August 2011
57 posts
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July 2011
99 posts
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“Philosophy has sometimes been understood as ‘an art of living,’ and...”
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It so happens that some philosophers entertain and profess certain ideas that compel them to lead a certain way of life. Sometimes, however, their way of life leads them to a situation where they have to choose between remaining faithful to their ideas or renouncing them altogether. The former...
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The Future of (Academic) Books? →
My good friend Michael Tofias writes:
The Next Web reports that last week, John Siracusa’s 27,300 review of Mac OS X Lion for Ars Technica (which I shamefully still haven’t read) made $15,000 to date at Amazon’s Kindle store. Sure, that’s probably most of the sales that will take place there, but that doesn’t include the ad revenue from people who read the review for free on the Ars website or...
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Conservative, white men more likely to be climate... →
It’s a good thing someone finally decided to do a study.
“Even casual observers” of those who argue that climate change isn’t a serious problem “likely notice an obvious pattern,” Aaron M. McCright of Michigan State University in East Lansing and Riley E. Dunlap of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater write in Global Environmental Change: “The most...
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Experts Exclude Man As Killer, Execution Set... →
Texas has set August 18 as the execution date for Larry Swearingen. Swearingen was sentenced to death for the murder of Melissa Trotter, but he had been in jail for 23 days when the body of the victim was found. Five separate forensic experts, including four current or former Chief Medical Examiners from Texas, have determined that Melissa Trotter died very close to the date her body was...
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Sympathy vs. Pity →
Writing about a Sharon Olds poem, the Banjo52 blog has the following to say about pity and sympathy:
Remember, “sympathy” is not pity, which is condescending. Sympathy is a feeling of connection to, identification with, even respect for that other character—whom we find appealing in some way, perhaps to our alarm.
I’ve been writing quite a lot about pity and sympathy lately, looking...
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“There’s an M.S. in skeletal and dental bioarchaeology, and an M.A. in learning...”
– The New York Times had an interesting unsettling piece the other day about the proliferation of Master’s programs in the U.S. and the take-away that I keep seeing is that the job market just keeps ratcheting up what “necessary credentials” entails.
Here’s why some people who...
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The "Multiculturalism Bites" Podcast →
Multiculturalism is one of the most vexing political issues of our day. How can people with very different values and customs live alongside each other? What is the history of multiculturalism? What are the arguments for and against its various forms? Has it failed? Does it have a future? The Open University’s Nigel Warburton interviews ten leading thinkers about the meaning and...
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Now UPDATED! ... But Not Improved →
Noam Sheizaf wonders, “Have you ever seen an editor in-chief attempt to explain what his newspaper actually meant in its editorial?” That, of course, is precisely what the Jerusalem Post’s editor is now attempting to do in response to the well-deserved criticism from around the world of Sunday’s shameful editorial, as the online version now includes the following...
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The Policy-Academy Gap →
Over at his Foreign Policy blog, one of my former professors, Peter Feaver, sets out five myths about the policy-academy gap. My sense is that I’m supposed to fervently agree with the central point behind Myth #4:
Students who invest a lot of time learning the math they need to use advanced quantitative methods appropriately have less time for other courses, especially courses in...
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Just Because You Wrote A Book... →
Just because you write most of a book doesn’t mean you can finish and sell a book.
Doesn’t it seem like if you can do most of something, you should be able to finish it? Like, if you run 23 miles of a marathon, you can walk the last few miles. If you eat 3/4th of a pizza, you can cram in that last quarter. But you cannot, it turns out, walk the last three miles of your book.
Just because you...
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The Reporter and the Rape Victim →
Over at The Atlantic, Max Fisher spends a considerable amount of time trying to get to the bottom of many issues surrounding Mac McClelland’s reports from her trip to Haiti. I first wrote about this story about two weeks ago, after information surfaced that McClelland did not have the consent of the woman whose story appeared in the tweets and articles she published. Not much, really, has...
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Never Miss an Opportunity to Miss an Opportunity →
The editorial staff at the Jerusalem Post did a nice job today of summarizing my oft-repeated mantra about how Israel never seems able to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Instead of taking the obvious position — standing with the victims of terrorism, especially as one of the best known newspapers in a state that has so often seen terrorist acts perpetrated against its own...
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DeYoung Video Stirs Debate Over Privacy of... →
Legal experts say the decision by Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane of Fulton County Superior Court to allow the taping in Mr. DeYoung’s case opens the way for defense lawyers across the country to push for the video documentation of other executions. And it is inevitable, many experts believe, that some of those recordings will make their way onto television or even YouTube, with or without the...
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Why You’re Not a Hero →
This recent blog post by Drew Jacob speaks to the exact reason I set out to write a book about the problems underlying our contemporary understanding of heroism:
When speaking about the heroic life, the most common response I get goes like this:
“I think teachers are heroes.”
“I think parents are heroes.”
“I think you can be a hero by doing little things for the people around you.”
I used to...
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Global Affairs on Tumblr: A Manifesto
Over the past few months, there have been many complaints (including my own) leveled against the Tumblr Politics tag. Some have been conceptual in nature and some have focused on the execution.
For my part, I generally like the idea of tags. A good tag, used well, could foster a sense of community for people from very different backgrounds who all share a common interest. Indeed, I think they can...
