Alan Jacobs

I think you’re very very beautiful and if you ever ask me to come and read aloud to you I will.

Queen Elizabeth II acceded to the throne aged 25 following the death of her father King George VI on 6 February, 1952. On 9 September she will have reigned for 63 years and seven months.

The record for longest serving monarch had previously been held by Queen Victoria, having reigned for 23,226 days, 16 hours and 23 minutes.

If I were an editor … well, actually, I’m not sure what I would do if I were an editor. So let me just speak as a teacher. If a student submitted this essay to me, in a freshman English composition class, say, I’d have a few concerns. My comments might go something like this:

First and foremost, I’m wondering who these people are you’re responding to — do you have any particular writers or speakers in mind? If so, it would be helpful if you quoted from them; it’s hard for the reader — especially the reader who doesn’t already agree with you — to know whether you’re representing people’s views fairly, because you don’t mention anyone in particular.

So, when you speak of people “distancing our educated selves from her simple faith,” I wonder if that’s accurate. Do people who disagree with Davis’s actions do so because they’re highly educated and she is less highly educated? It would be good to have some evidence about that, especially since you’re not contesting people’s arguments but assuming you know their motives. If they have said or written something that indicates that contempt for the less educated is among their motives, then you should probably cite that.

Similarly, when you assert that these unnamed people think that “Kim Davis is a simpleton of a Christian who should have resigned before embarrassing us Christians,” it would help if you could cite someone who has called her a simpleton (or something like that) and who have confessed embarrassment.

Moving along, and in in a similar vein, your suggestion that people who have criticized Kim Davis desire “to show the liberal gestapo that we really are for the ‘rule of law’” — do you have reason to suspect that these people want to please “the liberal gestapo”? If so, citing that evidence would be the right thing to do; otherwise people could say that you’re just making ad hominem assertions rather than substantive arguments. I also wonder whether the use of “gestapo” is your best option, given the problems that have long been associated with the reductio ad hitlerum.

You refer several times to Kim Davis’s sincerity, e.g.: “it doesn’t take much Christian thinking to see how Kim Davis can believe herself to be acting in accordance with God’s moral law which is now written on her heart as a convert.” But have Davis’s Christian critics — you seem to be addressing this only to your fellow Christians — impugned her sincerity? If so, you should cite them. After all, it’s possible to disagree with people while thinking them perfectly sincere. Also, perhaps you could explain why you have such confidence in the purity of Davis’s motives and such equally absolute confidence in the wrong motives of her critics.

Finally, near the end you accuse Davis’s critics of “wishing she would just offer a little incense to Caesar and go back to obscurity already.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but that certainly sounds like you’re accusing your fellow Christians of being idolaters — of worshipping at Caesar’s altar, or at the very least of wanting other Christians to do so; and if they’re not idolaters themselves, why would they ask other people to be? In short, this is an extremely serious, indeed quite damning, accusation, and not the sort of charge that should be made without strong evidence.

So, summing up, I think you need to go back and make clear who your targets are, provide more evidence for your claims about them, and try to stick to substantive arguments rather than ad hominem claims. As it stands, this is not passing work.

That’s what I would say as a teacher. Maybe I don’t understand the challenges of editing a magazine’s website.

You speak of ‘the curriculum [you] impose,’ but I deny that you have the right to impose anything. I am passing through this place, headed for the next stage of my life — possibly graduate education in some form or another, more probably a job — and I am paying you to prepare me for that next stage. In short, we have a business contract in which I am your client, and it is your job to serve what I perceive my needs to be, not what you may happen to think they are. It’s not as though we’re living in that long-ago age when universities were considered repositories of timeless wisdom and professors custodians of that wisdom. You faculty are employees of an ideological state apparatus in a neoliberal regime that constitutes itself by a series of implied or explicit contracts in which goods are exchanged for fees. Please stop acting like this is the University of Paris in the age of Aquinas and we’re all seeking transcendent wisdom. I control my own values and am not even interested in yours, much less willing to be subservient to them. So do the job I am paying you to do and shut up about all that other crap.

When we started, and were playing in pubs, I wasn’t the singer … I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs. We went through about five different singers – they were f***ing useless, basically. I always ended up thinking, ‘I could do better than this.’ … I mean, I hated my voice, but I didn’t hate it more than I hated everyone else’s voice … So I thought, 'If I can get away with that, I can be the singer.’ I’ve worked on that basis ever since.

[gallery] fromwithinabook:

Last week these two book sculptures joined Byard Art’s Mixed Summer Exhibition, which continues until 13 Sep

[gallery]

[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17869”]

thisisgrey:

now

1. At some point during the execution of a right turn, but always before your car is completely out of the road you have been driving on, be sure to come to a full stop.
2. Merge onto interstate highways at a speed no greater than 35 miles per hour.
3. Once on the interstate, if you are driving below the speed limit, make sure to stay in the far left lane and never leave it for any reason except to exit.

Al helped himself to my fries as I chatted him up over a dinner of ‘ugly burger’ (double-decker burger and fried egg on toasted wheat). He told me about his stint with the Marines during World War II, and how he had watched the Enola Gay take off on its fateful flight to Hiroshima. I asked him what his secret to long life was. He said it was the wrong question. ‘I would recommend that you don’t live past 80,’ he said. ‘This 100 business is the worst.’