Mencken on College Football
College football would be much more interesting if the faculty played instead of the students, and even more interesting if the trustees played. There would be a great increase in broken arms, legs and necks, and simultaneously an appreciable diminution in the loss to humanity.
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
Laughing on the Inside
I have a piece on the Weekly Standard website about the success and failures of the Jon Stewart comedy camp.
Like most of my fellow anti-cultists, I don’t deny the comic talents of the Stewart camp; I know their gags can hit gold. I’m grateful for the emergence through their channels of Steve Carrell, if not Lewis Black. I respect Chicago’s Second City improv school where they trained. Though darlings of the liberal-left orthodoxy, deviating from it on nothing at all, their politics don’t account for the problem, either. What, then, explains it? Why do I and so many others find it impossible to watch even a few minutes of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report without hurting the remote in our haste to switch channels? Why did we look upon the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, staged in Washington on Halloween eve, to be one of those nightmares from which a reading of Thomas L. Friedman: Selected Sonnets would be a welcome respite?
Pop Culture Ceilings
My review of “Eating the Dinosaur,” Chuck Klosterman’s most recent book of pop-culture essays, was printed in the September issue of Liberty Magazine. You can read it below.
Read more…
Behind The Shadows
This in-depth interview with Garin in Armenian Weekly on his book Family of Shadows is more than worth reading.
Family of Shadows — Garin’s brilliant new book
A Century of Murder, Memory, and the Armenian American Dream
Go to the official website for excerpts, reading tour dates, and advance raves from Christopher Hitchens, David Ignatius, and others.
Pre-order it from Amazon now to get it before its official release on September 21.
Eric Hoffer’s Influence
In “Theatre,” David Mamet’s new book of essays on the art and craft of drama, the acknowledgements read thus:
I am very much indebted to the works of Thomas Sowell, Paul Johnson, Frederich Hayek, and Milton Friedman, and to those of Richard Wright and Eric Hoffer.
From the Waterfront
I have a piece on the longshoreman-philosopher Eric Hoffer in the last issue of The Weekly Standard (June 28), which might be on newsstands for another day or two. The online version is here, though you need a subscription to read it.
