Beyond Free Speech: Ahmadinejad at Columbia (on Video)

in Current Affairs | September 26th, 2007

There was a lot of hand-wring­ing lead­ing up to Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad’s appear­ance at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty on Mon­day. But, as it turns out, free­dom of speech seem­ing­ly worked as it was intend­ed. Ahmadine­jad entered the mar­ket­place of ideas and quick­ly came out the wrong side of the exchange. (You can watch the full video of his appear­ance here or read the tran­script here.) The decid­ing fac­tor was­n’t so much the unbe­com­ing intro­duc­tion offered by Lee Bollinger, Columbi­a’s pres­i­dent. It was more just a mat­ter of giv­ing Ahmadine­jad enough rope to hang him­self (i.e., let­ting him doubt the exis­tence of the Holo­caust and also gays in Iran) and then sit­ting back and watch­ing it hap­pen.

Of course, the “mar­ket­place of ideas” metaphor only goes so far when you’re deal­ing with inter­na­tion­al pol­i­tics. Ahmadine­jad’s speech was­n’t about win­ning a com­pe­ti­tion at Colum­bia. It was most­ly about play­ing to an audi­ence at home, one for whom his rhetor­i­cal strate­gies score points. But then there are the unin­tend­ed con­se­quences to con­sid­er. Far bet­ter than a dis­cred­it­ed Bush admin­is­tra­tion ever could, Ahmadine­jad real­is­ti­cal­ly soft­ened up the Amer­i­can pub­lic to any mil­i­tary plans that the US gov­ern­ment has on the table. At the very least, this has to qual­i­fy for a Dar­win Award. I’ll save fur­ther analy­sis for the pun­dits and talk­ing heads since I know that pol­i­tics and polit­i­cal opin­ions only go so far on this blog.

Relat­ed Note:

Last week, KQED’s Forum here in San Fran­cis­co had a good con­ver­sa­tion about free speech in the uni­ver­si­ty. It touched on Ahmadine­jad’s appear­ance at Colum­bia, but also Don Rums­feld’s invi­ta­tion to Stan­ford’s Hoover’s Insti­tu­tion and Lar­ry Sum­mers can­celed invi­ta­tion to speak before the UC Board of Regents. Lis­ten here: iTunes — Feed — Mp3 — Web site.

Halberstam’s The Coldest Winter

in Books | September 24th, 2007

David Halberstam’s no stranger to writ­ing big books about big wars, and he report­ed­ly thought of his final work, The Cold­est Win­ter: Amer­i­ca and the Kore­an War, as a “book­end” to his clas­sic on Viet­nam, The Best and the Bright­est. The book comes out this week with a very unusu­al pub­lic­i­ty blitz.

Hal­ber­stam died in a car crash last spring and so, remark­ably, a group of his friends are doing a pub­lic­i­ty tour for him. Authors like Joan Did­ion, Sey­mour Hersh, Bob Wood­ward and Anna Quindlen are tak­ing up legs of the gru­el­ing pub­lic­i­ty trek in hon­or of Hal­ber­stam. Accord­ing to the New York Times they will be “offer­ing per­son­al rem­i­nis­cences and read­ings” in an inter­est­ing com­bi­na­tion of festschrift and pro­mo­tion. The tour will start on Tues­day and run until Octo­ber 15^th. In the words of Sy Hersh, “Lis­ten, ain’t noth­ing like David — you don’t need this to keep David alive. You’ve got to mar­ket a book, let’s mar­ket a book, but he tran­scends that. He was a great war reporter and a great base­ball reporter, and the most loy­al per­son in the world.”

Relat­ed: See our piece from April, David Halberstam’s Last Speech and Sup­per.

