Evangelical progressives, evangelical conservatives, even evangelicals, set out their stalls in the marketplace of ideas, with many an intellectual trinket to tempt the jaded passer-by. Moreover, communism, the ideology whose death, according to American theorist Francis Fukuyama, was supposed to herald the end of ideology, is undergoing a modest recrudescence, with philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek leading the way. The liberal-democratic consensus is showing signs of strain. Intellectuals are going back to the future. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Science-fiction writers make the best seers. In the late 1950s far-sighted Isaac Asimov imagined a sunny planet called Solaria, on which a scant 20,000 humans dwelt on far-flung estates and visited one another only virtually, by materializing as “trimensional images”—avatars, in other words. “They live completely apart,” a helpful robot explained to a visiting earthling, “and never see one another except under the most extraordinary circumstances.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
How to mark the passing of a universe that never existed? With invisible bells, and wreaths made of newspaper, and eulogies delivered from Styrofoam pulpits? Or with the slack jaws of 2 million viewers, a single thought in every brain: Okay … So now what do I do? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In early 2009, the United States was engaged in an intense public debate over a proposed $800 billion stimulus bill designed to boost economic activity through government borrowing and spending. James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, Vernon Smith, and Gary Becker, all Nobel laureates in economics, argued that while the stimulus might be an important emergency measure, it would fail to improve economic performance. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As ethnic and sectarian solidarities and conflicts sharpen in this part of the world, it may be worth reminding ourselves of another way of being – ‘new Ottoman’ cosmopolitanism, with its complex relationship to colonialism. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Tibetan children, decked out from head to foot in traditional tribal garb, danced for the nodding approval of women breastfeeding babies and long-haired, yet balding, men. Stalls sold stones (no ordinary stones – healing ones), scarves, CDs featuring the sacred chanting of Tibetan Buddhist monks, bangles, and books with titles such as The Magic of Healing and Contact with the Gods from Space. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Kris Kuksi’s first artistic creation was a miniature model of a Winnebego, complete with tiny bathrooms made from construction paper. Growing up in rural Kansas in the 1970s and ’80s, imagination and glue were his tools for entertainment. He developed a knack for constructing intricate miniatures made from model kits, mechanical parts and toy soldiers. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Singer does not call himself a vegan, that is, a person who goes beyond mere vegetarianism to eschewing any and all products derived from animals. But more and more people do, and precipitation from the debate continues to this day in scholarly circles and beyond. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
No topic is liable to prompt a fist fight among mothers so rapidly as breast-feeding. Foot soldiers for the breast versus bottle debate line up like Roundheads against Cavaliers. Women who bottle-feed are often accused of lacking maternal instinct, while those who dare lactate beyond the three-year mark are viewed as hessian-clad feminists, only one short step away from running a lesbian commune in a yurt. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
As bestselling reporter Sebastian Junger’s account of his year spent with US forces in Afghanistan joins other first-rate books about contemporary conflicts, novelist Geoff Dyer argues that recent reportage trumps fiction in its characterization, observation and narrative drive. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Social science may suggest that kids drain their parents’ happiness, but there’s evidence that good parenting is less work and more fun than people think. Bryan Caplan makes the case for having more children. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I never quite got the Sammy thing. Back in the 1970s, “Mr. Sammy Davis, Jr.!” would pop up on television shows singing cheesy songs and making lame jokes about being black, Jewish, and one-eyed. TV Guide always trumpeted these appearances; the implication was that the experience would be a special privilege. I could never tell why. <<<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.>>>
Hugh Hefner, the inventor of Playboy, has sold his idea of what sex should be with the winning fervor of a true believer, and while not exactly everyone has bought into it, he has enticed multitudes into his fold with the promise of as much pleasure as a body can manage in a lifetime, all of it perfectly innocent, of course. And what sensible person, playboy or playgirl, could possibly want anything better? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
St. Petersburg in revolt gave us Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin and Ayn Rand. The first was a novelist, the second a philosopher. The third was neither but thought she was both. Many other people have thought so too. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
‘A foolish story, such as is told by garrulous old women’ is how the Oxford dictionary defines an old wives’ tale. Despite being treated with contempt over the centuries, these narratives served not only to amaze and appal children but to teach them coded lessons about the realities of life, from toilet training to pregnancy, argues Germaine Greer. <<<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.>>>
The Germans did not realize—until it was too late—that “William Martin” was a fiction. The man they took to be a high-level courier was a mentally ill vagrant who had eaten rat poison; his body had been liberated from a London morgue and dressed up in officer’s clothing. The letter was a fake. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
From Whole Foods recyclable cloth bags to Michelle Obama’s organic White House garden, modern eco-foodies are full of good intentions. But though it’s certainly a good thing to be thinking about global welfare while chopping our certified organic onions, the hope that we can help others by changing our shopping and eating habits is being wildly oversold to Western consumers. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Hunting is usually taboo in the simplicity movement because it involves guns. However, if you’re hunting boar in the upscale hills ringing the San Francisco Bay so as to furnish yourself a “locally grown” boar paté,” then you’re doing a fine job of returning to the simple life. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Some pizza deliverymen are safe drivers, and though it seems incredible given the recent news to the contrary, some clergymen are pious, some politicians monogamous and some car dealers honest. There are ethical Boy Scout masters, too. Yet nothing is so satisfying to the lazy mind as news that reinforces a negative stereotype. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Early on Friday morning, March 11, 2005, a caravan of vehicles drove from New Orleans to a home outside the city of Lafayette, in the heart of “Cajun country.” State police, a SWAT team, U.S. customs officials, and federal agents, with the aid of the Louisiana Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (LSPCA) and the Humane Society of the United States, raided the home of Floyd Boudreaux. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Full English is the one meal that England does well, with fat bangers, sizzling rashers and eggs oozing sunshine, strong tea and two buttered toast. This is food that makes you feel good just thinking about it, a platter that pulls on the heartstrings (as well as straining the heart). It’s an icon of Englishness, as much of a symbol as the flag of St George, but here’s the thing: who really eats it these days? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Sandy, Jim and Karen work at a downtown community centre where they help low-income residents apply for rental housing. Sandy has a bad feeling about Jim: She notices that when black clients come in, he tends to drift to the back of the office. Sandy suspects racism (she and Jim are both white). On the other hand, she also notices that Jim seems to get along well with Karen, who is black. As the weeks go by, Sandy becomes more uncomfortable with the situation. But she feels uncertain about how to handle it. Test question: What should Sandy do?
