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| November 5, 2006 - November 11, 2006 »
November 4, 2006
Remember the SAT scandal last March, when nearly 5,000 college-bound students learned that their tests had been misscored? That was no fluke, say Bloomberg reporters David Glovin and David Evans. Bad tests and faulty scoring, their new report says, have affected "at least 500,000 people taking tests from 2000 through 2006 -- from Nevada third graders to aspiring teachers."
The SAT snafu was a hardware problem, but human scorers are also fallible – and sometimes unqualified. Florida's testing contract specified that scorers would have bachelor's degrees in academic subjects, but the records show that promise wasn't kept:
A person from Hungary wrote he was a "pyshical education'' major. A physical education major from Methodist College in Fayetteville, North Carolina, wrote that she had attended "Methidist College.''
Sometimes the problem is the test itself:
In 2003, the Minnesota Department of Education found flaws in questions proposed by [its test provider]. About 6 percent had no correct answers or multiple correct answers.
Money, of course, plays a part, especially when companies bid on low-margin No Child Left Behind contracts.
Companies often scrimp when they bid on No Child contracts, Eduventures analyst Tim Wiley says. . . . ``As with any bidding situation, it definitely requires a lot of cost cutting,'' Wiley says. ``Or, in some cases, cutting corners.''
Educational Testing Service, which wrongly flunked 4,100 teachers on certification tests, will pay $11 million to settle their lawsuit. But one of those teachers, fired after four "failures" on the test, remains bitter: ``I was just about to get tenure, and I had to start all over again.''
Posted by Jan Freeman at 12:58 PM
November 3, 2006
In the past, I've inclined toward the view that much of the hand-wringing about negative ads is overdone. Why shouldn't a Republican who believes that the Iraq war has struck a blow against terrorists argue that his or her opponent, who considers it a strategic debacle, is weak on national security? Similarly, why can't a Democrat who supports stem-cell research argue that a Republican who opposes it stands in the way of medical breakthroughs -- without getting tut-tutted by goo goo pundits? We define ourselves in part by what we stand against. I wrote about a (not entirely convincing) book called "In Defense of Negativity" earlier this year. (Sample quote: "If negativity ever happened to disappear from our electoral battles, we can safely assume that so would our freedoms.")
The ads this year, though, test the fiber of even the most staunchly pro-negative among us. Evan has cited the ad targeting U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford, but that's kid stuff compared to this, which Paul R. Nelson, a Republican, is running against Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wisc.). The shock jocks Opie and Anthony have been bowing down before this ad, citing it, partisanship aside, as a work of demented genius. (The ad says Kind votes against military spending and cancer research, preferring to use tax dollars to research "the masturbation habits of old men" and to pay "teenage girls to watch pornography with probes attached to their genitals." An earlier version of the ad was used against Democratic Rep. Brad Miller, of North Carolina.) Here's another Nelson ad, ridiculing a fictional marriage between "two dudes."
The nonpartisan ad dissectors at Factcheck.org, based at the University of Pennsylvania, call the sex-studies ad "fact-twisting bunk." (They analyze the North Carolina version.) More broadly, here are the group's analyses of ads financed this fall by the Democratic National Campaign Committee (DCCC) and the Republican National Campaign Committee (RNCC).
No shortage of bunkum on either side, but whether it's because they're behind in many races, or because they are running on "values" issues -- and therefore want to portray the Democrats as morally impaired -- the Republicans are running nastier, more personal ads this year, the group concludes.
More fact-checking can be found here.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:13 PM
November 3, 2006
How did I miss this? The collaborative blog D___ Interesting has a darn interesting post today about the spontaneous birth of a language. The brief essay isn't particularly well done, but it introduced me to a fascinating bit of news. Maybe everyone else knows this.
It seems that a group of deaf, illiterate students at the same school in Nicaragua developed their own intricate sign language, complete with a system of syntax that included, get this, subject-verb agreement. Again, they were illiterate. These children, lacking all but the most basic language skills to begin with, had a lot of trouble learning existing worldwide sign languages.
Prior to these attempts at teaching them to communicate, deaf children in Nicaragua had interacted with their respective families via idiosyncratic systems of very rudimentary gestures (known as mimicas in Spanish). This meant that deaf children from different families couldn't even understand each other, let alone form friendships.
But an interesting effect appeared once the many deaf children had begun interacting in the group setting of the schools. The children started learning and elaborating on one another's mimicas, and the resulting system of signs rapidly grew. The amazed teachers watched as their students began to communicate quite successfully among themselves.
I find it particularly remarkable that the language was not in fact collectively created whole cloth. It involved meshing together existing signs that kids brought from home. A language wiki. This had to mean resolving conflicts, e.g. how to choose between competing signals meaning "I'm hungry."
This was one of those magic moments when a group of people essentially created the conditions for an enormously important experiment without anyone organizing the game. And what a success the experiment was.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:33 PM
November 3, 2006
A Metafilter post draws attention to a smattering of new research into animal consciousness, including an update of a Stanford study. This is an issue that has obvious ethical implications in a time when the global food economy relies heavily on animal products of various kinds. Whether it is morally permissible to slaughter animals for our pleasure, when alternate foods with the requisite nutritional value exist, might be thought to hinge on just how these creatures experience their own death.
In an essay called "Consider the Lobster," from the book of the same name, David Foster Wallace fretted over the cruel (?) fate of the tasty crustaceans, who, after being tricked into capture by a clever enter-only trap (have you seen how this works?), are routinely killed by being dunked head first into boiling water. Peter Singer, a Princeton professor and a polarizing figure in ethical philosophy for a multitude of reasons, is by far the most prominent voice for animal rights in the academic world, and possibly in society as a whole.
Another reason to care about animal consciousness even if we think we aren't interested: As the Stanford essay begins to suggest, one important way we define what it means to be a person, and what it takes to be endowed with certain rights, is to distinguish between us and the "lower" animals. Why is it acceptable to kill a monkey (or is it?) and not a person? It's a harder question to answer than it might appear. Is it our capacity to feel pleasure and pain, our ability to to plan for the future, to have dreams, to carry out complex reasoning? But what if monkeys have all that, or have enough of it to trump a person in a vegetative state, or even an infant?
These and other questions might gain some clarity soon, as our science improves. To see where we are now, there's also an episode of the PBS program Nature, on the same topic.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:20 PM
November 3, 2006
Ezra Klein, who is really gathering steam as a thoughtful blogger, has a gutsy post today after a few days of thinking about L'Affaire Kerry -- the joke John Kerry seemed to make about the education level of American soldiers in Iraq. (For the record, I'm still not sure that's what he meant. That he was making a joke about the Administration seems plausible enough to me.)
But Klein takes seriously the question of troop education level, and in general the demographic profile of the men and women who are over there representing the country. Klein risks the backlash against frank talk about soldiers to say that we don't do the troops, or the debate about the war, any favors if we "dreamily speak of the great sacrifice, magnificent courage, inspiring intellect, and extraordinary characters of our troops. It's ... designed to make us feel better, so we don't have to face what we've done to these children, and don't have to imagine the toll a warzone takes on real humans, rather than imagined supermen." I think it's worth quoting a bit more:
I had a friend who ended up a biohazard unit during the early days of the invasion. He's an amazing person: gentle, empathic, wise, and courageous. He went to a top college and enlisted after 9/11. He's precisely the soldier we like to describe. But he spent his days terrified, waiting for calls back home, waiting for his tour to close. He performed his duties well and displayed enormous personal strength, but he was just a kid, and his expression of patriotism had landed him in hell.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:52 AM
November 2, 2006
An 18-year-old blogger from Singapore's upper crust has created a surprisingly far-reaching series of ripples with a single post. Her online screed, now removed from her blog but reproduced here (did anyone doubt it would live on?), rips a hole or five in the fairly innocuous views of a young man named Derek Wee, who expressed concerns about the economic insecurity of many people in Singapore. Both Derek Wee and his younger critic, Ms. Wee Shu Min, are the children of prominent politicians in the country.
