Author Archive | David Post

Sorry for the lousy pun. Yehuda Berlinger has produced a verse translation of the entire US Patent Act. It’s quite a feat — as Dr. Johnson said of the dog playing the violin, the amazing thing is not how well it was done, but that it was done at all. Not the world’s greatest poem […]

It was hard — for me, at least — to be unmoved by the whole Agassi story. It was hype, of course — but it was far from being just hype. A standing ovation from the press corps, and then, remarkably, a two-minute standing ovation in the players’ lounge. A great sports moment — not […]

Holland Carter’s review in the NY Times recently of the new show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington really made my blood boil. The show is “Bellini, Giorgione, Titian and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting,” and Carter writes that the show is “very beautiful,” a “feast” — “Renowned paintings from across Europe fill […]

One of the prerogatives of being on the VC blog is that one can take prior discussions and reframe them more to one’s liking. The comments on my previous post (“Hilarity (Presumably Unintentional) at the New York Times“) were quite interesting, and I want to respond. Some commenters took me to task for my “childish” […]

Here, in its entirety, is an editorial that appeared in Sunday’s NY Times [unavailable online except to NY Times Select members, otherwise I’d just give you the link): “A Dorm Grows in Harlem Graduating from college used to mean leaving your campus dorm and moving into your first grown-up apartment. Unfortunately, overpriced real estate in […]

Which American President is listed in the OED as the first cited author for over 100 words, including such beauties as “doll-baby”(!), “sanction,” “electioneer,” “vomit-grass,” “public relations,” “Mason-Dixon,” “obiter dictum,” “post-note,” and, best of all, the self-referential “neologize”? Answer is below. (show) Jefferson — what, you thought it was James Garfield? (hide)

It’s old news, I guess, and many of you may have seen this already — but I hadn’t (thanks to my student, Angela Giampolo, for passing on the citation to me), and it’s more than worth another look in any event. The case is Bradshaw v Unity Marine (147 F.Supp.2d, S.D. Texas 2001) — available […]

There a nice profile of Milton Friedman in last week’s LA Times. There are many things to admire about Dr. Friedman — high on the list for me, though, is the energy and passion he has brought to the campaign for school choice at a time when he could be sitting around enjoying his retirement; […]

Yesterday’s World Cup final saw the strangest thing I’ve ever seen in a sporting event (and I go back a ways — ’55 Dodgers winning the World Series is my first sports memory). I’ve been trying to think of a U.S. equivalent, for those many readers who don’t follow “the beautiful game” regularly, and here’s […]

Pretty much every day, in pretty much every newspaper in the country, there is a story that goes something like this [taken from todays WSJ]: “Yesterday, the Dow Jones industrials fell xxx points to yyyy on new concerns about interest rates and anxiety over North Korea’s missile tests.” Or the Dow rose, due to “increasing […]

With all the lip-flapping about nation-building going on, here’s a thought that is, alas, way too simple (and way too obvious) to ever be taken seriously. Aprroximately two billion people out there care more about the outcome of the World Cup than about pretty much anything else. Or, more precisely: people care more deeply about […]

Soccer is an almost-entirely improvised affair — another one of the things that makes it the greatest of sports. Anyone who thinks that basketball is the great improvised sport — “like jazz,” as the cliche has it — has never watched a soccer game. [And I mean that not as some kind of moral judgment, […]

As lots of people have noted in the past decade or so, the increasing globalization of communcation and commerce has at times generated not only strong anti-globalization reactions in some quarters, but has actually stimulated nationalist feelings in many places. World Cup (my favorite subject these days) is an example — seems to me that […]

Two brief responses to Todd’s responses to my comments on Americans and soccer. He writes: “Americans don’t like soccer because Americans don’t like soccer. The sports embraced by a given society/country/culture are largely conventional and traditional.” That’s what someone once called “a nice theory, slain by an ugly fact.” Within the last 30 years, Asians […]

Bobo makes some very interesting points in a comment on my earlier posting about soccer referees. He/she writes: Problems I, as an American, have with soccer: [SNIP] 3) Too much randomness. Scoring just seems too “lucky.” . . . So much has to go right just to make a shot go in. . . . […]