Whoa — retired Marine officer Dave Dilegge and military blogger Andrew Exum (spurred by Thomas Ricks’s new book The Gamble) look at the effect of the blogosphere on how the military shares information and tactics:

Ricks cited a discussion on Small Wars Journal once and also cited some things on PlatoonLeader.org but never considered the way in which the new media has revolutionized the lessons learned process in the U.S. military. […] Instead of just feeding information to the Center for Army Lessons Learned and waiting for lessons to be disseminated, junior officers are now debating what works and what doesn’t on closed internet fora — such as PlatoonLeader and CompanyCommand — and open fora, such as the discussion threads on Small Wars Journal. The effect of the new media on the junior officers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was left curiously unexplored by Ricks, now a famous blogger himself.

It seems clear that blogging and internet forums disrupt lots of traditional thinking regarding the way information is generated and disseminated — but it’s a testament to how powerful it can change readers’/writers’ expectations that that disruption can carry through to the military, the top-down bureaucracy if ever there was one.

In related news, the recent New Yorker article about the low-recoil automatic shotguns mounted on robots was awesome.

Just as at a certain point, the military decided it was a waste to have a professional soldier cook a meal or clean a latrine, we’ll come to see it as a waste for a professional soldier NOT to provide decentralized information that can help adjust intelligence and tactics: all soldiers will be reporters. Soon all of our wars are going to be fought by robots, gamers, and bloggers. Our entire information circuitry will have to change.

Farhad Manjoo’s jeremiad about the dangers of the Kindle is, um, weird. Give him points for originality, though — for Manjoo, the Kindle isn’t a joke that nobody will read, or an electronic interloper that will kill the book.

Instead, the Kindle is too good — which means that Amazon will dominate the market and control book publishing the way iTunes controls the music industry.

The Kindle isn’t the first electronic device to impose unpalatable restrictions on users. Until recently, if you wanted to (legally) download a broad range of major-label music for your iPod, you had to buy it from Apple.* (Ironically, it was Amazon that launched the first big online store that sold music without restrictions.) The same goes for video games. You can’t play just any game on your Xbox. You can play only the games that have been approved and licensed by Microsoft. Then there’s the iPhone, a veritable electronic Attica. The iPhone lets you buy music wirelessly — as long as you buy it from Apple. The iPhone lets you add new programs to your device — though only the programs that Apple approves of. Other than that, you’re free to do what you like!

But the Kindle’s restrictions are more worrying than those associated with the iPhone, the iPod, and other gizmos. For one thing, if you objected to the iTunes Store’s policies, there was always another way to legally buy music for your iPod — you could buy CDs (from Amazon, perhaps) and rip the tracks to MP3. That’s not an option for books; there’s no easy way to turn dead trees into electrons. Moreover, books are important. As a culture, we’ve somehow determined that it’s OK for a video-game console maker to demand licensing fees and exercise complete control over the titles that get on to their systems. Sure, this restricts creativity and free expression, but if that’s the business model that keeps the game business alive, so be it.

But we’ve come to a different cultural consensus on books. First, we’ve decided that books should be sharable — when you buy a book, you can pass it along to others freely. In fact, governments and large institutions actively encourage the practice; we build huge, beautiful buildings devoted to lending books to perfect strangers. We’ve also decided that there should be an aftermarket for books: When you buy a book, you’re also buying the right to sell that book when you’re done with it. This not only helps people who can’t afford new books, it also encourages those who can afford them to buy more — it’s much less risky to buy a $30 hardcover if you know you can sell it for $15 in six months. (Amazon is one of the biggest players in the used-book market.) And we’d certainly balk at a world in which your books were somehow locked to the store where you bought them. Say Barnes & Noble signed a deal to sell the next Twilight book at a huge discount. But with a catch — the book would be published in invisible ink, and in order to read it you’d need to buy a special Barnes & Noble black light. This is ludicrous, of course, and no bookstore would ever attempt such a deal. But what’s the Kindle other than a fancy digital decoder ring?

I don’t understand how Manjoo can move so effortlessly from totally legitimate comparisons — the answer to this last rhetorical question is that the Kindle is very much like a video game console, and that’s a powerfully suggestive way to look at it — to “ludicrous” ruminations about invisible ink and digital decoders, usw.

We didn’t “decide” that books were especially important for our culture and deserved a special status under the law, anymore than we decided that shoes or clothes deserved the same — we trade and lend those secondhand, too. That’s one of the intrinsic benefits (or, if you’re a content owner, a drawback) of the technology. And we have, at different points in our history, placed pretty serious restrictions on what can be published, printed, and sold. We fought that out, politically and economically — and if the Kindle starts to bring unnecessary weight, we’ll fight that out too. As, if you haven’t noticed, we are everywhere these days — not least because industrious people are turning dead trees into electrons every day. (It may not be as easy as ripping a CD — but it can be done.)

If Robin doesn’t like this, I’ll eat my hat.

Via Pitchfork TV.

That animated movie we’ve been talking about all month is available online. (Thanks, Waxy.)

“I looked deep into his eyes and found…

”

by Maira Kalman.

