BLVR: How much, if at all, do you concern yourself with entertaining the reader? It seems to me that even when The Tunnel is in tremendously dark territory, or when On Being Blue is entering a heady philosophical patch, the texts are still enormously entertaining—lively, daring, playful. Is entertaining the reader something you address consciously?

WG: No. The reader is somebody I don’t pay much attention to. But I do have a very conscious desire not to be academic. I’m antiacademic. I hate jargon. I hate that sort of pretension. I am a person who [commits] breaches of decorum—not in private life, but in my work. They are part of my mode of operation. That kind of playfulness is part of my nature in general. The paradox that, in a way, to take something very seriously, you can’t always be serious about it.

It is true—I have to take it back—I do think of my reader, or listener, really, more often, if I give a lecture, for example, and I know that I’m talking to these people; I enjoy sort of preening them a bit. But it’s a matter of decorum, basically. And I hate ideologies of all kinds, so I avoid jargon. I’ve done enough philosophy to know that some specialized terms are really needed. I don’t complain when Kant does it. Or when Aristotle introduces all kinds of new words; he needed them. But these other people are just obfuscating. It just makes me annoyed.

more from the The Believer here.

Via Lindsay at Majikthise, Stephanie Schorow has an article on women and and in the blogosophere in SadieMag.

Clancy Ratliff, who is studying female blogs for her PhD, blogs on www.culturecat.com.

Ratliff, who blogs herself at www.culturecat.com, explains that male bloggers rarely link to female-written sites or even visit them to leave comments. Female hosted blogs seldom get listed alongside powerhouse sites such as Eschaton (www.atrios.blogspot.com) and InstaPundit (www.instapundit.com), and those sites that do often have a well-known host or catchy appeal. Conservative pundit Michelle Malkin’s blog, www.michellemalkin.com, for instance, consistently ranks high in ratings indexes, but she’s also a syndicated columnist and author. Wonkette (www.wonkette.com) provides a titillating, raunchy collection of inside-the-Beltway gossip–not a website for those who see women as the more refined sex–making Ana Marie Cox, Wonkette’s creator, the go-to gal when mainstream media wants to cite a “women blogger.”

“I think she’s funny,” says Beyerstein, “but it’s kind of frustrating for more serious female bloggers. She’s not a [policy] wonk, she’s an entertainer.” Kathy states it more bluntly: “Any woman blogger on the web can use her sexuality to gain readers. But is that what we want?”

Yet mainstream media pundits and academics regularly invite the dirty-writing Wonkette to comment on issues of blogging or blogging ethics. She “was invited to represent not only women but the liberal blogs. That [annoyed] the hell out of everyone,” Beyerstein says.

In frontwheeldrive.com:

“Why the hell didn’t Hip-hop albums ever have liner notes?!!??” quoth journalist Brian Coleman, “Hip-hop fans have been robbed of context and background when buying and enjoying classic albums from the Golden Age: the 1980s.” With his self-published book, Rakim Told Me, Coleman set out to fix that problem and to fill a void in the written history of Hip-hop. That, and where a lot of writers who acknowledge the influence and importance of Hip-hop tend to focus on its sociological implications, Coleman stays with the music, how it was made, and where these artists were in the process. He brings a breath of fresh air to the study of Hip-hop, just by dint of focusing on the music itself.

frontwheeldrive: For the uninitiated, tell us about the premise behind Rakim Told Me.

Well, the book is 21 chapters, each one explores one classic Hip-hop album from the ’80s. The premise itself is something I call “invisible liner notes.” It’s the stories behind all these albums (e.g., Public Enemy, Run-DMC, Boogie Down Productions, Eric B & Rakim, etc.) — the history of the groups, from back when they first started. And, most importantly, it’s about talking to the artists themselves about their work as musicians, as creators. It seems to me that when you talk about music a lot of times, people tend to view the image of a group or at least the end product of their art, an album, as the most important thing. I think that the process of making them what they are as a group is as, if not more, important.

Beginning this Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History:

Darwin, the most in-depth exhibition ever mounted on this highly original thinker, botanist, geologist, and naturalist and his theory of evolution will open at the Museum on November 19, 2005, and remain on view through May 29, 2006. This exhibition continues a series of exhibitions the Museum has developed on great thinkers, explorers, and scientists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Ernest Shackleton, Albert Einstein, and now Charles Darwin.

This exhibition will explore the extraordinary life and discoveries of Charles Darwin, whose striking insights in the 19th century forever changed the perception of the origin of our own species as well as the myriad other species on this planet and launched modern biological science. Visitors of all ages will experience the wonders Darwin witnessed on his journey as a curious and adventurous young man aboard the HMS Beagle on its historic five-year voyage (1831–1836) to the Galapagos Islands and beyond.

The exhibition will feature live Galápagos tortoises and an iguana and horned frogs from South America, along with actual fossil specimens collected by Darwin and the magnifying glass he used to examine them. Darwin will feature an elaborate reconstruction of the naturalist’s study at Down House, where, as a revolutionary observer and experimenter, he proposed the scientific theory that all life evolves according to the mechanism called natural selection.

The recent issue of Postmodern Culture is devoted to Jacques Derrida. In it, Alex Thompson looks at what’s become of Derrida’s work and notion of “Democracy to Come”.

Faced with an apparently inevitable and overwhelming victory for the Islamist Front Islamique du Salut party, and following the resignation of President Chadli on 11 January 1992, democratic government in Algeria was dissolved between the first and second round of elections, to be replaced by military rule. Jacques Derrida draws our attention to these events in the third chapter of “The Reason of the Strongest (Are There Rogue States?)” (2002), the first of two texts collected in Rogues (2003). Derrida does not go into any great detail about the event, whose interpretation is extremely complex: neither Chadli, nor the ruling Front de Libèration Nationale, nor the Islamist party that looked set to gain nearly seventy-five percent of the available parliamentary seats with the support of barely a quarter of the electorate could have formed what might be comfortably described as a legitimate government (Roberts 105-24). But Derrida’s attention is elsewhere, concerned not so much with the specific history of his homeland as with what it might tell us about the idea of democracy itself. This is an example, he suggests, of a suicidal possibility inherent in democracy. Derrida appears to mean this in two senses. First, it highlights a risk to which a democracy is always exposed: the apparently suicidal political openness that allows that a party hostile to democracy might be legitimately elected. (Derrida acknowledges that this is itself a matter of interpretation, noting “the rise of an Islamism considered to be anti-democratic” [Rogues 31, emphasis added].) Second, that democracy may interrupt itself in order to seek to preserve itself: a suicide to prevent a murder.

The issue also has a review of Derrida’s Rogues: Two Essays on Reason.

Bert Keizer in the Threepenny Review:

I described Mr. C. [a severe aphasic] as “mindless,” which sounds like a disqualification. I did not intend it that way. What bothers me about him is his equanimity, his incomprehensible compliance, which strikes me as mindless because, if mindful, he would be blazing with rage and despair at the horror of the situation he has landed in. He lacks that cast of mind, and this lack implies that he does not fully experience this, the way a blind dog may not know it is blind.I mean to say that I don’t regard C. as a great stoic who manfully shoulders his misery. I don’t know exactly what his burden is, but he carries it lightly.

“You can’t help wondering just what’s going through his head,” muses his son while he gently strokes his father’s face. “Maybe not much, eh, Dad?”

Relatives rarely if ever reach this conclusion when dealing with brain-damaged loved ones.

Over at Cosmic Variance, Lawrence Krauss guest posts on string theory, religion, and popularizing science.

On ID and Science: As many of you know who have followed any of my writing in this regard, the reason I took up this cause a bunch of years ago, and have spent many unfortunate hours defending science against attacks rather than doing what I prefer to do, which is getting people excited about science, is that I viewed the attack on evolution as an attack on science as a whole. The more I learned, the more I saw this as a campaign that was based on fear of the fact that God is not an explicit part of the scientific method. For some, this implies that science itself is immoral, and if you read much of the literature, in particular from the Discovery Institute, you will see this expressed explicitly. I also saw this campaign as not merely one by well-meaning but misinformed individuals, but rather by people who were very well schooled in public relations, who had a mission, and wanted to achieve it however possible. And since scientists, by nature, tend to be miserable at public relations, it seemed important to try and counter this in whatever ways possible.

