URLs du Jour (9/21/2005)

  • If kausfiles disappeared from Slate, it would be pretty much wall-to-wall Tedious Liberal Snarkiness over there. But Jack Shafer has a classic article counting up and contextualizing the appearances of weasel-word "many" (12 times) in a page-one NYT story about college women's attitude toward motherhood vs. careerhood. Shafer observes that the article "can't be false because it never says anything sturdy enough to be tested."
  • Totally coincidentally, Tim Blair sets upon this snippet from a different Times story:

    Many New Yorkers said yesterday that Ms. Sheehan gave them back hope that was lost when war was declared on Iraq.

    You'll never look at the word "many" appearing in a news story the same way again. ("Many" count in the short NYT article: six.)

  • Rebecca Pidgeon looks so smart in her movies, but, well, geez, here's some of her latest at HuffPo:

    Virginia Wolf [sic] says it's important never to write when one is angry. Maybe that's a good rule for speech too. While anger can be proper for large, life and death issues (combating evil for example), outrage and emotions perhaps cloud the issue most of the time, causing sane, thoughtful, compassionate people to revert to hurling abuse, instead of making a clear, reasoned argument, that may change an opinion.

    Well, duh. I think I heard this on Star Trek once. Note that Ms. Pidgeon apparently did not intend this as a rebuke to the other contributors at HuffPo, who seem to be angry all the time.

  • Apparently Rebecca will be one of the few bloggers not to be employing the latest catchphrase "Stuck On Stupid". I, for one, am thinking about renaming my blog to that.

Last Modified 2012-10-26 8:52 AM EDT