2 Sound 2 Fury

I’ve got a satire in the Boston Globe’s great Ideas section tomorrow, in response to the news that publishers are looking at equipping ebooks with sounds for a more immersive experience (ahem). I imagine what sort of treatment our boy Biff Faulkner would come in for, in such a project, which would, inevitably, include Sean Penn…

New column…

… in New York magazine this week, here, on last week’s budget battle, on the alarming tendency to break down something as basic into a budget into moral terms, resulting, as you’d expect from a debate in which both parties believe their opponents are not just of a different mind, but are actually immoral, in an irritating, intellectually stunted Manichean gridlock. Whether partisans are maintaining this line because they believe it, or because it just makes for an easier argument, remains unseen. What is certain is that their cant is about as useless as it is boring. As Tom Waits sagely put it, come on down from the cross, folks, we could use the wood.