Yesterday, we introduced Rick and his companion Spotty. Today, we will get to know a typical Rick Perry supporter, Jane, and tomorrow, we will spend some time with Rick’s special friend, Jesus. On Thursday, we will compare Rick to the rest of the Republican field, and on Friday….well, Friday’s a long way away, we will think of something by then.

See Jane vote.

Vote, Jane, vote!

Jane votes for Rick because he is tall.

“I am tall, too,” says Mitty the Kitty.

Jane votes for Rick because he has big hair.

“I have big hair, too,” says Mitty.

Jane votes for Rick because he hates gummit.

“Say what?” says Mitty. Full story »

The sense of awakening in The Souls of Black Folk is impossible to miss. Published in 1903, when the new century itself was just awakening, Souls seemed to blink away the veil for a people looking for their own cultural and historical legacy. What W.E.B. DuBois saw—and helped others see—was nothing short of amazing.

Perhaps it’s because I am now just awakening to DuBois’ work that I see the book in such a light. Perhaps that awakening colors my view, giving me wide-eyed wonder to a text that’s over a century old. Perhaps my middle-class, middle-aged whiteness, and my historical place in the Twenty-First Century, makes DuBois’ work seem exotic and wonderful.

Perhaps. Full story »

Perhaps you, like most of America, are unfamiliar with Rick “Big Slick” Perry, the new Republican front-runner. Not to worry. We’ve pulled together a primer on Rick that will tell you everything you need to know. Today, we introduce Rick and his companion Spotty. Tomorrow, we will get to know a typical Rick supporter, Jane, and on Wednesday, we will spend some time with Rick’s special friend, Jesus. On Thursday, we will compare Rick to the rest of the Republican field, and on Friday….well, Friday’s a long way away, we will think of something by then.

See Rick run!
Run for President, Rick, Run!
Run, run, run!

See Spotty run!
Run, Spotty, run!
Is Spotty a friend? Full story »

Today, if we choose to listen, we’ll hear a great deal about America, about the last decade, about the lessons we’ve learned. Football will be played. Flags will be waved. Tears will be shed.

And tomorrow we’ll be exactly what we were yesterday, only moreso. Maybe today is a bad time for critiques. Or maybe it’s the perfect time. Hard to say. But if you find a few minutes today and need a breather, here are some innocent distractions for you.

First, it’s true – we’re all living in Amerika.

Full story »

by Chip Ainsworth

The first game of the 1975 World Series was an afternoon tilt, played on Saturday, October 11. I didn’t have a ticket, so I watched from inside a watering hole around the corner from Fenway Park called Copperfield’s. There were no sports bars in those days, no Sam Adams beer, big screen TVs, cell phones, twitter, Wally the Green Monster, pink hats, Monster Seats or anything else that revolves around the highly effective but somewhat repulsive marketing tool called Red Sox Nation, which didn’t exist back then either.

ESPN was still four years away, and the only sports talk shows in town were Guy Mainella’s “Calling All Sports” and Eddie Andelman’s “Sports Huddle,” both on WBZ-AM. We read the Globe and the Herald and rooted for guys named Pudge, Yaz and Dewey against a team of future Hall-of-Famers named Bench, Morgan and Rose (who’s still waiting). Full story »

by Matt Gallagher

I slept through 9/11.

When people hear or read that statement, they tend to think I’m speaking metaphorically. “Ahh,” they say. “Weren’t we all?” While I do appreciate my words being consumed as literary insight, and there’s certainly a great deal of truth to that particular interpretation, I mean that as literally as possible. As in, I was drooling on my pillow after staying up too late playing video games during my first week of college when my roommate, a native New Yorker, woke me up in time to watch the South Tower collapse.   Full story »

There is a particular narrative about Ronald Reagan and the end of the Cold War that has always struck me as compelling. I bought the argument at the time and I think I still do, to some extent, even though I’m hardly a Reagan fan.

The story goes like this: Reagan was able to finally win the Cold War and drive a stake through the heart of the Evil Empire because he realized that the Soviet economy was already badly overextended trying to prop up the war machine. All he had to do was accelerate the arms race, dramatically increasing military spending (while also amping up the sabre-rattling rhetoric) and that would force the Russkis to bankrupt themselves trying to compete. Full story »

I am compelled to write about 9/11, an event which affected me profoundly in ways I still do not completely understand.

