Harris discusses in numerous places the influence of peers in child development -- she also mentions the guidance of schoolteachers -- but it is in those passages that she most strays away from citing data and steps into more of an orator mode:
Children have to discover how they compare with other children along a variety of dimensions. Am I tall or short, strong or weak, pretty or plain, smart or dull? Without answers to these questions, they would have no way of deciding whether to try to dominate others or yield without a fight, to make suggestions or follow the suggestions of others, to turn down potential mates in hopes of doing better or take whatever comes along.
"No way of deciding" would be challenged by those who see parents as important teachers and moral guides.
Harris also gets in a little knock on her elders: "The urge to learn new words and new facts gradually declines as we get older...."
Strange news out of Houston: the Houston Museum of Natural Science is paying people who have a roach problem. To populate a new insect exhibit, the museum is offering a 25-cent reward for each live bug donated -- up to 1,000 roaches a person.
A blogger at free exchange gets wise about the entomology curator's suggested method of catching the little buggers: "First, you cover a glass jar with pantyhose. (These are still in fashion in Houston.) Then, you bait the jar with beer or dog food (those are her suggestions)."
"Absolutely, this wasn't devised as a joke," the curator told the Chronicle, adding "we really do need cockroaches."
He's never been one to dilly dally. Opening sentences: "I'm through with film as a medium. For me, film is dead." He cites video's ease of use, the mobility, the flexibility in working with actors, auto focus, and the possibility of very long takes. (Hitchcock famously worked around the time limit on takes in "Rope" by disguising cuts made during dark moments -- for example, when an actor passed by close to the lens. But it must have been a bear.)
Lynch thought at first that digital cameras were limiting but then started experimenting.
I did some tests from DV to film, because you still have to transfer to film to show in the theater. And although it does not look exactly like it's shot on film, it looks way better than I would have thought.
Many cinephiles take issue with that sentiment. One of the principal problems with video is that it still hasn't been able to match the "dynamic range" of celluloid -- the range between the lightest lights and the darkest darks. You notice this when you try to take a digital picture with no flash in a half-lit environment that you can make out just fine. (The eye beats both media by a lot, actually.)
In a 1999 essay in the New York Press, Godfrey Cheshire took a much took a much dimmer view of the switch to digital. Roger Ebert had recently protested it, too, and Cheshire backed him. But he, like Lynch, believed it was a losing battle. "Prognosis [for film]: Sudden death."
Forget Mitt Romney's untruthful statement, last month, that he's been a "hunter pretty much all [his] life" (read: he's hunted twice). And forget what he said to the Associated Press, last week, about how it's "not worth moving heaven and earth spending billions of dollars just trying to catch [Osama bin Laden]." These slip-ups may cost him a few votes, sure. But when the ex-Mass. gov. told Fox News, on Monday, that one of his favorite novels is the 1982 sci-fi epic "Battlefield Earth," by L. Ron Hubbard, the media went berserk.
The Times's Jim Rutenberg blogged about it immediately, coyly noting that, when posed to a presidential candidate, "What's your favorite novel" is a question "the answer to which presumably gives insight into leadership," wink wink nudge nudge. He said no more.
Two WaPo writers were less cautious, and made much of the fact that Hubbard was not your run of the mill SF writer, but also the founder of Scientology. "Yikes, that doesn't strike me as the way to go for a candidate who's trying to convince Middle America that Mormonism is not exotic," commented Congressional reporter Lyndsey Layton, in a live chat on Tuesday. In a live chat on Wednesday, WaPo Book World columnist Michael Dirda mused: "Hmmm. Is Mitt Romney a Scientologist? This is the only logical explanation."
Why is this the only logical explanation? Because, America's critics and pundits -- whether left or right of center -- seem to agree, "Battlefield Earth" has no redeeming qualities. It is such a lousy novel that nobody could possibly enjoy or admire it, we're informed by the chattering class; so Romney could only have been making a political or religious point of some kind by claiming it as one of his favorites. At TNR's website The Plank, Michael Crowley said: "Isn't naming a novel by the hilariously nutty founder of Scientology more than a little loaded?" David Weigel at Reason magazine's blog Hit & Run said: "'Battlefield Earth' is awful. Nobody reads that book except Scientologists and smartasses who want to giggle at Scientologists, and even they start to cash out by the 7000th page or so."
