Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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| December 24, 2006 - December 30, 2006 »
December 22, 2006
The wonderful stylist and interesting social theorist Martin Amis has a new novel out in England, soon to be released here: "House of Meetings." In it, according to a fierce but finely observed review by Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books, he does a kind of short novelization of his nonfiction book "Koba the Dread" -- Soar, being a bit fresh, calls it "a 'non-fiction' book" -- about the crimes committed under Stalin and Communism.
We're never clear, reading Soar, on where exactly the novel takes us, but Soar is dogged about pursuing Amis's mind, not only in this story but in his whole oeuvre. Of most concern to him, as to many former fans of his and Christopher Hitchens', is Amis's recent rhetorical war on Islamism, which Soar suggests is the metaphorical raison d'etre of this novel about Stalinism. Soar reproduces some of Amis's words about Islam and Islamism in a recent interview. For those unaware of these statements, it's worth reading the whole piece. Here they are, in part:
There’s a definite urge -- don’t you have it? -- to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation -- further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:02 PM
December 22, 2006
Josh has "Philosophy Watch" -- now, alas, on hiatus -- while Private Eye has its "Pseud's Corner." While I ponder my own rubric (not really), I'll just pass along this gem from Slate's year-end wrap-up of pop music.
The subject is two CDs, by Destroyer and Swan Lake, featuring the work of the songwriter Dan Bejar, that I'd actually like to hear (though not necessarily because of this particular endorsement).
Both albums, but Destroyer's "Rubies" especially, are like particle accelerators, bombarding their subjects (from romantic nostalgia to the status hierarchies of contemporary art) at every turn with polymorphous rhetoric, while never settling into a single point of view.
That, and there are some good -- I mean "casually indelible" -- "riffs and melodies," too.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:15 AM
December 22, 2006
Phil Baker, whose work I don't know, has a very nice essay-review in the new (London) Times Literary Supplement on a book about things that have disappeared in London: Iain Sinclair's "London: City of Disappearances." Great topic.
Cities are about death and rebirth, appearance and disappearance. They're works of art that remake themselves before our eyes -- often, at least to the misty-eyed observer, with disastrous results. In New York we're in the midst of losing three of the once-great bookstores (old story), and the Tower Records branches of course. That's just retail. Restaurants have a shelf life of about six months.
And I remember a Boston from my youth, particularly the grubby bits near Downtown Crossing and Fenway Park, that is no longer there for me when I return. Now we have new buildings to build memories around, and to be sad about when they're gone.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:33 AM
December 21, 2006
Verrry interesting news from the Washington Note via the folks at Talking Points Memo (the TPM Muckraker site, to be more specific), who have been known to break stories themselves: the New York Times is set to publish tomorrow an Op-Ed I blogged about earlier this week that was declared classified by the White House, with the CIA as intermediary. The Times will black out text that has been redacted by the government, but the paper, in what I would think is an unprecedented, Web-era move, will direct readers to other public sources that provide the so-called classified material -- for instance the longer paper the author, Flynt Leverett, published on the site of the Century Foundation in early Dec., from which the Op-Ed was derived.
A gutsy move by the Times, though obviously perfectly legal. And an interesting test for the government's hotter heads when it comes to Iran. Will they return fire?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:45 PM
December 21, 2006
Adam Bellow, a son of the venerated Chicago novelist nonpareil Saul Bellow, was one of my predecessors as an assistant editor at The New Leader -- his first job in publishing, I believe (and mine). He's been in the game ever since. His newest venture deserves a careful and watchful eye. He is bringing back pamphlet publishing with an outfit called The New Pamphleteers. Why should writers be bound to either 1,000 word essays -- maybe 5,000 if they are lucky enough to be in, say, the London Review -- or 50,000 word books (if not longer)? Surely there's a middle ground -- and an audience for it, when people are telling the publishing industry in myriad ways that whether it disapproves or not, they don't have the time for big books. Why not emulate the Revolutionary War intellectual Thomas Paine's "Common Sense," a concise pamphlet and still one of the most widely read political works of all time?
