Kieran Healy

Oh baby, give me one more chance

Friday Night Frivolity: Finnish Edition

I had all my wisdom teeth removed earlier today and so I am perhaps not quite at the peak of my game. Although, if you ask me, there is quite a good argument to be made that the AMR is best read while high on a cocktail of extra-strength Advil, Vicodin, and Haagen Daz ice […]

Wife Swap

Excerpts from an email forwarded from a philosopher of my acquaintance: Hello, I hope you are doing well! I am a casting producer for ABC Television’s hit reality show, Wife Swap. I am currently trying to cast families that promote philosophy as a discipline for a special episode of our show and thought perhaps you […]

Aigamemnon (A Fragment)

CLYTAEMNESTRA Citizens of Argos, you Elders present here, I shall not be ashamed to confess in your presence my fondness for my CEO, billions of dollars of losses notwithstanding. First and foremost, it is a terrible evil for a wife to sit forlorn at one of her several homes, severed from her husband, always hearing […]

All You Zombies

To be honest, watching the anchors and reporters draaaaaaag out the joke and gnaw it to death makes it clear that the real zombies are holding down well-paying jobs presenting local news. I especially liked the vox pop with the caption “Jane Shin / Drove by sign”.

The uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy (Suburban Line)

The Milky Way Transit Authority. (Via Elaine.)

Uh oh. Somebody cut the cake. I told them to wait for you, but they cut it anyway. There is still some left, though, if you hurry back.

I missed this bit of DC think-tank inside-baseball yesterday. Matt Yglesias wrote something critical about Third Way: Third Way is a neat organization — I used to work across the hall from them. And they do a lot of clever messaging stuff that a lot of candidates find very useful. But their domestic policy agenda […]

A Nightmare from which I am trying to Awake

Signs that things are very bad: Emacs 23 from CVS + ESS + Auctex, + a custom color theme. Brought back from the dead because while TextMate has many virtues, Emacs still, unfortunately, beats all-comers for coding with R.

Oppressed by Social Forces

Allow me a bit of a rant. Until a few volumes ago, Social Forces typeset its articles in Minion Pro, a modern serif face well-suited to lengthy stretches of text. Then, for no apparent reason, the journal was redesigned. (I speak loosely.) Minion was retained for the title, abstract and acknowledgment note, but the body […]

You Little Bobby Dazzler

Soc Blogger Jeremy Freese won this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, where the goal is to write a text-based puzzle game in the tradition of stuff like Infocom classics. The premise of Jeremy’s game, Violet, is summarized by the Chronicle of Higher Education: It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not […]

Also, You Have Not Been Exclusively Selected to Receive This Offer

“Classmates.com User Sues; Schoolmates Weren’t Really Looking for Him“, reports Wired: When Classmates.com told user Anthony Michaels last Christmas Eve that his former school chums were trying to contact him, he pulled out his wallet and upgraded to the premium membership that would let him contact long-lost fifth-grade dodge-ball buddies and see if his secret […]

The Anxiety of Influence

I’m at CASBS this year. The other day (for Halloween) I was given a list all of the occupants who have been in the office I now sit in. The list includes Jacob Marschak, Harold Wilensky, David Landes, Ernest Nagel, Philip Selznick, Alvin Gouldner, Robert Bellah, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Fred Dretske and Ron Breiger. Crikey. […]