Today brings the scientifically significant news that NASA's chief administrator has reversed a decision by his predecessor and announced that the space shuttle will make a trip, in May 2008, to service the neglected Hubble telescope, before the shuttle is retired by the space agency. Plans for such a mission were scrapped in the wake of the Columbia disaster, in which falling insulating foam from the fuel tank caused a hole in the wing that proved fatal to the crew.
A piece in March 2004 in Ideas by Peter Dizikes reported that many scientists (some of whom lost their jobs) felt that the earlier abandonment of the Hubble, with no similarly powerful telescope to replace it, represented a great loss for astronomy and the related disciplines. Astronomers occupy a strange and vulnerable position in that they are uniquely at the mercy of the government, which can cancel the whole basis for their research at will. Many projects would be rendered impossible without the Hubble, including, as Dizikes noted, the study of "dark energy" and, oh yes, research into the origins and history of the universe. "That's exploration," one scientist told Dizikes. "To me, it's more fun than going to Mars."
What the Hubble service mission will knock from the budget and priority list at NASA is unclear -- I hope it's not a manned Mars mission, as Dizikes suggested was possible -- but I hope that will be revealed in the coming days or weeks.
As noted by a conservative student blogger at Dartmouth College, the College of William and Mary has removed a two-foot gold cross from a Chapel in a building designed by Christopher Wren and first erected in 1699.
The move was made without fanfare, but calls for clarification led to an announcement from William and Mary president Gene R. Nichol, which read in part:
I have not banished the cross from the Wren Chapel. The chapel, as you know, is used for religious ceremonies by members of all faiths. The cross will remain in the chapel and be displayed on the altar at appropriate religious services.
But the chapel is also used frequently for college events that are secular in nature -- and should be open to students and staff of all beliefs.
Since William and Mary obviously has Christian religious roots, this incident plays into a larger debate about how far religious or semi-religious institutions should or must go to accommodate secular people or those of other faiths. It strikes me as remarkable that a small cross in what is after all a chapel is construed as too restrictive or objectionable in the setting of today's university.
With our content-free SAT's, which value a weird brand of native wit over actual knowledge, and hit-or-miss public schools, many Americans arrive in college with substantial gaps in their historical and cultural knowledge. Things must be different at Oxford and Cambridge, with those demanding A-level tests (or whatever they're called), and all those students from 800-year-old public (a.k.a. private) schools. Right?
The Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, who write a blog for the Times Literary Supplement (where she's classics editor), begins her ancient-history class for first-year students by handing out copies of a skeletal map of the Mediterranean. Then she asks students to place Athens, Sparta, Crete, Alexandria, Rome and a few other famous spots on it. Let's just say the results are not awe-inspiring. "Over the decades," she writes, "this little exercise has given the new students a wonderful feeling of shared ignorance" -- and left the dons shaking their heads.
In another entry, she opens a window onto admissions anxiety, English-style.
English science fiction writer Charlie Stross has a side project: Compiling the lamest things that Amazon.com users have said about classic novels in their "Customer Reviews."
Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina," for example, was reviewed like so:
I don't mind the parts the were actually about Anna and human relationships. I could not stand all of the boring Russian politic talk or Levin and his boring farming or hunting talk. AHH! I do not recommend this book. If I truly hated someone, I would [force] them to read this book."
Now, I've never read "Anna Karenina," so I can't say for sure if this review is lame-brained. But here's a review of Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities" that strikes me as crazy:
I found this book difficult to follow and hard to hold my interest. I am an English teacher so I don't think it's me.
"A Tale of Two Cities" -- boring? Every chapter is a cliff-hanger! I re-read the whole thing a couple of years ago in a single weekend.
One more strike against the concept of user-generated content.
Richard Dawkins's wildly polemical new book, "The God Delusion," has created a windstorm of argument in the significant journals of opinion and the more free-flowing, interactive world of blogs and email chains.
Dawkins sets out to argue that the entire foundation of religion is fatally misconstrued, that no gods can possibly exist, and that religion as a whole is a destructive force. As the eminent philosopher and generalist Thomas Nagel writes in a sturdily constructed review in The New Republic,
One of Dawkins's aims is to overturn the convention of respect toward religion that belongs to the etiquette of modern civilization. He does this by persistently violating the convention, and being as offensive as possible, and pointing with gleeful outrage at absurd or destructive religious beliefs and practices.
Nagel, no true believer, finds Dawkins's reasoning deeply flawed, because it fails to recognize the limits of scientific rationalism that religion means to address: "Dawkins, like many of his contemporaries, is hobbled by the assumption that the only alternative to religion is to insist that the ultimate explanation of everything must lie in particle physics, string theory, or whatever purely extensional laws govern the elements of which the material world is composed."
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.
Both Nagel and Eagleton are worth reading, since they and Dawkins are, you might say, addressing nothing less than one of the foundational clashes between red states and blue, not to mention West and Middle East.
There was a classic philosopher-name-drop (P-N-D) in the Oct. 23 issue of Crain's Chicago Business. Profiling derivatives trader-turned resterauteur Nick Kokonas, Mark Scheffler wrote:
Novelty. Innovation. Existence. It's all on the metaphysical menu tonight, fitting for a one-time philosophy major and fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work wrestled with the logic of language.
Huh? Also on Oct. 23, writing in The New Republic, TNR literary editor Leon Wieseltier weighed in on the flap surrounding the cancellation of a talk by NYU historian Tony Judt on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" at the Polish Consulate in New York. (NB: Judt was a contributing editor at TNR till he came out in favor of a one-state solution in Palestine, in the NYRB, in 2003.) Judt has reportedly written to "a variety of email chains" claiming that the cancellation was part of a smear campaign orchestrated by powerful figures in the New York media world who do not favor a one-state solution.
Tony Judt
Judt is quoted as writing, in one of these emails:
It helps to have read Kafka to know what it feels like to go to bed a liberal, secular historian of Jewish background and wake up the next morning an anti-semitic Israel-denier.
To which Wieseltier replies, "Only somebody who ... did not read Kafka could have written that sentence, or someone romantically involved with himself." I'm not taking sides, here, but that's a good line!
On to less serious stuff: On Tuesday, writing in the Evening Standard (London) about British comic Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" movie, David Sexton made this claim:
In refusing to give any interviews about the film out of character, Baron Cohen joins the ranks of those heroes, like Samuel Beckett and Thomas Harris, Salinger and Pynchon, who insist that their art alone will speak for them.
Borat
It's not that Baron Cohen's guerrilla comedy/PR stunt isn't interesting, but there are better ways to make point without dragging Beckett and Pynchon into it -- and that long author-name-drop (A-N-D) is an offense to the sensibilities. I know Sexton is being absurdist, just having a laugh. But he's also showing off. Thumbs down!
In an interview with the Sydney MX (Australia) on Tuesday, poet Nathan Shepherdson was asked, "Which four people would you like to invite to dinner and what would you cook them and why?" He responded as follows:
1. Samuel Beckett: I'd serve him a large, white bowl with nothing in it. He'd think of it as dessert. 2. Shakespeare: What else but black pudding. When he wrote "out damn spot," he wasn't yelling at his dog. 3. Franz Kafka: A beautifully moulded jelly, with a dark chocolate question mark set in the middle. He'd be too scared to breathe, overly concerned that the jelly might wobble. 4. Francis Bacon: Very expensive champagne, served with cobalt blue tapenade on melba toasts. Being alive is an indulgence.
What to make of this? Shepherdson's jokes are lame, at best, and his choices of dinner guests are cliched. But is this a pretentious or clueless A-N-D? No, one doesn't get that impression. So we'll let him off with a warning, this time.
On Saturday, the LA Times ran a fascinating e-mail exchange between Elvis Costello and Green Gartside, of the intellectual post-punk act Scritti Politti. Asked, by Costello, if there was an anything he'd read in school that particularly influenced his work, Gartside said:
I started at art school with Wittgenstein. I was interested principally in the indiscrete problem of meaning. The Beatles introduced me to the most powerful thing: ambiguity.
That's beautiful stuff, not Philosophywatch material at all.
Gartside, back in the day
On Sunday, a concerned reader points out, a review by Peter Darbyshire published in the Vancouver Province (British Columbia) described the 2005 graphic novel "Pyongyang," by French artist Guy Delisle, as "a quirky view of an absurd culture -- a sort of Tintin meets Kafka." "Isn't 'X meets Kafka' always a suspect formulation?" the reader asks. Yes, it is, and it should be avoided. But I've read "Pyongyang," and Darbyshire is not incorrect to describe it the way he does. Take a look:
Earlier today, a friend mentioned that in today's (Oct. 30) issue of The New York Observer, "Edgy Enthusiast" columnist Ron Rosenbaum praises the new Philip Kerr detective novel, "The One From the Other," by concluding that Kerr's book makes readers fall ill with
what Kierkegaard called "the sickness unto death," a sense of the infectious affliction of human nature and human history. A sickness of the soul that no immune system can protect you from.
Though I'd love to nail Rosenbaum, a look at the review made doing so impossible. The entire essay, it turns out, is an excuse for him to get off that Kierkegaard line -- it's replete with mentions of physical and emotional illness, from the flu to Weltschmerz. I may think Rosenbaum is pretentious, but he didn't shoehorn Kierkegaard in; he did just the opposite.
The cleverly titled book gossip blog Galleycat tells us that a Fidel Castro autobiography of sorts will be coming soon, although whether it comes to the US is still in question. It's an "as told to" memoir, written "with" a prolific Spanish left-wing journalist named Ignacio Ramonet, who also founded an organization called Media Watch Global, dedicated to monitoring the effects of corporate ownership of the media.
It would be difficult to imagine a self-written book emerging while Castro is still in power and in questionable health. So this is as good as we're likely to get. Any early reports from the Spanish-speaking world about the content are welcome. The UK publishers promise thoughts on Che Guevara, the death penalty, and homosexuality (?).
Bloomberg has an article today written from Caracas about Cuba's recent economic boom -- 12 percent growth -- and the boost it has received from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, who has been sending the island nation discounted oil and other goodies denied by the US and other Western governments. This raises questions about who will hold sway over Cuba, internationally and domestically, when Castro finally cedes power or dies. The piece provides a questionable but intriguing claim about Castro's current place in the Latin American community:
One would have to go back to the 1960s to find a time when Castro had so much sympathy in the region, says Colombian Senator Gustavo Petro, 46, a former guerrilla leader who's known both Castro and Chavez for years.
Three years ago this month, I had the privilege of writing a profile of Rosamond Purcell for the Globe Magazine. I say "privilege," because I've been an admirer of her art photography and writing for years. (As I mention in the profile, the first book of hers I stumbled upon was Suspended Animation, a 1995 collection of her photos of preserved body parts. She has also collaborated on three books with Harvard's Stephen Jay Gould.)
Purcell is not merely the "doyenne of decaying objects," as her friend and coauthor Ricky Jay has called her, she's a radical taxonomist, a gadfly on the flank of the natural history museums where she shoots so many of her photos. I mention her now because she will appear at Victoria Munroe's gallery tonight, from 4-7 p.m., to sign copies of her new book, Bookworm, a collaboration with Sven Birkerts.
The gallery is at 179 Newbury Street. Not to be missed!
I mentioned in a recent post that the Harvard Crimson was investigating similarities between literary quotes used as examples in a Crimson column by Victoria Ilyinsky and literary quotes used as examples in a Slate column.
Today, the Crimson announced that it is investigating similarities between an Oct. 25 editorial cartoon drawn by Crimson editor Kathleen E. Breeden and a Walt Handelsman editorial cartoon published in Newsday earlier this month.
The online version of the Crimson story provides these handy links:
I wrote here a month ago about a Princeton research group's discovery of flaws in touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold that are to be widely used in next week's election. The machine they tested is to be used in every county in Maryland.
Now news has emerged, thanks largely to reporting by the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun -- acting on tips from an organization devoted to vote-security activism -- that Diebold made fixes to thousands of machines in use in Maryland in 2005 to address a problem discovered three years earlier. At issue is whether Diebold properly disclosed these fixes (and the need for them) to state authorities, who made some indignant comments to reporters about "the level of contractor oversight that Diebold requires." Diebold officials claim that all repairs on their machines were properly communicated.
A tangential thought that occurs to me: Why is it that elections are handled (nationwide?) by county governments, which are often underfunded and operate in a continual state of jurisdictional confusion?
When you've just published a column citing results from Google's Book Search, the last thing you want to see in your in-box is an e-mail with the subject line "Beware of Google Book Search." But there it was, first thing yesterday morning: a warning from Ben Zimmer, editor of American dictionaries for Oxford University Press and a crack word sleuth, that Google's document dates were probably off by decades.
My quotes illustrating "silver bullet" and "magic bullet," which Google dated 1950 and 1955, are really from about 1999 and 1986, Zimmer estimates.
But finding that out is a chore. "There's no easy way to get the dates until Google gets its act together with these government documents," he says. All you can do is search the text for various dates, hoping to find a "snippet view" that includes a reliable clue. "It's particularly silly because these documents should all be public domain," says Zimmer; there's no reason to limit them to the tiny snippet view format.
