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Fighting over Fundamentals
Well, the election’s over so there’s no chance that anybody will possibly consider publishing this piece. But I thought I’d share my draft here anyway. Let me know what you think. It is an attempt to glean some little wisdom from a failed attempt at being a political pundit. It has become a popular sport…
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What You Mess with When You Mess with Star Trek
The following is cross-posted at Marc Andreottola’s excellent new moving pictures blog, CINEMA IS YOUR SYMPTOM. Keep an eye on that one, believe me. The trailer for the new J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie came out last week. My RSS feed lit up, as they say, like a Christmas tree. No fewer than three Facebook…
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Reading Everything (and More)
Reading David Foster Wallace’s Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞ at once reminds me why I write in the first place while also being so good as to tempt me to give up and quit trying. The book tells the story, starting with the Greeks, of how Cantor ended up developing a set…
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Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Last night, Dr. Atomic closed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, and I saw it from standing room. I have already written about a slow opera with big hopes, Philip Glass’s Satyagraha—this is another. What is it about these new operas, which have to turn every historical event into a funeral march? In John Adams’s presentation…
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Ways of Using Science
The most promising approach in the study of the relationship between “science and religion” today is not to talk about them at all. Neither the warfare model—where the two domains are utterly at odds—nor harmony one—that they are mutually supportive—quite captures the historical and epistemological evidence. Stephen J. Gould’s vision of “non-overlapping magesteria” is a…
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Obama’s Harlem
After giving up on the excruciating computer graphics and talking heads of MSNBC’s election coverage, my friends and I got on the train and headed up to Harlem. We arrived at 125th and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard not a minute before Barack Obama was declared winner. The enormous crowd, pouring into the streets far…
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The Election at RD
Religion Dispatches asked a bunch of its writers to come up with a short blurb on the election. They put it up today. And in turns out that, of eight blurbs, three of us (myself included) wrote about Colin Powell’s remarkable words of support for Obama. Take a look. My blurb starts like this: A…
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Reasons in Practice
Sunday morning at the AAR (okay, maybe I am live-blogging) I went not to church (unless you count the moment of prayer at the panel on Zizek by the Christian Theological Research Fellowship) but to a comparative ethics panel about John Kelsay’s recent book, Arguing the Just War in Islam. The panelists discussed the book…