The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Happy Easter!

by Tod Kelly April 8, 2012

So maybe I’m not the ideal League member to wish everyone a most Happy Easter, self-professed heathen that I am. But Happy Easter, everyone! We never went to church on Easter when I was a kid, so most of my Easter memories center around the Easter egg hunt that would take place in our living room, dining room and kitchen. My dad was always the parent that hid the eggs. He was very competitive, and made it a point of ...

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Can We At Least All Agree that John Derbyshire is Racist?

by Tod Kelly April 6, 2012

OK, I know that for supporters of the right here that it’s a sign of either my intellectual dishonesty or my being an intellectual lightweight that I can hear even echoes of racism in hoodie-gate, the “food stamp president,” Newt’s telling white South Carolinians that what blacks need is to learn the value of a good day’s work, much of the illegal immigration rhetoric, concerns about birth certificates, whatever a “Kenyan anti-colonial worldview” is, and Niggerhead. That being said, can we ...

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Draft Protests

by Christopher Carr April 6, 2012

Perhaps it’s best to think of our historical opposition to war not as war protest but as draft protest. I’ve been reading Jerome Marmorstein’s “War As a Disease Epidemic” lately with a student I teach over Skype. The article likens efforts at international peace to international public health initiatives and contains this passage: One of the greatest human rights violations occurs when healthy young men are forced to “lill or be killed” by means of a military draft or conscription. ...

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Friday Morning Jukebox: Matthew Ryan

by Will Truman April 6, 2012

A couple songs from Pennsylvania native Matthew Ryan. Ryan has a rather… distinct voice. If that’s the sort of thing that bothers you, Ryan might not be up your alley. He’s officially marked as Alternative Country, but I’m not sure how well that definition fits. He is one of the few songwriters where closing my eyes automatically generates its own music video. The first song here, “Guilty”, is the first of his I heard and piqued my interest This is ...

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Art, Morality, Music, and Fallout Open Open Thread

by Jaybird April 6, 2012

it's such a perfect day, I'm glad I spent it with you

We were arguing about art at work in the lab the other day. Not the aesthetic value argument (though that *IS* a good one) but about whether art could be moral in any meaninful sense. After a couple of jokes about the whole topic of what used to be called “stag films” we finally got onto the topic of whether a song, for example, could be immoral. The general tenor of the lab was centered on how art might be ...

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My own experience of being gay in medicine

by Russell Saunders April 5, 2012

Yesterday Andrew Sullivan linked to an item at WBUR’s Common Health blog, in which Dr. Mark Schuster, a tenured professor and pediatrician at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital tells his story of being a gay man entering the medical field. (Though I am also on staff at Children’s, I am not personally acquainted with Dr. Schuster.) I read it with deep interest, and I would recommend it to anyone who might find the subject interesting as well. In particular, I was fascinated by the ways ...

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The destructiveness of “hard work”

by Shawn Gude April 5, 2012

Few things in American society are as universally revered as a good work ethic. It’s one of the core values we attempt to instill in our offspring. Commentators and politicians have been known to denigrate the supposedly slovenly Europeans for their lack of it. It’s so woven into the country’s ethos in fact, that that enduring myth, the American Dream, is predicated upon it. But when the ostensible efficacy and benevolence of hard work isn’t obscuring the reality of declining ...

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On “Truth” and Its Consequences – Why We Need A New Business Model for 21st Century Journalism

by Tod Kelly April 4, 2012

On January 6, NPR’s This American Life aired an hour long and fairly damning segment on the working conditions of the Chinese manufacturing workers that build Apple products. To say the show got some attention would be an understatement. Within a few weeks it had become TAL’s most downloaded episode – quite an achievement for a show whose podcasts perennially (and perhaps after the Apple episode, ironically) sit atop iTunes most downloaded lists. For its own part, Apple found itself ...

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The Future Is Now: The Birth Of The American Wasteland

by Elias Isquith April 4, 2012

A really interesting piece from the Times‘ Binyamin Appelbaum focuses on how parts of the country where the housing bubble was the most pronounced — and where there was historically nowhere near the same level of economic output prior to the bubble that there was during those golden years — aren’t bouncing-back as textbook economics would lead one to expect. Still sagging under the weight of so much toxic debt, these communities remain in a de facto recession. My emphasis:

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Pick ‘Em Bleg

by Ryan Noonan April 4, 2012

I went to check Yahoo! ™ to see who won our little competition, but it seems that they have already euthanized the bracket groups. Anyone know who the winner was? (I apologize for not paying closer attention to this. I have been massively overtaken by events lately.)

