The Alyona Show has ended. Say what you will (and by this I mean “make every entirely reasonable critique of RT”) about the sources of funding and oversight, Alyona was willing to have guests and tackle subjects that could be found nowhere else on television. I can’t think of another show of its type that […]
Month: July 2012
Jim Emerson’s appreciation of Louie captures something I don’t think I quite did in my initial comments about the relationship of form to content in The Dark Knight Rises. The episode,
Not only would John Rocker provide some needed sectional balance to the Republican ticket, he knows just as much about the First Amendment as the previous Republican vice-presidential nominee: Technic
I have a piece up on the two awful recent decisions in federal courts that uncritically accept anti-abortion junk science. One court at least made the same kind of mistakes as Casey and Carhart II, while the other judge just decided to flat-out ignore that he was dealing with a rare case where Casey actually […]
I have a piece in Salon about the new generation gap, and how annoying it can be when The Graying of America fails to notice it’s not 1968 any more.
Chuck Lane. Of course, we should force sick and disabled people back to work so we can focus on real rights — you know, the right not to pay a tax penalty if you free ride in the health care mar
Chris Marker, one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers, died today. Best known for his science fiction short La Jetée, in my view the greatest science fiction film ever made*, Marker really should be known as an experimental creator of political films, most notably his opus, Grin Without A Cat, his lengthy 1977 documentary about […]
So SEK put me in an unusual position in his post on so-called “Social Darwinism.” My professional persona is very interested in his arguments. SEK present a compelling argument, at least f
This is the third in an eight part series on this year’s Patterson School Summer Reading List: Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters CJ Chivers, The Gun Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard
Erik’s posts (here and here) on the seemingly Darwinian politics of modern conservativism aren’t wrong about the lilt of these contemporary thinkers, but they do a bit of injustice to the historical ones, because there was no such thing as “Social Darwinism” during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. There was such a thing as […]
I guess Bryan Caplan isn’t the only member of the plutocracy channeling Gilded Age Social Darwinism. See Mitt Romney speaking about the differences between Israelis and Palestinians today. Notin
Ruh-roh — apparently Jonah Lehrer keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within caught up with him. It’s pretty hard to imagine that this was the only part of his work that won’t h