A strain of righteousness -- or is it self-righteousness? -- permeates the writings of David Rieff on foreign policy. But it is sometimes hard to tell precisely what principles he is writing in behalf of: he scorns neocons, isolationists, humanitarian interventionists, and the U.N. alike. (A.O. Scott, back before he became a noted film critic, expressed puzzlement about Rieff's ultimate stance, too: "Which side are you on?" he memorably asked in Slate.)

Still, it is bracing to read a passage like the following, in the latest issue of World Affairs, in which Rieff agrees with the neoconservative Robert Kagan that liberals have wildly exaggerated the differences between their own worldview and that of the likes of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Writes Rieff:

If you're lucky enough to be traveling to the Olympics, don't be surprised if you have a difficult time connecting with native Chinese, even if they speak fluent English.

A government campaign is afoot to teach Chinese citizens how to conduct themselves in a way that will be perceived as polite by foreigners. Trouble is, according to Foreign Policy magazine's blog, Passport, some of the "do" and "don'ts" on the posters and flyers lean awfully heavily on the don'ts, which may lead to some awkward silences:

1. Don't ask about income or expenses.
2. Don't ask about age.
3. Don't ask about love life or marriage.
4. Don't ask about health.
5. Don't ask about someone's home or address.
6. Don't ask about personal experience.
7. Don't ask about religious beliefs or political views.
8. Don't ask what someone does.

Chivalry is to be commended, another set of guidelines suggests, but know the limits:

Men should help women carry things, but must not help women carry their handbags.

Not my cup of tea, let's be clear, but the science-blogger P.Z. Myers claims to have made good on his threats of last week to desecrate a communion wafer, as a blow against what he views as superstition. His post today begins with almost King Jamesian simplicity:

It is finished.

His methods contained a dash of bitter historical irony -- and coffee grounds. To show his ecumenical spirit, he also "desecrated" a few pages of the Koran. (His Catholic critics kept egging him on to do this, he writes, charging that he possessed double standards.) To show he considers no belief system beyond challenge, he also "desecrated" pages from a Richard Dawkins book, one of his favorites, an atheist tract.

God willing, the response will peak at the level of angry emails, blog posts, and letters to Myers's bosses at the University of Minnesota.

For seven years, John H. Summers taught students in Harvard's Social Studies program -- simultaneously getting a crash course in elite students' sense of entitlement, he says.

Now ensconced at Boston College as a visiting scholar, he's given vent to his ire in the (English) Times Higher Education Supplement, in a piece titled "All the privileged must have prizes." He would routinely ask his students what they valued in their teachers. "Invariably," he wrote, "they said good teachers made them 'feel comfortable.'"

Nothing was permitted to disturb the cocoon-view that the students would move frictionlessly into the ruling class, unless stroking counts as friction. The "corruption" of grade inflation was part of this cosseting environment; no teacher dare give less than a B without risking "petty harassment." "I do not mean merely that the students are never so aggressive and articulate as when they hunt for grades," Summers, who had a series of one-year appointments, wrote. "I mean that they wage political reprisals against the B-minus grader and send gifts to high-placed academic directors." (Stephen Bradt, a Harvard spokesman, said he could not respond to the allegation about gifts unless Summers provided more specifics. In an email exchange, Summers said he wanted to stress that his charge was aimed at students, not administrators. If any gifts were received, as he says he had heard, he believes they were returned -- and that the staff of the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies were not swayed by them: "I have every reason to believe in the perfect integrity of the director of studies and of my colleagues." Anya Bernstein, the director of studies in the social-studies program, was on vacation and couldn't be immediately reached.)

Steampunk, a do-it-yourself design aesthetic whose touchstones include Victorian-era machinery and doodads, the novels of Jules Verne, and Terry Gilliam's film "Brazil," has proven irresistible to intellectual trend-spotters -- including writers and editors of the Ideas section.

Yesterday, however, on the influential website Design Observer, an L.A.-based designer and writer fired an impassioned broadside against steampunk and its chroniclers. First, argued Randy Nakamura, the author, steampunkers were guilty of bad history: They called for a return to an era of personal handicraft, yet the Victorian period, which they fetishize, represents "the ground zero of mass production, the cultural inflection point from the artisan to the manufactured" -- making it "a strange choice to say the least."

Moreover, steampunk assertions about modern technology are simply false. Its advocates mock supposedly bland and interchangeable cellphones and computers while pining for a time when the function of an object was manifest in its design -- all those pipes, gears, and steam valves. Yet anyone with a creative eye, Nakamura suggested, can see how the function of, for example, a computer chip is reflected in the patterns of circuitry on its face.

I guess if an author at Bitch Ph.D. hadn't heard of The Bechdel Rule till this week, I shouldn't be ashamed that it was new to me, too: "The rule is that movies should have 1) at least two women, 2) who talk to each other, 3) about something other than a man."

The guideline's name is disputed: See some background here. (It's also been referred to as the Mo Movie Measure, which also doesn't accurately reflect its origins.) Anyway, it may help pin down why, if you have feminist inclinations, you most likely left the theater last time feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

If you want a primer on what's going on in Sudan, now that the International Criminal Court has issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al Bashir, there's no better place than this group blog, overseen by the Social Science Research Council.

In one recent entry, Harvard's Alex de Waal, a skeptic of the ICC's move, describes how the main Sudanese opposition party -- and, astonishingly, even some of the rebels in Darfur -- would prefer that the Sudanese justice system itself handle the charges of atrocities in Darfur. The recent indictment, he goes on to argue, has prompted a circle-the-wagons defense of Sudanese sovereignty, as well as a search for regional allies to help in this defense. (Rather strikingly, for regular readers of Nicholas Kristoff, de Waal rejects the term "genocide" vis a vis Darfur in favor of the somewhat Orwellian term "complex emergency," though he is the opposite of naive about the horrors of the conflict.) At the same time, other contributors to the blog, titled "Making Sense of Darfur," suggest the ICC's move represents a belated but important blow for justice.

Could it be that NASA rivals MOMA as a repository of modern art -- at least certain kinds? The website environmentalgraffiti.com made that case this month by republishing 30 of the most striking images taken by the U.S. satellite Landsat 7.

The images were originally culled by NASA staff members from a data set of some 400,000, for an exhibit in 2000 at the Library of Congress. Environmental Graffiti didn't just give its readers a second look at the chosen few. It also added some value, providing versions that could be downloaded and used as computer wallpaper.

An unbelievable wave of comment-spam is making it virtually impossible to locate and publish actual reader comments. So until the spam-tsunami is over, I'll be disabling the comments function; my apologies.

UPDATE: You can always email me at brainiac [dot] email [at] gmail [dot] com

I don't mean to sound cavalier about green technology when I say, IMHO, that the winner of this year's Innovic Next Big Thing Award pales besides some of the runners-up. The prize is sponsored by the state of Victoria, in Australia, to promote ingenuity in the creation of marketable products, and this year's No. 1 was E-Crete, a concrete substitute made from waste producted by power stations. Congrats to Zeobond, the company that thought it up.

A bit more energizingly futuristic, however, is Your Shadow Caddy, a robotic cart that follows a golfer around the links, schlepping his or her clubs and balls (and beverages). It won the "people's choice" component of the contest. The robo-caddy takes its cues from a transmitter worn by the player. Your Shadow Technologies pitches it as the caddy for people who can't afford a human caddy -- especially golfers with minor aches and pains that keep them from carrying loads, but who don't want to go the lazy golf-cart route.

After remaining flat for decades, the incarceration rate in the United States has shot up four-fold since 1980, Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist, points out in the latest Boston Review -- one of the most striking ways in which America differs from its peer nations. Though there are signs that some politicians are catching on to the significance of this development -- Senator James Webb (D., Virg.) said at a hearing on the subject last fall that our policies "test the limits of our democracy and push the boundaries of our moral identity" -- so far the system churns on.

