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What always stuck with me about Shylock’s soliloquy in Merchant of Venice is how he opens with some of the grandest language ever written on the commonality of all humankind, and then seamlessly descends into the basest hatreds (which are also, unfortunately, just as universal):

To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else,
it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and
hindered me half a million; laughed at my losses,
mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my
bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine
enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath
not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with
the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject
to the same diseases, healed by the same means,
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as
a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison
us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not
revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will
resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian,
what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian
wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by
Christian example? Why, revenge. The villany you
teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I
will better the instruction.

David Remnick writes a (predictably) brilliant piece titled “The Moralist” on the Lewis-Tyson fight in this week’s New Yorker. With a group of invited reporters, the boxer was conducting “a vintage Tyson performance, full of contempt at his visitors and fury at the world”:

I’m just a dark guy from the den of iniquity. You guys would rather be with someone else who’s equal to your status in life. Tiger Woods, or somebody. I come across as crass, a Neanderthal, a babbling idiot sometimes. I like to show you that person. He makes you want to come and listen to me.

You guys have written so much bad stuff about me I can’t remember the last time I fucked a decent woman. I have to go with strippers and ho’s and bitches because you put that image on me…. I wish that you guys had children, so I could kick them in the fucking head or stomp on their testicles so you could feel my pain.

If only loathing, self-loathing, and rage were not quite so intrinsic to the human experience, the world might be a much nicer place.

Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics

Hit reload on this page to see a random New Yorker cartoon.

The NYT has a good article about new television shows.

At each network, 100 scripts become 20 pilots become half a dozen new TV programs. The story of three first-time show creators, in a profligate system, up against impossible odds

It seems that Hunter S. Thompson’s words still hold true: “The TV business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs.”

Arnold Kling doesn’t think blogging is a fad.

Brad DeLong’s superb piece on why Noam Chomsky is the most pathetic intellectual ever: “Arguing with [Chomsky supporters] seems to be a lot like trying to teach Plato’s Republic to a pig: it wastes your time, and it annoys the pig.”

A lovely print by Tom Wood, an artist I once visited in Florence.

I am one of the multitudes who, having never met the man, feel like I know some part of Scott Shuger for having read his words almost every morning for the past 5 years. I mourn his passing.

Remember, we haven’t evolved from apes, we’re evolving *as* apes. My favorite two lines from a New Yorker piece on the virtual world Ultima Online:

Considered as an inadvertent and largely unsupervised experiment, U.O. raises questions about whether people can manage to coexist peacefully even when they don’t really exist….

Still, moving the game online has not been without its costs. In the original Ultima games, the player might have been all alone, but he did get to be the hero. In U.O., the player has to struggle for recognition. “Playing a virtual-world game takes some getting used to,” Garriott told me. “You have to realize that the world is what you make of it. Unfortunately, that means most likely you’re going to have a relatively mediocre life.”

As my friend Xander Blakely said (butchering Thoreau): “The mass of virtual men live virtual lives of quiet virtual desperation.”

The author, Elizabeth Kolbert, also has an online-only interview.

My friend Xander Blakely has a great interview on WNYC (24 mins, RealAudio) about his new book Siberia Bound.