On Ask Polly: My Best Friend Is In Love With My Sister!
@Nabonwe: I don't think there's any real dismissal going on here, just an acknowledgment that there ain't no time machines for sale on the internet. The situation does suck from the letter writer's point of view, but there is no way to unsuck it. She could dwell on how she done been wronged -- but actually, she's going to do that, regardless of what Polly says, because people don't turn off or change their feelings that quickly. So what she really needs in the way of advice is someone saying, "Remember that these people who have done a sorta sucky thing -- or at least one of them -- will still be in your life when the suckiness has faded. AND YOU CAN TRUST ME, BECAUSE I'VE BEEN THERE."
I mean, you're free to disagree, but what advice would you have given? The letter writer's pain is real, but she has nothing to gain from lingering on it. Short-term vindication will feel very hollow in the years to come.
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On We Should Have Killed These Internet Pioneers Back In the 1990s
I have said it before and will say it again, speaking as someone who was in j-school right when the internet started to go mainstream:
Newspapers knew it was coming. And they convinced themselves that things would magically be OK.
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On Let's Make the Sequester the SEA QUESTER!
I came up with this joke last Wednesday. COME ON, THE AWL.
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On Nation Sets Aside Low-Level Resentment Of Simon Rich To Enjoy Story
You must never go to Slupsk!
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On 'Atlas Shrugged': Who Is John Galt's Chiropractor?
The Dispossessed is sort of a polemical novel, and not a bad one, although I think it reads better the younger you are, and probably read better when it was published than it does today.
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On 'Atlas Shrugged': Who Is John Galt's Chiropractor?
I read it my junior year of college, chain-smoking Camel Lights in my shitty basement apartment the whole time. Probably it wouldn't hold up if I reread it, but my impression was that sheerly as a page-turner, it totally worked! If you can get into the right mind-set (which I think you really have to be in your junior year of college, or younger), you will be righteously pissed on behalf of Rearden and Dagny et al., and you will want very badly to see how this all plays out and DO THEY GET JUSTICE. And I think the enduring popularity of the book and The Fountainhead is evidence that Rand was, empirically speaking, a great novelist, even if she was a pretty bad novelist and an awful fucking philosopher.
Anyway: Every American should read it once, the same way every American should read the Bible once. Both should be read under the guidance of wiser parties. And I mean, if you chose not to read either, I wouldn't be upset with you for it or anything.
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On Ways In Which The Movie 'Cloud Atlas' Has Changed My Life
Excellent. (I mean, tragic, too.)
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On Oh Look, An Actual Piece of Informative Political Reporting
@Multiphasic: THEN I HAVE DONE MY JOB.
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On Oh Look, An Actual Piece of Informative Political Reporting
@my_piru: My clunky, weary sentences are an acquired taste.
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On Ask Polly: My Best Friend Is In Love With My Sister!
@HereKitty: BUT ONE IS BLUE AND THE OTHER ONE IS WHITE