lists, lists & more lists

Not to Miss: Lists with a Twist for 2006




NPR.org,

What better way to spend the weekend than reading a bunch of lists. No, really. It's the end of the year, and you probably didn't pay attention to a lot of important cultural stuff. "Best of" lists tell you what you've missed.
We at NPR are happy to do our part. Our 2006 lists cover the funnest books for kids, the non-nastiest video games, the sparklingest wines for the New Year and many other topics. They are handily housed in our "Holidays 2006" package.
But we recognize that we are not the only maker of lists out there. As a public service, Five for Friday proudly presents its first roundup of weird, wild and altogether wonderful year-end lists. From the best movie trailers to the most dangerous toys in existence, you'll find plenty of grist (and gross) in our list of lists.
The Guardian inexplicably takes on the smelliest reads of all time -- that is, stories about scents. Speaking of odors, Popular Science tells which jobs in science are the dirtiest. (Manure inspector comes in at No. 2.) The literary blog Bookslut proves you can judge a book by its cover, while the tech site cnet.com reveals the worst tech products of the year. (Never name a living-room stereo system "Biohazard.") And Google reveals that "Paris Hilton" beat out "cancer" as 2006's top search phrase.
Speaking of electronics, here are the weirdest keyboards ever made. Video games more your style? Arthur's Hall of Viking Manliness compiled the manliest video games. (No, Duck Hunt doesn't make the cut, but here's a video of the top 10 video game weapons.)
The top 10 movie mashups of the year included Mary Poppins pulling a Poltergeist. (Like musical mashups, movie mashups mix vastly different genres.) VH1's Best Week Ever weighed in with its real movie Top Five (as well as 2006's top cliches in cinema) while the music blog DoCopenhagen listed the 50 top music videos of the year. Looking for extremely guilty cinematic pleasures? Or maybe you don't even remember what movies came out this year. The Guardian's 2006 quiz about the year in movies may help. And if you don't want to rent, you can always just watch the worst trailers of the year instead.
The BBC learned 100 things that it didn't know last year. (So the egg apparently did come first! Whodathunkit?) Up north, Canada released its list of top weather moments and also went after sports grinches. At its SFGate Web site, the San Francisco Chronicle chronicles the Top 10 Sex Stories of 2006. (Parents, shield thy children!) Connie Chung sings and Michael Richards rants on iFilm's compilation of voraciously viral videos. And the aptly named Jewlicious has a scoop: ice cream flavors that could save the Jewish state.
The board game beat is covered, from dominoes on ESPN to a chess smackdown. And on the billionaire beat, there are fantabulous gadgets for the "filthy rich." Lists also limn political cartoons, supercars and James Bond's playthings, like his totally cool invisible auto.
And finally, David Letterman has provided a year's worth of top 10 lists. Our favorite category? The "Top Ten Signs You Are Not One of the Most Fascinating People Of 2006."

SAFIRE'S 2007 OFFICE Pool

OPTIMISTIC predictions took a beating in 2006 (except for the stock market), but today — in my 33rd annual office pool in this space — is my chance to recoup. In these multiple choices, pick one, all or none.

1. The “O’Connorless Supreme Court” will decide

(a) without reversing Roe v. Wade to uphold laws restricting late-term abortion because they do not impose an “undue burden” on women
(b) that public schools in Seattle and Louisville, in their zeal to prevent re-segregation, have gone too far in using race in selection of students
(c) to reject Massachusetts’ case to force the Environmental Protection Agency to raise auto emissions standards, holding that “global warming” gives the state no standing to sue without new law

2. Dow Jones industrials will

(a) reflect 4 percent economic growth to rise in 2007 to close above 14,000
(b) fall out of bed to 10,000 in what the Republicans will claim is the Democratic recession
(c) soar to 15,000 before ending the year around 14,000
(d) change from a boring numerical index to lively prose opinions in the with-it Wall Street Journal

