The “howls”:http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/20/amazon-kindle-the-we.html “of”:http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/11/14512.html “derision”:http://ezraklein.typepad.com/blog/2007/11/more-kindle-com.html greeting the announcement of the Amazon Kindle last week reminds me that I never got around to reviewing the “iRex Iliad”:http://www.irextechnologies.com/products/iliad that I bought some months ago. I can’t provide a proper comparison of the two; not only do I not own a Kindle, obviously, but I haven’t even used the Iliad to read DRM-protected books (this has only become a possibility in the last few months; before that you were limited to PDFs and the like). But for my particular purposes as an academic, the Iliad works very well. It’s still a first generation technology, and has several kinks that could, and should, be ironed out. Even so, what I’ve seen convinces me that academics are likely to become early adopters of this technology _en masse_ when it comes down in price and becomes a little more user friendly.
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From the category archives:
Books
Kevin Drum responds to Matthew Yglesias, who is wondering why it took the social conservatives so long to come around to Huckabee, if this is what they wanted all along. Drum quotes the title of his review of Chait: “Forget neocons and theocons. It’s the money-cons who really run Bush’s Republican Party.” (I’m actually just about to get started reading The Big Con
Deadline Hollywood says a deal may be struck. Writers strike may be settled by X-Mas! If not, let them write graphic novels! (Guardian article about "film-makers themselves branching out into graphic novels, incorporating that art form as an alternative storytelling tool rather than simply an adjunct or cash-in." Eh. Sort of interesting.)
But what if you want to combine your love of graphic novels with support for artists on strike? [click to continue…]
It can’t have been easy to pick finalists for the Atlanta Journal- Constitution‘s contest for World’s Worst Book Title — not with candidates such as Letting It Go: A History of American Incontinence and Everything You’ll Need to Remember About Alzheimer’s.
I’m not sure how the contest was run, or if it was fair. A lot of times with these things it’s all about who you know.
Still, the results are in, and AJC has announced that the winner is Cooking with Pooh. This title is for real. But I’m sure readers can come up with worse titles than that, just as real.
(hat tip: Michael Merschel)
Matthew Yglesias links to an interesting paper:
“I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls; if you don’t understand what that means you are just plain dumb.” These were the words of United States senator Theodore G. “The Man” Bilbo of Mississippi, as he addressed white supporters during his successful re-election campaign in June 1946. His inflammatory language ignited a firestorm, however, that prevented him from taking his Senate seat in January 1947 and ended the career of one of the nation’s most flamboyant politicians.
“The Man” fell because of the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, white elites outside the South—defined here as leading daily newspapers, weekly magazines, organizations, and political leaders—largely ignored Bilbo’s racist incitements. World War II, however, brought about a significant change in elite attitudes. Due to the ideological war against Nazism, America’s emergence as a superpower, and the unifying nature of the conflict, the kind of virulent public racism that was a trademark of Bilbo’s career was no longer tolerated outside of the South. Bilbo’s career, from his return to the governor’s mansion in 1928 through the Senate debate over his seating in 1947, parallels and illustrates the declining tolerance of overt racism and nativism in the United States.
Yglesias files this under ‘the past is another country.” That’s only the half of it. [click to continue…]
Until Brian’s posts about cloning, I hadn’t thought much about the various technologies available for choosing how children will turn out, and insofar as I had my instincts were conservative, but my assumptions libertarian. That is, my own reaction to such technologies was that they should not be used, but I didn’t have any real reasons for thinking that, so I assumed that some general presumption in favour of liberty decided in favour of permitting them. My views have changed, or perhaps just solidified, since then, to a point that I am comfortably perfectionist in Raz’s sense and conservative in Cohen’s sense, and by the time I read The Case Against Perfection
The most entertaining cape-and-tights comic of the past several years might be Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory
Of course, knowing me, I’m reading vol. 1
Why read this sort of thing? [Moves pipe to other corner of mouth.] Because in every one of these Golden Age collections, the quintessentially Young Visiteerish quality of plot and dialogue …
Josh Glenn has a great little slideshow for you, in the Boston Globe. His worthy theme: Winsor McCay’s classic early comic strip, “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend” [1904-1913]. (McCay is more famous for Little Nemo. You’ve certainly heard of that one.) The occasion: a lavish new edition, The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, all the strips reprinted for the first time at full size; edited and annotated by some fanatic by the name of Ullrich Merkl. Here’s the book page. You can download substantial samples (PDF). Looks nice, though pricey. (Older editions
As I was saying: Josh’s little slideshow – with voiceover – documents the influence of “Rarebit Fiend” on five later films: L’Age D’Or, King Kong, Dumbo, Mary Poppins, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I guess Glenn is taking his cue from Merkl’s work. I deem it well worth 3 minutes and 31 seconds of your time.