"The whole tumbling horror of the 'Battlefield Earth' experience is so profound it nearly comes out the other side and achieves a kind of perfection of awfulness," insisted John Dickerson, in a Slate essay on Wednesday. "There must be something we can learn about Romney by examining this answer," he claimed, only to shrug his shoulders a few paragraphs later and conclude: "You simply need a deep level of weird to like 'Battlefield Earth.'" (Conservative pundit-turned-MSNBC anchor Tucker Carlson agrees: On Wednesday, he told viewers, "I am concerned about what our potential president is putting into his brain. If you are reading for fun, and not some sort of twisted research project, but voluntarily reading L. Ron Hubbard, as a novelist, I think it's a real red flag.")
So... we all agree that there's obviously some hilarious and telling point to be made about Romney, based on his enjoyment of "Battlefield Earth," but none of us can figure out exactly what that point is? I, for one, get suspicious when pundits agree to trash something. What is so threatening to everybody about "Battlefield Earth," anyway?
Dickerson is honest enough to admit that he hasn't actually read "Battlefield Earth," and I strongly suspect that none of these other folks have, either. I, on the other hand, have read the whole thing. In 1983, when I was 15. Yes, it's badly written, for the most part. But as post-apocalyptic science-fantasy novels go, it's not the worst one I've ever read. (That honor goes to: the 1971 Roger Zelazny novel "Damnation Alley." Or maybe Michael Crichton's "Andromeda Strain.") Romney's high school English teacher should have turned him on to "On the Beach" or "A Canticle for Leibowitz," maybe, but if enjoying schlock fiction means you're crazy, I don't want to be sane.
What does it mean that Romney likes "Battlefield Earth"? Here's an answer: IMHO, people who enjoy post-apocalyptic novels have a reactionary and/or utopian streak running through them; they enjoy narratives about the collapse of Western civilization because they're unhappy with the state of that civilization and would like (or imagine they'd like) to see the slate wiped clean. Once upon a time, James Fenimore Cooper novels thrilled educated Frenchmen for the same reason. Romney's brand of idealism may be jejune, but he's no more crazy than are the readers of other 1982 post-apocalyptic novels: "God's Grace," by Bernard Malamud; "The White Plague," by Frank ("Dune") Herbert; or the first installment of Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta" comic book series. If this sort of thing holds absolutely no appeal for Tucker Carlson and Michael Dirda, perhaps it's because they're (worryingly) satisfied with the current state of affairs?
If Romney had named the Book of Revelations as his favorite apocalyptic fiction, then there might be reason to worry. But "Battlefield Earth" has a happy ending: Rugged, never-say-die humans from around the planet join forces, educate themselves, work hard, and finally restore democracy on Earth, and in the rest of the universe. That's not so worrisome, is it? So cut the guy some slack about his taste in literature. Let's get back to bashing him about his flip-flopping on abortion, shall we?
UPDATE: Blogs that have linked to this post include: Blogs for Mitt and the libertarian blog Free Will. Boing Boing linked to the expanded version of this post that appeared in Ideas on 5/13/07.
UPDATE: What do Brainiac readers think of this blog post? Find out here. Am I wrong to argue that there's no Scientology in "Battlefield"? Wikipedia-using readers seem to think so.
I thought her argument -- made famous by a Malcolm Gladwell profile of Harris -- was that it was childrens' peers that shaped the parts of their personalities not already pre-programmed by genes. From your description, it sounds as if she's making a somewhat different, less specific argument today. But if it's not parents, and it's not peers, I wonder what's left. Books? Cartoons on TV? The school-bus driver?
More on Google Answers: with its demise came the end of a blog called Best of Google Answers. Written by the anonymous "Rajjesh," it was updated very infrequently and not well-written, but it gets points for enthusiasm and good taste.
Its last post came on Dec. 6, 2006, a week after Google announced that the service was soon to go into the dustbin of Interhistory. The post pointed to a Google questioner who offered $35 for a list of 50 to 100 reasons to get married, adding that he or she was looking for "some more serious answers." OK. A few of the 54 answers received:
16. Access to military stores if your spouse has access
35. Married couples are traditionally a two-car family so you'd have a backup vehicle if one of them ever breaks down
In the Winter 2007 issue of Azure, a Jerusalem-based political and cultural journal, the former federal appeals-court judge Robert Bork strongly criticized the views of Aharon Barak, until recently the president of the Supreme Court of Israel. In his recent book "The Judge in a Democracy," Barak praised the trend toward "the constitutionalization of democratic politics" that he said was evident in many Western nations. But Bork argued that what Barak was really applauding, via that ambiguous (Bork might say Orwellian) phrase, was judges' imposition of their own social and political preferences on Western polities, regardless of voters' opinions.
