January 2010
12 posts
Will Whole Foods CEO John Mackey please, please,...
Nick Paumgarten’s new New Yorker profile of Mackey includes this sentence: “‘I am not going to talk about my sex life,’ (Mackey) told me, without my having asked him to.”
Later in the piece, there’s this:
Mackey told me that he agrees with the book’s assertion that, as he put it, “no scientific consensus exists” regarding the causes of climate change; he added,...
December 2009
22 posts
“As you climb the baseball ladder, your social confidence explodes. You receive...”
– ex-MLB player Doug Glanville in the NYT (12/26/09)
The jackassery at the heart of much of what I’ve read about the Tiger Woods mess amounts to this: People — actual grownups who’ve outgrown the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy — seem to have trusted that there was no difference between...
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Will America Remember the Five Canadians Killed... →
Right now, just hours after someone detonated an improvised explosive device and killed four Canadian soldiers and one Canadian journalist in Afghanistan, I’m reflecting on words Canada’s defense minister spoke back in March. Reacting to the pseudo-apology of a Fox News host who’d belittled Canada’s military, Defense Minister Peter MacKay said the vast majority of Americans...
“The fault here is not just with our endlessly incompetent security services, who...”
– Christopher Hitchens in Slate (12/28/09)
Hitchens’ words, especially the ones about the sheepish bleats to make us “feel safe,” made me want to dust off two HuffPosts I wrote last November. I may end up reposting them here. For now, though, here are the links:
* Barack: Talk To...
I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure Gandhi had...
Really, Karl Shapiro? Did you really write the sentence I just read in your introduction to Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer?
Take it away, Mr. Shapiro: ”Morally I regard Miller as a holy man, as most of his adherents do—Gandhi with a penis.”
Here, as a sort of a palate cleanser, is a poem by Mr. Shapiro in which he steers entirely clear of both the “Gandhi with a...
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“I don’t think I ever once saw his hands clean. As Mrs Brooker was now an...”
– - from Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier
This passage caught me so completely by surprise that I emitted something between a chuckle and a sputter. The only witness to this, thankfully, was a deaf spaniel. If he heard me, he was gracious enough not to say anything.
Fighting flimflam with flimflam (Frank Rich's...
If you go on Twitter tonight and type “Frank Rich” into the search box, you will learn that Rich’s latest column deserves a Pulitzer. It’s today’s “MUST READ.” Quite simply, it’s “gold.”
I see it differently.
In “Tiger Woods, Person of the Year,” Rich’s prose bounds from notion to notion to notion to notion. It’s...
Un-ringing a bell tolled by the accidental me
Shortly after I wrote a post called “Malcolm Gladwell and the case for endless self-Googling,” I decided to add a new search to my Google Alerts profile: my own name.
It’s been fun to track the way my ideas spread — or, more typically, don’t spread — around the Web. But today is the first day anything truly useful came of my automated self-Googling.
Today’s daily...
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“If a work is complex, there should be 10 contradictory morals, and any lessons...”
– Lorrie Moore, quoted in the Chicago Tribune (12/15/09)
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Pakistan's "feudalism" through eyes of National... →
My new Big Think post is based on NPR’s interview with acclaimed short story writer Daniyal Mueenuddin. Here, through the miracle of embedding, is the whole interview. (If the miracle of embedding fails, click here.)
Like me and a slew of others who enjoy paying nothing for a great blogging platform, Mueenuddin seems to use Tumblr for his own site. It includes links to some of his...
"London in London and Londonstani in Southmead" →
My new Big Think post got away from me. Needing to cut words, I ditched all references to the experience I wrote up in 1993 and posted here Monday under the title “a very white boy in the hood.” Basically, I inflicted my college writing on you for nothing. I’m sorry. Unless you liked it. Then I’m sorry to everyone but you.
Here’s a sample of what did make it into my...
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Backing a "Good Islamist" in a Wrecked Somalia (my... →
Well, I didn’t write the Big Think post I planned to write this morning. That one will come soon. For now, a Jon Lee Anderson piece in the new New Yorker sent me off on a worthwhile tangent. Here’s a bit of what I just wrote:
“The Most Failed State,” a piece in The New Yorker’s December 14 issue, scrutinizes Somalia and offers glimpses of the mix of nose-holding and...
a very white boy in the hood (7/18/93)
Partly because I’m going to refer to it in a Big Think post I’ll be writing in the morning, partly because re-reading it for the first time in sixteen years dosed my bloodstream with a touch of the adrenaline I felt one afternoon back in July of ‘93, and partly because advanced age seems to have dulled whatever part of my brain is supposed to feel embarrassed by earnest, candid,...
I feel like I'm in a bad spy movie ...
I signed up to register my blog. It seemed/seems like a perfectly decent idea. The next step involves verifying that I am the author of my blog. I do this, apparently, by inserting a code in a blog post. So, um, …
Go to the door of the teriyaki place at 125th and Greenwood. Walk 13 paces to the west. You will find a storm drain. Drop to your knees and go into a headstand. Not a handstand. A...