More Pessimism for the Middle East
I don’t need to be the ten millionth person to comment on the hopelessness of peace in the Middle East, but there were a couple of pieces I read recently that dampened my feelings on the subject a little more than usual. That’s because they came from Tom Friedman and Christopher Hitchens, a two men who have made careers out of finding creative ways to point out reasons for optimism and reform in the Middle East.
Friedman’s latest Op-ed is a sobering column on the increasingly volatile relationship between Hamid Karzai and Barack Obama. Friedman’s column was primarily influenced by this NYT news story on Karzai’s repeated claims that he is the only thing that stands in the way of US hegemony in the region.
And then there’s Hitchens’ essay on Kai Bird’s new memoir. Hitchens concludes with what amounts to a very cold shower.
Everybody has to play a version of the counterfactual game at one point or another, but the more this book rehearses the dropped catches and untaken roads and other metaphorical mixtures, the more it succeeds in showing that the pursuit has hit abruptly diminishing returns. Almost no “concession” made by either side was ever sincere, or would not have been withdrawn or amended if the other party had accepted it. What is authentic and innate in moral individuals like young Kai or young Dani can almost never become true of states or nationalist parties, and is certainly never going to become true of clerical movements, the rise of which among Arabs and Jews is not something that was foreseen in the years under review… There was perhaps a moment when an unambivalent Israeli admission of responsibility for the original expulsion of the Palestinians could have had a healing and even cathartic effect. There may even have been a time when a sincere Arab denunciation of the role of the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust might have softened a heart or two. But that time is well in the past, which is where historians like Bird are at their best. The parties of God have the ordering of things now, and we must wait meekly upon their awful pleasure.
The iPad is No Savior
Jack Shafer scoffs at the idea the tablet will save newspapers and magazines. I’m inclined to agree.
What’s In Store for Us in the 21st Century
Physicist Freeman Dyson wonders if science will make this century worst than the last.
After watching this, I was reminded of Einstein’s famous line, “I don’t know what World War III will be fought with by World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
“The Radical Truth Behind Passover”
Over at Big Think, Rabbi Niles Goldstein breaks it down.
Murder and Passover
Another Passover has arrived. I’ll be off to the Seder in an hour or so. But before I go, I wanted to post this- a scene from Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The best, even if the only, Seder scene in the history of cinema.
Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?
NYT is blogging a debate on whether the lawsuits against the Fed Gov’t have any merit.
How We’re Paying for Health Care Reform
The Credibility Gap
The funniest thing I’ve read in a while is Jon Chait’s smackdown of Norman Podhoretz after the latter’s absurd claim that it doesn’t really matter that Sarah Palin doesn’t know much about international affairs. (“International affairs.” Gotta love that term- it’s a nice colloquialism for anything outside of one’s own little piece of the world.)
Podhoretz: True, she seems to know very little about international affairs, but expertise in this area is no guarantee of wise leadership. After all, her rival for the vice presidency, who in some sense knows a great deal, was wrong on almost every major issue that arose in the 30 years he spent in the Senate.
Chait: Likewise, why not Ted Kaczynski for president? True, Kaczynski is mentally ill and incarcerated, but being sane and non-incarcerated is no guarantee of wise leadership. George W. Bush is sane and has never spent a day in prison, and look where he got us!
Lou Gehrig’s Disease
Historian/public intellectual Tony Judt was diagnosed with ALS- aka “Lou Gehrig’s Disease”- in 2008 and has been in declining health ever since. NPR’s Fresh Air had a terrific interview with Judt in which he discussed his life and illness, and what his lifetime of work now means to him.
I strongly recommend you to listen to this thing.
The Reagan Era has Ended
I’ve been MIA the past week or so, thanks to a trip to Vegas and the lingering effects of procrastination. In the time between posts, Obama managed to sign into law health care reform.
I won’t offer too much- or anything right now- in the way of insight. If you care to read what I have to say about health care, chances are you’ve already consumed thousands of words on the matter.
