At long last my book “Rousseau and the Social Contract”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415201993/junius-20 is now available from Amazon in North America. (Readers in the UK “can order it”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0415201993/junius-21 from amazon.co.uk.)
Would this be possible in anywhere else than Britain? On last night’s Frank Skinner show former Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland “Mo Mowlam”:http://www.sfb.co.uk/cgi-bin/profile.cgi?s=50 gave an interview in which she attacked Tony Blair for poor judgement. At the end of the show Mowlam (dressed as Cher) performed “I Got You Babe” in duet with veteran porn star “Ron Jeremy”:http://www.ronjeremy-themovie.com/meetron.htm (dressed as Sonny).
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Hmm, Henry’s post about genre fiction greats has sparked an interesting aside which I think deserves a thread of its own. Laura says (scroll right down to the end of the comments) that romance novels account for more popular literature sales than just about anything else. They certainly deserve our attention. I think romance, or its sub-genre – chick lit – can show some interesting things about just what it means to ‘transcend the genre’.
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Kieran’s post immediately below focuses on the different pressures on men and women in academia. That difference is certainly there, but the extraordinary thing is that changes in academia over the past thirty years have exacerbated the pressures at the same time as universities have become more verbally supportive of gender equality, have implemented “family friendly” and “work–life balance” policies, and so on.
Why? It isn’t hard simply to do some sums. Here’s a typical career path in philosophy in the UK, circa 1960:
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I’ve written before about the way debates about work-family conflict are framed. In general, men with children are not thought to face work/family choices. Alternatives to this way of thinking about it — analyzing the institutions that structure people’s choices, for example — are often dismissed as utopian flim-flam. It’s a good example of how social facts are mistaken for natural facts. Quite sensible people — who know that it’s silly to argue that cloning, contraceptives and representative government are wrong because they are “unnatural,” for instance — can often be found insisting that the Pleistocene Savannah has set implacable constraints on the institutional design of work/family policies in postindustrial democracies. This is not in itself a clearly wrong claim, but, oddly, the particular constraints closely approximate the gender division of labor not of the Pleistocene Savannah but of portions of the U.S. middle class between 1945 and 1960.
I bring this up because I read an interesting report on the impact of children on men’s and women’s careers in academia. There are several ways to put the findings, but here’s one:
Twelve to fourteen years out from the Ph.D., 62 percent of tenured women in the humanities and social sciences and 50 percent of those in the sciences do not have children in the household. By contrast, only 39 percent of tenured men in social sciences and humanities and 30 percent of those in the sciences do not have children in the household …
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Met Lance Knobel yesterday and had a cup of tea. I raise my hand and claim responsibility for the quote about Canberra in the first paragraph of his post this morning. Lance himself tries harder than I did to be charitable to Canberra, and comes up with “it bids fair to make it to the better category of invented capitals.” High praise indeed.
The University of Toronto has recently had a minor to-do about free speech, and the circumstances under which it can be exercised on campus. A Palestinian group, Al-Awda, which is officially recognized on campus, wanted to book university facilities for a conference on “Palestinian Solidarity.” It required that all people attending the conference sign up to a six point “basis of unity” in order to be admitted. _Inter alia_ they had to sign up to the statement that “Israel is a racist apartheid state,” and that “[w]e support the right of the Palestinian people to resist Israeli and colonialism (sic) by any means of their choosing.” The University told Al-Awda that it could not the conference unless it removed the requirement that all participants sign up to the “basis for unity.” Al-Awda declined to do this, and the University revoked Al-Awda’s booking of the room.
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No argument this time, just a serious question. If cloning is to be banned, that presumably means there will be criminal penalties for creating clones. Who, exactly, should be vulnerable for those penalties? If a couple X and Y decide they want a cloned baby (say with Y’s DNA inserted into one of X’s eggs), and Dr. Z assists with this so clone baby A is born of X, who should be punished for this act of illegal cloning? X? Y? Z? A? (Well, presumably not A.) Any others?
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There was an interesting “imbroglio”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=529&ncid=529&e=3&u=/ap/20031120/ap_en_ot/national_book_awards at the National Book Awards ceremony on Wednesday. Stephen King, who had just won an award, made a speech telling the gathered dignitaries of the literary world that they should be reading more popular bestsellers. Another award winner, Shirley Hazzard, politely but firmly dissented from the idea that people should pay any attention to “a reading list of those who are most read at this moment.” According to Terry Teachout, “who was there”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031116.shtml#60797, you could tell that Hazzard “was torn between her obligation to be tactful and her desire to tear a piece off King.”
Update: more on this from “Terry Teachout”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031116.shtml#60900, “Ophelia Benson”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=41 and “Sarah Weinman”:http://sarahweinman.blogspot.com/2003_11_16_sarahweinman_archive.html#106936514304055841. Teachout also has a nice “piece”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20031109.shtml#59492, which I hadn’t spotted before, about the merits of one genre series, Donald Westlake’s Parker novels (written under the pseudonym of Richard Stark). It’s a series for which I’ve a “weakness”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000320.html myself.
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One of the neat things about the cloning debate is that it’s one of very few places where you’ll hear Christian conservatives saying that sex is good. Normally one hears that sex is at best a mortal sin and at worst the cause of all that’s wrong with modern society. But give us a chance to make babies any other way, and all of a sudden it’s sweetness and light. I mean, which of the following two kinds of activities looks to you like a ‘repugnant’ way to originate life?
- The kind of activity that goes on in nightclub bathrooms and on the sets of porn movies and between teenagers in the backseats of their parents’ cars.
- The kind of activity that goes on when people who have dedicated their lives to understanding a particular natural mystery try to carefully apply their knowledge in order to improve the lot of their fellow humans.
If you picked option 2, then you too can be Leon Kass’s friend. More seriously, I wonder how much my own support for cloning comes from somewhat different feelings of repugnance to Kass’s.
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The first episode of Dr. Who was broadcast 40 years ago today. Some of you will know that the BBC is planning to bring the series back, after a long hiatus, though the title role has not yet been cast. Sylvester Stallone perhaps? Anyway, congratulations to the Doctor on his birthday, and thanks to the BBC for bringing him, or her, back. (See also cartoon version, watchable if you have broadband, on BBCi here).
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I am wondering what sort of person shows up for a Michael Jackson vigil. It seems like the turnout was a little … underwhelming. About the numbers some people had been hoping the London protests would draw. Meanwhile, the celebrity lawyers are on the case. Those guys will need a new angle seeing as the Chewbacca Defense is now a standard Republican talking point.
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A great game — including a great try to boring boring England — and the right result . Commiserations to Brian (England had to beat Australia at something, one day).
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What must it be like to see the world from inside David Bernstein’s head?
QUOTE OF THE DAY: A London attorney:”You will never change the hearts and minds of terrorists by bombing them.”
That’s OK, I’ll settle for their death. I don’t think we changed the hearts and minds of too many Nazis during World War II, either.
It must be like living in a Mondrian painting. Seeing as Godwin’s law has already been violated here, let me just point, first, to the famously demoralizing effects of the Blitz on Londoners; and, second, to the fact that the likes of Al Qaeda would happily settle for our deaths, too. The gut reaction of that London attorney is, frankly, the reason we’re the good guys. Anyway, Matt explains, in a form adapted to the meanest capacity, the real-world difficulties of killing all the terrorists without (a) killing other people as you go or (b) creating more terrorists.
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I was going to blog on James Lilek’s “disgusting response”:http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/1103/112103.html to Salam Pax. But Dan Drezner has “beaten me to it”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000898.html.
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