Food Politics & the Moral Effects of Spaghetti
Adam Gopnik has compared le fooding, the movement to shake up French food, to two other movements: the New Wave and Futurism. The first analogy nails the way that le fooding seeks to marry...
Monthly Archive: April 2010
Butler 57, Duke 53
Butler basketball can be soporific, but every red-blooded American should be rooting for the mid-major underdog tonight. For the Duke-haters (personally, I’m agnostic): An impressively comprehensive take-down from SB Nation. For those who can’t...
Universal not Neo-Subjective Pragmatism
Freddie writes: To those who say that I am not disagreeing with Harris, I’m a bit confused: here I am, disagreeing with him. Harris claims that, despite uncertainty and a multiplicity of moral actions,...
The Price of Bibles
A few days ago, Rufus faulted the discipline of economics for failing to develop a theory of different types of wants, and for tending to press all wants into a single framework, that of...
Joyeuses fêtes de Pâques !
For our friends celebrating Easter today, Le Monde has a brief slideshow of Easter events around the world. Aside from lacking captions, it’s a nice collection.
Parmenides and non-Parmenides
First off, I’m not sure we can say the philosophy of Parmenides exactly “works”. That is, I don’t think we can take his ideas as precepts. Because, essentially, Parmenides speaks of the impossibility of...
Holy (and Wholly Misunderstood) Saturday
— From the Wiki on Holy Saturday, called The Holy Sabbath in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition: In the Greek tradition the clergy strew laurel leaves and flower petals all over the church to symbolize the shattered...
Tennis-track versus wrestling-track Democrats
Dividing Dems into “wine-track” and “beer-track” voters is one of the most annoying cliches of the past few election cycles, so I respectfully suggest we turn to this breakdown of sports fans’ political affiliations...
The First Culture War
The Financial Times on France’s turn-of-the-century Dreyfus Affair is worth reading.
Auserity Measures
Via National Review, here’s an interesting article on Lithuania’s belt-tightening response to the financial crisis: Faced with rising deficits that threatened to bankrupt the country, Lithuania cut public spending by 30 percent — including slashing...
Why Call Good Friday Good?
Good Friday Prayer from the Eastern Orthodox tradition: Today He who hung the earth upon the waters is hung upon the Cross (three times). He who is King of the angels is arrayed in a...
How the World Works
It’s this. Market-friendly and market-unfriendly policies alike most emphatically included.
And now for something completely different
I realize that I have been teetering on the brink of some form of madness or obsession the last couple days, though I believe it was madness based on reasonable grounds and sound logic....
Lying about Uganda’s Anti-Gay Bill, with Corporate Sponsorship
Watch this video by Molotov Mitchell. It’s repulsive, profoundly dishonest, and appears to be sponsored by major, respectable U.S. corporations. About the only good thing I can say is that it doesn’t embed in...
These Are Our Allies
Tomorrow, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia intends to behead a 46-year old father of five for the “crime” of hosting a Lebanon-based fortune-telling satellite television show. There are no words…
A Better Plan for Energy Security?
A little-reported fact: Obama’s recent announcement of expanded off-shore drilling was made at Andrews Air Force Base before a military audience with President Obama speaking not as a civilian leader, but as commander-in-chief. That’s...
Pop Quiz
From Foreign Policy: Which country has the highest percentage of its population in a DNA database? The answer, which may surprise you, is below the fold:
____, baby, ____!
Sarah Palin: “Stall, baby, stall“. This is, of course, a variation on, “Drill, baby, drill!” That seems to be a variation of “Burn, baby, burn!” which has always struck me as strange, since the...
Secret Smut
A quirky window into consumer behavior: As e-readers boom, bibliophiles take advantage of online anonymity to purchase more trashy romance novels. Will science fiction and fantasy authors enjoy similar dividends?