Bellow, in the words of a Columbia Journalism Review writer who interviewed him, "believes the Internet has become the central arena for intellectual debate in America [and how!--Ed.], and it is from this source -- reprinting digests of blog posts or letting individual bloggers pull together collections of their writing -- that he hopes to harvest most of his material." An intriguing next step for publishing, though we might counter that there's still a big place for print. Nevertheless, Bellow's enthusiasm comes through, and he's got a point:
What I am describing as the blogosphere is basically a Wild West situation, an oil boom, a gold rush. From the perspective of the traditional publishing company there is something to tap into, but not much of an understanding of how. What they are typically doing is applying the old familiar paradigm, the horse-and-buggy paradigm, bloggers should be writing books. Well, of course many bloggers do write books. But that is a different matter. That's turning them into a different animal.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:05 PM
December 21, 2006
I love this end-of-the-year reading list about American politics -- and not because I endorse the specific choices (though they seem sound). First, John Judis, of the Brookings Institution and the New Republic, admits that whenever he's asked for his picks for "best books of the year" (which is often), he must decline. "I don't read enough current books to offer an educated opinion," he writes. (I often wonder who honestly does, aside from full-time book critics.)
The list is the opposite of trendy -- how much cocktail-party mileage can you get out of "Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916," by Martin J. Sklar? -- and you get a good sense of one man's intellectual landmarks.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 02:49 PM
December 21, 2006
I posted a retraction, yesterday, correcting a recent Brainiac post of mine in which I'd too hastily described Habermas, Arendt, Berlin, and Popper as "the heroes of American neocons," a characterization that is somewhere between imprecise and incorrect, as Danny Postel pointed out to me.
Now a mutual acquaintance of ours, Scott McLemee, who writes the Intellectual Affairs column for Inside Higher Ed, and who has been mentioned more than once on Brainiac, emails to voice his support for Postel's argument. (NB: When we launched Ideas in September of 2002, if memory serves, McLemee and Postel were still colleagues at the Chronicle of Higher Ed.)
Among other things, McLemee has this to say about my misstatement:
One problem is that the term "neoconservative" now has very little historical specificity. Almost nobody going by the label now ever had any relationship at all to [Partisan Review] -- and the oft-repeated claim that neocon foreign policy is somehow related to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution is a matter of high-sounding but pluperfect ignorance. (I have yet to meet anyone making this claim who had any idea whatsoever what that theory was.)
That's good material, but his next graf is even better:
The belief that the faction now known as the neoconservatives has some deep continuity with the old New York intellectual left has become a kind of urban legend. For every Gertrude Himmelfarb who spent a little while in the Young People's Socialist League (Fourth International), there are two dozen guys like a certain third-tier neocon functionary I met here in Washington a few years ago who turned one visit to the meeting of a very mildly reformist campus organization into a marketable story about My Disillusionment With the Far Left.
There's a novel of ideas in here somewhere, don't you think?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:06 PM
December 21, 2006
I don't know, Josh (and Ty), but I think I'd need to hear a much richer argument than that L.A. Times piece provides before I conclude that one can "connect the dots" between "Casino Royale" and Abu Ghraib. Or even between "Casino Royale" and "Saw III."
Think about how far this argument carries. "Casino Royale" features a scene in which a cartoon villain tortures a cartoon hero, who everyone knows will triumph (such are the conventions of the genre). Are all such scenes in pop art now aesthetically and politically suspect, enablers of John Yoo's preferred methods of interrogation? (The laser beam heading toward the hero's genitals in "Goldfinger"? Baddies tormenting Indiana Jones or Han Solo?) What would genre fiction and film look like, shorn of all such scenes?
Isn't it usually lefty cultural critics who defend (some of) this stuff against the charge it is degrading and morally corrosive? How does Hamrah distinguish his argument from those arguments?
I am appalled by modern "torture porn," but I don't think the entire Grand Guignol genre -- "The Pit and the Pendulum"? "Halloween?"-- can be quite so easily written off as political retrograde. But I'd love to read a longer, deeper piece by Hamrah on these issues.
