thoughts in and out of season
I thought I’d mention this, even though it’s irrelevant to this weblog, because you gotta know about it: in Utah 15 years ago they detected a cosmic ray—a fast-moving proton—that hit the earth or rather upper atmosphere with a kinetic energy equal to that of a well-thrown baseball. To pack that kind of wallop … More ...
According to a recent report, unmarried women have become the most important leftist demographic. The marriage gap for women (their greater tendency to vote Democratic when unmarried) is now 36 percentage points, and unmarried women have become the biggest part of the Democratic base—more than blacks and Hispanics combined.
All of which makes sense. … More ...
A couple of family members are in India just now, so I went off to the Metropolitan Museum to look at their collection of Indian art. Here are some (rather naive) notes:
A reader mentioned Michel Houellebecq in connection with my link to a consumer’s guide to women in a recent post. I haven’t read Houellebecq’s novels (I don’t read French) and decided to look up his Wikipedia entry, which led me to a review by John Updike of his most recent book.
The review’s … More ...
In my recent entry on being American I quoted John McCain and Thornton Wilder as authorities. McCain evidently views America as a sort of overriding moral cause that we should all buy into, Thornton Wilder as an inescapable reality and predicament we must accept and deal with on its own terms. That is to say, … More ...
A couple of texts I found horrifying:
It’s a bad question, I think, because it overemphasizes the attribute in a way that makes no sense, certainly not in 2007 and maybe ever. You can reasonably be an American stamp collector, lawyer or Catholic, meaning one whose attitudes, understanding and pursuits are colored by a background and web of connections accumulated growing up … More ...
It seems strange that the reason given by the Federation of American Scientists for their condemnation of James Watson’s views on race and intelligence, and their public characterization of them as “personal prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science,” is that they’re worried that the credibility of the disinterested truth-seeking scientific enterprise might … More ...
I can’t get off the topic of Alexander and architecture. Luckily for my few remaining readers I’m running out of things to read and comment on, at least until volumes 2, 3, and 4 of his The Natwhy wereure of Order arrive. Anyway, I found on the web the transcript of a 1982 debate between … More ...
I’ve been reading a couple more books by Christopher Alexander that happen to be available at the New York Public Library, The Timeless Way of Building (1979) and A New Theory of Urban Design (1987). They’re altogether consistent with the more recent book of his I’ve read, the first volume of The Nature of Order… More ...