"Political content aside, the discussion provided a lovely example of how a term from literary theory has established itself in American political discourse." via Language Log

"We may expect the following. Language will be carefully crafted. Advertisements will focus on personal narratives. The campaign will employ “attack” advertisements that emotionally sway voters. Policy will be sketchy with vague descriptions that emotionally satisfy Americans while offering scant details. The emphasis will be on creating narratives that resonate with the values, beliefs, and identities of prospective voters."
– Literary Gulag, on Lakoff, Nunberg, Westen, and the narrative of the 2008 presidential election.
posted on Sep 9, 2008 - View this thread

Long before people called themselves Muslims or Hindus, long before they fought and died over these or any labels... water dripped and froze inside the Amarnath Cave at the heart of Kashmir. Amarnath Cave official site. Amarnath Cave pilgrimage. Amarnath virtual tour. Wikipedia's page on the Amarnath land transfer.
posted on Aug 16, 2008 - View this thread

Persia: Ancient Soul of Iran. "A glorious past inspires a conflicted nation."
posted on Aug 4, 2008 - View this thread

"Type designers know well that context, culture, and history shape the connotations of letterforms. . . . In fact, type plays a starring role in the making of nations." A short but interesting look at typography and political identity from Print magazine.
posted on Jul 8, 2008 - View this thread

Women's rights: What's in it for men? - "Women in rich countries largely enjoy gender equality while those in poor countries suffer substantial discrimination. This column proposes an explanation for the relationship between economic development and female empowerment that emphasises changes in the incentives males face rather than shifts in moral sentiment. Technological change that raises demand for human capital may give men a stake in women's rights."
posted on Jun 29, 2008 - View this thread

"The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class"
posted on May 1, 2008 - View this thread

Development porn and Humanitarian badges. A moment of Truth
posted on Feb 27, 2008 - View this thread

Saddam's Confessions - Given Saddam Hussein's central place in the American Consciousness over the last couple decades and particularly in recent years, I found 60 minutes' interview with FBI interrogator George Piro pretty fascinating.
posted on Jan 27, 2008 - View this thread

'Race' graphically illustrated - "most Europeans" vs. Ashkenazim (previously; see also IQ & Gladwell, viz. ;)
posted on Jan 23, 2008 - View this thread

"This will be a woman’s world, and men will have to learn to fit in." The Wilson Quarterly examines the historical, cultural, and sexual implications of matriarchy. Via.
posted on Oct 24, 2007 - View this thread

"Tired of the LIBERAL BIAS every time you search on Google and a Wikipedia page appears?" At Conservapedia, a "conservative encyclopedia you can trust," you can learn that "faith" is a concept "exclusive to Christianity," and about how Wikipedia is biased in matters such as its description of the Bell Trade Act of 1946, its gossipy treatment of the private life of NPR reporter Nina Totenberg, and its seeming acceptance of evolution. The Wikipedia bias entry also complains of a "rant" against the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, a group for which Conservapedia founder (and son of conservative gadfly Phyllis Schafly) Andrew Schlafly has worked. Signups are here; its take on evolution is criticized here.
posted on Feb 23, 2007 - View this thread

"John Smith, Youngest, of Crutherland, was given the honorary degree of LL.D in 1840. In 1842 he announced the bequest to the University [of Glasgow] of his runs of publications from learned societies, and his volumes of ephemeral items. These came to the library on Smith’s death in 1849." Some examples: Playbill, Theatre Royal, York Street. Broadsheet account of an attempted prison break. Radical Party election ballad. See also: Glasgow Broadside Ballads: cheap print and popular song culture in nineteenth-century Scotland and Glasgow Broadside Ballads: The Murray Collection
posted on Feb 3, 2007 - View this thread

Laws for an Outlaw Culture. Robert Greene is an unlikely guru for the Hip Hip Nation - a geeky white freelance writer & filmmaker. But his 48 Laws of Power have been embraced by the movers & shakers in the Hip Hop scene as their path to personal power. He's also written another book you may have heard of, The Art of Seduction. And he's just started his own blog.
posted on Jul 12, 2006 - View this thread

When Iranian paper Hamshahri (in Persian) launched a contest for Holocaust cartoons, an Israeli group responded in turn with a contest of their own for cartoons that make fun of Jews. Too bad it closed yesterday, or the Dutch branch of the AEL could submit theirs. (WARNING: some of the linked content may be offensive to readers' ethnicities, cultures, religions, or tastes.)
posted on Mar 4, 2006 - View this thread

