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The Rise of Obama Conservatives and the revolt of Conservative Intellectuals
Much of Mr Obama’s rhetoric is strikingly conservative, even Reaganesque. He preaches the virtues of personal responsibility and family values, and practises them too. He talks in uplifting terms about the promise of American life.
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What is the Right Price for Oil?
Traders at the Mercantile Exchange buy and sell oil for future delivery, and the price serves as the reference price for oil shipments around the world. When a refinery contracts to buy crude oil,it generally agrees to pay the price on the Merc
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Malcolm Gladwell: Creativity, Prodigies and Late Bloomers
Prodigies like Picasso rarely engage in an of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual” in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go. But late bloomers follow an experimental approach. Their goals are imprecise.
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What do buying patterns tell about economic downturns
People are physically healthier in times of recession. Death rates fall, people smoke less, drink less and exercise more. Traffic fatalities go way down.Heart attacks go down. Back problems go down. People have more time to prepare healthier meals at home
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Is there a case against tipping?
Tipping began as an aristocratic practice, a sprinkle of change for social inferiors, and it quickly spread among the upper classes of Europe. Yet even at its outset, tipping engendered feelings of anxiety and resentment.
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Kurt Andersen's Piece on New York
Murdoch’s sudden appearance reinforced the local sense that New York was falling to pieces,and being sold off for parts.Murdoch’s Post—manic,loud,prurient,shameless, unrespectable,finding entertainment in the hideous—was an appalling funhouse mirror.
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Google thinks Wikipedia's neutrality and anonymity are overrated
Google's online encyclopedia Knol diminishes community involvement, giving authors complete control over their postings. Second, it rewards authors with advertising lucre, creating a huge incentive for people to post as much content as possible.
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Downloadable Academic Lectures
M.I.T. had a head start with its software, but in short order other universities began clamoring to broadcast their lectures free. Duke, Yale and Stanford now serve as “providers” on iTunes U, which appeared in Mat to make lectures available online.
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New York Times Magazine Story on Student Evaluations
Professors are more ambivalent, and they happily share theories that what students are really evaluating is less pedagogy than whether a professor is funny, handsome or an easy grader.
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Hitchens on Pakistan
The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means "land." The resulting acronym means "land of the pure."
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Bret Stephens on Muslim Rage
The Muslim intellectual class has a tendency to fall prey to nearly every bad idea that comes its way, from fascism to socialism to third-worldism. Partly as a result of this, the Muslim world soured on liberalism before it ever really tasted it.
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David Frum: As America becomes more unequal, it also becomes less Republican.
As a general rule,the more unequal a place is,the more Democratic;the more equal,the more Republican.The gap between rich and poor in DC is nearly twice as great as in strongly Republican Charlotte.But this isn't a case of shanties against the mansions.
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McCain Favors Junk Food and Bad Jokes
McCain projects the blokeish persona of a man who used to drink too much, crash planes and chase women. He has a stock of awful jokes, which he repeats so often that his staff have the punchlines printed on T-shirts.
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Only the British people — not the Germans or the French
Brits are the ones who are carousing, brawling and getting violently sick. They are the ones crowding into health clinics seeking morning-after pills and help for sexually transmitted diseases.They are the ones who seem to have one vacation plan:drinking.
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Couples all over America are making love again and shouting ‘Yes we can’ as they climax.
Obama is strikingly self-obsessed even by the standards of politicians. He has already written two autobiographies. But there are worrying signs, for the Democrats, that Obama fatigue is beginning to set in.
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Obama's New Yorker Profile
Many people who knew Obama then remember him for his cockiness. He had good reason to be self-assured. A number of his accomplishments had been accompanied by adoring press coverage. He was the president of the Harvard Law Review.
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Obama's 'the end of history' rhetoric
Obama speeches almost always have the same narrative arc. Some problem threatens. The odds are against the forces of righteousness. But then people of good faith unite and walls come tumbling down.
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1997 New York Times Profile of John McCain
The article cites McCain working close with Democrats. He calls his own party's leaders corrupt. He jokingly refers to his younger political self "freshman right-wing Nazi." Conservatives, as a rule, do not liken conservatism to national socialism.
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Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine
The Shock Doctrine has a single, uncomplicated explanation for everything that ails us. It identifies the fundamental driving force of the last three decades to be the worldwide spread of free-market absolutism as it was formulated by Milton Friedman.
