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One of the leading lights of the science fiction world, editor and author Frederik Pohl, passed away this weekend after a career that defined the genre for decades... Pohl was known for his mind-bending, often satirical novels (many co-authored with longtime collaborator C.M. Kornbluth), his editing acumen, his science fiction criticism, and his witty, fascinating blog, which he was updating right up until his death...

Seamus Heaney, "acclaimed by many as the best Irish poet since Yeats," has died, the BBC and other news outlets are reporting. Heaney was 74 and had recently been in ill health. According to The Irish Times, he died Friday morning at the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin. Sky TV has a short statement from Heaney's family announcing his death. The Associated Press adds that Heaney's publisher, Faber & Faber, has also confirmed the news. Heaney was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Writer and literary critic Ola Larsmo said then that Heaney's poetry reveals "a profound experience ... that...

Simcha Jacobovici is a Canadian-Israeli adjunct religion professor and filmmaker known for his biblical archaeology History Channel series “The Naked Archaeologist.” In an op-ed in the Times of Israel, Jacobovici takes Reza Aslan, author of “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” to task for referring to the land of Jesus as “Palestine,” when a review of historical sources shows the place was known as “Judea,” a word that in Hebrew is synonymous with the word “Jew.” Jacobovici writes (emphasis added throughout), “in all his interviews, Aslan goes out of his way to refer to Jesus’ Judea i.e.,...

Reza Aslan, a religious scholar with a Ph.D. in the sociology of religions from the University of California and author of the new book, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth,” went on FoxNews.com’s online show Spirited Debate to promote his book only to be prodded about why a Muslim would write a historical book about Jesus.

Reza Aslan, author of the new book, “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth” has been interviewed on a host of media outlets in the last week. Riding a publicity wave, the book has surged to #2 on Amazon's list. Media reports have introduced Aslan as a “religion scholar” but have failed to mention that he is a devout Muslim. His book is not a historian’s report on Jesus. It is an educated Muslim’s opinion about Jesus -- yet the book is being peddled as objective history on national TV and radio. Aslan is not a trained historian.

The first volume of Charles Moore's authorized biography of Margaret Thatcher, covering her life up to Britain's victory in the Falklands, is out. It takes its place among the finest political biographies of all time. Thatcher gave Moore full access to her papers and to all her friends and relatives, on condition that she never see the book. It was a wise precaution. Moore is a conservative, more traditionalist than Mrs. Thatcher (as he always calls her) and broadly sympathetic to her causes. But he was able to get frank responses from relatives, friends, and colleagues that might never have...

Darwin’s Doubt Darwin’s Doubt, the brand new New York Times bestseller by Cambridge-trained Ph.D., Stephen Meyer, is creating a major scientific controversy. Darwinists don’t like it. Meyer writes about the complex history of new life forms in an easy to understand narrative style. He takes the reader on a journey from Darwin to today while trying to discover the best explanation for how the first groups of animals arose. He shows, quite persuasively, that Darwinian mechanisms don’t have the power to do the job. Using the same investigative forensic approach Darwin used over 150 years ago, Meyer investigates the central...

Darwin’s Doubt, the brand new New York Times bestseller by Cambridge-trained Ph.D., Stephen Meyer, is creating a major scientific controversy. Darwinists don’t like it. Meyer writes about the complex history of new life forms in an easy to understand narrative style. He takes the reader on a journey from Darwin to today while trying to discover the best explanation for how the first groups of animals arose. He shows, quite persuasively, that Darwinian mechanisms don’t have the power to do the job. Using the same investigative forensic approach Darwin used over 150 years ago, Meyer investigates the central doubt Darwin...

Nearly a dozen “long-lost, rarely seen” Soviet films and scores of screenplays that were never produced about the persecution of Jews during World War II have been revived and are featured in “The Phantom Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and Jewish Catastrophe,” a new book released by Rutgers University Press this week. “Those films have been pretty much just erased from history, really,” said the book’s author, Olga Gershenson, an associate professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in an interview with RIA Novosti. Gershenson said that “basically half of all the Holocaust victims, nearly three...

Last summer, California highway police pulled over pop star Justin Bieber as he sped through Los Angeles in an attempt to shake the paparazzi. He was driving a hybrid electric car—not just any hybrid, mind you, but a chrome-plated Fisker Karma, a US $100 000 plug-in hybrid sports sedan he’d received as an 18th-birthday gift from his manager, Scooter Braun, and fellow singer Usher. During an on-camera surprise presentation, Braun remarked, “We wanted to make sure, since you love cars, that when you are on the road you are always looking environmentally friendly, and we decided to get you a...