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Your Kind of Guy
I haven’t written anything at all about the terrible events that took place earlier today in Norway, in part because I’ve just been watching the developments via Twitter and Tumblr with increasing horror and in part because a lot of the information was hazy for much of the day.
I wanted to write just a few words this evening, though, about something I noticed while I was keeping up...
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“It all changed when I learned about the prairie voles.”
– So says Patricia S. Churchland, philosopher and neuroscientist.
The Chronicle had an intereting write-up last month of some of her work; in it, there’s a whole lot of interesting speculation [That’s right, I said “speculation”] about the roots of morality in evolutionary...
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How Killing Bin Laden Affected American Attitudes... →
Over at The Monkey Cage, John Sides notes that there was some survey research being done about Americans’ attitudes regarding Muslims when Osama Bin Laden was killed. Comparing the attitudes before and after:
Americans found Muslims living in the United States more threatening after bin Laden’s death, positive perceptions of Muslims plummeted, and those surveyed were less likely to oppose...
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“A more basic question might be, if the risk of inflicting cruel and unusual...”
– Brian Evans, over at the Amnesty International USA blog:
Last night (July 20), Georgia was scheduled to execute Andrew Grant DeYoung, but postponed the execution 24 hours over questions that the state’s new three-drug cocktail inflicts unconstitutional levels of pain. If DeYoung is executed...
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Kiva Detroit
I wanted to take a few minutes to write a bit more about yesterday’s post regarding microloans in Detroit, especially as I’ve had some time now to reflect.
To begin, my concern wasn’t really about the way in which Detroit is being portrayed by Kiva, though I’ve written about the issue of poverty and ruin porn on the blog often enough. Kiva isn’t necessarily equating...
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"Like" Me? →
May I suggest that you “Like” the Running Chicken blog on Facebook?
The new Facebook blog page provides a quick and easy way to share things you find here with others.
So, go on, “Like” the blog. And, if you really like it, you can even share the blog page on your Facebook Wall to tell your friends to “Like” it too.
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Same-sex couple wins Journal Star's Ultimate... →
Eighty-eight couples entered their stories in the online contest, which invited people to vote for their favorite. More than 44,000 votes were cast.
And Monday, Lee, 30, and Lowry, 32, won with 4,223 votes, more than 2,000 more than the next couple, which had 1,982.
First of all, a hearty congratulations to my former student Ryan Lowry and to his partner Mitch Lee. Two years ago, Ryan worked...
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Should We Care Where Human Rights Come From? →
Twice in the past couple of months, The Stone, the New York Times blog devoted to longish philosophical essays, has published essays on the philosophical grounding of human rights. Sadly, neither one made any mention of my book on exactly this subject. Not a big deal, to be sure, especially since my book was published by an academic press and isn’t one that exactly sells like hotcakes.
But...
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The Wrong Kind of Hero
In a post about a month ago, I gave RC readers a sneak preview of a section of the book manuscript that I’m finishing up this summer. In it, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about contemporary heroism and the ways in which the elevation of Socrates over more traditional Greek heroes like Achilles and Odysseus continues to impact us today. The topic of the first sneak peek was John...
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Mubarak’s Health at Issue in Egypt →
Former President Hosni Mubarak’s lawyer said Sunday that he had suffered a stroke and fallen into a coma, just two weeks before he was scheduled to appear in court on charges of stealing public money and ordering the killing of demonstrators.
But the report was countered immediately by at least one doctor at the hospital in Sharm el-Sheik where Mr. Mubarak has been kept.
The Associated Press...
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Writing is Bad for You →
Ah, the life of a writer:
Leave the bed with my mind whirling with gorgeously formed sentences which are as evanescent as the smell of lily of the valley, and about as easy to recall. By the time I get to the keyboard their perfection (as it seems to me in my drowsy creative mode) has dissipated, and though I can catch something of what seemed a sensational formulation it is already, in that...
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The Most Common Grade Given By Colleges Is An 'A' →
A comprehensive look at historical data on letter grades given by more than 200 four-year colleges and universities found that A’s have become “ordinary.”
In a study published Wednesday in Teachers College Record, Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy found that A’s represent 43 percent of all letter grades, making it the most common mark.
Well … now I have...
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Harry Potter by Ayn Rand
Harry decided not to save anyone, because it was against his rational self interest.
Voldemort won, and rightly so, as his ethical egoism allowed him to value his life above all else.
I can’t say that I would have liked the books better if their plots had all followed Ayn Rand’s objectivist “philosophy,” but I think a few of the movies would definitely have been more...
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Getting the words right
Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Ernest Hemingway: I rewrote the ending of "Farewell to Arms", the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that stumped you?
Ernest Hemingway: Getting the words right.
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Our Man in Kabul →
When Obama won, Kerry dearly hoped to be named secretary of state, a job for which he felt supremely qualified. But Obama, to almost everyone’s surprise, picked Clinton instead. Kerry is enough of a creature of Washington to understand that no one has a lock on jobs like that, but the setback still stung. Baring your wounds, however, is against Kerry’s nature. “It’s a great job,” he says...
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Chuck Klosterman on Breaking Bad →
The Wire absolutely exhibited the finest writing; Mad Men has the most fascinating collection of character types, and The Sopranos was the most fully realized (and, it’s important to note, essentially invented this rarified tier of televised drama). But I’ve slowly come to the conclusion that Breaking Bad is the best of the four, or at least the one I like the most. And I’ve...