Living Room Couch Professors
I went to the third-tier school, albeit for the first-rate economics program and by hefty fiscal incentive. Among the fifty most intellegent people I've ever met, only a handful did their undergraduate work at US News's top 50 schools. While a brand-name degree gets your foot in the door, success is determined by skill, creativity, and competence. Good to see Letters to the Editor in the WSJ today expressing similar sentiment.
Wednesday, May 7, 2003 09:02 p.m.
Shot Through the Heart and You're to Blame A million bloggers before me linked to this NYT article on the "software bullet sought to kill music piracy." None, AFAIK, however made the comment that I will right now: this could be a good thing. I say could because if the RIAA stuck only to measures like this instead of suing college students for developing search engines or sending cease-and-desist letters to SUN Micosystems, the information superhighway would be a less congested place. Madonna's "Fuck Off" track was brilliant strategy. If you really want to keep music from getting pirated, legal measures aren't enough (although they are costly, annoying, and evil.) Who's going to bother KaZaa-ing the latest Madonna single now that she's flooded the internet with fakes? When I have more time I'll continue with this thought -- but hold on for now
Wednesday, May 7, 2003 08:42 p.m.
Die Another Day
The spring issue of Free Inquiry brushes upon the morbid hot topic, euthanasia. Unfortunatly, neither of the cases made against physician-assisted suicide are up online, but do seek them out in the print edition. It is refreshing to hear secular voices in the debate, although their arguments are, to me at least, still unconvincing. AFF's next roundtable is also on euthanasia, although I doubt any atheists are arguing against it.
Tuesday, May 6, 2003 11:50 a.m.
The Sea and Crake
New Scientist interviews the underrated novelist Margaret Atwood. She says her new book, Oryx and Crake, isn't sci-fi but "speculative fiction" like her masterwork, the now classic The Handmaid's Tale. It's about post-men that fight wars over scarce resources in an environmental dystopia. Tuesday, May 13th, she's reading at St. Paul's Lutheran Church, in an event sponsered by Politics and Prose
Tuesday, May 6, 2003 10:29 a.m.
Watch It
After a recent visit to the video store I learned a film obsession of mine -- Cube -- has a sequal, Cube 2: Hypercube. How does one begin to describe perfection? It's a brilliant suspense. If you were salivating over this month's Scientific American story on Parallel Universes, you must see this film. It's physics, math, philosophy ...If I think anymore about the existentialist message I'm going to have a panic attack.
Monday, May 5, 2003 07:59 p.m.
Blogging Tipping Point?
In Reason’s latest issue, Julian Sanchez ponders the same “Diligent vs. Dilettante” dichotomy I did a few months back, though under a different context. We can’t ever expect blogging to unseat real journalism, but the phenomena will mine stories that otherwise go unnoticed.
Bloggers aren’t JV-league journalists, but like a loosely-organized pick-up team. You can make and break the rules as you go along. The best analogy, and one I’ve made over and over, is that a blog is one’s virtual soapbox and for that reason it says a lot about you. If your daily deliberations are limited to “what I’m wearing today,” you’re a waste of bandwidth, if not just a total moron. Likewise, the political equivalencies of “what I’m wearing today” – the Neoconservative lemming screeds – reflect just as badly on their authors.
Blogging has an inextricable social component. Neocon lemmings may get blogger-buddies, but they won’t get respect (or hits) without something unique to bring to the table. Uniqueness and writing skills are first-level necessities to develop a following. Jerry tells me Movable Type is another (yeah, just be patient.) Another level is the factual content. Given the alacrity of the medium, it’s easy and tempting to post something unverified. If you do it over and over, you’re reputation’s shot, except as a media speculator.
And who knows, maybe media speculators have their own niche. One thing I like about Julian’s essay is the emphasis on the blogosophere’s comparative advantage aspects. There are blogs about quantum mechanics and joke blogs about Kim Jong-Il. Whatever the topic, someone on the blogosphere’s tapped it. The carpo di tutti bloggers tends to discusses a wide variety of topics to keep readers on their toes, and that's the most successful method
But no public sphere is all wonderworld. Every day I deliberate whether or not I should save my musings for essays I might write in the future once I crack down and get my act together. In a better world, I’d never need to worry my commentary, insights, and alluring alliterations may consciously or subconsciously get picked up by another writer once out on the public sphere. Jeremy Lott wrote “offensively jaded” is “an insult that's just dying to be stolen." But the Google cache will always lay my claim to it – as well as other phrases-- and that’s enough to keep me going.