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How Not to Discuss Whether We Need Stories

by Ethan Gach April 3, 2012

“Do we need stories?” asks Tim Parks. An interesting question. And an important one. But not a matter easily resolved within the confines of a few tweets, a couple Facebook updates, or an entire blog post (even one at the respected New York Review of Books). That’s obvious though, right? So why Does Parks appear attempting just that? And what does he have to show for it?

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The Roots of Scandal

by Mike Dwyer April 3, 2012

The clergy-abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic church throughout the last decade has probably gained the most attention regarding the criminal way that problem priests were moved around and never turned in to authorities. What has been given far less attention is just what lead to the abuse in the first place. A new report sheds some light on the problem.

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Leaguefest 2012: Reservations Still Available

by Burt Likko April 3, 2012

If you have not already made plans to do so, please take a moment this week to solidfy your arrangements to attend Leaguefest 2012 and join the dozen or so of your colleagues here. It’s in Las Vegas, so you can’t go wrong for fun things to do. Memorial Day weekend — May 25 through May 28 — is sneaking up on us fast. Come and meet your fellow Ordinary Gentlemen (and Gentleladies or Gentlepersons or Gentleneutrallygenderedfolk, if you prefer) ...

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Bible Verse and Commentary

by Alex Knapp April 3, 2012

Matthew 25:31-46 – “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed ...

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Privacy and Girls Around Me

by Burt Likko April 2, 2012

This is what can happen when you don’t understand the fine nuances of privacy policies: you could wind up a pop-up on Girls Around Me (“GAM”). GAM is a really creepy iPhone app that coordinates data from GPS readings on cell phones and Foursquare, and data from Facebook and Google Maps to give the user pop-up images of women physically located near the user. The user can then, innocuously enough, go approach these women to flirt and ask them for ...

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Coverture and Liberty

by Jason Kuznicki April 2, 2012

In which we return to a time that Bryan Caplan appears to love… blindly. Inexplicably. Sort of embarrassingly. I mean the nineteenth century. Back in 2010, Bryan wrote that the legal regime of coverture must have been pretty good for women. Sure, they forfeited all their legal rights, but look at how many of them got married anyway! And if they didn’t like it, they could surely have contracted around it. If they didn’t, they must have been happy. This, ...

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Can Romney Beat Obama?

by Guest Authors April 2, 2012

Guest post by James Hanley Short answer; yes. After all, we don’t know what’s going to happen between now and election day. Longer answer; not likely, with detailed explanation below. For the record, although I am a political scientist, this is not a professional explanation. There is no specialized information here that anyone else here couldn’t have just as easily accessed. (There is a body of literature on election prediction, but I’m not really familiar with it.) Also, this is ...

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Classic TV is Bad TV

by Rose Woodhouse April 2, 2012

One of the banes of my teaching existence is the degree to which my students fail to respond to old movies. There are a few happy exceptions, of course, who love old movies – or at least, are eager to learn more about them. But to most, the idea of sitting through an actual black and white movie has all the appeal of waiting on a line at a pre-ATM bank to get cash. So it is with some suspicion that I ...

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The Ultimate Victory, The Final Defeat

by Elias Isquith April 1, 2012

Corey Robin was interviewed by David Johnson for the Boston Review, and at the very end the two of them got to talking about the GOP primary. At first, Robin repeated an argument I’ve heard him make elsewhere and that I think is on-point: the dogmatism and ideological rigidity, exemplified most prominently in the Tea Party, is evidence of the contemporary conservative movement’s decline.

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Four Weeks of Boat-Building in Four Minutes

by David Ryan April 1, 2012

Back in 1989 I made a 10′ x 8′ self-portrait composed of 6400 tiny xerox copies of a portrait of Andy Warhol. I used an early Macintosh II to help me map the location of each “pixel”. It was the only Macintosh II on the entire University of Oregon campus, and while considered very powerful at the time (it lived in a special studio that only a select number of art student had access to) it was incredibly slow. I ...

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A Bloggy Puttanesca

by Tod Kelly March 31, 2012

(A staple in my house since my single years, a puttanesca is a cheap, low-class pasta dish that clears out little bits of other stuff from the fridge you are trying to get rid of.) The Media & Trayvon Martin – Of all the various parties I hear criticized about the Martin/Zimmerman case, the one that I find the most confusing is the widespread condemning of the media. (Actually, the media is the second most confusing. But I’m choosing not ...

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