This NYT Magazine article about women who are choosing to become single mothers by using donor sperm is very interesting. The article is entirely focussed on the women’s side; no sperm donors are interviewed. But I actually thought the strangest fact was this:

…the Aryan bodybuilder with the leaping sperm has fathered 21 children (and counting — he is still an active donor), including four sets of twins. These children are all 3 and under, and their families — four lesbian couples, three heterosexual couples and six single mothers — have formed their own Listserv, where photographs of the children (all blond, with a strong familial resemblance) are posted, and daily e-mail messages are exchanged about birthdays, toilet training and the like. They are planning a group vacation in 2007.

21 children? That’s a lot of children. Is there a limit to how many children the fertility clinics will allow a single man to father? These people seem to live in NYC, so the chances of two unknowing half-siblings turning Tristan and Isolde Seigmund and Seiglinde, duh (thanks Matt) are small (and this listserv forestalls the possibility in any case). Or, if he prefers younger women, could a reverse Holy Sinner situation loom in his future? I am most interested in what this guy thinks, though. I mean, he’s a bodybuilder, which at least implies a certain degree of narcissism. It can only enhance his self-image that he’s got such motile sperm and that he is so frequently chosen by the would-be mothers–he’s the man! I’m sure we can all spin a nice Darwinian tale about how he’s maximizing his chances for reproductive sucess (and boy is he ever!), but is that really the sort of thing that consciously motivates people? Does he turn and look at every tow-headed kid on the playground as he walks by, wondering? What will he feel like when he has a child of his own, and it’s his 28th child?

UPDATE: it has been suggested in coments that he might not even know–do they really not tell you at the clinic? Also, it occurred to me that this number is only of children whose parents have registered on this donor sibling list; he may well already have 50 kids.

Unless “you’re English”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4813172.stm, I mean. Not very funny at all then, really.

It looks as though a lot of CT readers decided to “join the EFF”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/18/eff-on-bloggers-rights/ as a result of our post a couple of months ago; the EFF is now “listing us”:http://www.eff.org/bloggers/badges/ as one of the ten blogs that brought in the most donations. They’re doing very good work – thanks to all of you for supporting it.

Here’s a bit of not-quite-shameless self-promotion. My new book On Education has been out for a couple of months in the US, and longer in the UK.

I started writing the book around the time I started blogging here at CT, and wrote it largely with a CT-type audience in my head — smart, intellectually serious, and interested, but not necessarily specialists, in Philosophy or in Education. Also a transatlantic audience; I try to develop arguments and positions that will be interesting and useful to people in both the countries I know well. It’s an attempt to argue for a (small l) liberal account of the purposes of education, and to explore some current policy controversies in the light of those purposes — viz, funding of faith schools, teaching patriotism, and citizenship education; all with the aim of being accessible to just about anyone who is interested in these things (unlike some of what I write). It’s not for me to say how good it is, but it was reviewed very favourably in the TES, and the nicest comment was reported to me by the spouse of a teacher who is reading it: “She’s had several moments where her reaction as been that as soon as you said something, she sees that it’s obviously right, had thought about similar things, but had never formulated the point quite that way.” That’s a large part of what I hoped to achieve in the first part of the book.

I can say that it has three unquestionable virtues. It is short, inexpensive, and it has a nice cover (according to my wife, not always my strongest point).

“Whatte the swyve?” you say? “Anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death.”:http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/2006/01/abbreviaciouns.html This and other useful acronyms from “Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog”:http://houseoffame.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/. (Via “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/.)

David Bernstein “writes admiringly”:http://www.volokh.com/posts/1142624100.shtml of his friend “David Boaz’s effort”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/david_boaz/2006/03/why_do_conservatives_like_bush.html “to explain why conservatives love Bush so much, even though his economic policies are anything but conservative.” Boaz says,

Conservatives love Bush because the left hates him. If the New York Times would run a front-page story headlined “Bush Delivers the Big Government Clinton Never Did,” and the lefty bloggers would pick it up and run with it, maybe conservatives would catch on.

