My latest B&C writing:
Why there will be sidewalks in heaven, featured at ChristianityToday.com
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/web/2003/jun09.html
See also my book on heaven, in progress

Blog: the rising prison population, plus the limits of knowledge.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030609.html

My B&C blog archive

posted by Nathan at 4:24 PM 0 comments

 
My latest B&C blog:
May news in review and May book review roundup. Enough reading to kill a week of lunch breaks or wipe out a weekend.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030602.html

- My B&C blog archive
posted by Nathan at 12:45 PM 0 comments

 
I've been doing a lot of thinking, and plan to do some writing, on how belief is (in part) socially constructed, including how belief (in the markets, individualism, self-redemption, etc.) is disseminated in American culture. So I'm wondering about this quote from Os Guinness I found in an old issue of B&C (see this too). Do you think it's true?

"Of the roughly 20 civilizations in the course of human history, if you take on Toynbee's reckoning, Western secular civilization is the first that has no agreed-on answer to what is the meaning of individual life."

More on looking for meaning in life in Chapter 1 of my book in progress and tracing the social roots of belief in my letter to an athiest
posted by Nathan at 12:43 PM 0 comments

 
Thought of the Day: Poe and The Matrix
My editor trimmed this from my Matrix blog at B&C a couple weeks ago, and rightly so--it was too muddled. I've tried to resuscitate it here; see if it makes any sense...

What would Edgar Allan Poe make of The Matrix? For Poe, the most haunting evil lay within the mind and the reality it perceives. The Matrix, whose first sequel opened [last month], was just the latest example of a very different (if equally paranoid) philosophy of evil and reality. It holds that the greatest dread is not Poe's belief that the reality we perceive is poisoned by evil, but rather the possibility that this reality is only an illusion, and that evil itself lies in another dimension. Ostensible reality is not evil's torture chamber that serves an obviously ominous purpose, as in Poe's stories and poems; instead it is evil's inviting playground that serves an elusive purpose.

(Now I'm wondering how this all jives with my Calvinist belief in total depravity ... I need lunch.)

Previous Thought of the Day: Why atheism is a faith
posted by Nathan at 12:38 PM 0 comments

 
Moment of lucidity from a recent left-wing boilerplate syndicated column:

Now what you hear in Washington, just as among the exhausted and confused American officials in Iraq, is, "But we overthrew a horrible dictator!" That is both true and, in its own way, virtuous. But does that mean that we take on the Burmese junta, the Rwandan mass murderers, the Turkmenistan prisons-keepers, the Congolese militias, the Syrian and Iranian torturers, the ...? (Sorry, running out of space.)

posted by Nathan at 11:24 AM 0 comments

 
One of those homespun, simplistically populist (in the case of #2) but not totally useless e-mail forwards (here's another one [um, try here]):

Twelve things you should learn by age 40:
1. Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
2. For every action, there is an equal and opposite government program.
3. If you look like your passport picture, you probably need the trip.
4. Bills travel through the mail at twice the speed of checks.
5. Junk is something you've kept for years and throw away three weeks before you need it.
6. Eat well, stay fit, die anyway.
7. Men are from earth. Women are from earth. Deal with it.
8. A balanced diet is a cookie in each hand.
9. Opportunities always look bigger going than coming.
10. By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.
11. Experience is a wonderful thing. It enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.
12. Middle age is when broadness of the mind and narrowness of the waist change places.
posted by Nathan at 11:23 AM 0 comments

 
E-bayers wouldn't shell out more than $154,000 for Johnny Carson's boyhood home, only a few thousand more than the home's owners just paid for it.

See also this feature in AARP magazine on Carson's post-"Tonight Show" seclusion by a former writer on the show.

Highlights:

- "Pat McCormick was the only other staff member who seemed to play by different rules. He came and went as he pleased and was on and off the staff many times. During the streaking craze of 1974, Pat once raced across the stage—buck naked—during Johnny's monologue. Afterward, Johnny refused to let NBC fire him. (I'll always remember Pat not for his tush but for a classic joke he wrote after a major California earthquake: "Due to today's earthquake, the God Is Dead rally has been cancelled.")"

- "The first thing Johnny did each day was review five or six sets of jokes—usually about 20 jokes per set—submitted by each of the writers. He took pride in deciding almost instantaneously which ones to put onto cue cards for the monologue, completing the entire process within minutes. Frankly, I always thought that rush to judgment was the main reason some of those jokes died."
posted by Nathan at 11:12 AM 0 comments

 
Etymology Today from M-W: banausic \buh-NAW-sik\
: relating to or concerned with earning a living -- used pejoratively; also : utilitarian, practical

>Each summer, countless college students set aside their books and turn to more banausic tasks, such as waiting tables, to earn tuition and spending money for the coming year.

