I love reading Slate. It’s an online magazine with eclectic content. Politics to video games, pop music to the ethics of cloning, columnists from Christopher Hitchens to Timothy Noah, Slate has insight into almost everything.
Here are my two finds of today.
First, a 45-minute audio discussion of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. One of my favorite books, dissected with phrases like “social nihilism” and discussions of the social scene of Jazz Age New York. Magnificent stuff.
Second, should we clone Neanderthals? That’s William Saletan’s question. It’s an interesting question, but Saletan misses the essential problem — even if we can recreate the Neanderthals biologically, we won’t ever recreate them socially. We won’t understand who they were by having one in a room with us that can talk with us, because it won’t be a Neanderthal culturally.
From 1920’s bootleggers to prehistorical cultures, where can you find such a wide variety of topics than Slate? It’s daily reading for me. 🙂