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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIBERAL AND CONSERVATIVE POPULISM

JONATHAN CHAIT THE NEW REPUBLIC Conservative populism and liberal populism are entirely different things. Liberal populism posits that the rich wield disproportionate influence over the government and push for policies often at odds with most people's interest. Conservative populism, by contrast, dismisses any inference that the rich and the non-rich might have opposing interests as "class warfare." Conservative populism prefers to divide society along social lines, with the elites being intellectuals and other snobs who fancy themselves better than average Americans.

Consider this analysis recently offered by Bill Clinton in Clarksburg, West Virginia: "The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules." This is precisely the dynamic that allows multimillionaires like George W. Bush and Bill O'Reilly to present themselves as being on the side of the little guy. A more classic expression of conservative populism cannot be found. . .

Likewise, Bill Clinton recently declared, "The people in small towns in rural America, who do the work for America, and represent the backbone and the values of this country, they are the people that are carrying her through in this nomination." The corollary--that strong values and hard work is in shorter supply among ethnically heterogeneous urban residents--is left unstated. Hillary Clinton's statement about "hard- working Americans, white Americans" simply made explicit a theme that conservative populists usually keep implicit.

Liberal populism is mostly harnessed to a concrete legislative program aimed at broadening prosperity. Al Gore's "people versus the powerful" campaign focused on his differences with Bush over issues like regulation of HMOs and progressive taxation. Conservative populism, by contrast, is a way of exploiting the grievances it identifies without redressing them. It has an ever- shifting array of targets--Michael Dukakis's veto of a law requiring students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, or the rantings of Jeremiah Wright--but no way to knock them down.

Conservative populists sometimes ape liberal populism by promising material benefits to average people. But the promise is structured so as to pose no threat to any wealthy economic interest. George W. Bush offered tax cuts to the middle class, but paired them with far larger tax cuts for the rich, so that, ultimately, the middle class bore a larger proportion of the tax burden.

Hillary Clinton's embrace of the gas tax holiday is a miniature example of the same pattern. Her plan, which rests upon the political principle that high gasoline prices are unacceptable and that the federal gas tax is a burden on hard-pressed Americans, is highly congenial to the interests of oil companies. Yet she presents it as an assault on Big Oil, much as Bush presented his tax cuts as a way to force the rich to pay a higher share of the burden of government. . .

The liberal populist sees politics as a series of quantifiable trade-offs between competing interests. The conservative populist offers an appeal that can't be quantified: Who shares your values? Who is more manly? (James Carville: "If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two.")

THE LIFE OF AN ALGORITHMIC MAN

GARY WOLF, WIRED - Twenty years ago, [Piotr Wozniak] realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person's memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal. As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge - introspection, intuition, and conscious thought - but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.

Given the chance to observe our behaviors, computers can run simulations, modeling different versions of our path through the world. By tuning these models for top performance, computers will give us rules to live by. They will be able to tell us when to wake, sleep, learn, and exercise; they will cue us to remember what we've read, help us track whom we've met, and remind us of our goals. Computers, in Wozniak's scheme, will increase our intellectual capacity and enhance our rational self-control.

The reason the inventor of SuperMemo pursues extreme anonymity, asking me to conceal his exact location and shunning even casual recognition by users of his software, is not because he's paranoid or a misanthrope but because he wants to avoid random interruptions to a long-running experiment he's conducting on himself. Wozniak is a kind of algorithmic man. He's exploring what it's like to live in strict obedience to reason. On first encounter, he appears to be one of the happiest people I've ever met. . .

As a student at the Poznan University of Technology in western Poland in the 1980s, Wozniak was overwhelmed by the sheer number of things he was expected to learn. . . The most important challenge was English. Wozniak refused to be satisfied with the broken, half-learned English that so many otherwise smart students were stuck with. So he created an analog database, with each entry consisting of a question and answer on a piece of paper. Every time he reviewed a word, phrase, or fact, he meticulously noted the date and marked whether he had forgotten it. At the end of the session, he tallied the number of remembered and forgotten items. By 1984, . . . Wozniak's database contained 3,000 English words and phrases and 1,400 facts culled from biology, each with a complete repetition history. He was now prepared to ask himself an important question: How long would it take him to master the things he wanted to know?

The answer: too long. In fact, the answer was worse than too long. According to Wozniak's first calculations, success was impossible. The problem wasn't learning the material; it was retaining it. He found that 40 percent of his English vocabulary vanished over time. Sixty percent of his biology answers evaporated. Using some simple calculations, he figured out that with his normal method of study, it would require two hours of practice every day to learn and retain a modest English vocabulary of 15,000 words. For 30,000 words, Wozniak would need twice that time. This was impractical. . .

Wozniak takes an almost physical pleasure in reason. He loves to discuss things with people, to get insight into their personalities, and to give them advice - especially in English. One of his most heartfelt wishes is that the world have one language and one currency so this could all be handled more efficiently. He's appalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone. He's baffled that Americans do not use the metric system. For two years he kept a diary in Esperanto.

Although Esperanto was the ideal expression of his universalist dreams, English is the leading real-world implementation. Though he has never set foot in an English-speaking country, he speaks the language fluently. "Two words that used to give me trouble are perspicuous and perspicacious," he confessed as we drank beer with raspberry syrup at a tiny beachside restaurant where we were the only customers. "Then I found a mnemonic to enter in SuperMemo: clear/clever. Now I never misuse them."

WARNING: DECONSTRUCTION AHEAD

MASSIMNO PIGLIUCCI, SCIENTIFIC BLOGGING In his April 6 column, [Stanley] Fish delights in announcing the publication of a book by Francois Cusset entitled "French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Delouze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States." . . . Fish starts out by summarizing the contribution of these deconstructionists (or postmodernists, or whatever) authors, telling us of the challenge they posed to the "rationalist tradition" of the Enlightenment and the philosophy of Francis Bacon (who, strictly speaking, was an empiricist, not a rationalist). Stanley tells us that what deconstructionists have been up to is "an interrogation of [the Enlightenment's] key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the 'I' facing an independent, free-standing world." To put it in another fashion: the human ability to inquire about nature is limited by the fact that we are a part of nature itself, whether we like it or not.

In particular, emphasize both the deconstructionists and Fish, the problem is with language: "The trouble is that everything, even the framing of [scientific] experiments, begins with language, with words; and words have a fatal tendency to substitute themselves for the facts they are supposed merely to report or reflect." Deep insight, but as Fish himself tells his readers, this isn't Foucault talking, it's Bacon himself! Bacon, like any reasonable philosopher of science, was well aware of what he called "idols," certain habits of thought common about human beings that have a tendency to get in the way of scientific inquiry. Indeed, Bacon made a list of such idols (there are four fundamental kinds), and warned his readers to be aware of them and actively work to avoid them.

Foucault and friends simply took a good idea and ran with it to the point of absurdity, famously claiming, among other things, that "there is nothing outside the text" (where "text" for deconstructionists is not just the written word, but pretty much any aspect of human communication and culture). Or take an American counterpart of the French "revolution," philosopher Richard Rorty, who said that "where there are no sentences, there is no truth . . . the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." Duh, is the most articulated response that comes immediately to mind. Again, late by some three centuries, as Fish himself reminds the reader: Thomas Hobbes had already said that "true and false are attributes of speech, not of things.". . .

Fish concludes his article by attempting to shield deconstruction from its worst enemy: itself. You see, if the human condition makes it impossible to ever state that something is objectively true and not just a matter of social construction, then what is stopping us from rejecting deconstruction itself simply on the ground that is is just another social construction with no normative value? Fish quotes Cusset himself: "Deconstruction thus contains within itself … an endless metatheoretical regression that can no longer be brought to a stop by any practical decision or effective political engagement." Translating the esoteric mumbo jumbo: deconstruction is worthless intellectual masturbation. But then again, how come its authors, Derrida and Foucault in particular, are often hailed as revolutionary social critics? Social criticism implies that one can tell whether something is right or wrong, that is, it implies normative judgment, which Fish and Cusset tell us simply cannot be done -- by definition -- in the case of deconstruction.

All of this is why I must agree with physicist Alan Sokal . . . when he says that "When one analyzes [post-modernist and deconstruction] writings, one often finds radical-sounding assertions whose meaning is ambiguous and that can be given two alternative readings: one as interesting, radical, and grossly false; the other as boring and trivially true." Amen.

IN PRAISE OF MELANCHOLY

ERIC G. WILSON, CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION - Ours are ominous times. We are on the verge of eroding away our ozone layer. Within decades we could face major oceanic flooding. We are close to annihilating hundreds of exquisite animal species. Soon our forests will be as bland as pavement. Moreover, we now find ourselves on the verge of a new cold war.

But there is another threat, perhaps as dangerous: We are eradicating a major cultural force, the muse behind much art and poetry and music. We are annihilating melancholia.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least pretty happy. The psychological world is now abuzz with a new field, positive psychology, devoted to finding ways to enhance happiness through pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Psychologists practicing this brand of therapy are leaders in a novel science, the science of happiness. Mainstream publishers are learning from the self-help industry and printing thousands of books on how to be happy. Doctors offer a wide array of drugs that might eradicate depression forever. It seems truly an age of almost perfect contentment, a brave new world of persistent good fortune, joy without trouble, felicity with no penalty. . .

