Brad DeLong takes Slate’s Eric Umansky to task for criticizing an apparent omission in the New York Times’ coverage of income inequality without bothering to check Google first (and learn that the Times wasn’t hiding anything). “FOR GOD’S SAKE, PEOPLE, USE GOOGLE!!!” Indeed.
Random posts
Google news is hot right now. (See CNet’s story.) Not sure how I feel, as an editor and all, about a “front page” that declares, “This page was generated entirely by computer algorithms without human editors. No humans were harmed or even used in the creation of this page.” (Google’s sense of humor remains intact.) For the moment it’s an interesting experiment. Useful, challenging our expectations, but not any kind of replacement for the human-edited front page. Google’s engineers are smart, though; this is a beta. Who knows how far they can take it? Nick Denton’s critique is worth pondering: he observes that Google’s algorithm fails to give “exclusives” their due.
Weblog panel notes
On Christian’s Blogistan, a rough transcript of, or notes on, the Weblogs panel at UC Berkeley from last week.
Marc Canter’s output
I can barely keep up with the stuff Marc Canter is blogging about broadband these days — he’s an idea spitfire. This post is a good starting point.
The Raven and Rob Salkowitz
Thoughtful exchange between The Raven and Rob Salkowitz on art and terrorism: Damien Hirst’s thoughtless comments about 9/11 being “visually stunning” and Eric Fischl’s controversial sculpture “Woman Tumbling.” Also good reading: Salkowitz’s further thoughts in this article — ostensibly a review of a stage show (!) based on Greil Marcus’ “Lipstick Traces”. Choice quote: “The tragedy of 9/11 is that it took airplanes flying into buildings to blast away the accumulated layers of phoniness, commercialism and propaganda that cloud our vision. And even that didn’t last.”
Rayne on blogger diversity
Rayne Today says, more personally, what I’ve been saying about how journalists fail to fathom the wide variety of purposes motivating bloggers: “No, hell no, bloggers are not ALL frustrated journalists. I’m certainly not. I’m just a collection of day-to-day issues in need of some airing. While some bloggers might feel otherwise, I’m not really worried about driving up my readership. Personally, my concern is finding a place to set free this stuff in my head so it’s not stagnant, not locked on paper or a hard drive.”
Julie/Julia
Foodies, get thee hence to the Julie/Julia Project, which is continuing voluminous chronicles of “extreme cooking”: “How in God’s name do people do multicourse meals? This is French Cooking for the servantless American cook, remember?!”
Slow
The blogging has been slow for 2-3 days now. Over the weekend I dealt with monster network problems at home (Bad hub! Weird network troubles! Still working on it!). Things have been busier than usual on the editing front. Just beginning to catch up…
Bin Laden, serving U.S. interests?
Courtesy Tom Fox’s Paris blog, a fascinating interview in a Lebanese paper with French scholar Gilles Kepel, who says that bin Laden’s effort to rally the Muslim masses against America has not only failed but backfired: “Kepel sharply criticized bin Laden, saying everything he did ultimately served US interests, whether during the Afghan war when he was America’s ‘puppet’ or after Sept. 11 when he was on Washington’s hit list. But Kepel said bin Laden may have won some popular Arab sentiment.
.. ‘I toured here and Syria, Qatar, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates between October and December 2001,’ he said, adding he could measure the enthusiasm among youth, particularly young women, for bin Laden, who has become a type of Robin Hood or Che Guevara. Bin Laden’s videos, broadcast on television and featuring his vows to destroy America, have fascinated many Arabs. Kepel, however, described them as ‘only rhetoric, a symbol of (Arab) political impotence.’ “
Some turtles are more equal than others
A stray reference to the U.S. as “the turtle on top of the pile,” in response to my post below regarding the new Bush doctrine of U.S. uber alles, has incited a stirring exchange involving the (highly relevant) saga of Yertle the Turtle. (Here’s the condensed version.) Being “top turtle” may not be all it’s cracked up to be; you may recall that Yertle, the ruler of all that he sees, is eventually laid low when a peon at the bottom sneezes.
(This is not to be confused with the celebrated tale of the scientist confronted by the old lady who insists that the world is a flat plate supported on a tortoise’s back, and when the scientist challenges her as to what the tortoise is on, she replies, “It’s turtles all the way down.”)
And while I am gamely analyzing the Bush doctrine in light of Dr. Seuss, Frank Lynch is finding his way in via Dr. Johnson.