Taylor’s book is a vivid, comprehensive account of how the Berlin Wall came about, of the repulsive or inspiring events which took place along it during its 28-year life, and of its eventual fall in 1989. He backs this narrative with a summary of Prussian and Berlin history leading up to the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, a close study of the devious postwar struggles within the ruling Socialist Unity Party under Walter Ulbricht and then Erich Honecker, and an account of developing East-West relations before, during and after the great ‘Berlin Crisis’ of 1958-61.

When he is telling stories, Taylor is at his best. He makes compulsive reading, for instance, when he traces the process by which the first spontaneous and idealistic Fluchthelfer (‘escape helper’) groups formed in 1961 became slowly entangled in all kinds of moral and practical dilemmas. Should they carry guns and shoot back when fired on? They began to do so, but lost much Western sympathy when GDR border guards were killed. Should they raise money for expensive tunnels by striking coverage deals with American TV networks or Axel Springer’s right-wing press empire? They eventually did, but getting into bed with journalists sometimes compromised their security as well as their public image. Should they convert the whole effort into a commercial undertaking, in which the escapers were obliged to pay for freedom – and in hard currency? By the late 1970s, the price had reached something like £5000 a head.

more from the LRB here.

This leads to the loss of one of the great comforts of modern urban life, not accounted for in the vast sociological literature on anomie: the fraternity of solitude. Sometimes you eat dinner alone; sometimes you do your grocery shopping alone; often you’ll ride the bus alone. At such times, in a city, there are always other people who are dining alone, shopping alone, sitting in their bus seats alone, in exactly the same situation. The fraternity of solitaries is always there for you to join. Pynchon imagined a society of “Inamorati Anonymous,” solitary anti-love and anti-company people who send letters through a secret network, simply to assure one another they are there. Go into a restaurant now, sit near a fellow single diner, and you will see him dial his cell phone during the appetizer and talk through to dessert. The only choices you have are to pull out your own phone or listen in.

From literature to advertising, we’ve developed a cultural style of ceaseless babbling. Never mind the endless self-interruptions and elaborations of needlessly footnoted fiction, talking copyright pages, and the rest; we got used to that, and it was sort of in the spirit of a warning. But even Burger King has now stolen the text-happy style of McSweeney’s, so you are fed grease by some whimsical garrulous spirit of the paper sack and the napkin.

more from the boys at n+1 here (so young to think like such old men).

Howard Freil in ZNet:

Norman Finkelstein was denied tenure at DePaul University on June 8, 2007, despite votes in favor of tenure by the school’s Political Science Department and a college-level personnel committee. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, tenure was opposed by the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the University Board on Promotion and Tenure, and the university president, Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, the ultimate decision-maker in the case, who reportedly told the Chronicle that he found “no compelling reasons to overturn” the tenure board’s recommendation.

In addition, Holtschneider reportedly told the Chronicle that he “decried the outside interest the case had generated” and stated for the record: “This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case.” While the outside interference was both inappropriate and probably unprecedented, due on both counts to the prolifically public opposition to Finkelstein’s tenure by Harvard Law School’s Alan Dershowitz, it seems implausible that Dershowitz’s campaign had no impact at DePaul on the final decision to deny tenure to Finkelstein.

Because few assistant professors with books published by at least three major publishers (in this case the University of California, W.W. Norton, and Verso) are denied tenure, and because even fewer with such books, a vote of support from their department, and glowing student evaluations, are denied tenure, it is difficult to imagine that anything other than outside interference, almost all of it from Dershowitz, led to the denial of Finkelstein’s tenure at DePaul.

From the Political Compass website, via Microscopically Fictitious:

In the introduction, we explained the inadequacies of the traditional left-right line.

If we recognise that this is essentially an economic line it’s fine, as far as it goes. We can show, for example, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot, with their commitment to a totally controlled economy, on the hard left. Socialists like Mahatma Gandhi and Robert Mugabe would occupy a less extreme leftist position. Margaret Thatcher would be well over to the right, but further right still would be someone like that ultimate free marketeer, General Pinochet.

That deals with economics, but the social dimension is also important in politics. That’s the one that the mere left-right scale doesn’t adequately address. So we’ve added one, ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.

Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper political analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. While the former involves state-imposed arbitary collectivism in the extreme top left, on the extreme bottom left is voluntary collectivism at regional level, with no state involved. Hundreds of such anarchist communities exisited in Spain during the civil war period

You can also put Pinochet, who was prepared to sanction mass killing for the sake of the free market, on the far right as well as in a hardcore authoritarian position. On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process.

The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy).

The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal “anarchism” championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America’s Libertarian Party, which couples law of the jungle right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.

In our home page we demolished the myth that authoritarianism is necessarily “right wing”, with the examples of Robert Mugabe, Pol Pot and Stalin. Similarly Hitler, on an economic scale, was not an extreme right-winger. His economic policies were broadly Keynesian, and to the left of some of today’s Labour parties. If you could get Hitler and Stalin to sit down together and avoid economics, the two diehard authoritarians would find plenty of common ground.

Economic Left/Right: -5.75
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.38

More, including the test, here.

UPDATE: I posted this on a lark, and sure enough, quickly got a (deserved) scolding from Cosma Shalizi. I am just copying his usefully informative comment here:

This one has been around, as a Libertarian recruiting tool, since at least the early bronze age (when I encountered it in high school). There are about a zillion problems; the late, lamented Chris Lightfoot came up with a substantially better alternative, along with an explanation of why the political compass test is unsatisfactory. (I wrote about Lightfoot’s test in November 2003, and was late to the party even then.)

And in case you’re interested, here are my results from Chris Lightfoot’s survey:

1	left/right	-7.0408 (-0.4238)
2	pragmatism	+4.5748 (+0.2754)

Lindsay Beyerstein in In These Times:

The House Appropriations Committee subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education shocked many progressives in early June when it approved a $32 million increase for the discredited Community-Based Abstinence Education (CBAE) program. The extra money seems particularly strange, since congressional Democrats announced last month that they would allow a major source of abstinence-only funding to expire at the end of June.

In April, a congressionally mandated report confirmed that current federally funded abstinence programs are ineffective. The multi-year study conducted by Mathematica Research examined youths who participated in abstinence-only education programs funded under Title V of the Welfare Reform Act. The authors concluded that kids who participated were no more likely to abstain from sex until marriage and no less sexually active than the control group that got no abstinence training.

In the wake of the study, congressional Democrats pulled the plug on abstinence funding through Title V. But it makes little sense to squelch Title V while boosting CBAE because the two programs share the same curriculum guidelines. If Title V is a waste of money, so is CBAE.

From the University of Chicago Press website:

In 1838 Charles Darwin jotted in a notebook, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth take up Darwin’s challenge in Baboon Metaphysics: The Evolution of a Social Mind, throwing light on the roles of instinct and thought in baboon behavior and investigating the question of baboon self-awareness.

Excerpt from the book:

What goes through a baboon’s mind when she contemplates the 80 or so other individuals that make up her group? Does she understand their social relations? Does she search for rules that would allow her to classify them more easily? Does she impute motives and beliefs to them in order to better predict their behavior? Does she impute motives and beliefs to herself when planning a course of action? In what ways are her thoughts and behavior like ours, and in what ways—other than the obvious lack of language and tools—are they different? These are questions that also vexed Charles Darwin.

We have taken our title from one of Darwin’s most memorable remarks. He wrote it on August 16, 1838, almost two years after returning from his voyage on the Beagle and 21 years before the publication of The Origin of Species. It was a time of vigorous intellectual activity, when Darwin read voraciously on many subjects, both within and beyond the sciences, and met and talked with many different people, from family friends to prominent literary and political figures. Despite this active intellectual life, however, it seems unlikely that he or anyone else had ever combined the words “baboon” and “metaphysics” in the same sentence. What was Darwin thinking?

More here.

Richard Rorty has been one of my greatest intellectual heroes for many years, ever since I read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature and then his extremely influential collection of papers Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth. A few months ago I asked him to write a short review of something for 3 Quarks. He wrote back saying he would have liked to, but unfortunately was too ill to do so. This was the first I heard of his cancer, and I was saddened, but not quite prepared for his death within months. Robin and Morgan have already been posting Rorty-related material here in the days since his death on Friday. His thinking and writing was of such a profound philosophical depth that he was easily misunderstood by dabbling dilletantes in philosophy who attacked him mercilessly for decades. The following is from an autobiographical piece he wrote in 1992:

If there is anything to the idea that the best intellectual position is one which is attacked with equal vigour from the political right and the political left, then I am in good shape. I am often cited by conservative culture warriors as one of the relativistic, irrationalist, deconstructing, sneering, smirking intellectuals whose writings are weakening the moral fibre of the young. Neal Kozody, writing in the monthly bulletin of the Committee for the Free World, an organization known for its vigilance against symptoms of moral weakness, denounces my ‘cynical and nihilistic view’ and says ‘it is not enough for him [Rorty] that American students should be merely mindless; he would have them positively mobilized for mindlessness’. Richard Neuhaus, a theologian who doubts that atheists can be good American citizens, says that the ‘ironist vocabulary’ I advocate ‘can neither provide a public language for the citizens of a democracy, nor contend intellectually against the enemies of democracy, nor transmit the reasons for democracy to the next generation’. My criticisms of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind led Harvey Mansfield – recently appointed by President Bush to the National Council for the Humanities – to say that I have ‘given up on America’ and that I ‘manage to diminish even Dewey’. (Mansfield recently described Dewey as a ‘medium-sized malefactor’.) His colleague on the council, my fellow philosopher John Searle, thinks that standards can only be restored to American higher education if people abandon the views on truth, knowledge and objectivity that I do my best to inculcate.

Yet Sheldon Wolin, speaking from the left, sees a lot of similarity between me and Allan Bloom: both of us, he says, are intellectual snobs who care only about the leisured, cultured elite to which we [4]belong.  Neither of us has anything to say to blacks, or to other groups who have been shunted aside by American society. Wolin’s view is echoed by Terry Eagleton, Britain’s leading Marxist thinker. Eagleton says that ‘in [Rorty’s] ideal society the intellectuals will be “ironists”, practising a suitably cavalier, laid-back attitude to their own belief, while the masses, for whom such self-ironizing might prove too subversive a weapon, will continue to salute the flag and take life seriously’. Der Spiegel said that I ‘attempt to make the yuppie regression look good’. Jonathan Culler, one of Derrida’s chief disciples and expositors, says that my version of pragmatism ‘seems altogether appropriate to the age of Reagan’. Richard Bernstein says that my views are ‘little more than an ideological apologia for an old-fashioned version of Cold War liberalism dressed up in fashionable “post-modem” discourse’.  The left’s favourite word for me is ‘complacent’, just as the right’s is ‘irresponsible’.

More here.

From The New York Times:

When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces. In the first place, the photographs she makes don’t sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. “Nobody wanted to bother looking,” she said. In the second place, her images are not full of emotion or ideology or any other kind of message. As she says, “My stuff is about phenomena.” Phenomena like magnetism or the behavior of water molecules or how colonies of bacteria grow — phenomena of nature. “So I don’t call it art,” Ms. Frankel said. “When it’s art, it’s more about the creator, not necessarily the concept in the image.”

As first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at M.I.T., and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for Innovative Computing at Harvard, she helps researchers use cameras, microscopes and other tools to display the beauty of science. With her help, scientists have turned dull images of things like yeast in a dish or the surface of a CD into photographs so striking that they appear often on covers of scientific journals and magazines. According to George M. Whitesides, a Harvard chemist and her longtime collaborator, “She has transformed the visual face of science.”

More here.

From Nature:

Telling apart relatives from strangers is crucial in many animal species, helping them to share precious resources or avoid inbreeding. Now it seems that plants can perform the same trick.
Plants have already been shown to compete with others — of their own kind or of another species — when sharing space. For example, they sometimes choose to invest more energy in sprouting roots when they have nearby competition for water and nutrients. Now, Susan Dudley and Amanda File of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, have shown that plants grown alongside unrelated neighbours are more competitive than those growing with their siblings — ploughing more energy into growing roots when their neighbours don’t share their genetic stock.

Plants ‘know’ more about their environment than they are often given credit for: they can sense the presence of neighbouring plants through changes in water or nutrients available to them or through chemical cues in the soil, and can adjust their own growth accordingly. “That plants have a secret social life is something well known to plant ecologists,” says Dudley.

But the ability to recognize kin has not been demonstrated before.

More here.

