The Dish

Frank Furedi hates that current "educational fads are based on the premise that because we live in a new, digitally driven society, the intellectual legacy of the past and the experience of grown-ups have little significance for the schooling of children":

The fetishisation of change is symptomatic of a mood of intellectual malaise, where notions of truth, knowledge and meaning have acquired a provisional character. Perversely, the transformation of change into a metaphysical force haunting humanity actually desensitises society from distinguishing between a passing novelty and qualitative change. That is why lessons learned through the experience of the past are so important for helping society face the future. When change is objectified, it turns into spectacle that distracts society from valuing the truths and insights it has acquired throughout the best moments of human history. Yet these are truths that have emerged through attempts to find answers to the deepest and most durable questions facing us, and the more the world changes the more we need to draw on our cultural and intellectual inheritance.

Erik Stokstad reports that a group of researchers has found that Americans waste about 40% of their food:

Food waste is usually estimated through consumer interviews or garbage inspections. The former method is inaccurate, and the latter isn't geographically comprehensive. [Kevin] Hall and his colleagues tried another approach: modeling human metabolism. They analyzed average body weight in the United States from 1974 to 2003 and figured out how much food people were eating during this period. Hall and [Carson] Chow assumed that levels of physical activity haven't changed; some researchers think that activity has decreased, but Hall and Chow say their assumption is conservative. Then they compared that amount with estimates of the food available for U.S. consumers, as reported by the U.S. government to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The difference between calories available and calories consumed, they say, is food wasted.

(Hat tip: 3QD)

“Major Lazer (feat. Nina Sky & Ricky Blaze) – “Keep It Goin’ Louder.” Directed by the incomparably batshit Eric Wareheim (i.e. not safe for work, grandmas).”

Major Lazer | MySpace Music Videos

Hey, was that Jennifer Lopez?

Choire hoists the standard:

At a bar last night, I was talking to someone smart who made an excellent point: that a very quiet, revolutionary act in the history of publishing had just taken place. (This person compared this moment to Gutenberg, which might be a little bit far afield but not that far off!) That is that Joshua Micah Marshall is hiring a publisher for Talking Points Memo, the blog he started all on his own in 2000, a bit before all the warbloggers like Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds came onto the Internet, and four years before Michelle Malkin. (Oh yes, how soon we forget.) My friend’s point was: here is an editor, who built and owns his publication, who is now going to be the editor-owner, who will employ the publisher. For those of you who have worked at any sort of publication, the implications of this are staggering.

For instance, pretty much everything that is wrong with the Washington Post is driven by issues of ownership and control; the financial operation of the newspaper exercising control over editorial. (In this case, as so often happens, the executive editor of that paper, Marcus Brauchli, has some sort of weird, terrible, degrading Stockholm Syndrome relationship with the publisher-owner-corporation as well, and it is destroying the paper.)

Now that anyone can own a publication just by sweat equity, what will happen when the publishers actually report to the editor-owners? Yes, I am pretty much expecting a grand utopia, and perhaps I will be disappointed. But it’s high time media publishing—where, nearly everywhere across the industry, the business side that has failed so utterly at its duties is currently squeezing every last bit of blood out of editorial—tried something different.

The Big Picture rounds up some entries from National Geographic‘s annual International Photography Contest. The photo above is by Richard Rush. Vote for your favorites here.

A reader writes:

In your post there was a small but odd detail that caught my eye. You write "until Christians start condemning the greed and debt and consumerism of the past two decades as morally wrong, they have no standing on other moral questions that are now in play."

Why two decades? Why not three, four, ten, or two hundred? Was it an offhand choice of words, or do you actually think American "greed, debt, and consumerism" somehow started about one year into the first Bush administration? In particular, was your choice of "two decades" an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to downplay the role of Reaganism in the care and feeding of American greed? Or, was it that you didn't arrive in the USA until roughly two decades ago and didn't see firsthand the greed, laziness, and magical thinking underlying the Reagan revolution.

Avarice and sloth have always been with us, but the Reagan years deserve special mention for it was then that we replaced the unsustainable "tax and spend" with the even less sustainable "borrow and spend." It was then we gave up any pretense of seriousness in budget policy: tax cuts would raise revenue painlessly. If tax cuts somehow didn't raise enough revenue, the budget could still be balanced painlessly by cutting foreign aid and cracking down on welfare cheats (if you were a Republican) or cutting wasteful military spending (if you were a Democrat). And if that didn't work, hey, how about this nifty state lottery? Reaganomics and the heralded Reagan optimism was all about believing you could have everything you wanted while someone else paid the bills and made the sacrifices.

By putting two wars on tab while cutting taxes, Bush II may have raised magical economic thinking to an art form, but it was the Reagan-era supply-siders and deregulators who laid the political and rhetorical groundwork that made it possible. The greed and debt of the last two decades are a major part of the legacy of Reaganism.

My reader is reading too much into my dates. I do think Reagan's supply-side hooey was instrumental in propagating the idea that money grows on trees and the tax cuts always mean higher revenues. But the cumulative damage of the thrift-aversion seems to me to have taken off in the past two decades most markedly. The failure of the churches to warn of these deep dangers of this kind of worldliness with anything like the passion they have deployed against the sexual lives and choices of individuals is a lost opportunity. Yes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI have indeed maintained their moral critique of modern capitalism. But it didn't permeate; and America's evangelical movement managed to turn a family-less hippie commie of the first century into a God-fearing, family-obsessed subprime borrower of the twenty-first.

The latest review of Sarah Palin's work of magical realism by someone who knows the truth comes to the same conclusion as everyone else:

In Going Rogue, Palin mentions none of Wooten's military record, but cites many charges that were brought against Wooten that were subsequently dismissed. She contends that there were "ten different" citizen complaints field against Wooten–without acknowledging that all of them were filed by members of her family or close friends. "They filed every stinking one of the charges," Wooten contends. "But it's been more like two dozen." …

Wooten calls the version of events rendered in Going Rogue an "outright lie." Either it "didn't happen [the way she alleges]," he says, "or she exaggerated it all beyond recognition. I look forward to telling my side of this story."

Wooten now joins an ever-growing array of figures from John McCain on down who have challenged the veracity of Palin's memoirs. The list also includes McCain senior advisers Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace, Palin's former legislative director John Bitney, her former political ally Andree McLeod, and former Alaska gubernatorial candidate Andrew Halcro. All Republicans. Wooten identifies himself as a "conservative" as well.

When you realize how vicious her vendetta was against Wooten, her brother-in-law, you wonder again why she has kept such kid gloves on with Levi Johnston.

You also wonder whether any fact-checking was done at HarperCollins. Well: you don't have to wonder. They had no fact-checkers at Harper Collins when they marketed my book (I had to hire two of my own). A random blog, I'd wager, has more factual reliability than a book published by Jonathan Burnham and edited by Adam Bellow. Yes: Adam Bellow. Editing Sarah Palin. What a stunning emblem that is of so much.

Jonah Lehrer reviews Stanislas Dehaene's new book:

One of the most intriguing findings of this new science of reading is that the literate brain actually has two distinct pathways for reading. One pathway is direct and efficient, and accounts for the vast majority of reading comprehension — we see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word's meaning. However, there's also a second pathway, which we use whenever we encounter a rare and obscure word that isn't in our mental dictionary. As a result, we're forced to decipher the sound of the word before we can make a guess about its definition, which requires a second or two of conscious effort.

Wangdue, Bhutan, 4 pm