Too long; do not read.
So, up until today, the Republic jobs plan has been, essentially, to throw rolled-up balls of newspaper at the President and yell “Sucks to your jobs bill!” But the man who brings them their evening cognac has apparently made them aware of some discontent amongst the rabble, so they took …
Comics fans are hardly unique in having a standoffish relationship with the medium they love. (They are probably outpaced by sports fans in terms of the distance between the product on display and the character of the culture that has grown up around it, but that’s another story.) Every genre, …
The commemoration of any great tragedy is a thorny proposition. Pay it too little attention, and you are open to charges of ignoring the pain of the victims and the grief of the survivors; pay it too much attention, and you become vulnerable to accusations of exploitation and devaluation. This …
It’s hard to write anything like this without seeming to endorse a second term for Barack Obama. This is difficult for me to do, since I’ve generally found Obama to be a Clintonian disappointment; he’s squandered one political opportunity after another, bowed down before the G.O.P. with barely a struggle, …
It’s Labor Day in America. Celebrating what Adam Smith called “the first price, the original purchase that was paid for all things” has always been an iffy proposition in this most capitalist of countries. In fact, the very commemoration of Labor Day here in the U.S. was sped along by …
And now it’s time for another exciting installment of LEONARD GIVES ADVICE TO WRITERS EVEN THOUGH HE IS TERRIBLE! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ One of the biggest problems in writing fiction is giving a character attributes that you, as a writer, do not possess. “Write what you know”, they say, and if, for …
So everyone is bitching and moaning that the awesome new debt ceiling deal is going to be bad for the economy. Liberals are all running around saying that Obama went all Cave Carson on the deal, and that all the austerity measures, which are totally necessary because America doesn’t have …
I’ve been listening to a collection of incredible music from the ’40s and ’50s by Holiness preacher Brother Claude Ely, which is inspiring in all kinds of ways, but also deeply frustrating. For one thing, as much as I like to denigrate religion, it is one of the few things …
So, because I am a self-hating jerk, I was flitting around a bunch of the right-blogs yesterday, to see what horrifying inhumane garbage they had to say about the Norway slaughter. And one of the most common threads, especially at Ace of Spades and Confederate Yankee, was a variant of …
Occasionally, I’d like to share somewhat longer excerpts from things I’ve read and been impressed by than my usual slender quote-of-the-day offerings. Here’s the first, from Hannah Arendt’s Essays in Understanding 1930-1954: “In trying to understand what were the real motives which caused people to act as cogs in the …
So, there’s this: And there’s nothing inherently wrong with the argument that big dumb summer blockbusters should be held to different critical standards than art films. The thing is, though, the video short-circuits that argument, calling you a snobby effete hipster jackoff with a funny haircut for daring to equivocate …
Nobody has suffered today like I have suffered today, unless they also read the entirety of the shitty Libertarian webcomic Roswell, Texas by L. Neil Smith. Allow me to share with you some of its insouciant crappiness in the form of a list. 1. The comic is set in an …
Leave it to Dave fucking Eggers on Grant-fucking-land to write the ultimate paean to the horseshit “Who cares if the Cubs suck forever and ever, Wrigley Field is TOTALLY SO MUCH FUN” mentality. The thing is so reeking of sensa-wunda excrement that the not-true-since-at-least-2005 accusation that White Sox Park is …
Terence Malick’s new film, Treee of Life, has debuted at Cannes, and as is drearily predictable, it’s already causing waves of controversy. Booing, walkouts, endless vitriol, critics and viewers exchanging invective — the only difference between this and his other films is that now people are having the arguments on …
Spring is here, and a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. I am not a young man, nor lovable neither, so my fancy once again turns to all that is fraudulent, disinformed, and cozened in the world of criticism. We’ve spoken of this before, and I suppose nothing …
