Renaissance Pundit's Posterous

Confronting The Beautiful Mess of Adult Life

Anti-Socialist Realism | The New Republic

Solid primer on Vassily Grossman, one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century. Highly recommend "Life and Fate" as well as the book reviewed, "Everything Flows."

http://www.tnr.com/book/review/actually-existing-social-realism

Posted June 1, 2010

Women and body image: a man's perspective - Telegraph

This guy may have a point or two. If you're a guy and have had to deal with a GF who was a wreck when it came to body image, you'll definitely get something from this. The odds are sadly quite high. Yep, if you're a guy, you'll just never understand why she gets so easily upset over nothing, and it's damn well better not to try. It's not just evolution at work, but all that endless f-ing advertising.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fashion/stellamagazine/7725736/Women-and-body-imag...

Posted May 30, 2010

dystopia & utopia - bookforum.com / in print

Keith Gessen on the past and future Of the dystopian genre in fiction, and what Americans have yet to learn from Russian advancements in the field.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/017_02/5799

Posted May 26, 2010

The Postradical Legal Generation - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

What the selection of Elena Kagan by President Obama says about the state of legal pedagogy and the "post-ideological" era in this most conservative (small c) profession of ours...

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Postradical-Legal/65623/

Posted May 24, 2010

conversation resumed - bookforum.com / in print

Excellent film. Have to be patient with the development and pacing, but it's definitely thought-provoking about the nature of human consciousness. Plus, the music was (at least partially) done by one of my favorite composers, Osvaldo Golijov.

http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_04/1381

Posted May 23, 2010

From Fermilab, a New Clue to Explain Human Existence? - NYTimes.com

Wow, what an interesting discovery! If muons indeed tend slightly toward matter over anti-matter, the existence of our universe might actually start to make sense! It doesn't prove the existence of G-D quite yet, but it's certainly a view of the bridge to the Ultimate Cause.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/science/space/18cosmos.html

Posted May 17, 2010

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education: an article by William Deresiewicz about how universities should exist to make minds, not careers | The American Scholar

I have read few truer words in my adult life about elite education in America. Life experience confirms, and countless products of this system demonstrate, that the best schools are complicit in creating an entitled mediocracy (my own variation of the author's term). To say that elite universities are factories for the Big Three professions, where independent thought beyond the semester's end is hardly encouraged or supported, for that matter, is a terrible understatement. Pilgrim intellectuals - take your Johnny Appleseed self elsewhere.

Add the Great Recession, and you have a real crisis of confidence in where this ship is going. Heaven forbid, this crisis may even show us the Ivy King's clothes!

A truly great read. Enjoy, and share widely!

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/the-disadvantages-of-an-elite-education/

Posted May 13, 2010

The Tea Party Jacobins | The New York Review of Books

Excellent dissection and analysis of the Tea Party movement as a phenomenon and what it says about American sensibilities - political and otherwise, in this day and age where skepticism of government has reached new (and often absurd) highs.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/may/27/tea-party-jacobins/?pagi...

Posted May 12, 2010