Monthly Archive: March 2017
PATN Week 12 – Astyanax is Bad Bad News for Baseball Dudes
This week on Play All The Nintendo: Astyanax, Bad Dudes and Bad News Baseball. I love the NES, it’s so bad.
The Hoover Hog: My “Open Letter” Concerning the Amazon Blacklist and Freedom of Speech
But you already know this. Since I assume you’re a stakeholder situated somewhere above my marginal niche in the larger world of book culture, I’d wager that your fingerprints are probably on some books that many people – perhaps I? – will find offensive. And when the would-be censors rattle, I’m guessing you know just where you stand. You might write the occasional check to the ACLU, or maybe you attend the annual “Banned Books Week” events at the local library. Or, if you’re of a certain age, you may even have been a signatory when the Association of American Publishers and other groups protested the decision of a once-ubiquitous bookstore chain not to sell copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. I thought that was a good move, by the way. A proud moment for the AAP.
And I sincerely believe that those of us who devote our lives to books have had quite a few good moments over the centuries. Whatever our differences, we belong to a tradition that has from the beginning stood for the liberal advancement of knowledge and human understanding. As publishers and as readers, we’re guided by an ethos that runs from the broadsides of Martin Luther to the trials of Henry Miller. If there’s anything to the notion of being on the “right side of history,” publishers have set the odds.
Thus I am addressing this “open letter” to you, my fellow publishers and book mavens. And now that I’ve done my worst to butter you up, I mean to draw your attention to a recent event that has received little above-ground media coverage but that I think should be of profound concern to all publishers, not just naughty pipsqueaks like me.
Specifically, I am referring to the decision of Amazon.com, which is now the world’s largest book retailer, to discontinue the sale of dozens of books that promote, or are said to promote, Holocaust denial. This policy seems to have taken full effect on March 8, 2017, and a bit of Googling convinces me that it was in large part a capitulation to mounting pressure from presumably well-intentioned people who vocally objected to the content – if not the mere the existence – of such literature. In a communication to Castle Hill Publishers, the primary target of the delisting (or ban), Amazon justified its decision with a vague reference to a “content guidelines” violation.
From: The Hoover Hog: My “Open Letter” Concerning the Amazon Blacklist and Freedom of Speech
Beinart: Donald Trump, Frank Gaffney, and the Looming Threat to American Muslims
For years, Washington conservatives ridiculed these arguments and stigmatized Gaffney for making them. In 2003, after Gaffney attacked two Muslim staffers in the Bush White House, anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist banned him from his influential “Wednesday meeting” of conservative activists. In 2011, according to sources close to the organization, the American Conservative Union informally barred Gaffney from speaking at CPAC, the ACU’s signature event. In 2013, the Bradley Foundation, which had backed the Center for Security Policy since 1988, cut off funds. That same year, Gaffney lost the Washington Times column he had been writing since the late 1990s. As late as December 2015, The Daily Beast declared that, “Frank Gaffney has been shunned by pretty much everyone in conservative intellectual circles.”
Yet less than 18 months later, America is led by a president, Donald Trump, who has frequently cited the Center for Security Policy when justifying his policies towards Muslims. Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, has called Gaffney “one of the senior thought leaders and men of action in this whole war against Islamic radical jihad.” Trump’s Attorney General, Jeff Sessions—who has said “Sharia law fundamentally conflicts with our magnificent constitutional order”—in 2015 won the Center for Security Policy’s “Keeper of the Flame” Award. Trump’s CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, has appeared on Gaffney’s radio program more than 24 times since 2013. Sebastian Gorka, who runs a kind of parallel National Security Council inside the White House called the Strategic Initiatives Group, has appeared on Gaffney’s radio program 18 times during that period. He’s called Sharia “antithetical to the values of this great nation” and recently refused to say whether he considered Islam a religion.
From: Donald Trump, Frank Gaffney, and the Looming Threat to American Muslims – The Atlantic
Science and Technology Links 3/23: Einstein Condensates Are Not Headphones!
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not “Eureka!” (I found it!) but “That’s funny …”
— Isaac Asimov
‘The most frightening phrase in the Russian language is “That’s odd.”
–Guess the source
Book Review: Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust (2016)
A scholarly look at how literature can help us to understand the hard work of being human.
Kuznicki: In Search of a Post-Godwin Politics
In my office there’s a framed poster of Godwin’s Law: as the length of a conversation increases, the probability of a Nazi reference rises to one. After that, all rational discussion comes to an end. The author of the meme, internet legend Mike Godwin, autographed it for me, and as the editor of an online debate journal, I refer to it often. Sadly.
When Donald Trump was elected president, I draped my print of Godwin’s Law in black: It was clear that we were going to need some entirely new and more flexible laws in the time to come. How else to even talk about politics, with anyone?
