Blog to Self

Sunday, September 14, 2008

potitics shmolotics

I have been looking again at some of the political blogs I had subscribed to via RSS (on Google Reader) for a while now, but stopped following due to information overload and the job search. One of them is a liberal feminist sort of thing called Pandagon -- an odd name that doesn't quite trip off the tongue, but memorable in its way. It's a professional blog, so the writers/owners make money from the ads on it. I really don't like the "secondary sidebar" full of ads to the left of the main content on the page. It's extremely obtrusive. Fortunately, I can 'filter' the ads by reading it on my aggregator/reader.

Anyway, a recent post called The beginning of the decline of McCain is interesting (in part, to me) because it manages to pay tribute to David Foster Wallace while linking to a This American Life broadcast (on the 2000 presidential primaries in South Carolina, featuring Wallace) as well as making me feel better about how the presidential campaign has been going lately (even more than the image/idea of Hillary as the Palinator courtesy of Ann Atlhouse). I'm a big fan of This American Life, and of the little I've read of David Foster Wallace, in re: there was an impressive "book review" of the new edition of the American Heritage Dictionary in Harper's awhile back that was rather mesmerizing.

While I'm getting into political blog territory (I wrote "bog" instead of blog, which is apt), here is another I'm really liking these days, currently with comforting graphic on the relative effects of McCain's and Obama's tax plans: A Tale of Two Graphics. This is Obsidian Wings, mostly by someone under the pseudonym 'hilzoy' who I gather is a female philosophy professor. Curious about her real identity, I tried to find it on Google just now, but couldn't. Apparently it is findable, but she prefers to remain anonymous in part because she teaches and would rather her political writing online not well, get in the way of her teaching. An admirable wish. So I leave it at that, though I discovered she guest blogs/commentates on "real" news sites like CBS News.

1 Comments:

  • Nice to hear from you, Ben. The loss of David Foster Wallace is a major blow to American literature. You may want to track down his non-fiction collection of essays "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," which has some of his funniest writing on American culture. His accounts of an Illionois state fair and a journey aboard a cruise liner are fantastic. As somebody who passed the long hours of retail employment by reading his 1,000 page tome "Infinite Jest" up in the stockroom over the course of a summer, I find his death pretty depressing.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:36 AM  

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