So, if "silver bullet" and "magic bullet" weren't interchangeable images in the '50s, when did they reach that point? My now-earliest "magic bullet" in the non-medical sense comes from a 1965 New York Times story: "The good showing of the economy last year evidently suggests to [President Lyndon Johnson] that tax reductions are a sort of magic bullet for the economy."
"Silver bullet" is more elusive. It's not clear what Times book reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt meant when, in 1968 and again in 1973, he called William F. Buckley Jr. "the silver bullet of American conservatism." But a Washington Post report in 1977 quotes a former FDA official, talking about the contentious process of drug approval, who said there were "no magic solutions, no silver bullets" to quell controversy.
The search continues – though this time, with a healthy dose of Googleskepticism.
The other day, I wrote about a new book from Oxford University Press, "They Never Said That," that seeks to correct quotations that were never in fact spoken or were attributed to the wrong party -- also the subject of an Ideas column in May by Jan Freeman.
Now I've learned that there's another new book that casts cold water on a slew of other old saws we all like to carry around. According to "The Yale Book of Quotations," P.T. Barnum's "There's a sucker born every minute" was concocted by who-knows-who, but not P.T. Barnum.
But the Yale book, by Fred R. Shapiro, isn't only out to correct popular mistakes. At 1,067 page, it's meant to be an updated "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations," incorporating quotes from pop culture, including ad jingles and lines from songs and movies.
Shapiro quotes Shakespeare voluminously but also includes Marion Barry, the former mayor of Washington, D.C., including this classic: "outside of the killing [Washington, D.C.] has one of the lowest crime rates in the country."
Herbert Aptheker, a noted scholar of slave rebellions who died in 2003, at 87, was famous not just for his books -- and his editing of the W.E.B. DuBois papers -- but for his obdurate support of the Communist Party. Now his daughter, the feminist scholar Bettina Aptheker, adds a dark new twist to his legacy by charging that he molested her from age 3 to 13. (More here.)
At the History News Network, historians are weighing what it all means -- and whether any skepticism is in order, given that Bettina Aptheker says her memories "erupted" in the 1990s, having been lost for decades.
PS [added 6:40 p.m., 10/27] There was a glitch with that last link. It's fixed.
I'm not sure I have much to add here, but this is just a remarkable story. It happens to be a first-person account by the creator and author of the beloved Dilbert comic strip, Scott Adams. But it has nothing to do with the strip.
Adams lost his voice 18 months ago, apparently for good. He was diagnosed with a rare condition affecting the vocal cords called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Strangely, he found that he could sing and speak in certain contexts. He tried an experiment:
All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar -- but still different enough -- from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory.
I was just making some rounds on the Web and landed on the website of the Poetry Foundation, where I found a fun widgit called the Poetry Tool. Among other things, it allows you to search for a poem by occasion. For instance, I clicked on Halloween, it being nigh upon us, and the Tool came back with 22 selected poems, from Donne's The Apparition to Poe's The Raven.
The list of occasions is impressive -- it's about as comprehensive as your average Hallmark aisle: there are poems for graduations, funerals, farewells, anniversaries. Need a poem to declaim next Labor Day? Here are 12. There's even a listing for Cinco de Mayo -- though when I clicked on it, I found there were no poems listed. Note to struggling poets everywhere: What the world needs is a good poem about the fifth of May.
This just in, from an article by Sarah Schweitzer in today's Globe:
Harvard's student newspaper says that one of its writers lifted material for her column on linguistics from a similar column posted a year earlier to Slate, an online magazine.
The Harvard Crimson published an editor's note expressing regret for failing to reference the Slate column as a source for quotes from "The Great Gatsby" and "Little Women" used in the Crimson column. The Crimson editors plan to publish another note today saying that they will discontinue the biweekly column by Victoria Ilyinsky, and will remove the problematic column from the Crimson website.
Failing to reference another news story as a source for quotes from novels doesn't sound so bad, but as someone who has spent many hours trolling through Amazon's Search Inside Search Inside! or Google Books search results, just to get the perfect quote, I can understand why Slate's Jesse Sheidlower would be annoyed. I also imagine that the Crimson is crimson-faced about this, since -- as the Globe points out -- the Harvard paper covered itself in glory not so long ago, by being the first to report multiple instances of plagiarism in Kaavya Viswanathan's highly publicized first novel.
Gratuitous Kaavya headshot
Still... I have to admit that the phrase "failing to reference X as a source for quotes from Y" makes me nervous. I'm sure that I've failed in the same way, in the past. Hopefully not so egregiously, though.
Vladimir Putin's fear of foreign encroachment on to Russian turf has now extended to the soccer field. Or the football pitch, if you like.
The Russian president said Wednesday he was concerned over the large number of foreign nationals playing for Russia's soccer clubs.
Vladimir Putin, speaking at his annual televised question-and-answer session, said: "There are too many of them. We need to restrict their number, because when it comes to composing the national team, we do not have enough players."
I'm not sure I see Putin's logic there. Presumably the five or so foreign players on a team are knocking five Russian players off the bottom of the ladder when they sign up. The guys failing to make the cut were unlikely to make the national team, no?
Moreover, as Daniel Drezner points out, American baseball's example would fly in the face of the notion that foreign-born players hinder local talent development: "Imagine, for a second, imposing caps on the number of Dominican baseball players allowed into Major League Baseball, for example. The best way to have quality American ballplayers is to have them face the toughest competition imaginable."
Most geologists think they not only know that a giant meteor (and the resultant climate change) killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but even where that meteor hit: the Yucatan peninsula. They found the crater's remnants 15 years ago.
But as the Philadelphia Inquirer explains, an iconoclastic female geologist at Princeton thinks they've pinned the crime on the wrong meteor.
Word Watch bonus: The otherwise fine article includes a sentence that begins this way: "Researchers first proposed that a meteor killed the dinosaurs in 1980 ..."
That theory, presumably, was shot down fairly quickly.
An interview with Dick Cheney by a conservative radio talk show host, a transcript of which has been published by the White House, indicates without much doubt that Cheney both confirms and endorses the use of waterboarding with terror suspects, as the Christian Science Monitor reports. Waterboarding was described this way by CIA sources who spoke to ABC News last year:
Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.
According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in.
Here's Cheney on Tuesday:
[HOST:] And I've had people call and say, please, let the Vice President know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation.
And more:
Q: Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President "for torture." We don't torture.
A Cheney spokeswoman said, "What the vice president was referring to was an interrogation program without torture," she said. "The vice president never goes into what may or may not be techniques or methods of questioning." I'm not so sure about that.
As McClatchy Newspapers reports, "The U.S. Army, senior Republican lawmakers, human-rights experts and many experts on the laws of war, however, consider waterboarding cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment banned by U.S. law and by international treaties that prohibit torture."
The new issue (#23) of Cabinet, an arts and culture quarterly published in Brooklyn, arrived in the mail yesterday, and I read most of it last night. This issue is dedicated to the theme of fruits, and the cover displays a great photo of Belgian men dressed up for a carnival, holding tangerines.
Cover of Cabinet 23
Inside we find essays on: the colonial adventures of the United Fruit Company, Thoreau's "Wild Fruits," the citrus bud mite as sculptor, the 1893 US Supreme Court decision on the great tomato (fruit or vegetable) controversy, the miracle fruit (a West African berry), and more. I particularly like the memoir by the intellectual historian Barry Sanders, about his father's career selling fruits and vegetables.
Full disclosure: I contributed to this issue, but I didn't write about fruit.
Earlier this week, I wrote about a particularly underhanded attack ad aimed at Tennessee Congressman Harold Ford Jr., a Democrat. The TV spot, shown in a YouTube video in my earlier post, featured mock interview sound bites from imagined voters who supported Ford on ridiculous, anti-conservative grounds. (I thought one of the interviews had an unintentionally comic effect. A guy in camouflage face paint says, "Ford's right. I do have too many guns." As if that were an outrageous position to take.)
Now the New York Times has picked up the story of the ad on the front page (thank you very much), adopting a slightly different angle. The article quotes a couple of critics who see a racial slant to the commercial, which features a bare-shouldered blonde saying she met Ford, who is black, at a Playboy party, and adding, "Harold, call me."
I can't say I even thought of the racial subtext, but the Times piece has an interesting if elliptical passage about who is behind the ad:
The spot was paid for by the Republican National Committee but was produced by an independent expenditure group that is supposed to have an arm’s length relationship with the actual campaigns. As a result, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said he did not see the spot before it was broadcast and did not have the power to order it removed.
Seems strange that the RNC pays for the ad but can't have it pulled. Also, it's hard to see why the arm's length relationship with the campaign means the RNC can't intervene. Perhaps it's just a symptom of the byzantine rules of campaign finance, which McCain-Feingold unfortunately never laid to rest.
This past Sunday the Ideas section ran a piece by Gregory Dicum on fair trade coffee, which, depending on who you ask, is either hitting its stride or losing its meaning. The debate centers around whether the adoption of the fair trade logo by big corporations like Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks is a good or bad thing for fair trade. It's good in the sense that these companies are buying a very large volume of beans. But some purists argue it's bad because these companies are not committing themselves to selling 100 percent fair trade coffee -- and are just using the logo as a marketing tool.
Today brings an interesting, and related, story about Ethiopian coffee. As the AP reports:
Ethiopia wants Starbucks to sign a voluntary licensing agreement saying the country owns the rights to the coffee names. Seattle-based Starbucks said Wednesday that it wants instead to work with the country to establish a geographic certification for the coffee bean names, much like is done with Washington apples or Kona coffee.
Ethiopia has also applied to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office to get the rights to three coffee names, a move the National Coffee Association (Starbucks is a member) opposes.
Ethiopia believes these efforts will help its coffee growers get a better price for their beans, which is of course one of the goals of the fair trade label. The NCA disagrees.
I'd been meaning to write a post questioning the generally high praise that Martin Scorcese's The Departed has received, but then I read Dave Kehr's take on the film, and realized he'd said it already, in an admirably concise dismissal on his website. Kehr, who writes the new DVD's column for the Times, says the film "has a bored, dutiful feeling, as if Woody Allen had been forced to remake one of his 'early, funny ones.' " Well worth reading his thoughts if, like me, you enjoyed the picture, but felt it got a good bit more juice from the critics than it deserved. (And not just because of that rat at the end.)
A Washington D.C.-based group of active-duty members of the military has set up a no-frills Web site called An Appeal for Redress. Soldiers who "sign" the appeal agree to send the following message to their Congressmen and Senators:
As a patriotic American proud to serve the nation in uniform, I respectfully urge my political leaders in Congress to support the prompt withdrawal of all American military forces and bases from Iraq . Staying in Iraq will not work and is not worth the price. It is time for U.S. troops to come home.
Meanwhile, a brother of former NFL star Pat Tillman, who was killed during service in Afghanistan, has spoken out forcefully against the war in in Iraq in an essay posted online at the lefty Web site Truthdig.com. Kevin Tillman, the author, was in the same Army unit as Pat Tillman.
Both of these news items indicate the way the Internet has posed a challenge to military leadership in their customary efforts to limit dissent and activism among the troops. The Internet provides an outlet that is very difficult to monitor and that can reach a potentially unlimited audience. It can be much more powerful than passing around dissident fliers on a base, which is forbidden in some cases within the military. The Kevin Tillman essay has given rise to over 1,800 reader comments on the site, which were selected from an even larger total.
Speaking of Scott Eric Kaufman, it seems that he, too, is interested in the poetry of spam, which I wrote about here. On his blog Acephalous, he wonders what on earth is up with spam that contains nonsensical words or sentences -- and nothing else: "'Beaver in disloyalty kisses the drizzle's price' is all the email says. That's it. No link. Nothing."
This is indeed a bizarre and slightly worrying phenomenon, as it makes one grow paranoid that there is some below-the-radar effect said email is having on one's computer. But I didn't open an attachment! I'm OK, right? Right?
But Kaufman is also bothered by the nonsensical sentence itself. He tries to parse it:
Why would someone named "point man" want me to know what happens to those who are "beaver" in their disloyalty? Why would somone who is want to kiss "the drizzle's price"? Who is The Drizzle? What is his price? Do I only have to pay to kiss it if I'm beaver in disloyalty? Or is "kissing the drizzle's price" a euphemism for the dire fate of those who are beaver in their disloyalty?
Maybe this is some sort of test.
Kaufman has also concocted several poems composed entirely of discrete single lines from separate unsolicited me-mail messages, "in an attempt to create eerily impersonal poetry." The execution is pretty great.
I just read a funny post from yesterday on the blog Acephalous, from Scott Eric Kaufman, an English graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, who also blogs at The Valve.
Scott asks:
You Know What This Blog Needs? More photos of Southern debutantes reenacting scenes from John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" in front of giant cypress trees dripping with Spanish moss during the Great Depression!
Then, after the jump, he hits us with a bunch of photos like this:
Click here to see more photos, and especially to read the comments his readers have left. One starts off like so: "Well, there went the already-tenuous grasp I had on the concept of ekphrasis..."
I tell you, in the blogosphere, tenure-track academics have more fun!
In a column in Ideas back in May, cleverly headlined "Misspeak, Memory," Jan Freeman discussed the epidemic of misquoting. Not misquotes by reporters on deadline, but those that have echoed through the literary-journalistic ages. She cited Ralph Keyes's book "The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When," which demonstrates that "despite copious research," no one has been able to demonstrate that Margaret Meade ever said the unofficial motto of every activist organization: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world." (In my memory there's a nice second sentence: "Indeed, nothing else ever has." But now who knows?)
