Monday, September 10, 2007

What I've been reading online...

Alas, few magazines, newspapers, or websites offer RSS feeds dedicated to my favorite journalists and writers. (Alex Beam is an exception.) So I troll the Interweb for their bylines, an imprecise process. Still, my efforts usually pay off. Here are a few recent essays worth reading:

Michael Agger writes about Wikiscanner, for Slate (Aug. 24): "It's not news that Wikipedia is occasionally incorrect. It's also not a surprise that tobacco companies, the Mormon Church, and Scientology are altering pages to promote their products and worldviews. More interesting are the small fry who were also caught in the Wikiscanner net. Someone with a New York Times IP made a crucial edit to the Condoleezza Rice page, altering 'pianist' to 'penis.' A Greenpeace IP sniped at Ted Nugent (the Nuge is a prominent pro-hunting spokesman) by claiming that he once had a 9-year-old Hawaiian girlfriend. A Republican Party IP ruined the sixth Harry Potter by blanking the entire entry and adding a spoiler."

Annalee Newitz also opines about Wikiscanner, for AlterNet: "It's not a mean dude with a grudge who is spreading lies on Wikipedia but rather a member of the federal government or a journalist at The New York Times. Cultural anarchy online is coming not from the hordes of scribbling bloggers but from the same entities that have always posed a danger to culture: corporations and governments who refuse to take responsibility for what they're doing."

Jason Zengerle writes about Mitt Romney for Boston Magazine (September 2007): "With most flip-floppers, we assume they've abandoned some core belief for political gain. With Romney, there may be no core to abandon. And whether in business or in politics, that has served him well. The question as he makes his run for president is how much longer it still can."

Zengerle also writes about the New Hampshire primary's exalted position as first in the nation, for The New Republic (Sept. 10).

Joe Keohane gripes about Boston's student population, in Boston Magazine (September 2007): "That’s not to say it’s necessarily the kids’ fault, not when you consider they’ve been incubated in a culture bent on simultaneously narcotizing them, infantilizing them, and artificially ballooning their self-esteem to head off the sort of crippling, corrosive self-doubt that plagues their parents. But it does raise the question of to what extent colleges will choose to follow the rest of society down this bottomless, if extremely lucrative, well. For a high school to spit out graduates with a mental age of 13 is one thing. For a college, it’s a gross abrogation of duty -- one keenly felt in a city whose population nine months out of the year is nearly a quarter students."

Douglas Rushkoff, responding to the question "Is Conservative Judaism suffering from malaise?" writes, in The Forward (Aug. 29): "I see Conservatives as the nerds of Judaism in the best sense the people who actually read Torah, understand it, and thoughtfully apply its teachings to their daily lives in the quest to make the world a better place.... If Conservatives surrender, as did their sister movements, to the seemingly pressing but ultimately transient matters of racial fidelity and international politics, they will have abandoned the true calling of this movement, and left the rest of Judaism to flounder."

Mark Kingwell, writing in The Toronto Globe and Mail (Sept. 1), explains how our leisure time has become increasingly meaningless: "Why was Mr. Galbraith so off about this trend when he was otherwise so right about the pathologies of the luxurious society? One reason is that his suspicions about affluence did not extend far enough. For instance, he was highly critical of advertising -- then a nascent art, at least in terms of mass media -- because it stimulated artificial desire. But he could not have predicted how pervasive, and acceptable, such stimulation would become, the very cultural air. Nor could he, or anyone, have predicted that the final triumph of an affluent society is not mere consumption of goods but a total identification between consumption and the self in the form of the consumer."

Jonathan Lethem writes about his dance moves, his record collection and his obsession with the Fifth Beatle in The Guardian (September 1): "John explained bitterly that he wrote the hook to 'Taxman', George's 'best' song, just as Ray Davies was quick to note he helped his brother with 'Death of a Clown,' Dave Davies's greatest hit. So the sham notion of a 'democracy of talent' within these great groups, with its analogous utopian implications for collective action, could dissolve into sour cynicism: the presiding genius probably could have done just as well with any other supporting cast."

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:37 AM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss