Watching various injury troubles at the Sochi Winter Olympics makes us wonder whether quantum sports medicine is an idea whose time has come.

To the First Chapter, which turns on Paradise and Fig-leaves, and leads us into interminable disquisitions of a mythological, metaphorical, cabalistico-sartorial and quite antediluvian cast, we shall content ourselves with giving an unconcerned approval.

Over and around this petalled monstrosity a convocation of bees and butterflies was hovering distractedly.

Is this “bad art” or is it intentionally “Celtic”?

I’ve always liked the last two sentences here:

Leon Wieseltier’s choice of a title for a book of essays by Lionel Trilling, The Moral Responsibility to be Intelligent, summed up the outlook. (The quotation belongs originally to John Erskine, but Trilling used it and it could very well have been his own – do recall, in your nostalgia for the fifties intellectuals, that lugubrious funereal tone.) The moral responsibility is not to be intelligent. It’s to think.

(From “Designated Haters,” by the editors of n+1 Magazine)

At the end of the novel Dr Faustroll dies, and he sends a telepathic letter to Lord Kelvin describing the afterlife and the cosmos.

Examples of exhibits include a troop of singing animatronic Chipmunks, a Time Machine, which the museum claims to be the world’s largest automated Phenakistoscope, an olfactory Clock, a chandelier of singing animatronic nightingales, an Undigestulator (a device that purportedly reconstitutes digested foods), A Peanuts Enlarger, A Syzygistic Oracle, The Earolin (a 24 inch tall holographic ear that plays the violin), and a machine for capturing the dreams of bumble bees.

Why is Alpha, unlike other robots, allergic to animal proteins?

What are the “water gods”, strangely beautiful mushrooms with human faces, that have started growing in the wilds?

The newly-created Japanese anime icon who is wanted by Ukrainian national security service, Crimea’s chief prosecutor Natalia Poklonskaya, says her attractive looks have never hampered her judicial practice and are, well, deceitful.

Essays and documents related to Hideous Gnosis, a symposium on black metal theory, which took place on December 12, 2009 in Brooklyn, NY. Expanded and Revised.