Update: I guess this is a very circular way of explaining blogging is personal, ergo individual-oriented. A real journalist's individual style often gets lost in the editing room
Monday, May 5, 2003 07:56 p.m.
Dark Waves
Part of the reason I enjoyed the movie Storytelling was it was a mirror on the discreetly racist "United Colors of Benetton" sanctimony of goody-goody liberal Caucasians. They feel “white guilt” without multi-colored friends. It’s not racist to have a racially monolithic social circle, but to them it signifies a subconcious narrow-mindedness they must purge at all costs.
I guess I paid my dues growing up in a "black" town and going to a "black" high school. I learned to see racial groups for who they are -- people --rather than mythic, "disadvantaged" creatures that need my assistance.
I don't go to Anacostia just like I don't bother with Hyattsville, Maryland. It's not because it's unsafe. It's not because the residents have dark skin. It's because there is nothing to do there. The nature of urban development is attractions are centralized in a hub area. But in Washington this divide has color lines and the longer you live here, the harder it becomes to ignore.
“Black culture” is what’s isolating black America. Is there anything we “white people,” can do about it? Well, we could dismantle the welfare state, but that would require much more extrapolating than I have time for -- just go read a number of Heather MacDonald’s essays instead.
But the do-gooder whites seek out token black friends, like their “white-safe” hip-hop artists (Black Star, Jurassic 5) that speckle otherwise rock-oriented collections. They fear passing judgements, however obvious, and rationalize ghettos and ghetto-dwellers as aspects of a culture they do not understand.
These aspects are inferior to the status quo and should be identified as such. Students at my school were pressured against taking advanced-level courses, lest they be teased by peers and called "proper." Crack-whore is a punch line to white kids, but it is a sad reality in the ghetto. "Crack babies" are nothing less than tragic. The younger, and more drugged-up the mothers, the dumber their children are – and the harder it is for the future generations to break free. But that's the United States for you. And that’s the whole world. No one ever said it has to be a happy place.
Monday, May 5, 2003 08:19 a.m.
New Way to Waste Time
I was so wrong about Friendster, it's 15 minutes aren't up. It's 2003's answer to blogging. It just gets better and better as more people join in. I want all my friends on it, and Alina and I want the libertarian community represented too. BTW, the Friendster parody site, "Fiendster" has a "testimonial" from me.
Monday, May 5, 2003 07:46 a.m.
Campaign Finance Reform
James, who is about to unseat me as the internet's "most creative" speller, brings up the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance reform initiative that was struck down in federal court last week. "A noble end they forwarded, reducing the amount of corruption in politics, but as is often the case, a politician's reasoning on how to acheive a certain end was flawed."
Monday, May 5, 2003 07:21 a.m.
Orwell, Orweillian
The Guardian printed part of Thomas Pynchon's introduction to the new edition of Orwell's 1984.
There is a game some critics like to play in which one makes lists of what Orwell did and didn't "get right". Looking around us at the present moment in the US, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law enforcement," familiar to us from countless televised "crime dramas," themselves forms of social control - and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself. The two-way telescreen bears a close enough resemblance to flat plasma screens linked to "interactive" cable systems, circa 2003. News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke. And so forth. "Wow, the government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?" "Orwellian, dude!"
Monday, May 5, 2003 07:07 a.m.
Smoked Out
New York commands the world's attention, as per usual, but Boston too passed a smoking ban that went into effect midnight last night. The Boston ban does not extend to neighboring towns meaning we can expect an interesting neighborhood redistricting in coming months. As if MIT and Harvard need anything more to boast about, the Davis and Central Square bar scene in Cambridge will likely gain as Boston proper loses business. It's a shame because around the financial district/ waterfront-area are bars that were established a hundred years ago and could still attract cool crowds. Then again, now that smoking is banned everyone's going to quit, right?