I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to expunge melancholia. . .

I'm not questioning joy in general. . . I do, however, wonder why so many people experiencing melancholia are now taking pills simply to ease the pain. Of course there is a fine line between what I'm calling melancholia and what society calls depression. In my mind, what separates the two is degree of activity. Both forms are more or less chronic sadness that leads to continuing unease with how things are - persistent feelings that the world is not quite right, that it is a place of suffering, stupidity, and evil. Depression (as I see it, at least) causes apathy in the face of this unease, lethargy approaching total paralysis, an inability to feel much of anything one way or another. In contrast, melancholia generates a deep feeling in regard to this same anxiety, a turbulence of heart that results in an active questioning of the status quo, a perpetual longing to create new ways of being and seeing.

Our culture seems to confuse these two and thus treats melancholia as an aberrant state, a vile threat to our pervasive notions of happiness - happiness as immediate gratification, happiness as superficial comfort, happiness as static contentment. . .

The American dream of happiness might be a nightmare. What passes for bliss could well be a dystopia of flaccid grins. . . I'd hate for us to awaken one morning and regret what we've done in the name of untroubled enjoyment. I'd hate for us to crawl out of our beds and walk out into a country denuded of gorgeous lonely roads and the grandeur of desolate hotels, of half-cracked geniuses and their frantic poems. I'd hate for us to come to consciousness when it's too late to live.

http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=t5wqrs9hpxt70zjz3bv348pqg1hcxz0r

WHERE DO AUTHORITARIANS COME FROM?

GEORGE KENNEY INTERVIEWS Robert ALtemeyer, a psychologist at the University of Manitoba, who has spent decades studying authoritarians: his key insight, that a small, determined, and well organized minority is really and truly impervious to reason.

LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS

[From Robert Altemeyer's free E-book, The Authoritarians]

ROBERT ALTEMEYER - Battalion 101 had eleven officers and nearly 500 men--nearly all of them from Hamburg. Their commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, was a World War I veteran who had risen in the police service after that war. He was not a member of the S.S., but two of his company commanders were, and the third was a "Nazi by conviction." The rank and file were about 40 years old on the average, too old to be drafted into the Wermacht. They had worked on the docks, driven trucks, and moved things around warehouses for the most part prior to being drafted. Although a quarter of them were members of the Nazi Party, they had grown up before Hitler came to power. They were given basic military training and in June 1942, sent to Poland.

At first the battalion rounded up Jews in various locations and send them off to camps and eventual death. . . But on July 11, 1942 Major Trapp received orders to move his battalion to the town of Jozefow --which was probably a village much like Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof--and after sending the fit Jewish males off to labor camps, to kill the 1800 Jewish women, children, infirm and elderly who remained.

Trapp was quite distressed by this assignment, and as the order passed down the chain of command within the battalion of policemen, one of the junior officers announced he would not take part in the killings. His platoon was therefore put in charge of moving the Jewish men to the labor camp.

As the day of execution dawned Trapp assembled his battalion, told them of their assignment, and then made an extraordinary offer: any of the older policemen who did not feel up to the task would be excused. One man stepped forward and was immediately berated by his company commander. But Major Trapp cut his officer off and took the soldier under his wing. Seeing this, ten to twelve other men stepped forward. But the rest of the battalion stayed in their ranks, and were soon moved out to perform the executions. Major Trapp excused himself from any direct participation, and the three company commanders organized the massacre.

The policemen blocked off the Jewish section of the village and set to work herding the residents to the town square. The old and infirm were shot in their homes.

Infants and small children were sometimes shot on the spot, but usually were moved with everyone else to the square. One company of the battalion was pulled aside and given a quick lesson in how to shoot someone in the back of the head with a rifle. It then moved to a nearby wooded area and awaited the victims to be brought to them in trucks.

When the trucks were unloaded the executioners were paired off, face to face, with their individual victims. They marched the Jews further into the woods, made them kneel down, and shot them. The killings continued all day without interruption, but the pace was slow so Major Trapp ordered a second company into the woods to speed up the murders. The leader of one of the platoons in this company gave all his men the opportunity to do something else, without penalty, but no one took up his offer.

A number of the policemen however found various ways to avoid becoming executioners. They hid in the village, or gave themselves extra "searching" duties.

Some of the shooters asked to be given other assignments, especially after being given a woman or child to kill, and generally they were excused. Some of the policemen deliberately missed their target from point-blank range, while others just "disappeared" into the woods for the rest of the day. But these were the exceptions.

At least 80 percent of those called upon to murder helpless civilians did so and continued to do so until all the Jews from Jozefow had been killed.

Afterwards Major Trapp instructed his men not to talk among themselves about what they had done. But great resentment and bitterness roiled in the battalion. The physical act of shooting someone had proved quite gruesome, with many of the shooters becoming covered with the blood and brains of their victims. Some of the policemen had killed people they had known earlier in Hamburg or elsewhere. Almost everyone was angry about having to kill children.

How could they do it, especially since many of them never individually had to? For one thing, while the policemen were not usually Nazis, they had little regard for Jews in general, so that made it easier. For another, their company commanders made it clear that, whatever Major Trapp had said and whomever he had protected, they expected their men to do the job assigned to them.

But judicial interrogations of some 125 of the men conducted in the 1960s indicated that, while no one had to participate, and about a dozen men demonstrated this by stepping forward, and others later dropped out in various ways, the great majority stayed in ranks and later killed whoever was brought to them out of loyalty to those ranks, and to maintain their standing in their units. "The act of stepping out that morning in Jazefow meant leaving one's comrades and admitting that one was too weak or cowardly." "Who would have dared," declared one of the policemen, "to lose face before the assembled troops?"

http://www.electricpolitics.com/media/docs/authoritarians.pdf

GUERRILLA GARDENING

BOOK BLURB - These modern-day Johnny Appleseeds perform random acts of gardening, often without permission. Typical targets are vacant lots, railway land, underused public squares, and back alleys. The concept is simple, whimsical, and has the cheeky appeal of being a not-quite-legal call to action. Dig in some soil, plant a few seeds, or mend a sagging fence-one good deed inspiring another, with win-win benefits all around. Author David Tracey is a journalist and environmental designer who operates EcoUrbanist in Vancouver. He is executive director of Tree City Canada, a nonprofit ecological engagement group.

ORDER
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0865715831/progressiverevieA/

VICTORY GARDENS

VICTORY GARDENS 2007+ calls for a more active role for cities in shaping agricultural and food policy. It is a concept currently in development with the city of San Francisco that would provide a subsidized home gardening program for individuals and neighborhoods. This program offers tools, training & materials for urban dwellers to participate in a city-wide transformation of underutilized backyards- turning them into productive growing spaces. The project draws from the historical model of the 1940's American Victory Garden program to provide a basis for developing urban agriculture as a viable form of sustainable food practice in the city. . .

The program is a two year pilot project that supports the transition of backyard, front yard, window boxes, rooftops and unused land into food production areas. VG2007+ has the mission to create and support a citywide network of urban farmers by (1) growing, distributing and supporting starter kits for home gardeners, (2) educating through lessons, exhibitions and web sites and (3) starting and maintaining a city seed bank.

The program seeks the power to reinhabit some of the original Victory Garden space in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park and perform the duties of development, maintenance, and operation.

http://www.futurefarmers.com/victorygardens/

RETIREE OFFERS PACKAGE PICKUP SPOT

OMAR FEKEIKI WASHINGTON - In a city of workaholics who leave home early and return late, many neighborhoods have their version of William Outlaw -- or would like to. The 80-year-old retiree accepts packages for 130 Capitol Hill neighbors when they are not home during delivery hours. His practice is so well established that delivery services often head directly to his door without stopping elsewhere on the block. . .

What started a few years ago as a kindly offer after several packages were stolen from neighborhood stoops has turned into a mammoth undertaking. Outlaw has turned his living room into a de facto storehouse of boxes wrapped in brown paper; on any given day, dozens of packages and padded envelopes are stacked high on tabletops and floors.

Some neighbors call Outlaw the unofficial mayor of the street, not only for his grass-roots post office but also for the way he volunteers to clean sidewalks, check on homes while neighbors are vacationing and do other odd chores.

Now, even on routine days, his living room is overrun by more than 50 packages. During the holidays, the room begins to look like Santa's workshop, with packages of every size sent from across the country and wrapped in colorful paper.

"I've had 100 packages in one day," he said. "During Christmas, you can't get into my living room."

THE IDEA MILL: FACTS AS AN ENDANGERED SPECIES

SAM SMITH - One of the characteristics of government at every level is how much harder it has become to get basic facts. Washington, DC, for many years had an annual report called Indices that was jammed with factual information about what was happening in the city. After the federal government put the city into a form of colonial receivership and a purportedly reform administration was named, the book became one of the first things to disappear.

At the other end are the well documented assaults on public information by the Bush administration. While there is much variation in between, it remains true that many aspects of governance are becoming conveniently complicated and obscured so that no one - including the media - really know what's going on.

Here's one example: once you could tell what a city was doing in the housing field by how much public housing there was. Now the number and complexity of subsidies is enormous and no one really knows what is happening. As a result it doesn't get reported.

