Culture & Religion — June 3, 2011

From Bill to Jill at the NYT

“I don’t know enough about the inner workings of (The New York Times) to offer definitive judgments, but from the outside it looks like Keller did a pretty good job.”

bigthinkeditor

What’s the Latest Development?

Hendrik Hertzberg on Bill Keller’s eight years in the saddle as executive editor of the New York Times. “I don’t know if the job is inherently harder now than it used to be, but it is certainly more inherently stressful. Keller has had to deal with something that none of his predecessors needed to worry about: a prolonged existential crisis of the institution itself.”

What’s the Big Idea?

“From the outside it looks like Keller did a pretty good job overall. Yes, the way that he and the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., handled the aftermath of the Judith Miller/Iraq/WMD fiasco left a lot to be desired. …But there were countless triumphs as well, up to and including the Times’s painstaking curating of the WikiLeaks cables.”

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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