Now the Guardian draws attention to a new book from Elizabeth Knowles, the editor of "The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations," with the slightly snotty title "They Never Said That."
Knowles says, "The last thing we want is to be seen as clever clogs, saying that these quotes are wrong. The fascination lies in how and why they were altered. Misquotations are much more interesting than mistakes." (Nevertheless, I find it very disappointing that Beam me up, Scotty" and "Let them eat cake" are fictitious.) Knowles makes a similar point to one Jan made -- that misquotes tend to represent a form of wishful thinking. We make the quote snappier and less clumsy than the original, or we credit it to a more fitting source.
An argument about the philosophical roots of the United States has sprung up between the conservative pundits Andrew Sullivan and David Brooks. On Sunday, in a review in the Times of Sullivan's new book, "The Conservative Soul," Brooks expressed doubts about the usefulness, in analyzing America, of Sullivan's favorite philosopher, Michael Oakeshott.
Sullivan endorses Oakeshott's "politics of doubt," the view that social and political life ought to stick firmly to the path worn by custom and tradition; one should reject "rationalist" social engineering and grand ideologies untethered to the patterns of daily life.
In his review, Brooks retorted that Oakeshott, while "wise," will never resonate in American politics, because America is a nation built on a creed ("all men are created equal"), not on custom. (He also says that Sullivan's well-known crusade for gay marriage is the very opposite of Oakeshottian, but that's another story.)
In response to the review, Sullivan makes the very old-fashioned sounding argument that the American Revolution was, in truth, largely conservative: an assertion of deep-rooted English liberty against, paradoxically, the English. Sullivan notes that this is why Edmund Burke did not disdain the American Revolution, as he did the French.
But the pseudonymous blogger P. O'Neill asks: Why does Sullivan quote Burke on this point, rather than Oakeshott? As it happens, Oakeshott appears to have detested the American Revolution, writing, in "Rationalism in Politics" (1947):
The early history of the United States of America is an instructive chapter in the history of the politics of Rationalism.... the independence of the society concerned begins with an admitted illegality, a specific and express rejection of a tradition, which consequently can be defended only by an appeal to something which is itself thought not to depend upon tradition ... And it is not surprising that [the Declaration of Independence] should have become one of the sacred documents of the politics of Rationalism, and, together with the similar documents of the French Revolution, the inspiration and pattern of many later adventures in the rationalist reconstruction of society.
Oakeshott couldn't be more clear: The Declaration of Independence is one of the "sacred documents" of those who hold the worldview he reviles. P. O'Neill, though no fan of either writer, comments: "Brooks 1, Sullivan 0."
A while back, John wrote here about an exceptionally cool use of "the 3D interface for the planet" Google Earth: planespotting. (Some of the satellite photographs used by the program capture airplanes in flight. Geeks go find them and mark their locations.)
Now there's a new built-in feature -- an "overlay" -- to Google Earth that functions as an online voter guide. Click on a star on the US map and up pops a set of links for the selected Congressional district. You can register to vote and find out where to do it; get news about the races in your district; get information about the candidates, etc. There goes Google and its "Don't be evil" motto. I'm betting that this is the result of a Google engineer's "20 percent time" -- the time employees are allowed and encouraged to spend on their own projects.
If you're embarrassed that you're not 100 percent sure who your Congressman is, here's where to find out without having to ask.
One of the things I like about blogs -- it's the same thing I liked about zines, when I first encountered them, back in 1988 or so -- is how they allow you to eavesdrop on the conversations and in-fighting among members of particular subcultures to which you have no other access.
One of the subcultures I like to tune into now and then is tenure-track academics: Grad students and associate professors kicking against the taken-for-granted constraints of their chosen discipline. So among the blogs I check out every couple of weeks is Savage Minds, on which one can read Field Reports (from anthropologists in the field), Culture Notes (on: the relation of classical kinship theory and debates about marriage in developed countries today; the "I Am African" ad campaign in fashion magazines, which fights AIDS in Africa by putting "tribal" facepaint on Gwyneth Paltrow and others; the use of Taiwanese Aborigines in a recent Taiwanese computer ad); The Other Three Fields (one of them is archaeology, not sure about the others); and more.
I mention Savage Minds now because there was a useful post yesterday answering the question, What have the trends in anthropological theory been since the late 1980s? As you can see, my eavesdropping is Zelig-like: When I'm reading a blog like this, I really want to know the answer to questions like that!
Boston College has adopted new rules regarding speakers on campus that allow the university to postpone or even cancel student events that present speakers whose views do not comport with Catholic teaching if a speaker with a Catholic perspective cannot be found to provide balance. The new regulations, which were not open to debate among faculty or students before their adoption, have ruffled some feathers, particularly among liberal groups on campus. BC students are planning a protest in the coming days. Administrators at Georgetown University, also a Catholic insititution, have said they will not follow BC's example.
BC spokesman Jack Dunn acknowledged to Inside Higher Ed that it was only certain subjects of debate that were likely to set off administrative intervention: "'Abortion is the hot button issue,' he said, adding that other topics related to sexuality would also be subject to scrutiny."
This is a significant admission, because it raises the question of whether it is fair to require balance in some arenas and not in others. As a student pointed out, would a Republican speaker who favored the death penalty, which runs counter to Catholic teachings, necessitate the inclusion of an abolitionist viewpoint?
Yesterday former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was sentenced to over 24 years in prison for his role in the fraud that led to the collapse of the company. He will appeal, naturally, and will be under house arrest only during the appeal process, but this essentially concludes the criminal prosecution of the energy trading company's key players. (Last week a judge threw out the conviction of former Enron executive Kenneth Lay due to his death in July of heart failure.) The fraud scandals and prosecutions at Worldcom and Adelphia have run their course, too.
Is an era of white collar crime at its end? Very hard to say, since the nature of corporate scandals is that they are hidden from view for months and even years -- until they aren't. But something has changed. And I'm afraid that part of that change is a typical national forgetting. A brief outpouring of outrage is quelled by a few prosecutions and a cynicism that accepts that boys have been boys. To counteract that amnesia, it is worth checking out a terrific book on the Enron collapse by Kurt Eichenwald called "Conspiracy of Fools."
I understand quantum physics about as well as, um, the average person undereducated in the sciences. Which is to say, I don't get it. It has just come to my attention, however, that there is a cartoon video posted online that helps more than I would have thought possible. As far as I'm concerned, it's the best thing since the 1959 film "Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land," which is probably too long to watch online but is nonetheless posted (illegally?) here.
The new cartoon is a dramatization of the double slit experiment, which was voted "the most beautiful experiment" by readers of Physics World. It doesn't exactly put confusion to rest, obviously, but it explains the mystery that surrounds the nature of matter and the mysterious effect of a detector or observer:
I was reading the October issue of Elle Magazine on the commuter rail to the Globe this morning (people often asked me where I got "so many ideas" for my Examined Life column in Ideas, and now you know) and came across some fascinating tidbits.
In a feature on "New York's Loveliest New Locals," I learned that model Marie Steiss, 20, most recently seen in Givenchy's "Ange ou Demon" perfume ads, is not only a former finance major, and a skateboarder (!), but "the doe-eyed daughter of politically beleaguered French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin" (!!).
Marie Steiss
For 20-year-old Brainiac readers interested in meeting Marie, who appears to be single, here are a couple of tips: She tells Elle that she browses the (great) Strand bookstore "for 18th-century poetry," and skates at parks in Brooklyn and at Chelsea Piers.
In the same article, I found out that Italian knitwear heiress/fashion ambassador Margherita Missoni, 23, now a budding actress in New York, "started out pursuing something far more serious: philosophy." It seems that Margherita was a philosophy major at the University of Milan until her mother, Angela, the force behind the Missoni label, persuaded her to quit and go to acting school instead.
Margherita Missoni
What a loss to philosophy! The discipline could use some glamour. I mean it. Anyone who knows what branch of philosophy that MM was studying should get in touch. Inquiring minds want to know.
So I got the call on Friday night around 6:00 -- a good friend of mine from Traverse City, Michigan had come through with a pair of tickets to Game 1 of the World Series.
I'm a Red Sox fan by birth, but I've always had a place in my heart for the Tigers. Fandom is of course determined first and foremost by geography, but there are other factors in play -- radio station wattage, in the old days, fantasy sports nowadays.
My flight out on Saturday was full of folks going to the game. Some of them were surely displaced Michiganders, but I shared a cab to the park with a guy who was decked out from head to toe in Tigers gear -- and grew up in Somerville. He explained that he took to baseball as a kid, but his dad just didn't like the sport. When some relative gave him a hat with the old English "D" on it for an early birthday, a Tigers fan was born.
My Tiger fandom also came by way of the hat (though via Magnum P.I.).
I was of course disappointed by the outcome of Saturday night's game, but the trip was great regardless. For starters, I had the thrill of being on the same flight to Detroit as one-time Tigers phenom and Massachusetts native Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, the southpaw known for his zany antics (talking to the baseball; sending back balls he determined had "hits in them") and for appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated with Big Bird. Here's a shot of The Bird deplaning:
You can't quite appreciate it on TV, but Comerica is one of the best stadiums in baseball. (I humbly submit this having been to all but seven of them.) I'm not sure the park will revitalize Detroit, much of which is just plain hollowed out, but at least on game nights, the park does give this dying city a heartbeat. Here's a shot of the Willie Horton statue (not that Willie Horton -- the one who played left field for the Tigers from '65 to '74) out beyond center field. In the background is the boarded up Broderick Tower -- I'd never seen boards in a window that high up before I visited Detroit. Apparently, however, a redevelopment is in the works, for this building at least:
My zoom lens leaves something to be desired, so you'll have to take my word for it that this is Michigan-native Bob Seger performing America the Beautiful. Not much has been made of this in the coverage, but there was no performance of the national anthem before Game 1 -- Seger's America the Beautiful was it. Not to impugn Detroit's patriotism -- there was a very large American flag, and a flyover -- but I can't think of another recent sporting event of this calibre where there was no anthem. Perhaps Brainiac readers can offer up some other examples:
This guy would have appreciated my sighting of The Bird:
And finally, the very nice Michigan State grad who sat next to me and my friend, a University of Michigan guy. As the game went from bad to worse for the Tigers in the middle innings, I had a front row seat for what I gather is a debate that kept many a Tigers fan sane through the long run of lean years they've had of late: who's better, the Spartans or the Wolverines? Late in the game, our neighbor produced what I believe she thought would be her knockout punch -- the fact that all Michigan State grads get a laminated, wallet-size copy of their diploma, which she produced for us to inspect. In the background, her boyfriend dons a rally cap, to no avail.
Steven E. Jones, a professor of physics at Brigham Young University who popularized the term "cold fusion" in the '80s and has sparked controversy over his research into Sep. 11, will resign from his position effective Jan. 1, as reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education [sub req'd] and the Deseret Morning News. BYU had stripped him of two classes and placed him on paid leave six weeks ago, citing the "increasingly speculative and accusatory nature of statements being made by Dr. Jones regarding the collapse of the World Trade Center."
The university had begun a review of his work, including his widely available paper "What Indeed Caused the WTC to Collapse Completely?" Jones's research, based in part on his studies of molten metal and soil from the WTC site, has led him to suggest that "pre-positioned explosives" inside the towers may have brought the complex down. Needless to say, that's a political hot potato. Molten, even.
Jones had nothing but praise for the university in his official statement, but did say that he is "electing to retire so that I can spend more time speaking and conducting research of my choosing." His suspension and early retirement raise some old yet undying questions about academic freedom and its limits.
As noted by several web sites devoted to discrediting 9/11 conspiracy theories, among Jones's other papers is one called "Behold My Hands: Evidence for Christ's Visit in Ancient America." In it he remarks that dark marks on the hands of ancient Mayan artifacts and hieroglyphs resemble stigmata, and posits this as evidence that the Book of Mormon was correct when it said that Jesus visited the New World shortly after his resurrection. BYU had no problem with that one.
Whoops! Philosophywatch -- a Brainiac feature wherein I take a weekly look at banal and embarrassing mentions, in magazine, newspaper, website, and newswire stories, of the names of great thinkers and authors -- took an unexpected vacation this month. Thanks for the emails, everyone, and not to worry. I'm back now, with a 6th installment.
"Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower," said French author and philosopher Albert Camus, and he very well may have been describing the palette of colors soon to be showcased in South Carolina.
One doubts that Camus was talking about South Carolina. I also wonder where in Camus, exactly, this line comes from. A Google Books search shows that this line is attributed to Camus in a reference book titled "20,000 Quips and Quotes," but the same search turns up no actual Camus books. I searched inside "The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus" on Amazon.com (I realize that translations may vary) and found nothing. When I searched inside "The Plague," however, I did find the line "In autumn ... we have deluges of mud," which sounds rather more like Camus, to me. (You can see why it takes me a long time to do a single installment of Philosophywatch.)
A reader points out what she believes is a frivolous use of a philosophical term in Ian Parker's New Yorker essay on Christopher Hitchens, from the issue dated Monday, Oct. 16. Here it is:
"No, excuse me," Hitchens said. His tone tightened, and his mouth shrunk like a sea anemone poked with a stick; the Hitchens face can, at moments of dialectical urgency, or when seen in an unkindly lit Fox News studio, transform from roguish to sour.
