By Harry Stein.
AS JOHN DERBYSHIRE, a British conservative author of a now-viral blog piece about talking to your children about race, should have realized, there is a lot of ugly
history attached to the subject of racial politics in America. It’s a topic that engages
passions that must be respected, and especially by those on the right.
Why?
Partly because fifty years ago, when it mattered — when racism truly
was rampant in America and to oppose it often meant showing some
actual courage (and not just the moral preening common today
) the right was on the wrong side of this defining issue. This was
true even of those, like Barry Goldwater, Mr. Conservative himself,
who opposed civil rights legislation on principled philosophical
grounds revolving around federalism – as Goldwater later had the good grace to admit. Thus it is
that ever since, liberals have used their influence over the media and the
educational establishment to cast themselves as good and decent on
race – and conservatives as constitutionally small-minded and
intolerant, their bigotry kept in check, if at all, only by the merest
veneer of civility. Continue reading “Race, writing, and skipping through minefields.” »
The romance of the theorist who shouts ‘Eureka!’ when he finds he is surrounded on all sides by the ‘failures’ of others.
By HOWARD W. FRENCH [The Atlantic] – [Edward O.] Wilson told me he’d worked for a decade on the ideas he presents in [Social Conquest of the Earth], drawing on the primary literature in a wide variety of fields to refine his views. These ranged, he said, from molecular genetics and ecology to anthropology and cognitive science. In the book, he proposes a theory to answer what he calls “the great unsolved problem of biology,” namely how roughly two dozen known examples in the history of life—humans, wasps, termites, platypodid ambrosia beetles, bathyergid mole rats, gall-making aphids, one type of snapping shrimp, and others—made the breakthrough to life in highly social, complex societies. Eusocial species, Wilson noted, are by far “the most successful species in the history of life.” Humankind, of course, has thoroughly transformed the environment, achieving a unique dominion. And ants, by some measures, are more successful still. (If you were to weigh all the animals on the planet, you would find that the mass of ants exceeds that of all other insects combined, and also that of all terrestrial nonhuman vertebrates.) Continue reading “E.O. Wilson is in. Wow, the butterflies are out.” »
The distinction between copyright and a protection racket can only be made in a court of law. Usually, it’s a contest between inspiration and greed. But sometimes the crucible can be something as lowly as kitsch on a tea towel.
By SIMON STOKES [The Art Newspaper] – Copyright is about protecting original styles and creative skill and investment as much as it is about protecting an image from exact/literal copying. Yet others who use photographs and images as inspiration for their works will feel uneasy. The boundary between the expression of an idea which copyright protects and the underlying idea which cannot be protected is a fluid one. Continue reading “A ‘c’ in a circle the size of a red London bus.” »
By ANTHONY GRAFTON [Daily Princetonian] – Instead of offering books, in the first instance, NYPL will offer banks of computers, fast Wi-Fi and lots of places designed for individuals and groups to work together: a big, and probably beautiful, digital commons, with a cafe and circulating collection. The starchitect Norman Foster will design the new spaces. If he does his job well — and he usually does — the new space will attract students and writers and ordinary citizens from all over the city and become a hub of literary,intellectual and social life for a new generation. Continue reading “Visiting the rare pixel room at the new NYPL.” »
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
By JUAN WILLIAMS [Wall Street Journal] – While civil rights leaders have raised their voices to speak out against this [Trayvon Martin] tragedy, few if any will do the same about the larger tragedy of daily carnage that is black-on-black crime in America.
The most recent comprehensive study on black-on-black crime from the Justice Department should have been a clarion call for the black community to take action. There is no reason to believe that the trends it reported have decreased since 2005, the year for which the data were reported. Continue reading “The selective outrage of American media.” »
By Harry Stein.
NEWS REPORTS SAY that Al Sharpton is in Florida to lead the protests over the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The accounts in USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe all identify Sharpton as a “civil right activist.” The New York Times goes a step further and calls him a “civil rights leader” – presumably in the mold of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. So the question is more pertinent than ever: how in the name of all that is good and decent did that self-promoting racial hustler par excellence ever get to be so respectable? So much so he was handed his own TV show on an NBC outlet?
