In “How I Work,” Elder of Ziyon offers a few crucial lessons, about any kind of investigative or reportorial blogging, and about the easy, slimy, self-delusive nature of political misinformation in the electronic age. He tracks a claim by BDS supporters about Palestinian Authority cooperation with BDS activities (which is not the policy of the […]
Political and Poetical Thinking
Lea Carpenter at Big Think ruminates on alternative responses and needs attached to the “Ground Zero” Islamic center dispute. In “A Poet for the Mosque,” she writes, Let them build it. Is this what the rationalists want us to say? Let them build it. These four words counter the one, more emotional one—never—echoing across anger […]
The Political and the Wretched
(Updated Below) The separation of adjectives in the title is an act of forlorn hope against almost all evidence. There have actually emerged isolated instances of thoughtful, free-thinking, and humanistic consideration of the Cordoba Initiative Islamic center in lower Manhattan, but they are overwhelmed by the worst manifestations of reflexive political contention. All evidence now […]
I Know There’s a God Because There is Stephen Colbert
I’m late posting today because I’m working on that long post I promised last week to piss everyone off. In the meantime, a monkey hitting a keyboard randomly for a thousand years would one day type: I Take Sen. McConnell ‘At His Word’ When He Says He’s Not A Human-Turtle Hybrid. The Colbert Report Mon […]
Story Board
The best New Yorker story I’ve read in some time. From “The Dredgeman’s Revelation,” by Karen Russel, the story of Louis Thanksgiving: The dredge barge clanked downstream with its dipper handle swinging. For the first time in his short life, Louis had real friends, all sorts travelling alongside him into the glade—calm men, family men, […]