Category: The Dish

It strikes me as the most hopeful area of research. This could be good news.

A trip to a very literary graveyard in Massachusetts.

… so Stephen Colbert can keep thinking from his gut.

A striking new study:

"I construct measures of the number of slaves exported from each country in Africa, in each century between 1400 and 1900. The estimates are constructed by combining data from ship records on the number of slaves shipped from each African port or region with data from a variety of historical documents that report the ethnic identities of slaves that were shipped from Africa. I find a robust negative relationship between the number of slaves exported from each country and subsequent economic performance. The African countries that are the poorest today are the ones from which the most slaves were taken."

The likeliest reason?

"[The] procurement of slaves through internal warfare, raiding, and kidnapping resulted in subsequent state collapse and ethnic fractionalization."

(Hat tip: Ampersand.)

There’s a blog for everything – including a Soviet Poster a day! Each poster comes with an often fascinating explanation of its cultural, political and historical context. Jesse Walker explains the odd feelings of admiring the kitsch of evil here.

The front-runner is Marlon Brando. Pauline Kael called it in the Atlantic in 1966:

"He was our angry young man—the delinquent, the tough, the rebel—who stood at the center of our common experience. When, as Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, he said to his brother, "Oh Charlie, oh Charlie … you don’t understand. I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody, instead of a bum—which is what I am," he spoke for all our failed hopes. It was the great American lament, of Broadway, of Hollywood, as well as of the docks."

But he hasn’t won yet. Alas, Monday’s entries still have many more votes than the other days – a function of timing. You can tilt that by voting for the leaders in the other four lists. Vote often if you’re a real fan. So far, the runners-up are Apocalypse Now, Cool Hand Luke, Casablanca, and this:

You can still vote for any of the forty-five others, of course. Where are the Star Wars fans?

Pharyngula goes there:

Andrew Brown suggests that we shouldn’t suppose that religious belief is irrational, and I’m going to have to agree in part with him. I think theology is actually an exercise in reason — it is an activity that has engaged some of the greatest minds of the ages, and it is a sophisticated and elaborate logical edifice.

Introducing the unobtrusive, and freedom-friendly truck bomb trap.

Dave Hoffman of Concurring Opinions thinks I’m all out of focus on how HDTV may impact political performance:

The thing that Drum, Sullivan, and others seem to forget is that we’re simply switching one set of distortions for another. Politicians have responded to low definition t.v. with a set of tools: makeup, hair stylists, careful tailors. They will likely respond to clearer t.v. with moves that, at least on one reading, are more substantively related to well-being: working out more, eating better foods, and coming out as hair-challenged.

But even were this new advance in the medium of political communication to be 100% immersive – if we had hyper-realistic media transmission systems that let you smell Fred Thompson’s Gucci loafers – the way that we experience politicians, news, indeed, any informational stimulus would still be biased and culturally contingent. That bias isn’t external to the viewer, it is all in our heads.

Sure. My point is not that we won’t in due course adjust – but that in the period of adjustment, there will be winners and losers. Bush lost on HDTV last week. I bet his handlers noticed. Better make-up next time.

More grist for Luttwak, noted by Josh.