False documents.
A reader kindly points me to the essay “False Documents,” by the great E.L. Doctorow. It is of course through Doctorow that many readers now know of Sherman’s march or the Rosenberg trial; which is to...
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Monthly Coalition Fatalities in the U.S.-Afghan War from January 2009 with...
The predicted fatalities are based on an extremely rough and ready calculation. Fatalities from Spring 2009 to Spring 2010 nearly doubled (1.78, actually), so I applied that same increase to the Summer...
View ArticleIs American politics a “sick system”?
Or the American media? Or the Internet? Somehow I’m suspicious, but I’m too tired to think it through …
View Article1st Meditations on the soccer ball.
It’s that time again, once every four years, when nations from around the globe gather… … to ponder why Americans don’t like soccer.* None of the typical explanations are compelling. Thus I rant,...
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I don’t like the sound of those … horns.
I can’t decide if the vuvuzelas are a war crime or a just retaliation for colonialism. Also, in case your website needs more vuvuzela.
View ArticleFirst draft of history.
An excellent chronicle by Sean Flynn in the July GQ of the events on and around the Deepwater Horizon just before and just after the explosion. I’ve put some excerpts below the fold but the whole thing...
View ArticleThe first one’s free.
We learn today that one can download a free sample of Banana Republican to one’s iPad from the iBook store. The sample ends with the phrase, “… compromised by the distraction of my trousers being down...
View ArticleOf shakedowns and slush funds.
In response to the Mississippi River flood of 1927, the administration of Calvin Coolidge dispatched Herbert Hoover to serve as what we would nowadays call the “czar” of the flood relief effort. Among...
View ArticleA town you’ll adore.
Perhaps you were wondering, “What music best exemplifies the Banana Republican experience?” Perhaps you weren’t, but now that I’ve suggested it, you’re curious. You can find me trying to answer this...
View ArticleCivil contempt.
As my grandfather used to say of his time in the Army, you learn very quickly on a bad posting that the fish rots from the head down. General McChrystal is at the very least guilty of fostering a...
View Articlenatural prayer
I had a vaguely negative impression (mainly received rather than first-hand) of Herman Melville’s abilities as a poet; but “Shiloh” is pretty strong. Skimming lightly, wheeling still, The swallows...
View ArticleWill this well end well?
There oughta be an axiom of regulation, that if you’re changing the rules in such a way that will make you sound grossly culpable when something goes wrong, you shouldn’t do it. The future of BP’s...
View ArticleIf you gaze into the ping-pong balls, the ping-pong balls gaze also into you.
OK Go’s drummer has a staring contest with Animal, overseen by Ira Glass of This American Life.
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It’s only a model.
Dsquared posits, I think we can all agree that things will go better if all currently working monetary economists stop teaching their models to undergraduates and instead adopt my modelling approach: A...
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Handing Out The Car Keys
From Noah Feldman’s “The Triumphant Decline of the WASP” in today’s New York Times: But satisfaction with our national progress should not make us forget its authors: the very Protestant elite that...
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Footprint.
I don’t know how often a sidewalk needs repaving. But this certainly looks like a WPA signature on a sidewalk in Davis, on the north side of First Street between B and C. If that’s what it is, it’s a...
View ArticleI’d be open to considering a buzzer with some flashing lights.
So England scored a goal that didn’t count because the referee didn’t see it and now my English friends are suddenly of the opinion that perhaps a smidgen of technology might not be the end of the...
View ArticleThe Same Thing Over and Over Again Expecting Different Results
I tread warily on Eric’s turf, but this is too much to resist. David Leonhardt lays out, in today’s Times, the gamble which most of the world is about to undertake: The world’s rich countries are now...
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