I’m the first to admit I have a bleeding heart. It doesn’t take much for me to feel sorry for someone. That’s why my first feeling when I heard about Jonah Lehrer was pity. He’s 31-years-old, and his career is probably over. Jonah Lehrer was a boy wonder. He’d reached a point that journalists twice [...]
What you are now reading is a review of a review of Sam Harris’s brief new treatise against free will, Free Will. I haven’t read the treatise myself, because I don’t like to read things that tell me what I already know, and I’ve known since early adolescence that free will is nonsense. (You may, science and common [...]
Earlier this week, right-learning journalists went rummaging through the old financial disclosure forms of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and discovered she was invested, to the tune of $1,001 to $15,000, in a 401(k) operated by a thoroughly ordinary money-management firm of California advisors called the Davis Financial Group. The “Davis Financial Fund” invests in many [...]
Everyone has gone appropriately bonkers over the commencement address delivered by English teacher David McCullough, Jr., to this year’s graduates of frou-frou Wellesley High School in Massachusetts. The Daily Beast, the Boston Globe, CNN, WashPo – it’s everyplace. Now known informally as the “You’re Not Special” speech, Mr. McCullough’s address gently reminded the graduates that they had received more from [...]
Yesterday in a rare self-penned post, entertainment heavyweight Russell Simmons took to his own GlobalGrind news. The title? A simple “Get Off Rihanna’s Dick!” The pointed, two-graf screed addressed an amorphous mass guilty of criticizing her recent supposed “good girl gone bad” streak. “It’s just that she is out there allegedly fuckin’ the rockstars of [...]
Let’s stop paying attention to Bill Maher. Yes, he’s very handy to have around when you absolutely need to hear something bitchy and pithy about political hypocrisy or popular superstition. Never mind that. When he sets out to make a point, which is always, Maher gets almost as much wrong as he gets right. And [...]
Did President Barack Obama blow it by saying nothing about the death last week of the Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch? Yes, he did, according to one apparently heartsick Beastie Boys fan, who took to the pages of the Washington Times on Sunday to eulogize Yauch and needle the president. Yauch, 47, died Friday of complications from [...]
Yesterday, New Times‘ music blog County Grind published a piece so completely and utterly offensive, the headline alone caused a face-slam to the keyboard. Titled “Eight Pleasantly Plump Female Musicians We’d Like to Get Down With” — a headline which works against its own implied, ostensibly complimentary purpose by assuming “plump” (whatever that means) is problematic enough to warrant [...]
Trayvon Martin is a martyr. He died defending gay rights. Don’t agree? Then you’re a hopeless reactionary, and probably a racist and a sexist to boot. Or so you might be led to believe by reading of some of the fringier discourse attached to the Trayvon tragedy, which in recent weeks has come to represent [...]
You already know this: while earning your college degree was informative and pleasant enough, plenty of us head in a different direction. Or maybe the experience wasn’t so awesome or helpful, but we’re sticking, steadfast and stubborn, to what we set out for in the first place. Joshua Miller, the executive director and founder of [...]
