Internal Monologue

According to this graph , 70% of Nevada homeowners have negative equity in their houses. About one-third of California ones do. How can we pull out of a recession with realities like that in place?

His biggest fear about getting older is that he'll become comfortable with being ignorant about new things : Age, like all power constructs, (race, gender, class) encourages it's own ignorance. To not know is a luxury of power. You don't have to know Their Eyes Were Watching God . But I damn sure better know The Scarlet Letter . (It's bad enough I'm slipping on Twain.) Age turns ignorance into a luxury, and worse, if you don't recognize it as a luxury you start to think everyone is as clueless as you. And of course you're clueless that any of this is even going on. It's just a bad look all around. Sarah and I have this fear as well, and we've promised not to let each other sink into it. I think this relates to the backlash against Obama's recent disparagement of some new electronic devices: With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations--none of which I know how to work--information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of enter

Via Yglesias, I came across this 1860 New York Times review of Darwin's On the Origin of Species . Clearly, the reviewer understands the importance of the book: Meanwhile, Mr. DARWIN, as the fruit of a quarter of a century of patient observation and experiment, throws out, in a book whose title at least has by this time become familiar to the reading public, a series of arguments and inferences so revolutionary as, if established, to necessitate a radical reconstruction of the fundamental doctrines of natural history. But does the reviewer actually agree with Darwin's central thesis? No: Ten times the space given to this article would not suffice for any adequate treatment of this vast and complicated subject. In a very general way, though, we may touch on a few topics. To this and every hypothesis which assumes the gradual transition from species to species, from genus to genus, geology opposes the irrefragable fact of the utter absence of all transitional l

Maybe I should get one of these at GenCon and post a video of myself hacking carcasses with it:

Think Progress : [O]ne fact being ignored in the American media’s sensationalist narrative about the failed bombing is that the man who was responsible for police finding the bomb was Muslim. The UK’s Times Online reports that Aliou Niasse, a Senagalese Muslim immigrant who works as a photograph vendor on Times Square, was the first to bring the smoking car to the police’s attention[...]

"Sigh. I'm not that old but I can remember a time when there was nothing but suspicious activity in Times Square. And that's why it was such a glorious, hideous, amazing place - and not the Disney shopping mall it is today." - Andrew Sullivan