The mainstream press, Western argues, has made the American public aware of the two-to-one discrepancy between black and white unemployment rates, and, even more so, that there exists a three-to-one gulf in out-of-wedlock birthrates. Less often reported is the fact that blacks are jailed at a rate seven times that of whites. Explanations for the gap that look to character or cultural deficiencies, Western argues, fail to take into account the wholescale de-industrialization of central cities, leading to a lack of opportunity for unskilled men and, relatedly, a concentration of crime, drug abuse, and capture by police in poor neighborhoods.

At least two publications this week fell for a nine-year-old high-concept gag: a supposed literary correspondence between existentialist par excellence Samuel Beckett and the original author of the comic strip "Nancy," Ernie Bushmiller. Such was Beckett's enthusiasm for Bushmiller's deadpan style, we are led to believe, that in the early 1950s he sent the cartoonist several ideas for strips.

Editor and Publisher magazine "broke" the news, drawing on a blog item by a cartoonist and writer named R.C. Harvey, and a blogger for the Seattle paper The Stranger picked it up. Trouble is, the whole story is bogus, having originated in a 1999 issue of The Hermenaut, the late, lamented Boston-based magazine published by Josh Glenn -- in the "Fake Authenticity" issue, no less. "The Bushmiller/Beckett Letters" were written, in fact, by A.S. Hamrah and illustrated by R. Sikoryak. After some desultory words of thanks, here's how "Bushmiller" responded to some of "Beckett's" proposals:

"If globalization is to survive, it will need a new intellectual consensus to underpin it. The world economy desperately awaits its new Keynes."

So writes Harvard's Dani Rodrik in a new opinion piece, excerpted on his blog. (The whole thing is available here.) Forever gone, he writes, is the "time when global elites could comfort themselves with the thought that opposition to the world trading regime consisted of violent anarchists, self-serving protectionists, trade unionists, and ignorant, if idealistic youth."

He's less clear on what the new Keynes would provide that we're currently missing, so we await further installments.

A couple of interesting moves on the intellectual-blogs front. Matthew Yglesias announced late yesterday that he's migrating from the umbrella of the Atlantic to the more overtly ideological (i.e., liberal) Center for American Progress. He'll continue to blog -- readers will just have to change their bookmarks -- but will also be available to give advice about some of the center's other Webby projects. Certainly a loss for the formerly Boston-based Atlantic, whose owner, David Bradley, often boasts of his knack for recruiting "extreme talent." Also an interesting professional decision by Yglesias, a Harvard grad and philosophy major who occasionally riffed on philosophical matters on his site. Perhaps it signals a greater interest in shaping policy than in getting longer pieces into a prestigious magazine.

It's safe to say that this isn't the kind of exchange between science and religion that the Templeton Foundation and other high-minded groups try to encourage.

First, the back story: at the University of Central Florida, a student, for reasons that remain murky, took a consecrated communion wafer back to his seat at Mass instead of eating it. When other churchgoers became aware of this, they confronted him, and possibly grabbed him-- at which point the student resolved to take the wafer out of the church. He later reported getting death threats, while a local church official called what the student did a "hate crime." He returned the wafer, but the university posted armed guards at a subsequent Mass.

Upon learning of the incident, P.Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota at Morris and proprietor of the popular science (and anti-creationist) blog Pharyngula, mocked Catholics' anger and the college's reaction. In a post with an outrageous title ("It's a frackin' cracker!"; the faux-obscenity is borrowed from Battlestar Galactica), he went so far as to ask his readers to supply him with his own consecrated wafer. He pledged to treat it "with profound disrespect … all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart."

Was Frank Lloyd Wright an even more prolific designer of private houses than previously thought? William Allin Storrer, a Frank Lloyd Wright scholar, says he's identified 29 houses that ought to be freshly credited to the eminent architect -- although not everyone is convinced he's got the evidence to back up the claims. All of the structures are in suburban Chicago, including 24 on a single block of the town of River Forest.