In the new, Spring 2007 issue of Azure, in response to a reader, Peter Skurkiss, who suggested that America's "democratic character" would be "destroyed" if such trends continued, Bork sounded a fatalistic note: Nothing so dramatic as destruction, or a political "explosion," was imminent, he wrote:
We have been living with what Skurkiss aptly terms 'judical tyranny' for over half a century, and so far there are no signs of an explosion. Nor is it clear what an explosion would entail....
The more likely prospect is that we will continue to defer to the unconstitutional diktats of the courts on social and cultural matters, and so will come to resemble sheep who are no longer allowed to make important moral choices for ourselves as we passively acquiesce to our diminished status.
This is not to say that the situation is hopeless, but recovery will require political victories that enable presidents to nominate and the Senate to confirm men and women who take their guidance from the principles of the historic Constitutional. So far, through a long list of Republican appointees to the court, that strategy has not worked. Perhaps it will never work, but it seems the only solution open to us.
There's a new book for the sci-fi-inclined from Oxford University Press called "Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction." In the venerable Oxford manner, it includes citations tracing back to the first use that can be found.
Teresa Nielsen, at the blog Making Light, writes: "How can I dislike an OUP dictionary where the first entry is actifan...?" (That's as opposed to a passifan, who reads sci-fi but doesn't engage in the culture of fanatics.)
Sci Fi Magazine weighs in: "This is a fine work, helpful for anyone who has ever been asked what the hell we've been talking about all this time."
A new essay in Prospect Magazine (UK) by Judith Rich Harris posits that what goes on in families doesn't matter as much as is commonly thought when it comes to personality development:
Whether the home is headed by one parent or two, whether the parents are happily married or constantly rowing, whether they believe in pushing their children to succeed or leaving them to find their own way in life, whether the home is filled with books or sports equipment, whether it is orderly or messy, a city flat or a farmhouse -- the research shows, counterintuitively, that none of these things makes much difference.
This is a very old debate, of course, but Harris isn't trying to deliver a KO in Nature v. Nurture. She says in "virtually every" study, it's essentially a split decision. But the environmental effects aren't to be found in the home.
Where are they? "[R]esearchers still haven't been able to pin down which aspects of the environment are important." The aspects that aren't, she says, are those "shared by all the children who grow up in a given family -- which includes most of the things the word 'home' makes you think of."
UPDATE: I meant to mention that Christopher Shea wrote a related article for Ideas in August 2004 about the controversial views of Jerome Kagan, author of "The Long Shadow of Temperament." Kagan favors Nature in the fight, by a lot, but doesn't think much of the way Harris downplays parenting: "'I am embarrassed for psychology,' he told Newsweek when her book came out in 1998."
Great post, Josh. I want that t-shirt. Via the Chicago Blog, a venture of the U. of C. Press, I learned this week that Discovery magazine placed a whole series of photographs from the book "The Deep" online. Discovery identifies your Tweetyish friend as a "Dumbo Octopus," which sounds a shade disrespectful.
This fellow also caught my eye. Hard to wrap your mind around the fact it's it's 6 feet long, teeth to tail, and has been known to forage for food on land.
More watery beasties here, with a related story here.
"Non, ce n'est pas un Pokemon que voila, mais un authentique octopode du genre Grimpoteuthis," we read at the French blog Les fabuleuses Pieuvres de l'Espace. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks the octopuses of the genus Grimpoteuthis -- particularly the specimen whose photo appears in a new book, "The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss," which features deep sea monsters photographed using robots capable of diving three miles -- looks like Pikachu.
Alas, I believe that humankind knows less about the Grimpoteuthis than we do about Pikachu. According to Wikipedia, for example:
Pikachu often forage for berries. Instead of climbing trees, they use small electrical bolts to release the berries from the tree, roasting them at the same time. They store electricity in their cheeks, and discharge them in sparks, bolts or other forms of electricity. An inability to discharge electricity in this last way, as in the presence of strong magnetic field, causes an illness with flu-like symptoms. Pikachu gather in areas with high amounts of thunderstorm activity such as power stations. Pikachu evolve into Raichu via use of a Thunder Stone. However, it is somewhat common for Trainers to choose not to evolve their Pikachu into Raichu.
Etcetera! But the humble Grimpoteuthis does have its fans. A German website sells the following excellent T-shirt.
UPDATE: Thanks for the traffic, Boing Boing. Also: "The Deep," the book in which the Grimpotheusis photo appears, has its own, very cool website. There are many more great photos on the website; and there are hundreds more photos in the book!
UPDATE: What do Brainiac readers think of this blog post? Find out here.
Wow, for once I actually scooped Boing Boing with my Brainiac post yesterday about the massive game of online hide-and-seek that DVD hackers and others are playing with the AACS LA. Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow reported on this phenomenon in the wee hours of the morning, today, using the same Flickr photo I did as an illustration. Doctorow and I must be stealing ideas from the same places.
