Author Archives: Nick Werle

How to improve Morning mail

In my first BDH column today, I discussed how the new Brown policy restricting advertising in Morning Mail to events expecting more than 300 people harms student groups. Building the Critical Theory Project has shown me how important access to Morning Mail is for forming and organizing a student group. This policy will also harm university [...]

Defining Torture

Bob Woodward’s article in today’s Washington Post includes the first Bush Administration confirmation of torture at Guantanamo. Susan Crawford, who was named convening authority of military commissions by Defense Secretary Gates in February 2007, went on the record:
“We tortured [Mohammed al-] Qahtani. His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that’s why I did not refer the case” for [...]

War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength, Scion is Creepy

there seems to be one company - or rather one marque of the no-longer profitable Toyota Motor Corp - that is still “cool:” Scion. Personally, I find their cars pretty ugly and they’re not fun to drive (I’ve rented the xB a few times through Zipcar). Perhaps their only redeeming quality in my eyes is that ?uestlove drives one. But their owners’ fanaticism brings to mind Marx’s famous quip about Ideology “They do not know it, but they are doing it.”

I Hear Blago’s Innocent

My favorite part of the speech is when he quotes Rudyard Kipling.  

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Not [...]

Lest We Forget: The Internet is a Series of Tubes

Thank you NJDG for pointing out my lapse into the mythology of an etherial Internet. We can never forget that the Internet is a series of tubes that require huge amounts of capital and largely unseen infrastructure. Indeed, the rising use of high-bandwidth streaming video and web apps is responsible for a serious evolution in electricity [...]

BLogic at nyt.com

Last night I was reading Andrew Sullivan’s piece on blogging as a literary form in the current Atlantic (in the dead tree edition no less, a format I now use almost exclusively in the bathroom). “Andrew” argues that blogging is to writing as jazz is to music: an improvisational form that at its best is a conversation [...]

Train Station Music

I like train stations almost as much as I dislike the climate-controlled, fast food lubricated, homogeneous environment of Airport Land. There are some great things to recommend train stations:

Location: Because airports are unsightly, large and polluting, they are always found on the outskirts of a city surrounded by gas stations, long term parking lots, and [...]

John King Kong

Watch out for John King and his magic wall. He might use it to launch some missiles at you. Or replace the midwest with someplace more useful.

In all seriousness, CNN is totally ridiculous.

I Can’t Wait for Barack Obama to be President

Last night I watched both sides of the pending transfer of power. First, I saw Jon Stewart’s take on Bush’s G-20 performance. Bush constructed some brilliant metaphors to explain his current thinking about free market fundamentalism.
Then I watched this:

I can’t wait for the Obamas to move in.
The bad really seems so much worse after I’ve [...]

Repugnicans’ Diversity

And people say there’s no diversity on the right! There might be more black people in NASCAR than in the Repugnicans’ quickly shrinking “big” tent, (notice FOX News’s complete disavowel of race’s role in Michael Steele’s “prominence”), but the GOP might have enough cross-cutting diversity in its employment of language to make up for its [...]