The Withering Anonymity
How’s the post-privacy world working for you?
Bookslut
Anonymity: A Secret History of English Literature By John Mullan: Author Mullan reveals that the celebration of personality has all but done away with anonymity as a commodity. Credit goes to Mullan for term: “withering anonymity.”
Salon
What does Sarah Palin have to hide in her Yahoo emails?: Glenn Greenwald highlights the hypocrisy of the party that did away with privacy rights:”Shouldn’t these same people be standing up today and insisting that if Sarah Palin has done nothing wrong, then she should have nothing to hide?”
WebMD
Your Body Holds Clues to Political Views: Conservative or liberal? Even if you’re not telling, your body knows: more fearful responses, more authoritarian controls.
Too Late to Say You’re Sorry
When apologies are thin solace.
New York Times
Gates Apologizes for Afghan Deaths: With all the hoopla on Wall Street, this story got little play.
CNN
McCain, Obama: Fighting for Middle-Class Voters: Don’t promise what you won’t deliver, just to get votes. We won’t forget.
BBC
Bitter Taste Over China Baby Milk: Got regulators?
Minnesota Post
St. Paul dropping all misdemeanor charges for journalists arrested during RNC: So, the whole point of the arrests really was intimidation?
Time
McCain and the Lying Game: Not that anyone disagrees, but Joe Klein (author) always does know which way the wind blows.
The Other Woman
She’s into so much more than shooting wolves, dressing moose, or standing in the way of feisty librarians!
Haaretz
Tzipi Livni is Israel’s Barack Obama: The people have voted for Livni because of her inexperience. And her honesty. And her disinclination to gladhand.
The Nation
Mad for Rachel Maddow: Is this anti-bubblehead broadcaster the poster girl for a post-gender world?
AP
Clinton Avoids Palin, focuses criticism on McCain: HRC refuses to be sidetracked by the sideshow.
Big Think
Queen Noor on Rebuilding America’s Credibility: Investing in the bridge to somewhere, a Middle East that respects the West.
To the Rescue
We could all use friends in high places right about now.
BBC
Norway joins fight to save Amazon: Joining other nations, Norway commits to a billion dollars to help stop the deforestation of Brazil, one of the biggest contributors to global warming.
Telegraph
Corduroy Mansions: Need an escape from the turmoil? Alexander Call Smith serializes his latest novel for all of us to read.
New York Times
G.M. and Ford Officials Seeking U.S. Loans to Meet Fuel Goal: Sure, now the big car markers want to produce fuel-efficient cars, as long as the taxpayer pays for it. Line up at the trough GM, Ford.
The New Statesman
The Myth of the Super-Rich: Not about whether or not they exist–they surely do–but whether or not they are any good for the rest of us.
Breaking the Buck
What’s a hard-working taxpayer, who’s saving for retirement during a time of few safety nets, supposed to do with a shrinking nest egg?
New York Times
Money Market Funds Enter a World of Risk: The unthinkable could happen, when one of our ’safest’ investment products “breaks the buck.”
Reuters
China paper urges a new currency order after “tsunami”: Beijing newspaper urging their government to reduce financial dependency on US. They cite our lack of “oversight and supervision.” China buys most of our Treasury bonds. How about some regulation with our morning coffee?
NPR
Could Wall Street Woes Set Off a Global Crisis?: Michael Greenberger explains (podcast) to all us what just occurred on Wall Street. It’s not pretty. He says it’s 50/50 that the AIG bailout will work. You need to hear this.
Bloomberg
Savings bonds face ill wind from Treasury: Jane Bryant Quinn questions why the Treasury no longer encourages purchasing government savings bonds? What, the government no longer needs our money?
Spatial Coordinates
Whether tumbling through space, traversing the Martian landscape, careening along a track, or falling into history, we’re constantly moving from one place to another.
Gizmodo
Hubble Finds Unidentified Object Space, Scientists Puzzled: So you’re Hubble, a bit past your prime but still working hard, when one day something appears in your sites acting differently from anything you’ve ever seen before. And you’ve seen a lot in your illustrious career. You keep a close eye on this thing, when 100 days later, it disappears. What the heck?
