A very happy Mother’s Day to you and yours.
Category: Culture
I Took Your Name.
By way of Pickle in the City, the Baby Name Wizard is a fun tool that helps you trace the popularity of a given name over the course of the twentieth century. (For what it’s worth, Kevin topped out in the ’60s.)
A Day to Forget.
Be careful out there, y’all: A British psychologist has run the numbers and deemed that today, Jan. 24, is the most depressing day of the year. Hmmm. It’s early yet, but I can think of worse. Perhaps someone should acquaint the good professor with last November’s election, or, for that matter, Valentine’s Day.
Kinsey on Lincoln.
Schindler, Rob Roy, Darkman, Qui-Gon, Kinsey…why not Honest Abe? Liam Neeson is apparently in talks to play Lincoln in a Spielberg-directed biopic, to be based on Doris Kearns Goodwin‘s forthcoming book, The Uniter. Ok, that’s not bad…but hopefully this project turns out better than Amistad.
Also in loosely related Lincoln-by-way-of-Kinsey news, Salon‘s Andrew O’Hehir casts a troubled eye at C.A. Tripp’s Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln. As he ably points out (as does George Chauncey in the excellent Gay New York), “the difficulty with assessing Lincoln’s private life (or that of anyone else who lived before the 20th century) is that the nature of private life has changed dramatically from his time to ours, and the distance between us distorts the view…Whether [Lincoln and Joshua Speed’s, with whom Lincoln shared a bed] relationship had a sexual component or not, it belongs to a vanished world of intimate male friendships of a kind almost unrecognizable to us.” In other words, sexual orientation is an historically dynamic idea. Homosociality does not necessarily imply homosexuality, and one cannot simply read 19th century sources and infer a 20th century mindset. You have to delve a little deeper. Update: Columbia’s David Greenberg also weighs in for Slate.
Frenchfries 9/11.
Along the same lines, Slate‘s Seth Stevenson scrutinizes the return of the (Burger) King.
Terminator J.
He’s big, He’s mean, He’s pissed…He’s the Son of God? The NY Times examines the rise of “Angry Jesus” among conservative evangelicals and other Christian groups feeling swamped amid a rising tide of secularism (Never mind that Mel’s paean to gory Christian martyrdom is the highest grossing film of 2004, and that the White House of the most powerful nation on Earth is currently manned by a born-again biblethumper.) C’mon y’all…to use the parlance of the movement, WWJD? Somehow, I’d think He’d err on the side of love and forgiveness, not run around like the Rock wreaking havoc on sinners and unrepentants. But perhaps I’m just old-fashioned.
Gnome Run.
Slate‘s Seth Stevenson weighs in on Travelocity and pilfered gnomes.
Fighting Fire with Fire.
Along the lines of Esquire’s Indefensible Proposition column, Slate questions firefighters’ place in the pantheon. Hey, they said it.
Super Sized.
Dahlia Lithwick examines the legal strategies soon to be employed against “Big Food”. Sounds like these cases’ll be tough to make, but they still might encourage Mickey D’s to back away from McGriddle and the like.
War Games.
“He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade — and then they both should burn it.” A GMU grad student finds his infrastructure research may be groundbreaking…and dangerous.