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Paul Krugman tonight at the New School
I thought that filling my head with constructive thoughts might make tonight's State of the Union less painful. So I'll be starting the night out at this event listening to Paul Krugman talk on "the growing concentration of wealth, income, political and economic power in America." I think it just might be really good, so if you're in New York, think about checking it out.
Educating Chris Bowers
I'm busy researching a piece on the future of filmmaking that I think is gonna be great if I can beat it into shape, but I wanted to point out this post from MyDD's Chris Bowers that asks some potentially illuminating questions about the role of the blogosphere in the Alito nomination.
Toward an anthropology of Stephen Gaghan
I was just reviewing Wikipedia's entry on cultural anthropology and had a thought that ties together two of my favorite things -- anthropology and the movies. Here it is. In the old days, the bread and butter of anthropology was the ethnography, where the anthropologist went and lived with one circumscribed group of people for an extended period of time (generally two years) and then wrote up the results. That's where we get works like Evans-Pritchard's "The Nuer" and Firth's "We, the Tikopia." While, to the best of my knowledge, getting a doctorate in the field still more or less requires the completion of a traditional ethnography (and, oh, about a decade of your time), there's a new trend mentioned in the Wikipedia entry toward what's called 'multi-sited ethnography,' where the anthropologist tracks something -- like an idea or a commodity -- from one place to the next. Wikipedia cites this example, of a study that tracked human organs as they move through the black market. All in all, a positive trend in the field, I'd say, that frees anthropologists to address more interesting and relevant questions. A trend in anthropology and a nascent trend in cinema, I think. I'm thinking about movies like Traffic and Syriana (both Gaghan films). Though I enjoyed neither immensely, I love how they tried to tell their stories by tracking a broad theme -- drugs in the former, oil in the later -- from place to place and through the perspective of the folks involved. In both anthropology and the movies, I think that we could do worse than to popularize this 'multi-sited' approach. For my money, it's a powerful way to tell enjoyable stories about complex stuff.
(By the way, the title of this post is a weak joke. Every emerging sub-field these days is called "toward an anthropology of" something or other, like "toward an anthropology of the Internet." Anthropologists don't like to be presumptuous.)
Data profiling
Propaganda, sure, but still a pretty great Flash piece from the ACLU on life without privacy.
UPDATE: I thought that this was kinda funny. Right after posting this, I Googled the phrase "Democrats supporting Patriot Act" to remind myself which Democrats stood where on the recent reauthorization. I clicked on an old Declan McCullagh's article in CNET called "Patriot Act critics propose temporary extension" and on the page it read (see for yourself):
Welcome, Google user!
If this story isn't what you're searching for, try these other News.com search results for "Democrats supporting Patriot Act":..
Heh. So much for privacy.
George Snuffaluffagus reads the Washington Note
I don't even think that you need to be a blog triumphalist to think that this -- a network anchor (George Stephanopoulos) questioning a U.S. Senator (Barack Obama) on air about a story posted by a blogger (Steve Clemons) regarding first-hand comments on a pressing issue (bipartisan ethics reform) made by another Senate Minority Leader (Harry Reid) during a blogger conference call -- is a pretty cool thing to happen.
1982 and the Federalist Society
Sometimes I think that conservatives play up the brilliance of their world-domination master plan, but does seem as if Justice Roberts and probable-Justice Alito were more than twenty years in the making.
Lauryn Hill
It just occured to me that the picture of Lauryn Hill on the cover of Essence that I keep seeing in the supermarket checkout line might mean that her long-awaited new album is upon us. As it turns out, a Fugee reunion album is due early this year. And while I'm no Fugee fan, I'm a huge Lauryn Hill fan and will tolerate Wyclef's rapping/whooping noises to hear anything out of the mouth of the divine Ms. Hill that even approaches the genius of The Miseducation.
That said, her insistence on actually being called "Ms. Hill" and other strange behavior (see link above) raises questions of whether she is any happier or more grounded now than she was during those ugly MTV Unplugged days. And if that album is any indication, an unhappy Lauryn makes bad music (see, for example "Mystery of Iniquity"). I'm hoping for the best, but I fear that this might be a disaster.
UPDATE: The first single of the new album, "Take It Easy", is up on iTunes. From the thirty second preview, it's, um, not very good.
Bill make a gay joke
This little quip from Clinton may have been more humorous were he not the man who (1) came up with the Don't Ask Don't Tell policy, (2) signed the Defense of Marraige Act, (3) advised John Kerry to come out in support of anti-gay marriage amendments in the 2004 election, and (4) said of his opposition to gay marriage: "This has been my long-standing position, and it is not being reviewed or reconsidered." But he did all those things, so no laugh for Bill from me.
