The ginormous, no good, really random post about stuff to read

Coming out of a long, long hiatus to basically clear out my tabs:

A very interesting article from LAT on how hip-hop is gaining ground in the Middle East.se are the kinds of trend stories that are so interesting to read and are for whatever reason not appearing in the Indian media. We’re so insular and so uninterested in this kind of article. It’s a shame.

10 easy steps to write a scary article about cyberattacks. I do think that the author is a bit unfair here, but certainly the media is guilty of many of the crimes he accuses us of. Heck, maybe I’ve been guilty of it too.

An excellent piece in World Affairs on Russia’s coming population crisis. It’s like the opposite of India’s problem, which is that we have too many young people under 35, which could be a bane or a boon.

The always excellent Rebecca Traister weighs in on a rather gross new reality show.

This is a new website I found, which is the best of the crowd.

A fascinating book by Carla Del Ponte, on her struggle to bring justice to the perpetrators of war crimes. She was so important in international justice (the idea) gaining credibility. She’s definitely one of my heroes.

The first chapter of an absolutely fascinating book on how we make decisions.

Joseph Nye weighs in on international relations scholarship and its increasing ivory-towered – ness. This is a real problem with any academia, and in India, IR and policy have very rarely informed each other. The ivory tower syndrome is perhaps at its worst here. Or maybe the problem is not that IR scholars are don’t influence foreign policy, it’s that only one kind of IR scholar influences Indian foreign policy, part of which is because IR instruction in India is loyal to one ideology only.

A really really cool article in Wired by J.J Abrams on the magic of mystery and how spoilers are evil. I’m a spoiler whore, but I appreciate what he’s trying to say here and I do understand that the experience can be frustrating for showrunners, authors etc etc. This almost made me like him again.

I love food writing, and this isn’t precisely that, but it’s close: a history of the fridge and how it has changed not only the food we eat but when and how we eat it.

Two excellent articles from the New York Review of Books: the war against women and what you can learn from Reinhold Neibuhr, one of my favourite authors/thinkers.

The WTF of the day:Google rents goats to replace lawnmowers. The PETA response and then Google's response are worth a read too.

A rather motley collection

of links and such things. I have just finished reading Tim Harford's the Logic of Life, and like the blurb behind the book promised, I feel like I have a pair of x-ray vision goggles to look at the world with. Unfortunately, it is little help in understanding the utter chaos in the world right now. And if you read the papers, you'd be forgiven for thinking the world is ending. I get scared every time I look at a newspaper, and its hard not to be pessimistic. On the other hand, you take relatives out shopping to boutiques and look at this gorgeous, gorgeous kurta and think, hmmm, maybe 32k isn't that unreasonable an amount to spend on something so pretty. Thankfully, sanity reigns before you can spend money that you don't have on clothes that you don't need.

So onto the fun stuff: Foreign Policy wonders what Google would be like as US President. I so love the idea of the article, I wish I'd written it! And I'm sure Google would have done better than Dubya. And there's an amusing bit here about how Bill Adama is the leader we need. Not as fun is three US states trying to challenge the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court ruling. This NYT editorial on the matter is spot on in its estimate that the measures these three states have taken will have far-reaching consequences. And there's an alarming piece in the Times UK about how the credit crunch might mean the end of sport. But to end on a bit of a happy note: people are apparently getting mixed-up over which is Sarah Palin and which is Tina Fey. And in other bit of news, McCain has rescheduled with Letterman after the relentless ribbing he took when he cancelled his last appearance on the show to ostensibly deal with the financial crisis.

ETA: This lovely article in the NYT about caricature and its influence on politics. Again, I lament the lack in India.

More Lit Spam

More reviews and essays from the NYT:

Rachel Donadio explains how those blurbs at the back of books come to be.
Mary Roach reviews a book called Traffic by Tom Vanderbilt, who explains why we drive the way we do.
Another review on a book by journalist Jane Mayer detailing the Bush administration's information retracting methods.

And to prove I do read things other than the NYT:
Here's TWoP's Fall movie review. It's not got a lot of the movies I'm excited about, like the Curious Case of Benjamin Button but my guess is that's because they're leaving out Oscar stuff.
ETA: It says Fall movie BLOCKBUSTERS. Stupid.
TWoP also look at some new fall pilots and find most... lacking, shall we say. I'm still wondering about Fringe and whether it's going to be worth it. But really, Nothing on that list sounds particularly exciting, except True Blood and that Sean Bean show, whatever it is.

