As its authors have been explaining to everyone who would lend them a microphone, "The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything" is not a basketball book. It's a brackets miscellany, in which experts apply the March Madness method of winnowing to 101 cultural categories as varied as Economic Indicators, Paul Simon Songs, and Women's Undies.
And, of all things, punctuation. Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, staged the punctuation playoffs, arraying parentheses and tildes, capital letters and commas in competing pairs. Semicolon and space faced off in the final, and Sheidlower's final pick for punctuation champ was the space.
That's an obvious enough call; none of us want to return to the days when monks economized on parchment by running words together. But how did the semicolon get so far?
By beating the dollar sign and the pilcrow (the old-fashioned paragraph sign) and then, less understandably, the uppercase and the period. The semicolon more powerful than the period? Sounds like the decision of a semicolon sentimentalist.
And Sheidlower's commentary doesn't dispel that suspicion:
A tough battle indeed. While the period is objectively more important, in the end it has no soul. You master the period when you learn to write. The semicolon actually says something. What Nicholson Baker has called "that supremely self-possessed valet of phraseology" is a relatively modern mark, yet skilled use of it is what separates the pedestrian from the elegant.
I'd think a showdown between the period and space would have been even tougher. But that's the point, say "Bracketologist" authors Mark Reiter and Richard Sandomir: It's not about who wins, it's about the pleasure of squaring off over square brackets, apostrophizing ampersands, and debating em dashes with your fellow punctuation nuts.
And when you've had enough of that, you can move on to the Latin grammar shootout. (The smart money's on the ablative absolute.)
I mentioned the other day that only one April Fool's Day prank from the Globe appears on a list of the top 100 mainstream media April Fool's Day hoaxes of all time. But Ryan Mulcahy, an Ideas colleague, points out another Globe prank, from 1974. Staff writer Monty Montgomery penned an April Fool's Day item about piranha in Massachusetts's Westfield River.
Writers who've fumed over delays in seeing their stories appear in print may get a chuckle out of the story's actual pub. date: April 13! Seems like the joke went awry.
The "bookart" blog BibliOdyssey is always worth checking out, but there's a particularly great entry up right now about "Theatrum Cometicum" (The Theatre of Comets), a 1668 volume providing accounts of over 400 comet sightings throughout history. It includes 80 lavish engravings, including this one:
Doesn't that look ominous? Like a missile strike on a peaceful hamlet?
Last year, I wrote a short item for Ideas about "Testament," a fascinating new comic book written by Douglas Rushkoff. Rushkoff is a media theorist, novelist, business consultant, and all-around public intellectual. "Testament" is in some ways a spinoff of his book "Nothing Sacred," in which he claims that Judaism is an "open source" religion that encourages all of us to actively create the narratives that give meaning to existence.
Rushkoff announced yesterday that "Testament" has been nominated for a prestigious Eagle Award. He's asking readers to cast a vote for it here. "Testament" is nominated in Category no. 14: Favourite New Comicbook. I just voted.
PS: For Favourite Comics Writer/Artist (Category no. 2), one absolutely must vote for Darwyn Cooke. The guy is a genius.
Poor Alex Heard! Ever since his "This American Lie" -- a takedown of David Sedaris, whom Heard caught in numerous falsehoods -- appeared, earlier this month, in The New Republic, he's taken a lot of flak. Sedaris is a humorist, people insist, so we don't expect all of his supposedly real-life anecdotes to be 100 percent true. And Heard's "prosecutorial swagger" (as somebody put it) just makes us all the more sympathetic to Sedaris.
Everybody's got something to hide 'cept for David Sedaris
"I don't buy that," claims Heard, in a letter to the journalism blog Romenesko:
Sedaris chose to call his work nonfiction and repeatedly assured interviewers that everything in his stories was true. Even so, at times he allowed himself the use of every fictional tool in the bag to make his stories better. That's a wonderful device to have at your disposal. Unfortunately, all the funny nonfiction writers I know would be fired if they were caught using it.
Meanwhile, over at The New York Times Book Review...
Last weekend, Globe reporter Kevin Cullen wrote in Ideas about the nascent movement to use the '08 Beijing Olympics to pressure China to use its influence over Sudan to stop the humanitarian disaster in Darfur. (China is Sudan's biggest economic and diplomatic supporter.)
