online archive
6:10AM
JUN 1 2007
Philosophy, science, academia and education
From Abstracta, Michael Esfeld (Lausanne): The Impact of Science on Metaphysics and its Limits; Patrick Spät (Freiburg): A Pill Against Epiphenomenalism; and Daniel O’Brien (Birmingham): Gullible Yet Intelligible pdf. A review of Plato: Political Philosophy by Malcolm Schofield. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, who has died aged 86, produced a framework for understanding society that should be part of the mental furniture of every educated adult.
From Qualitative Social Research, a special issue on "From Michel Foucault's Theory of Discourse to Empirical Discourse Research", including an interview with Ruth Wodak: "What is Critical Discourse Analysis?" A review of The Shadow of the Antichrist: Nietzsche's Critique of Christianity by Stephen N. Williams. From Cross Currents, a series of articles on theology, democracy, and the project of liberalism. Is Levinas' challenge to the Western philosophical tradition philosophically tenable? More on Emmanuel Levinas' challenge to the modern European identity. The prologue to Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture.
From Wired, in the event of global disaster, the ultimate crop backup system. North America is fine for rewilding but Europe may be a better candidate thanks to close living relatives of its extinct megafauna. From Discover, an article on Science’s Family Tree: A visualization showing the structure of scientific knowledge. Scientists should form a closer alliance with mainstream religion in order to better fight extremism, says Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society—Richard Dawkins warns against "buying into fiction". Talk to foreigners and we will view you as a spy, Iran warns academics.
From Dissent, Britain's 120,000-strong University and College Union votes to endorse a call to boycott Israeli universities. Martha Nussbaum argues against all forms of the academic boycott ( and more on the academic fallout from the Middle East). Michael Yudkin and Denis Noble on why an academic boycott of Israel would be selective, disciminatory and counterproductive, or will the boycott of Israel give voice to a people whose freedoms have long been repressed?
From The Guardian, cash for clichés: Graduation speeches in US universities are expensively short on substance. More schools are ditching final exams: A number of campuses use oral presentations to determine if students have earned promotion. Move Over, Ann Coulter: Meet Emily Mitchell, the woman behind ASU's Caucasian American Men's Club. Too sexy for my students: She was fired from her teaching job after expanding her students' sexual vocabulary. The Abstinence Gluttons: Meet the religious conservatives at the faith-based feeding trough who are getting rich controlling sex education in America.
From The Weekly Standard, a world without public schools: If the consensus underlying American public education has disappeared, why shouldn't the institution? A review of Can We Talk About Race? And Other Conversations in an Era of School Resegregation by Beverly Daniel Tatum. A review of The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Oddballs, Geeks and Geniuses Who Make Up America’s Top High School Chess Team. Margaret Soltan of University Diaries joins Inside Higher Ed.
6:10AM
JUN 1 2007
White supremacy, religion, health care, sex and more
From the Journal of Political and Military Sociology, a series of articles on the White Separation Movement, including an introduction; Betty Dobratz (ISU) and Stephanie Shanks-Melie (IUN): The Strategy of White Separatism; and Sine Anahita (Alaska): Blogging the Borders: Virtual Skinheads, Hypermasculinity and Heteronormativity. In the days since Jerry Falwell died, much has been written about his influence on politics, but relatively little has been written about his hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia (and more on Falwell and Savage Christians).
From Truthdig, Chris Hedges on why he doesn't believe in atheists, and Sam Harris strikes back. The polemical journalist Christopher Hitchens is more read in America than in his native UK – but that is about to change. Religion, claims Christopher Hitchens, is bigoted, irrational and evil. But his moral certitude makes him no better than the fundamentalists he opposes (and more on God Is Not Great). Nicolas Sarkozy debates belief, freedom and work with the atheist philosopher Michel Onfray.
