December 2009
16 posts
P.S.
This blog isn’t dead, it’s just afflicted with an unreliable narrator.
I will revive it soon, I swear. I’ll also be a better friend and do my laundry regularly. Oh boy you guys have a lot to look forward to.
“There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists...”
– FiveThirtyEight: Politics Done Right: The Odds of Airborne Terror (via mikehudack)
Once again, Nate Silver is the voice of rationality. Except, of course, that terrorism is an act of man, and lightning an act of God; in theory, we can do something about the former.
(via newsweek)
Hubba-wha,...
Why don’t people like Lily Allen the way...
“I was, at this age, unfamiliar with Matthew 4:7, and my father, a devout...”
– DFW’s new short story in the New Yorker.
I don’t think I’ve read anything outside of Thomas Merton that better encapsulates what it means to grow up Catholic, post-Vatican II, in a family of middle-class not-quite-intellectuals. This story also provides a pretty good psychological...
“‘Footloose’ is a better vampire movie. And it’s not even about vampires.”
–
Wry, trying to decode the Twilight series for the generationally-impaired (me) without actually betraying her secret love for it. (via unshared)
This renews my faith in 15-year-old girls.
My grandmother died at 10:30 a.m.
I am at work. I logged into my bank account online before purchasing a flight to Louisville to check my balance. The security question appeared: “What is your maternal grandmother’s first name?”
Is. Was.
It was Margie.
5 tags
Ugh Stanley Fish
Read this:
Resigning was a moral act for which she was responsible. The vice-presidential candidacy just happened to her; her account of it reads like an extended “what-I-did-on-my summer-and fall-vacation” essay. For many politicians, family life is sandwiched in between long hours in public service. Palin wants us to know that for her it is the reverse. Political success is an accident that...
4 tags
'Could a Dream from "The Wire" Really Be Coming... →
Oh you know TNR has been waiting for a port-privatization story to come along, just for the sake of that homepage headline.
For posterity
So you know how reunions (high school, college, etc.) are typically marked by life stages?
Judging from what the facebook tells me, my high-school five year will be the reunion of Baby #2. Apparently, to get through the reunion of engagements, the reunion of newlyweds, the reunion of baby #1, and the reunion of premature divorces, we should have been having these things every year.
Jesus fucking...
“‘Bag-lady syndrome,’ the fear many women have that their financial...”
– In her otherwise ridiculous column, Judith Warner assures me I am not alone in my irrational fear of homelessness. While I personally can’t get behind her rationale, I’m now afraid my neurosis will only worsen with age.
Why yes,
I will bike to work in three-inch heels every day if it means I’m taller than the office misogynist.
“i am really saddened that such an amazing and beautiful girl has passed on so...”
–
Oh oh, oh Petaluma, I am so tired, so so tired [via unshared]
I promise I don’t mean this in an assholey way, but the fact that people who work at a hospice can’t function in the face of a death says a lot about northern California.
“When I grasped that some of the most complex, almost otherworldly fiction of the...”
– Wordy rare-book dealer, NYTimes, “No Country for Old Typewriters” (what a headline!)