John Oliver hit close to home for me with a "Last Week Tonight" segment on the importance of customer service workers in home improvement stores. He enlisted Nick Offerman, Sarah Baker and Sterling Archer to dramatize why my colleagues at the Big Box could never be replaced by robots. Read more
One phrase that came up again and again when the Southern Baptist Convention named its new spokesman was “media savvy.” Richard Land, who served for decades as chief of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, was a media dinosaur. Russell Moore, who replaced him as the denomination’s primary public face, seemed to have a much better grasp of social media and the Internet. Being more “media savvy” than Richard Land sets the bar pretty low. This was a guy,... Read more
Quick -- whats 2 * 0 * 1 * 4? Did you get zero? I got zero. Also: theistic atheists; Pat Robertson's spiritual warfare against Parker Brothers; a Bircher in the Senate; 23 fiscally irresponsible governors; and stuff white teachers say in North Carolina. Read more
A spoonful of Sugar helps the Monday links go down, featuring: Heritage USA as haunted village; the Queen's annual Swan Upping; the myth of Aristotle; the user agreement to all technology; covert baristas; and the recipe for Guacamole Karloff. Read more
Rick Paulas says Americans should adopt the bidet. That seems unlikely -- for many reasons discussed here. But this post isn't actually about bathrooms and bidets. Read more
Some Sunday afternoon linkage, including: Paul Waldman on the gigantic federal failure that wasn't; praise for an endorsement rejected and praise for an endorsement withheld; the man who taught Inigo Montoya to fight; and who's stealing from whom? Read more
"Wisdom excels folly as light excels darkness. The wise have eyes in their head, but fools walk in darkness. Yet I perceived that the same fate befalls all of them." Read more
Mary Hunt on the Synod on the Family; Elesha Coffman on Randall Balmer; Monte Harrell Hampton on the "Southbound" evangelical Bible; and Mark Binelli on "The Great Kansas Tea Party Disaster." Read more
In theory, Comcast could have an incredibly detailed demographic dossier on our household. But when it comes to mining that data for any apparent purpose, they don't even seem to have a grasp on the basic geography they could learn from our billing address. We get ads for political candidates in other states and for restaurant chains that don't have any franchises in our region. We get ads for diapers and baby care products and motorcycle insurance. Read more
All the rest of what we think of as ethics shouldn't stop at the bedroom door, replaced there by the separate sub-category of "sexual ethics." Rather than risk segregating "sexual ethics" from the rest of our ethics, we might be better served by some variation of that silly game we play with fortune cookies. We should reaffirm what we already know or believe about ethics ... "in bed." Read more
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