Archive for July, 2009

I Hate to Say I Told You So…..

Actually, I don’t hate it at all. In fact, it makes me feel vindicated and smugly satisfied: I told you so.

Continue reading »

Stewart! Kristol! It’s Health Care Debate 2009 on Comedy Central!

This video has been makings its way around the old internets recently, like so many of Jon Stewart’s interviews do these days. It features William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, discussing his issues with Obama’s health care plan in a responsible, reasoned manner…and I mean that in most sarcastic way possible.
Kristol is, of course, spewing conservative [...]

Continue reading »

Is Billy Beane a Good GM?

Up until recently, the answer to this question would be quick: “Well, obviously.” The more relevant question had always been, “Is Billy Beane baseball’s best GM?”
Billy Beane runs the Oakland Athletics, a team in a small market with a low payroll (26th out of 30 in 2009), yet he managed to assemble a consistent contender, as [...]

Continue reading »

Ranking The Bill of Rights, Number 8: The Eighth Amendment

I am not a supporter of cruel and unusual punishment. In fact, I prefer my punishments humane and usual. While I had negative views on the Second Amendment and neutral views (well, assuming you interpret pointlessness as a neutral description) on the Tenth, at this point, my views on the 8th amendment are generally positive. [...]

Continue reading »

Give the Tutorial System a Chance

The Lecture and Its Drawbacks:
The lecture is a systemic feature of the American university system. Let me be clear: I have a fairly broad definition of the lecture. It could consist of anywhere from 15 to over 1,000 students. The primary feature of the lecture is that the professor controls all of the talking, [...]

Continue reading »

Meet (and Rank) the Beatles’ Albums, Part 2: The Top Five

5) Rubber Soul, 1965

John S (3): Rubber Soul is the band’s first truly great album; it features the beginning of the band’s more sophisticated songwriting (“You Won’t See Me,” for example, was the longest song the band had recorded to that point, coming it at a whopping 3:22), both in terms of lyrical depth and musical [...]

Continue reading »

Meet (and Rank) the Beatles’ Albums, Part 1

We here at NPI aren’t exactly breaking new ground or going out on a limb when we say that The Beatles are the greatest band of all-time, but we’re saying it anyway. Not only is each one of their twelve studio albums (we don’t really count Yellow Submarine) excellent, but they more or less invented [...]

Continue reading »

Monday Medley

What we read while Rickey disappointed everyone by saying “I” all the time:

(Can you believe it’s already been 10 years since that song came out? Always puts us in a summer mood. We also like to think 24 is stylistically indebted to the video.)

Finally, someone has figured out how to optimize [...]

Continue reading »

Stylish

Who died and put Strunk and White in charge of the English language?
If you talk to anyone who takes the rules of grammar and usage seriously, the names Strunk and White are bound to come up. The Elements of Style, the “little book” that was originally self-published by Professor William Strunk, Jr. at Cornell University [...]

Continue reading »

Ranking The Bill of Rights, Number 9: The Tenth Amendment

I like the Bill of Rights. So, while the Second Amendment is pretty terrible, I don’t have a particularly strong distaste for any other of the first ten amendments.
With that said, the Tenth Amendment has no point. It reads: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to [...]

Continue reading »