December 2011
“Modern liberalism is a mixture of two elements. One is a support of Federal...”
– Matt Stoller: Why Ron Paul Challenges Liberals « naked capitalism
“The class is conducted very simply. You turn in stories, and I read them aloud —...”
– Marvin Mudrick, describing the class in Narrative Prose he taught for many years at UC-Santa Barbara.
“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to...”
– From the seventeenth episode, commonly called “Ithaca,” of James Joyce’s Ulysses
“HTML5 offers a glimpse of the freedom to define the Web publication the way it...”
– If HTML5 Kills the Blog Format, I Won’t Shed a Tear. MAN, do I hope skilled people pay attention to this.
“A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge...”
– Pico Iyer
“Hamleys, which is London’s 251-year-old version of F.A.O. Schwarz, recently...”
– NYT. I know it’s passé to comment on how New-York-centric the NYT is, but the habit continues to annoy. Hamleys is a hundred years older that Schwartz, but to the NYT is just a “version” of the store they know. Whatever is in New York is the ruler by which the whole world is...
“Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican)...”
– I’ve seen this passage from David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years quoted in several venues, and it really is a wonderful passage: who knew that a person could get so many facts wrong in one little sentence? I can’t quite get over it. Apple Computer (not...
“What English speakers call ‘computer science’ Europeans have known...”
– James Gleick, The Information. All this is true and interesting and cool — but, I want to say, once you have acknowledged that in a sense everything is information, you need to move on to acknowledge the equally important point that one thing may be information in a radically different form than...
“In a sense, every house, hill, barn, and byre [on Colonsay] is a center of...”
– John McPhee, The Crofter and the Laird
“I believe that we ought so to love and trust God in our lives, and in all the...”
– Bonhoeffer again
“Weizsäcker’s book The World-View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It...”
– Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison
“Ahh, Firing Line! If I leave a TV studio these days with what Diderot termed...”
– Christopher Hitchens, 2008
“Call this a leftover 2012 prediction: like a forest getting older, our social...”
– There Is No Next Facebook: How Multiple Social Networks Will Peacefully Coexist - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
“While researchers have known for decades that the body undergoes various...”
– The Fat Trap - NYTimes.com
“Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it...”
– Harold Pinter, as quoted by Maria Popova. Ah yes, the old “the one truth is that there is no one truth” line. How many times have we heard that one?
Whenever I think of Pinter, I think of this story: He had for many years given generous financial support to the Comedy Theatre in London...
“I happen to think copyright does induce creation and that creators and consumers...”
– Will Wilkinson, commenting on the Julian Sanchez post I just quoted.
“Proponents of ever stronger and longer copyrights, supported by ever more...”
– Julian Sanchez
“It’s a safe bet that in the history of state funerals, no former president...”
– Václav Havel’s Funeral: Why Truth Needs Love - Reason Magazine
“For students who are not talented with words and numbers but who are talented...”
– Why Don’t We Value Spatial Intelligence? | Getting Smart. Via Alex Knapp.
“Because of piety’s penchant for taking itself too seriously, theology does well...”
– Tom Oden (via Philip Tallon on Twitter)
I called it!
I think one of the odder locutions currently in use is this: “I call bullshit.” “I’m calling bullshit on that.” Aren’t you really just saying, “I disagree” or “I think you’re wrong”? But people act like they’re taking disagreement to some higher level of meaning and truth when they “call bullshit.”
I think this...
“Truly wondrous is the whole chronicle of the incarnation. From the time Christ...”
– Leo the Great
“For some years now, it has been a Christmas Eve tradition in my family for my...”
– Rod Dreher » Light in the darkness. Read on.
“I pray good beef and I pray good beer
This holy night of all the year,
But I...”
– Hilaire Belloc. I like posting this when I feel the need for an injection of the true Christmas spirit.
“The story told by the book – epicureanism flourished at Rome, was lost, and then...”
– The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt - review | Books | The Guardian. I’ve been waiting and waiting to see if any reviewers of Greenblatt’s book would notice how reductive and simplistic his picture of the Middle Ages is. So here’s one, at least.
“[John Jeremiah Sullivan] seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he...”
– James Wood. Reading a passage like this, I am reminded that, for all the faults he has legitimately and illegitimately been accused of, Wood does as much as anyone ever has to make the humble book review a form of art.
“The weird, accidental material conditions of the practice of software...”
– Ian Bogost - The Virtues of Long Compiles
“There are intimations of the abyss: wars and rumors of war, our television and...”
– Our Holiday Gift | The Classical Editor: As an introductory paragraph to a post about watching sports during the holidays, this is … I don’t know, rather too restrained, I think. Can’t you be more portentous, man? Can’t you ratchet up the rhetoric a notch or two? This needs...
“In our strange cultural moment it is necessary to make a distinction between...”
– The Book of Books - What Literature Owes the Bible - NYTimes.com
“Writers of all kinds, from the nakedly commercial to the wilfully abstruse, look...”
– A new map for the books world | Books | guardian.co.uk. But what is the “new map”? Doesn’t seem like anyone has one yet.
“Should driver-less cars become a commonplace way of getting from here to there -...”
– Unpaving Paradise: Do Driverless Cars Mean the End of Parking Lots? - Conor Friedersdorf - Technology - The Atlantic. Very cool stuff to think about, and hope for. But of course the most dangerous drivers will be the ones to insist that they drive themselves everywhere. This is inevitable.
“People just get things wrong. They read them wrong, or remember them wrong or...”
– What Is Good Fact-Checking? | Mother Jones (via rubenfeld)
“Lucia Etxebarria has every right to feel furious. The Spanish prize-winning...”
– Kathryn Hughes.
Yes, how dare Etxebarria think about making a living? How dare she not be so nobly thoughtless and clueless as Hughes’s students? How dare she not have the motives Kathryn Hughes thinks she ought to have — the extraordinarily self-sacrificial ones that (by implication) drive...
“We invite you to celebrate New Year’s Eve 2012 at The Aviary.
Doors will...”
– From an email I received yesterday. Love Grant Achatz, but I’m probably not quite the target audience for this one. English profs are rarely plutocrats.
“When I was young I thought cops were cool. They had a respectable and honorable...”
– Young, Black and Frisked by the N.Y.P.D. - NYTimes.com. This essay is rightly focused on the profiling problem — and as someone on Twitter pointed out (maybe @binarybits) it’s rather disturbing how many people in the comments take the police’s side on this matter — but I would also note...
“It’s true that Germans and Greeks work very different amounts, but not in the...”
– European financial crisis: Is Europe a mess because Germans work hard and Greeks are lazy? - Slate Magazine 