Intellect
Professor Keiger's Writing Prejudices...
…should be your writing prejudices. Check them out. (They remind me that I need an editor sometimes.)
Steve Casburn
Houston
Sunday evening at MFAH
As part of its "Revivals" film series, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston showed Leni Riefenstahl's film about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Olympia I. Olympia I is a stunningly beautiful film. Except for the parts which have Nazis in them. There's no harm in
History
The Wonderful Wizard of 16 to 1
I had always thought of "The Wizard of Oz" as a fairy tale (or as the video for "Dark Side of the Moon"). In fact, it is an allegory of…bimetallism? Read on… (Warning! Simplifications ahead!) In the 19th century, the United States was on the
Politics
Semantics
Kevin Drum (CalPundit) notices how a key Bush administration phrase has evolved over the last year: March 2003: June 2003: October 2003: January 2004:
Politics
Dean and Iowa
In 1996, Arizona voted for Bill Clinton in the general election, between voting for Bush 41 in 1992 and Bush 43 in 2000. At the time, some speculated that Arizona voters had been so alienated from Bob Dole by the negative television advertisements run by the Steve Forbes campaign in
Politics
The Perfect Fog
The Dean campaign's Perfect Storm drizzled out tonight in Iowa. I think I know one reason why. One year at Ohio State, an ideologically driven group went all-out to win the student government presidential race. It had money, it had organization, it had eager volunteers; on paper,
Houston
Massages in Houston
If you live inside the Loop, and you'd like to get a massage, I can recommend the West Gray location of Serenity Now.
History
The New Republic and George McGovern, Part 3
With his endorsement of Wesley Clark, George McGovern perhaps answers those who compare McGovern to Howard Dean. Still, though, the similiarities between this account of the McGovern campaign in 1971 and what we've seen of the Dean campaign are interesting: To run as an "insurgent," the
History
Oops.
Future historians may well mark the mid-1980s as the time when Japan surpassed the United States to become the world's dominant economic power. [...] America's GNP may remain larger than Japan's well into the 1990s (depending on exchange rate measurements), but there are many
History
The New Republic and George McGovern, Part 2
In 1971, The New Republic noted an aspect of George McGovern's personality that I see as the biggest difference between him and Howard Dean: Next to his "radical" image, McGovern's biggest liability is the feeling he doesn't project strength, that he'
Intellect
The role of critics
His similes are terrible, but his points are good… [T]he art critics and the dramatic critics [...] are separated by a great chasm of "culture" and fastidiousness from the people for whom they write. They [look upon] the amusements of the public, not as wine-tasters oversee wine-
History
A tragic hubris
Even after the slaughter of World War I, there could still be in 1937 an excessive faith in human progress: Today, of course, we hardly know the meaning of the word "fear" in its medieval sense. Anesthetics have removed the fear of physical pain. Logic and intelligence have