Gordon Haber

Writer, editor, mediocre guitarist

Category: Thinkiness

This Way to the Gas Chambers, Ladies and Gentlemen (Auschwitz 2003)

An excerpt from my unpublished travelogue about Poland, in honor of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. As the bus left the station, my breakfast was trembling in my belly. I hadn’t slept much, maybe four hours. It was going to be a bad day, clouded by fatigue and dyspeptic twinges. Then I […]

A Brief Guide to Appropriate vs. Inappropriate Reactions to the Massacres in Paris

Appropriate Shock Sadness Anger Confusion Inappropriate 1000-word article on how the massacre precisely confirms your already existing world-view

Top 5 Psychic Predictions for 2015

You will see a link to a list, and you will click on that link, and you will lose three minutes of your life reading that list, and you will hate yourself for your weakness. Someone will get mad about something that has to do with Israel. In a futile bid at non-conformity, 70,000 white […]

Generic Post-Soviet Jewish Novel

I was a child in Russia where everybody thought a Jew was a very bad thing, even other Jews. Actually it was Ukraine but Americans don’t know the difference so we just say “Russia” and leave it at that. Anyway during glasnost period — remember Gorbachev, the bald Russian politician with spot shaped like Japan […]

Blah Blah Blah Higher Ed Technology Blah Blah Blah

Wired Magazine—that is, the magazine that takes any idea seriously so long as technology is involved—has a piece up about how to fix higher ed: 4 Radical Ideas for Reinventing College Drawn from Stanford Research. Let’s parse that title. (Yes, I know journalists don’t write the titles, editors do. That changes none of my points.) […]

On the Breathtaking Hypocricy of Lobbyists and Politicians

This little gem was in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal: From a Dec. 6 speech by Ed Gillespie at the Republican Party of Virginia’s annual meeting in Chantilly, Va.; the former Republican National Committee chairman was the GOP’s 2014 U.S. Senate candidate from the state: We can see an influence economy starting to take shape. CEOs […]

Cormac McCarthy’s Dance Party

The young people dancing half-naked their sweat illuminated by glo-sticks like some preterite atavistic ancient ritual. The host moved between them, some years older, face stretched by chemical injections and grinning with a crazed rictus. The microphone in his hand like a club. Then putting the microphone into some dazed white rasta kid’s face, the […]

On the Proclivities of Shelley Winters

  From Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him by David Henry, Joe Henry: During that same engagement at the Village Gate, Richard [Pryor] caught the eye, and the fancy, of Shelley Winters who came backstage afterward and offered him a part in her upcoming movie Wild in the Streets. Richard was […]

Oh Lord Here We Go Again

One of the truly horrible things about the Internet is how it has professionalized trolling. A day does not go by without click-baiting nonsense appearing in the guise of informed opinion. Last week The Chronicle of Higher Education published Confessions of a Young Prolific Academic, one more example of the growing genre of “tenuresplaining,” that […]

The Wisdom of Ulysses S. Grant

On cruelty: Boys enjoy the misery of their companions, at least village boys in that day did, and in later life I have found that all adults are not free from the peculiarity. On a military career after West Point: A military life had no charms for me, and I had not the faintest idea […]

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