What if you had a generally accepted standard developed my reporters and public interest groups that defined just what information people deserved to know about housing? It might include

- Number of public housing units

- Number of subsidized housing units identified by name of subsidy, average percent of cost subsidized and number of units

- Number of subsidized housing units provided by non-profit groups identified average percent of cost subsidized, and number of units

- Distribution of subsidized units by ward or other subdivision

- Number of persons on waiting list for subsidized or public housing.

- Average length of wait

- Number of persons in city who can't afford the median rent

- Ten year trend in all of the above.

At first the standards could be put forth by a group like the Society of Professional Journalists or a consortium of journalism schools or public interest groups. It could be initially done at the local, state or national level. It would not be long, I suspect, before you would find candidates for mayor, governor and even president bragging that they observe these standards.

There could also be annual ratings of these governments as to how well they are doing.

One journalist - formerly with Jack Anderson - wrote me:

I think this is an incredible idea. As an old journalist who came up through the ranks covering City Hall, the County Commission, the School Board, the police, etc., etc. I am perpetually stunned by the total lack of information the local newspaper provides these days about where public funds are going. (and even more stunned at the total passivity of the readers)

This kind of "open government" reporting used to be routine, and started to be obfuscated (I believe) in the Reagan years. Now it's gotten so murky that none of the young journalists even know what real reporting actually looks like. . .

I think it's really about returning to what the original standard of openness in a democratic society started out to be and continued to be for two centuries. It's really only in the last few decades that it's fallen by the wayside, in my opinion.

I think that your idea of getting urban journalists together to compile a list of essential facts every city should provide its citizens would be a fabulous reminder to every community of what the relationship between the local government and the community is supposed to be. Such a dialogue would then naturally become an issue in all campaigns.

BRITISH POLL FINDS HISTORY INTERESTS MORE PEOPLE THAN SPORTS

GUARDIAN, UK - Far more people are interested in history than football, according to a poll finding which may be particularly true today. . . The Mori poll showed that 73% were interested in history, compared with 59% in sport in general and 48% in football.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/news/story/0,,1811361,00.html

LIBERAL EDUCATION IN TROUBLE

SCOTT JASCHIK, BOSTON GLOBE - Earlier this month, [Dartmouth faculty] gathered academic luminaries like Anthony Grafton, Steven Pinker, Louis Menand, Elaine Scarry, Nicholas Negroponte, and others for an intense, two-day discussion under the stark heading "The Liberal Education: Dead or Alive?"

While most of those who gathered here would answer "alive," some might add: "barely." The latter pointed to students who flock to business programs, administrators who evaluate courses based on how much tuition revenue they bring in, and a society as a whole that doesn't seem to much care. Some even argued that it is time for liberal-arts institutions to start doing what would have been unthinkable a short time ago: focus more on students' career needs. . .

The fact that professors at Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth are worried about the health of liberal education is noteworthy. If the liberal arts are perceived to be struggling at these institutions, does liberal education stand a chance anywhere?

Keynote speaker Raimond Gaita, a philosopher at King's College London, kicked off the conference with an anecdote about a gathering of leading philosophers at Leeds early in the Thatcher years, when universities felt under siege from the market-oriented conservative government. If a university eliminated its philosophy department, they told a junior government minister they had invited, it couldn't be called a university. "That's OK," the minister replied. "We'll call it something else."

But for Gaita, it's not just budget-cutting conservatives who must be defended against. He reserves a special scorn for academic leaders who have "debased" the academy by pretending that fields like hospitality and gaming Studies have a place at a university. A true liberal education, he says one in which learning is pursued for its own sake, and is based on the idea that broad literacy prepares students to act as educated, enlightened citizens requires a "community of scholars" who are not worried about job-placement rates, or the relevance of their work to government officials, and who view a life of scholarship "as a vocation," not simply a career. "We couldn't well imagine Socrates taking early retirement," Gaita said.

PATHOLOGICAL DISBELIEF

["Pathological Disbelief" was the title of a lecture by 1973 Nobel Prize winner Brian D. Josephson, who teaches physics at the University of Cambridge, delivered at the 2004 Lindau meeting of Nobel Laureates. It describes a problem for science but also one for journalism which has over the past few decades moved from ubiquitous skepticism to ubiquitous condemnation of skepticism, most popularly expressed in labeling the skeptic a "conspiracy theorist."

Josephson, incidentally, cites the treatment of cold fusion as an example. Some readers may recall that the Review is one of a tiny number of publications that has treated research into cold fusion as newsworthy - not because this research will necessarily pan out but because the suppression of this research by both science and journalism violated the objective principles of both trades.]

BRIAN D. JOSEPHSON - This talk mirrors "Pathological Science", a lecture given by Chemistry Laureate Irving Langmuir. Langmuir discussed cases where scientists, on the basis of invalid processes, claimed the validity of phenomena that were unreal. My interest is in the counter-pathology involving cases where phenomena that are almost certainly real are rejected by the scientific community, for reasons that are just as invalid as those of the cases described by Langmuir.

Alfred Wegener's continental drift proposal provides a good example, being simply dismissed by most scientists at the time, despite the overwhelming evidence in its favour. In such situations incredulity, expressed strongly by the disbelievers, frequently takes over: no longer is the question that of the truth or falsity of the claims; instead, the agenda centers on denunciation of the claims. . . In this "denunciation mode", the usual scientific care is absent; pseudo-arguments often take the place of scientific ones. . .

Other popular forms of attack are "if X were true we would have to start over again" (as we of course had to do with relativity and quantum theory, and so the argument proves nothing), and then there is the dictum "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", which has the marvelous feature of allowing the requirements for acceptable proof to be stretched indefinitely as more and more support for a contested claim comes in. Its originator, the late Marcello Truzzi, later decided that his comment was 'a non sequitur, meaningless and question-begging', and had planned to write a debunking of his own creation.

"Cold fusion" appears to be the modern equivalent to continental drift, starting with the controversial claim, made by Pons and Fleischmann in 1989, to have generated in an electrochemical cell heat considerably in excess of anything explicable in conventional terms. This provoked hostile reaction: ignoring the possibility that an aggregate of ions in a condensed matter matrix may behave differently to a collection of freely moving ones, it was asserted that nuclear fusion could not be responsible for the claimed excess heat.

Then came 'failure to replicate' by a number of groups, equated with the non-existence of the phenomenon, ignoring the fact that if different groups get different results there can be two explanations, one that the people who see some effects are bad experimenters, and the other that they were in fact better at creating the precise conditions needed for an effect to be seen.

Usually in such cases time tells which side is right, but here the steadily mounting evidence that there was a real effect was suppressed through the publication policies of the major journals. Consequently, these apparently supportive results are not known to most scientists, who simply take it for granted that the Pons-Fleischmann claims have been disproved.

In an attempt to promote proper discussion of the issue, I tried in 2002 to upload a survey by Storms to the preprint server arxiv.org, the natural place for facilitating such discussion, but the moderators frustrated this intent by deleting the review, declaring it "inappropriate" (chemists, being a more robust species than physicists, were permitted to see it on their own server chemweb.com).

A breath of fresh air has been introduced into the situation now, with the recent decision of the US Department of Energy to review the research; if the reviewers simply look at some of the research going on they will almost inevitably conclude that fusion can take place at ordinary temperatures, with a yield far in excess of the 'almost undetectable level' referred to in Langmuir's lecture.

The overall situation seems profoundly unsatisfactory. The system built up over the years to promote scientific advance has become one that narrow-minded people can use to block any advance that they deem unacceptable. This demands urgent review: otherwise, just as astronomy became fixated on the reasonably accurate, but wrong, Ptolemaic model, science will become fixated in a respectable, but inaccurate, view of reality.

MARTIN SELIGMAN ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HAPPINESS

THE EDGE - Clinical psychology, social psychology has, in our lifetimes, been able to relieve an enormous amount of suffering, notes Martin Seligman. "Can psychologists can make people lastingly happier?" he asks.

"We are able to look at the causal skein of mental illness and unravel it, either by longitudinal studies - the same people over time - or experimental studies, which would get rid of third variables...We're able to create treatments - drugs, psychotherapy - and do random assignment placebo control studies to find out which ones really worked and which ones were inert." But, he notes that one result of this success is that 90% of the science in psychology is now based on the disease model, and this has resulted in three costs:

"The first one was moral, that we became victimologists and pathologizers. Our view of human nature was that mental illness fell on you like a ton of bricks, and we forgot about notions like choice, responsibility, preference, will, character, and the like. The second cost was that by working only on mental illness we forgot about making the lives of relatively untroubled people happier, more productive, and more fulfilling. And we completely forgot about genius, which became a dirty word. The third cost was that because we were trying to undo pathology we didn't develop interventions to make people happier; we developed interventions to make people less miserable."

Since 1996, Seligman, the Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at U Penn, has been president of the American Psychological Association. His aim for the coming years is that "we will be able to make the parallel claim about happiness; that is, in the same way I can claim unblushingly that psychology and psychiatry have decreased the tonnage of suffering in the world, my aim is that psychology and maybe psychiatry will increase the tonnage of happiness in the world."