(I much prefer the way James Wolcott handles the issue of violence, sexual abuse, and degradation in TV cop and forensics procedurals, here and here: He tries to identify the line at which a genre he himself enjoys crosses over into something darker. Partly because they are so mainstream, these shows often make my jaw drop more than "Turista" does.)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:11 PM
December 21, 2006
Potentially lost in the shuffle of Bush's two rounds of rare public comment on Iraq in the last 72 hours, Bush lent support yesterday -- with a string attached -- to a key element of the Democratic congress' plan of action on the home front. He gave his first clear public endorsement of a program to raise the minimum wage by $2.10 over the next two years, a significant hike in percentage terms from $5.15 to $7.25 -- not a favorite move of the GOP, generally speaking.
Perhaps this was a simple acknowledgment that his low approval rating probably wouldn't withstand a veto of such a measure early next year, but nevertheless it's interesting. If nothing else, it's probably a sign that Bush is ready or forced to swallow a bitter pill or two at this point. It's worth noting, though, that Bush's caveat is not insignificant. He wants the wage hike attached to specific small-business tax breaks so that those businesses hurt by the hike have the means to recover their losses. Sounds reasonable as a compromise, but it was enough to make Sen. Kennedy, for one, grumble about obstacles.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:37 AM
December 21, 2006
Sven Birkerts wrote a fine article in Sunday's Globe Ideas section about the task and psychology of reviewing a pre-hyped book, in his case "Sacred Games," by Indian novelist Vikram Chandra, due out here in January. Birkerts writes of flipping through the "advance reader's copy" and snapping to attention upon seeing that the publisher planned a $300,000 marketing budget. That's a lot of dough by any standard, he thinks, quite rightly. Suddenly his perception of the book is changed -- and he hasn't started reading!
I had this very experience once, when I wrote a review of a novel whose debut author had received a $1.4 million advance. (I'll never forget that figure.) As it happens, he was also Indian, Hari Kunzru, and had written a sprawling epic, "The Illusionist." It was difficult to write that review, my first ever for a serious publication, without letting what are called off-the-page considerations creep in. A lot of soul-searching occurred, having little effect on the review I hope, but certainly standing in the way of writing it. I had to smile and nod at this bit of Birkerts's:
I had weighed Western civilization in the balance and found it wanting. Now I lay down on the couch, set a pillow on my stomach -- the novel really is that big -- and actually opened the cover....
Posted by Evan Hughes at 08:53 AM
December 21, 2006
Globe film critic Ty Burr posted to the Movie Nation blog yesterday about sometime Ideas contributor A.S. Hamrah's recent LA Times op-ed. Here's Ty on Hamrah:
The writer A.S. Hamrah had a brilliant piece in yesterday's L.A. Times on why we like torture movies so much. An absolute must-read for fans of the New Horror and "Casino Royale," and Hamrah correctly connects the dots to Abu Ghraib and points out that Mel Gibson is being pilloried for the sins of others. I have yet to hear a defense of Torture Porn movies that goes beyond "Uh, I just like them." The question still hangs there: Why do you like them?
Hamrah's most recent essay for Ideas was about a fellow Brooklynite, the cartoonist Mark Newgarden. Earlier this year, he demonstrated his encylopedic knowledge of movies and deep insight into what makes us tick by writing about fat suit chic for Reason magazine.
He and I are old friends, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt (if you must): Hamrah is America's Barthes or Baudrillard, a sociocultural critic extraordinaire. You heard it here first!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:12 AM
December 20, 2006
Last Thursday, in a Brainiac post about Danny Postel's excellent pamphlet on the situation in Iran, the American anti-imperial left, and the future of American liberalism, I described Habermas, Arendt, Berlin, and Popper as "the heroes of American neocons." Postel and I exchanged emails about this line, and though I meant to post an excerpt from our dialogue that same day, alas, events overtook me and I'm doing it a week later...
Postel wrote to me as follows:
Nothing could be further from the truth! Habermas in particular [and Postel should know] is anathema to the neocons! He was *adamantly* against not only the Iraq war, but famously wrote a widely-discussed statement on the future of Europe (co-signed with Derrida) which directly defines the European vision AGAINST the neocon agenda, against US unilateralism and hegemony. Habermas is NEVER cited by neocon thinkers as a hero -- go through the pages of the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and the like and you'll find the
opposite: they regard him as a European socialist who champions the UN
and is guilty of anti-Americanism.