That being said, I strongly urge you to read David Leonhardt’s analysis of health care reform in today’s NYT. Leonhardt takes a broader view of reform to argue that, with one lasting piece of legislation, Obama has officially ended the era of Reagan.
Much about health reform remains unknown. Maybe it will deliver Congress to the Republicans this fall, or maybe it will help the Democrats keep power. Maybe the bill’s attempts to hold down the recent growth of medical costs will prove a big success, or maybe the results will be modest and inadequate. But the ways in which the bill attacks the inequality of the Reagan era — whether you love them or hate them — will probably be around for a long time….
Above all, the central question that both the Reagan and Obama administrations have tried to answer — what is the proper balance between the market and the government? — remains unresolved. But the bill signed on Tuesday certainly shifts our place on that spectrum.
Before he became Mr. Obama’s top economic adviser, Lawrence Summers told me a story about helping his daughter study for her Advanced Placement exam in American history. While doing so, Mr. Summers realized that the federal government had not passed major social legislation in decades. There was the frenzy of the New Deal, followed by the G.I. Bill, the Interstate Highway System, civil rights and Medicare — and then nothing worth its own section in the history books.
Now there is.
3 Reasons Why It’s Easy to Love March Madness
As I sit here watching Villanova- the team I picked to lose to Kansas in the championship game- barely beat 15th-seeded Robert Morris in OT in the first round, I began to wonder what makes March Madness so much fun to follow.
After all, March Madness is probably the single biggest American sporting event of the year. I’m not including the World Cup- truly the world’s sporting event- or the Olympics because those are every four years. While the Super Bowl has become a cultural phenomenon, the event has less to do with sports watching than with planning a social engagement around Sunday afternoon. As far as the thrill that comes from watching a sporting event, nothing is better than March Madness. But why?
Liberal Arts College or Celebrity Baby Name?
McSweeney’s tests your pop culture knowledge.
Sports Guy is Live-Blogging the Tourney
For those with an abundance of time to waste, Simmons is live-blogging the first round of the tournament.
Patience During the Great Recession
The Onion has advice for recent grads looking to wait out the bad job market.
Baracketology
No spoiler, except to say that he plays it very safe.
A Polite Discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Since any and all discussions of Israeli and/or Arab politics often devolve into a vague and emotionally imbalanced shouting match- even when you kind of agree on 99% of the issues of concern- I thought this back-and-forth over at the Goldblog was worth your time.
Yglesias and Goldberg have a very measured and polite discussion on “who created the crisis in the Middle East.”
The Art of the Bracket, Ctd.
You might be wondering which sports site to trust with your March Madness analysis. I say Yahoo! Sports. Why? Quite simply, I just think they’re on the money. The Yahoo! basketball writers have a series of blog posts that tell you everything you need to know before you fill your bracket. But don’t let them convince you Gonzaga is making it to the Final Four. (Hey, we’re all hit-and-miss.)
Of the many solid sportswriters that have been poached by Yahoo!, I’m a little partial to the work of Jeff Eisenberg, my old Daily Bruin colleague. Jeff breakdowns who really has a shot at winning it all. Jeff also explains why getting a lower seed is sometimes a blessing in disguise.
Here’s the Yahoo! regional breakdown: West, Midwest, South, East.
The Art of the Bracket
Joe Posnanski picks his March Madness bracket in 64 seconds. He did the same last year, and picked the final game (and tourney winner) correctly.
Grad Rates for Student-Athletes Has Big Racial Disparity
ESPN: “A new study finds the disparity between graduation rates for white and black players on NCAA tournament-bound men’s basketball teams grew this year.
“The annual report released Monday by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida shows 45 teams graduated 70 percent or more of their white players. But only 20 teams graduated at least 70 percent of their black players.”
Latin American Ballplayers
In a USA roundtable on the dearth of black baseball players, Torii Hunter referred to Latin American ball players as “impostors.” It was a dumb, yet understandable, comment that was taken out of context.
People see dark faces out there, and the perception is that they’re African American … They’re not us. They’re impostors. Even people I know come up and say, ‘Hey, what color is Vladimir Guerrero? Is he a black player?’ I say, ‘Come on, he’s Dominican. He’s not black.
