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| December 17, 2006 - December 23, 2006 »
December 15, 2006
Former President Carter's new book about the Middle East has been attacked from many sides: Some find its criticism of Israeli policy offensive and even anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, a prominent Emory University professor and former director of the Carter Center has charged that Carter's version of certain high-level meetings is not to be trusted.
Pedants are pre-occupied with a different issue: Where's the colon?
The book's title -- not just on the cover, where designers can do what they want, but also on the formal title page -- is presented as "Palestine Peace not Apartheid." That's a pretty odd formulation. How does one read it aloud?
In the Globe, writers and editors insert the colon you expect to see: "Palestine: Peace not Apartheid." Ah, yes: order is restored to the universe.
However, in this scathing Washington Post review, and in this Post piece about the brouhaha surrounding the book, the editors went with President Carter's and Simon & Schuster's awkward version. (Curiously, the Post's Op-Ed editors made a different call in a Michael Kinsley column.)
The New York Times, too, is going with the awkward "Palestine Peace not Apartheid."
(I'm told the Post's internal message board was briefly lit up with heated debate over this vital issue. Finally, one wag made the point that obsessing about colons isn't exactly the way to win over those younger readers everyone's always talking about.)
Newspaper copy editors generally don't pay much heed to the sometimes-daft ways that outsiders choose to render their product names or titles. Otherwise, you'd have read stories about a TV show called "NUMB3RS." But evidently overruling a former President on a style point is a bit harder.
A beleaguered-sounding publicist at Simon & Schuster just returned my call, to confirm that, yes, omitting the colon was a conscious choice. Someone else took the message, so I didn't get a chance to ask why. I don't think I'll call back, as I suspect she has enough on her plate already.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:31 PM
December 15, 2006
The blogosphere is all abuzz with the latest news about ... blogs. BBC News:
The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.
The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.
Gartner has also predicted, perhaps more interestingly, that Microsoft's Vista, appearing soon, will be the last version of Windows ever made. But back to blogs. Technorati, the blog search site, presents a picture that conflicts with Gartner's: they see blogs as an ever-growing phenomenon. In any case, it would seem to me that the trend-line worth paying attention to is whether blogs begin to improve in quality as they became embraced as an alternate form of legitimate media. Ahem.
But Frank Fisher, at the Guardian blog Comment Is Free, is already throwing blogging under the bus. The next big thing, he says, is "slife" -- that is, "slice of life" videos:
Not an after-the-fact, edited and considered diary, but a real-time feed of daily life, streaming from lapel cameras and mikes, via your phone or PDA's 3G connection, up to a web server and then to the world. "Who would watch that?" you cry. Are you kidding? Billions.
I'm pretty sure his tongue's in cheek, but this is actually a pretty perceptive extrapolation from the phenomenon of YouTube, which has surpassed blogging in buzz. Who thought anyone would watch other people's home movies?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:24 PM
December 15, 2006
New York City long ago went smoke-free; nothing doing for the man with a Marlboro in restaurants, bars, or in fact any indoor space I can think of. Now the European countries, of all places, are falling in line. Germany is among the latest to ban most indoor tobacco use, I believe.
But Ohio?! Yes, folks, it's gone there, too, after voters passed "Issue 5" in November. The uproar in the great football state has been something to behold, I'm told by multiple sources.
The freshest -- and funniest -- account comes from the excellent blogger Scott McLemee, writing at Crooked Timber. The humor begins with the title, "First They Came For the Snuff Dippers, and I Did Not Speak Out, For I Was Not a Snuff Dipper." McLemee quotes a truly astounding example of the time-honored genre of the hysterical, anti-government letter to the editor, this one from the Toledo Blade. Here's the quote:
In their quest to form a perfect world run by perfect people and rule over all others, corrupt little Nazi German people who could not control their own unhappy lives tried to control the lives others for their own good. But freedom-loving people rose up against them and restored freedom.... My main concern as I get older and near retirement is people will live longer and as Social Security fails, what will be the Smoke Nazis' final solution to that problem?