Ms. Wee leveled her sights at Mr. Wee (no relation) without even a nod at the norms of decorum, which seem to be particularly exacting in Singapore. Ms. Wee also touched some hot buttons by accusing Mr. Wee, apparently below her position in the class structure, of laziness and entitlement:
derek, derek, derek darling, how can you expect to have an iron ricebowl or a solid future if you cannot spell?
if you're not good enough, life will kick you in the balls. that's just how things go....
dear derek is one of many wretched, undermotivated, overassuming leeches in our country, and in this world. one of those who would prefer to be unemployed and wax lyrical about how his myriad talents are being abandoned for the foreigner's, instead of earning a decent, stable living as a sales assistant. it's not even about being a road sweeper. these !!^#bags don't want anything without "manager" and a name card.
This is just a particularly nasty and polarized forms of an old debate about political philosophy. But again, it's remarkable how much these off-the-cuff remarks have gone beyond Singapore's borders. Ms. Wee's name was for a time the third most popular search term at the blog search engine Technorati.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:21 PM
November 2, 2006
Art Spiegelman, the graphic novelist and memoirist, best-known for "Maus," which won a Pulitzer in 1993, has been working on an autobiography, after his own fashion. The Virginia Quarterly Review is publishing sections of it as Spiegelman finishes them. Only excerpts are available online, but from them you can still get a sense of the arc of a distinctive -- not to mention idiosyncratic and, by now, improbably distinguished -- life.
VQR and the artist are now up to Episode Three, in which Spiegelman meets his mentor, the filmmaker and SUNY-Binghampton professor Ken Jacobs, and stumbles toward the idea that will form the basis of his breakthrough book.
In an earlier installment, a young Spiegelman discovers a cultural object that will change his life: Mad magazine, which he calls "my Talmud."
(Fun fact: From 1966 to 1989, Spiegelman worked for Topps Chewing Gum -- that's how he paid his rent -- helping to create Wacky Packages and, later, the Garbage Pail Kids. Josh Glenn mentioned that aspect of Spiegelman's career in an "Examined Life" column last year.)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:59 PM
November 2, 2006
By now you know that William Styron, a writer best known for the wrenching novel "Sophie's Choice," has died in Martha's Vineyard of pneumonia. Styron had, as Norman Mailer said yesterday, an incomparably "omnipresent and exquisite ... sense of the elegiac." Whether his struggles with severe depression contributed to his gentle yet penetrating touch with the dark side of the human condition is hard to know, but a difficult conclusion to resist.
Styron is to be commended, I believe, for his frank and even beautiful discussion of his mental illness, long before it was fashionable, or even acceptable in certain polite circles, to commit such private pain in print. His "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness," to be re-released by the Modern Library in Janoary, remains a keystone of the literature. It was illuminating and universal rather than merely revealing and personal. In that book he memorably rejected the word depression as flat, misleading, and insufficient to capture the horror of the lived experience. "Brainstorm" would come closer to describing the attack from within, he felt, if it were not already in use for another, lowlier purpose. Styron will be missed.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:07 PM
November 2, 2006
For those who have been tracking my small obsession with Diebold and the perils of today's touch-screen voting machines, or for those who would rather trust another source, a documentary called "Hacking Democracy"is to air tonight at 9 on HBO.
The film seems to cast an even more suspicious eye toward Diebold, the foremost voting machine manufacturer (whose chief executive once inadvisedly promised President Bush in writing "to deliver the electoral votes of Ohio"). The doc features a dowdy-looking grandmother who has made it her cause, along with a group of committed friends and colleagues, to exposes the security weaknesses of computerized vote counters. She's disturbed by what she's found. With so many races across the country hanging in the balance come Tuesday -- rather than one Presidential race -- perhaps we should be disturbed as well.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:49 AM
November 1, 2006
This month brings a new coffee table book from the creators of Spy magazine, "Spy: The Funny Years." An admission that not all their years were funny, or are they saying the funny years all belonged to Spy? Who cares?
