Written by a journalist embedded with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the Marine Corps, Evan Wright’s Generation Kill describes the experience of invading Iraq alongside them in 2003. The book provides a graphic account of what transpired among the men of the Battalion and its subsidiary units, as well as on battlefields between Kuwait City [...]

The entire archive of the PBS investigative journalism program Frontline seems to be available online for free. Some of the more interesting topics covered include:

Children and psychiatric drugs
The expansion of executive power in the United States
US climate policy, from the first Bush administration to 2007
Pakistan’s tribal regions
Credit cards and debt
Alternative medicine
Growing up in China

There [...]

Since I spent the last fourteen hours sleeping, I don’t have much of interest to convey right now.
As a consolation, here is a time lapse video of slime moulds and fungus growing. I have always found slime moulds rather fascinating. They start of as single-celled, bacteria-eating organisms resembling amoebas. If two with matching mating types [...]

To celebrate my youngest brother Sasha’s graduation from high school and admission into McGill, my brother Mica made him a video. It can be seen over on Mica’s site.
One word of warning: it does feature an implicit comparison between my appearance and that of Grigori Rasputin.

Recently, there was controversy about a doctored photograph showing four Iranian missiles launching, whereas the original apparently showed three and one on the ground. Errol Morris discussed the images on the website of the New York Times.
Photo and video editing are nothing new, but some new software seeks to make the former much easier. It [...]

Juno, a gently comedic and mature-feeling story of teen pregnancy, is really quite a charming film. Other films had so thoroughly ingrained the notion that a teen pregnancy was necessarily utterly disastrous that I spent most of the film waiting for the axe to drop. The fact that it didn’t was a nice deviation from [...]