Get Smart

Historian and reporter Rick Shenkman writes a book and starts a blog to tackle the “paradox” of the dumb voter. What paradox? Well, according to the author, political speeches used to be written to meet a “12th grade level” fifty years ago, but current debates are pitched as if they were directed to [...]

Parcheesi

Another illustrated letter from the Smithsonian’s archive of same for the continuing DaD series on handwriting. This time, a note from sculptor Alexander Calder to Agnes Rindge Claflin, director of the Vassar Art Gallery, June 6, 1939. That year, Claflin was completing the catalog for art collection at Vassar and hiring German refugees, [...]

Notices

People are reading G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, and coming up with complicated things to say about it. (Hey, there’s even an Orson Welles radio play)
Others are getting hip to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery again, on its anniversary. (Sometimes reading it aloud)
Meanwhile, read a few recollections of Emerson written by [...]

Serendipity

In The New Yorker this week, an article about itching from the excellent Atul Gawande. Gawande begins with a literary image that would equally befit Franz Kafka or Freddy Kruger:
One morning, after she was awakened by her bedside alarm, she sat up and, she recalled, “this fluid came down my face, this greenish liquid.” She [...]

Signs and Wonders

Just to let you know, it turns out that there are people who can read the stars and thereby date some of the events of “The Odyssey” to the year 1178 B.C. We also have folks who can introduce ten new chapters to James Agee’s “A Death in the Family” so that it doesn’t [...]

Cooler Heads

Clark Hoyt, Public Editor at The New York Times, discusses the Clinton-lost-because-of-sexism hypothesis that I blogged about last week. His investigation is relatively successful because he treated the matter in a limited and focused way – defining sexism as types of words expressed in the coverage, and using Times material as his dataset, also asking [...]

Veritas

Columnist Joel Stein complains about wine critics in the Los Angeles Times. Let’s give Stein a round of applause for his opening salvo:
When wine drinkers tell me they taste notes of cherries, tobacco and rose petals, usually all I can detect is a whole lot of jackass.
The complaint is that “the language of sommeliers, [...]

Illustrated

Here in Chicago, The Smart Museum is exhibiting “John Sloan’s New York.” The show inspired me to fish around online for some of Sloan’s handwriting. Pickings were pretty slim, but I did find some examples at this online archive of illustrated letters at the Smithsonian.
Here’s a letter from Sloan to the art [...]

Stalled

Lately, there has been caustic argument over the hypothesis that sexism played a role in the outcome of the recent Democratic contest. The acrimony went from bad to worse last week. Alone among mainstream broadcast news personalities, CBS anchor Katie Couric lent credence to the sexism idea, then was pilloried for doing so by [...]

Exception

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, author and professor John L. Jackson Jr. takes on the recent brouhaha between Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee. To summarize the controversy: some time ago, Lee took exception to the dearth of African-American servicemen in Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima,” then Eastwood took [...]

Policed

Joseph Kugelmass continues an ongoing discussion at The Valve about how bloggers are replacing film, book and music critics, particularly those based in what have until recently been august print venues. As yours truly did in an earlier post, Kugelmass roots his analysis in some remarks by film professor David Bordwell on the subject [...]

The Old Cat is Dead

A letter from ten year-old Orville Wright to his father Milton Wright, April 1st, 1881. Available online as part of the Library of Congress Exhibit “Dreams of Flight.”
Like his brother Wilbur, Orville never finished high school.

Variegated

Celebrating its ten year anniversary, The Philosophers’ Magazine publishes a post drawn from a larger piece in which the editors posed the following question to a panel of highly accomplished and celebrated philosophers:
Has philosophy responded adequately to the big events and debates of the last decade, such as climate change and the post-9/11 world?
It behooves [...]

Memento Mori

Novelist Ian McEwan writes a paper on the history of apocalyptic thinking, both religious and secular, both archaic and modern. It’s nice writing and even better research, full of illuminating questions on the politics of how people think about the end of the world, and how we should approach this thinking today, with so [...]