Of course this fellow Canby — Yale class of 1899 — would end his description of the "college widow" with a cigarette:For the college widow had a depth and richness of emotional experience never developed in American life of that day outside of a few metropolises, and seldom...
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Tobacco Then and Now
Via Division of Labour, this from the New York Times in 1909:BERLIN - The Committee on Appropriations unanimously voiced today to report to the Reichstag a resolution appropriating $500,000 for the relief of tobacco workers who have been thrown out of work as a consequence of...
Friday, December 11, 2009
Would you transport this woman across state lines for immoral purposes?
I do love the Mann Act. It's such a beautiful and ridiculous expression of moral panic -- like a Time cover-story, but, instead of an article, a federal law. It jumped the shark a little bit in 1986 when "immoral purposes" was redefined as "any sexual activity for which any...
Pass Huey!
Peter Richardson's history of Ramparts magazine, A Bomb in Every Issue, taught me something I didn't know:Like Pat Brown before him, Huey Newton was taking classes at San Francisco Law School; one of his instructors was Edwin Meese III, who would later serve as President Reagan's...
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Hoving Happened
Let's all pray for the repose of the soul of Thomas Hoving, the former head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who died today. I knew of him mostly as John Lindsay's first Parks Commissioner (from 1965-66), a job he evidently thought was a little like being a grand-scale cruise...
Thanatos tastes good like a cigarette should!
Hat-tip Dara:SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Cigarette pack warnings that remind smokers of the fatal consequences of their habit may actually make them smoke more as a way to cope with the inevitability of death, according to researchers.Mo...
Hoover wasn't Mr. Intervention, he was Mr. Best Practices. There's a difference.
Megan McArdle says we all need to chill out about administrative costs. She may well be right, but, since she raised the subject, I'll throw out my favorite statistics from Eugene Lyons' Herbert Hoover: A Biography:The overhead for relief administration under Hoover rarely...
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Battle for Williamsburg: Are the Hipsters Losing?
One of my hopes for this blog is that it will become a clearinghouse for all Hasid-on-hipster violence coming out of Williamsburg, eventually building to a coherent narrative about the undesirability of having hipster neighbors.The best skirmish in this ongoing war came over...
I seen my misattributions and I corrected 'em.
Dan Lynch writes of the recent Bruno conviction: "The real problem isn't Joe Bruno, who — in the immortal words of Boss Tweed — merely 'seen my opportunities and took 'em.'"For the record, it was George Washington Plunkitt, he of Tammany Hall, who said that.While we're at it,...
Monday, December 7, 2009
Bookblogging: Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo
Molasses is fundamentally surreal. You've got the expression "It's like pushing molasses up a sandy hill." You've got the Molasses Hat Gang described in Luc Sante's Low Life, which had the signature gambit of "walking into grocery stores, asking the keeper to fill a derby...
Friday, December 4, 2009
Bookbag: Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor by Arch Puddington
The scene: a meeting between Murray Weidenbaum, budget advisor to Reagan, and several labor leaders, including Frank Fitzsimmons of the Teamsters:Then Weidenbaum twitted the trade unionists by asking if there were items in the budget that they would propose for spending reductions....
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Origen and God-as-Samuel-L.-Jackson
Thomas J. Bridges of theology blog An und für sich has turned up some interesting bits of Origen in a post called "The Word of God Was Messing With Us": “This was to conceal the doctrine relating to the before-mentioned subjects in words forming a narrative that contained a...
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Apostasy Done Right: The case of David Bazan
I was pretty rough on apostates earlier, but I wouldn't want to give the impression that I think everyone who switches ideological sides needs to grow a beard, get false papers, and move to another country under an assumed identity. I put a lot of stock in team loyalty, but...
A Kass-bashing amuse-bouche
I'll weigh in on the newly reincarnated President's Council on Bioethics sometime soon, but, basically, I'm for it. The old PCBE fell into a pattern of just spinning its wheels after the big stem-cell victory, and the White House's new mission statement points in the right...
Labor is like a tweed jacket, and environmentalism is like a feather boa
This article by Ann Friedman has been getting some play, but I can't quite figure its key paragraph:After all, "special interest" issues do not exist in separate silos. Labor rights are tied to gay rights are tied to women's rights are tied to immigrants' rights. If what binds...
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Shapur never killed a shrew
Normblog's Writer's Choice book this week is Sexual Politics in Modern Iran, a topic about which I know nothing. However, I know a very little something about sexual politics in pre-modern Iran, a casual familiarity I picked up during my Zoroastrian phase.Purity rituals aside,...
Apostasy Pieces: Don't be that guy
So Little Green Footballs has disavowed the right. The best take is Matt Frost's—"I'm saddened and concerned by the debased state of concern trolling"—but I have a submission for second-best take. (No shame in losing to Mr. Frost.)Ten words: If you write an apostasy piece,...
"I should avoid transporters and replicators even if by doing so I inconvenience myself."
Or so says Will over at PomoC...
Monday, November 30, 2009
Everything is about shame, including the Amazon Kindle
Katherine Eastland has pointed out a very good article on the Amazon Kindle by Stephen Marche, which reminds me that I wrote a little something on the subject for The American Conservative last month when this blog was still on hiatus. Enjoy it now, if you like:There is no...