World War IV As Fourth-Generation Warfare
posted on Feb 1, 2006 - View this thread

Einstein Speaks from Beyond the Grave... To issue a vigorous challenge to the muddled claims coming from all sides about the inherent incompatibility of science and religion. (No secondary links to go with this, but in my opinion, this link is interesting enough to stand on its own.)
posted on Oct 28, 2005 - View this thread

Gone by 2040: Religious Hierarchy, Japan's Passivity, The Chinese Communist Party, Auto Emissions, Monogamy, The Euro, The War on Drugs, Sovereignty... To mark their 35th year in publication Foreign Policy magazine asks 16 influential thinkers which ideas, values, or institutions will be gone by the year 2040. Also discussed on NPR radio today.
posted on Oct 13, 2005 - View this thread

Internets: Serious Business! These last few months have seen an increase in the attacks on the participatory culture of the web. The mainstream establishments, both political and corporate, have been looking with a cautious eye towards this new developing place. So far we've established that blogs can get you fired, keep you from getting a job, give pedophiles a place to ruminate on snatching your children, threaten journalistic integrity *snicker*, endanger the marketing , product planning, and product life cycles for automobile manufacturers, can infect your computer with virii, and have all sorts of negative consequences. The internets (both of them) can cause your children to be charmed, seduced, and addicted by readily available porn, and can also provide access to extremist radical and fundamentalist groups, prompting Congress to discuss more restrictive legislation (NSFW), but only for the porn. It has even been claimed that the web has given "Al Qaeda wings". P2P is blamed as causing record loses by the music industry, despite their investments in local station marketing payola. The FEC has held public hearings attended by both hemispheres of the blogosphere (amazingly in near-agreement) discussing the regulation of political speech online. The figureheads of a certain political party fear that their affiliated slice of the blogosphere may be too far-left. Newspapers and TV are leading the charge, with the internet standing in for pharmaceutical scares, yo-yo diets, and missing white women. The question is, how will the libertarian-minded digerati respond to this very real attack on the essence of web culture?
posted on Jul 29, 2005 - View this thread

Embracing Illegals: Companies are getting hooked on the buying power of 11 million undocumented immigrants - The Underground Labor Force Is Rising To The Surface [pdf]
posted on Jul 11, 2005 - View this thread

Sexuality, politics, and memory in Twentieth-Century Germany. The introductory chapter of Dagmar Herzog's brilliant, deeply researched, and beautifully written book, and an informative review by Thomas Laqueur. (via nextbook)
posted on May 27, 2005 - View this thread

Foreign Exchange TV with Fareed Zakaria - I'd heard about it, but thought it was only showing on OPB; checked again and lo and behold all the episodes are online! Watched a couple episodes so far; they're pretty good, esp if you're into foreign policy and stuff :D
posted on May 26, 2005 - View this thread

Earthly Empires: How evangelical churches are borrowing from the business playbook - "The triumph of evangelical Christianity is profoundly reshaping many aspects of American politics and society... This year, the 16.4 million-member Southern Baptist Convention plans to 'plant' 1,800 new churches using by-the-book niche-marketing tactics. 'We have cowboy churches for people working on ranches, country music churches, even several motorcycle churches aimed at bikers', says Martin King, a spokesman for the Southern Baptists' North American Mission Board... Many of today's evangelicals hope to expand their clout even further. They're also gaining by taking their views into Corporate America. Exhibit A: the recent clash at software giant Microsoft."
posted on May 15, 2005 - View this thread

What's the matter with Liberals? An article by Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter With Kansas, and previously linked here. Well researched, and worth arguing over. via MoFi
posted on May 5, 2005 - View this thread

Opium Made Easy: One gardener's encounter with the war on drugs.
posted on Sep 22, 2004 - View this thread

A View from the Eye of the Storm. An Arab intellectual in Europe ponders on the Muslim world and comes to some interesting conclusions. Israel is a sideshow. Iran is the most dangerous country in the world.. in the long run the only way for us (the West) to win the war of terror is to force the problem nations to reform both politically and culturally.via Steven Den Beste weblog
posted on Jun 25, 2004 - View this thread