Flight 93 and Mark Bingham
Tonight's A&E movie "Flight 93" reminded me of a fact that I had forgotten -- Mark Bingham, one of the passengers who resisted the highjackers, was a proud gay rugby-playing man. I wish that it wasn't even worth mentioning. But we are of course living in the age of James Dobson, a time where those who demonize homosexuals are embraced by the establishment. (I'm talking about things like the White House's vetting of Harriet Miers with Dobson, a man who routinely makes statements asserting such things as that gay marriage "will destroy the earth.") Pointing out that gay men and women are human and occasionally even heroic seems sadly necessary.
The Color Purple
Saw it last night on Broadway. It's really quite a story and a fantastic production. I highly recommend it.
Getting inside the mind of Google China
Ethan Zuckerman is testing out Google.cn, the new Chinese version of the Google search portal, and has facinating some in-the-weeds thoughts on how the whole thing works. If I'm reading Ethan right, his working hypothesis is that Google China censors search results in one of two ways -- searches terms trigger either (1) a search of the whole web with results then filtered through a blacklist; or (2) a search of only a preapproved subset of the web hosted in China. So far, Ethan has found that search for "democracy" produces full-web-but-filtered results while a search for "falun gong" triggers a China subset-only search. Testing out in which of the two ways Google China responds to searches for different terms could, Ethan says, "provide an interesting map of what topics are merely controversial and which are completely off limits." Really fascinating stuff. Much more on it here.
I call that blogress
Via John Aravosis, a provocative article on Congress and blogging. I tend to think there's limited potential in the current crop of congresspeoples for getting them to ever blog for real (like writing or at least being intimately involved in writing their own posts). But when we start electing new folks in who "grew up" blogging, and who understand and value the blogosphere in their bones, it's going to seriously change the shape of things.
(For what it's worth, here's one current member I'd love to see blogging.)
Real life quote
Heard at last night's candidate forum for the open seat in New York's 11th Congressional District:
"I can't get my mind around a society that would deny those basic rights."
- NYC Council Member Yvette Clark, on hospital visiting rights for same-sex couples Me neither.
Most scientific of the humanities, most humanistic of the sciences
Seed Magazine's new ScienceBlogs network, the new home to Chris Mooney's Intersection blog, is hosting a new anthropology section -- perhaps not suprising for a magazine with the tagline "Science is Culture" but I'm curious to see what shape a blog on anthropology (arguably the black sheep of the science family) might take in a science-focused context. The posts up there already don't do much to clear things up. I'll be keeping an eye on that one.
Drinking at Rudy's
FYI -- I'll be at Drinking Liberally at Rudy's (on 9th, between 44th and 45th) tonight. UPDATE: I'll be at Rudy's right after I check out the 11th Congressional District candidate forum, at the Montauk Club at 8pm.
DC Olympic Committee
Wouldn't you just know it. Now, only the fact that I just moved out of DC -- and that I still lack the necessary athletic ability -- stands between me and international soccer glory. You see, the members of the self-selected DC Olympic Curling Team have launched an effort, complete with spiffy website, to convince the International Olympic Committee to allow DC to enter its own teams into competition. (via Chris Mooney)
There's
more...
Talking back
Comments were all ferkockteh, but should now be fixed now. They're still not pretty, but I'm gonna work on that. (If you're going to be coming by the site, you should maybe know that despite being an Italian-French Creole-American from New Jersey, I have a small vocabulary of Yiddish slang, like ferkockteh, which more or less means "messed up". My dad picked it up from the kids in the Brookline, Massachusetts neighborhood where he grew up and I grew up hearing it from him. It wasn't until fairly late in life that I realized that they weren't Italian words and phrases.)
Go home, gay soldier, go home
Great, a few hundred medical professionals kicked out of the military for their propensity toward homosexuality. Add that the scores of linguists and translators (26 of them speakers of the really rather unimportant languages of Arabic and Farsi) discharged for the same sin over the last several years. Well, the Defense Department has managed to rid the world of one evil -- the highly-trained-and-mission-critical-but-queer military specialist. Fabulous.
Freedom '06
It’s been an interesting last several days for those of us interested in Internet freedoms, with two Google-centered situations in the news with potentially large implications for that sort of thing.
The first is, as reported last week, the Justice Department’s attempts to force Google to turn over a database of search records, as part of its ongoing efforts to prove that the Child Online Protection Act is necessary. DOJ is insisting that the records won’t be used to tie the search results to any one user, but the folks at EFF are not convinced. Even the searches themselves, they say, raise privacy issues. The Mercury News has a nice write-up of the situation and the New York Times has an interesting piece today on how the idea that government lawyers might be having a sneaky-peek at our search records might already be affecting how we Google.