Central to Seligman's positive psychology is "eudaemonia, the good life, which is what Thomas Jefferson and Aristotle meant by the pursuit of happiness. They did not mean smiling a lot and giggling. Aristotle talks about the pleasures of contemplation and the pleasures of good conversation. Aristotle is not talking about raw feeling, about thrills, about orgasms. Aristotle is talking about what Mike Csikszentmihalyi works on, and that is, when one has a good conversation, when one contemplates well. When one is in eudaemonia, time stops. You feel completely at home. Self-consciousness is blocked. You're one with the music."

"The good life consists of the roots that lead to flow. It consists of first knowing what your signature strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them more - recrafting your work, your romance, your friendships, your leisure, and your parenting to deploy the things you're best at. What you get out of that is not the propensity to giggle a lot; what you get is flow, and the more you deploy your highest strengths the more flow you get in life."

IN DEFENSE OF THE MEDIAEVAL ERA

[This we find interesting because we've been telling folks that we living in a new Middle Ages, only with the mythology being determined by cable television instead of the church. Glad to know it wasn't as bad a time as we thought]

TERRY JONES, OBSERVER - The main reason I wanted to make 'Medieval Lives' was to get my own back on the Renaissance. It's not that the Renaissance has ever done me any harm personally, you understand. It's just that I'm sick of the way people's eyes light up when they start talking about the Renaissance. I'm sick of the way art critics tend to say: 'Aaaah! The Renaissance!' with that deeply self-satisfied air of someone who is at last getting down to the Real Thing. And I'm sick to death of that ridiculous assumption that that before the Renaissance human beings had no sense of individuality. . .

The Renaissance was a backward-looking movement that hailed the distant past - ancient Greece and ancient Rome - as the only source of enlightenment. Petrarch, a Renaissance writer, wanted to put the clock back and to return to writing in Latin. And not just the Latin that was then current. He wanted to return to classical Latin. The Latin that was then current and still being spoken in the churches and monasteries was condemned as deficient. Rather than reviving Latin, the Renaissance killed it stone dead as a spoken language.

Chaucer, Boccaccio and Dante (although writing at the same time as Petrarch) wrote in the vernacular. They also celebrated the vitality, exuberance and individuality of ordinary men and women. They were the modernists and in that way they were truly medieval. Petrarch was the backwards-looking conservative. The proud despiser of the common people. The willing servant of a tyrant such as Bernabo Visconti. Petrarch provides a prototype for the Renaissance and for much of what follows.

In order to sell their package of conservative intellectual authoritarianism, the writers of the Renaissance had to make out that the intervening centuries were a time of darkness and ignorance into which they would now shine the light of ancient knowledge.

The distortions, obfuscations and downright lies which they and admirers of the Renaissance ever since have fastened onto the Middle Ages still infect our historical vision. The very fact that we call that period (whatever it is) 'the Middle Ages' is but one example. The idea that it is a limbo between the bright lights of the classical World and the even brighter lights of the Renaissance is enshrined there in the very title.

But the medieval world wasn't a time of stagnation or ignorance. A lot of what we assume to be medieval ignorance is, in fact, our own ignorance about the medieval world.

ACADEMICS FINALLY DISCOVER
POSTMODERN THEORY DOESN'T WORK

DAVID KIRBY, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR - Postmodern literary theory is now transforming itself so rapidly that Marxist, feminist, deconstructionist, and psychoanalytic critics (and others) are flocking back to the drawing board in droves as they search for new approaches to writing and teaching. Indeed, some academics say that postmodern theory is on the way out altogether and that the heady ideas that once changed the way literature is taught and read will soon be as extinct as the dodo and the buggy whip.

According to some, theory has been losing its grip on academia for years now. "For me, theory reached its apogee in the early 1980's and has since been declining," says Roger Lathbury, professor of American fiction at George Mason University. Today, he says, it's a matter of "the pendulum swinging toward the center.". . .

And in his new book "After Theory," Terry Eagleton of Manchester University argues that postmodern literary theory (which he defines as "the contemporary movement of thought which rejects . . . the possibility of objective knowledge" and is therefore "skeptical of truth, unity, and progress") was relevant in its heyday, but no more. . .

Postmodern literary theory is rooted in mid-century European philosophy, though it didn't begin to catch on in America until the late '60s; the Johns Hopkins University conference on "The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man" which featured Jacques Derrida and other master theoreticians took place in 1966 and is generally regarded as the theoretical equivalent of the Pilgrims' landing at Plymouth Rock.

SAM SMITH, 'SHADOWS OF HOPE', 1994 - Of course, in the postmodern society that Clinton proposes -- one that rises above the false teachings of ideology -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism. Among equals, indifference to shared meaning might produce nothing worse than lengthy argument. But when the postmodernist is President of the United States, the impulse becomes a 500-pound gorilla to be fed, as they say, anything it wants.

ALL POWER CORRUPTS; POWERPOINT CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY

SHANTHI MANIAN, GEORGETOWN VOICE - PowerPoint's latest destination seems to be the classroom. More and more teachers from elementary schools to universities are abandoning blackboards for computer screens, or using a combination of the two. But even as many professors are enthusiastically adding PowerPoint to their toolbox, some wonder whether it belongs there at all. "It's only a little better than teaching children to smoke cigarettes," said analytical design expert Edward Tufte about PowerPoint in the classroom. Tufte says PowerPoint's low-resolution and bullet-point style make the presentation of complex concepts impossible. Lecturers try to compensate for the thin, oversimplified content with animations and tricks, a phenomenon labeled "PowerPointlessness" by Jamie McKenzie, the editor of From Now On: The Education Technology Journal. But Tufte and McKenzie say that bright colors, music, and animations fail to disguise what Tufte calls a "poverty of content."

"A vicious circle results," Tufte said. "Thin content leads to boring presentations. To make them unboring, PowerPoint Phluff [extraneous elements such as animations] is added, damaging the content, making the presentations even more boring." But Tufte and McKenzie's criticisms of PowerPoint are not restricted to its many extraneous features, however. Tufte says the limitations of the software are so severe that it can never be used in a positive way. In his essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, he reviews the flaws that inherently doom PowerPoint users to failure.

Vague, broad ideas forced into artificial hierarchies characterize virtually all PowerPoint presentations, according to Tufte. Because slides projected onto a wall or screen are of such low resolution, he argues, each slide can only hold a few words. It is simply an issue of space: Complex statements do not fit on a PowerPoint slide.

The lack of space also forces the viewer to see data or graphs in a sequence, rather than all at once. It is much easier to analyze two graphs drawn side-by-side on a blackboard than two graphs that can only be viewed one at a time, Tufte says. For this reason PowerPoint does not effectively communicate important information.

Moreover, the bullet style of PowerPoint forces complex ideas into short "catch phrases," Tufte says. And bulleted lists can imply causality where it does not exist. When three items are in a list, the relationship between those three items is unclear - does one cause another? Do they happen simultaneously? "Bullet outlines might be useful in presentations now and then, but sentences with subjects and verbs are usually better," Tufte wrote in his essay.

THE POLITICS OF BIKE RIDING

ELANOR TAYLOR, SIRC - Critical Mass has existed as an "unorganised coincidence" since the early nineties, when a group of cyclists in San Francisco decided to cycle home from work en masse on the last Friday of every month. The initial numbers involved were small — around 45-50 attending the first rides — but the movement (if it can be called this) has blossomed into a world-wide phenomenon, with rides across the globe attracting thousands of cyclists and Critical Mass itself becoming a symbol of successful, peaceful protest. However, the word "protest" is a loaded one, and despite the significant presence of Critical Mass cyclists at events like anti-capitalist May Day protests and marches against the 2003 Iraq war, Critical Mass literature is keen to emphasise the lack of dogmatic ideology behind the rides themselves. As Chris Carlsson, one of the founders of the San Francisco CM, puts it:

"It is inherently anti-corporate even though there are more uncritical supporters of the American Empire and its moneyed interests riding along than there are blazing subversives, which is just another of the many pleasant ironies of Critical Mass."

Indeed, Critical Mass web sites (of which there are many, with no one site acting as a main resource or home page) emphasise the idea of a "Xerocracy" between cyclists, in that anyone can bring printed materials — flyers, pamphlets etc — to distribute at a Critical Mass ride without the content of this material being seen to be entirely representative of Critical Mass itself. This emphasizes further the idea that nothing, beyond riding bikes in large groups, actually represents Critical Mass thinking. There are as many ideologies as there are cyclists on the rides, which makes Critical Mass simple to become a part of and yet difficult to define.

While Critical Mass rides clearly have something to say about the car-dominated state of transport systems, it would be wrong to categorize CM as an "anti-car" movement. Many of those who attend the rides also drive cars on other days, while some of those held up in cars at intersections by CM rides will also be keen cyclists. The essence of CM, if such a thing can be spoken of, goes beyond the idea of simple transport and holds the bicycle up as a symbol of a different world, a contrasting mode of existence to that represented and dominated by the car. To quote Carlsson again:

"When I bicycle around town I see things happening and can stop and explore them in depth with no hassles. I also see my friends and acquaintances and can stop and speak with them directly. This, combined with the absence of mass media pumping into my brain in the isolation of my car, sets up organic links and direct channels of human experience and communication." (Carlsson, "Bicycling Over the Rainbow")

GOOD READS
A. J. LIEBLING & EARL LONG

JONATHAN YARDLEY WASHINGTON POST - Turn to the opening sentences of A.J. Liebling's "The Earl of Louisiana," and three things happen. You are dazzled by the wit and acuity of Liebling's prose, you want to keep on reading for as long as he keeps on writing, and you are struck by how deeply the character of American politics has changed in the four-plus decades since "The Earl of Louisiana" was first published. To wit:

"Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas -- stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows."