A poem called "Short People" by one Jennifer L. Knox
When Emperor Hirohito told the Japanese people it was time to surrender, he never used the word surrender. Instead, he talked about how everyone had done their best, tried so hard, etc. His speech was broadcast over loudspeakers hung outside on electrical poles. People had never...
"Sad Panda is actually pretty sad."
The New York street act known as Sad Panda—a guy in a panda suit who earns tips from tourists for standing around glumly on Wall Street—is actually a 62-year-old Chinese man with a hard-luck story. He quit his restaurant job to go to China in order to make his mother's funeral...
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Tip O'Neill was such a girl
I don't mean it, of course, but you just try resisting the thought as you read the last line of this snippet from James A. Farrell's biography:. . . He had even taken fifty pounds off his corpulent frame by attending Weight Watchers classes at Catholic University. He was the...
Saturday, November 28, 2009
The Golden Age of Right-Wing Novelty Songs (is Obviously Over)
Of embarrassing right-wing rap videos there will be no end, and the latest one is simply awful. But this was not always so. To prove that there was a time when novelty songs could be conservative and non-terrible, here are five favorites.1. "Tea Partay" [video]Oh, the summer...
Friday, November 27, 2009
No Mercy!
Nick catches an embarrassing slip-up:OVERLY TECHNICAL CORRECTION OF THE DAY: The Chicago Tribune, writing about the soundtrack for An Education, praised its new songs "in the Mercy Beat" style. Which is great, except I have no idea what "Mercy Beat" is. Merseybeat is the style...
Bookblogging: The Headless Republic
Of all the blogs I've ever liked, not one has ever posted any poetry. But these are special circumstances. First of all, I read Jesse Goldhammer's The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought, and I liked it. Moreover, I want Mr. Goldhammer, when he...
Thursday, November 26, 2009
A woman is a woman, but a good Speaker of the House is a smoker
From John A. Farrell's Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century:When Whip Thomas Foley's wife and chief of staff, Heather, asked O'Neill to put out his cigar at a leadership meeting, O'Neill leveled her. "You know, we only tolerate you in these meetings," he sa...
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Thanksgiving is the perfect time to reduce the minimum wage. Wait, why are you laughing?
Sean, who ReadsTheNews, draws a holiday lesson from this Forbes article about programmers who give away their software for free because they're in it for sheer love of the pixels. Sean:The result is an off-beat story about interesting people doing important work. I love stories...
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Self-Promotion: "Average Janes: To save feminism, get rid of the lady-blogs"
I've got an article about women's blogs like XX Factor and Broadsheet in the current issue of Doublethink:It’s possible to write interestingly about body image, sperm donation, or your foibles as a mother. Caitlin Flanagan and Virginia Postrel have done it, and one of these...
The Plight of the Condorf
It's pretty obvious what Conor Friedersdorf wants to do. He wants to be every pundit's conscience. In his perfect world, he'd be the guy who purged the propagandists from journalism's noble ranks in a grand final battle, maybe with a broadsword. Love it or hate it, that's...
What's My Name, Fool? Hint: Not "Mister T."
Dave Zirin proves that hippies hate sports:I did a book talk for my first book, What’s My Name, Fool!, which has this big picture of Muhammad Ali on the cover, and I did it at a very left-wing anarchist bookstore with tons of antiwar stuff everywhere. I go into the bookstore...
Future Senator Seeks Blogger; Must Be Willing to Time-Travel
Advertising for Love is the blog of a Rutgers PhD student who posts nineteenth-century personals, matrimonial ads, and missed connections. Some of the authors are reactionary teenage girls ("No abolitionists need apply"). Some are Republican Party operatives, maybe. Some are...
Monday, August 17, 2009
"Ghost Rider doesn't smoke." "He's made of fire."
Via Eli's Coffer, who is carrying on the Yale Mafia's good name, this dialogue from Confessions of a Superhero, "a 2007 documentary about costumed panhandlers outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre":"Superman" and "Ghost Rider" are walking down the Walk of Fame.Superman: Ya gotta...
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Big Shoulders, Manly Words, Womanly Deeds?
If you buy a hardback copy of One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko, as I almost did, you'll see that the inside flap blurb begins:With the incisive pen of a newspaperman and the compassionate soul of a poet, Mike Royko was a Chicago institution . . . Am I wrong, or is that...
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Bookbag: "She had registered as a Democrat, figuring he would never be the wiser."
From Frances Costikyan's "The Captain in the Election District," published in her husband's Behind Closed Doors: Politics in the Public Interest:We have often unwittingly betrayed husbands and wives politically to each other. I remember one young bride who had married a very...
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Scando-Asian Calvinism is no way to run a city.
Is it important for politics to be entertaining? If you live in "Scando-Asian Calvinist" Seattle, according to Knute Berger, the answer is no:Big-city bosses make great story characters, and political wards and machines are fodder for entertaining narratives. It’s civic soap...