Max Rodenbeck in the New York Review of Books:

It is easy enough to counterpoint the opulence and squalor, hope and despair that remain such close bedfellows here. It is far harder to untangle the network of shifting allegiances that make up the spider’s-web-in-a-kaleidoscope of Lebanese politics. Differences between the eighteen sects that are formally recognized in the Lebanese constitution, which reserves political offices proportionally for representatives of different religious communities, form only part of the puzzle. Other elements include clan loyalties, class, historic alliances, ideological currents, the grievances of refugees from throughout the region, money interests, guns, and foreign intrigue involving everyone from the Vatican to the CIA and Mossad to the rival Shiite seminaries at Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran.

Scholarly attempts to clear this thicket are fraught with risks, starting with the fact that there is scarcely an overarching narrative on which enough Lebanese can agree to establish commonly accepted truths. Rather like in modern Italy, but more so, this is a place where achieving any sort of closure on important national traumas, such as the “Events” of 1975–1990—known to the rest of the world as the civil war—has proved dismayingly elusive. Historical happenings that elsewhere would be simple signposts on a recognized road become instead prisms, used to construct mutually negating paths.

More here.

Christopher Bonanos in New York Magazine:

Edward Tufte is most likely the world’s only graphic designer with roadies. “We own two of everything—amplifiers, digital projectors,” other A/V gear, he says. “One set moves up and down the West Coast, and one stays in the East, to keep the FedEx charges down.” He plays 35 or so dates a year, at $380 per ticket. Today’s is in a raddled old auditorium on 34th Street, over the Hammerstein Ballroom.

Like a musician’s tour to promote an album, this one—which will hit New York again in the fall—exists partly to sell Tufte’s four design books, the newest of which is titled Beautiful Evidence. But Tufte, through his own Graphics Press, is the book’s publisher, and he doesn’t do the usual quick month of hard promotion before heading back to his desk. He keeps going on the road, selling steadily, a few gigs a month, year after year. That may be why there are 1.4 million copies of his titles in print—a staggering figure for self-publishing. (The top seller, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has been a reliable mover since 1983.) And at these six-and-a-half-hour presentations, the audience starts cheering when he hits the floor, clamors for their books to be signed, buys posters at the table out front.

More here.

Via Shakesville:

In the latest issue of Dissent:

Movement politics, the sort that held “bourgeois reformism” in contempt, was the kind of politics that [Irwing] Howe came to know all too well in the thirties, and was dubious about when it was reinvented in the sixties. This kind of politics assumes that things must be changed utterly, so that a new kind of beauty may be born…

What Howe said of modernism is true of all movements, but of no campaigns: namely, that it “must always struggle but never quite triumph, and then, after a time, must struggle in order not to triumph.” If the passion of the infinite were to triumph, it would betray itself by revealing itself to have been merely a passion for something finite. Anyone who prides himself on having achieved purity of heart convicts himself out of his own mouth. So Howe, I think, raised just the right question when, at the end of an essay on “The Idea of the Modern,” he asks “How, come to think of it, do great cultural movements end?”

I would answer this question by saying that such a movement can only be killed off by another movement of the same kind. It takes a new sublime to kill an old sublime. As the century wore on, it became increasingly difficult for cultural critics to avoid demoting “modernism” from the sublimity of a movement to the finitude of a period: to avoid saying that Proust, Picasso, and the rest were characteristic neither of a change in human nature nor of a crisis of modem society, but simply of early twentieth-century art and literature, as Baudelaire and Delacroix had been characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century art and literature.

In The Progressive, Danny Postel interviews Rorty (via normblog):

Danny Postel: How do you feel about the spirited engagement with your work in Iran today? You were invited to lecture in Tehran in 2004 and encountered intense interest in what you had to say. More recently, the Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji sought you out in California and the two of you had a long discussion. I was in a bookstore in Tehran in March and saw several of your books, as well as a collection of essays about you, in both English and Persian. I wonder what you make of this.

Richard Rorty: When I visited Tehran I was surprised to hear that some of my writings had been translated into Persian, and had a considerable readership. I was puzzled that rather fussy debates of the sort that take place between European and American philosophers, and in which I engage, should be of interest to Iranian students. But the reception of the talk I gave on “Democracy and Philosophy” made clear that there was indeed intense interest in the issues I discussed.

