Jules Crittenden and the anti-Salingerites double down on their criticisms of Catcher in the Rye as an “angst-ridden wankfest” (with some of the criticism this time even coming from those who’ve read the book), and offer what they are calling an “adolescent angst-free curriculum” in its stead: That was fun yesterday, speaking ill of the dead with a shout out for angst-free education and common sense vs. commie sensitivities. Here’s

Looks like I won’t be up and running until March. So. If you didn’t contribute earlier this year and want to contribute for February, there’s no time like the present. (Ordinarily I’d wait until the first of the month to post something like this, but for February, the first of the month happens to be my birthday, and so I’ll be busy trying to drink myself back to, say, 23

Unless, you know — you do. Which, hey, it happens. I’m just not so sure I’d go about advertising it, though.

[The recent death of Howard Zinn put me in mind of this old interview I did with Noam Chomsky, originally published here April, 2004 – jg] Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. He is the author of dozens of books, including Power and Terror and Middle East Illusions. His book 9-11 was an international bestseller. protein wisdom: “To borrow a question from

Piece of protein wisdom, 8, dies along with him. (h/t bh)

— Which, of course, isn’t much of a deterrent to leftist demagogues like Obama, because “wrong” only means wrong in the sense that it can be measured against something demonstrably right — and the grounds for making such epistemological value judgments have been replaced, in our postmodern worldview, by meaning-by-consensus, manufactured or otherwise. Or, to put it another way, Obama is only wrong if enough people agree he’s wrong; if

David Harsanyi, Denver Post: Tax credits? Spending freezes? Deficit commissions? The president is starting to sound a lot like one of those fiscal he- devils the Democrats have been warning the nation about for years. Not to worry, true believers, Barack Obama only sounds like he’s making sense. The proposed three-year freeze sham accounts for less than a measly one-sixth of the federal budget and the deficit panel already has

A lengthy response to my argument against the “hidden mind” by this person. Here’s the gist: All Vedantam is really saying is that there is such a thing as an Amity/Enmity Complex, that it can manifest itself as racism, and that, if we are to control such socially destructive behavior, it would behoove us to understand what causes it. Fifty years ago, he would have been loudly denounced as a

At the risk of bringing up a sore subject… From NPR, “How ‘The Hidden Brain’ Does The Thinking For Us”: After making a silly mistake, it’s not uncommon for a person to say, “Oops — I was on autopilot.” In his new book, The Hidden Brain, science writer Shankar Vedantam explains how there’s actually a lot of truth to that. Our brains have two modes, he tells NPR’s Steve Inkseep