The College Widow: Not a Woman Who Married a College that Died

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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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,...

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"I should avoid transporters and replicators even if by doing so I inconvenience myself."

Or so says Will over at PomoC...

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