3. Bipartisan achievement of 110th Congress and Bush White House will be

(a) blue-ribbon Social Security panel providing cover to raise retirement age to 70 for those now under 50
(b) passage of Leahy-Pence shield law permitting whistleblowers to expose corruption to reporters without fear of being ratted out by runaway prosecutors
(c) immigration reform allowing earned citizenship of current illegals and installing 1,700-mile fence named after the nativist Millard Fillmore
(d) substantial minimum-wage increase with reduction but not elimination of “death tax”

4. Congress will override Bush veto of

(a) federal support of stem-cell research
(b) federal negotiation of drug prices

5. The word most often heard in 110th Congress will be

(a) sellout
(b) compromise
(c) subpoena
(d) civility
(e) payback

6. The Oscar for best picture in a year of great pictures will go to

(a) Martin Scorsese’s “Departed”
(b) Paul Greengrass’s “United 93”
(c) Clint Eastwood’s “Letters From Iwo Jima”
(d) Stephen Frears’s “Queen”
(e) Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris’s “Little Miss Sunshine”

7. The level of American troops in Iraq at year’s end will be

(a) over 100,000, down from surged 160,000
(b) under 100,000, down from today’s unsurged 140,000
(c) under 80,000 with announced timetable for downsizing in 2008 to 40,000 in secure Iraqi Kurdistan

8. Iraq will be

(a) in full-scale civil war
(b) on the road to shaky democracy with insurgency weakening
(c) split three ways with Kirkuk as capital of Kurdistan

9. Iran at year’s end will be

(a) more intransigent than ever and on the way to matching North Korea’s nuclear weapon
(b) more reasonable after plunge in oil income, anti-terrorism boycott, labor-student unrest and global sanctions
(c) red-faced at double cross from Arab Iraqi Shiites

10. Publishing sleeper-seller will be

(a) “Sacred Games” by Vikram Chandra, a gangster novel like an Indian “Godfather”
(b) Jim Lehrer’s novel “The Phony Marine”
and in non-fiction
(c) “Spy Wars: Moles, Mysteries and Deadly Games,” by a retired spook, Tennent Bagley, which refutes C.I.A. groupthink about the molehunter James Angleton being paranoid
(d) “Father’s Day,” by Buzz Bissinger, about his twin sons, one exceptional and the other damaged

11. Internal party struggle will be

(a) John Edwards’s labor-appealing protectionism versus Hillary Clinton’s championing of Nafta-style free trade
(b) John McCain as pro-life versus Rudy Giuliani as pro-choice
(c) cognitive dissonance of anti-bias liberals at bias toward a conservative Mormon candidate

12. Scientific news will be in

(a) neuro-circuitry
(b) deep brain stimulation in treating depression
(c) sequencing the genome of higher apes in studying evolution
(d) vaccine approaches to treatment of Alzheimer’s as well as eradication of malaria
(e) gene duplication to detect mental illness
(f) commercial hype about cranial calisthenics

13. Year-end polls of likely primary voters will have in the lead among Democrats

(a) Clinton
(b) Obama
(c) Edwards
(d) Gore
(e) Richardson-Biden-Dodd-Dean
and among Republicans
(a) McCain
(b) Romney
(c) Giuliani
(d) Gingrich-Rice-Brownback-Hagel

14. Time and chance will happeneth to all predictions if

(a) McCain scampily blows his stack
(b) Clinton freezes over
(c) Romney is brainwashed
(d) Obama loses his cool over press interest in “Rezkogate”

15. Key factor in swing-voter choice of next president will be

(a) experience
(b) freshness
(c) character
(d) name recognition
(e) seizure of health-care issue
(f) Internet organization

My (William Safire) picks are: 1 (all) 2 (c) 3 (b) 4 (both) 5 (c) 6 (d) 7 (a) 8 (b) 9 (b) 10 (c) 11 (a) 12 (all) 13 (a), (a) 14 (all) 15 (c)

2006: Culture

The Year in Culture

Stanley Crouch, Azar Nafisi, Michael Pollan, and others on the most amazing—and disappointing—events of 2006. All from SLATE and all worth reading.

2006

Click above for some good reviews of 2006 from the FT.

