jeffmacintyre.com » Linkblog

Revisiting Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire

Jeff — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 19:00:54 +0000

At once rarefied and accessible, with a singular visual style that’s impossible to carbon-date, Wings has earned its place alongside the likes of The Seventh…

24M Bachelors Condemned to Life Without a Wife

Jeff — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:00:53 +0000

The country’s leading think-tank describes the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem facing China. The surplus of bachelors — known as…

A New Turn in Dark Tourism Comes to Haiti

Jeff — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:00:32 +0000

Paging David Foster Wallace:

A huge Royal Caribbean liner docked 60 miles away from Haiti’s devastation in the heavily guarded resort of Labadee, and it won’t…

Against repressive antisentimentalism

Jeff — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 18:00:27 +0000

Marriage is Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell standing side by side in the closing scene of His Girl Friday, nattering on with the same jollity…

College Ivy Sprouts at a CT Prison

Jeff — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 18:00:30 +0000

During her class in the prison, Professor Richards walked a fine line between energizing her students with the demands of real scholarship and scaring them…

Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Two-Part Harmonies

Jeff — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 18:00:09 +0000

In any society, he maintained, “the purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.”

As he saw it, the…

How universities should exist to make minds, not careers

Jeff — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 18:00:45 +0000

I’ve had many wonderful students at Yale and Columbia, bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it’s been a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But…

Against Camel Case

Jeff — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:00:04 +0000

Put some distance between you and your Master Card; don’t let your Iphone make the rules. You don’t have to buy their language. It already…

On Samuel Johnson’s Worth Today

Jeff — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:00:30 +0000

Though an excellent poet and storyteller, aside from his critical power, Johnson now matters most as a wisdom writer. His test for literary criticism was…

Information Overload, Renaissance Edition

Jeff — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:00:57 +0000

While the extreme availability of information today should presumably have highlighted its relative paucity in earlier periods, historians–most notably Ann Blair–have in fact extended the…