Wed., September 2, at 8pm, with:
Sander Hicks* arguing yes.
Saul Devitt** arguing no.
(And the group NYCCAN fighting in court, meanwhile, over whether to make it a ballot initiative question.)
Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.
Free admission, cash bar. Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on [...]
Not wishing to look like I was singling out Catholicism as the only questionable faith with yesterday’s entry, I should stress that I doubt all supernatural and paranormal claims, not just, say, Mormonism (and we should be suspicious of people who only pick on a few favorite paranormal targets, as though with a sliding scale [...]
I’m scheduled to attend a Catholic (and conservative) wedding today, and I hope it won’t look like ingratitude toward my hosts (who I’m sure are too busy to read this blog today) if I pick this occasion to remind people of my love-hate relationship with religion and the religious right.
I say love because, despite my [...]
Whether religious or secular, people are naturally inclined to think the universe is in some sense a just place where things tend to work out. But what if they’re wrong? I’m not a naturally gloomy person myself (I don’t think), but what if, for example, all ten of the following rather negative thoughts [...]
I wonder if healthcare “reform” will in fact pass now simply because so many people will think “Ted Kennedy would have wanted it that way.” Perhaps humanity’s single biggest problem is that the human brain longs to navigate complex situations with instincts built for sizing up simple interactions between a few people — deciding who [...]
Obviously, I am pleased to see that both Adam Ant and the Upper Crust made it into the Wikipedia entry for “fop” — bringing us one step closer to the ideal world in which knee breeches and mohawks signal a culture balanced between reason and productive anarchy (even if one of the Upper Crust’s former [...]
I should have mentioned when I plugged The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging a few months ago that I’m quoted in it as calling “I don’t know” the three most important words in the language. (And they are, you know.)
But in the interests of full disclosure, here is the list of all the books [...]
Per a Forbes.com piece, the top five most stress-filled cities in America are:
1. Chicago
2. Los Angeles
3. New York (feel the pride)
4. Cleveland (is there any upside here?)
5. And, yes, Providence, RI
Brown: top of GQ’s “douchebag” list yesterday, in a stressed out city today, no longer as reputationally strong according to my mom, and last I [...]
I started saying over a decade ago that as the population’s average age increases, we’d see both major political parties “coincidentally” reformulate their philosophies around whatever elderly citizens wanted, even if it meant the Democrats abandoning their ostensible New Left ties to youth and progress and innovation and the Republicans abandoning their opposition to big-government [...]
I checked the September issue of GQ to see if it quoted me — not because I assume all magazines are likely to quote me at some point, though that would be nice, but because one of the writers, Andrew Corsello, interviewed me for a piece he was working on.
That piece hasn’t appeared, but I [...]
•Engage in elite philosophical debate all you like, but in America, at least, you need the masses on your side at some point, so it’s nice to see the populist upsurge against socialized medicine at the town hall meetings — and articles like this one about an elderly miner’s wife who’s had all the big [...]
Last night, I saw the fifteen minutes of IMAX 3D teaser footage from James Cameron’s Avatar (the full film due out in December), and I fear Cameron has a $237 million bomb on his hands.
Not that it was bad, really, but it’s aiming so high, the hype’s already so big, and the end result is [...]
Here’s one more for the hippies: a Yellow Submarine remake surfacing.
I’ve watched with fascination and alarm as Hollywood, creatively bankrupt, has recently contemplated producing unnecessary remakes of nearly any film as it turns twenty, sometimes even sooner, even when the originals are perfect as-is, as with RoboCop and Total Recall (the former being considered for [...]
While looking for wrapping paper last week, I ended up unfurling the posters in my closet — as a lot of ex-hippies were probably doing over the past few days to commemorate Woodstock — and realized that I am all too predictable (a Gen Xer nerd, that is, not an ex-hippie).
I’m fairly cautious in some [...]
Everybody’s been talking about Woodstock and the 60s for the past four days of the fortieth anniversary, but as usual my brain’s been on my 80s childhood.
And much as I love the songs of Blondie, I have to admit Pat Benatar was undeniably more of a showman than Debbie Harry at last Thursday’s awesome Coney [...]