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An Accurate Perspective on AKP
The cliché is that AKP represents the "real Turks" fighting off the "secular elites"; the pious, popular masses versus an irreligious intelligentsia. But this is hardly the case. Both Turkeys in this power struggle are religious, both are wealthy.
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Sexual competition may explain male-genital mutilation.
In a recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior Christopher Wilson, a neurobiologist at Cornell University, suggests that male-genital mutilations are actually intended to prevent younger men from fathering children with older men’s wives.
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Buruma's Chronicle Review Summary of His Occidentalism
The idea of the West as a malign force is not some Eastern or Middle Eastern idea, but has deep roots in European soil. Defining it in historical terms is not a simple matter. Occidentalism was part of the counter-Enlightenment, to be sure.
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Chavez: A Psychopath with a Vision
Bolívar led military campaigns to free large parts of South America from Spanish rule, and in 1819 he helped create a vast nation called Gran Colombia, which encompassed the present-day republics of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Panama.
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Michael Rubin in Wall Street Journal: "Erdogan Aspires to be Turkey's Putin"
Erdogan's disdain for press independence rivals the Kremlin's. He has sued more journalists than any predecessor, and has leaned on the owners of media outlets to rein in editors. Those who do not abide the prime minister's wishes face consequences.
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John McCain's New York Review of Books Profile
The McCain myth, as we know, is built on the foundation of his five and a half years of captivity in Hoa Lo Prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." He was flying a bombing raid in October 1967; his plane was shot down, he parachuted into the middle of a lake.
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Sleuthing about Descartes' Skull
In "Descartes's Bones", Shorto makes deft use of the centuries-long to-and-fro over Descartes’s remains, a tale that involves three different burials, events in six countries and lingering questions, partly resolved by the author himself.
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The Big Necessity: Poop Factor
Sex and money are now topics for documentaries, even after-dinner conversation. The last taboo, surely, is shit. The byproducts of digestion are so hard to mention that symptoms of bowel cancer are often ignored until it is too late.
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Public Enemies: A Book by Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lewis
Houellebecq, the novelist and ageing enfant terrible, and BHL, the leftwing philosopher, epitomise France's love-hate relationship with its bestselling literary exports. In a surprise joint venture, they have produced a book of confessions of letters.
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A New Richard Rorty Bio: The Making of an American Philosopher
By the last years of the 20th century, Richard Rorty was probably the best-known university-based philosopher in the United States. In recent years he has been surpassed in notoriety by the utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer.
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Airports as Vast Glass Hangars
"Naked Airpor is an impressively illustrated, comprehensive "cultural history" of airports as buildings, from the earliest days of makeshift sheds and hangars to the vast, glassy terminals designed by architectural multinationals such as Foster + Partners
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Waht are the chances of an American getting the Nobel Prize in Lit
The British betting shop, ladbrokes.com, has as the frontrunner, at 3 to 1 odds, the Italian essayist and novelist Claudio Magris, followed, at 4-1, by the Syrian poet Adonis. All of whom caused Americans to scratch their heads and say “Huh?”
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Ian Buruma's Novel: The China Lover
The actress Yoshiko Yamaguchi’s career forms the narrative thread of Ian Buruma’s evocative novel which spans roughly 50 years of Japan’s tumultuous modern history.Buruma uses Yamaguchi’s bizarre story as a metaphor for Japan’s own shifting identity.
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Jay McInerney on 80's, Yuppies and Patrick Bateman
David Brooks tried to refine the concept, coining the term BoBo to describe an allegedly more enlightened consumer who combined the self-interest of the 80's with the liberal idealism of an earlier era, using the Y-word to denote a less enlightened group.
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The history of Cuba can be narrated around tales of rum
Facundo Bacardi, who founded the eponymous rum company in 1862, came to Cuba from Spain as a teen-ager. By the turn of the century the distilling operation that Facundo had begun in a shed was among the brands most closely identified with Cuba.
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Parry Anderson on the History of Turkey 1
For public consumption, CUP proclaimed a ‘civic’ nationalism, open to any citizen of the state, no matter what their creed or descent. In secret conclave, on the other hand, it prepared for a more confessional or ethnic nationalism, restricted to Muslims.
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Perry Anderson on the History of Turkey 2
During WW2,Inönü had steered Turkey in much the way Franco had done Spain, tempering political affinity and assistance to the Nazi regime with a prudent attentisme allowing for better relations with the West once it looked as if Germany would be defeated.
