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17 Jan 2010 — An incisor-lickin’ good movie, with a message for our times

Recently, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a leader in the Jewish Renewal movement, encouraged “fellow-seekers for peace and healing of the earth” to see Avatar, James Cameron’s film about native resistance to a resource-extraction conglomerate, and to connect that film with the upcoming Jewish holiday of Tu B’Shevat.

14 Jan 2010 — Robes in the ’hood

The Harry Potter series was partly inspired by a peculiarly British literary genre: stories of boys’ adventures in public¹ school. If J. K. Rowling had been American, perhaps she would have been inspired by a peculiarly American sort of educational drama, and come up with this.

13 Jan 2010 — Weak tea

Hall’s Third Rule of Politics states: “Constituency always outweighs consistency.” Thus, activists who fly the banner of the “Tea Party” have been eager to condemn “socialist” government spending. But the tea-partiers in Michigan have found one government spending program they like: the auto-industry bailout.

12 Jan 2010 — Dances With Monotheism

Over the past few weeks, I’ve seen some controversy in political and SF blogs regarding a certain Hollywood movie, in which a white American human takes on the form of a blue-skinned alien. I was reminded of this when I read last week’s parsha (Exodus 1:1–6:1), because one could argue that the young Moses is an Egyptian prince who has the form of an Israelite. Pharoah’s daughter describes him as “from the Hebrew children” in 2:7, and Jethro’s daughters describe him as “an Egyptian man” in 2:19. This dual identity gives us a new way to understand one of the most cryptic passages in the Torah, Exodus 4:24–26, which the new JPS version tentatively renders as follows:

08 Jan 2010 — I’ve got bad news and good news

The bad news is, if a certain industry rag can be trusted, jobs in the information technology sector suck.

01 Jan 2010 — “I never drink... soda.”

According to the NYT, Scholastic is reissuing its Baby-Sitters Club series, a line of novels for tween girls that ran for 213 titles and sold 176 million copies. Girls who devoured these books during the 1980s and 1990s now have children of their own and, as one bookseller put it, the rebooted series would sell “really well to the girls who aren’t quite ready for vampires and particularly to the parents of the girls who aren’t quite ready.”

01 Jan 2010 — Happy new decade

Almost ten years ago, some of my friends were discussing what we should call this decade: the Oughts? the Naughts? “The Zeroes”, my wife said. As it turned out, she was prescient.

25 Dec 2009 — Comrade Vladimir Ilyich has left the building

Like most liberals, I’m disappointed by all the compromises that the Democrats had to make to get their 60th Senate vote¹ for health care reform. But make no mistake: even without single-payer, public option, or Medicare buy-in, this law is A Very Good Thing. Kevin Drum summarizes what we are getting:

24 Dec 2009 — Re-re-reconsidering nuclear power

I generally have a “meh” attitude towards nuclear power. I’m not one of those folks who thinks that anything with the word “nuclear” in it must automatically be Evil. But as a practical matter, nuclear plants have proven so capital-intensive and so dependent on government subsidy that their value as carbon-free power investments has been drastically oversold. Nuclear-plant operators in the United States don’t have to pay the full cost of their own liability insurance. We still don’t have a permanent location for storing high-level nuclear waste, and from what I can tell, if we ever do choose such a location, taxpayers who don’t benefit directly from nuclear-generated electricity will still have to pitch in to cover the cost of disposal. If nuclear operators had to raise capital, buy liability insurance, and dispose of their waste on the open market, nobody would dare to run a nuclear power plant; if other forms of non-fossil-fuel energy enjoyed the same level of subsidy, we’d have solar panels on every roof by now (even in towns where it rains for 364 days out of the year).

23 Dec 2009 — Annals of cultural transmission

Scene: The dinner table.

22 Dec 2009 — Laws are like sausages; sometimes they contain traces of lead

The “Manager’s Amendment” that gave Senator Reid his sixtieth vote for cloture on health care reform includes a new subsection, 2717(c), headlined “Protection of Second Amendment Gun Rights”. Agencies or activities empowered by this law may not collect information on the lawful ownership, possession, or use of firearms, and insurers may not charge higher premiums to gun owners. (The precise text begins on page 5 of this PDF document.)

16 Dec 2009 — I would like to register a meta-complaint

Even before the news hit the New York Times, you may have heard about “complaints choirs”, Finland’s incomparable gift to world culture. Here you can see videos of choirs that have gathered all over the world to sing their particular grievances: ninety-one singers in Helsinki, twenty-three in Hamburg, fifty-four in St. Petersburg, eighty in Canada, seventeen in Jerusalem—

15 Dec 2009 — The Internet interprets a cherem as damage and routes around it

It’s too bad there aren’t more Orthodox Jews working for Agence France-Presse, because this article, headlined “Ultra-Orthodox rabbis decry Internet’s ‘terrible impurity’”, buries the lede.

13 Dec 2009 — Thank God we are free, unlike this poor sod

Twice in my life, I have attended Passover Seders¹ in people’s homes in which we, as we celebrated our freedom, were attended by Black servants. Perhaps if I had been raised in a social class where “the help” was a constant presence in my life, I would not have considered this unusual, but I felt like the hosts must have been deaf to irony. What did those women say to their families when they got home from their jobs? I hope that at least they were well paid.

29 Nov 2009 — Dubious taxonomical choice of the day

My wife and I just got back from a romantic date at Brookline Booksmith, and I noticed that their staff has shelved Cecilia Tan’s anthology Women of the Bite: Lesbian Vampire Erotica, not under “Fantasy” or “Gay & Lesbian”, but under “Love & Relationships”.

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