Vitty Cent cut in line at a D.C. coffeeshop and a witness said, I was like, ‘What?’ But you couldn’t say anything. I mean, he’s a Senator. Yes you can.
Derek Bridges
115 Articles
Derek Bridges lives in New Orleans, trading in words and pictures. A carpetbagger of long standing, he grew up in the top right corner of IL and later went to college in the middle cornfield part. He has also lived in MS and FL, for educational purposes only, and was diasporized for a time in TX.
Derek Bridges
2 Min Read
The novelist Ru Freeman’s mother recently passed away and Ru has written a moving remembrance. This paragraph really hit me: In more ways than one, I was trying to define for my mother a life that I wanted her to live. I wanted her to…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
One thing I’ve always liked about hockey players is they’re great at the “aw, shucks” routine. They talk some trash during games, they’re excitable after scores, pretty much like all athletes, check, but when they’re off the ice, they talk shyly about how they don’t…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
Imagination stuck? Imagine you’re in California. (If you’re in California, imagine you’re in New Orleans). From Scientific American: For the insight problems, participants were told that the questions were developed either by a research institute located in California, “around 2,000 miles away” (distant condition), or…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
I was talking to one of our trainers, just chatting. It hit me like a baseball bat. It hurt quite a bit and then I was kind of dazed for a while. That’s Ottawa Senator goalie Pascal Leclaire describing what it feels like to get…
Derek Bridges
2 Min Read
David Shields has a new book coming out called Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. I saw Shields read from his manifesto a couple years ago and he sure had the fiction writers in the room riled up. I found myself both nodding along with Shields and…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
Kurt Vonnegut’s letter home May 1945 to let family know he was still alive (h/t 3quarksdaily): Under the Geneva Convention, Officers and Non-commissioned Officers are not obliged to work when taken prisoner. I am, as you know, a Private. One-hundred-and-fifty such minor beings were shipped…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
A couple years ago when the Saints played the Bears in the NFC championship game there was a lot of shock locally at how abusive the Bears fans were of Saints fans. I certainly wasn’t surprised. The Bears bring the worst out of the Chicago…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
In honor of our expiring New Yorker subscription, this nugget from a profile of director James “Mij” Cameron: Making “The Abyss” was brutal … Cameron built the set in Gaffney, South Carolina, in the containment vessel of an abandoned (and never activated) nuclear-power facility, which…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
I’m starting to get the feeling that at least part of Senator David Vitter’s motivation for frequenting prostitutes is he identifies with them. From Mother Jones: So why is Vitter so sympathetic to the formaldehyde industry? Campaign finance records show that many of Louisiana’s big…
Derek Bridges
1 Min Read
I can be a little paranoid about groups and the things groups do, but I’ve (almost) always been warmed by instances when people combine in mundane, anonymous ways to express a collective will. My favorite example of this is “desire paths” (also called “aspirational paths”). …
Derek Bridges
6 Min Read
Source: THE JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY Volume LXXII, No. 4, November 2006 Author: TED TUNNELL, Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University Whatever the terminology, carpetbagger and scalawag were crucial to the political language of Reconstruction. They expressed white southerners’ ideas and emotions about their…