The BBC is asking visitors of its news site to vote from a shortlist of the ten most embarrassing political moments. Visitors can watch a short film [real media] which shows all ten nominated moments (forgive the home-video moments style background muzak). There's some variety here: Tony Blair and Neil Kinnock in moments exhibiting a baffling degree of misguidedness, George W Bush and Kenneth Clarke in tight spots (figuratively and literally), while Charles Kennedy and John Prescott probably coming out of their situations looking better than they did beforehand. For me the most cringe-inducing clip is that of John Redwood, the then newly appointed Secretary of State for Wales, attempting to mime the Welsh national anthem. Genuinely difficult to watch.
posted on Dec 5, 2003 - View this thread

Robot Wisdom weblogger and prolific online writer Jorn Barger has been missing since early October, according to friend Eric Wagoner.
posted on Dec 2, 2003 - View this thread

The Nuba of Sudan : - politics, culture, photographs and wrestlers.
Related :- Survival International; the photographs of George Rodger, who travelled among the Nuba after World War II; the Nuba People; the Dinka and the Nuer, neighbours of the Nuba.
posted on Jun 8, 2003 - View this thread

Frontier Psychology - Does Frontier Psychology drive America in a direction that the rest of the world cannot comprehend? Roughly defined as "the effort on the part of Americans to come to grips with untamed elements of nature and, by taming them, to reorganize their society" We see it everywhere, even in Buffy. Europe appears to value stability over mobility and change, in opposition to America. Prof. Richard Slotkin has written extensively about these concepts. An interiew with audio clips is here. (Real)
Are America's recent domestic and international policy decisions attempts to tame "untamed elements" around it?
posted on Apr 30, 2003 - View this thread

Understanding what makes America tick "The belief that America is exceptional, in the double sense that it is superior and that it is different...The United States had a mission, a manifest destiny, to change the world in its image. This conviction echoes down through American history....Other countries—France, Britain, Russia—have from time to time in their history felt a sense of mission, of carrying their civilisation to other peoples and territories. But in their cases it has been episodic and not deeply rooted—usually limited to when their power was at its zenith and usually clearly recognisable as a rationalisation for what they were doing for other reasons. In the case of the United States, it has been constant and central." [Centre of Independent Studies in Sydney via aldaily] American Exceptionalism. Mix it with sole super power status and massive military might. Should make it quite an intoxicating ride these next few years.
posted on Apr 4, 2002 - View this thread

Indian & Pakistani ex-pats dissect world affairs, write fiction, and discuss anything and everything under the sun. I'm a typically ignorant American, so it's illuminating to read the opinions of others much more familiar with central Asia and the Indian subcontinent than I am. Site features a high level of discourse and exemplary manners.
posted on Jan 28, 2002 - View this thread

Italy privatizes its culture. At least that's what will happen when a bill turning management of all of its museums sails through the Parliament this week. Critics of the Berlesconi-driven measure say that trying to turn culture into a profit center is foolish as there are only a few attractions that make any money now.
posted on Dec 8, 2001 - View this thread

Looking the World in the Eye Huntington, a Harvard prof., lays out his vision for the future of the clash of civilizations in an article in The Atlantic Monthly. The main points are- • The fact that the world is modernizing does not mean that it is Westernizing. The impact of urbanization and mass communications, coupled with poverty and ethnic divisions, will not lead to peoples' everywhere thinking as we do. • Asia, despite its ups and downs, is expanding militarily and economically. Islam is exploding demographically. The West may be declining in relative influence. • Culture-consciousness is getting stronger, not weaker, and states or peoples may band together because of cul tural similarities rather than because of ideological ones, as in the past. • The Western belief that parliamentary democracy and free markets are suitable for everyone will bring the West into conflict with civilizations—notably, Islam and the Chinese— that think differently. • In a multi-polar world based loosely on civilizations rather than on ideologies, Americans must reaffirm their Western identity.
posted on Nov 28, 2001 - View this thread

The Hindu nationalist group Bajrang Dal name a puppy George Bush. This isn't meant to be a complimentary act... it's in reaction to their discovery that the Bushes' cat's name is India (short for India Ink). They've taken this as an insult to the nation, and have retaliated with the puppy. I'm kind of curious about what this tells about Indian naming practices and significances, as compared to those in the US. Could someone more familiar with Hindu/Indian culture please enlighten me as to why they'd feel so insulted?
posted on Jul 26, 2001 - View this thread

One nation or two? An interesting critique from afar of wehre our nation might be heading, given two separate and distinct cultures
posted on Jan 22, 2001 - View this thread