It may have been because I hadn’t slept well the night before, but a couple of days ago, while I was riding the subway to work, a newspaper article about state parks almost brought tears to my eyes. And not near-tears of joy, or of wistful memories of childhood trips. The article just made me [...]
Archive for the ‘Politics’ category
In or out?
If your collection of Facebook Friends is similar to mine, you’ve probably been seeing these lately: I’m not in. Rather than an exhaustive list of why I’m not happy with the Obama administration, let me give you just a few illustrative points: – Failure to prosecute Bush administration officials for torture and other crimes. – [...]
Widening gyre
This whole month, both of my literature classes have turned into discussions of what defines the human and what we assume that humans deserve by being human. We’re reading a lot of 18th-century stuff on colonialism and slavery, so it keeps coming up, even if I fear that the conversation is getting wide of strictly [...]
You get to color this one in yourself
To start off, a provocative post about the media by John Emerson: Everyone talks about the media, but no one has been able to do anything about it. I share the common opinion that the disaster of contemporary American politics is in large part the result of the corruption and dishonesty of the media, and [...]
Censorship is a Funny Thing
In the past few weeks, my roommate and I have watched a couple of movies that got their directors banned from making films in their home countries. We didn’t set out to do it; it’s just what we like, I guess. It seems a bit extreme to me, not just to ban the film itself, [...]
Reading the Constitution
So apparently the House of Representatives is going to read the Constitution today. The Republicans, particularly the Tea Partiers, apparently consider this a partisan act. There are parts of the Constitution I’m not crazy about; an obvious one is the undemocratic structure of the Senate. But there are other parts I really love. For example, [...]
Bigotry vs. bigotry
A couple of weeks ago, commentator Juan Williams got fired from NPR for saying this: The firing caused a huge uproar; many believed Williams was simply stating a truth, something that many other non-Americans feel too, and that political correctness had run amok. Personally, I was glad to see Williams fired, mostly because it’s not [...]
Do! Your! Civic! Duty!
…today, please! And if you live in California, please vote… and… and… Thank you. If you live elsewhere, please do not vote for… Or… Or… Or anything relating to the … And…
Fatigue
Regardless of what happens on Tuesday, many of us will wake up on Wednesday feeling a vast sense of relief. Until then, I wanted to share one last attack ad, which I think we can all enjoy…
Make it better now
I can’t get Asher Brown’s face out of my head. The Texas teenager committed suicide last month after years of bullying at school. You probably haven’t heard of him. His story was overshadowed by that of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers freshman who jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate secretly recorded him kissing [...]
