Daily Office:
Wednesday, 3 November 2010
¶ In “Caucasion Nation,” Marco Roth reflects on racism in America in its surreptitious but no less malignant modern form: the crisis of “white victimhood.” We haven’t read anything so in accord with our own view of the problem — ever. (n + 1; via 3 Quarks Daily)
¶ We knew that David Hockney began creating art on his iPhone the moment he got one; we’re not surprised to find that he has moved on to the iPad. Nor is it really unexpected of him to prefer to display his digital art on the tablet as well — instead of printing and framing it. (BBC; via Arts Journal)
¶ Felix Salmon is back, and he has lost no time picking up on a guest post by Barbara Kiviat that we linked tothe other day about whether financial regulation ought to be rules-based or principle-based. Felix agrees with the Michael Lewis rule that Barbara captured, banning “any sort of position-taking at the giant publicly-owned banks.” He goes further to make an extraordinarily interesting point, one that we’re still chewing on.
¶ Tyler Cowen tips us off to the blog of former Scientific American editor John Rennie, The Gleaming Retort. (And he has us on “retort,” always our favorite piece of chemistry-set glassware.) In “Height, Health Care, and I Q,” Mr Rennie makes a very strong case for attributing variations across populations to environmental, rather than genetic, factors.
¶ Someone’s gotta do it, and Roxane Gay steps up to the plate. She not only makes the case for money, but she suggests that, in the wake of the Virginia Quarterly Review debacle, everybody in the lit world did.
¶ Yves Smith, who lived in Australia for a few years, insists that they’ve got some things terribly wrong Down Under; but, when it comes to elections, they put us to shame. No TV ads, and no shirking the ballot.
¶ As Yevgeniya Traps argues, in her discussion of Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker winner at The Millions, the real “Finkler Question” is one of just how different Jews are from everybody else. Not that it can be answered clearly; but one point that the book doesn’t make is the Family-of-Man thesis that Jews are “just like everybody else.” And she turns to the author himself for an eloquent rebuttal.
¶ At Salon, Michael Humphrey interviews Ted Fishman, author of Shock of Gray, a book about “How old people will remake the world.” We certainly sat up. (via 3 Quarks Daily)
¶ Antonio Rubino. (The Rumpus)
¶ Amazing retinal implant. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
¶ Facebook knows when you will break up. (GOOD)