Daily Office:
Friday, 10 September 2010
¶ Samuel Freedman’s piece on the Muslim Prayer Room on the 17th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower is required reading. The fact that there was such a spiritual center is unlikely to persuade opponents of the Parc51 center to change their minds — we fully expect to hear someone claim that the Twin Towers were doomed by the contaminating presence of an Islamic facility — nor will it make radical extremists stop to think what terrible damage they do to their values by corrupting them with violence. It’s up to the rest of us to bear in mind what’s right, and to speak out for it. (NYT)
¶ In what amounts to a letter of admonition, The Economist berates Damien Hirst for enriching himself at the expense of his “investors.” Since, in our view, the focus of Hirst’s art is in its marketing, we don’t see how investors can lose, no matter how much value their purchases lose. Really, the conned investors are part of the picture.
¶ Yves Smith is not hopeful that the heightened SEC investigation of accounting fraud at Lehman Brothers will lead to criminal penalties. In part, as Ms Smith points out, this is because the complexities of financial litigation can be counted upon to overpower juries’ judgment. But it also owes, we think, to the hushed respectability of the courtroom environment, in which groomed and suited white-collar types exude blamelessness.
¶ At Wired Science, Brendan Keim writes up an interesting study: “Early Warning Signs Could Show When Extinction Is Coming.” As populations are challenged, they rebound less robustly from environmental challenges.
¶ You can close down Spy Magazine, but you can’t take the stunt out of former Spy-meisters like Tad Friend, who was determined to make his way from the Empire State Building to Central Park without setting foot on Fifth or Sixth Avenues. There’s a burly doorman on Fifty-fifth Street who owes Mr Friend a cigar. Or something. He didn’t think that our hero would find a mid-block route (through some building or other) to Fifty-sixth street. We wouldn’t have been surprised if Mr Friend had hitched a ride with low-lying window washers.
¶ Gordon Chang tells us what to watch for as the Korean Workers’ Party’s national conference — the first since 1966 — unfolds. Will Kim Jong-Il have his way as regards succession plans? (The New Republic; via Real Clear World)
¶ Venerable Oxford bookseller Blackwell’s, in order to avoid “awful takeovers,” is going to adopt the employee-owned business model developed by John Lewis, the British department store. (Guardian; via Survival of the Book)
¶ From the look of it, Miles Klee already lives in the dystopian near-future sketched by Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Which makes his dissatisfied review of the novel a kind of pendant to it. Also it will absolve would-not-be readers of the venial sin of procrastination. (Having heard Shteyngart read from Absurdistan, we have no idea why his publisher hasn’t cajoled him into making an audiobook of Super Sad.) (The Awl)
¶ Virtual restoration of the Abbey of Cluny, founded 910 and one of the great medieval institutions. (Le Monde; via Ionarts)
¶ Reading list recommendations from Jonathan Franzen. (Book Beast)