In one of the more shameless displays of media exploitation I’ve seen in a while, Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv last Friday published the prayer note that Barack Obama left at the Western Wall (also known as the Kotel or the Wailing Wall) on his recent trip to Jerusalem. Reportedly, the prayer note was stolen by a…
Read MoreSo, I saw this on anotherpanacea first, and therefore can’t take credit for what a great idea it is… You may remember the story by Dr. Seuss (né, Theodore Seuss Geisel) from 1950 entitled If I Ran the Zoo, in which the pint-sized protagonist, Gerald McGrew, speculates upon the amazing creation he could bring about…
Read MoreTwenty-four years ago today, on June 25, 1984, Michel Foucault died in Paris, France. In an interview with Lé Magazine Littéraire, barely a month before his passing, Foucault remarked: “The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field,…
Read MorePace the author of Ecclesiastes, every once in a while we find that there is, in fact, something new under the sun. As evindence, I refer you to the political philosophy blog Public Reason, where Simon Keller (Philosophy, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) recently offered what I find to be a remarkably original “Thought…
Read MoreIn other election-related news, check out the dubious decision on the part of supposedly left-leaning German magazine Die Tageszeitung editors to run a picture of the White House with the headline “Onkel Baracks Hütte” (“Uncle Barack’s Cabin”). Wessen dumme Entscheidung war das?
Read MoreThere’s a very famous country song, made popular by David Allan Coe, called “You Never Even Called Me By My Name.” (NOTE: That link is to a YouTube rendering of the song, which might be one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.) As Coe explains in the song, it was actually written by Steve…
Read MoreRankophiles (n. pl., people who are in love with “rankings”) might be interested to learn that Brian Leiter has identified the top three “Rising Stars” among newly hired junior faculty in philosophy. The stars (Agnes Callard, Matthew Kotzen and Japa Pallikkathayil) earned their rank, according to Leiter, by exhibiting a level of “talent and promise”…
Read MoreAbout a month ago, the U.S. Supreme Court almost heard a case from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in which the plaintiffs, South African citizens, sought damages from several American and multi-national corporations for their role in (and profiting from) the perpetuation of apartheid in violation of international law. The Circuit Court had…
Read MoreI just watched There Will Be Blood (2007), the Paul Thomas Anderson film adaptation of Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil! about a small Texas village that becomes a boomtown in the crude oil rush of the early twentieth century. Daniel Day-Lewis won an Academy Award for his performance as Daniel Plainview, the story’s tortured protagonist, and…
Read MoreIn my last post, I praised the skill and acumen of director Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, which I think is one of his best films. In a rather serendipitous turn of events, I also watched on television that same night the American Film Institute’s 10 Top 10, which listed the top ten films in ten…
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