December 2009
27 posts
I consider it a mark of my intellectual development that I no longer find Thomas L. Friedman the least bit intelligible. What nonsense is this?
November 2009
35 posts
WatchCameron Sinclair: The refugees of boom and bust
Truly a travesty when one of America’s few good journalists is stopped at the Canadian border en route to Vancouver for a book talk. For what: because she might talk critically about the 2010 Winter Olympics. Really, as in really dumb and embarrassing. What a joke. Read the CBC story here.
In (dis)honor of crazies →
It seems like there’s this moment in the unveiling of an argument or setup of a chapter in this dissertation where I get so frustrated and roiled that I just want to pack the whole damn thing in. No kidding. This time, with this chapter, was no different. But a moment arrived, how or by what intervention or otherwise I do not know. Around two o’clock this morning (or last night,...
And sometimes it really does take writing 2,000 words to figure out what you want to say. Bye, bye 2,000 words and the weekend writing them.
By far the most interesting conversation of the evening was with a 4-year old girl who told me she lived in Burger King.
“We should all aspire to the merely good.”
– Joshua Howard
“Well-intentioned cultural relativists partake in this Westing of the West; they...”
– Marnia Lazreg, “Piety, Politcs, and the Veil,” The Times, November 7, 2009
“Well, these are pieces that I sweated over. I don’t sit down and it flows...”
– Malcolm Gladwell, talking to Charlie Rose, November 11, 2009, about his latest book of essays, What the Dog Saw
All this time writing and only two paragraphs to show for it. Not that I care to share them. Not yet. But they are stellar indeed.
“Our decent impulse, to recognize the ordeal of our veterans, has been used to...”
– Howard Zinn, from “A Veteran Remembers,” November 12, 2006
“Americans are saying that with their planes they can see an egg 18 kilometers...”
– Abdullah Wasay, 60, a pharmacist in Charikar, a market town about 25 miles north of Kabul, quoted in “Prospect of More Troops Worries Afghans,” Alissa J. Rubin, The New York Times, November 7, 2009
“What you know ‘bout me? Can’t even pee straight, nary a one of you....”
– Da Mayor, Do the Right Thing (1989; Spike Lee, director)
I agree in principle with Arianna Huffington’s criticism of Barack Obama one year after his presidential election victory. Now ten months in office, it is remarkable to measure the rhetoric, tone, and promise of the candidate Obama against his political accomplishments, or lack thereof, while in office. That said, I find it telling the way that Huffington neglects to consider the role her...
I am sitting at one of the front tables at Sit & Wonder, a coffee shop in Prospect Heights. Just now a man in his mid- to late-twenties popped his head inside the front door, grabbed a copy of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint from a row of books against the window, looked to the barista, and said, I’m going to borrow this. The barista responded: Sure. At that, the...
IT'S DECORATIVE GOURD SEASON, MOTHERFUCKERS →
Interpol: NYC
Watch
In the United States, is a person’s cell phone record of calls and texts admissible as evidence to prove driver distraction in the event of a car accident? It should be. It is in the U.K.
“All the word is like a stage, we do strut and fret our hour on it, and that is...”
– Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis
I is sic.
“Being has not been given its due.”
– Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness