Everyone knows that predicting the future is incredibly easy, whereas explaining the past is incredibly difficult. For example, in 1933 everyone in the entire world could foresee that Hitler’s rise to power would lead directly to the Final Solution, whereas today, it’s impossible to prove that the Holocaust even happened. Similarly, today everyone in the […]
Month: August 2012
Any interesting news in the wingnuttery world today? First to Maryland: A homophobic Maryland lawmaker has admitted to being drunk when he accidentally crashed his boat into a boat full of children. M
*Estimate may not subtract to account for leap days because math is hard.
Via Eileen Joy and the outstanding number of medievalists I know on Facebook, I see that Thomas Meyer‘s translation of Beowulf is now available. For free. It possesses a striking cover: And though I haven’t had a chance to read it yet—this translation, I mean, because I’ve obviously read Beowulf before—the excerpt from the publisher […]
Homer Simpson and the moon-landing from Flow Experience on Vimeo. R.I.P.
New Jersey now has a higher unemployment rate than Michigan. Maybe there are some more useful infrastructure money he can turn down so he can turn around and give taxpayer money to rich people so they
This is a fun little account of the origins of one of my favorite Tom Clancy sequences; the attack on the USS Nimitz in Red Storm Rising: The level of granularity required to produce a credible account of modern naval warfare is daunting. The fighting usually occurs at great distances, the combatants beyond visual range […]
On this date in 1925, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters was founded. Led by A. Philip Randolph, this labor union became the most important civil rights organization in mid-20th century America,
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s essay, “Fear of a Black President,” is probably the best essay on this country I’ve read in 2012. It’s hard to even know what to excerpt here. Of many
On the pending blockbuster, see Neyer, Jaffe, and Cameron. For the Red Sox, this trade is obviously pure win. (And should also be a reminder that while Valentine will probably get fired and probably deserves to, the real problem the Red Sox have is that Brian Cashman spent three years cleaning Theo Epstein’s clock.) Dumping […]
Assuming this really is his Twitter account (it’s so hard to tell in this topsy-turvy pomo world). Samples of his wit and wisdom: I put my ass out there in Newsweek. I still believe in Armstrong
Shorter Ann Althouse: “Romney’s appeal to birthers is simply a claim that Obama is un-American, which therefore cannot be racist. Romney/Ryan, by opposing social programs that Americans