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Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History

in Books, History, Most Popular | September 23rd, 2007

Here are a few facts to know about the adven­tur­ous Patrick Hunt. He’s a Stan­ford archae­ol­o­gist who has spent more than a decade try­ing to unrav­el the mys­tery of how Han­ni­bal, the great ancient mil­i­tary leader, crossed the Alps in 218 BCE with 25,000 men and 37 ele­phants. (Lis­ten on iTunes to the course he gave on this adven­ture, and get more info below). He has bro­ken more than 20 bones while doing field­work, fought off kid­nap­pers, and twice sur­vived sun­stroke-induced blind­ness. And now he has just pub­lished an excit­ing new book called Ten Dis­cov­er­ies That Rewrote His­to­ry. It’s pub­lished by Penguin/Plume and starts ship­ping tomor­row. I asked Patrick what makes these dis­cov­er­ies — rang­ing from the Roset­ta Stone to the Dead Sea Scrolls to Machu Pic­chu — so impor­tant. Below he gives us a brief glimpse into what makes each dis­cov­ery his­tor­i­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant and fas­ci­nat­ing. Read on, and check out his cap­ti­vat­ing new book for the fuller pic­ture.

Patrick Hunt: “First I should say that not every archae­ol­o­gist would agree that these are the ten most impor­tant dis­cov­er­ies of all time. On the oth­er hand, the ten sto­ries retold in this book are often regard­ed as among the most excit­ing archae­o­log­i­cal dis­cov­er­ies of the mod­ern era (since 1750). And no one would deny that these ten vital dis­cov­er­ies have for­ev­er changed the world of archae­ol­o­gy, trans­form­ing how and what we know about ancient his­to­ry. Let me tell you a lit­tle about them.

Roset­ta Stone: This excit­ing dis­cov­ery in 1799 was the key to deci­pher­ing Egypt­ian hiero­glyphs and unlock­ing the his­to­ry of the ancient world texts. It pro­vides a win­dow into the real his­to­ry of Egypt rather than an imag­i­nary one; all oth­er deci­pher­ings of ancient lan­guages since the Roset­ta Stone’s ini­tial decod­ing in 1822 are based on its prece­dents. (See pho­to here.)

Troy: Its dis­cov­ery and exca­va­tion begin­ning in 1870 proved once and for all that Troy was not just a myth based on Homer; Troy was a his­tor­i­cal site where real peo­ple lived and fought. Its ear­li­est exca­va­tor, the oft-maligned and often-uneth­i­cal Hein­rich Schlie­mann has been most­ly cred­it­ed — right or wrong — as being the “Father of Archae­ol­o­gy” and his tech­niques became the foun­da­tion of archae­o­log­i­cal research, how­ev­er great­ly improved, after­ward.

Nin­eveh and the Roy­al Assyr­i­an Library: This riv­et­ing find begin­ning in 1849 by Austen Hen­ry Layard, a sleuth of antiq­ui­ty, even­tu­al­ly unearthed a whole lost library of cuneiform texts, includ­ing ones not only from ancient Assyr­ia but also from far old­er Sumer, Akkad, Baby­lon and oth­er great civ­i­liza­tions. This had a very sig­nif­i­cant impact on world lit­er­a­ture, intro­duc­ing such sem­i­nal works as the Epic of Gil­gamesh.

King Tut’s Tomb: The dra­mat­ic open­ing of this roy­al tomb in 1922 — sought for years by a deter­mined Howard Carter — was the first time in mil­len­nia a pharao­h’s tomb had actu­al­ly been found intact; its trea­sure gave the world a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to actu­al­ly account for stag­ger­ing Egypt­ian roy­al wealth. [Dan’s note: Nation­al Geo­graph­ic has a nice web site on this archae­o­log­i­cal find.]

Machu Pic­chu: The remark­able high jun­gle moun­tain dis­cov­ery in 1911 of the remote Lost City of the Inca by Hiram Bing­ham made it pos­si­ble for the world to final­ly see an undis­turbed Inca roy­al city mys­te­ri­ous­ly aban­doned on a moun­tain­top but nei­ther con­quered nor changed by the colo­nial world. (See pho­to here.)

Pom­peii: Pre­served by the erup­tion of Vesu­vius in AD 79 and not dug out for almost two mil­len­nia, Pom­peii (prob­a­bly acci­den­tal­ly found by a farmer dig­ging a well) is the sin­gle most impor­tant Roman site in the world; its arti­facts offer the largest and fullest record of life in a Roman city. Pom­pei­i’s mis­for­tune is our great for­tune. It pre­serves a city with thou­sands of objects vir­tu­al­ly unchanged. (See images here.)

