Entries associated with the tag "New Yorker":

If you've heard of Herbert Spencer at all, you probably know him as the original social Darwinist, a radical libertarian avant la lettre. Now, thanks to Steven Shapin's New Yorker review of a new biography, I know why today's libertarians don't like to talk about him. He understood their philosophy deeply and followed it to its logical conclusions:

"For Spencer, the 'fundamental law' governing social life could not be more obvious: 'Every man has freedom to do all that he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man.' Yet if the fundamental law was clear and coherent, its applications to the contingencies of social life were not, and this gap in Spencer’s scheme between principle and practice proved a fertile source of misunderstanding. For example, natural and moral law required that all people should compete on a level playing field, but in practice land and other property were inequitably distributed, as the result of ancient crimes. And so this supposedly laissez-faire writer advocated both a progressive death tax and the nationalization of land, projects that put him on the side of the socialists he so vigorously attacked. The role of the state was, ideally, supposed to be minimal, but the fundamental law also meant, for Spencer, that equal justice ought to be guaranteed, and this, in turn, underwrote proposals for a vast extension of systems of free legal aid, far in excess of anything we have today."

Spencer isn't inconsistent; his original principle cannot be consistently followed. His logic's impeccable, it just doesn't attract donations from greedbots.

If Adam Gopnik did not exist, we would have to invent him. In the new New Yorker he nails Philip K. Dick.

"Although 'Blade Runner,' with its rainy, ruined Los Angeles, got Dick’s antic tone wrong, making it too noirish and romantic, it got the central idea right: the future will be like the past, in the sense that, no matter how amazing or technologically advanced a society becomes, the basic human rhythm of petty malevolence, sordid moneygrubbing, and official violence, illuminated by occasional bursts of loyalty or desire or tenderness, will go on. Dick’s future worlds are rarely evil and oppressive, exactly; they are banal and a little sordid, run by a demoralized élite at the expense of a deluded population. No matter how mad life gets, it will first of all be life."

Thus, in “Ubik” (1969), "The first premise is that the ancient human dream of communication with the dead has been achieved at last—but, when you go to speak with them, there is static and missed connections and interference, and then you argue over your bill."

There's more. Read the whole thing. In that generation, Robert Heinlein was a better writer and a better storyteller, but Heinlein was merely obsessive, not stark raving mad. That way lies depth. The empire has never ended.

The whole point of reading book reviews is to find the one book in a thousand that you absolutely have to read (and do), and to learn what the other 999 are about. So it's just perverse to read Steven Shapin's review in last week's New Yorker (excerpts here if that link goes away) and find that it mentions several must-reads, some more than a decade old. They're all about how we misunderstand technology when we think it's all about world-changing inventions.

Shapin's reviewing David Edgerton's The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. "Edgerton notes that as things get older they tend to move from rich countries to poor ones, from low-maintenance to high-maintenance environments. In many African, South Asian, and Latin-American countries, used vehicles imported from North America, Western Europe, and Japan live on almost eternally, in constant contact with numerous repair shops. Maintenance doesn’t simply mean keeping those vehicles as they were; it may mean changing them in all sorts of ways—new gaskets made from old rubber, new fuses made from scrap copper wire.

"'In the innovation-centric account, most places have no history of technology,' Edgerton writes [because nobody invented the car or the microchip there]. 'In use-centered accounts, nearly everywhere does.' John Powell’s marvelous study of vast vehicle-repair shops in Ghana, The Survival of the Fitter: Lives of Some African Engineers (1995), describes a modern world in which vehicles imported from the developed world initially decay, and then something changes: 'As time goes by and the vehicle is reworked in the local system, it reaches a state of apparent equilibrium in which it seems to be maintained indefinitely. . . . It is a condition of maintenance by constant repair."'

