Alas, the mighty have fallen. The news was released yesterday afternoon that John Edwards engaged in an extramarital affair in 2006 and that he lied about it during his campaign for President last year. Edwards’ paramour, Rielle Hunter (who, apparently, is also the inspiration for a Gen-X literary character), now claims that Edwards is the…
Read MoreWe Memphians just saw the conclusion of what has been a truly U-G-L-Y battle between the candidates for Tennessee’s 9th U.S. Congressional District, incumbent Steve Cohen and challenger Nikki Tinker. As you may already know, our district Representative before Cohen was the DNC wunderkind Harold Ford, Jr., who was famously done in by his Senate-race…
Read MoreThere is quite a bit of buzz about the upcoming release of the new film Man on Wire, which is a documentary account of Philippe Petit’s 1974 illegal and clandestine 110-story high tightrope-walk between the World Trade Towers (pictured left). I remember first learning of Petit’s stunt a few years back when I read about…
Read MoreRecently, I was reminded of a passage from Micheal Herr’s excellent 1977 memoir Dispatches. Herr was a war correspondent for Esquire magazine during the Vietnam War, he helped write the screenplays for Coppola’s Apocolypse Now and Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, and he (along with Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe) pioneered the literary genre…
Read MoreThere’s an interesting discussion over at Perverse Egalitarianism following a post entitled “Derrida and the Professors” in which the post’s author (Mikhail Emelianov) asks: Why is it that Derrida’s philosophy, after a quick and eventful love affair with American English departments and a rather scandalous world tour and a series of “live albums” (excuse my…
Read MoreExiled Russian novelist, political activist and Nobel Prize for Literature winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn brought the horrors of the Soviet labor camps to the attention of the world in his 1973 The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of the Soviet police state resulted in his exile for almost two decades, but he returned home to Russia in…
Read MoreI just finished watching the documentary Flock of Dodos: The Evolution-Intelligent Design Circus by marine biologist and filmmaker Randy Olson. As it turns out, less than 50% of Americans believe in evolution. The most vocal opponents come from the Intelligent Design camp, organized chiefly by the Discovery Institute, who basically believe in a modernized form…
Read MoreApparently, Memphis is about halfway between Texas and Philaedelphia. Also, apparently, I am the hostess with the mostest. This week my apartment runneth over with friends on their way from one of those places to the other. So, please forgive my absence on this blog for the next couple of days. I’ll be back on…
Read MoreIn 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 MoreThere’s an opinion peice in the recent issue of conservative magazine The National Review by John Derbyshire entitled “Talking to the Plumber: The IQ Gap,” in which Derbyshire argues that Americans are uneasy with the “inequality of smarts” in this country… and even more uneasy with the way that inequality in intelligence corresponds with other…
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