Dangerous liaisons: Why we find vampires sexy

By Brian Alexander

The hot undead sink their teeth into a pop-culture resurgence

Summit Entertainment Robert Pattinson plays Edward, the sultry lead vampire in the hit movie "Twilight."

Luzzara After Paul Strand

A Gallery in the Red Room

After Paul Strand and his wonderful pictures of Luzzara I tried, as a devote tribute to one of the greatest photographer of XX century, to come back to the same place this summer and to find out and catch what could still remain of 50 years ago making a gallery of shots in the same spirit of straight photography as he did.

Inauguration of New Academic Year at Lincei in Rome

PROGRAMMA DELLA CERIMONIA

Relazione del Presidente dell’Accademia, LAMBERTO MAFFEI

Prolusione del Prof. Ira H. Pastan, Premio Internazionale

“Antonio Feltrinelli” 2009 per la Medicina, sul tema

“Recombinant Immunotoxins: a New Cancer Therapy”.

Seguirà una esecuzione musicale offerta

dall’Associazione Amici dell’Accademia

The Dual State in the West

2 penetrating geopolitcal analysis on the never ending story of the 70s
a forgotten decade to be reappraised
by Peter Lemkin
and by the Law & Geopolitcs blog

Snakes on the brain

The Snake Detection Theory posits 
a fascinating relationship between 
serpents and primates

From the Time Litetary Supplement
October 7,2009

Barbara j. King
In The Fruit, the Tree, and the Serpent, Lynne A. Isbell weaves together facts from anthropology, neuroscience, palaeontology and psychology to explain that our emotional connection to snakes has a long evolutionary history. This history, Isbell says, is responsible not only for snake fear – the serpent in the garden of Eden, the worldcreating Rainbow Serpent of Australian aboriginal myth and B-grade cinema fare – but also for our keen primate vision and perhaps even our facility with language.

Welcome to the Real Narnia

The hidden medieval message at the 

heart of C. S. Lewis's classic 

Chronicles

Tom Wright
From Times Online October 21, 2009

Our age is dominated by Saturn, and it is time to rediscover Jupiter. It is safe to say that few if any of the millions who have read C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia would have summarized their message in those terms, taken from medieval planetary lore. Michael Ward, who with Planet Narnia has established himself not only as the foremost living Lewis scholar, but also as a brilliant writer in his own right, well knows that in advancing such an argument he risks being lumped with Dan Brown and other so-called discoverers of hidden codes. But his cumulative case for reading the Narnia books in terms of the planets (a brief preliminary account of which was given in the TLS of April 25, 2003) is overwhelming. These stories and their author deserve to be taken far more seriously in literary, cultural and philosophical terms than has hitherto been suppose