Michael Koplow focuses on a key factor of the Tunisian uprising:
Unlike in Egypt, Jordan, Algeria, and most other secular Arab autocracies, the main challenge to the Tunisian regime has not come from Islamist opposition but from secular intellectuals, lawyers, and trade unionists. The absence of a strong Islamist presence is the result of an aggressive attempt by successive Tunisian regimes, dating back over a half-century, to eliminate Islamists from public life.
Stephen Bundiansky wants real talk on guns:
We have made a reasonable social decision, I think, that the benefits of the automobile outweigh its harm; yet that has not prevented us from honestly acknowledging its harm and the perfectly plain fact that how roads and cars are designed and regulated have an enormous impact on death and injury, completely apart from human volition. (Per capita auto-related fatalities are today half what they were in 1950; deaths per vehicle-mile have dropped sixfold, almost entirely through technological modifications.)
Yet only when it comes to guns do people attempt, usually furiously, to deny that anything but individual responsibility matters, as I mentioned the other day. If we are ever to have a real discussion on this topic, we need to begin with the simple admission that guns — like drugs, medicines, cars, power tools, ski helmets, and every other piece of technology in the universe — can be built and employed in ways that are inherently safer or ways that are less safe.
Jesse Walker finds the question too narrow. Larison expands on Walker's argument:
There is no question that protesters made use of Twitter, and it is also quite clear that Twitter was a valuable tool for disseminating information about the revolt, but that doesn’t make the revolt a “Twitter revolution” except in the very narrow sense that more people learned of what happened in Sidi Bouzid more quickly than they would have otherwise. Arguably, this accelerated the escalation and spread of the protests, but there seems to be general agreement that the trigger was Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation and the real causes were widely-shared economic and political grievances. Labeling something a “Twitter revolution” seems to trivialize what we’re talking about, as if other nations’ political struggles can be defined by the technologies and websites that happen to be trendy elsewhere.
Joining the debate, Marc Lynch discusses the synergy between traditional outlets and new media tools like Twitter:
Al-Jazeera and the new media ecosystem did not only spread information — they facilitated the framing of the events and a robust public debate about their meaning.
… Arabs collectively understood these events quite quickly as part of a broader Arab narrative of reform and popular protest — the "al-Jazeera narrative" of an Arab public challenging authoritarian Arab regimes and U.S. foreign policy alike. Events in Tunisia had meaning for Jordan, for Lebanon, for Yemen, for Egypt because they were framed and understood within this collective Arab narrative. From al-Jazeera's talk shows to internet forums to the cafes where people talked them out face to face, Tunisia became common focal point for the Arab political debate and identity.
Al-Jazeera's role may not fit the current passion for the internet, but overlooking it will lead to some serious misunderstandings of how the media works in today's Arab world and how the Tunisian events might matter outside of that country over the longer term.
Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz on panicking after having quit her job:
I was exhausted, I was wearing my boyfriend’s clothes because all of my clothes smelled and I was surrounded by books filled with 1850s medical horror stories and I thought, “What have I done? Why did anyone think I could do this? Wasn’t it so much simpler just to have an office job?”
And it was then that Thomas Dent Mutter, that genius, that cad, spoke to me through 150 years of history. He wrote a speech in 1847 that I just happened to be transcribing in 2010 and in it he said, “The world is no place of rest. I repeat, it is no place of rest but for effort. Steady, continuous undeviating effort. Our work should never be done and it is the daydream of ignorance to look forward to that as a happy time, when we shall wish for nothing more, and have nothing more to accomplish.”
Belfast, Maine, 1.30 pm
Scott Rosenberg examines the news organizations on Twitter that first reported Giffords had been killed. He supports the fix proposed by Being Wrong author Kathryn Schulz in this Poynter interview by Mallary Jean Tenore:
Why not have a ‘correct’ function (like the ‘reply’ and ‘retweet’ functions) that would automatically send a correction to everyone who had retweeted something that contained an error?
Rosenberg goes on to explain why we need to figure out Twitter retractions now:
Every new style of online participation is born dangling from a “just.” It’s “just” a tweet, so why bother worrying about deleting it? But every wave of Internet-based communication that preceded Twitter arrived on the scene with a similar sense that it was more ephemeral than what preceded it. Save your e-mail? Why bother? Hey, edit your Web page at will — it’s just data on a server!
Each time, we gradually discover that what we thought was casual has become an essential part of the record of our time. And each time we scramble, belatedly, to retrofit some responsibility onto our practices. Maybe this time we can at least shorten that cycle.
Sue Fishkoff catches up with rabbis who participated in the civil rights movement:
One night in Georgia in the summer of 1962, [Rabbi Israel] Dresner and [Martin Luther] King were trapped with other activists in a house surrounded by hundreds of members of the local White Citizens Council.
While they were waiting for help, King told Dresner about the Passover seder he’d attended that spring at a Reform synagogue in Atlanta. He particularly recalled reading the Haggadah and hearing the phrase “We were slaves in Egypt.”
“Dr. King said to me, ‘I was enormously impressed that 3,000 years later, these people remember their ancestors were slaves, and they’re not ashamed,” Dresner said. “He told me, ‘We Negroes have to learn that, not to be ashamed of our slave heritage.’”
Mauritanian man sets self on fire in front of presidential palace in an echo of suicide that triggered Tunisia uprising – Reuters
And this just hours ago:
An Egyptian man set himself on fire Monday outside the country's parliament, security officials said, in an apparent protest emulating the self-immolation of an unemployed Tunisian man last month that helped trigger a popular uprising.
Four Algerians have also set themselves aflame over the past week.
Maud Newton interviewed Misha Angrist, member four of the Personal Genome Project to have his entire genome to be published online, and author of Here Is A Human Being:
I think what will happen is that more and more people of reproductive age will undergo carrier screening in order to avoid conceiving kids with relatively rare genetic diseases that are caused by single genes gone awry. I'm talking about cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, muscular dystrophy, etc. One can imagine a day when having kids with those maladies will be stigmatized—a kind of GATTACA-lite.
That would suck, IMHO, and perhaps not only because of the icky eugenic implications. It could also suck because the genome is a dynamic thing, and a balancing act. Sickle cell trait has persisted because carrying it protects one from getting malaria. Who's to say that carrying one copy of a cystic fibrosis mutation doesn't similarly protect us against cholera or various diarrheal illnesses? If we eliminate those mutations from the population, are we opening the door to a future of intestinal problems?
Radio City Music Hall, 2009
Eliza Williams reviews a new exhibition of photographs by Christopher Thomas:
The effect of witnessing these familiar places in such stillness is a little disquieting but mostly feels a rare treat. Somewhat remarkably, Thomas hasn't employed any trickery to capture them empty of people – he simply got there very early in the morning.
The Dish 