Amer­i­ca’s mis­ad­ven­ture in Iraq has had mul­ti­ple costs for the US, with just one being the decline of Amer­i­can moral lead­er­ship on the inter­na­tion­al stage, and par­tic­u­lar­ly with­in the Mid­dle East. Intel­lec­tu­al­ly, we know that Amer­i­ca’s pres­tige is momen­tar­i­ly shot. But to get a feel for what this means in prac­tice, it’s worth lis­ten­ing to this inter­view (iTunes — MP3) with Lawrence Pin­tak, who directs the Adham Cen­ter for Elec­tron­ic Jour­nal­ism at The Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Cairo. A long­time observ­er of the Mid­dle East, Pin­tak sees the evo­lu­tion of Amer­i­ca’s image going some­thing like this: Before 9/11, the prover­bial Mid­dle East­ern cab dri­ver expressed deep admi­ra­tion for Amer­i­ca and Amer­i­cans, even while dis­agree­ing with Amer­i­can lead­ers and poli­cies. When the Twin Tow­ers fell, sym­pa­thy for Amer­i­ca was nev­er greater. Now, six years lat­er, it’s all gone awry. The men­tal line that sep­a­rat­ed Amer­i­cans and Amer­i­can pol­i­cy is gone, and the antipa­thy toward Amer­i­ca is fair­ly com­plete.

What part­ly explains this shift is how the war has been refract­ed through the Mid­dle East­ern media. Ever since Al Jazeera start­ed air­ing in 1996 (you can watch it here in Eng­lish), the Mid­dle East has had its own free media and seen events through its own lens. And, in the case of the Iraq war, it has meant see­ing what we don’t see — the unsan­i­tized war, the bod­ies, the lev­eled build­ings, etc. — but also much more mun­dane things that shape over­all impres­sions. It means see­ing, for exam­ple, how tone-deaf US spokes­men in Bagh­dad show up at jour­nal­ist con­fer­ences in Abu Dhabi (a com­plete­ly non-mil­i­tary event out­side of Iraq) in army fatigues, leav­ing essen­tial­ly the impres­sion that the US sees the larg­er Mid­dle East as a mil­i­tary stage.

Pin­tak knows the region well, and he artic­u­lates Amer­i­ca’s per­cep­tion prob­lem in a bal­anced and thought­ful way. Check it out here: (iTunes — MP3) Also, on a relat­ed note, any­one who wants to digg more deeply into Mid­dle East­ern per­spec­tives may want to explore Mosa­ic: World News from the Mid­dle East (iTunes  Feed). This Peabody award-win­ning pod­cast pro­vides a dai­ly com­pi­la­tion of tele­vi­sion news reports from across the Mid­dle East. The news comes from inde­pen­dent and state-run news ser­vices, and it is all trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish.

Posts are fly­ing around the lit­er­ary blo­gos­phere lament­ing the Death of Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism. Now, by my count this par­tic­u­lar demise has been pre­dict­ed at least three times in the past few decades, so why wor­ry now? The short answer is that more books are pub­lished annu­al­ly than ever, and now there are few­er book review­ers. The LA Times recent­ly fold­ed its free­stand­ing book review into the rest of the week­end paper and news­pa­per staffs around the coun­try are trim­ming review posi­tions in favor of syn­di­cat­ed wire ser­vice reviews.

Michael Con­nel­ly, a crime fic­tion writer, pub­lished an op-ed in the LA Times protest­ing the move and he paints a dire pic­ture of our cul­tur­al future:

The truth is that the book and news­pa­per busi­ness­es share the same
dread­ful fear: that peo­ple will stop read­ing. And the fear may be
well-found­ed. Across the coun­try, news­pa­per cir­cu­la­tions are down — and
this is clear­ly part of the rea­son for the cuts to book sec­tions. At
the same time, the book busi­ness increas­ing­ly relies on an aging
cus­tomer base that may not be refu­el­ing itself with enough new read­ers.

Should we blame cash-strapped news­pa­per com­pa­nies or a cul­ture that’s shift­ing away from tra­di­tion­al media alto­geth­er? Ladies and gen­tle­men, start your iPods–to lend rea­soned analy­sis, we now turn to Steven Col­bert, who inter­viewed Salman Rushdie on this sub­ject ear­li­er this week (click below or watch the full show on iTunes):

Over the past cou­ple weeks, our read­ers have sent some new links our way. Here’s some of the good stuff that they’ve had to offer:

• Ency­clopo­dia (Wikipedia on Your Ipod): If this works, it’s a great idea. Ency­clopo­dia is a free soft­ware project that brings Wikipedia to the Apple iPod. Ency­clopo­dia can be installed on iPod gen­er­a­tions 1 through 4, plus on iPod Min­is.

