Cool archaeological things found that you might not necessarily know about, from all over the world.Being a public library security guard sounds awesome. Seems like those porn videos are true!
If these are the ten most controversial skits in SNL's history, then really the show isn't that controversial when you get right down to it. "Mildly offensive" is probably the most I can muster for these.
I like this list of bizarre military strategies because it shows that a little bit of creative and outside the box thinking can help you achieve your goals.
Nick Hornby discusses what would happen if he were to create a sequel to High Fidelity.
A breakdown of what went wrong (or, possibly right if your opinion differs) in making the movie The Shining from the book.
Good thing to know - what do you do when a grenade is thrown at you?
Always interesting to hear about a "mystery noise" coming from outer space.
you.
? If not, I recommend it. While (predictably) the ending is rather abrupt and comes out of left field, the characters and richness of the world King creates is fantastic.
. Like most people I talk to, I used to like The Simpsons, back when it had a soul, and this book seemed to speak right to me, hinting at uncovering the stories of the golden years of the show. And unauthorized histories? The scandal! Unfortunately, it didn't really deliver, as the bulk of the interviews the book was based on didn't come from the key players, only the periphery and even people not involved whatsoever. I wanted it to be the New York Times covering the story, what I got was TMZ.
I received free at a Twitter meetup in Philadelphia in February of 2010. And let's just say there's a reason I got it for free. If you like generic thrillers with a twinge of the supernatural, it's an ok book. Plenty of cliches on top of cliches, but if you're a fan of the zombie genre, then it might be for you. 
annoyed me with its pretentiousness; the premise has author/food critic Jay Rayner flying all over the world to find the perfect meal, and great! I get to read about it. It's not that I minded reading about a dream assignment that I was envious of, it was that Rayner didn't really seem to enjoy his adventure whatsoever. And that jadedness seeped into his prose. Unfortunately, Bill Simmons' 
seemed to do the same thing with basketball, only with many more words and some humor. I wanted to love this book, as I think Simmons is one of the more influential sportswriters out there, but the book overall comes across as "my opinion is better than yours," which goes against Simmons' "hey, I'm just a fan like you" writing style. Not to mention it's long. Really long. Stop a bullet long. I guess Simmons has reached a point in his career where he can boss his editor around, but that doesn't mean he should.
is just not easy to understand. And I don't think that's a knock on Kaku. I think the subject matter is simply complex, and you either have a brain wired for it, or you don't.
to see how a food critic for a major magazine really lived. Plus, he's a Philly guy! Unfortunately, the book is just a collection of his food writing for GQ, and while I like his take on a lot, I wanted a bigger peek behind the curtain.
is an odd book. Set in a world that could be ours but is not, the book deals with identity, war, love and many of the other cliches authors write about in an interesting way. These are the types of books I enjoy - found through some book-recommendation-list digging, it's a book that probably many haven't heard about, but many would enjoy. Of course, it didn't prepare me for my next book...
holds stories about life, its problems, and solutions to those problems, no matter how dirty they might get. Simultaneously tragic and comedic, the stories paint genuine pictures that never offer the Hollywood ending. And that's not to say these stories are full of tearjerker moments; actually we're pretty far from that. What they offer is a look at how life is never black and white, and we're never 100% right or 100% wrong. We're always in the middle, and that's ok.
, a detailed look at the events leading up to and including the massacre at Columbine High School. Author/journalist Dave Cullen does an excellent job of telling the story based on his meticulous research, solidifying some things we already knew, and dispelling some of the other things we thought we knew. It's easy (and comforting) for people to blame easy targets such as the media for the tragedies that happen in our lives. Unfortunately, it rarely happens to be the case. Much like people clamored to point fingers in the recent Giffords shooting, the same thing happened after the events at Columbine. This book goes a long way to show that blame is never easy to place in a situation that is impossible to understand.
a book about death and dying throughout history. Why I felt underwhelmed after I finished, is difficult for me to explain. Though the writing was competent, it felt as though it was just a number of magazine articles strung together. Or perhaps I just wanted more from the book. Death is such an expansive and mysterious subject that our society is both fascinated and scared by it, and I think I expected something a little deeper. Roach seemed to scratch the surface on topics, but not dig deeper. It wasn't a bad book, I just thought it would be different.
but I think not knowing anything about the premise of the book made me enjoy it more. And that's why I'll say nothing more about it than it's a historical thriller based during World War II and the years immediately following. Complex in narrative (at times detrimentally so), the book tied supernatural powers into the superpowers that survived the second World War, but in ways that are not at first easily understood.
