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On The Media: Transcript of "Not So Innocent" (October 5, 2007) RICHARD HALPERN: Right. There's often a kind of loss of innocence that takes place in the paintings themselves, which reflect on a potential loss of innocence on the part of the viewer. I think an interesting example of that is Rockwell's painting called The…
Read more →The Girl Wars : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com It seems like half the interactions between women can be classified as Girl Wars. Do we ever get out of this? And why the hell are girls so vicious to each other? When did they start this? Just a few years ago, Thing One was small and…
Read more →Metaphorically Challenged : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com âThat is an awesome metaphor,â? I said. Because it is. Itâs funny without the use of burning children. But it isnât accurate. John isnât on some emotional island where he canât understand what heâs doing. And he isnât trying to fight, really. He doesnât want to be inconvenienced…
Read more →OBAMA: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged and to which we have now spent $400 billion and has seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted . Michelle Malkin: Obama: Soldier deaths = "Wasted" lives I could go on, but it…
Read more →iTWire - A new 'iBook' from Google?: be afraid, be very afraid Google is plotting to do for books what the iPod has done for music: make them purchasable by download to a portable access device. Could civilisation as we know it be under threat? ... The news immediately lead Sunday Times commentator, Bryan Appleyard…
Read more →I got an A in Phallus 101 - Los Angeles Times The problem that the Young America's Foundation list, first issued in 1995, highlights isn't simply the hollowing-out of the traditional humanities and social sciences disciplines at colleges and their replacement by crude indoctrination sessions in whatever is ideologically fashionable — although that's a serious…
Read more →Limp language leaves kids with an awesome paucity of speech [Teenagers on which the author eavesdrops] They've got one all-purpose word -- "awesome" -- to cover everything from mild approval to exhilaration. When they're indignant or angry, they have to fall back on clichés -- including a few tired four-letter words. ... Today, teens aren't…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "God No!" (December 15, 2006) In response to the global challenge posted by religious extremism, a small group of impassioned atheists has taken a new approach. They target the tolerant with both reason and ridicule. "The New Atheists", as they were dubbed by Gary Wolf in a recent article in…
Read more →OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts A software program developed by SirsiDynix, an Alabama-based library-technology company, informs librarians of which books are circulating and which ones aren't. If titles remain untouched for two years, they may be discarded--permanently. "We're being very ruthless," boasts library director Sam Clay. ... But this raises a fundamental question: What are…
Read more →Foreign Policy: Why Hawks Win Why are hawks so influential? The answer may lie deep in the human mind . People have dozens of decision-making biases, and almost all favor conflict rather than concession. This is an interesting blend of folk psychology and 'professional' psychology. The first part if completely within the realm of sensationalist…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Today - 20006 Vote The Hunting Act with 52.8% Dangerous Dogs Act: 1.6% Serious Organised Crime and Police Act : 6.2% Human Rights Act: 6.1% European Communities Act : 29.7% The Act of Settlement: 3.6% Radio 4 is listened to by British political and cultural elites and could be thought…
Read more →A Renaissance of the Commons | Nick Lewis: The Blog Cultures, like people, can run out of ideas. They can exhaust themselves in the face of events and ideas they can no longer predict, explain or control. When they do, they revert to the repetitive assertion of the simplest and most soothing of their founding…
Read more →Left Behind Games The storyline in the game begins just after the Rapture has occurred â when all adult Christians, all infants, and many children were instantly swept home to Heaven and off the Earth by God. The remaining population â those who were left behind â are then poised to make a decision at…
Read more →On The Media: Transcript of "The Power of Myth" (November 24, 2006) ANA MARIE COX: Well, I think that Joe is a provocative thinker and a great reporter. He was really early out of the gate t rying to put a narrative around this election . There was a very unusual mid-term. There were races…
Read more →From the Wikipedia entry : Accepted is a 2006 comedy motion picture about a group of high school seniors who, after being rejected from all colleges to which they had applied, create their own college. ... At one point Bartleby [the main character] wants to end the charade before it begins, but is overcome with…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - Home Page the mammoth undertaking that was the Encyclopédie – one of its editors, D’Alembert, described its mission as giving an overview of knowledge, as if gazing down on a vast labyrinth of all the branches of human knowledge, observing where they separate or unite and even…
