In the Driftway

Scott McLemee | 'The Passion of Tiger Woods' | Inside Higher Ed

“But that mask flew off, so to speak, when [Tiger Woods’] car hit the fire hydrant in late 2009. Starn fills out his chronicle of the scandal that followed with an examination of the conversation and vituperation that took place online, often in the comments sections of news articles — with numerous representative samples, in all their epithet-spewing, semiliterate glory. The one-drop rule remains in full effect, it seems, even for Cablinasians.”

Jackson Lears | A History of Disappointment | London Review of Books

“To those of us who hoped that Barack Obama’s election marked a departure from right-wing rule, the president’s failure of leadership has been stunning. Seldom have insurgent expectations – even sceptical, guarded ones – been deflated so swiftly.”

Adam Kirsch | Whole in One | Tablet

“More practically, the most reliable way of defining a Jew in the 21st century is that he is someone who worries about what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century.”

Daniel Mendelsohn | The Mad Men Account | New York Review of Books

“But then, why not have captions when so many scenes feel like cartoon panels?”

Scott McLemee | On Reading 'On Rereading' | Inside Higher Ed

“A book remains the same through time, but the context and personality of the reader don’t. Whether the consequence is nostalgia or embarrassment can be the luck of the draw.”

Scott McLemee | Christopher Hitchens, Contradiction | American Prospect

“But the end result in either case, Soviet or Hitchensian, was militaristic belligerence and an ideology sealed off from contamination by empirical evidence. Unless someone finds proof to the contrary, Hitchens went to the grave certain that Saddam Hussein’s WMDs are out there, somewhere. Say what you will about the contrast in their prose styles, but late-phase Hitchens possessed an almost Breshnev-like suppleness of mind.”

Benjamin Kunkel | Hitch | n+1

“But another part of the sadness of Hitchens’s death is that it makes the loss of him for the left, which occurred a decade ago now, absolute and final. The most energetic and often the most brilliant polemicist in the language lavished his last ten years on attacking religious belief and advocating and defending a war that was at best an awful tragedy.”

Scott McLemee | Under the Bridge | Inside Higher Ed

“Trolls are in it for the lulz, and they take getting b& in stride.

Clearly a little translation is in order. It is simple enough to figure out what b& means. Just pronounce it: “banned” – enough of an occupational hazard to merit a shorthand expression. But “lulz” takes a bit of unpacking. While derived from the familiar interjection LOL, for “laugh out loud,” lulz carries a special in-group nuance. Lulz refers to “a particular kind of unsympathetic, ambiguous laughter similar to schadenfreude,” explained Phillips by email. “Unlike schadenfreude, however, which is often described in passive terms (a bad thing happened to someone I don’t like, so I laughed), lulz are much more active, or at the very least imply the vicarious enjoyment of others’ direct actions (I made a guy so mad he started typing in all caps, so I laughed and/or I saw someone else make a guy so mad he started typing in all caps, so I laughed).”

Adam Kirsch | Mysteries and Masterpieces | Harvard Magazine

Adam Kirsch | Mysteries and Masterpieces: The latest stage in the “American conquest of the Middle Ages” | Harvard Magazine

“The combination of these worldviews produced some strange syntheses—pagan, erotic poetry written by priests, Biblical stories retold as Homeric epics. After exploring these volumes, the Middle Ages are sure to strike the reader as more familiarly human, and more exotically remote, than ever before.”

Why WikiLeaks Is Bad for Scholars | The Chronicle Review | Daniel W. Drezner

Smart, well-written argument that the Wikileaks cable-dump will boomerang in the medium run—lead to an information clamp-down that will hamper future scholarship.