Month: April 2007

  • Stephen Elliot spends a month without internet

    A month without internet? He writes like it’s an addiction, and it probably is: constant stimulation, freedom from reflection, instantaneous access to the opinions of others. Why think yourself? Why bother to formulate a position that’s anything other than a reaction to the latest rant? During weeks two and three, I watched the first three…

  • The Tanner Lectures

    The Tanner Lectures are available online. Here’s a selection that I found interesting: Ben Barber’s “”Democratic Alternatives to the Mullahs and the Malls” Seyla Benhabib’s “Reclaiming Universalism: Negotiating Republican Self-Determinism and Cosmopolitan Norms” Stephen Breyer’s “Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution” Umberto Eco’s “Interpretation and Overinterpretation: World, History, Texts” Michel Foucault’s “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards…

  • The Problem with Too Much Cleverness

    According to Phil Agre’s “How to be a leader in your field,” the first step to disciplinary domination is to “Pick an issue.” This, it turns out, is so very hard that he devotes the majority of his paper to this important decision. One of many issue-spotting techniques is this: (m) Ask yourself, what is…

  • Guantanamo Follies, or Euphemism in America’s Cuban Gulag

    Please read these two extracts from Clive Stafford Smith’s forthcoming book Bad Men, recounting his experience as a lawyer for prisoners at the military base in Guantanamo: “No fairytales allowed,” and “Have you received your gift pack?” From the first: One of the escorts told me that, on pain of punishment, soldiers are required to…

  • Incrementalists win?

    Incrementalists win. That’s the take-away message from today’s NYTimes article on the aftermath of Gonzales v. Carhart, where the Supreme Court upheld a ban on partial birth abortions: The court did not talk about big concepts and issues like privacy, but about the small, gripping details of how abortion works, said Professor Hendershott, author of…

  • Robert Putnam on Commuting

    Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can…