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Stuff White People Like
Sushi, for instance, is everything [White People] want: foreign culture, expensive, healthy, and hated by the ‘uneducated.’ Christianity and Sarah Palin are “a little trashy” The aversion for christianity is rooted not in religious enmity but in taste.
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Hitchens praising Bernard-Henri Lewis'
Bernard-Henri Lewis takes a stand against the mindless anti-Americanism that is so prevalent among the lumpen intellectuals of Europe. In his view, the phenomenon has two highly unpleasant subtexts to it. The first is ingratitude.
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Machiavelli, Cesar Borgia, Florentine Prisons, ...
At 43 Machiavelli desperately needed a job. Poor and unemployed he retreated from the city to live on the family farm. He was sadly out of his element, catching birds and playing cards; his worldly friends sent mocking regards to the chickens.
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Ambient Intimacy through Facebook, Twitter, ..
Social scientists have a name for incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does out of the corner of the eye.
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Julian Barnes's Book on Death
While some people on their deathbeds dutifully rage against the dying of the light, Barnes prefers those who simply remain true to themselves, who depart this life with, say, a gesture of quiet courtliness.
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Anthony Lane on Mamma Mia!
Mamma Mia is more like a theatrical kebab, onto which she skewered as many Abba songs as humanly possible: a clever move, given that half the people in the Western world have the Abba sound stuck itchily in their ears, whether they like it or not.
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Individual vs. harmony
Researchers argue about why certain cultures have become more individualistic than others.Some say that Western cultures draw their values from ancient Greece,with its emphasis on individual heroism,while other cultures draw on more on tribal philosophies
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Mamma Mia!
See that girl! Watch that scene! If you change your mind,I’m the first in line. Mamma Mia,here I go again. You may have spent the last 30 years struggling to get lines like those out of your head and wondering what they were doing there in the first place
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Adam Sandler's Zohan is a Israeli secret agent who wants to quit the Army and become a hairdresser
To this end, he fakes his own death in a confrontation with his Palestinian nemesis, the Phantom (John Turturro), and smuggles himself to New York in a dog carrier, taking his co-travelers' names as his own, "Scrappy Coco."
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Wikipedia aims not for truth with capital T but for consensus
The philosophy that appealed to Jimmy Wales--founder of Wikipedia--was Objectivism, a strand of thinking associated with the author Ayn Rand. “It colours everything I do and think,” he says.
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James Wood on Bart Ehrman's Anti-theodicy
Creation almost begins with a curse, God’s determination that women will give birth in pain as a result of Eve’s disobedience.The earth is then quickly condemned to the Flood, because God is unhappy with his sinful creation, and wants to start over again.
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Anne Applebaum Snubbing Gawker, Wikipedia and Nicholson Baker's History of WW2
If you can get your news from Google and your opinions from the latest, hottest, angriest blog? But Human Smoke might be a harbinger of what is to come in other spheres: Baker, after all, is the historians' equivalent of the smug bloggers.
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Robert Downey Jr. in Jon Favreau's Iron Man
We catch up with Tony Stark (Iron Man) in dusty Afghanistan, where he is enjoying a Scotch on the rocks in the back of an armored American military vehicle. Tony is a media celebrity, a former M.I.T. whiz kid.
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Why is Nozick a better philosopher than Rawls?
Like Rawls, Nozick sought to impose an abstract vision of justice on political life, relegating considerations of feasibility to be resolved by others, in the spirit of Kant’s dictum, “let justice triumph, even if the world perishes by it.”
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Do Consevatives Have More Fun?
Conservatives tend to be happier than liberals in general. A conservative outlook rationalizes social inequality, accepting the world as it is, and making it less of a threat to one’s well-being, whereas a liberal outlook leads to dissatisfaction.
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Why do gay genes reproduce themselves more succesfully than non-gay genes?
ThE evidence suggests that homosexual behaviour is partly genetic. This raises a worrying evolutionary question: how could a trait so at odds with reproductive success survive the ruthless imperatives of natural selection?
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The Starbucks theory of international economics
Having a significant Starbucks presence is a pretty significant indicator of the degree of connectedness to the form of highly caffeinated, free-spending capitalism that got us into this mess.
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Gossip Serving a Useful Social Function
Celebrities may serve an important social function. In industrial society, celebrities may be the only “friends” we have in common with our new neighbors and co-workers. They provide a common topic conversation between people who otherwise might nothing
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Adam Gopnik on John Stuart Mill
Certainly no one has ever been so right about so many things so much of the time as John Stuart Mill, the nineteenth-century English philosopher, politician, and know-it-all nonpareil who is the subject of a fine new biography.