When Times sportswriter Mike Penner announced he’d become Christine Daniels, he sought ‘joy and fulfillment.’ After a year of accolades and ordeals, he returned as Mike. But his struggles continued. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Decades before Kinsey, Stanford professor Clelia Mosher polled Victorian-era women on their bedroom behavior—then kept the startling results under wraps. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
More than a lingua franca, the rapid adoption of ‘decaffeinated English’, according to the man who coined the term ‘Globish’, makes it the world’s most widely spoken language. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
We’ve all heard about the “greatest generation,” which lived through the Depression of the 1930s and won World War II (with a little help from our Russian friends). We’ve also been subjected to innumerable analyses about the “baby boomers,” born in the late 1940s and 1950s, who instigated the social and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and have shaped American society ever since. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The young woman by the window turns to the man in the middle and smiles. He smoothes her hair and tells her she is going to love his city. Not even off the ground, and they have already created a private lair in the still-upright theater of coach. The man in the aisle seat immediately experiences feelings of exclusion, envy, and inadequacy. Travel, most people believe, is best when shared—an attitude that makes the solitary traveler one of life’s losers. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
This week Oliver will host his first American network television show, Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, a Ryan Seacrest-produced reality series debuting Friday evening on ABC. In a departure from Oliver’s previous American shows, which focused on teaching people who want to cook how do so, Food Revolution is a bold attempt by Oliver to begin forcing every American to cook and buy only the foods he thinks we should eat. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years. But this is nonsense. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Facebook and Indians have a magnetic connection. Everyone in my family in India except my father—who, at 77, is entitled to his suspicions of the medium—is a Facebook user. Every single friend of mine in India—except for an eccentric Bengali writer who idolizes a 19th-century British viceroy, Lord Curzon, for which reason he cannot be said to have come to terms with the modern world—is a Facebook user. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 1992 I was chairman of the History Department at New York University—where I was also the only unmarried straight male under sixty. A combustible blend: prominently displayed on the board outside my office was the location and phone number of the university’s Sexual Harassment Center. History was a fast-feminizing profession, with a graduate community primed for signs of discrimination—or worse. Physical contact constituted a presumption of malevolent intention; a closed door was proof positive. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Downtown Tehran, winter: impossible traffic, the energy of 9 million Iranians making their way through congested streets, the white peaks of the Alborz Mountains disappearing shade by shade in the ever-increasing smog. The government’s declared another pollution emergency, and the center city is closed to license plates ending in odd numbers. The students at the university, where I am teaching a seminar on American Studies, are complaining openly about the failures of their elected officials. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
From pole-dancing lessons to baking cupcakes, modern woman thinks she can do it all. Germaine Greer’s free-thinking female eunuch has been replaced by the desperately self-inventing ‘Madonna’, argues Charlotte Raven, who looks back in shame at the moment in the 1990s when her generation turned its back on feminism. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It is economic inequality, not overall wealth or cultural differences, that fosters societal breakdown, they argue, by boosting insecurity and anxiety, which leads to divisive prejudice between the classes, rampant consumerism, and all manner of mental and physical suffering. Though Sweden and Japan have low levels of economic inequality for different reasons – the former redistributes wealth, while in the latter case, the playing field is more level from the start, with a smaller range of incomes – both have relatively low crime rates and happier, healthier citizens. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the popular imagination, Tibet is a land of snow-capped mountains and sweeping vistas, fluttering prayer flags, crystal blue skies, saffron-robed monks spinning prayer wheels, and, perhaps most of all, timelessness. And likewise, the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet and its chief emissary to the West, is a man of abiding wisdom and compassion, an inspiration and moral compass, a beacon of calm in a frenetic modern world. Set aside the fraught politics of this contested region. If one word sums up what Tibet means to the West it is this: purity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In november 2009, one of the uglier fruits of the current practice of seeding mothers into the American military burst briefly onto the national stage. Ordered to Afghanistan from Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, an Army cook named Alexis Hutchinson refused to go. A 21-year-old single mother, she explained that there was no one to care for her infant son because initial plans to leave him with her own mother had fallen through. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Facebook, the most popular social networking Web site in the world, was founded in a Harvard dorm room in the winter of 2004. Like Microsoft, that other famous technology company started by a Harvard dropout, Facebook was not particularly original. A quarter-century earlier, Bill Gates, asked by IBM to provide the basic programming for its new personal computer, simply bought a program from another company and renamed it. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Courtney, 21, is a student at Penn State University. Tucker Max, 33, six feet tall, extrovertedly good-looking, and usually photographed latched to a girl, a bottle of booze, or a cheeseburger, is an honors graduate (in three years) of the University of Chicago. He has a law degree from Duke University, whose admissions committee was so impressed with his academic record that it awarded him an academic scholarship. Yet his only experience practicing law to date has consisted of getting fired from a $2,400-a-week summer-associate job at a prestigious Silicon Valley firm for, among other things, showing up intoxicated at the orientation meeting and complaining that he couldn’t see anything because he had lost his contacts in a hookup with a girl he had met at a party the night before. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Goldman Sachs, the huge and hugely profitable investment bank, has become a symbol of the financial excesses that helped to bring on the current recession. Because Goldman is thought of as a “Jewish” firm, and because it dominates the financial industry, criticism of Goldman, or of bankers generally, is often accused of being anti-Semitic. Commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have been so accused. When, if ever, are such accusations fair? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Europe’s anti-Islam sentiment may be expressed most visibly in memoirs because Europeans have been reticent to condemn Islam—or religion more generally—outright. Americans, however, seem to prefer a less subtle approach. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Which has the superior economic model, the United States or Europe? The question keeps coming up and never gets resolved. It is having another go-round at the moment, with the adversaries lining up as usual. Conservatives say that Europe’s social-democratic model is bound for the landfill of history. Progressives defend the model, even if they usually stop short of recommending it outright. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Is America going to hell? After a year of economic calamity that many fear has sent us into irreversible decline, the author finds reassurance in the peculiarly American cycle of crisis and renewal, and in the continuing strength of the forces that have made the country great. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The second-oldest republic in the Western Hemisphere has been wracked by coups, dictators, and foreign interventions throughout nearly its entire history. But you don’t have to agree with Pat Robertson to agree that even by Haitian standards, the last few decades have been particularly tragic. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Many people who feel passionate about saving the planet justify their intense feelings by pointing to the seriousness of the problem and the high stakes involved. No doubt they are right about the seriousness. There are indeed environmental challenges, and steps must be taken to ameliorate them. But there is another way to understand the unique passion surrounding our need to go green. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A Whole Foods store, in some respects, is like John Mackey’s mind turned inside out. Certainly, the evolution of the corporation has often traced his own as a man; it has been an incarnation of his dreams and quirks, his contradictions and trespasses, and whatever he happened to be reading and eating, or not eating. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Britain has had a long and sometimes problematic relationship with alcohol. James Nicholls looks back over five centuries to examine the many, often unsuccessful, attempts to reform the nation’s drinking habits. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Videogames are no longer the preserve of adolescent males in dark bedrooms. Their emergence as a social medium is changing the way we work, learn and fight wars. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The world’s tallest skyscraper will open soon in Dubai, even as the emirate continues to be battered by the financial crisis. Is Burj Dubai an expression of failed megalomania or proof of Dubai leader Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s stunning vision? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
New Year madness is a thing of quite modern making, and hardly an improvement on the tradition that long preceded it, which called for a somewhat sober, respectful and reflective morning celebration. I blame the Scots for the worldwide embrace of midnight debauchery. And, of course, whoever it was that, some little while beforehand, went and invented public clocks. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Of the 6,500 languages spoken in the world, half are expected to die out by the end of this century. Now, one man is trying to keep those voices alive by reigniting local pride in heritage and identity. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Belgium already looks less like a country than a loose confederation of two states. Partly thanks to half a dozen reforms pushed through since the 1970s by nationalists on both sides, French speakers and Dutch speakers inhabit different cultural universes. Most people have never heard of the major politicians, the major actresses, and sometimes even the major athletes on the other side of a country that is smaller than Maryland. They inhabit different political universes, too. Except in one nettlesome suburban area of Brussels, Flemings and Walloons are not permitted to vote for the same parties at the national level. They don’t even obey the same laws. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all. Already the characteristically modern relationship, it has in recent decades become the universal one: the form of connection in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the struggle for equality between the sexes, it keeps coming down to motherhood, doesn’t it? Consider a recent article by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic. Rosin finds that nursing her infant is holding her back from the work she enjoys, despite her plan for a fully egalitarian marriage. She combs through research on the health benefits of breast-feeding for babies and makes a convincing case that they aren’t as strong as experts have insisted. So does she quit nursing? She does not—even though, she admits, “I’m not really sure why.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Last month, the architect and author Christopher Alexander received the Vincent Scully Prize, given annually by the National Building Museum “to recognize exemplary practice, scholarship or criticism in architecture, historic preservation and urban design.” For the last 45 years, Alexander has been a controversial figure on the architectural scene, both revered and reviled; yet in an period burdened by flocks of architectural theorists, I would guess that he is one of very few whose work will endure. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
When New Moon, the second film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s four-part Twilight series, opens in theaters this month, those who see it will not be getting great art. The faults of Meyer’s immensely popular teen vampire-romance novels have been endlessly, and publicly, rehashed: the retrograde gender roles, the plodding plotlines, the super-heated goofiness of Meyer’s prose. I can confirm for you that these faults are real! <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Amid the smoldering wreckage of the popular culture, the author blames Reality TV, which has not only ruined network values, destroyed the classic documentary, and debased the art of bad acting, but also fomented class warfare, antisocial behavior, and murder. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
My son just turned 3. He loves trains, fire trucks, tools of all kinds, throwing balls, catching balls, spinning until he falls down, chasing cats, tackling dogs, etc. That doesn’t make him unusual; in fact, in many ways, he couldn’t be more typical. Which may be why a relative recently said, “Well, he’s definitely all boy.” It’s a statement that sounds reasonable enough until you think about it. What does “all boy” mean? Masculine? Straight? Something else? Are there partial boys? And is this relative aware of my son’s fondness for Hello Kitty and tea sets? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Before Facebook, few of us asked others, explicitly, to be our friends. We didn’t monitor how many friends we had as an indication of our status or scroll through listings of friends of friends to pad our own list. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Cook as vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. I learned it as I learned to bake. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In Culture, Music on November 25, 2009 at 10:55 am
Armstrong’s lack of prejudice extended to Jews, an attitude that was comparatively rare among blacks of his generation. Outside his marriages, his closest adult relationship was with Joe Glaser, a Jewish gangster from Chicago who became his manager in 1935 and with whom he was intimately associated from then on. Armstrong described Glaser as “my dearest friend,” and those who knew both men well agreed that this was nothing more than the truth. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco, who is curating a new exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, talks to SPIEGEL about the place lists hold in the history of culture, the ways we try to avoid thinking about death and why Google is dangerous for young people. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
After events like Fort Hood, why do public officials have to sound like college diversity deans? As though Americans will be hanging Muslims from lamp posts? Why not honesty? <<<More.>>>… <<<Still more.>>>…<<<And, some more.>>>
