My old friend, Mrs Carter, could make a pudding, as well as translate Epictetus. — Samuel Johnson As noted yesterday, liking sports is as optional as liking ballet, but then there are polymaths like Elizabeth Carter whose intellectual curiosity and wide span of interests was testimony to the sexism inherent in the term “Renaissance […]
I was glad to see Steve Brodner’s latest commentary, which is about banned books, and about the way the right wing has embraced Cancel Culture and about how young people are not accepting it. The Granbury School District is banning books. Banning them. Not simply removing them from a curriculum as we discussed yesterday, or […]
I don’t disagree with Steve Brodner (or Neil Gaiman)’s take on the idea of banning Art Spiegelman’s now-classic graphic memoir, Maus. Or, at least, I wouldn’t disagree if what is being reported were what had happened. As DD Degg noted here yesterday, the Daily Beast reports that “The McMinn County (Tenn.) school board’s 10 members […]
Michael Ramirez (Creators) paints as good a picture of our current situation as anyone. He’s not the first political cartoonist to depict Moses coming down from Mt Sinai to find his people in a state of idolatry, but he is more explicit in labeling their idol as conspiracies and bull and tying the delusion into […]
Drew Sheneman offers an imaginary scenario, “imaginary” in that I wonder how many people are really going to toss their jobs in the gutter over something so petty and foolish, even in a labor shortage? As has been said here before, a lot of older workers have chosen early retirement, because the disruption of the […]