Writing for the Atlantic, R. Jay Magill reminds everyone that the irony/sincerity battle has been raging since, like, FOREVER. Also: the hipster has been around since before Christ. So Christy Wampole should just chill out a bit.
November 2012
“For the record, no one has been more correct in his analysis and prescriptions for the economy’s problems than Paul Krugman.”
– Bruce Bartlett, former domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and U.S. Treasury official under President George H. W. Bush, and author of Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action.
Revenge of the Reality-Based Community | The American Conservative
The novel I never wrote is spotless. Every sentence is a sickening surprise. The plot coils round you like a python. Your eyes water badly at the humanist climax. You do not trust this response.
It is three hundred and twenty-nine pages long. It is at least fifty-four percent true and took six days to write. Seventeen people conspired against it, and each died under odd circumstances.
Essayist William Deresiewicz worries that our newfound appreciation of food is coming at the expense of art:
Just as aestheticism, the religion of art, inherited the position of Christianity among the progressive classes around the turn of the 20th century, so has foodism taken over from aestheticism around the turn of the 21st. Now we read the gospel according, not to Joyce or Proust, but to Michael Pollan and Alice Waters. […] But food, for all that, is not art. Both begin by addressing the senses, but that is where food stops. […] A good risotto is a fine thing, but it isnt going to give you insight into other people, allow you to see the world in a new way, or force you to take an inventory of your soul.
I like this idea.
[Maybe] the solution is simply to give Texas and other secessionist-conservatives what they really want: free passage to the land of all their conservative fantasies. Send them all off with gratis one-way tickets (I’m happy to earmark some of my socialist tax dollars for the effort) to a country with: a small federal government with limited power and meager influence over the private lives of its citizens; extremely weak trade unions routinely sabotaged by the federal government (i.e., a “pro-business environment”); negligible income tax; few immigrants, legal or otherwise; a dominant Christian population, accounting for some 70 percent of the people; no mandatory health insurance or concept of universal health care; a strong social taboo surrounding homosexuality and a constitution that already states, “All individuals have the right to marry a person of their choice of the opposite sex”; and a gun culture so ubiquitous that you can find automatic weaponry displayed openly on the streets of its capital city and in many households.
Sound like a Texan secessionist’s dream? Well, it’s no dream. This country already exists. It’s called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Don’t mess with us, Texas. You just might get what you want.
The New Republic: Go Ahead and Secede, Texas. We Dare You.
Texas becomes a semiautonomous territory (with no electoral votes) and Puerto Rico becomes a full state. No need to create a new flag with 51 stars.
Let’s do this.
People selling books: “YES. They’re awful, these kids!”
Science: “The cross-temporal meta-analytic technique for identifying cohort-related changes in psychological characteristics is limited in terms of how the method is usually applied to the existing literature (Arnett, in press; Trzesniewski, Donnellan, & Robins, 2008a).”
