For those of you who don’t know (and shame on you if you don’t), David Hilbert was one of the giants of 19th-20th century mathematics. Despite his very English-looking name, he was German by birth and by upbringing and lived almost his entire life in Königsberg and later Göttingen. Although Hilbert wrote instrumental papers in [...]
Orson Scott Card has created hisself some kind of internet firestorm with his online column for The Mormon Times in which he draws a line in the sand against same-sex marriage because, you know, allowing gay marriage “marks the end of democracy in America.”
Others have already performed the necessary takedowns. I heartily recommend Ed Brayton’s [...]
Under Rupert Murdoch’s stewardship, The Wall Street Journal op-ed section (although not necessarily its primary reporting) has slid from a mercantilist-conservative newspaper to an insane right-wing pamphlet flecked with the froth of ranting imbeciles. I nearly wrote about this back in June when the increasingly aggravating Arts and Letters Daily recommended a WSJ op-ed piece, [...]
This week’s New England Journal of Medicine has a—shall we say—rather frank exchange of views on the methods for assessing casualty rates in Iraq following the 2003 invasion. Readers may well wonder how it is that two studies of deaths in Iraq could come up with a ten-fold difference in reported deaths. The short answer [...]
In The American: A Magazine of Ideas, reviewer James Bowman says that Hollywood no longer makes films about heroes.
American movies have forgotten how to portray heroism, while a large part of their disappearing audience still wants to see celluloid heroes. I mean real heroes, unqualified heroes, not those who have dominated American cinema over the [...]
I hadn’t intended to write about George Carlin’s recent death. But then something prompted me. It was this cartoon by Mike Lester, published on June 26 and widely syndicated throughout the US:
It’s an old rhetorical trick: find some statement that the reader will assume is made by someone of a particular persuasion and then make [...]
Dear Mr Press
By your own advice, quotations of 39 to 79 words from Associated Press stories may be a breach of copyright liable to legal action. You are now selling “quotation licenses” valued at $12.50 for excerpts of 5-25 words. As such, I point out three Associated Press stories published this day:
House to vote on [...]
The schools of thought that have dominated literary theory for the last half-century are dying. But they still have their adherents. Consider this widely referenced essay in The Chronicle Review. Here François Cusset writes a defence of what he calls “French theory” (which is not a term I like but at least seems to have [...]
Justice Antonin Scalia, the religious revanchist appointed by George Bush as part of his pandering to the evangelist right, gave a speech to Orthodox Jews earlier this year in which he supported his bigotry with a steady stream of lies. All quotes in italics are from the story in New York Sun.
Lie the First: [...]
In the never-ending circus of lies, misattributions, and ethical lapses surrounding the current so-called Culture War, especially as it relates to evolutionary science versus religious fundamentalism, biological anthropologist Pat Shipman has contributed yet another outright lie to the debate.
