Ben O'Donnell
Race and IQ tests are two nebulous determinants of nebulous qualities that have incited fractious and controversial reactions as long as they have existed.Many studies of the correlation between the two--and we might as well stir the pot by throwing gender into the mix as well--have been conducted ... Read More
In a recent editorial for the Wall Street Journal, author of the Bush-era "torture memos" John Yoo warns against Obama's closing of Guantanamo and effort to stamp out Geneva-unfriendly interrogation methods.To wit, Yoo argues such moves will seriously impede the flow of intelligence that US ... Read More
In Japan, they have a saying: first the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man. Or, at least in the case of former Finance Minister Shoichi Nakagawa, the drink take's the man's job. Nakagawa pulled a Boris Yeltsin at last weekend's G7 summit; press videos show ... Read More
For decades, the average Indian citizen could vote for the governmental representatives of his choosing and then follow their foibles in the news—and that's where his access to government ended. That changed three years ago this month, when National Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi ... Read More
In the Sunday New York Times Magazine, Deborah Solomon interviewed philosopher J. D. Trout about empathy. During the course of a rather hostile interview, Trout invoked the image of the Roman vomitorium as a metaphor for waste and excess, and Solomon challenged both the metaphor and the actual ... Read More
It's been a busy birthday week between Robert Burns (250 years young), Wilmer Valderrama (29), and the Iranian Revolution (30). But lest you forgot to mark your calendar amid all the parties, today, February 3, happens to be the big 200 for German composer Felix Mendelssohn. Possessing a talent was ... Read More
Having successfully built itself into a global center of the Hello Kitty trade, Hong Kong is setting its sights on a still greater conquest: the wine world. Dominated by the West for thousands of years, the wine industry is slowly ripening in Asia, with Hong Kong indisputably spearheading the ... Read More
About Ben O'Donnell
I have recently worked as a traveling wine correspondent for the Francis Ford Coppola blog knoWine.com, as well as at the Hood Museum of Art in New Hampshire and the literary magazine The Paris Review. I am now a freelance (unemployed) writer. I am interested in classical cultures, classical art and architecture, classic literature, classical, rock, and rap music, but not so much rock-rap or rap-classical.