No, just kidding. Foolish question, because it’s all too clear: we’re talking nearly three decades of mainstream media enabling. Actually, there’s a kind of frightening logic to it. The media has treated Sharpton with kid gloves all these years because, in the end, the view he so tirelessly promotes — of an irredeemably racist America, in which black people’s failures are more society’s fault than their own – is one they share. Continue reading “Race, exploitation, and the press in America.” »
By WALTER A. WEISSKOPF [The New York Review of Books] – A kind of “socialism” has already arrived in the US but in a rather disappointing form: Galbraith has described it in The New Industrial State: quasi-public agencies called corporations in the private sector; “quasi-private” governmental agencies, in the public sector; (they are quasi-private because they cooperate closely with corporations); all are parts of the industrial-governmental-military establishment. Corporations and public agencies are cooperating and competing with each other for the accumulation of power; the profit motive is by no means dead but it is amalgamated with and obliterated by the drive for power. And the power is exercised not by atomistic independent individuals but by large-scale organizations; whether they are called GM, ITT, or “Armed Forces” makes very little difference. In all these organizations, managers, bureaucratic administrators of the funds and the assets of others, are making the basic decisions. And these decisions, whether they concern advertising, products, services, war, or taxation determine our fate. Continue reading “Affluence, comfort, and ‘the silken web of managerialism’.” »
By ANNE EISENBERG [New York Times] – To cope with the information explosion, [Princeton University Professor David] Blei and other researchers write algorithms so that computers can sift through millions of works and find their common themes by sorting related words into categories. It’s a field called probabilistic topic modeling. Continue reading “The view from the ‘Cultural Observatory’: Trillions of needles, billions of haystacks.” »
By TIM WALKER [Independent] – From the ancient Roman calendar to Facebook’s brain-melting new “Timeline” profile layout, most of us are accustomed to visualising history as linear; a middle, book-ended by arbitrary beginnings and ends. And yet, timelines designed as a single straight axis, with a regular and measured distribution of dates, have only existed in such a form for around 250 years. So write historians Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, the authors of Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline. Continue reading “One thing leads to another on the line of time.” »
By ROBERT PIGGOT [BBC News] – His resignation is not that surprising – Dr Rowan Williams never wanted this job. He was a reluctant Archbishop of Canterbury. But he came into office of feeling he was called to a job but there were few candidates for.
He hoped to recapture the imagination of the public for Christianity. But his 10 years in office have been hugely dogged by the disputes, especially over homosexuality.
Continued at BBC News |
♦ Continue reading “Rowan Williams and the freedom of Bonhoeffer.” »
By ALEX J. POLLOCK [Wall Street Journal] – The German External Loan of 1924 that followed to implement the Dawes Plan was considered by many to be “a brilliant success.” As late as 1930, with 19 years left to maturity, these 7% Dawes loan bonds traded above their face value, at 109. “The Dawes Loan opened the eyes of American investors to the romance of buying foreign securities,” wrote Charles Kindleberger and Robert Aliber in their classic “Manias, Panics and Crashes.” Foreign government bonds became popular in the new financial capital of the world, New York City. Continue reading “Who’s dumb enough to promote loans to governments?” »
[From the announcement online] – Seventy writers, mostly from the East Midlands, will be reading from their work at ‘States of Independence’, an events programme at the Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Oxford Street, Leicester, on 17 March 2012.
The event also features participants from independent publishers and writing organisations staffing bookstalls and displaying their work. Continue reading “Event: Independent Press Day in Leicester, 17 March 2012.” »
[From the announcement] – ‘Anthony Howell at Home’ is the name of an afternoon performance of readings by Deborah Dawkin, Rosalind Harvey and Anthony Howell of work by Lars Ramslie, Juan Pablo Villa Lobos, and Fawzi Karim at The Room in London N17, on Saturday, 24 March 2012, from 3pm to 6pm. Continue reading “Event: Reading from translations in N17, on 24 March 2012.” »
THE RECENT ‘debate’ between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams (with Sir Anthony Kenny serving as upholstery) was perhaps more a media event than a meaningful one. But it did give both men a chance to try to sell their respective positions. And selling matters. Dawkins has a shop; you can buy the trinkets of his atheism online. Yet there is no shop at archbishopofcanterbury.org. Surely another opportunity missed.
By TAEDE A. SMEDES [tasmedes.nl] – Have you ever looked at the website of the [sic] Richard Dawkins, and then I mean especially the store section? I recently noticed that “they” (I don’t presume Dawkins is selling stuff in person) sell jewelry.
In itself there’s of course nothing wrong with that. But notice that The Richard Dawkins store sells jewelry in the form of DNA-strands, and Darwin’s sketch of the tree of life. These apparently are adopted as the symbols of the atheism that Dawkins is preaching. It’s interesting to see how science and symbolism here go hand in hand. Continue reading “Skirmishes in the battle of Whence.” »
By ALAN BROWNJOHN [TLS] – The huge 1960s wave of poetry readings — by everyone, everywhere — was not discernible on the horizon, so younger poets met each other at a relatively small number of venues where the famous or notorious performed their work. Peter Porter was there on the night Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso gave their first London reading – I believe – at the humanists’ Contemporary Poetry and Music Circle just off High Street Kensington in 1957. But Martin Bell and Peter Redgrove were on the same platform, so they were making their mark. Continue reading “To know Peter Porter was to ‘delight in his company’.” »
AS JOHN DERBYSHIRE, a British conservative author of a now-viral blog piece about talking to your children about race, should have realized, there is a lot of ugly
history attached to the subject of racial politics in America. It’s a topic that engages
passions that must be respected, and especially by those on the right.
