By DAMON KRUKOWSKI [Pitchfork] – The origin of The Phoenix, like many alternative newspapers, lies in the underground press of the 1960s. But that link can be misleading. Just as the underground music subcultures of the 80s morphed into the alt rock of the 90s, the alt weeklies of the 70s drew from the same pool of talent and readers as their more radical predecessors, but treated that community as a marketing demographic rather than a potentially revolutionary body. Information about drugs, cops, and music were replaced by articles (and ads) about food, the movies, and… music. The necessities for a drop-out life were swapped with the needs for a lifestyle dependent on free time (students), disposable income (young urban professionals), or both…. Continue reading “Ashes to ashes, Phoenix to dust.” »
Friday, February 22, 2013
ONE DOESN’T NEED to be an American Doctor Educationis to comprehend this answer to that question: Continue reading “In America, are students ‘unprepared for college’?” »
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
By ROBBY SOAVE [Daily Caller] – With record numbers of college graduates underemployed in jobs that don’t actually require degrees, economists are joking that even aspiring janitors may soon have to get master’s degrees to compete for jobs. Continue reading “Mop up that spill with your diploma, will you?” »
By KENNETH W. JOHNSON [the text of a message sent to James Taranto and excerpted in The Wall Street Journal] – The expected announcement of expanded combat roles for women by the outgoing Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, has resulted in a fairly predictable debate. This debate largely revolves around legitimate views of giving women more opportunities in military service, since they are already near combat in their current occupational specialties (a classic case of boot-strapping) and maintaining, let alone improving, military effectiveness and efficiency…
As a Marine Corps veteran of three combat tours, the first as a Marine Rifle Platoon Commander during the Vietnam War, my concern is what this policy will contribute to further breaking down the already-troubled relationships of men and women in our society. Continue reading “‘What kind of a man is it who can send women off to kill and maim?’” »
By OVIDIU PECICAN [Romania Libera] – It is high time that someone once again took a stand to say that “translations do not make a literary culture,” and that they cannot and should not be substituted for freely undertaken original production in the language of this country and in the name of an ethos, which is ours alone.
It is once again time — even if it is tiresome to repeat history — for a Mihail Kogălniceanu [the nineteenth century liberal politician, prime minister and cultural figure] to speak out against writing that comes to us from Potomac, St Petersburg or Tokyo, which, no matter how exciting and interesting it may be, and regardless of the universal values it may transmit, can never express our joy and suffering like simple tales from such breeding grounds for creative ideas as the Obor Market, the Bega Canal, or the Apuseni mountains. Continue reading “Translations ‘do not make a literary culture’.” »
By JANE MERRICK [The Independent] – David Cameron’s pledge to give Britain a referendum on Europe has given him a five-point “Brussels bounce” in a poll for The Independent on Sunday today.
The Conservatives have narrowed Labour’s lead to six points, down from an 11-point gap last month, in the first comprehensive survey of public opinion since the Prime Minister’s speech on Wednesday. Continue reading “In England, Cameron promises a referendum on the EU…” »
By JANE NARDIN [from “…Five Things Jane Austen Can Teach Us” in The Wall Street Journal] – Many of the plots and themes in Austen’s works resemble or have inspired some of our most beloved “chick lit” and “rom-coms,” including “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Clueless.” In honor of the 200th anniversary of “Pride and Prejudice” this month, let’s take a look at the following five lessons from Austen classics and decide for yourself if they still resonate today: Continue reading “Five (more) reasons you don’t have to read Jane Austen.” »
Friday, December 28, 2012
By P. J. O’ROURKE [Wall Street Journal] – I would argue that the world doesn’t need more encouragement to think in zero-sum terms or act in redistributive ways.
Western Europe has done such a good job redistributing its assets that the European Union now has a Spanish economy, a Swedish foreign policy, an Italian army, and Irish gigolos. Continue reading “I say! What about British hospitals?” »
Monday, December 24, 2012
From the First Chester Nativity Play
called
THE WRIGHTES PLAYE.
[Scene 10]
EXPOSITOR: LOE! LORDINGES all, of this miracle here
freere Bartholemewe, in good mannere,
beareth wytnes, withowten were,
as played is you beforne.
