Cure-alls and Remedies
This is a week late, but I thought I’d note that the list is out : * Darkmans by Nicola Barker (Fourth Estate) * The Gathering by Anne Enright (Jonathan Cape) * The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton) * Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones (John Murray) * On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan…
That’s right: the German government has declared that it will fund experts to ensure the accuracy of Wikipedia articles . This has been going on for some time: with funding, a position as a newsmaker, and specialized knowledge, an expert or partisan can create the primary resources wikipedia requires, and then alter the content to…
Today’s Suggestion: Try out Google Earth . Then, check out the new Sky extension, a starmap that rivals Celestia .
Jakob Norberg synthesizes some of the thinking on coffeehouses that hangs at the edges of contemporary democratic theory. Without reifying it as a miraculous commodity, he works through some of the ways that Habermas and Carl Schmitt used the figure of the coffeehouse to represent the pretensions and triumphs of the middle-class after the industrial…
There is a consensus forming about Iraq, and increasingly I suspect that the Democratic party is on the wrong side of it. The consensus is this: though we were certainly the cause of the current instability in the country, the violence is not principally directed towards American forces. In light of that fact, David Ignatius…
Back in January, President Bush gave a speech acknowledging that income inequality has been rising for the last 25 years . He attributed the cause to inequalities in education: The fact is that income inequality is real; it’s been rising for more than 25 years. The reason is clear: We have an economy that increasingly…
The Government Accountability Office has shown that the Executive Branch is ignoring certain provisions of laws passed by Congress. Though it seems strange until you remember that the ‘A’ in GAO was once ‘Accounting,’ the GAO focused only on appropriations acts from the fiscal year 2006… ignoring the much juicier signing statements regarding torture, wiretapping…
There is a deeply interesting discussion of energy policy going on at ask.metafilter. It hits on some of the best thinking in environmentalism right now, and takes that long-range speculative view that may not satisfy the average policy wonk but gives me the philosophical shiver that lets me know that some deep thinking is occurring….
I’ve written about Robert Putnam before in this space, but I’ve been holding off on commenting on his most recent ‘discovery’ that ethnic diversity leads to significant losses of public trust . Apparently the full Skytte lecture will be published sometime soon in Scandinavian Political Studies . Still no sign of it, though the Financial…
I just came across this early Joseph Heath/Andrew Potter article based on their excellent book Nation of Rebels . It’s called The Rebel Sell . They argue that consumerism, more than capitalism, is the reigning political-economy of our times, and that we are being sold our insurrections: Take, for example, Volkswagen and Volvo advertising from…