The houses date to the 1910's, a period when Wright was a pariah in Chicago, a situation resulting from an affair he'd conducted with the wife of a wealthy client -- one plausible explanation for why he and the houses' owners would keep his contribution quiet. They were previously attributed to other members of the so-called Prairie School of architecture, but Storrer, an adjunct professor at UT-Austin and author of two books on Wright and his work, and two research partners, Richard Johnson and Daniel Dominique Watts, say certain interior and exterior details are giveaways.

The Chicago Tribune's architecture critic tells the tale of the discovery (and reports the opinions of some skeptics) here, while Storrer has posted photographs of all the houses at his somewhat ungainly website.

Does the idea of treating college students like customers -- striving never to disrupt their sense of contentment -- give you the willies? Then welcome to your nightmare: High Point University, profiled this month in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

This "once-sleepy institution in the hills of North Carolina" is now evidently thrumming with vitality, thanks to the efforts of its president, Nido R. Qubein, a Lebanese-born High Point alumnus and author of the books "How to Get Whatever You Want" and "Close Like a Pro: Selling Strategies for Success."

The American Enterprise Institute, home or at least temporary perch to such right-wing stalwarts as Richard Perle, John Yoo, Charles Murray, David Frum, and John Bolton -- and, as a result, unsurprisingly, a bete noire of the left -- has a new president. He's Arthur Brooks, a professor of government and business at Syracuse University.

I wrote about Brooks when he first arrived at AEI as a visiting scholar, and I saw him present at the DC think tank the ideas and data underpinning his book "Who Really Gives"? (The short answer: Religious conservatives. Who doesn't? Secular liberals and -- a fact played down in his book -- secular conservatives.) Some readers thought my profile was unduly skeptical, but judge for yourself.

Brooks's latest book is "Gross National Happiness." Its main finding, according to the AEI website: "The values that bring happiness are faith, charity, hard work, optimism, and individual liberty. Secularism, excessive reliance on the state to solve problems, and an addiction to security all promote unhappiness."

Brooks succeeds Christopher DeMuth, who has led AEI since 1986.

A clash of civilizations, of sorts, upended the British magazine Prospect's list of the world's 100 top public intellectuals this year -- as compared with 2005, the only other time the magazine compiled such a roster.

As the website Arts & Letters Daily put it, a bit insensitively, the Prospect's top ten slots, as determined by more than a half-million online votes, were occupied by "Muslims you never heard of." Astride the very peak was Fethullah Gulen, a 67-year-old Sufi Turkish intellectual presently living outside Philadelphia, whose work seeks to reconcile Islam and modernity. His victory, Prospect reported, was fueled by a get-out-the-vote campaign waged by Turkish publications close to Turkey's ruling AK party, to which Gulen has close ties. And other Muslim intellectuals no doubt benefited from the publicity the pro-Gulen campaign created. (Go here for the Prospect's edifying profile of Gulen.)

To Western ears, the most familiar of the next nine names on this intellectual Top 100 would be the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-based scholar of Islam famously denied a visa by the United States. (Others include Muhammad Yunus, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, and Aitzaz Ahsan. Eat your heart out, Christopher Hitchens, languishing at No. 27.)

Academics are no strangers to plagiarism -- the latest high-profile casualty was the Columbia University education professor Madonna Constantine, fired last month for passing off the work of others as her own -- but the Times Higher Education Supplement recently reported a trendy new variant: Self-copying.

According to the British newspaper, two scholars from the University of South Australia analyzed 269 papers stored on a social-science and humanities database called Web of Science. They found that 60 percent of the authors had self-plagiarized at least once. (Self-plagiarism was defined as occurring whenever 10 percent of one paper appeared more or less verbatim in a second paper.)

You can imagine (as John Quiggan points out) that some innocent fish were caught in that net: You wouldn't expect much variation in the boilerplate "literature reviews" that kick off social science papers on closely related topics from one author, for example.

Still, the figure is eye-opening. And perpetrators beware: journal editors say they are working harder to catch offenders. (Eye-opening in its own way is the title of the gathering at which these results were announced: the Joint Information Systems Committee's Third International Plagiarism Conference at Northumbria University -- which is, let's be clear, not a "how to" kind of conference.)