Upward Mobility

By now, I suppose, the cat’s out of the bag. As of next week, I’ll be blogging regularly at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen. Dispatches will remain in place, though I’m afraid I don’t have the time or inclination to write for two blogs simultaneously. My heartfelt thanks go out to everyone who has stopped [...]

Mary Washington Debate Has a Twitter Feed!

Exciting stuff. Follow us as we crush the hopes and dreams of debaters from more presitigious schools at the year-end National Debate Tournament.

Gene Wolfe is a conservative

I suppose there were elements of The Book of the New Sun that could plausibly be described as conservative, but I never really considered the man’s politics. Here’s an interesting podcast interview with Wolfe from National Review.

Highbrow vs. Lowbrow

Sonny Bunch had a smart comment on the latest Culture11 postmortem:
Yeah, but this is a problem with the culture writ large, not just in conservative spheres. Example: In my day job, I’m a film critic at the Washington Times, and my boss just came over and talked about the DVD reviews that generate web traffic [...]

Notre Dame For The Win

I’m not a Catholic, so I’m loath to comment on the Obama-Notre Dame controversy. That said, I’m dully impressed by the names of the student groups assembled to oppose Obama’s commencement address:
The Irish Rover Student Newspaper
The University of Notre Dame Anscombe Society
Militia of the Immaculata
Children of Mary
Orestes Brownson Council
Notre Dame Law School Right to Life
Notre [...]

Larison Brings the Funny

Here:
The contrast Homans makes between C11 and Big Hollywood is instructive, and tends to confirm my rather jaundiced view of the inverse relationship between success and quality. Essentially, on one site you would find intelligent cultural criticism, and on the other you would find a lot of the cultural whining that seems especially concentrated among [...]

Posted Without Comment

From The Nation’s “Liberal Liaisons” section:
PRISON PICASSO. 48, nonviolent marijuana farmer. Seeks progressive Frida/O’Keeffe for correspondence . . .

Worthy Adversaries

So Katha Politt unleashed a broadside last week, taking the New York Times to task for daring to replace Kristol with another conservative columnist. She also criticized Ross Douthat’s liberal admirers, many of whom had the temerity to publicly applaud his selection. A few quick thoughts:

It’s a bit dishonest of Politt to not only not [...]

Exercising Civic Virtue: or, Why Dive Bars Are Best

Obviously, I’m in favor of anyone who defends drinking after work, but the latest from Front Porch Republic goes above and beyond the call of duty:
The news is dreadful: According to the Census, since 2006 we have been living in a republic where, for the first time in the history of the republic, Americans drink [...]

Reasonable People

Over at Shadow Government, Peter Feaver defends the cost of the Iraq War. His “sanctions were falling apart; we had to do something” argument has always struck me as a bit odd – had we invested a tenth of the diplomatic capital we spent on badgering the U.N. and assembling a coalition of the willing [...]

Amateur Hour

The Times is hosting a fun debate on college athletes’ amateur status. Check it out.

Really, Mr. President?

The Jay Leno appearance didn’t bother me. Filling out a NCAA bracket for ESPN was kind of cool. But a $500,000 advance for a book deal? Had Bush done something similar, we’d all be braying about gross dereliction of duty. Granted, context matters, and so far the Obama Administration is nowhere near Bushian levels of [...]

Moving/Car Towed/Other Stuff

Blogging, as they say, will be light.

Cheaters

Via John Schwenkler, it seems plagiarism has finally caught up with our globalized economy:
Screen after screen, assignment after assignment — hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others request an [...]

One of them

I was a bit perplexed by this Brad DeLong entry, which purports to criticize Ross Douthat for expressing reservations about hooking up with a girl in college:
From Ross Douthat, Privilege, bottom of p. 184:
One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese [...]

Basketball Interlude

Cringe-inducing words from TrueHoop’s Henry Abbott:
Every time I hear about the government needing “shovel ready” projects to invest in as economic stimulus, I can’t help but think: Governments pay for stadiums anyway. Surely somebody is going to get some stadium stimulus dollars. Tim Romani from Icon Venue Group addressed that. He said he thought there [...]

Best Gift Ever

I received a pretty awesome pirated copy of “The Wire” for my birthday. Among other hilarious miscues, the cover features Bunk, Sydnor, Freemon, and Bubbles arrayed against the Sydney skyline. The artist presumably thought that Sydney’s waterfront was a decent stand-in for Baltimore, but then forgot to remove the painfully-apparent Sydney Opera House from the [...]

Racism in Sport

Brian Phillips compares soccer hooliganism to American fans’ troubled relationship with black NBA players. A taste:
Unlike American racism, which can be seen as an internal social problem transformed by changing attitudes within one overarching culture, the history of European nationalism was decided by relatively recent battles between armies whose sources of legitimacy were external to [...]

The Old College Try

I’m not sure if Campus Progress dredged up Ross Douthat’s old Harvard articles as part of some misguided attempt to derail his move to the Times, but they’re fascinating reading nonetheless (via). Three quick thoughts:
1.) I shudder to think what I would have done with a newspaper column in college. My only contribution to Mary [...]

Better Gatekeepers, Please

TNR has a fun piece on the decline and fall of the (in)famous Pajamas Media blogger network:
Instead, many of the laid-off bloggers have found a different way to express their angst about Pajamas Media’s business strategy: They’re calling the owners of PJM sell-outs. “The initial purpose was to support citizen-blogging as a counterweight to the [...]