The old Lingua Franca is dead. Long live the new Lingua Franca. The two have nothing to do with each other, to be sure. The old Lingua Franca was a magazine about academia. The new LF is an Australian radio show about language, and it’s phenomenal. To wit, a defense of the art of euphemism:

As you mature and leave behind childish things, it’s important to learn how not to say what you mean. For a start, saying what you mean presupposes that you actually know what you mean (increasingly unlikely as you grow older, particularly when you reach your ‘golden years’ as we all say). Apart from that, it’s quite simply dangerous. As any ape knows, sending a clear signal about what you mean can get you killed in no time at all. Not having language, apes groom each other instead as a way of saying, ‘I’m on your side, I think you’re wonderful; here, let me just get that tick out of your hair, and you know, if there’s the odd baboon cutlet going around when you’ve finished eating, do toss it my way, if it’s not too much trouble.’ If you’re very, very nice to an alpha male chimpanzee, he might even let you fondle his scrotum.

Not all the episodes have full transcripts or recordings, but many do. Do go and have a look around the site.

I’m grooving on these frequent, article-length, well-reported Campaign Desk articles. This one’s particularly interesting.

Political blogs are mostly written by men, it turns out. While this is hardly news to me, it’s odd how rarely I’ve stopped to think about it. Tara McKelvey and Garance Frank-Ruta represent over at TAPPED, but otherwise, I don’t read any female political bloggers on a regular basis. So now I just feel vaguely unsettled. Besides Wonkette!, where are the female-written political blogs?

Note that despite women’s absence from the political blogosphere, even in the Campaign Desk article Kathleen Hall Jamieson continues her unchallenged hegemony over the realm of Random Sources, commenting on everything from women’s thoughts on the rodeo to the impact of talk radio.

How can you not love the Beeb?

Any interest in hearing Ravi Shankar speak? How about Andy Warhol? Gandhi? Nabokov? Woolf? Yeats?

Take your pick.

(Via E-Media Tidbits.)

Wow. Johnny Depp as Jesus. That’s brilliant!! I already feel ministered to.

Who else would make a good Jesus?

• Viggo Mortensen … I mean, he basically just played Jesus three times already, right?
• Sean Penn … This would be interesting. Crazy psycho supermasculine Jesus with an astonishing soft side.
• Julianne Moore … She can play anything.

The strangest book review appears in The Washington Post for Jayson Blair’s new book, Burning Down My Master’s House. Maybe one-fourth of it actually reviews the book, half of it is nanny-nanny-boo-boo WaPo vs. NYT one-upsmanship, and another fourth is a pretty unenlightening psychoanalysis of Jayson Blair.

The review starts with a shot of bitter scorn at the NYT — “Newspapers and television stations across the nation follow its lead,” the author writes. “This state of affairs, in a nation that sees itself as the capital of free markets, is appalling, but it is the reality of the news business.” Later in that paragraph, the author says, “We shouldn’t dismiss [Blair’s] allegations just because the people currently running The New York Times tell us to (as they recently did in a news article on their own pages).” Their own pages!!

The very next sentence pats the WaPo on the back for breaking the Jayson Blair story. And I mean, that clearly had to come at some point in this story, but it seems like a bit of a cheap shot right here. The rest of the review is spent making the case on the one hand for trusting Jayson Blair’s words whenever he casts the NYT in the worst possible light, and on the other hand for not trusting Jayson Blair’s words at all when it comes to his account of his feelings and motivations.

Maybe the weirdest part is that this book review has gotten probably the most play any review ever will on the WaPo website. I understand there’s a rivalry here, but is it supposed to be this obvious?

From The New Yorker, here’s a “pro-family” argument I can get behind.

Have you, like me, been baffled by the constant references to John Edwards as “Breck girl”? It’s probably something from before my time. Anyway, these are the Breck girls:

Environmentalism is one of those crazy issues where the “conservative” position is the most progressive. “Liberal” environmentalists go on and on about the need to preserve the status quo, while “conservative” corporatists want to dash headlong into all manner of genetic experimentation and wildlife restructuring without considering the potential effects.

I started this article because I thought it might give me an insight into the mind of a moderate, someone who balances both sides. It’s about Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, a self-proclaimed rational environmentalist, who currently advocates for the genetic modification of food and against regulation of things like PVC production.

It’s an interesting article, but I didn’t come away thinking of Patrick Moore as a moderate, even though the article was quite sympathetic to him. He is not well-liked by environmentalists (a former Greenpeace director calls him a “corporate whore, an eco-Judas, a lowlife bottom-sucking parasite who has grown rich from sacrificing environmentalist principles for plain old money”). And he is apparently quite well-supported by organizations who probably don’t have the best interests of the planet at heart. So I take Moore’s brand of environmentalism with a heaping teaspoon of salt. But I’m also not very swayed by opponents of GM food.

Basically, I’m just confused.

Via Kevin McAuliffe’s MetaBlog II, I want to also take this opportunity to point out that the following sentence appears in an AP story:

“The ingenious album reconfigures the trippy Beatles rock to jibe with the Jay-Z’s rough acapella raps.”

I won’t even comment on the fact that Jay-Z now apparently requires an article before his name. (Oh wait.) But I will say, for the record, that it’s spelt “a cappella.”

Don’t be snarky. I know how “spelt” is spelt.

Kevin Drum and Robin were both philosophizing today about The Bachelorette and illusions of attachment. Robin, apparently, was taken in by the show; he believed for a few moments that there was real devotion forming. Then, one of the Bachelorette’s suitors proposed, and the thing was so insincere and hammy that the facade was shattered.

I actually think that real emotion does happen on these shows. I really believe that the contestants or whatever you call them feel “in love” by the end of it. Their version of “in love” is strange, synthetic, and fleeting, but it’s not imaginary. I would argue that the same thing happened in high school when I went away for a week or two for special programs and retreats and whatnot. I’ll never forget the NYLC in Washington, D.C., specifically, although this happened in micro all throughout high school.

A few hundred students attended the National Young Leaders Conference, but they split us up into groups of 20 or so for the week. We had field trips and learned about democracy and crafted bills and elected people and whatnot. By the end of the week, we were Frnds4Evr. This group of 20 people was just the tightest, most amazing, most meant-for-each-other group of buddies the world had ever seen, and these relationships would never die.

Oh wait.

Eight years after that week was over, I still remember Katie Sparnecht, and dancing with Pat Germann on the last night, and quietly wanting this Polish guy Dave Swaintek, who was not-so-quietly hooking up with this girl Ashley. I remember Mormon Will, and my soft-spoken friend Mike. I knew these folks for (I think) nine days. There was enough genuine attachment there that vivid pictures of these folks are stuck in my minds. But the friendships were strange, synthetic, and fleeting.

Hasn’t that ever happened to you?