Monthly Archive: January 2011
Rules are rules
Well, here’s a horrific story. After defying a school district to send her kids to a better school, a single mother faces jail time for “defrauding” the county (via): ”The state would not move,...
Observations on the “Palestine Papers”*
The most important—and, perhaps, the only—aspect to the Israel-Palestine peace process that the “Palestine Papers” have revealed is not that Palestinian negotiators offered more than most had previously believed, but that neither party during...
Oscar Nominations Open Thread
I’m not normally interested in the Oscar nominations but because this is the first time since Return of the King that I have actually seen one of the leading nominees, this year is marginally...
Schilling on Social Security
Mike Schilling asks: By the way, wouldn’t privatized Social Security [be] the same sort of unconstitutional mandate as health insurance is? If by “privatized Social Security” we mean “forced individual transfers, not to the...
Abortion and Slavery again
Ta-Nehisi has pushed once again into the abortion and slavery debate, this time following the invocation of that analogy by Rick Santorum and Joe Klein’s subsequent defense of Santorum’s rhetoric. Now, I’ve admitted in...
Anti-Intellectualism and Magical Thinking
A couple follow-up thoughts on DougJ’s response to my Little Republics post. First of all, I think the charge of anti-intellectualism is a little off the mark. I have absolutely nothing against intellectuals or...
Three Classes
By Burt Likko (aka Transplanted Lawyer) This post is about what exists in reality and how I’ve seen it, not what I think that reality ought to be or my moral approval or disapproval of...
NYTimes critic just can’t bracket his personal preference for Bach
Like pretty much the whole internet-reading public, I haven’t been able to avoid New York Times music critic Anthony Tommasini’s list of top 10 composers of all time. As Tommasini acknowledges, the point of...
Please Give to Your Alumni Organization!
Anecdotal evidence about academia’s race to the bottom: a local university emailed our graduate department- they’re offering to pay adjuncts $1,850/ course to teach their history offerings. Some math: a full time teaching load is...
Two Songs for Friday Night
The first is from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes: And the best cover of that song I’ve seen: The second is from The Decembrists: Have a happy weekend all.
The Moment of Impending Crisis
“I’ve begun to suspect that our delusions tend strongly to return us to the same moment in time,” said the Academic. “When would that be?” asked the Stoic. “The moment of impending crisis.
Little Republics & Little Platoons
‘Beyond the Wild Wood comes the Wide World,’ said the Rat. ‘And that’s something that doesn’t matter, either to you or me. I’ve never been there, and I’m never going, nor you either, if...
Literature and the “Prophetic Voice”
I’m not certain where this line of thought is going quite yet — but it’s going somewhere. Elsewhere, I offer the beginning of a thought about a concept somewhere between Forster’s “Prophecy” (as an...
New Media Playground
Even if you’re not a sports fan, GQ’s profile of Deadspin editor-in-chief A.J. Daulerio is worth reading because it’s such a perfect distillation of the clash between old and new media cultures. Deadspin’s raison...
Wire Fraud
The Wire’s David Simon forcefully responds to criticism of his show from Baltimore’s police commissioner. Read the whole thing, and then read his stirring defense of the show from similar criticism in front of...
Explaining that post that didn’t make sense
Writing a post that doesn’t quite compute is one of the perils of blogging, so let me expand upon a point I was trying to make here. I once heard someone (a cursory Google...
Decriminalization in Portugal
Here’s a good article from The Boston Globe on the drug trade and Portugal’s experiment in drug decriminalization. This nugget about Nixon’s drug policy commission is pretty funny:
Tunisia and Iraq
The analytical gymnastics Jennifer Rubin is forced to perform here to defend the invasion of Iraq are pretty impressive. If the Tunisian revolution spurs reform in neighboring countries, her line of reasoning goes, Iraq’s...
