iMortal
It looks like a previous Kindle ad, but with a twist at the end that pleases the bleeding heart liberal in me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lS3t9reE364 Read more
It looks like a previous Kindle ad, but with a twist at the end that pleases the bleeding heart liberal in me. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=lS3t9reE364 Read more
You really have to watch this video of this mystical guy who really seems to know things he could not possibly know about the people he’s giving readings to. Watch to the end to have your mind blown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F7pYHN9iC9I Read more
Why I love the Internet: I thought to myself, they often talk about overseas military bases as being places where a lot of famous chains come and claim territory (the obligatory McDonald’s in Baghdad or what have you), and presumably Starbucks would be one of those chains. So if the United States really did ever build a Death Star as so many folks wanted, how many Starbucks would it have? Then I thought, this is the Internet. Someone will find... Read more
Before his time, Jack White shakes his fists at the clouds. Via The Verge: “Getting out of your chair at home to experience something in the real world has started to become a rare occurrence,” White says. “Why go to a book store and get a real book? You can just download it. Why talk to other human beings, discuss different authors, writing styles and influences? Just click your mouse.” (None of these qualify as activities in White’s real world.)... Read more
As mentioned in the previous post, which is about something else entirely, I was delighted by a 41-year-old essay in the New York Review of Books by Isaiah Berlin on Machiavelli’s The Prince, a piece that kind of bowled me over. Berlin makes a case for where he thinks Machiavelli is coming from morally: Is he an evil bastard who thinks it’s fine to just crush people underfoot? Or is he a pragmatist who understands that sometimes you have to... Read more
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 be compelled to digest it. Heck, I even got my master’s from GWU’s political management program, which could well be described as a graduate school for... Read more
From the NYT report on the Siberia meteor: “I opened the window from surprise — there was such heat coming in, as if it were summer in the yard, and then I watched as the flash flew by and turned into a dot somewhere over the forest,” wrote Darya Frenn, a blogger. “And in several seconds there was an explosion of such force that the window flew in along with its frame, the monitor fell, and everything that was on... Read more
Ta-Nehisi Coates on our perpetual state of war: The president is anti-torture — which is to say he thinks the water-boarding of actual confirmed terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was wrong. He thinks it was wrong, no matter the goal — which is to say the president would not countenance the torture of an actual terrorist to foil a plot against the country he’s sworn to protect. But the president would countenance the collateral killing of innocent men, women and children... Read more
His creepiness Pope Benedict XVI is going to resign at the end of the month, and before anybody gets any ideas, I want to throw my hat into the ring to be the new guy wearing the giant, ridiculous hat. Why Paul for Pope? I’ll lend an unprecedented breath of fresh air to a decaying institution, as the first Pope to actually admit his own atheism. I’ll enforce particular pieces of Catholic dogma that suit me personally, and ignore the... Read more
Go ahead and let this passage from a wonderful piece on Galileo by Adam Gropnik in The New Yorker blow your mind. What would Shakespeare’s Galileo have been, one wonders, had he ever written him? Well, in a sense, he had written him, as Falstaff, the man of appetite and wit who sees through the game of honor and fidelity. Galileo’s myth is not unlike the fat knight’s, the story of a medieval ethic of courage and honor supplanted by... Read more
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