That was 1960, when the first article in Liebling's series about Earl Long, then governor of Louisiana, appeared in the New Yorker. . .

Even Louisiana is sliding into the monotony of the mainstream -- Louisiana, where, as Liebling fondly wrote, "denials . . . are accepted as affirmations, and it is held a breach of the code for a public man to deny anything that isn't so." . . .

To get into the rhythm of things, a few quotations are in order. Here, for example, Earl is asked by a reporter "whether he could manage his legislators." His reply: "You know, the Bible says that before the end of time billy goats, tigers, rabbits and house cats are all going to sleep together. My gang looks like the Biblical proposition is here." Here he discusses his libel suit against Henry Luce's Time-Life empire: "The Luce people been going on too long picking on people too poor to sue them, and now they're going to get it in the neck. Mr. Luce is like a man that owns a shoe store and buys all the shoes to fit himself.". . .

Here, as icing on the cake, is an episode at the gubernatorial dinner table:

"One of the women guests, a Northerner, inadvertently sat on a jacket a political gent had laid aside. It was a silvery Dacron-Acrilan-nylon-airpox miracle weave nubbled in Danish-blue asterisks. She made one whoop and rose vertically, like a helicopter. She had sat on his gun, an article of apparel that in Louisiana is considered as essential as a zipper. Eyebrows rose about as rapidly as she did, and by the time she came down she decided that comment would be considered an affectation."

THE MYTH OF WESTERN MODERNITY VS. EASTERN PRIMITIVENESS

[From a five part series in the Asia Times]

HENRY C K LIU, ASIA TIMES - The United States defines its global "war on terrorism" as a defensive effort to protect its way of life, beyond attacks from enemies with alien cultural and religious motives, to attacks from those who reject modernity itself. This definition is derived from the views of historian Bernard Lewis, a scholar of Islamic culture at Princeton University, who traces Islamic opposition to the West beyond hostility to specific interests or actions or policies or even countries, to rejection of Western civilization for what it is. To Lewis, Western civilization stands for modernity. This anti-modernity attitude, he warns, is what lends support to the ready use of terror by Islamic fundamentalists. . .

Tu Weiming, professor of Chinese history and philosophy and director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute at Harvard University, wrote: "Hegel, [Karl] Marx and Max Weber all shared the ethos that, despite all its shortcomings, the modern West informed by the Enlightenment mentality was the only arena where the true difference for the rest of the world could be made." . . .

Tu suggests that, in the global context, what some of the most brilliant minds in the modern West assumed to be self-evidently true turned out to be parochial. In the rest of the world and, arguably, in Western Europe and North America, the anticipated clear transition from tradition to modernity never occurred. As a norm, traditions continue to make their presence in modernity and, indeed, the modernizing process itself is constantly shaped by a variety of cultural forms rooted in distinct traditions. The recognition of the relevance of radical otherness to one's own self-understanding of the 18th century seems more applicable to the current situation in the global community than the inattention to any challenges to the modern Western mindset of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. For example, the outstanding Enlightenment thinkers such as Francois Arouet de Voltaire, Gottfried Leibniz and Jean Jacques Rousseau took China as their major reference society and Confucianism as their major reference culture. It seems that toward the 21st century, the openness of the 18th century, as contrasted with the exclusivity of the 19th century, may provide a better guide for the dialogue of civilizations. . .

In Tu's view, East Asian modernity under the influence of Confucian traditions suggests an alternative model to Western modernism:

(1) Government leadership in a market economy is not only necessary but is also desirable. The doctrine that government is a necessary evil and that the market in itself can provide an "invisible hand" for ordering society is antithetical to modern experience in either the West or the East. A government that is responsive to public needs, responsible for the welfare of the people and accountable to society at large is vitally important for the creation and maintenance of order.

(2) Although law is essential as the minimum requirement for social stability, "organic solidarity" can only result from the implementation of humane rites of interaction. The civilized mode of conduct can never be communicated through coercion. Exemplary teaching as a standard of inspiration invites voluntary participation. Law alone cannot generate a sense of shame to guide civilized behavior. It is the ritual act that encourages people to live up to their own aspirations.

(3) Family as the basic unit of society is the locus from which the core values are transmitted. The dyadic relationships within the family, differentiated by age, gender, authority, status, and hierarchy, provide a richly textured natural environment for learning the proper way of being human. The principle of reciprocity, as a two-way traffic of human interaction, defines all forms of human-relatedness in the family. . .

(4) Civil society flourishes not because it is an autonomous arena above the family and beyond the state. Its inner strength lies in its dynamic interplay between family and state. The image of the family as a microcosm of the state and the ideal of the state as an enlargement of the family indicate that family stability is vitally important for the body politic and a vitally important function of the state is to ensure organic solidarity of the family. . .

(5) Education ought to be the civil religion of society. The primary purpose of education is character-building. Intent on the cultivation of the full person, schools should emphasize ethical as well as cognitive intelligence. Schools should teach the art of accumulating "social capital" through communication. . .

(6) Since self-cultivation is the root for the regulation of family, governance of state, and peace under heaven, the quality of life of a particular society depends on the level of self-cultivation of its members. A society that encourages self-cultivation as a necessary condition for human flourishing is a society that cherishes virtue-centered political leadership, mutual exhortation as a communal way of self-realization, the value of the family as the proper home for learning to be human, civility as the normal pattern of human interaction and, education as character-building.

SHARED LIBRARY PROGRAM IN SAN FRANCISCO

COMMUNITY BOOKS - The Distributed Library Project is an experiment in sharing information and building community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately, the traditional library system doesn't do much to foster community. Patrons come and go, but there is very little opportunity to establish relationships with people or groups of people. In fact, if you try to talk with someone holding a book you like - you'll probably get shushed. The Distributed Library Project works in exactly the opposite way, where the very function of the library depends on interaction.

How does it work?

Create an account, then list the books and videos that you own. You will then have access to the multitude of books and videos available in other people's collections. You can search for specific authors or titles, browse individual collections, find nearby users, or find people who like books in common with yours. You will have access to user-written reviews and have the opportunity to write your own.

If the owner of a book or video you're interested in has time for you to pick it up, you can check out items for a 2, 7, 14, or 30 day period (at the owner's discretion). Returning books late will get you negative feedback, while returning books promptly will get you positive feedback. You are never under any obligation to lend an item if you don't feel comfortable doing so.

How do you manage trust?

While this is a community site based on good will, we have an ebay-style feedback system for managing trust. Lenders have the opportunity to leave positive or negative feedback for borrowers when an item is returned. These positive or negative points contribute to an overall "score" which lenders can use to gauge the trustworthiness or responsibility of a borrower. Lenders can also leave comments along with the points to be more specific.

POWERPOINT CORRUPTS ABSOLUTELY

EDWARD TUFTE, WIRED - Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware - computer programs for presentations - is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch. . .

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay explaining something.

In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds' worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another.

JOHN SCHWARTZ, NY TIMES - Critics have complained about the computerized slide shows, produced with the ubiquitous software from Microsoft, since the technology was first introduced 10 years ago. Last week, The New Yorker magazine included a cartoon showing a job interview in hell: "I need someone well versed in the art of torture," the interviewer says. "Do you know Power Point?"

Once upon a time, a party host could send dread through the room by saying, "Let me show you the slides from our trip!" Now, that dread has spread to every corner of the culture, with schoolchildren using the program to write book reports, and corporate managers blinking mindlessly at Power Point charts and bullet lists projected onto giant screens . . .

Before the fatal end of the shuttle Columbia's mission last January, with the craft still orbiting the earth, NASA engineers used a Power Point presentation to describe their investigation into whether a piece of foam that struck the shuttle's wing during launching had caused serious damage. Edward Tufte, a Yale professor who is an influential expert on the presentation of visual information, published a critique of that presentation on the World Wide Web last March. A key slide, he said, was "a Power Point festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism."

Among other problems, Mr. Tufte said, a crucial piece of information - that the chunk of foam was hundreds of times larger than anything that had ever been tested - was relegated to the last point on the slide, squeezed into insignificance on a frame that suggested damage to the wing was minor.

The independent board that investigated the Columbia disaster devoted an entire page of its final report last month to Mr. Tufte's analysis. . . In fact, the board said: "During its investigation, the board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The board views the endemic use of Power Point briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA."

HISTORY IS MORE THAN AN EXPERIENCE

JOSIE APPLETON, SPIKED ONLINE - If the past is a foreign country, some history students seem to be finding it difficult even leaving their home town. A survey from History Today magazine has discovered that new students find nineteenth century history 'unappetisingly strange' - opting instead to tread the paths of the twentieth century that they covered at A-level. Their focus is on familiar morality tales of 'men with moustaches' - 'twentieth century dictators in general and Hitler in particular'

. . . And the history book itself is going out of fashion. John Gooch from Leeds University says that very few A-level students have read 'even one history book all the way through'. And they can do pretty well without, it seems - Gooch says that one candidate for an academic post at Leeds admitted to having worked solely from duplicated notes as an undergraduate, without opening the pages of a book.

