Yes, lust made the seven deadly sins list, but it’s also the reason we’re all here. Nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unplanned. Eliminate the primal urge to get naked and share body fluids, and homo sapiens would die out rather quickly. My admittedly incomplete internet search (it’s easy to get sidetracked […]
Month: December 2011
You know the feeling: somebody has something and you want it for yourself. That thing may be talent, or success, or good looks, or something simple . . . like a bag of chips. For me, the emotion is all too familiar. See that cute girl on the subway? The one with curly blonde hair, […]
On June 26, 2000, three famous men — one president, two scientists — made a big announcement at the White House. Two independent teams — one public, one private — had published a first draft of the human genome, or as one of the scientists called it, the “book of life.” It was a feat. […]
When is a sin a virtue? When the sinner is an assasin, and the sin is laziness. In cancer, however, it’s diffiult to know which tumors will be slothful and which will be aggressive. This is the dilemma behind the ongoing controversies in screening and treatment for conditions such as breast and prostate cancer.
Dearest readers, we hope you had a gluttonous, slothful, greedy and lustful holiday, with only the tiniest touches of wrath. Here at the Last Word on Nothing, we’re celebrating the season with a series of posts on the Seven Deadly Sins. Beginning tomorrow, each of our crack writers will tackle his or her favorite (or […]
I always thought of Harry Houdini as a master trickster, fooling his audience into believing something had happened when, in fact, it had not happened. That’s not true. Houdini’s tricks — like escaping from a locked packing crate after it had been thrown into New York’s East River — were real. His “magic” was that […]
One day on Twitter, certain science bloggers (see below) who began life on the dark side, in the humanities, happily discovered a shared taste for classic mystery writers. We thought we might write a series of posts, all on the same day, about the science in mystery books. Mine is by Josephine Tey, “To Love […]
In 1930, the legendary bartender Harry Craddock prescribed a popular cure for revellers who stumbled into London’s Savoy Hotel for breakfast and complained of throbbing hangovers. Craddock had fled Prohibition in the States in 1920 and found work at the American Bar in the Savoy, and he knew a thing or two about the ailments […]
