politics

Many years ago, when I was in the full throes of my pomo-lit phase, I read John Barth’s 1955 novel The Floating Opera, which was one of those books that serendipitously landed in my lap at just the right time. John Barth is a little bit of a Philip-Roth-Lite, I think. He’s funny and smart…

There’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…

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…