The ancient Greeks held intellectual pursuits in the highest esteem, and they considered ideal a leisurely life of contemplation. A large population of slaves enabled many Greek citizens to adopt that preferred lifestyle. Those who had others to do the heavy lifting for them tended to regard professional labor with contempt. Their prejudice against the need to toil to earn a living is reflected in the Greek adjective "banausikos" (the root of "banausic"), which not only means "of an artisan" and "nonintellectual," but also "vulgar."

- Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 10:58 AM 0 comments

 
My latest B&C blog:
Roundtable on faith and the science of free will, plus the rise of the female farmer.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030526.html

Coming next week: May news in review and May book review roundup.
posted by Nathan at 8:37 AM 0 comments

 
My latest B&C blog:
Can Neo save America's soul? Plus, more on CEO salaries, why Canadians make the best American flags, how Washington D.C. is preparing for annihilation, and the future of zoos. All in one weblog! How's that for "Random Curiosity"?
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030519.html

- My B&C blog archive
posted by Nathan at 12:25 PM 0 comments

 
Cleaning out a couple of items on the Iraq invasion (and be sure to follow the last link in my B&C blog this week to a wrenching Weekly Standard feature on the U.S. military's Mortuary Affairs unit)

This Wash.Post piece raised the interesting question of what it means for fighter pilots to be removed from the destruction they bring with their bombs:

In fact, pilots in the air campaign over Iraq usually hear nothing when their bombs explode and often don't see the blast, either. Their war is based on precision weapons, bombs guided by lasers and satellites to targets with often pinpoint accuracy. Since the start of military aviation, pilots have been cushioned to some degree from the carnage of combat. But the prevalence of sophisticated weaponry in this conflict offers an unprecedented level of psychic insulation.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14993-2003Apr2.html

And a USA Today clip. The headline says it all:
"War brings the world to Bagdad, [Florida]"
posted by Nathan at 12:20 PM 0 comments

 
I've written (for the Trib) and blogged (at B&C) about the college admissions frenzy (see fourth item here), but as usual, The Onion is among the most helpful sources in putting it into perspective:
"Soup-Kitchen Volunteers Hate College-Application-Padding Brat"
posted by Nathan at 12:17 PM 0 comments

 
I was reading through the March/April 2000 issue of Books&Culture and was intrigued by these two stories, which I hope to follow up on with articles at some point:

Moe Berg was a third string catcher for the Boston Red Sox, on the same team as Ted Williams. He was sophisticated, especially for a professional athlete, having been educated at Princeton; he spoke several languages and was something of a ladies' man. During World War II he spied for the Allies. His life makes for quite an adventure, and several biographies of Berg (both for adult readers and for juveniles) have been published in the last five years alone, in addition to earlier ones. At the present time George Clooney is reportedly in conversation with Warner Brothers about adapting one of these biographies2 for the big screen. Clooney will play Berg.

One of the first biographies of Berg was Moe Berg: Athlete, Scholar, Spy, originally published in 1974, and rereleased in 1996.3 A copy of the original book, which contained a number of pictures of Berg, was sent to the great German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who had headed up Hitler's nuclear physics program during the war. An astonished Heisenberg recognized Berg in the photos as a "Swiss acquaintance who had accompanied him to the hotel, who had listened so attentively in the first row during his lecture" and had later asked "such intelligent and interested questions."4

It turns out that Berg was not Swiss, and his interest in what Heisenberg had to say was rather sinister. The catcher-turned-spy sat in the front row of that small lecture hall in neutral Switzerland with a loaded pistol in his pocket under orders to shoot Heisenberg, if the infamous Nobel Prize-winning physicist had said anything that indicated he was making progress on building a bomb for Hitler. Satisfied that Heisenberg was not in fact making meaningful progress on a German atomic bomb, Berg kept the gun in his pocket.

Berg's judgment was validated by a remarkable revelation that came to light when the Allied forces invaded Germany and captured the leading physicists: despite the fact that basic bomb physics had been discovered in Germany in 1938, despite the fact that Heisenberg, arguably the world's greatest physicist at the time (Einstein and Bohr having passed their prime), was working on nuclear physics for Germany, despite the very long tradition of German superiority in physics—despite all this—the Germans had made virtually no progress on the atomic bomb, while their American counterparts, sequestered on a mesa in the New Mexico desert, had succeeded. The results in Germany were simply pitiful.

