American writer Nicholas Carr’s claim that the internet is not only shaping our lives but physically altering our brains has sparked a lively and ongoing debate, says John Naughton. Below, a selection of writers and experts offer their opinion. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It is not an altogether happy thought and one that, in minds less discerning than Geertz’s, helped license a parade of academic folly marching under the banner of “cultural studies.” From analyses of the power dynamics of Madonna to deconstructions of “Gilligan’s Island,” the field has produced work to make even the forgiving reader want to reach for a gun. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Reading the first three of these books about marriage, you might be tempted to reflect that there’s nothing new under the sun. Books of advice about finding love and keeping it have been around, offering formulas and nostrums to readers and believers, since the beginning of print, and so have statistics about the demise of marriage. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
According to Pascal Bruckner, we in the west suffer from neurotic guilt, a condition imposed upon us by the high priests of the left. This secular clerisy are heirs to the Christian tradition of original sin, which universalised guilt by claiming that humans are fallen and must redeem themselves. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What is not as frequently remembered is that, when Forster uses the phrase in Howards End, he is not actually talking about this kind of social connection, but about something more elusive and private—the difficulty of connecting our ordinary, conventional personalities with our transgressive erotic desires. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Ernest Renan, in his pathbreaking “Life of Jesus” in 1863, also repudiated the idea that Jesus was the son of God while affirming the beauty of his teachings. In rather striking contrast, C. S. Lewis maintained in his classic statement “Mere Christianity”: “That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of hell. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 2000, in a book called Losing the Race, I argued that much of the reason for the gap between the grades and test scores of black students and white students was that black teens often equated doing well in school with “acting white.” I knew that a book which did not focus on racism’s role in this problem would attract bitter criticism. I was hardly surprised to be called a “sell-out” and “not really black” because I grew up middle class and thus had no understanding of black culture. But one of the few criticisms that I had not anticipated was that the “acting white” slam did not even exist. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In her provocative new book, The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Law and Life, Stanford law professor Deborah Rhode argues that workers deserve legal protection against appearance-based discrimination unless their looks are directly relevant to their job performance. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Like attacking the Catholic Church during its heyday of killing heretics and infidels, criticizing Islamism today is not for those who jump at the sound of bubble wrap cracking. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel. In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Michael Sorkin, an architect and critic, and Sharon Zukin, an urban sociologist, have each written what they describe as books about contemporary New York City—but that’s putting things far too broadly. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What does it mean to be French? A simple enough question, and one that has exercised many minds over the centuries, but to ask it these days in Paris seems akin to drawing swords. Consider what happened to President Nicolas Sarkozy when at the end of 2009 he launched a nationwide series of “town hall” discussions on the issue of French identity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Humans are social animals, and so were their ancestors, for millions of years before the first campfires lighted the night. But only recently have humans come to understand the mathematics of social interactions. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
When it comes to religion, the connection between believing and belonging is a tangled one. The notion of an established church or credo representing the nation at prayer stretches back through history and lingers on, to almost everyone’s dissatisfaction, in the current Church of England. For, in Britain at least, alongside all the other privatisations of recent decades, there has been a privatisation of faith, with people exploring religion in their heads and hearts but increasingly rarely in houses of God. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Hilberg’s anger toward the German refugee and New York intellectual erupted with the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which Arendt told the tale of Adolf Eichmann, the man responsible for implementing the Final Solution, against the backdrop of his trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity. (Eichmann was captured by Mossad agents in Argentina in May 1960. His trial in Jerusalem began in April 1961, and he was executed in May 1962.) <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
With family in Britian, David Kynaston has finished the second volume of his multipart chronicle of the British people from 1945 to 1979, called Tales of a New Jerusalem. I’ve already reviewed the first volume, Austerity Britain, so I’ll just say: Kynaston has again written a masterpiece. More vividly and profoundly than any other historical work I’ve read, Tales of a New Jerusalem captures the rhythms and texture of everyday life and the collective experience of a nation. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The last few years in American mental health have been marked by a brutal public flogging. Revelations in 2008 and 2009 that drug research at Harvard and the University of Texas was tainted by millions of dollars in drug company undisclosed payments to the researchers (which were subsequently condemned on the floor of Congress by Senator Chuck Grassley) was followed by high profile media coverage of problems with the practice of psychotherapy. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I had come for an adventure’, says freelance foreign correspondent Rob Crilly of his time in Sudan. ‘Changing the world or saving Darfur were not part of my agenda.’ This characteristically frank and unpretentious comment captures the core strength of his book Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War: its honesty. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Visiting North Korea some years ago, I was lucky to have a fairly genial “minder” whom I’ll call Mr. Chae. He guided me patiently around the ruined and starving country, explaining things away by means of a sort of denial mechanism and never seeming to lose interest in the gargantuan monuments to the world’s most hysterical and operatic leader-cult. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 1831, French politician and thinker Alexis de Tocqueville visited the still growing United States, traveled widely and took copious notes. He assembled those notes in two volumes, published five years apart, titled “Democracy in America,” that are still studied and quoted today. The title “Stephen Fry in America” echoes de Tocqueville’s classic, but also puts the reader on notice that the ambition here is scaled back. This isn’t an attempt to understand America, Mr. Fry says, as much as to experience it. And it’s supposed to be as much a window into the author as subject. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
American bioethics was born out of a desire to be relevant. The philosopher Daniel Callahan has said that he and his colleagues founded the Hastings Center—the premier bioethics think tank—in 1969 because they wanted to give philosophy “some social bite, some relevance.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
We have swung around a full 180 degrees to the opposite extreme, at least in American school lunchrooms. As Janet Poppendieck writes in Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, we live in “a new age in which a business model permeate[s] school food.” Where lunchrooms in the past treated children as lucky recipients, they now view them as customers whose business must be won. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Google has become synonymous with user-friendly efficiency, via its search engine and its many free and easy-to-use offshoots. But as used in the title of Ken Auletta’s new book, “Googled: The End of the World as We Know It,” the word takes on a more aggressive edge. “Googled” is the sound of old media being outfoxed, slamdunked, left for dead. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Killing the Buddah Magazine
Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series of sixteen novels (so far!) represents everything that is most deranged about religion. If I had to choose companions to take my chances with in a lifeboat, and the choice boiled down to picking Tim LaHaye, Jerry Jenkins, or Christopher Hitchens, I’d pick Hitchens in a heartbeat. At least he wouldn’t try to sink our boat so that Jesus would come back sooner. He might even bring along a case of wine. Frank Schaeffer explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Levitt and Dubner have in mind a very particular kind of “technological fix.” Wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels—these are all, in their view, more trouble than they’re worth. Such technologies are aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, which is the wrong goal, they say. Cutting back is difficult and, finally, annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? This sounds, the pair write, “like wearing sackcloth.” Wouldn’t it be simpler just to reëngineer the planet? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“Do you think he even knows the rest of us are here?” old-school Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell whispered in 1986 to his fellow Supreme Court justice, the legendary Thurgood Marshall. Both men were looking on as their newest colleague grabbed the chance to play pit bull. Greenhorns on the nation’s high court usually put obsequiousness first and assertiveness second, but not Antonin “Nino” Scalia. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Just in the past few years, the scientific world has been rocked by a series of high-profile frauds. Within the physical sciences, accusations arose in 2002 of data rigging in a search for exotic nuclei at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. What does this mean for modern science? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The events of 1989 are most often depicted as the failure of socialism. It’s a powerful interpretation that has served to discredit alternatives to the capitalist system, which is said to have triumphed, and to bestow upon capitalism an aura of legitimacy based not only on a reading of recent history but also on assumptions about the natural order, not least human nature. Capitalism, it is proposed, is the normal state of human traffic in what people make and value and need; socialism is the deviation. History, however, is always more complicated and messy than the moral and ideological tales it may be called to serve. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Richard Wrangham’s, author of Catching Fire, has compelling evidence that the invention of cooking is the only possible explanation for the transformation that stood us on our feet, shrank our guts, gave us silly teeth and receding jawlines, and swelled our brains to their current, horrendously fuel-inefficient size. The big news – I think it is big news – is that he succeeds. Catching Fire is that rare thing, an exhilarating science book. And one that, for all its foodie topicality, means to stand the test of time. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We’re facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
