Recent blog posts by Michael Schaffer and Hendrik Herzberg nicely characterise the feeling of futility provoked by trying to track and understand all of the variables involved in the ongoing US election. It is very difficult to get a sense both of political events, and of the media and popular reactions to those events. [...]
The pastor whose prayer Sarah Palin says helped her to become governor of Alaska founded his ministry with a witchhunt against a Kenyan woman who he accused of causing car accidents through demonic spells.
Hannah Strange, “Palin linked electoral success to prayer of Kenyan witchhunter”, in Times Online, 16 September 2008.
“And face it—McCain and Weaver were [...]
Paul Doyle, “Chelsea’s potency uninterrupted by limp Bordeaux”, in The Guardian, 17 September 2008.
In 1677, the most unpopular law of the old customary code was finally abolished in France. Congrès was defined by the Frutière dictionary as: “the practice of coitus ordered by decree of an ecclesiastical judge, performed in the presence of surgeons and [...]
Roberto Bolaño would have had a lot of fun with this—
Scott Alan Carson, “The Stature and Body Mass of Mexicans in the Nineteenth-Century United States”, in Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 39, No. 2, Autumn 2008, pp. 211-232.
Abstract
Data taken from nineteenth-century American prison records reveal that the statures of Mexicans born in Mexico declined, whereas [...]
There is an excellent article in the latest Harper’s by Alec Wilkinson, a veteran staff writer at The New Yorker, describing the work of a husband and wife team who spend nearly two hundred days a year travelling America with a boat to search for the drowned. This is Wilkinson’s first piece published with [...]
Some favourite recent searches that have landed people here:
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this thought is not mine
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We learn about the perks that accompany a Nobel Prize, including a living alarm clock in the form of a white-robed soprano sporting a tiara of lit candles.
Jerry A. Coyne, “The Complex James Watson”, in The Times Literary Supplement, 12 December 2007.
In which Jonathan Bennett refers to all females working on conditionals at the time of his writing by employing a single proper name:
Whenever I report what someone ‘told me’, ‘warned me’, or the like, I always mean that he or Dorothy did so in a personal communication.
Bennett, Jonathan. 2003. A Philosophical Guide to Conditionals, Oxford [...]
WHEN BOTH ARE STRANGERS
Let us say the young Lakes from Chicago are about to move to Strangetown, where John Lake will manage the new branch office his firm has just opened. Business is the usual reason for moving to a new community. John will, of course, meet a few people through business. If the town [...]
On a tour through Iowa farming communities, Rudolph W. Giuliani endured the test of making small talk.
From the Times news feed for Adam Nagourney, “Iowans Check for Dirt Under Giuliani’s Nails”, New York Times, 20 August 2007.
Among those Americans who care enough about politics to have registered themselves with The Democratic Party and intend to vote in the upcoming Democratic primary elections, 7 percent think that Barack Obama is a Muslim (CBS Poll). I find it very difficult to interpret this sort of information. In particular, I am curious how [...]
Women compete in a high-heel sprint in St. Petersburg on 21 July 2007. Approximately 100 women took part in the race wearing high-heeled shoes with a required minimum height of 9 centimetres to compete for a shopping voucher worth 50,000 roubles (approximately 2,000 US dollars). Via Feminist Philosophers.
I was lucky enough to come by the last ticket to the last performance of the Peter Weiss play Die Verfolgung und Ermordung Jean Paul Marats dargestellt durch die Schauspielgruppe des Hospizes zu Charenton unter Anleitung des Herrn de Sade—or The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum [...]
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain, and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.
Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 1789.
I am alive, though turned of eighty; still in [...]
Two quotes from an article about a secondhand bookstore in Kansas City which is burning books in protest at the decline of the industry. The quotes are from the two owners of the store.
“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch [...]
On a day off, I am strolling around the vast internetwork, looking and listening. I feel sorrow on finding that the wonderful guitar player Rod Poole was killed in his adopted home of Los Angeles last week. I have been listening to his masterpiece The Death Adder on and off since it was [...]
I haven’t really managed to understand MySpace yet, despite participating. It has the benefit of attracting a whole lot of people who otherwise don’t have an internet presence, but what mystifies me is why it attracted all those people in the first place. It’s poorly designed, has too many—and too poorly targeted—advertisements (compare [...]
Hi Future people! Hello from the Past! It is amazing all the human in the Universe are on Earth!
Anonymous, Wikimedia Fundraising Pledges.
A Haiku Composed of Three Quotations from the New York Times on the Occasion of The Democratic Party Winning Both Houses in the United States of America Midterm Elections.
Is it too early?
Rather like a “real” person,
The salesroom burst into applause.
From a Times article about Jonathan Littel’s Les Bienveillantes, the 900-page debut novel which just won the Prix Goncourt—
Gallimard, which received the manuscript under a French pseudonym and planned to publish only 12,000 copies, has used paper reserved for the new Harry Potter book to print thousands more.
(Time to write the first draft: 112 days).
[...]