So here’s your challenge, lefty bloggers: If you don’t like the tree-chopping, Falwell-loving, cowboy president–if you want his presidency fatally wounded for the next three years–then start praising him. One good Paul Krugman column taking off from that USA Today story on the surge in entitlements recipients under Bush, one Daily Kos lead on how Clinton flopped on national health care but Bush twisted every arm in the GOP to get a multi-trillion-dollar prescription drug benefit for the elderly, one cover story in the Nation on how Bush has acknowledged federal responsibility for everything from floods in New Orleans to troubled teenagers, and maybe, just maybe, National Review and the Powerline blog and Fox News would come to their senses. Bush is a Rockefeller Republican in cowboy boots, and it’s time conservatives stopped looking at the boots instead of the policies.

Oh, please. Sure, let me be the first to step up and say people on the left think Bush is great because of all the damage he’s done. After all, “the left” and the Democratic Party are all about ruining America. Thanks but no thanks. Both Davids labor under the belief — genuine or disingenuous, who can say? — that “lefty bloggers” and their ilk are all in favor of irresponsible government spending, economic mismanagement, ham-fisted responses to security threats and natural disasters, gigantic handouts to energy and pharma companies disguised as environmental and health policy, phenomenally botched foreign policy interventions, and so on. If, after several years of this from the President, “schmibertarian”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/09/24/song-of-the-schmibertarians/ fellow-travelers now feel that, for the sake of their own conscience, someone needs to smear the GOP faithful as rubes more impressed by cowboy boots than good government, let them go ahead and do it themselves. (Where’s individual responsibility when you need it?) I recall, though, that when Tom Frank made something like this argument about a key part of the Republican base, it wasn’t very well received by those on the right.

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As always, the choices are limited to maudlin, drunk, and maudlin drunk. I choose drunk.

Philippe Van Parijs has made some “correspondence with John Rawls concerning the Law of Peoples“:http://www.uclouvain.be/10166.html available on-line. The final two paragraphs of the Rawls letter are remarkable for their explicit anti-capitalism, a sentiment that is not so clearly expressed elsewhere in his work.

From “BBC News”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/ just now:
I suppose it means the same thing, to all intensive porpoises.

The current issue of _PS: Political Science and Politics_ has a “symposium”:http://www.apsanet.org/section_651.cfm on inequality and American democracy, collecting together various responses to the “report”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/taskforcereport.pdf and book issued on the topic by the American Political Science Association’s taskforce. There’s a lot of valuable commentary and empirical data in there; also well worth reading are the accompanying critical papers on “inequality and American governance”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/governancememo.pdf and “inequality and public policy”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/feedbackmemo.pdf. A lot of meat in there, including the below graph drawn from Larry Bartels’ “paper”:http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/PSJan06Bartels.pdf . It shows income growth by income level under Democratic and Republican administrations from 1948 to 2001. The solid line shows how families at the 20th percentile (lowest), the 40th percentile etc have done under Democratic adminstrations, the dotted line how they’ve done under Republicans. The difference is startlingly obvious. Under Democratic administrations, growth has been fairly egalitarian, ranging from 2.6% average growth for the poor at the 20th percentile to 2.1% for the rich at the 95th percentile. Under Republican administrations, the rich have done about as well as under Democratic administrations, but the poor at the 20th percentile have only seen .6% income growth. As Bartels says:

bq. Are partisan differences in the economic fortunes of American families really this stark? The arithmetic calculations from the Census Bureau data are straightforward. Their political significance can only be gainsaid by supposing that the apparent pattern is the result of a massive historical coincidence. Elsewhere, I have provided extensive checks on the robustness of the partisan disparity evident in Figure 2, including comparisons based on alternative economic units, time periods, and income definitions, statistical controls for historical trends, nonparametric tests, and the like ( “Bartels 2004”:http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/income.pdf ). It seems hard to escape the conclusion that, over the past half-century, Republican presidents have been consistently bad for the economic health of middle-class and poor people.

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/bartels.jpg!

You may have to be a pretty particular breed* to appreciate the following, but I can’t be the only one in the CT crowd. I found this Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character quiz quite entertaining. I scored 33 and while it is probably a sign of something positive that I didn’t score higher, I was still a bit disappointed. My point range gets the following recommendation: “As your doctor, I recommend moving out of your parents’ basement.” The whole thing is quite amusing, try it. Don’t look at the score chart until you’ve taken the quiz, you don’t want to spoil that part of the fun.

[*] The original post said “bread”, which should explain some of the comments.

