Joshua Cooper Ramo’s got some great schtick his new book about Picasso that has me pondering again the remarkable intellectual trajectory that leads from the raw innovation of Les Demoiselles to the crisp completion of the thought in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Lots of cubism after that point, but in some sense the space …
Continue reading ‘The advantage, from an audience perspective, of music over painting’ »
This is not an April fool’s joke.
On Joshua Cooper Ramo’s Age of the Unthinkable: Instead of tanks and planes and armed battalions, we face “adaptive microthreats and ideas,” like improvised explosive devices made of cheap cell-phone components. Because of such thinking, Ramo writes, “no major power has been able to defeat an insurgency anywhere in the world” since World War II. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Sandpile Edition’ »
Between the university economics class I’m taking and the various stuff people are actually trying to pay me to do, I’ve been too busy to pay proper writerly attention here to a number of important events and discussions. Let me just dump a few things quickly, and let you click through to read what smarter …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Cleaning Out the In Box’ »
From Larry Calloway: I asked Wallace Stegner if he could define the history of the West, expecting a Frontier Thesis answer consistent with his Wilderness Letter and “the geography of hope.” He leaned forward as cool as his heavy drift of snowy hair and said: “One big real estate deal.”
Links to my work from Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight in the same day. Barb raises the question of whether that’s 30 total minutes.
I’ve largely been out of the climate wars fray for years, but yesterday’s Hansen v. Pielke thread leads to a couple of observations: New business model: mention Hansen and Pielke a lot. The quality and usefulness of commenter contributions scales as the inverse square of their relative anonymity. (This blog in recent years has largely …
From Democracy for New Mexico: My partner of 19+ years and I are aging. We’re dealing with a number of health problems. We’re aware that if Mary Ellen loses her job, my health insurance will end that day, because the vast majority of employers in New Mexico can’t, by law, offer insurance coverage to domestic …
Talking dinosaurs and the false balance problem.
It’s been a hard week. Colleagues who did good journalism around me losing their jobs, and the business I love coming unglued. We call it “the daily miracle,” somewhat sarcastically, because you see the chaos that sometimes sets in, around 6 in the evening, the false starts and confused discussions, the arguments over what are …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Thing That Finally Made Me Cry’ »