Last week, Edvard Munch's 1895 pastel version of The Scream went under the gavel at Sotheby’s to set a new record as the most expensive piece of art ever sold at auction. One of our culture’s most recognizable and reproduced images, it rivals even the Mona Lisa for the irreverent…  [more]

According to a recent Slate piece, we get tattoos to feel alive in our semi-awake, Brave New World, soma-holiday culture. People “are seeking an antidote to the numbed feelings and detachment that result from their idiotically screen-centered lives,” the story suggests, and “crave the enlivening, awakening, back-to-reality release which comes…  [more]

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat doesn't mince words in his new book Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Since the 1960s, Douthat argues, institutional Christianity has suffered a slow-motion collapse, leaving the country without the moral core that carried it through foreign wars, economic depressions and…  [more]

My dogs know most things through their noses. You might say that smelling is their epistemology. Their sense of smell has always been keener than their eyesight or hearing and is even more so now that those senses are diminishing with age. The human race is a little less constant,…  [more]

I have to admit, it was not virtue that brought me to start watching Doomsday Preppers, which recently wrapped up its first season on the National Geographic Channel. More like morbid curiosity. After watching my first episode, I found myself yelling at the television both “You’re crazy! That will never…  [more]