Wikipedia still has its critics, skeptics who doubt its merits as a reference source. But even they cannot deny the tremendous social innovation unleashed by Wikipedia-the-project. Every professional conference—on topics ranging from entrepreneurship to journalism to philanthropy—now includes the mandatory, impassioned plea for the industry to adopt The Wikipedia Model, as if it were a set of Lego pieces that could be ordered from eBay and assembled in a newsroom or on the trading floor. But does Wikipedia really work? Can we really trust it? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text: the jargon of the digital age describes how we now read, reflecting the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing. The extinction of the narrative may be ruining civilization, Ben MacIntyre explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“Ardi Refutes Darwin’s Theory,” Al Jazeera announced, in an Oct. 3 article not available on the English version of the website. “American scientists have presented evidence that Darwin’s theory of evolution was wrong,” the article opened. “The team announced yesterday that Ardi’s discovery proves that humans did not evolve from ancestors that resemble chimpanzees, which refutes the longstanding assumption that humans evolved from monkeys.” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
These days, American food is far more complicated and infinitely better. The U.S. has revolutionized its culinary culture over the last 40-odd years. No longer is it the developed world’s worst food nation; in fact, it’s perhaps the best. And it’s largely thanks to the (currently disputed) genius of America’s entrepreneurial capitalism. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Kids these days. Just look at them. They’ve got those headphones in their ears and a gadget in every hand. They speak in tongues and text in code. They wear flip-flops everywhere. Does anyone really understand them? Only some people do, or so it seems. They are experts who have earned advanced degrees, dissected data, and published books. If the minds of college students are a maze, these specialists sell maps. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The other day – well, on Saturday, 5th September, to be exact – I opened Le Monde to the page called ‘Debates.’ The page was devoted to prisons in France, where conditions are acknowledged by almost everyone to be very bad. Prison reform is an honourable cause; and while I don’t agree with Churchill, that a nation’s level of civilisation can be gauged by the way in which it treats its prisoners, I have always opposed the brutality that can so easily pervade what Erving Goffman called ‘a total institution.’ Theodore Dalrymple explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Germans have long struggled with the idea that their country was on a “special path” – one that led directly from the 19th-century founding of the Second Reich through the hell of Nazism into a sort of permanent postwar purgatory, in which they were condemned to endlessly confront and apologise for their past. So what to make of today’s Hermannmania? Germany regards itself as being post-patriotic, and certainly cured of all the militaristic nationalism that Hermann once represented. And yet the hundreds of thousands of Germans visiting Detmold aren’t simply looking for a theme-park character – nor are they seeking a new militarism. So what are they looking for? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
America’s post-war prosperity has been a wonder of the modern world. Flexible and adaptable labor and capital markets, a culture that values entrepreneurial initiative and risk-taking, and an openness to the increasingly global economy have all helped create the wealthiest society in history. Above all, though, America owes its bounty to its vast and robust middle class: a skilled, efficient, and ever-expanding work force upon which American companies have built immense success. The severe economic contraction of the past year has left many Americans wondering if we are witnessing the end of this age of affluence. If General Motors can collapse into a heap, what other pillars of our post-war order may yet fall? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
That the current ruler of the People’s Republic of China, Hu Jintao, is a bore will no doubt be a relief to most people, including 1.3 billion Chinese. Hu’s dullness is remarkable given the high drama of China’s fairly recent transformation from a poor, blood-soaked totalitarian country to a rich (in patches) superpower aspiring to take over America’s lead in the not-so-distant future. But perhaps his lack of charisma is part of the point. The first 27 years of the People’s Republic, under Chairman Mao, when millions died in almost constant purges and upheavals, and tens of millions died of starvation in bizarre economic experiments, were so awful that most Chinese are quite sick of charismatic leadership. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University. Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Has anyone watched the English-language version of Al Jazeera lately? The Qatar-based Arab TV channel’s eclectic internationalism—a feast of vivid, pathbreaking coverage from all continents—is a rebuke to the dire predictions about the end of foreign news as we know it. Indeed, if Al Jazeera were more widely available in the United States—on nationwide cable, for example, instead of only on the Web and several satellite stations and local cable channels—it would eat steadily into the viewership of The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Al Jazeera—not Lehrer—is what the internationally minded elite class really yearns for: a visually stunning, deeply reported description of developments in dozens upon dozens of countries simultaneously. <<<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.>>>
Should the film director Roman Polanski be extradited to the US over his statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl in Los Angeles in March 1977? It’s a potentially interesting legal question. But it’s not the question that is driving the transatlantic furore that followed Polanski’s arrest and imprisonment in Switzerland over the weekend. Instead, various political prejudices and unresolved battles are being projected on to L’Affaire Polanski, robbing it of its specific legal complexities and turning it into the site of a proxy Culture War in which clapped-out conservatives and disoriented liberals are hurling intellectual (and not-so-intellectual) hand grenades at one another. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
What is going on in small-town America? The nation’s mythology of small towns comes to us straight from the The Music Man’s set designers. Many Americans think about flyover country or Red America only during the culture war’s skirmishes or campaign season. Most of the time, the rural crisis takes a back seat to more visible big-city troubles. So while there is a veritable academic industry devoted to chronicling urban decline, small towns’ struggles are off the grid. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Back in 1959, a gourmet American dinner might have included tomato aspic (gelatin with canned tomato juice), crab casserole (canned crab with canned cream-of-mushroom soup and canned fried onions), and cherries jubilee (canned cherries heated in a chafing dish with brandy and sugar, “flambéed,” and poured over vanilla ice cream). Ethnic food came in two varieties: Americanized Italian (spaghetti with meatballs and red sauce, with grated “Parmesan” cheese from a green cylindrical box) and Americanized Chinese (fried rice and shrimp with lobster sauce). For the everyman, there was steak (well done) and mashed potatoes and canned peas, fried chicken and mashed potatoes and canned peas, and meatloaf and mashed potatoes and canned peas. Or the newfangled but repulsive TV dinner. Food has changed. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Customer Loyalty Team, or C.L.T., is the nerve center of Zappos, whose thirty-five-year-old C.E.O., Tony Hsieh, has earned a zealous following by imposing an ethos of live human connection on the chilly, anonymous bazaar of the Internet. He talks about being the architect of a movement to spread happiness, or “Zappiness,” via three “C”s: clothing, customer service, and company culture. “Eventually, we’ll figure out a way of spreading that knowledge to the world in general, and that has nothing to do with selling shoes online,” he told me after I visited the company over the summer. <<<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.>>>