. . . Instead, there is a preference for more bite-sized, experiential media, like TV history programs or websites. Apparently, TV provides a model for what students expect from their university courses, as something involving 'color, action, biography and narrative'. There are complaints that students see history as 'basically a narrative, descriptive subject', and 'expect to be told stories rather than acquire the skills of the historian'.

. . . The UK government's Holocaust Memorial Day attempts to discuss the Holocaust in the light of everyday experiences of bullying and bigotry. The teachers' pack for children suggests a number of different suggested 'reflections', or themes for assemblies - including 'being different', 'being in a foreign country without a family' and 'individual responsibility' The specific context that led to the horror of the Holocaust is ignored. Students are encouraged to talk, not about Europe in the 1930s and 40s, but the way that they relate to each other in the playground. The Holocaust Memorial Day Working Group said that: 'We are all individually responsible to ensure that we are active citizens and do not stand by while others are being victimized or persecuted.' It would be of little surprise if kids saw the Holocaust as something like calling people names (but worse), and Hitler as something like a bad guy on a film (but worse).

. . . At the Imperial War Museum in London, there is a 'blitz experience', a 'trench experience' and a '1940s House exhibition' - all complete with sounds, lights and smells to help recreate the sense of life at those times. The museum offers trips for schoolchildren, where an 'actor interpreter' will show them around the exhibition (4).

. . . For a start, it's impossible to recreate the experience of the past. The main business of the First World War 'trench experience' - killing and the threat of death - is impossible to convey through noise and lights. The noise and lights derive not from history, but from the present manipulations of Imperial War Museum curators.

. . .
If we study artifacts, documents and history books, and ask the right questions of them, we can grasp something of what history was like. In doing this, we bring it within the purview of our present understanding. If we try to see it all in terms of images, stories and colors, then everything seems comfortable and familiar. But in reality, the past then really does become a foreign country.

RICHARD CHANG, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER: Just as the economy has stalled during the past year, Orange County's top museums have seen downturns in income and attendance recently. Attendance has dropped significantly at the Orange County Museum of Art during the past two years. And after years of surplus, the museum is expecting to just break even with a lower budget for fiscal year 2000-01 . . . During fiscal year 1999-2000, OCMA saw its revenue rise to $4.88 million, with a $430,969 surplus, according to audited financial statements. Contributions hit $2.58 million, up from $900,000 the previous year. But revenue shrank to an estimated $3.2 million for fiscal 2000-01, and a notable surplus is not expected. Contributions dropped about $500,000, to $2.1 million. Admissions, too, have taken a downturn: 311,298 visited the museum's Newport Beach and South Coast Plaza facilities in 1998-99; 247,035 attended in 1999-2000; and 202,780 visited in 2000-01.

BR MYERS, ATLANTIC MONTHLY: Today any accessible, fast-moving story written in unaffected prose is deemed to be "genre fiction" - at best an excellent "read" or a "page turner," but never literature with a capital L. An author with a track record of blockbusters may find the publication of a new work treated like a pop-culture event, but most "genre" novels are lucky to get an inch in the back pages of The New York Times Book Review. Everything written in self-conscious, writerly prose, on the other hand, is now considered to be "literary fiction"-not necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance. It is these works that receive full-page critiques, often one in the Sunday book-review section and another in the same newspaper during the week. It is these works, and these works only, that make the annual short lists of award committees. The "literary" writer need not be an intellectual one. Jeering at status-conscious consumers, bandying about words like "ontological" and "nominalism," chanting Red River hokum as if it were from a lost book of the Old Testament: this is what passes for profundity in novels these days. Even the most obvious triteness is acceptable, provided it comes with a postmodern wink. What is not tolerated is a strong element of action - unless, of course, the idiom is obtrusive enough to keep suspense to a minimum. Conversely, a natural prose style can be pardoned if a novel's pace is slow enough . . .

KEN KEUFFEL, WALL STREET JOURNAL on The seventh National Black Theatre Festival: As many as 50,000 patrons will take in plays, musicals, readings and seminars all over town. Actors who are just starting out will get to test their mettle on stage, often rubbing elbows with celebrities in the process. New plays will emerge, and old ones will gain valuable national exposure . . . The effects will be felt not just in Winston-Salem, though. The festival, which runs through Saturday, provides a much-needed infusion of energy for the nation's struggling black-theater scene. The number of black-theater companies in the country, professional and amateur, has decreased dramatically over the past 10 years. Victor Leo Walker, a former theater professor, runs the African Grove Institute for the Arts, a service organization for black theaters. He said that there were about 200 companies in the 1970s and '80s; now, there are fewer than 50. Moreover, companies that made their mark by developing the best acting and playwright talent - including Crossroads Theatre Company in New Jersey and the Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles - have gone under. Many others are operating in the red. Given that situation, the festival, which is the only one of its kind in the country, offers hope that black theater will continue to survive, no matter how dire the financial situations of many companies become. The event, which is held every other summer, has become a dependable place for actors, directors, playwrights and producers to network and recharge their batteries.

MARJORIE COEYMAN, CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: For decades, large publishing houses paid scant attention to the interests of African-American readers. Then "in 1992, everything just changed," says Emma Rodgers, co-owner of Black Images Book Bazaar in Dallas. That year, Terry MacMillan published "Waiting to Exhale," and for a time, she, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker were simultaneously top-selling authors. "The market was always there" for books by and about blacks, says Ms. Rodgers. "But suddenly the mainstream publishers discovered it." They have since been moving rapidly to mine it. Seven publishing imprints dedicated to books by black authors have been created or revived by major publishing houses in the past couple of years. Black novelists like E. Lynn Harris and Lalita Tademy currently enjoy red-hot reputations.

NEIL POSTMAN'S FIVE IDEAS
ON TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

NEIL POSTMAN: These are my five ideas about technological change. First, that we always pay a price for technology; the greater the technology, the greater the price. Second, that there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners. Third, that there is embedded in every great technology an epistemological, political or social prejudice. Sometimes that bias is greatly to our advantage. Sometimes it is not. The printing press annihilated the oral tradition; telegraphy annihilated space; television has humiliated the word; the computer, perhaps, will degrade community life. And so on. Fourth, technological change is not additive; it is ecological, which means, it changes everything and is, therefore, too important to be left entirely in the hands of Bill Gates. And fifth, technology tends to become mythic; that is, perceived as part of the natural order of things, and therefore tends to control more of our lives than is good for us . . . In the past, we experienced technological change in the manner of sleep-walkers. Our unspoken slogan has been "technology über alles," and we have been willing to shape our lives to fit the requirements of technology, not the requirements of culture. This is a form of stupidity, especially in an age of vast technological change. We need to proceed with our eyes wide open so that we may use technology rather than be used by it.

FULL ADDRESS

CLIVE THOMPSON, LINQUA FRANCA: Florence Rossignol has just finished using an on-line travel site to plan a package tour across Europe. The site has prompted her for a few facts about herself: her date of birth, her education and nationality, her occupation. She has typed in that she was born in 1945 and trained as a nurse. She has also volunteered the fact that she is claustrophobic. As far as on-line shopping goes, it looks like an everyday event. Except this Web site is smart-unusually smart. It has been outfitted with a copy of Cyc (pronounced sike), artificial-intelligence software touted for its ability to process information with humanlike common sense. At one point, Cyc detects a problem: The proposed tour involves taking the Channel Tunnel from London to France; Rossignol is claustrophobic. The Web site notes that Rossignol "may dislike" the Channel Tunnel, and Cyc justifies the assertion with a series of ten related statements, including:

31 miles is greater than 50 feet. The Channel Tunnel is 31 miles long. Florence Rossignol suffers from claustrophobia. Any path longer than 50 feet should be considered "long" in a travel context. If a long tunnel is a route used by a tour, a claustrophobic person taking the tour might dislike the tunnel.

At the same time, Cyc scours the list of various cities on the tour and takes special notice of Geneva, where one can visit the Red Cross Museum. This time, Cyc's thinking features the following steps: The Red Cross Museum is found in Geneva. Florence Rossignol is a nurse. Nursing is what nurses do. The Red Cross Museum (organization) has nursing as its "focus." If an organization has a particular type of activity as its "focus," and a person holds a position in which they perform that activity, that person will feel significantly about that organization.

Bingo. The travel site tells Rossignol to make sure she catches the Red Cross Museum in Geneva-but for God's sake, don't take the Channel Tunnel.

CULTURE

SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: It's no secret that large arts groups receive more donations than small ones, but the fund-raising disparity is widening in the Bay Area. Of nearly 950 arts and cultural groups in the Bay Area, just eight accounted for half the private contributions and government grants reported on tax returns filed in 1999, according to a Chronicle analysis of tax data compiled by the National Center for Charitable Statistics. Furthermore, the Bay Area's 25 biggest groups accounted for 68 percent of the contributions and grants received in the region in 1999, up from 64 percent five years earlier.

