It amazes me how relieved I feel after Biden's inauguration.

The past four years I have devoted so much work to dissociating my own sense of wellness from the craziness going on in my country's national politics. In fact, I think this has been one piece of the larger work of dissociating my wellness from external signals in general. It's part of ( Read more... )

This is ramble (okay, rant) about why I may be responding as I am to Wonder Woman: 1984 (liked it okay) and Discovery, especially S3 (kind of hate it). I am socially on the left but increasingly find my responses to pop culture out of step with some of the more prominent left-leaning responses. To wit, Wonder Woman is being panned and most of the ( Read more... )

Disclaimer: This is a personal reflection, not a prescription for what anyone else should do.

So there's a certain social media storm about certain author's views and to what extent they warrant boycotting or completely "giving up" her works. (I'm not going to spell out the specifics out of regard for the effort to not increase her platform-but you ( Read more... )

I saw Joker the other day and have to offer some scattered thoughts on it. The bottom line: I loved it and think it is probably the best DC movie ever-but many have a very different view, which I want to haphazardly unpack ( Read more... )

Today my country is launching #ICERaids to detain undocumented people. At this shameful moment, I want to offer a perspective on immigration to the United States ( Read more... )

I don't know if I've ever been so pleased with the voting of my fellow Oregonians in the 16-ish years I've lived here. They pretty much came through with sanity across the board ( Read more... )

I've done a couple of reviews of French stuff:

Rousseau: A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality: Surprisingly outdated and yet still current.

Victor Hugo, The Man Who Laughs: Good story (about the guy whose look inspired the Joker in Batman) but disappointingly executed.

Thoughts on Romney's statements ( Read more... )

MoveOn.org (which I belong to and usually pretty much agree with) just sent me an email calling for the resignation of Alan Simpson, Deficit Commission Co-Chair, because he made a comment in which he called those who rely Social Security for income "lesser people."

I followed a link graciously provided by MoveOn.org to Mediaite.com, where I ( Read more... )

I was taken aback to discover that my credit card provider--which I joined because they give donations to progressive organizations, like Amnesty International--uses MBNA, that right-wing George W. Bush admiration society, as its bank. I wrote them a terse note about this ideological inconsistency and got back the following reply (an excerpt):

( Read more... )