Month: December 2010

by Patrick Appel

32 nerd litmus tests. Above image from here.

by Patrick Appel

2012 Republican hopeful Haley Barbour is rightly being pummeled for his praise of 1950s and 1960s era segregationist Citizens Councils. Weigel suggests the comments were politically calculated:

Barbour is not dumb. If he's being a revisionist about race in Mississippi, he's not alone, and he's fighting back against a media standard that all conservatives hate — this idea that Southerners and conservatives can never stop atoning for Jim Crow. Why should he have to apologize for this, after all?

Sargent isn't so sure:

There's a lot of talk on the Internets to the effect that Barbour fully intended to make his claim about the Councils, as part of some sort of "southern strategy." Whether or not that's true, this kind of skirting of the line on race makes GOP establishment figures very nervous these days. When Michael Steele recently acknowledged that the GOP had been pursuing a "southern strategy" for four decades, GOP insiders were privately furious about Steele's lapse.

So if the narrative takes hold that Barbour is undisciplined or sloppy about racial matters, and is unwilling or unable to keep this third rail at arm's length, this could seriously damage his standing among insiders as a 2012 presidential hopeful.

by Conor Friedersdorf

As some of you know, I run a newsletter called The Best Of Journalism where exceptional non-fiction is curated and discussed, mostly because I just can’t get enough of the stuff as a reader. I fully awakened to this world of writing during graduate school, but my appetite was whet even earlier than that by this magazine, one of the first national publications I began reading sometime in high school. (In this regard I am especially indebted to James Fallows. In those days, I didn’t actually pay much attention to the bylines on the pieces I read, but when I flip through back issues from the 1980s and 1990s I am awed by how impressive a body of work he has produced. So many pieces I remember enjoying turned out to be his handy work.)

This week, as the news cycle slows for the Christmas holiday, I thought I’d delve into the treasure trove that is the archives of The Atlantic, which is rich enough that it could support its own magazine club. I’ll jump right in with the January 1999 issue (Netscape has a full page ad on page seven).

Below the fold, a taste of three great pieces from the issue.

THE FRONT OF THE BOOK features several great dispatches. Being a Californian, my favorite is "Paradise Found" by Benjamin Schwarz, who writes this about pre-World War II Los Angeles:

In what critics dismissed as a "huge country village," the veterans of bleak prairie winters found a place that in their earnest wonderment they called a "Paradise on Earth," where they rapturously grew in their own back yards the oranges, lemons, figs, nectarines, and pomegranates that were rare treats in groceries back home.

Usually belittled as bland sun seekers, these people seem to me grim realists who understood that because life was mostly loss and disappointment, small consolations should be gratefully savored. Today, for all their complaining, Angelenos have the same sense of gratitude when, after flying home from a trip to the East or the Midwest in January, they hungrily roll down the windows of the cab to smell the jasmine and feel the soft night air.

THE COVER PIECE from that issue is titled "What Is The Koran." It’s something I re-read a few years back when, along with so many others, I sought out various primers on Islam after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. It remains a useful piece on the religion’s holy book precisely because it was written prior to that judgment skewering event, and the subsequent politicization of every piece on the Islamic faith.

Its subject is the scholarly movement to treat the Koran as a historical document rather than a sacred text, and the tension it was causing in the Muslim world. Click through if you’re interested. Here I’ll reproduce a long quote, also in the piece, from Parvez Manzoor, a staunch Islamic critic of secular scholars:

The Orientalist enterprise of Qur'anic studies, whatever its other merits and services, was a project born of spite, bred in frustration and nourished by vengeance: the spite of the powerful for the powerless, the frustration of the "rational" towards the "superstitious" and the vengeance of the "orthodox" against the "non-conformist." At the greatest hour of his worldly-triumph, the Western man, coordinating the powers of the State, Church and Academia, launched his most determined assault on the citadel of Muslim faith. All the aberrant streaks of his arrogant personality—its reckless rationalism, its world-domineering phantasy and its sectarian fanaticism—joined in an unholy conspiracy to dislodge the Muslim Scripture from its firmly entrenched position as the epitome of historic authenticity and moral unassailability. The ultimate trophy that the Western man sought by his dare-devil venture was the Muslim mind itself. In order to rid the West forever of the "problem" of Islam, he reasoned, Muslim consciousness must be made to despair of the cognitive certainty of the Divine message revealed to the Prophet. Only a Muslim confounded of the historical authenticity or doctrinal autonomy of the Qur'anic revelation would abdicate his universal mission and hence pose no challenge to the global domination of the West. Such, at least, seems to have been the tacit, if not the explicit, rationale of the Orientalist assault on the Qur'an.

As a secularist who believes that neither the Koran nor the Bible is the incontestable word of God, I very much disagree with Manzoor. I also think that he is largely wrong about Western motives. But his words seem to me a good distillation of why some religious Muslims are threatened by aspects of the west other than our military, which is understandably the focus of recent discourse.

THE BACK OF THE BOOK features a book review titled "A Cataclysm of Thought" whose first paragraph alone makes it worth a look:

I’ve often been struck by the fact that philosophy students read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, political-science majors read the U.S. Constitution, and literature classes read Shakespeare, but students of science rarely read the works of Mendeleev or Lavoisier or Einstein. The widely used college textbook from which I learned mechanics, the area of physics whose foundations were laid largely by Isaac Newton, contains a beautiful exposition of classical mechanics but only a handful of mentions of Newton, no excerpts from his Principia, and no pages at all on the history of the subject. From this one observation an intelligent creature from outer space could determine that there exists a profound difference between the disciplines we call natural science and those we call humanities or art or social science. Modern textbooks on science give no sense that scientific ideas come out of the minds of human beings. Instead science is portrayed as a set of current laws and results, inscribed like the Ten Commandments by some immediate but disembodied authority.

