In his most recent column, which I saw in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Thomas Sowell patronizes the working class by imagining a group of educated people who look down on manual and semi-skilled labor. He characterizes Utopian intellectuals who “lament that many people work ‘just for money’” and want every job to be self-fulfilling, which Sowell […]
You wouldn’t ask a fox to guard a henhouse. Nor would you ask a known thief to serve as treasurer for a charity. And you certainly wouldn’t have a child molester chaperone a two-week Cub Scout camping trip. And yet the part of the white middle class that is free-falling towards poverty wants to put […]
Anyone with doubts that the primary way in which Americans commemorate and celebrate is to shop should see all the proof they need in the announcement that Teen Vogue magazine is organizing its own private holiday dedicated to shopping called Back-to-School Saturday on this coming August 11. The idea of Back-to-School Saturday is to fill […]
Read More… from Teen magazine manufactures new holiday dedicated to shopping
We’re used to the History Channel running pseudo-historical and non-historical shows. And the only thing it seems you can discover on the Discovery channel nowadays are fantasies and fiction. Et tu, Animal Planet? This past weekend, the cable channel built around accurate, if sometimes overly cloying or dramatic images and narratives about animals, took the […]
Read More… from Now joining the Un-History channel is Non-Animal Planet with its feature on mermaids
The mainstream seems to be taking a hard look at some of the more radical ideas of the right wing. Over the past week or so, we have seen a number of signs that the mainstream is beginning to push back against the constant bullying by the right-wing on such issues as women’s reproductive rights, […]
Read More… from Is the mainstream moving left or just reacting to right-wingers behaving badly?
Most of us have heard of twice baked potatoes and those who frequent Chinese restaurants often see twice cooked pork on the menu. And home brewers sometime pride themselves on their twice fermented beer. But today’s Parade Magazine one-ups all double-cooking by presenting a menu of delights that has been homogenized not once, not twice, […]
The major business news story this morning was the fact that Facebook fell four points or a little over 11% in its second day of trading. It led the business pages of The New York Times and Yahoo!, Google and National Public Radio’s business news. Here in western Pennsylvania, the political cartoonist Rob Rogers shows […]
One of my favorite scenes in movies is at the very beginning of Chinatown, when Jack Nicholson says to a cuckolded husband, “When you’re right, you’re right.” I’ve seen the movie at least 10 times and every time I want to yell at the screen, “and when you’re wrong, you’re wrong.” And now I say […]
Read More… from OpEdge author admits he’s wrong: comic books can be an art form for adults
My generation read comic books growing up: Superman, Batman and their various ancillary Supers and Bats. Green Lantern and Green Hornet, Archie and Jughead. And then most of us stopped at about 12 or 13, and moved on to other literature. In those days, any movie based on a comic book was a Sunday serial […]
Read More… from Movies from comic books are one more sign of the infantilization of American adults
Mother’s Day dominates the news media today. Every newspaper has a Mother’s Day story on the front cover and every television and radio news show is running a Mother’s Day feature. The New York Times Book Review starts reviews of two books about mothers on its front cover. The Wall Street Journal weekend edition touts […]