That’s the trouble when you run against a shape-shifter. He has no shame in jettisoning every position he took in the primaries. That was a different market to sell to. Now he has a new market, so he has new policies and a new persona. In office, he will find a new market to sell …
Monthly Archive: October 2012
Oct 16 2012
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THE ROMANTIC PORTRAIT of the blasphemer that I have just painted does not apply to us, not least owing to the success of blasphemy in the West, where it was also called Enlightenment. Diderot needed courage; Monty Python did not. We are beyond shock. The giving and taking of offense is the very structure of …
Oct 15 2012
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Whether you read it online or hold the physical object in your hands, this issue of Newsweek is best viewed as an archaeological artifact that is certain to embarrass us in the eyes of future generations. Its existence surely says more about our time than the editors at the magazine meant to say—for the cover …
Oct 15 2012
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The loss is there, an old wound never fully healed. My disappointment was certainly personal, made deeper by the awareness that many thousands of young Americans, and far more Vietnamese and other Asian citizens, were going to and did lose their lives with the Nixon administration’s continuation of the war. And I was upset that …
Oct 15 2012
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Is such a mode sustainable, over the long haul, and not just for one project, by people other than the handful of Special Cases like Doctorow and Coulton and Zoë Keating? That’s what we’re all waiting to find out. We need more data points to plot this graph, to see what shape the line makes …
Oct 13 2012
Anxiety and Grief over the Quantified Self
Craig Mod, in an essay reflecting on how we come to know ourselves through our networked collected data, discovers a new kind of tragedy as he uses a Fitbit to track his steps and stair-climbs through Paris: Staring out, I traced my walk from so far above. I thought of the staccato data at the …
Oct 12 2012
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Here’s some breaking news: the kind of people who choose to watch a vice-presidential debate instead of baseball or football or a cooking show are not sensitive souls who curl up into a ball at the first sign of disagreement between politicians. People who choose to watch political conflict can deal with it. Those who …
Oct 11 2012
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The e-ink Kindles are designed to do one thing really well: display long-form text. Page-turning is at the heart of the Kindle reading experience. An active Kindle reader is going to go to the next page hundreds — in some cases, I’m sure, even thousands — of times every week. There should not just be …
Oct 10 2012
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I am sorry that the president finds debating before the public to be annoying. And I am very sorry that more Americans don’t delve into the footnotes of position papers. And I am very sorry that Mitt Romney was mean to the moderator, and lied to the viewers. And I am especially sorry that Barack …
Thousands of Years of Religious Slaughter in One Cartoon
You know what’s hilarious? The idea that for millennia, various religious and ethnic factions have slaughtered each other over the right to claim a small strip of arid land in the Middle East because they think God wants them to have it. I mean, come on, that’s a hoot…
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