Unpopular New Blog!

So I'm going to try something new? My editor at the New Haven Advocate has asked me to start blogging for them! There is no money in it, but there is no money in this shit either, and I have extracted explicit promises that I can be as "wonky" and "profane" as I desire.

Will this move get me more readers? Lose me all of my readers? Who can say! But anyway, here is my latest entry on the new blog. Lemme know what you think in the comments (here, or there). Oh and, here's a link for the RSS feed on the new blog.

Nothing to Say

The Chronicle of Higher Education is giving me a 404 when I try to leave a comment on this article about David Gelernter, so I'll just spit it out here:

Depending on whom you ask, Gelernter's intellectual adventurism is the mark of a true Renaissance man or the desperate flailing of a scattershot dilettante. Around Yale, there is a curious reluctance to criticize him on the record. "Some communication at Yale is conducted in raised eyebrows and significant silences," notes Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at the university, when asked about this reticence. It may be that many of his colleagues are reluctant to speak openly about Gelernter out of sympathy for his experience with the Unabomber. Whatever the case, few want to be publicly critical.

Oh well allow me! Because I'd like to point out that this is disgusting:

The woman who yearns to be a rabbi resembles the openly practicing homosexual who wants the same thing. Both cases suggest a man who yearns to be a hazzan but lacks the ear or voice for it, or hopes to be a rosh yeshiva ... but lacks the temperament or brains, or wants to be a poet but has nothing to say.

That's from Gelernter's new manifesto, Judaism: A Way of Being. Note the flaccid rhetoric! Note the creepy use of "openly practicing homosexual"—a rabbi who practices sodomy in secret is A-OK, I guess.

Oh, yeah, and in case you're wondering, our "Renaissance man"'s paintings are pretty wretched, too. Way to go, Chronicle of Higher Ed, and way to go, Yale University Press.