1. A happy ending for a recovering alcoholic who was rescued from drowning by Paulist priests sailing by on a tiki bar pontoon. Not everything about 2020 is awful, folks! 2. In the first of two book reviews for your consideration this week, Judith Shulevitz reviews The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West […]
The Areopagus and The Woodshed: Re-imagining Abuse in Social Media
In the world of social media, Twitter’s hard times have caused much hand wringing and head scratching. Once hailed as a global marketplace for the exchange of ideas, a modern Areopagus of sorts, the social network has seen its growth achieving ever flattening levels of stagnation. And as resident social media watchman, I’m beginning to […]
Another Week Ends: Facelessness, Lent CEOs, Literacy Losers, Baseball Clocks, and North Korean Inspiration
1) Stephen Marche is certainly making a name for himself as the technological doomster, and in a supremely convincing way. He’s the one that wrote that piece we completely over-covered, called “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” and then there was that piece on our modern muse, Failure, and right in time for Ash Wednesday, we […]
The Nerdy Pharisees
When I was in college, a group of pledges from one of the socially-elite fraternities on campus painted “NERDS” in large capital letter on the roof of my fraternity’s house. It was a pejorative statement. Until that act of vandalism, we didn’t know that we were nerds. We dressed nicely. We drank a lot. We […]