And now, the word of the day: steganography, a way to conceal a coded message inside an innocuous-looking photograph, document, or other bit of media. The photo I posted yesterday is one example of steganography; Doctorow's post documents two more ways in which the infamous processing key is currently being concealed from search engines: as a song, and as a photo of (gulp) a scalp tattoo.
PHOTO REMOVED
Speaking of which, steganography is Greek for "covered writing." When the ancient Greeks wanted to transmit a secret message, we were informed at Boston Latin School, they'd shave the head of a messenger, tattoo the information on his scalp, wait till his hair grew back, then send him off on his journey. Glad to see that this fun practice is still flourishing!
UPDATE: Looks like the tattoo image (no longer posted to this site, per order of the higher-ups) wasn't a scalp tattoo. It was a chest tattoo. I have seen the full photo now; turns out the tattooing was done here in Boston.
UPDATE: What do Brainiac readers think of this blog post? Find out here.
I didn't realize until just now that the research-for-hire service Google Answers is no longer an active project. According to a post yesterday by Jessamyn West of the excellent and venerable blog Librarian.net, if you were a GA user (and are also very nerdy) you might be interested in finding out which GA researchers answered the most queries.
I'll miss Google Answers! I used the service three times, with only one glitch. The first time was in the name of journalism; see my November 2002 short item (from Ideas), below. I queried GA a second time because I couldn't think of the title of a terrific book that I'd read as a child; the brilliant GA researcher Pinkfreud (2d busiest of them all, with 2354 answers) sniffed out the answer for me: "The Astonishing Adventures of Patrick The Mouse," by Katja Beskow.
Then there was the third time. On Dec. 18, 2003, I submitted a query to Google Answers about the long-gone Old Mr. Boston distillery in Boston. I'd found absolutely nothing online about it, so I gave GA a month to turn something up. Before the month was over, though, I got the answers through the Boston Globe's library, instead, and published my Old Mr. Boston item in Ideas. Not long after than, a Google Answers researcher (410 answers, total) replied to my query with... yes, my own item. Once I'd explained the mix-up, we both got a laugh out of it.
I was pleased to learn, from Jessamyn West's blog, that 37 former GA researchers now work for the paid answers service Uclue.
***
Here's that Ideas item about Google Answers:
The cook, she's name was Rosie / She cam' from Mo'real / and was a chambermaid on a lumber barge / in the Grand Lachine Canal," sings Rob Rexler, protagonist of Saul Bellow's 1995 story "By the St. Lawrence." He abruptly falls silent, and Bellow explains why: "Rexler had more than once thought of opening an office to help baffled people who could remember only one stanza of a ballad or song. For a twenty-five dollar fee you would provide the full text."
Recent developments at the Internet search-engine company Google indicate that it was probably wise of Rexler to keep his day job. Last week saw the launch of Google Answers, a service which matches up baffled people with Google's freelance cadre of "carefully screened Researchers." When Ideas submitted Rexler's query on Oct. 31, Researcher "Pinkfreud" turned up the full text of the dialect-poem-turned-folksong "The Wreck of the Julie Plante" within the hour.
The tune was put to wax in 1923 by Jimmy Rice, we learned - although Bellow may have had Nelson Eddy's radio version in mind. Total price: two dollars, plus a 50-cent service charge.
Volunteer users have built a massive encyclopedia (that need not be named); they've helped themselves and others get published; and they've done an awful lot of other things online that one wouldn't have thought anyone would do without pay.
They can also help keep old books alive. Distributed Proofreaders scans old volumes in the public domain, runs them through optical character recognition (OCR) software and then, in a virtual sense, hands them off to the elves one page at a time.
Each volunteer gets a page scan image side by side with the OCR program's outputted text version and then proofreads to make sure they match up. (OCR software is just about never 100 percent accurate.) When the book is done, it goes to Project Gutenberg, the leading source of free electronic books.
"We seriously regret the wrongdoing," said Motonori Watanabe.
Yokohama High School has admitted to giving tuition discounts to baseball players. The team has won the national title five times, including in 1998, when Matsuzaka was on the hill, throwing his nasty stuff.
UPDATE 5/3 11:30 a.m. Reader Jared B. adds that because Mainichi means daily, Mainichi Daily News (as it it called in English) "is a funny redundancy--it's a sloppy translation of Mainichi Shimbun. Second, the high school championship is a very very big deal in Japan. It's televised, in a country without cable TV. Daisuke threw a no-hitter in the 1998 final."