From The New York Times:

His mother in Ireland is entirely unaware of his international reputation, as far as he can tell. His neighbors in the hamlet of Porthaethwy, on an island off the coast of Wales, are equally oblivious, or indifferent. His wife, who knows too well the furor he has caused, says simply, “How could you be right and everyone else wrong?” Dr. David Healy, a psychiatrist at the University of Cardiff and a vocal critic of his profession’s overselling of psychiatric drugs, has achieved a rare kind of scientific celebrity: he is internationally known as both a scholar and a pariah.

In 1997 he established himself as a leading historian of modern psychiatry with the book “The Antidepressant Era.” Around the same time, he became more prominent for insisting in news media interviews and scientific papers that antidepressants could increase the risk of suicide, an unpopular position among his psychiatric colleagues, most of whom denied any link.

But Dr. Healy went still further, accusing academic psychiatry of being complicit, wittingly or not, with the pharmaceutical industry in portraying many drugs as more effective and safer than the data showed.

More here.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Rioting by Muslim youth in some 300 French cities and towns seems to be subsiding after two weeks and tougher law enforcement, which is certainly welcome news. The riots have shaken France, however, and the unrest was of such magnitude that it has become a moment of illumination, for French and Americans equally.

In particular, some longstanding conceits about the superiority of the French social model have gone up in flames. This model emphasizes “solidarity” through high taxes, cossetted labor markets, subsidies to industry and farming, a “Ministry for Social Cohesion,” powerful public-sector unions, an elaborate welfare state, and, inevitably, comparisons to the alleged viciousness of the Anglo-Saxon “market” model. So by all means, let’s do some comparing.

More here.  [Thanks to Samad Khan.]

From Edge.org:

David Deutsch is the founder of the field of quantum computation. Paul Benioff, Richard Feynman, and others had written about the possibility of quantum computation earlier, but Deutsch’s 1985 paper on Quantum Turing Machines was the first full treatment of the subject, and the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm is the first quantum algorithm.

When he first proposed it, quantum computation seemed practically impossible. But the last decade has seen an explosion in the construction of simple quantum computers and quantum communication systems. None of this would have taken place without Deutsch’s work.

More here.

Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books:

In 1988, several dozen AM stations began carrying a show hosted by a thirty-seven-year-old college dropout named Rush Limbaugh. Advertising himself as “the most dangerous man in America,” Limbaugh attracted listeners by combining political jokes, thundering polemics, and outrageous overstatement. He spoke, he said, “with half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it fair, because I have a talent on loan from…God. Rush Limbaugh. A man. A legend. A way of life.”

More here.

Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The earthquake that struck northern Pakistan on the morning of October 8th left some eighty thousand people dead, perhaps a quarter of them children. It was a catastrophe without precedent in the country’s history, and the government was slow to react. In the weeks that followed, President Pervez Musharraf, who is also the nation’s military leader, faced sharp questions from civilian politicians, Islamic leaders, and reporters about why the government, and the Army, had not organized relief more quickly. In much the same way that the Bush Administration’s reaction to Hurricane Katrina embarrassed the White House, the earthquake-aid effort has threatened Musharraf’s standing. In the first days, Pakistan’s offshore independent channels televised the suffering, and the images were inescapable: people waiting in vain to be rescued; hundreds of thousands sleeping outside in cold rain, waiting for tent camps to be built; the injured, with bleeding wounds or broken limbs, staggering about in search of treatment.

More here.

Rossella Lorenzi at the Discovery Channel:

Some of the greatest murder mysteries of all time, including the identity of Jack the Ripper, could be solved soon thanks to a major breakthrough in DNA technology, Australian researchers say.

Developed by Ian Findlay at Queensland’s Griffith University, the method is able to extract and compile a DNA fingerprint from as little as one human cell up to 160 years old.

The technology, called Cell Track-ID, consists of modifications to the traditional DNA extraction technique — known as short tandem repeats (STR) profiling — which works by amplifying the DNA billions of times to look for very specific markers.

But while the STR method needs samples of 200 or more cells, Cell Track-ID provides single-cell forensic DNA fingerprinting.

Cell Track is very similar to the STR profiling, but the technique has been refined to have a much better extraction protocol. This keeps the DNA intact, therefore providing much more information and making it possible to examine the smallest genetic material that is up to 160 years old, Findlay told Discovery News.

More here.

Jennifer Viegas at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation News:

Genes that favour stronger sperm or other aspects of male sexual potency may be exerting a strong influence on human evolution, a recent study suggests.

