Plain Dumb Luck
In my perfect world, I’d have Michel Foucault’s old job: Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. Here’s a bit of what I might want to teach.
Monthly Archive: March 2012
Lighten Up (Or You Will Be Pun-nished)
I know it’s election year for you guys and emotions are high and tempers are short. For our own health, sanity and for the sake of the community here, I appeal to the League ...
Economic Benefits of Marriage
In 2011 Pew Charitable Trusts published an interesting study showing just who is falling out of the middle class. – Compared with married women, women who are divorced, widowed or separated are between 31 and...
Stray Thoughts on This Week’s Peter Beinart To-Do
1) I don’t know why I’m writing about this tonight and not Dr. McCoy’s technophobia. Probably because I’m a masochist at heart. 2) I haven’t read The Crisis of Zionism. Neither the university nor...
Sad Songs
they say, so… so much. This is the saddest “sad sack” story you will ever read if you’re a sports fan. Mets fans don’t have anything on this. Nobody has anything on this. CLIPPER...
Like any truly great politician, the real Mitt Romney doesn’t exist
“Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.”...
Skimming for the Dirty Parts – Book Censorship In Public Schools, The Enders Game Controversy, and The False Allure of Public Decency
While it is true that I stole both Brave New World and Flowers for Algernon from the public library, it should be noted for the record that I did eventually return them. Plus, it...
Confirmation Bias, Video Games, Art, and Interactivity
Mass Effect 3 was released two weeks ago today (Tuesday) and there have been a lot of little swirling dynamics when it comes to the game, consumer response, corporate response to the consumer response, and...
Book notes: Sex at Dawn
I suppose I’m the most likely culprit here to read and comment on the recent book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher...
A Quick “OMG! Update” on Enders Game & South Carolina
Big, big, big hat tip to Erik who sent me an email today about the continuing breaking news surrounding the South Carolina teacher suspension for reading Scott Orson Card’s Enders Game that I discussed...
Five Leadership Lessons of James T. Kirk: The Movie (Or, How Alex Knapp Plans To Conquer The Universe)
If you missed Alex Knapp’s article on the five leadership lessons of James T. Kirk you really should read it. Or, if you prefer, you can watch Alex’s video version which he recorded at...
Scenes from an Arizona snowfall
One reason I really do love this town: we just had thirty inches of snow dumped on us, and today it’s sunny and bright and the snow is melting. You can go outside in...
Death + Taxes + … + n
The quote, attributed to Benjamin Franklin, from a letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy, is: “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to...
Don’t Fear Me
I won’t go into any of the details surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin. First of all because many of them are in dispute, but more importantly because none of them really matter, or...
Everyone in Afghanistan suffers PTSD
I’m pretty sure that long before American troops set foot in the mountains of Afghanistan, that the people of that country already suffered from post-traumatic-stress-disorder. Another ten years of war stacked on top of...
Peyton Manning is coming to Denver Open Open Thread
Peyton Manning is coming to Denver. The story says that this means that Denver is going to trade Tim Tebow. This has “short-term solution” written all over it. Now, if they benched Tebow (and I...
Portlandia in Portland, The Enders Game in South Carolina, and Why I Prefer Living In A Nation Over a Confederacy
There are few things on television today that are as beloved by we denizens of the Rose City as IFC’s Portlandia. While I believe that quite a few people in other parts of the...
Arizona buried, again, beneath a tide of snow
I’m tired of snow. I know this is true because it’s hardly snowed this winter at all until now. I took the above picture about half-way through our current storm. It was about the...
Odium Surplus/Odium Deficit
A common way to talk about crime and punishment is to liken them to debt and repayment: A crime creates a debt to society; if the criminal is caught and convicted, a just sentence...
The Silence is Deafening, but not Illuminating
Okay, don’t worry: this post is not about Rush Limbaugh or birth control pills. Alas! That stories so voluminously begun as the Chronicle of Limbaughpalooza 2012 (or Slutpocalypse Now) should come to so lame...
