Today’s Guardian has “a piece by Jonathan Wolff, political philosopher at UCL”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,9865,1500524,00.html , on the peculiar way in which humanities research is funded in the UK and the distorting effects this may have on the way academics work:

bq. Many of the grants currently awarded require outputs to be specified in advance, and to be submitted for publication soon after the grant ends. There is at least a suspicion that this is having a peculiar effect. Some people, including some leaders in their fields, are simply refusing to jump through these hoops, and are not applying for grants. Others are playing a more subtle game. They are applying for grants for their “second best” projects that they know they will be able to complete and deliver to deadline. At the same time, on the side, they are working on projects they care about much more, but have not included on their funding applications. Why not? Because they do not want to be forced to stand and deliver when the grant is over. The work is too important to them for that. Years more might be needed to sort out the details. Maybe it will never be ready, or at least not in the planned form. Genuinely creative work is risky, and risk means the real possibility of failure. But even when it succeeds it is unpredictable, perhaps even a little chaotic, and often deadlines are deadening. Better not to promise anything.

Steve Jobs “announced this morning”:http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html that Apple will ditch the IBM PowerPC processor and begin using Intel chips in its computers as of next year.

We pause for a moment to allow Mac users to digest that sentence.

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Do not, under any circumstances, heat an empty Teflon-covered nonstick pan on the range for more than two or three minutes. At temperatures above 500 degrees (beyond the range of normal home cooking), Teflon will release fumes that cause flu-like symptoms in humans and can be fatal to birds.

(No birds were harmed in the preparation of this post. One human, however, feels like he’s been chewed up and spit out of something big.)

“He says”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/opinion/05brooks.html?ex=1275624000&en=8d105859570ef902&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss:

Entering the world of the Higher Shamelessness, they begin networking like mad, cultivating the fine art of false modesty and calculated friendships. The most nakedly ambitious – the blogging Junior Lippmanns – rarely win in the long run, but that doesn’t mean you can’t mass e-mail your essays for obscure online sites with little ‘Thought you might be interested’ notes.

They create informal mutual promotion societies, weighing who will be the crucial members of their cohort, engaging in the dangerous game of lateral kissing up, hunting for the spouse who will look handsomely supportive during some future confirmation hearing, nurturing a dislike for the person who will be the chief rival when the New Yorker editing job opens up in 2027.

He concedes it’s a “normal stage of life,” which maybe shows that (like Gollum) some shred of his former self remains. But honestly: do we really need prim little essays on climbing the greasy pole from someone who’s worked his way on to the Op-Ed page of the _New York Times_? What next? Contempt for authors who undertake book tours? Sneers for those who finagle visiting fellowships at Yale? Scorn for people with little or no insight into themselves or their own career paths?

Others here at CT have been more critical of the whole evolutionary psychology approach than I have, and I imagine their scepticism will be bolstered by a newish book by “David J. Buller”:http://www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/adaptingminds.shtml , a philosopher at Northern Illinois University: “Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262025795/junius-20 . According to the reviews, Buller devotes some attention to the factoids that evolutionary psychologists deploy in support of their view. Many of these “well-known facts” seem to have little more support than the well-known fact that if you step on the cracks in the pavement, the bears will get you. From the “Wall Street Journal review”:http://www.niu.edu/phil/~buller/wsjrev.pdf (pdf) :

bq. This field claims to explain human behaviors that seem so widespread we must be wired for them: women preferring high-status men, and men falling for nubile babes; stepfathers abusing stepchildren. …. Take the stepfather claim. The evolutionary reasoning is this: A Stone Age man who focused his care and support on his biological children, rather than kids his mate had from an earlier liaison, would do better by evolution’s scorecard (how many descendants he left) than a man who cared for his stepchildren. With this mindset, a stepfather is far more likely to abuse his stepchildren. One textbook asserts that kids living with a parent and a stepparent are some 40 times as likely to be abused as those living with biological parents.

bq. But that’s not what the data say, Prof. Buller finds. First, reports that a child living in a family with a stepfather was abused rarely say who the abuser was. Some children are abused by their biological mother, so blaming all stepchild abuse on the stepfather distorts reality. Also, a child’s bruises or broken bones are more likely to be called abuse when a stepfather is in the home, and more likely to be called accidental when a biological father is, so data showing a higher incidence of abuse in homes with a stepfather are again biased. “There is no substantial difference between the rates of severe violence committed by genetic parents and by stepparents,” Prof. Buller concludes.

I finally got to see “Steve Earle”:http://www.steveearle.com/ play live at the “Wychwood Festival”:http://www.wychwoodfestival.com/ outside Cheltenham in England. It was a fairly miserable day weatherwise, but the storms held off for his set and (earlier) for that of his current partner Allison Moorer. Since my enthusiasm for all this may not be widely shared at CT, I’m putting the rest below the fold.

