homefries.org

A very nice article about cosmopolitanism and globalisation written by a man from Ghana (via Arts & Letters Daily).
People who can afford it mostly like to put on traditional garb — at least from time to time. I was best man once at a Scottish wedding, at which the bridegroom wore a kilt and [...]

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Librarianna has an interesting little exercise on her blog. How many of the The TIME 100 | The People Who Shape Our World can you identify?

J.J. Abrams
George Clooney
Dixie Chicks
Ellen DeGeneres
Nicolas Ghesquiere
Wayne Gould
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Arianna Huffington
Ang Lee
Renzo Piano
Rain
Rachael Ray
Jeff Skoll
Kiki Smith
Will Smith
Zadie Smith
Howard Stern
Meryl Streep
Reese Witherspoon
Rob Pardo
Daddy Yankee
Tyra Banks
Dane Cook
Matt Drudge
Stephen Colbert
Mike Brown
Kelly Brownell
Nancy Cox
Richard Davidson
Kerry [...]

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Michael Wex’s Born to Kvetch: Yiddish Language and Culture in All of Its Moods is entertaining, informative, sometimes uncomfortable, and uneven. I’m glad to have read most of it and skimmed the rest.
Faint praise, huh? But it really wouldn’t be in the spirit of the book to praise it, now would it?
Wex ranges widely through [...]

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Interesting article over at the New York Times, Growing Unease for Some Blacks on Immigration. (The article also reports on black civil rights leaders who support the immigrant efforts.)
Some blacks bristle at the comparison between the civil rights movement and the immigrant demonstrations, pointing out that black protesters in the 1960’s were American citizens and [...]

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OK, so I finally gave in and bought “the #1 worldwide bestseller, now a major motion picture,” Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code
What did I think? Well, I bought it, and I stayed up very late one night to finish it. So by the standards of the book publishing industry, it was a great success.
And [...]

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My friend and coworker Philocrites has written a smashing reflection: Bush and Colbert, Lear and the Fool.
Remember King Lear’s Fool? The jester in the play doesn’t crack Bob Hope one-liners or play the lute; he introduces a very dark kind of comic relief. He satirizes Lear’s misjudgments. He’s the only person who tells Lear the [...]

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