In “The Interstitials” (New Republic, August 17, 2011), Michael Kimmage reviews Robert Vanderlan’s Intellectuals Incorporated: Politics, Art and Ideas inside Henry Luce’s Media Empire, an account of Henry Luce’s Time, Life, and Fortune empire:

Intellectuals Incorporated is a bracing contribution to American intellectual history. It is full of well-drawn biographical portraits, and through them Vanderlan analyzes a dynamic whereby intellectuals transform and are transformed by the world around them.

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In "Peter the Wild Boy" (History Today Volume 60 Issue 4 2010), Roger Moorhouse recalls for us the "wild child" myth of the early days of modern science: "If we could just get hold of a genuinely wild child, raised in the woods by animals, we will learn about human nature." In 1725, a 12-year-old boy was found in the woods, naked, mute, and quadruped (at the time) – later baptised as "Peter," What to make of him? Absent Darwin, they couldn't decide that he was a human-ape hybrid, but other theories abounded.

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Anyone who studies design in nature will have heard it a million times, usually from theistic Darwinists: "Identifying design in life forms is risky to faith because once we find out how it really happened, your faith will be diminished. Protect your faith by assuming that God played no direct role." Yes, but what ifthere is no gap? Who, except the theistic Darwinists, said there was? It's their scam, and boy have they milked it.

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Here, New Scientist's Amanda Gefter explains, "Time need not end in the multiverse" (11 August 2011):

GAMBLERS already had enough to think about without factoring the end of time into their calculations. But a year after a group of cosmologists argued that they should, another team says time need not end after all.

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From "Darkest Known Exoplanet: Alien World Is Blacker Than Coal" (ScienceDaily (Aug. 12, 2011) we learn:

Astronomers have discovered the darkest known exoplanet — a distant, Jupiter-sized gas giant known as TrES-2b. Their measurements show that TrES-2b reflects less than one percent of the sunlight falling on it, making it blacker than coal or any planet or moon in our solar system.

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In “Will science banish superstition for ever?: Which makes people more superstitious: fervent scientism or fervent religious belief? The answer may surprise you,” we learn, among other things:

In Britain, during National Science Week (2003), University of Hertfordshire psychologist Richard Wiseman and associates surveyed 2068 people on superstitious behaviour. They found, among other things, that

“The current levels of superstitious behaviour and beliefs in the UK are surprisingly high, even among those with a scientific background. Touching wood is the most popular UK superstition, followed by crossing fingers, avoiding ladders, not smashing mirrors, carrying a lucky charm and having superstitious beliefs about the number 13.”

Twenty-five percent of the people who claimed a background in science were very or somewhat superstitious. (Mercatornet, August 10, 2011) More.

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