Justin Katz
Blogs are a marker of a new elite. More accurately, they represent one area in which the ways society works around elite structures must be reconceived. That’s the central theme with which I approached the annual professional development seminar of the Legislative Information and Communications Staff Section (LINCS) of the National Conference of State Legislatures…
My latest FactIs column, “The Premises of the Culture of Death,” ponders a theme upon which I can’t quite land my finger. Something about things not meaning what they mean in pulsing cultural conversation that lacks substance. This, by the way, is my final FactIs column. I’m very grateful to the folks who produce the…
This announcement comes after the fact, but I wanted to mention that Andrew was interviewed for the 6:00 news on WJAR NBC 10 regarding the latest anti-Laffey attack ad. The report was replete with a screen shot of this very page, and stands as evidence that Anchor Rising is beginning to have exactly the effect…
My latest column, “Speaking Past an Oppressive Template,” remarks on the difficulty — in motivation and in practice — of being “well informed,” and the accompanying difficulty of communicating.
Somehow this bit of biography of the man who recently performed a “75-minute one-act, written by Howard Zinn, [that] engaged the audience by shedding light on the theories of philosopher Karl Marx” at the University of Rhode Island is almost too predictable to notice: Jones is a high school teacher in New York and is…
David Wilcox and Nance Pettit’s new CD, Out Beyond Ideas, puts to music mystic poetry from multiple religious traditions. My review, of sorts, suggests that they’ve uncovered and enhanced commonalities that underlie human societies, and that conservatives should look past the too-obvious backstory of the project to commonalities that ought to underlie our own.
That’s an interesting circle the “Chafee forces” are hoping to square, Andrew. On one hand, they don’t want anybody to believe that Laffey is electable. On the other hand, they want Democrats to cross over for the primaries in order to ensure the nomination of the Republican candidate who can (the Chafee folks believe) beat…
Andrew is perspicacious to note, in a comment to the previous post, that the Chafee camp’s talk of ending Steve Laffey’s political career is disconcerting. Laffey may or may not be worth keeping on a list of potential Republican candidates, but this tough rhetoric — now used too frequently to be mere candid overstatement —…
In “Katrina and the Media’s Demand for Racial Division,” I note that Hurricane Katrina seems to have undone some of the good that came from the evil of September 11 by rejuvenating racial divisiveness as a focus of conversation. Depressing. Sickening. Discouraging. And yet there’s hope if only we can find the patience to let…
I’m not picking sides, but a short Providence Journal bulletin by Scott MacKay turns an on-air spat between two talk radio hosts into a lesson in the methodology of media bias: WPRO talk-show host Dan Yorke and John DePetro, a former Rhode Island talk-radio host, got into an on-air spat yesterday after DePetro showed up…