Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2577
September 5, 2010
"Rest In Vinyl"
Mental Health Break
by Chris Bodenner
A video version of this Dish thread:
Web Design and Development - Hosting - Free - Protocols - HTTP
About My Job: The British Debt Collector
by Conor Friedersdorf
A reader writes:
I collect unpaid British court fines, mostly for the Magistrates Courts. The fines are mostly for vehicle offences, public transport fare dodging, and small crimes such as assault, shoplifting, etc. What people do not understand is that there are virtually no repercussions if they refuse to pay. The collection process is outsourced to private contractors such as myself and theoretically we have powers to seize goods and initiate arrest. However this never ...
Be A Mensch
by Zoe Pollock
Bill Taylor responds to a disturbing statistic about the disparity of obituaries written about men and women in the New York Times:
What really matters? As a society and business culture, we still tend to equate money with success. If someone is rich, the thinking goes, he or she may or may not be a no-good SOB, but a fortune is evidence that someone is smart, or at least shrewd, and no doubt a success. Which helps to explain why so many wealthy males get New York Times
The View From Your Window
New Orleans, Louisiana, 12.15 pm
Louisiana - New Orleans - United States - Metro Areas and Regions - Hurricane Katrina
An American Tradition
by Zoe Pollock
A Commonweal reader points Paul Moses to a July 28, 1879 article in The New York Times, "An Unprofitable Church: Roman Catholic Troubles in New-Haven:"
As The Times put it, "When the residents of this aristocratic avenue discovered that they were in danger of seeing a Roman Catholic church spring up among them, with all that the establishment of such a church implied, they bestirred themselves to oppose the project. The wisest of the Roman Catholics here did not favor it...
About My Job: The ER Doctor
by Conor Friedersdorf
A reader writes:
There are an immense number of things people don't understand about the work I and my team do, but if I had to pick one that causes the most problems, it's the belief, fed and nurtured by medical television, that minor symptoms can exploded into a life-threatening disease process at any moment.
In reality, people who are critically ill almost always look critically ill. It's not subtle. If you are in a lot of pain, or vomiting uncontrollably, or suddenly...
Poem For Sunday
by Zoe Pollock
Walt Whitman does humility like no one else; the entire poem is like walking into the ocean and immersing yourself in something greater. Here, an excerpt from "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life:"
As I wend to the shores I know not,
As I list to the dirge, the voices of men and women wreck'd,
As I inhale the impalpable breezes that set in upon me,
As the ocean so mysterious rolls toward me closer and closer,
I too but signify at the utmost a little wash'd-up drift,
A few sands and ...
Post-Modern Mapping
by Zoe Pollock
David Schneider meditates on maps, both literal and metaphorical. It's an abstract post, bordering on free-form poetry, but also a nice summation of how we view place and our surroundings:
The furniture upon the floorplan upon the block upon the 'hood upon the subway upon the commute upon the city upon the work upon the mapping, the mapping, the remapping. Look homeward you cannot look home. The past is a different country.
How could we not go mad?
"I'm lost," you say. "I only...
Why Conversion Matters
by Zoe Pollock
Randall Balmer points out the hypocrisy of Franklin Graham's recent (and these days all too ubiquitous) claims that Obama must be a Muslim because his father once was:
[O:]ne of the mottoes of evangelical Christianity, the faith that Graham espouses, is that "God has no grandchildren." I heard that refrain many, many times as I was growing up within evangelicalism in the 1950s and 1960s. The purpose of that statement was to impress upon young people in particular, but...
Andrew Sullivan's Blog
- Andrew Sullivan's profile
- 154 followers
