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Presenting the sixth installment of "Table Scraps": Where we suck the tasty marrow out of the past weeks' food & drink news.More...

Table Scraps -- Food & Drink News You Might've Missed, Quickly

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Last summer, Jesse Rabinowitz, a 19-year-old Orthodox Jew, found himself in a hot, dusty Guatemalan village. A participant in a service-learning trip, Jesse built houses and learned about the lives of migrant workers and their families who stayed behind. At the end of his trip, Jesse made a promise to the people he met in the Guatemalan village: he would fight for the rights and dignity of their relatives in the United States.This summer, he is working with a social justice organization in New York to fulfill his promise. At first glance, the group he works with would not seem out of place among other social justice organizations. Twelve excited, idealistic college students are gathered around a long conference table, discussing a text about worker's rights. A closer look, however, shows that this group is different. All the males at the table wear kippot (skullcaps), and several of the women sport long sleeves and skirts despite the 90-degree weather. The text they are discussing is not a contemporary justice article; it is over 1000 years old and in Aramaic.More...

Social Justice and Orthodox Judaism

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A new biography by Western Australia English professor Bob White examines the role that the study of medicine played in John Keats' life and poetry--a subject most Keats biographers, White believes, tend to "gloss over."  It seems a sensible approach, when you consider that Keats spent seven years of his short life (he died at 25) apprenticing as an apothecary.White told the Australian that knowledge Keats gleaned from his botany and anatomy texts surfaces in his work, citing as an example the famous opening lines from Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale":More...

Poetry and Medicine: Keats Was an Apothecary

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NoLIta boutique Haus Interior celebrated its first anniversary Thursday night with a party hosted by founder Nina Freudenberger."This has been an amazing year for me and for Haus Interior," Freudenberger told the Huffington Post.  "We have plans to open a store in Boston in 2011, continuing our amazing interior projects and working on a book on creating the perfect home."More...

Haus Interior Marks First Anniversary With Plans To Expand (PHOTOS)

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"Hello darkness, my old friendI've come to talk with you againMore...

The Sound of Silence

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In the old days in Japan a spiritual aspirant would kneel in the snow at the gates of the monastery for several days before either gaining entrance or being turned away.These days in the West, we have weekend enlightenment intensives promising realization by Sunday night or your money back.More...

'Slow Enlightenment' in a Quick Fix Culture

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It is almost ten years since the twin towers came down and more than five since Hunter S. Thompson took his own life but his words remain chillingly prophetic to this day.

"The towers are gone now," he wrote just hours after the first plane hit on September 11th 2001, "reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are at war now -- with somebody -- and we will stay at war with that mysterious enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a religious war, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare with no front lines and no identifiable enemy...More...

Animals, Whores & Dialogue: The Resurrection of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

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Fox News may be the undisputed ratings champion in cable news, but not among black viewers.The New York Times' Brian Stelter tweeted that, according to Nielsen Media Research, Fox News has averaged just 29,000 black viewers in primetime so far this television season (9/09-7/10).  That represents just 1.38% of its 2.102 million total viewer audience.More...

Fox News Audience Just 1.38% Black

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We've all been in a position where we wished we could take back what we said.  In the case of an interview, the implications are huge in that saying the wrong thing could eliminate you as a candidate.More...

Bad Things to Say in an Interview

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It was on Friday afternoon that @EvilWylie, the Twitter doppelganger of agent Andrew Wylie was born. Self-described as an "Evil publishing industry insider and winner of the Golden Balls Award 2010," @EvilWylie claims to be "10% less evil than actual Andrew Wylie!" Not long after EvilWylie showed up on Twitter, quickly gathering followers, @GoodRandomHouse came to do battle and the superhero alter-ego publishing smackdown in the Twitterverse began.The alter-ego extravaganza was inspired by an extremely controversial announcement made Thursday by the Wylie Literary Agency, headed by top-dog agent Andrew Wylie. The agency said it would be launching its own eBook publishing imprint called Odyssey Books for famous works by the likes of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and John Updike, and that the eBooks would be sold through Amazon exclusively. Random House, which owns the paper book rights to these books but not technically the eBook rights, retaliated, and refused to deal with Wylie for the foreseeable future.More...

EvilWylie vs. GoodRandomHouse: The Publishing World's Twitter Battle Of The Century