Before you decide economics reporting can’t get any more incoherent, read this analysis from Rick Newman: [M]any longer-term gains in living standards are still in place. So while the middle class is clearly under stress, millions of Americans are still much better off than they were 20 or 30 years ago. Granted, it’s not a perfect epitome of the form, but this is an instance of The Stossel*: the claim that we have microwave ovens, smart phones, abs-strengtheners, and varieties of Chinese-made footwear that would have made our forebears vomit with delight, and therefore poverty is somewhere between a relic of yesteryear and a phantasm of limp-wristed freedom-haters
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Squirrels Go Up, Squirrels Go Down
Ed Brayton invites us to look at the argument they’re making [in the Obama administration]: Obama’s Justice Department asked U.S. District Judge Virginia Phillips to stay her ruling that overturned the ban while the government prepares a formal appeal. Asking the judge for a response by Monday — “given the urgency and gravity of the issues” — the government said that suddenly ending the ban would be disruptive and “irreparably harm the public interest in a strong and effective military.” What a bizarre position
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‘Bizarre’ Is One Word For It
Suppose proponents of Amazon.com’s Kindle didn’t exist — would it be necessary to invent them ? I say no, but opinions differ: And then there was this comment from Piper Stockton: “I like reading and at the beginning I did miss a bit on the feeling of reading books. But now I love to hold the Kindle, the e-ink seems to work very well, it is really like reading books…” All of the messages came in within minutes of each other, although they all cited different authors, gave different email addresses, and came from different IP addresses.
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I Am Not Piper Stockton and I Approve This Message
I have had my differences with Stanley Fish in the space of this precious, precious blog — here , here , and here for instance — but his discussion of Howl , the film about Allen Ginsberg’s trial and his famous poem that gave rise to it, demonstrates why I have not dropped his blog from my RSS reader. Fish: Because the trial’s analyses of specific lines and passages interrupt (or are interrupted by) the movie-long declaiming of the poem, we have a chance to hear the same lines and passages twice and even three times, and, as a result, we experience the effect of deepening understanding that is produced by the classroom teacher who circles and surrounds a poem with information, references and multiple points of view.
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Fish on Howl
It is generous of Cathy Lynn Grossman to walk us through the hazards of posing thoughtless rhetorical questions: [Jerry] Coyne argues we must clear vision from the fog of belief and religious structures that nourish communities of faith. No common awe for the dazzling sunrise here
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A Rhetorical Scared Straight
Nicholas Kristof has created a quiz that exposes unflattering passages from all the leading brands of revealed faith — Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. What is the point of his little quiz? [T]he point of this little quiz is that religion is more complicated than it sometimes seems, and that we should be wary of rushing to inflammatory conclusions about any faith, especially based on cherry-picking texts.
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Scriptures Demoted
The Portland Marathon starts promptly at 7am tomorrow, and this is the forecast for the 97204. I wish I could say the forecast is likely to be wrong, but while I can say that, it’s actually likely to be right. Today has been much the same.
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Portland Marathon 2010: I Feel Your Rain
Weirdly (or whatever), my thoughts often turn to death while I am running — but in a good way. When things become crushingly difficult, one of my internal mantras goes something like “I am running for those who can’t,” and frequently I have in mind my mother and grandmother, who are dead, not just out of shape, injured, ill, or lazy
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Running and Death (Or Whatever)
I am embarrassed on behalf of the neighbor who keeps this unspeakably hideous wall lamp tacked precariously beside his garage door, out in the wide open where people are at risk of seeing it when passing by. Even if he bothered to clear away the dirt and cob webs, it would only more vividly reveal the compact fluorescent light bulb, which, whatever its qualities, was never intended to be seen. Past the bulb and the filth, look at the shape of the thing
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Come, Let Us Plumb the Shallows
Matt Yglesias gamely tries to explain terribly written great books: I actually think this is a pretty general problem with “great books,” for reasons that are explained in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions which is, itself, a great book that suffers from the very same problem. Obviously part of the issue is simply that there’s no guarantee that conceptual innovators will be good writers.
Excerpt from:
To be great is to be misunderstood