Month: March 2011

Jill Lepore sets the record straight about Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in January 1861:

That Longfellow has been neglected, and relegated to the domestic, the maternal, and the juvenile, means that he was never subjected to the scrutiny of New Historicists, either. If he had been, they might have picked up on something strange about “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which is that one way of reading it is as a poem less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown.

Farhad Manjoo profiles Google's new CEO Larry Page and his way of engaging frenemies:

So if you've ever wondered why Google needed its own web browser, called Chrome, here's why: It needed Chrome to goad Microsoft, Apple, and other browser makers into reigniting innovation in what had become a moribund market. Everyone's efforts collectively improve the web as a whole, which is good for Google and its ad business. Even if its rivals merely copied Chrome's advancements — superfast, stable, and, thus far, impossible to hack — Google saw that it could achieve its larger goals. About 10% of web surfers now use Chrome, which is respectable, but not as important as pushing Microsoft to retire the decrepit IE 6 browser in favor of new versions with a string of great improvements.

You wish your band director had been this cool:

Tim Donnelly laments the dearth of "male blogs":

Googling “female blogs” provides several directories to some of the top writers, sites and topics on the internet. Google “male blogs,” however, and you’ll fall down a completely different rabbit hole: the top result is “Best Male Blogs — Gay Blog Directory;” eight of the other top 10 results are gay porn-related; one is about male nurses; the other is spam.

A commenter makes an apt point:

I think the reason that such a blog doesn't exist is the same reason that there aren't any "white people" blogs (well, not the ones we'd want to read). The internet itself is male-centric, every blog in a sense is a "dude" blog, except the ones that expressly serve another audience – the content is already there.

The best, most honest, smartest take on the issue I've read in a very long time is by the invaluable Nate Silver. Just read it all. And then remember that without the blogosphere, we might never have heard of Nate Silver at all.

Bryan Lee Madden creates meticulous Etch-A-Sketch art. Buzzfeed rounds up his most impressive pieces.

Kim Mok provides a basic formula.

(Hat tip: Coudal)

A reader writes:

Don't know if you all have been keeping up, but Obama's NCAA tourney bracket is in the top 0.3% of all 5 million ESPN bracket pickers. It's a revealing bracket.

While going with the favorites in most cases, he picked a few underdogs in the first (now called "second") round – notably Gonzaga, Richmond and Florida State – who pulled upsets. I thought it encapsulated his overall personality well – clear-headed and realistic about the tendency of events to play out based on historical precedent (e.g. according to the seedings), but willing to buck conventional wisdom when his own judgement argues against it. At the risk of extending the metaphor too far, you get the sense that someone like John McCain's bracket would be filled with all upsets, and that Mitch McConnell would choose all the higher seeds. Most people aren't really able to switch back and forth between different mindsets as facilely as Obama. Either the underdog is always going to pull an upset, or the favorite is always going to come out on top.

I'll take all this on faith. I have zero ability to judge this.

There are a few places where she'll be interviewed by a non-Fox reporter. You just have to leave the country:

And yes, for all you Palin-obsessives, there are a couple of priceless moments.

Haley Barbour joins Tim Pawlenty and Mike Huckabee in wanting to reinstate the ban on gays in the military, opposing a policy now supported by 80 percent of the public and a majority of servicemembers. He made the commitment on the radio show of the extreme right Christianist, Bryan Fischer. Now remember what we have been told about the Tea Party and the current GOP: they are focused on the size of government, debt and spending and are downplaying social issues. The latter is not true. Their position on the military ban is aggressively reactionary.

And Bryan Fischer, who has made this issue a litmus test for support, is one of the most radical theocrats out there. Fischer has argued that Adolf Hitler was "an active homosexual" and that the most ferocious Nazi storm-troopers were gay because heterosexuals were not sadistic enough. Homosexuals, according to Fischer, "had no limits in the savagery and brutality they were willing to inflict … the Brownshirts were male homosexuals." On his blog, he has written that

"Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler [sic], and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews."

This is speech designed to demonize gay people in the most offensive way possible.

Fischer, for good measure, wants to add a Muslim ban to the gay ban in the military; wants to alter immigration laws to prefer Protestants (Catholics are too pro-gay); and has written that "the superstition, savagery and sexual immorality of native Americans … [made] them morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil."

Fischer is to the right as Farrakhan is to the left. And yet today, Fischer had on his show as guests Newt Gingrich, Mike Huckabee, and Haley Barbour. He has already had T-Paw.

Every now and again, you see just how extremist the GOP now is. In my view, journalists should ask these candidates how they can associate themselves with a bigot and hate-monger like this man. If Farrakhan is out of bounds on the left (as he should be), why is Fischer a non-issue for the right?