Fresh off the resolution of a boycott crisis, Bay Windows has another great editorial: Our Problems Are Bigger than Microsoft. The lede says it all: “The thing that makes the Microsoft story so maddening is that despite the fact that Microsoft is an evil company, it’s our evil company.” Susan Ryan-Vollmar goes on to analyze […]
The Third Decade’s Derek takes me to task for writing about arcane tax policy while ignoring a recently released study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project on racial discrimination in Boston. Let me just say that a) I think there is a place for arcane policy matters in blogging and it’s something I enjoy writing […]
Kevin Drum decides to get constructive and offer a couple of “frames” liberals could adopt - nice, pithy summations of policy in everyday language. Far be it for me to shun this project, as I wish I were better at thinking like that. But let’s think a second before we adopt Kevin’s measure #1:
Here’s an […]
Memento and the Charlie Kauffman-scripted films seem to have started off a mini-genre of off-beat genre independent films. Primer (d. Shane Carruth), at least, wraps science fiction and a little bit of thriller within the realist ethos of the indie film. The results are great.
I don’t want to reveal too much of the narrative […]
Michael Berube ponders what the best pop song is and gets many nominations in reply, a surprising number of which I can endorse. (I’d have to choose Big Star’s “September Gurls” for showing that bubblegum can have texture, melancholy and complexity.)
But claiming that he doesn’t acknowledge the divide between rock and pop seems […]
There’s a scene at the start of Preston Sturges’ Sullivans Travels (1941) in which John L. Sullivan, an action star who wants to make “important” social-problem films, describes an action fight scene in his movie as an allegory of Capital and Labor. The joke is now multilayered. It’s funny because Sullivan’s film is simply an […]
Tyler Green reports speculation that Harvard’s Fogg museum is contemplating a move to the South Boston Seaport district.
The Carpetbagger Report weighs the P.R. blunder that Senator Bill Frist’s appearance at this weekend’s Family Research Council conference and concludes that the senator has gone out on a political limb.
I’ve not read Jay Epstein’s book yet, but […]
At Mother Jones’ blog, Bradford Plumer riffs off of a Democracy Arsenal post and wonders why "free trade" and "fair trade" liberals can’t find political common ground.
Part of the problem, I think, is a simple trust issue. Whenever the "fair trade" crowd raises objections to this or that treaty, as with CAFTA, the neoliberal […]
After pointing me to James Howard Kunstler’s article on oil depletion, my friend Whit looked up Kunstler’s website and suggested I take a look. He’s right: it’s a series of a serious thesis and some smart readings of buildings punctuated with rants: one confusing postmodern architecture with a strawman cultural relativism, one mocking factory workers […]
Apologies for the sparse posting this week. I’ve been frantically revising my first chapter, as I enter the home stretch of the dissertation. But since Chapter 1 is on industrial history in the classical period, a side thought arose: how much of our sense of Hollywood is skewed by the relative unavailability of B films? […]
His cheesy logo/slogan did deserve some ribbing. And unlike Point .08 Acres, I don’t think “Believe Again” will have especially appeal to crossover suburbanites. It will have appeal to progressive suburbanites, the ones who supported Reich in 2002.
But I should point out that I’m quite open minded about the Deval Patrick candidacy. Everyone seems to […]
Busy day today. Let me just note that someone’s rather transparently trying to ride the Red Sox victory to a victory of his own:
Last night, my friends and I went out for post-dinner birthday drinks at one of those bistro-y South End bars and in the process discovered an insidious trend. Reaching for the wine list lying next to the bar menu, we discovered that it was in fact a list, with prices, of all of the art […]
That seems to be the idea circulating on the new literary studies group blog The Valve as well on Crooked Timber. For instance, the Valve’s Daniel Green writes:
More than anything else, academic blogging (in its literary version) is going to have to muster up some enthusiasm for its ostensible subject–literature. In my view, such […]
Sweden:British Rock::Canada:American Rock
Discuss.