February 2010
101 posts
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January 2010
63 posts
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Alan Dershowitz Goes Nuclear
Long after hyperbolic responses to the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead stopped being interesting to most people in the West, Alan Dershowitz has decided to step into the fray and blast Richard Goldstone, calling him — among other things — “a traitor to the Jewish people” and “an evil, evil man.”
It’s difficult to know how to feel about a topic,...
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“[N]o humanitarian crisis generates so little attention per million corpses, or...”
– Nicholas Kristof had an excellent op-ed column in yesterday’s New York Times about the on-going civil war in Eastern Congo. Not only does he nicely put the humanitarian crisis in perspective — it “is the most lethal conflict since World War II and has claimed at least 30 times as...
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Jürgen Habermas Tweets
In a series of four posts on Twitter this afternoon, the account that might or might not belong to the German political philosopher banged out a few interesting thoughts about the internet:
It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers. It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of...
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“The conclusion I arrived at was that trying to get cooler was not the most...”
– In a hilariously un-self-critical article that centers around an interview with a British sociologist who is attempting to be desperately self-critical and failing.
Why is he failing? Well, he’s turned 30, had a child, and moved “into a permanent academic post and so on.” These...
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Iran Executes Two Over Poll Unrest →
Two people convicted and sentenced to death in the wake of the post-election protests in Iran have been executed. They are the first to pay with their lives for the crime of protesting against their government and what they considered to be a fraudulent election.
Mohammad Reza Ali Zamani and Arash Rahmani Pour were convicted of plotting to topple the government and, for good measure, of being...
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“Is there a moral imperative for passing climbers to try to not only sustain that...”
– This question comes from a review of Dark Summit, a new book by Nick Heil about the catastrophic 2006 climbing season on Mount Everest.
I’d heard all about the disastrous 1996 season — immortalized in the Jon Krakauer book that I hated — but I didn’t know anything at all...
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Health Impact Fund
Here is another Philosophy Bites podcast that is a must-listen, in my opinion, especially if you’re interested in questions of global health, justice, and ethics.
It’s an interview with Yale philosopher Thomas Pogge on creating incentives for pharmaceutical companies to provide their drugs to people who need them without the traditionally enormous mark-ups that arise from intellectual...
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Twitter, Damn Twitter, and Statistics
Everyone knows that I love Twitter and use it in a lot of different ways (fun, news, teaching, conversation, and even academic research).
So it’s no surprise that I would write something in response to the claim — by various mainstream news sources — that we’re all already done with Twitter and are ready for the next stupid fad. Except I didn’t. One of my graduate students did — is the possessive...
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Twitter, Damn Twitter, and Statistics
Everyone knows that I love Twitter and use it in a lot of different ways (fun, news, teaching, conversation, and even academic research).
So it’s no surprise that I would write something in response to the claim — by various mainstream news sources — that we’re all already done with Twitter and are ready for the next stupid fad. Except I didn’t. One of my graduate...
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Twitter, Damn Twitter, and Statistics
Everyone knows that I love Twitter and use it in a lot of different ways (fun, news, teaching, conversation, and even academic research).
So it’s no surprise that I would write something in response to the claim — by various mainstream news sources — that we’re all already done with Twitter and are ready for the next stupid fad. Except I didn’t. One of my graduate...
3 tags
Twitter, Damn Twitter, and Statistics
Everyone knows that I love Twitter and use it in a lot of different ways (fun, news, teaching, conversation, and even academic research).
So it’s no surprise that I would write something in response to the claim — by various mainstream news sources — that we’re all already done with Twitter and are ready for the next stupid fad. Except I didn’t. One of my graduate...
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“‘My score was decent. I had a plan that if my score was really well [sic],...”
– While Yale and Harvard probably weren’t too worried about whether Vinny’s LSAT score was “well” enough to earn a spot in the incoming class of their law schools, it’s clear that we should all be breathing a sigh of relief that he’s putting law school “on the...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, Season Finale
There’s not much to say, really. We’re clearly all sad that it’s over. And despite my own desire for an odd or unique ending, the cast instead spent time together, got over all of their drama, and reflected on how much they loved and learned. So here it is, your final Jersey Shore update:
The gang has no idea whatsoever about how to react to Ronnie’s arrest. Happily, they...
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“‘The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when...”
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I’m rereading Don DeLillo’s Underworld and I couldn’t be happier to run across this nugget about the shot heard ‘round the world. This book is almost single-handedly responsible for keeping alive in me a shard of interest in baseball. DeLillo captures the way a baseball...
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“[A]ny field that has a weak non-academic market could be helped [by] these...”
– The most recent post over at The Monkey Cage asks whether recommendations such as the ones quoted above might be helpful in mitigating the oversupply problem that yields a perennially terrible job market in political theory.
There are a few ways to think about this:
The recommendations don’t...
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A Great Tribute
A special issue of Five Dials — a literary magazine available only as a pdf document — has just come out and it celebrates the life of David Foster Wallace — one of my favorite authors — with a series of reprinted tributes, given in October 2008 at NYU.
I highly recommend this special issue and, in case you haven’t read anything by DFW and are looking for a...
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“Here’s one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn’t want the...”
– This quote comes from a really fascinating article, which I think ought to be read by everyone who loves everything about Web 2.0 and can’t think of a single problem with online collectivization. It’s another adaptation/promotion for a book that comes out next week — “You Are...
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“‘The rumour, with certain aims, about a meeting between Iranian and the...”