Adrian Burgos Jr. writes that Hunter’s gaffe reveals our relative ignorance about the cultural significance of the Latin ballplayer. It’s a worthwhile read.
Torii was just trying to illuminate a problem that Major League Baseball has had in attracting (and developing) “black” talent. His motivation apparently is to get MLB to invest more in baseball in African American communities; part of the problem here is that Hunter is defining black just to mean African Americans and thereby exclude black Latinos
So, in seeking to shed light on one problem, Hunter has cast a spotlight on another, one that is a perhaps longer-lingering matter that afflicts not just baseball but U.S. society as a whole: how to talk about Latinos and race, and, even more challenging, what to do with Afro-Latinos.
Indeed, this issue is not a recent one when it comes to baseball, Latinos, and racial matters. And Torii is not alone in lacking the language and historical understanding of how we got here in U.S. professional baseball.
For all the time spent chronicling the racial legacy of baseball, there’s little about the emergence of Latin players. (Another recommendation: This review of a new book on interracial baseball before Jackie Robinson.)
David Beckham’s Injury and Legacy
Beckham’s left Achilles tendon was totally torn and he is expected to be out of action for about six months. That means he won’t compete in the World Cup this summer. Beckham turns 35 in May, so this injury probably means he’ll never compete in another World Cup. Already approaching the winter of his career, the severity of the injury definitely puts us all on notice for the inevitable end to Beckham’s career.
Beckham is the epitome of an athlete so overrated he’s underrated. His fame reached a whole, new nauseating stratosphere after he and his wife became a force of nature. Once he became an international icon, it became fashionable to think of Beckham as a good player but not worthy of all the attention. As an old Israeli history professor of mine liked to say, Beckham was what Marx had in mind when he wrote about the fetishism of commodity. Yes, it is predictable that highbrow sports fans would deride Beckham-the-athlete as being eclipsed by Beckham-the-pop star. But that’s just not the case.
Education Reform
TNR has kicked off a week-long symposium on whether or not education reform is working. It starts with a scathing critique of the push for more standardized tests and charter schools. NYT has a blogging debate on the so-called “charter pushback” from those opposing an expansion of charter schools in poorer (mostly Black and Hispanic) parts of cities. Although liberals are sometimes presented as a monolithic group, this is probably the most controversial issue within the liberal intelligentsia at the moment. The charter school reform has gained much-needed resources and credibility from Pres. Obama and Sec of Ed Arne Duncan, but this remains very unpopular with some who belief in the preservation of quality, public education.
But I have to say that I take my marching orders from Bill Maher on this one. As he pointed out on Friday night, it’s a little too easy to blame the teachers. On the heels of Newsweek’s “fire bad teachers” cover story, Maher responded: “It’s so simple, fire the bad teachers. Hire good ones…from some undisclosed location. And, hey, while we’re at it, let’s cut taxes more.” Maher gets to the ultimate problem with our discussion of education reform. We can’t improve education while cutting school budgets. This just perpetuates the absurdity of “doing more with less.” You know what you do with less? Less!
Education in Texas
GOOD has done a great job outlining the changes the Texas States Board of Education has made to its social studies curriculum, and why it is going to impact education all over the country. (Texas is so big that many publishers tailor their text books to the state’s specific curriculum.) Just to get an idea of the forces at work in Texas, below is a profile on one of the men who put the curriculum changes into place.
The Future of Libraries
In TNR, Lisbet Rausing imagines what the future of libraries will look like, or if libraries will even exists at all.
Imagine a new Library of Alexandria. Imagine an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West—our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data—as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world’s civilizations, and many of the world’s most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome.
Well, why not imagine this library? Realizing such a dream is no longer a question of technology. Remarkable electronic libraries are already being assembled. Google Books aims to catalogue about 16 million books. The nonprofit Internet Archive already has some 1 million volumes. Public expectations run ahead even of these efforts. To do research, only one in a hundred American college students turn first to their university catalogue. Over 80 percent turn first to Google.