ZOOS

COLIN TUDGE, LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS: Many 'landscapes' in modern zoos are a sham: bad for the animals, useless for conservation. Gorillas, for example, may be shown these days among vague miscellanies of plants. These not only have more to do with Harrods' Floral Hall than with Central or West Africa but are kept apart from the beasts by artful sheets of plate glass . . . Some zoos spend huge sums on fiberglass trees with steel foliage; wonderful to the eye, perhaps, but lacking the unpredictable movement, the textures, smells and micro-fauna and flora that wild animals experience in real trees. Traditional zoos at least supply balls and tires, which offer some amusement. No such frivolity is allowed in the modern chocolate box displays in case it spoils the illusion . . . Similarly, in the name of 'education' modern zoos seek to present entire 'ecosystems' that are set, supposedly, in the animals' native countries - the 'zoo geographical' approach. But this, too, is largely spurious. Some animals are ineluctably wedded to particular vegetation, as koalas are to eucalyptus, and some pairs of creatures have co-evolved to the point where neither can do without the other, like the deep flowered orchids and the long-proboscised moths that Darwin described. But many creatures, like cockroaches and barn owls and big, intelligent mammals, can and do live almost anywhere. Tigers live in dense forest, up mountains, in swamps. Elephants generally prefer forest but often graze in open country. Ecologists have found, too, that whereas a particular mussel may cohabit with a particular clam in one place, it may well be found in completely different company elsewhere. Ecosystems, in short, are not scripted. Much of the time they are loose assemblages of creatures that happen to find themselves in each others' company, and rub along as best they can. Many animals live in particular places not because they are especially 'adapted' but almost entirely through contingency - and often enough because human beings have kicked them out of somewhere else. Lions do not live wild in Paris only because it is full of Parisians . . . Obviously, the ideal is to conserve wild animals in the wild. But this isn't always an option. Genetic theory suggests that unless there are around five hundred individuals in any one population, sooner or later, accidents and inbreeding will drive the group to extinction. But a single tiger needs up to a hundred square kilometers in which to hunt. How many reserves are there of fifty thousand square kilometers? There are many wild populations of tigers, but how many are viable, in all but the shortest term? Species like this need captive back-up, just to maintain the numbers; not all the time, but at least in those intervals (such as war) when the wild is too inhospitable. Few zoos are ideal for captive breeding but, faute de mieux, they must play their part. Of course, captive breeding cannot provide back-up for all the species endangered at any one time (the figure must run into millions), but then it isn't suitable for all of them. The big whales, for instance, are not good candidates. But it is ridiculous to write off a strategy that is necessary for some because it cannot be applied to all . . . The notion that tigers are not important 'ecologically' because they are at the top of the food chain, while mice are because they are nearer the bottom, is another piece of nonsense. In all ecosystems, influence flows both ways. The unfashionable notion of phylogeny also has a part to play in establishing conservation strategy. If we save one species of elephant from extinction, then we have conserved half of the great zoological order of the Proboscidea. But to conserve one beetle is to rescue just one in half a million of the order Coleoptera. Big animals matter for reasons of the crudest biology, as well as for their beauty and intelligence.MORE

[Colin Tudge is a former member of the Council of London Zoo.]

BBC: A new European deal to give artists a cut of the proceeds from the resale of their works has been agreed in Brussels. But in the UK the royalties will not start flowing in until 2012. The Government is holding out until the last moment before introducing the law. It fears London auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's would suffer if art owners took their paintings outside the EU in order to avoid handing over a cut of the sale . . . Once the law comes into force, authors of works of art will receive a royalty of up to 4% every time their original paintings, sculptures, or other artistic treasures are sold on by agents or at auction in Britain or anywhere else in the EU. The maximum an artist can receive on a single sale is pegged at £7,500. MORE

ENTROPY BEAT
Newspapers cut back book reviews

[The San Francisco Chronicle has done away with its pullout, 12-page book section and demoted book reviews to the back of its Sunday entertainment section, a tabloid called Datebook.]

SALON: The book editor at the time, David Kipen, was shifted to "book critic," responsible for reviewing two books per week, and Oscar got the job of overseeing Sunday's seven book pages, which now fall between "Dining Out" and "Get Together," the personals. The Chronicle has a Sunday circulation hovering around 1 million, making it one of the most widely read papers in the country. And it's not the only metropolitan daily to trim its book coverage this year. The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe have all put their papers on a diet by cutting back on book reviews. Even the nation's most influential Sunday book supplement, the New York Times Book Review, killed two pages, resulting in the loss of six "In Brief" write-ups and one full-page review . . .

The guiding philosophy of newspapers today may well be epitomized by this comment from Wall Street media analyst Laura Rich Fine: "Until you can show me that your subscribers are willing to pay more money because of the quality, I sort of feel like the average reader isn't that sensitive to the quality at a certain level, and you really do need to make decisions that sometimes seem short-term in nature, because you chose to go public, and shareholders really do deserve a return." . . .

The reason for the cuts is not exactly front-page news. In our "age of corporate newspapering," as the American Journalism Review calls it, the $60 billion-a-year newspaper industry is "now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling, and consolidating of newspapers."

To keep hitting those high quarterly profit targets, conglomerates such as Knight Ridder, which owns more than 50 papers, including the Mercury News; the Hearst Corp., which owns 30 papers, including the Chronicle; and the New York Times Co., which owns the Boston Globe, are streamlining costs at every turn -- including personnel. Knight Ridder and the New York Times Co. alone have laid off a total of 2,900 employees this year. MORE

TOM LOWE, JACKSON PROGRESSIVE: Several weeks ago we Mississippians voted to keep the Confederate battle flag in the corner of the Mississippi flag. As one who voted for the new flag - and was disappointed with the result - I've done my best to be philosophical in dealing with things I cannot change, and to ponder the significance of the decision . . . The author, after much thought on the subject, has reluctantly concluded that keeping the old flag was an act of honesty, even integrity, on the part of the voters. It is an admission that a deep ambivalence about race still permeates the state and its citizens. The new flag, in retrospect, would not have expressed the soul of this state: a highly individualistic culture with deep roots in conformity; the white matriarchy that skillfully disguises itself as a male-dominated macho regime; the denigration of the African-American that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy countless times in schools, businesses and courts of law; and all obscured by a cooperative denial of reality that occasionally makes the state resemble a mental institution, rather than merely a political subdivision. No, we did not make a mistake in voting for the old flag; it is an apt symbol for where we are and who we are as a people. No longer can we pretend that we are something that we are not. Keep the flag! Embrace it! Let it serve as a reminder of the formidable task ahead of us. To change it would be dishonest, to indulge in false advertising. Perhaps a time will come when we have truly put aside our nasty streak of racism. When that time arrives, maybe we will choose to replace the flag with something more representative of our ideals. On the other hand, when we reach that point, we may no longer care about the symbolism of the Confederate battle flag.

IS THOUGHT ENOUGH?

TOM STOPPARD, TIUMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT: I had used my speech to suggest that a fault line in the history of art had been crossed when it had become unnecessary for an artist to make anything, when the thought, the inspiration itself, had come to constitute the achievement, and I would have been pleased to see this phenomenon get an airing in the column inches which were devoted instead to parading the death of shorthand. I had decided to keep value judgements out of it, and I think I succeeded (I was speaking off the cuff) but the instructive thing about the press coverage and the letters I have received is that merely to describe the phenomenon ("An object can be a work of art just because the artist says it is") is to be taken to be attacking ithen did it stop being true that an artist is somebody who can do something more or less well which the rest of us can only do badly or not at all? If I were a conceptual artist, or a minimalist, I might answer that it was never true, or rather, never the point; the real point was that the artist made us see things we wouldn't otherwise see, and look at things in a new way, and that what I called a fault line was the realization that this could be achieved differently, not by being good at making something, but perhaps by relocating a familiar object in an unfamiliar context, or perhaps by removing the idea of skill from those shrines to skill known as art galleries . . . From the repudiation of the traditional idea of value, sprung on us by Duchamp's urinal 84 years ago, we have come to put a value on repudiation. And yet, there is a problem. In Peacock's novel 'Headlong Hall,' two sparring landscape gardeners, Milestone and Gall, are trying to impress the client:

Milestone: Sir, you will have the goodness to make a distinction between the picturesque and the beautiful.

Mr. Gall: I distinguish the picturesque and the beautiful, and I add to them, in the laying out of grounds, a third and distinct character, which I call unexpectedness.

