PreTeena: May 6 – May 12, 2019
By Allison Barrows
You won’t want to miss these hilarious cartoons depicting the ups and downs of adolescence. Now each week’s strips will debut on Sundays as the lead strip of Liberty Island’s Sunday Comics feature. If you draw a comic and would like to have your work featured on Sundays, please contact us: [email protected]
Check out Allison Barrows’ new PreTeena blog here.
2 Photos: Sisterly Love In Nature
By David Churchill Barrow
Submit your photographs of nature and the outdoor life to [email protected] to participate in this weekly feature exploring the natural world.
‘Every Cop is a Criminal’
By Fred Tribuzzo
Mick Jagger liked to say that “Sympathy for the Devil” exposed the power of evil, not its support of the dark angel.
Books You Didn’t Realize Represented the Sapir-Whorf Theory
By Tamara Wilhite
The Sapir-Whorf theory says that language does not just influence how we think but has an incredible degree of influence. “Native Tongue” and “Babel-17” typically top this list. For example, in “Babel-17” learning a new language makes you smarter but makes you loyal to an enemy faction, as well. In the book “Native Tongue”, a new language is crafted to change minds about the current social system and, more pragmatically, communicate without others knowing what you’re saying. “The Languages of Pao” demonstrates how separate languages keep people apart, each in their linguistic ghetto until a small group crafts a common language. There are other works, though, that represent Sapir-Whorf theory that don’t make the list.
Which Way Do Australian Toilets Flush?
Part 3: Thank You Bart Simpson
By Tom Weiss
This, believe it or not, is the first thing my friend Kevin wants to know about Australia. He saw a Simpson’s episode once (Season 6, Episode 16. Kevin remembers next to nothing of his four years in college, but he does remember this.) where Bart calls Australia, collect, to find out which way the toilets flush.
John Wilkes & The Colorful, Criminal & Bawdy Origins of our 4th Amendment
Part 2 In an Ongoing Series on the Revolutionary War
By Scott
John Wilkes, the bad boy of 18th century British politics — hated by King George III and beloved by the American colonists — wasn’t the only inspiration for our Fourth Amendment prohibition against the government using general warrants to search for evidence and to arrest for a crime. But his story was by far the most colorful.
The Cult of Bonnie and Clyde: Lessons On How To Avoid the Worship of Today’s Killers
By David Churchill Barrow
In Robert Arrington’s review of The Highwaymen on this site, he laments the cult that idolized this murderous couple in their day, and wonders if much has changed. There is more to the fascination, then and now, with these two than just the “Robin Hood” and “stickin’ it to the man” memes (which was also falsely attributed to the James & Younger gang of the previous century) and, as Eastwood’s character in The Unforgiven observed; “Deservin’s got nothin’ to do with it.”
First, there is the “star-crossed lovers” angle (though Bonnie was married to someone else serving time, and wore his wedding ring up to the day of her famous death). This was amplified by Bonnie’s poetry, which was discovered in one of their hideouts, and made public. They make sport of it in this movie – and she was no Whitman or Longfellow – but it ain’t half bad if we’re honest, especially for common folk.
Exploring LeftTube, Part 1: PhilosophyTube
By Shant Eghian
I watch a lot of YouTube. Like… a lot of YouTube… So much YouTube in fact, that I get a good bulk of my political commentary from watching YouTubers. Since about 2015, YouTube’s political content has exploded, with political views from Left, Right, and Center putting in their two cents on the culture wars that are polarizing our nation. As a conservative myself, I’ve been fascinated by the rise of “LeftTube,” a loosely connected group of leftist YouTubers that have formed in response to the rise of right-wing political content on YouTube. These content creators provide good insight into how the Left is responding to the Trump era, and more importantly, where it is going. Over the course of a series of shorter posts, I will be picking a certain prominent Leftist YouTuber, and I will uncover a central point they make that I think is worth exploring.
Norm MacDonald: Controlled Chaos
Deconstructing Canadian Culture, Part 27: the Holy Fool Personified
By Josh Lieblein
So, now the truth has come out. Canadians are a people without “story”.
But then again: That’s what happens when, for so long, the thing that holds Canadians together was “not American.” And that’s why it’s so important that a “story” for Canadians is created out of the disparate building blocks that make up this series.
Now, the fact that Canadian have no “stories” could be tragic, or it could be magic, as the wonderful case of Norm MacDonald shows.
PreTeena: April 29 – May 5, 2019
By Allison Barrows
You won’t want to miss these hilarious cartoons depicting the ups and downs of adolescence. Now each week’s strips will debut on Sundays as the lead strip of Liberty Island’s Sunday Comics feature. If you draw a comic and would like to have your work featured on Sundays, please contact us: [email protected]
Check out Allison Barrows’ new PreTeena blog here.
