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08 Oct 2009 — Down from Puritanism

Orthodox Jews believe that the Torah is the Word of God, and one of the aims of Orthodox school systems is to teach young Jews to read that text in its original Hebrew. Even in the non-Orthodox strands of Judaism, religious education is “Hebrew school”; there is a cultural recognition that the Bible is that Hebrew book on the rabbi’s shelf.

17 Sep 2009 — The autumn mists have come to New England...

…and a land called Honalee has a new permanent resident.

09 Sep 2009 — In which your humble servant strikes a blow for ecumenicism

ImHalal.com, meet Koshernet. Koshernet, meet ImHalal.com. Now that I’ve introduced you guys, I’m sure you can have a very fruitful collaboration.

08 Sep 2009 — This is the season when Jews should reflect on traditional words of wisdom...

…such as the thespians’ maxim “never work with children or animals”.

08 Sep 2009 — Down with Helvetian imperialism!

One of my pet peeves about discussion of Israel among left-wingers is the prevalence of the idea that the Jewish state is an illegitimate entity that should be eliminated, not just compelled to yield territory to a Palestinian state. Even if we assume for the purpose of argument that every complaint about the morality of Zionism is true, it would prove that Israel as a nation-state is born in sin, as it were—and similar complaints can be made about every other nation-state on this planet. (If you say “all those other countries committed their founding war crimes long long ago, before the international community even recognized them as such,” then I will respond with one word: “Serbia”.)

06 Sep 2009 — Dept. of “oh, no, not again”

NYT: “After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers plan to buy ‘life settlements,’ life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to ‘securitize’ these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors…”

04 Sep 2009 — IHTFP but it does have some redeeming social value

I must congratulate my alma mater on reaching 12th place in the Washington Monthly’s national university rankings. (This is the ranking system that asks not what colleges do for their alumni’s reputations, but what all these well-endowed tax-exempt institutions are doing for their country.) Surely it is a mere statistical fluke, perhaps a slip of an editor’s pen, that led another well-known Cambridge educational institution to reach 11th place.

02 Sep 2009 — The Gordian solution to poverty

Every once in a while, some wide-eyed idealist—I believe that the most well-known such thinker was libertarian Milton Friedman—suggests that the real problem that poor people have is not enough money. Therefore, they say, the most effective way for the government to lift the poor out of their miserable condition is to give them money.

23 Aug 2009 — Michel Foucault to the pink courtesy phone

News coverage of the controversy regarding whether or not track star Caster Semenya is “really” a woman is giving everyone a crash course in postmodern gender theory. Can one’s chromosomes determine once and for all whether a person is “really” a man or a woman? Nope. Shape of genitalia? Nope. Hormones? Nope. Now that we’ve reviewed the general issue of how subjective sex attribution can be, I’d like to focus on who, in this case, gets to be the subject.

10 Aug 2009 — Dept. of “you can’t win for losing”

I’ve been trying to protect myself from the headaches of another massive hard-drive failure by backing up our home systems to Amazon S3, first by using JungleDisk, and more recently by using duplicity. (JungleDisk is a fine program—it’s one of the few pieces of software running on my Linux box that I’ve put down money for, and I’ve never regretted doing so—but the basic version is oriented towards backing up one user’s personal files, and knows nothing of Unix ownership, file permissions, etc.)

23 Jul 2009 — Indicted

Many bloggers whose hard drives I am not fit to defragment have commented on Prof. Gates’s arrest for the dastardly crime of Residing While Black. Others are no doubt compiling enough links to create a definitive record of commentary on this case. I humbly submit for the archives this analysis by Lowry Heussler which cross-examines, as it were, the arresting officer’s own report.

21 Jul 2009 — We came in peace for all mankind

15 Jul 2009 — The incredible true story of the girl with two hearts

14 Jul 2009 — Pain considered harmful

I would have thought that the pain of unmedicated childbirth has very little in common with the pain of getting woken every three hours by a crying infant, not to mention the pain of one’s plans interrupted by a pre-schooler’s fourteenth tantrum of the day, not to mention… you get the idea. And therefore, I would have thought that suffering one of these pains does not really prepare you for the others, except perhaps through the psychology of misaccounting for sunk costs.

13 Jul 2009 — A literary note

I hear they’re coming out with a new series of children’s books about a Pope who solves mysteries in his spare time.

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