In the comments to my earlier post on Malcolm Gladwell, commenter sisu pointed me to a link to an excellent and detailed article that exposes how Gladwell was groomed from his early days to be a shameless huckster in the service of right-wing and corporate interests. [Read more…]
I had heard of long-time Georgia congressman John Lewis and his role in the civil rights movement but had never actually seen him. I found this interview with Stephen Colbert quite moving. [Read more…]
Malcolm Gladwell has made a name for himself by publishing superficial books that basically promotes a simple theory for everyday phenomena and cherry picking data to support it. He is a good writer and when you read his books his argument initially sounds plausible and it is only later you discover that things are a lot more complicated than he lets on and that his favorite theory either has strong competitors or powerful counter-arguments. [Read more…]
South Korea is one of the so-called ‘Asian tigers’, a modern, rapidly developing, and highly educated country with a large and still-growing role in the world’s economy. So it was a surprise to me to read that they are purging the teaching of evolution from the country’s textbooks. [Read more…]
The New York Times had a long article showing how willingly and easily Obama sidesteps the constitution he has sworn to protect, all the while presenting him as someone who grapples gravely with issues. The article provides another striking example, if one were needed, of what I wrote about before, how constitutional protections are being hollowed out, to become mere window dressing. [Read more…]
Opponents of same sex marriage kept saying that if we allowed it, then it would open the floodgates to every possible combination of marriage, even involving turtles. We laughed at them but, astonishingly, they were right after all. And the new form of marriage that has been spawned is even worse than was imagined. [Read more…]
One result of the Vatican’s attack on Catholic nun and theologian Sister Margaret Farley and her 2006 book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics that I wrote about yesterday is that her book shot up in Amazon rankings from #142,982 to #16 just one day after the attacks began.
Frankly, I think I am a much harsher critic of the Catholic Church and the pope than Farley so I am appealing to the pope: Please, please, attack me and my books, as harshly and loudly as you can.
I got around to watching the new BBC series Sherlock, showing in the US as part of PBS’s Masterpiece Theater.
There have been many reconceptualizations of the iconic character of Sherlock Holmes, not all of them successful. The recent film version with Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude was a buddy action movie and I found the hyperactivity just barely tolerable. The 1980s and 90s BBC series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and two different actors as Watson were perhaps the best of the lot so far, with Brett in particular capturing the edginess and nervous energy of Holmes.
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Sometime ago I wrote in a post titled God save us from the Queen my view that the British monarchy, like any other monarchy, is a feudal parasitic institution that should be abolished and that I am amazed that people in the US with its republican tradition pay so much attention to its absurdly excessive pageantry. [Read more…]