McLemee's rejoinder: "Gosh, you don't suppose they would enforce mandatory smoking for the elderly in order to kill them off? That would be evil. But also sort of appropriate, what with being Smoke Nazis and everything."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:39 PM
December 15, 2006
This buzz-creating paper, by an MIT engineer and an MIT business professor, is heavy-going [and a pdf] -- only academics and financial whizzes should bother downloading it -- but it suggests that we plebeians may soon be able to crash the hedge-fund party.
As readers of the business pages know, hedge funds these days are at the center of the financial world -- secretive, gigantic investment pools, open only to the wealthiest individuals and institutions.
But the MIT scholars, Jasmina Hasanhodzic and Andrew Lo, suggest that while some of the investment returns earned by these funds derives from the individual savvy of the managers, most comes more simply from their creative mixes of different investment instruments. In other words, the authors say, it may be possible to replicate the returns of hedge funds -- or come close, anyway -- through low-cost methods relying on copycat formulas.
Two implications: First, ordinary investors might eventually have access to funds earning larger returns than the mutual funds they now choose among. (Even some investors who could afford to buy into hedge funds, such as pension managers, shy from them because of their lack of transparency and liquidity. The clones would have more of both.) Second, managers of real hedge funds might have to lower their gargantuan fees, once word gets out that their investment strategies aren't as unique and mysterious as we thought.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:42 AM
December 15, 2006
This post is not meant to point out a well-turned article or an interesting argument advanced online. I just want to turn attention to a piece of news that didn't make the front page. It's meaningful news to many people: newly released data show that death sentences have declined dramatically in recent years, by as much as 60 percent since 1999.
Why? No one can be certain, but one quote seems to capture the prevailing theory:
"You could call this the DNA era," [Richard C. Dieter, who heads the Death Penalty Information Center,] said. "It’s been quite a phenomenon over the last eight years and has had a great impact in raising doubts about the reliability of verdicts."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:24 AM
December 14, 2006
Zadie Smith and Salman Rushdie aside, American readers demand a particular vision of England in their English novels, Benjamin Markovits argues in this essay for the British magazine Prospect.
Is the fact that English writers keep giving us what we want -- lots of "public schools" (even in Harry Potter!), Oxbridge, and clever upper-middle-class banter, for example -- a sign of artistic bankruptcy, or of a robust tradition?
(Martin Amis thinks -- or thought -- the former, writing, in 1990: "In its current form, the typical English novel is 225 sanitised pages about the middle classes. You know, 'well-made' with the nice colour scheme and decor, and matching imagery.")
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:54 PM
December 14, 2006
Attention frustrated law students: Daniel J. Solove -- an associate professor at George Mason Law (do all those GMU people blog?) -- feels your pain.
Wow, this post feels like it was written by a student, don't you think? The system of grading exams, a widespread activity this time of year, is simple, says Solove. You toss the stack of exams down a staircase. Where the individual exams land -- well, that determines the curve! The only matter of debate is whether the exams that end up lower get lower grades or vice versa:
While many professors still practice the top-higher-grade approach, the leading authorities subscribe to the bottom-higher-grade theory, despite its counterintuitive appearance. The rationale for this view is that the exams that fall lower on the staircase have more heft and have traveled farther. The greater distance traveled indicates greater knowledge of the subject matter.
I know he's kidding, but all the more reason to ask: the guy's a bona fide professor? I have this feeling not everyone is finding this post funny.
Thanks to Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:20 PM
December 14, 2006
Tomorrow, Prickly Paradigm Press, about whom I've written for Ideas, will publish an excellent pamphlet by Danny Postel, a Chicago-based intellectual and political activist who I've known and admired for years.
