Jun 3rd, 2009
The release of a Da Vinci Code franchise always unleashes a flurry of debunking. Is there really an Illuminati? Can you really do that with a particle collider? According to an excellent essay by Dennis Overbye, director Ron Howard is well aware that the quasi-believability of author Dan Brown’s fictions are part of what gives [...]
May 13th, 2009
Recently a friend told me an origin myth about Charles Shaw, the cult favorite extra-cheap Trader Joe’s wine known as Two-Buck Chuck. It was founded, he’d heard, by a California woman who, after being taken for everything in a divorce settlement with a pretentious wine snob named Charles Shaw, set out to make her ex-husband’s [...]
May 12th, 2009
The Mythographer found herself in Philly recently, and it would have seemed downright rude not to visit the Liberty Bell. Now, the Mythographer went to public school, so I didn’t even really know what the Liberty Bell was, just that it had a crack in it. But the whole experience got me thinking about the [...]
Apr 13th, 2009
According to cultural critic Frank Rich, the culture wars are over. Between the economic crisis and the election of a President who has bridged the red-state/blue-state divide, and the accompanying splintering of the religious right, Rich argues, we have no time for the “divisive moral scolds” that haunted us in the Bush era. Stem-cell research [...]