"Is patriotism a mistake? I think that it is a mistake twice over: it is typically a grave moral error and its source is typically a state of mental confusion.… A defense of patriotism is an attack on the Enlightenment … The highest moral principles teach restraint of self-preference, whether the self is oneself or a group-self; while, on the other hand, a person's basic rights and tangible self-interest, in a tolerable society, are supposed to be practiced or achieved without morally cognizable harm to the same rights and interests of others. In contrast, patriotism is self-idealization; it is group narcissism without any self-restraint except for a frequently unreliable prudence, and carried to death-dealing lengths."

--George Kateb, professor of politics emeritus, Princeton (formerly of Amherst College), in "Patriotism and Other Mistakes," an essay collection published in 2006. His argument faulted both postmodernists and conservative political theorists for their defenses of various forms of "group thinking," from ethnic and racial pride to religious sectarianism and nationalism.

PS Happy Fourth!

T.S. Eliot's clipped, Anglicized cadences, as heard on recordings of the modernist poet reading his own work, echoed off countless dormitory walls in the 1940s and '50s--the soundtrack for young minds engaging with the best of the Western tradition. So Cynthia Ozick wrote in the New Yorker nearly 20 years ago, in a piece lamenting the decline in Eliot's stature over the previous few decades as well as the declining respect, as she saw it, for literary greatness generally.

Here's a new soundtrack for a modern dorm room, complete with that same high-church voice, but this time with backup:

Would Ozick approve? Doubtful, as her scorn for all things "pop" is well documented. So does this recording--the video component here is superfluous--represent debasement or genius squared? You decide.

Via The Elegant Variation.

Melissa McEwan of Shakespeare's Sister has a series of posts called "Impossibly Beautiful," tracking dubious fashion-industry standards. One theme has been the use of photo-editing software to make models look thinner (or in the case of some size-zero models, slightly less skeletal). Here's her latest example, of which she writes: "Quite honestly, this is less about being Photoshopped into impossible beauty than it is about being Photoshopped into looking impossibly like a plucked emu posing with a purse."

Go here for the full item and for links to the other installments in the series. (And it's not purely a feminist project: Look what they did to poor Clive Owen.)

McEwen credits Photoshop Disasters with noticing the Chanel image.

It's the high-toned rhetoric of the founders that gets the attention on holidays like July 4, but take a minute to remember the money-hungry American pirates who made their mark in the Revolutionary War.

They wreaked havoc on British shipping--splitting the goods they seized among themselves--and lifted the spirits of Americans who followed their adventures in the newspapers, writes Robert H. Patton, grandson of the famous general, in his new book "Patriot Pirates" (Pantheon). Yet even in their day many American worthies viewed them with deep suspicion. George Washington, for example, worried about men "so basely sordid" as to need the lure of lucre to fight for their country.

John Paul Jones, hero of the minuscule American navy, also inveighed against men who fought the enemy out of pecuniary motives (it was a matter of degree: Jones's sailors got to keep one-third to one-half of the goods they seized). And he urged that sailors who deserted the navy for privateers, where they faced no limit on their take, be executed. Yet, in an example of one of the many ironies that litter Patton's tale, by 1777 Jones was quietly inquiring among his business associates as to how he might invest in privateers himself.

Greg Mankiw, former chief economic adviser to George W. Bush, author of one of the world's best-selling economics textbooks, and noted econoblogger, may not be quite as unrelentingly wonky as his website can make him appear. The author of the recent stirring posts "Cross-Price Elasticity of Demand VI," "Shiller on Fiscal Stimulus," and "Heckman on Ability Gaps" recently branched out a bit into cultural commentary.

On his blog, under the title "What I've Been Listening To," he wrote, simply: "Vampire Weekend. The best new rock band I've heard in a long time."

This puts him on the same page as the arbiters of hip at pitchforkmedia.com, who concluded their review of the group's eponymous debut album with these words: "Bring any baggage you want to this record, and it still returns nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and yes, unpretentious--four guys who listened to some Afro-pop records, picked up a few nice ideas, and then set about making one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years."

The father of the science writer Leonard Mlodinow could easily have died at Buchenwald, but a capricious decision by a murderous Nazi spared him. This is one reason Mlodinow, a physics Ph.D., finds the topic of randomness so compelling …

Hello again, Brainiac readers, and thanks for the kind introduction, Josh!

I'll be trying to fill Josh Glenn's ample shoes on this blog, starting today. I thought I'd plunge in by writing a substantive item, but did want to say how pleased I am to be back here. I'm not a stranger to the Ideas section, having written its Critical Faculties column for several years, ending last December. And before Josh took over Brainiac and made it his own, I was part of the group blog that was its first iteration.

I can't hope to match Josh's eye for trends in graphic novels, design, hermeneutics, and LED-armed faux-terrorists, but I'll do my best to dig up good items on those and other cerebral (and semi-cerebral) subjects. As before, Brainiac will be a Web-print hybrid, with versions of some items appearing in the Sunday Ideas section.

And I'll continue the tradition, or try to, of hearing irony and fun in the term "Brainiac." The last thing this blog is supposed to be is heavy-going, and that's the last thing it was under Josh.

