Too long; do not read.
The state of the nation as Baby 2012 makes its squalling entrance is extremely hard to gauge. The answer to the question of where we are politically, as is often the case, depends entirely on where you are standing, and what sort of filter you are looking through at the …
People are still making rap music! Can you imagine? Maybe it’s not a trend after all. Foxy grandma even noticed some beats being jacked when she was watching Glee last week. Thank goodness for the internet, where we can keep on arguing about ‘relevance’ and ‘credibility’ until the return of cows. …
George Orwell was right about a great number of things, and he was right about them in an extremely eloquent and insightful way. Never was he righter, and never more insightful, than in Chapter III of Down and Out in Paris and London, where he describes the stroke of bad …
Dear geeks, Congratulations! It is my understanding that you have taken over mainstream culture recently, and while this has caused consternation in certain quarters, I am the magnanimous sort, and besides, whenever someone says the words “culture war”, my eyes glaze over like a Honey Baked Ham. It has, however, …
It is in Ezekiel, near the beginning of God’s crazy-old-man period, when he admits that he deliberately gave his followers stupid ideas and made them follow intentionally bogus rules just to make them miserable and remind them who was really in charge. For all their talk of abortion, homosexuality, and …
As the Occupy Wall Street movement drags on, and law enforcement agencies make the foolish but predictable decision to respond to its persistence with violence, a fundamental contradiction begins to make itself known in our political lives. It has always been a basic assumption of even the most partisan political …
Now, before we get too far into this, let me clarify something: I am not arguing that the lottery is, in and of itself, a good investment. The odds, as everyone should be aware, are extraordinary remote, and the argument that it is a kind of regressive taxation on the …
It’s not that I feel sorry for Herman Cain. I don’t. He is, after all, a heartless rich asshole who couldn’t care less about people like you an me, an intellectual flea who only has one idea and a bad one at that, and very possibly a serial sexual abuser. …
Ever since Al Gore invented the internet, one question and one question alone has haunted the minds of scholars and charged passionate debates among the world’s great thinkers: which website has the world’s worst comments sections? Over the years, a number of consensus favorites have arisen. For sheer number of …
This article is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. Every time someone asks me why I hate Cubs fans so much, I’m just going to send them a link to it. It’s a perfect encapsulation of their moronic faith in a team that has achieved the status of …
In what has to be the top “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” moment of the week, 24-hour full-service horrible human being Michelle Malkin has penned an article in which she condemns the Occupy Wall Street movement for…being a burden on the taxpayer. Oh, she throws in some other …
So, up until today, the Republic jobs plan has been, essentially, to throw rolled-up balls of newspaper at the President and yell “Sucks to your jobs bill!” But the man who brings them their evening cognac has apparently made them aware of some discontent amongst the rabble, so they took …
Comics fans are hardly unique in having a standoffish relationship with the medium they love. (They are probably outpaced by sports fans in terms of the distance between the product on display and the character of the culture that has grown up around it, but that’s another story.) Every genre, …
The commemoration of any great tragedy is a thorny proposition. Pay it too little attention, and you are open to charges of ignoring the pain of the victims and the grief of the survivors; pay it too much attention, and you become vulnerable to accusations of exploitation and devaluation. This …
It’s hard to write anything like this without seeming to endorse a second term for Barack Obama. This is difficult for me to do, since I’ve generally found Obama to be a Clintonian disappointment; he’s squandered one political opportunity after another, bowed down before the G.O.P. with barely a struggle, …
