Whew... what a whirlwind few months. Thankfully, all my final papers are now submitted, I've got the summer to recuperate and slowly build a thesis, and I now have time for non-academic fun like life and blogging.
I'll be in Alaska next week on a cruise with my grandma, but expect some dispatches upon my return.
Wow. We're productive.
In short, animals do not choose their mates randomly. They identify and reject those with whom they have already had sex. Scientists know this reflex as the "Coolidge Effect." It earned its name many years ago when President Coolidge and his wife were touring a farm. While the President was elsewhere, the farmer proudly showed Mrs. Coolidge a rooster that "could copulate with hens all day long, day after day." Mrs. Coolidge coyly suggested that the farmer tell that to Mr. Coolidge, which he did.
The President thought for a moment and then inquired, "With the same hen?"
"No, sir," replied the farmer.
"Tell that to Mrs. Coolidge," retorted the President.
[via kottke]
Modern life has made it easier than ever before to live on the surface of existence and apparently without the need for any deeper sense of purpose. The pace of life for one thing gives us little time for reflection, and this suits a lot of us very well. In developed countries, we don’t have to worry about basic survival and we enjoy greater and greater freedom to cut our own course in life. This is one of the great achievements of Western culture, a genuine liberation -- for those who can enjoy it. But the down side is that it is easier than ever before to avoid commitments and to evade dependence -- both the dependence of others on us and the dependence we have on others. The worst thing you can be in personal relationships, so we are told, is dependent. The second worst thing is to have a partner who is dependent on you.
To the present generation, the 1960s and all it represented seem like nostalgic snapshots from a bygone era. Yet despite the placidity of our own prosperous times, the radical assaults of the 1960s are not confined to the past. Its ideology has insinuated itself, disastrously, into the curricula of our schools and colleges; it has significantly altered the texture of sexual relations and family life; it has played havoc with the authority of churches and other repositories of moral wisdom; it has undermined the claims of civic virtue and our national self-understanding; it has degraded the media, the entertainment industry, and popular culture; it has helped to subvert museums and other institutions entrusted with preserving and transmitting high culture. It has even, most poignantly, addled our hearts and innermost assumptions about what counts as the good life: it has perverted our dreams as much as it has prevented us from attaining them.
Roger Kimball (who, oddly enough, looks like a grown Harry Potter) rebuts Tariq Ali on the value of the sixties.
The smartest thing Bill Clinton ever said: "If you look back on the Sixties and think there was more good than bad, you're probably a Democrat. If you think there was more harm than good, you're probably a Republican."
I'm not sure about the party split, but it says much about one's general outlook.
Makes you wonder about all those man-hunting-mammoth cave drawings, doesn't it?
Here's what kept me busy during my week off:
Books
The Brothers Karamazov
I had hoped to finish Dostoevsky and read Rawl's Theory of Justice while resting back home. I can't finish Brothers before I return to Chicago, but it's excellent. Like Hume for Kant, Dostoevsky awoke me from my dogmatic I-love-fiction-but-don't-know-what-to-write slumbers.
Articles
Factory-Sized Deception
The backstory behind one of Obama's protectionist ads.
New Age Nuclear
Potential breakthrough for energy production.
New Limits to Growth Revive Malthusian Fears
Short on resources, long on people.
Better the Second Time: Would We Be Smarter Voters If We Did It Twice?
Michael Walzer questions voter's remorse.
A Nation of Givers
Americans are, on the whole, a charitable bunch.
On Borrowed Time: Urban decline moves to the suburbs
Suburbia, notably in Chicagoland, is struggling.
On the peripheries of this speech there's plenty with which to disagree. (He's wrong on trade, especially NAFTA, and he overstates the outsourcing case). But never have I heard such a cogent, nuanced presentation on race by a politician of any stripe. He's exactly right.
I've learned two things from Paul McCartney.
1. All you need is love.
2. Always sign a prenup.
Two quick media items, both oddly relating to Keith Olbermann and my quixotic quest to transcend partisanship.
