Archive for 2011

Social facts

Many philosophers make a distinction between natural and social. What is natural is given to us by nature or reality. What is social is somehow created by us, humans, albeit often through massively complicated and impersonal processes. In particular, philosophers speak of natural facts and social facts. Natural facts are facts that “carve nature at […]

Beer…

! (av’s new beat.)

End-of-year playlist: what year is it, again?

Today I really loved my job. In the morning I taught Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, which takes place in the summer of 1985, when the narrator is 15. (The book’s climax, if it can be called that, is the day that Lisa Lisa—and Cult Jam!—come into the ice cream shop where the narrator works and […]

Magic in his eye: JDub

Serenity now!

At the risk of seeming like an Apple worshiper, I will recommend to you the Buddha Machine app. Once you play around with it and figure out the Chinese characters, you can customize up to six different drones for simultaneous play on an iPad. Ommmm.

2011 in Movies!

2011 has thus far been a pretty terrible year for film. It set the record for the most sequels at 27, the highest since 2003 (23). It was also the year that Werner Herzog, Justin Bieber and Martin Scorsese embraced the third dimension, Adam Sandler dressed in drag and Shakespeare was reenacted by animated gnomes. […]

Till human voices wake us, and we drown

Because of a family medical history predisposing me to cancer, I have an MRI screening at least once a year, sometimes twice. Most people I mention this to express a claustrophobic terror of this experience, but I find there’s something perversely peaceful about it. Getting tucked into a heavy double layer of blankets, I start […]

I want to get old

Reading this excellent, somewhat-Shandean meditation on the glories of post-menopausal life by Roseanne Barr got me all jealous. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve been spending a lot of my time around post-menopausal women lately, but I’m going through a phase in which I simply can’t wait to be in my mid-50’s. I think that’s […]

Hello, Bali!

No football and turkey and family gatherings for us this year! Instead, RB and I decided to head to Indonesia for ten days, deciding where exactly to go after we arrived. Here’s how our vacation unfolded, in very brief because we just got in tonight from 28 hours of planes, airports and automobiles: This is […]

Busted Brown

You’d never catch Thom McCann hanging out in just his undies.