anotherpanacea

Category: Uncategorized

  • You Wanna Be Saved? Sing You Sinners.

    Last night I saw Erin Mckeown at The Basement. It was my first taste of both, though they’re apparently both well-known and fantastically well-endowed with talent. Here’s a video of Mckeown on Conan O’Brien. Here’s a link to her newest album: Sing You Sinners, a reworking of lesser-known standards form the 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s.…

  • Three faces of courage

    Recently, a woman asked whether being told to “grow a pair” was evidence of misogyny, since it assumes that the only way to be courageous is to be masculine. I responded with some nonsense about the Laches and ᾳνδρειᾳ, stubborn manliness, which is the Greek word for courage. Still, it’s an interesting question: in the…

  • Oh yeah? Well wait till I get my MacArthur grant!

    How to deal with rejection? Console yourself with the rejection slips of great authors.

  • Μολών λαβέ: Come and take them!

    “300” is slated for release on March 9th. Call me a Hellenic fanboy, but I’m excited. The Battle of Thermopylae pitted 300 Spartan warriors, 400 Theban hostages, and 700 Thespian volunteers against an army of Persians reputed by Herodotus to be 5,283,220 strong.

  • Democracy and Conviction

    Sam Harris has started another great debate over religion, this time with conservative author Andrew Sullivan. They’ve been fairly civil with each other, and what little upset there has been has arisen from the justifiable claims they both make about the intellectual honesty of theism. In other debates, Harris has been too civil with his…

  • This is why I love Metafilter

    Right now, I have tabs open to three different great sites, all of which I discovered from fifteen minutes of browsing MeFi. Fora.tv is what PBS should be, but isn’t: awesome, interesting panel discussions, lectures, and conferences. Dr. Lester Brown discusses ways to restructure the global economy so that it can sustain economic progress through…

  • On Beauty and Being Just Good Enough

    Zadie Smith indicts herself for the failure that characterizes almost all writing: Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry – we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing – great writing…

  • Real Genius

    Necessity is the mother of invention, but ingenuity is its own reward. This site gives me joy.

  • Objectivism Is Comedy Gold

    Angelina Jolie to star in Atlas Shrugged… comedy gold, I tell ya.

  • For A Few Dollars More…

    The New York Times has a report on the proposed law regulating oil contracts. There’s no mention of production-sharing agreements there, but there is something a little fishy about the law, which centralizes the approval procedure for contracts for the oil under regional control. Here’s the relevant text from the NYT: [The law allows] regions…