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Ian on Twitter
- Police and the Press: http://t.co/cxqrIeKi
- All recommended reading; this week's piece, too--McPhee's still got it: http://t.co/EREfdw6d via @NewYorker
- Nothing like an #Arsenal victory topped with a John Terry blunder _ http://t.co/UuzpNKIp
- American-Born Qaeda Leader Is Killed by U.S. Missile in Yemen: http://t.co/ri4jyEd9
- Possibly the stupidest excuse yet to call for stricter immigration controls: http://t.co/WCrfrbFB
Brian on Twitter
- The days are getting longer.
- A well-thought-out blog essay by Andrew Sullivan, "Controlling birth control, control, controlling liberty": http://t.co/p1fKbp5t
- RT @MaddowBlog: #Maddow to @PolitiFact: What is wrong with you? Also, you're fired http://t.co/XVdcdS07 /re fact-check of #SOTU
- on NYTimes webcast of #SOTU Biden's tie looks radioactive.
- The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life that is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. Thoreau
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Author Archives: Ian
“A Vigorous Young Man”
Good writing is a rare commodity in law school, as in the legal world generally. Mercifully, there are a handful of judges who are a joy to read. One is Benjamin Cardozo, who was on the New York Court of … Continue reading
Posted in New York, Sailing without guide
Tagged cardozo, coney island, judicial opinion
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Herzog!
On a recent Friday evening, I went down to the IFC to see Werner Herzog’s new film, Into the Abyss. It’s a genre film—the death penalty documentary—and its cloying subtitled, A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, suggests it … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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“Because The Odyssey needs a German director. Everybody knows that a German, Schliemann, discovered Troy.”
Fritz Lang’s 1931 film M is the perfect narrative movie. It’s not worth trying to make that argument here, so I’ll limit myself to the obvious starting point, the beginning. In the opening scene, we’re introduced to Berlin rapt in terror, … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Hollow Wastes
A review of the collected letters of TS Eliot in The Nation recently directed me back to two poems I last read, respectively, a few months ago and a few years ago, “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men.” I found … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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Response: On Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer
Whether or not Joe McGinniss, as Janet Malcolm presents him, is an archetypal bad journalist depends on him being a bad journalist to begin with. There’s an argument—consistent with Malcolm’s characterization of journalistic practice—that McGinniss is, in fact, a very … Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
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A well-phrased dig
From Grant Gilmore’s 1974 Storrs lectures at Yale, in reference to a 19th-century dean of Harvard Law School: “Langdell seems to have been an essentially stupid man who, early in his life, hit on one great idea to which, thereafter, … Continue reading
Posted in Nonfiction, Uncategorized
Tagged Christopher Columbus Langdell, Grant Gilmore, insults, Ivy League rivalry
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What Woolf’s ‘The Waves’ Says About Anders Behring Breivik
Brian– Your mention of the Norway attacks reminds me of something I’d meant to post a while ago. I finished Virginia Woolf’s The Waves just a few days before I was called over to Oslo. I was very much taken … Continue reading
Posted in Cape Cod, far-away lands populated by foreigners, Fiction
Tagged Breivik, Oslo, terrorism, The Waves, Woolf
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Naphtha beguiles
In his poem “Naphtha,” Frank O’Hara catalogs the 20th century from the perspective of the mid-century. (I’m not sure exactly when the poem was written; O’Hara died in 1966, so sometime in the 1950s or 1960s.) It’s a century of … Continue reading
Shamus, shammes, Seamus
By my silence lately, dear reader, if you exist, you might have concluded that I’d run afoul of some Providence mobster, that I’d been whacked, rubbed out, offed. And where would that have left us? I think it was Aristotle … Continue reading
Posted in Fiction, Movies, Uncategorized
Tagged Dashiell Hammett, detective novels, etymology, Raymond Chandler, shamus
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A Spy Retired to the Country
Like the Millennial man who favors brown worsted vests and a sculpted moustache, Jesse Ball is of the wrong age at just the right time. A poet and novelist—though, from what I can tell, mostly novelist, these days—Ball is a … Continue reading