From Larissa MacFarquhar's New Yorker (behind the pay wall) profile of married philosophers Paul and Pat Churchland:

"He and Pat like to speculate about a day when whole chunks of English, especially the bits that constitute folk psychology, are replaced by scientific words that call a thing by its proper name rather than some outworn metaphor. Surely this will happen, they think, and as people learn to speak differently they will learn to experience differently, and sooner or later even their most private introspections will be affected. Already Paul feels pain differently than he used to: when he cuts himself shaving now he feels not 'pain' but something more complicated -- first the sharp, superficial A-delta-fibre pain, and then, a couple of seconds later, the sickening, deeper feeling of C-fibre pain that lingers. The new words, far from being reductive or dry, have enhanced his sensations, he feels, as an oenophile's complex vocabulary enhances the taste of wine." 

I haven't read anything this good in months, maybe years. Ditch this blog, turn off the computer, and go find the nearest physical copy of the January 15 New Yorker containing Katherine Boo's meticulously observed account of a high-expectations school superintendent and low-expectations high school kids in Denver. (Not online as of Friday afternoon.)

It doesn't excerpt well, so I'll just say that if you leave the magazine in the bathroom you'll find yourself making excuses to go there.

Check out all the worst political web sites, from "campaign dogs" to a screen of raw HTML, here.

Emergency Kindness provides emergency contraception for women in need, thus helping to prevent abortions.  (Hat tip to Feministing, which has some good commentary.)

Those of us who worship at the New Yorker shrine need to know that their reporters and editors can screw up their stories badly -- for example, implying there's some kind of "Democratic orthodoxy" on gay marriage.

BerkShares are a local currency in western Massachusetts (170,000 currently in circulation) -- one often-talked-about method of building up a local or regional economy. They're no wackier than frequent flyer miles or credit card cash-back programs, and they might do some good.

Geoffrey Stone at the University of Chicago Law School Faculty blog remembers back when the school's first Gay Law Students Association convened: "One of my faculty colleagues was outraged, comparing it to a Heroin-Users Law Students Association."

Not just another day at the office: scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder find that dinosaurs had stomach worms. "This research is exciting because it provides evidence for the movement of tiny, soft-bodied organisms inside the gut cavity of a dinosaur."

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise explains why Cheney admitted on a right-wing talk show that U.S. interrogators practice waterboarding:  "That's right folks, we're destroying our constitution for the sake of a marketing campaign."

Khaled al-Masri, a German car salesman whose name resembles that of an Al Qaeda suspect, "has alleged in court papers that Macedonian authorities turned him over to a CIA rendition team [in January 2004]. Then, he said, masked figures stripped him naked, shackled him, and led him onto a Boeing 737 business jet. Flight plans prepared by [Boeing subsidiary] Jeppesen show that from Skopje, Macedonia, the 737 flew to Baghdad, where it had military clearance to land, and then on to Kabul. On board, Masri has said, he was chained to the floor and injected with sedatives. After landing, he was put in the trunk of a car and driven to a building where he was placed in a dank cell. He spent the next four months there, under interrogation."

Not just Boeing's plane. Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen International Trip Planning is involved in CIA "rendition flights" sending suspects to places where torture is even more legal than it is here, reports Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, drawing on Stephen Grey's new book, Ghost Plane. Read the whole thing.

(Hat tip to 3 Quarks Daily.) 

• The So-Called Austin Mayor doesn't talk as much as I do, but when he does he makes it count. Here he impeaches the supposed integrity of retiring suburban rep Henry Hyde, without even getting into that gentleman's walloping double standard on the subject of presidential impeachment.

• Jessa Crispin at Bookslut will never have to read the New Yorker again, thanks to haiku! Who would've thunk it?

• Alexander Russo's District 299 Chicago Public Schools Blog is fast becoming to CPS what Rich Miller's Capitol Fax Blog and Illinoize are to politics--sources of both information and intelligent discussion from many viewpoints. Victor at Chicago Teachers Speak Out rescues the following from a number of insightful comments responding to CPS's Peter Cunningham, who was invited to make a statement on college-graduation data. The anonymous commenter asks, "Why free a group of schools from bureaucratic oversight? If that oversight is harmful, free all schools. If it is supportive, don't 'free' any. If it is harmful, change it. It's like Cunningham is saying, 'we not imposing our stupid rules and regs on everyone, just the bad schools.'"

• Steve Rhodes at Beachwood Reporter explains in painstaking detail why the Sun-Times's coverage of Daley's Olympic brainstorm would get an F in any reputable J-school.