Word: topicalism
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Whatever else you may think about testosterone, you can tell it's a hot topic. Every time you mention that you happen to be writing about it, the first thing people ask is "Can you get me some?" (Everybody, even the women.) Maybe that's not so surprising. If there is such a thing as a bodily substance more fabled than blood, it's testosterone, the hormone that we understand and misunderstand as the essence of manhood. Testosterone has been offered as the symbolic (and sometimes literal) explanation for all the glories and infamies of men, for why they start...
George W. Bush is flying at 30,000 ft. and talking a mile a minute. Fresh from delivering a speech about health care for the uninsured, the Republican presidential candidate is moving briskly from topic to topic, from the wretchedness of entrenched poverty to the nation's lost faith in the individual to the '60s paternalism that he thinks caused it all--the attitude, he says, that "we can't trust poor parents to make a decision for their children." His hands reach out as he speaks. His eyes are animated, especially when the subject is education or the need...
...snapped. Investigators from Columbine and Jonesboro have tutored administrators across the U.S. on the telltale signs that in their cases went tragically undetected or unheeded. The FBI, which last fall circulated a 20-point "offender profile" culled from common characteristics of school shooters, will release a report on the topic next month. And the Secret Service, at work on its own study, is interviewing school shooters to see what makes them tick--and then explode...
...that book, the brilliant but mentally deteriorating poet Von Humboldt Fleisher was widely regarded as a fictional copy of Delmore Schwartz, a friend and onetime mentor to the young Bellow. The author never denied an imaginative connection between Humboldt and Schwartz, but neither did he think it a topic much worth discussing. And he was right. For a quarter-century, untold thousands of people who never heard of Delmore Schwartz have read Humboldt's Gift and been beguiled by its stand-alone fictional power. That is what thousands more, knowing nothing of Allan Bloom, will eventually find in Ravelstein...
Enough has already been said on the topic of the now notorious Mister Chu. The comic strip's readership has spiked from five people (the artists, their mothers and the AAA censor) to approximately 12 people, according to a recent Crimson poll. And, apparently a compromise has been negotiated wherein Mister Chu will morph into a WASP. Thank God for WASPs. In this age of political correctness, where would the art of ethnic lampooning be without them...