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Anti-smoking activists using Nazi methods
Some despots, in Hindustan and Persia, went further, slitting smokers’ lips or pouring molten lead down their throats. American prohibitionists claimed that smoking led to moral decay; Nazis that it was a decadent Jewish habit.
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What should be the price of an e-book?
Publishers risk being viewed much like recording labels were a decade ago: greedy corporate titans who hide behind claims of high costs and creative entitlement as they resist the transition to a digital landscape.
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Tukey turning itself into an ambassador of the islamic world
When it came to the nomination of the Dane Rasmussen as the next NATO secretary general, Turkey not only wanted to demonstrate its strength, but also served as a mouthpiece for Muslim anger over the Muhammad caricatures
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David Plotz blogging the Good Book
If a man pushes a pregnant woman and she miscarries, but is not otherwise hurt, then the offender pays only a fine to the victim's husband. This has interesting implications for how we think about abortion.
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Freeman Dyson's subversive way of doing science
Dyson maintains that climate change has become an “obsession” — the primary article of faith for “a worldwide secular religion” known as environmentalism. he blames environmentalists “lousy science” for “distracting public attention.”
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John Tierney speaks of an inverse buyer's remorse
People feel guilty about hedonism right afterwards, but as time passes the guilt dissipates. At some point there’s a reversal, and what builds up is this wistful feeling of missing out on life’s pleasures.
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UN Resolution, conflating religion with etnicity, exonerates religion based criminality
Islam affirms itself as the last and final revelation of God's word, the consummation of all the mere glimpses of the truth vouchsafed to all the foregoing faiths, available by way of the unimprovable, immaculate text of "the recitation," or Quran.
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Robert Darnton explains Google's digital library lawsuit settlement
Google is not a guild, and it did not set out to create a monopoly. On the contrary, it has pursued a laudable goal: promoting access to information. But the class action character of the settlement makes Google invulnerable to competition.
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Is Turkey Still a Western Ally? Turkey's foreign policy is driven by Religion and Money
Since the AKP assumed power in 2002, Turkish foreign policy is increasingly driven by two new factors: religion and money. Over the past year, the Islamist AKP government has hosted a series of anti-Western leadersincluding the presidents of Iran, Sudan .
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Michael Lewis's NYT Op-ed Piece
Americans watched investment bankers and emulated them: for a long time now half the planet’s college graduates seemed to want nothing more out of life than a job on Wall Street. This is one reason the collapse of our financial system has inspired ...
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The book for which William Tyndale gave his life
Tyndale was not a charming sophisticate. He seems to have lacked social grace,and was rather bad at reading the minds of people around him. The modern term for that is autistic; he would probably have found some neater way to describe a personality that i
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John Seabrook: Annals of Psychopathy Research
For your own physical, psychological, and financial well-being it is crucial that you know how to identify the psychopath. Among the professions likely to attract psychopaths are law enforcement, the military, politics, and medicine.
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Degeneracy of the conservative intelligentia
The Republicans lost the battle of ideas marching into the election armed with nothing more than slogans. Energy? Just drill, baby, drill. Immigration? Send the bums home. Torture and Guantánamo? Wear a T-shirt saying you would rather be water-boarding.
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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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Alexander Waugh's House of Wittgenstein
The publishers of “The House of Wittgenstein” compare the “novelistic richness” of its style to Thomas Mann’s first novel, “Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family,” which was published in 1901. In fact, there are more than stylistic similarities.
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James Wood reviews "Lowboy"
In standard third-person narration, a tiny slippage often suffices to alert us to a character’s fiction-making. For instance, if I were describing the New York subway, in the third person, from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old boy, and I wrote:
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David Denby talking of mumblecore movies
Mumblecore movies are made by buddies, casual and serious lovers, and networks of friends, and they’re about college-educated men and women who aren’t driven by ideas or by passions or even by a desire to make their way in the world.
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Duplicity a caper movie, a love story — with Clive Owen and Julia Roberts, no less
Tony Gilroy’s most ingenious structural gamble — the duplicity of “Duplicity” — is to make foreground and background almost perfectly reversible. It’s a sharp, sexy comedy masquerading as a twisty tale of intrigue, and vice versa.
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Ferguson follows the trajectory of finance through history
"In ascent of money", Niall Ferguson argues, Imperial Spain amassed vast amounts of bullion from the New World, but it faded as a power while the British and Dutch empires prospered because they had sophisticated banking systems and Spain did not.
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Gran Torino is a sleek, muscle car of a movie
Totems of masculinity and mementos from a heroic cinematic age, are what make this unassuming film — small in scale if not in the scope of its ideas — more than just a vendetta flick or an entertainment about a crazy coot and the exotic strangers next doo
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Amelie Nothomb’s novel, Tokyo Fiancée
It isn’t a love story; it’s a tale about koi — a term used in Japan for a sexual relationship free of the melodramatic trappings of love, founded on camaraderie rather than romance. As the narrator explains lve is serious and intense, but koi is funny ..
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Orhan Pamuk's Turkish Library
In an orginal piece written for New York Review of Books, Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk appears to believe that 1955 Istanbul pogrom is instigated not just by Turkish secret service but also by Britain. That's very weird.
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David Foster Wallace writing on Richard Taylor's "Fatalism"
Wallace wrote big, brainy novels that were encyclopedically packed with information and animated by arcane ideas. In nonfiction essays, he tackled a daunting range of highbrow topics, including ethics and epistemology of lobster pain.
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New Yorker's Naomi Klein Profile
Since her book “The Shock Doctrine” was published last year, Klein, now thirty-eight, has become the most visible and influential figure on the American left—what Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky were thirty years ago. She speaks every few days, all over.
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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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Margaret Talbot writing on neuroenhancers like Ritalin, Adderall, Provigil
Drugs like Ritalin and Adderall work, in part, by elevating the amount of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is something you want just enough of: too little, and you may not be as alert and motivated as you need to be; too much, and you may feel stimulated.
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'Christian List explains how ants. bees and birds behavior are relevant for human collective decisio
it is becoming clear that group decisions are also extremely valuable for the success of social animals, such as ants, bees, birds and dolphins. And those animals may have a thing or two to teach people about collective decision-making.
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Anthony Gottlieb reviews Denis Dutton's "Art Instinct'
Although Denis Dutton endorses the popular form of evolutionary psychology in principle, his practice is more nuanced. His discussion of the arts and of our responses to them is uniformly insightful and penetrating.
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New Republic's Adam Kirsch trashing Slovenian philosoher Zizek
Zizek is all bark and no bite. Robert Boynton, writing in Lingua Franca in 1998, found Zizek "bearded, disheveled, and loud ... like central casting's pick for the role of Eastern European Intellectual."Boynton was amused to see the manic, ranting ...
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Jim Holt on Gershon Legman, scholar of dirty-jokes
There are two classic theories about the origin of jokes. One is that they come from stockbrokers, who have time on their hands between sales and a communications network to send jokes around.The other theory is that they are made up by prisoners.
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Dacher Keltner's case in defense of teasing
The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Younger monkeys pull the tails of older monkeys. African hunting dogs jump all over one another, much like pad-slapping, joking football.
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The quality of a man’s sperm depends on how intelligent he is
One implication of a paper about to be published in Intelligence is that brainy people are intrinsically healthier than those less intellectually endowed. This result results has emerged from an unrelated study of the quality of men’s sperm.
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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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