Welcome to the Facebook Age
As an exercise, imagine the entire Facebook network as a real world, in some temporal place. In this world, the human being is replaced by the personal homepage of Facebook; in place of bodily organs and anatomical processes are substituted “about me” sections and a wall for public posts.
Johann and Me
To an unbeliever, most Christian thinking, beginning with the proclamation of the cosmic kingship of an executed Palestinian carpenter, must seem like an insane, if touching, attempt to rationalize tragedy and failure. Yet the history of my romance with the greatest of all composers concretely and compellingly illustrates the ancient Christian doctrine that God’s Providence brings good out of every evil.
More or Lessing
The Nobel Prize in Literature is an important mark of Swedish achievement. Throughout its one-hundred-and-seven year history, the award has been bestowed upon many legendary writers and a number of women as well. Last week, Doris Lessing joined the ranks of these few but handsome ladies when she was named the recipient of the 107th […]
The Second Coming of…Life
The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject. – Walter Benjamin Art matters. Whether new schools of painting or filmmaking, or the invention of new media itself, both static and moving images change the way […]
Horizon’s Edge
So most of my summer wasn’t all that exciting. I taught at a private school in rural Massachusetts, and mostly I just went to the pool and told annoying kids to shut up. But one weekend I went into Boston, and a friend and I cruised around on a boat fifty miles off the shore. […]
You Want Schmaltz With That?
“Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe,” plead Shylock to the barrister, and indeed what characterizes Jewish history in the main is calamity and tribulation of a scope and cruelty so reckless and undreamt they seem enjoined from another universe. As Shylock suggests, extraordinary persecution is so far the only homage history has elected […]
An Apology
Two weeks ago, the October 4 issue of the Nassau Weekly ran a cover lamenting the entirely fictional passing of Juergen Habermas. While our last issue intended to remedy what was supposed to be a humorous presentation of our lack of journalistic integrity, we realize that what is needed is not a stylized retraction, but […]
Here are some things that we know:
1. The popular Dirty Southern rap term “Crunk” has it’s origin in the early 1960s. Jewish pharmacist’s would ask young men “bist du krank?” or “are you sick?” when they purchased a dozen bottles of cough syrup. Presumably, the young men answered “yes, I am krank.” 2. Diane Keaton’s role in the Woody Allen film […]
A Letter to the Nobel Prize Winner
Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin c/o Elizabeth Hayes Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Dear Doris, The Nassau Weekly pauses its inexorable jubilations, ignited last Thursday morning with your wonderful news, to offer you our very profoundest compliments on your deeply deserved Nobel. How long we have anticipated its […]
Decca’s Revenge
So: a month ago, J.K. Rowling decided to out Dumbledore in front of a booked-solid Carnegie Hall. The audience gasped, and then burst into applause. The real surprise, though, is not Dumbledore’s “homosexuality,” but the fact that there could be anything else to know about him. What could she possibly have to say that she […]
Eschatological Rock
“What’s the point of instruments?/Words are a sawed off shotgun,” cries Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke on the band’s newest studio album, (In Rainbows). How true those words are. It’s not that the music on the band’s newest disc isn’t worth listening to.