A Thinking Reed

  • “A wholly American and appropriate indulgence”

    “An Ode to Bourbon” ‘Nuff said.

  • Friday metal – Dio, “Rainbow in the Dark”

    Is Ronnie James Dio the worst dresser in metal? Well, he’d have some pretty stiff competition (see, e.g., the entire sub-genre of “viking metal”), but I think he’d be a strong contender. Doesn’t stop him from rocking, though. (If anything, it might help.)

  • Cooking with ATR

    Jennifer’s post here makes me think that this sort of thing might actually be interesting or useful to some folks. One of the most common questions I get as a vegetarian is “What do you eat?” I chalk this up to a couple of things. One is that, for many people, the standard American meal,…

  • Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, RIP

    The co-founder and longtime editor of First Things, and noted conservative polemicist, has passed away at age seventy-two. I’ve drifted away from reading FT over the last few years, partly because it seems to me to have embraced a more down-the-line conservative ideology than before (whether that says more about them or me is debatable).…

  • Intolerable

    I was doing some online research on website development for a project I’m working on and came across this statement: It’s an established fact that Internet users today are increasingly impatient and intolerable. Indeed!

  • Bittman on our meat-guzzling way of life

    Readers of the previous post might be interested in this talk from Mark Bittman: “What’s wrong with what we eat.” His story will be familiar to people who follow these issues, but it’s a good primer. Bittman makes a big deal out of the meat issue (rightly, IMO) and the impact that our levels of…

  • The anti-foodies’ foodie

    Salon has an informative review of Mark Bittman’s new manifesto/cook book Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating. Bittman is the author of several cookbooks and writes for the NYT, including the “Minimalist” column about cooking. The reviewer, Laura Miller, calls Bittman the “anti-foodies’ foodie” and describes his book as an application of Michael Pollan’s…

  • Make with the flying cars already!

    Mean Automakers Dash Nation’s Hope For Flying Cars

  • Friday metal – Black Sabbath, “Faries Wear Boots”

    My brother-in-law and his wife got me a Sabbath “best of” collection for Christmas and I’ve been rediscovering some of the lesser known gems:

  • Tit for tat

    One of the most unfortunate (and oft-observed) aspects of the blogosphere is that, in discussing events that require actual expertise to understand, genuine insight tends to get drowned out by soapbox editorializing. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: whenever there’s a flare-up of hostilities, every blogger and his…