Elephants can paint. Who knew?
Makes you wonder about all those man-hunting-mammoth cave drawings, doesn’t it?
Stuff I read during spring break
March 28, 2008 – 5:38 pm
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Stuff I read during spring break
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.
Obama’s Speech on Race
March 19, 2008 – 8:47 am
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Obama’s Speech on Race
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.
Can’t Buy Me Love
March 18, 2008 – 5:55 pm
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Can’t Buy Me Love
I’ve learned two things from Paul McCartney.
1. All you need is love.
2. Always sign a prenup.
Kinda-sorta waking up to media bias
March 16, 2008 – 11:15 pm
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Kinda-sorta waking up to media bias
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.
Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’
March 15, 2008 – 5:42 am
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Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’
An excellent essay by David Mamet (gasp!) in the Village Voice (gasp!gasp!) on how he slowly realized he wasn’t a liberal.
Bored? Enjoy.
March 15, 2008 – 5:34 am
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Bored? Enjoy.
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.
Stalin has left the game
March 10, 2008 – 9:42 pm
Experiencing Experience
March 7, 2008 – 11:51 am
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Experiencing Experience
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.
Moses was an addict?
March 4, 2008 – 6:53 pm
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Moses was an addict?
"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.
“I think it would be a good idea.”
March 4, 2008 – 6:50 am
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"I think it would be a good idea."
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."
A life history in six words
March 3, 2008 – 9:47 am
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A life history in six words
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.
How dare they misreport…
March 2, 2008 – 6:06 pm
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How dare they misreport…
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…"
