Unqualified Offerings

By Thoreau
It’s being reported that the bombing of the military recruiting station in Times Square might be the work of a serial bomber.  I don’t know if this person (assuming it is just one person) is motivated by religion, political ideology, mental illness, general douchebaggery, or whatever.  However, I predict that the perpetrator(s) will not [...]

By Thoreau
Is to mark the manuscript revisions as “approved” and send them to the publisher with the OK to publish. I’ve gone over this manuscript with a fine tooth comb through so many cycles of revision that this time I just read it twice, paid special attention to the stuff that changed in the [...]

Eve Tushnet’s comments on the chapters of Sexual Personae I read (Dickinson and Spencer and some earlier than that) second those of a contemporaneous conservative critic. It might have run in The New Criterion in the early 1990s, but it may have been the New Republic. She treats poems like pictures, is a close paraphrase. [...]

By Thoreau
Scientists in the UK have just created the optical equivalent of a black hole: A system in which a strong pulse of light changes the properties of the medium that it’s in, so that a second pulse of light tries to catch up with the first one but finds itself slowing in response [...]

My esteemed colleague has been hired to blog at The Art of the Possible, receiving a salary raise over what she makes here that, in percentage terms, can be described as infinitely larger. (Granted, mathematicians might quibble, and Excel would characterize it instead as "#DIV0!" But you get the idea.) I think she’s still allowed [...]

Note: If anyone gets the reference in this entry title, I will retire and turn the blog over to them.
* Jaden Hair’s recipe greeting cards look amazing.
* Three trillion dollars for the Iraq War? Seems like a lot even to me, but I don’t have a Nobel Prize in economics.
* Tim Lee [...]

Angelina Jolie is really playing John Keegan in her "stay the course" op-ed on Iraq, relying on the word of officials of the US and UN who really want to believe that Iraq will soon get better, and taking hopes for prospects. We’d like to believe the refugee situation is on the cusp of improving, [...]

By Thoreau
On the advice of some Syrian guy with lots of chemical knowledge (I call him “the doctor”) I’ve decided to purchase a controlled substance.  But since my insurance won’t cover it (don’t they realize that receding hairlines are a leading cause of low self esteem?) I’ve decided to break the law and obtain my [...]