More to the point: in a world dominated by a quite oddly specific political disaster narrative, what happens when the genuinely disastrous occurs – or even just the inexcusably lousy – and when whatever is happening is not entirely in keeping with our script? What do we do when a disaster looms all around us, right at this moment, only it’s not in a form that we’re expecting? What if it’s one that we’re not even trying to care about yet? That’s close to where I think we are today.
From: In Search of a Post-Godwin Politics – Liberal Currents
In Praise of Youtube Pop-Culture Academics
Youtube is where intellectuals should be making community outreach.
Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers?
The move might succeed in expanding the pool of applicants. But here’s what it won’t do: increase the number of people in law school who actually want to be lawyers.
See, the LSAT is a speed bump with potential to separate those who truly want to be lawyers — the ones who thrive doing logic games in the same way they’ll relish adding Bluebook-style footnotes to briefs and motions in years to come — from those who just aren’t sure what else to do with their lives.
I practiced at a firm for seven years. Lawyers are notoriously dissatisfied and depressed, but I had an unusually positive experience. Even so, I eventually quit, to pursue the TV writing career I’d always wanted.
But not after spending — some would say wasting — 10 years and six figures to get there.
The LSAT was rough. The logic games that make up its most infamous section are real killers, and my name, which means “logical” in Arabic, failed to give me any sort of edge. Studying was grueling, repetitive and at times mind-numbingly boring, adjectives that happen to have quite a bit of overlap with the way some lawyers would describe their jobs.
From: Will Dropping the LSAT Requirement Create More Miserable Lawyers? – The New York Times
Conservatives should look to Robert Peel
American conservatives should consider the example of Robert Peel in trying to figure out the way forward.
Noah Smith: The Man Who Made Us See That Trade Isn’t Always Free
If empirical studies can lead top mainstream economists to question this once-universal belief, then the profession really is shifting from theory to evidence. With this in mind, I recently contacted Autor to ask him how his research on China has altered his own thinking about the costs and benefits of trade.
Autor told me that he had been astonished by his own findings. Autor, like most top economists, was once an orthodox thinker on the trade issue. He had expected American workers would adjust well to the shock of Chinese imports, finding other jobs for similar wages after a short period of dislocation. That was largely what happened in the 1980s and 1990s in response to Japanese and European competition. Instead, he and his co-authors found that trade with China in the 2000s left huge swathes of the U.S. workforce permanently without good jobs — or, in many cases, jobs at all.
This sort of concentrated economic devastation sounds like it would hurt not just people’s pocketbooks, but the social fabric. In a series of follow-up papers, Autor and his team link Chinese import competition to declining marriage rates and political polarization. Autor told me that these social ills make the need for new thinking about trade policy even more urgent. A large population of angry, unmarried men with deteriorating career prospects is a dangerous thing for any democracy.
From: The Man Who Made Us See That Trade Isn’t Always Free – Bloomberg View
Meanwhile in another universe: The allure of dystopian alternative histories | The Economist
For all their nuance, both “SS-GB” and “The Man in the Castle” are, at root, hero narratives whose protagonists attempt to overthrow a foreign invading force. (The heroine of “The Man in the High Castle”, Juliana Crain, first appears on-screen practicing aikido; by the end of episode two, she’s putting her moves to use on a Nazi bounty hunter.) And yet, for those wishing to draw parallels with today, wouldn’t the Nazis’ rise be a more ripe area for exploration? As Jochem Bittner wrote in the New York Times last May, “Some people today imagine that Hitler sneaked up on Germany, that too few people understood the threat. In fact, many mainstream politicians recognised the danger but they failed to stop him. Some didn’t want to: The conservative parties and the nobility believed the little hothead could serve as their useful idiot…” The parallels many viewers see in today’s Washington are almost too obvious. Meanwhile on British shores, the unravelling mess that is the Labour Party is testimony to the dangers of having a divided and useless opposition.
Certainly, there is precedent for the “homegrown fascism” narrative in the history of alternate-history: CJ Sansom’s 2012 novel “Dominion” takes as its historical point of divergence the appointment of Lord Halifax, rather than Winston Churchill, as prime minister in 1940. Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America” takes a similar tack in replacing Roosevelt in the White House with an isolationist president, as does “It Can’t Happen Here”, Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel intended as a wake-up call to American complacency in the face of fascism. (Sales of Lewis’s novel soared after Trump’s election in November.)
From: Meanwhile in another universe: The allure of dystopian alternative histories | The EconomistImage by Smabs Sputzer 
Linky Friday: Technopolis
This week: Cities, Religion, Energy, Space, Transportation, and Technology!
