- Blog
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Starbucks on the Death Star
Why I love the Internet: I thought to myself, they often talk about overseas military bases as being places where a lot of famous chains come and claim territory (the obligatory McDonald’s in Baghdad or what have you), and presumably Starbucks would be one of those chains. So if the United States really did ever…
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Jack White Turns into John McCain
Before his time, Jack White shakes his fists at the clouds. Via The Verge: “Getting out of your chair at home to experience something in the real world has started to become a rare occurrence,” White says. “Why go to a book store and get a real book? You can just download it. Why talk…
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Mining Value from Machiavelli: You Need Me On That Wall!
As mentioned in the previous post, which is about something else entirely, I was delighted by a 41-year-old essay in the New York Review of Books by Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli’s The Prince, a piece that kind of bowled me over. Berlin makes a case for where he thinks Machiavelli is coming from morally: Is…
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Me vs. the Western Canon
As part of a recent initiative of mine to read a bunch of the foundational classics that I’d so far missed, I finally got around to reading Machiavelli’s The Prince, maybe about a year ago. Though it’s something that has had a tremendous impact on political thought for centuries, I had somehow managed not to…
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Near-Earth Object, Too Close for Comfort
From the NYT report on the Siberia meteor: “I opened the window from surprise — there was such heat coming in, as if it were summer in the yard, and then I watched as the flash flew by and turned into a dot somewhere over the forest,” wrote Darya Frenn, a blogger. “And in several…
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The Bodies of Those Who Happen to Be in the Way
Ta-Nehisi Coates on our perpetual state of war: The president is anti-torture — which is to say he thinks the water-boarding of actual confirmed terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was wrong. He thinks it was wrong, no matter the goal — which is to say the president would not countenance the torture of an actual terrorist…
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Is Not the Truth the Truth? – Galileo as Falstaff
Go ahead and let this passage from a wonderful piece on Galileo by Adam Gropnik in The New Yorker blow your mind. What would Shakespeare’s Galileo have been, one wonders, had he ever written him? Well, in a sense, he had written him, as Falstaff, the man of appetite and wit who sees through the…
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Words, Once Said, Can Never Be Unsaid
I can’t help but think that Justin Timberlake, perhaps many years from now, will find himself unable to sleep some nights, haunted by these words: Bud Light Platinum brings a refined discerning aesthetic to beer that plays well with what I’m doing. Does it, Justin? Does it really?
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The Game Should Leave an Imprint
With a few exceptions, I haven’t been into video games in a very long time. Part of that is, of course, being a grownup with a job and a family, which leaves little time for, well, anything. (And I genuinely have no idea how folks with jobs and families can devote the hours they do…
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The Stream of Invective, a Price Well Paid
Wikipedian Brandon Harris takes to Quora to talk about how he felt being the subject of a lot of Internet derision during his famous banner appearances throughout Wikipedia’s fundraising drive. His words were, to say the least, helpful. None of it is real. There is a stream of invective from people saying that I look…
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Too Cute By Half
You know, I actually kind of dig Seth Godin. He really does drop some useful wisdom about work and creativity here and there, things I do try to remember and take to heart. But then, you know, he’s also Seth Godin, the “look at the mischievous upper-half-of-my-bald-skull” guy who is, let’s face it, sometimes pushing…
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Shut Up and Listen
We do not like to be told we are being jerks. We do not like to be told we are being demeaning, or belittling, or discriminatory, or bigoted, even if by accident. Particularly we skepto-atheists, who so pride ourselves on our rationality, our grip on reality, our ability to coolly evaluate information on its merits.…
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The Home of Lost Causes and Nostalgic Lunacy
Gary Wills, a conservative, shakes his head at his native South: This is a region that rejects sex education, though its rate of teenage pregnancies is double and in places triple that of New England. It fights federal help with education, preferring to inoculate its children against science by denying evolution. No part of the country…
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Deep Riffs: Ain’t Tryin’
Don’t worry, girl. From my album Evidence of Absence, accompanying froggie image by Phoebe Schweizer West.
pav dot quest 