The Retroactive Table of Contents : Jan 26 – Feb 3
(Note: This week Rufus brought up the point that with so many posts these days it’s easy to miss stuff. He suggested we begin doing a weekly review, similar to The Dish. Great idea! So starting today, each Friday(-ish) I will do up a quick list of the posts from the past week. This will now be a regular feature that all can look forward to, until such time as I get bored of it and no one steps in to do in my place. Which is to say maybe this may well be a one shot deal. Since it took longer than I thought it would to put this together, I would appreciate hearing honest feedback as to whether people actually find this helpful, or if no one’s ever going to be checking it out. Thanks.)
The Big Headline
Promising a series of posts on Government 2.0, this past week was most notable for the return of beloved prodigal son Scott Payne.
The New Bright Shiny Object of the Week
The topic of the week was probably Charles Murray’s How Thick Is Your Bubble. Jason had us take the quiz to determine exactly how thick that bubble was, and then – after reviewing the results – was unsure that Murray’s thesis stood up.
Part of there reason for that might have been that Murray was confusing preference with facts, according to guest writer Sam Wilkinson.
JL wondered where the middle class went in Murray’s thesis.
Pat, on the other hand, riffed off of Murray and tackled the issue of realistic bigotry in the workplace.
Politics, Government & Elections
Elias confessed his feelings in a swooning, flowery love letter to David Frum, and then willingly walked the minefields of Israel-Firsters.
Eric asked everyone to join him as he live-blogged the last Florida debate, and then did Newt a solid in his newest Atlantic piece.
Elias was not overly impressed with those debaters.
Ethan was not overly impressed with the entire state of the Union.
Mark showed how the question of whether or not federal workers are overpaid is actually a complicated one to answer.
Jason lamented the state of our prison system.
Pat finally confessed to being a terrorist. We were all very surprised. He was always such a quiet boy, and kept mostly to himself.
Education
In education, Mike looked at the competing benefits of roots and mobility where public education is concerned.
Shawn strapped himself in the Way Back Machine to take on an old Freddie DeBoer reaction to the POTUS sending his kids to a private school rather than a public one.
Pat submitted a mandatory library for the techie-to-be, not one volume of which I will be able understand a word of.
Entertainment & the Arts
Ethan weighed the merits of ebooks vs. book-books following Jonathan Franzen’s recent comments.
Noting that we never seem to feature country or bluegrass, Mike took a big stick to last week’s Friday Jukebox and rectified the situation.
Rufus looked at heredity and eugenics through the lens of Nana on his second Zola post. He also promised to discover you at a bus station and make you a star on Broadway, baby, if you could just help him with a plot device.
Focusing on issues of Hollywood and morality, I argued that Red Tails is not proof that Hollywood is not un-American; also, I vowed to never eat a human fetus – or at least not when I was in Oklahoma. In either case, I sought God for forgiveness.
Burt wondered if the porn industry would survive mandatory latex.
Ryan dove into Homeland on Showtime, only to find that he was not so comfortable with its politics.
Essays & Cultural Issues
Following up on early posts, guest writer Stillwater connected conservative politics and racism.
Not to be outdone with third-rail subject matter, Mike threw down on class warfare and why it’s so hard to resist.
Christopher wondered to what degree immigration status should play in green-lighting life and death operations.
I submitted that even though his legacy should be positive, Joe Paterno had to be fired.
David mused on the tragic fate of the Pelican as he continued his Mon Tikki project. He then fessed up to his first missed deadline, so as you can imagine he could use some help. (This week’s I-Am-A-Moron Confession: It wasn’t until I read the Pelican post that the penny finally dropped and I realized David & Tony Comstock are the same person.)
Philosophy & History
Murali continued his philosophical journeys with a post on Justification and Argumentation.
Christopher and Jason continued mining Hobbes, who is apparently Mr. January and Mr. February in this year’s LOoG Philosophers Swim Suit Calendar based on the posts he’s been racking up.
JL Continued with his series of posts on the Civil War, this week focusing on Meade & McClellan.
