Prospero
Bookstore troubles

Is it time to reinvent the library?

Rethinking what they look like, what they offer and how they store their wares More »

More Intelligent Life
Five Things

The Sheikh's Batmobile

A tour through 17 Muslim countries in search of local interpretations of American culture More »

Drinking

Pina coladaville

You wouldn't expect to find a tiki bar at the storefront of 49 Essex Street in the Lower East Side More »

Munich's waves

Surf'n'Turf

The landlocked city boasts some of Europe’s best waves. Noah Lederman investigates More »

Books of the month
Audio: Fiction

Our books and arts editor discusses Jonathan Franzen’s "Freedom", the Booker prize judging process and its long list More »

What we're reading

Defining the best
(Guardian)
Which is the best free online dictionary?

PhD market share
(Inside Higher Ed)
"Ominous clouds on the horizon" for America's dominance of the higher education market

I like it, but what do I do with it?
(Boston Globe)
Early books posed similar questions to those that meet today's technological advances 

Today's quote

"It turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue."

~ Guy Deutscher, "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" (New York Times

Highlights
The future of the internet

A virtual counter-revolution

The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it More »

World heritage sites

A list in danger

In its care for precious places, the UN cultural agency is torn between its own principles and its members’ wishes; the principles are losing ground More »

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Latest blog posts - All times are GMT

Meet Charlemagne
From Charlemagne's notebook - September 3rd, 1:25
And WiFi for all
From Prospero - September 2nd, 22:15
Link exchange
From Free exchange - September 2nd, 20:58
Nowhere to go
From Free exchange - September 2nd, 20:51
You know the drill
From Democracy in America - September 2nd, 18:44
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