In Being, Culture on September 15, 2009 at 1:00 am
Children everywhere stew in the same pot of family conflict, with different cultural seasonings added for flavor. When parents restrict behaviors that children regard as personal choices, such as what clothes to wear or which friends to hang out with, disputes inevitably arise. Parental restrictions on behavior that kids view as morally wrong or as a violation of conventional social rules are often accepted, even if grudgingly. Charles Helwig explains how universal concerns, not cultural values, may shape kids’ developing notions of right and wrong. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In Being, Culture on September 13, 2009 at 1:00 am
Perhaps I may begin with a few words about the title. There is too much nuance and variety to make such sharp distinctions as theirs-and-ours, them-and-us. And neither I nor anyone can presume to speak for “us.” But I will pretend it is possible. There is also a problem with the term “crisis.” Which one? There are numerous very severe crises, interwoven in ways that preclude any clear separation. But again I will pretend otherwise, for simplicity. Noam Chomsky explains. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In September 2008, when Nielsen Mobile announced that teenagers with cellphones each sent and received, on average, 1,742 text messages a month, the number sounded high, but just a few months later Nielsen raised the tally to 2,272. Add email, blogging, IM, tweets and other digital customs and you realize what kind of hurried, 24/7 communications system young people experience today. This hurried communication system which once was seen as an advantage for our youth however is showing to be definite disadvantage. The absence of gesture, eye contact, and personal posture makes for problems. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The financial bust reminds us that free markets require a constellation of moral virtues. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville worried that free, capitalist societies might develop so great a “taste for physical gratification” that citizens would be “carried away, and lose all self-restraint.” Avidly seeking personal gain, they could “lose sight of the close connection which exists between the private fortune of each of them and the prosperity of all” and ultimately undermine both democracy and prosperity. How is it that Tocqueville became right? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Kim Kardashian has practically made a living off her curvaceous figure. But the E! network celeb was looking a little less shapely in Complex magazine in April, her body reduced about a dress size, her legs smoothed to near-perfection. How did readers know? Complex accidentally posted a pre-Photoshopped image of Kardashian on its website — before her thighs, arms and waist had been digitally sculpted. In a matter of hours the photo was gone. But in that brief time span, those who spotted it got a little reminder that we should think twice about taking photographs at face value. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Can money buy happiness? Since the invention of money, or nearly enough, people have been telling one another that it can’t. Philosophers and gurus, holy books and self-help manuals have all warned of the futility of equating material gain with true well-being. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Once upon a time, the Central Intelligence Agency was a near-omnipotent, immaculately stealthy organization of serious-minded men who stood watch over the West. Nowadays, of course, the CIA is usually portrayed in a different light. What caused this change in image? The answer to that question could fill a book. But one of the most interesting and least understood aspects of the transformation is the role played by the revelations made in 1967 and afterward that, for the previous two decades, the CIA had been secretly funding a large number of organizations, including the AFL-CIO and the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), whose purpose, in whole or part, was to oppose the spread of Soviet influence in the West. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
After 26 years and 70,000 casualties, Sri Lanka’s civil war has ended—for now. The key to easing the fears of the country’s historically beleaguered Buddhist majority while protecting its Hindu minority? Rediscovering the blend of faiths that laid the foundation for the ancient kingdom of Kandy. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
“You are so hot,” Rielle Hunter said to John Edwards 10 years after he and his wife buried their first boy, and after they had started a new family, and after they had given their all to a presidential campaign—with the personal losses and long separations that come with it—and after Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and undergone a disfiguring surgery and chemotherapy and lost her hair and been handed a recalculated set of odds about her life expectancy with two very small children who needed their mother. “You are so hot,” Rielle Hunter said, because she turned out to be another woman with a cavalier attitude toward wives. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Brits call it the “silly season.” In Germany the media call it the Sommerloch, literally “the summer hole.” What they are referring to is the fact that when politicians and businesspeople close up shop and go away for the major European summer holidays, the number of serious news stories tends to diminish — meaning desperate hacks need to find something else to fill the hole. That could be concocted scandals, minor celebrity gossip or spurious health scares. But the average German journalist’s best friend during the Sommerloch is undoubtedly the offbeat animal story. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves. This is what Conroy was hinting at in his account of adolescence, the way books enlarge us by giving direct access to experiences not our own. In order for this to work, however, we need a certain type of silence, an ability to filter out the noise. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Route 154 seems like a road out of a Beckett landscape, a long, hot, flat, dusty strip that runs through a featureless pine forest. It comes from nowhere, it goes nowhere—connecting, on a more-or-less straight shot, Mt. Lebanon and Sailes, in Bienville Parish in Louisiana’s northwestern corner. Not much has changed in 75 years. Someone has asphalted what was once raw earth and now, of course, you may Google up a certain point and view it through the satellite’s eye, sliding through the magnifications from the comfort of your own home. What you see, no matter the height, is a ribbon of road running through a green nothingness. But in that desolate place at 9:10 a.m. on May 23, 1934, something memorable happened. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In the past decade, positive-psychology research has drawn hundreds of millions of dollars in grants. But the success of positive psychology has a flip side. The research has advanced alongside the mushrooming of a hungry popular market for guidance on what “happiness” really is and the tools—called “happiness interventions” in the lingo—that help people achieve it. But do people really need “happiness interventions”? <<<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.>>>
General knowledge, from capital cities to key dates, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be Googled? Brian Cathcart confers with educationalists, quiz-show winners and Bamber Gascoigne . <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Popular culture seems to have two general depictions of small towns. The first is a naive, sleepy, hamlet where nothing ever happens, populated with lovable eccentrics and warm-hearted folk (always folk, never people). Generally this setup sees the return of the prodigal son or arrival of an outsider, almost always from the “big city,” of which the townies speak with disdain. The protagonist will eventually fall in love with a more wholesome type of woman and realize what he’s needed all along is a simpler kind of life. See television shows like Northern Exposure and Ed, for example. The other stereotype involves a placid calm that masks a swirling tempest of murder (Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt), violence, racism (Pudd’nhead Wilson), small mindedness, and cowfucking (that would be Faulkner). The most accurate depiction of life in a small town I have ever seen, the TV show Friday Night Lights, is constantly in danger of being canceled. No one wants to watch it. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In America William Faulkner and Scott Fitzgerald were the Paris and Britney of their day, caught in the funhouse mirror of fame, their careers a vivid tabloid mash-up of hospitalisations and electroshock therapies. “When I read Faulkner I can tell when he gets tired and does it on corn just as I used to be able to tell when Scott would hit it beginning with ‘Tender is the Night’,” said Hemingway, playing the Amy Winehouse role of denier-in-chief. He kept gloating track of his friends’ decline, all the while nervously checking out books on liver damage from the library; by the end, said George Plimpton, Hemingway’s liver protruded from his belly “like a long fat leech”. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
There’s an awful lot of money to be made from compulsive shopping, judging by the career of Madeleine Wickham. Her Shopaholic series, written under the pen name Sophie Kinsella, is required reading for chick-lit enthusiasts, and the romantic comedy Confessions of a Shopaholic, the first of several planned big-screen adaptations, grossed more than $100 million worldwide. While the film, starring Isla Fisher, isn’t terribly funny, it does make the valid point that to enjoy shopping for elegant clothes isn’t a pathology. It’s a style.The American Psychiatric Association risks losing sight of that distinction by grimly—and rather inexpertly—debating whether avid shopping should be considered a sign of mental illness. <<<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.>>>
One of the most comprehensive data sets available about Americans—how tall they are, when they last visited a dentist, what sort of cereal they eat for breakfast, whether they have to pee during the night, and, if so, how often—comes from a series of studies conducted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Participants are chosen at random, interviewed at length, and subjected to a battery of tests in special trailers that the C.D.C. hauls around the country. The studies, known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, began during the Eisenhower Administration and have been carried out periodically ever since. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
It is 40 years since Neil Armstrong took his ‘giant leap for mankind’ on the early summer morning of July 20th, 1969. It was the high point of a vast and expensive space program initiated by President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s which ended when Apollo 17’s lunar module lifted off from the Moon on December 14th, 1972. In just under three and a half years, 12 US astronauts walked on the Moon, drove around in their Moon buggy and thrilled television viewers around the world with their barely believable pantomime on a celestial body 236,000 miles from Earth. The Apollo space program that put them there was the product of an age of optimism and daring very different from our own. Andre Balogh argues that Apollo would have never happened if the society of today lived in society’s yesterday. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Auschwitz as symbol of the Holocaust excludes those who were at the center of the historical event. The largest group of Holocaust victims—religiously Orthodox and Yiddish-speaking Jews of Poland, or, in the slightly contemptuous German term, Ostjuden—were culturally alien from West Europeans, including West European Jews. To some degree, they continue to be marginalized from the memory of the Holocaust. The death facility Auschwitz-Birkenau was constructed on territories that are today in Poland, although at the time they were part of the German Reich. Auschwitz is thus associated with today’s Poland by anyone who visits, yet relatively few Polish Jews and almost no Soviet Jews died there. The two largest groups of victims are nearly missing from the memorial symbol. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The era of male dominance is coming to an end. Seriously. For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe. The death throes of macho are easy to find if you know where to look. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
I cannot remember the first time I heard an American say “cricket is so boring: it lasts for days and still ends in a draw.” Let’s just say it was not this decade or the one before that. I am not going to try and explain cricket—the rules are too complex for a short article. Or to persuade you that cricket is a great game—hundreds of millions of Indians, Pakistanis, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Sri Lankans, Australians, New Zealanders, Bangladeshis, West Indians, Kenyans, Dutch, Welsh, Scots, and English, like me, know it is. All I am going to say is that baseball makes the blood run hot, and yes, Red Sox fans do hate the Yankees. But India and Pakistan nearly went to war over cricket. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The Dalai Lama wants “one country, two systems” for Tibet. Tibetans would be happy with one system – the relatively liberal one found elsewhere in China. The leading historian of modern Tibet discusses the background to recent protests on the Plateau. What has been the evolution of its culture, modern and traditional, under the impact of the PRC’s breakneck development and market reforms? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
The number of bars and cafes in France has fallen from 200,000 half a century ago to 38,600, according to industry associations. More than 2,000 went out of business last year alone as an indoor smoking ban took effect and the world economic crisis bit into budgets. The shifting lunchtime habits, which are more pronounced in large cities such as Paris, are part of a social tug of war in France between the imperatives of a modern industrial economy and a long-cherished tradition of fine food produced and prepared by artisans devoted to their crafts. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
University of Newcastle professor James Tooley journeyed to Hyderabad, India in early 2000 at the behest of the World Bank, to study private schools there. Or, more specifically, to study familiar private schools—that is, those that served the children of middle-class and wealthy families. But while on a sightseeing excursion to the city’s teeming slums, Tooley observed something peculiar: private schools were just as prevalent in these struggling areas as in the nicer neighborhoods. Everywhere he spotted hand-painted signs advertising locally run educational enterprises. “Why,” he wondered, “had no one I’d worked with in India told me about them?” <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Personally speaking, my difficulty with Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry has always been the girls. Because at my elite British boarding school, you understand, there were no girls. At Hogwarts, however, the remote and castellated establishment where Harry Potter pursues his studies, there are girls everywhere: eccentric girls, stalwart girls, mean girls, ghost girls who live in the toilet, girls you get crushes on, girls you can kiss … Is this how a sorcerer is made? By shaking a leg at the school dance? Shouldn’t his education be more like mine—which is to say, a lonely flare of unrequited hormones? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A specter is haunting the world—the return of capitalism. Over the past six months, politicians, businessmen and pundits have been convinced that we are in the midst of a crisis of capitalism that will require a massive transformation and years of pain to fix. Nothing will ever be the same again. However, what must be remembered is that greed is good, up to a point. We must get straight on what capitalism offers the world, and know what its limits are. This means better knowing ourselves, says Fareed Zakaria.<<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In a bygone era of gray flannel suits and ad copy that read as sincerely as a minister’s sermon, masculine sanctuary within the realm of the family home came in three flavors: the study, the workshop, and the bar. Kids weren’t allowed in these places, not just because Dad needed some time away from the tiny demons who had sabotaged his dreams, but also because there was nothing for kids to do in these places. They were adult rooms where serious business transpired. The study was for drinking Scotch while pondering the works of Aristotle and Hugh Hefner. The workshop was for drinking beer while building a new doghouse or set of bookshelves. The bar was for drinking Mai Tais while flirting with the neighbor’s wife. Men have long enjoyed having a refuge in the home. But what grown one wants a man cave? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
Concerns over binge drinking — the habit of drinking large quantities of alcohol with the intention of getting drunk, usually in company but without the benefit of conversation of any kind — have brought into focus the great difference that exists between virtuous and vicious drinking. Our puritan legacy, which sees pleasure as the doorway to vice, makes it difficult for many people to understand this difference. If alcohol causes drunkenness, they think, then the sole moral question concerns whether you should drink it at all, and if so how much. The idea that the moral question concerns how you drink it, in what company and in what state of mind, is one that is entirely foreign to their way of understanding the human condition. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
In 2006, photographer Jonathan Torgovnik began work on what became a three-year project photographing and interviewing Rwandan women who had children as the result of being raped during the genocide. Torgovnik won the 2007 National Portrait Gallery’s Photographic Portrait Prize for an image from this work. The culmination of his project is an exhibition and book, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape, published by the Aperture Foundation. Inspired by the people he met on this project, Torgovnik co-founded Foundation Rwanda, established to improve the lives of Rwandan children born of rape. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
A Wall Street Journal piece by Carl Bialik, and his related blog post, examine how the mania for lists amplifies behavior — and not necessarily for the better. Reporting on a study by the Princeton sociologist Matthew Salganik: Deducing merit from popularity “can lead to self-reinforcing snowballs of popularity, which can become decoupled from the underlying reality. These snowballs can grow much larger than their competitors, leading to winner-take-all markets.” The funny thing is that in today’s society, it doesn’t matter so much if the most-deserving entrant wins, whether it’s Britney Spears ruling pop, or a gossip item leading a list of most-read articles. What matters is that everyone sees the same thing and not what the thing is. <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To read blog post, click here.>>>
This is not to say such diversity training, and infinite variations thereof, don’t still transpire constantly. They do. American business, always keen to adopt suspect managerial fads and enforce them with ruthless repetitiveness, still spends $200-300 million a year on it. Ninety percent of Fortune 500 companies have had diversity training, even though studies have shown it doesn’t work as advertised. The only sort of diversity that isn’t much championed is diversity of thought, as there’s little room for those who think it’s a waste of time to overemphasize diversity in transacting business. <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
You can’t fail to notice when flicking through the first 12 advertising campaigns of the May issue of US Vogue that they feature nothing but platinum-haired, blue-eyed goddesses. It’s a similar story on the pages of Grazia, British Elle and French Vogue. In the past few months, model agencies such as Premier and Storm have observed a significant increase in requests for blonde-haired, blue-eyed models, something they putdown to a fragile economy and grim financial climate. <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. In his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Crawford asks us to look around in the field of which we toil, be it advertising, finance, or consulting. Who really gets to face new problems and make decisions based on their knowledge and instincts, and who is just another clerk, following instructions? <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Today’s prevailing social consensus about pornography is practically identical to the social consensus about tobacco in 1963: i.e., it is characterized by widespread tolerance, tinged with resignation about the notion that things could ever be otherwise. After all, many people reason, pornography’s not going to go away any time soon. Serious people, including experts, either endorse its use or deny its harms or both. Also, it is widely seen as cool, especially among younger people, and this coveted social status further reduces the already low incentive for making a public issue of it. In addition, many people also say that consumers have a “right” to pornography — possibly even a constitutional right. No wonder so many are laissez-faire about this substance. Given the social and political circumstances arrayed in its favor, what would be the point of objecting? <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Here is an anniversary which makes some of us feel old. It is 30 years - yes 30 years! - since the appearance of the first Sony Walkman. It is 30 years since we first got on a bus or a train and heard that infuriating tsst, tsst, tsst, tsst noise emanating from a wired-up earhole just behind us, 30 years since one section of the population became literally deaf to the existence of the other half. <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Ellen Moncure and Joe Wong first met in school and then fell in love while living in the same dorm at the College of William and Mary. After graduation, they got married and, in 1999, moved to Washington, D.C., where they worked amid a large community of single and childless people. Like many in their late 20s, the couple began to seek something other than exciting careers and late-night outings with friends. “D.C. was terrific,” Moncure recalled over lunch near her office in lower Manhattan. It was an extension of college. But after a while, you want to get to a different ‘place.’” The ‘place’ Ellen and Joe looked for was not just a physical location but something less tangible: a sense of community and a neighborhood to raise their hoped-for children. Although they considered suburban locations, as most families do, ultimately they chose the Ditmas Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Joe had grown up. It seems that recently everyone has been talking about how young families are staying in the cities and revitalizing the city’s neighborhoods. The truth of migration patters tells another story. <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Should stewardesses flying to Saudi Arabia be required to wear head-to-toe coverings and walk behind men? One airline thinks so. British Midland Airways is going to absurd and insulting lengths to patronize backward habits of the Middle East by forcing its female flight attendants to dress and behave in a stereotype of subservient Saudi women. When flight attendant Lisa Ashton stood up to the policy, she was fired. <<<To read full article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
