A Thinking Reed

  • 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…

  • On Vilsack

    Jennifer asks what I think of Obama’s pick of Tom Vilsack for Secretary of Agriculture. Doesn’t she know that the question of who gives the invocation at the inauguration is much more pressing than our country’s food system? Sheesh! I only know what I’ve read, and the general impression I get is that Vilsack is…

  • 2008: The year in book blogging

    I’m not going to provide a best books of the year list, but here’s a sampling of those that got their hooks into me enough to generate some more or less in-depth blogging (needless to say, most of these weren’t published in 2008): Andrew Bacevich, The Limits of Power “Empire of dysfunction” Evelyn Pluhar, Beyond…

  • Empire of dysfunction

    If I could put one recent political book in the hands of conservatives trying to rebuild their movement and liberals irrationally exuberant about all the “change” that’s about to take place, it’d be Andrew Bacevich’s The Limits of Power. Heck, as long as I’m wishing, I’d like to get it in President-elect Obama’s hands too.…