Where did Brad Delong's blog title, grasping reality with both hands, come from. Am I alone in finding it extremely irritating? I hope its derived from some famous quote; otherwise it's a perfect example of a horrifically overwritten title, like A Heartbreaking Jerk of Staggering Penis, only worse since there's no irony.

P.S. I do enjoy the blog, I just hate clicking on that title everyday in google reader.

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Is it just me or is Bob Herbert's love affair with Obama starting to get a little creepy?

Before Herbert was boring because he would talk about social problems that still exist but no one cares about anymore. Now he's boring because he seems to have morphed into fluffer in chief. Fire the man damn it!

...Or keep him on if he starts to write about his dreams of Obama riding around on a white unicorn, and then the unicorn suggests that they stop at the beach and the unicorn asks if he can apply some tanning oil to Obama's back because he wouldn't want Obama to get burnt. No no no he wouldn't want that... And then the unicorn unzips itself and out comes... Bob Herbert. Oh God!

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As part of my research, I've been delving into some papers from other disciplines. Now I am a big fan of interdisciplinarity; I'm delighted by the move in economics to borrow from other disciplines like psychology, sociology, and history and hope that it accelerates. But... Man is there a lot of crap in other disciplines. I guess I shouldn't be surprised given the amount of crap churned out by economists, but still.

Take this anthro paper on the internet in Malaysia. First off, the writing is terrible:

Having visited putatively exemplary innovative spaces such as Silicon Valley, Cyberjaya planners were clearly convinced of the importance of creating an environment of interactive conduct.

This is anthropology guys, you know one of those liberal arts subjects that has no use in the "real" world. At the very least, you're supposed to be able to write! Reading this sentence makes me feel like I'm chewing on dried cow dung: too many needless polysyllabic words and irritating alliterations.

The kicker, which prompted me to write this post is the following:

If Southern California was the exemplary intelligent space on account of its ‘technical virtuosity and economic dynamism’ (Winner, 1992, p. 32), then its inhabitants--what Nigel Thrift has termed Homo Silicon Valleycus (Thrift, 2000, p. 688)--were imaginatively positioned at a global evolutionary apex in the minds of MSC planners.

Aren't anthropologists supposed to do lots of field work, where they visit physical locations rather than simply reading about them in a book? These guys don't seem to know much about basic geography: silicon valley is in Northern California. You may think this is a tad nit picky on my part, but if you're supposed to be an expert in anthropological implications of new media, this is one thing I think you should know.

I don't see why they didn't just go the traditional route and write in a manner that is so incomprehensible that the paper is impossible to critique, like Homi Bhabha:

If, for a while, the ruse of desire is calculable for the uses of discipline soon the repetition of guilt, justification, pseudo-scientific theories, superstition, spurious authorities, and classifications can be seen as the desperate effort to 'normalize' formally the disturbance of a discourse of splitting that violates the rational, enlightened claims of its enunciatory modality.

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We at the Daily Gimpei are nothing if not respectful of the dead. So let us all share a moment of silence for the "penis with a thesaurus".

Okay... Let us now end this moment of silence. Who actually likes Updike? I read Rabbit Run and found it mildly entertaining. I tried to read a few of his pieces on art in the New York Review of Books and on literature in the New Yorker... but they were so boring that I couldn't get more than a page in. If only he was as entertaining as a penis with a thesaurus.

P.S. If Updike is a penis with a thesaurus, there must be vagina with an almanac out there somewhere. Barbara Kingsolver perhaps?

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I admit it; I'm a regular reader of slate, and it's for a reason: they have some great contributors. For example, this article on adult diapers is gold. Kaus is good fun, if not a little too contrary for the sake of being contrary. Also great are the various dialogues they host, like the most recent one on the state of the republican party. It was great fun to see all the bickering, and I wish it had gone on for much longer.

But... There's also a lot of crap. I think it falls into two categories. First, slate tries too hard to find the next big thing. Take for example, the post Help! I'm a hip, young New Yorker. I am not supposed to have a crush on Mike Huckabee by a Ms. Cupp. The editors of Slate apparently think that because Ms. Cupp is "hip", she lives in New York, and she likes Huckabee that we should care about what she has to say. After all, look how hip she is!

I can name at least 10 boutique vodkas. My music interests are sufficiently sophisticated that I can condescend to most other age groups with authority.

There should be a word for this sort of sarcasm that is nothing more than thinly veiled self-flattery. The real problem, though, is that there really is nothing to this post apart from the title, or to be more specific, the "persona" of Ms. Cupp. It makes me wonder who'll get published next: an amish physicist, a preacher who is also a pimp, a terrorist who only fights using akido.

The second type of article that pisses me off is the one that seems to be written not because it is correct, but because the title sounds nifty. Exhibit two Only in America: The wrongheaded American belief that Barack Obama could only happen here. Guess what the main piece of evidence is in this article: Stalin, Daniel arap Moi, Napoleon, and Benjamen Disraeli?!

The disappointment I feel in reading these articles is kind of like buying an album with one catchy song and then realizing that the rest of the album is guff. Not only have you waisted money on a crappy album, but now you can't get that annoying song tubthumping out of your head.

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