After shrinking the government “to the size of a chipmunk and garrotting it in a birdbath,” as an experimental reactionary economist once famously put it, the next challenge for my country’s wealthy was how to destroy money itself. They owned all of it; they’d worked hard to hoard it, like toy houses in a children’s [...]
Every time I read this (which is often—sometimes nightly; from Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat Comes Back; p. 59 in the Beginner Books Book Club Edition, copyright 1958—our copy still in great shape and going strong!): Then the Voom… It went voom! And, oh boy! What a voom! Now, don’t ask me what [...]
(Week-of-unrelated-quotes catch-up post, three of five.) From Eliot Weinberger’s critique of a show at the Met, “The World of Khubiliai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty,” which closed last month: Yuan meant “origin”—as in “back to the origins”—and Khubilai [Khan] revived ancient Confucian court rituals and had a dynastic history written in the traditional [...]
Ten years ago today, I registered the domain name tomhop.com for the first time. This Web site remains as infrequently visited now as it has been since before Al Gore was chosen as President by a majority of the American electorate. I’ve been renewing the domain once a year ever since; I’ve never renewed for [...]
August 2009, in an alternate universe: Ted Kennedy dies; Conan O’Brien has been hosting The Tonight Show for just shy of three months, but it is already clear to NBC executives that, to them, the new guy is just not working out; at the same time, Jay Leno has decided that he doesn’t really want [...]
I can remember driving with my late father through western Pennsylvania. He was struck by the amount of land without a human figure in it. So much space! After a long silence, in a traveler’s trance resembling the chessboard trance, he said, ‘Ah, how many Jews might have been settled here! Room enough for everybody.’ [...]
1) Isn’t the whole thing a bit like having sex for the first time? Certainly not everybody’s experience of sex for the first time. (And perhaps this analogy only applies to the experience of voting with these trusty-yet-antiquated AVM Lever Machines that we still have here in New York.) But there’s this enormous, years-long build [...]
I’ve been thinking recently about a short story I wrote while I was at NYU, in a workshop with Breyten Breytenbach in the fall of 2003. The story, like this post, is titled “Clintonian Rhapsody.” I’ve been thinking about this paragraph in particular: Bill Clinton lay his head on his desk. He was tired. He [...]
Because I just moved last week, when I went to the polling site for my new precinct yesterday, I had to fill out a paper ballot. The ballot itself was straightforward, although the note that said that my entire vote would be voided should I fill in one standardized test-like oval incorrectly was a little [...]
From The Book of Lists #2, in section 21, “Loose Ends,” item #6 (“The Wired Nation”) in the list “6 Outrageous Plans that Didn’t Happen” (on p. 483 of the Bantam Books paperback, which came out in 1980, and which I was completely obsessed with for years): In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael [...]
On a day trip to Buffalo, at one of the stores we visited—I can’t remember exactly which one, it might have been the glass shop—the proprietress asked us where we were from. Brooklyn, we said. She visibly shuddered, either an enormous unconscious tic of revulsion, or a conscious and theatrical desire to communicate her disgust. [...]
This past Saturday night, at about 6:55pm, I was walking home from a bike shop in my neighborhood. I cut down South 5th Place, a short connecting street by the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge, bordering tiny Continental Army Plaza. Parked at the corner with South 5th Street, right at the entrance to the pedestrian [...]
(Not that the three of you who check in here on a regular basis don’t already know this stuff, but here goes.) In addition the the Red Cross, NPR has a list of other places to make cash donations here. BoingBoing has a gazillion useful posts. Terry Teachout and Our Girl in Chicago have compiled [...]
I’ve been worried sick about you all day. I haven’t visited in two years now, and I miss you terribly. The last time was for the second NOLA Book Fair. That weekend R. and I went to Fiorella’s, like we had the year before, to hear Bingo! play. We’d gone originally with J. and H., [...]
Is it me, or does the preznit, when he talks about the environment, almost always refer to it as “our beautiful environment”? Doesn’t that make it sound not like life itself, but instead like landscaping? Doesn’t it subtly steer away from, or even do harm to, the whole point of environmentalism? Isn’t it like saying, [...]
To paraphrase a smart person I talked to recently about Not One Damn Dime: first, people will just buy the stuff they need the day before or the day after, and second, even if you got every pissed-off left-of-center American—or not even left, just pissed—to go along with it, wouldn’t the only real noticeable effects [...]
1) John Kerry wins both the popular vote and the electoral college vote by indisputably large numbers. Most people are confident that their vote actually was counted properly, and mattered. Few are disgruntled. No one is killed. There are no riots. The Republican Party smacks itself on the forehead with its palm and says “what [...]
I went to Andover. Or Phillips Academy, as you call it when you’re there. And the entire time I was there I never—not once—saw George W. Bush. “But Hop,” you say, “Bush was at Andover a good thirty years or so before you were.” To which I reply, “Where exactly are you getting these numbers?” [...]
I’m still working out the kinks, but here are some excerpts. Some of my opponents have gone on the record as being against babies and puppies. Time and time again, they have voted against babies, and have speechified and slandered against cute, little, defenseless puppies. Let me make my position clear: I love babies, and [...]
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