Posts Tagged ‘Jay Leno’
Other Stuff
* Details on the U.S. operation of Port-Au-Prince’s last working airstrip from Crooks & Liars, a possible (or partial) answer to complaints about its allocation. A second airport is now working at Jacmel, administered by tiny American charity Joy in Hope. From Ryan, I see the Caribbean is still at risk for more earthquakes.
* Yahoo News is hiring bloggers.
* Gawker has your roundup of clips from the ongoing NBC late-night fiasco.
* Louis Menand and how to rescue the professoriate from professionalization.
The ultimate problem is this: How do you create a system for the production of knowledge that is, on the one hand, rigorous and peer-reviewed and, on the other, committed to aims and obligations beyond its own survival? The professoriate itself is well aware of the dilemma, Menand observes, and has enthusiastically promoted what sounds like a solution: “interdisciplinarity.” The hope is that if professors join in conversation with one another, they’ll remember to be interesting to people outside their building.
Theoretically, this solves everything. The disciplines are still accountable only to themselves, but they’re also engaged with something broader—i.e., other disciplines. They are still autonomous without being hermetic. Except that, Menand explains, interdisciplinarity finally does nothing to alter the ways in which the individual disciplines produce their professors. Rather than a therapy for academic neurosis, interdisciplinarity is in fact yet one more symptom of it. “Interdisciplinary anxiety,” he writes, “is a displaced anxiety about the position of privilege that academic professionalism confers on its initiates and about the peculiar position of social disempowerment created by the barrier between academic workers and the larger culture. It is anxiety about the formalism and methodological fetishism of the disciplines and about the danger of sliding into aimless subjectivism or eclecticism.”
Misc.
* A stage production of Two Gentlemen of Lebowski is already in the works.
* Asheville, NC, is one of the gayest cities in America.
* You said it: “The Senate is just a pain in the ass to everybody in the world as far as I can tell.”
* And if NBC screwed over Conan because they wanted me to watch his monologue on YouTube every day, mission accomplished.
Saturday 2
* A rather cromulently argued article at The Star says The Simpsons was the Beatles of the 1990s, which I think I actually buy.
* O’Brien added later that he wanted to address rumors swirling about his show and Leno’s, including one that “NBC is going to throw me and Jay in a pit with sharpened sticks. The one who crawls out gets to leave NBC.” UPDATE: Video here.
* Which films are most popular in your neighborhood? Netflix by Zip code. Via Kevin Drum.
* Somebody in my Facebook feed sent me looking for Wikipedia’s list of animal names.There’s some real poetry here: a congregation of alligators, a shrewdness of apes, a colony of badgers, a sleuth of bears…
Jay Leno Is Your President Now
Alas, poor Conan. More news and speculation at this MeFi thread.
Before My Time
Jay Leno’s evil twin goes on Late Night with David Letterman c. 1984 to rant about Star Trek and venereal disease. This is so far before my time I can’t even begin to make sense of this clip. More on YouTube.