Author: Rufus F.

I know what you’re going to say: I’m getting you to do my homework for me! But I’m working on designing my Enlightenment course today and I’m trying to select a single text for the English Empiricism...

I haven’t done one of these in a while and this one is certainly not a new recording by any means (Domino Records, 1960 and available on the “Domino Records Story” CD). I’m a...

Via the Economist, a poli-sci professor comes up with a clever way to describe tax credits.

“Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?” In other words, are they rooted in the Soul, the Body, or some combination of the two?...

They have their calling cards, don’t they?

Rhesus is a play about connections missed and badly met that has seldom quite connected with audiences, which is probably why a few nineteenth century critics attempted to disconnect it from Euripides’s body of work. My own...

Like that post on Haiti, I often put things in Off the Cuff just to ask, “Hey, what do y’all make of this?” So, in that vein, what do y’all make of this Vancouver...

In other news, the Obama administration seems to have pressured the Haitian government at the behest of contractors for American companies Levi Strauss and Haines to abandon a law they’d passed in 2009 to raise their minimum wage law...

An American Muslim-convert South Park hater was recently arrested in Morocco. My sister actually saw him last week, in Morocco, eating in a local TGIFridays. There are many possible punchlines here.

Of course. I’ve always wondered, incidentally, if Barry McGuire was ever tempted to pen a follow-up song for Eve of Destruction. Maybe, “(Okay, we’re not quite on the) Eve of Destruction”.

Have we found a cure for lovesickness yet? Judging by our dramatic works, one might guess we had. Fictional characters seem to suffer all sorts of exaggerated ‘conflicts’- from owing the mob money they...

The Economist surveys the Arab press on the death of Osama bin Laden and finds one pan-Arab newspaper reporting the encouraging hearsay that he was already yesterday’s news in much of the Arab world:...

After the jump a few of the Vernesque machines from the workshops of Les Machines de l’île Nantes:

After few wars have the victors entirely resisted the urge to be as vengeful in peacemaking as they were in war-making. There’s more often the desire to settle all accounts and ‘teach them a...

A recent Washington Monthly profile of Dan Savage draws this interesting* parallel between modern sexual norms and consumption patterns: “Classical liberalism, however, may prove just as inadequate in the bedroom as it has in...

  I have a very distinct memory from last summer, sitting in a chair on our back porch and taking a break from my reading. I was looking at out lilac bush, just sitting...

An old joke: Tonto and the Lone Ranger are surrounded by hostile Indians. The Lone Ranger: It’s looks like we’re in a lot of trouble, old friend! Tonto: What do you mean “we”, Paleface?...

I posted something recently about the Baltimore B-Note, a local currency being unveiled next month for use in local businesses in “the city that reads”. After getting some questions here and elsewhere and having...

Coming next month to a store near you, but only if you happen to live in Baltimore, a new local currency the BNote will be available on April 16th and 17th. More on local currencies here....

{Note: Just remembered I’ve previously discussed the idea of a moral order reasserting itself in Hecuba here last year.} I’m not sure if Oscar Wilde’s line about losing one parent being a misfortune but...