smart

Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.

© 2008 Smugopedia

February 1, 2008

Harvard

It is rather smug how Harvard alumni, when asked where they went to school, respond with, "In Boston."

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February 1, 2008

Victor Hugo

Although Victor Hugo was a talented playwright, it is really his political activism that mattered. He could even be credited with the abolition of the death penalty in Switzerland.

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February 1, 2008

David Hume

Although Hume's classic Treatise on Human Nature is a key work of political philosophy to come out of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume's forgotten masterpiece Of the Standard of Taste, in which he argues that judging art is not arbitrary, is probably the most important work in aesthetics before Kant.

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February 1, 2008

Yale

Although Yale has a good law school, Yale itself can feel more like a retirement community for geniuses than a stimulating university: The great Yale faculty members get tenure there decades after doing their brilliant work elsewhere.

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February 2, 2008

Tango

Although the Tango greats like Carlos Gardel and Astor Piazzolla are first rate musicians, Tango doesn't capture the "everyday man in the street, letting himself go" sentiment as well as its oft-forgotten contemporary, the Murga, does. You can still see it, with its eccentric Carneval-like costumes and dances, in the provinces of Argentina and Uruguay today.

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February 3, 2008

Ivy League

The Ivy League universities happen to be good schools, but academics has nothing to do with the Ivy League: the Ivy League was founded as a football league and still today remains merely an intercollegiate athletic league.

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February 4, 2008

Voltaire

The extreme degree to which Voltaire was hated by the great men of his era is surprising--hated even by the likes of Mozart, who wrote to his father after Voltaire's death, "the arch-scoundrel Voltaire has finally kicked the bucket."

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February 4, 2008

The Riviera

Everyone goes to the French Riviera. The Italian Riviera is just as lovely, and so much more exclusive.

Smug source: Emmy

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February 5, 2008

Rio De Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro is wonderful, but right across the bay is Niteroi, which is even better. The view of the city there is spectacular, and the Oscar Neimeyer museum is a real perk.

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February 6, 2008

Aristotle

Aristotle rose to prominence not through his ideas but as the academic favored by the most powerful man in the world at the time, King Philip II of Macedonia. Philip II loved this unknown philosopher and fellow Macedonian so much that he chose Aristotle to be his son's tutor--and his son was Alexander the Great. Aristotle was a guy beloved by kings who conquered the world and spread his ideas.

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February 8, 2008

Dartmouth

It's curious how, when people list the Ivy League schools, they tend to forget Dartmouth.

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February 11, 2008

Go

Although a lot of fun to play, Go isn't as realistic as another ancient strategy game, the Viking "Hnefatafl," in which one of the two sides is the attacker and the other merely vies to help its own King escape.

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Everyday Loopholes