If you don’t already subscribe to the New York Times‘ Idea of the Day weblog, you should.

(If I weren’t at work with a lot to do, I’d write about how it aggregates some of the best articles in print from the web concerning culture and the life of the mind. I’d say something about how it goes a little way toward fostering the kind of society-wide philosophical debates that are a common fixture in a certain Gallic country that I love. I’d delve deep into the contradictions between those last two sentences, digging into the inherent conflict between a time-shifted, remixed, excerpted, low-bandwidth form of communication (web sites) and the more active but ultimately futile discourse (about, say, the “hyperreal” in Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation) that tends to occur in the café or coffeehouse. But I am at work, and no one really wants to read about that anyway.)