What had gone wrong? Why was Germany unable to make even nominal progress on a bomb despite the conviction of a number of his former colleagues working for the Allies that if anyone could build a bomb, it would be Werner Heisenberg? ... full story


In 1855, the Rock Island Railroad and its subsidiary, the Rock Island Bridge Company, built a bridge across the Mississippi River at Rock Island, Illinois. A year later, the steamboat Effie Afton collided with one of the bridge piers, and the boat's owners promptly filed suit in federal court against the bridge company, asking for compensatory damages and the removal of the bridge as a hazard to navigation.

More was here, though, than met the eye: the bridge represented the first reach of the northern railroad system across the Mississippi, and the Effie Afton's Saint Louis owners saw this as a direct threat to the grasp that the river and the slave-holding South held on midwestern agriculture. At the trial, the bridge company's chief counsel charged that the boat had been deliberately wrecked as a political gesture, with the owners of the Afton attempting to break up the Northern railroads in just the same way that Southern politicians were threatening "a dissolution of the Union" in order to shore up the slipping hegemony of slavery. But then, he added, the wreck of the Afton was also a psychological gesture. The pilot of the Afton had been driven, not just by the politics, but by "passion"—by a mad, unreasonable urge to wreck what could not be controlled—when, if reason had been in charge, "the chances are that he would have had no disaster at all." The jury listened to both arguments, and then deadlocked, nine to three, in favor of the bridge company.

The chief counsel for the bridge company was Abraham Lincoln.

It does not come as a great surprise to find that Lincoln in 1857 would discover a political analogy between Southern threats to disrupt the railroads and Southern threats to disrupt the Union. ... full story

posted by Nathan at 12:07 PM 0 comments

 
I blogged earlier about the demise of Netscape. Here's an article about the state of Netscape on its tenth anniversary from News.com. "Netscape these days survives as a desolate outpost in the vast AOL Time Warner empire, something akin to banishment to Irkutsk."
http://news.com.com/2010-1071-992568.html
posted by Nathan at 11:50 AM 0 comments

 
Although this article in yesterday's Tribune is a little too predictable, not to mention obsessive about the recent teen hazing video, I like how it spins the usual media assumption that poverty creates savages and wealth brings happiness:

Everyone knows poverty puts teenagers at risk for a host of problems. But after a flurry of violence and vandalism has roiled some of the most affluent towns in Illinois, parents are wondering if wealth is its own risk factor. As committees gather to complete plans for the traditional rites of prom and graduation, the feeling of nervousness in Chicago's more moneyed communities is palpable....

Recklessness has always been intertwined with adolescence, regardless of family income. But many mental health experts believe that, for history's most indulged generation, something has changed. Whether it's stress once reserved for chief executive officers, a sense of entitlement, a relentless barrage of media or too much time alone, many kids have simply lost their way, said Dr. Louis Kraus, chief of adolescent psychiatry at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-0305180388may18,1,692055.story

posted by Nathan at 11:46 AM 0 comments

 
I didn't want to bury these links, so here they are again. Look for a response to an essay on "apatheism" (the combination of apathy and atheism) in my B&C blog on Monday along with a little rumination on the Matrix and philosophy.

My latest Tribune story:
A profile of Ricky Harris, the first American to have a network talk show in Germany, on the cover of today's Tempo:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0305130028may13,1,7537737.story
you can log in with member name and password of "bcread"

- My Tribune archive

My latest B&C blog:
The quiet scandal of CEO pay; plus my interview with Robert McChesney on media diversity and democracy.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog/030512.html

- My B&C blog archive
posted by Nathan at 4:16 PM 0 comments

 
What better way to send off the leaders of tomorrow on their prom nights than with some alcohol-induced hedonism in some extravagantly god-awful SUV limos? The Wash. Post leaves this rhetorical question unuttered.

Grr...the picture isn't working. Click here.
posted by Nathan at 4:11 PM 0 comments

 
It’s the end of the Lakers dynasty, writes Jack MacCallum at SI.com. Here's my 2001 story for the Web site of Sports Illustrated For Kids comparing the late nineties Laker dynasty with the eighties version. The stats are there, but numbers aside, the clunky individualism of Shaq and Kobe were no match for the artistry of Magic, Kareem, and Showtime.
posted by Nathan at 4:07 PM 0 comments

 
This NYT story on staging the photo ops of President Bush relates to my B&C blog on presidency and projection.
posted by Nathan at 3:58 PM 0 comments

