Crunchy Brain Food

[the_gneech]

Worthy of metaquotes, from ozarque:

"It seems to me that the current primary campaigns as a collective entity are, more than anything else, like a great hulking five-volume fantasy epic; the plots and subplots are so intricate and so utterly improbable that I expect some big redwood tree to set out on the campaign trail any minute now."

From Arts & Letters Daily:

The New York Times -- "Laws of Nature, Source Unknown"

Dr. Davies asserted in the article that science, not unlike religion, rested on faith, not in God but in the idea of an orderly universe. Without that presumption a scientist could not function. His argument provoked an avalanche of blog commentary, articles on Edge.org and letters to The Times, pointing out that the order we perceive in nature has been explored and tested for more than 2,000 years by observation and experimentation. That order is precisely the hypothesis that the scientific enterprise is engaged in testing.

New York Magazine -- "Taster's Choice: Is disdain for Céline Dion innate or learned? And what's wrong with liking her music anyway?"

But while most critics would leave Céline there and go back to gushing over the lost tapes of the live versions of early takes of Dylan's unwritten B-sides, Wilson feels a twinge of critical conscience. Pop criticism's sacred duty, after all, has always been to articulate the secret genius of the underappreciated -- an approach that's given us our cherished canons of rap, rock, and manga. (Not to mention films and novels.) So what about Céline? In a critical climate that venerates slick, hyperproduced Top 40 pop, why is she immune to praise? Is her ululatory arm-flinging really so unforgivable? To find out, Wilson embarked on what he calls "an experiment in taste," undergoing solid months of Céline immersion in an effort to get to the bottom of his "guilty displeasure."

-The Gneech