David Owen, a staff writer for The New Yorker whose interests include global ecology, has examined numerous communities across America and discovered one that strikes him as a model of environmental efficiency. That community is New York City, and in Green Metropolis , his latest book, Owen tells readers what green-conscious citizens can learn from Gotham’s example. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As Americans confront what has been dubbed the worst economic catastrophe since the Great Depression, they may be forgiven for failing to linger over soon-to-be-old current events, because they recognize that for the first time in their lives they’re in the grip of history. They’re anxious, even terrified, about what that may mean for their daily lives and dreams and—really the same question—for their children’s lives and dreams. Because this pervasive trepidation is unprecedented in their lifetime, most Americans have reflexively invoked the Depression in their efforts to comprehend their experience. But, how can you live in the Depression when you are driving a nice car and still going on vacation? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Michael Meyer is a very good historian. As Newsweek’s bureau chief for Eastern Europe in 1989, he watched the world turn on a dime. The myth he busts in this book concerns the contribution the United States made to the collapse of communist regimes that year. Some Americans want to believe that those regimes crumbled because of White House manipulation — clever diplomacy backed by raw power. In fact, American meddling was rather benign and, during that fateful year, conspicuously ill conceived. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
For urbanists and others, the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was the great titanic struggle of the twentieth century. Jacobs is the secular saint of street life, representing a humane approach to urban planning grounded in the messy interactions of the neighborhood. Moses is the icon of infrastructure established by power, the physical reconstruction of cities with great bridges and wide expressways and tall apartment buildings. The actual projects that fueled their acrimony may now be curiosities of urban history, but the ideological conflict embodied by Jacobs and Moses continues to rage in every growing city in the world. The growth of Shanghai may be described as Moses on steroids, whereas the land-use restrictions in Mumbai honor a central element of Jacobs’s legacy. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Frans de Waal’s book title, “The Age of Empathy”, has a double-meaning: empathy is both very old and freshly topical. It is as ancient as the entire mammalian line, he argues, engaging areas of the brain that developed in our distant ancestors over 100m years ago. And we are also entering a new age of empathy, he thinks, brought on by the financial crisis (the product of a selfishly oriented system), and marked by America’s election of President Barack Obama, who has re-emphasised the importance of compassion and helping one’s neighbour. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Potential Readers should not be deterred by the vaguely Hallmarkish cover—and subtitle—of this book, both of which may be blamed on the publisher. Looking for insight, Elizabeth Edwards is more likely to quote Ovid than the Gospels. From the Old Testament, she prefers the Book of Job, and no wonder. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Christopher Caldwell believes in what the great man called “prejudices,” which is to say the unspoken authority of tradition, habit, family and shared cultural predilections. In that sense, he believes the clash of civilizations already has been lost in Europe. He also believes that its native peoples must now choose between what Powell called “the tragedy” of American-style cultural pluralism or a kind of quasi-Ottoman order in which religious communities essentially are self-governing within national borders. History, though, has a way of confounding both Western historical determinism and its not-so-distant intellectual cousin, the resignation of Islamic fatalism. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In these challenging times, libertarian or economic conservatives and traditionalist or social conservatives confront opposing temptations. More commonly, they feel the allure of purity. Impatient or disgusted with compromise and conciliation, many members of both of conservatism’s leading camps are keen to rally around their own favored principle or highest priority and disregard or denounce the principles and priorities of their longtime coalition members. Meanwhile, a few, typically social conservatives, are drawn to the prospect of achieving a more perfect unity among conservative factions. They argue that if only economic conservatives and social conservatives would think through their deepest commitments, they would grasp that the differences between them are in reality superficial, and that when they understand their principles properly and examine policy alternatives rigorously, they will see that their opinions on major matters converge nicely. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Jaroslaw Anders’s Between Fire and Sleep, a collection of essays that first appeared in American periodicals, especially The New Republic, when Eastern Europe was digging out from under the wreckage of Communism, is the best book of its kind available in English and, quite likely, any other language. Granted, the field of nonscholarly books that synopsize modern Polish literature is admittedly narrow, so such praise may sound slight, a little like Spinal Tap exclaiming that they’re huge in Japan. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Three years ago, Matthew Stewart published a provocative article in The Atlantic magazine blasting modern management theory and education. His advice to anyone considering an MBA was “don’t go to business school, study philosophy.”The secrets of business, he said, were to be found in history, literature and the classic ruminations on life and existence, not in the half-baked ramblings of business academics, consultants and “gurus.” In “The Management Myth,” he expands the Atlantic article into a devastating bombardment of managerial thinking and the profession of management consulting. As a former management consultant, Mr. Stewart lived long enough in the belly of the beast to know its nature. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A common complaint about the Internet, whether it’s being leveled by a journalist who just lost his newspaper job or someone who found herself the target of online rage, is that it’s such a shallow, spiteful place. While it’s a ludicrous statement — the Internet is merely a medium, not anything homogeneous — the complaint is valid in large, and vocal, parts of the online world. It’s odd that in this age of loosened borders and individualism, online you can be drowned out with boos and hisses just by stating an off-center position. Sure, the idyllic promise of the Internet is that it can bring you news from around the world and expose you to people and things you never would have seen otherwise, but in reality many of us use it simply as an echo chamber. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