Slate
Driving That Train: How Does a Locomotive Engineer Get His License?: In the wake of the deadly passenger/freight train collision last Friday, investigations will focus on qualifications of locomotive engineers.
NASA
Spiky Probe on NASA Mars Lander Raises Vapor Quandary: So, you’re Phoenix, the new kid on the Martian block, and you’re trying your darndest to get every measurement just right. The public wants you to find water. So, you go where you sense moisture in the atmosphere. You’re excited, but when you stick your probe in the dirt, it comes up dry. Completely dry. What gives?
Spectator
Our times: When we lost our mojo: A. N. Wilson thinks the second (current) Elizabethan period is when Britain lost its mojo: “We gained material comfort but lost our identity as a nation.” “There is no longer,” Wilson claims, “a Britain about which you can meaningfully say anything much at all.”
Mind Readers
Will brain scans betray our guilt or explain spiritual revelations? Why the upswing in bipolar disease? Can you parse a visual grammar, or read a lover’s mind from long-distance?
International Herald Tribune
India’s use of brain scans in courts dismays: Orweillian mind-purge or the latest in forensic science?
New York Times Magazine
The Bipolar Puzzle: With diagnosis of this disease on the rise, chances are good that you know someone who is afflicted.
VizThink
Visual language vs. visual communication: As the internet embraces non-textual communications to take advantage of our varying modalities, we are confronted with concepts such as visual grammar. Here are a series of podcasts to explain the differences between communication and language.
The Clarion Review
Comfort, a poem: Reading a lover’s mind over a long-distance connection.
Science & Spirit
Flesh Made Soul: Can a new theory in neuroscience explain spiritual experience to a nonbeliever?
Ya feel me?
There’s pain all over; we feel it.
Wall Street Journal Blog
Lehman Employees and the Wall Street Compensation: Along with all their other creditors, many of Lehman’s 24,000 employees are fighting for their piece of the pie–their salaries, tied up in stocks. Get in line.
Moscow Times
Mixing Love Triangles With Global Affairs: Russia wants to be liked by the West. Really. But the US can’t love anyone with ties to the KGB. Really?
StandPoint Magazine
Writers, Visible and Invisible: Think you know a writer? Not likely, Cynthia Nozick writes: “Writers are what they genuinely are only when they are at work in the silent and instinctual cell of ghostly solitude, and never when they are out industriously chatting on the terrace”.
in character
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, I Feel Your Pain After All: “Mirror neurons may hold the key to understanding how human beings respond to one another.”
Tick Tock
The clock’s ticking, time is running out . . .
The Atlantic
Goodbye to All That: Why Obama Matters: Barack Obama may be imperfect, “often tired, sometimes crabby, intermittently solipsistic, he’s a surprisingly uneven campaigner.” But he’s the candidate for the future, the only one free of the baggage of past decades.
Economist
Egypt: Will the dam burst?: “Given rising resentment against the government and a generation-long resurgence of religious feeling, and given the simple fact that Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s president of hte past 27 years, is now 80 years old with no clear successor, it takes little imagination to conjure up an Islamic dynastic upheaval . . . .”
New York Magazine
The End: New York publishing giants may be facing their demise, and they haven’t a clue what to do about it.
Energy Bulletin
The dress rehearsal is over: The fall in oil demand gives the world a moment to catch its breath before the inevitable price-ratcheting process starts up again.
Moral Hazards
Where’s the morality in imprisoning inner city citizens for political gain, or over-medicating university students over liability worries? Is compassion a virtue or a trend? What’s the upside to being good?
The Guardian
The Escalating Breakdown of Urban Society Across the US: The Wire imagines a stunning example of a parallel economy working within a national economy that has abandoned an entire subculture. Writer David Simon explores a similar disconnect with the legal system in Baltimore, and how its citizens are fighting back.
The American Interest Online
Medicate U.: Over-medicating college students with psychiatric drugs may be a university’s defense against malpractice suits, risk-management masking real problems.
in character
How an Emotion Became a Virtue–it took some help from Rousseau and Montesquieu: It’s only a recent historical phenomenon that we see compassion as a virtue. Will we eventually return to dispassion?
The New Yorker
“Good People” by David Foster Wallace: It is through being good that we learn how to love–a short story.
