From Paul Franco's Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction:It is interesting to note that no don at Cambridge lectured on Marx until Oakeshott did so in 19...
Friday, May 30, 2008
Oh, the shame!, part two
Well, that was fast. Let me take the comments on shame culture one by one, with Dave first:What about the downside of shame? After all, guilt seems to be based in some sort of objective fact-seeking process. Shame, by contrast, rests primarily in community consensus."Good!"...
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Oh, the shame!
As promised, a post on shame culture versus guilt culture. Ross and Ta-Nehisi have pitched one in my wheelhouse by bringing it up, and Ross gets double points for connecting it to conservatism:One provisional answer would be to say no to guilt, and yes to shame: I think they're...
Hallelujah, he was a bum.
This blog's relationship with unions is ambiguous, but its relationship with union music is not (and, no matter what David says, there's a difference) (sort of). Utah Phillips passed away this week: fine retrospectives here and here; my favorite of his two albums with Ani DiFranco...
"If smoking didn't kill you, no one would do it?"
I'm gearing up for a post on shame culture (in the context of Ross's thoughts on liberal guilt and Ta-Nehisi's on not being a punk) by writing about the shame of being a cigarette smok...
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
"Proud of the glory, stare down the shame, the duality of the conservative thing..."
To those fortunate few who have managed to escape reading George Packer's take-down of the conservative movement, may I suggest Kevin Mattson's Bookforum piece as an alternative? He's tough . . .There’s a danger in treating the right in an insular manner, the way historians...
Hit pundit, win steak.
Ross misses the real reason to root for the Rays this season: their Triple-A is the best in the country, and not just because they used to be called the Durham Tobacconis...
Marxism Round-Up
David has gone to the source, Savage Minds wonders whether it makes sense for Indiana Jones to be a fan of Marxist archaeology (I mean, I'm a "die-hard anticommunist" and there are still some Marxists I like), and James has Yale Leftists and Leftist-symps all aflutter by promising...
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Your search "preferential option for the autistic" did not match any documents.
New York has a piece on the "neurodiversity" wing of the autism rights movement (analogous to Mad Pride), published hot on the heels of this NYT piece. Matt Zeitlin is ambivalent:Where the neurodiversity folks get it wrong, I feel, is in their (sometime) categorical objection...
Monday, May 26, 2008
Besides, if we discount low art, we can kiss Southern culture goodbye.
Nick has pitted me against Michael Stipe, which I don't think is quite fair:I don't doubt, for example, that one can approach The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, etc etc and come away with an appreciation of Humphrey Bogart and, by extension, existentialism....
Will Helen ever stop talking about gay marriage?
No, she will not. For a change of pace, this one's not about gend...
All Growed Up
Didn't have much time to write during the hurry-up-and-wait of commencement weekend, but I did get a chance to read (especially during Tony Blair's address, which was, as far as I can tell, equal parts decent humor and enthusiasm for globalization). From Joanna Zylinska's On...
Friday, May 23, 2008
Resolved: A Yale degree is worth the paper it's printed on.
Me on higher ed:Speaking as someone whose undergraduate years are not far behind her, my guess is that the real problem with demanding a B.A. of every white collar worker isn’t that it makes the intellectual demands of economic advancement too high, but that it forces too many...
Monday, May 19, 2008
Feminist As I Wanna Be
It's inconvenient for me to have just disavowed feminism today, as I tend to follow the school of "Nobody hits my little brother but me," but, having listened to ISI's "Are We Getting It Right?: The State of Women and Gender Studies" podcast (audio and video available here),...
Movement Politics: "Are You In or Are You Out?"
Noah earns his nickel's worth of credit by giving us a dime's worth of difference between feminists and anti-feminists:What I really wanted to argue was that while David III and Helen agree (and to a lesser extent, so do I) about how gender works, the difference is more important...
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Pinker, Patristics, and Pain
. . . nothing is worse than extreme affliction that destroys the 'I' from the outside, because after that we can no longer destroy it ourselves. Simone WeilSteven Pinker thinks that talking theologically about bioethics will put us in a world of hurt. Well, yeah. Saint Basil,...
To be Doc Holliday or not to be Doc Holliday
Forget Val Kilmer; it's all about Victor Mature:Strangely, this is not the first time My Darling Clementine has come up...
Unlike my predecessor in the speakership, I have no thought experiment-related catchphrase.
Noah Millman thinks he's coming late to the Pinker party. I like to think of it as just being fashionab...
Helen the queer theorist is neither queer nor theoretical; discuss.
I thought about adapting the joke from Matt's YFP headline ("Conservatism and Libertarianism: Not a Gay Marriage") for this Taki Mag post; then I didn...
Friday, May 16, 2008
I'm pro-multiple choice!
Quick quiz: my Taki Mag piece on "fertility films" is (a) a response to this Mother Jones article; (b) part of my ongoing campaign against the "Redemptive Woman" trope; (c) a riff on this Eve-ism:Fun is fun, sometimes. (And sometimes it isn't.) But the more I thought about why...