SIXTY-FOUR

When I have seen by time's fell hand defaced

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,

When sometime lofty towers I see down razed,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage,

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

ncreasing store with loss, and loss with store,

When I have seen such interchange of state,

r state itself confounded to decay,

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,

That time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

WS

2007

May your New Year be replete with health, peace and prosperity!

A Buddhist Prayer

Evoking the presence of the great compassion, let us fill our hearts with our own compassion - towards ourselves and towards all living beings.Let us pray that all living beings realise that they are all brothers and sisters, all nourished from the same source of life.

CAESAR on the TIGRIS?

Caesar made mistakes in Gaul, and came very close to defeat, but he never doubted his ultimate success. This was not just a question of staying the course. Caesar was able to admit when he had made a mistake. He adapted, changed his plans to meet a situation and threw every resource — including his own massive energy — into achieving his aim. In a few years in Gaul, initial victory turned to apparent disaster, and that was turned into lasting success.

Click above to see one historian's view of how Caesar would have handled the war in Iraq.

Number 10 on You Tube

Virtual tour of Number 10


The interior of No 10 Downing Street, home of British prime ministers since 1735, can now be viewed room by room on the internet.

The tour, accessed on the website www.pm.gov.uk, takes in the main rooms of the house. But those hoping for a glimpse into Tony Blair's sock drawer will be disappointed — private apartments are omitted and, in any case, he and his family live above No 11 while the Brown household occupies the flat above No 10.
Unveiling the online tour yesterday, Mr Blair said: "This is an excellent way of showing the tremendous history of this building.

"I feel very lucky to live and work here, and if we can share just a fraction of the fascination of this extraordinary place then the tour will enthral a great many people."
Virtual visitors will find some interesting titbits about the history of the house, which was presented by George II to Sir Robert Walpole, the first prime minister. For example, No 10's bricks are not naturally black, but yellow. The discoloration, due to pollution, became such a feature of the house that the bricks were painted black rather than cleaned during renovation work in the 1960s.

And if you have ever wondered why the zero in the number 10 on the black front door is tilted at a slight angle, then you will be glad to learn that the original door suffered from a badly fixed zero.

The letter box is engraved with the words "First Lord of the Treasury", Walpole's formal title. Prime ministers still occupy No 10 in that capacity, and they have Walpole to thank for their home — he was given the house as a gift but insisted that it be used by his successors.
Suitably perhaps, in terms of the people who would later occupy it, Downing Street was the result of speculative scheming. Sir George Downing was a sometime spy and property developer who saw building houses on prime land as a means to get rich quick.
Today's No 10 started life as No 5. The modern house is made up of two properties joined together — Downing Street's cheap terrace at the front and a much more imposing building at the back overlooking Horse Guards Parade.

MARTELL on French and American Culture

No, not the Cognac, but the author.

Martel, 39, a former French cultural attaché in Boston, has set out to change this. In "Culture in America," a 622-page tome weighty with information, he challenges the conventional view in Paris that (French) culture financed and organized by the government is entirely good and that (American) culture shaped by market forces is necessarily bad.

And that leads him to the crucial role played by nonprofit foundations, philanthropists, corporate sponsors, universities and community organizations, which in practice do receive indirect government support in the form of tax incentives.

"If the Culture Ministry is nowhere to be found," he writes, "cultural life is everywhere."
He felt reassured by this. He first visited the United States in 1999 — to promote an earlier book, "The Pink and the Black: Homosexuals in France Since 1968" — and he was still very much a neophyte when he arrived in Boston in 2000. After studying the history of American culture in libraries and private archives, he set out to discover American culture as it is being lived today.
"I spent all my vacations traveling," he said. "I counted up over 700 interviews in 110 cities in 35 states. American universities were a revelation: French universities don't play an important cultural role. I reached out to gays, feminists, Latinos, avant- garde, counterculture. I gave priority to visiting black communities in every major city, attending associations, street theater, poetry clubs."

Yet, Martel noted, the same country that embraces this extraordinary cultural diversity is itself accused of imposing cultural uniformity on the world. The United States was almost alone last year in voting against a French-sponsored international convention on cultural diversity that was adopted overwhelmingly by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which is based in Paris.