And the second is Google’s decision yesterday to release a new Chinese version that restricts certain search results, including links to blogs. Former CNN Asia bureau chief-cum-blogger Rebecca McKinnon, who of course knows far more about this part of the world than I do, says that anyone providing Internet services to China is “committing evil.” Perhaps. But I think that this move might actually open up more of the web to more Chinese. The Chinese government has regularly blocked Google.com, so even a limited but accessible Google China might be a step forward. And I have some amount of faith that Chinese hackers -- aided by sympathetic souls around the world -- will be able to figure out ways to work around the restrictions.
In my mind, both speak to the essential question when it comes to the Internet -- is there any chance that it might manage to keep up its act as as sort of free and unfettered “place apart” in the years to come, or are these two cases signs that it is trending toward becoming just as regulated as our offline spaces are? We shall see.
Grammar police
All right, I know I'm obsessing about this "try and" thing, but this from the quite bright and perfectly capable of choosing words correctly folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston: "If Google continues to gather and keep so much information about its users, government and private attorneys will continue to try and get it."
I'm up against the world on this one, I'm afraid.
The strange case of Starbucks
Yesterday, I reported on the strange phenomenon of the after-school Starbucks kids, who hang out in my neighborhood Starbucks all afternoon, never buying any coffee beverages. Today, further reporting: it's now lunch time in Park Slope, and fourteen young children have just infiltrated Starbucks and commandeered several tables to eat their school lunches upon. Fourteen, I counted! And not a latte purchased among them.
Cox on DC
Ana Marie Cox (yes, yes, she was until recently Wonkette, but did you know that in a past life she also worked at Feed, one of the coolest early online magazines?) offers some insight on Washington culture.
The best and the brightest
You know, we spend a lot of time in the liberal/progressive blogosphere attempting to figure out how to fix what’s wrong with the Democratic party. I strongly believe that one factor that we musn’t overlook is just plain old, um, stupidity:
(On the political risks of coming out against wiretapping:) “If Democrats want to be the party of people who think [the government] is too tough and the Republicans are the party of people who are tough, I don’t see how that helps us,” said one senior Democratic strategist who asked not to be identified while discussing party strategy.
I hate to say that, in my experience, this sort of nuanced thinking is what passes for political wisdom in Washington among Democrats. And I do hate to say that, because there are an awful lot of good smart Democrats in Washington who, if given the chance to govern, would really do a heck of a job. But as for having any sort of sense of what it takes to actually get people to vote us into that position, sometimes I just have to wonder what’s the matter with us. Why do we continue to rely on “strategists” who just don’t seem to know what the hell they’re talking about? (via Wonkette, who is today, Glenn Reynolds. Naturally.)
Kids
Random aside: I'm sitting in Starbucks working next to a table of three very peppy girls of about ten years old or so (in my Park Slope neighborhood, Starbucks is an afterschool hangout -- no purchase necessary) who are earnestly debating whether Jessica Simpson has "the best hair in the world." I'm not entirely sure that at their age I was aware that human hair could be styled in different ways. And I'm not even really kidding about that. We are all so very different, aren't we?
Try and write "try to"
I know this is insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but what is it with this use of "try and" instead of "try to" when writing about someone attempting to do something? I've noticed it twice in the last few days, from respectable writers spanning the political spectrum -- Andrew Sullivan on a scene from the "The 40 Year-Old Virgin" where two straight guys "try and out-straight" each other and Matthew Yglesias on how the U.S. "should try and find out" if Iran is a serious nuclear threat. This is just not acceptable.
I've just now this minute realized that -- likely as a result of a particularly militant high-school English teacher -- I have a Catholic school girl guilt and anxiety even when other people make grammatical errors or unorthodox word choices. Oh vel.
Garance's great piece on the "culture debate"
Garance Franke-Ruta has a really terrific piece in this month's American Prospect laying out a new understanding the U.S cultural landscape. I've read it three times and am still not entirely sure what to make of it, but the gist of it is that, properly understood, the "values" debate in American politics is really less about some sort of traditionalism and more about a fear and a sense of isolation that progressive values can, in skilled (and I'd stress, authentic) hands, go a ways towards succoring. But that's a gross simplfication of Garance's piece and it's well worth reading the whole thing. It is, I think also an interesting complement to this piece from the same issue that I mention below, on the promise of Barack Obama (and good news for Obama.) (Correction: the Obama piece is online only, not in the February issue.)