On September 11, 2001, we were on Long Island at a company offsite. During a break, I went back to my room and picked up a message from Jill telling me that an event scheduled for the next day had been cancelled “for obvious reasons.” It was to have been held at the Wall Street Journal, right across the street from the World Trade Center. The meeting was to launch my new book and the cancellation infuriated me. I called her voicemail, left a sharp message and slammed down the phone. On the way back to my meeting, I paused when I saw a group congregated in the bar, and was getting an explanation from the bartender when the first tower fell. I stayed and watched in disbelief as the second collapsed.

Later, not sure what else to do, we tried to continue our meeting. But it was no use. Full story »

by Timothy Gross

In a series of clicks, darkness shrouded the playing field at Clipper Magazine Stadium in Lancaster, Pa., Saturday. The ballpark’s denizens settled back into their seats, basking in the glow of a few illuminated scoreboards, the concourse’s light and the thrill of another victory for their hometown Barnstormers, a satisfying 9-0 decision punctuated with a rocket sliding up the early-September sky.

As the post-game fireworks commenced, a figure emerged from the home dugout and drifted along the first-base line toward right field. His teammates sauntered to the locker room, laughing and cheering and congratulating each other on the franchise’s first one-hit shutout, a gem tossed by starter Matt Wright. His manager met with a newspaper reporter to discuss the two-hour, 15-minute contest well before first deadline. His fans, entertained by the post-game fireworks, sat and peered out toward the night sky beyond right center field.

All of them, that is, except one. Full story »

I’ve been thinking about how modern society explains various phenomena, everything from simple everyday questions to the grand complexities that vex the lay thinker’s ability to make sense of a confusing world. More and more, it’s become clear that we’re relying on Fuckem’s Razor, the little-known Medieval principle of implausibility. I’d like to take a moment to explain this theory for those who haven’t encountered it before.

Wait, you say – don’t you mean Occam’s Razor?

No, but thanks for raising that. Occam’s Razor, in Newton’s formulation, says that ”We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.” Put more directly, this means that when trying to understand things, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. Occam’s Razor is credited to 14th century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham. Full story »

by Lindsay Hayes

A recent study conducted at University of California, San Diego revealed that people enjoyed short stories more when they had been given a spoiler about the ending. That’s nice, but as far as I’m concerned spoilers are still the revelation of the damned.

While some have taken this study to mean spoilers aren’t so bad after all, I have a different take. Uses and Gratifications theory tells us that people use media for whatever purpose suits them at the time. Enjoyment is far from the only use of media consumption. It’s worth noting that the participants in this study were just that – participants in a study. They were not at the local Barnes & Noble seeking the gratification of a good read after a hectic work week. Full story »

by Hannah Frantz

So far I haven’t mentioned the events of 1994, but I feel like I need to bring it up sometime, and now is as good a time as any.

Yesterday we visited the memorials at Ntarama, Nyamata, and the Kigali Memorial Centre, which serves partly as a museum. The group I was in visited the churches (Ntarama and Nyamata) first. Nothing prepares you for what you see there.

I went to Dachau with my parents a few years ago, and that was a starling experience. Full story »

Full story »

Last Friday, Wolfgang Wagner of the journal Remote Sensing resigned as editor-in-chief. He took this extraordinary step because he felt that it was his responsibility that Remote Sensing published a “fundamentally flawed” climate paper by Roy Spencer and William D. Braswell, both of the University of Alabama – Huntsville (UAH). In response, Spencer wrote on his blog: “If some scientists would like to demonstrate in their own peer-reviewed paper where *anything* we wrote was incorrect, they should submit a paper for publication.” The first published response appeared this morning in the journal Geophysical Research Letters by Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M, and Dessler’s response points out multiple severe deficiencies in Spencer and Braswell’s paper titled “On the misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedbacks from variations in Earth’s radiant energy balance” (hereafter SB2011). Full story »

I live and breathe travel. I love to see new things, but more importantly I travel to learn. To me, exploring the world firsthand has proven the most effective way to learn about the depths of people, culture and myself. Our trip from Chicago to New Orleans included a drive through seven states: Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. Of these seven states, I had only been to three before making this trip, which proved a unique and exciting opportunity to learn more about the hidden beauties and truths of America. Full story »