amy g. dala

In most other parts of the world, it would be no extraordinary mental leap to correlate such killings with America’s relaxed approach to gun control. After all, many eight-year-old boys get cross with their fathers, but they can’t turn that anger into a bloodbath unless they have access to a gun. Thanks to the exalted position that the gun inhabits in the American psyche, however, that sort of logic has little purchase in the US, certainly in those parts of the country – the south and the west in particular – where gun ownership is high and shooting popular. Yet if you look at a map that plots where children have died by the gun in any one year, they are concentrated in precisely those same regions.

By all accounts, watching Twilight is the cinematic equivalent of seeing a turnip shaped like the Virgin Mary: a miracle for the devoted, a punchline for everyone else.

I did have another job at one point, as a computer programmer, but I kept up with my other work because it was so much more enjoyable.

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

My tools appear deceptively simple. TextMate. Terminal. Transmit, LaunchBar, DropBox.

No one is pushing for “political correctness” as a decontextualized blindly dogmatic philosophy. What people are pushing for is not pretending that racism and homophobia and misogyny and anti-semitism don’t exist, or trying to camouflage these things as “jokes.