Author: Jason D. Rowley

  • In Philadelphia, Waiting for My Flight

    Currently, I’m sitting in the Philadelphia airport in terminal F and looking skeptically at a rickety propellor plane which I am supposed to board.. Looking around, there are the average people one might expect to see in an airport, or a mall, or in the waiting room of a doctor’s office.  Overwhelmingly plain, some pasty,…

  • Go East, Young Man, Go East

    For the next week, I’ll be away on vacation in New Haven, CT visiting a couple of friends at Yale.  Next weekend I’m likely headed to New York City for 48 hours of solid exploratory misbehavior and adventure.   I’d love to make this a longer post, but I’m way behind on packing and I…

  • On Reading Habits of Young People

    I met the most charming adolescent in a used bookstore. He saw I was reading Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and proceeded to converse with me with astounding alacrity about Fitzgerald’s short stories, the Great Gatsby, and our shared favorite, This Side of Paradise. He was eleven, and said his father had read these before…

  • If You Can Read This…

    My previous post contained an extended quote from Chris Hedges’s book, Empire of Illusion. Although I finished it a couple of weeks ago, I’ve gone back to the pages which I’ve marked for followup.   In the first chapter called “The Illusion of Literacy,” Hedges makes a convincing argument that our media diets are constituent…

  • On Thinking Critically

    In many ways, the following is a rejoinder to my first Halcyon Days post, Are You Too Smart for College?, but in still more ways it exists as a free-standing entity: a brief, critical treatise regarding the once-venerable “college education.” Late last week, I posted to Twitter a paraphrased quote from Christopher Hedges’s The Empire…

  • Why I Am So Happy, a Follow-Up

    In looking through the internal statistics of this blog, I found that my post, Why I Am So Happy, was one of the most widely read thus far. In it I referred to the wish to scan and distribute William Hazlitt’s essay, On the Pleasure of Hating. I found a full version of the text…

  • Happy Fourth of July

    Have a happy birthday, America! Celebrate safely: keep fireworks out of the reach of those with below an 8th grade education, and reduce the amount of processed beef and pork sausage products you consume.  I don’t want to subsidize your quadruple bypass operation with my tax dollars. More snarky, lengthy posts to come. In the…

  • On Reading Critically

    There is no ought, objectively speaking. There is thus no gage of what “a modest amount of analysis” is; it varies from reader to reader, and from one prescriptive I-can-read-closer-than-thou snob to another.

  • In Defense of Good Television

    Extremely well-done television provides an experience akin to reading well-done literary fiction. One empathizes with certain characters, embraces some, and reviles others.

  • Why Soccer is Not the New Football

    I was extremely fortunate to have the day off yesterday, and I am still more fortunate to own a television with picture-in-picture capabilities. I was sitting in my room, watching the World Cup on ESPN and flipping between the USA-Algeria match and that between England and Slovenia, deducing from the scores if staking a points…