Malcolm Gladwell takes on criminal profiling in this week’s New Yorker, tying the discipline’s pseudo-scientific methods into a neat narrative knot. Gladwell directly compares the practice to the tricks used by fortune-tellers, but only after destroying profiling’s fundamental assumptions (i.e. that crimes encode information about those who commit them). It’s good reading.
DailyShowTube
The Daily Show has launched a spiffy new website, with what appears to be their full archives posted in an interface that represents a quantum leap from Comedy Central’s clunky, hard-on-the-RAM “Motherload” player. Also, it lets you embed those videos anywhere you might happen to want to:
Classical music’s online renaissance
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross notes cautiously that classical music is doing quite well in the dot-com age, propelled by the long tail effect, greater ease of entry via music blogs and iTunes, and more communication between classical nerds. In the course of it, he links to a variety of classical blogs and resources – I’m going to spend some time following up.
Important = ?
Edge asks a list of luminaries to describe their equation or algorithm and gets a wide range of results, from truistic to the inscrutable. I have owe a nod to the elegance of Richard Dawkins’s response, but my favorite is, I think, Stephen Pinker’s, which has more “wow” factor.
Viva Al
Gore Shares Peace Prize for Climate Change Work – New York Times
Over at Slate, former Gore staffer Mickey Kaus gives him his due, and Christopher Hitchens begs him to run.
Wired just reprints AP coverage.
Morning Edition goes for blanket coverage.
Hillary’s laugh: better that W’s
The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg takes on the nonsense about Hillary Clinton’s laugh, and makes a remarkably sensible point that even the Daily Show has missed:
Hillary’s laugh is unusually uninhibited for a politician—especially, perhaps, for a female politician. It is indeed a belly laugh, if not a “big belly” laugh, and it compares favorably with the incumbent Presidential laugh, a series of rapid “heh-hehs,” at once threatening and insipid, accompanied by an exaggerated, arrhythmic bouncing of head and shoulders in opposite directions. [emphasis added]
Kriss’s Camino
Steve Kriss has some reflections from his summer pilgrimage in this week’s Mennonite Weekly Review. Perhaps appropriately, Steve doesn’t come to any strong conclusion, but he makes the journey look much better than the destination.
SPLC on NSA
The antiracist Southern Poverty Law Center, which has previously called attention to the racist politics of with New Saint Andrews College founder/eminence grise Doug Wilson, now takes the New York Times to task for its deferential reporting on the pseudo-accredited Bible college in this Sunday’s Magazine:
Saint Andrews treats as a foundational Western thinker, right up there with Plato and Aristotle, a 19th-century theologian named Robert L. Dabney — a Confederate Civil War chaplain who described blacks as “a morally inferior race,” a “sordid, alien taint” marked by “lying, theft, drunkenness, laziness, waste.”
…
None of this makes it into Worthen’s article. In fact, when she does give a three-word quote to a Wilson critic, she uses the occasion to sarcastically describe how the woman took “two hours to detail Wilson’s crimes” — almost none of which are mentioned. Instead, Worthen refers lightly to Saint Andrews’ “chronic spats with liberals in town.”
Honestly, it was ridiculous that the Times gave no space to the multifarious connections between NSA and white supremacy. The absurdity of NSA’s intellectual pretenses pales next to the outrageous positions of its founder.
About time
Thomas Friedman comes out against 9-11 craziness in what is certainly the first clearly articulated mainstream call for America to get over it already that I’ve read. All I can say is, it’s about time.
NSA: all the trappings of academia, none of the logic
The New York Times Magazine’s “College Issue” is running a
none too critical story about New Saint Andrews College, the pseudo-accredited hyperconservative school that has been trying to take over my present hometown for years. Highlights include NSA founder/eminence grise Doug Wilson saying that (1) he’d rather vote for Jefferson Davis than George W. Bush; and (2) rather than “woodenly” following the Old Testament commandment to execute homosexuals, “you might exile some … depending on the circumstances and the age of the victim.”
More revealing than those soundbites, though, is a comment from an NSA alumnus: “We want to be medieval Protestants.” Anyone who knows her Church history, of course, will immediately recognize this oxymoron: the Medieval Age of Europe is notably defined by the lack of Protestants. The Reformation didn’t start until well into the Renaissance (Martin Luther tacked up his 95 Theses in 1517). The use of the term “medieval Protestants” therefore implies a rejection of the cultural, philosophical, and intellectual movements that allowed Protestantism, and the Calvinist tradition with which New Saint Andrews allies itself, to arise in the first place.
Needless to say, the Times reporter let this whopper pass without comment.