Archive for August, 2006
Suspended Citizenship
Good post from Saheli on this situation:
[T]he United States has denied re– entry to two American citizens–one naturalized and one-native born–unless they first agree to be interrogated by the FBI abroad without a lawyer and take a polygraph test. They have not been charged with any crime.
As always with S.S.R. Datta, the analysis is nuanced and, it seems to me, correct.
Meet the Panopticon, Age 21
Bob Kerrey gets interviewed in Foreign Policy. Here’s an interesting prediction:
FP: How will college students affect November’s election and the U.S. presidential race two years from now?
BK: They’re likely to have a very large impact as a result of this ‘macaca’ type of an event [involving Sen. George Allen]. They’re going to be out with cameras and tape recorders and blogs, and they’ll be carrying a larger part of the debate itself. I think it will likely be a relatively small fraction of young people who turn out and vote. [But] in the blogosphere and beyond, there will be something that will be comparable to this remarkable story of George Allen — it was, I think, a 20-year-old who [broke that story]. I think you’ll see a lot more of that.
Worth reading.
Buy This Book
Okay I’m biased. I used to work at the Poynter Institute, where Roy Peter Clark hangs his hat, and I learned lots from him. Much of it was stuff that’s now encoded in this book, actually. But even so, I am so glad to have it all in one place. Even better, the volume is a wonder to behold: simple, slim, elegant.
And, you know, I can tell just from the feel of it that this is the kind of book that will age like good leather shoes: One day it will be totally worn out and beaten up from overuse, but somehow handsomer for it.
Dude, I have a question though — even when you’re Roy Peter Clark, how do you score blurbs from Mark Bowden, Sister Helen Prejean, Eugene Patterson, Howell Raines, Tom French, and David Von Drehle?
Indeed, Von Drehle writes: “Roy is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of writing teachers…” Just for the record, if one of his Snarkmarket students is Anakin Skywalker (i.e. initially promising but ultimately a force for total evil) it is definitely Matt.
8.5″ x AWESOME
Crazy paper art! (Click past the homepage, then check out the ‘A4 papercut’ stuff. It’s so rad.) Via Core77.
No Surprise This One’s Online
At this point, blogging software should probably just include a button that says “link to latest Malcolm Gladwell article.” Because, well, yeah. It’s about pensions and is, of course, illuminating and eminently sensible. And, bonus! — the article continues on Gladwell’s blog.
Demands
Ezra Klein points to video of Stephen Lewis’s speech at the close of the big AIDS conference in Toronto. He’s right, it’s great (control-F for ‘lewis’ on the page). Lewis is a Canadian diplomat and, it turns out, a bracing speaker.
Containerization
In The New Atlantis this month there’s a review of two books on shipping containers (middle item) — the TCP/IP packets of modern trade. (Come on, you are all blog readers out there, you know what I mean.) Somehow I find this incredibly evocative:
[…] McLean inaugurated the era of containerization on April 26, 1956 by transporting 58 containers from Newark to Houston aboard a ship called the Ideal X.
Also: It is said that the container cranes at the Port of Oakland were the inspiration for George Lucas’s AT-AT walkers. It’s highly plausible.
There’s a couple of interesting-looking pieces in this month’s Atlantis, too… one about scientists’ memoirs and another on network neutrality. I’ll read them and let you know if they’re any good.
This Blogpost Automatically Generated in 0.03 Seconds
Thomson and Reuters run stories written by computers! COMPUTERS I say! Will Sullivan with the deets and the awesomely appropriate frame-grab.
Second Life and Macromyopia
3pointD transcribes a fascinating keynote talk by Mitch Kapor at the Second Life Community Convention this weekend.
Also, he gives a name to an effect I am constantly citing:
One thing that