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I taught a course called “Congress and the Presidency” this summer and I’m polishing off the finals for that course as I begin the Fall semester tomorrow. Anyway… I asked the class, as part of a larger question: Lasty, on which, if any, President did you either change your opinion from this class or merely [...] This one will frighten you: I’ll be publishing a new book in the Spring of 2011. It’s called Regulators Gone Wild: How the EPA is Ruining American Industry and will be published by Encounter Books. The last Trzupek-authored tome was a techno-geek crap. This is a lot more in the political mainstream. Will it sell? [...] Here’s a review of the above book from The New Republic. It looks like a great read. His book is also a treatise on male folk custom. Bare-knuckle championship fights were highly ritualized events. Challenges were published in the newspapers—“I, John C. Heenan, of the City of West Troy, United States of America, hereby…”—and formal [...] Did Germany outstrip England’s growth — reaching industrial parity in 1900 because it didn’t have copyright laws? This article from Speigel online makes that claim. The entire country seemed to be obsessed with reading. The sudden passion for books struck even booksellers as strange and in 1836 led literary critic Wolfgang Menzel to declare Germans [...] I’m prepping Fall Courses and wrapping up Summer ones. These are a couple of the books I’ll be assigning this Fall. For a grad seminar called Psychology, Law and Public Policy In my Disability Law course: The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (History of Disability) And as a supplemental in my Humanities course (which I love to teach [...] A little book post for this Tuesday morning. I always liked Nathaniel Hawthorne in my American Lit classes… 1600s America by way of 1800s filtered through the 1980s… the simmering tension, the supernatural aspects and the cold and bare New England… good and different stuff for this West Texas boy. I came [...] John FN’s posting of Christopher Hitchens interview reminded me of this quote from C.S. Lewis — a man not unacquainted with pain in his youth or in his latter years: ‘The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems well with it. Now error and sin both have [...] For those who couldn’t stand Anderson Cooper’s celeb-esque questioning, here’s an infinitely more inquisitive Hitchens interview with Jeffery Goldberg at The Atlantic. Part of a series, this episode touches on mortality and features an appearance by author Martin Amis, Hitchens’ life-long friend and compatriot. I saw Hitchens a little less than two months ago on The [...] I’m reading John Yoo’s Crisis and Command for a class called Congress and the Presidency… I’m on the Andrew Jackson chapter and so far it’s quite good. There’s a lot of good history as well as insight into the workings of the Constitution– explicit and implicit — with (or sometimes not so much) the [...] The above is a quote from an interview with author P.D. James (most famous here for the book The Children of Men, but who is most well known in the UK for writing crime/detective novels) from The Guardian who is celebrating her 90th birthday today. If you are at all interested in the [...] Chang Apana… Detective Honolulu Police Dept. Here’s a very interesting piece from The New Yorker on the beginnings of, the inspiration for, and legacy of Charlie Chan. I loved the Warner Oland movies in reruns of course in the 1970s though I’ve never read the books. Chang Apana, a real life detective [...] David Mamet, playwright (Glengarry Glenross, Speed the Plow and American Buffalo), screenwriter (The Spanish Prisoner, Ronin, The Verdict, The Untouchables) and even creator of TV shows (The Unit) has written a collection of essays called Theatre which seem to flesh out his recently realized conversion (of sorts) to conservatism — or at least not liberalism [...] I had heard that Frank Miller had wanted to do a Batman graphic novel in which the Caped Crusader opens up a can of whoop-ass on al-Qaeda. Given the PC nature of corporate comics today (DC in this case) it appears that such a Batman comic was not meant to be, though Miller says [...] Anne Rice… author of a whole horde of vampire novels has left Christianity for her old faith… feminist New Age-ism. The 68-year-old author wrote Wednesday on her Facebook page that she refuses to be “anti-gay … anti-feminist,” and “anti-artificial birth birth control.” She adds that “In the name of … Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. [...] In my International Law seminars we often discuss the similarities between pirates (or pyrates as Daniel Dafoe would write) and terrorists. I’ve just put the above book on my list since that course is coming up in the Fall again. The history of dealing with pirates could offer a great road map for [...] When Mark Twain was pronounced dead in the newspapers, he said rumors of his death had been greatly exaggerated. I read so many nice things about myself now I begin to think that rumors of my life have been a bit exaggerated From Hitchens three-hour interview on Hugh Hewitt last week, quote courtesy [...] Ever since regular Threedonia commenter and all-around good egg Lars Walker published his latest novel West Oversea last year I have had it on my list of books to read. Post-Pagan Viking fantasy is not on my usual fictional genre radar, but I have Swedish blood coursing through these veins somewhere, Lars is [...] I’m continuously mystified and horrified by North Korea. No amount of reading or documentaries or eyewitness accounts can shake the gnawing feeling that the DPRK is really just one of the Circles in Dante’s Inferno. I know that’s not true of course and that it actually exists — and yet the thought of [...] Here is a great review of the above book (now on my Amazon wish list) from The National — Abu Dhabi’s English language newspaper. Here’s a bit go read the rest above. It sounds like a fascinating story: Indeed, McMeekin offers, among other things, a brilliant exposé of a geopolitical disaster. From the [...] “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee. Sink all coffins and all hearses to one common pool! and since neither can be