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A few weeks ago, “Michael Bérubé”:http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/balls_to_the_wall/ wrote a snarky post responding to a Joseph Epstein “review”:http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5546&R=C4FE2FB13 of Elaine Showalter’s “Faculty Towers”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0812238508-0, a brief history of the academic novel. As Michael says, the essay “honestly isn’t very good,” but I can understand why a little better after reading Showalter’s book. _Faculty Towers_ isn’t very good either, and it isn’t very good in the same ways as Epstein’s essay.
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Continuing on a European theme, and on recycled debates, the perennial issue[1] of Heidegger and the Nazis has been reignited by the publication of Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger, l’introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, which also includes an attack on Carl Schmitt, another thinker associated with the Nazis but now popular on the left (Mark Bahnisch gives some background here). Not surprisingly, Faye’s book has produced a reaction, in the classic form of a manifesto (in 13 languages!). The manifesto announces this site, with many contributions (all in French), with lots of references to to previous contributions to the debate, and without any systematic organisation, which makes it all a bit hard to follow. Some of the arguments focus on the details of the historical evidence, and others on the more general question of whether the kind of attack put forward by Faye and his supporters is legitimate, even granted the fact of Heidegger’s Nazi activity.

I haven’t read Faye, and it sounds as if he pushes his case too far, but I’m not ready to acquit Heidegger of active support for the Nazis, or to conclude that our reading of his philosophical views should be unaffected by his own apparent interpretation of them as a guide to action. However, others are, no doubt, better informed and should feel free to set me straight.

fn1. This longer post at my blog gives some links to an earlier round a few years ago.

In a story responsibly timed for release on a Friday evening, “the Pentagon confirms”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4608949.stm that American soldiers at Guantanomo have been messing with the Koran in various ways:

bq. US guards at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre kicked, threw water and splashed urine on copies of Koran. The Pentagon has released details of five incidents in which the Koran was mishandled by US personnel at the camp, some intentional and others accidental. In another incident a two-word English obscenity was found written in a Koran.

I’m sure _Newsweek_ was responsible for this somehow. I suppose the next line of defense in this charade is going to be “You see, the military is investigating this and punishing the few bad apples responsible.” On the merry-go-round spins.

_Update_: As expected, the comments have examples of several of the expected, semi-trollish lines of defense. As a reminder to those now arguing that defiling the Koran is no big deal (and of course it’s small potatoes in comparison with torture and other human rights abuses), the story here is the contrast between the contents of the Pentagon report and the avalanche of aggressive, high-minded flimflam that the Administration unleashed on _Newsweek_ when it originally ran its version of the story.

“Mark Schmitt”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/3/135622/4413 and “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/2/104034/7861 have an interesting debate on whether the term “information age” is a metaphor, synechdoche or a description of a more-or-less tangible empirical phenomenon. I’ll have more to say about this soonish when I finish reading Bruce Abramson’s “Digital Phoenix”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0262012170-0 ; but in the meantime want to recommend those interested in this question to Doug Henwood’s “After the New Economy”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=1-1565847709-2 (which we ran a “seminar”:https://crookedtimber.org/category/henwood-seminar on in 2004).

Update: And “Ed Kilgore”:http://www.tpmcafe.com/story/2005/6/3/233228/5444 jumps in too, arguing, as best as I can tell, that skepticism about the information age is rooted in nostalgia for a 1950’s version of social democracy, that only ever applied to the “aristocracy of labor” in the North.

Gary Farber has an interesting series of posts (here, here, here, and here) about elements of Revenge of the Sith that ended up on the cutting room floor.

From Saturday Night Live‘s TV Funhouse, the adventures of Divertor! The Jay Leno impression just slays me.

I don’t know what made me think of the Movie Trailer Cliché Theater, but it never fails to raise a smile. I miss Modern Humorist something fierce.

All the Deep Throat talk reminded me of the pleasant little comedy Dick, which proposes that Deep Throat was really two bubbly teenage girls who wandered downstairs at the wrong time during a sleepover at the Watergate. Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch (from “Kids in the Hall”) steal the show as Woodward and Bernstein, but Jim Breuer (as John Dean) and Harry Shearer (as G. Gordon Liddy) have some moments. I think we’ve got some readers who would enjoy it at their hastily-scheduled Deep Throat parties this weekend.

David Brooks resurrects the claim that

The Western European standard of living is about a third lower than the American standard of living, and it’s sliding. European output per capita is less than that of 46 of the 50 American states and about on par with Arkansas.

This was done to death in the blogosphere a couple of years ago, but it’s obviously time for another go.

Update: Oops! Scott Martens points out in comments that the EIU gives US median household income as $57 936, way out of line with the Census Bureau figure, which obviously invalidates my comparison, and casts doubt on their figures for France. I guess I’d better not just rely on a quick Google next time. I’ll look into the EIU numbers some more.

And, as several commentators point out, that will also teach me to be more careful before slagging off others for sloppy work. Time for a dish of crow.

Further update I haven’t yet found out how the EIU gets its numbers, but I’ve fixed the obvious errors in the post and taken the opportunity to remove unfair comments about Brooks

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Have just found out that the better part of the argument that I made in “this post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/24/3351/, and which I imagined in a rather self-satisfied way to be quite original, was made (apparently some weeks ago) by Mark Leonard in this “online piece”:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=2821&page=0 for _Foreign Policy_ (online). Oh well. Great minds and all that … (or perhaps, as has just been revealed in my case, not so great).

The BBC News website has “a piece on the role of bloggers in the French referendum”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4603883.stm, and especially that of a “non” “manifesto by law professor Etienne Chouard”:http://etienne.chouard.free.fr/Europe/ .