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United States Senator
Lindsay Graham, a sitting U.S. Senator, just tweeted this about a U.S. citizen: If captured, I hope Administration will at least consider holding the Boston suspect as enemy combatant for intelligence...
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Record Store Day!
Pull the earbuds outta your head and go find a record store near-by. Though they dwindle, most towns still have ‘em, and today they’re waiting for you with cool new music (some in limited quantities,...
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The Left and Miranda
It should be noted that Lindsay Graham (along with his buddy John McCain) is not the only federal official interested in limiting the reach of Miranda – and preventing those rights from being read to...
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Bullies At The Pulpit.
Commenter Matthew argues that one of the main reasons gun reform didn’t succeed is that Obama is a lousy negotiator. He cites Maureen Dowd’s recent column as a good summary of why. A few things to...
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Evaluating Value
I was thinking about cultural value this morning, as I have all week (all month, really…actually, for the past year, I guess). I’m interested in the overlap between the hard economic value of cultural...
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The Value of Pop (slight return)
Yesterday, I tried to make sense of the relationship between various forms of “value” and popular culture. I should have known not to bring up the internet and, especially, not to have tried too hard...
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On Trial by Ordeal, Obama, and Game of Thrones
In a recent New Yorker article (March 18, 2013), historian Jill Lepore outlines a concise genealogy of state torture and capital punishment. Lepore begins with Attorney General John Ashcroft’s shock...
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Things We’re Enjoying IX
After another hiatus, our weekly endorsement column is back. Here’s what we’ve been enjoying over the past few weeks. Tom Sarah Polley’s made two fantastic features to date. Away from Her (2007) and...
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MOOCs, Part II: This Time It’s Personal.
This has not been a good month for MOOCs. A couple of weeks ago Amherst College faculty members voted down an invitation to join edX, the nonprofit MOOC platform. A few days later, Duke University...
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The NY Times Doesn’t Get Structural Racism
Sometime in the mid-1990s, the head of the National Black Farmers Association, John W. Boyd, Jr., went to his local branch of the Farm Service Administration’s loan office in Virginia, to try to...
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Things We’re Enjoying X
Cartoons, choral music, dispatches, and speeches: here’s what we’ve been enjoying over the past week. Keith This is a double endorsement. The first is the FX show Archer, a cartoon about a secret agent...
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History and Scandals
I’ve been away for awhile – grades and students and graduations! – but while away I’ve caught faint hints of bleating cries emanating from our esteemed Beltway commentariat. See, said commentariat is...
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Things We’re Enjoying XI
We’re going to change things up a bit here at SGap. Instead of presenting our weekly endorsements on Friday afternoon, we’re going to shoot for Mondays instead. There are other changes to the blog on...
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Southern Fantastic.
Beasts Of The Southern Wild has to be the most overrated movie of last year. It was, yes, beautifully filmed and hypnotically acted. Quvenzhane Wallis in particular was pretty remarkable. But despite...
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Bring On the Robots
Can we please end this charade already? There is absolutely no reason for MLB to refuse to implement comprehensive instant replay immediately – the games are being compromised, and the situation –...
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Things We’re Enjoying XII
Here’s our Memorial Day installment of things we’ve been enjoying. Modeled on the Slate Culture Gabfest‘s weekly endorsements segment, we recommend things we’ve been reading, watching, listening to,...
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Penance
I didn’t provide Tom with an endorsement this week because I was traveling… hmm, well not really. Ok, the real reason I didn’t provide one is because I ignored Tom’s email and thought “boom.” Perhaps...
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More on the Southern Fantastic
I’ve been thinking about Keith’s most recent post on the “Southern Fantastic”—the common and consistent mythification of the American South in film. Keith offers lots of good cinematic examples, and I...
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Presto, Read the Communist Manifesto/Guerrillas in the Midst, a Guevara Named...
Scott Lemieux of Lawyers, Guns and Money is one of the better bloggers out there when it comes to law and political economy, but maybe less so rap music. Lemieux posted a brief item the other day...
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On Empathy
There is a great profile in this week’s Times Magazine on the author Colum McCann, his new book TransAtlantic, and his recent trip to Newtown, CT, where he discussed his last book – Let the Great World...
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