Okay, I know I only just recently posted about t-shirts, but forget all about those, because I've found something infinitely cooler. Courtesy of Boing Boing, I present to you...

"Teach the Controversy" t-shirts, the perfect rebuttal to anyone who dares suggest that evolution is a contested theory that should be taught by side with other 'equally' possible theories like Intelligent Design.



Tell me these are not the greatest thing you've ever seen, I dare you.

Plus, you can get the design on a messenger bag!



I'm in love.

One of my favorite activities here is window-shopping along streets packed with dusty bookstores, their windows crowded with first editions of Balzac, Sartre, Camus, Diderot, Rousseau, etc, etc, etc. So many beautiful leather spines, so many crumbling pages, so many famous names and great works...and all of them out of my reach. Because, of course, I'm not about to pay 10,000 euros for a book -- and these stores aren't built for browsing.  I suspect they wouldn't even let me in the door. Not that I have the nerve to try.

But now I don't have to. Because it turns out there's a new reason to love my neighborhood library. Not only do they have extensive archives, but their collection is open the public! With a minimum of muss and fuss -- and some seriously humiliating efforts to follow the rapid French -- I convinced the librarians to let me lay my hands on an original, 1632 edition of this:



This was rather close to mind-blowing.  Now, I know I said before that Descartes was one of "my guys."  True.  But it's ten times as true for Galileo. He's in the inner circle of guys. And this is a book I've been learning about since I was 18. (Unfortunately, it's not actually the book I wanted, because I was an idiot and filled out the wrong number on the request form, so I got the Discorsi rather than the somewhat more interesting Dialogo, but tomorrow's another day...)

The library also has a first edition Copernicus, which is really the holy grail, but that one's off limits to the public.  Still, they've got a whole archive full of this stuff, and I've got another two weeks...

I've been spending a lot of time with grad students over here, and these grad students--perhaps because they spend long days sifting through dusty archives with no one to speak to but the ghosts of the people they're studying--spend a lot of time talking about their "guys." ("Guys" being whichever long-dead hero or rogue they happen to be investigating.)

As in, "My guys are total post-structuralists." Or "My guys were in an Algerian prison camp when that happened, so don't blame them." Or "Remember that time when my guys sunk yours guys' battleship?"

Alas, I no longer have any guys.

But back when I did, Descartes was definitely in the in crowd. (Fun fact: one of my favorite parts about writing Hacking Harvard was getting to geek out for a couple pages -- which I think my editor cut down to a couple paragraphs -- about why everyone should love Descartes.)


Which is why, when I arrived here in his hometown, I was eager to track down his grave.  Turns out that's not as easy as it sounds.  Almost every guidebook you check proposes a different location for it. 

This seemed somewhat odd to me, since France honors its intellectuals like no other country. Every famous dead person you can think of -- along with a couple thousand you've never heard of -- is honored with a giant statue or plaque or tomb. And Descartes is pretty much one of the greatest and most important figures in Western history. But his grave, as it turns out, is buried in the back corner of a church, marked by only a dusty, faded stone that you would easily miss if you weren't on a mission.

And now, because it's an excellent story about my guy, I will explain why.  But because over the last week I have been privy to any number of enthusiastically told stories about "my guys," and I accept that these stories are never quite as thrilling to the listener as they are to the teller, I'll tuck it behind the cut.