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Creative destruction (Updated)
Headline on the NY Times website: TV Chief Takes 2-by-4 to a Proposed Cable Merger I was at first confused by the reference. Having grown up around my father’s lumberyard, I naturally think of a 2-by-4...
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When did you stop sexually assaulting women other than your wife?
It is a cliché of the legal trade: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” The paradigmatic damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t trick yes-or-no question. Everyone knows it. Thus it is with a sense of...
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Social climber
What is it about rock climbing that makes it such a useful synecdoche for enjoying your life? In an article about an unusual case about a girl whose lawsuit against a sexually abusive teacher foundered...
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European Seilschaften
The image of Seilschaften, of a group of mountain-climbers connected by a rope, is as frequently used in German political discourse (both verbal and visual) as cricketing terminology in British. One...
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Surfin’ NSDAP
I think we can all agree that the entire 20th century has conspired to make this sentence from the April 11 1933 NY Times the most bizarre political analogy since the New Jerusalem: Cleverly mixing his...
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Political doping
Who would have imagined that elections could be swayed by political-performance-enhancing drugs? Trump, in full “unshackled” mode, told a crowd of supporters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that Clinton,...
View ArticleNerve agents and the World Cup
Here’s a crazy theory that I need to write down, because no one else seems to be saying it: Could it be that the Novichok poisoning of two ordinary British people in Amesbury was not, as most have...
View ArticleThe World Comeuppance
There are few turnabouts more satisfying than when the cynic who thinks he’s calculated everything to his own benefit finds himself suddenly betrayed by the evil to which he’d accommodated himself....
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