The brains behind Spy, Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis, are responsible for the book, too, although you wonder how much time Carter and Andersen, busy guys, really put in. But never mind.
Print magazine has published a snappy review by a good editorial choice, Village Voice gossip hand Michael Musto. His memories of the satirical mag makes me wish I were in New York in the heyday. It seems mainstream media hadn't started hitting power below the belt till these young guys came in and started ransacking the apartments of the sassy and too-powerful. Now wannabe insiders have Gawker, an all-day free version of Spy in Musto's interpretation, but it ain't the same, especially when it's already been done better.
A good bit from Musto, about Spy: "It made spitting at famous people a spectator sport, and did so with academic humor that elevated it from tabloid-trashy sniping into the realm of sophisticated spite."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:55 PM
November 1, 2006
ABC News is reporting that computer disks sent this week to Maryland legislators from an unknown sender "contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland's new electronic voting machines." Diebold denies that the disks are dangerous because election workers can reset passwords -- which seems a tacit admission that the disks could otherwise be effectively used.
Moreover, ABC says that a report commissioned by the state reveals that many Diebold machines in use today still have the factory default passwords. (Haven't we all lazily "forgotten" to change an automatically provided password?)
ABC adds a sobering roundup of technical glitches already experienced by Diebold machines, including adding phantom votes in Texas and providing directions for voters with vision problems in Vietnamese. Again, we don't have to suspect Diebold or anyone else of vote tampering to find this troubling. Unintentional technical bugs are more likely and still threaten to undermine the value of each American vote.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:55 PM
November 1, 2006
On the collaborative blog of the longtime New York Press film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, a lively forum has broken out over the the top five movie monologues of all time. Seitz friend and fellow contributor Edward Copeland, an active blogger on a range of topics, started the thread with this post.
Copeland cites "Dr. Strangelove," "Network," "Jaws," "Pulp Fiction" -- "I'm tryin' reeeal hard to be the shepherd" -- and "Witches of Eastwick" (?). In the comments section below the post, which has gathered some traffic from other sites, things get more interesting. "Judgment at Nuremberg" gets a mention, as does Judd Nelson in "The Breakfast Club" (quite a range), and two personal favorites:
1) Alec Baldwin's outright theft of "Glengarry Glen Ross," as the merciless boss of some desperate salesmen. "What's my name? What's my name? I drove in on a BMW. You drove in on a Hyundai. THAT's my [bleeping] name."
2) Woody Allen, playing Isaac in "Manhattan" but really playing himself, lies on the couch on the phone with a friend, enumerating the little things that make life worth living: "Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues..."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:31 AM
November 1, 2006
Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, author of numerous important books examining, among other things, what he called "the systems of meaning, beliefs, values, world views, forms of feeling, styles of thought, in terms of which particular peoples construct their existence," and a longtime professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, died on Monday, at the age of 80, of complications following heart surgery.
Geertz
Geertz was one of the last of a vanishing breed, the public intellectual. He was a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and wrote perhaps the best work (IMHO) of meta-social-science ever, "Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author" for which he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism, in 1988. Those of us impatient with the jargon-laden and trivial output of today's over-professionalized academic will miss him greatly.
An exhaustive obituary was published yesterday on the website of the Institute for Advanced Study.
(Via A&L Daily)
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:09 AM
October 31, 2006
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.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:15 PM
October 31, 2006
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.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:45 PM
October 31, 2006
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.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 01:37 PM
October 31, 2006
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.
(Via Boing Boing)
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:55 PM
October 31, 2006
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."
Terry Eagleton, writing in the London Review of Books, is more blunt in his criticism. His opening:
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.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:50 AM
October 30, 2006
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.
OK, come back next Monday for more.
Previous installments: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:36 PM
October 30, 2006
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.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:10 PM
October 30, 2006
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!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:10 PM
October 30, 2006
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:
1) Breeden's cartoon (at top left)
2) Handelsman's cartoon
Seems like an open-and-shut case.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:42 AM
October 30, 2006
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?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:41 AM
October 30, 2006
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.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 10:49 AM
October 30, 2006
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."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 09:40 AM
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