Dan Raspler, the victor in our Lolita Bar debate before last, about sci-fi, forwards this combo-parody of the Mac/PC ads, Rorschach, and Wolverine.
That in turn reminds me that even an animalistic, deadly, “berserker rage”-prone fellow like Wolverine is depicted in the comics as feeling a certain reverence towards other species, once explaining to his teammate [...]
ONE WEEK FROM TONIGHT, the species-spanning battle of the century:
Wed., May 6 (8pm).
Law professor and lawyer with the State of New York Mariann Sullivan arguing yes.
Freelance writer Justin Shubow (Master’s in Philosophy from U. Michigan, J.D. from Yale) arguing no.
Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.
Free admission, cash bar. Basement level of [...]
My friends Scott Shannon and Liz Braswell recently celebrated the impending birth of their second child — by watching Aliens (having viewed Alien last time around, inspired, I believe, by a joke I made back when Liz and I were in college about childbirth being like something out of those films — a joke repeated [...]
From a recent article about scientists studying people who are meat-averse (not that this makes them all crazy, of course):
Robinson-O’Brien and her team, who reported the findings in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, said about 20-25% of current and former vegetarians in the study displayed unhealthy weight-control behaviors such as taking diet pills, [...]
My parents, fairly ordinary, decent Americans, did not go to an “End the Fed” protest yesterday, but they did go to one of the four Connecticut Tea Party protests that occurred a week and a half ago. Good for them.
Note that my parents were not moved to rally against the government and in favor of [...]
Dogs have likely evolved to look cute to humans — the ugly breeds tending not to be treated as well — and there are certain objective (or at least biologically-rooted) criteria for “cute,” partly rooted in “neotony,” or possession of child-like qualities (sometimes recognized instinctively even between different mammal species) that evoke protective impulses, as [...]
Like a lot of people, I was disappointed to hear about Jackie Chan — one of humanity’s most physically adept specimens — sucking up to Beijing by complaining that Taiwan and Hong Kong are displaying too much “chaotic” freedom (though it shouldn’t surprise me — most people hate freedom, really, even those who most clearly [...]
Yesterday I mentioned the site Memepool going silent. Perhaps it has done so simply because Google and YouTube and the like have made it so easy to find wacky stuff online without an aggregator — sometimes even when you’re not trying. After I heard that sometime political writer John Carney had reported on [...]
Today marks one year since the last time there was a post on the wacky-links aggregator site Memepool (which over the preceding ten years had been sort of the PiecesofFlair of the late 90s and early 00s). Over the past year, the founder of Memepool has apparently gone from working at Yahoo to working [...]
Intelligence Squared U.S. is hosting a debate tonight at 6:45 at the Rockefeller University right here on York Ave. on whether it is morally wrong to exchange money for sex.
This, it seems to me, is a much more tricky question than whether prostitution ought to be legal. Presumably, if a law code (to remain minimal [...]
My main political focus my entire adult life has been on economics. I’m sure I’m as guilty as countless other writers, though, of acting as though my positions are self-explanatory when they are in fact baffling even to some intelligent, well-meaning people.
In an effort to make things a bit clearer, below is a super-quick walk-through [...]
An impressive urban skyline — made possible by commerce — is probably the most emphatic rebuke that can be delivered to people overly in love with nature, government projects, or imagined spiritual realms. Of course, you can argue about dialectics or metaphysics until the cows come home (presumably to a rural area like the [...]
There’s another Tea Party occurring, in western New York State, today at 1pm, so I say go be part of history if you’re in that area. Regardless of what your ostensible political philosophy is, it probably rests upon some vision of the world as it ought to be — and in the meantime, in the [...]
Taxes, dammit. But let’s look back at the high hopes that were aroused around this time of year fifteen years ago — in 1994. Yes, it was that year, on April 15, that America made a “contract with comedy,” if you will — in the form of the debut of the retro-surreal TV [...]
That recent poll suggesting 53% of Americans prefer capitalism to socialism didn’t strike me as too alarming. Polls mainly reveal that the public has few ideas so firmly fixed that they can’t be changed with a little rewording (70% had earlier said they favor the “free market”). Two things that did strike me [...]