This is Your Life, Genocide Edition

I take This American Life for granted and often it can seem too familiar and predictable. Some of the more famous voices on the show grate on me, and the giggles, awkwardness and teenager-y cuteness can feel contrived; sometimes I just want them to sound like grownups.  Yet, not so rarely they come through with [...]

Recycling the World of Interiors

Sarah was coveting Matt and Miranda’s subscription to The World of Interiors.  This is a high-end, expensive (at least $100 for the year’s subscription) British design/decoration/architecture magazine.  The photography is beautiful and they somehow seem to avoid the typical design-porn cliches — it’s not just a sequence of rich person after rich person’s predictable homes. [...]

Iron Man

Iron Man was fun. Iron Man is a robot, HAL, 3CPO & R2D2, and especially, I thought, Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still; he’s a cyborg, part machine part man (and a techie friend of various other pet/helper robots); he’s a golem (I wonder if the Jewish golem tradition ties in any covert [...]

Gap Whitney Museum artist edition t-shirts

Gap Whitney Museum artist edition t-shirts: by Kenny Scharf, Barbara Kruger, Chuck Close, Kiki Smith, etc., and Sarah Sze. It’s a weird feeling to have someone you know from childhood design a t-shirt for the Gap and appear as a model for it in the ads. Why couldn’t Barbara Kruger appear in her own ad? [...]

Swingtown

My sister-in-law Vanessa is a writer for this new CBS drama Swingtown, premiering on June 5. Here’s a NY Times article about it. Family loyalties aside, I’m looking forward to it — some writers and producers from Six Feet Under are involved and it co-stars Molly Parker, who was so good in Deadwood. Here’s a [...]

Horace Mann Facebook scandal

I just came across this New York Magazine article about a Facebook scandal at an elite NY prep school. The article generated controversy and a whole lot of letters/response. My overwhelming response is relief that I don’t have to worry about NYC private school insanity for my kids…

ABC Debate

Check out this amazing question from George Stephanopoulos , 2:24 in: “If you get the nomination, what will you do when Rev Wright’s sermons are played over and over and over again?” What will you do when pundits bring this up over and over and over and over again? Also note Hillary practically licking her [...]

French Theory

Stanley Fish’s column on the new book by Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. (Uggh, the hundreds of comments are irritating.) Also see Scott McLemee’s column in Inside Higher Ed. In “a particularly sharp-eyed chapter titled “Students and Users,”” McLemee writes, Cusset “offers [...]

Because it is Bitter, and Because it is my Politics

As a semi-rural Midwestern smallish-town resident who is prone to occasional bitterness and has no problem with that emotion, I am offended by the vilification of bitterness throughout this whole episode. Bitterness can be a highly rational and appropriate response to the state of the world.