U.S.A. Trilogy update.
The American Scene announced this season as Fall of the USA, and I had high hopes that we’d be treated to cornucopia upon cornucopia of reflections on John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy. Alas, it’s...
Author: William Brafford
Did the Tar Heels invent the forward pass?
My Tar Heels had a rough day in football this weekend, losing to NC State by a point. But it was some small consolation to come across the suggestion that the Tar Heels invented...
6 steps to disenchantment.
There are several bloggers and writers I used to love, but now I find them dry or irritating. I’ve gone through the same cycle with each of them. If you want to go through...
How North Carolina got its reputation for moderation in the civil rights era.
I’ve been reading Rob Christensen’s The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics, a book that I started a while back but didn’t pick up again until recently. I’ve just finished the section on North Carolina’s...
While you guys were talking about a certain politician…
…I was messing around with the “in b flat” project. It’s sort of like playing with sound loops, except other people made them and put them on YouTube. Enjoy your ten-minute collaborative tune! [via...
How robots replaced amateur artists.
James Matthew Wilson, an editor at Front Porch Republic, has posted the first four sections of an essay called “Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic,” and the fifth and final section is on...
Glad(well) tidings of joy.
Galley Slaves points to a nice little parody in Vanity Fair: Malcolm Gladwell takes on Christmas — with social science!
Bloggers and biographies.
I just thought of something. In maybe twenty-five or thirty years, we’ll start seeing scholarly biographies of people who at one time maintained or contributed to a blog.
“Taking responsibility” again.
Conor Friedersdorf has posted another entry in the “sprawling, muddled debate about the state of the right, the role dissident conservatives should play, and the wisdom of attacking talk radio hosts” that’s been playing...
Hawks’ gall.
I’m not really a foreign policy guy, but I thought Daniel Larison had a nice line on hawkishness today: “Hawks have routinely unleashed forces they do not understand, cannot control and are unwilling to...
ACORN stuff.
So the ACORN videos are crossing over to CNN and the Daily Show (h/t: Conor). At this point, it seems rather hard to deny that there’s something wrong with ACORN. By appearances, it looks...
The “Beatles or Stones?” of Russian literature.
I hate to all the time be talking about David B. Hart, the theologian, but his writing is too good to go unremarked. Today, at First Things, he’s taken on that perennial question: Dostoevsky...
Teleology, evolution, imagination.
I’ve been following Jim Manzi’s series* on evolution and teleology with some interest. In his most recent post, Manzi states the proposition he wants to defend: The findings of the modern synthesis of evolutionary...
Let’s all go back to MySpace.
Here’s an article describing how social stratification shows up in social networking among teenagers. Maybe we all knew this already, but there’s some interesting quotes. A few of them after the jump.
More meandering thoughts.
Jamelle, the ferocity of the right-wing opposition to Obama mystifies and bewilders me, so as far as I’m concerned your explanation’s as good as any. Because when I try to imagine what I would...
Late to the party: Anathem edition.
I read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem over Labor Day weekend. It’s not particularly apposite to the holiday, but it was the right book for my frame of mind. Stephenson’s scholar-monks appealed to the part of...
Summer films 2009: a frivolous post.
I’ve missed the biggest summer movies for one reason or another. I missed Funny People because I was busy during the week or so when it was tanking. I missed District 9 because I’d...
Some thoughts after starting Nozick.
I’m finally reading Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, and I’m a hundred pages in and enjoying it so far. There are plenty of nicely conceived thought experiments. But I’m not a libertarian, and...
Casualties of war.
Lee says this article, about soldiers who commit violent crimes after returning to the USA, is a must-read, and I have to agree. It’s sad and harrowing, hard to process but necessary. Please read...
For Buster Bluth fans.
Remember that superpowers thread last week? Commenter Kyle thought “CTRL-Z for life would be kind of amazing.” Well, so did Tony Hale, better known as Buster from Arrested Development. He’s got a web series...