Former Electric-car Engineer: Electric Cars Pollute More Than Gas The New American 12 July 2013 Is the only "green" aspect of electric cars the money some companies make off them? If former plug-in advocate and General Motors engineer Ozzie Zehner (shown) is correct, this is exactly the case. Author of the book Green Illusions, Zehner once built his own hybrid car that could run on electricity or natural gas. And, he writes in a recent article entitled "Unclean at Any Speed," he was convinced cars such as his "would help reduce both pollution and fossil-fuel dependence." But he now...

BERKELEY, Calif., July 1 (UPI) — Electric cars, despite their supposed green credentials, are among the environmentally dirtiest transportation options, a U.S. researcher suggests. Writing in the journal IEEE Spectrum, researcher Ozzie Zehner says electric cars lead to hidden environmental and health damages and are likely more harmful than gasoline cars and other transportation options. Electric cars merely shift negative impacts from one place to another, he wrote, and "most electric-car assessments analyze only the charging of the car. This is an important factor indeed. But a more rigorous analysis would consider the environmental impacts over the vehicle's entire life...

Conservatives have long argued that the pursuit of electric vehicles through government grants and credits is a bad idea, mainly from a public-policy and economic standpoint. But what if electric vehicles are a bad idea from an environmental standpoint, too? An environmental activist who once pushed for EVs and now works as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley now calls electric vehicles “unclean at any speed” in a recent article for the engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (via Weasel Zippers and UPI): The idea of electrifying automobiles to get around their environmental shortcomings isn’t new. Twenty years ago, I myself built...

New Book: Solar Cells 23,000 Times Worse for Environment Than Carbon Dioxide Tuesday, June 05, 2012 – by Staff Report Solar Cells Linked to Greenhouse Gases Over 23,000 Times Worse than According to New Book, Green Illusions ... Solar cells do not offset greenhouse gases or curb fossil fuel use in the United States according to a new environmental book, Green Illusions (June 2012, University of Nebraska Press), written by University of California - Berkeley visiting scholar Ozzie Zehner. Green Illusions explains how the solar industry has grown to become one of the leading emitters of hexafluoroethane (C2F6), nitrogen...

The abrupt resignation this week of William Lynch, the 43-year-old Barnes & Noble chief executive, was only the latest in a catalogue of troubles at one of the US's biggest book chains. If this were a business whodunnit, nobody could fail to spot the culprit: Amazon. Still, with bookshops everywhere in retreat as the internet takes an ever greater slice of their trade, it seemed to many that a chain with its own dedicated e-reader – the Nook – could have the answer. But with Barnes & Noble's device struggling to make any headway against Amazon's Kindle, that strategy, and...

Edward Kritzler’s history of Jewish pirates is uneven By Adam Kirsch NEW YORK (NEXTBOOK) -- There are places you expect to find Jews and places you don't, and in the second category, the deck of a pirate ship ranks pretty close to the top. The very title of "Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean" sounds like the premise of a science-fiction novel -- maybe a sequel to Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policemen's Union," in which Yiddish-speaking Jews colonize Alaska -- or else the punchline to a joke. But Edward Kritzler's new book, despite its serious flaws of scholarship and interpretation, has...

Looks like a realatively high volume of page requests is overwhelming FR yet again. Perhaps it's past time to call in some FR code jockeys to get this straightened out?

July 3 marks the last day of the battle of Gettysburg 150 years ago -- Pickett's Charge, the "high water mark of the Confederacy." July 4 is of course Independence Day, but this year it is also the sesquicentennial of the surrender of Vicksburg, which split the rebel states in two by securing the length of the Mississippi for the Union. This week, a century and a half ago, marked the certain beginning of the end for the Confederacy and thus of slavery and the rise of the great Republic of freedom. To commemorate this week, I am spending the...

In the summer of 2010, with Republicans poised to take over the House and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) in line to lead the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the White House started urging reporters to write negative stories about the congressman’s past, a new book says. (article continues at link)

…are the only possible response to this White House memo extolling the virtues of Obama consiglieri Valerie Jarrett. The memo contains talking points to be used by White House staffers who were instructed to praise Jarrett in advance of a New York Times profile that appeared in September 2012. It was leaked to Mark Leibovich and will appear in his forthcoming book, This Town. The memo is hilariously titled “The Magic of Valerie.”The magic of Valerie is her intellect and her heart. She is an incredibly kind, caring and thoughtful person with a unique ability to pinpoint the voiceless and...