So says Joseph Stiglitz on CNN: “The stock market is not a good metric here… If we give money to the banks, the stocks will go up. That’s not what we’re concerned about.”

As Peter Dreier at TPM Cafe says, “the reliance by TV and radio newscasters, newspaper reporters and columnists, and quick-with-a-conclusion pundits on the stock market to assess the merits of a policy prescription, or even the health of the economy, is incredibly misleading.”

Now, normally, what’s good for the economy is good for Wall Street. Shareholders place bets on the economic future of their companies. If companies look like they’ll do well, the stock goes up. On aggregate, a rising stock market suggests that a lot of companies will do well, and ditto the overall economy.

But it’s an index, not a picture. Let’s take a situation where what’s good for the economic health of the nation involves, or even MAY involve, forcing shareholders to take losses. Now shareholders’ interests are in conflict with good economic policy. In fact, in this case, the BETTER the policy is, the worse shareholders are likely to view it.

The banks, in this case, are like Allen Iverson. Normally, you want this guy on your team — if he plays really well, your team plays well. Now let’s say he’s got a gimpy knee, but he can still shoot. Let’s say you’ve got a lame fantasy draft that only ranks players by points scored. If you’ve got Allen Iverson in your fantasy draft, you want him to play, and you want him to chuck up as many baskets as possible to get his PPG high, at least until they can swap him off to somebody else before he REALLY gets hurt.

But if you’re coaching the team, you want to sit him down on the bench or put him into rehab until he’s ready to play again. Nobody would say that the fantasy draft players in this case have the team’s — or the game’s — interest at heart,

I can’t tell you how many times I used to turn on the news to see that Iverson scored forty, but the Sixers lost. Who cares? I just want the game to be good again.

A little late, but I just saw this little delightful slice of pop:

So long as we’re talking about classic literature morphing into monster movies, let’s take a moment to look at Dante’s Inferno, a new video game, um, loosely based on The Divine Comedy:

EA’s take still features Dante as the protagonist, but the poet-philosopher is now a hulking veteran of the Crusades. He returns home from war to find Beatrice, the subject of his love and admiration, murdered. When her soul is “kidnapped” by Lucifer himself, Dante dives down to the very depths of hell, armed with Death’s scythe, to win her back…

Dante’s Inferno stands in a rather awkward place. The source material is a treasured piece of culture, yes, but it’s far less likely to incite fanboy wrath than would a videogame adaptation of a contemporary movie or comic book series. Liberal arts majors might be shocked to find Dante morphed into a hypermasculine action hero. Other people won’t care…

On the bright side, the story behind Dante’s Inferno was pretty much fleshed out back in the 14th century, detailing hell’s nine levels and many of the potential boss characters, so the development team likely just needs to fill in the blanks.

Look, classics get adapted, translated, bowdlerized all the time. But it’s important to remember that in popular culture, people don’t remember the original — they remember the bowdlerization. I bet in a few years, we’ll start to see college students who “know” that Inferno is about Dante rescuing Beatrice from Hell.

All the same, if they get the centaurs and the lake of boiling blood right, I am there. And who knows? Maybe some of the kids might even learn what “simony” means.

Yet another testament to the infinite remixability of Jane Austen:

First, it was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Seth Grahame-Smith novel due out in May that intersperses Austen’s familiar prose with scenes of “bone crunching zombie action,” which reportedly already has Hollywood studios vying to acquire its rights. Now comes the news that Elton John’s Rocket Pictures intends to produce Pride and Predator, “which veers from the traditional period costume drama when an alien crash lands and begins to butcher the mannered protags, who suddenly have more than marriage and inheritance to worry about.”

Pride and Predator! Genius! And yes, I know, Northanger Abbey is already sort of a horror story, or a send-up of one. If you’ve got a better title idea, put it in the comments.

One of my favorite people, um, ever is Charles Olson — poet, amateur anthropologist, rector of Black Mountain College back when BMC was quite possibly the coolest place to be in the country. (Olson reportedly said, “I need a college to think with” — something that I often feel myself whenever I take a stab at thinking about the New Liberal Arts.)

Olson’s essay/manifesto “Projective Verse” helped build the bridge between modernist and postmodern literature — in fact, Olson’s sometimes given credit for helping formulate the whole idea of the postmodern.

One of Olson’s most important contributions to American letters is his book Call Me Ishmael, a wonderful, idiosyncratic but authoritative critical take on Herman Melville and Moby Dick. Here, for example, are the first few sentences:

I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.

Olson himself was a giant — 6’8″ — and knew a thing or two about spelling things large. (If you want to read more, I highly recommend picking up Olson’s Collected Prose — it’s all really, really good.)

Now the University of Connecticut is digitizing Olson’s notes on Melville — which would be cool in its own right, but 100% cooler insofar as Olson’s notes bring back a world that doesn’t exist anymore:

Olson was one of the first scholars to consider the importance of Melville’s reading and marginalia.

In the 1930s, Melville’s surviving literary manuscripts, letters, personal papers and journals, and reading library were still, for the most part, in the possession of the family and a few institutional or private collectors. The most substantial collection of Melville materials unaccounted for at that point