From Rolling Stone, he's cashing in on 9/11, working with Karl Rove's henchmen and in cahoots with a Swift Boat-style attack on Hillary. Will Rudy Giuliani be Bush III? Matt Taibbi investigates. The Democratic presidential candidates tout their ideas for health care reform. Obama's cautious health care plan: When it comes to achieving universal health care, Obama wants to wade in, not to jump. And that says a lot about him as a candidate. A lack of audacity: How Obama's health care plan resembles the candidate himself — a proposal filled with "almosts" from a politician who still hasn't quite fulfilled the promise of his appeal. A review of The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care by David Gratzer; Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care by Arnold Kling; and Medicine and the Market: Equity v. Choice by Daniel Callahan and Angela A. Wasunna. A review of Never Shower in a Thunderstorm: Surprising Facts and Misleading Myths About Our Health and the World We Live In by Anahad O'Connor. From TLS, a review of Birth: A history by Tina Cassidy; Born in the USA: How a broken maternity system must be fixed to put women and children first by Marsden Wagner; and Bioethics and Women: Across the life span by Mary Briody Mahowald.
From TNR, intellectual celebrity deathmatch: Alan Dershowitz & Noam Chomsky debate. An acerbic look at the Holocaust industry: A review of My Holocaust by Tova Reich. From Jewcy, a look at why Unitarianism is a pre-teen crypto-Jew's best friend. A Nation of Wimps: Parents are going to ludicrous lengths to take the bumps out of life for their children. However, parental hyperconcern has the net effect of making kids more fragile; that may be why they're breaking down in record numbers.
From RCCS, living and loving beyond the heteronorm: A queer analysis of personal relationships in the twenty-first century. Investigating the rise of highbrow porn—from the inside: How a modest lady editor from good New England stock wound up in an erotic film. Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence: There’s still plenty of sex to be had in Manhattan, but the kind of sex that results in friendship and business deals, not romance.
The poisonous legacy of 9/11: New Yorkers were told their air was safe to breathe after 9/11. It wasn't. A report on the lies and the cover-up. Stony Brook's Malcolm Bowman had a message for the City of New York: Prepare, because the flood is coming. Eric Alterman on how The New York Sun's alleged success is a figment of its conservative owners' imaginations. And from CJR, Before Jon Stewart: Fake news is back, but our tolerance for it isn't what it was before journalism donned the mantle of authority
6:10AM
JUN 1 2007
International affairs, global warming, Israel, violence and more
From PUP, the introduction to After Anarchy: Legitimacy and Power in the United Nations Security Council. Dilemmas of justice: Phil Clark on how the challenges faced by the International Criminal Court are about more than "peace vs justice", but Tim Allen remains broadly confident about the International Criminal Court. Here's why. You can measure peace with a rating, but can you understand it? Pro and anti-whaling nations are circling each other at the International Whaling Commission meeting. Andrew Darby reports on the manoeuvres, deals and compromises threatening the endangered humpbacks.
From The Economist, a look at how business is starting to tackle climate change, and how governments need to help; and a series of articles on how business is getting down to cutting carbon, but needs more incentives to make much difference to climate change. Bush kills off hopes for G8 climate plan: US recognises global warming danger but wants to lead response outside UN, as Bush plays for time as the planet begins to burn.
Form The Nation, The Case for Shared Sovereignty: Let's give up the illusion of a two-state solution—Israel's already a binational state; and For a Secular Democratic State: Zionism has run its course, and in doing so has killed any possibility of a two-state solution; and a review of The Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy by Bernard Avishai; The Question of Zion by Jacqueline Rose; A Threat From Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism; and Booking Passage: Exile and Homecoming in the Modern Jewish Imagination by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi. A history of the hapless: Palestinians in Lebanon are long the unluckiest of the lot.
From Daedalus, a special issue on violence, including William McNeill (Chicago): Violence & Submission in the Human Past; Steven LeBlanc (Harvard): Why Warfare? Lessons from the Past; Mark Juergensmeyer (UCSB): Gandhi vs. Terrorism; Neil Whitehead (Wisconsin): Violence & the Cultural Order; Tzvetan Todorov (CNRS): Avant-gardes & Totalitarianism; Adam Michnik on the Ultras of Moral Revolution; Cindy Ness (John Jay): The Rise in Female Violence; Mia Bloom (Georgia): Female Suicide Bombers: A Global Trend; and James Blight (Brown): Robert McNamara: Then & Now. From Prospect, my brother the bomber: What turned Mohammad Sidique Khan, a softly spoken youth worker, into the mastermind of 7/7? Shiv Malik spent months in a Leeds suburb getting to know Khan's brother. A complex and disturbing story of the bomber's radicalisation emerged. John Gray explores Ed Husain's The Islamist, his candid, riveting story of how as a young man he joined and then left a radical British Muslim group.