The first is this article from the Huffington Post suggesting what we all already knew - Olbermann is no Edward R. Murrow. His trite partisanship is no better than Bill O'Reilly's, and he's equally vindictive (a "World's Worst Person" segment? Really?) while claiming the moral high ground.
The author is angry with Olbermann for hatin' on Hillary (and his melodramatic special comment was quite funny in parts). What's sad is that infighting is the only catalyst for us to recognize favoritism. Come November, liberals will be rallying around Olbermann while conservatives do the same for O'Reilly, both groups following their leader as the sole source of accurate political judgment.
Need further proof that we can't separate the cant from the facts? Look no further than today's AP headline, ironically about "polarities" in politics. How about polarities in reporting? Do assertions like "feel-good, way-cool" make for objective, let alone accurate, reporting? And how about this line?
And when the campaign moves beyond Democrats, the party of diversity, and into the general election, it's questionable how much room is left for such progress.
Don't get me started. The need for this awakening to media anti-news is all the more apparent when you understand the echo chamber that exists today. Take this short entertaining tale from Glenn Beck, whom I had never seen until this clip:
First, editorials on Headline News? Second, Beck is wrong to single out liberals here - both sides are equally guilty and equally self-righteous about the other group's biases. I feel like conservatives are usually more explicit in their bias, since their major outlets are talk-shows and opinion pieces (while most mainstream press only tacitly leans left), but neither side likes to be forthcoming. I welcome counter-arguments on this claim, though.
The point is this: America needs discourse more than it needs lower taxes or universal healthcare. Bias can be a part of discourse, so long as we call it what it is.
An excellent essay by David Mamet (gasp!) in the Village Voice (gasp!gasp!) on how he slowly realized he wasn't a liberal.
But are we too busy twirling through the songs on our iPods -- while checking e-mail, while changing lanes on the highway -- to consider whether we are giving up a good thing? We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries -- one not available to creatures that spend all their time pursuing mere survival. To be bored is to stop reacting to the external world, and to explore the internal one. It is in these times of reflection that people often discover something new, whether it is an epiphany about a relationship or a new theory about the way the universe works. Granted, many people emerge from boredom feeling that they have accomplished nothing. But is accomplishment really the point of life? There is a strong argument that boredom -- so often parodied as a glassy-eyed drooling state of nothingness -- is an essential human emotion that underlies art, literature, philosophy, science, and even love.
I'm not sure who made this, but anyone who has ever played an online multiplayer game knows how accurate it is. Crass and true.
Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally solitary exertion — repeatedly practicing the most difficult physical tasks for an athlete, repeatedly performing new and highly intricate computations for a mathematician — that leads to first-rate performance. And it should never get easier; if it does, you are coasting, not improving. Ericsson calls this exertion "deliberate practice," by which he means the kind of practice we hate, the kind that leads to failure and hair-pulling and fist-pounding. You like the Tuesday New York Times crossword? You have to tackle the Saturday one to be really good.
Take figure-skating. For the 2003 book Expert Performance in Sports, researchers Janice Deakin and Stephen Cobley observed 24 figure skaters as they practiced. Deakin and Cobley asked the skaters to complete diaries about their practice habits. The researchers found that élite skaters spent 68% of their sessions practicing jumps — one of the riskiest and most demanding parts of figure-skating routines. Skaters in a second tier, who were just as experienced in terms of years, spent only 48% of their time on jumps, and they rested more often. As Deakin and her colleagues write in the Cambridge Handbook, "All skaters spent considerably more time practicing jumps that already existed in their repertoire and less time on jumps they were attempting to learn." In other words, we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.
"As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don't believe, or a legend, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics," Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.
Of course it's probable when you exclude the other possibilities. The world may be round, which I don't believe, or flat, which I don't believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, could be on the back of a giant tortoise with turtles all the way down.
Was that whole "manna from heaven" thing just the excuse Moses used when he got the munchies?
Come on. We already know how the 10 commandments were really given.
