I’m no fan of Sarah Palin, but I’ve received numerous messages this morning purporting to contain a list of books Palin attempted to have banned from the Wasilla city library when she was elected mayor. This is clearly a myth.
First, this list has been circulating, in various incarnations, for ages and is just one [...]

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[photo by Steve Rhodes]
David Foster Wallace’s essay on John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign is being re-issued as a book called McCain’s Promise. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, DFW responded to the question of whether he had changed his mind about his assessment of McCain:
"The essay quite [...]

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Another comic I forget because I can’t subscribe to it (though that is supposedly going to change real soon) is the almost always amusing– and often scary– Get Your War On. A pair from late last month:

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This brief documentary on the rise of Neo-Nazis and other hate groups in Russia is powerful and disturbing… and perfect for the web where it isn’t censored as it would undoubtedly be on television.

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A snippet from a newspaper article on Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

“Poetry can save the world by transforming consciousness,” he argues in “Poetry as Insurgent Art,” a slim hardback pocketbook manifesto of prose epigrams, seemingly addressed to poets and those who might be.
“I am signaling you through the flames,” he begins in the new section from which his [...]

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Patriotism. It’s become a distasteful, even shameful, word to me. I don’t know when it changed, at what point in the evolution of my thinking the mere invocation of the word started to make me shiver.
I love this country, though not to the exclusion of all others. The United States is a good place to [...]

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I’m thoroughly disgusted by the party line Supreme Court decision in the Morse v. Frederick (aka Bong Hits 4 Jesus) case. I’m too angry and frustrated to write a dispassionate, analytical post. But I would like to make a few points.

Frederick was not on school grounds at the time he put the banner up [...]

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There are some powerful images in this Slate exhibit about how to approach the disappeared artistically, but none more so than this video of an artist painting– with water on stone– the likenesses of disappeared individuals, a race against time before the images inevitably fade away…

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Robert Pinsky moderates a linguistic duel, the Meta-Free-Phor-All between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn.

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Via Victoria:

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via Link comes this juicy bit by Chief Justice Warren:
Unfortunately, there are some who think that the way to save freedom in this country is to adopt the techniques of tyranny.

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As Sartre constantly reminds us, we are what we do.
In short, existentialism is not a philosophy that allows us to feel sorry for ourselves in the midst of our malaise. It is a philosophy with which we can come to grips with these terrible times and actually change them. The recent midterm election was encouraging. [...]

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From the article “A Deadly Certitude”:
Dawkins treats Islam as just another deplorable religion, but there is a difference. The difference lies in the extent to which religious certitude lingers in the Islamic world, and in the harm it does. Richard Dawkins’s even-handedness is well-intentioned, but it is misplaced.
If one is going to be intellectually honest, [...]

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It sounds better to title this post positively than to say what it’s really about: my intolerance. The common adage is that as one grows older one grows more intolerant. But when I was younger I was already extremely intolerant. Not in the grand and notable ways– I quickly outgrew my childhood racism and homophobia, [...]

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Thomas Merton:
Hence it becomes more and more difficult to estimate the morality of an act leading to war because it is more and more difficult to know precisely what is going on. Not only is war increasingly a matter for pure specialists operating with fantastically complex machinery, but above all [...]

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