Category Archives: politics

People Still Want Sex on Holiday

politics, sex Leave a comment

Maine town is shaken by Zumba prostitution scandal (Reuters) It figures that a story like this would break when I was hit with the double whammy of a bad sinus infection and planning for an additional teaching gig I picked up in the middle of the term. I can’t think of a story more well-tailored to discuss some major themes of The Prostitutes of Lake Wobegon. It’s hardly been a huge national story because of the election, but it’s had some staying power, so at least…

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The Nexus of Politics and Grammar

glbt, politics, rhetoric, teaching, transgender Leave a comment

In addition to discussing linguistic relativity with my classes this week, we’re also going to go over the problematic issue of singular/plural pronoun agreement, in particular the sticky issue of indefinite pronouns. If you’ve ever gotten red ink on your writing for saying “Everyone is entitled to their opinion” then you’ve had to deal with this, and it’s one of the longest-lingering grammar-based arguments I’m aware of. I grew up when the appropriateness of using male pronouns as defaults (“everyone is entitled to his own…

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As You Can See, He’s Not Senate Material

music, politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

Here’s Scott Brown’s Staff Mocking Elizabeth Warren With The “Tomahawk Chop” (Slate) Tori Amos somehow managed to stay totally off my radar when she started her solo career with Little Earthquakes. It was only in 1994, after Under the Pink came out (the greatest non-Björk album of all time), that I became aware of her. I quickly came to appreciate her amazing musical skills, but I admit that at first I was drawn to her more controversial material just for how it rankled some people. Although…

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They Can’t Lose?

politics, rhetoric Leave a comment

My big period of Anglophilia coincided with Betty Boothroyd’s tenure as Speaker of the House of Commons. For we Americans, whose actual legislative activities tend to be kind of sedate (despite how absurd our campaigns can get), the more spirited discussions that happen in other countries’ legislatures can be interesting. The fistfights that break out between legislators get the most attention, but Betty Boothroyd had a way of asserting order in the House of Commons that really captivated me and made C-SPAN’s airing of Prime…

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The Littlest Victims of Fanatic Competition

politics, sports Leave a comment

‘Bounties’ split Tustin Pop Warner club (ocregister.com) As a culture, modern America is not very self-reflective. Maybe it’s a natural outgrowth of our previous national tumults, or maybe it’s a symptom of our ever-shortening attention spans, but when something bad happens to us as a nation, we usually don’t spend any significant amount of time after the problem to think about the underlying circumstances that might have caused it, and how we might go about altering those circumstances so that future problems are at least ameliorated,…

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