As this Wall Street Journal article explains, with the increased popularity of genealogical research, the demand for the work done by historical photo detectives has increased.

"Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car's headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear."

"How the Edwardians Spoke" is a BBC documentary on how British accents have changed over the last 100 years. You can watch the hour-long program here on Google Video.

According to this article from The Hill, Democrats are optimistic about their chances in the 2008 Minnesota congressional elections.

"The entry of a trio of top Democratic candidates into races in the state’s three GOP-held House districts in the past 10 days has spurred talk of turning Minnesota into the Massachusetts of the Midwest, electing a congressional delegation that could mirror the all-Democratic slate representing arguably the most liberal state in the Union.

Whether or not the Democrats can achieve such a tall order, the state has quickly turned into a battleground, with as many as half its congressional seats up for grabs in 2008."

Does exercise make you thinner? According to this New York Magazine article, "despite half a century of efforts to prove otherwise, scientists still can’t say that exercise will help keep off the pounds."

Simon Schama discusses the life and work of the painter J. M. W. Turner in this New Yorker article.

As this Times Online article explains, after "25 years, five working prints and three quite different cinema releases," Ridley Scott is finally happy with the latest version of his film Blade Runner.

The characters from The Office discuss what they did this summer in this YouTube clip.

William Gibson discusses "growing up in Virginia, becoming renowned as a science-fiction seer, and the process of writing his latest novel, Spook Country," in this Onion A.V. Club interview.

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Beloit College has created its Mindset List for the incoming college class of 2011. The list is an effort "to identify a worldview of 18 year-olds in the fall of 2007." Some examples:

10. Pete Rose has never played baseball.

39. Fox has always been a major network.

55. MTV has never featured music videos.

61. They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.

Adam Gopnik examines the life and novels of Phillip K. Dick in this New Yorker article.

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Are we all living in someone's computer simulation? In this New York Times article, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom says, “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that, is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

James Carville explains "How Karl Rove lost a generation of Republicans" in this Financial Times column.

James Surowiecki discusses what's wrong with student loans in this New Yorker article.

"This convoluted process is good at making student-loan companies rich—Sallie Mae, the biggest issuer of student loans, earned $1.3 billion last year, with a return on equity that dwarfs most other companies’. But it’s not very good at getting government money to students cheaply and efficiently. President Bush’s 2007 budget shows, for instance, that it’s four times as expensive for the government to subsidize and guarantee private loans as for it to issue those loans itself. In other words, the current system is not just corrupt. It’s also inefficient. So why are we stuck with it?"

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William Gibson discusses his new novel Spook Country in this Wired interview.

Maps of War presents an animated map showing the History of Religion in 90 seconds.

Smart Money magazine presents, "The Best Time to Buy Everything."

The Family Guy looks at what the world would be like if Al Gore was president in this YouTube clip.