June 2008
Tyson Homosexual, champion sprinter
The American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website… replaces the word “gay” in [Associated Press] articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.
The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter...
Brian Appleyard's least favorite book
The Awkward Age by Henry James This late (1899) book marks the beginning of the end for James, and persuaded me that he was never that good. FR Leavis called it “one of James’s major achievements”. Leavis was mad. I tried to make myself read it, my mouth gaping in a silent scream, but I failed. I wanted all the characters to die, slowly and in terrible agony. It would be the first interesting...
European men and the baby bust
A study released in February of this year by Letizia Mencarini, the demographer from the University of Turin, and three of her colleagues compared the situation of women in Italy and the Netherlands. They found that a greater percentage of Dutch women than Italian women are in the work force but that, at the same time, the fertility rate in the Netherlands is significantly higher (1.73 compared to...
“Pixar may have earned awards and laurels as the pioneers of digital animation,...”
– James Rocchi
George Orwell explains how to make a nice cup of... →
“No benign deity plucks television news-show hosts from their desks in the prime...”
– Hitchens on Tim Russert’s funeral and its rainbow
world unlikely to end immediately
Physicists around the world are waiting with excitement as the final preparations for CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) take place in advance of the start of operations this summer. Others, however, are much less enthused, as they worry about the prospects for cataclysmic forces to be released through the exotic forms of matter that will appear in the debris of the collisions that take...
“I don’t have pet peeves. I have deep, psychotic hatreds.”
– George Carlin
Jed Perl: a postcard from somewhere
Shortly after returning to New York, I went down to Philadelphia to visit the Barnes Foundation, a sacred place for anybody who loves modern art. And the news there is bad as well, for most likely the Barnes will soon be torn out of its historic home in suburban Merion and reconstituted as part of a projected museum district in downtown Philadelphia. I wish that the cultural commissars who now...
WatchI love Dean Allen’s dog videos
“There are good movies. There are bad movies. There are movies so bad...”
– Dana Stevens on The Love Guru
Please don't forget my 'other' new book →
the rage of stickers
Bumper stickers such as “Make Love, Not War” and “More Trees, Less Bush” speak volumes about a vehicle’s driver — but maybe not in the way they might hope. People who customize their cars with stickers and other adornments are more prone to road rage than other people, according to researchers in Colorado… .
The researchers recorded whether people had added seat covers, bumper...
feelin' bad
The case that things are basically pretty good? Unemployment is 5.5%, low by historical standards; income is rising slightly ahead of inflation; housing prices are down, but the typical house is still worth a third more than in 2000; 94% of Americans do not have threatened mortgages, and of those who do, most will keep their homes.
Inflation was up in 2007, but this stands out because the 16...
Sina Najafi on presidential doodles
The doodles are very different from president to president. Reagan, for example, who had dreams of being a cartoonist, made very workmanlike doodles. They’re nicely done, but he had a limited repertoire, drawing the same people again and again. In that way, they’re not very interesting, but there is a level of art that he brings to it that you don’t find in someone like Kennedy.
Kennedy made...
conflicts of interest
For a medical researcher, the failure to report income from drug companies is a serious ethical lapse.
No one knows how Harvard’s pending ethics review will turn out for Drs. Joseph Biederman, Thomas Spencer, and Timothy Wilens. They are the three psychiatrists spotlighted for possible conflicts of interest by Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa. According to the Congressional Record, Grassley had...
from Brian Williams's Commencement address at Ohio...
I come here today with a request for the Class of ‘08: We need you to fix the country — and I’m sorry to ask this of you. And I’m deadly serious and we really do. I am 49 and on behalf of my generation, I’m so sorry, the Internet is so cool we got sidetracked. I can burn an hour on Perez Hilton like that. And I know I speak for a lot of you: WebMD, very cool, except...
from J. K. Rowling's Commencement address at...
Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me...
The feminist gender rift
I recently got tipsy with a group of ferociously successful second-wave lawyers, each of whom offered up blood-curdling tales of being one of a small group of women in her law school class; forced to walk great distances—uphill in both directions—to find the single ladies’ room on campus. They were never called upon in class (or they were always called upon) and denied clerkships and jobs...
Léon Krier's Poundbury
Krier conceived the town, still being built, as a single and continuous public space, organized around a town hall, each building contributing to the public vistas of which it is a part. Poundbury is a small settlement that will grow, in time, to 10,000 inhabitants—Krier argues that beyond that size, the need is not for further development around an existing center but for another center. And it...
“Humanity lives by trial and error, sometimes committing errors of a monumental...”
– Léon Krier
healing
How did we come to pray so fervently for recovery from illness? As Heather Curtis notes at the outset of her fascinating first monograph, it has not been ever thus. Although one can certainly find prayer for healing popping up throughout church history, for much of the last 2,000 years those prayerful desires for healing went hand in hand with a certain veneration of bodily affliction. Suffering...
the weakness of religion →
Peggy Noonan on Obama
A friend sent, by instant message, the AP flash that ran at 16:56 ET on 06-03-2008. There it was suddenly on my screen:
”*** WASHINGTON (AP)—Obama clinches Democratic nomination, making him first black candidate to lead his party.”
A great old-school bulletin, and of course it carried a huge and moving message. It is good when barriers fall; it’s good when possibilities seem...
the Church of England establishes its priorities
A meeting of the Church’s “parliament” was due to discuss whether clergy should be doing more to convert British Muslims to Christianity.
The sensitive issue was highlighted last week by a senior bishop who accused Church leaders of failing to reach out to other faiths, and warned that radical Islam is filling a gap in society caused by the decline of traditional Christian...
sorry, you had your chance
If millions of Christians suddenly disappear from the face of the Earth as the opening act for Armageddon, Threat Level thinks most nonbelievers will be too busy freaking the hell out to check their e-mail. But if they do log in, now they can be treated to some post-Rapture needling from their missing friends and loved ones, courtesy of web startup YouveBeenLeftBehind.com.
For just $40 a year,...
Anthony Lane on "Sex and the City"
Is this really where we have ended up—with this superannuated fantasy posing as a slice of modern life? On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves...
