The news came on Facebook from one of my high school classmates. FYI EVERYONE – There’s a site called spokeo.com and it’s an online phonebook that has a picture of your house, credit score, profession, age, how many people live in the house. Remove yourself AND ANY AKA OR SPOUSE by the Privacy button on [...]
Steve Barnes is worried. … The Facebook page praying for Obama’s death has topped a million people. This is so fascinating. People can carry automatic weapons at his speeches, Fox News can joke about cross hairs, Sarah Palin can talk “Lock and Load,” and at every turn, people keep insisting that there is nothing unusual [...]
Today I learn from Steven Barnes that the Facebook group praying for Obama’s death has passed a million members. Let me start by reiterating what I said in a Facebook status message when I first heard of the group. Could I suggest that Facebook pages praying for *anyone’s* death aren’t funny? And not just because [...]
Chevron demands “Crude” filmmaker hand over footage. The “Crude” filmmaker is Joe Berlinger, who went to my high school, so naturally I have a special interest in this story on those grounds. But it’s also an interesting legal case for investigative documentary film making in general; Chevron wants Joe Berlinger to turn over all his [...]
Chris Blattman on Colonialists, through African eyes, preserved. Charli Carpenter at Lawyers, Guns, and Money on Thinking Differently about Somalia, Governance and Piracy. John Quiggin at Crooked Timber on After the dead horses and A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Deborah Pearlstein at Balkinization on Replacing Justice Stevens on Security.
Omar al-Bashir has won Sudan elections, with Kiir winning in the South. Global Voices has a round up of post-election commentary, from praise for the peaceful elections to allegations of fraud. “Sudan: ‘Too Big To Fail’?” at AllAfrica.com: … As commentator Ahmed Elzobier remarked, the elections mean different things to different stakeholders, for most southerners [...]
One of my Greek cousins sent me this video: It reminds me of this poem by Rupert Brooke.
As Papandreou admitted that the IMF is already overseeing the Greek economy, Greek opposition parties from center-right Nea Demokratia to left wing SYRIZA united in criticizing Greece’s turn to the IMF for help. Meanwhile, the EU revised Greek budget deficit figures – to be even worse than they were already. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble [...]
Slate’s XX Factor blog describes La Cage Aux Folles as “an edgy show by three gay artists.” I don’t know about that. Edgy? La Cage Aux Folles? To me it seems more sweet and sentimental. Edgy, a show about a long term settled couple? About a son who learns to appreciate his parents? About the [...]
You’re waking me up to tell me that you have carpal tunnel? This was my first thought when Joel woke me at 2am Wednesday morning to tell me that his left arm had gone numb. Joel, you see, always stays up later than me, typing at the computer. Joel, though, was worried about something else. [...]
Special issue of Ethos on autism. Maybe people are liberal because they went to Hollywood. My Mormon Testimony (Or Something Like Unto It). Thirty Days of John Paul Stevens. A series of posts by authors who know him and his work. The Non-Radicalism of Diane Wood’s Church and State Jurisprudence. British National Party support fueled [...]
In some cases I care as much about how people defend where they’ve chosen to draw their sexual ethical boundaries as about where they draw them. (OK, just in some cases, not all; some ways of drawing ethical boundaries are going to be indefensible no matter how you justify them.) In that sense, both the [...]
Sudan has just completed elections that were praised for their peacefulness and criticized as being too flawed to be free and fair. The ruling National Congress Party won, but will this victory widen the gap between North and South? In Chad, humanitarian agencies are combating outbreaks of measles and meningitis. Also, Vietnam will be sharing [...]
Again, since I haven’t read the actual book that seems to have inspired this whole discussion, I’m going mostly off Koppelman’s description, and my own sense of how family values in liberal areas of New York and California actually work. Eve Tushnet had criticized Andrew Koppelman’s piece as a simple Not Our Kind sneer at [...]
First, happy anniversary to the sweetest husband I’ve ever had. Also the onliest husband I ever had. Today’s our twenty-second anniversary. We’re going to be eating at one of our favorite restaurants tonight. Earlier this week, we went to the opera, the see the Metropolitan Opera at the movie theater version. This one was Hamlet. [...]
Ta-Nehisi Coates is on a roll, honoring Confederate History Month, so to speak, through a glass darkly. Check out, in particular, The Ghost of Bobby Lee. Or any of his other recent Confederate history posts. Steve, one of my co-bloggers at Alexandria, suggested that I look at what Simon Johnson has to say about the [...]
By now, of course, everyone has heard about the tragic plane crash that took out so many of Poland’s leaders. I don’t have a lot to say that others aren’t already saying, but I did find it interesting, as I looked through my usual international papers, to see how the same event gets described in [...]
I met Hoiyin Ip (whom I’ve already linked as an environmentally minded blogger) through a local professional organization, and it was she who introduced me to the writer’s group that’s the Orange County branch of Independent Writers of Southern California. Kurt Bensworth is the leader of the group, and the only one of us, as [...]
Eve Tushnet has a bone to pick with Andrew Koppelman’s post at Balkinization, which I think I’ve linked more sympathetically. Eve writes: … The idea is that families in “blue states” are relatively adept at transmitting some aspects of a marriage culture to their children. Massachusetts, e.g., is home to families where the children mate [...]
Suppose you have two racial or ethnic groups, group A and group B. Group B is arrested and convicted more, not necessarily for every crime, but for some anyway, let’s say crimes X, Y, and Z. There are several possible explanations for this disparity: People in groups A and B actually commit the crimes in [...]
The Bechdel Test, for any of you who don’t know it, is that, to pass, a movie needs to: a) have at least two women in it, who b) talk to each other, c) about something other than a man. Although the comic character who first voiced the test used it as a rule to [...]