The Day of the NYT

One of the only e-mail newsletters that I subscribe to (such as it is) and actually read is the NYT book review. It's full of such interesting essays on such a wide variety of subjects (see, for example: R U really reading? and Designing Dictators) , it makes me sad that there is no equivalent in the Indian English language press. I suppose the Hindu's monthly literary supplement comes close, but it's monthly and not very exhaustive. It also suffers from the same problem that the rest of that newspaper does: it looks boring. Deathly dull in fact. Plus, you find the same old people regurgitating the same old things. (The one exception is Pradeep Sebastian's column, which is a delight). What I love about reviews, and NYT in particular (it's my favourite, I don't really have a better reason than that) is how they can add a whole new dimension to a subject or text without one even having read/watched that particular work. It enhances my understanding in very particular, and invaluable ways and goes far beyond the it's-good-read-it type of review.

Here's a very interesting article in Slate by Ron Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars. He takes off on an editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review, cautioning journalists against the suppression of dissent in the mass media. He commends the Review for the editorial, but then goes on to pick apart an article on climate change in the same issue, which appears to suppress the dissenting view that global warming is a consequence of natural factors, and has nothing to do with human activity. The centre is of course the nature of dissent, and the nature of truth. In the debate over climate change, and indeed over contradictory science, it becomes very difficult to tell what the Truth is, and if there even is a Truth. In the absence of an established, verifiable fact (which the science of climate change - as far as I can understand it - is not, at least not yet) one is left with no other option but to believe the scientific consensus. Rosenbaum does make an important point on the distinction between the scientific truth and scientific consensus, but surely he can forgive bypassing this distinction sometimes. Particularly if that is not the focus of the article, anyway. CJR has responded to his criticism here. There's a lot more I want to say about this, but I need to gather my thoughts.

NYT also asks, Is Jon Stewart the most trusted man in America?I don't know about that, but I sure as hell trust him over Anderson Cooper. Long live The Daily Show.

And now for a bit of tab clearing:

Nicholas Baker (he of the Human Smoke) reviews Ammon Shea's experience reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary.
Yet another article from the NYT, this time asking Why We Read.
Vulture has a couple of great articles on the August movie: why they suck and a historical analysis. They also look at upcoming fall movies -- some great stuff in there, but I don't think it's going to be more depressing than last year. I mean, how could it?

Another Eternity

I so want to be regular at this thing, because I really do have things I want to say. Unfortunately, laziness and real life kind of prevent me posting here, but I'm honestly going to try to be good. (Not that anyone cares). I shall begin with some linkspam.

Slant has an excellent review of The Dark Knight. They've put into words exactly what I so loved about the movie.
There's also a great article at the Smart Set about criticism, or the lack of it, in the era of Web 2.0.
The International Herald Tribune has a fabulous article celebrating the classic book, The Leopard.

One of the more boneheaded news items in the papers today was this piece of nonsense:

New Delhi, July 28 (IANS) Condom and safe sex are terms that will find no mention in the new sex education module being devised for school students in India. It will instead stress on abstinence, the National Aids Control Organisation (NACO) announced Monday. NACO director-general Sujatha Rao said the module would be adopted after intensive consultations with all partners, including parents and teachers.

How can we, as a country, be this stupid? I know the Kamasutra thing gets brought up time and again, but really, this is ridiculous. What is the point of having a sex-education class if you're not going to, you know, actually educate children? I blame parents for this as much as the education establishment in general. Sex is a part of life. Indeed, it is essential for life. How can our policymakers just... wish it away? Newsflash: if you close your eyes and ignore something, it doesn't mean that thing will disappear. If these people are at all serious about not just containing AIDS, but, hello, preventing teen pregnancy or the spread of a whole host of other STDs, they need to get their acts together and stop being so bloody priggish. You're not talking about lessons in bestiality, for crying out loud. You're talking about a completely natural function and about protecting and preparing kids/teenagers from the consequences of unsafe sex. India's attitude towards sex needs to come out of the dark ages already. We didn't become a country of over a billion people by practicing abstinence, after all. Hypocrisy, thy name is India.