A lot has happened since Sunday -- in Boston, D.C., and in China -- so Kevin checked in today with a follow-up dispatch:
From Beacon Hill to Capitol Hill, human rights activists were pushing politicians this week to increase the pressure on Sudan to stop a counterinsurgency war in Darfur that has killed an estimated 400,000, which President Bush has called genocide -- and to push China to use its influence over its allies in the Khartoum regime to stop the killing.
On Thursday, actress and activist Mia Farrow and Eric Reeves, the Smith College literature professor who has become the nation's leading advocate for Darfuris being slaughtered by janjaweed militia, urged Massachusetts legislators to divest state pension funds from Sudan.
"No one is safe in the Darfur region of Sudan," said Farrow, who earlier in the week had back-to-back op-ed pieces in the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal, the latter of which took Hollywood director Steven Spielberg to task for his visiting China to help the government there prepare to stage the ceremonies for the Olympic summer games in Beijing next year.
At approximately the same time Farrow and Reeves were testifying before the Joint Public Service Commitee at the State House, John Shattuck, the CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, and former assistant secretary of state for human rights under the Clinton administration, was testifying before the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs.
Shattuck told the committee the US was losing credibility on human rights because of policies toward detainees since the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
In a telephone interview, Shattuck said the committee expressed "great interest in a diplomatic initiative" aimed at China modeled on Reeves' idea of shaming China by linking its complicity in the Darfur genocide to the Beijing games -- the so-called Genocide Olympics campaign.
"It's a moment of movement," Shattuck said, referring to the push for divestment on Beacon Hill, and the push for official US pressure on China from Capitol Hill.
Farrow, who has made four trips to the region and met with some of the 2.5 million refugees from Darfur, acknowledged her public rebuke of Spielberg won't endear her in Hollywood.
"I won't be doing a Spielberg movie any time soon," she said in an email to the Globe, "But I'm on Darfur time -- 10,000 a month are dying. Time to burn a bridge or two."
China this week said it had found a new, potentially large domestic source of oil. China's need for oil -- it gets about 10 percent of its crude from Sudan, which amounts to 70 percent of Sudan's oil exports -- is seen as one reason it is reluctant to criticize the Khartoum regime.
This sudden, unexpected claim has led some human rights activists to hope that China will be more likely to pressure its friends in Khartoum to allow a UN and/or African Union peacekeeping mission in to stop the killing and protect humanitarian workers who have mostly withdrawn from the region.
One of the salvos in that interesting TNR attack on "Freakonomics" strikes me as way off the mark. Scheiber ridicules a paper, by the Emory University economist Andrew Francis, titled "The Economics of Sexuality: The Effect of HIV/AIDS on Homosexual Behavior, Desire, and Identity in the United States."
The paper's premise is that men who experience both heterosexual and homosexual desire will modify their choice of partner, depending on how dangerous they perceive homosexual sex to be at any given time. Scheiber finds this self-evidently ludicrous:
Granted, there is a legitimate, if sometimes tawdry[!],literature examining the way sexual behavior responds to disease. But Francis wasn't talking about changes in behavior -- less promiscuity, greater condom use, etc. He was talking about changes in sexual orientation.
But obviously -- this is not controversial, is it? -- for some people the line between sexual "behavior" and "sexual orientation" is not as bright and shining as Scheiber imagines. As a former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, has he really never read an account of, for example, life at an all-male English public school in the 19th or early 20th centuries? Even when it comes to sexuality, at least for some people, opportunities, risks, and social context clearly make a difference -- as the "Freakonomics" school rightly recognizes, and as Richard Posner, a frequent TNR contributor and hardly a trendy freakeconomist, was pointing out 13 years ago.
Last month, the Globe's Alex Beam attended a showing of "300" and had a few choice words to say about the college-age crowd in attendance, who
guffawed loudly as the Spartan hoplite warriors meandered among the fallen Persians, nonchalantly snuffing out the survivors with their long spears. The Spartans were, like, totally not into taking prisoners.
