As the 1960s sitcom Get Smart makes its way back into popular culture with the release of the film adaptation starring Steve Carrell, it is amusing to note that the series has also had an unlikely impact on legal discourse. In both Canadian and American legal briefs and court rulings, the idea of the ‘cone of silence’ – which never worked on [...]
Archive for June, 2008
The Supreme Court Salutes “Get Smart”
Posted in Arts and Aesthetics, History, Media, Personalities, Popular culture, Uncategorized on June 29, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Edward Luttwak: The Intellectual as Adventurer
Posted in Foreign affairs, U.S. Politics, tagged conservative intellectuals, Edward Luttwak on June 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Like his friend Michael Ledeen, Edward Luttwak lives in the weird nether-land where scholarship meets espionage and intellectual journalism meets military adventurism. When he’s not writing learned books on the grand strategy of the Roman Empire or crisp essays for the London Review of Books, Luttwak works as a consultant for the various military and [...]
Christopher Lasch: The Radical as Cultural Conservative
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Christopher Lasch, conservativism, radicalism on June 14, 2008 | 1 Comment »
As my Sans Everything colleague A.M. Lamey has observed, there are certain strands of radical thought, even forms of Marxism, which are surprisingly sympathetic to cultural conservatism. One of the best examples of this tendency is the late historian Christopher Lasch (1932-1994). In works like The Culture of Narcissism (1979) and The True and Only [...]
The War Liberals: From Wilson to Bush
Posted in Media, Philosophy, U.S. Politics on June 12, 2008 | 8 Comments »
If there is one thing historians understand, it’s that history does really repeat itself exactly. History is the study of the past in all it’s local and unique particularity. Yet still, some forms of human behavior do fall into patterns, and when people make the same mistakes over and over again, it’s worth asking why.
The [...]
Comics: Out of the Gutter and Into the Academy
Posted in Popular culture, Uncategorized, tagged Art Spiegelman on June 3, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Comics were once a gutter art form, barely more respectable than pornography. Now comics are perhaps all too cherished by the establishment, showered with attention by academic studies and museum shows. More than anyone else Art Speigelman is responsible for this shift, thanks not only to his celebrated graphic novel Maus but also his many [...]