• Down­load Free Music Thanks to Peter Gabriel: You can can down­load songs free and legal­ly through a new ser­vice backed by Peter Gabriel. The new ven­ture, We7, pro­vides DRM-free music. And in exchange for it, lis­ten­ers agree to lis­ten to “per­son­al­ized mes­sages” (read ads) that are “graft­ed” onto the begin­ning of song tracks. Mean­while, anoth­er read­er sug­gests look­ing at Groove­shark, which is also offer­ing DRM-free music.

• Free Travelling/Touring Pod­casts: In our Mon­day piece that looked at 10 Unex­pect­ed Uses of the iPod, we men­tioned a prod­uct that let’s you take guid­ed tours of New York and Paris, and they hap­pen to run about $12. It turns out that you can get user-cre­at­ed city tours for free. Check out iToors, Podguides.net (where you can get user-gen­er­at­ed city guides), and also iaudioguide.com, which fea­tures audio guides for over 40 cities. Anoth­er one sug­gest­ed by a read­er is Tour­dio.

• Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­casts: As you may know, we keep a nice col­lec­tion of uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts, which include free lec­tures, cours­es, and speech­es by impor­tant thinkers. Here’s a cou­ple new ones that read­ers sent our way: one from the School of Visu­al Arts in NYC, and yet anoth­er from the Uni­ver­sité de Provence, where, if you speak French, you’ll find an eclec­tic col­lec­tion of pod­casts from the human­i­ties and sci­ences. And while we’re at it, you may want to check out a new pod­cast by The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion.

• More French Cul­ture Pod­casts: This is from John­nyB in Brook­lyn: “France Cul­ture (iTunes) has a vast col­lec­tion of pro­gram­ming avail­able for down­load, includ­ing dai­ly news updates and lots of cul­tur­al pro­gram­ming. One of my favorites is Repliques (iTunes), host­ed by Alain Finkelkraut. The tenet of the pro­gram is to invite two authors with either slight­ly or wide­ly diver­gent points of view on a sin­gle top­ic, and to let the dis­cus­sion roll. Some­times it’s won­der­ful, some­times vapid, and Finkelkraut often impress­es me as a one-note John­ny with his wail­ing about La Defaite de la Pensee, but I always find it bet­ter than lis­ten­ing to my neigh­bor’s hip-hop beats in the sub­way ride to work.”

• Lan­guage Learn­ing Pod­casts: Rox­anne sug­gests a cou­ple pod­casts that will teach you Kore­an: One is called Kim­chi­girls; the oth­er is called Core­an 4 Life, which despite the mis­spelling appears to be teach­ing Kore­an. Then Hank rec­om­mends Span­ish­Sense that will help you pick up some Span­ish, and Frank offers up a pod­cast for stu­dents learn­ing Khmer.

See Our Pod­cast Col­lec­tions — Tell a Friend About Open Cul­ture   — Buy a New iPod & iPod Gear

The PEN Amer­i­can Cen­ter just wound up World Voic­es 2007, a con­fer­ence fea­tur­ing a slew of major authors, includ­ing Salman Rushdie, Don DeLil­lo, Neil Gaiman, and many more. One of the pan­els this year fea­tured some lit­er­ary heavy hit­ters read­ing works to raise aware­ness for envi­ron­men­tal issues: Bil­ly Collins, Jonathan Franzen, Moses Isegawa, Pico Iyer, Geert Mak, Mar­i­lynne Robin­son, Rox­ana Robin­son, Salman Rushdie, Gary Shteyn­gart, Janne Teller and Col­son White­head all par­tic­i­pat­ed (mp3).

The PEN orga­ni­za­tion works for lit­er­ary free­dom world­wide, and the con­fer­ence keynote (mp3) fea­tures Israeli author David Gross­man and Nobel Prize-win­ner Nadine Gordimer dis­cussing the “Free­dom to Write.” Con­sid­er­ing the news in Turkey these days, you may also want to give last year’s lec­ture with Orhan Pamuk and Mar­garet Atwood a lis­ten (mp3).

The Cen­ter also has an iTunes pod­cast series and an audio archive, but since the con­fer­ence just end­ed it will prob­a­bly take some time for them to process the lat­est audio. iTunes Feed Site

See Open Cul­ture’s Pod­cast Col­lec­tions:

Arts & Cul­ture — Audio Books — For­eign Lan­guage Lessons — News & Infor­ma­tion — Sci­ence — Tech­nol­o­gy — Uni­ver­si­ty (Gen­er­al) — Uni­ver­si­ty (B‑School) — Pod­cast Primer