"Reading 'Legitimation Crisis' in Tehran" asks why American progressives, human rights activists, and antiwar types seem so indifferent to the plight of Iranian progressives, who in the past year have suffered from a brutal crackdown -- by the Ahmadinejad government -- on dissident intellectuals and newspapers, trade unionists, student movement leaders, and human rights organizations. (A veteran of the Central America solidarity movement of the 1980s, Postel sees no similar efforts today with respect to Iran.)
The short answer, according to Postel, is that most American leftists view Iran through
the prism of American imperialism, which is no less an American prism for being critical, as opposed to uncritical, of US foreign policy.
By that, Postel means that American lefists are uncomfortable with the idea of being on the same side of a movement to reform or topple a foreign government as the Bush administration. Especially when it comes to Iran, where the CIA infamously toppled a government already. In Guatemala (or Indochina, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, or East Timor), by contrast, solidarity with the victims of military juntas was an extension of one's opposition to the US Empire.
What can western supporters of those fighting for democracy, feminism, pluralism, human rights, and freedom of expression in Iran do to help? Postel, who pointedly identifies himself in his pamphlet not as a leftist but a liberal, suggests that those of us whose solidarity is with all people struggling for liberation from oppression take inspiration not from Marxist, postcolonialist, and poststructuralist thinkers, but from liberal political philosophers like Jurgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper -- i.e., the heroes of American neocons.
UPDATE: After an email exchange with Postel, I retract these imprecise, misleading, and partially incorrect lines.
How to be a liberal who is not a neocon? Postel suggests that American have a lot to learn from Iranian intellectuals and activists who have rediscovered "radical liberalism" as a fighting faith, and that liberals need to roll up their sleeves and engage in the kind of solidarity politics that the US Left, to its credit, is known for.
There's much more to this slim pamphlet, including a fascinating interview with Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, who was arrested last year, and who (despite his maddeningly vague arguments in favor of a "soft univeralism" of human values) emerges as an extremely charismatic figure; and a close psychological reading of Michel Foucault's illiberal 1978-79 articles in support of the Iranian Revolution.
I read the pamphlet every morning before work last week, on the subway; couldn't put it down! Great stocking stuffer...
UPDATE: Scott McLemee weighs in on all this.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:58 PM
December 14, 2006
At The Economist blog called Free Exchange, well worth a regular read, a new post is perceptive about the scourge of "padded" books -- that is, books that should really be long articles. The problem at the root of this phenomenon, says the writer, is psychological. It's about what economists call "sunk costs." A recognition that you have spent a lot of money on a renovation to your house leads you, logically or not (that part's debatable), to spend a bunch more making it "perfect" (as if such a thing were possible). Spending leads to spending. This is most visible, as the Economist blogger says, at casinos. "Well I'm down $200 -- can't stop now."
In the case of authors, they sink a lot of time (the freelancer's currency) into an article that naturally ends up leaving out much of the research and even writing that they put into the project. A book, then! But of course, much more effort is required to make a well-constructed book-length piece of writing. Which means either that (usually) the writer drains herself pouring time into a book that readers of the article pass over or, and this is more common among big shots, she doesn't put in the required extra effort and risks a skewering in the reviews. The answer, I suppose, is restraint; maybe agents contribute to a thirst for something more?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:07 PM
December 14, 2006
Speaking of "Brainiac's treatment" of Alex Beam, the Globe columnist, let me explain: Last week, I noted that the Web site IvyGate, co-edited by Beam's son, Chris was "whining" that Beam had "pilfered" (my words) a story idea about Felicia Nimue Ackerman, a Brown professor.
IvyGate did, in fact, complain ...but it was a complaint with a higher irony quotient than I realized. As this New York Observer piece explains, Alex Beam had the idea to write about Ackerman first. Then he casually mentioned the idea to Chris Beam, who wrote about it first, on IvyGate. So, to be clear, there was no "pilfering" involved.
