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The Way We Live Now: Bad Connections |
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| Topic: Society |
7:01 am EST, Mar 22, 2005 |
The mirror, you might say, was an early personal technology -- ingenious, portable, effective -- and like all such technologies, it changed its users. By giving us, for the first time, a readily available image of ourselves that matched what others saw, it encouraged self-consciousness and introspection and, as some worried, excesses of vanity. In a rebuke to Karl Marx, we have not become the alienated slaves of the machine; we have made the machines more like us and in the process toppled decades of criticism about the dangerous and potentially enervating effects of our technologies. Or have we? The Way We Live Now: Bad Connections |
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Religion and Natural History Clash Among the Ultra-Orthodox |
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| Topic: Society |
6:58 am EST, Mar 22, 2005 |
Fundamentalist Christians have long championed a literal reading of the Bible that suggests the planet is thousands of years old, rather than millions. But the denunciation of Rabbi Slifkin has publicized a parallel strain of thought among ultra-Orthodox Jews, a subset of the Orthodox Jewish community that is deeply skeptical of modern culture, avoiding television and the Web and often disdaining college education. Religion and Natural History Clash Among the Ultra-Orthodox |
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Human Nature and Social Networks [PDF] |
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| Topic: Society |
1:20 pm EST, Mar 19, 2005 |
Have you found the connection between Richard Dawkins and Neal Stephenson? Human Nature and Social Networks [PDF] |
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A Family Tree in Every Gene |
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| Topic: Society |
9:19 am EST, Mar 14, 2005 |
Shortly after last year's tsunami devastated the lands on the Indian Ocean, The Times of India ran an article with this headline: "Tsunami May Have Rendered Threatened Tribes Extinct." The article said, "Some beads may have just gone missing from the Emerald Necklace of India." The metaphor is as colorful as it is well intentioned. But what exactly does it mean? After all, in a catastrophe that cost more than 150,000 lives, why should the survival of a few hundred tribal people have any special claim on our attention? Human physical variation is correlated; and correlations contain information. Genetic variations show similar correlations. The human species is irredeemably promiscuous. This is a very nice article. If you're looking for more information, Richard Dawkins expertly describes this in his latest book, "The Ancestor's Tale." A Family Tree in Every Gene |
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The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told |
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| Topic: Society |
2:47 pm EST, Mar 13, 2005 |
The chill cast by the government war against "indecency" is taking new casualties each day, and with each one, the commissars of censorship are emboldened to extend their reach. If you can see only one of the shows Senator Ted Stevens wants to banish, let me recommend "Deadwood". It captures with Boschian relish what freedom, by turns cruel and comic and exhilarating, looked and sounded like at full throttle in frontier America before anyone got around to building churches or a government. "Deadwood" alone is worth twice the price of an HBO subscription. The Greatest Dirty Joke Ever Told |
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| Topic: Society |
12:13 pm EST, Mar 13, 2005 |
We are witnessing today a coupling of ideology and theology that threatens our ability to meet the growing ecological crisis. Theology asserts propositions that need not be proven true, while ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. The combination can make it impossible for a democracy to fashion real-world solutions to otherwise intractable challenges. Welcome to the Rapture! Who would have thought that witnessing a coupling could be so shocking? -- and so disheartening! Welcome to Doomsday |
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| Topic: Society |
12:07 pm EST, Mar 13, 2005 |
In 2005, Kabul is full of surprises: new walled-off villas with mock-Palladian façades, well-stocked supermarkets, Internet cafés, beauty parlors, restaurants, and stores selling DVDs of Bollywood as well as pornographic films. Sitting in one of Kabul's great traffic jams caused by the Land Cruisers, surrounded by the vivacious banter of Afghanistan's new radio stations and the cries of children hawking newspapers, I often felt as if I was in a small Indian city, among people prospering under the globalized economy. Quick -- name three well-stocked vivacious films! But to know, as the days passed and I traveled around Afghanistan, that the new mansions with the architectural adventurousness of Los Angeles belonged to corrupt government officials, often built upon lands stolen from poor Afghans; to learn that the provincial governor, who spoke fluently of "peace," "reconstruction," "international community," and "poppy eradication," was a drug lord; to find out that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which was briefly famous in the West for highlighting the Taliban's harsh treatment of women, was too fearful of radical Islamists to announce its presence in Kabul -- to know this was to begin to have a different sense of the change that had come to Afghanistan in the last three years. Now -- name three briefly famous radical Islamists! The Real Afghanistan |
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| Topic: Society |
10:58 am EST, Mar 13, 2005 |
Francis Fukuyama has written this article for the Book Review in the Sunday New York Times. This year is the 100th anniversary of the most famous sociological tract ever written, "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism," by Max Weber. In the present decade, when cultures seem to be clashing and religion is frequently blamed for the failures of modernization and democracy in the Muslim world, Weber's book and ideas deserve a fresh look. The Calvinist Manifesto |
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As Through a Glass Darkly |
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| Topic: Society |
9:18 am EST, Mar 8, 2005 |
Spin is not just a technique. It is not just a political phenomenon. It permeates our culture and our daily life. And it's an industry almost a sector of the economy. One day's front page articles quoted lobbyists, public relations specialists, professional "damage control" experts. If computers and communications go by the acronym IT, for information technology, the perceptual industry might be MT, for misinformation technology. The business of MT isn't lying. It's shaping perceptions irrespective of the truth. Reality is a consideration, of course. But if reality were sufficient, we wouldn't need spin would we? As Through a Glass Darkly |
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