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Monthly Archives: April 2011

Hitch 22 and Continuity Between The Old Left and American Interventionism

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Having finished Hitch 22 [and, incidentally, nearing the end of my hiatus from thinking --- a week and a half to go], I am struck by Christopher Hitchens’s support from the left for neoconservative foreign policy. He traces a biographical continuity — his own — between the solidarity and internationalism of the old left and [...]

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The Department of Quotes That Retroactively Support Points I’ve Made

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

The Pale King treats its central subject—­boredom itself—not as a texture (as in ­Fernando Pessoa), or a symptom (as in Thomas Mann), or an attitude (as in Bret Easton Ellis), but as the leading edge of truths we’re desperate to avoid. It is the mirror beneath entertainment’s smiley mask, and The Pale King aims to [...]

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Cautions and Recommendations

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Cautions: Do not tell your wife a curious thing just happened to you, you felt a peculiar twinge of pain from your headache and then your nose started bleeding. Do not sniff a boiled wool coat when it is wet. Do not cheerily greet a prof in the hall whose class you skipped hours before. [...]

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I Knew It Was Coming

Saturday, April 23, 2011

I’ve always wondered when emails would start to be a regular part of the archives of famous or important people. Well, now the British Library has bought the email archives of Wendy Cope, for about $53,000. I somewhat pity the biographers who will soon be sorting through these vast info dumps, combing the detritus of [...]

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Los Angeles Review of Books

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

This looks interesting. Serious online publications excite me.

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Cautions and Recommendations

Monday, April 18, 2011

Cautions: Do not assume that a mere umbrella will protect you on a 1.5 hour walk in driving rain in Iowa. Resist the temptation to add water to your slow-cooker at the beginning of the percolation of a pot roast, unless you wish a deluge of gravy. Reify lists; don’t let them reify you. Do [...]

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On Gen Ed Philosophy Courses

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Over at The New APPS, Mark Lance has written an interesting post on the “telos of Gen Ed philosophy.” This is a significant question for any professor of philosophy at a university that requires an introductory philosophy course of its students (as many historically religious universities do, from Lance’s Catholic Georgetown, to the Dutch Reformed [...]

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