 
Tax cuts are a reckless and ineffective tool for poking the economy. As a recent New Yorker column pointed out, President Bush (a man whose sincerity while presenting platitudes and other simplistic thinking is rarely paralled in American politics) has argued that tax cuts create jobs. Which is an odd equation when you consider that Congress already passed his historically deep tax cuts in 2001, and that hardly kept the job market out of the crapper. Earlier, James Surowiecki also deconstructed the logic of tax cuts:

The righteous disdain for taxation is clearly part of a broader backlash against the government’s “greedy hand.” It is politically expedient, since lower tax revenues can be used to justify sharp cuts in entitlement programs, whose beneficiaries tend to vote Democratic. And it has become a convenient way of patching up the holes in the economic case for tax cuts. Thanks in part to the supply-siders, the U.S. already has the lowest tax burden of any major industrial country, and marginal tax rates are relatively modest. Cutting tax rates that are so low, most economists believe, creates few incentives. The carrot just isn’t big enough. And with the national debt at more than six trillion dollars, and twenty-five trillion dollars in Social Security and Medicare obligations soon coming due, the potential benefits of another big tax cut are simply outweighed by the costs. ... In the past three years, the president has managed to offer tax cuts as the right response to a booming economy, then to a recessionary economy, and now to a slow-growing economy.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?030421ta_talk_surowiecki

From Time magazine:

While President Bush held a rally last week near Arkansas' state capitol to drum up support for his tax cuts, a few blocks away, at nearly the same hour, Republican Governor Mike Huckabee was imploring his balky legislature to support a tax raise. "I envy his position of being able to come to Little Rock and preach tax cuts while I preach a tax increase," Huckabee told TIME. "He has a tool that I do not have, called deficit spending, and can shift—or at least not fix—the Medicaid issue, which is causing most of my heartburn." Medicaid costs in Arkansas have risen from $1.2 billion a decade ago to $2 billion, and Huckabee, like Governors everywhere else, wants Washington to start shouldering more of the burden. ... Governors increasingly blame the Bush Administration for the severity of their situation. "I am a good Republican. I am a good team player," Arkansas' Huckabee said laughingly during an interview. "[But] turn that tape recorder off and I will speak an earful."
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030519/ngovs.html

posted by Nathan at 3:54 PM 0 comments

 
The 94-foot blue whale is back at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, says the NY Times.
posted by Nathan at 3:39 PM 0 comments

 
Newsweek ran an item on jokes about Saddam Hussein that were funny but used to have serious consequences--people died for cracking wise about the dictator. Here are some of their favorite examples:

Saddam’s chief bodyguard assembles all 20 of Saddam’s official doubles. “OK, listen up. Praise be to Allah, our president has survived the American bombing, so you all still have your jobs. That’s the good news. The bad news is, he lost an arm.”

Saddam Hussein, Taha Yassin Ramadan and Tariq Aziz are lounging on the balcony of one of Saddam’s palaces when a flock of geese flies over. “Ramadan, shoot the geese,” Saddam says. The vice president lifts his AK-47 and empties a clip into the sky, but doesn’t hit a single goose. “You try, Tariq,” Saddam says. The deputy prime minister fires and misses as well. “Damn, I have to do everything around here,” Saddam says. He fires five rounds in the air. None of the birds fall. There’s an awkward silence. Then Tariq Aziz points at the receding flock and says, “My God, would you look at that! Dead birds flying!”

A TV interviewer asks an American, an Afghan and an Iraqi, in turn: “What is your opinion about electricity shortages?” The American replies, “What’s an ‘electricity shortage’?” The Afghan says, “What’s an ‘electricity’?” The Iraqi says, “What’s an ‘opinion’?”

posted by Nathan at 3:33 PM 0 comments

 
This essay was too incoherent to work well in my B&C blog roundup, but I wanted to retain this clip. It's by the lucid writer Cullen Murphy of the Atlantic Monthly on the "built-in conservatism" of human beings:

Over the ages and across countless cultures our beds have looked like beds, our chairs like chairs, our houses like houses. Our active lives are defined by the body's thresholds of heat and cold, pain and pleasure, energy and fatigue. Our eyesight is fixed within a specified range (better than that of bats, inferior to that of eagles), and so is our hearing. The sheer physical demands of hauling the body to work seem to be influenced by some inherent governor: a famous study of commuting, for instance, suggested that although distances have changed with technological advances, people in all eras and cultures have budgeted about the same amount of time for daily travel (on average, about half an hour one way). ... I retain considerable faith in the staying power of our pre-posthuman selves. Enhancement arrives with the audacity of Napoleon; the body responds with the inertial resistance of those two great Russian generals, January and February.
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/05/murphy.htm