I presented the whole pseudo-dispute as a joke, but I did also leave a misleading impression.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:00 PM
December 14, 2006
Speaking of Second Life intellectual-celebrity appearances, as John did yesterday, Fri. night from 9p to 11p (prime computer-addict hours?), the virtual community/universe will play host to the fourth anniversary party of Creative Commons, an organization dedicated to freeing the world, and particularly the Internet, from the bonds of an antiquated concept known as copyright.
Among the appearances: Lawrence Lessig, author of "Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity," which he made available free online, and a prominent enemy of copyright lawsuits; Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, the creator and presiding guru of Wikipedia, the user-generated encyclopedia on which no one can protect or profit from their work; and Joi Ito, a longtime Internet hand who wandered around in his post-collegiate years (that's funny, me too!) but now is a bigwig techie at Technorati, as well as a big investor, having sold his heavily venture-capitalized startup for gobs a few years ago. (Weren't those the days?)
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:38 AM
December 14, 2006
Globe columnist Alex Beam -- his office is right across from mine; last week, he busted my chops about Brainiac's treatment of him -- published his annual satirical family newsletter, detailing the antics of the fictional Joye family, in yesterday's paper.
With real end-of-the-year missives, you're forced to read between the lines to get the whole story; Alex does it for us:
You know our son, little Jon-Jon, and how he likes to follow in his Dad's footsteps! He's plunged into the fast-growing "offset" trading business for people like Al Gore who want to lead "carbon neutral" lifestyles. Every time you consume energy generated by bad old fossil fuels, Jon-Jon will find you an offsetting investment in renewable energy, like wind or solar power. Now I'm glad we planted him in front of "Captain Planet" when he was a baby.
(There's gilt in guilt all right. J-J is piling up investments from families ashamed of piloting their six-ton Lexus SUVs around America's national parks. The money goes right into his pocket, of course, but he provides extensive "documentation" for customers eager to sound off about their wind farm investments in some woebegone corner of the US, like West Dakota.)
This year, for the first time, Alex exhumed all of his previous Joye letters and made them available online. Here are the links:
2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 -- the year irony died | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 -- not sure what happened | 1995 | 1994 | 1993
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:45 AM
December 13, 2006
Richard Posner gave a lecture today -- in Second Life. Details, and a pointer to a transcript, here.
Posted by John Swansburg at 08:03 PM
December 13, 2006
At The Volokh Conspiracy, David E. Bernstein, a professor at the George Mason law school who has been published by the libertarian Cato Institute, points to an important piece of long-form team reporting from Sunday's Washington Post.
The article is about a successful large-scale lobbying effort by the dairy industry, which managed to block a small milk producer from undercutting the competition by around 20 cents a gallon -- no small amount, as experience at the gas pump will tell you -- largely by bottling his own milk. As Bernstein points out, the piece raises two issues, which cut in opposite directions politically. One, which Bernstein highlights, is that the free market is sometimes squelched by anti-competitive legislation -- by a government that tends to be viewed by liberals, says Bernstein, as a consistent source of good works.
The other matter, more likely to be embraced by liberals themselves, is the enormous influence of lobbyists and the lasting need, despite McCain-Feingold, for campaign finance reform:
[The large dairy producer] Dean Foods reported spending almost $2.5 million, including $500,000 for outside lobbyists. One was Charles M. "Chip" English Jr. of Thelen Reid & Priest. English also represented Shamrock Foods, United Dairymen of Arizona and the Dairy Institute of California.
During 2005, English fine-tuned the language in the milk bill. "My hand can be seen throughout the bill," he said in an interview. Pick a paragraph in the legislation, he said, and "either I wrote it or I commented on it."
Some pride in that voice, huh? The Post's reporting uncovers the key legislative moment, in which a Democrat (another wrinkle) was the principal culprit.
