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By Jove! Trump as disrupter in chief

God created the world in seven days, the Bible tells us.

It took President Donald Trump only 14 to destroy it.

“Destroy” may be too strong a word. “Disturb,” “disrupt” are better choices. In one of the greatest games men play, politics, he is the lord of misrule, tweeting and executive-ordering us into a new world that may or may not be brave; terrifying the already traumatized “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” and insulting world leaders – with the exception of boy crush Vladimir “Rootin’ Tootin’” Putin – in equal stead.

Australians, refugees, refugees in Australia – is there anyone who has not been blasted by Trumpet? ...

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Top five stories of 2015 – in and out of this world

We continue looking back – and ahead – with the top stories covered by this blog in 2015. In the last post, I considered the top sports stories. Now I explore the top cultural events of a tumultuous year:

Pluto rising
It was the summer (OK, July) of the little planet that could as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft staged an expensive ($700 million) but profitable flyby. “Pluto, still smarting from its demotion to dwarf planet, nonetheless revealed itself to be a complex world, with a polar ice cap, rugged mountains, smooth plains, and reddish patches that recalled the surface of Mars,” Nicola Twilley writes. ...

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Sympathy for Achilles

“The “Iliad” may be a giant of Western literature, yet its plot hinges on a human impulse normally thought petty: spite,” Natalie Angier writes in the April 1st edition of The New York Times’ Science section.

Natalie Angier may be a brilliant science writer for The Times, yet she has a long way to go as a classicist and literary critic. In an essay on the possible benefits of spite – I say possible because I don’t think spite is good in any event – Angier goes on to explain that Achilles sulked in his tent, holding a grudge against Agamemnon in part because he took Achilles’ war prize, the woman Briseis. Oh, if it were only that simple.

In fairness to Angier – whose essay is all about the evolutionary role spite plays in fairness – she doesn’t have the time or space in the article to unspool the back-story that explains the bad blood between Agamemnon and Achilles, two of the key figures in the Trojan War.

So here we go...

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