When I was told that another figure much discussed in Tehran was Habermas, I concluded that the best explanation for interest in my work was that I share Habermas’s vision of a social democratic utopia. In this utopia, many of the functions presently served by membership in a religious community would be taken over by what Habermas calls “constitutional patriotism.” Some form of patriotism — of solidarity with fellow-citizens, and of shared hopes for the country’s future — is necessary if one is to take politics seriously. In a theocratic country, a leftist political opposition must be prepared to counter the clergy’s claim that the nation’s identity is defined by its religious tradition. So the left needs a specifically secularist form of moral fervor, one which centers around citizens’ respect for one another rather than on the nation’s relation to God.

Among contemporary philosophers, I know of none who equalled Rorty in confronting his colleagues – and not only them – over the decades with new perspectives, new insights and new formulations. This awe-inspiring creativity owes much to the Romantic spirit of the poet who no longer concealed himself behind the academic philosopher. And it owes much to the unforgettable rhetorical skill and flawless prose of a writer who was always ready to shock readers with unaccustomed strategies of representation, unexpected oppositional concepts and new vocabularies – one of Rorty’s favourite terms. Rorty’s talent as an essayist spanned the range from Friedrich Schlegel to Surrealism.

The irony and passion, the playful and polemical tone of an intellectual who revolutionised our modes of thinking and influenced people throughout the world point to a robust temperament. But this impression doesn’t do justice to the gentle nature of a man who was often shy and withdrawn – and always sensitive to others.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Never before such a distant season of derision. Across town, the silo siren heralds an encore to panic. The lake below Mexico City shivers like a Plexiglas dance floor.

A fine time to forget about our appointment with the radioman
who was appropriately hostile with his briefcase blues:
somewhere in California something is on fire.

A smattering of pay phones is known as a “currency” of pay phones.
Currently, this currency has no customer. Stay alert.
Watch your neighbors. Leave us a backgammon board

and your buttons for checkers. Leave us sharks and soapboxes
and sleight of hand, Triffids and tercets and a Teflon pan.
It had been warm, and we spoke in open air on suburban streets

about pleasant things.

more from Adam O. Davis’ poem at the Paris Review here.

In 2005, astronomers and cosmologists celebrated – in style – the 100th anniversary of their annus mirabilis: 1905. This was the year in which Albert Einstein wrote a set of scientific papers, including one containing the equation E=mc2 that changed our understanding of the universe and became the cornerstones of quantum mechanics and general relativity – the twin intellectual pinnacles of the 20th century. Not bad for a 26-year-old patent office clerk.

You can therefore understand what all the fuss was about. Journals, biographies, exhibitions, even plays and operas, were produced to mark the centenary. Every utterance, every scrap of paper produced by the great man was examined and debated in 2005. Nothing, surely, could have been left out, you would have thought. Certainly, another telling of Einstein’s life story, only a couple of years later, must surely seem unnecessary and ambitious.

more from The Guardian here.

Peter Green in The New Republic:

Kingsley William Amis was born on April 16, 1922, in Norbury, a newish outer suburb south of London. When a rail line was put through in 1878, as Amis reports in his memoirs, “the stretch between Streatham and Croydon was too long so they planted a station in between.” Haphazard Metroland expansion did the rest. The name was picked from a neighboring country house. Until young Amis came along, Norbury’s nearest approach to literature was as the setting for one of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Marinated in a genteel atmosphere of tennis clubs, bridge parties, and stucco-fronted semi-detached villas, it formed a natural breeding ground for upwardly aspirant lower-middle-class conservatism. Popular lending libraries abounded, encouraging a mild philistinism toward anything more literary than romances, whodunits, and the new Pooh books. Fake Tudor architecture, pseudo-Jacobean furniture, imitation Turkish rugs were all the rage. This was the world in which Amis grew up, a world where, as he later confessed, “I would as soon have expected to fall in with a Hottentot as with a writer,” and the pretentions of which he started demolishing at an astoundingly early age.

When the poet Philip Larkin, Amis’s closest friend, told an interviewer that he himself had begun writing “at puberty, like everyone else,” Amis commented, in surprise, “He left it until puberty? I’d been writing for years by puberty.” To his first biographer, Eric Jacobs, he admitted, revealingly, that “I wanted to be a writer before I knew what that was.” When every other factor has been counted in, what sets it all in motion is still the inexplicable creative spark that strikes seemingly at random, and in the ancient world was externalized as a visitation by the Muse.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Researchers at Tel Aviv University in Israel have demonstrated that neurons cultured outside the brain can be imprinted with multiple rudimentary memories that persist for days without interfering with or wiping out others. “The main achievement was the fact that we used the inhibition of the inhibitory neurons” to stimulate the memory patterns, says physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob, senior author of a paper on the findings published in the May issue of Physical Review E. “We probably made [the cell culture] trigger the collective mode of activity that … [is] … possible.”