What follows is a fascinating look at the most remarkable year of Albert Einstein’s life, seen through the lens of five groundbreaking papers he published that revolutionized the field of physics and humanity’s fundamental understanding of the world around us.

by Patrick Appel

The phrase has rules, as Ben Casnocha notes:

Someone who credibly says "I'm proud of you" usually has two characteristics. First, he is probably higher status / higher power. Most of the time, having pride about someone else comes from a place of superiority. Second, he must know you well. Most of the time, to be proud of someone means you know where they've been and how far they've come — pride is a word about growth. If a homeless guy on the street (lower status) or Bill Gates (don't know him personally) tell me they're proud of me it won't have a huge positive effect.

by Patrick Appel

The subject of most rap and pop songs made explicit (NSFW):

by Conor Friedersdorf

In high school, I always hated "in class" essays: accustom to writing on a word processor, the different process of longhand composition always made me feel incapable of producing my best work, even if I adjusted capably enough to get a good grade.

Clive Thomson came up at a different time:

The funny thing is, cutting and pasting is now so routine that we often forget how strange it felt at first. I'm 42, old enough that I wrote my high-school essays — and even the essays of my first year of college — longhand on paper, then typed them up on a typewriter. The work of arranging and redacting my thoughts was done with a pencil and paper; the typewriter existed mostly just as a way to produce a good-looking final draft, though I'd occasionally buff or improve a sentence as I was typing it up. (Though I wouldn't edit too much; if my attempts to tweak the sentence while typing made things worse, I'd have to laboriously white out my screwed-up text with Liquid Paper, a substance beyond foul.)

When I first got my hands on a word processor, it felt absolutely uncanny: The words! They're … they're moving around! THEY LOOK LIKE PRINTED WORDS BUT THEY'RE MOVING AROUND. But pretty quickly I grasped the new style of composition that was possible, and I loved it. Precisely as Englebart envisioned, I could write longer, more discursive drafts, letting my thoughts wander into ever-more-creative-or-weirder nooks, and taking arguments to their logical endpoint just to see where they'd lead. I could give myself mental permission to do this because it was easy to redact the best parts into my final essay. Robert Frost talked about how he couldn't tell what a poem was going to be about until he'd finished writing it. That's what word processors did to my academic and journalistic writing: As the mechanical act of writing became easier, it became easier to write prodigiously as a way of sussing out my own thoughts.

Elsewhere in the same post, Thompson notes that there are critics of word processors who believe that they hurt our ability to think. And you're doubtless familiar with the hand-wringing about the younger generation: that they'll grow up capable of texting and not much more. All interesting topics for debate, but what I'm wondering about this moment is whether advances in voice recognition software are going to bring about an age of dictation, or perhaps a world where writers, broadly construed, are divided, some preferring to type out their words while others prefer to speak them aloud.

Also, for readers who find themselves depressed and pessimistic about the future whenver this subject comes up, a bit of perspective. The passage that follows appeard in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1911:

The rising generation cannot spell, because it learned to read by the word-method; it is hampered in the use of dictionaries, because it never learned the alphabet; its English is slipshod and commonplace, because it does not know the sources and resources of its own language. Power over words cannot be had without some knowledge of the classics or much knowledge of the English Bible – but both are now quite out of fashion.

by Patrick Appel

Ryan Grim reports:

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) had promised the White House early last week that they would deliver the votes necessary to ratify the START treaty if the administration would pull the repeal of the military's DADT policy off the lame-duck agenda, according to Democratic aides familiar with the pair's offer. 

by Patrick Appel

Andrew Gelman takes aim at a truism. Jonathan Bernstein defends it.

by Patrick Appel

Michael Specter applauds the above PSA:

This [ad] has sent a number of H.I.V. activists into a frenzy—and many have demanded that the city pull the ad. Why? For the same reason that Larry Kramer, who founded both Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the New York-based H.I.V.-advocacy group, and ACT UP, was ostracized in the early days of the epidemic: unpleasant truths are never welcome. … Nasty messages are unpleasant and they don’t always work. But they do work sometimes, and there is research to suggest in cases like this, where it has become easy to shrug off the truth, harsh reminders are particularly effective. (You can find a series of exchanges that stakes out the positions of each side in great detail here.) 

Michael Petrelis is much more skeptical of fear-based HIV prevention efforts, as am I.

by Conor Friedersdorf

John McWhorter wonders why it matters:

Out of the 6000 languages in the world, why is it so vital for smart people to learn the one spoken in one small European country of ever-waning influence and its former colonies? Isn’t the sense of French as a keystone of an education a legacy of when few met foreigners who spoke non-European languages, French was educated Europe’s lingua franca, and the elite who went to college often had plans to do the Grand Tour?

That is, is knowing French really so obviously central to engaging what we know in 2010 as the world, or is it that French is a kind of class marker? You know: two cars, a subscription to the Times, and mais oui, Caitlin knows some French?

…There’s an awful lot of world beyond Europe; people speak some languages there too, and in our times, a liberal arts education should focus on them. Take Chinese, which increasing numbers of students are taking. A Martian would be baffled as to why anyone would think of French, German or Italian as more important for young Americans to learn than Chinese. Or—in response to the objection that no one is saying European languages are more important—let’s face it, the Martian wouldn’t understand why Chinese was not thought more important.

I took Spanish, and never could learn it until I actually moved to Spain, where immersion worked. But if I had a facility with language I'd learn Russian so that I could read Tolstoy in the original (no disrespect to Constance Garnett intended).