I think that a lot of people in the straight world* react weirdly to disabled people for a couple of reasons. First, they recoil at just how much effort it takes the person to accomplish some task ("Jesus Christ, that person's killing himself just to get into a chair!"). Then, the imaginitive placing of themselves in…

 Slate's Mark O'Connell (here) highlights one of the main virtues of Nardwuar the Human Serviette: One of the most interesting things about watching a lot of Nardwuar’s interviews (and if you watch one, chances are you’ll end up watching a lot) is the way that they tend to reveal aspects of artists’ personalities that we’re…

The biggest failing in my generation is the inconstancy of our affections, driven by an inconsistent mix of ironic detachment and fear of being uncool.  Think of poor hair bands like RATT, on tour in 1991. In the exact same weeks as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" starts its relentless climb up the charts RATT…

Even the noblest vocation carries with it spiritual dangers unique to that calling. Medical doctors are in grave danger of seeing all humans all the time as automobiles to be fixed. Police officers see too much depravity in every context. Dentists start to feel generally unloved. And for the humble professor, other people become lecture…

Thanks to Michael Friedman's heroic efforts, the outright distortions that governed much of our common sense concerning the logical positivists is finally beginning to fade. For example, most of us now know that the so-called "Quine-Duhem hypothesis" was explicitly (e.g. "one can hold true a proposition come what may") stated and defended by A.J. Ayer…

Nearly everyone with whom I find myself having long conversations* has at some time fallen into a kind of holidays era depression strong enough to take the comic edge off of Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse" (NSFW). The inevitable clash between promise and experienced reality is exacerbated by difficult family dynamics (even with respect…