Read more →YouTube - Team America Finale Speech PhatGun (3 months ago) HAHAHAHAHHAHAHA SO TRUE!!! Tomster22 (19 hours ago) Neo-Cons = Dicks, Peacenicks = Pussies, Islamo-Fascists = Assholes AerisRocks (2 months ago) lol! Thats a great metaphor they used...assholes want us to shit on everything and dicks fuck assholes lmfao, great scene. This post has been brewing…
Read more →ANTI- Album - Orphans What’s Orphans? I don’t know. Orphans is a dead end kid driving a coffin with big tires across the Ohio River wearing welding goggles and a wife beater with a lit firecracker in his ear. Just like true mythopoeic narrative is returning to its roots through TV series after a brief…
Read more →BBC - Radio 4 - Feedback Love quadrangle Things have been getting very steamy in the cowshed at Brookfield lately and Archers listeners who've written to Feedback talk of sensationalism and complain that some of the main characters seem to have had personality transplants. After David Archer's flirtation with his old flame Sophie, his wife…
Read more →14 WFIE, The Tri-State's News Leader: Manhunt Ends, Baby Found Safe A fugitive couple who hid in a camper are now behind bars. The kidnapped baby is safe, and the funeral for the social worker who cared the baby is over. It's been a busy and emotional 24 hours. What a great little example of…
Read more →Cartoon Warfare (Ann Applebaum, WP) In recent years "the personal is political," a phrase whose origins are lost deep in the history of the women's movement, has among other things come to mean that just about anyone is allowed to transform her personal experience into a political program. Writing about oneself has a long history…
Read more →Several years before his death, the famous Estonian semiotician Yuriy Lotman came to Prague and the thing that I still remember from his talk is an admonition that boundaries are the places to study because that's the most interesting phenomena happen (or come to the surface) at the border between two stereotypes (my words not…
Read more →AfterEllen.com - The L Word's Vanishing Bisexual The L Wordâs representation of bisexuality reflects popular and sometimes opposing ideas about bisexuality. One belief--represented best on the series by Jenny--is that those who identify as bisexual are merely experimenting with their sexuality before they choose to identify as strictly heterosexual or homosexual, thus suggesting that a…
Read more →CNN.com - Quotes from the Golden Globes - Jan 16, 2006 "As I was coming in, I felt a little tug at my skirt. And I looked, and there was a little girl maybe 8 or 10 in her first party dress, and she said, 'Because of you I want to be president someday.' And…
Read more →On The Media-- NAMING RIGHT The key variables that differentiated the titles that had been number-one bestsellers from the titles that had failed to be were whether the title was literal or figurative, the word type of the first word, although it was interesting that the word type of the second word didn't matter, and…
Read more →NPR : Muslim Migrants, 'Embracing the Infidel' Author Behzad Yaghmaian spent two years traveling with Muslim migrants and collected their stories on safe houses, bribes, police custody, and human trafficking. He talks about his book, Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West. An interesting podcast about a book illustrating the transformation…
Read more →Urban Legends Reference Pages: College (The Unsolvable Math Problem) This legend combines one of the ultimate academic wish-fulfillment fantasies — a student not only proves himself the smartest one in his class, but also bests his professor and every other scholar in his field of study — with a "positive thinking" motif which turns up…
Read more →Propp and other formalists had many things figured out quite right. Then the structuralists came and elevated emergent properties to the level of meaning creation. This post is an analogy in the sense that it compares the idea of the 'morphology of the folktale' but takes the source domain from cognitive morphology rather than traditional…
Read more →The Video Game Revolution: "Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked" by Henry Jenkins | PBS The availability of video games has led to an epidemic of youth violence. According to federal crime statistics, the rate of juvenile violent crime in the United States is at a 30-year low. Researchers find that people serving time for…
Read more →My Week In Thought This PBS essay neatly summarizes almost all the arguments I would ever make - or in some cases have made - in defense of video gaming. OK, there may be a fine line between vanity and self-referentiality but here we go. It struck me how powefully I was affected by this…
Read more →Introduction Imagine that two millenia or so in the future, literary experts attempt to collect the glories of our literature. Most of our paper writings have crumbled into dust or used for kindling; all our digital files are long gone or indecipherable. English is a dead language and many of the cultural references are a…
Read more →"I've read the internet, and it's rubbish" - a comedian on a BBC Radio 4 show. In this essay, I will diagram exactly how this happened, but also include some speculation as to how things could have turned out differently, though it is no way intended as a work of "fan fiction". By highlighting how…
Read more →Narnia's lion really is Jesus - Sunday Times - Times Online AN unpublished letter from the novelist C S Lewis has provided conclusive proof of the Christian message in his Narnia childrenâs books. In the letter [to be published in a new collection of Lewis' letters], sent to a child fan in 1961, Lewis writes…
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