[NOTE: I originally wrote this post in 2005, nearly twenty years ago. I was reminded of the subject matter last night when commenter “Jeff Z” wrote, on the Holocaust inversion thread, “I don’t know if you’ve ever read ‘Reading Lolita … Continue reading →
I read Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World shortly after I had read Orwell’s dystopian Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I was around thirteen years old at the time, and I didn’t quite get Brave New World although I did finish it. In my … Continue reading →
And that means I finally signed off on the proofs. Proof-reading is one of my least favorite occupations, and at a certain point you just have to say enough, because it seems it’s always possible to find mistakes. I still … Continue reading →
I finally turned in the PDF of Gerard’s book to the printing company. I had long been formatting and fixing things and proof-reading and fiddling with this and that. There are a nearly infinite number of decisions to make when … Continue reading →
For most of my blogging career, I’ve had the category “evil” on my right sidebar. As I write this, there are only 118 entries there. Ordinarily, I’ve kept the designation for things like the Holocaust or terrible crimes rather than … Continue reading →
I had some Chinese food leftovers for lunch a little while ago. Heated them up in the microwave for a few second and voilà! Done. Which got me to thinking – Leftovers used to be a chore Heating them up, … Continue reading →
For the past few months not only has a lot of the news been extremely depressing, but it’s been appearing on so many fronts that I have at least thirty stories to choose from each day for my blog posts. … Continue reading →
One of Billy Joel’s most famous songs – his first big hit, “Piano Man” – was released when he was twenty-four years old. It was based on his real-life experiences: “Piano Man” is a fictionalized retelling of Joel’s own experience … Continue reading →
Laurence Tribe is a law professor at Harvard specializing in the US Constitution. But leftism and partisan Trump-hatred so blinds Tribe that he sounds incredibly stupid here. Maybe he really is incredibly stupid, but I doubt it – at least, … Continue reading →
[NOTE: Today is Presidents’ Day, and this is a repeat of a previous post.] I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s … Continue reading →
Same scene, two versions of War and Peace. Hollywood, circa 1956. Ferrer and Hepburn were married in real life at the time: Here’s the Russian version made in the 1960s, which I saw in movie theaters long ago. I found … Continue reading →
Commenter “huxley” had AI perform an interesting exercise. He asked ChatGPT 3.5 to do the following: Write song lyrics like “Why Can’t a Woman Be More like a Man” based on “Why can’t a Nothing be more like a Something.” … Continue reading →