On the train the other day, I picked up a neighbor's crumpled Washington Post, and read this warm-hearted response by the advice columnist: You've been more honest with us than most of us are with ourselves. Maybe everyone needs to write a letter like this. And then shred it. Cross-cut. Thank you. (WaPo, 3/24/08, p. C8) What, I wondered, could have provoked this squirm reaction (acknowledgment, suppression, mashing extra hard on the shredder b...

Correspondent Amanda Gradisek responds to "Terrorism's schadenfreude" with some thoughts about sports, nationalist rivalry, and terrorism. Speaking as a person who would buy almost any "I hate Michigan" shirt as a result of my family legacy at THE Ohio State University (except for that one), this shirt comes close to articulating a thing I've been thinking about a lot lately. While I recognize the completely irrational nature of the hatred B...

Jake Adam York, a subject of the mighty Congressman Tom Tancredo, writes in response to E Wesp's Friday post: I very much enjoyed your treatment of Mr. Tancredo's linguistic winds. I think, however, you may give him too much credit. As a Coloradan, I am often subject to Tancredo's credos, bloviations, flatulations, borborygmic voids, and pontifications, so I can say with certainty that (and in no way do I mean this to perforate the reach or l...

Adam Schenck writes in about "Live Strong and Prosper": In America, all failings are moral failings. The most significant and obvious foreign policy failure in our recent history is Vietnam. For most, the war was not "lost in the whorehouses of Saigon," as Jeff Bridges' character in Masked and Anonymous says. Instead, the argument goes, the war was lost because of those Sixties lefties, with their drugs, sex, music, etc. For our Iraq failure,...

In response to my post of June 8, a letter from the author of The Asian Mystique: Dear SL Kim, I am grateful to read of your interest in my book, The Asian Mystique. You are correct that any book that endeavors to do what I have done must, by necessity, be marketed to the 95% Caucasian book-buying public (and I will be thrilled if Asian Americans prove my publisher wrong by buying this book en masse and assuring a future lucrative series of ...

Sound financial advice from reader Catriona Menzies-Pike, who writes in response to a recent post: If I had a dollar for every student who has asked me to raise their grade. And asked again. And then proceeded to expend more effort on raising said grade/mark one point than would have been required to make that essay make the grade… well I wouldn't be a down at heel academic, holding a so-called career together through a hyper-inflated teach...

Reader Jake Adam York writes in response to “Support our Truths!”: Dr. Bush, Many thanks to you for a spirited and (typically) intelligent response to “The Death of English.” Were you inclined to extend your remarks, either in private or in public, I would be interested in your thoughts on two separate issues: (1) I wonder if you feel, as I do, that the recent (i.e., in the last decade) increase in aesthetic consideration of literature, marked...

Carlos Gallego, who blogs in an impetuous style, stuck his thumb in a recent entry of ours and pulled this out: “Bullshit” is “sweet” like an “apple”...

Amanda Gradisek writes in: What fascinates me the most about this--let's face it--event of global concern, is the how fascinated all lapsed Catholics seem to be with the process of choosing a new pope. I guess this furthers my argument that being Catholic is a cultural identity; but those of us who are “lapsed Catholics” have probably known that strange defensiveness when people criticize a church we no longer follow and perhaps ...

J. Smieja writes from Canada: He gave of Himself as any Holy person would be expected to. Only this Pope, gave ten times more. It is a shame for some to refuse to see goodness for what it is. Mother Theresa is another shining example of pure love. I can only hope to be a small reflection of those great people. It is easy to look at negatively, but how do you balance your scales? Who in history was such a worldly figure of peace apart from Chr...

Those of you who live in Tucson may have noticed that the Arizona Daily Star has taken to reprinting little pieces of Printculture in its weekly “best of the local blogs” section. This week we got a short letter of thanks from Glenna H. Davolt regarding the reprint of a piece on Terri Schiavo: (In today's Ariz. Daily Star 3/28/05) My favorite line: “the even more ridiculous manner in which such a fantasy ties together aborti...

Loyal reader Joseph Rosenberg, of the Canada Rosenbergs, was in London last week to see a concert, and passed by this wonderful door to a stately, dignified, Soho townhouse. A classic case of protesting too much.

