Word: jedediah
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...Jedediah Purdy '97 was a social studies concentrator. He just published a book about the pervasive presence of irony in modern culture. Recently, quite a few intellectuals have been expressing concern for the state of the zeitgeist. Many have observed that technological innovations have led to an excess of information. People are exposed to too much data, leaving them jaded. Perhaps irony is a means of escaping the weight of over-saturation. I really don't know. In order to participate in such modern debates, I am told that one must understand Habermas...
Mostly I want to say that Jedediah Purdy is a funny name. And also that his argument that irony is poisoning our culture is really stupid. That's the kind of argument we ironists use. We also use idiot and scalawag. But ironically...
...apparent reason, the media have become very excited about For Common Things, a book by a Yale law student named Jedediah Purdy. No one else is reading it, but in my earnest effort to join the media elite and thus get a promotion, I too want to write about this book...
...like that Purdy wants us to consider the consequences of our attitudes. But I think the anti-irony movement is a longing for an innocence that existed only for one moment in Timothy Leary's lab. And if my name were Jedediah, I'd be so ironic, David Letterman would seem caring. Or I'd call myself...
Purdy's book is in its way strikingly mature and knowledgeable, extraordinarily well crafted, and in the end profoundly meaningful. This does not mean the book is flawless. It simply means that in the sum of things Jedediah Purdy has written a book that, in its example of a person who is unafraid to express out loud his delicate loves, richly deserves fulfillment of its modest request: "I cannot help believing that we need a way of thinking, and doing, that has in it more promise of goodness than the one we are now following. I want to speak...