Hitch
Sorry, but I don't see any problem with this example. Hitchens likes to boast that he is a former Trotskyist, after all, so the "dialectical" jab seems appropriate, to me. Let's move on.
Here's a line from a sports story in the Monday edition of the Lewiston (Idaho) Morning Tribune that caught my eye:
The first question put to Rosenbach, the quarterbacks coach, was, "Can you put a finger on why it's been so difficult for your guys to punch it in?" How to describe Rosenbach's resolve over the next few minutes? Friedrich Nietzsche would perhaps call it a Will to Vagueness. "We're just not doing a good enough job coaching," he said. "We've got to get the ball in the end zone.... We've got to do a better job."
That's more like it! Then, on Tuesday, an editorial in the St. John's (Newfoundland) Telegram described a graffiti battle in a local men's washroom -- one person had written "Gay is God's way," another had added the word "not" between "is" and "God's," and then a third had changed the "not" to "hot" -- in the following manner:
With apologies to the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, it is the perfect graffiti dialectic, the development of an argument through the use of thesis and antithesis...
Using all three of Hegel's names is a bit much, but maybe the writer has a point? I'm on the fence. On Wednesday, the blog Gawker used a post debunking retro notions of what a New York editor's daily life is like as an excuse to mock people who talk about philosophy:
Maybe there is, like, one rockstareditor left in this city, swilling hard liquor long into the night with his rockstarauthors while discussing, you know, Sartre v. Camus. He is statistically insignificant compared to the thousands of us who steal milk and toilet paper from the office because we can't afford our own, and go to readings for the free canapes.
Did you catch the parallelism -- French philosophers vs. canapes? Clever stuff. More existentialism ahead: On Wednesday, writing a preview of a Kris Kristofferson concert in the Riverfront Times of St. Louis, Missouri, Roy Kasten got off this zinger:
As you read this somewhere in Soulard or some west county karaoke horror, a drunk is singing Kris Kristofferson's "Me & Bobby McGee." But as an apotheosis of crippling nostalgia there's mystery at its core: "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." Camus never got free will so right. Kris Kristofferson did.
Yowza. A Friday review of a new video game titled "Dark Messiah of Might and Magic," which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, uses everybody's favorite German philosopher in a particularly lame way:
DMMM takes the top spot for two reasons: the use of Valve's Source engine (Half Life 2) for its first-person view, and a multiplayer aspect that is deep. Deep like Nietzsche. All of the detailed individual skills (spells, melee combat, etc.) for your DnD-type characters in single player are available in multiplayer.
That is deep. This Saturday, in the Globe and Mail (Canada), a review of a new thriller, "The Ruins," by "A Simple Plan" author Scott Smith, starts off like so:
Four young Americans get caught by a grisly and esoteric evil that draws from Mayan lore. The story wields examples of Kant's categorical imperative, Nietzsche's myth of eternal return and John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism.
Eh? The author of the review, Barb Minett, is identified as the owner of The Bookshelf in Guelph, Ont. One probably gets a lot of heavy reading done in Guelph, this time of year.
OK, one last item, also sent in by a reader, who points out that an essay studying biases in venture capitalists' decision-making, from the November issue of the Journal of Business Venturing, contains the following sentences, which the essay's authors felt the need to footnote:
"Birds of a feather flock together" is the saying that illustrates the basic hypothesis of this paper. The insight per se is not new.
What did the footnote say? "Goldstein (1980) cites Aristotle and Spinoza already describing such a phenomenon." This academic overkill is funny, yes, but we expect it. It's not really Philosophywatch material. Still, keep trying, readers! Your emails are most welcome.
Fans of Dungeons & Dragons and other fantasy worlds -- I am not among them, for the record -- will be pleased to know that scientists have taken a small but significant step toward the invention of a cloak of invisibility. Mind you, the device works only on microwaves; is barely 8-cm wide; only works in two dimensions (I don't really get that); and can only reduce back scatter and forward scatter (ditto).
But still. "The concept that you can cloak something and make something invisible can now be demonstrated by this method," said Duke University physicist David R. Smith. He and his partner at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering were excited enough that they they've been keeping some secrets while they worked on this:
Engineers David Schurig and David Smith of Duke University say they were concealing something themselves last May when they and their colleagues reported their proposal: "We had a cloak we liked pretty well in May, and it got better from there," Schurig reveals.
It's campaign countdown season, so the TV ads are coming fast and furious now. And they will only be more prevalent in the two weeks to go. Every election we have the debate about negative campaigning. But doesn't it seem worse this time?
On Friday picketers camped out outside Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Deval Patrick's house in Milton. Wearing orange jumpsuits, they carried placards declaring themselves "Inmates for Deval Patrick" and mocked him for allegedly being soft on crime.
Probably there are plenty of Democratic attacks ads out there -- readers are invited to point them out -- but look at this televised spot, whose approach resembles the jumpsuit guys'. Paid for by the Republican National Committee, as the voiceover announces, it sets out to sully the name of Harold Ford, a Democratic Congressman from Tennessee:
The Washington-based New Republic has apparently parted ways with one of its most outspoken critics of the Iraq war, Spencer Ackerman, former author of TNR's blog "Iraq'd." (Here's where Ackerman makes the announcement and here are some additional comments from a friend, fellow junior pundit Matthew Yglesias.)
Ackerman doesn't say much about the cause of his departure, except to say that the "ostensible reason" is some sort of clash with his editors, while the actual reason has more to do with divergent ideologies. Yglesias, however, does a wink-wink, nudge-nudge routine, while gesturing emphatically at Marty Peretz, TNR's editor in chief and part owner.
On what issues might there have been conflict? Ackerman is the rare -- if not the only -- TNR scribe to voice the view that American withdrawal from Iraq might reduce the carnage there and amount to a step forward in the war on terror. Then there's Joe Lieberman. Peretz has written that if Lieberman wins his race, or "more important, if Ned Lamont loses it and loses it decisively, meaningfully--there will be real reason for reasonable people to celebrate."
Ackerman, meanwhile, wrote in the American Prospect, a rival magazine to TNR's left, that Lieberman has been "reality-averse" in his analysis of Iraq and the GWOT. "Perhaps the most surprising thing about Lieberman's defense record," he wrote, "is the difficulty of defining Liebermanism. On the central question of why a nation should or shouldn't go to war, Lieberman's answer is simply, 'yes!'"
Since TNR's advocacy of the war in Iraq has been a sore point with many liberals, this staffing move is likely to get more attention than it otherwise would. (Full disclosure: Peretz bashes a Globe editorial here.)
My earlier post about the creeping corporate takeover of the Internet notwithstanding, there are still a bunch of labors of love out there bringing together fervent communities of enthusiasts. Comic book collectors are generally geeks, and geeks are generally prone to complex and laborious technological projects ... and voila! We have the grandly named Grand Comic Book Database.
The goal of the volunteer-driven GCBD is to catalog data -- "key story information, creator information, and other information which is useful to readers, fans, hobbyists, researchers" -- for all the comic books ever published. There are "no commerical objectives" here. Ideally each comic book page is to show an image of the book's cover. (Over 40 covers have been posted today, including some from 1952.)
Like any widely distibuted volunteer project, certain guidelines need to be observed, e.g.: "Our general rule of thumb is to look for a 25 issue commitment over a two-month time period. This is particularly true of new members who are indexing in our format for the first time. All reservations will be held for only 6 months."
The site today also displays a prominently featured ad for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, where you'll find news about a pretty fascinating case or two. Bet you didn't know the CBLDF has been "Defending the Comic Book Industry's First Amendment Rights Since 1986."
An article in the November issue of The American Prospect, posted online this week, carries the audacious title "We Answer to the Name of Liberals." It's written by Bruce Ackerman, a Yale professor of law and political science, and Todd Gitlin, the ubiquitous professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia who wrote "Letters to a Young Activist." I have always found Gitlin rather shrill, but this is an important piece.
In large part it's a rebuttal to a recent London Review of Books article by Tony Judt, who charged that American liberals have "acquiesced in President Bush's catastrophic foreign policy." Ackerman and Gitlin call that "nonsense on stilts." Their piece is written as a kind of manifesto -- "Clearly this is a moment for liberals to define ourselves" -- and carries a fairly long (and growing) list of prestigious signatories.
Ackerman and Gitlin indulge somewhat in a speechifying tone, but it's refreshing to see a couple of intellectuals lay out a political platform in no uncertain terms. I'd like to see a conservative reply.
An assistant professor of English at the University of Connecticut, Gregory Colon Semenza, has published a book called "Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century: How to Build an Academic Career in the Humanities."
Title doesn't sound so thrilling. But the book, which has a forward by Michael Bérubé, author of "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?," seems to be an unusually blunt and useful guide to navigating the purgatory that is graduate school. Judging by the review excerpted here, it may also sneak a little candy in with the medicine:
Imagine, if you will, the next big thing in reality television: You're Not Hired! -- the inside scoop on the job market in the humanities. A mixture of Survivor, The Apprentice, and The Batchelor(ette), You're Not Hired! would take an audience thirsty for vicarious punishment into the secret workings of search committees, the countless hours rehearsing suitable answers to adversarial interview questions, the agonizing days waiting by the phone or checking e-mail inboxes constantly, and the marathon campus visits (a mixture of speed dating, boot camp, and Survivor-like immunity challenges).
In Sunday's Ideas section, Harvey Blume interviewed PBS documentarian Bill Moyers. Moyers spoke about his program "The Net at Risk," which can be watched and discussed here. The program, as Blume put it, "asks if Net neutrality -- broadly defined as equal access to the Internet -- will survive Congress rewriting the Telecommunications Act of 1996." Moyers told Blume:
Giving control of content and access to big corporations will mean that the Internet, the most revolutionary democratic phenomenon of our time, where all of us are equal, will slip through our fingers. I did this documentary to say, Hey people, pay attention. Something is about to happen that will be very hard to change.
Now I wonder what Moyers would make of the New York Times report that corporations are making inroads into an exceedingly popular online game/alternate world called Second Life, which is now getting loads of attention. The likes of Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Sun Microsystems, Nissan, Adidas/Reebok, Toyota, and Starwood Hotels are advertising and setting up virtual resorts and stores "in world." Makes you long for the Wild West days when the Internet was a tool for research only if you were geeky enough to "get it," poorly designed fan sites were the name of the game, and nytimes.com didn't exist.
In the latest issue of "In Character," Jeffrey Rosen makes a classic contrarian argument: Supreme Court Justices have abandoned the concept of justice -- and that's a good thing!
What Rosen means (he's a law professor at George Washington U. and also the legal-affairs editor at the New Republic) is that today's Court has dropped from its job description the task of righting society's wrongs. It prefers incremental decisions that clarify existing law -- that further the rule of law -- but do not infringe on the duties of Congress.
For Rosen, Roe v. Wade is the classic instance of the Court's imperiously trying to settle a question involving social justice on which the Constitution is unclear. He's relieved that no one on today's court possesses such arrogance about the role of the court (save, in his own way, Clarence Thomas, in Rosen's account).
Like other arguments of this type, Rosen's appears to fail what might be called the Brown v. Board of Education test. No decision is more canonical in 20th century constitutional law -- and in none did the Court more clearly attempt to resolve a divisive question involving social justice.
Jay-Z is back. James Parker noted this in Ideas a few weeks ago, as did the Times's Kelefa Sanneh in a great review last Thursday comparing the comebacks of Jay and Puffy. But I saw Jay's return for myself last night.
Flipping through the channels waiting for the Mets game to start, I alit on BET, which was airing Jay's new video, for the single "Show me what you got." The video had already begun when I came upon it, and having perhaps missed an establishing shot or two, I found myself rather confused regarding the video's conceit. There was Jay, dropping his lyrics over a beat by Just Blaze and riding shotgun in a sports car (a Lambourghini Countach? Nope, I checked and they don't make those anymore). Jay's car was racing another sports car, driven by a woman. Hardly a pathbreaking scenario for a rap video, I realize. What threw me, however, was the rather plain-looking white guy driving Jay's car and the attractive, but not really video girl attractive, woman they were chasing.
It wasn't until I leaned forward and squinted at my set that I realized Jay's chauffer was none other than Nascar's Dale Earnhardt Jr., and their quarry Formula 1's Danika Patrick.
Now it all made sense. Say what you will about Jay-Z's abilities as a rapper -- his detractors accuse him of serial plagiarism flagrant even by hip-hop standards -- he's an astonishingly good salesman. That car chase was as dizzying for its culture clashes as for its speed: I mean, rap + Nascar? And, for that matter, Nascar + Formula 1? Not too many people could put these elements together and make it work. Jay pretty much does.
As if all this weren't enough, not a half hour later, now happily taking in the Mets defeat of the Cards, I had the deja vu experience of seeing Jay's video again -- only this time, during a commercial break on Fox. It was the same video, only edited down to a 30-second advertisement for Budweiser, the sponsor of Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s #8 Chevrolet. Not, I gather, a coincidence.
