8/30 A heartfelt missive from an exasperated American farmer: Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal. (Thanks to Anastasia for the link.)
8/29 Signs of progress: Neal McCluskey wonders just how starving those starving college students are—though he also notes wryly who is paying for the party at the nation’s top party campuses.
8/28 Morgan Meis asks what art is in a shrewd review of Stephen Farthing’s 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die. (Via Arts & Letters Daily.)
8/27 Awesome: Astronomers view four galaxies colliding. The image is here.
8/25 Entrepreneurship round-up: For enterprising students, Entrepreneur.com shows how you can build a million-dollar business while you’re still in college. . The Business Pundit explains why you are not alone in your entrepreneurial struggle. At LifeHack.org, cautionary advice on how not to go broke on your million-dollar idea. (Via the Entrepreneur MD.) And here is a good set of entrepreneurial resources.
8/23 The new SBA small business statistics are out and Jeff Cornwall has some highlights. Here is a sobering progress datum on infant mortality in 1907, which suggests how far we’ve come. Here is Greg Easterbrook’s candidate for the greatest living American. And this is offensively amusing: Should we tell Africa about the new global economy?
8/22 Here is a well-put-together women-in-art animation. And Ted Keer applies a fine art-critical eye to Michael Newberry’s Ascension Day.
8/21 Education problems and solutions: In Britain, a study indicates that boys are especially at risk. (Via ifeminists.) A further downside of poor education is the influence of junk evidence on juries. On the positive side, Peter Gordon comments on how, post-Katrina, a New Orleans charter school is speeding educational reform and reconstruction. And the Michigan Education Report chronicles Detroit’s mayor’s endorsement of charter schools as a path out of Detroit’s schools’ chronic problems.
8/20 David Bordwell uses The Bourne Ultimatium as a running example to explore developments in video shooting and editing: shaky shot, queasicam, run-and-gun cinema verité, and/or plot-gap cover-up? And Lester Hunt comments on the wisdom of Ratatouille.
8/18 Via David Thompson, a new, short video by Richard Dawkins giving an impassioned defense of objectivity against postmodern relativism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and touchy-feely voodoo.
8/17 Plato argued that “there is an ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy.” F. C. Light carries on the tradition with this collection of anti-Nietzschean couplets. And philosophy could fight back by using as ammunition this example from Slate’s Bad Poetry Contest. (Via University Diaries.)
8/16 This is a good book: Quee Nelson’s The Slightest Philosophy is a well-written, jargon-free critique of postmodern philosophy and politics, tracking it from its skeptical and idealist origins in Berkeley, Hume, Kant, and Hegel to its recent anti-realist manifestations in Rorty and the rest. Nelson also ambitiously and in take-no-prisoners-fashion connects that philosophical morass to deadly politics: “A Cambodian guerilla deep in a steaming jungle carries a paperback copy of Rousseau, and the next thing you know, a million people are dead.”
8/15 Advice from art critics to the postmodern art world: It’s time to move on. At Art.com, art history professor Donald Kuspit excerpts a chapter from his new book: “The Decadence of Advanced Art and the Return of Tradition and Beauty: The New as Tower of Conceptual Babel.” And The New Criterion’s Roger Kimball explains why the art world is a disaster. (Thanks to Michael for the links.)
8/6 
Philosopher Douglas Rasmussen has been traveling in eastern Europe this summer and writes of his experiences at two former concentration camps, one Communist and one Nazi: “Last week I saw the Sighet Prison in Romania which is very close to the Ukraine border. From about 1948, the Communists used it as a place for political prisoners and torture. It is a memorial now, and it shows all the prison camps and labor camps that were in Romania. It also shows a history of the Romanian resistance to the Commies. They fought in the mountains for years—indeed as late as the 60’s. I have known of this for years, but to actually see the place, the names, the faces is overwhelming. I realize now that I came here to see this prison as much as anything else. It is amazing how bland and simple a place of terror can look. You think it would be in red and orange and look evil. Two days ago, I saw Auschwitz. Well, what can one say? German efficiency is a marvel! I knew what happened there. Indeed, I have read much and seen movies, but to walk under the gate with the words ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ is unbelievable. To see huge rooms filled with human hair, shoes, brushes, to see the tickets that Greek Jews bought to go to Auschwitz thinking that it was to be a new land for them, to see the rooms smaller than a broom closet in which people were forced to stand all night and day, to see the gas chamber, the crematoria, to see it all this is more than one can take. I could not sleep after seeing it, and I cannot accept such a moral obscenity! Nothing can remove this stain, and it is something that can NEVER be forgiven or forgot. Justice demands no less. A very good philosopher and friend, Jon Jacobs, was with me. Jon is more or less sympathetic to classical liberalism and more or less Jewish, and he said the central point quite eloquently: Once you accept the proposition that people can be used without their consent, this is where you end. Philosopher Doug den Uyl then added, ‘And the first step towards thinking people can be used without their consent is to claim that the individual exists for the sake of society.’”
8/4 An important article on the Muslim world’s embattled secularists. (Via TIA Daily.)
8/2 Artcyclopedia has a very useful database of art museums worldwide.