INTRODUCTION This is the 22th episode of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” a rambling consideration of Thurber’s works, examining his life and work in some detail. Generally, these appear every Friday. The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 22 continues the discussion of Thurber’s 1942 collection, My…
Author: Alan Vanneman
Hillary Clinton, Warrior Princess
By now, you may have read that Hillary Clinton’s interview with Jeffrey Goldberg was not quite the unadulterated love-fest that Goldberg described in his intro to the rap session. It was only 99 percent unadulterated. At the Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky wants us to believe that Hillary isn’t really a neocon. She’s just a “muscular…
Ferguson: White folks being white folks, cops being cops, and black revolutionaries being bad asses
Those white folks down in Ferguson, Missouri are clever, aren’t they? In a classic “winner deals and dealer wins” situation, the white power structure has arranged for city elections to be held on off years, in April! Hey, what’s wrong with having an electorate composed of the citizens who care, who work hard, who aren’t…
Tony Malaby, William Parker, & Nasheet Waits—“Tamarindo”
Live from Sound It Out at the Greenwich House Music School, July 31, 2013. Parker is on bass and Waits on drums. Posted by Scott Friedlander All jazz videos here
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. All cartoons here. and here “Yeah, that was excessive. But somehow I don’t feel so bad.” “Technically, it’s legal. But Big Bill Bronson don’t do technical.” “A few broken windows I can ignore. A flipped car, not so much.” “This isn’t a cry for help. This is a cry for a butt-kicking.”…
James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide, Part 21
INTRODUCTION This is the 20th episode of “James Thurber, A Reader’s Guide,” a rambling consideration of Thurber’s works, examining his life and work in some detail. Generally, these appear every Friday. The links to the first part and the most recent part are given below. Part 21 continues the discussion of The Male Animal, Thurber’s…
Pseudo New Yorker
Legal humor here. All cartoons here. and here “Hey, at least they got rid of the office cat. That was huge!” “If we don’t keep busy they’ll tap on the glass. And we both hate it when that happens.: “Listen, if I got upset every time Miley Cyrus ignored one of my mash-ups, I’d go…
Thomas Friedman, last seen doing a piss-poor job at self criticism
Over at Politico, Jonathan Topaz reports that Thomas Friedman recently told MSNBC “If there’s anything we should have learned from Iraq … it’s that we don’t know what the hell we’re doing,” Let me unpack that remark just a little, and give you the gist of what Tom is trying to say: “I am a…
New Yorkers find themselves unable to cope with conversations not based exclusively on the self-congratulatory repetition of thread-bare, left-wing clichés
In a long, desperate post, New York reporter Tim Murphy clues us into the intellectual crisis that’s halting conversations all across Manhattan and large parts of Brooklyn: In New York, folks don’t think twice about cheering gay marriage or abortion rights, but never know what buttons they’ll push among friends, family, or colleagues if they…
Ross Douthat’s Obama Outrage O’ the Week
I’m in the habit of reading Ross Douthat’s blog “Evaluations” at the New York Times, which, when he is not ruminating about the reverberative, not to say rebarbarative, phallocentricity of John Melius, is largely devoted to Ross’s mostly honest account of “thoughtful” conservatives like Ross to craft a domestic policy for the Republican Party that…