[Sen. Harry] Reid made his move on Dec. 16 [of last year], with the Senate chamber nearly empty. He brought up the milk bill, which passed a few minutes later by "unanimous consent," a procedure that requires no debate or roll call vote if both political parties agree. Reid and [Republican Sen. Jon] Kyl said in recent statements that their goal was to level the playing field for milk producers.
The good sport award, by the way, goes to the small producer who got squashed: "'I still think this is a great country,' [Hein] Hettinga said. 'In Mexico, they would have just shot me.'"
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:08 PM
December 13, 2006
Regret the Error, a blog that "reports on corrections, retractions, clarifications and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in the media," offers today its best errors and corrections of '06. There are some pretty amazing examples of the form here, but my favorite has to be this one from the Chicago Tribune:
An editorial in Friday’s paper incorrectly stated that Florida Cresswell, a candidate for state representative in the 28th District, was convicted in 1999 of battery and stealing Tupperware. In fact he was convicted of stealing a battery from a van as well as Tupperware that was inside the van.
Via Romenesko.
Posted by John Swansburg at 01:46 PM
December 13, 2006
A while back I blogged about the Unsuggester, a feature of LibraryThing that will tell you, based on a book you own, what other books you are least likely to own.
Now John Emerson, at the pleasingly low-tech blog Idiocentrism ("Your best source of bulk discursive charity"), has tested out some interesting books to find out their anti-books. The funniest pairing: "Chicken Soup for the Soul," by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, is the anti-book of "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," by Hunter S. Thompson. One surprise for me: those who own the popular Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days" just don't take to the wildly popular J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter Box Set." Maybe it's the differing age demo? The Valve points to Emerson's post and sparks a lively comments section. John Emerson again, in the comments section: "'Sisterhood of the travelling pants' is the opposite of almost everything."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:08 PM
December 13, 2006
In a new post on The Economist blog, Free exchange, the anonymous writer takes issue with Gwyneth Paltrow's alleged statement (she denies it) that the English are "much more intelligent and civilized then the Americans" and that "people [in England] don't about work and money; they talk about interesting things at dinner." (The blogger also notices that the New York Times more or less took Paltrow's side, citing the English accent as key.)
The Economist thinks Paltrow was just snowed by fresh faces who haven't yet trotted out the same stories. More seriously, though, they note that in fact Americans have more schooling:
An American partisan might even note that finding a well-educated dinner companion may actually be easier in the US. Until recently, only a small minority in most Western European nations received any post secondary education, even though tuition was low or free in most places.
The culprit across the pond seems to be the relative paucity and poverty of universities, who would be better off if they could charge tuition, if only that proposal didn't always spark mass student demonstrations.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:12 AM
December 12, 2006
A story by Neela Banerjee in today's Times takes a look at the plight of gay evangelicals:
Gay evangelicals seem to have few paths carved out for them: they can leave religion behind; they can turn to theologically liberal congregations that often differ from the tradition they grew up in; or they can enter programs to try to change their behavior, even their orientation, through prayer and support.
A few months ago, Ideas took a close look at the last of these options in a piece by Tanya Erzen, a professor at Ohio State who wrote a study of "ex-gay" ministries after a year of living and doing field work at New Hope Ministry in California.
As Banerjee notes in the Times, perhaps the most difficult aspect of being a gay evangelical is finding a community that will accept you. "They are too Christian for many gay people, with the evangelical rock they listen to and their talk of loving God," she writes, but too gay for most evangelical congregations.
Tanya Erzen made a similar observation, and found that this profound sense of alienation explains, in part, the appeal of the ex-gay movement. While many gay believers first go to ex-gay ministries hoping they can change their sexuality, the reason many stay is because "places like New Hope can offer the first experience they have ever had of belonging to a community and being open about their struggles."