[A]nd other myracles, yf I maye,
I shall rehearse, or I goe awaye,
that befell that ilke daye
that Jesus Christ was borne. Continue reading “‘That daye was seene verament three sonnes in the firmament’.” »
Sunday, December 23, 2012
‘The History of Rock & Roll 1955-1974’, from Tufte’s ‘Beautiful Evidence’. Via Steve Duin, The Oregonian. Click it.
By DENNIS KOKS [Johnny Holland] – After one hundred twenty-one pages of critically analyzing images [in Beautiful Evidence], [Edward] Tufte comes with a number of (fundamental) principles for analytical design which are derived from the principles of analytical thinking. He emphasizes that these principles apply broadly and are indifferent to language or culture or century or the technology of information display: Continue reading “How PowerPoint violates the six universal laws of great chart-making.” »
Sunday, December 23, 2012
By JAMES MEEK [interviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books] – It sometimes seems in this kind of northern European, northern American, post-Catholic world, you are either religious, in which case you are probably smug about having a moral code that has been given to you by God, by the Bible, or even the Koran, or you’re smug about not believing in that. But there’s a gap there, because if you are one of these nonbelievers, or almost-nonbelievers — agnostics, I suppose — then are you really just going to define yourself as somebody who doesn’t believe? Continue reading “James Meek: ‘Don’t get found out’ – America’s 11th commandment.” »
Friday, December 21, 2012
By DENIS BOYLES [Claremont Review of Books] – Greg Gutfeld takes in-your-face polemic to a new level altogether in The Joy of Hate: How to Triumph over Whiners in the Age of Phony Outrage. Continue reading “The smartest political pundit on the planet is a Moe among stooges.” »
by DAVID WEIGEL [Slate] – If losing the 2012 election was tough for movement conservatives, the month since the loss has been even tougher. They’re losing every internal power struggle that matters. On Nov. 14, conservative Rep. Tom Price lost a secret ballot election for a leadership post. The next day, the conservative Republican Study Committee gave its chairmanship to Rep. Steve Scalise, who’d been opposed by the group’s former leaders—like Tom Price.
Over the next two weeks, Washington bubbled with rumors of Republicans agreeing to raise taxes, and violate the pledge they’d made to Grover Norquist, if it got them a “grand bargain” that cut spending on entitlements. Huelskamp responded with a YouTube video in which he warned that “a lot of my colleagues appear ready to break their word,” but when he signed that pledge, he “meant it.” Continue reading “Republicans mount ‘a rearguard action against the party base’.” »
By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Daily Princetonian] – After World War I, Princeton had its own army ROTC artillery unit, with horses to pull the cannon and a course on hippology on the books for the hundreds of students who joined it. After World War II, Princeton’s administration planned for a future in which every able-bodied student would eventually serve. In the age of the GI Bill, Princeton joined its sister schools in educating hundreds of its own who had left to fight — and a good many other veterans who didn’t come from wealthy families or private schools and owed their educations to government and university support. It was the least that America and its professors could do to help those who had fought and to honor those who died. Continue reading “‘Princeton has just one American veteran enrolled as an undergraduate this year.’” »
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
By HANNA ROSIN [The Atlantic] – On a mild fall afternoon in 2011, I sat in a courtyard with some undergraduates at Yale to ask about their romantic lives. A few months earlier, a group of mostly feminist-minded students had filed a Title IX complaint against the university for tolerating a “hostile sexual environment on campus.” The students specifically cited a 2010 incident when members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity stood outside freshman dorms chanting “No means yes! Yes means anal!” I’d heard this phrase before, from the business-school students, of course: on spring break, they had played a game called “dirty rounds”—something like charades, except instead of acting out movie or book titles, they acted out sex slogans like the one above, or terms like pink sock (what your anus looks like after too much anal sex). But the Yale undergraduates had not reached that level of blitheness. They were incensed. The week before I arrived, an unrelated group of students ran a letter in the campus paper complaining that the heart of the problem was “Yale’s sexual culture” itself, that the “hookup culture is fertile ground for acts of sexual selfishness, insensitivity, cruelty and malice.” Continue reading “Notes from a planet where the only women who matter have a beautiful tan, long dark hair, and a great figure.” »
