In December, a group of professors from America’s top philosophy departments, including Columbia, Yale, and NYU, set out to establish the philosophy of cosmology as a new field of study within the philosophy of physics. The group aims to bring a philosophical approach to the basic questions at the heart of physics, including those concerning the nature, age and fate of the universe. This past week, a second group of scholars from Oxford and Cambridge announced their intention to launch a similar project in the United Kingdom.

What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology – Ross Andersen – Technology – The Atlantic

The point here isn’t that piracy by American consumers is somehow completely independent from output or employment rates in the content industries—though, again, that’s not at all the same thing as the overall U.S. employment rate. Obviously, at some level it has to have some effect. But the link is, to use the technical economic term, weirder than in many other sectors of the economy.

Internet Regulation & the Economics of Piracy | Cato @ Liberty - stellar piece on piracy, content economics and audience behaviour. 

Hitchens went into my kitchen, took a cutting board off the counter, and threw it into my forehead, drawing blood. “Don’t be an imbecile,” he said. “The struggle never ends. Also, you must remember that there is no God.” I needed four stitches that day. Hitch put them in himself, with his teeth. What a friend he was.

I knew Christopher Hitchens better than you – Salon.com

It is the story of the deconstruction of the American dream, piece by piece, literally steel beam by steel beam, broken up and shipped out south, east and points unknown, told in the voices of those who’ve lived it. Here is the cost, in blood, treasure and spirit, that the post-industrialization of the United States has levied on its most loyal and forgotten citizens, the men and women who built the buildings we live in, laid the highways we drive on, made things and asked for nothing in return but a good day’s work and a decent living.

Bruce Springsteen on ‘Someplace Like America’ – The Washington Post