Dead Sea Scrolls: Since 1947, when two Bedouin boys in the desert stum­bled upon the first cave at Qum­ran, these hid­den desert texts have rev­o­lu­tion­ized our per­cep­tions of ear­ly Jew­ish and Chris­t­ian reli­gion; their find­ing has pushed back our knowl­edge of bib­li­cal man­u­scripts by a thou­sand years. This dis­cov­ery and the off-and-on secre­cy of the finds reads like spy fic­tion but is real instead. (See pho­to here.)

Akrotiri on Thera: Archae­ol­o­gist Spyri­don Mar­i­natos had been laughed at by his peers for his the­o­ries and was final­ly vin­di­cat­ed 30 years lat­er (cir­ca 1967). Like Pom­peii, ash from the vol­canic erup­tion in 1620 BC pre­served a whole Aegean city that might have been the source of the Atlantis myths but was cer­tain­ly a wealthy city with fab­u­lous wall paint­ings depict­ing Bronze Age life. It gives us for the first time a whole new body of Minoan art and under­stand­ing of Mediter­ranean sea trade. (Images here.)

Oldu­vai Gorge: Since the 1920’s, the Leakey fam­i­ly dogged­ly per­sist­ed search­ing in East Africa for the most ancient human ori­gins; dra­mat­ic unearthing of bones and tools in 1959 from Oldu­vai and oth­er sites in Great Rift Africa for­ev­er showed the world how long — at least a mil­lion years — antecedents to human life have per­sist­ed, final­ly pro­vid­ing proof of Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion from ear­li­er pri­mate and hominid finds.

Tomb of 10,000 War­riors: This stag­ger­ing tomb from around 220–210 BC, spread­ing over hun­dreds of acres, sin­gle-hand­ed­ly awak­ened West­ern inter­est in Chi­nese his­to­ry and revi­tal­ized Chi­nese archae­ol­o­gy. The opu­lence and grandeur of an emper­or’s tomb aston­ished the world. Archeo­tourism in Chi­na has prof­it­ed immense­ly from the acci­den­tal 1974 find of a pre-Han tomb where lies the author­i­tar­i­an emper­or who forcibly unit­ed and rewrote Chi­nese cul­ture in many ways that still sur­vive today.”

Relat­ed Con­tent: Above, I men­tioned that you can lis­ten to Patrick Hunt’s Stan­ford course on Han­ni­bal on iTunes. The course is going to be rolled out in install­ments over the next sev­er­al weeks. Sep­a­rate­ly you can lis­ten to a stand­alone lec­ture that he gave on Han­ni­bal short­ly before the start of the course. (Lis­ten on iTunes here.) This lec­ture gets ref­er­enced in the course at sev­er­al points. Patrick­’s work on Han­ni­bal is spon­sored by Nation­al Geo­graph­ic Soci­ety.

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The Writing Rooms of Famous Writers

in Books | September 21st, 2007

Here’s where great writ­ing gets done. The Guardian has post­ed a nice col­lec­tion of anno­tat­ed pho­tos of the work­ing spaces used by famous writ­ers, includ­ing Sea­mus Heaney, AS Byatt, Michael Frayn, and Alain de Bot­ton. (Get the full list here.) My favorite selec­tion is Jonathan Safran Foer’s, the Rose Read­ing Room of the 42nd Street Branch of the New York Pub­lic Library, a beau­ti­ful place to work.

Anoth­er quick obser­va­tion to men­tion: Most all of these rooms are paint­ed com­plete­ly white. For most of the world, that’s hard­ly strange. But if you live in North­ern Cal­i­for­nia, the site of one white room after anoth­er is fair­ly jar­ring. It’s pas­tels here all the way. Source: Boing Boing

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Also check out our list of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es and For­eign Lan­guage Les­son Pod­casts.

iPod Classic Not Quite Ready for Primetime

in Apple | September 19th, 2007

Robert X. Cring­ley’s week­ly article/podcast (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) may make you think twice about buy­ing an iPod Clas­sic … at least for now. Despite the name, the guts of the iPod Clas­sic are actu­al­ly new, and the bugs haven’t been ful­ly worked out. The list of prob­lems expe­ri­enced by users includes (and I quote Cring­ley direct­ly):

