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David Foster Wallace, R.I.P.
I never read Infinite Jest, but I did read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments and got a lot out of it. However, the DFW work that left the biggest mark on me by far was this Harper’s essay [$] about grammar and usage. To take a subject as crushingly boring as this and turn it
Maher looks back
Bill Maher raised the subject of 9/11 on last night’s show, and countered Sarah Palin’s regurgitation of “they hate us for our freedom” with his own “they hate us for our airstrikes.” And there the debate remains frozen, still, seven years later. Although “they hate us for our freedom” is cartoonish and misleading, Islamist militants are in fact declared foes
Bush doctrines
Timothy Noah makes a fair point. You could say this talk of The Bush Doctrine gives Bush 43 too much credit, as if he’s left us some grand foreign policy legacy on par with Monroe, Teddy Roosevelt and Truman. … In his book The Bush Tragedy, my Slate colleague Jacob Weisberg identifies and dates five separate Bush Doctrines: Unipolar Realism
The week on disc (27)
In case you missed the last one… Bobo Stenson Trio, Cantando (ECM) Catherine Russell, Sentimental Streak (World Village) Mark O’Leary & Han Bennink, Television (Ayler) Aaron Weinsten & John Pizzarelli, Blue Too (Arbors) The Stance Brothers, Kind Soul (ObliqSound) Michael Jefry Stevens Quartet, For the Children (Cadence)
Back to Obama
A Sullivan reader makes a good point: The McCain campaign has managed to get liberal blogs constantly talking about McCain-Palin, rather than Obama-Biden. “Yesterday Obama gave a fantastic interview at the Service Forum. Did the liberal blogs even cover this? No. He gave a great speech on the trail. Are his town halls even posted or excerpted? No. […] The liberal
Remembering
It is September 11 and the McCain campaign has us all ranting about lipstick on a pig. Think about that. Last year, to mark this anniversary, I posted a passage from Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel The Shadow Lines. I’d like to do so again. — The Shadow Lines is a semifictional account of anti-Muslim communal violence in Calcutta in 1964.
Lipstick traces
Larry King has Arianna Huffington, lying sack of shit Ari Fleischer and complete moron Chuck Norris on his show, and he’s milking lipstick-gate for all it’s worth. Get this: Fleischer conceded that Obama was not referring to Palin with the lipstick remark, but since the audience laughed, clearly they must have taken it that way. The audience laughed because it was