It is a war which has cost the lives of more than five million people, yet how much attention do we pay to it?
I was aware of this conflict, of course, but as I read French's essay, I realized that I knew very little about its origins, evolution, or the prospects for ending it. I'm a full-time professional in the field of international relations and security studies, and I teach an undergraduate course on "the origins of modern wars" here at Harvard. I go to seminars on various international relations topics almost every week. And yet I knew next-to-nothing about the greatest international bloodletting of my lifetime
The way life is moving, this new gadget will probably be obsolete long before I ever get round to buying an iPhone. (Being a Luddite, I'm still adjusting to the idea of using a mobile to take a photo.) But I can see why Robert Scoble is impressed:
The problem is, this will make you look like a total dork. I’m cool with that!
Times columnist Caitlin Moran and her seven siblings received their education in a three-bedroom council house in Wolverhampton. As she recalls it, the syllabus mainly consisted of visits to the local library, endless viewings of MGM musicals and lots of messing about. I don't know whether you can draw any firm sociological lessons from her experience but it makes an entertaining read nevertheless.
That other Midlands rebel, Small Town Scribbles, comes out against taking exercise as well. Which is probably taking things a little too far.
Seems some opponents of the new lobbying group, J Street, are getting rattled. Politico reports on the response from the United Jewish Communities. Michael Goldfarb piles in at the Weekly Standard:
J Street is nothing more than a partisan, Democratic organization trying to provide Jewish cover to an administration that is hostile to Israel
They're not best pleased by James Traub's sympathetic profile of the new kids on the block, which included this aside on the generation gap:
Important Jewish organizations are normally reached through a series of locked doors presided over by glassed-in functionaries. The peril may be real. But it can also feel like a marketing device. “You know what these guys are afraid of?” says M. J. Rosenberg, Washington director of the Israel Policy Forum. “Their generation is disappearing. All the old Jewish people in senior-citizen homes speaking Yiddish are
Heat vs light, talking vs shouting... John Naughton celebrates ten years of Blogger.com while, in a Q&A, Kevin Drum offers a cautionary take on the state of online punditry:
At the same time that more experts have entered the arena, the tribalism and partisanship of the rest... has increased. So even if the experts have a positive influence — which I’m not sure of — I don’t think that’s translated into higher overall quality. Basically, the experts provide us with more raw data than they used to, but it gets cherry picked and twisted as much or more than it ever has.
In your view, what has fueled that increase in tribalism, partisanship, and cherry-picking and does it appear to have occurred equally on “both sides”?
That’s pretty hard to pin down. But if I had to guess, I’d toss out
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