Tony Blair reflects on the lessons of his decade as Britain's prime minister. Are the Tories under David Cameron a genuinely new party? Anthony Giddens David Willetts debate. 50 ideas for Brown's Britain: New Statesman asks the five leading think tanks of the left to suggest ten-point plans for the Brown premiership. The 1960s was a mythical period in British history in which the way the country was run fundamentally changed. Lectures about Heaven: Thomas Laqueur reviews Five Germanys I Have Known by Fritz Stern. She goes West, he goes Right: A study finds a lack of women in eastern Germany feeds Neo-Nazis. And Jerry Falwell lives ... in Poland: The Poles are now investigating whether the Teletubbies are gay as US religious-right style politics spreads through Europe
6:10AM
JUN 1 2007
Literature, international issues, book reviews and more
From Prospect, the democracy of Don Quixote: Novelists have always turned their hands to essays, and the essay-writing novelist remains a literary force to be reckoned with. The two forms share an inherent pluralism and scepticism that makes them natural allies of democracy. The introduction to The Shadow of Death: Literature, Romanticism, and the Subject of Punishment by Mark Canuel.
From L'Espill, Catalan cultural products are seen as a political instrument rather than a response to genuine demand. As a result, it is easier for a Catalan author to get published in German or Dutch than in Castilian Spanish. Libraries in the desert: An article on preserving ancient literature in Mali. Are British public libraries ok? It depends on who you talk to, and what you read into statistics.
From TLS, Clive Wilmer reviews Selected Translations by Ted Hughes; and the new earnestness: A review of Granta 97: Best of Young American Novelists, 2. From Bromsgrove to Trinity: Paul Johnson reviews The Letters of A E Housman. More on Edith Wharton by Hermione Lee.
Lissa Warren on The Decline and Fall of the Book Review Section...and What It Means to Publishers. From Britannica, an article on reading and its well-contents; and a look at the book critics’ war on bloggers. Greece or Rome? Jordin or Blake? Star Wars or Lord of the Rings? It’s hard to resist comparing two obvious rivals, and Internet-based publications Salon and Slate are no exception. The return of the media queen: For more than a decade, as the British editor of the city's most influential magazines, Tina Brown was New York royalty. Now after a high-profile debacle she's back in style. Cashing in on the 60s: John Harris writes that before we idolise the generation that gave us the summer of love, we shouldn't forget how very easy it turned out to be for so many of them to go from hippie to yuppie.
Harry First (NYU): Microsoft and the Evolution of the Intellectual Property Concept; Nicholas Economides (NYU): "Net Neutrality", Non-Discrimination and Digital Distribution of Content Through the Internet; and Mary-Rose Papandrea (Boston College): Citizen Journalism and the Reporter’s Privilege. Burnt By The Man: How copyrighting, capitalism, and lawsuit chaos disturbed the radical utopia of Burning Man. More on The Little Book of Plagiarism. My Favorite Font: Anne Fadiman, Jonathan Lethem, Richard Posner, and others reveal what font they compose in and why. The inaugural issue of the International Journal of Design is out.
From The San Francisco Chronicle, an article on painting a picture of the creative mind and a look at what happens to us when art connects to the unconscious. From LRB, Boudoir Politics: A review of Lola Montez: Her Life and Conquests by James Morton; and a review of Walt Disney: The Biography by Neal Gabler; The Animated Man: A Life of Walt Disney by Michael Barrier; and Drawing the Line: The Untold Story of the Animation Unions from Bosko to Bart Simpson by Tom Sito. Whether it be opera or a lead role in a major motion picture, kids who pursue the arts often find themselves embracing two very different worlds. A review of Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life by Micki McGee. And a review of A Practical Handbook for the Boyfriend by Felicity Huffman and Patricia Wolff