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Warfare between Science and Religion
Galileo did not get into trouble solely because he was expressing views contrary to scripture, but because he was doing so independently, rather than as a theologian acting within the Church.
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Dan Dennet on Germs and Memes
In a talk he gives in TED, philosopher and scientist Dan Dennett draws on a similarity in the works of Jared Diamond (the author of 'Guns, Germs and Steel') and Sayyid Qutb.
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Fermi Problem and Gut Feelings in Mathematics
When mathematicians and physicists are left alone in a room, one of the games they’ll play is called a Fermi problem, in which they try to figure out the approximate answer to an arbitrary problem,” said Rebecca Saxe, a cognitive neuroscientist.
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Economic downturn prompts an upsurge in divorces
One explanation is that the defecting spouses of high earners are getting out before the crunch reduces the potential for lucrative settlements. As the City boom turns to bust, redundancies are becoming commonplace and hefty bonuses a distant dream.
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Researchers find interesting things with yearbook photos
Two psychologists from Berkeley California argue that whether a woman smiles in her photo can predict "favorable outcomes in marriage and personal well-being up to 30 years later."
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Doggy Pharm
On the 4th of July, a dog named Dixie was sitting in the backyard of her owners. Around dusk, the sky above her exploded with the flashes and percussive booms of fireworks. Whatever happened, Dixie hasn’t been the same since.
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The Four Horsemen of the Apocalyse
On the 30th of September 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated 2-hour discussion. Video-stream or download the video of their conversation
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String theory goes against the modern in physics
For string theory to make mathematical sense the world must have nine spatial dimensions. Why don’t we notice the six extra dimensions? Because, according to string theory, they are curled up into some microgeometry that makes them invisible.
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Analytic Philosophy in America
Scott Soames describes the development of the analytic tradition of philosophy in the United States. His essay appears in "The Oxford Handbook of American Philosophy" edited by Cheryl Misak.
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Steven Pinker on the Stupidity of Dignity
A free society disempowers the state from enforcing a conception of dignity on its citizens. Democratic governments allow satirists to poke fun at their social mores. This is very much in America's contributions to civilization.
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Language and perception
Language affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. But it can trip us up, too.
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Alexander Bird on Kripke (pictured)
Alexander Bird writes on the fundamental contributions of Saul Kripke with regard to metaphysics, semantics, philosophy of language, theory of reference, singular terms and names, rules and scepticism.
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An Argument for Conformity
Americans have a prejudice in favor of lone wolves. Moral superiority, we like to think, belongs to the person who stands alone. And that's a crap. Until recently, social science went along with this idea. Lab-based research furnished slam-dunk evidence.
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Nick Zangwill. 'Aesthetic Experience'. Download Word file
Zangwill unifies sociological, cognitive and Kantian explanations of aesthetic experience. Kant regards taste as arising from the faculties of cognition, which can be integrated with theories of cognition and social theories of taste.
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Husserl 'Logical Investigations' Volume I. pdf download
The most recent edition of Husserl2s great early work which has strong influenced European philosophy ever since,and which has been taken up by Analytic philosophers.
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Download pdf of 'Truth Makers' by Scott Soames, leading philosopher of language.
Soames the defends reality of propositions, the bears of truth, in relation to facts. It is propositions that can be true or false, that can be believed or not believed, not the facts.
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Download pdf of Husserl's Book Cartesian Meditations
Husserlreturns to Descartes in order to present his own transcendental Phenomenology. He explains this as the need to repeat Descartes' gesture of moving inwards in order to construct philosophy in a pure and systematc way, from nothing.
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Jim Holt: What were Einstein and Godel talking about?
Wittgenstein once averred that “there can never be surprises in logic.” But Gödel’s incompleteness theorems did come as a surprise. What could it mean to say that a mathematical proposition was true if there was no possibility of proving it?
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Utilitas 'A Leading Journal of Ethics' . Free access issue
Vol 20issue 1 of Utilitas is available in free access for articles in Html and pdf formats.
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Jim Holt: Are Our Brains Wired For Math?
According to Stanislas Dehaene, humans have an inbuilt “number sense” capable of some basic calculations and estimates. The problems start when we learn mathematics and have to perform procedures that are anything but instinctive.
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