On Your Summers Are Numbered
I love reading essays with the phrase 'come the revolution.' It reminds me of my youth in Alberta (basically Canada's Texas, or maybe Arizona? Lots of rednecks, anyway), during which time I was marginally active in the youth wing of the leftist/social democrat party there (the NDP). I guess that being so far outside the political mainstream tends to push people (or at least teens) further towards the extremes, because we definitely had more than a few discussions about what we were going to do 'come the revolution.' It hasn't us yet, but if it does, at least I have a plan...
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On Ross Douthat Would Make A Fine Atheist
It's kinda funny to read this article next to Sunday's NYTimes Magazine article on Robert George, wherein "the country's most influential conservative Christian thinker" stakes out his position that religion has nothing to offer on moral issues beyond hating gays (and women, obviously). So transcendent!
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On Literary Vices, with Rudolph Delson: Spiro Agnew, NSFW
Can I suggest another book to review? It isn't vice-presidential, but it does fit in with the theme of 'pulp fiction written by Nixon associates.' The book is The Coven, by David St. John, which happens to be one of the pen names of E. Howard Hunt, famed Watergate burglar and all-around unpleasant dude.
Here's a synopsis, gleaned from Rick Perlstein's wonderful Nixonland: Some jazz musicians are murdered, and Jonathan P. Gault, hard-boiled detective, in on the case. The trail, detouring through hippie communes and government funded 'Community Involvement Centers', eventually leads to Senator Newborn Vane (D-Mass?). SPOILER ALERT: Senator Vane is a devil-worshipper.
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On AIDS Activist Is Upset
I think we've been trained to expect vaccines to be 100% effective, making a mere 30% reduction in risk seem dubious. The vaccines we get as kids are presented as really powerful things - shots that will protect you for life (or until the next booster shot) from diseases that would otherwise strike at any time. In fact, none of these vaccines are perfectly effective, and a substantial amount of their protective effect is due to herd immunity.
A vaccine that reduced risk of infection by 30% could still greatly reduce the incidence of HIV infection, if it was administered to a substantial proportion of the population. It therefore doesn't seem all that unreasonable to trumpet these results as a big deal. Or at least, it's fairly unreasonable to say at this stage that "it didn't actually work." The trick with statistical significance is that it's just an arbitrary threshold. It sucks that the vaccine doesn't seem to be strongly effective, but these results are promising enough to merit further study (in the real sense, not the padding-out-the-conclusion-section sense), regardless of where you draw that threshold.
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On The D.R. Adams Mail Project: The First Commission
Diplomacy is pretty good, but the era from whence it came is an otherwise barren wasteland, boardgame-wise. Risk? The Game of Life? Those were crimes against humanity...
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On The D.R. Adams Mail Project: The First Commission
Citation:
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/magazine/17-04/mf_settlers
But secretly, the cool kids are all playing Dominion at the moment (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36218).
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On The D.R. Adams Mail Project: The First Commission
This is the golden age of board games. Seriously, have you played Settlers of Catan? Or Power Grid? They are to Monopoly what Jesus is to Satan, except that they both exist.
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On Reading Mark Greif's Recent 'N+1' Piece In Real Time
Harper's printed an even crazier anti-coupling screed in its October issue. It was an excerpt from the manifesto of a French terrorist organization, so it likely lacked a certain amount of editorial supervision, making it a poor target for The Shadow Editors(TM). But what it lacks in editing, it makes up for by labeling the couple 'autism-for-two'...
link (paying customers only, I think):
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/10/0082661
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On The Most Hilarious Piece You'll Ever Read About Gays in the Military
The reference is to Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 supreme court case that overturned Connecticut's ban on contraceptives. The court ruled that while the constitution contains no mention of privacy, the rights specified in the constitution nevertheless imply a right to privacy. They used the metaphor of lights and shadows to convey this concept; the right to privacy, they said, is found in the penumbra cast by the Bill of Rights. (Working through the metaphor, I suspect that what is meant is that the specified constitutional rights lie in the umbra - the darkest part of a shadow - while the implied rights lie in the penumbra).