• VERY Slow menu switch­ing response
• Dis­play of clock rather than song info when “Now Play­ing”
• Inabil­i­ty to use exist­ing AUTHORIZED 3rd par­ty dock prod­ucts (includ­ing Apple-adver­tised)
• Audio skip­ping dur­ing oper­a­tion
• Slow con­nec­tion to Macs and PCs
• Inabil­i­ty to dis­able “split-screen” menus
• Lag­ging and unre­spon­sive Click Wheel
• Cam­era con­nec­tor not work­ing
• Inabil­i­ty to use EQ set­tings with­out skip­ping and dis­tor­tion

See­ing that the “Clas­sic” is Apple’s only iPod that cur­rent­ly has more than 16 gigs of stor­age, the com­pa­ny will be hus­tling to fix these prob­lems. But, for now, pod­cast lovers might want to stick to their tried and true mp3 play­er. Source: I, Cring­ley

See our Tech­nol­o­gy Pod­cast Col­lec­tion

The World of Words & Carnal Knowledge

in Books, Podcasts | September 18th, 2007

Gram­mar is in vogue. The sta­tis­tics don’t lie. The Gram­mar Girl (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) remains one of the most pop­u­lar pod­casts on iTunes, and The Gram­mar Grater (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) is hold­ing its own. From gram­mar, it’s just a short step to words, to ety­mol­o­gy. And, today, we want to high­light Pod­ic­tionary (iTunes — Feed — Site) for you. It’s a “word-of-the-day” pod­cast that spends an easy three to five min­utes sur­vey­ing the his­to­ry of com­mon words in the Eng­lish lan­guage. (This makes it use­ful for native and non-native speak­ers alike). Its cre­ator, Charles Hodg­son, has so far tack­led over 600 terms, which means that he’s amassed an exten­sive audio archive that you can access here.

And his work on words does­n’t stop there. Hodg­son recent­ly pub­lished a new book called Car­nal Knowl­edge: A Navel Gaz­er’s Dic­tio­nary of Anato­my, Ety­mol­o­gy, and Triv­ia (St. Mar­t­in’s Press). Far from pedan­tic, the book uses engag­ing prose and fun facts to tease out the mean­ing of words we use to describe our bod­ies. The whole body gets cov­ered here, from the “eye” to the “simi­an line” to the “gul­let,” and it goes straight down to the nether regions, too. For more infor­ma­tion, spend some time with the blog that accom­pa­nies the new book.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ten Pod­casts to Build Your Vocab­u­lary

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The End of History Revisited

in Current Affairs, History | September 15th, 2007

Stew­art Brand, the cre­ator of the icon­ic Whole Earth Cat­a­log, heads up the The Long Now Foun­da­tion, an orga­ni­za­tion com­mit­ted to cul­ti­vat­ing “slower/better” think­ing and fos­ter­ing greater respon­si­bil­i­ty over “the next 10,000 years.” (Yes, they’re ambi­tious.) To help bring this about, Brand hosts a month­ly speak­ing series that you can down­load as a pod­cast (iTunes — Feed — MP3s), and, in late June, he brought in Fran­cis Fukuya­ma to speak. Fukuya­ma, a pro­fes­sor of inter­na­tion­al polit­i­cal econ­o­my at Johns Hop­kins, first made a name for him­self in 1989 when, dur­ing the wan­ing days of the Cold War, he pub­lished an essay called “The End of His­to­ry?” (Lat­er, he would turn it into a best­selling book, The End of His­to­ry and the Last Man.) Steal­ing a page from Karl Marx, Fukuya­ma main­tained that his­to­ry had a direc­tion to it. It flowed with pur­pose, always bring­ing progress. But the end point was­n’t com­mu­nist utopia. It was lib­er­al democ­ra­cy mixed with free mar­ket eco­nom­ics. That’s where human­i­ty was col­lec­tive­ly head­ing, with a vic­to­ri­ous Amer­i­ca lead­ing the way. (In his orig­i­nal essay, he wrote, “What we may be wit­ness­ing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the pass­ing of a par­tic­u­lar peri­od of post-war his­to­ry, but the end of his­to­ry as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ide­o­log­i­cal evo­lu­tion and the uni­ver­sal­iza­tion of West­ern lib­er­al democ­ra­cy as the final form of human gov­ern­ment.”)