Again, all very impressive from the standpoint of promotion, self- and otherwise. Yet while I couldn't help but tip my hat to Jay for the feat of cross-branding he'd pulled off, I also couldn't help feeling a bit nostalgic for a different era of hip-hop. The refrain in Jay's "Show me what you got" features a sample of Flavor Flav saying "Show 'em what you got," from the Public Enemy track "Louder than a bomb." The latter was an angry protest song in which Chuck D, with encouragement from Flav, accuses the government of tapping his phone and the CIA and FBI for trafficking in lies (among other crimes).
Hip-hop has changed since that track dropped in 1988. Public Enemy, as they were fond of lamenting, could barely get a few spins on the radio; Jay's track gives new meaning to the word commercial. Of course, it's not as if Flavor Flav himself isn't enjoying the current state of affairs...
“[The caucus] had concerns about confidentiality, lack of respect of confidentiality through discussions in their caucus, also issues of personal attacks on various members that had come up on blog sites related to Mr. Turner at different times,” [the party’s national caucus chair, Rahim] Jaffer told reporters.
Turner seems uncowed in a statement on said blog:
Well, this has turned out to be one interesting day. This blog has been melted down a few times over the last couple of hours with Canadians logging on because, I would presume, they'd like to see why it is I have been removed from the Conservative bosom.
Well, knock yourself out. All my words are here. Judge for yourself.
Political blogs are now apparently enough of a force to be reckoned with that they have stoked fear at the top of the food chain. And this is Canada we're talking about.
According to London School of Economics evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry, the human species may "split in two" in the next 1,000 years (check out the graphic). Selective breeding among a genetic upper class, in Curry's vision, gives rise to a kind of Nietzschean overman (and -woman) -- tall, durable, and very easy on the eyes -- while the rest of the species becomes nasty, brutish, and short.
Curry may be overestimating what can happen in a thousand years; were we really so different-looking in 1006? But in one prediction he doesn't seem to go far enough:
However, Dr Curry warns, in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for relying on technology.
Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to resemble domesticated animals.
Heck, a number of people think that advances in technology are going to put us in deep water by 2020. Enslavement to our own machines? I don't think 10,000 years are required.
I've just happened upon a corner of the blogosphere I didn't know existed: blogs dedicated to exploring Google Earth. This may sound like a region inhospitable to those without a comp. sci. degree to keep them warm, but I was surprised at how readable some of these sites are. Ogle Earth, for instance, has a great post about how archaelogists are using Google Earth to find dig sites in France dating back to the Iron Age.
Other dispatches from Google Earth bloggers are slightly quirkier, but interesting nonetheless. It seems several folks in the Google Earth Community have devised a new hobby, a sort-of trainspotting for the Google age. The sattelites that provide the photography that Google Earth displays have had to take a lot of pictures of a lot of Earth, and naturally they've occasionally taken those pictures while trains and planes have been passing through.
Finding the coordinates of these trains and planes has become a passion for some, particularly the planes. See, e.g., the post on Google Earth Blog, noting the discovery of a fully restored Lancaster bomber (apparently a mainstay of the WWII-era RAF) cruising around England. According to the post, a Google Community member discovered the plane when doing what everyone does when they first test drive Google Earth -- type in their home address. Most of us, however, don't find something like this when we do:
Google Earth Blog has a pointer to a list of all the planes the Community has thus far found flying the friendly skies of Google Earth. If nothing else, you've got to check out the KC-135 refueling the C-5 Galaxy over Northern California. So much cooler than that probably sounds.
Seven funeral home directors have secretly pleaded guilty in New York in a case involving the theft and sale of bones and tissue from cadavers. (One of the bodies that were plundered is that of the late "Masterpiece Theater" host Alistair Cooke.) This ghoulish case is one of a number that have cropped up concerning the shocking for-profit treatment of corpses -- often a legal gray area due to a lack of effective government oversight.
Readers of Ideas will remember David Barron's article about the resistance in some cities to the arrival of Wal-Mart and other big box retailers with controversial management practices. And Brainiac readers might recall follow-up posts here and here about the Wal-Mart fracas in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley vetoed an ordinance that would have required the company to offer better pay and benefits in any store in the city.
Now Wal-Mart is advancing on China, whether China likes it or not; the company has purchased Trust-Mart, the country's leading retailer, seeking more stores in the world's fastest-growing market. On the blog of the business magazine Fast Company, Lynne D. Johnson has an interesting take on Wal-Mart's strategy. She sees the retail giant pursuing another chain in China in part because employees at the 66 existing Chinese Wal-Marts have (surprisingly) managed to form trade unions, a development Wal-Mart has fought back in the US.
A few weeks back I wrote here about change in the works in the peer review process at scientific journals.
One soon to be launched journal published by the Public Library of Science, PLoS ONE -- described here -- plans to publish articles more frequently online (rather than issue-by-issue) and take steps to introduce more transparency. PLoS ONE will use a more public peer review process that continues after publication, allowing reviewers to annotate and comment on papers on the site.
The managing editor of PLoS ONE, Chris Surridge, will be giving a talk about the journal and "open access" publishing at MIT's Stata Center at 2 p.m. on Friday the 20th.
In my column this week, I'd hoped to discuss a chapter in "The Challenge of Affluence" about the notorious tail-fin era in American car design, but ran out of space. The Oxford economic historian Avner Offer holds it up as an example of affluent consumers acting against their best interests.
From 1954 to 1958, American cars went through a period of outlandish designs. Cars grew something over a foot in length from 1949 to 1958, and consumers grew addicted to various design gew-gaws, such as those fins that caused your Buick to vaguely resemble a horizontal rocket.
(That's actually a '59 Caddy.) Domestic automakers pushed their designers to come up with new fillips each year, even though the best designers knew the trend was ludicrous, and engineers wanted the companies to stop redesigning the for a minute, so the engineers could make them actually work.
Quality nosedived and design novelty, by definition, is short-lived: Fords and GM cars lost 83 percent of their value in their first four years during this period, Offer suggests. Plainer, slow-changing vehicles, like the new Volkswagon, retained about twice that proportion of value. American consumers shifted abruptly toward simplicity and prudence at the end of the '50s, and the overdesign era was over. (Ford saved itself with the simple Ford Falcon, a brainchild of Robert McNamara, who later had other brainchilds.)
In short, car companies hurt their reputations, engineers lost their dignity, and consumers lost a lot of money -- all because the thrill of momentary gratification ("tail fins!") swamped considerations of real value.
Is something similar at work in the SUV craze of the past decade? Offer thinks so.
For the person who has it all: An outfit called Skyacht, out of Amherst, Mass., is developing a hot-air powered personal blimp. Why, you ask? Well, according to their project summary:
In addition to recreational uses, the Personal Blimp can fly in ways that no other aircraft can match. For instance, no other aircraft can accomplish the seemingly straightforward task of picking off the top-most leaf from a particular tree (Helicopter downblast tosses the leaves wildly; Helium airships can't hover; Previously built hot air airship and and hot air balloons are nearly impossible to steer precisely.) In contrast, the Personal Blimp flies "low, slow, and smooth." This enables one to accomplish tasks as simple as the above-mentioned picking of leaves off the tops of trees or as complex as carrying airborne gravimetric measurement equipment (used in diamond prospecting) with far greater sensitivity and spatial resolution. Other areas of application for the Personal Blimp's unique abilities include forest canopy research, wetlands survey/management, eco-tourism and aerial photography.
Thanks to Chris Spurgeon, who emailed me to say he's saving up for one of these. Chris is the author of spurgeonblog, for my money one of the best blogs out there. Recent posts include a guide to where you can buy the clothes the PC and Mac guys are wearing in the current Apple ad campaign, a history of malt liquor, and, with flu season upon us, a link to a video made by a doctor in Maine explaining why sneezing into your sleave is healthier than sneezing into your hands.
Tonight's episode of WGBH's Frontline (which airs on most PBS affiliates at 9 p.m.), is called "The Lost Year in Iraq." It examines the period between the toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad and the departure in June 2004 of former Coalition head L. Paul Bremer.
According to Anita Gates, writing today in the New York Times, "very few punches are pulled" in this account of the mistakes and failures that followed early military success. (The program seems unlikely to please conservatives who claim that public television is too left-wing.) The story here is not a new one; much of it has been told in numerous articles and books, perhaps most notably in "The Assassins' Gate" by George Packer, who supported the war before it began.
The Frontline producers "found no shortage of highly placed people who were willing, even eager, to talk about the disaster that many perceive American-occupied Iraq to have become since the spring of 2003," Gates writes. Among them is Jay Garner, the retired Army general who served as director of the Iraq Reconstruction Group. On camera he says, "There was no plan and no staff."
If you've got Times select, or still have the Sunday Times lying around, check out Nicholas Kristof's Sunday Op-ed column, "Looking for Islam's Luthers." Kristof's focus is actually the growth of "feminist Islam," a movement advocating gender equality in the Muslim world. But he comes at it by way of a reference to Luther:
While the thread of fundamentalism is real in Islam, so is the thread of reform. The 21st century may become to Islam what the 16th was to Christianity, for even in hard-line states like Iran you meet Martin Luthers who are pushing for an Islamic Reformation.
Last month, Reza Aslan, author of No god but God, and owner of a snazzy website, also wrote of an Islamic Reformation. But in his Ideas essay, The war for Islam, Aslan's focus was the role of fundamentalists like Osama bin Laden in this Reformation. His point of comparison, however, was still Martin Luther:
Bin Laden has shown he is willing to use any means necessary to purify Islam of what he considers to be its adulteration at the hands of the clerical establishment. While his tactics are immoral and horrifying, his justification for the use of violence is not so different than that used by reformation radicals like Martin Luther, who defended the massacre of his Protestant opponents by claiming that ``in such a war, it is Christian and an act of love to strangle the enemies confidently, to rob, to burn, and do all that is harmful until they are overcome."
But what most connects bin Laden and the Reformation radicals of the 16th century is his deliberate attempt to seize for himself the powers traditionally reserved for the institutional authorities of his religion. Luther challenged the papacy's right to be the sole interpreter of the Scripture; bin Laden challenges the right of the clerical establishment to be the sole interpreters of Islamic law.
Two very different visions of the Islamic Reformation -- and of the Protestant one.
Last night's episode of the Newshour with Jim Lehrer had a segment on the new Poet Laureate Donald Hall. Hall gave a tour of his New Hampshire farm and talked about his poetry, in an interview reproduced here in audio form.
Hall, a deserving Laureate, has written gem-like poems about New Hampshire and country life. His earliest book of essays, published in 1961, had the delightful title "String Too Short to Be Saved." Hall's work of the last decade includes eloquent verses and essays about his wife Jane Kenyon, also a poet, who died of leukemia in 1995. Our Poet Laureate, I'm happy to say, is also a maniacal Red Sox fan, and showed his range by publishing a marvelous collection of short essays called "Fathers Playing Catch with Sons: Essays on Sport (Mainly Baseball)."
From a neuroscience conference in Atlanta comes the news that scientists restored some movement and powers of speech to a severely brain-damaged man who had been barely conscious for six years. They did so by sending electric pulses to wire electrodes they had implanted deep in his brain.
This finding echoes a recent article in the New York Times Magazine that discussed scientists' success in helping a woman with treatment-resistant depression using electric stimulation of the brain.
Advances in neuroscience, one of today's wild western frontiers of knowledge, continue not only to hold practical promise but to approach the realm of sci-fi films.
What could be worse than the stereotypical smooth-talking salesman, all unctuousness and flattery? Now we know: It's the gloomsayers of today's appliance departments, who are cultivating a new apocalyptic style in retail rhetoric.
I heard it myself last week, when I phoned a big chain store to change an order for a microwave oven. Once that was done, the salesman, George, went into his extended-warranty spiel.
Now, in my family we tend to shun extended warranties; sometimes, when I'm face to face with the salesman, I'll explain the economic rationale, just for the fun of watching his eyes glaze over. But we were on the phone, so I just said no thanks.
George wasn't having it. He launched into the sad tale of his own microwaves: The first one, the house brand, had lasted less than two years, and the next failed before its first birthday. If not for his warranty he'd have been screwed.
"I'm sorry you were so unlucky," I said. "But my last one was still going strong at 20 years."
"Well," said George testily, "I can guarantee you this one won't last that long!"
What's next? Buy the warranty or we'll shoot this dog?
Turns out Consumer Reports ran a story on this spreading phenomenon in the August 2006 issue. They found salespeople at several big chains assuring shoppers that only a warranty would keep that fridge or dishwasher alive. “Manufacturers are cutting corners," said one salesman. "Everything is being made in Mexico, and God only knows what they’re doing down there.”
The truth? Warranties are cash cows for stores and ripoffs for consumers. CR quotes a warranty trade newsletter: "You sell a $400 television set and maybe make $10. But you sell a $100 warranty and make $50.”
For margins like that, apparently, salespeople will say just about anything to customers – even "You knucklehead, that appliance I just sold you is a piece of junk."
A tip from a reader: McSweeney's has published another amusing list, with a more cutting tone, related to New Yorker cartoons. This one, "Future Winners of the New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest," appears both online and in the highly entertaining new book "Mountain Man Dance Moves: The McSweeney's Book of Lists."
My favorite: "I'm saying a cliché in a different context, Pam."
