In honor of the 70th birthday of Philip Glass, Jens Laurson has a handy starter guide to the minimalist composer. For my money, Solo Piano (which he doesn’t mention) and the Kronos string quartets (which he does) are the best intro points. But either way, if you associate Glass with his early breakthrough work, like […]

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If you couldn’t make it to Utah, cinéaste blogger Rhys Southan has the roundup.

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Via Ross, number 4,839,215 in the ongoing series of tedious conservative jeremiads against modern art manages to be not only willfully, proudly obtuse (no surprises there) but, it seems to me, fairly openly un-conservative. Here’s the author’s main beef: Modern art is ideological, as its proponents are the first to admit. It was the ideologues, […]

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There’s a protest scheduled for this afternoon in support of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer: Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer’s trial is scheduled for this Thursday. An informal group of New York City residents are joining together in solidarity for a peaceful protest of the government of Egypt’s treatment of Kareem, and to plead for all […]

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The latest entry in the ongoing theological throwdown between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan (about which I hope to offer some more general thoughts once the dust has cleared) contained a claim that made me perk up, because I’d just been discussing this very question with a friend: I remain open to evidence and argument […]

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So, I have no idea whether the “liberaltarian” coalition that was being batted about last month has a chance in hell of working, but I’ve got some advice for any student lefties who feel like giving it the old college try over at Campus Progress.

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Gene Healy’s irritated by the growing chatter about a “politics of meaning.” I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to suggest that this is an unintended, but possibly unavoidable, side effect of expecting the national government to be an all-purpose solver of problems and doer of good. People come to think that—perhaps like […]

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I’ve always thought the best argument for worrying about income inequality as such—which is to say, the best of a bad lot—was that wealth disparities tend to get translated into disparities in political power. I’ve also tended to think the best response was to have a government too limited in its economic power to merit […]

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Ezra wants to debunk the “pernicious fallacy” that income is “somehow related to the virtue or necessity of the position, rather than its skill level and the supply of labor willing and capable of filling it.” Well, no dispute here, but whose fallacy is this supposed to be? Sure, there are very crude versions of […]

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Writing in The Washington Times, Diana West appears to be having a minor schizoid episode: She doesn’t seem to think that a “surge” in Iraq would be successful, or even that it would do much for U.S. security interests in the unlikely event that it were. But she’s also “incensed” at legislators who are opposing […]

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