brother versus brother! who will win?
Amplifying Kevin Drum 's remarks, Ezra Klein points out: You hear a lot about "countercyclical policy" amidst deep recessions. You don't hear much about it amidst periods of joyously fast growth. Instead, our thumb is always on the same side of the scale: We have counter-recessionary policy and pro-expansionary policy. The problem, as Kevin puts it, is both human and political. "How do you ensure…
Weird NYT front-pager on a decision confronting President Obama: "whether the government must provide health insurance benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees." As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama said he would “fight hard” for the rights of gay couples. As a senator, he sponsored legislation that would have provided health benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees. Now, Mr.…
When Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons began work on Watchmen, the twelve-issue DC Comics maxiseries (yup, that’s what we called them in 1986) that would come to bear the literary aspirations of superhero comics fandom on its shoulders, they chose to restrict themselves by declaring certain established techniques off-limits. Watchmen contains no thought balloons, the cloud-shaped bubbles used for…
Surowiecki: First of all, we don’t want policymakers to assume the worst about the future when shaping economic policy. Nor do we want them to assume the best. Actually, we don’t want them to assume anything. Instead, we want them to come up with the most accurate forecast of the future they can, and to adopt the economic policies that make the most sense given that forecast. Unfortunately, it's…
Matt Linderman writes : Imagine you’re the drummer in a band. If you ask the bandleader for permission to do something different, it starts a whole conversation that may result in an argument or your idea being shot down. But what if you just do what you think is best? What if you switch to the ride cymbal during the chorus or use brushes instead of sticks? If it sounds good, it sounds good.…
Best news of the holiday season: David Denby has written a book entitled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation -- setting up what will no doubt be a knock-down, drag-out contest to write the best negative review. Adam Sternbergh takes an early lead .
Link rodeo: Adam Gopnik remembers Saul Steinberg. The real progenitors of modern Republicanism are not Goldwater and Reagan but McCarthy and Nixon. Terry Gross interviews the great Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, of Philadelphia International Records [ web , iTunes ].
Why professional journalism sucks: Dan "Fake Steve" Lyons quits blogging in Newsweek censorship fracas.
Gay marriage: The database engineering perspective.
John Darnielle: "It's pretentious, but hard-won pretentiousness is its own kind of realness once you've learned the secret handshake."
Wait ... Jeff Tweedy is friends with Barack Obama?
This made me really sad for Jack Kirby.
Harold Meyerson: "Second, Waxman is a legislative genius ."
Chuck Klosterman: "The GNR members Rose misses more are Izzy Stradlin (who effortlessly wrote or co-wrote many of the band's most memorable tunes) and Duff McKagan, the underappreciated bassist who made Appetite For Destruction so devastating. Because McKagan worked in numerous Seattle-based bands before joining Guns N' Roses, he became the de facto arranger for many of those pre- Appetite tracks,…
Ezra Klein: "You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. "
In the spirit of Nathan Zuckerman's perennial Hebrew-school essay topic "Sandy Koufax: Great Pitcher, Greater Jew," comes the Forward 's roundup of the top 50 Jews . Of Matthew Weiner's Mad Men, which features two peripheral Jewish characters in its large cast, the editors write: " Mad Men won six Emmy awards this year, including one for best drama, but its greater accomplishment was in shaping…
These past few days I've been crying at odd intervals, prompted sometimes by pieces of music -- James Carter's version of "Summer Babe" coming up on shuffle, Sam Cooke's version of "A Change Is Gonna Come" coming up in my head -- and sometimes by the sight of children in strollers, although when the children are black I try to hide my emotion because I bet the black parents of Fort Greene are…
I love Fort Greene.
For the past two decades, a core set of "cultural conservative" opinions has served as a theoretical dividing line between "red" (Republican/conservative) and "blue" (Democratic/liberal) America. These incude attitudes toward sex roles, the centrality of Christianity in culture, and a social traditionalism focused on patriotism and the family. If you were to translate that divide into baby names…
Spore wrapup: Seed article on the conflict among the game's developers: the "cute team" versus the "science team." On the Spore messageboard, disappointed fans react with a thread called "We Found Who to Tar and Feather!" Biologist P. Z. Myers bemoans the dumbed-down science.
OMG, I'd forgotten like 65 percent of these , and the rest are permanently burned into my brain.
Andrew Sullivan : If you place a map of the states that favoured the proslavery south over a map of the states that are now showing a trend for John McCain, you will get an almost perfect match. The only differences: Virginia has switched sides, and West Virginia has too. (It is now for McCain.) Florida, once part of the Confederacy, is also now prone to vote Democrat because of a massive influx…
Awesome website for Maura's new book.
Mark Danner's " Obama and Sweet Potato Pie ": Probably the best non-newsy belles-lettristic thing I've read about the campaign, maybe the closest we're going to get to a full-scale Joan Didion Obama/McCain piece.
[37] David Lipsky's great sad biographical piece about DFW, the most thorough so far, is now online .