I concede the point about Habermas; my mistake. I replied, however, that whether or not Arendt and Popper and Berlin are cited in neocon journals today, these liberal thinkers were influential on those New York Intellectuals who cut their teeth writing for Partisan Review and other leftist journals but later shamefacedly renounced their leftism.
Postel agreed with me that Popper was -- and remains -- an intellectual hero to the neocons. But regarding Arendt and Berlin, he refused to back down:
Arendt and Berlin were influential on the Cold War liberals around Partisan Review who had renounced their Marxism, *some* of whom eventually *became* neocons but *most* of whom simply remained Cold War liberals.... The ones who *did * become neocons tended to be louder and more visible and better funded -- and they took over the publication of Partisan Review itself (though it was moribund for decades) -- and so created the impression that they were what had become of Cold War liberalism, whereas in reality they were but one faction of what had become of it.
It's been too long since I read up on my Cold War intellectual history, but Postel sounds like he knows what he's talking about. I surrender! Drop me an email if you have a strong opinion on this.
UPDATE: Scott McLemee weighs in on all this.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 05:11 PM
December 20, 2006
Those reading this blog, and most people not reading this blog, are only too aware of Wikipedia, the reader-edited not-for-profit online encyclopedia. Those shocked that Wikipedia, like the ubiquitous classifieds billboard Craigslist, has not yet been monetized through advertising, now at least have the relief of seeing that Wikipedia has launched a fundraising campaign, aided by its nonprofit (read tax-deductible) status. According to the fundraising plea, it's one of the top ten sites in the world -- not that surprising when you take note of how often a Wikipedia entry is in the top five results of a Google search.
But did you know that under the Wiki Foundation's umbrella is also Wikiquote, where you can track down or discover thousands if not millions of notable quotes? Great idea, though again reliability is, I would think, a major issue, especially when it comes to spoken words. But what else is new?
An interesting category on the Wikiquote page: famous misquotations. I blogged about common misquotes a few months back, but I knew nothing of this gold mine! (Prepare to be slightly depressed upon being disabused of some favorites.)
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:39 AM
December 20, 2006
If you are interested in Drake Bennett's piece for Ideas this past weekend, on giving the gift of carbon neutrality, you should also be interested not only in the shopper's guide that runs online alongside his article, but also in the posts to the discussion forum Drake gave rise to. It's worth noting that the overall flavor of the discussion is pretty snide and defeatist about any attempts to reduce carbon emissions, particularly through gifts, but one reader posed an interesting question, albeit with a negative undertone:
I wonder how the cost of emissions in flying a plane cross-country is figured. I suppose the most frenzied environmentalist in the room assigns a unit cost to CO2 and to methane and so on, then figures how much of each is emitted during the flight, multiplies the amounts by the unit costs and adds up the results for a total cost. (The article doesn't provide any clue as to how it's done.)
I'm not a scientist, but I would guess that Expedia and Travelocity's carbon-offset charge of $16.99 might in fact represent a low-ball estimate, rather than the work of "the most frenzied environmentalist." Have a look at climatecrisis.net, the Web site of the Al Gore film, "An Inconvenient Truth." If you click on "Calculate your personal impact" and enter the number of flights you took in a given year -- even, say, three round trips -- you'll be amazed as to how much your carbon report card plummets. Due to the massive amounts of fuel burnt by a commercial jet in a given flight, each passenger is responsible for more carbon output than if she drove the same distance. That's based on numbers, not environmentalist propaganda.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:39 AM
December 19, 2006
Maybe using nouns as verbs "weirds language," as "Calvin & Hobbes" famously observed, but according to a new report from the University of Liverpool, it also limbers up the little gray cells - at least when it's Shakespeare who does the verbing.
"Bard boosts brain," "Shakespeare excites brain," and, most implausibly, "Shakespeare used advanced brain theories" say the various headlines on the story, which claims that brain imaging shows how Shakespeare's inventive language stimulates mental activity.