Savage Minds
Hot damn. I think I may have gone and found something that I've been searching for a long time -- a good anthropology blog. Hoo-ray.
The year in film
In an ongoing effort to dilly-dally this rainy Monday away, I had the thought that I might be fun to come up with a top ten list of movies of the movies that I saw in 2005. In doing so, I realized two things. First, that I've seen more movies (nine) in the almost three months since I've moved to New York than I had (five) in the first nine months of the year living in DC. And second, that I'm really incapable of numerically ranking movies in a way that their order makes any sort of real sense. So I've just listed the movies that I saw last year and divided them up into three loose groupings -- enjoyed a lot, enjoyed somewhat, enjoyed not really much at all. While there's some amount of arbitrariness even in this way of doing it, here goes:
Enjoyed not really much at all
March of the Penguins (haaated), Crash
Enjoyed somewhat
Brokeback Mountain, Syriana, Match Point, Cinderella Man, Good Night and Good Luck, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Rumor Has It (everything else was sold out, I swear)
Enjoyed a lot
Walk the Line, The Woodsman, Children of the Decree
I'm reserving a place in "Enjoyed a Lot" for the Squid in the Whale because, while I haven't seen it yet, everything that I've read about it makes me think that I'd like it very much.
Obama
In my mind, this fantastic profile of Barack Obama in this month's American Prospect hits all the things that make the freshman senator seem so promising -- his clear-eyed view of the weaknesses of the ways of old-school liberals and modern centrists, his comfort level on religion and faith, and more. Concerning, though, are the the quotes from a handful of Democratic 'big-wigs' show signs of Obama-fetishism. Definitely worth reading. And given my recent post on the problem among progressives about growing and supporting next generations, I certainly appreciated this thought on how party leaders backed Dan Hynes in the Illinois Senate primary: "There’s a lesson the party needs to learn here about nurturing and developing such obvious talent (do the Republicans ignore their Obamas?)"
FeedBurner
I've gone and switched over to a FeedBurner feed so that I my be able to track the hordes of folks visiting the site through syndication. The old feed -- http://www.nancyscola.com/atom.xml -- will keep working, but if any of you are reading the site through a feed reader, I hope that you might consider switching over to the new one -- http://feeds.feedburner.com/nancyscola. And, of course, thanks for reading in whatever fashion you choose to do so.
The Will-Grace-Jack-Karen effect
I was out with some new people for drinks for a friend’s birthday last night when the topic of the new New York City council speaker came up. One of the women that I was talking with said, “it’s so cool that it’s a woman” and I said “yeah,” and she said, “and that she’s gay” and I said, “wha?” This, I had no idea. I had had an interest in the speaker’s race when it was going on, but it was really heating up right at the end of last year at just about the time that I moved from DC to New York and was preoccupied with other things. Still, I never heard anything about the new speaker – Christine Quinn – being a homosexual. And Quinn is no non-political lesbian – she an Act Up activist who was arrested twice for protesting the banning of gays from the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Yet the New York Times (TimesSelect) article from the day she became speaker mentions her sexuality in the fourth paragraph and then only briefly – calling her a “trailblazer.” The Daily News story mentions it in its first sentence and then not again. I have to think that the reaction to Quinn’s election would have been different even just two years ago – remember, this is back in the time when Howard Dean’s support for civil unions got him branded an extremist. I think of myself a member of the first generation (late twenty-somethings) that thinks that being gay is no big deal, but that it seems to be no big thing when a lesbian rises to a a high-profile political position – even if it is in New York City – suprises even me
Smoking in the peleton
A new friend of a friend alerted me to this photo tonight. Back in the day, Tour de France riders would light up cigarettes before the big hills, as they thought that the smoke helped expand their lungs. They thought it was good for them! Imagine that.
Coffee, Tea, or Not Me
This review of Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong’s upcoming book, Crashing the Gate, talks about something that I think about often – the idea that “the Democratic Party has failed to nurture the young for its own future.” They mention the expectation that eager young progressives should be willing to work for little or nothing. In my experience, another layer of the problem is that young professional Democrats who do find paying jobs in Washington are somewhat abandoned by the generation above them -- left alone to hone their idealogy and figure out their political purpose, without guidance from their elders. Is that true for them more than it is for young Republicans? I’m not sure. But if so, it’s not a matter of the disparity of resources. I’m talking about friendly chats around the water cooler or over coffee.
Hot or not, my friend, hot or not
I have my first post up on the Personal Democracy Forum, where they've been kind enough to make me a contributing editor. It's a little something I like to call "Hot or Not: Long Live the Ugly Web" about the unimportance of being pretty online. Please consider checking it out.
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