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:
