As you might be aware, I also blog for a little outfit known as Friendly Atheist. Yeah, way more people read me there. Here’s a roundup of some of my recent posts there. I looked at how Andrew Sullivan is calling out liberals for being unwilling to confront the reality of radical Islam’s threat and …
Tag Archive: personal
Apr 10 2013
“I Am Thrilled That He’s Dead.”
Andrew Sullivan has what at first seems like an alarming reaction to the death of his friend David Kuo, following a ten-year-long battle with brain cancer. Watch: I feel a revulsion to this line of thinking, that someone has gone “to a better place,” or as Sullivan calls it, “home.” It obviously comes from the …
Apr 10 2013
Eat My Feelings
I am known as something of a high-strung, ever-disappointed, self-loathing stick in the mud. Guilty as charged. So Hemant Mehta pointed me to a confection that could just possibly warm my cold, ashen heart. Yeah, that’s a Captain Picard facepalm cookie. Make it so…delicious.
Mar 15 2013
Paul Dreams of Tech-Journalism Intrigue
This is a dream I had a couple of nights ago. I was entering some kind of convention hall along with an excited and somewhat hip throng of people (I, of course, was in no way hip). I didn’t enter alone, though my companions were unidentifiable to me, sort of faceless. I don’t know who …
Mar 13 2013
A Phase of Incestuous Contraction
As a performing artist, here’s a thing I’ve definitely fretted over; doing art only for an audience of people who all do the same thing. Here’s Steve Almond at The New Republic writing from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference (AWP): But there’s a larger and more unsettling truth. . . one that …
Mar 13 2013
Hospitality Used to Scare Me (And a Humble Ask)
I don’t know what to do in the face of hospitality. It confuses me, frightens me. Prime example: On our honeymoon, the wife and I were stranded by our cruise ship because our plane had mechanical trouble, so we had to instead fly to where the boat would meet up with us. Luckily, her mother …
Feb 26 2013
When the Bullied Becomes the Bully (You Can’t Punch Up, So You Punch Down)
A study from JAMA Psychiatry, as reported in Time, looks at the effects of bullying in school into adulthood, from the perspective of all parties involved, the bullied and the bullies themselves. First, I’ll say that I’m always glad to see any recognition that bullying has long-term effects, as I’ve lived my life being told …
Feb 17 2013
Me vs. the Western Canon
As part of a recent initiative of mine to read a bunch of the foundational classics that I’d so far missed, I finally got around to reading Machiavelli’s The Prince, maybe about a year ago. Though it’s something that has had a tremendous impact on political thought for centuries, I had somehow managed not to …
Feb 14 2013
Cover Those Stats with a Smudge of Ash [Updated]
The folks over at Non-Prophet Status are indulging in this secular Lent thing, where they all give up something for 40 days because, well, I don’t know why. They’re weird, what can I say? Maybe they think it’ll make them better people to go without something for so long. Oh, except Chris Stedman, who’s just …
Feb 06 2013
The Stream of Invective, a Price Well Paid
Wikipedian Brandon Harris takes to Quora to talk about how he felt being the subject of a lot of Internet derision during his famous banner appearances throughout Wikipedia’s fundraising drive. His words were, to say the least, helpful. None of it is real. There is a stream of invective from people saying that I look …
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