Category: Uncategorized
-
Getting Things Done (Philosopher’s Edition)
My family likes the business self-help section of the bookstore. When I was an an awkward adolescent, my father made me read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and How to Win Friends and Influence People. Seriously. I’m not a big fan of this kind of thing; I think it’s a bit of a…
-
Life in Tehran
Things look pretty normal in Iran these days. Check out this Flickr blog of quotidian shots of Persian life.
-
Advice for Romantics: Stay in School, Get a Job
The Boston Globe has a long story about the shift in marriage rates for educated women. It looks like: 1. “The median age for a first marriage nationally is now 25.5 for women and 27 for men. It is even higher for those with graduate degrees. In Massachusetts, the median age at first marriage is…
-
Love Song: I and Thou
Alan Dugan’s off-putting rhythm and his messianic carpentry metaphor makes love a labor of suffering and still finds room for a partner. I enjoy the way he manages to build a love poem out of his self-obsession and his undirected fury… even though I don’t experience love that way, I recognize the power of the…
-
Carla Bruni is no Paris Hilton
Carla Bruni went from heiress to model to singer/songwriter. Her new release shows she has the wisdom to copy her betters rather than write poor facsimiles. She sets poems by Emily Dickinson, W.B. Yeats, Dorothy Parker, Walter de la Mare, W.H. Auden, and Christina Rossetti to music. Listen. (via) “Promises Like Pie-Crust” by Christina Georgina…
-
Gerrymandering hurts progressives participation
Incorporating the results of the 2006 election cycle, Ronald Klain argues that Progressives cannot afford to put election reform on the backburner. Rather, Klain suggests that, unless reforms are aggressively pursued, partisan gerrymandering will continue to weaken voter choice and participatory democracy in ways that ultimately hurt progressives in the long run: 1. There are…
-
Walmart: A sufficiently advanced capitalism is indistinguishable from socialism
I came across a blog a while back that argued that Walmart’s size and distribution has put them in a state-like position vis-a-vis their workers, the communities in which their stores are based, and the regulation of their distributors. When you think about it, there’s a strong congruity between communist architecture and Sam’s Club chic.…
-
Women’s Petition Against Coffee
Women’s petition against coffee from 1674: Thus like Tennis Balls between two Rackets, the Fopps our Husbands are bandied to and fro all day between the Coffee-house and Tavern, whilst we poor Souls sit mopeing all alone till Twelve at night, and when at last they come to bed smoakt like a Westphalia Hogs-head we…
-
Cost-benefit analysis of drug policy
Here is why I love the economic analysis of policy. It’s an article by Mark A. R. Kleiman, detailing some simple rule changes and common sense redistributions of law enforcement budgets in order to maximize the efficiency and fairness of our drug enforcement policy. Imagine if we asked the DEA, the FBI, and the Army…
-
The New Executive Order: Cost-Benefit Analysis and Market Failure
I’m late in getting to this news, but on January 18th, President Bush amended Executive Order 12866 on Regulatory Planning and Review. The new order, EO # 13422, has some interesting and potentially troubling new provisions. Here are some links: pro, pro, pro, con, con, con. Public Citizen identifies three problems with the new order,…