League News
Jaybird announced a book-club style group watching of Fringe over at Mindless Diversions; the homework, due Tuesday, will be to watch the pilot.
Burt finalized a group rate at the LVH in Vegas for this May. League-fest 2012, here we come.
This is such a good idea but I wouldn’t dare ask you to do it — it must have taken so long! The League needs its own Super PAC so we could pay someone to do this as a weekly newsletter post/email.Report
The email idea is kind of awesome. We could have people subscribe to the update.Report
We could have people subscribe to the update.
Exactly!
Erik/Mark: thoughts? I feel like this is the kind of thing I’d want if I liked reading the League but never had the time to at work, etc., Might could increase our audience…just a thought.Report
Incredibly awesome, fantastically organized, and must be done in the future.
I’ll certainly pitch in and do it when need be. And if this takes-off, maybe (for those particularly enthusiastic among us) we can put together a daily comment recap for the best one-liners, quick insights, and epic fails of the last 24 hours.
But first things first. Great job Tod.Report
All of those are great ideas, Ethan.Report
This ….was….awesome.Report
Indeed.Report
Beyond awesome + ?Report
Yeah, I was going to say, you mucked this all up.
You’re supposed to do a terrible job on the first one of these, so that everyone feels guilty that someone else went first and nobody asks you to go to the effort of doing one again.
Instead you knocked it out of the park, so now we all know that if we hem and haw and drag our feet you’ll rock out future ones, too.Report
This is very awesome. Even visiting several times a day, I still manage to miss a lot.
If I can be so bold as to make a request, it might be neat to add notes on where the comments discussion has taken an interesting turn, those are easy to miss when the post is no longer at the top.Report
I like this idea, plink, but I think it would add waaaaaay too much time. Maybe we could invite people to recommend threads in the comments sections?Report
I like what we’ve periodically done: Highlighting particularly good and insightful comments into new posts. I think we should do more of that.Report
Doing more of that would be just as good, IMHO.Report
This is beyond awesome. I wish I had the energy to do stuff like this.Report
Tod, let me know if you want to rotate. I also found myself unable to participate in any meaningful fashion on the computer nerd thread.Report
Tod actually should have at least the crisis management books. You haven’t read Fisk, Tod? Tisk for no Fisk!Report
I’ve been thinking about this and smooshing everything together by category is *LOVELY* but probably adds brain cycles to the post that wouldn’t be necessary if we just smooshed everything together by day… and, additionally, doing it by day would allow this post to live in the dashboard to be edited at the end of the day (making it relatively easy to just scroll down in another window) rather than needing the author to devote a great deal of brain to make it coherent by topic.
Doing it by day might make the post less susceptible to burnout.Report
But i like the categories 🙁Report
A day is a category!Report
Tod’s post adds meta information that is valuable in and of itself.
It also creates a ton more work. But this creates the opportunity to be awesome.
I dunno what is the right answer here. I just want Tod to keep making these awesome summary posts so that the question is moot and I don’t have to do any work.Report
Don’t be a pill, JB, you know what I mean.Report
He’s not being a pill. He’s trying to save us from ourselves. Well, from burnout.Report
I know. It’s a good idea, dang it.Report
So far, I’m most exceed by Elias’s idea. I’ll keep doing it this way for a long time if ED green lights it.Report
Autocorrect?Report
No, his idea was to get a subscription list for the weekly recap, so that those that don’t hang here got a regular update of things they missed. He made the point that it might increase our overall readership, and I think he’s right.Report
(I got it, Patrick)Report
oh. oops.Report
This is amazing, but I must point out that the Homeland post was mine.Report
Crap! I knew that!
Fixed.Report
Love it! Probably the funniest table of contents I have ever seen. Oh, and helpful too.Report
I like this a lot too, and I hate hate the Dish summarization. But isn’t this something that could be automated by each author writing a seperate “{blank} wrote a {blank} about {blank}” blurb for their posts, and the weekly curator would simply organize the blurbs by topic? It seems like summarizing a post just written would be much less work, and the blurb serves as a useful subtitle to the post itself.
A few highlighted comments would be very cool too as much of the interesting stuff happens down here.Report