Cure-alls and Remedies
Sam Harris has started another great debate over religion, this time with conservative author Andrew Sullivan. They’ve been fairly civil with each other, and what little upset there has been has arisen from the justifiable claims they both make about the intellectual honesty of theism. In other debates, Harris has been too civil with his…
Right now, I have tabs open to three different great sites, all of which I discovered from fifteen minutes of browsing MeFi . Fora.tv is what PBS should be, but isn’t: awesome, interesting panel discussions, lectures, and conferences. Dr. Lester Brown discusses ways to restructure the global economy so that it can sustain economic progress…
Zadie Smith indicts herself for the failure that characterizes almost all writing: Bad writing does nothing, changes nothing, educates no emotions, rewires no inner circuitry – we close its covers with the same metaphysical confidence in the universality of our own interface as we did when we opened it. But great writing – great writing…
Necessity is the mother of invention, but ingenuity is its own reward. This site gives me joy.
Angelina Jolie to star in Atlas Shrugged … comedy gold, I tell ya.
The New York Times has a report on the proposed law regulating oil contracts. There’s no mention of production-sharing agreements there, but there is something a little fishy about the law, which centralizes the approval procedure for contracts for the oil under regional control. Here’s the relevant text from the NYT: [The law allows] regions…
Steve at Cows and Graveyards correctly connects the upcoming oil extraction agreements in Iraq to peak oil. Yes, Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world, and as the global demand (mostly due to 40% increase in yearly consumption caused by the burgeoning Chinese economy) outstrips supply, prices will skyrocket unless the US…
Project Witness provides training and video cameras for local groups to use in their human rights advocacy campaigns. They have recently begun releasing these videos online . Check out US films like Outlawed , Rights on the Line , or The Day After Diallo , or focus your attention on the international scene: Between Two…
The 2005 Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index looks like a better indicator than the Philosophical Gourmet’s reputation survey. This study weighted journals and then counted publications, so it’s fairly straight-forward. The controversy surrounding philosophy rankings is about to get hotter, because state schools seem to be more productive than Ivies! Michigan State U. CUNY Graduate Center…
Brian Leiter writes : …[W]hat is more appalling is the nonsense about Penn State, Stony Brook, and Vanderbilt. First of all, they don’t have good departments, they have weak departments overall (with honorable exceptions etc. etc. etc.), whether you’re interested in philosophy of language or ancient philosophy or Continental philosophy. He’s responding to this claim…