Milestone: Pray, sir, by what name do you distinguish this character when a person walks round the grounds for the second time? MORE

CARL HONORÉ NATIONAL POST, CANADA: The famously blocked Englishman [Douglas Adams] died at the age of 49, leaving behind a string of broken deadlines, a manuscript that wasn't and a publisher badly out of pocket. In the early 1990s, Pan MacMillan paid Mr. Adams a hefty advance -- rumored to be around $4-million -- for a novel, The Salmon of Doubt. Now, nine years later, they have nothing to show for it. Though an assistant is busy scouring his personal computer for material, friends warn that, during a decade of procrastination, Mr. Adams wrote a grand total of eight pages of publishable text. "It is not fair on Douglas to pretend that he left us with a cache of work which he would be happy with releasing," one friend told the London Sunday Times. "He suffered from writer's block all of his life, and there came a point where he froze entirely." . . . Mr. Adams, who died of a heart attack at his gym in California, was a deadline-dodger par excellence. Despite his worldwide success -- Hitch-Hiker's Guide sold more than 10 million copies -- he always approached the blank page with a heavy heart . . . Earlier in his career, Mr. Adams's minders resorted to desperate measures to force him to put pen to paper. One editor set up her office in his dining room. Others simply put him under house arrest. Just before the deadline for his fourth novel, So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish (1984), his publishers installed Mr. Adams in a suite at the Berkeley Hotel, overlooking London's Hyde Park. They supplied him with smoked salmon sandwiches and a box of caffeine pills, making sure he did not wander too far from his desk. He eventually banged out the whole novel in two weeks. MORE

BBC: Scientists believe they may be closer to understanding why some people like pop music and others like classical. Psychiatric consultant Dr Raj Persaud of Maudsley Hospital in London believes his studies of dementia patients show a link between taste and "hard-nosed intellectual function" - in other words, appreciation of classical music may require more brain power. Persaud has observed that, as brain power diminishes in dementia patients, they sometimes go from liking classical to pop - but not the other way round. "What this may mean is that you require more gray matter to appreciate classical music and that you don't need so much gray matter to appreciate pop music, so as you lose gray matter your taste in music changes accordingly," said Dr Persaud . . . Some scientists believe Mozart can even reduce epileptic attacks MORE

THE WORD POLICE

THE BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL has banned the word "accident" from its pages but not without an outpouring of semantic arguments on both sides by its readers. Some of our favorites:

John McConnell, Editor, The Lancet Infectious Diseases: My first reaction to attempts to replace simple words whose meaning is innate to all native English speakers with circumlocutory contrivances ("prostitute" with "commercial sex worker" springs to mind) is to reach for my dictionary. To quote from Chambers English Dictionary - 7th ed (1989): "n. ac'cident that which happens: an unforeseen or unexpected event: a chance: a mishap: an unessential quality or property: unevenness of surface." If your editors agree with these definitions, I suspect that they will seldom find cases where "use of the term is inappropriate or misleading" because your new stricture on the use of accident invoke the exact instrument of hindsight. For example, if a healthcare worker unintentionally sticks herself or himself with a contaminated needle, they might look back on the incident and think "although I now realize I ignored years of training and acted carelessly, I failed to foresee the event at the time". That event is then clearly an accident by the dictionary definition. If on the other hand, a colleague had seen the healthcare worker handling the needle carelessly, immediately communicated their foresight, and the injury had still taken place, that is not an accident by the dictionary definition because the specific event was foreseen . . . Before trying to do away with accident, I urge you to use the benefit of hindsight. Deliberate attempts to change the use of words have failed almost without exception, whereas constant actual changes in language are an accident of history.

John Hopkins, GP Darlington: It is surprising the BMJ should associate itself with the somewhat Orwellian proposal that a particular word should be banned from use. Davis and Pless cite no evidence to suggest that by preventing "inappropriate" use of the word accident the world will become a safer place. It is arguable however that, in a small way, it will have become less liberal.

Dr. Nicholas Birkett, Associate Professor University of Ottawa: The implication behind the ban is that nothing happens by chance: we can always find a reason to blame for a bad event. This is a political, not a scientific statement. It is also wrong, as shown by your own examples of earthquakes or hurricanes. For a less dramatic example, if I play soccer and twist my ankle trying to kick the ball when no other players are around, I have been injured but it also was an accident. I have no one else to blame. To try and blame the groundskeeper is silly. To say I shouldn't have been playing is even sillier. Your position caters to the view that we should eliminate all risk from our lives. This is not only impossible but also not desirable.

Anna Whelan, Corporate Services Officer Orkney Islands Council: Attempts to substitute politically correct words for those in common parlance can lead to some daft terminology. One local newspaper in South West London persistently refers to pedestrian casualties as having been "in collision" with vehicles, suggesting a rather more equal contest than that experienced by the pedestrian, who would probably say that he or she has been knocked down or run over - if still in a position to comment at all. With hindsight, the pedestrian might agree that it was not a good idea to cross the road without looking, but he or she has probably done the same thing on many previous occasions without mishap. Statistically, there may have been the same probability of meeting a car each time, but humans do not conduct a Bayesian analysis every time they cross the road. After crossing the Cromwell Road twice a day for ten years I felt that a close encounter with a No. 74 bus was becoming a near certainty. Having now moved to Orkney, getting mown down by one would qualify as an achievement rather than an accident. Join the real, less than perfect world!

John Dutton, GP Principal: You are asking your editors to "be vigilant in detecting and rejecting inappropriate use of the 'A' word", but please don't come down too hard on them if they fail and the word slips through onto your pages. We your readers recognize that these things happen even in the best regulated circles. We will realize that it was just an accident.

Tim Marshall, senior lecturer university of Birmingham: 15-20 years ago a book called "Accidents Happen" included on the first page the following arresting sentence: "A submarine has collided with a bicycle, a yachtsman has had his bowsprit cut off by a railway train, and an aircraft has taken off towing a glider with neither craft having anyone on board." There is no hope for anyone not attracted by such extraordinary happenings, though all of them contained elements of thoughtlessness, ignorance, stupidity etc. which could (relatively) easily have been avoided. But how should we characterize the event where a bee landed on someone's snorkel, he breathed in, was stung in the mouth, and died? With hindsight we know that putting a mesh across the top of the snorkel would have stopped this, but hindsight is a wondrous thing not given to most of us in advance. Perhaps an accident could be described as something we haven't seen how to prevent, before it happens, but afterwards any repetition can be attributed to ignorance, carelessness etc.

David C Taylor, Visiting Professor Dept of Neurology Great Ormond St Hospital:
Your article offends because it contributes further to the culture of blame. You fail to notice that accidents are usually predictable retrospectively by detached and uninvolved observers separated from just those chance contingencies that set up that one tragedy that drew attention to the problem. It offends because it seeks to proscribe a word, to censor, in order to achieve an effect. It offends because that is a dangerous and totalitarian policy. MORE

CLAPPING AT JAZZ CONCERTS

JOHN SHAND, SIDNEY MORNING HERALD: Perhaps the weirdest thing about jazz concerts is the clapping. Back in the smoky past, someone was overcome by enthusiasm for a solo, and at its conclusion applauded vigorously, despite the music still being in full swing. Enthusiasm being as contagious as measles, others emulated the outburst, until the exception became the rule and it was mandatory to clap solos. Now they are clapped regardless of merit. People clap because they think it is the right thing to do, just as audiences at classical concerts don't clap between movements . . . The idea caught hold because a solo was seen as an individual's discrete creation within a piece of music which therefore deserved its own acknowledgment. Bunkum. This denigrates the accompanists, and in much classic and modern jazz, what is applauded as a solo is actually collective improvisation. Singling out one contribution is a mockery of that. The only forgivable reason for clapping solos is being so moved by the music that you cannot contain your appreciation until the end of the piece. But this does not constitute the bulk of applause. Many do it to show they know jazz protocol: that they can pick the right place to do so, thereby aligning themselves with a supposedly hip cognoscenti. What's so wrong with clapping? Most obviously, it drowns out the next few bars of the music - bars which may contain the most exquisite magic of the night, but the clappers (and everyone else) will never know because of the racket being made. Softer instruments such as basses suffer most in this regard. Those who applaud, say, a piano feature on a ballad while the bassist is beginning his or her solo have no idea how the new improvised narrative originated. It is as ludicrous as tearing the first pages out of a thriller and then trying to pick up the story.MORE

[Your editor, with 40 years of gigs under his fingers, will take applause wherever he can get it, one of the most memorable occasions being the Central Ohio Jazz Festival where his piano solo was greeted by a cacophony of cheap noise makers brought by a spirit-sated contingent from Cincinnati.I thought the piano was falling apart.]

THE DANGERS OF BREAD

KONFORMIST: More than 98 percent of convicted felons are bread users. Fully 50% of all children who grow up in bread-consuming households score below average on standardized tests.

In the 18th century, when virtually all bread was baked in the home, the average life expectancy was less than 50 years; infant mortality rates were unacceptably high; many women died in childbirth; and diseases such as typhoid, yellow fever, and influenza ravaged whole nations. Every piece of bread you eat brings you nearer to death. Bread is associated with all the major diseases of the body. For example, nearly all sick people have eaten bread. The effects are obviously cumulative:

a. 99.9% of all people who die from cancer have eaten bread.

b. 100% of all soldiers have eaten bread.

c. 96.9% of all Communist sympathizers have eaten bread.

d. 99.7% of the people involved in air and auto accidents ate bread within 6 months preceding the accident.

e. 93.1% of juvenile delinquents came from homes where bread is served frequently.

Evidence points to the long-term effects of bread eating: Of all the people born in 1839 who later dined on bread, there has been a 100% mortality rate. Bread is made from a substance called "dough." It has been proven that as little as one pound of dough can be used to suffocate a mouse. The average American eats more bread than that in one month! Primitive tribal societies that have no bread exhibit a low incidence of cancer, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and osteoporosis. Bread has been proven to be addictive. Subjects deprived of bread and given only water to eat begged for bread after as little as two days. Bread is often a "gateway" food item, leading the user to "harder" items such as butter, jelly, peanut butter, and even cold cuts. Bread has been proven to absorb water. Since the human body is more than 90 percent water, it follows that eating bread could lead to your body being taken over by this absorptive food product, turning you into a soggy, gooey bread-pudding person.<