Though I'm occasionally willing to pokefun at ad language, I'm not really annoyed by the slogans that purposely take liberties with "proper" usage. From "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should" to "Think different," taglines have always been formulated to get our attention, by fair means or foul.
But language accidents are a different story. How does an obvious blooper make its way into a giant company's print ad, an ad that is surely rewritten, designed, tested, and proofread for months, at vast expense? Right now I'm wondering about a splashy Merck newspaper ad that urges people over 60 to hotfoot it to the doctor's office for a shot of the company's new shingles vaccine. Among the bold red reasons:
The older you get, your risk for Shingles increases.
We'll give them the silly capital S; the writers want to make shingles look scarier and, perhaps, to distinguish the disease from the roofing material. But can there be one native speaker of English, either at Merck or its ad agency, who thinks that is normal English syntax? One who would say to a co-worker, for instance, "The more I write, my grasp of grammar declines"?
Well, maybe there is -- the construction is common enough on the Web -- but there shouldn't be. This is not one of those linguistic tight spots where "correct" grammar sounds overformal ("Whom do you trust?") or wordy ("Each patient should ask his or her doctor"). Some casual yet correct alternatives come to mind:
The older you get, the more you're at risk for shingles. (This one actually appears on the Merck website.)
The older you get, the higher your risk of shingles.
As you get older, your risk of shingles increases.
The risk of shingles increases with age.
Older adults are more at risk for shingles.
"Ask about the facts," the ad concludes. OK, I'm asking: who signed off on this sad excuse for a sentence?
I spent yesterday evening in a visitors' centre for a country that doesn't exist. Kymaerica is a parallel universe with its own artefacts, stories, history and geography, roughly coexistent with this world (the 'linear' world) but not identical to it.
The central space for exploring Kymaerican history and heritage is online, but it erupts into the 'linear' world here and there. There is a permanent installation in Paris, Illinois; there are now five plaques in the UK: during the London exhibition there was a bus tour around Kymaerican sites corresponding with Central London.
That's from Sebastian Mary, writing on the blog of The Institute for the Future of the Book. Kymaerica has some resemblances to Second Life, though Mary doesn't mention Second Life by name. But the off-line element to this alternate reality is different. And while SL is a virtual world constructed by users, or "residents," Kymaerica is the brainchild of Eames Demetrios, the project's "geographer at large."
Eames claims to have the whole history of this world mapped out in detail, but intentionally reveals it bit by bit, mostly through the real objects planted on Planet Earth: "'I always want to hint at something that's just out of reach,' [Demetrios] told me. 'It's like writing a novel so you can publish a haiku.'
A particular string of hexidecimal numbers -- TEXT REMOVED -- appeared, seemingly everywhere at once, yesterday, in the blogosphere. Ethan Zuckerman, a friend and former colleague of mine who is currently affiliated with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, explained the numbers' significance on his blog today. Zuckerman says:
The string in question is the "processing key" that can be used to unlock the encryption on HD DVD discs protected by the AACS (Advanced Access Content System) digital rights management system.
The key has been available online for several months, but unless you are a DVD hacker, it's unlikely that you've ever seen it before. So what happened? On Monday, AACS LA, the consortium responsible for the encryption standard, started sending cease and desist notices to websites on which the string had been posted. (Including websites whose content is user-generated, like Slashdot, Wikipedia, and Digg.) As Zuckerman notes, "The cease and desist letters backfired, in a big way. Searching for the key on Google [as of today, Wednesday] reveals 320,000 pages that contain the code."
In order to thwart the efforts of AACS LA, some hackers have taken to hiding the processing key in graphics and photos, like this one from Flickr:
In my column Sunday on "social-norms marketing," I downplayed, for reasons of space and decorum, the bad blood between Henry Wechsler, the former head of the College Alcohol Study at Harvard's School of Public Health, and the social-norms crowd. But that tension does illuminate some issues involved in these debates over how best to tackle certain social problems.
Wechsler, whose large-scale surveys of students date back to 1992, is best-known for the widely reported finding that some 40 percent of students "binge drink" -- by which he means consuming five drinks in one sitting anytime during the past two weeks. (That's the figure for men; for women it's four.) He's also stressed the connection between alcohol and social maladies like date-rape.
Social-norms researchers, on the other hand, think the term "binge" -- which to some of them connotes a week-long bender, not five beers during a football game -- itself contributes to students' false impressions about their peers' drinking habits.
Wechsler, for his part, thinks the social-norms approach offers an easy out for campus administrators: It doesn't involve taking beers out of students' hands; and it lets deans ignore pockets of hard partying, so long as they put up signs explaining what the majority of responsible students do.
In other words, each side thinks the other's approach isn't just misguided -- it's actively harmful.
The norm?
I didn't really explain, either, why the social-norms researchers think it makes sense that -- as they find -- college students who drink less than the average don't begin to drink more, once they learn what the true average is. (The norm, after all, is a magnet.)
Students who don't drink much, they say, already have a sense of how much their peers drink -- an inflated sense. Someone who drinks three beers a week and thinks her classmates drink ten is unlikely to drink more after she learns the real average is six beers weekly. That's the theory, anyway.
In the reader-mail department, Patricia S., who says she's always suspected that peer pressure has its good side, writes in to express the wish that pro-football players exert a little peer pressure on Randy Moss during his time with the Patriots. And she hopes social norms will work their subtle magic little closer to home, too -- though she is quick to clarify that she doesn't want to inaugurate a new era of public shaming: "A little decorum in the supermarket parking lot will be enough for me!"
Incidentally, the National Social Norms Resource Center will hold its annual conference in Cambridge, in mid-July.
At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen has some thoughts about long books and why so few people read them. He bought a one-volume collection of five Eric Ambler novels and "ripped it into five separate, easy to transport pieces."
Perhaps the detachable book is coming to a Barnes and Noble near you, he speculates. More easily digestible chunks might lend a feeling of satisfaction at having "finished" something. That makes some sense to me. Of course, the problem comes when you can't remember who the characters (or people) are and you need to go flipping back through for earlier mentions and get into the flow again. But there's no particular reason you can't pick up section two just after you finish section one.
In an earlier post on a similar thread, Cowen wondered why we stop in the middle of books and return to them but very rarely do so with movies. I favor the simple explanation that books generally take a lot longer.
But perhaps it's not that simple. Commenting on the post, John Voorhees says, "it might be something about the way in which the narratives are experienced, phenomenologically. Movies are experienced audio-visually but novels are experienced imaginatively. But I don't think I could break up a play, and that's audio-visual." A lot of people are going to see Tom Stoppard's three-part play "The Coast of Utopia," however, on separate nights.
We've been hearing quite a bit lately about the demise of newspaper book review sections. (This phenomenon is not unrelated to the ongoing drop in newspaper circulation around the country.) Well, Richard Nash of the hotshot independent publishing house Soft Skull has a counterintuitive suggestion: Go ahead and get rid of those book review sections!
Now, I believe that newspapers should be devoting more time, intelligence and column inches to dealing with books overall (the demographics of book consumers and newspaper consumers overlaps to a great degree), but isolating that coverage in a stand-alone section with a sequence of one-person-says-a-few-things-about-one-book isn't necessarily the best way to engage readers OR writers.
That is to say, newspapers shouldn't stop covering books, but they don't necessarily have to concentrate all book reviews into one section:
Could some of the articles that would otherwise be about the annual March-April flood of baseball books be incorporated into the fat start-of-the-baseball-season sports supplement? Could self-help books be in Living sections? Current Affairs books be in the National or International pages? And could Arts & Ideas be a forum for novelists and poets to be discussed alongside filmmakers and dancers and philosophers and political scientists?
Personally, I believe the answer to these questions is: Yes!
1. Wow! There's an excellent roundtable on global warming in the current issue of Sierra magazine. It features Democrats and Republicans, politicians and venture capitalists and energy honchos and scientists. It was convened by Marilyn Snell, head of the magazine's investigative journalism project. Check out: the panelists, the helpful definitions (carbon allowances, biofuel, cellulosic ethanol, etc.), and other sidebars.
2. Spinal Tap reunites to fight global warming
3. President Bush (Will Ferrell) vs. global warming
Ideas editor Wen Stephenson informs me that poetry lovers can gather at the ICA tomorrow, at 6:30 pm, to celebrate the installation of Emily Dickinson's "695 (As if the Sea should part)" on the HarborWalk.
This is the first program in the Poetry Partnership between the ICA and the UMass Boston Creative Writing Program; there will be readings by Gail Mazur, Robert Pinsky, Lloyd Schwartz, and Rosanna Warren. (Perhaps talent scouts for Boston's soon-to-be-appointed poet laureate will surreptitiously mingle with the assembled luminaries?) Whether or not you plan to attend, here's the poem:
As if the Sea should part
And show a further Sea --
And that -- a further -- and the Three
But a presumption be --
Of Periods of Seas --
Unvisited of Shores --
Themselves the Verge of Seas to be --
Eternity -- is Those --
Huh? Dickinson's poem, according to some scholars, is a prime example of her key practice of holding alternatives in dialectical tension; Dickinsonian dialectics, like the later "negative dialectics" of Frankfurt School theorist T.W. Adorno, offer no neat, final synthesis. Even if we were to somehow arrive at paradise, "As if the Sea should part" seems to warn, we'd discover that it's not the final paradise. "Utmost is relative," as Dickinson puts it elsewhere.
The event is free; tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis at the ICA admissions desk one hour before the program.
For an interesting and funny report I saw on CNN this morning, click on the Best Video tab on their home page and select "New citizen test."
It's just gotten a little trickier to pass the US citizenship exam. New questions focus on "the ideals of democracy, to make [the test] more meaningful." Some are easy. Some aren't.
The story is based mostly on reporting from Boston, where members of a test-prep program are shown in the classroom and in interviews. Some less industrious types are shown on the streets of New York, milling about. These Americans have a hard time answering the questions. One guy is positive Susan B. Anthony wrote "The Star-Spangled Banner."
The stumped people should have gotten more creative.
As reported in The Star (South Africa) and some other far-flung places, Miles Hilton-Barber, 55, has become the first blind person to pilot a plane from London to Sydney -- more or less halfway around the world. It took him 59 days.
How does he do it? His navigation instruments "talk" to him, for one. And he steers the microlight craft, says the Star, "from a wireless keyboard."
They don't explain that one. Perhaps braille on the keys? Or maybe he learned by feel from an amped-up version of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing? I could never get through those lessons.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has opened up the Katherine Newman essay I mentioned yesterday, on the Virginia Tech shootings, to non-subscribers. Here it is.
A couple of readers have written in, with tongues at varying depths in cheek, to shed yet more light on my key question regarding the Prez comic book cover below: "why is an American Indian particularly concerned about the fate of the President of the United States, who is a surfer dude?"
Melissa Flashman writes:
Why is the Indian concerned with the white teenage prez. in peril? Walter Benn Michaels has a lot to say on this subject (the role of Indians for imperiled white Americans) in "Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism."
Flashman is Walter Benn Michaels's agent.
Scott Eric Kaufman, a contributor to The Valve and the author of the blog Acephalous, writes:
The Native American would be "Eagle Free," the youthful Prez's sidekick[, as Josh Glenn noted]. Eagle Free taught the Prez how to fight -- but, as that cover shows, not that well. I know this not because I'm the height of geek, but because the Prez showed up in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, in an issue called "The Golden Boy," about which more here.
In 1999, the sociologist Katherine Newman -- then at Harvard, now at Princeton -- was tapped by the National of Academy of Sciences (itself tapped by Congress) to investigate the phenomenon of school shootings. She has an essay [$] in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education that, while offering few surprises or answers, is nevertheless authoritative and clarifying:
It's subscriber-only, but here's a sample:
School shooters are problem solvers. They are trying to turn the reputations they live with as losers into something more glamorous, more notorious. Seung-Hui Cho, a student of creative writing, probably didn't get a lot of "street cred" for his artistic side.... When their daily social experience--created by their own ineptness, and often by the rejection of their peers--is one of disappointment and friction, they want to reverse their social identities. How do they go about it? Sadly, becoming violent, going out in a blaze of glory, and ending it all by taking other people with them is one script that plays out in popular culture and provides a road map for notoriety.
Depression is endemic in these young men. Indeed, it can be so bad that they want to die. Why, then, don't they throw themselves in front of trains? That is the wimp's way out ... by taking dozens of other people with him, [Cho] insured his notorious place in history and found a way to set the record straight: He was a man to be reckoned with.
I am older than Evan, so I forgive him for not being familiar with "Prez: First Teen President," a very weird 1973-74 DC comic book series, written by Joe Simon, that was canceled after only four issues. I have at least three issues in my attic, I'm pretty sure.
Like so many other DC titles of the early 1970s, "Prez" was a cleaned-up, de-fanged ripoff of far-out, subversive themes and memes floating around the culture already. ("Kamandi," about post-apocalyptic, animals-in-charge America, is more subversive than "Prez," less subversive than what it ripped off: "Planet of the Apes.") In this case, the preexisting meme was: long-haired teens take over the US government. Ripped off from: the terrific 1968 boomersploitation flick "Wild in the Streets," directed by Barry Shear, based on the Robert Thom story "The Day It All Happened, Baby!" In the movie, Max Frost (Christopher Jones, shown above) is a pop star whose multiracial band/housemates/think tank (inc. Richard Pryor, shown above, as anthropologist/drummer Stanley X) conspire to lower the voting age; once that is accomplished, Frost is elected president, and he immediately starts putting everyone over the age of 30 -- including his mother, played by Shelley Winters, shown above -- into psychedelicized concentration camps.