posted by Nathan at 3:27 PM 0 comments

 
Etymology Today from M-W: vinaceous \vye-NAY-shuss\ of the color wine : dark red

The first recorded evidence of "vinaceous" in English dates from 1688, about the time of the accession of Mary II. If ever the queen used "vinaceous," she was probably in the confines of her landscaped garden, admiring the vinaceous shades of petals or looking indifferently at the vinaceous cap of a mushroom; since its beginning, "vinaceous" has flourished in the earthy lexicon of horticulture and mycology. It has also taken flight in the ornithological world as a descriptive word for the unique dark-red coloring of some birds, like the vinaceous amazon or vinaceous rosefinch. You probably won’t encounter these exotic birds while enjoying the spring weather in your neighborhood, but you might see someone tossing a vinaceous Frisbee or jogging by in a vinaceous T-shirt.

- Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 3:21 PM 0 comments

 
My latest Tribune story:
A profile of Ricky Harris, the first American to have a network talk show in Germany, on the cover of today's Tempo:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/lifestyle/chi-0305130028may13,1,7537737.story

My Tribune archive
posted by Nathan at 9:01 AM 0 comments

 
Latest B&C blog:
The quiet scandal of CEO pay; plus my interview with Robert McChesney on media diversity and democracy.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/weblog030512.html

My B&C blog archive
posted by Nathan at 2:10 PM 0 comments

 
From a recent SI.com daily newsletter:

Sure hope Dave Ladensack enjoyed his round of golf. According to the odds, he'll have to wait 335,000 years to repeat his feat -- recording two holes-in-one during a single round. Bucking odds mightier than lightning-strike proportions, the 47-year-old Ladensack did it April 27 at the Port Huron (Mich.) Elks Golf Club. "I was in disbelief," said Ladensack, who notched his third and four career aces. "It really doesn't sink in right away." A 5-handicap, Ladensack used a 6-iron on the 161-yard seventh hole and, about 90 minutes later, perfected a 4-iron on the 186-yard 14th hole. Chances of pulling off the feat, while hardly scientific, are 67 million-to-1, according to a representative of Golf Digest. That means Ladensack could play 200 rounds of golf a year and not duplicate his feat for another 335,000 years. "From tee to green, I'm not too bad. But my close game, that's bad," he said after finishing with an above-average 81. "I guess it helps that I didn't have to chip or putt."

posted by Nathan at 12:51 PM 0 comments

 
From the 4/20 Sunday Telegraph via the Globe and Mail:

My father was very much in his own world," says Thomas Steinbeck, the son of Nobel laureate John Steinbeck (1902-68), who is also a writer. "This was a man who named his suits. I remember there was a 'Dorian Gray' grey of course, a fawn-coloured suit that he called 'Old Yeller' and a brown one called 'Chestnut Bay.' He also named his shoes, his comb, his screwdriver. This was a man who talked to parking meters, seriously. His life was in his head."

posted by Nathan at 12:50 PM 0 comments

 
From Fortune magazine via Sojomail

10 largest employers in the USA, according to the 2003 Fortune 500:

Wal-Mart: 1.3 million employees
McDonalds: 413,000 employees
United Parcel Service: 360,000 employees
Ford Motor Company: 350,321 employees
General Motors: 350,000 employees
IBM: 315,889 employees
General Electric: 315,000 employees
Target: 306,000 employees
Home Depot: 300,000 employees
Kroger: 289,000 employees

Added together, these top 10 employers oversee a population of employees roughly equal to the population of South Carolina or Scotland. Wal-Mart alone has a payroll as large as the combined populations of Delaware and Wyoming.
posted by Nathan at 12:48 PM 0 comments

 
Etymology Today from M-W: prestidigitation \press-tuh-dih-juh-TAY-shun\
: sleight of hand, legerdemain

The secret to performing magic tricks is all in the hands—or at least, that’s what is suggested by the etymologies of "prestidigitation" and its two synonyms "legerdemain" and "sleight of hand." The French word "preste" (from Italian "presto") means "quick" or "nimble," and the Latin word "digitus" means "finger." Put them together and—presto!—you've got "prestidigitation." Similarly, "legerdemain" was conjured up from the French phrase "leger de main," which translates to "light of hand." The third term, "sleight of hand," involves the least etymological hocus-pocus; it simply joins "hand" with "sleight," meaning "dexterity."

Note: One of my favorite English professors has been lobbying the Oxford English Dictionary to include presticogitation--sleight of mind, or thinking that is so swift and impressive that it baffles the observer (as I blogged about before).

- Previous E.T.
posted by Nathan at 12:45 PM 0 comments