Well, whaddya know?!

The Unstoppable Susan Boyle Juggernaut lost in the finale of the Britain’s Got Talent competition. I’ve commented before on her not-that-amazing singing and the inexplicable fame that accompanies it. So it’s interesting to watch the performance in the first link, and to see how the performance in the new video doesn’t match the first, due [...]

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“Traditional” marriage

One of the funny things about history is how quickly we forget what the history was. We often assume that the way we do things is the way we have always done them, but this is generally far from the truth. As in my previous post about prisons in America, we assume that prisons have [...]

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The San Bruno Redemption

In between grading today, I’ve been reading a Helen Epstein piece from the new New York Review of Books (ostensibly a review of Sunny Schwartz’s must-read book) concerning America’s prison complex.
The program detailed in the article, a violence-prevention program called RSVP (Resolve to Stop the Violence Project) implemented by Schwartz at the San Bruno prison [...]

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Deep thought from student paper

From a literary analysis essay on One Hundred Years of Solitude:
As you can see from his greed with the ice, it’s clear that Jose Arcadio Buendia is sucka fool.
Apart from every convention of writing essays, the author’s conclusion is at least correct.

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Ranking Pixar’s movies

Because I just love to list and rank stuff.
In honor of Up’s release today, here is my ranking of the Pixar movies (with the caveat that I have not seen A Bug’s Life).
8. Cars – The comparative “dud” of the bunch. But let’s consider what that means. It was the worst reviewed, but was still [...]

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Going to see “Up” this weekend?

Because this alone has me psyched:

Pixar is awesome.

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Israel’s most important relationship

One of the problems with the United States’ role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the unwillingness for the United States to tighten the reins on the diplomatic relationship with Israel.
Now, it appears that Obama is willing to hold the line on settlements, and although he hasn’t said “or else,” the threat is implied. Netanyahu’s response? [...]

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So which one is it? (again)

So here are two of the main anti-Sotomayor arguments floating around:
(a) “Empathy” is just a code word for liberal activist judge; she is going to make decisions based on her personal feelings of fairness and not the law.
(b) Her decision in the Ricci case is realllly unfair! That poor guy spent all that time and [...]

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Why is spelling bee commentary so bad?

With sweeps over, ABC has decided to air the Scripps National Spelling Bee (by the way, since Scripps is hemorrhaging money, will this become the Tostitos National Spelling Bee sometime soon?). For the last couple years, the finals has aired on ABC, and before that, the finals were on ESPN.
The announcers, however, are even worse [...]

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A problem with color-blindness

At the heart of conservative bellyaching and increasingly offensive drum-beating about the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, there is a grain of truth (a very small, and again distorted grain, which I’ll get to).
That truth is that minority Americans, particularly those in an isolated ghetto, can have a distorted and unrealistic view [...]

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