I’ll confess, as someone who spent the early 80s as a toddler, when I came across the term “Atari Democrats” in the second graf of this American Prospect piece by Jim McNeill, I thought it was a new coinage: The world headquarters of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. is still in Akron, Ohio, but […]

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There are times when I’ll walk into a bar or club, look around, and think: “We can’t possibly be members of the same species. Or at least, I hope we’re not.” Still, count me a shade on the skeptical side about this BBC report on one evolutionary theorist’s prediction of some genetic schism in which […]

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In the midst of a post defending his penchant for 80s music, Andrew Sullivan let’s out a mighty curmudgeonly harumph: There is indeed no pop on the radio any more. Just hip-hop drivel and godawful indie crap or whiny, lesbian complaint-rock. Look at the top ten in any other advanced Western country and pop is […]

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Via Slashdot, it seems an elementary school near Boston is only the most recent to ban tag and other “contact” games. Money quote: Another Willett parent, Celeste D’Elia, said her son feels safer because of the rule. “I’ve witnessed enough near collisions,” she said. Near. Collisions. I couldn’t have made that one up. Our fearless […]

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So, at Art Brut last night, I spent the better part of one of their songs torturing myself trying to figure out why a riff they kept playing sounded so maddeningly familiar. I finally realized that it was basically pulled note-for-note from the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter”. My gin tonic decided that […]

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A woman who was a grad assistant in a class I once took confessed to us that she’d burst out laughing in the previous section when, in the midst of a dialogue about the source of ethics, she queried a student: “So you’re a relativist, then?” To which he replied: “Absolutely!” I mention this because […]

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Your favorite eyeball-headed mystery men The Residents have a new project, a series of podcasts inspired by old “true crime” radio called The River of Crime. It can be gotten from Cordless or via iTunes.

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BoingBoing posts about an intriguing new academic book on Rumor Psychology, whose authors find (among other things) that “most workplace rumors are 95 percent accurate.” But I wonder whether publicizing that figure might not have the paradoxical effect of reducing that accuracy rate. That is, maybe rumors tend to be so accurate at least in […]

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For once, I agree with Jonah Goldberg: The revelation that large numbers of government officials tasked with making decisions about this sort of thing appear to be totally innocent of the fundamental theological divide in Islam and how various contemporary groups fall along that divide. Granted, I probably couldn’t go into phenomenal detail either, but […]

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It’s not online, but the new issue of Harper’s (which I can no longer read without thinking of The Wire‘s Brother Mouzone) has a review by novelist Marilynne Robinson of The God Delusion. There are a handful of interesting but ultimately rebuttable objections, some that seem more solid (e.g. the charge that when there are […]

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