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Jan 13, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 8:9:29
Digital natives and their brave new world—Is the smartphone generation getting smarter, or just more superficial? (MercatorNet 1-10-12)
Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, is a distinguished scholar of this technological and cultural revolution. In 2009 he published a best-seller called The Dumbest Generation, arguing in thoughtful detail what the constant use of the Internet was doing to the mind and character of people glued to their computers, cell phones, tablets, and a huge variety of additional electronic gadgets. The book was disturbing at best, pointing to the growth of narcissism, anti-intellectualism, and the loss of general literacy and good manners. Bauerlein has now collected a series of excerpts taken from books, magazines, and journals by 23 authors that “present a range of judgments about the Digital Age, and digital tools and behaviors that have enveloped our waking hours.” Variety abounds in The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, texting, and the Age of Social Networking (2011), but the quality level is inconsistent. Here is a review of some of the best of the selections.
Jan 12, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 18:56:44
Getting There Too Quickly—Aldous Huxley and Mescaline (The Revealer 1-2-12)
Between his 1932 vision of a sterile dystopia in Brave New World and the 1962 novel Island about a spiritual utopia, the author Aldous Huxley experienced two things; the Hindu religious philosophy known as Vedanta and psychedelic drugs. In Brave New World, people are addicted to Soma, a hallucinogenic that artificially simulates a kind of dull transcendent state, and so makes religion irrelevant. In Island, the Palanese (residents of Pala where the book takes place) ritually use the drug moksha for spiritual and mystical insights. It wasn't that by the time he was writing Island Huxley no longer believed that civilization was potentially doomed to a homogenized over-indulgent consumer culture, but rather that there was another possibility for human destiny. Soon after writing Brave New World Huxley saw this other opportunity but believed it would take work, a disciplined and rigorous adherence to a spiritual ideal. By the time he got around to writing Island he was convinced there was a faster, less strenuous way to find the higher purpose of human consciousness: mescaline.
Jan 10, 2012
By David Brown | Posted at 14:58:12
Ready for Doomsday: Buying asteroid-proof bunkers, killing their pets and planning mass suicide, the families convinced this ancient calendar predicts the world will end in 2012 (UK Daily Mail 1-10-12)
Public concern is so high that NASA, the U.S. space agency, even has a section debunking the theories of impending doom on its website.
The agency says it has taken more than 5,000 questions from people, some asking if they should kill themselves, their families or their pets.
Dec 12, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 10:12:37
The Occupy movement is an unprecedented opportunity to overcome America's current hopelessness by Noam Chomsky (In These Times 11-1-11)
Delivering a Howard Zinn lecture is a bittersweet experience for me. I regret that he's not here to take part in and invigorate a movement that would have been the dream of his life. Indeed, he laid a lot of the groundwork for it.
If the bonds and associations being established in these remarkable events can be sustained through a long, hard period ahead—victories don't come quickly—the Occupy protests could mark a significant moment in American history.
Dec 5, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 10:48:13
The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers (Foreign Policy Dec. 2011)
Foreign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2011's global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them.
Dec 2, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 11:11:53
Kate Bolick: why marriage is a declining option for modern women (UK Guardian 11-26-11)
For starters, we keep putting marriage off. In 1960, the median age of first marriage in the US was 23 for men and 20 for women; today it is 28 and 26. Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier. We're also marrying less—with a significant degree of change taking place in just the past decade and a half. In 1997, 29% of my Generation X cohort was married; among today's Millennials (those born in the late-70s to 90s) that figure has dropped to 22%. Compare that with 1960, when more than half of those aged 18 to 29 had already tied the knot. These numbers reflect major attitudinal shifts. According to the Pew Research Centre, a full 44% of Millennials and 43% of Gen Xers think that marriage is becoming obsolete.
Even more momentously, we no longer need husbands to have children, nor do we have to have children if we don't want to. For those who want their own biological child, and haven't found the right man, now is a good time to be alive. Biological parenthood in a nuclear family need not be the be-all and end-all of womanhood—and in fact it increasingly is not. Today 40% of children are born to single mothers. This isn't to say all of these women preferred that route, but the fact that so many upper-middle-class women are choosing to travel it—and that gays and lesbians (married or single) and older women are also having children, via adoption or in vitro fertilisation—has helped shrink the stigma against single motherhood. Even as single motherhood is no longer a disgrace, motherhood itself is no longer compulsory. Since 1976, the percentage of women in their early 40s who have not given birth has nearly doubled. A childless single woman of a certain age is no longer automatically perceived as a barren spinster.
Nov 21, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 10:23:1
The de-politicization of politics—Slawomir Sierakowski and Charles Taylor (Eurozenew 11-10-11)
The challenge for a liberal democracy is to remain as such, argues Charles Taylor in conversation with Slawomir Sierakowski. Western democracies suffer two types deterioration: a misperception of really existing problems and a lack of vital tension between the demos and the government.
Nov 3, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 7:26:58
Years Later, Lawsuit Seeks to Recreate a Wedding (NY Times 11-2-11)
But what is striking, said the studio that took the pictures, is that Mr. Remis's wedding took place in 2003 and he waited six years to sue. And not only has Mr. Remis demanded to be repaid the $4,100 cost of the photography, he also wants $48,000 to recreate the entire wedding and fly the principals to New York so the celebration can be re-shot by another photographer.
Re-enacting the wedding may pose a particular challenge, the studio pointed out, because the couple divorced and the bride is believed to have moved back to her native Latvia.
By David Brown | Posted at 7:23:19
With an App, Your Next Date Could Be Just Around the Corner (NY Times 11-2-11)
Ms. Wang and others who use these services—typically people in their 20s and 30s—say they are a slightly updated version of Internet dating sites.
They say the services allow them to skip the more elaborate mating rituals of standard online dating, which seems to move glacially in an era of text messaging and social networking.
“It can take a month to actually meet up with someone that you're messaging online,” Ms. Wang said. Mobile services allow for a “quicker jump from virtual meetings to actually meeting.”
On the apps, which use smartphone location technology, users post a simple profile and then broadcast their availability, or scan a list of others who have done so.
They can immediately exchange messages and, if there is mutual interest, decide where to meet.
Oct 24, 2011
By David Brown | Posted at 15:21:52
JOHN HUMPHRYS—How our welfare system has created an age of entitlement and dependency (UK Daily Mail 10-24-11)
Professor Paul Gregg of Bristol University calculates that the level of support a single mother receives for a child today is about three times what it would have been twenty years ago. It was raised, he says, in a deliberate attempt to reduce child poverty. But the other side of the argument, he told me, is that 'the very creation of the safety net encourages people to exist on it longer than they otherwise would.'
So we're back, once again, to perverse incentives. When Beveridge wrote his report in the 1940s he saw a nation in which there were vast numbers of people who were desperate to work if only they could get a job. Now there are many who have no incentive to get one because they are better off on benefits. The Centre for Social Justice, which was set up by the welfare secretary Ian Duncan Smith, calculates that the number of households in which no-one works has doubled over the past fifteen years.
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