Before I reveal my pick for a “song that reminds me of someone,” let me say a little bit about the someone in advance. My “someone” is not just one of the best best friends in the whole wild world, not just any grossly-underappreciated poet and philosopher, not just any garden variety wunderkind, not just any…
Read MoreAs I’ve said many times before on this blog, the four essential ingredients of a great song (in my estimation) are three chords and a sad story. I think I’ve always had a particular affection for sad songs, one that has only grown over the years, and my guess is that if I made a…
Read MoreFor today’s pick, I’m returning home to Soulsville, to draw from one of our deepest cultural and musical wells: Stax. The Stax “sound” is the sound that I most closely identify with Memphis, my home, and even the saddest of songs from the Stax vault has always possessed the power to cheer me up. Those…
Read MoreFirst, see yesterday’s post for my caveat about picking “favorite” and “least favorite” songs. The category “least favorite song” is a weird one, since it presumes there is something at least minimally favorable about the pick. It needs to be a song that is not so awful that you actively avoid hearing it, but still…
Read MoreAs I’ve done for the last several years, I’ll be posting once a day throughout the month of June for the #30DaySongChallenge. (Here is the link to the “anchor” page for this year’s iteration of the Challenge where you can keep up with my daily picks.) There is a prompt for each day, and today’s prompt…
Read MoreOnly a couple of weeks ago, I noted on this blog (in “Philosophy’s Gatekeepers”) that it had been 190 days since the last major breaking-news story about sexual harassment or assault in professional Philosophy. That was a noteworthy fact, And then, last Friday, the Thomas Pogge story broke. I’ll just direct readers to the news coverage…
Read MoreEach summer, I participate in the #30DaySongChallenge. As regular readers of this blog already know, what that entails is my posting a song in response to a daily prompt for each of the 30 days of June, accompanied with some (long or short) post that accounts for why I chose that song for that day’s…
Read MoreTwitter has changed a lot over the last few years, but until recently there was one inviolable rule to which all users were obliged: tweets must be limited to 140 characters or less. Because a computer “character” is a unit of information that roughly corresponds to a grapheme– letter, number, punctuation mark, or whitespace– the…
Read MoreThere are so many things about Netflix’s original comedy series Grace and Frankie (now in its second season) to recommend it, not least of which is its pitch-perfect gallows humor. Orbiting around the decidedly 21st century lives of four septuagenarians– the eponymous Grace (Jane Fonda) and Frankie (Lily Tomlin) and their now ex-husbands, Saul (Sam Waterston)…
Read MoreYesterday’s piece by Jay Garfield and Bryan Van Norden’s in NYT‘s The Stone (“If Philosophy Won’t Diversify, Let’s Call It What It Really Is”) has already generated some of the most interesting online discussion about the discipline and profession of Philosophy that I’ve seen since our last salacious exposé. (What are we at now, philosophers? 190 days…
Read More
Recent Comments