(Thanks to Scott McLemee, of the blog Quick Study and the "Inside Higher Education" column Intellectual Affairs, for noting the changing of the guard here.)

At Harvard last year and again at Davos, Switzerland, in January, Bill Gates drew applause when he called for a new "creative capitalism" that would help the world's poor more than the current version does. But beyond sounding nice, what is there to the concept? After all, Gates himself notably (and admittedly) followed the "uncreative" route: In phase one of your life, spend all your time and energy on business; in phase two, switch to philanthropy.

The star editor Michael Kinsley, founder of Slate, is tackling that question in his next Web-publishing experiment, soliciting and editing responses to the Davos speech from noted economists and policy experts and publishing them at the website creativecapitalismblog.com. The best of the exchanges will appear in a book to be published by Simon & Schuster this fall.

At least so far, what's striking is how negative some of the responses to Gates's proposal are. "Mr. Gates's speech attacks the system that has historically done the most to alleviate poverty--traditional capitalism--in favor of an untried and implausible alternative," writes NYU's William Easterly. Gregory Clark, of UC-Davis, chimes in that for almost every product, the world's poor "are indeed well served by selfish capitalism." He cites the fact that companies already make a profit selling cellphone service for pennies a day in Africa. (The development costs of most goods are paid by consumers in the wealthy countries.) The system only breaks down, Clark adds, when the developing world needs products that aren't demanded by wealthy consumers, like malaria vaccines. In such cases, he says, private charity is still the best response.

Goodbye, readers! As previously announced, I'm leaving Brainiac for new projects. It's been fun.

Hello, Chris Shea! I look forward to reading you every week.

Final entry in the Brainiac Summer Reading series: books about pop culture.

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION
Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS
Click here for Part 4 of this series: INTELLECTUAL, PHILOSOPHICAL, CRITICISM

"The Hamburger: A History" (Yale), by Josh Ozersky. Forget Michael Pollan's corn. Josh Ozersky, food editor for New York Magazine's website and a top-notch cultural historian, serves up a fast-paced and amusing account of how German "hamburg steak" evolved into hamburgers for urban factory workers, became an irrepressible economic and cultural force, and played a role in the suburbanization of America.

My friends Alex Beam, Dan Zedek, and three other Globe staffers recently raced from a Whole Foods in Cambridge to the Hummer dealership in Norwood. It didn't matter who crossed the finish line first; it was all about getting the highest MPG. Check out the video by Ann Silvio.

4th installment of Brainiac Summer Reading series: books of intellectual, philosophical, critical interest.

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION
Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS

"Chic Ironic Bitterness" (Michigan), by R. Jay Magill Jr. Magill is a multitalented guy on whom I've had my eye for quite some time. Formerly the executive editor of the excellent magazine DoubleTake, he's also a talented illustrator, and a scholar of American culture. His new book, which was awarded the 2008 Eric Hoffer Notable Book in Culture prize, got its start in 1999, when Magill wrote a small review of Jedediah Purdy's supposedly anti-irony book "For Common Things"; since then, it's blossomed into a close study of irony as an American social attitude and critique. Magill carefully draws distinctions, which I appreciate: Dave Eggers's "A.H.W.O.S.G." isn't ironic, Magill notes correctly, even though most journalists and reviewers assumed that it was. I also appreciate the fact that, like Purdy, Magill wants to resurrect irony's moral dimension, its liberating powers. To this end, he approvingly quotes Samuel Hynes's 1961 comment that contemporary irony is "a view of life which recognize[s] that experience is open to multiple interpretations, of which no one is simply right, and that the coexistence of incongruities is part of the structure of existence." Amen.

It's very difficult to put off reading a new comic book. My impulse today is the same as it was in 1977, riding home from the Norton Flea Market in my mother's VW Rabbit with a pile of Silver Age DC titles. I wanted to read 'em right away! However, over the course of the past few months, I've managed not to read a few excellent-looking graphic novels and comics collections. I'll get started next week...

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION.

Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS

"Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956-1966)" (Fantagraphics), by Jules Feiffer. Like Jerry Lewis, Mel Brooks, Bob Newhart, Robert Altman, Philip K. Dick, John Barth, John Updike, and Philip Roth, Jules Feiffer is a quintessential example of the Postmodernist Generation. I don't mean that Feiffer is a postmodernist theorist; I mean he's plagued with the conviction (as I've said of some of his contemporaries) that something's gone awry with the technologically advanced, prosperous, contented, triumphalist liberal democracy that is postwar America; he lacks -- and therefore both mocks and mourns -- the virile can-do spirit of some of his generation's immediate predecessors; and his characters are beset with anxiety-provoking tensions, uncertainties, paradoxes that can never be resolved. (Think of the supine fellow who says to himself, in a strip dated 5/14/58: "It's not healthy to lie here! Got to arouse myself! Got get involved! Now! Right now!" Then: "Or am I rationalizing? Perhaps I don't really want to get up. Perhaps I feel that I have at last found my role." Then: "Or perhaps though lying here attracts me, getting up also attracts me -- hence my indecision." And so forth.) Still don't believe in my American Generational Periodization Scheme? In Gary Groth's fine introduction, we learn that Feiffer says of himself: "I was part of a generation. I identified with that generation and I was curious about what made us all tick." Groth rightly notes that the 10 years of Feiffer's strips in "Explainers" are "practically an encyclopedia of issues preoccupying the public intellectual from 1956 to 1966." Plus, they're funny! Can't wait to crack this one.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr, writing in the July/August issue of The Atlantic, thinks so. Or, to be precise, he thinks that spending too much time on the Internet is making him less able to focus on long texts.

"Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory," Carr reports.

"What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation," he goes on to say. "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."

How do we read online? According to a British study that Carr quotes,

Imagine yourself on vacation in Berlin. You stop by the reconstruction of Checkpoint Charlie (the name given by the Western Allies to an infamous crossing point between East Berlin and West Berlin during the Cold War), and decide to take a snapshot of the sign. Unbeknownst to you, a shady-looking young man has crept up, assembled a sinister-looking device that includes a flash gun and an old SLR (a single-lens reflex camera, which permits the photographer to see exactly what will be captured by the film or digital imaging system), and aimed it at the same sign.

The device -- which its inventor, Berlin-based artist Julius von Bismarck, calls an Image Fulgurator -- senses the flash of a camera, and then quickly illuminates itself, projecting images or text onto the object that was being photographed. The result?

Your photo has been hacked! Take a look: There's new text on the Checkpoint Charlie sign, text that wasn't there before. Or, to be precise, that wasn't there a split-second before or after you pressed your camera's shutter button.

Fulguration, by the way, means "the act or process of flashing like lightning"."

Here's a video of the Image Fulgurator in action:

And here's a promotional photo of the Image Fulgurator:

Included among the large pile of books I've put aside to read over the summer are five reissued fiction and nonfiction classics and/or new anthologies of classic texts.

Check 'em out.

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION.

Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS

"Uncle Cleans Up" (New York Review Books), by J.P. Martin. When NYRB reissued the first "Uncle" book last year, I described the series like so:

Written by J.P. Martin, an elderly English clergyman, and not published until shortly before and immediately after his death in 1966, these fun stories concern the adventures of Uncle, a distracted millionaire elephant who puts up eccentric friends in his enormous skyscraper-castle (I've seen it described as "half Gormenghast and half Disneyland"), and who must ceaselessly defend against Flabskin, Oily Joe, Isidore Hitmouse, Hootman, Jellytussle, and other lowbrow, Blue Meanie-like enemies.

In this second installment, Uncle faces not an external enemy, but infiltration. Homeward, his labyrinthine castle, which houses a multitude, is being sabotaged. The waterworks are tainted with vinegar, the Dwarftown Railway is overcrowded, and The Badfort News is full of lies about Uncle. He must take decisive action!

OK, let's start with Fiction.

Here are a few new, recent, and forthcoming novels that I've put aside, over the past few months, in order to read while on vacation -- in the wilds of northern Minnesota, the woods of central New Hampshire, and of course the beaches of South Boston and Hull.

Click here for Part 1 of this series: NEW FICTION.

Click here for Part 2 of this series: REISSUED CLASSICS
Click here for Part 3 of this series: COMICS

"Slumberland" (Bloomsbury), by Paul Beatty. Beatty, whose first novel, "The White Boy Shuffle," was an intellectual-absurdist tour de force set in early-'80s gang-banging LA, is one of the very few contemporary writers (he's also a poet) for whose latest work I'm always on the lookout. (I interviewed Beatty for Ideas about "Hokum," a 2005 anthology of African-American humor that he edited.) "Slumberland" is a picaresque starring DJ Darky, a brilliant and obsessive turntablist who goes in search of the Schwa, a jazz musician who apparently disappeared into East Germany in the '60s. DJ Darky's quest for the Schwa, whose music he decides is the one missing ingredient from his own otherwise perfectly cobbled-together sound, takes a political turn when the Berlin Wall comes down.

If you've left a comment at any point in the past 7 days, you've no doubt wondered why it hasn't been published. Alas, Brainiac has been attacked by an Italglish-language spammer. We've received several hundred comments every day that consist of fascinating, hyperlink-larded insights like this one (links removed):

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It's become impossible to find the genuine comments, so I've given up trying. I've asked Boston.com to figure out a way to block these comments, though. I'd hate for Chris Shea to inherit this problem along with the blog! Fingers crossed.

Cool tutorial at Make Magazine's blog about making a bicycle jacket with built-in turn signals on the back, which you control by pressing buttons on the sleeves.

As always, do not wear this to Logan Airport!

Thirty years ago tomorrow, the rainbow flag -- the international symbol, whether you love it or think it's tacky, of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) movement -- was first flown, at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Parade. On June 25, 1978, that is to say.

"Garish it may be," notes artist and designer John Coulthart at his blog, {feuilleton}, "but it has the advantage of being highly visible, which is partly the point, of course. Flickr photos show how effective it is at standing out in a variety of surroundings."

I've always thought the flag was goofy-looking, but I find the Flickr photos quite moving.