Following up on cartoonist Drew Dernovich's piece in Ideas about the new book "The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker," I thought I'd point out a funny little piece on McSweeney's Internet Tendency that lists "In-Progress Ideas for New Yorker Cartoons." They include:
Two guys are sitting on a desert island with their backs against a single palm tree.
"I miss blogging."
Or, no, wait, maybe one of them is standing near the water with a bottle at his feet, reading a letter. "It's from the former treasurer of Nigeria." You know, making fun of those fraud e-mails. But on paper. Or maybe something else involving the Internet, which you don't get on desert islands. "It's a good deal on vi_jgra" or "I wonder what Google is doing."
Doesn't everyone have some New Yorker cartoon idea and wish they knew someone who could draw? Maybe we need a Web site where we can pool our inner cartoonists' brain power. A Caption Contest for the people.
Readers of Christopher Shea's piece about the weak connections between a nation's wealth and its happiness might be interested in two important recent books that take up the subject. Chris writes that new research suggests that "the richest societies ... particularly America and Britain, have reached a point at which their wealth and growth are actually harming citizens’ health and quality of life." That is the central argument of Peter Whybrow's book "American Mania." Whybrow, director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, writes that rising rates of stress, anxiety, depression, obesity, and time urgency are now grudgingly accepted as part of everyday life in the world's most affluent society. He grounds both our extraordinary achievements and our excessive consumption to an understanding of the biology of the brain’s reward system.
Whybrow draws on the works of the prominent British economist Richard Layard, who published a book last year called "Happiness: Lessons from a New Science." Like Chris's article, Layard's book discusses the surprisingly loose correlation between a nation's wealth and its citizens' well-being. It also demonstrates that people from developed nations are no happier than they were 50 years ago, even though real incomes have more than doubled.
Which popular musician do lawyers and judges quote most? According to a report today on WNYC's "On the Media," it's Bob Dylan (whose lyrics, coincidentally, are the subject of today's "Word" column in Ideas).
The top 10 also include the Beatles and the Stones, Woody Guthrie and Joni Mitchell, and Paul Simon, both solo and with Garfunkel. But author Alex B. Long doesn't just report the rankings. His analysis, online at the Berkeley Electronic Press, also covers the demographics of musical taste:
While it is unlikely that the volume of Tupac, 50 Cent, or Ludacris lyrics will ever rival those of Bob Dylan in legal scholarship . . . "rap music vernacular" will become more prevalent as the legal profession becomes more diverse.
And what makes a lyricist quotable:
[Chuck] Berry has been dubbed the poet laureate of rock 'n' roll, yet his lyrics are rarely used in legal writing. This may be because his poetry is often though of as the poetry of cars, girls, and being young and bored. Important themes all, but only infrequently do they find their way into the courtrooms.
And when – as in the case of an opinion that cited both the Beatles and Pink Floyd -- quoting lyrics may do more harm than good:
While the music of the Beatles . . . transcends any number of age or cultural barriers, the music of Pink Floyd is not nearly so universally loved. In order to be effective, a metaphor must not only be descriptive, but it must be easily accessible. . . . The "Another Brick in the Wall" reference is likely to be lost on a sizable portion of the readers and may, in fact, be off-putting.
Here's a good idea. The reader of a literary translation, or any book for that matter, holds in hand a bound volume, sold in a bookstore, forever cataloged by the Library of Congress. A book conveys the impression that it is a finished product, a work that cannot be other than it is. But literary translation, like writing itself, is a messy process, full of false starts, blind spots, and dead ends.
Wouldn't it be interesting to see the notes of a translator at work--writing and revising, questioning himself, consulting other sources, digressing...? And now we have Translator's Notes, a project devised to accompany the book editor Lorin Stein's translation of Gregoire Bouillier's "The Mystery Guest." I hope the site, or at least the idea, lives on for future translations.
Speaking of satire, a gifted satirist named Paul H. Henry -- anyone know something about him? -- is creating a five-part documentary video in mock celebration of the conservative bloggers and pundits who have been playing their part in the war in Iraq. They have been "using their bellicose rhetoric to create a crucial bulwark of support for their President," Henry explains. The tagline of "The War of the Words: The Story of the 101st Fighting Keyboarders," which is designed as a historical doc about the present, borrows Ken Burnes's liberal use of voiceovers, pans across still images, and heroic strains of violin.
Its movie poster says that the Keyboarders "had honor. Courage. And a lot of spare time." So too does Henry, apparently--plus a great comic touch. Part II is called "Mission Accomplished." Part III: "Well, Not Accomplished Exactly, So Much As -- Look, Just Shut Up, Okay?" Yes, I am now writing in praise of satire, having just lamented its current outsize role.
The Baltimore Sun has a thoughtful and thorough article on The Daily Show's Jon Stewart and the rise of satire. Some of it echoes a more essayistic and fun recent piece [$] called "My Satirical Self" by the critic Wyatt Mason in The New York Times Magazine. (And both, I might add, are contributions to a debate stretching back a decade or so about the triumph of irony as the dominant mode of contemporary discourse, a debate often traced back to a piece written by David Foster Wallace in The Review of Contemporary Fiction.)
Stewart and the editorial staff of The Onion didn't ask to be seen as serious social critics and champions of truth-telling, as Stewart has repeatedly emphasized. ("People say, 'Why don't you take the president to task?' Well, there are three cable news organizations that are supposed to be doing that every day.'") But that is how The Daily Show and its ilk are being seen, in an era of great distrust of politicians. At the risk of raining on the Stewart parade (I watch the Daily Show all the time), I have to wonder whether we are well-served if our best and brightest young minds join the staff of The Daily Show rather than aim for some political or journalistic position that has to grapple with power rather than revel in the fodder it provides for mockery.
Walter Benn Michaels is the author of "The Trouble with Diversity" and was the subject of an Ideas column and two Brianiac posts (here and here) by Chris Shea. After WBM's book was the subject of spirited online book club forum at The Valve, he appeared out of the digital wilderness and took a stab at beating back his various critics. Sometimes I find it's more fun (and quicker) to read a guy's off-the-cuff defense of his work rather than the work itself. Bad intellectual habit, I'm sure, but you can gain a lot from watching a thinker contend with the strongest objections he's been faced with. (Just ask Socrates.)
Plus in WBM's case you get some fun bits thrown in:
I was on a talk show the other night where a caller (trying, like all the other callers, to show that I was mistaken about decreasing social mobility in the U.S.) described himself as dropping out of Yale and floating like a leaf through the American class system until he landed somewhere near the bottom. Since whenever I talk about social mobility I customarily find myself surrounded by self-made, risen from the ranks, men and women, I had to give the guy credit for originality.
This time around, Fine is digging into the dirty laundry of Carl J. Truscott, the former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who has been accused of wasting his agency's time and money on a host of questionable endeavors. The news reports have focused on his money-is-no-object approach to appointing the director's suite (who wouldn't want a flat screen in their bathroom?) and a truly hilarious fiasco involving the director's nephew, who used ATF resources to produce a film for a high school research project. (He got an A.)
You can get a sense of the hoops Truscott's nephew had ATF staffers jumping through from the news coverage, but you really need to turn to page 63 of the report itself to get a feel for the sheer absurdity of the 10-month endeavor (what high school project takes 10 months?)
There's nothing so deadpan as an Inspector General's report. See, for example, the following description, from the section of the report dedicated to Truscott's misuse of protective details:
In June 2005, Truscott traveled to the region of the Boston Field Division to visit various ATF field offices and U.S. Attorney’s Offices. Truscott’s Chief of Staff, Truscott’s Assistant, and an EPB advance agent traveled with Truscott from Washington, D.C. Several agents from the Boston Field Division also accompanied Truscott while he was in the region. These agents included the SAC; an ASAC; and three special agent drivers, one of whom who was a medic. The group traveled in two sedans and one rented Suburban.
Witnesses told us that the group checked into their hotel in Portland, Maine, at around 6:00 p.m. The group dispersed at the hotel because Truscott declined to go out to dinner. Although witness accounts varied on the timing, all agreed that at some point after the group had dispersed, Truscott decided that he wanted to go out for cheesecake.
The SAC told us that he and the ASAC were sitting in the hotel lobby
discussing business when Truscott’s Assistant approached approximately
30 minutes later and told them that Truscott wanted to go out for cheesecake.
The SAC said he asked either the Assistant or the EPB advance agent why everyone had to go and was told that everyone was needed. The SAC told us that he had to reassemble all of the agents, some of whom had already left the premises to work out or go for a run. He said he also had to find a local restaurant that served cheesecake.
As Chris writes, a Johns Hopkins team has completed a new study, published in the Bristish journal The Lancet, of post-invasion Iraqi deaths, and arrived at a much more startling number than they did in a controversial paper published there in 2004. The new paper claims that "655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred." The study was produced by interviewing residents during a random sampling of households throughout the country.
Whether or not their estimate is accurate is debated here on the blog of the Washington Monthly (and will be heavily debated elsewhere in the weeks to come). Person-by-person interviewing does seem, to my untrained eye, subject to a high rate of error. (How do you know several different residents aren't describing the same death or deaths?) But one keen observer points out that the famed pollster John Zogby, who likes to call himself apolitical, has weighed in -- in a CNN interview reproduced here -- in support of the Hopkins researchers' technique.
I am not qualified to judge the methodology used in the Lancet study that finds that some 600,000 Iraqis may have died so far in the Iraq war. (The study claims 95 percent confidence that the number falls somewhere between 426,000 and 794,000.) I did write, in Ideas, about a previous Lancet study by the same researchers, which found 100,000 civilian deaths, but that story is no longer available without a charge.
But note that in the Globe story linked to, above, as well as in more partisan critiques, you do not find any epidemiologists or scientists criticizing the study on methodological grounds.
Here is a sophisticated defense of how that first study was done. In brief, modern sampling methods were used to identify several thousand families to interview about the fates of family members during the war. As with any survey, the data for these familes were then extrapolated to the country as a whole.
The consequences of rejecting the epidemiological approach in favor of, say, assembling estimates from newspaper accounts of battles and air strikes, seems to me larger than some of the critics appear to realize. After all, the sampling approach is the same one that has been uncontroversially used to estimate how many people have died in the wars in Congo, in Sudan, and other troubled regions. It's the same methodology used to estimate how many people died during the inter-Gulf-war period in Iraq, from sanctions and Saddam's terror. (Those deaths were one of the factors in the argument that Saddam needed to be deposed.)
To accept the sampling method in other wars, and other contexts, but rejecting it in the one war in which the United States is involved, is awfully hard to defend.
John's enthusiasm for the Transformers, pound for pound a much more imaginative toy than the (usually electronic) kind one sees today, brings to mind what I remember as the Avis to the Transformers' Hertz. We're the Gobots. We try harder.
The Gobots were conceived just like the transformers -- as characters that could shapeshift into machines and vice versa. They were what your grandparents got you when you asked for Transformers. One Webhead has taken the task in hand of comparing the two.
Another has posted a cheeseball ad I remember too well:
Readers of Drake Bennett's September article in Ideas on the origins and universal appeal of music will be interested in this episode of the NPR program Radio Lab.
As sociologist Kieran Healy points out on Crooked Timber, the program includes a segment on the musical nature of language. Diana Deutsch, a psychologist, demonstrates that a looped segment of speech begins to sound like music when repeated. (Deutsch's research has also shown that speakers of tonal languages, like Chinese, are much more likely to have "perfect pitch," the ability to identify a musical note when sounded in any context.)
Deutsch's segment may be taken to support the notion, discussed by Bennett, that music, like language itself, evolved as a means of forging social connnection.
Impossible (for me) to put down a story in today's Globe on the return of the Transformers. Hasbro's toys and the attendant animated program flourished around the time of my ninth birthday, and I was a devoted fan of both.
Transformers, of course, have never really been gone, but they'd become the province of geekazoids (sp.?) and would-be hipsters, who put Decepticon decals on their cars (as if a Decepticon would be caught dead in a car -- their arch enemies are the Autobots!) But as the Globe's Vanessa E. Jones reports, Hasbro is about to bring out a collection of classic Transformer toys and next summer will see the release of a new, live-action Transformers movie directed by Michael Bay and produced by Steven Spielberg. (The latter announcement is one of those that leaves me utterly at a loss -- am I horrified by the notion of this movie, or exceedingly fired up? I just can't decide.)
Of course, this will not be the first Transformers movie, that distinction belonging to the 1986 annimated feature The Transformers: The Movie. The leader of the Autobots, the redoubtable Optimus Prime, is killed off in that movie, a loss that I was simply not prepared for as a second grader.
When I watched the movie again a few years ago, however, it wasn't so much Prime's death that struck me, but the movie's cast. Judd Nelson, in his Brat Pack prime, played Hot Rod, the brash young Autobot who becomes Prime's successor (and is subsequently renamed, unfortunately, Rodimus Prime). That made sense. But not too many people, I don't think, remember a less likely casting choice.
The movie's plot revolves around the Autobots and Decepticons having to team up to take on an enemy bigger than either side could defeat on their own -- an intergalactic menace called Unicron. Who gave voice to this planet-crushing bad guy? Ladies and gentlemen, Orson Welles, who brought more than a touch of evil to the role, one of his last.