Thursday, May 15, 2008
"Come on, Foucault, just get in the car. We're going on a road trip!"
Noah points out that while it's "fun to play with that theorist you were just reading, and can't you just take him for a spin," politics is serious business:Feminism is deadly serious. When women were trying to integrate the New York City Fire Department, male firefighters literally...
Oulipo: Saints of Constraint
Broockman, who is interested in both poetry and constraints, would love the Oulipo school, who are such connoisseurs of poetic constraint that the modest limits of the sonnet scarcely clear their bar; a sonnet written only of pangrams would, maybe. I love them primarily because...
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Every woman needs a little mystery; this is mine.
Am I a feminist or an anti-feminist? No one knows for su...
Best. Urbanism. Quote. Ever.
I neglected to link to this when Noah posted it, but I repeated it to Dave yesterday and he busted a gut:Watching this video a second time, I realized why in the 1970's they kept building these ugly concrete structures that made unwalkable spaces. It's that they weren't for...
Oscar Wilde's Life among the Deathworks
. . . [Wilde] intruded deeply into a struggle of son against father—Bosie Douglas against the Marquess of Queensberry—without realizing what it was about. More important, Wilde may have been led into the fatal step of prosecuting Queensberry for slander (the Marquess was naive...
Pop's Authenticity Hang-Up: Who's to blame, progressives or reactionaries?
I've been disposed to agree with Yuval Taylor (from yesterday) since reading Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, but I'm a little taken aback that he wants to blame pop's preoccupation with authenticity on conservatism:My poker buddy Mark Weinberg turned...
By a vote of five to two, this post's witty title will be . . .
. . . Socrates spoke as if political science regarded the inhabitants of the city as either "public craftsmen" or as "private persons, women and men." If the architectonic art were to come into operation, it would leave no room for the public life of "citizens" or "gentlemen."...
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Talmud Envy: Adultery Edition
Pamela Druckerman's Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee takes up sex and adultery among the Hasidim:Once they're married, Hasidic couples (as well as some other ultra-Orthodox Jews) don't touch, hand each other objects, or use terms of endearment...
". . . with a minor in Collegial Insularity."
Within an hour of posting on localism in pop music, I picked up the latest issue of Volume ("Yale's Only Music Magazine") and found an article titled "New World Order: Think Globally, Rock Locally." Neat.Yale's music scene is nothing to write home about (the art scene speaks...
Pop Localism Redux: "And how do we get to Detroit?"
You base your love on credit and when your loving days are doneChecks you signed with love and kisses later come back marked "Insufficient Funds" . . .Pop Matters has published a piece by Yuval Taylor (of the blog Faking It) on Funkadelic's Maggot Brain:. . . In the early 1970s,...
Friday, May 9, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
". . . it strikes me that a little humane graft is a good thing."
Richard Sennett offers an interesting solution to unemployment among the disabled:. . . As the work of Robert Lane has so incisively shown, the political competence of working-class people, white as well as black, lies in forging personal relationships and affiliations as a...
Then again, if they didn't subsidize disability, who would risk playing Human Tetris?
Noah has a post up on disability policies in the US and Japan:. . . In Japan, the government mandates that each employer hire a certain portion of disabled workers and then fines those who do not. The government recognizes that firms where this is actually an undue hardship...
Monday, May 5, 2008
I also hate fluffly bunnies, chocolate hearts, and the sun.
Who hates international law designed to help adults and children with disabilities? I do, at least when it does so in a way that telegraphs modernity's pathological insecurity about human frail...
Sunday, May 4, 2008
James Agee weighs in on parenting
I thought I remembered James Agee writing something interesting about child-rearing in a movie review, and I've found it:Lost Angel undertakes one of the few dramatic subjects worth a second thought: the bringing-up of a child. The child, who is, with occasional skids, very...
Saturday, May 3, 2008
When you believe in things you don't understand, then you suffer/Oh, superstitious thick identities ain't the way...
Most libertarians admit that children, like national defense, are an exception that proves the ideology, but libertarianism's inability to deal with children demands more of an explanation than simply that. After all, every grown man acts like a child sometimes, and children...
Friday, May 2, 2008
Woodrow Wilson, the South, Neoconservatism and Lincoln Bashing
Grant Havers, Daniel Larison and Paul Gottfried all seem to agree that, while they can see where someone like Henry Jaffa is coming from, it is still essentially wrongheaded to claim Lincoln as the father of Wilsonianism or neoconservatism. Something Gottfried mentioned but...
Gone to Carolina in my lungs
Dara has already pointed out Dayo Olopade on David Sedaris on cigarettes, but in case you missed it:David Sedaris has penned a lovely ode to his smoking years (inhale, exhale) in this week's New Yorker. With wicked precision, he ruminates on just what it is about cigarettes...
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Smoke Break Over
Astute readers will notice that I disappeared around this time last semester. Same reason this week.Posts in the next couple of days shoud include a real Elvis Costello primer; a conservative take on disability policy (liberal one here); the South and Woodrow Wilson; an attempt...
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