So the story goes that America is disinterested, often even benevolent, in its conduct of foreign affairs. We fought the Vietnam War to protect the South Vietnamese and the rest of Southeast Asia from Communism; same with the Korean War. World War II was “the Good War”; Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on [...]
Postscripts, follow-ups, and a few odds and ends I’ve wanted to share for a while:
1. Nostalgia or counternostalgia? The Jon Kessler Experience
VBS.tv has a little four-part Art Talk! interview with a friend of mine, Jon Kessler, who set up studio space out in Williamsburg in 1980. He took an entire factory building for $150 a [...]
Riding the Fung Wah bus from New York to Boston is cheap and more interesting than driving alone. Last week I found myself surrounded by the typical mix of ages, languages, food odors and fragments of music leaking from many earphones. I left my iPod in my bag, choosing instead to vaguely fill in a [...]
From Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish:
A reader has an interesting point:
1. Why is it illegal for me to pay a prostitute for sex, but it’s NOT illegal for a film director to pay two people to have sex in front of a camera and then make money for his product in the form of a [...]
About a year ago, my father wrote me an email. “You should get some therapy,” he said. “You really need it.” (He said some other stuff too, but we won’t get into that again.)
Of course, I dismissed this as a fake entreaty, bitter retaliation for a Whatsit post I wrote about growing up a child [...]