For those who don’t already follow Crooked Timber, a group blog comprising (mostly) academics from an assortment of disciplines, I highly recommend it. It’s one of the best forum in which to read academics commenting on current events and, more usefully, to get some sense of the pulse across the academy, particularly in the humanities […]
I don’t have a detailed tally of the international coverage and commentary of the major US dailies. But it seems that the American press has been strangely uninterested in one of the biggest stories facing Europe in a long time: the expansion of the EU to include the former Soviet Bloc nations (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, […]
From today’s Washington Post:
But upon learning that the judges were with the World Trade Organization, and that they had ruled U.S. cotton subsidies to be in violation of international trade rules, [Texas cotton farmer George] Hoelscher began to perceive some dark truths.
“We’re losing our sovereignty in a lot of ways,” said Hoelscher, who farms […]
Since my last post on the 1913 law preventing out of state marriages, the issue has been more fiercely debated, as Gov. Romney has announced that he intends to use the law to instruct clerks not to issue any out of state residents gay marriage licenses, under the theory that since no other state yet […]
Yesterday, anti-gay marriage legislator in the House filed a long-shot measure seeking to remove the SJC justices who ruled in favor of gay marriage. Today, it’s the pro-gay side who has filed its own long-shot legislation, a bill to overturn the 1913 law disallowing the performance of marriages of out of state residents if those […]
It’s hardly news that Chinatown is transforming right now. The highest profile incursions into the neighborhood has been the development along Washington St. south from Downtown Crossing - the renovation of the Paramount, the erection of the Ritz-Carlton high rise, and now the new construction on the parking lot at Beach Street. On the other […]
No surprise, but from various news outlets we find out that Brown University has been recognized as the best-dressed Ivy and Harvard the worst. I’ve long been impressed with the off-the-runway attire of the semiotics majors - and the generally relaxed comfort in style of the (less fashionista) rest of the campus. What’s surprising is […]
The Globe today has an article on Boston’s residency requirement (the requirement that city workers live within Boston city limits). The article looks at the numbers and contracts and concludes that most city workers are exempt from the rule.
Just 4,836 of 16,695 city employees are subject to the residency ordinance, and most of those […]
From today’s roundup:
1) Burberry sales are up, remarkably so for a fashion retailer, at 13% over the last year. The source of their success? As the Guardian notes,
The story of the Burberry revival is a story of paradoxes…. “They’ve trodden the clever line between being very smart and Footballers’ Wives,” observes Alexandra Schulman, […]
I’ve been meaning - really - to write a post on NBC’s The Apprentice, and tonight’s finale seems like the time to get around to it finally. The surprise of the show has been that’s it’s made for such great television by juggling multiple dramas at once. It presented a battle of the sexes, stereotyped […]
Slate’s William Saletan picks apart the new anti-Bush ads from one 527 organization, the Media Fund. His verdict? The ads are perhaps politically smart but morally ugly. Criticism of economic policy has morphed into claiming that Bush is “creating jobs” overseas; criticism of Iraq has morphed into treating the Iraqis as the new welfare-queens. Here’s […]
Matt Yglesias quotes a pithy remark from Shibley Telhami: “We say we want democracy….I think our political elite wants democracy. I think even our leaders want democracy. But they want a lot of other things even more, and that’s the problem that we have in Iraq.”
It’s a good quote, but Yglesias’ gloss is even […]
For the dissertation, I’ve lately been reading up on the founding of MoMA’s film library in the 30s. Looking back, it seems such a seminal time for hierarchy of art and culture in the US. Not only was the museum taking popular, mass-media products seriously as art - with their own masterpieces, movements and aesthetics […]
I’ve been pretty silent during the entire Richard Clarke affair and now the appearance of Condoleezza Rice before the 9/11 commission. It’s been pretty dramatic as political stories go - and one in which the more melodramatic developments and partisan rancor are completely unseparable from real, substantial issues of American foreign policy - its past […]
Throughout the developments in the gay marriage debate here, I’ve tended to think that Romney’s anti-gay marriage shenanigans will ultimately hurt any reelection attempt. Probably not on a huge scale, as I sense that most voters don’t care one way or another about the issue, or at least aren’t prepared to make that the central […]