Speaking of the shift from print cartooning to film, Winsor McCay, if you don’t know, is pretty much the God-Grandfather of the animated cartoon. He was one of the very first (the very first?), and hand-drew every damn frame, apparently. (With an occasional assistant.) And he did these vaudeville tours in which he lectured and interacted with the films. Obviously the joke is to synchronize your patter with the film itself. YouTube has it all: “Little Nemo” (1911) (but you have to wait until, like, 8:30 minutes in for the actual animation to start.) “Gertie the Dinosaur” (1914); and “Gertie on Tour” (1921); “How a Mosquito Operates” (1912); and some other stuff, too. Gertie the Dinosaur has the distinction of being the first made-for-animation character, I believe.
Last but not least, Josh Glenn himself has a fun new book out: Taking Things Seriously
I’m reading The Conservatives Have No Clothes
It is difficult to overstate the impact of the Heritage Foundation – along with the much broader network of conservative think tanks, foundations, university-based programs, activist organizations and media affiliates – on U.S. public policy and debates over the role of government in recent years. (p. 2)
Phrases like ‘it would be difficult to overstate’ are a delicate way of saying it would be difficult to state. But it’s a lot. But Anrig’s thesis hinges on how much:
The philosophies of the leading individuals who financed movement conservatism are far outside the mainstream. (David H. Koch ran as a vice presidential candidate on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1980, receiving just over 1 percent of the vote – a typical showing for libertarians running for public office even today.) But the institutions receiving their largesse needed to concoct strategies for simultaneously keeping those founders happy while also building a broad political coalition.
The real wonder of the conservative enterprise has been its ability to transform the rudimendary desire of a handful of wealthy families to gut the government into a set of public policy ideas that would help to accomplish that goal while sounding appetizing enough to attract large numbers of voters. Rather ingeniously, the simple, easy-to-understand ideas they developed are largely consistent with each other and elegantly link to a broader story line that the conservative movement has effectively sold with remarkable sophistication. That’s how the right won the war of ideas. It’s also the underlying reason why those ideas are failing. (p. 11)
One should, of course, read the book before judging; but I expect a lot of skeptics would fire back promptly that this is shaping up to be a too-easy false consciousness thesis. The whole ‘appetizing enough to attract lots of voters’ bit doesn’t sit easily with the ‘far outside the mainstream’. (Why did Ron Paul raise 4 mill. from 40,000 individual contributors in a single day? Obviously he’s still polling at the traditional, libertarian 1%. But there’s something a bit more going on, surely.) I’m actually pretty sympathetic to Anrig’s overall case, but what is precisely difficult is rigorously refraining from overstating the degree to which his basically plausible, coherent narrative is accurate. Just how influential has Heritage been?
We’ll be doing a seminar on Dani Rodrik’s new book _One Economics, Many Recipes_ in the nearish future. Originally, the seminar was going to go upshortly after the book’s launch, but the book got out into the stores earlier than originally planned. Those who have an interest in buying the book so as better to follow the discussion can do so at “Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=dani%20rodrik%20one%20economics%20many%20recipes or “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FOne-Economics-Many-Recipes-Globalization%2Fdp%2F0691129517%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1193945280%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325.
Tintin is apparently set to appear in a movie at some time in the unspecified future. I’m indifferent to this myself — the black and white cartoon from the 60’s was good enough for me, and the BBC radio drama adaptations are unsurpassable. But it should not be a matter of indifference to school librarians, for whom it is will create some major headaches.