Philip Davis, professor of English at Liverpool, explains:
"It works in a similar way to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. If it is easy to see which pieces slot together you become bored of the game, but if the pieces don’t appear to fit, when we know they should, the brain becomes excited.
"Research has shown that there are parts of the brain that are responsible for the processing of nouns and others for the processing of verbs. . . . If you throw something in that looks like a noun, but is used as a verb, a new level of consciousness might have to be created as they talk to each other.
"For example, Shakespeare uses the phrase, 'he godded me' in the tragedy 'Coriolanus.' Godded looks like a noun, but is a verb and the brain is confused by the anomaly."
Confused in a good way, Davis is certain: "One of the things that makes us dull is simply going back over established pathways."
But wait, there's more:
The research could help stave off old age, claim the researchers, who are conducting more experiments to identify the precise regions of the brains that are involved.
"All's well that ends well," indeed. It's not clear, though, whether verbing nouns is supposed to be good medicine only in great literature, or wherever it turns up. Reading Shakespeare sounds like a fine prescription for mental longevity. But if officing, incentivizing, and solutioning are the brain boosters on offer, some people might prefer oblivion.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 10:15 PM
December 19, 2006
Flynt Leverett, a fellow at the centrist New America Foundation, gave a talk in Washington last week at the Center for American Progress. It was a speech laying out America's diplomatic alternatives for dealing with Iran. Important, but hardly earth-shaking stuff. But in the talk Leverett revealed that before sending an Op-Ed to the New York Times that week he had submitted the article to the CIA for clearance -- a standard procedure for him because he served on President Bush's National Security Council, and a procedure that had always gone through without a hitch.
This time, though, the CIA forwarded the Op-Ed to the White House, which promptly quashed it. Leverett: "I have been extremely pessimistic that this administration is inclined or capable of genuinely rethinking its approach to Iran in the way that we need it to at this point,and [this] has only confirmed that for me."
The irony of it all is that the Op-ed was merely an 800-word condensation, with nothing new added, of a report he already wrote, drawing on his significant Iran experience, for the Century Foundation (home to Ideas contributor Patrick Keefe, who tipped off Brainiac). It would seem that the Century Foundation has published classified information -- only the CIA didn't think so when it approved that very report earlier this month. I can't think of another episode that has demonstrated that either the process of classification is tremendously flawed and silly or the government is using it arbitrarily and even politically. Or both.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:30 PM
December 19, 2006
In an unusually long and thought-provoking post at The Valve, Joseph Kugelmass, a U. Cal grad student and a prolific blogger of cultural criticism, delivers a critique of the ways in which Nabokov's "Lolita" is read, both in Tehran and everywhere else.
Kugelmass believes we've been led astray by Nabokov's statement, perhaps intentionally misleading, he feels, that "Lolita" is "the record of my love affair with the English language." (We're even more misled by that ubiquitous John Updike quote about Nabokov writing "ecstatically.") "Lolita" isn't really about language, Kugelmass protests. It's about the enormous and enormously complex consuming power of love, however forbidden. In the works of "Lolita" critisicm, he says, "one finds, instead of these elements, a series of moralizing accounts of the novel, most of which are both convincing and anaesthetizing."
He moves from there into a discussion of what it means to disagree about works of art, as he disagrees with many about "Lolita" and others (like the Web site Pitchfork) about music. He wants to conserve disagreement as a fruitful and compelling habit, not to let conflict devolve into agreeing to disagree, as the saying goes: "It is good to be provoked." A wandering essay, but in the end strangely persuasive.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:49 PM
December 19, 2006
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Jonathan Adler, a professor at Case Western Reserve's law school and a contributing editor to the conservative National Review Online, picks up on a Wall Street Journal editorial [$] comparing carbon emissions in the US and the EU.
It appears that though the EU had the edge in reducing emissions, or at least curbing emissions increases, in the late 1990s, Europe has fallen behind the US since 2000, in part by abandoning cleaner energy sources like nuclear power for coal and other carbon-based fuels "for other environmental reasons." Like what, I wonder?