The University of Michigan Press is putting together a volume called The Best of Technology Writing 2006. The editorial team is soliciting suggestions for pieces, including blog posts.

[W]e’re asking readers to nominate their favorite tech-oriented articles, essays, and blog posts from the previous year. The competition is open to any and every technology topic–biotech, information technology, gadgetry, tech policy, Silicon Valley, and software engineering are all fair game. But the pieces that have the best chances of inclusion in the anthology will conform to these three simple guidelines:

1. They’ll be engagingly written for a mass audience; if the article requires a doctorate to appreciate, it’s probably not up our alley. Preference will be given to narrative features and profiles, “Big Think” op-eds that make sense, investigative journalism, sharp art and design criticism, intelligent policy analysis, and heartfelt personal essays.

2. They’ll be no longer than 5,000 words.

3. They’ll explore how technological progress is reshaping our world.

The resulting publication will be available both in book form and online.

Hop on over to digitalculture.org for more information and to submit your nominations.

As was pointed out in the comments to my karate post, the observation that most traditions are invented is getting somewhat traditional itself, going back as it does to the exposure of the Donation of Constantine as a forgery.

So maybe it’s time to turn all this around, and make the point that we are now living in a society that’s far more tradition-bound than that of the 19th Century, and in some respects more so than at any time since at least the Middle Ages.

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I watch a lot of kids TV with my two girls. A lot. Like, you, hypothetical bourgeois CT reader, think I am a bad parent type of a lot. This is in part a consequence of a happy development: 24-hour cable channels offering ad-free, age-appropriate kids shows. To say that these shows are better than the ones I watched when I was young doesn’t begin to bridge the vast chasm which looms between the Higglytown Heroes and Jem and The Holograms (which remains, however, totally outrageous. And in fairness I watched that show when I was much older than my kids are now. Which is all the more embarassing, really.) But one’s mind tends to wander when a previously viewed episode of Stanley comes on. (Warning: an instrumental version of the Stanley theme song will play. Interestingly, the original version played on the show is performed by the BahaMen, of “Who Let The Dogs Out” fame. Or, perhaps more accurately, not interestingly.)

So, I have been wondering about the gender politics of these shows. Let’s take the new offering: Little Einsteins. This show has obviously been put together by a crack team of well-meaning educational consultants. The opening credits for the show have the Little Einsteins explaining that the music from this epsiode is by Camille Saint-Saëns, and the images are provided by Paul Gaugin and Hokusai. But they refer to him as Katsushika Hokusai. On the kids show. That’s not even really his first name, it’s some kind of toponym, but whatever. It’s not like I’m totally ignorant about Ukiyo-E, but I had never heard this before. It’s a very random thing for 4-year-olds to know.

The Little Einsteins have to navigate around the problems they encounter by referring to a map on which the directions are encoded as various musical themes. So then they offer (phantom) choices to the viewer, à la Dora The Explorer: was this a crescendo? No, the music got quieter! And so on. So, the cast: there are two boys and two girls. One boy is black, the other white. One of the girls is asian-ish, and the other white. This is all fine and dandy. But who is the captain of the team? The white boy. Why? No, really why? (Or on Stanley, sure, he’s got some little black twin sidekicks, but when you get right down to it it’s all about Stanley and his British fish (also male.)) Now, there are also shows with female leads, such as Dora and Jojo’s Circus. (Though in the former case they’ve had to come up with Diego, even more boring than Dora herself. And all her friends are boys except Issa the useless iguana.)

No, the thing I don’t understand with Little Einsteins is, since it’s an absolute given that the creators had all kinds of earnest meetings about the ethnicity of the characters etc., what was the motivation to just revert to ordinary filmic conventions and make the white boy the leader? I sort of imagine them feeling, well, me made enough concessions in putting the asian chick in, so… Finally, if the Little Einsteins ever get in any real trouble that little black guy is toast. (This just reminds me of watching Final Fantasy. When the one big black marine sacrificed his life for the white guy and his magic scientist girlfriend I thought “even a digitally animated brother can’t catch a break.” Although the most egregious example ever was in that movie Mimic about scientist Mira Sorvino inventing giant bugs. The noble black subway worker who just met these people 10 minutes ago sacrifices himself by going out to lure giant bugs to eat him alive, and he does so by banging a sledgehammer on the subway tracks while singing old Negro spirituals, I shit you not.)