The right-of-center academic blogger Daniel Drezner has a thought-provoking post on Open University (following up on a point made by George Mason University's Ilya Somin) that compares the Oakland's A's player scouting technique -- developed by Billy Beane and analyzed by Michael Lewis in his popular book "Moneyball" -- and the hiring philosophy of George Mason's law school and economics department.
George Mason, says Somin, has managed to compete with better-funded universities by seeking out faculty candidates who are undervalued, often due to their unpopular views. For decades GMU's economics department hired conservative and free-market thinkers without obvious credentials, and wound up with two Nobel winners.
Drezner rains on the parade somewhat by pointing out two downsides to the GMU approach: 1) In the end the wealthier players in the market poach the talent you found, and 2) your departments become overspecialized. Similar problems have intermittently plagued the A's, I'd add, but this season they once again find themselves in the playoffs with the bigger kids on the block.
Following up on the David Lynch thread, it's worth pointing to a post about the film and about Lynch on the blog of the Independent Film Channel.
The post decribes "Inland Empire," accurately, as a kind of "remix project," noting the actors and thematic riffs recycled from other Lynch films. (This notion is also supported by the fact that Lynch shot the film over the course of three years, without quite knowing how it would all fit together.) The IFC blog also nicely captures what is so confounding about "Inland Empire." In ealier Lynch films like "Lost Highwway," it says,
there's a sense that if you could somehow reach bottom, you'd find truth, some primal series of events that kaleidoscoped out of recognition in the telling. There's no bottom to "Inland Empire."
A year ago, I wrote a short item for Ideas about DIY Planner.com, a website for devotees of "paper-based organizational products," from the vaunted Moleskine notebook to the humble PocketMod, a free, disposable organizer that I have used every week since then.
This morning I stumbled upon a treasure trove of info for less-than-completely-organized types like myself: this handy list of "50 ways to take notes." The list includes a number of Quick Public Pages, meaning online services that allow you to take notes and pop them onto a web page with its own URL; Basic Note Taking services and applications, which organize your to-do lists, or allow you and colleagues or friends to keep notes in the same place; Online Document services, which allow you to create and share content online easily; not to mention some online Voice Recording services, and more.
One word of caution: While researching the article on DIYPlanner.com, I realized that, for some people, the pleasurable activity of getting organized can itself become a form of procrastination. So dip your toe into the waters of these organization applications, but don't drown.
PS: I put quotes-within-quotes in my headline because I'm quoting Travis Bickle ("Taxi Driver") quoting an office-humor poster.
The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting post by George Mason law professor David E. Bernstein about the first-year curriculum changes outlined by Harvard Law School. The post discusses the new focus at Harvard on international and comparative law, and is valuable as much for its lively user comments as for its content.
Former law students, Harvard and otherwise, weigh in on whether teachings in international and comparative law will improve legal education. There aren't too many supporters. Many commenters detect a lefty tint to the changes, or mourn the loss of the 1L emphasis on the basic vocabulary of U.S. law. Others, now acquainted with (and disillusioned by?) the real life of a lawyer, think HLS is straying too far in the direction of theory:
My education at Harvard was already so theoretical and impractical that I had to study hard AFTER law school just to pass the New York bar exam.
After I saw the persuausive if less than cinematic documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," I visited the film's Web page, on which users can enter some facts and assess their own impact on carbon emissions. I was feeling smug because I don't own a car.
But it turns out that flying on commercial jets, even, say, four times a year, contributes greatly to carbon emissions. Now the London Times points out the same fact, and notes that not only Al Gore but other climate activists are logging frequent flier miles all over the globe, and thus contributing to the problem, adding a startling statistic:
Aviation generates about 5 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions but their warming effect is up to four times greater at high altitudes.
As promised, I've seen the new David Lynch film, "Inland Empire," and I'm reporting that ... wait for it ... it's bizarre. But I mean bizarre by Lynchian standards. And not in a good way.
For the first third there's a confusion of identities, doppelgangers, art within art, and other favorite Lynchian tropes, but there is also a semblance of story. Then we're off into ponderous wandering through a sea of incoherence, with occasional arresting moments.
David Foster Wallace once wondered whether Lynch's decision to work only if he could have total control was artistically heroic or (paraphrasing) born of a childish desire to run the whole sandbox. (Both, he suggested.) "Inland Empire" makes it clear that someone should be reining Lynch in. There's a rumor that Studio Canal, co-producer and international sales agent for the film, tried to do so by pulling it from a fantasy film festival in case audiences liked it too much, because that would make it harder to convince Lynch he needed to cut some of the three-hour movie. Now, though, we have the news that Lynch has secured the rights to distribute the film himself in the US and Canada. No one else allowed in the sandbox...
Like Chris Shea, I was surprised by the TV ad that takes the trouble to footnote Sofia Coppola's new movie, "Marie Antoinette," as "based on a true story." But when I mentioned it to a friend last week, she reminded me of another dumb-Americans tale, this one attached to 1994's "Madness of King George."
The film (with wonderful Helen Mirren as yet another English queen) was originally titled "The Madness of George III," the story went, but the distributors renamed it, worried that Yanks would think it was a sequel to two movies they'd never heard of.
False, says Snopes.com, debunker of urban legends. The Alan Bennett play on which the film was based was indeed "The Madness of George III," but the movie itself was always and everywhere "The Madness of King George."
But is it as "false" as Snopes's red-lettered verdict implies? The explanation goes on, a bit defensively:
Although Nicholas Hytner, the film's director, admitted that the claim is "not totally untrue," he also divulged that the most important factor was that "it was felt necessary to get the word King into the title." The change was not primarily motivated by a perceived need to cater to Americans' alleged gullibility or ignorance, but by a prudent recognition of cultural differences. . . . America has always been a nation without royalty, and thus using "King George" in the title established much more clearly to American audiences that this was a film about a monarch than "George III" would have.
By the end, the author of the entry is admitting "perhaps there is a little bit of truth to this one."
And Bennett himself, if he didn't come up with the "sequel" joke, liked it enough to use it. A 1999 report in Literature/Film Quarterly says that the story "is probably apocryphal -- though with typical slyness, the author himself claims it was true."
"This was a marketing decision," Bennett writes in the preface to the published version of the screenplay, "a survey having apparently shown that there were many moviegoers who came away from Kenneth Branagh's film of Henry V wishing they had seen its four predecessors."
An insult to the audience, or just the awful truth? Ask the Hungarian Cultural Center, whose billboard in Times Square is pictured in today's New York Times. It might be an ad for an art film, this bleak photo with "1956 Hungary" lettered across a Soviet tank, and that's the point. The tagline: "Our revolution was not a movie."
As discussed here, film director David Lynch, maestro of the bizarro, has a new movie on the way, a long one. Three hours or so. This one, "Inland Empire," is shot on digital video.
While the debate over film vs. video has now dragged on for years and grown a bit tiresome -- Godfrey Cheshire wrote an excellent two-part article in the New York Press on "the death of film" back in 1999 -- Lynch has an interesting take on it. As Ted Waitt notes on Peachpit Commons, Lynch acknowledges the superiority of film, but loves exploiting "the 'harshness' of digital video." Lynch says video "talks to you differently."
I'll be seeing the film Sunday and reporting back next week on Brainiac.
We now have the news, announced to coincide with the Frankfurt Book Fair, that Google is launching a program aimed at improving literacy rates world wide. Never one to think small, Google is taking its motto "Don't be evil" a step further.
The Google Literacy Project, not entirely straightforward or intuitive on its face, gathers its books, mapping, and blogging services in an effort to allow users to share information about reading resources worldwide. Another example of a Web 2.0 application, the site is meant to be collaborative, allowing teachers and students to post content that might be of help to others. Like Wikipedia, it depends in part on the kindness of strangers, and it holds a lot of promise if and when that kindness kicks in.
I won't be blogging on Monday, or over the weekend, so here's an abbreviated and advance edition of Philosophywatch.
Evan Hughes saw this Nietzsche put-down in the new issue of Commentary, in a review of a book called "Happiness: A History":
The mortifying fact is that we often get better guidance in such matters from Dale Carnegie ("Success is getting what you want.
Happiness is wanting what you get") than from the combined profundity
and smart-alecky wit of all the world's Friedrich Nietzsches and Nora
Ephrons combined.
Not so fast! Writing on his stock-market tips website Alchemy of Trading this past Monday, Oct. 2, Stephen Vita would seem to disagree. Nietzsche and Carnegie aren't opposites, after all:
If you read any of the best books on trading, from "Reminiscences" to the "Market Wizard" books, what do all of these great traders have in common? Yes, that's right... an open mind. I've mentioned before that Nietzsche's instruction "to kill your convictions" in the realm of philosphy also applies to trading, at least for me.
That same day, another website, the car-fancier blog Jalopnik, invoked Kant for a cheap, anti-intellectual laugh:
Honda released a promotional video clip of its Civic Type R intro in Paris last week. If memory serves, I once heard the video's Euro-chillout sound bed at oxygen bar in Berlin, where, in between sips of a well-turned Batida Garincha, I pointed out to a Portuguese transfer student that we were indeed proving Kant's Theory of Judgment by not just hanging out in a basement listening to AC/DC. She disagreed, saying I was a shallow denyer in the metaphysics of aesthetical choices. Sheesh, Europeans.
Ha! On Wednesday, Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times invoked some classic works of fiction to add color to his coverage of the ongoing investigation of the J. Paul Getty Trust:
Like something out of a Jane Austen novel, California's attorney general on Monday named a chaperon to accompany the J. Paul Getty Trust for two fiscal years. The Getty, headstrong and wayward, apparently requires some adult supervision.
On Thursday, a Houston Chronicle story on the Christian rock band BarlowGirl invoked Austen, but perhaps with more justification:
Although their romantic hopes sound a bit like the plot of a Jane Austen novel, their hard-rocking music and contemplative ballads are in step with the contemporary world.
Now, here's a thinker whose name you don't see dropped too often in newspapers and magazines. In a dispatch from the Copley News Service published today, Lynn O'Shaughnessy got off this bizarre zinger:
The hedge fund kings of Greenwich, Conn., and other tony ZIP codes, however, are no more likely to turn a lead pipe into a gold bar than they were when Thomas Aquinas was preoccupied with his theological writings.
Hedge fund kings and Aquinas?! Wow. Hats off to O'Shaughnessy!
A television ad for the new Sofia Coppola film "Marie Antoinette" cross-cuts between scenes of regal privilege and revolutionary tumult. A narrator lays out the storyline: A cosseted young aristocrat is thrust into social and political circumstances beyond her understanding! Marie cries in her room. Mobs gather in the streets. Lots of shots of Versailles.
Finally, the narrator intones: "Based on a true story."
The founder of the core-knowledge movement in K-12 education would not be surprised that someone -- probably correctly, unfortunately -- thought that that clarification was necessary.
I had the pleasure and honor, last night, of sitting at the bar at Doyle's (in Jamaica Plain) between two of my favorite Boston journalists: Walter V. Robinson, Pulitzer-winning reporter and head of the Globe's Spotlight Team, and (wait for it) Joe Keohane, editor of the Globe-trashing alt-newsweekly Boston's Weekly Dig.
Robinson & his younger self
Keohane & friend
I was pleased to have the opportunity to introduce Robbie to Joe, because one of the only things that the Dig actually likes about the Globe is... the work of Walter V. Robinson. (Make that liked: Robbie left the paper this past Friday for a professorship at Northeastern.) Later in the evening, after a few beers, I suggested to Joe that he launch a New York Herald-Tribune-style paper in Boston -- meaning a newspaperman's newspaper -- and hire us to work for him. Robbie made a crack that I won't repeat here... but I wasn't kidding!
(I know, this is supposed to be an ideas blog, so here's a list of some of the writers and thinkers who wrote for the Herald Tribune, from John Ashbery to Walter Lippmann to Charles Portis to Wallace Stevens.)
I'd been resisting joining the vast fray over L'Affaire Foley, but this post by the hugely popoular blogger Andrew Sullivan deserves some comment.
Sullivan takes the line that the issue has been overblown, because "we have no evidence (yet) of any actual sex; if we did, and it had happened in D.C., it would not have been legally under-age, because the age of consent is 16.... Now can we all calm down ... ?"
Sure, it would be better if we were all discussing war, torture, and climate change, as Sullivan says, but he is awfully soft on Foley. And it's surprising that Sullivan should be surprised or even dismayed that the scandal has mushroomed. Of course, the big issue here, as in nearly all political scandals, is less about the behavior but the alleged cover-up. How the House leadership did or did not deal with Foley's misbehavior is a genuine national concern.
It's hard to top Mark Foley in the unseemly use of electronic messages category, but over the last six months or so, several publications have noted a phenomenon not so much lewd, but troubling nonetheless: College coaches using text messages to recruit high school prospects.
The NCAA restricts the use of the telephone in recruiting, but texting falls outside the regulations. ESPN caught up with one Arrelious Benn, a highly touted high school wide receiver:
Sitting on his bed, sporting a backwards cap and T-shirt, Benn read off a list of schools that text messaged him just that day, from his T-mobile Sidekick. "Miami, Maryland, Auburn, Tennessee, Florida, Illinois," Benn said. "That's about it for now, but I'm pretty sure I'll get more later on." In one message, Tennessee head coach Phillip Fulmer wrote: "What's up playmaker? Do I have a chance to get you wearing orange and white?"