Anyhow, this is a rebuke to those who thought that the American refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocols was the death knell of US environmentalism, or at least put us far behind other industrialized nations in reducing our environmental footprint. Not so, if the Journal is to be believed.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:11 PM
December 18, 2006
As noted in the New York Times, a blog of the tech magazine Wired has recorded an unhappy milestone: 100 million personal records lost or opened to prying eyes since the notorious ChoicePoint breach of two years ago. That's a lot in two years. And according to attrition.org, the number since 2000 is around 136 million. Assuming no overlap, that number is equivalent to more than a third of this country's population, and most of these records do involve Americans. (One shudders to think about data security in the third world.)
This is another reason, as if one needed one, to limit the collection of personal data by corporations and government agencies. Telemarketing is a popular reason, as is state spying. Add this to the list: your social security number could get lost or stolen, as it was for some 382,000 employees present and past of the aerospace giant Boeing. At UCLA, a database containing SS #s was being hacked for a year before anyone noticed. (Educational institutions tend to have the weakest data protection.) So think twice, perhaps, while online shopping.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:32 PM
December 18, 2006
n+1 has been carrying, for a few weeks, an interesting ongoing debate about Walter Benn Michaels' "The Trouble with Diversity," clearly one of the hottest academic crossover books of the season. (Chris Shea covered the book thoroughly back in September, both in Ideas and on Brainiac, e.g. here. )WBM himself has been involved in the back-and-forth on n+1, following a very critical review by Bruce Robbins.
For the moment, WBM's letter is reproduced at the bottom of the n+1 home page, with Robbins' reply at the top. It's an interesting exchange, but I feel that WBM, despite not having the last word, is having the last victory here. Robbins seems to me to be setting up a straw man. After WBM argues that addressing racism would do nothing to address economic equality because then "we'd just have more poor whites and Asians" -- a vulnerable claim, I'd agree -- Robbins says WBM has fallen into a trap of thinking that society represents some kind of zero-sum game. Why should black misfortune affect anyone else's fortunes?
But as WBM has already made clear, the reason he thinks so is that that's the way capitalism works: "it’s capitalism not racism that produces economic inequality (racism is just a selection mechanism)." The floors still have to get cleaned after black boats have risen on the latest tide. Robbins tries to say that WBM is secretly -- or by some logical necessity -- despairing about all attempts at justice: "Given his assumptions, Michaels cannot really expect any more from the trade unions whose weakness he claims to bemoan than from the feminism he mocks. For he has to assume that any gains the unions might wrench from the corporations would be instantly confiscated from other employees elsewhere." But no. Because union strength would represent a direct and, for WBM, welcome, assault on capitalism. It would mean attacking inequality directly, and that's just what WBM wants to do.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:59 AM
December 18, 2006
There have been some recent attempts to revive the reputation of tiny Kazakhstan, the object of some brutal humor in the movie "Borat," starring the man of the cultural moment, Sacha Baron Cohen. In one, the government halted its anti-"Borat" crusade and abruptly shifted course, as if to boast of its newfound sense of humor: "'This film was created by a comedian so let's laugh at it, that's my attitude,' a smiling [Kazakh] President Nursultan Nazarbayev told reporters at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair." Too little too late?
The latest news isn't exactly resonating in Kazakhstan's favor, though. The country has launched a campaign to switch to iodine salt, which has a record of discouraging disease. No problem there, but the PR campaign has had a ring of the old Eastern bloc:
One female volunteer went to a bus company and rerecorded its “next-stop” announcements interspersed with short plugs for iodized salt. “She had a very sexy voice, and men would tell the drivers to play it again,” Ms. Sivryukova said.
Even the former world chess champion Anatoly Karpov, who is a hero throughout the former Soviet Union for his years as champion, joined the fight. “Eat iodized salt,” he advised schoolchildren in a television appearance, “and you will grow up to be grandmasters like me.”
Mr. Karpov, in particular, handled hostile journalists adeptly, Mr. Zouev said, deflecting inquiries as to why he did not advocate letting people choose iodized or plain salt by comparing it to the right to have two taps in every home, one for clean water and one for dirty.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:14 AM
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