YouTube I guess this is cool? Using homeless people as a means to teach a brand you’ll never buy a lesson they won’t hear? I guess? I’m all for trolling giant corporations, don’t get me wrong. But if some bearded guy with a camera came up to me and said, “Hey! This retailer said only [...]
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From the Blog
Anthony Foxx, the mayor of Charlotte and Obama’s pick for the next Secretary of Transportation, issued two city proclamations yesterday. One of them recognized the National Day of Prayer; the other one declared the day to be a Day of Reason. The second proclamation noted that the country was founded on the principles of reason [...]
“How?” asked the staring Professor. “Why?” “Because I am afraid of him,” said Syme; “and no man should leave in the universe anything of which he is afraid.” – G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday Jacob Bacharach observed something on his blog the other day that prompted a reminiscence of my own: my lingering [...]
I struggled a lot with this post for several reasons. Chief among them is that not only do I know several first responders in Boston – EMTs, firefighters – I’m friends with one of the officials who conducted DHS emergency response drills in Boston for the last two summers. I’ve had beers and gone to [...]
In 2001, my father worked in the DC area, sometimes commuting into the city depending on his work schedule. Obviously nothing happened any nearer than Arlington on September 11th of that year, but in the first couple hours we didn’t really know what was going on. When Seung-Hui Cho shot up the Virginia Tech campus [...]
Over the last few months I’ve found, in the weird corners of the Internet (Boing Boing, Vice, NPR), occasional references to ASMR – autonomous sensory meridian response. It is, to quote the Vice article, “a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine [...] a shortcut to a [...]
Hey folks! I haven’t been updating here, I know, but I’ve been cranking out pop culture posts on Overthinking It for your entertainment: Is Batman a Virgin?: Examining how Batman subverts the usual action hero trope of superior virility. Suits and the Unsustainable Premise: How long can a show’s core premise strain our suspension of [...]
Note: every time I talk about sales figures for Too Close to Miss, I open the post with a very self-conscious apology for talking about sales figures. I still feel self-conscious about it! Focusing too much on sales numbers turns writing from a noble attempt to bridge the unfathomable gap between Self and Other into [...]
Struggling after the fact to put my conflicting feelings about Django Unchained and Quentin Tarantino into words, I came up with this: Tarantino never makes films in the genres he admires. Rather, he borrows the trappings of genre to talk about subjects he finds important. With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino used the trappings of a war [...]