William H. Gass at 100
William H. Gass was, as everyone notes, known more widely as a novelist and essayist than a philosopher, but his literary prose showed analytic philosophy’s interest in language, image, and metaphor, which he made cool.
By John Griswold
Not Being John Malkovich: TCR at the DNC
The reporter was the same height as John Malkovich, and baldheaded, and got a similar pissy look on his face when he was tired. (Malkovich grew up 15 miles from where the reporter grew up.) The reporter felt as if he looked like John Malkovich in that movie where he was walking through the crowd in a station, trying to look normal, but doing it so obviously that Bruce Willis just had to laugh.
The Spectacle in Chicago in 2024
Chicago hosted the Democratic National Convention again in August 2024, and if one were going to connect city and convention in some essential way as Mailer intended, an updated metaphor would be needed. Forty-five-year-old Norman Mailer would have hated the choice of something “corporate,” for its connotations: intangibility, unaccountability, absence, abstraction, hiddenness, hardly a way to know where the heart even sits.
Young Man Addresses the Crowd: TCR at the DNC
The young man talked another 40 minutes. The bus crawled through rush hour and the security perimeter at the United Center, where Harris would make her speech. There was no bathroom or water on the bus, and no exiting it.
AI Illiteracy
If visual-textual AI literacy is this bad, what (else) will Americans believe about, say, politics, based on social media posts with altered or fictional material? I think we know but pretend not to.
Blogging the 2024 DNC
The Common Reader goes to Chicago to check in with the Democratic Party.
Poverty Council Reveals Tensions in the Party: TCR at the DNC
Despite political rhetoric slung to get elected, no party can take care of all people and all problems at once, and resources and time are limited. This was tacitly acknowledged by the DNC when they tried to quash the Poverty Council.
The Tension in “Rural Issues”: TCR at the DNC
The tension was there for anyone to see, as when the chair of the DNC Rural Council, Kylie Oversen, told a TV station in her home state of North Dakota that “a lot of rural Democrats get overlooked, as they are in flyover states and red states.”
“Can You Feel Me?”: TCR at the DNC
I can hardly put into words how weird (since that is the Democrats’ own word of the month) it was to see dozens of international figures, including Harris and her husband, the Walzes, the Clintons, the Obamas, Bernie Sanders, Lil Jon, Common, and Stevie Wonder, all in short order. For most of the time, however, I sat there feeling either dead inside or professionally Zen, in service to hoping to see what was really going on apart from marketing tricks.
Recruiting Veterans: TCR at the DNC
Veterans hold a trove of experience for the country and, if the speakers this day are to be believed, a relatively sure path to leadership and personal sacrifice. But it should be pointed out that the talk at the meeting was 100 percent unidirectional, from the politicians to the attendees. No questions or other input were permitted.
What a Mess: TCR at the DNC
My experience with the DNC’s event has been not only long walks and great expense, but closed media offices, people who think they know but do not know, absent or last-minute email information that ends up limiting reporting, and being denied access to meetings on the basis of limited seating, where in reality there are hundreds of empty chairs.
Business and Entertainment: TCR at the DNC
Conventions are celebrations of future power not yet won, so there must be a show commensurate with the spoils. The DNC is being held in the two biggest buildings in Chicago, which not coincidentally celebrate the highest powers in our land: business, in the shape of McCormick Place, more commonly used for enormous trade shows; and entertainment, represented by the United Center arena.