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National Libraries in Australia and Czech Republic are filled with biographies, memoirs, deaths and taxes. If prophecy is an expression of our contemporary fears and wishes, so too, to a very great extent, is history. A Dead Certainty of Chance: Feelings and More Feelings Media Dragons wanted to experience everything, taste everything, go everywhere, do everything. Our notions of the future have something of that significance which Moravian born Freud attributes to our dreams dreamt along the Morava River July - Brave New World at 75: There’s nothing sweeter in the world

Arrived late Sunday night. So tired, and the rudest concierge I ever met. It’s the Paris Hilton prison diaries... If you read literary blogs you know that hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned. For their part, serious writers assume that those who can, do, while those who can’t, blog. The Scorn of the Literary Blog What is wrong with the modern literary novel? Why is it so worthy and dull? Why is it so anxious? Why is it so bloody boring? Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good, said Nietzsche. There can come a point in life when this begins to make sense. Divine comedy

End of dreams, return of history. With the Cold War over at last, many thinkers blissfully hoped that conflict between nations would fade to a memory...
End of Dreams, Return of History

How can a country be so rich and yet have dreadful health care, a declining population, and a corrupt political system with almost no opposition?... The Russian Conundrum: Growing Economy, Failing Society

The body count among Russian reporters is now thirteen murders since Putin came to power. In each case the reporter was working on a story critical of government or business officials. Once upon the time Media Dragon had a price on his head by the KGB Putin Strikes Again

Romantics who visit Cuba from rich lands like to kid themselves that they have found a true alternative to capitalist democracy. Why? A Cuban death rehearsal

Can a woman with a literary bent, an editor, find the man of her dreams on the internet? Maybe, though it is clearly asking too much that he should learn to spell her name. One day, as a cure for a broken heart, a heart that had only barely survived a head-on collision with another heart, a heart just out of intensive care, bruised and limping and still shying at the sound of any traffic A Woman of His Dreams

Psychologists reduce happiness to a sensation and then regard it as the only thing that matters. Sure, but the Greeks knew a thing or two as well... More Happiness Please

Polygyny can benefit women, while men do well from monogamy. And beautiful people really do have more daughters: strange truths of human nature Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature: Handsome Media Dragons have daughters ;-)

Sure, some girls can sprint well and lift weights. But on the whole, boys are more excited than girls by the use of urine as secret ink. Let’s face facts. In Praise of Skinned Knees and Grubby Faces

What’s the relation between punch lines and laughter? What’s So Friggin' Funny? Nothing—laughter is simply how we connect

A-bombs, or the final particles of matter. There are some things that are so serious that you can only joke about them ... Last laugh before the cold war

Hallmark now offers consolation and strength to those faced with the awkward irrelevance of Father’s Day in some homes Happy Father’s Day, Mom!