Constantly swarmed by press and photographers, [Mahatma] Gandhi was peppered with questions wherever he went. One day a reporter yelled out, "What do you think of Western civilization?"
It was a defining moment, and Gandhi's reply instantly transformed him from an object of curiosity into a celebrity. In his heavy Indian accent, he answered: "I think it would be a good idea."
You might have heard about the six word memoir meme going around - NPR did it, and Salon is seeking reader contributions. I felt inspired to write a handful this morning.
He wanted to lead, challenge, serve
Good at many things, never best
Hated running; loved the human race
From pastor's family, a listening layman
Tried this exercise, needed seventh word
Take a stab at a few of your own in the comments. They're surprisingly fun.
That an article purporting to examine allegations of media bias for Obama/against Clinton would make such errors/omissions here and provide such a glancing view of press coverage is really discouraging. We're talking about a pretty fundamental issue of press fairness here, in the context of what everyone and their brother seems to be calling the most important presidential campaign in recent history [...]
[Sharply dressed news anchor looks away from the camera, presses earpiece to ear]
"Wait... wait... just a moment... we're getting new reports that... yes... this just in... it seems we can now confirm that the American press is not as objective... we repeat, not as objective as claimed... we'll have more details as we find them. More at 10. Returning to our late-breaking Paris Hilton coverage, CNN has learned..."
Why is it only conservative "cranks" who think it's relevant that Obama's campaign headquarters in Houston had a Che Guevara-emblazoned Cuban flag hanging on the wall? Indeed, why is love of Che still radically chic at all? A murderer who believed that "the U.S. is the great enemy of mankind" shouldn't be anyone's hero, never mind a logo for a line of baby clothes. Why are Fidel Castro's apologists progressive and enlightened but apologists for Augusto Pinochet frightening and authoritarian? Why was Sen. Trent Lott's kindness to former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond a scandal but Obama's acquaintance with [William Ayers, former Weather Underground leader] an unrepentant terrorist a triviality?
I couldn't have cared less about Lott trying to make an old man happy at his birthday party. Nor do I care about Obama visiting this guy - Hyde Park politics are sufficiently tight-knit so that not doing so would be an odd move. (It should also be noted that the Clinton campaign was the one pushing this story) The flag is admittedly too much, but underlings don't always speak for the candidate.
Still, Goldberg is right to point out the drastically different heroes we (or, more accurately, the media) tolerate and persecute.
On the first watching it's just cute. The second time around it's hilarious.
From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science: especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.
One of the great promises of the internet revolution has been the democratization of knowledge. Armed just with a computer and way of connecting to the internet, it is possible to find information on just about any topic known to humankind. In academia, the spread of the digital age has been most effective. Instead of having to spend hours in dusty stacks looking for the right volume of an obscure periodical, a few seconds using PubMed, Google Scholar, or any one of a number of databases will often yield up an electronic copy.
But electronic journal subscriptions are horrendously expensive, often costing hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for each title (and that's a discounted rate). Even the most well-endowed US institutions find these fees burdensome, but for foreign schools—especially those in less-developed nations—these journals remain out of reach.
Knowledge deserves to be free.
My continuing mission: To chronicle the laughably atrocious abuse of the English language by those who think they sound smart.
Neoliberal and corporatist logics are increasingly reconfiguring bodies in and around universities. The work of "diversifying" the academy imposes a disproportionate burden of labor on faculty, students, and staff marked by multiple forms of difference; the pressures of professionalization anticipate and authorize narrow standards of bodily capacity; and precarious modes of transnational expansion involving institutions of higher learning fortify and retrace imperial circuits of acquisition in land, bodies, and knowledge. This calls for a critical account of how neoliberal processes dismantle and rearticulate various sites of the university as well as the contours of bodies allowed to function within it. Our conference will thus engage debates surrounding embodiment within the university as it pertains to the overlapping structures of access, difference, and power.
- A conference invitation to NYU
Turns out, women are much more attuned to male pheromones than we thought. It also seems we can't do much to make ourselves smell more genetically attractive. Sorry guys.