Beam may or may not be happy to learn that a cleaned-up, kid-friendly version of the "300" trailer is making the rounds online. Check it out:
Over at Slate today, Jack Shafer recalls some of the MSM's classic April Fool's Day pranks (e.g., the BBC's 1957 segment on the Swiss spaghetti harvest, Phoenix New Times' 1999 story about the formation of the "Arm the Homeless Coalition," PC Computing's 1994 report on legislative efforts to ban the use of the Internet while drunk) and offers an April Fool's Day defense kit. For example:
Shun the British press. The British tabloids make stories up all the time, but on April Fool's Day, everybody on Fleet Street fabricates. The Times used the day to run a spoof ad announcing an auction of "surplus intellectual property" -- various patents, trademarks, and copyrights. The Daily Mail announced the postponement of Andrew and Fergie's wedding because of a clash with Prince Charles' calendar. He was going to be butterfly-hunting in the Himalayas. The Daily Mail told readers that nuclear submarines were now patrolling the Thames.
Shafer also links to the Museum of Hoaxes' list of the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of all time. Has the Boston Globe ever pulled a stunt like these? Only by accident. No. 96 on the Museum of Hoaxes' notes that the price listed on the front page of the April 1, 1915 edition of the Boston Morning Globe was lowered from "Two Cents Per Copy" to "One Cent." The new price, Globe management discovered, was the responsibility of a mischievous production worker who had surreptitiously inserted the lower value at the last minute as the paper went to print.
There's a fine essay online at TNR today (from the April 02 issue of the magazine) about the "evil spawn of 'Freakonomics.'"
Ever since the book came out in 2005, complains Noam Scheiber, the field of economics has had a "cleverness problem." He asks: What young economist wants to solve the world's most intractable problems--poverty, inequality, unemployment--when it's so much sexier (and more lucrative) to study point-shaving in college basketball, underused gym memberships, and the parking tickets of U.N. diplomats?
Scheiber responds to critiques -- made at the blog Marginal Revolution, by economists/popularizers Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen -- at TNR's blog The Plank. Talkfest of the week?
One more science fiction-related post, then I'll drop the genre for a while. (Until Sunday.) Over at the excellent blog Paleo-Future today, Matt asks: "When did a certain level of self-awareness about futurism outweigh the sincere, optimistic brand of futurism?"
In other words, at what point did pop culture start producing speculative fictions about the future that didn't reflect on then-contemporary anxieties about what the future might be like, but instead reflected (ironically, for the most part, or at least with a certain emotional distance) on the anxieties of previous generations about the future? When did we stop worrying about dystopian societies run by computers, robots running amuck, and mutated cannibal survivors of nuclear war and start cracking wise about those things?
Today, Matt notes, we're swamped with ironic meta-futuristic fictions like "Mystery Science Theater 3000," "Meet the Robinsons," and the "Futurama" TV show. He can't think of any earlier examples than Woody Allen's "Sleeper" (1973). I assume that accidentally funny speculative fictions -- like "The World, the Flesh and the Devil" (1959), in which Harry Belafonte is the last man alive after a nuclear war, and the last woman alive happens to be white, so what to do? -- don't count.
Samuel Beckett's "Endgame" (1957) might count, right? But the trend probably began with something like...
"The Penultimate Truth" (1964), by Philip K. Dick, offers a phildickian twist on the already well-established genre of post-apocalyptic fictions in which the survivors of nuclear war must live in underground cities: It turns out (spoiler alert) that everything is fine aboveground, and cynical governments are just making undergrounders think the war's still going on.
Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" (1969), made into the excellent movie starring a young Don Johnson. Ellison romps merrily through the usual post-apocalyptic scenario.
"Love in the Ruins" (1971), by Walker Percy -- offers a wry twist on the then-established apocalyptic scenario in which survivors hole up in motels and fight pitched battles on golf courses.
The Winter/Spring issue of the bi-annual litmag Fence has arrived.
One can't help noticing that at least three of the stories in this issue concern a woman troubled by the shortcomings of domestic life:
"I lie in bed at night hoping my husband will be in a terrible car crash and die because these days a divorce would just be too much work." -- "The Housewife," by Shannon Turner. | "Kent arrived home from work to find his wife beating a boiling head of cabbage like it was the body of a subdued mugger." -- "The Guest," by Jim Hanas. | "I left my husband Charlie, but I haven't told him yet. I told him I was taking a vacation." -- "Tell Me When It Hurts," by Emily Benz.
