Miniver Cheevy

Yes. The only way to cultivate organic symbols is midrash. As a discourse, midrash is completely different from scientific discourse. [......

Lady Gaga: “Essentialized conceptions of gender, sexuality, and other identity categories compel a celebration of diversity. Also, at H...

I stumbled across this clever little trifle today. It's a takeoff on Ice Cube's “It Was A Good Day,” depicting a good day as a you...

X-Men: First Class is elaborately plotted, smart, and melodramatic. It's full of in-jokes, sexy ladies in absurd costumes, and symboli...

This, in a nutshell, is how I reconcile magickal practice and the understanding of reality we get from the natural sciences. I take Uncle ...

I just succumbed to the temptation to respond to someone who said this: I do not want anyone to assume this is anything to do with trying...

I used to go for cocktails at a restaurant bar near my old apartment, where they sold “soup shots,” which were exactly what they sounded li...

Via Rick “Nixonland” Perlstein, I learn of a disconcerting article about the demographics of affluence in Ad Age, seen through the creepy...

In a couple of recent conversations, I've heard folks invoke the Manhattan Project as a demonstration that given a vigorous enough gove...

A few months back, I snarked to a friend: few things say culturally conservative American Protestant hegemony with an “I’m not an anti...

I originally blogged a link to this article here back when. It is paywall’d but old, so in early 2025 I feel justified in transcribing th...

James Ellroy is to noir fiction what Herman Melville is to fishing stories, and the word is that his life is not so different from his s...

Curse you, internet! Ordinarily I would never have known about Iggy Pop's surreal, mortifying performance on American Idol . But ther...

House of Games was the first film David Mamet directed, featuring Joe Mantegna as a con artist. My favourite line in the film is when he s...

Who What I don't know Why Because Tomorrow Today Don't give a darn Third base!

You've heard of the “homosexual agenda,” right? On this week's episode of Glee , we got a proper kiss between two gay characters....

I don't have answers, but I like the questions these games ask. Brenda Brathwaite's Train John Tynes' Power Kill F...

President Obama says he accepts the Pentagon's assurances that Bradley Manning's treatment in custody is right and appropriate: ...

In reference to this clip of Senator Paul complaining about his toilet.

Preface : This post was an attempt to lay out my thinking about a difficult topic. I don’t think it works well. I leave it up for posteri...

TomDispatch offers an expansive accounting of the military budget that tallies it at $1.2 Trillion/year. I'm not sure if I buy those fi...

Cartesian bears can be found in temperate climates closer to the equator, where longitude lines can be treated as approximately parallel. F...

Good evening to the American people, the people of Egypt, and the people of the world. Hosni Mubarak's government in Egypt has lon...

Via Ben Jervey at Good magazine.

Cairo yesterday: Washington DC 1967: