Today in The Nation: Obama and Iraq
Today in The Nation: MoveOn at Ten
Christopher Hayes It's given voice to a new silent majority--and made a few enemies. Now what?
Today in The Nation: Nine Reasons to Prosecute War Crimes Now
Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith Why we can't afford to let the Bush Administration off the hook.
Campaign 08: The Obamas Are Bringing Sexy Back
5:00PM
JUL 18 2008
A nation of wimps
From TED, Freeman Dyson on looking for life in the outer solar system. Great minds think (too much) alike: Is the web narrowing scientists’ expertise? Using the internet to search for scientific articles is bad for researchers, says sociologist James Evans. The general who investigated Abu Ghraib now says the Bush administration is guilty of war crimes — but will anyone take notice? Has the "surge" in Iraq worked? Immanuel Wallerstein investigates. More and more and more and more on Soldiers of Reason: The RAND Corporation and the Rise of the American Empire by Alex Abella. What the past term reveals about the Roberts Court: Evidence that the Court is disturbingly elitist and anti-democratic. From Esquire, an article on the Battle of Newark, starring Cory Booker (and a response by Booker). Prominent women are one-third less likely to be encouraged to run for office than prominent men. An article on Edward O. Wilson on ants and human social evolution. A review of A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting by Hara Estroff Marano (and more and more and more). From Minding The Campus, Charlotte Allen on mandatory summer reading. Why do Asian students generally get higher marks than Latinos? More on The Dumbest Generation by Mark Bauerlein. An anthropologist studies the “recursive public” of programmers; Scott McLemee gets his nerd on.
1:00PM
JUL 18 2008
The strongest known material
The dark side of paradise: A special New Statesman focus on South East Asia. From The Economist, more religions, more trouble: Radical Muslim and Christian groups stoke the embers of Papua’s conflict; in the Indian Ocean you'll find the most dangerous seas in the world; and a special report on Al-Qaeda: Winning or losing? Saying farewell to the sort of horrible social engineering projects that dominated the 20th century is a major example of human progress. A review of Against Schooling: For an Education that Matters by Stanley Aronowitz. Graphene, praised for its electrical properties, has been proven the strongest known material. Wait, who is this? Shining the dim light of cultural obscurity on the prank phone call. For centuries, Oxford remained a bastion of Western Civilization — then came American marketing. From The Believer, an interview with Matt Bai. From Portfolio, Joel Osteen preaches the virtues of prosperity—for himself as well as his congregation; the man may well be one of the biggest beneficiaries of the slumping economy. The Ten Commandments of race and genetics are issued. Seneca may have disapproved of them, but roof gardens are part of the poetry of urban life. Here are five questions Israel should ask before bombing Iran. Before it was bought by Belgium's InBev, Budweiser trampled local breweries across this land; who's crying in their (piss) beer now?
9:00AM
JUL 18 2008
The idea of the “bad girl”
From Reason, Ronald Bailey on TEOTWAWKI! Or, the end of the world as we know it at the Global Catastrophic Risks conference. Self-interest is bad? Andrew Ferguson on CGTYOSI, or the "cause greater than your own self-interest". A review of The Wisdom to Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism by J. L. Schellenberg. From Infidels.org, Amanda Avellone on confessions of an evangelical atheist. From ARPA, the idea of the "bad girl": A review of Princesses and Pornstars: Sex, Power, Identity by Emily Maguire and Beyond Bad Girls: Gender, Violence and Hype by Meda Chesney-Lind and Katherine Irwin. From Big Think, Harvey Mansfield defines the concept of "manliness". How good was the Good War? TAC contributors debate the lessons of World War II and their relevance to American foreign policy today. D-Day with bikinis: Alasdair Soussi re-examines the history of an odd invasion. Why doesn't the world understand us? A review of God and Gold by Walter Russell Mead. A review of In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan (and more and an interview; and more from Bookforum). Would Small is Beautiful's E. F. Schumacher have a MySpace page? An Egyptian quip could reasonably be considered the world's first recorded joke. Facebook phobia: Thought high school was bad? Social-networking sites jack up Web-era insecurities.
5:00PM
JUL 17 2008
One-armed vegetarian live-in boyfriends
From Cato Unbound, Robert Levy on District of Columbia v. Heller: What’s next? Forget veepstakes: The consideration of potential Cabinet picks would create a better presidential race. A blog, a flight attendant, and a firing: When a Delta employee had a little fun on her personal Web diary, her career was forced to make an emergency landing. What’s left of Confucianism? Daniel A. Bell wants to know. From FT, a review of books on China, Tibet and the Dalai Lama. In decades of linguinsania, Deirdre McCloskey has tried to learn a second language, everything from French, Greek and Latin to German, Scots Gaelic and Sanskrit, with no success — but she's still not resigned to monolingualism. Why does anyone learn Esperanto? Overgrown frat boys, cheesy pick-up artists, overly sensitive cry-babies? What's going on with straight men's sexuality? One-armed vegetarian live-in boyfriends: The quest for this year's sexy swing demographic. How bad will it get? An interview with William Poole, former president of the Federal Reserve of St. Louis. A new model explains why we overestimate our future choices. Katharine Weymouth tells Portfolio how she plans to save the family's flagship brand and—she hopes—reinvent the industry. Want Obama in a punch line? First, find a joke. A survey of Obama in pencil, ink and paint shows artists are struggling to get the brother right.
1:00PM
JUL 17 2008
Outside the big box
From The Wilson Quarterly, the abolition of slavery was the great cause of 19th-century humanitarians; in the 21st century, it needs new champions (while thousands still live in slavery in northern Mali). From Boston Review, Elias Khoury on imagining justice in Palestine; outside the Big Box: who speaks for small business?; and a review of Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960 by Alan Filreis. He was long a jewel of the MIT faculty; now, after a devastating brain injury, mathematician Seymour Papert is struggling bravely to learn again how to think like, speak like, be like the man of genius he was. Post-PC dignity: Political correctness has come in for a battering, but ethically sensitive language remains crucial. Free Textbooks: A pilot project aims to upend the publishing industry, and help strapped students, by offering textbooks free of charge online. From TAS, David Mamet sent shockwaves through the lefty literary world when he declared himself an admirer of America and the Constitution — how could this be? A review of Open: Love, Sex, and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block. A review of The Darker Nations: A Biography of the Short-lived Third World by Vijay Prashad. New Digg.com feature on Digg.com allows Digg users on Digg.com to Digg more stuff than ever Dugg before on Digg.com.
9:00AM
JUL 17 2008
How dogs came to run the world
From The Philosophers' Magazine, Jean Kazez tests Kwame Anthony Appiah, philosophy’s most readable writer; Julian Baggini interviews philosophy’s best kept secret, TM Scanlon; and what is wrong with Socrates? Emily Wilson questions the legend of the wisest man in Athens. A look at how the social psychology revolution is reaching its tipping point. The case against Christopher Hitchens can be summarised, broadly, in a kind of comic list as done by the British satirical magazine Private Eye. From TNR, Leon Wieseltier on Christopher Hitchens, Damien Hirst, and our Golden Age of the Pseudo-Meaningful Stunt; Frank Kermode reviews How Fiction Works by James Wood; and a review of Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 by Chris Wickham and Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce AD 300-900 by Michael McCormick. A review of Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson by Ian Goodwillie. From Guernica, Crisis Darfur: A conversation with Mia Farrow and Bernard-Henri Levy. Joseph Stiglitz on the end of neo-liberalism. From Natural History, a look at how dogs came to run the world. Daniel Gross on the hot business catchphrase of 2008, and what it really means. The latest issue of Edge is out. An article on the future of babies: Artificial wombs and pregnant grandmas.
5:00PM
JUL 16 2008
The serenity of letting go
From Reason, a review of The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot by Naomi Wolf and Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg. A review of Sociology in America: A History, ed. by Craig Calhoun. A review of White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement by Allan J. Lichtman. A review of Steven Teles's The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement (and more). From the Claremont Review of Books, an essay on civil rights and the conservative movement. Nastier, noisier, costlier — and better: Why letting judges speak out during political campaigns enhances democracy and serves justice. From Communio, Jorg Splett on freedom as the serenity of letting go. Turning their Backs on Jihad: More and more prominent terrorists are defecting from the cause. Buying into Brand Borat: A look at Kazakhstan’s cautious embrace of its unwanted "son". A look at how charades reveals a universal sentence structure. Long tails and big heads: Why Chris Anderson's theory of the digital world might be all wrong. Facebook never forgets: How all those scandalous photos lingering on the Internet may affect future elections. Self-described CIA "Manchurian candidates" gather to share fractured memories. From The Moscow Times, it was as much by good luck as good judgment that the Cuban missile crisis was resolved.
1:00PM
JUL 16 2008
Is art running out of ideas?
From CrossCurrents, Gary Dorrien (Columbia): Imagining Social Justice: Cornel West’s Prophetic Public Intellectualism; and revising Night: An article on Elie Wiesel and the hazards of Holocaust theology. From Crisis, James V. Schall on the young tyrant; or how the modern notion of democracy becomes in practice the ancient notion of tyranny. How do you fix a broken society? As conservatism tries to find its moorings after the long wilderness years in Britain and the debacle of George Bush’s presidency, this is becoming the question. Artists have appropriated images from advertising for decades; what happens when the tables are turned? And is art running out of ideas? Artists forced to explain modern art. The reviewers come in from the cold: At Publishers' Weekly, a tradition of anonymity is abandoned; herewith, a brief review of the reviewers. We all produce a rich resource in our homes and then spend millions of dollars to throw it away; a new movement says there are smarter ways to think about waste. Vegetarianism a key ingredient in the new life of peace, compassion and nonviolence. Carl Zimmer on how your brain can control time: The three methods your mind uses to reverse, speed, and even slow the minutes. Where did modern conceptions of heredity come from? A review of Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870.
9:00AM
JUL 16 2008
Displacing the blame for the human condition
Stale R. S. Finke (Trondheim): American Exceptionalism: Carl Schmitt and the Neoconservative Justification for the Sovereignty of Politics. A video of a detainee being questioned at the US prison camp in Guantanamo Bay has been released for the first time. A review of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Meyer (and more and more and more and more and more and more and an more). Displacing the blame for the human condition: A review of Complaint: From Minor Moans to Principled Protests by Julian Baggini; Credit and Blame by Charles Tilly and Trust: Self-Interest and the Common Good by Marek Kohn. From FT, a review of Apocalypse: Earthquakes, Archaeology and the Wrath of God by Amos Nur, Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems by Vaclav Smil, and The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present by Jan de Vries; an interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick: "We can’t live without the goose prosciutto". From CJR, Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is racing to transform the embattled New York Times for the digital age; is he up to the job? From Vanity Fair, why do people love to hate The New York Times? Times-bashing isn’t just for conservatives anymore. Katharine the Second begins reign at WaPo.
5:00PM
JUL 15 2008
An insight into insanity
From Common-place, H. Robert Baker (GSU): The Supreme Court Confronts History Or, habeas corpus redivivus. Ben Cohen on Bush's banned interview: An insight into insanity. A review of When Languages Die: The Extinction of the World's Languages and the Erosion of Human Knowledge by K. David Harrison. A review of A World of Wealth: How Capitalism Turns Profit into Progress by Thomas G. Donlan. If economics is the study of the allocation of scarce goods and services, what could be scarcer or more precious than love? Habits may be good for you: Social scientists have learned that there is power in tying certain behaviors to habitual cues through relentless advertising. Some bloggers have pondered a severe question about Joe Liberman: Can you recall a sitting Senator? If Barack Obama is the most admired black man in America right now, it may be no exaggeration to say that John McWhorter is a candidate for the unpopularity prize. Obama, Shaman: The candidate’s post-masculine charisma tempts America in the age of Oprah. From The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza on how Chicago shaped Obama; the lion and the mouse: Jill Lepore on the battle that reshaped children’s literature; and Americans can’t live without their lawns—but how long can they live with them? More and more and more and more on The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria.