I should also mention "Massachusetts," a poem by Milosz Biedrzycki in the same issue of Fence. Here's a good passage: "you can cough all the fiberglass out after work/go to dankin donats after midnight they'll give you/yesterday's donats six for a dollar/coat your throat with them, it'll help...."
On Friday, I mentioned that the Library of America has added the far-out science fiction writer Philip K. Dick to its canon of great American authors. And I mentioned an argument over at The Valve about whether Dick had accurately portrayed the zeitgeist of the late 20th century. Well, at least one person believes that PKD is a go-to author for those who'd like to understand the early 21st century. I learned this morning about Frolix-8, a website run by someone calling herself himself Palmer Eldritch (both names are PKD references).
CORRECTION: It has come to my attention that Palmer Eldritch, the blogger, is male, not female. PE corrected me, as one might have expected, by making reference to a PKD character, Angel Archer (from "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer"), who Dick fans feel is an autobiographical figure. In other words, like this blog entry's mistaken characterization of PE, Angel Archer is a male who only appears to be female. Ha!
Back in 2004, Palmer Eldritch started The Project, in which she he re-read all of Dick's novels and stories, and copied out any references to women's breasts. Now, reading too much PKD in a concentrated period will seriously warp your perspective, as those of us who've tried it can attest. So it should have come as no surprise when, sometime around the middle of last year, Palmer Eldritch started a new feature, "Which PKD Story Are We In Today," in which she he points out uncanny parallels between PKD plots and themes and... well, pretty much everything going on in the world, offline and on. Or rather, she he links to something she's he's read in the news or elsewhere online, namechecks a PKD fiction, and lets you connect the dots. Here's a recent example:
An essayist in the Washington Post's Outlook section on Sunday argued that high-school and college teachers should stop assigning papers. Thing is, students plagiarize relentlessly. It's time to stop fighting the trend -- to stop overvaluing originality -- and join it. The way forward, he argues, is to test students' knowledge with in-class writing assignments, multiple-choice questions and the like -- and, in place of those obsolete "original" term papers, coach students to be better plagiarizers, which will serve them later in life:
My transfer from education to the world of business has reminded me just how important it is to be able to synthesize content from multiple sources, put structure around it and edit it into a coherent, single-voiced whole. Students who are able to create convincing amalgamations have gained a valuable business skill.
I mentioned recently the disquieting rumor that Keanu Reeves has been tapped to play Doctor Manhattan in the Zack Snyder-directed film version of the excellent graphic novel "The Watchmen." True, Doctor Manhattan is a godlike being; so he's a bit stonefaced. That's not a good reason to hire Keanu.
But can he play a cartoon character?
After all, Doctor Manhattan used to be human -- so he tries to care about human life in general, and particular individuals too. He is not a sentimental character, but he has emotions. That's why I think Viggo Mortensen, who has played just such a complex figure (Tom Stall, an ex-killer, in "A History of Violence," also a graphic novel) so convincincly, should get the part.
This morning, however, I read an item in Variety announcing that Snyder will also direct "Army of the Dead." Aha! Snyder was probably talking to Keanu about playing a zombie. Now, that would make much more sense.
Once upon a time (from March 2000 through September 2003, to be precise) there was a Web-based encyclopedia whose peer-reviewed articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. It was called Nupedia. Despite the fact that Nupedia was very much a part of the free software movement (not the same thing as open source), its bureaucratic peer review process was an uncomfortable fit with free-software culture. Nupedia produced fewer than 25 entries.
Nupedia begat Wikipedia, a collaborative encyclopedia whose visitors can add, remove, edit, and change content. It has been a tremendous success, but its reliability and accuracy are suspect. And as the "Wikipedia" Wikipedia entry notes:
The site has also been criticized for its susceptibility to vandalism, uneven quality, systemic bias and inconsistencies, and for favoring consensus over credentials in its editorial process.
On Monday, Larry Sanger, founding editor-in-chief of Wikipedia, announced the beta launch of Citizendium, "a citizen's compendium of everything." It's Wikipedia minus the anonymous editing, and plus "gentle expert oversight" (authors are asked to provide CVs and other proof of their expertise). Wikipedians are scornful of this elitist newcomer; but others -- including Alex Golub at the well-respected anthropology blog Savage Minds -- are cautiously optimistic.
A couple of weeks ago, I ranted about the grammatically misunderstood woe is me, and promised (or threatened) to return to the question. And here I am, with a tentative diagnosis: I'm betting that Patricia O'Conner's catchy book title, "Woe Is I," has a lot to do with our current confusion.
Before that 1996 usage guide hit the bookstores, most people knew the idiom was woe is me, and most people never gave it a second thought. Now uncertainty reigns, and no wonder: O'Conner herself hasn't yet got the grammar straight.
Last fall, on her Q&A blog Grammarphobia, O'Conner answered a reader who wondered why the title was not "Woe Is Me" or "Woe Am I":
I chose the title "Woe Is I" to poke fun at hypercorrectness. The butt of the joke is the old rule of English grammar (now considered excessively formal) that required the nominative case after the verb “to be.” (Example: using “It is I” instead of “It is me” or “It's me.”) . . . Here’s how I put it in the preface to the second edition:
“While ‘Woe is I’ may appear technically correct (and that’s a matter of opinion), the expression ‘Woe is me’ has been good English for generations. Only a pompous twit -- or an author trying to make a point -- would use ‘I’ instead of ‘me’ here.”
Beside the point, almost every word of it. As I said in my previous post, woe is me has nothing to do with the predicate nominative. Woe is I is not "technically correct," and that is not just "a matter of opinion." "Woe is me" has been good English not merely "for generations" but (linguistically speaking) forever.
But O'Conner is not alone in her grammatical muddle. William Safire is also confused about woe is me, and, worse, he likes it that way.
In a 1993 New York Times column, Safire -- defending the likes of "it's me" -- wrote that "The grammatically pristine form of 'Woe is me' is 'Woe is I' (or even 'Woe am I'), but go tell that to Ophelia and Isaiah."
Bales of mail soon arrived, Safire reported, informing him that "the pronoun here is not a nominative at all: it is a dative. . . . In 'Woe is me,' the noun is not being equated with the pronoun. The meaning is 'Woe is to me' or 'Woe is unto me.' "
He continued his recap:
My interpretation of Shakespeare and the Bible held that, in this use, woe and me were one and the same, and my point was to show a long history of the use of the objective me, when formal usage would dictate the nominative I. After all, if both Shakespeare's heroine and the biblical prophet said, "Woe is me," who are the predicate nominatarians to insist on "Woe is I"?
And now, said Safire, I have to learn about the dative? He dutifully added a paragraph explaining how it worked, but his conclusion was, essentially, Dative, shmative:
I think Shakespeare knew what he was writing. If he had wanted to say, "Woe is to me," he would have said it (or if the poetic meter required three syllables, "Woe is mine"). Contrary to the opinion of all my activist-dativist correspondents, I think he did intend to equate woe and me. Sometimes the truth lies flat on the surface.
Indeed it does, and here it is: For 400 years before Shakespeare, the written record shows people using woe is me, woe is us, woe is unto me, woe to them. It was ordinary English. If Shakespeare had written "Woe is I," we might want to examine his reasons, but "woe is me" requires no deep interpretation.
Woe is us, indeed, when writers who claim to love language and grammar care so little about the facts.
A reader points out that (the real) Jane Austen's makeover, mentioned in an earlier post today, resembles (the fictional) Aunt Jemima's. Removing the hair covering, in particular.
The inspiration for Aunt Jemima-brand pancake mix, syrup, etc., launched in 1889, was a minstrelsy/vaudeville song of the same name, performed by white vaudevillians in blackface, apron, and kerchief. A "mammy" caricature appeared on packages of Aunt Jemima Pancake mix. In 1893, the R.T. Davis Milling Company bought the brand; and in 1917, Aunt Jemima was redrawn as a smiling, heavy-set black housekeeper with a bandanna wrapped around her head. In the mid-1920s, Quaker Oats bought the brand. (Here's a sampling of their ads.) In 1989, Quaker Oats modernized Aunt Jemima, making her thinner, eliminating her bandanna, and giving her a permanent wave and a pair of pearl earrings.
It's this latter makeover to which the reader was referring. But the semiotic significance of the two makeovers, it goes without saying, is quite different. As Big Daddy Kane put it, in Public Enemy's "Burn Hollywood Burn":
And Black women in this [acting] profession/As for playin' a lawyer, out of the question./For what they play "Aunt Jemima" is the perfect term/Even if now she got a perm.