mine, let me then tow to pieces, [...] The Vatican is allowing the publication of 100 of its most interesting documents from its Secret Archives. From The Christian Science Monitor: “We were amazed by the access we were given and the speed with which the whole project was completed,” says Paul Van den Heuvel, the head of the Belgian publishing house undertaking the [...] I was perusing the latest declassified articles in CIA Studies for no apparent reason. In it they have a page of book recommendations on a wide variety of topics — a fascinating list not so much for scintillating reads, but for the arcane niche topics on which people write. Here’s my favorite from [...] According to this website called I Write Like — and based on the text I pasted from the Labor Virgins post below… I kid you not — I write like William Shakespeare — and nobody named Bacon helped me either.. Cut and paste a representative sample of your writing (a paragraph or two) and their algorithm [...] The only surviving copy of the 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemüller, purchased by the Library of Congress and now on display in its Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C. The term “America” can be seen in continent on the lower leftmost panel. Vespuci is pictured on the top panel of the third column. The above [...] I posted about Glenn Beck’s potentially troubling references to whacko conspiracy theorists here. In fairness and because I mostly like the guy even if I don’t always agree with some of his methods… here’s an interview he gave to National Review Online’s Robert Costa: Or worse. Beck says that his first draft of Overton — [...] Starting a Diplomatic History of the U.S. course tonight… Tonight is an introduction on international law, diplomacy and diplomats, ambassadors… so they’ll get the first 3-4 minutes of this clip on the personal inviolability of diplomats (or heralds in this case)…. Don’t shoot the messenger! Then we’ll move to foreign policy. I’m having them [...] To Kill a Mockingbird and Harper Lee — reconsidered from The Wall Street Journal): In all great novels there is some quality of moral ambiguity, some potentially controversial element that keeps the book from being easily grasped or explained. One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship [...] Last year I gave a speech on religious liberty and the particular contribution of three men: Roger Williams and two Baptist preachers named Isaac Backus and John Leland. Leland especially was instrumental in the drafting of the First Amendment and passage of the Bill of Rights and if not for him James Madison was [...] I have been advised by my physician that I must undergo a course of chemotherapy on my esophagus. This advice seems persuasive to me. I regret having had to cancel so many engagements at such short notice. Share on Facebook Edward George Bulwer-Lytton…. some of you may know who this man was…. ALL of us have been affected by his “greatest creation”… I quote to you from the opening paragraph of his greatest work (emphasis mine) — the 1830 novel Paul Clifford: “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except [...] Besides the weekly Sunday Gospel posts and the occasional comment here and there on religion generally I try not to use this spot to proselytize or beat a specific theological drum too hard, but every so often I come across something I feel like sharing. One of my favorite blogs is by a pastor [...] I have some Father’s Day Amazon gift cash to spend (which of course I will through Threedonia’s Amazon links — that’s how we pay for diapers for the little FN baby and keep Wank’s F-me pumps shined to a high gloss) — I’m thinking of getting this book. Here’s a bit of a [...] Here is, to me, a potentially damning troubling portrayal of Glenn Beck in a Weekly Standard cover story on which face the Tea Party movement should adopt — a Glenn Beck type or Rick Santelli — the CNBC journalist who is sometimes credited with kickstarting the whole thing with his outburst at the Chicago Stock [...] Lord of the Flies (1963) Here’s a nice little profile of Ayaan Hirsi Ali — former Muslim and now an atheist — and a brave woman fighting Muslim extremists around the world especially in the battlegrounds of the West — from The Sydney Morning Herald. Here’s a bit, go read the whole thing: The subtitle of Nomad is A Personal [...] In my Classic Pick below I mentioned three folks with epic survival stories…. there are books for each of course so I highly recommend these books for high adventure and if you like stories of courage, stubbornness and the WILL to live: Touching the Void (2003) British mountaineers climb the Andes in 1985. “Harrowing” and “heartbreaking” cannot even begin to describe this film — sort of a quasi-documentary. I include the IFC synopsis here in full because it sums it up as [...] Daniel Drezner, highly acclaimed international relations expert, political scientist and blogger for the erudite Foreign Policy website is working on a new book. There are many sources of fear in world politics — terrorist attacks, natural disasters, climate change, financial panic, nuclear proliferation, ethnic conflict, and so forth. Surveying the cultural zeitgeist, however, [...] Carrie Fisher’s life would make a great book. Oh, wait, the actress turned author already mined her sordid past both for her hilarious fiction and a recently released memoir Wishful Drinking Her battles with addiction and mental illness are legendary, but to “Star Wars” geeks like myself she’ll always have a “Get Out of Jail Free” [...] Let me preface this by saying this former student of mine is the sweetest young woman in the world — a delight to have in the classroom and intellectually curious (insofar as that goes) and while I only had her in 3 courses of her entire college career I feel on some level like somewhat [...] Share on Facebook A couple of weeks ago Outlaw posted the trailer to Restrepo — a documentary about the 173rd Airborne in Afghanistan by Sebastian Junger — also author of the book War on his experiences in Afghanistan. Junger is currently Peter Robinson’s guest on his Internet interview show Uncommon Knowledge. He’s on part 3 of [...] |
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