85 – 13
On the whole, I think that the President of the United States should be able to choose the Cabinet he wants to govern with. Yes, the Senate should advise before it consents, but for me the bar for turfing a…
Category: NYTimes
Ranting
I do not like to use this Tohu Bohu as a griping zone just to call attention to those things in the world that I think are wrongheaded, but an article by Sharon Waxman called Onscreen, It’s the Season of…
MFQ again
The New York Times Magazine appears to have gone sort of nuts for toys this week. In addition to a disturbingly wonderful slide show of cutting-edge Japanese playgrounds, and another slideshow that’s less wonderful and more disturbing, what with the…
Around the Horn
I’ve seen a few things recently on-line that are interesting, but about which I don’t have enough to write an essay. So: From the Language Log, Arnold Zwicky writes about Two and Threes, specifically about the figure of speech taken…
Movie Report: The Incredibles
So. Your Humble Blogger saw The Incredibles, and enjoyed it immensely. Anything said below should be held in that context; I thought it was great, and pretty much if you think you’d like it, you will. For one thing, it’s…
Liberals, arts, colleges
I happened to see a New York Times article about two recent studies of the Liberal Professoriate (working paper versions are available of the two, How Politically Diverse Are the Social Sciences and Humanities? Survey Evidence from Six Fields and…
Wasting time
Follow the bouncing links, right? After I had deliberately passed on reading this NYT article, I was sent back by this Michael Bérubé note to look at this inspirational photo, which I’m certainly nominating for the Jesus of the Week….
news from the front
Articles such as this one in the Times remind me that there were an awful lot of people who warned, before the invasion, that this could well degenerate into a house-to-house shooting war. As it happens, I am not one…
Party time
It’s probably not the ideal time to write about it, but this Op-Ed by Phil Keisling and Sam Reed in this morning’s yesterday’s Times and this segment on Morning Edition piqued me into talking about political parties. You see, I’m…
We’ll always have the Paris Review
One of the most talked about articles of the day is the Suskind article in the Times Magazine. Almost every political blogger has had a say on it; I’m going to just choose one idea and riff from that, and…