The January issue of Wired included an extremely interesting story on the benefits of replacing uranium nuclear reactors with thorium nuclear reactors. Among other things, thorium doesn’t create dangerous waste, doesn’t produce plutonium and is both infinitely efficient and very common.
The article mentions a blog—Energy From Thorium, run by aerospace engineer Kirk Sorensen—that’s worth a look if the above appeals to you in the slightest.
A short article in the LA Times on the twilight years in the life of science fiction writer Philip K. Dick.
The Books of the Century includes, among other things, nearly every Publishers Weekly annual bestseller list compiled since 1900.
An incredible, and incredibly rare, selection of William Burroughs’ audio experiments, recorded on a variety of tape decks in London, Paris, New York and Tangiers, at various dates from the mid-50s to the late 1970s.
If you want to hear Burroughs at his best—that is to say, in the midst of his many brilliant, unsettling and incoherent moments—then have at it.
The ongoing fracas over Jack Kerouac’s estate—centering on a jilted wife and a forged will—sounds like some sort of noir novel.
David Brooks speculates about the DNA of the Tea Party:
The tea party movement is a large, fractious confederation of Americans who are defined by what they are against. They are against the concentrated power of the educated class.
The spooky picture he paints—after a little paranoid extrapolation of my own—is of a movement that fears knowledge itself.
David Foster Wallace, in a 1998 issue of Waterstone’s Magazine, connects the dots between Terminator 2 and its thematic/artistic cousin, hardcore pornography.
+