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My biggest personality flaw is that I always expect to get what I want, and have fits when I don't. Close second is that I can be boastful and arrogant. What's yours?

That's what Slate asked a number of influential people in this article. What's your answer?

Mine would have to be Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, which exposed me to a much broader range of possibilities in fiction that I had before. I hated it the first time I read it. I thought it was pretentious and unnecessarily difficult. But on second ( Read more... )

According to this article, doctors are now able to test for Downs Syndrome 11 weeks into a pregnancy, which would make abortion of such fetuses safer.

Would you abort a fetus with Downs Syndrome? I don't think I would, if I was planning to have a baby regardless. But that's of course, only in theory.

This whole retro pre-feminist business seems to be injecting itself into lots of things. Consider Stephen Holden's review of Pride and Prejudice the movie in the NYT. The last graph says: As the tide of feminism that crested two decades ago recedes and the old advance-and-retreat games of courtship return, "Pride & Prejudice" speaks wistfully to ( Read more... )

... at least in mobilization if anything else. Voters in a Pennsylvania school district elected to throw out eight board members who voted that "intelligent design" be taught in biology courses. Here's the articleThe other thinks Intelligent Design should be taught in classes such as comparative religion. Wow, I wish I had comparative religion ( Read more... )

I was trying to find something more literary and less "oh my god this is my 38th book" or "oh my god i need to write this paper"-oriented than booktards, but I failed. So i started litfic as a way of following up on the "If you want it and it's not there, go build it yourself," motto ( Read more... )

According to this Times article, men are still authoring more articles in major national magazines than women, by a ratio of more than 3 to 1 ( Read more... )

Saw Salman Rushdie at the 92nd Street Y last night, as he read from his latest book, Shalimar the Clown, and answered questions from Christopher Hitchens.

I've read Shalimar the Clown and really enjoyed it. I won't launch into a full review, but I like the fact that it's set in all of these different places and has characters of many nationalities ( Read more... )

i'm vaguely interested in seeing marina abramovic reenacting other people's famous performance pieces at the guggenheim, even though i have some biases against the institution. abramovic performing vito acconci's "seedbed" is kinda like the tori amos cover of eminem's "'97 Bonnie & Clyde" in the Strange LIttle Girls album. i also like valie export ( Read more... )