Why? Tintin will suddenly be popular in America, and there’ll be lots of enthusiasm about the books. Librarians will buy them in job lots, without looking at them carefully, and will be especially attracted by the title Tintin in America
Now, having got into trouble myself for giving Tintin books to the child of right-wing Republican gun-toting conservatives, who accused me of being politically incorrect (me? I ask you), I’m aware both that I have a tin-ear with respect to certain cultural values, and that a cover like this might cause offense across the board.
We recently moved and I now have a long commute. I’ve discovered that I greatly enjoy expending enforced bus-time, listening to audiobooks. I’ve also discovered that Librivox is a rich source of free listening material. They are slouching toward the 1000 title mark, with 1000 volunteer readers doing the work. All the products are released into the public domain. I just finished the second half of Dracula – which was, I must say, touch and go in some chapters. A few of the readers were quite good; the lady with the Indian accent did not – as I feared – make van Helsing sound like Apu. She was quite good. (But there were some terrible van Helsings in the bunch, all the same. I could add to Henry’s post about bad accents, but it seems cruel to mock earnest volunteers, as opposed to overpaid Hollywood actors.)
Modeling myself on the aurally self-improving Mr. Boffin, I’ve started in on Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. (Belle, like Mrs. Boffin, is more a ‘high-flier in fashion’, you understand, and correspondingly less inclined to listen to audiobooks.) I have got up to chapter 9, and the quality of the readers so far has ranged from commendably adequate to downright excellent. (Someone named Alan Chant is doing Boffin as Wallace, from Wallace and Gromit. Which works just fine.)
Does anyone have any special recommendations, audiobook-wise? I’m not averse to paying for good stuff, although so far I am gratified by the availability of high-quality free stuff.
In other late Saturday night news, the 3-year old certifies this as the funniest video in the world. It is pretty funny.
I thought, at first that he worked far harder than most of the men I knew. Later, I came to doubt this, finding that Quiggin’s work was something to be discussed rather than tackled and that what he really enjoyed was drinking cups of coffee at odd times of day
Anthony Powell, in A Dance to the Music of Time. Any of my co-authors will recognise this much of the picture, at least.
Further evidence that blogging has eclipsed the Traditional Publishing Model.
Exhibit A. How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard (2007). “A witty and useful piece of literary sociology” (LRB), “funny, smart, and so true” (Clare Messud), “evidently much in need” (NYT), “The runaway French bestseller … that readers everywhere will be talking about—and despite themselves, reading—this holiday season.”
Exhibit B. Books I Did Not Read This Year, by Kieran Healy (2003). “A blog post” (Me).
It’s Saturday noon and my toddler is taking a nap; I am not in the mood for doing academic work and by now too heavily pregnant to do any serious amount of housework. So here are two musing about books.
The first is a real book, with a wonderful 1970s smell. I finally could get hold of a copy of Amartya Sen’s Collective Choice and Social Welfare. I made photocopies of that book when I studied welfare economics in the mid-1990s, and subsequent attempts to buy the book always failed. It hasn’t been reprinted for yeeeeeeears, and the only second hand version that I once found was a few hundred dollars – too much for my budget. But purely by accident, I had another look earlier this week on the Amazon second hand market, and found one, for 50 dollars. A first edition, with the errata-page included. It arrived from California today – less than 5 days after I ordered it. It’s a first edition, previously owned by someone called David Owen Butcher. Thank you David, you made my day.
The other book is Facebook. It seems that the virus finally caught me. Last week a friend showed me the ‘inside’ of facebook, and tried to lure my into joining. I saw the phantom of the timesink in the close distance, so resisted the temptation. Yet “Chris’s post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/10/11/reforming-inheritance-tax/ suddenly made me think that perhaps facebook can also be useful, and hey, the economist in me woke up, and earlier this week I joined. I even joined the Crooked Timber group (not sure what that implies, though). So, did those of you who joined Facebook in July after “Henry set up the group”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/11/trying-not-to-lose-face/, ever went back to work on your social facebookrelations there?