30 pages in, instead of plodding through it as I did. Do I feel good that I finished it? Not really. I had satisfaction when I reached the end mostly because I knew I didn't have to read another page. Look, I'm sure people will disagree with me, because this book did receive some critical acclaim and I can see how it might speak to some people with its subject matter. And perhaps it owes a lot to the fact that it was groundbreaking when it first came out. But in the age of the Internet, when avante garde can be achieved with 2 clicks of a mouse with your morning coffee, this story and its storytelling offered me very little.
delves into the 2008 Presidential race, and takes a look at all the key players, as well as the strategies, arguments, and characters each presidential hopeful had and used to make their presidential bid. Though not as hard hitting or insightful as I hoped (there was hardly any mention of Internet campaigning strategy, which I would have loved to read about), it still painted a picture of what it takes to win the presidency of the United States, and what it can do to someone. 
was trying to accomplish; I found it to be much about nothing using technology and Disney as a backdrop for...not much of anything. Set in the future with fantastical technical advancements (including the ability to come back to life over and over), I felt the book to the reader for granted, and assumed we would just like the premise enough to gloss over the overall lack of substance. Luckily, I followed that up with 
an account of a crime committed on a deserted island in the Pacific, written by Vincent Bugliosi, the prosecutor famous for convicting Charles Manson. As an author, Bugliosi writes like a lawyer; factual, with a slight heir of superiority. It's both good and bad in this case - the crime and subsequent trial that follows is convoluted, slightly unbelievable and intriguing, all of which is helped by Bugliosi's straightforward approach. But, as he also is an integral character in the book, some of his opinion gets a little soiled since we can't really make up our own mind. He soapboxes a little and tries to make it for us. Still, it's an interesting book and is recommended for true crime lovers. 
and Jesse Ball's 
play with identity and the concept of reality. I found myself racing through The Book of Illusions, if only trying to get to the true meat of the story, but never finding it. The whole thing felt like set up for a much larger story. And Samedi the Deafness...well, it started out with a murder in a park and ended with...I won't give it away but the pieces to go from A to B were so tangled with lies, deceit, mistaken identities and parlor game "what if this isn't real" tricks that it crashed in on itself. Which may have been the author's point, so it's possible the joke's on me. 
had a lot of hype behind it. Coming out of the University of Iowa's writers' program, Cronin attempted to write a "literary" vampire/dystopian future novel. And while I have issues with the labels "literary" and "genre" (meaning science-fiction) I don't have a better solution to categorize this book. Cronin is obviously a talented writer, I just think he needs an editor or maybe even a good friend to sit him down and explain the idea of focus. Because this book not only has an unbelievable cast of characters, and spans hundreds of years, it jumps around so much and introduces so many new and left-field concepts and then drops them to again pick up the story. I really wanted to like it (it's difficult to mess up vampire-zombie apocalyptic stories), and there are many interesting things here, but ultimately it left me wishing he had simply told the story he started with and left the future stuff for future books. To frustrate me even more, after finishing the novel I learned it's the first book of a planned trilogy, which really left me scratching my head. I still don't see the reason he crammed so much into this first book.
helped me learn about wine, or more precisely, the world of wine collecting. A world I will never be a part of based on the fact that I am not rich. But I don't think I'm missing much anyway; it's not that different from the kids of my youth collecting baseball cards, right down to the bullies who gyp you out of your favorite Tony Phillips' rookie card. Um, not that I would know anything about that.
fit that bill nicely. Predictable, absurd, gruesome and easy to read, I breezed through Douglas Preston's and Lincoln Child's umpteenth take on a serial killer, and gobbled it right up. What of course it didn't prepare me for was 
a detailed look at how and why 9/11 happened. At different times I believe everyone and no one should read this book, as it delves into exactly how it was planned, and exactly how our country let it happen. While it goes a long way to simply report the events leading up to that fateful day without pointing fingers of blame, it's easy to read between the lines. And it's also easy to see it wasn't anyone party's or individual's fault. It was one domino placed after the last, which ultimately only required a simple nudge.