Amanda Gradisek was inspired to write after reading about Spring Break Shark Attack: Not that long ago, I was talking to my brother on the phone when I was extremely tired, and noted, to my surprised, that I suddenly had free cable for awhile. I found myself watching the fabulous film Orca, and while this wasn't quite as great as Spring Break Shark Attack,and the little shark bite out of the CBS logo at the end of the preview, this film was ...

Reader Haun passes along these thoughts on “The Times.” We'll be done minting that Nobel medal by mid-week. Applicants sought. Along with just about everybody, I admire and respect Benedict Anderson's books arguing that the daily press (and, for more leisured readers, the novel) produced the informational context for the nation, that “imagined community” of several million people who probably have little else in common ...

Elizabeth Allison, who refers to herself charmingly as “one of your ever-growing readership,” writes in on SF vs. LA: I don't want to be one of those defensive, SF-apologists — after all, I'm loving living in the east bay these days — but I just had to share the news story I heard upon waking up this morning: “A new study shows that 74% of Los Angelenos are unhappy, citing the worst traffic in the country and un...

Two short combined responses to pieces from a week or so ago: First, physicist extraordinaire Srin Manne writes in with a couple thoughts, the first on “Dangerous Liaisons”: I don't know if you ever read The Poor Man, but he wrote a “Google trap” once about a year ago that went like this. (1) Put in an embarrassing phrase with zero Google hits into a blog entry; his choice was “pictures queen mother naked.&#8221...

Since my entry won't be up till later today, I thought I'd give everyone something to get over their jones--just got this letter this morning from Joe Hill (AKA Miss Brandy), from Lone Pine, CA, responding to E Wesp's Friday missive on Tom Harkin: Obviously, the “learned” Senator is not aware that the flowers he will buy for his wifey, instead of that evil chocolate, are produced (mostly) by slave labor in Latin America. The glob...

Just a note to say that a colleague has written in with some useful corrections and ideas regarding the MLA interview advice, and that the advice has been updated accordingly.

This from reader M Hagan, who responds to Better Living Through Algebra and the attempt there to deduce the Bush administration's elusive “equation”: In regard to your inquiry about the nature of the equation followed by the present administration, I present the following: While the representatives of the administration have been quite clear that the equation has changed, there is no evidence that there has been any modification t...

Reader Steve Yao writes in about “It's a Doggy Dog World” : Just read S L Kim’s piece on malapropisms and wanted to suggest another venue for gathering them. It's not just students and native speakers who come up with interesting malapropisms based on homophony. A fellow grad student at Berkeley (who now teaches at Hopkins) thought for sure the phrase was ‘For all intensive purposes,’ which makes its own sense, even in line with...

Well, the offices of the Printculture empire (headquartered in Delaware, to avoid corporate income tax) were abuzz this week with the news that we'd been called “the culture blogzine” in an article at the BBC. The use of the definite article was probably, S L Kim pointed out, the best thing about the BBC piece, which basically made me look like a “gaming freak” (as one friend remarked) and completely misrepresented my m...

Reader Anne Brooksher writes in regarding “Losing in Iraq”: I understand your dilemma: if we believe that the war was wrong, was unprovoked, and was fought without moral dignity or humanity, how do we justify hoping for an ending which does not include American failure and then by its very definition American deaths? Your answer is simple: we don't. We hope for defeat, for American deaths, for miserable, unarming, castrating fa...

We received a long letter from reader A.W. about the “Coach ’em up” entry, objecting to pretty much everything in it. Here are some of the more serious objections –and a brief response. Your characterization of teacher-as-coach as a rightist trend seems incorrect to me. Teacher-as-coach and student-as-worker is one of the principles of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a school reform movement that was begun by educator Ted Sizer at Brown Un...

Reader A.G. responds to “Be All You Can Be”: K.K.'s recent entry was extremely interesting to me because I'm currently teaching a class on the rhetoric of the gendered body to my freshmen comp students. While we haven't gotten to the plastic surgery section yet, one of my students rather insightfully pointed out the rhetoric of many cosmetics sends the message of “you...only better,” as if the very self can be redefi...

Reader H.S. responds to “Theory in China”: “Nothing pleases in an argument like novelty! Bookhounds, dig through the barns and church sales for: William Speer, The Oldest and the Newest Empire: China and the United States. Cincinnati: National Publishing Company, 1870.”