According to this article, some airlines are starting to enforce policies that children shouldn't be seated next to unrelated men, because you never know what might happen . . . Frances Kemp booked an aisle seat on a recent British Airways (BA) flight because she had a bad leg that…
No, sorry. He's not cartooning. According to this article from USA Today, though, Larson has has recently released a calendar (of previously released cartoons), all of the profits going to help Conservation International for the organization's work to help end the illegal trade in Asian elephants, Indochinese tigers, Asiatic black bears,…
We recently received this comment from Scholar:
Erich or Grumpy,
May I please have some more links to the discussions here at dangerous intersections which you have found to be most interesting, *must read*, or highlights in general.
Thanks,
Scholar
—
I took Scholar’s request seriously and went back to review many of our posts. I still can’t get over how many topics we’ve addressed in nine months, covering 592 posts!
Rather than call these posts the “best of,” I would merely call them the more memorable posts to me, keeping in mind the triple asterisk that comes with the assembly of this list: 1) I simply didn’t have the time to review each of the posts again. Therefore, this list is only representative, not complete. 2) It is difficult to determine any meaningful criteria on which to base such a list, other than (as I’ve already suggested) the idea that this list includes many of the posts I found memorable. Other people will certainly have different ideas of what posts are worthy 3) Scholar’s request puts me in an awkward spot, given that I write for the blog.
To the extent that I’ve included my own posts, then, it should be with the understanding that I am not trying to judge the writing so much as considering whether the ideas addressed are memorable to me, whether the ideas expressed therein seemed important or whether they moved me. Here’s another way of looking at it: if you want …
I have been accused of being a curmudgeon by more than a few people who know me well. Perhaps I deserve it, based upon the intensity with which I approach writing. Also, I too often fall into the trap of seeing the world as a set of problems needing to…
Everyone knows that the United States was first settled in 1620. Everyone is wrong.
We celebrate a wildly distorted history of Thanksgiving year after year. On Thanksgiving, we solemnly give thanks that we have enough food to allow our families to overeat. For the sake of holiday decorum, we avoid the thought that we could actually be doing something to help millions of people starving to death elsewhere in the world. We could splurge a bit less on the big holiday meal, for instance, then send life-saving donations to relief agency to save some real lives. But that would be such a downer on the holiday. Instead, let’s spend time with those people we love and think happy thoughts about Thanksgiving.
After all, we celebrate holidays to be happy, to bond family and friends. And it is a good thing to keep in touch with family and friends. To keep the room happy, though, we need to focus mostly on happy things and to avoid thinking about facts, memories or courses of conduct that might interfere with that happiness. Other than watching our favorite football team lose the big game, what could possibly interfere with the flow of happiness on Thanksgiving? Here’s one thing: the truth about Thanksgiving.
With Thanksgiving approaching, I decided that it would be good medicine to re-read the chapter on Thanksgiving in James Loewen’s iconoclastic classic, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995). It was well worth the …