Word of the Day: Ucalegon
(n.) a neighbor whose house is on fire; from the Ancient Greek character Ucalegon, an Elder of Troy whose house was set on fire by the Achaeans when they invaded…
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Washington Post
38 posts
The Stories that Remain
Slender Man and the Hunger Games salute have crossed the boundaries from the fictional world to the real world. Begging the questions, what are the stories that remain with us?…
Trolls Are “Sadists and Psychopaths”
Common wisdom has it that the Internet has disconnected people from their sense of empathy—but maybe it’s just exposed society at large to greater numbers of people who were already…
Amazon Purchases Washington Post
What exactly does it mean that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has purchased the Washington Post?
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: What Alexandra Petri Should Have Said in the Washington Post.
Kelly Clarkson’s Inaugural Song Means the Death of Country Music Inaugural country singer Kelly Clarkson said that her story is America’s story. If that’s the case, America should be slightly…
The 51st State?
What if Puerto Rico becomes a state? What if our flag looks like this? What if we have to change that “fifty nifty United States” song to “fifty-one nifty, fun…
Undergrads Beware
An article in the Atlantic discusses the Washington Post’s graph that charts undergraduate degrees and their expected income levels. The Post’s graph seems pretty deterministic (or maybe it just reflects…
Foreign Until Proven Innocent
Joe Lieberman is introducing something he calls the Terrorist Expatriation Act–TEA Act for short, though the redundancy seems lost on them–which would make it possible for the State Department to…
Julianna Baggott on “the Invisible Prejudice”
“What are the best books? The answer is always subjective, and I’m not a literary arbiter. But the message I received from this year’s lists was painfully familiar. It forced…
Saturday Morning Links
Is the Bible too liberal for you? Too much of that “help the poor” and not enough sinner-smiting? Do you have no knowledge of ancient Greek and no experience in…
Hoping Things End Safely: The Rumpus Interview with Hyejin Kim
North Korean women risk their lives to escape across the border to China, where they often face lives of indentured servitude and the ever-present fear of being outed by the…
A Found 1969 Editorial on the Moon Landing
Mumpsimus was digging through his attic and found an old editorial his grandfather wrote for The Needham Times after the moon landing. Funny how a forty year old opinion piece is…