Posted by John Swansburg at 06:15 PM
December 12, 2006
In a post on his economics and international relations blog, Daniel Drezner gets interested in a Jonathan Alter Newsweek piece about the 2008 potential presidential contenders. One quote about Barack Obama grabs his attention:
"After seven years of the 'we kick a--, go it alone' foreign-policy response to 9/11, the American voter will be ready to try a leader who projects better on the world stage," says Jeh Johnson, a corporate attorney and former general counsel of the Air Force under Clinton. "Barack's multicultural heritage will represent that change."
Is that really true, wonders Drezner? He takes a glance around the globe, and, "without naming names," sees a certain amount of racism lingering on a few continents. A couple of commenters on the blog mention China, but where Drezner may be on target is Western Europe, which has been coping with African immigration and where apparent xenophobes like France's Jean-Marie Le Pen have gained political traction.
Of course, the larger question is whether America itself is ready for a black president.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:32 PM
December 12, 2006
Coverage of the death of General Augusto Pinochet, the former ruler of Chile, has generally emphasized his role in an anti-democratic coup, his murder of dissidents, and his personal corruption.
In these three pieces -- a new symposium and two "flashbacks" (here and here)-- the National Review offers more-sympathetic views, ranging from the claim that Pinochet was an anti-Communist hero, who has been falsely maligned by leftists and "academics," to the assertion that he was both hero and tyrant.
(Actually, those pieces only scratch the surface of NR's discussions of Pinochet, I now see. Here's a reprinted pro-Pinochet column from 1978 by William F. Buckley, for example.)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:27 PM
December 12, 2006
We at Brainiac strive not to ridicule, but this link is worth posting just for the humor value. I don't need to comment here, only to give a taste of what's in store at WorldNetDaily, an organ that calls for a healthy dose of skepticism, it would appear. Jim Rutz, chairman of Megashift Ministries and founder-chairman of Open Church Ministries, has penned an all-out assault on, uh, soy. This vegetarian favorite is weakening the manhood of our nation's children, he says:
Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That's why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today's rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products. (Most babies are bottle-fed during some part of their infancy, and one-fourth of them are getting soy milk!)
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:40 PM
December 12, 2006
In the second issue of Situations, a journal published by the CUNY Graduate Center that "addresses the lapse of the radical imagination in both left theory and in popular consciousness," we have a fine essay from the late, much-lamented critic, writer, and professor Ellen Willis.
Willis has shown great range in her career; she wrote a profile of Bob Dylan early on for The New Yorker, and here she has written a left-wing complaint about Thomas Frank, author of the highly influential lefty book "What's the Matter with Kansas." What Frank misses in his critique of the misguided rural Republican voter who votes contrary to his best economic interests, says Willis, is that the social/culture-wars issues that Frank thinks are mere GOP bait-and-switch devices are in fact very much alive among rural voters, if not among the upper-middle folk that Frank probably consorts with most often. Tell the young girl who needs both parental consent and an illegal trip across state lines to get an abortion that the social issues are a mere phantom.
The examples like that one that Willis brings to bear are impressive in quality and quantity.
[Updated 1:11 p.m.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:40 AM
December 11, 2006
Richard Epstein's Ideas piece on the pharmaceutical industry occasioned many letters to the editor, several of which were published in yesterday's Globe. Read them here.
Posted by John Swansburg at 05:25 PM
December 11, 2006
Mark Feeney, who is running away with the 2006 Brainiac Sixth Man Award, wrote this morning to bring my attention to what seems like a rather fascinating undertaking: The Johns Hopkins University Press is publishing the complete prose of T.S. Eliot. Says JHU:
The project will be developed under the editorial direction of Ronald Schuchard, the renowned Eliot scholar and professor at Emory University, and co-published with Faber and Faber, the literary publisher founded by Eliot in the 1920s.
What's so special about this? Well, according to Schuchard, only about 10 percent of Eliot's prose has ever been published.
I confess to not having read much of Eliot's prose, though I have dipped into his Shakespeare criticism a bit (he famously thinks very little of Hamlet). This promises to be an important volume, though I'm not sure it will supplant my favorite Eliot book, the facsimile edition of the Wasteland, in which you can look over the shoulder of "il miglior fabbro," Ezra Pound, as he scratches out his edit of Eliot's draft (working title: "He Do the Police in Different Voices").