I missed this last week, but Time magazine has embraced B.U. professor Stephen Prothero's call for new courses, in the public schools, on the Bible (the subject of my column three weeks ago). I say "has embraced," rather than "took note of," because the author of the cover story, David van Biema, wholeheartedly endorses the idea of (secular) Bible courses in public schools.
One curious aspect of the piece is its suggestion that endorsing a course on the Bible means, by definition, rejecting the comparative-religion approach. In fact, Prothero argues that there should be two required religion courses in every high school -- one on the Bible, one comparative. Odd that Time would leave that part out.
In pumping up the "trend" aspect of the story, Time also gives too much weight to the numbers of school districts that various groups claim have embraced various Biblical curricula. I left those out of my Ideas piece because some skeptics of the Bible courses say the numbers are inflated, and I didn't want to get bogged down in a subsidiary controversy. But if you're going to cite them, you should check them out, and it looks like Time didn't.
I tend to think courses on the Bible -- done well and done from a non-devotional perspective -- make sense (unless you live in a district prone to culture warfare, in which case who needs the hassle? But maybe there are more districts like this than I think ...). Still, there's something vaguely unsettling about this Time cover story. Time's new editor has said he's going to let his writers express their opinions more often in his pages. Yet it's hard to imagine a less courageous editorial stance than this resolutely pro-Bible one. I'm quite sure van Biema sincerely holds the opinions he expresses. But does anyone think he'd have gotten the cover if, after studying the issue, he'd concluded that schools should reject courses on the Bible in favor of the comparative approach? Or if he'd concluded that the Bible is just too potent for public-school teachers to handle -- as one evangelical historian I spoke to believes?
I hope the new pro-opinion era at Time allows room for opinions that don't happen to also, coincidentally or not, juice newsstand sales.
Last year, I wrote an Ideas item about an exhibit of "Jane Eyre" book covers and movie posters. Though Eyre describes herself in Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel as "plain" and "Quakerish," over the years she's been reimagined by publishers and marketers as a Gibson girl, a 1940s starlet, and a romantic pre-Raphaelite type, among other things. Now comes the news that another 19th-century Jane is getting an extreme makeover.
According to a story in The Guardian, novelist Jane Austen is being dolled up by the publisher Wordsworth Editions. "Jane Austen wasn't very good looking," explained Helen Trayler, the publisher's managing director. "She's the most inspiring, readable author, but to put her on the cover wouldn't be very inspiring at all. It's just a bit off-putting."
Austen before
For the cover of a new edition of an Austen biography, Wordsworth has taken the portrait of Austen that hangs in England's National Portrait Gallery (talk about plain and Quakerish) and Photoshopped it to remove the author's nightcap, and to give her make-up and hair extensions. Here's what she looks like now:
There's some quality late-night-dorm-room-style philosophizin' going on in the comments section of Books Inq., the blog of Philadelphia Inquirer Book Review editor Frank Wilson.
Responding, this Saturday, to the argument that blogging isn't just another form of writing, it's a performance in which the performer is constantly in flux, Wilson wondered, "Isn't writing also a kind of performance? Are we ever not performing?" One reader, Art Durkee, replied: "Any presentation of self is a performance. However, and it's a big however, there are difference scales of authenticity within performance." Rus Bowden wrote a long response, concluding: "If I ever were to become a stable 'I', will I agree with myself, or will this have been someone else's thoughts? Or, is there a stable 'I' trying to get through to you all through whomever this 'me' is writing this blog?"
Neil Forsyth got off a good one:
Don't know what you are all talking about. "I" was made redundant as a concept following cutbacks in the second half of the 20th century (or rationalisations, as they were euphemistically called). In fact, "I" was one of the first to be let go. Sadly, it now spends its time in the garden of authenticity smoking roll-ups and pruning roses. It occasionally visits other out-of-work concepts, like moral norm (among friends its just plain old norm), class and, the most recent casualty, democracy.
Too soon, perhaps, to nominate an online discussion as Talkfest of the Week. But so far, this one has my vote.
I will be traveling abroad this week to do research for a book proposal, and will be taking a Brainiac vacation. My fellow Brainiac bloggers will be more than happy to keep you enlightened and entertained.
