From Plato’s Republic to The Firearms Philosophy of Ivan Chesnokov
Wherein I argue that the best way to learn, apart from painful personal experience, is via a story filled with colorful characters. Exhibit A: The Firearms Phil...
Category: people
How North Koreans (and Cubans) read the state-sponsored newspaper
From the excellent blog Ask a Korean!, a very familiar account of how readers adjust to propaganda in order to eke out the truth: Take, for example, the war in ...
Less black and white, still good versus evil.
Patricia A. Turner: To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not. Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because i...
The only true mirror is the funhouse one.
In the last 24 hours I’ve had the pleasure to experience two novel and fun works of art: The Exterior World, a sarcastic animation by David OReilly and St...
Overheard at ORD: what about us Americans?
A few minutes ago, I was sitting near two men in their 50s at an airport in Chicago. They were talking current events, headlines. The economy, the dollar. One w...
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About a year of tweets, archived here for posterity.
I began this current journal, XSML, with the intent of reducing my own notes to extra small, XML-friendly updates. Increasingly, I have been drawn by the allure...
The Inner Child Family Policy: on pain and politics
From a recent New Yorker story on Freudian psychoanalysis in China: I asked what problems he sees most often among his patients. He answered, “If a grandfather,...
getting served by a sixth grader.
I’m in my car, stopped at a red light, on the phone. Right outside my passenger door is a sixth grader in a public school uniform, eating his after-school...
The great American standup tournament that can be the Twitter trending topic.
The original snap was: #thingsfatpeoplehatedoing. Here are some snaps back – one-liner’s, survey results – that caught my eye: Jasmine Lewis: going to the...
The separation of powers and personalities.
Yesterday I spent some time thinking about the differences between grifters and leaders and how the public stage beckons and rewards them both. So much so that,...
On friendly politicians and presidential character.
My parents just sent me a story in the Washington Post by Anne Kornblut that focuses on the personal slights and favors that underpin so much of our politics. I...
Bruce Sterling sheds light on the cultures that led to cablegate, obscures what comes next.
Bruce Sterling knows his nerds, outsiders in real life who are insiders online, alternately diffident and insolent. In his interesting assessment of the Wikilea...
The brutal irony of the DREAM Act being spiked by conservatives, many Christians, a week before Christmas.
Three questions for the Christian constituents of the senators who voted against the DREAM Act yesterday: Was the Son of God born in a barn, among the animals a...
Civil rights victories are always win-win. The repeal of DADT is great news for all Americans.
There were well-publicized protests in select California cities after President Obama was elected and Prop 8 was passed. Some of that anger was fueled by the ru...
A rejoinder I must commit to memory: “Let’s talk about you.”
Jane: What are you listening to? Jack: x Jane: I was listening to x three years ago. I’m so happy x is popular now. Jack: OK. Let’s talk about you.
Russian white nationalist street gangs, terrorism and post-Soviet political culture. Also, the confederate flag.
Charles Clover has written a brilliant, daring report on terrorists in Russia who are inspired by racist nationalism and financed by officials of the Russian st...
We are bacteria all the way down.
From Burkhard Bilger’s savvy report on fermentation and underground food culture in the U.S., sadly available only as an abstract to non-subscribers: Mode...
If you know any Italians, please forward this anecdote to them.
An anecdote that must be shared: Their favorite activity, however, seems to be holding joint press conferences. At one of their most memorable appearances toget...
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in the U.S. State Department for the next month.
When I first read about the process by which the New York Times sorted out what leaked documents they would publish and how, I thought: “Wow, it must have...
De-worming pills for $.50 or a laptop for $100?
Kentaro Tomaya on why high technology, in and of itself, doesn’t solve the problems that lead to poverty: Does a hundred dollars for a computer make sense...