Posted by John Swansburg at 04:40 PM
December 11, 2006
In the new Los Angeles Times Book Review, an appreciation of the New York Review Books series of classics in reprint. Disclosure: like the author of the piece, I'm a friend of the editor of the series, and worked at the magazine arm of the NYRB. (It's worth noting, too, that NYR Books publishes original titles, too, including collections of work from the magazine.)
I must add, discounting for bias, that this is indeed a great series, and one that has been able to carve itself a niche that keeps it more than alive. Low cost helps; many of the books are either in the public domain or have rights that are inexpensive to obtain.
I've read "English, August," too, and was delighted to discover that there exists an Indian slacker novel that incorporates elements of Kafka- or Bartleby-like workplace frustrations. The LAT reviewer has very cleverly nicknamed the book "Bright Heat, Big Dust." "Cassandra at the Wedding" is on the waiting-to-be-read stack, as are other books in the series. Ah, the brick-like "Anatomy of Melancholy": some day.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:12 PM
December 11, 2006
This from the (London) Independent, about a new report by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation: "Meet the world's top destroyer of the environment. It is not the car, or the plane, or even George Bush: it is the cow." According to the 400-page report, "Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together." I'd heard about the impact of methane emissions from cow manure and flatulence [chuckle], but I had no idea about the carbon output, nor the scale we are talking about. (Also, I hadn't known that methane is far more dangerous than carbon. Al Gore didn't mention that one in "An Inconvenient Truth.") What is more, the harm done by livestock will more than double by 2050, as meat demand increases.
Here we are devoting vast amounts of energy and ink and political debate to alternate sources of fuel to drive our automobiles and planes, while I haven't heard a word about What To Do About the Cows -- a bigger worry, it would appear. Are there any ideas even on the table, aside from a vast sea change toward vegetarianism?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:49 AM
December 11, 2006
The Web site of the American Prospect has published an intriguing article about what the Creationists are planning next after significant losses in the courts. The piece, by Sahotra Sarkar, a professor of biology, geography, and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, points to the publication of a landmark book among intelligent design proponents. "The Privileged Planet" (2004) and its accompanying documentary were the work of Guillermo Gonzales and Jay Richards from the Discovery Institute, and they contend that the physics of earth seem to be carefully arranged to allow the possibility of life forms able to investigate the universe itself, i.e. us:
According to Gonzales and Richards, conditions on Earth have been carefully optimized for scientific investigation in such a way that it is "a signal revealing a universe so skillfully created for life and discovery that it seems to whisper of an extraterrestrial intelligence immeasurably more vast, more ancient, and more magnificent than anything we've been willing to expect to imagine." The evidence for creation, in other words, now comes from physics, not biology.
This is a clever maneuver by creationism, for in a sense it uses pure science, the enemy, as evidence. But it seems vulnerable to me to a big-picture objection: physics could have given rise to a planet in an infinite number of ways, and any one of them could have provided -- randomly -- for the creation of some form of life, for who's to say that in these alternate scenarios the conditions for life wouldn't be different? Perhaps another world would have allowed the possibility, for instance, of free-floating minds, without bodies. If these minds were capable of investigation into the universe, moreover, I don't see how that "whispers of" anything. After all, our minds haven't been able to prove the existence of a creator, no matter how hard we try.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:04 AM
December 10, 2006
The annual New York Times Magazine "Year in Ideas" issue is always terrific, and this year's edition, out today, is no exception. Some of my favorites from the '06 batch:
Digital Maoism
The Drivable One-Man Blimp
The Gyroball
The Hidden-Fee Economy
The Myth of "the Southern Strategy"
Paternity Confidence
Great stuff!
Posted by John Swansburg at 04:28 PM
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