In "Prez," by contrast, although Prez Rickard's election is made possible by a voting-age amendment, Prez is an incorruptible idealist who appoints his mother VP. (He seems more Gen Y than Boomer.) Prez, too, is surrounded by multiracial teen comrades. Most important is: FBI chief Eagle Free, a Native American youth who communicates with animals, lives in a cave, and is master of all the martial arts. Eagle Free is constantly thwarting the efforts of evil adults who'd depose or assassinate Prez.
I blogged recently about Caleb Crain's argument that gay marriage's institutionalization in one state after another parallels the abolition of slavery two centuries ago. Brainiac reader Andre M. suggests that "the parallels are even eerier than Crain suggests, but the situation gets complicated when we assume that it's more than coincidence." I'll give Andre the floor:
Actually, Vermont (not yet a state) adopted by legislative vote a gradual abolition of slavery; the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court then ruled that slavery violated the state's constitution, and freed all the slaves. (In 1790, Massachusetts was the only state with no slaves.) A number of the states followed Vermont's approach. This is pretty much exactly what's happened with gay marriage. (Mass. is at the moment the only state with nominal same-sex marriage).
Other points made by Andre:
* We're not adding new states these days, slowing down the process.
* New York had lots of slaves, and has lots of gay couples, so different situation; Pennsylvania was full of anti-slavery Quakers.
* The Defense of Marriage Act is parallel to the Fugitive Slave Act (federal preemption of state authority); will we see growing opposition to it, most likely over differential tax status, forcing the issue at the national level?
UPDATE: Crain replies to Andre M:
You're right, of course, that those dates on state-by-state abolition are condensing a lot of legal history very crudely. Your analogy between the Defense of Marriage Act and the Fugitive Slave Act is intriguing. I wonder if there will ever be the same kind of popular resistance, though. Helping to ensure that someone pays a more equitable tax burden just doesn't have the same emotional valence as helping someone escape a slave-catcher. But maybe some politician will figure out a way to make the inequity more visible, more moving...
Thanks, Andre! Please keep the emails coming, readers.
Josh knows a lot more about comics than I do, but I'm not sure even he can answer a couple of questions that arose for me from an image in this post of his from Friday:
Why do the soldiers look like Skeletor, the bad guy from "He-Man"? More pressing: why is an American Indian particularly concerned about the fate of the President of the United States, who is a surfer dude?
Kate Bolick's interview in yesterday's Ideas section with the one-of-a-kind fiction writer and translator Lydia Davis brought to mind the very first article I edited for pay, at The New Leader magazine. The piece was a review of "Process," an autobiographical novel by Kay Boyle written in the 1920s that had recently been discovered in a library and finally published. About midway through, I came to this sentence: "Boyle was born in 1902, and I the year after." I nearly fell out of my chair.
Hope Hale Davis, Lydia's mother, wrote the review. Hope was married four times, the second time to the communist British writer Claud Cockburn, the fourth to the literary critic and Columbia professor Robert Gorham Davis, who also wrote for The New Leader before his death in 1998.
A former communist who broke with the party during World War II, Hope Hale Davis had an illustrious and very long career. Some of her work, largely fiction, was collected in "The Dark Way to the Plaza," 1968. Her memoir of the 1930s, "Great Day Coming," came out in 1994. She died in 2004, a month short of her 101st birthday.
It's been over a year since I actually worked at the Globe's Ideas section -- though obviously I'm still blogging and doing other freelance writing for Ideas -- so on Sunday mornings I get to be pleasantly surprised, like everybody else, by the section's contents.
Yesterday, I was pleased to see a lead Ideas feature by Jonah Lehrer, an editor-at-large and blogger for the hip science magazine Seed, on the 50-year history of the very much ongoing cognitive revolution. (Partial disclosure: I know Lehrer, in a virtual way, via a hermeneutic newsgroup; also, much as I admire and miss Ideas designer Greg Klee, who is temporarily designing the Style section, I dig the story's illustration, shown above, by current Ideas designer Mike Swartz.) One detects the influence of new Ideas deputy Gareth Cook, who until recently was the Globe's hotshot science writer; in today's Globe, as a matter of fact, Cook alerts us to a Harvard geneticist's quixotic crusade to search for DNA on Mars.
I won't mention every item in yesterday's Ideas, but I was particularly entertained and enlightened by contributions from my fellow bloggers: Chris Shea's Critical Faculties column was about the effectiveness of social-norms (aka peer-pressure) marketing campaigns; and Jan Freeman's The Word column cast a cold eye on "news-speak" malapropisms like "grievance counselors" and the proper pluralization of "ho."
Later today: What else I've been reading, in publications that don't support me financially.
