http://cyberblogue.com/tag/xp/ Dan Baum came to New Orleans two days after Hurricane Katrina as a reporter for The New Yorker. The encounter changed his life, and New Orleans became one of his fascinations, for good and ill, as with most fascinations. As he says, “I think part of my being ejected from The New Yorker was that […]
Monthly Archives: March 2009
Dan Baum’s Nine Lives.
07-Mar-09New Orleans in a nutshell.
06-Mar-09buy disulfiram paypal “Long before the storm, New Orleans was by almost any metric the worst city in the United States – the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy, the most corrupt and brutal cops. Yet a poll conducted a few weeks before the storm found that more New Orleanians – regardless of […]
Taking on “Award-winning Architecture.”
02-Mar-09A friend of mine came up with the term “award-winning architecture” to describe the worst, most intellectual bits of modernism that blight our national landscape. He called them that because you can be certain that the worse they are, the more honored they had been by an intellectual elite completely out of touch with humanity […]
Small government is big business.
02-Mar-09“One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat [the Democrats] is with better policy ideas,” – Rush Limbaugh “Small government” is just a business slogan at this point. It should be given a trademark symbol like “Nodoby Beats the Wiz (TM)” to remind people that it’s just a slogan, […]
I’ve taken my time writing in response to Tuesday evening’s political events – the speeches of Obama and Jindal – but the ground has not shifted in the intervening days. The best vocalized reaction from a pundit, I have found, comes from David Brooks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoKd9irM9dM&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2ztrF253DE Obama’s speech was muscular and serious, a ripening of […]
City of David.
02-Mar-09As I write this, it’s the last hour of March First, Saint David’s Day. The feast is named after a Welsh man, but the feast was appropriated by Saint David’s School (where I taught in years past) as the feast of King David. The Western Church typically does not call Old Testament figures “saints” nor […]
Some sense on marriage.
04-Mar-09I’ve finally seen some internet writing on gay marriage that makes sense – a reader writing in to Andrew Sullivan, who makes a nice, tempered, intelligent reply. The problem with the gay marriage campaign has been that marriage is not a right, but, as the above reader describes it, “a social institution.” It is a […]