Link me, daddy, eight to the bar.

Chuck Klosterman in Esquire:

I'm teaching a class on twentieth-century popular culture at the University of Leipzig. I don't know why the school asked me to do this, but it did. And it turns out that any seminar on U. S. consumer culture is extremely attractive to every non-American kid majoring in American studies, because ninety-six students signed up for the class in the span of three days. Due to the size of the classroom, I was forced to immediately reduce this number to twenty. I was unsure how to do that fairly, so I decided to give them a competitive online essay test before the first day of class. The question was this: "Who do you consider the most interesting twentieth-century American -- not necessarily the most historically important, but the individual you find most personally compelling?" The responses were well written, habitually understated, and devoid of any pattern whatsoever. For example:

-One person wrote about the first black woman in outer space. This individual is named Mae Jemison, which was news to me.
-One person wrote about the Hummer all-terrain vehicle. This is not technically a human, but I could see her point.
-Someone selected Ryan Adams. This made me happy for two reasons. The first is that I suspect Adams is something of an underrated semi-genius, and I like the fact that he's more appreciated in places where nobody cares whether or not Paul Westerberg hates him. The other reason is that I think there's probably a 98 percent likelihood that Ryan Adams will read this sentence, put down the magazine, walk over to his four-track, and immediately write a psychedelic country song titled "Hey Little Leipzig Girl (I'm Glad You Dug Those Whiskeytown Bootlegs)," which I will be able to listen to on the Internet forty minutes from right now.

Andrew Stegmaier on transit:

Norm [Leahy]’s argument goes like this: travel on one set of routes (railroads) accounts for only a fraction of the total passenger-miles. Yet some of the cost of maintenance and construction of these routes is paid by people who never use them. This is an unjust transfer of wealth, and it probably leads to inefficiency, too.

However, there are thousands of miles of pavement in the Commonwealth, of which I only drive a small fraction on a regular basis. There are many sets of road routes that, taken as a whole, cost more to maintain and build than the people who drive them are paying in taxes. Is this also an unjust, inefficient transfer of wealth, too? Well, actually, it is. Realizing this does not give rail as a whole a free pass. But it does teach two important lessons: (1) the question of whether road or rail is the most cost-effective investment must be determined on a route-by-route basis, not in a summary fashion, and (2) even taking into account the fact that much road money comes from the gas tax, the current system still really bad at figuring out what makes sense and what does not.

Noah Kazis on the superhero genre:

I'm super curious about Dara's "as-yet-unwritten essay on why Iron Man is the first truly postmodern action movie." It seems that Dara is missing the fact that superheroes are always post-modern. It's all about playing the role. Is Batman really Batman, or is he Bruce Wayne? The answer is clearly that he is both, depending on context. The exterior symbols of the costume matter, but a costumed Batman can act as Bruce Wayne and vice versa, if necessary (think about Superman/Clark Kent and Lois Lane).

Moreover, the hero characters exist independent of the alter ego. There have been at least two Batmans (Bruce Wayne and Azrael), two Spidermans (Peter Parker and Ben Reilly, his clone) and so on.

Bringing it from the comics to the silver screen, the ease with which the superhero franchises can be rebooted - two Hulks in how many years?! - shows that the role matters more than the individual within the superhero genre. And what superhero movie doesn't have the scene where the hero (or even the villain, a la Catwoman in Batman Returns) stares at the suit, deciding what to become?

By request, me on disability theory:

One common emotional reaction to disability is a feeling of not being at home in one’s own body. Eiesland describes the story of Nancy Mairs in detail: after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, Mairs begins to find her own house “too big” for her, then finds her own body eerily foreign. As Eiesland puts it, “her body had betrayed her.” This sensation of being not-at-home is more formidable than the alienation from normalcy that the disabled feel, because it is alienation not from a social group, or from an ideal, but from oneself.

This experience of the rebellious flesh that betrays itself by its own imperfection is a personal illustration of the abstract concept of the Fall. Ever since original sin was introduced into the world, man has been broken and unable to fulfill the task of perfect virtue for which God made him. Disability studies and orthodox theology intersect when original sin is understood as a universal disability.