Recruiting by text has thrived in the regulatory gray area -- according to a recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education, many college teams now have an assistant coach known as the "text fiend" -- but the NCAA is taking up the issue at its annual convention in January. It's likely to ban or restrict the practice, if for no other reason than, now that wooing recruits with piles of cash has fallen out of style, a lot of these kids can't afford to pay their text-laden cellphone bills.
More on Pakistan/Afghanistan: Pankaj Mishra, a wonderful writer who was raised in rural India and writes from far-flung places for The New York Review of Books and other publications, was interviewed today on NPR's "Morning Edition" and discussed his experiences in Pakistan, recounted in his book "Temptations of the West."
Mishra talks about his 2001 visit to Peshawar, the gateway city to the lawless tribal regions along the border with Afghanistan explored in this week's episode of Frontline. At the time, pre-9/11, the city was teeming with Taliban, and spies tracked Mishra's comings and goings. He had a local fixer during this visit who told him, "They're all fanatics here." Frontline raises the question of whether that might still be the case.
Orin Kerr, a prolific law professor at George Washington University notes on The Volokh Conspiracy that the American Constitution Society has launched a new law journal, Harvard Law and Policy Review, which describes itself as "a forum for progressive debate about new and unorthodox solutions to the most pressing problems facing the nation."
Kerr also points out a worthy piece by Ian Bassin, former President of the Yale ACS student chapter, on the new journal's site. Bassin hopes Harvard Law and Policy Review will help liberal legal scholars articulate, critique, and defend their views, which are rarely examined with much rigor in today's left-leaning law schools. Bassin contrasts the experience of a campus conservative with a liberal:
Confronted with a chorus of opposing arguments, [the conservative student's] education is an intellectual boot camp. She’s been tested, her positions forged in fire, and she's emerged a refined soldier for her cause. The liberal, on the other hand, has spent his period of intellectual maturation on the couch so to speak. Every once in a while either throwing or receiving that knowing look, but never having to exert too much effort to get it right. While the conservative emerges muscular and defined, the liberal is paunchy and a bit slow.
Many commenters on the Volokh post nod in agreement with Bassin's characterizations.
The Chronicle of Higher Education this week throws a bit of cold water on the discovery of a new poem by Robert Frost, a farewell of sorts to a friend killed in World War I. Although the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, which published "War Thoughts at Home," called the find "staggering" -- the graduate student who made the discovery recounts it here -- the Chronicle contends that Frost left quite a few unfinished or unsatisfactory (to him) poems lying around. The article is for subscribers only, but this captures the gist:
"I'm very happy to see it happen. It's good for business," said Mark Richardson, the author or editor of several books on the poet, including "The Collected Prose of Robert Frost," which is scheduled to be in Harvard University Press's fall 2007 catalog. But "it's not so uncommon as, say, coverage in the New York Times would suggest," said Mr. Richardson, who is a professor of English at Doshisha University, in Kyoto, Japan. "There are a number of unpublished poems that scholars know of, residing in several libraries, that he never chose to publish."
For instance, Mr. Richardson pointed out, "the Amherst College Library has for 30 years been issuing various unpublished materials" of Frost's. Just this past spring, the Friends of the Amherst College Library put out a pamphlet containing two previously unknown Frost poems. Like "War Thoughts at Home," those two works -- "The Inscription in the Desert" and "Gone Astray" -- were jotted by the poet in books given to friends or acquaintances.
Because of an agreement with the Frost estate, the VQR couldn't put the poem online.
PS [added 10/05/06, 1:20 p.m.] Scott McLemee, the "Intellectual Affairs" columnist at Insidehighered.com, comments on the poem.
It's funny: Just an hour before Evan was transported by the score of Lost, I had a similar experience on a different network, watching the first episode of Friday Night Lights. The show was just as good as the critics have been saying. But I was particularly delighted to discover that the show will be scored by Explosions in the Sky, an indie rock band out of Austin that plays slow, mournful instrumentals. They were a wholly unlikely choice to score Peter Berg's film version of Buzz Bissinger's book, but an inspired one. A movie about high school football might more readily suggest an act like Sprung Monkey (which graces the Varsity Blues soundtrack), but Berg's film, and now his new show on NBC, are about football and about small-town Texas. The Explosions in the Sky sound isn't necessarily the best accompanyment to footage of a well-executed bootleg, but it is the perfect companion to a shot of Texas at twilight.
Last night's season premiere of the hit ABC television show "Lost" brought home one of the little-noted strengths of the show -- its unusual and slightly kooky score. Composed by Michael Giacchino, who graduated from video game scoring, it's a genre-busting melange of strings playing tremolo on the fingerboard or close to the bridge; horns blasting out quick crescendos; and an electronic-sounding deep and anxiety-provoking percussion.
Like the show itself, it's often overwrought, and it doesn't seem like it should work, but it just does.
The outstanding PBS program Frontline, one of Boston's great journalistic institutions, has another fine program this week, reviewed by Sam Allis in yesterday's Globe, about the resurgence of the Taliban in the tribal regions of Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan. The footage is eye-opening and disturbing, and producer Martin Smith interviews a number of the key players, including Richard Armitage, who says the current situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is creeping back in from Pakistan, is "a little more dire than we've seen it publicly portrayed." Smith also talks to Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf, who is under fire for failing to rein in the Taliban.
Barnett Rubin, the author of several books about Afghanistan, says on camera: "I cannot really overstate how important the stakes are. A U.S. military leader in Afghanistan said to me just last week that if we do not find a way to stabilize the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the United States will always be at risk."
The progam will air several times this week, and the DVD can be purchased here.
One note: Allis's favorable review calls this episode "a rarity for an outfit that is often behind the news." While that may be true, what Frontline offers is in-depth pieces of the kind that are no longer available elsewhere on television.
In Commentary magazine, Wilfred M. McClay, a history and humanities professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, has written a rave review of Darrin M. McMahon's book "Happiness: A History" that bears reading.
McClay highlights McMahon's vision of happiness as a notion that has evolved with the changing currents of intellectual life -- a concept "with a history, a long and varied trajectory that, when revealed, shows our age's approach to be far from the norm."
What lends weight to the review is its claim that McMahon is exceptionally able to capture the way our beliefs come to bear on history:
Nor can I think of a recent book that does a better job of making a case for the central importance of ideas in history. As McMahon shows repeatedly, the pattern of expectations to which the pursuit of happiness conforms itself in any given age -- the age's vision of feasible felicity, so to speak, and the means one uses to reach it -- is itself a product of the dominant contemporary ideas: ideas about life, death, God, nature, causality, moral responsibility, and human possibility. In a word, what we believe about the world’s structure and meaning will determine what we think happiness is, and how we can act to gain it for ourselves.
On Monday, Oct. 9, at 6-8 pm, we are informed, Cafe Sci (formerly Cafe Scientifique) will meet at the Redline bar & grill in Harvard Square.
I wrote about the first Cambridge meeting of Cafe Sci, which featured Harvard astronomer Robert Kirshner talking about the expanding universe over beers, for Ideas a few years ago. (The European movement was imported to Cambridge when the British magazine New Scientist opened an office here.) More recently, James Parker wrote a fun Ideas column about a Cafe Sci meeting at which MIT roboticist James McLurkin led an exercise in "emergent behavior."
Monday's session, which will feature David Kaiser, faculty member at MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society and Department of Physics, is on "a new arrangement of matter known only as element 114." Cafe Sci is open to the public. Info: Contact Ben Wiehe at (617) 300-3980, or ben_wiehe@wgbh.org
Some, in our forum, and in emails, suggest that Halpern wants to "tear down" Rockwell -- although Halpern arguably treats him with more respect than the many critics who consider his work pure kitsch. Others suggest Halpern is saying Rockwell created "pornography," which equates placing a sexual image in a painting with posting videos of Paris Hilton on the Web.
What I want to touch on here is the widespread objection to the very notion that a wholesome fellow like Rockwell would even contemplate commenting on sexuality in a painting -- and the related belief that to see a sexual subtext in a work or situation that's obviously "innocent" is to have a twisted and perverse mind.
If that's the standard, Rockwell himself had a twisted and perverse mind. Set aside his art for a moment. In his autobiography, "My Adventures as an Illustrator," he makes it quite clear that he's willing to play with the line between innocent and not-so-innocent. Consider this running joke between Rockwell and two of his favorite young-teenage models (when Rockwell worked in a studio in New Rochelle, New York, that was part of a larger building):
Four ground glass windows faced the hallway to the other offices. When Bill and Eddie saw the shadow of a passing person on the glass, they'd shuffle their feet and scream, "Oh, Mr. Rockwell, don't! Please. Oh, Mr. Rockwell, we didn't know you were that kind of man." And I could see the person stop and turn his head to listen. Then Billie and Eddie would fall silent and the person would put his head close to the window so that he could hear better. But Billy and Eddie always ruined their own game at this point by breaking into shouts of laughter.
What pervert could possibly think of anything sexual at all when pondering the idea of Norman Rockwell in his studio, alone, with teenage models? Well, let's see: the teenagers, the people in the hallway outside the studio (once prompted) ... and Norman Rockwell. Of course, nothing actually perverse is taking place, but the joke was hanging in the air, and the kids grabbed it, and Rockwell found it hilarious.
Rockwell is also quite arch, in "My Adventures," in describing his searches for new models:
For days I'd hang around the grade schools at recess, peer over fences into back yards, haunt the vacant lots, and stop little boys on the street, turning them around and sideways to see if they were the type I wanted.
Rockwell knows full well how all this looks. (And the children's parents had a few ideas, too: "He seemed like a nice man," one says. "But I'd heard he'd been to Paris.") It's a very funny passage. But if the reader of the autobiography isn't willing to entertain the idea that Rockwell might make an off-color allusion (here, to the kind of creepy men who "haunt" playgrounds), she's not going to get the joke.
All this -- which Halpern discusses -- says nothing about the paintings. But it may show that Rockwell's sense of humor, his sensibility, were a touch "darker and more complex" than some people give him credit for.
The 2006 installment of the Best American Science and Nature Writing is out, and we at Ideas are proud to note that staff writer Drake Bennett is among the anthologized. Naturally, we'd have preferred if editor Brian Greene had selected one of the fine pieces on science Drake has written for Ideas -- say, his piece on Daniel Dennett, whose work also shows up in the '06 Best American. But we can't really argue with their pick: Drake's fascinating profile of Alexander Shulgin, the man who introduced Ecstasy to the world, which ran in the New York Times Magazine.
The Guardian has a snappy interview with the singer Pete Doherty, the frontman of Babyshambles and formerly the Libertines, who's done a couple stints in jail for various misdeeds. Doherty, known for his thoughtful lyrics, waxes enthusiastic about the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon, and the influence of Emily Dickinson on his work: "Aargh, she's outrageous man! She's [bleep] hardcore! Can't ignore her."
He also credits his time in prison for improving his intellectual range:
But could he read a lot in prison? "Ah, man!" he smiles gleefully. "I've got a shelf full of books with [the prison names] HMP Pentonville, HMP Wandsworth on them, smuggled 'em out, yeah. Crime and Punishment I read! Except my cellmate at the time kept on pulling his shorts down...
A number of reporters on the hot, hot trail of Rep. Mark Foley's suggestive instant messages to teenage congressional pages have described those e-mails as lurid. Now that I've read the exchanges, though, I'm wondering if some journalists these days think lurid is a euphemism, or maybe a dysphemism, for lewd.
It's not. Lurid, from the Latin for "pale, wan," means "Causing shock or horror; gruesome," or "Marked by sensationalism," says the American Heritage Dictionary. In a note on synonyms, it adds:
[Lurid] describes what shocks because of its terrible and ghastly nature: lurid crimes. At other times, it merely refers to glaring and usually unsavory sensationalism: a lurid account of the accident.
So there's nothing inherently sexy about lurid. Lewd, on the other hand, has one thing on its mind: "Preoccupied with sex and sexual desire; lustful," it means, or "obscene; indecent."
Coverage of the Foley story may well achieve luridness ("unsavory sensationalism"); the facts, too, may prove to be more lurid ("terrible and ghastly") than we know today. But the congressman's icky e-mails don't deserve the drama of the lurid label; they're just plain old lewd.
A piece in the Phila. Inquirer reports on the uncertain status of H.L. Mencken's house in Baltimore. (He moved in at age 3 and more or less never moved out.) The house was for many years a museum, but it's been shuttered since 1997.
The Inqy suggests that one reason the house has stayed closed is that, despite his bulletproof literary legacy, Mencken is also remembered in Baltimore for some racially insensitive observations he made, making him a dangerous cause for local pols. Naturally, this nettles Mencken enthusiasts:
David Thaler, a Mencken buff and vice president of the Maryland Historical Society...thinks his man's locked home and politically incorrect reputation are "very much related."
"Mencken has gotten what I believe is a bad rap," says Thaler, author of a monograph titled The Mencken Paradox. "There are no schools named for him. There's no statues. There are schools named for everybody. Attila the Hun's brother-in-law has a school named for him, but not Mencken."
Yet Richard Pickens, treasurer of the Society to Preserve H.L. Mencken's Legacy, doesn't see race as the issue: "I think the explanation's very simple -- lack of money. Lack of priority. The city's got its hands full."
