It probably won’t be news to anyone following the issue already, but I thought the NewsHour’s piece on the proposed Cape Cod wind farm was a good one.
My post on the Linda Hirschman article brought some grumbling in the comment section and plenty more here (hat tip: Crooked Timber). I should hasten to add that another, obvious reason I hestitate to be judgmental about anyone’s personal-as-political choices is that as a gay non-parent, I hardly have to face the lifestyle tradeoffs and […]
I won’t bug you with every DVD release notice, but this week’s dovetails with my renewed interest, scholarly and otherwise, in documentaries of the mid-20th century. First is a fascinating sounding series of British pseudo-documentaries directed by Peter Watkins. I’ve yet to see them (Netflix queue here they come), but I’ve been studying the postwar […]
Wow, this American Prospect polemic on feminism’s current crisis is really, really fascinating. Argument in a nutshell: to the extent that feminism has molded itself into a movement of individual choice and of women’s rights, it has ignored the true insight of women’s liberation that the family and the private sphere is the locus of […]
Complete Oscar bait. You have measured, langorous cinematography and editing, favoring longish-takes shot in melancholy hues. You have meticulous period piece production values. You have good, if showy, transformative acting. You have social problem angle of anti-death penalty thematics. You have plucky, independent vanity production company using culturally serious narrative about the half-misunderstood Artist as […]
Cross-posted at TPMCafe
Yes, it’s something of a moot point to fret about the success of liberal policymaking when a) liberals are so resolutely out of power at the moment and b) the current administration barely tries to pretend it cares about policy actually designed to solve problems. Still, for anyone who cares about how to […]
Today’s Wall Street Journal has a business trend article (subscription only) on supermarkets’ focus on prepared holiday dinners. Interesting tidbit: the dry goods sales at supermarkets (the non-snack food of the center aisles) have declined over 8 percent over the last four years. Given that 2001 was probably already a nadir for home baking and […]
Egads, I must be tapping into my heretofore unknown inner libertarian… Jeff Jacoby writes an article on blue laws and I (mostly) agree with him!
Since I’m on the subject of blue laws, let me bring up another yet somehow related ongoing gripe of mine: the tight restraints on liquor licensing in this town. A little insight from the August Boston magainze summarizes the problem best (sorry, no online version):
Another problem [for restaurant culture] is the limited availability of liquor […]
Mass Marrier points me to the Bay State Banner’s city election analysis grappling with the power Bostonian voters of color now exert. They’re cautiously optimistic, emphasis on caution:
While Flaherty walked out of West Roxbury with 53 percent of the vote, Arroyo came out with just 27 percent of the votes from the 9,093 voters who […]
So I’m catching up with the news for the last couple of days after a weekend out of town, and I see that the biggest local story seems to be controversy over Thanksgiving blue laws. (Hat tip: Universal Hub and Borderline. Archived story at the Globe) It started when Whole Foods planned to have all […]
My response to Perilous Times is forthcoming (maybe Monday), but while it’s fresh in my mind I want to encourage readers to consider joining our little Book Club. We’ve had a solid group of four to five people each time and some great discussion (we actually talk about the book, not simply gossip), but a […]
The Globe has a story on "office-isms," those catch phrases that have become commonplace at the workplace. The thing is, the catch phrases the author cites strike me as far from the most memorable corporate catch phrases floating out there. "Out of the box" is my favorite (not to be confused with "outside the box"), […]
In the current issue of Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review, there’s an interesting interview with Keith Boykin (sorry, no online version), who argues that the "down low" - i.e. the lifestyle/identification of black men who sleep with other men but who are not gay-identifying - was all media hype and invention. I’m inclined to believe […]
Sometimes I like local pundit Jon Keller - at the very least he’s beefed up CBS4’s political beat and has been a more analytical version of WHDH-7’s Andy Hiller. But this brand of political cynicism seems wrongheaded to me:
We are coming up on the 30th anniversary of the last major auto insurance reform here, […]