Anthropologists have long noted that societies that herd livestock in rugged terrain tend to develop a “culture of honor.” Since their wealth has feet and can be stolen in an eye blink, they are forced to deter rustlers by cultivating a hair-trigger for violent retaliation against any trespass or insult that probes their resolve. Farmers …
Monthly Archive: October 2012
Oct 28 2012
This store contains no elephants
The Surface is partially for Microsoft’s world of denial: the world in which this store contains no elephants and Microsoft invented the silver store with the glass front and the glowing logo and blue shirts and white lanyards and these table layouts and the modern tablet and its magnetic power cable. In that world, this …
Oct 25 2012
Fired from the polity
Private equity is concerned with rewarding winners and punishing losers. But a democracy cannot lay off its failing citizens. It cannot be content to leave any of its citizens behind—and certainly not the forty-seven per cent whom Romney wishes to fire from the polity. The New Yorker’s Endorsement of Barack Obama : The New Yorker
Oct 20 2012
Reading Shakespeare is like going to church
While I’m very much interested in Shakespeare’s life, I’m more interested in my own. What I extrapolate from The Winter’s Tale is that if Leontes deserves a break, so do I. There came a time in my life when I needed to be forgiven. I wasn’t. If I must take my consolation from a play …
Oct 20 2012
But America Didn’t Listen
Connor Friedersdorf on how we should have listened to George McGovern, now nearing death: Over the course of his career, McGovern made a lot of arguments that I personally find unpersuasive. But he sure did get the most important issue of his time right. Think of all the Americans who’d be alive today if the …
Oct 19 2012
269
This horror scenario of an Electoral College tie is completely plausible. I have an unprovable hunch that this scenario is far more likely than almost anyone is thinking.
Oct 18 2012
Break the seal of shame
… should Obama fail, the people who will suffer under a triumphant Republican administration will not be abstract to him; they will be down the street. The poor black women who will doubtlessly find their access to contraception troubled will be degrees closer to Obama than to any other presidential aspirant. That 47 percent whom …
Oct 18 2012
Invisible hand
Maybe a couple of magazines will survive in print as status symbols at the high end, or as supermarket check-out tabloids at the lower stratosphere. But I doubt even that. Tablet subscriptions seem to me the only viable way forward. The good news is that the savings from this can be plowed back into journalism …
Oct 17 2012
(No title)
But not even I expected Romney to let his entitled, Lord-of-the-Manor freak flag fly as proudly as he did on Tuesday night. He got in the president’s face. He got in Crowley’s face. That moment when he was hectoring the president about the president’s pension made him look like someone to whom the valet has …
Oct 16 2012
(No title)
… many a BlackBerry owner will not mince words about how they feel about their phone. “I want to take a bat to it,” Ms. Crosby said, after waiting for her phone’s browser to load for the third minute, only to watch the battery die. “You can’t do anything with it. You’re supposed to, but …
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