– Was Googling my own blog, and found this picture titled “flybottle,” which I assume is a depiction of Wittgenstein helping to show Popper the way out.
Tyler Cowen excerpts this NYT piece by Barry Schwartz on whether we have too many choices. I found titibits like this pretty damn obvious:
Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper, psychologists at Columbia and Stanford respectively, have shown that as the number of flavors of jam or varieties of chocolate available to shoppers is increased, the [...]
– If today was my birthday, how old would I be?
I’m going with K-Rad, Emilicious & the D.I.K., among others, to see the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at the Kennedy Center. Very exciting!
– Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber drips with disgust at Congressman Billy Tauzin’s whoring:
For the last couple of weeks, theres been a bidding war between the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) for Tauzins services. The MPAA had paid its outgoing head lobbyist, the unlamented Jack [...]
– Gawker Media has launched a new blog devoted to gossip about the Federal City side of the District. Despite their innovative reputation, let it not go unsaid that in this instance Gawker is derivative. Swamp City has been covering the same beat for some time now, with panache. You should add it to your [...]
– Joanne McNeill has the lowdown on paunchy aging hipster Gavin McGinnes. His claim to be conservative was apparently a spoof. This supports my argument below that claiming to be conservative is likely to be cooler than actually being conservative. McGinnes does a great job of showing how very uncool conservatives are by showing us [...]
– It’s not often these days that I say this, but I think Andrew Sullivan is spot on about the SOTU. If I didn’t agree entirely with Chris Sciabarra about the irrelevance of the presidency given the structural immutability of the American political system (great post, read it), then I too would be shopping [...]
– Despite the arguments set forth by Holiday Dmitri on NRO, conservatism is not now, and never was, cool. Indeed, anyone disposed to utter “young hipublican” without scare-quotes is immediately disqualified from the cool sweeps (unless of course the lack of scare quotes is itself part of an undetectably ironic performance of earnestness, which is [...]
– I enjoyed Mia Fineman’s perceptive but careful-not-to-make-too-firm-a-judgment essay on the paintings of John Currin on Slate. I find Currin excruciatingly boring, and technically just OK. Without the funky anatomical distortion (the creepy tiny extremities!), there’s just nothing to take in. But do look at the slideshow which features some other decent neo-realist painters. Vincent [...]
– Since my window for interest in Iowa-themed posts is now closing, let me just point out that Iowa comes out as the 47th most corrupt state in the union in this study. When I tell people Iowa was a good place to grow up, this sort of thing is part of what I [...]
– Galen Strawson calls out the “narrativist orthodoxy” in his review of Jerome Bruner’s Making Stories. Strawson argues, and he is right, that we are not “constituted” by the stories of our lives in which we cast ourselves as characters. While having a sense that one’s life has gone well may involve seeing it as [...]
Tim Graham of the NRO Corner get’s it right. Take note all you Mid-Atlantic ninnies.
UM…IT’S IOWA. [Tim Graham]
Dumbest moment of the morning came on NPR, when Juan Williams was asked if the around-zero cold would keep Iowans home from the caucuses. This is IOWA, people. They’re USED to these temps in the winter. Twenty below [...]
– As an irrationally proud and defensive Iowan, I am annoyed by the headline of the top story on the Slate front page. It says: “The Phantom Pollbooth: Why You’ll Never Know who won Iowa.” (The headline over the story itself reads, cryptically, “The Vanishing.”)
The implication here is that there is something wrong with [...]
– In response to my claim that men have not yet figured out how best to be men in the post-feminist world, Kim “Rifleman” DuToit writes:
Actually, we have figured it out, but I’m not so sure women are going to like the answer.
We seem to have preferred to opt out of the whole [...]
– I’m proud to report that the Fly Bottle is #2 in this search on AOL, just after “A Special Weekend” by D. at Spinkle’s Golden Showers! [WARNING: For the love of sweet Jesus DO NOT READ "A Special Weekend" by D. at Sprinkle's Golden Showers!!! Just don't.]
[To National Review Readers: Sorry about [...]
This is just nauseating. The New York Times reports that the Bush administration is planning to provide “$1.5 billion for training to help couples develop interpersonal skills that sustain ‘healthy marriages.’”
This is apparently what compassionate conservatism comes to: the intrusion of the state in even the most personal spheres of life; social engineering through therapy.
“We [...]
– Terence O. Moore is worried that manhood is ailing, and that our culture now produces only barbarians and wimps. While there is some truth to his complaints, my issue with this kind of conservative social criticism is its utter lack of imagination. The world has changed, and despite Moore’s loathing of whiners, all he [...]
– Julia Magnet’s thoughtful paean to the films of Whit Stillman moved me to dwell on tensions in my own character that reflect, I think, the uneasy integration of fairly traditional (read: conservative) values and the values of the “sexual revolution.” Magnet enthusiastically approves of Stillman’s rearguard defense of traditional conventions, and his indictment of [...]
– Well, very suddenly, I am teaching an introductory aesthetics course at Howard University, not far from my digs. I’m scrambling to prepare.
In addition, I’m guest blogging over at Liberty & Power. And I’m still blogging at Radley’s until, I guess, he tells me I’m not.