Category Archives: Culture

Links and Comments: Reactions to Art; the Eclipse; Christianity and PKD

Posted on Saturday 16 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Saved from Facebook… A post by Adam-Troy Castro: Noted in a thread: Somebody (I forget who) told the story of leaving A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE as one of two teenage couples, being absolutely gobsmacked by it, and listening to his … Continue reading →

Posted in Culture, Movies, Religion, Science | Comments Off

Pinker: Better Angels: Passages and Outline from the Preface

Posted on Wednesday 6 September 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is Steven Pinker’s big 2011 book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, that takes a long-range view of human history to show that the human condition, over millennia and especially in recent centuries and decades, … Continue reading →

Posted in Book Notes, Culture, Evolution, Human Progress, Humanism, Steven Pinker | Comments Off

Links and Comments: Trump’s anti-intellectualism; ‘religious liberty’

Posted on Monday 31 July 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon, Conor Lynch: Draining the swamp — of brainpower: Trump’s corrupt administration is fueled by anti-intellectualism. Subtitle: “Trump got elected by attacking ‘elites.’ But he didn’t mean rich people — only those with education and expertise” Well of course. Only in … Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture | Comments Off

Links and Comments: Rules to Escape Trump’s Moral Rot; Escaping New Atheism(?); Optimistic Nihilism

Posted on Monday 31 July 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

William Saletan, at Slate, takes inspiration from John McCain’s recent speech, during last week’s health care debate: Words to Live By. Subtitle: “McCain’s speech gives us a map for escaping the moral rot of Trumpism.” He says, “To escape the … Continue reading →

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Meaning | Comments Off

Curious Play

Posted on Monday 24 July 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

On Saturday we saw the play “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”, on its US National Tour leg just ending here in San Francisco, with a different cast than the Broadway version, or any previous version, but … Continue reading →

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More from Cory Doctorow’s Locus Interview

Posted on Monday 17 July 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

While editing the ‘excerpts’ from Cory Doctorow’s long interview in the current issue of Locus Magazine, excerpts that I posted online on Sunday (here), I captured several other passages from that interview that particularly appeal to the themes of this … Continue reading →

Posted in Conservative Resistance, Culture, Psychology, Species Reset | Comments Off

Link and Comments: American Narratives

Posted on Saturday 27 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

David Brooks NYT column on May 26: The Four American Narratives. He recalls his own characterization of the American unifying story as an Exodus story: one about people leaving oppression to settle a new promised land. A story that no … Continue reading →

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Link and Comments: Kids These Days

Posted on Tuesday 23 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

From Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, a review by Jennifer Szalai of a book by new Nebraska senator Ben Sasse, THE VANISHING AMERICAN ADULT: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis — and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance. The review is … Continue reading →

Posted in Children, Conservative Resistance, Culture | Comments Off

Parents, Children, Identities: Andrew Solomon’s FAR FROM THE TREE

Posted on Friday 19 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

This is an enormous book, 962 pages long, 702 of that text (with the remainder consisting of encyclopedic notes, a lengthy bibliography, and an index). The book is about how parents deal with exceptional children, covering ten categories of exceptionality, … Continue reading →

Posted in Children, Culture, MInd, Psychology, The Gays | Comments Off

Link and Comment: The Changing US Demographic

Posted on Monday 15 May 2017 by Mark R. Kelly

Essay in Sunday’s NYT: The Census and Right-Wing Hysteria, by Herbert J. Gans The “right-wing hysteria” concerns the predictions, for several years now, than within a few decades the US would become a “majority-minority” nation by the 2040 — i.e., … Continue reading →