I have an op-ed piece running in today’s International Herald Tribune, which is online here: Speed up or get out of the way.

World Aids Day. I am reminded of the first time I ever heard of the mysteries of HIV. I was 15, a student in Year 10 at the bland and conservative Meriden School for Girls. It was summer and I was in a geography class with Mr Mawad who was droning on and on as […]

What interests me about all the noise surrounding the Antikythera Mechanism is the question of what would have been, I mean what would things be like now, what would the world look like, be like, had the technology that produced this mechanism not been lost.

Jo Marchant on Nature.com articulates the question:
I’m also interested in finding […]

Mark Twain said: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
So, what’s the possibility of finding your missing, and now dead, sister wedged, upside down behind the bookcase in her bedroom? Well, hardly a real possibility (I mean WHAT are the odds?), but according […]

Another great book review by Apostolos Vasilakis over at Greekworks.com. This time it’s a review of George Pelecanos’s The Night Gardener. Vasilakis begins the review with a quote from Petros Markaris, the Greek crime writer (Deadline in Athens) who was the subject of Vasilakis’s previous reviews. The quote:
[The] detective novel becomes more and more social….It’s […]

Public schools in Sratford (Connecticut) have discarded their old “cutesy, feel good” motto of “Children First - Whatever It Takes” and adopted words straight out of the Stoic philosopher’s mouth, reports Fred Musante via the Stratford Star. The new motto Tantum eruditi sunt liberi or Only the educated are free is what public school children […]

The much anticipated translation of poems and prose of Greek poet of despair Kostas Karyotakis by Keith Taylor and William W. Reader has been published. Taylor and Reader have been collaborating on this project for years and won the 2004 Keeley and Sherrard Award from Poetry Greece magazine for two translations.

From the publisher:
KOSTAS KARYOTAKIS, Battered […]

Browsing through the archives of Archaeology on this very wet Greek day, I pause to read a piece called “Artful Surgery” by one Anagnostis P. Agelarakis. The subtitle states: “Greek archaeologists discover evidence of a skilled surgeon who practiced centuries before Hippocrates.”
The remains of a woman excavated by Eudokia Skarlatidou in the Clazomenean colony […]

Or so announces The Australian. Historian Andrew Dalby said:
“There is no direct evidence of the poet’s identity and therefore no justification for the customary assumption that the two epics were composed by a man.”
Full article here.

Two charming gentlemen, Mr Charlie Williams and Mr Christopher Morrow, have stories in this issue of Bullet Magazine….

More info at Bullet Magazine online.