A few weeks back some literary theory friends of ours invited us to a very special edition of their annual party Twainmas, this year’s having been the 99th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death. Though we couldn’t attend – by a strange coincidence that date was also Anthony Quinn’s birthday and we’d committed to a Lawrence [...]

It’s funny, we’re always disappointed to learn that a character we’ve come to love isn’t actually as original and unique as we thought. Like our uncle Ted, who we thought was just the sweetest guy, but turned out to be a documentary filmmaker making a life-long project about the decline of the modern family. That’s [...]

Every so often, in a strange moment of Interweb telepathy (or, as we like to call it, “webathy”, which is incidentally the name of the Listicles office cat), two lists will come into existence at nearly the same moment detailing instances of nearly the same phenomenon. One such case occurred recently, when Unreality posted its [...]

From what we understand, dating advice books are always sort of a joke, right? Well, we hope so, because otherwise Whip It Out Comedy’s listicle of The 10 Strangest Dating Advice Books That Actually Exist is really quite tragic. That said, certain titles (like Getting Your Wife Or Girlfriend To Become A Swinger and Women [...]

Goldfish-brained as we are, if a non-fiction book doesn’t have some kind of catchy, er, catch, the odds that we’ll wade through its cumbersome statistics tend to be slim. That’s why Time’s recent listicle of the Top 10 Literary Stunts found all our summer reading for us (thanks Time!), with its New Journalism-y personal narratives [...]

Arguably the most masterful and brilliant detective of any time or reality (though we’ll be difficult and stick with Dale Cooper), Sherlock Holmes has been deployed to crime scenes all over the galaxy and space-time continuum. As io9’s listicle outlining 22 Cases of Sherlock Holmes in Science Fiction demonstrates, it only takes some inquisitive aliens [...]

Life, as they say, imitates art, and if there’s one art form that seems uncannily skilled at predicting future technologies it’s probably literature (sorry film fans, but Steven Spielberg couldn’t have existed without Philip K. Dick). As things accelerate (and books become re-shapped by new technologies like the Kindle), it’s helpful to keep turning to [...]

An article in yesterday’s New York Times explains that new fossils and artifacts found in northern Kazakhstan suggest horses were likely domesticated as early as 3500 B.C., or about one millennium sooner than previously thought. While this is apparently a landmark discovery, we’re not terribly surprised. As we’ll show in this edition of our weekly [...]

As Canadian communication theorist Harold Innis taught us, some empires are time-biased and others are space-biased, depending on their preferred mass medium of control. Well, he probably never dreamed things like interplanetary space travel, teleportation, telekinetics and instant cross-universe communication would figure into the evolution of empires. But then he probably wasn’t a huge sci-fi [...]

Remember those times, about 5 years ago, when everyone thought that books would slowly disappear as people took to reading texts for free online and on nifty digital reading devices? Well, since then a surprisingly top-shelf library of free online books has acrued thanks to Project Gutenberg (Google Books, meanwhile, has been a big disappointment).
Campus [...]