"Maginot Joe" Puts that MFA to Good Use
Joe Pernice would like to explain something about the song "Black Smoke (No Pope)" and his new novel It Feels So Good When I Stop:The story behind this tune is something akin to an Escher print. The Young Accuser is a band I made up for my book. That fictitious band gets a scathing...
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
It doesn't sum it up to say he's singing the blues. Well, maybe.
Some things hurt much more than cars and girls, and Prefab Sprout's silence was one of them, at least until word got out that they plan to release a new album in September. The title is Let's Change the World with Music. I only hope that the title's intention comes true.I...
Monday, August 10, 2009
In 1896, the author of "What's the Matter with Kansas?" was the matter with Kansas.
I am willing to admit that, as much as I love machine-style politics, it may not be always and everywhere the right way to run things. If the time and place is 1950s California and one fourth of the people in your state did not live at their present addresses one year ago,...
Bookbag: "Stop Gushing" Postscript
From Philadelphia: Patricians and Philistines, 1900-1950 by John Lukacs, this snippet from the society column "Deborah Debbie":After church this morning we all went over to Uncle Robert's and Aunt Helen's for lunch. The conversation centered on their forthcoming trip to Palm...
Monday, August 3, 2009
"Most likely they are."
Via Conor Friedersdorf, I see that Paul Graham hates meetings. He has his own solution; I prefer the Chicago method. From a 1950s news story quoted in City Politics:Alderman Keane (31st) arrived eleven minutes late for a meeting Tuesday morning of the council committee on...
Friday, July 31, 2009
Stop Gushing: A "Stop Snitching" for the Hipster Set
I wasn't on Twitter for very long, and one of the reasons I jumped off that apparently sinking ship was the tendency of Twitterers to gush. Bloggers do it, too — everything is "the best [X] in the history of human endeavor," and everyone is "brilliant," "inimitable," or "freakishly...
"My misandry is just a subset of my misanthropy."
Feministing has drawn attention to a new study:Despite the popular belief that feminists dislike men, few studies have actually examined the empirical accuracy of this stereotype. The present study examined self-identified feminists' and nonfeminists' attitudes toward men. An...
Are You Conservative, Yet Attracted by the Idea of Class War?
Your opportunity may have arrived! North Carolina passed an indoor smoking ban in May with the following exceptions:The new law permits cigar bars and private clubs to continue operating. However, Bliss said it would not be possible to change his business to fit under either...
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Bookbag: William F. Buckley on the Republican Party in New York State
It wasn't ego that made William F. Buckley run for mayor in 1965. He just wanted to put a dent in John Lindsay's career, which he worried would drag the Republican Party to the left. With that in mind, here is his description of the New York 17th (in Manhattan), the unlikeliest...
Bookbag: Machine Politicians vs. Yippies
From Bill & Lori Granger's Lords of the Last Machine, this paragraph about the '68 Chicago convention:What the hard-ball players in City Hall did not understand, or did not wish to understand, was that the rhetoric of confrontation that people like [Abbie] Hoffman delighted...
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
Lovers Laughing in Their Amateur Hour, Holding Hands in the Corridors of Power
The American Conservative has a nice article up about "Samantha Power and the weaponization of human rights." Since Samantha Power has been at the NSC, there's already been one human rights crisis that, ideally, could have served as an indication of how we could expect her...
The Only Way I Could Like This Clip More Would Be If Tuesday Weld Put On Dobie's Boxing Gloves
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis has not yet been released on DVD, but someone has just put up several episodes on YouTube, including this one, "The Fist Fighter," about a boxing match between Dobie Gillis and Milton Armitage (Warren Beatty, looking about fifteen). Old-timey...
Letter to a Fanzine, circa 1841
From A History of American Labor by Joseph Rayback, this description of two oddly zine-like publications:In 1841 there had appeared in Massachusetts the Lowell Offering, a magazine dedicated to the principle that the lot of the factory girl was a veritable heaven on earth. ...
Friday, July 24, 2009
Up is Down, Black is White: Media History Edition
Freedom is slavery, says Tim Crouse in Boys on the Bus:"Freedom" scared a reporter out of his mind, because it wasn't really freedom at all. "Freedom" simply meant that nobody had clearly marked all the pitfalls and booby traps, so the reporter became cautious as a blind man...
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Truth is Bad and There Should Be Less of It: A Continuing Series
First installment here.From Charles Walton's Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution: The Culture of Calumny and the Problem of Free Speech:[François] Dareau understood the risks to individual honor in the courtroom, which is why he downplayed the importance of discovering...
"I fear that if I went before the Holy Father with a blossoming rod it would turn at once into an umbrella."
The Daily Mail and the Times are both surprised that L'Osservatore Romano would say nice things about Oscar Wilde. The Times explains its surprise:Wilde, who was married and had two children, was arrested and tried in 1895 over his relationship with Lord Douglas (known as Bosie),...
"I've never taken boxing promoter Don King too seriously as a self-proclaimed Republican."
But the new concert documentary Soul Power made J.R. Taylor of RightWingTrash change his mind:There are still two fine political moments. One has King and fellow Republican James Brown discussing the importance of capitalism in liberating a minority—in this case, black men named...
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