The results, Ben-Jacob says, set the stage for the creation of a neuromemory chip that could be paired with computer hardware to create cyborglike machines capable of such tasks as detecting dangerous toxins in the air, allowing the blind to see or helping someone who is paralyzed regain some if not all muscle use.

More here.

Monday morning after the French Open final (if you are a fan of that quirky little niche sport, tennis), the beginning of summer.  It’s somehow a day for cleaning up and rounding things up, an errand kind of day.  You feel that, right?

So I thought I’d do my version of a post Robin “The Omnivore” Varghese did a few weeks back, in which he picked the blogs he reads most often, or which he likes the best, or something like that.  I think I can’t remember which because those two things are linked–interpenetrated as William Carlos Williams or a young dialectician might say.  That is, the blogs you read the most are the best ones, because by definition, blogs are about complusive readability. I know the relation between usefulness and value is suspect to lot of people, but they are basically fascists.  As a good pragmatist, I think usefulness is a useful (turtles all the way!) way to gauge value.  And since blogs have come to occupy an avocational kind of space, to serve as a distraction or to be about by definition what one doesn’t really do, here are some blogs that I have realized I check up on often enough to make them good.

PS Feel free to append your own lists in the comments: only, leave us out of it, for Dawkins’ sake, cause we already know this is your favorite one (or don’t want to know it isn’t).

In no particular order:

Chocolate and Zucchini: Clotilde Dusoulier is a French home cook living in Paris who details her inventions in clear and friendly prose on this extremely popular food blog.  What I like about it (and it certainly isn’t the graphic design) is that Dusoulier (I want to call her Clotilde) is just the kind of cook I like best: she doesn’t go bananas with innovation or a showy desire to impress.  Her nettle soup, for instance, is basically nettles blended in water, and it shows off the interesting ingredient at the cost of the chef’s own desire to preen: luckily, this chef doesn’t.  Her creations have the kind of unshowy authenticity that comes from the hand of the true lover of food. The site is organized into useful categories, and in addition to all the recipes, there’s a ton of good, if not especially esoteric, information about Parisian restaurants and markets.  Food treated with the respect it deserves, without the obsessive-compulsive disorder it doesn’t.

Todd and in Charge: This compendium of its author’s favorites is how I like to keep up with events in Washington, as well as what Steely Dan might be up to these days.  It is a personal blog in the sense that it groups together TaiC’s predilections, whether they are the latest executive branch gaffe, Tom Tomorrow cartoon, YouTube clip of a jazzman, or general political or legal coverage.  Big ups, as some say, to TaiC’s sly and commonsensical sensibility, too – he knows when someone just needs to be quoted in their own words without the need for any annotation.  I guess it doesn’t hurt that I’m almost always in league with him politically.  Finally, I learned from him why Bill O’Reilly is called “Falafel,” information for which I’m sort of grateful.

Gawker: Did I say all of these sites were going to be non-behemoths?  The thing with Gawker is that everyone already knows it and has been vaguely annoyed by its pioneering role in spreading ultra-sarcasm around the internet.  Also, the site is parasitic in the sense that it skewers, over and over, the same elite/celebrity/wealthy subjects.  But maybe you haven’t checked it out lately.  The latest editorial team is the best yet, all snappy writers and sharp as push pins.  They cover more topics than before: I love the “restaurant tells” series, about the semiotics of eatery design features such as bare lightbulbs.  I also don’t think the current squad of Sicha, Gould, Balk, etc. gets enough credit for the general way that they use snark: they target the right targets (Amanda Hesser, the Misshapes (passim), cocaine), they leaven things by turning on themselves, they are smart and they get things.  The best flavor of haterade.  (Cool Breeze?)