– This statement, from Iran’s state news agency, claims that there’s no way an Iranian tourism representative shook hands with an Israeli tourism representative, when the two found themselves face-to-face at a reception in Spain.
It’s not clear from the statement what the...
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Just A Thought
If people are increasingly consuming tracks instead of albums, shouldn’t we expect to see either fewer full-length albums being made or more fantastic albums that contain numerous tracks that people would want to buy? Neither of these scenarios seem to be the case, except when it comes to Lady GaGa and indie rock darlings. Everyone seems to love just about everything these two completely opposite...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, Episode 7
I’m sad to say that we’re running out of time at the Jersey Shore. There’s only a week left for our intrepid cast and, though we don’t know how many episodes that means, we can be sure it’s probably just a few. Maybe even fewer than a few. At this point, I think I need to throw my support behind an idea that Bill Simmons mentioned on his podcast a couple of weeks ago,...
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“I want to offer a disturbing idea. The reason human beings seem to care so...”
– Washington Post staff writer Shankar Vedantam has a new book coming out tomorrow; it’s called “The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars and Save Our Lives,” and the above quote is from a piece adapted from it for the Washington Post...
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“An Israeli IT company has sold an online business management system to the...”
– The above quote isn’t particularly funny. And business deals in themselves generally aren’t funny. But the whole story is so weirdly funny that I couldn’t pass it up.
Going forward, keep in mind that “Both direct and indirect trade between Israel and Iran is illegal in both...
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“New York Times Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. appears close to announcing that...”
– You can charge, sure. But, after more than a decade of getting their news for free, will people pay or will they simply go elsewhere? It’s completely unreasonable to expect the New York Times to be free. But we’ve been encouraged to think that way for as long as we’ve had the...
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Pope Defends Pius Against Jewish Critics →
As I see it, here are the two possible major problems:
This particular Pope shouldn’t be championing the sainthood of that particular Pope;
That particular Pope ought not to achieve sainthood, regardless of who champions his cause.
I completely understand either one of these problems, or both, as Benedict XVI is probably not the best person to advance the cause of Pius XII precisely...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, Episode 6
In my most recent post on MTV’s Jersey Shore, I mentioned that I’d finally caught up. And then MTV decided on back-to-back episodes so I’m behind again. But I’m committed to catching up well in advance of the next new episode. So here’s the first in another back-to-back set of posts:
Sammi wants to know whether a family meeting is needed, as Snooki requested in the...
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“This is a long-standing question for Geekdads of all kinds: 1) When do you...”
– Over at the Snarkmarket blog, my Twitter buddy Tim Carmody asks two important questions that I really hadn’t thought much about. As a “Geekdad”-to-be, I really need to get moving on this, though — especially since my best attempts to introduce the Mrs. to the galaxy far far...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, Episode 5
And now, the second of my double-feature posts on MTV’s Jersey Shore. Since it took me so long, though, it looks like it will really be the second part of a triple-feature since there’s another new episode airing tonight. What this means, my friends, is a back-to-back-to-back situation.
Anyhow, here’s what struck me as the most important moments or issues from last...
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“‘They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know Napoleon the 3rd and...”
– So that happened.
This sort of thing isn’t the reason I don’t watch the Christian Broadcasting Network, but it certainly confirms my decision. There’s really nothing like blaming suffering people for the horrible natural disaster that just happened to them. That’s definitely...
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What's Wrong With Our Society, Episode 4
It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything of substance in my on-going series about MTV’s Jersey Shore. But now it’s time for the double-feature that I promised in a post on New Year’s Day (robo-posted while I was on vacation in Rome). To refresh your memory about my most recent thoughts in this on-going series, check here. And now, without further ado, here...
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Questioning the Deterrence Data
A few years ago, my friend Seth Jolly and I set out to write a paper about the problems with a number of papers that claimed each execution deterred some (constantly changing) number of murders. This argument seemed intuitively wrong to me and it was nice to work with Seth to set out precisely what the problems seemed to be. We wrote something up relatively quickly, we presented it at a...
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Google, Human Rights, Corporate Social...
Some time ago, I wrote a little bit about why I thought that corporations should do more than simply not do evil. Here is the full post, which began with Google but didn’t really use Google as the model of a corporation that needed to do more. Though I certainly could have done so, I went with Microsoft and Cisco in China, and — of course — Shell in Nigeria. In the end, I...
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“‘I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to...”
– Let me begin by saying that I don’t really watch late night network talk shows. I don’t particularly like the format; I generally don’t find the monologues to be funny and I’ve never particularly cared for the celebrity interviews. The one exception was Craig Kilborn’s...
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“‘I am not a hero. I stand at the end of the long, long line of good Dutch...”
– Today, there are a great many obituaries of Miep Gies, the women who helped to hide Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust and who found the now-famous diary. She passed away yesterday, at age 100.
While the points that Gies makes are compelling — namely that many people did what she...
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“[T]he ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of...”
– I’m fascinated by the idea that there might be all sorts of mini-generation gaps now arising due to the way that people are using technology. Yet, my own experience teaching college students over the past ten years hasn’t pointed to this at all. Here’s the finding that...
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It's A New Semester
I love the first day of school.
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always been too excited to sleep the night before going back to school. And on my first first day of school — when I was four years old and started kindergarten — I threw up as soon as I got there.
While I’ve managed to contain my excitement a bit better over the years, I’m still pretty giddy about...