IN WHICH I STILL DON’T QUOTE OSCAR WILDE!: EDITED 9/28 to fix a ridiculously stupid mistake! …I’ve gotten two terrific pushbacks on my big post about sincerism. You can find Camassia’s here. And Miss Ogilvy emailed me thusly: Just a quick question in reply to your recent “sincerism” posts: where and how does a gay self-identity (as opposed to a queer self-identity, which is a bit more flexible and maybe less self-serious) fit into your arguments against sincerism? I think... Read more

THIS BILL IS NOT A TOY: The invaluable Walter Olson on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, aka the Unintended Consequences Are a Conservative Rhetorical Device Act–this is horrible stuff, and, as Olson points out, more may be coming down the pike: Last Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee finally held a hearing on the highly controversial Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the children’s-product-safety law that took effect on Feb. 10. Chairman Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) allowed a single... Read more

The denial of the Fall–the hopeful insisted–was supposed to make life more cheerful; Bushnell was sure it succeeded only in making it duller. It was a denial of that human potential for evil which had made life adventurous precisely by making genuine moral crisis possible. It was a failure to understand tragedy. The sustained American aversion for tragedy, then as now, was based upon an obscure connection between tragedy and low spirits. Bushnell, pointing to the most enduring tragic dramas... Read more

DISTURBING SEARCH REQUESTS: maleness and humanity Read more

UH, HERE’S THE ACTUAL LINK TO “GOLEM: A JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND MONSTERS.” Sorry about that! Read more

SETTLING: I have a review of Andrew Cherlin’s Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today in the current Weekly Standard. Link is subscribers-only right now; I’ll let you know if that changes…. Read more

TRADITIONAL MUSIC IN ENGLAND: “Circa 20,717 field recordings of traditional music, including popular ballads, children’s skipping songs, customs, music hall, soldiers’ songs folk tales and interviews.” via WKO. Read more

PESTIVAL 2009: INSECT ARTS FESTIVAL. The termite pavilion looks pretty epic. Via The Rat, who deserves a Pestival of her very own…. Read more

GOLEM: JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND MONSTERS. Eventually via LOTT-D. EDITED to unfuzzle the link. You can click through now! Read more

PLAYGROUND TWIST. Oh. I hadn’t realized that “Rockin’ Robin” was covered by the Jackson 5. I guess that explains why we all knew it as a handclap rhyme, more than ten years after they sang it on “Top of the Pops.” It was an incendiary expression of pure joy. Read more