The idea that people deserve a second chance is an important American value. Perhaps it grows out of our history, in which those who got into trouble in Europe (whether it was their fault or not) moved to the United States to start a new life. And as the American West was settled, many easterners and midwesterners found a place there for a second beginning. More profoundly, the belief in a new beginning is a tenet of Christianity, which allows sinners to repent and be fully redeemed, to be reborn. In a similar vein, the secular, progressive, optimistic, therapeutic culture of today’s America rejects the notion that there are inherently bad people. As individuals, we seek insights into our failings so we can learn to overcome them and achieve a new start. From a sociological perspective, people are thrown off course by their social conditions—because they are poor, for instance, and subject to discrimination. But these conditions can be altered, and then these people will be able to lead good lives. Under the right conditions, criminals can pay their debt to society and be rehabilitated, sex offenders can be reformed, and others who have flunked out can pass another test. Just give them a second chance. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Actress Kate Winslet last week denied her middle-class roots by insisting she came from an impoverished, working-class background. Here, in the second of a series of essays on Britishness, the editor of GQ magazine, Dylan Jones, says enough is enough – and that it’s time to take pride in the middle-class values that have shaped Britain and the world in which we live. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Yes, Starbucks has come to Warsaw at last. The brand might be out of fashion in the States; the company might be losing money. Its shares might be worth a third of what they were at their peak in 2006; it might have diluted its once-exclusive image through massive overexpansion. (After drinking the watery brew served by a sullen barista in a Starbucks at the Salt Lake City airport recently, I mentally cheered the chain’s decision to shut down 600 U.S. shops.) But here in Central Europe, the arrival of Starbucks has been greeted with undiluted enthusiasm — so much enthusiasm, in fact, that the phenomenon seems to require further explanation. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Because Americans have turned a blind eye onto their democracy, groupthink and the erosion of individual responsibility could cause America to fail. It is amazing that American society accepted the incredible assumptions of economic gurus such as Alan Greenspan and Robert Rubin that unregulated financial markets would naturally deliver economic growth and serve the public good. The goal of these financial professionals was always to enhance their personal wealth, not to serve the public interest. So why was Greenspan’s nonsense accepted by American society? The simple and amazing answer is that most Americans assumed that their country has a rich and vibrant “marketplace of ideas” in which all ideas are challenged. Certainly, America has the freest media in the world. No subject is taboo. No sacred cow is immune from criticism. But the paradox here is that the belief that American society allows every idea to be challenged has led Americans to assume that every idea is challenged. They have failed to notice when their minds have been enveloped in groupthink. Again, failure occurs when you do not conceive of failure. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
This is an exhilarating time for proponents of freedom and individual opportunity. The last several years have brought malaise, in which the “conservative” politicians in power paid little more than lip service to free enterprise. Today, as in the late 1970s, we have an administration, Congress and media-academic complex openly working to change American culture in ways that most mainstream Americans will not like. Like the Carter era, this adversity offers the first opportunity in years for true cultural renewal. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Exclamation marks – those forms of punctuation derided by the funless and fastidious – are making a comeback, thanks to an internet renaissance that is bleeding over into every form of written communication. Once it was bad form to end a paragraph with an exclamation mark. Now it’s borderline obligatory. Once it was enough to put a sign on your door: “Back in five minutes.” Now, without the flourish of an exclamation mark, that sign lacks verve or at least zeitgeisty voguishness. Go figure! What is it about email that makes people so excited? <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
There is something of a misanthropist view coming out from the possible outbreak of a swine flu pandemic that highlights mankind’s unhealthy fascination for farmed animal products and a food-production process that is proven to be unsustainable in the long run due to its excessive use of land and agricultural resources as well as the significant pollution caused by the raising, culling and transporting of livestock. Viewed from a different perspective, the pandemic is but a natural manifestation of what is being seen in the global financial markets, where some investors have railed against the excesses of Western countries borrowing well beyond their means to fund a lifestyle that proved unsustainable. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
The fact that Susan Boyle has become an instant celebrity by embodying the triumph of ordinary people over obscurity is disheartening. The popular audience in the West likes to validate its own mediocrity, and crowns stars-for-a-day. A generation of Americans learned the wrong jobs: selling real estate, processing mortgages, and selling cheap imports from China at shopping malls. The cleverest among them got business degrees and learned to trade derivatives. Their services will no longer be required. While the West may look up to their Frat boys who created this financial disaster, China who has been overlooked like wallpaper will continue to export as they have always done, growing their economy and laughing at the West’s foolish mediocre ways. <<<To read article, click here.>>> | <<<To comment on article, click here.>>>
Once selection by ability was abolished and replaced by comprehensives based on catchment areas, the best state schools would be in the wealthiest parts of town, and the Conservative-voting middle classes need no longer fear competition for scarce places from the bright children of poor homes. And so it has turned out, more or less. But it is much harder to work out why Labour – supposedly the party of the working class –should have tried so hard and for so long to deprive the poor of good schools. If you can understand why this happened, then you can begin to grasp what has gone so wrong with British politics since the Second World War. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
Not long ago, New Yorker film critic David Denby had an epiphany: American culture was being debased by “snark,” that “low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing” style of criticism, a “bad kind of invective” that’s “spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation” and proliferating on the Internet. <<<To read article, click here.>>>
The world’s tallest skyscraper will open soon in Dubai, even as the emirate continues to be battered by the financial crisis. Is Burj Dubai an expression of failed megalomania or proof of Dubai leader Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s stunning vision? <<<To read full article, click here.>>>
