Category: The Halcyon Days
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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.
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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.
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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…
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Why I Am So Happy
In trying to find a writer who provided an articulate, cogent framework upon which I could build my nascent pessimism, I was surprised when I found William Hazlitt, an Englishman born in 1778, whose words so accurately and punishingly vivisect modern American “culture,” or lack thereof.
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Starbucks: Commendable or Untenable?
The answer: because people like to think that they are “generating grass-roots social change” and, as a general rule, don’t particularly enjoy writing checks to charity, they can have their (coffee) cake and eat it too by supporting allegedly impoverished, illiterate, disease afflicted individuals in third world countries with the purchase of their venti-soy-iced-carmel-macchiato-with-an-extra-shot. They…
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Are you too smart for college?
What I believe the value of a “college education” to be is the following: the formalistic academic environment provided by our nations’ colleges and universities provides its young people with the framework–the papers, the reading assignments, the problem sets, etc.–to undertake the rather formidable task of consuming and digesting giant quantities of information, and, hopefully,…