The Role of Politics in Art
To continue a discussion on Hollywood politics, I turn to Ross Douthat’s column on “Hollywood Political Fictions.” Douthat pans Matt Damon’s new Iraq war film, The Green Zone, which he thinks doesn’t try to show anymore moral complexity than the “Bush lied, people died reductionism.”
I think it’s fair for Douthat to argue that this kind of portrayal is overly simplistic, especially for a film that presents itself as having “The Why we’re in Iraq” theme. But Douthat doesn’t really make this argument, instead saying that the film reveals a greater problem with the nature of political fiction. He claims that artists- not just those in Hollywood- have this strange difficulty in accurately portraying the moral complexities of politics. And this is where the column goes off the rails.
Hollywood Politics
Last week I railed against the grandstanding of Hollywood celebrities, so now I’m going to offer a small defense of Hollywood’s political activism. Philip Hammond wrote a glowing review of Rob Crilly’s book, Saving Darfur: Everyone’s Favourite African War. Crilly argues that Hollywood has oversimplified the problems in Darfur to the point that it has hurt the movement for peace. And Hammond applauds Crilly’s courage and honesty.
Crilly refuses to ignore awkward facts that don’t fit the accepted narrative about the ongoing conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan. His fair-minded efforts to understand the motivations of the various actors involved ultimately lead him to challenge head-on the over-simplifications and distortions perpetuated by many Western journalists and Save Darfur campaigners. ‘By focusing on criminalising a government and making military intervention the top priority’, he argues, ‘[the Save Darfur Coalition] has made peace more elusive and increased the suffering of ordinary Darfuris’. His challenge springs, not from having some axe of his own to grind, but from the good reporter’s desire to really nail the story.
The review goes on to argue that celebrities portray political situation in grandiose yet narrowly defined ways. Such moralizing gives the public an inaccurate depiction of the situation- whether it is Darfur or Haiti or anything else. While it’s fashionable to criticize the obtuse politics of celebrities, I can’t agree with Hammond or Crilly on this one.
Yes, we would all be better served if we got our political news from journalists rather than screen actors. But that’s not the point. Those of us who are politically aware do get our news from the appropriate sources, and are better served because of it. However, Hollywood-style activism has its virtues.
Goldberg’s Advice
The Atlantic’s April issue is out, and with it the new advice column from Jeff Goldberg.
I am in my first year of law school (Ivy League). But the stories from the trenches are horrendous. Recent graduates are telling us that there are no jobs, and that when someone finds a job, it comes with no security. Should I cut my losses and get out now?
C. B., New York, N.Y.
Dear C. B.,
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through LSATS at dawn looking for job security, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night and to partner-track slots at Skadden Arps, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating the idea of billing clients in 15-minute increments for the rest of their lives. So yes. Get out now. Why don’t you try journalism?
Why Don’t Bad Things Happen to Bad People?
You know, like Glenn Beck. The Onion News Network reports.
The Roots of Ideology
Big Think video: “New research suggests a fundamental, yet unconscious, reason why liberals are more accepting of disorder in the world, while conservatives crave constant order and closure.”
Why Conservatives Don’t Get Feminism
Jonah Goldberg’s latest column in the LAT was about how “feminists get it right” by protesting the mistreatment of women in “developing countries.” Goldberg, the author of such measured polemical works such as Liberal Fascism, is not usually taking sides with social progressives. But in the column he argues against the practices of “genital mutilation” in the developing world. At least on this issues, Goldberg says he is in complete agreement with feminists.
The column is a worthwhile read, if only because it illustrates why so many conservatives just don’t get social liberalism. First of all, it must be said, Goldberg is suspiciously condescending in his depiction of feminism. I usually don’t like to call out another man for having a condescending tone of argument because I am about as condescending as it gets. But why is it that so many conservative men speaks so derisively of feminists? Does they’re dismissive tone not reveal a certain amount of chauvinism? Granted, Goldberg is trying to give props to feminists protests, but he is so back-handed in his compliment that it is offensive.
