First published in 1945 and about to be reissued in the NYRB Classics series, it is an epic account of how just about everything in America—creeks and valleys, rivers and mountains, streets and schools, towns and cities, counties and states, the country and continent itself—came to be named. Like other broad-minded and big-hearted works of American culture from the first half of the 20th century—H.L. Mencken's American Language, John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy of novels, the Federal Writers' Project American Guide series, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music—Names on the Land reflects a glorious union of two primal forces in the American mind. On one hand, Americanism: the inclination toward the large-scale and industrial, toward manifest destiny and the farthest shore, toward what a French critic a century ago called the American "worship of size, mass, quantity and numbers." On the other, Americana: the craving for the local and the lo-fi, for the inward heart of things, for the handcrafted and the homemade.

Rediscovering George Rippey Stewart's Names on the Land

Andy Grove:

Energy independence is the wrong goal. Here is a plan Americans can stick to.

Our Electric Future

William Deresiewicz:

There’s been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude. It used to be that you couldn’t always get together with your friends even when you wanted to. Now that students are in constant electronic contact, they never have trouble finding each other. But it’s not as if their compulsive sociability is enabling them to develop deep friendships. “To whom can I expose the urgency of my own passion?”: my student was in her friend’s room writing a paper, not having a heart-to-heart. She probably didn’t have the time; indeed, other students told me they found their peers too busy for intimacy.

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude. They took this in for a second, and then one of them said, with a dawning sense of self-awareness, “So are you saying that we’re all just, like, really excellent sheep?” Well, I don’t know. But I do know that the life of the mind is lived one mind at a time: one solitary, skeptical, resistant mind at a time. The best place to cultivate it is not within an educational system whose real purpose is to reproduce the class system.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

In contrast with most internet topology measurement research, our concern here is not to obtain a map as complete and precise as possible of the whole internet. Instead, we claim that each machine's view of this topology, which we call ego-centered view, is an object worth of study in itself. We design and implement an ego-centered measurement tool, and perform radar-like measurements consisting of repeated measurements of such views of the internet topology. We conduct long-term (several weeks) and high-speed (one round every few minutes) measurements of this kind from more than one hundred monitors, and we provide the obtained data. We also show that these data may be used to detect events in the dynamics of internet topology.

A Radar for the Internet

The global order is changing. The 21st century will be marked by many competing sources of global power. Across politics, economics, culture, military strength, and more, a new group of countries has growing influence over the future of the world.

Rising Powers: The New Global Reality is a Stanley Foundation project designed to raise awareness, motivate new thinking, and ultimately improve US foreign policy regarding this global transformation. Our aim is to discuss several of the countries challenging the global order, major issues which cut across national boundaries, and how all of this will impact American lives.

As this new world unfolds, America will increasingly need other nations, and they will need us in order to build a better future. Leadership and cooperation in this situation require understanding the world as it really exists.

Rising Powers: The New Global Reality

Neal Stephenson delivered a talk entitled The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture at Gresham College.

The Fork: Science Fiction versus Mundane Culture

Coming in September.

Anathem is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world.

Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside "saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.

Now, in celebration of the week-long, once-in-a-decade rite of Apert, the fraas and suurs prepare to venture beyond the concent's gates—at the same time opening them wide to welcome the curious "extras" in. During his first Apert as a fraa, Erasmas eagerly anticipates reconnecting with the landmarks and family he hasn't seen since he was "collected." But before the week is out, both the existence he abandoned and the one he embraced will stand poised on the brink of cataclysmic change.

Powerful unforeseen forces jeopardize the peaceful stability of mathic life and the established ennui of the Extramuros—a threat that only an unsteady alliance of saecular and avout can oppose—as, one by one, Erasmas and his colleagues, teachers, and friends are summoned forth from the safety of the concent in hopes of warding off global disaster. Suddenly burdened with a staggering responsibility, Erasmas finds himself a major player in a drama that will determine the future of his world—as he sets out on an extraordinary odyssey that will carry him to the most dangerous, inhospitable corners of the planet . . . and beyond.

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

Coming this Christmas, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. A trailer is now available.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Jack M. Balkin wrote:

Sandy Levinson and I have noted previously that we are in the midst of the creation of a National Surveillance State, which is the logical successor to the National Security State ...

The larger point is that two parties are not in fact dividing over the issue of Executive power. Both parties seem to like more and more executive power just fine. They just have adopted different ways of achieving it. One can expect far more Congressional cooperation if a Democratic Congress is teamed with a Democratic President. The effective result may not be less Presidential power to run the National Surveillance State. It may be in fact be more.

Decius wrote:

Much of this commentary is spot on.

Indeed, this was clear in 2005, when Thomas Powers wrote:

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe?

It wasn't respect for the Constitution that kept the NSA from reading the "Tomorrow is zero hour" message until the day after the disaster. It was lack of translators. To meet that kind of problem, the Comint professionals have a default solution: more. Not just more Arab linguists but more of everything -- more analysts, more polygraph examiners and security guards, more freedom to listen in on more people, more listening posts, more coverage, more secrecy.

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

RE: Balkinization: The new FISA law and rise of the Surveillance State

Tracking who's hot and who's not presents an algorithmic challenge

The Britney Spears Problem » American Scientist