The study determined that at least one new gene has emerged every million years on the human lineage during the past 63 million years of primate evolution.

And most of these new genes appear to be linked to male sexual prowess, the researchers write in the November issue of the journal PloS Biology.

As the new genes evolved from genes that are not directly related to male sexual function, this suggests natural selection aggressively promotes positive changes to males’ ability to reproduce.

More here.

Joseph Rago in the Wall Street Journal:

There is something out of time about lunching with William F. Buckley Jr. It goes beyond the inimitable WFB style: the mannered civility, the O.E.D. vocabulary, the jaunty patrician demeanor. It is also something more than mere age. “Well, I am one day older than I was yesterday,” he says, with rather good cheer. Yet if there’s anachronism to Mr. Buckley, it is also a sense of being present at a moment of creation.

For all his versatility as editor, essayist, critic, controversialist and bon vivant, Mr. Buckley is widely credited as the driving force behind the intellectual coalition that drew conservatism from the fringes of American life to its center, with such side-effects as the utter collapse of the Soviet empire. “There’s nothing I hoped for that wasn’t reasonably achieved,” declares Mr. Buckley, who will turn 80 later this month. “Now, I’m going to have a cocktail,” he announces, flashing his oblique grin. “Will you join me?”

More here.

Lorne Manly in the New York Times Book Review:

Few children’s books carry promotional blurbs from the likes of the fashion designers Roberto Cavalli, Giorgio Armani and Jean Paul Gaultier. But then “Cashmere if You Can,” is not your typical children’s book.

This new lavishly illustrated book from HarperCollins Publishers follows the misadventures of Wawa Hohhot and her family of Mongolian cashmere goats who just happen to live on the roof of Saks’s Midtown Manhattan store.

The location is no accident: a Saks Fifth Avenue marketing executive came up with the idea, and the department store chain owns the text copyright. It is as if the Plaza Hotel had underwritten “Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-ups.”

On sale now only in Saks stores, HarperCollins plans to distribute the $16.99 book nationwide in January as if it were any other children’s picture book. And “Cashmere if You Can” has inspired HarperCollins, a unit of the News Corporation, to make a business out of these sorts of corporate collaborations.

More here.

Marginalized. Digitally embellished photograph, Sughra Raza, 2001

More here.

Optional reading: “After the End of Art” by Arthur C. Danto

Tom Bissell in the New York Times:

In the middle of Peter Davis’s Vietnam war documentary, “Hearts and Minds,” a large, pale, scarily eyebrowless face suddenly takes over the screen. It’s the face of Col. George S. Patton III, son of the famous general, as he describes his attendance at a memorial service in Vietnam for some fallen American soldiers. When he gazed upon the faces of the memorial’s attendees, Patton says: “I was just proud. My feeling for America just soared.. . .They looked determined and reverent at the same time. But still” – and here Colonel Patton’s abrupt, savage smile reveals a mouth packed with draft-horse-size choppers – “they’re a bloody good bunch of killers.”

It is a moment you have to see to fully appreciate, which is to say it is a moment you have to see to believe. And it is the sort of completely defenseless moment you often see only in documentary films. No Hollywood dramatization could do justice to Patton’s cheerful viciousness, and a print journalist would doubtless hoard Patton’s words for some skeweringly perfect ending. But Davis allows Colonel Patton and reverent killers to float through his film like stray pieces of the dreadful shipwreck that was American aspiration in Vietnam.

More here.

From The New York Times:

What are movie stars for? Yes, I know, it’s an odd, possibly irrelevant question. The whole point of movie stars is that they just are. It might be more appropriate to wonder whether, in a world of generalized, instantly manufactured celebrity, movie stars are still necessary. The alloy of glamour and artistry that great screen actors embody may not survive the currency crisis precipitated by reality television and the Internet. At least for the moment, however, movie stars still serve as the gold standard of modern fame. Indeed, the rise of cheap, interchangeable, mass-produced celebrity may have endowed those whose primary medium is the big screen with a bit of added gravity, renewing their license to be taken (or to take themselves) seriously. Their fame remains a unique form of cultural capital, a resource that can sometimes be converted into influence or power.

Why should we care what these people – whose faces lure us into buying magazines, whose clothes and hairstyles we imitate, whose private lives we take to be our business – have to say about AIDS in Africa or the war in Iraq? How dare they presume to tell us how we should vote?

More here.