News That Stays News

Immappancy November 11, 2010

How big is Africa? It’s bigger than you think, because of the distortion inherent in most maps. The Economist investigates.

From the Browser November 11, 2010

1. A lawyer evaluates the Chinese and Japanese claims to the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands. These islands are uninhabited and good for nothing, but the dispute rages all the same (though the Japanese claim there is no dispute at all). A case of history as farce.

2. David Bromwich critiques Obama’s temperament. Bromwich is almost slick enough to rise above the political noise; he writes as though he has the foresight to write history as it happens. Makes you wonder who his ideal president would be. He’s a big Lincoln fanboy, but for some reason I doubt that he would have gotten Lincoln right on the first go-round.

3. World of Warcraft’s new expansion pack, Cataclysm, as a new model of what games will be. Why buy a new game when you’ve spent six years building an emotional connection to a world as detailed and dynamic as WOW?

Gap Year at Sea November 10, 2010

Christopher Buckley read too much Melville and Conrad in boarding school, and spent a year on a Norwegian tramp freighter.

From Moby-Dick:

Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen, and regulating the circulation. Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off – then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship. There is nothing surprising in this. If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.

Sorting Sitcoms by Party Affiliation November 10, 2010

A fluff piece from The Hollywood Reporter.  Big, primetime hits tend to have slightly republican audiences; democrats apparently like shows about “damaged people.”

You Can’t Teach Shame to Detroit November 8, 2010

I suppose elections have consequences. Now that American car companies are off the public dole, they’re starting to back out of the fuel-economy deal they signed during the bailout.

Reading the Civil War, as it happened November 7, 2010

A new project for Walter Russell Mead and The American Interest: over the next few years, the magazine will publish The Long Recall, a daily digest of the news available to American readers, a hundred and fifty years ago. So today you can read about the reaction to Lincoln’s victory in the election of 1860 in the New York Times, the Weekly Raleigh Register, and the Montgomery Weekly Mail, which declares that

The South throws away, every year, more dollars than makes the legitimate income of the North. In fact, the North has fattened on the South; sucks its blood, year by year; and if now it feels like driving the South, who should complain? Hungry bellies will soon drive the lover of the almighty nigger to his knees; he will whine and beg, like any hound, when it is too late. If he goes unfed, he will find out, after a while, that his own folly lost him his dinner.

Credit: my girlfriend.

Race and the Death Penalty November 7, 2010

An analysis of the Death Penalty as a proxy for racial progress, via The American Interest. A rare article, capable of persuasion.

What happens when you start an English-Mandarin public school in New York? November 5, 2010

Why am I not surprised?

Voting November 1, 2010

It had never even occurred to me that proportional representation could be unfair.

Click to access gelmankatzbafumi.pdf

Fallout 3 Goes Before the Supreme Court November 1, 2010

Are Video Games entitled to 1st Amendment rights?

I can’t believe we’re going to have to abide by what a bunch of old heads have to say about video games. Even old men with good taste make the wrong choice in this department.