“Down and Out in Antarctica”

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 1:56 pm By Eve Tushnet

Hunter R. Slaton, great piece at The Fix: Eight years ago this month, I was mind-bendingly hungover and miserable, pushing a push broom across a dirty blue-linoleum floor in Antarctica. I was working as a “dining attendant”—aka a dishwasher—at McMurdo Station, a US scientific research facility on Antarctica’s Ross Island, site of the launch of many heroic expeditions, including Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated trek to the South Pole, and home to the world’s southernmost active volcano, Mt. Erebus. more... Read more

From “Some Prefer Nettles”

Last updated on: January 21, 2013 at 1:52 pm By Eve Tushnet

Kaname had seen the Bunraku puppets once ten years before. He had not been impressed–he could in fact remember only that he had been intensely bored. Today he had come solely out of a sense of duty, expecting to be bored again, and he was somewhat astonished that he should almost against his will be drawn so completely into the play. He had grown older, he had to admit. … A pair of conflicting emotions pressed themselves on him: old... Read more

“Sex in the Meritocracy”: Helen Rittelmeyer

Last updated on: January 19, 2013 at 3:34 pm By Eve Tushnet

w/a really good piece: I rather think Yale is plagued by an excess of moral purpose—that purpose being the pursuit of perfection, however perversely defined. Its students are not relativists; they are not even radicals. They are ordinary modern liberals, with all the earnestness and all the moral blind spots the term implies. Concepts like social responsibility and public service animate them greatly (not many Gordon Gekkos in this generation), honor and loyalty less so. Their code of sexual ethics... Read more

“The Relief Disaster”

Last updated on: January 19, 2013 at 3:30 pm By Eve Tushnet

Reason reviews Jonathan M. Katz’s new book: In The Big Truck That Went By, Katz presents an engaging first-person account of the quake and the first year of the international response that followed. He recounts living through the earthquake in the AP house, which served both as his residence and as an office for himself and his Haitian fixer/driver/translator, Evens Sanon. The first chapter takes readers through the chilling hours that followed the quake as Katz and Sanon rode around... Read more

Vintage Working Gold Lighter Earrings

Last updated on: January 18, 2013 at 11:27 pm By Eve Tushnet

You’re welcome. Via Ratty. Read more

“Did You Go to Passion 2013? Here’s What Fyodor Dostoyevsky Would Say to You”

Last updated on: January 18, 2013 at 11:25 pm By Eve Tushnet

(if he were a blogger, I guess? but no, some good stuff here) I will never forget the advice given to me a few years back by an older, wiser friend who had just planted a church near my hometown. I, as an eager gotta-do-it-yesterday college kid was (and am) excited about church planting. But my friend said to me something to the effect of, “These are not your best years of ministry. Spend this time learning, listening and maturing”.... Read more

“Christians: Siblings, Not ‘Friends’?”: Wesley Hill

Last updated on: January 18, 2013 at 11:21 pm By Eve Tushnet

writes: …In the New Testament, familial language far outweighs the language of friendship when it comes to describing Christian community. Believers are one another’s “brothers and sisters in Christ,” not (primarily) one another’s “friends.” It’s true, as Stephen Fowl and others have shown, that some of the Greco-Roman language of friendship is reappropriated in the New Testament as descriptive for the church. But by relocating that language into a context of spiritual kinship, the New Testament reconfigures it. “Friendship” is... Read more

JPII caps Nietzsche

Last updated on: January 17, 2013 at 1:53 pm By Eve Tushnet

Human beings, in a certain sense, are unknown to themselves. Jesus Christ not only reveals God, but “fully reveals man to man”. –from the Letter to Artists Read more

“How John Cho Got Slapped Down By Morrissey”

Last updated on: January 16, 2013 at 9:01 pm By Eve Tushnet

Via SKTJ. This is your warning about cussin’. Read more

The End of Football Juju, Humility: The Glossy Fur Coat of a Yale Man, and the Uncanny Parallels Between “Arrested Development” and Dostoyevsky

Last updated on: January 16, 2013 at 8:46 pm By Eve Tushnet

First Things has acquired Helen Rittelmeyer’s blog, so all of you need to change your bookmarks. Read more