Peter Bodo’s Tennis World: This is the best blog about tennis on the internet, written by a majordomo of tennis journalism (he’s the author of the classic book “Courts of Babylon”).  Pete rises above mere reportage to a kind of cowboy tennis mythopoesis.  He speculates fearlessly about players’ minds and hearts, bestows nicknames with abandon, and writes effortlessly funny, complex and honest prose.  He also infuriates fans of various players and even continents (try his writing on the Argentine doping scandal or the Dubai tournament).  But unlike most bloggers, Pete has an inclusive sense of how this medium can create communities, and he has attracted a very large following that regularly posts six to eight hundred comments a day.  Try this: post a tennis question (sample: What is a kick serve?) in the comments – within an hour, several knowledgeable posters, perhaps even ex-pros or other eminent sports journalists, will have answered it, and, likely, begun a debate amongst themselves about the fine points.  More than a blog: a phenomenon, a way of life.

L.A. Woman: A blog by former NYC indie-icon-ruler Ann Magnuson, the rocker and frontwoman for Bongwater back in the days when Vincent Gallo was still scrawling his name into wet cement on Prince Street.  Magnuson has moved to La La and begun keeping this suitably airy diary of her doings and web crawlings for Paper magazine.  A constant source of great YouTube clips, accounts of smoke rising over Griffith Park, recollections of times past, self-promotional tidbits, and a general feeling of creative zaniness combined with an appreciation for faded or twisted glamour.  Fun for the whole family!

Steve Tignor’s The Wrap: The other of Tennis Magazine’s blogs, and with a slightly different flavor than TennisWorld, but equally worth your reading time – this one by the executive editor of the magazine.  Steve is a technical analyst of the highest order, and to read his take on a match is to understand the players’ abilities and stroke mechanics like a pro player yourself.  But he also has a very deadpan sense of humor, and covers the cities to which he travels, and takes on other matters in witty asides.  Right now, though, the little match yesterday in Paris has posed the philosophical question of the hour: how do you decide how well or badly one player played in a sport as dialectical as tennis, in which the efforts of one directly limit or enable the possibilities of the other?  This dilemma is being turned over and over by the fans of Roger Federer, who (according to me) yesterday both lost to the better player on clay, Rafa Nadal, AND played well beneath his best.  Steve’s take, which is up now, is much more nuanced and typifies his ability to do that very difficult thing: describe what you see.

That Was Probably Awkward: A very new blog, co-written by a friend (gosh, I’m turning into Amanda Hesser myself), but I recommend it despite that.  It’s a diary of wandering around and contemplating – I know, but the writing is good! – a kind of throwback blog (we’re at that point already) written by two smartypantses, one of whom I know, as I said.  Blogs these days are all handling similar, public topics, and I find it refreshing to hear someone’s anonymous, private, wry reflections.  I think Walter Benjamin is their patron saint.  Somehow it has a similar effect on me as the Harry Potter books: it’s a kind of comfort reading.  Take that how you will, HT. 

Porkchop Express: What can I say?  If you are a New York City resident and you don’t already read the ‘Chop, start!  NOW.  J. Slab puts together the single raddest, dopest log of the adventures of a gastronome out there.  He’s usually ahead of the curve and while everyone else is talking Red Hook ballfields, he’s already in East Flatbush, eating roti and goat curry.  Except Slab is too smart to even think there is a curve – he knows that’s an artificial sensation produced, ironically, by his own influential internet principality, and all the media outlets pick up on it.  Also, the graphics are awesome.

Michael Berubé: Okay, I don’t check this very often at all, because it’s defunct.  But I mention it because I think this blog was the apotheosis of the first phase of the medium: it’s brilliant, self-indulgent, hilarious, informative, facile, and hugely time-consuming and logorrheic.  Berubé is one of those people who wins you over despite being annoyingly relaxed about being so accomplished yet cool, all while knowing it too: a professor, public left intellectual, academic ambassador, hockey player, ex-rock drummer, etc.  The blog exemplifies blogs – one man’s itinerary through a set of sometimes unmatching but always intriguing interests: politics, theory, the NHL, his son’s disability.  I assume everyone in academia was secretly jealous of Berubé for doing it, not to mention pissed that he revealed you could hold down a tenured professorship while spending four to six hours a day blogging, undermining academic claims of busy-ness everywhere.  But the result of all that pro-caliber time management is a great archeological record, still worth plowing though every so often.  This was The Spectator of blogs, or maybe The Tatler, Steele’s solo production.  If my friend Tricia Lawler reads this, she’ll tell us which.  Tricia?

Dispatches.