In the inter­ven­ing years, the world’s move­ment toward west­ern democ­ra­cy has­n’t exact­ly fol­lowed a straight line, and the 9/11 attacks and the ensu­ing “War on Ter­ror” have seem­ing­ly lent cre­dence to a dim­mer world­view, one out­lined by Samuel Hunt­ing­ton in the con­tro­ver­sial book, The Clash of Civ­i­liza­tions and the Remak­ing of World Order. Speak­ing 18 years after the pub­li­ca­tion of his orig­i­nal essay (iTunes — Feed — MP3 — Blog), Fukuya­ma revis­its, clar­i­fies and large­ly defends his the­sis that lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is still on track to pre­vail. And that’s because, in his mind, there are deep eco­nom­ic, sci­en­tif­ic and tech­no­log­i­cal trends in motion that dri­ve almost inex­orably toward these polit­i­cal ends. Whether he is right or wrong, it’s impos­si­ble to say. Regard­less, his talk is smart, hard­ly dog­mat­ic, and worth your time.

SmartLinks From Our Readers

in Uncategorized | September 15th, 2007

Below, we have some links rec­om­mend­ed by our read­ers. Feel free to send oth­er good bits our way. The more we give, the more we get. Just click here to send:

• Sean Penn reads an excerpt from Bob Dylan’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Chron­i­cles, here. (Or check out the full audio­book ver­sion.)
• Jared Dia­mond, the Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Col­lapse speaks at The Long Now Foun­da­tion about why civ­i­liza­tions have his­tor­i­cal­ly endured or failed. Two impor­tant fac­tors include how they man­aged their nat­ur­al resources and dealt with cli­mate change. Does this ring any bells? Get the lec­ture here: (iTunes — Feed — MP3s)
• Ayn Rand’s Lit­er­a­ture of Cap­i­tal­ism. A piece in The New York Times explores Atlas Shrugged and its impact on Alan Greenspan.
• Inter­view with Hal Var­i­an, Chief Econ­o­mist at Google (and UC Berke­ley Pro­fes­sor), who talks (iTunes - Feed — MP3 — Web Site) about the inter­net as an “engine for democ­ra­cy.”
• Appear­ing in The New York Review of Books, this piece, enti­tled Cit­i­zen Gore, takes a look a Al Gore’s new book, The Assault on Rea­son, and how Gore, being freed up from pol­i­tics, has been remark­ably able to prod the con­science of the nation. For some, how­ev­er, it’s not enough. Hence the recent “Draft Al Gore” cam­paign that has got­ten under­way.
• Check out the Voodoo Music Fes­ti­val com­ing up on Octo­ber 26, 27 & 28 in New Orleans. The line­up of artists includes Rage Against The Machine, Com­mon, Tiesto, The Smash­ing Pump­kins, Black Rebel Motor­cy­cle Club, M.I.A., Ben Harp­er, Wilco and more. To win pass­es to the show and some trav­el mon­ey, you can enter a con­test here.

The New iPod Lineup Versus Its Rivals

in Apple, Web/Tech | September 13th, 2007

Since we talk a lot here about pod­casts and mp3 files, it seems worth flag­ging this Yahoo gad­get review that pits the new iPod line­up against its rivals. Here, we’ve got the new iPod Touch v. the Sam­sung Yepp YP-P2; the new Nano (with video) v. the Sansa View, and the iPod Clas­sic v. Microsoft­’s Zune. The net result is that the new iPods come out ahead, but not by much. Get review here.

(For anoth­er review of the new iPod Touch, have a look at this piece on Giz­mo­do.)

Quick note: As part of the new line­up, the iPod Clas­sic fea­tures a new 160 GB mod­el for $349. It appar­ent­ly holds 40,000 songs (twice as many as the pre­vi­ous mod­el), which trans­lates to three con­tin­u­ous months of lis­ten­ing enter­tain­ment. Imag­ine how many mind-expand­ing pod­casts that could include.

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New R.E.M. Concert Video “Leaving New York”

in Music, Video - Arts & Culture | September 13th, 2007

Below we have “R.E.M. Live, record­ed on the Around the World Tour, which pro­mot­ed Around the Sun, a stu­dio album from 2004. It is to be released Octo­ber 16.” (Thanks to Justin for the clar­i­fi­ca­tion.)

Source: Stere­ogum. (For more music, check out our col­lec­tion of MP3 Blogs.)

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