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Welcome to the final installment the Politics & Paine series. Harvey Kaye and Elvin Lim are corresponding about Thomas Paine, American politics, and beyond. Read the first post here, and the second post here, and the third post here. Kaye is the author of the award-winning book, Thomas Paine: Firebrand of Revolution, as well as […]
Yesterday, I tried to start a #mathbattle on Twitter, but it proved too geeky to take. (Go figure.) I was having a nostalgic moment, remembering back in middle school when we had to write date equations. Everyday. Because each day, my friends, is different. A new day, full of new possibilities, opportunities, and numbers. Today is 7/30/2010. That means two things:
1) It will be August very, very soon.
2) We have the numbers 7, 3, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0 to work with. (Or, you can leave out a 2 and a 0. That is the cheater’s way.)
LET’S DO IT! —> 7 – ((3+0)(2 + 0)) = (1 + 0)
Yessssss. Math is awesome. Got a better equation? Prove it. Until then, here are some interesting things.
Did you guys see that movie The Blind Side? I’m a huge Michael Lewis fan—MONEYBALL WHAT!—plus I’ve been a huge Sandra Bullock buff ever since her performance in Speed 2. So needless to say, Blind Side was a must-see for me last year. Anyway, I was SHOCKED by how much that movie resonates with my real life. Consider these similarities between me and the protagonist, Michael Oher:
1. Oher lived in poverty for 16 years; I lived in a cage for 6 years
2. Oher was adopted by a southern lady with strong opinions; my mommy is southern and has very strong opinions about me eating chicken bones in the park (SPOILER ALERT: she’s against it)
Welcome back to the Politics & Paine series. Harvey Kaye and Elvin Lim are corresponding about Thomas Paine, American politics, and beyond.
Kaye is the author of the award-winning book, Thomas Paine: Firebrand of Revolution, as well as Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change & Development and Director, Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Lim is author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, and a regular contributor to OUPBlog.
By Gordon Thompson
At the July 29, 1965 premiere of the Beatles’ second film, Help!, most viewers understood the farce as a send-up of British flicks that played on the exoticism of India, while at the same time spoofing the popularity of James Bond. Parallel with this cinematic escapism, a post-colonial discourse began that questioned how colonial powers justified their economic exploitation of the world. Eventually, Edward Said’s Orientalism would describe the purpose of this objectification as “dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (1978: 3). In effect, Said and others argued that portrayals of the non-Western other
What does Simon Blackburn have to say about morality? What does A.C. Grayling think about atheism? Alain de Botton about the aesthetics of architecture? Adrian Moore about infinity? Will Kymlicka about minority rights? For the last three years, David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have challenged some of the world’s leading philosophers to hold forth on their favourite topics for the highly successful Philosophy Bites podcast. Now 25 of these entertaining, personal, and illuminating conversations are presented in print for the first time.
Welcome back to the Politics & Paine series. Harvey Kaye and Elvin Lim are corresponding about Thomas Paine, American politics, and beyond. Kaye is the author of the award-winning book, Thomas Paine: Firebrand of Revolution, as well as Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He is the Ben & Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change & Development and Director, Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Lim is author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, and a regular contributor to OUPBlog.
By LeeAnna Keith
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas took dead aim at Supreme Court tradition in his recent concurring opinion on gun control in the city of Chicago. McDonald v. Chicago, named for an African American plaintiff, raised the question of whether the 2nd Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms imposed limitations against the states. A plurality of justices insisted
by Anatoly Liberman HOOSIER. Almost exactly two years ago, on July 30, 2008, I posted an essay on the origin of the nickname Hoosier. In it I expressed my cautious support of R. Hooser, who derived the “moniker” for an inhabitant of Indiana from a family name. I was cautious not because I found fault […]
Earlier this month, Harvey Kaye led a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings at the Bryant Park Reading Room. It got me thinking: what is the influence of Paine on Americans today? Who among us are the devotees? Are we over-quoting, over-citing, over-appropriating his politics?
So, I decided to introduce Harvey Kaye to Elvin Lim, and ask if they wouldn’t mind corresponding about this matter. They readily agreed. Below is the first of four installments of this conversation; the second of which will appear tomorrow.
Shipwreck:
But it wasn’t.
It was much more mundane, though no less violent.
“Lie Like the truth” —Daniel DeFoe
Why do I need to circle around and invent, when a list of facts could do just as well or better: On an evening in October, your father dies suddenly of a heart attack. Eight weeks later, you find that the reason your husband has been almost completely absent through this abrupt shock into mourning has not been because of his work. Turns out he has another life in another country and another language. A woman with her own daughter the same age as our youngest. What he doesn’t have is an income and apparently he hasn’t had one for quite a while now. Turns out he is in love.
By Elvin Lim We have 99 Days to go before Election Day. How different things look today compared to Obama’s first 100 days. In the last year and a half, the national mood has turned from hope to uncertainty. The sluggish job market is the economic representation of this psychological state. Business are not expanding […]
“Some memories are more vivid than others, some experiences more profound. Pedro’s story is one of those. I remember the morning Pedro told me in the stroke clinic that his greatest pain since his stroke was his physical inability to care for Lucy, his dog. I remember the noose of hopelessness dangling around his neck; the way he sat in front of me, scratching frenziedly at his paralyzed right arm, the deep excoriation marks, the trails of oozing blood from under his skin, my concerns about a drug allergy, and the way he talked about Lucy. I remember watching tears fall from his heavy eyes and the relief in my heart that he was opening up for the first time in months since his stroke. I remember not knowing what to do; a momentary lapse that seemed infinitely long.”
Welcome to round two. Last week you met Redford and Nikita. Two brave souls attempting to bridge the gap between dogs and cats. As our two volunteers continue to explore their common love of literature, we are quickly learning that the written word does more than just spark conversation for your book club.
Looking at what I’m choosing to share this week, one might call this the brand-placement edition of Linked Up. But it’s actually the accidental-brand-placement edition. Lucky them. (P.S. I think Lucky Brand Jeans is having a sale.)
Stonehenge was begun about 2800 B.C. by a people who had no written language, no wheeled vehicles, no draft animals, and no metal tools. To dig holes in the ground, they used the antlers of deer. The initial Stonehenge consisted of a circular embankment 350 feet (107 meters) in diameter, four marker stones set in a rectangle, some postholes, and the Heel Stone. The Heel Stone was apparently the first of the great boulders brought to this site as construction commenced. But it may not have stood alone. A similar huge stone stood just to its left as seen from the center of Stonehenge. In that ancient time, the Sun at the beginning of summer probably rose between the famed Heel Stone and its now-vanished companion, and the alignment with sunrise at the summer solstice was probably exact.