The American Mind

Merry Christmas!

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I’m in agreement with Barry Ritholz. Gift cards aren’t a good Christmas gift. I admit when I’ve been desperate I’ve resorted to them. But as Ritholz writes it shows “you couldn’t be bothered actually picking out a present.”
He offers some suggestions that giving your everyday, average gift card. A gift card does make sense [...]

The snow stopped falling in the Washington, DC area. Now, it’s about digging out. I’m stuck watching Senate proceedings on C-SPAN2 because the Metro is still only running underground trains, and there’s no bus service to my part of Northern Virginia. I have no way of getting into work. When the National Weather Service reports [...]

Historian Paul Johnson took on the challenge of a brief biography of Winston Churchill. He talked about it with the Wall Street Journal:
He gives credit to his success as a historian to his simultaneous and successful career in journalism. “You learn all sorts of tools as a journalist that come in extremely useful when you’re [...]

May 13, 2003: I met Iris Change, author of The Rape of Nanking. A few years later she committed suicide:
I asked her how the reasearch for her latest book differed from Rape. She told me that the research and writing about Nanking made her physicially ill, and she had to recuperate after finishing the book. [...]

January 30, 2003: Displaying my frustration in moving from a Blogger.com-power weblog to Movable Type:
Now, I have this really nice design all ready and waiting (thanks, Joni). You’d love it, and I’d love to show you. All that’s left is to import my old posts. Based on the manual, it appears to be a simple [...]

I’m going through 10 years of TAM archives:
September 11, 2001:
Evil’s shadow fell upon the United States today. Even now, a cloud of death covers the ruins of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The survivors from the WTC looked like ghosts. Their skin and clothes were covered with grey-white ash. Their mouths gaped open gasping [...]

Eight Days of Hanukkah from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

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The traditional gift for a 10th wedding anniversary is aluminum. This little weblog is now 10 years old. That explains the aluminum can wall picture above.
I’m not sure how to begin this post, so I asked for help on Twitter. I wasn’t let down:
@haystack: “Still crazy after all these years” ???
@Xavier: “it was a dark [...]

If you’re a regular Facebook user when you logged in today you probably got a request to update your privacy settings. Facebook wants their users to make more of their content and activities public to the internet. Facebook’s new default as public doesn’t bother me. I’ve been on the World Wide Web since the beginning [...]