This apparent contradiction had a simple explanation at Unesco: Washington was bending to pressure from Hollywood studios, which claimed that the convention threatened their movie and television exports. But Martel also sees inconsistencies — actually, he prefers the word hypocrisy — in the French position.

"Americans defend cultural diversity at home and deny it abroad," he said, "while France defends cultural diversity around the world and refuses it at home."
And it is here that he most wants France to learn from the United States.
"What really annoys me is the way our cultural elite uses ideology to protect its privileges," he said. "It says that our culture defines a certain idea of France, that the alternative is Americanization. But it's really only defending itself against the popular classes. We cannot have 10 percent of our population stemming from immigration and deny them their culture.

Faith & Reason in 2007

On Dec. 31, Christians traditionally give thanks to God for the blessings they have received during the year that is ending. On Jan. 1 and on the feast of the Epiphany a few days later, they might equally well give thanks for the gifts of faith and intelligence that will guide them through the new year, even as the star guided the Magi on their journey. Although these two gifts are profoundly different, they are compatible with each other. Pope Benedict XVI was voicing the common Christian conviction when he said last February in a speech to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: “There is no competition of any kind between reason and faith.”

St. Paul made a similar point when, around 46 A.D., his first missionary journey brought him to Lystra, a city in what is now part of Turkey. After a crowd gathered, the apostle told them that he and his companion, Barnabas, had come to proclaim the good news about the living God of whom the citizens of Lystra should already have had some knowledge. “In bestowing his goodness,” Paul said, “he did not leave himself without witness, for he gave you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, and filled you with nourishment and gladness for your hearts” (Acts 14:16-19).

Paul was here invoking a conclusion to which, he believed, human reason, enabled by divine grace, can arrive. Pope Benedict XVI regularly expounds this central Christian teaching when he notes that reason and faith collaborate in every aspect of human life and particularly in the search for God.

That search responds to a religious impulse that has flourished over the millennia in countless forms, even though at various times and places it may have atrophied from disuse. Some of these forms were quite pure; some were bizarre. In Matthew’s Gospel the Magi pursue this religious search. In their studies of the heavens, the wise men discovered a new star. When they followed that beacon, they found in Bethlehem the child with his mother. In the gifts they offered they acknowledged this child to be the mysterious king they had been seeking.
Some searchers have been led to God by the philosophical reasonings that Paul recommended to the Lystrians. For others, a vivid awareness of God’s presence has meant more than discursive reflections. From a multitude of cases, two that are both representative and random may be cited.

Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the famous Charles, was a successful physician and a freethinker. He did not deny the existence of God—after all, no one can prove that God does not exist. He just said he was not sure and wanted to keep the question open. One day he was visiting an elderly bedridden woman and their conversation turned theological. The patient was not learned, but she was serenely sure of her Christian faith. “Doctor,” she said, “I know honey is sweet upon the tongue, and I know that my Redeemer liveth.”

In Venezuela in February 1976, a band of leftist guerrillas kidnapped William Niehous, who was the operations manager for a U.S. firm, the Owens-Illinois Glass Company. The captive was held hostage for three-and-a-half years while the masked gunmen negotiated for ransom. He was rescued when Venezuelan police stumbled upon the hideout. When he returned to the United States and was reunited with his family, Niehous told reporters that he had lived in constant anxiety during his captivity, because he had no assurance that he would not be killed. “I prayed a lot,” he said. “I believe in God now more than before, if that is possible.”

As the human family faces a new year, it confronts massive problems, ranging from the climate of poverty enveloping billions to the miseries of Darfur to the war in Iraq. Christians believe that meeting these challenges must engage the energies of both reason and faith. Benedict XVI developed this theme in the second half of his encyclical on divine love (Deus Caritas Est), dated Dec. 25, 2005.

On the one hand, the pope wrote, the essential task of building a just political and social order is not the church’s immediate responsibility. It is primarily a task for civil society, directed by reason. On the other hand, Benedict wrote, politics is not enough. The Gospel faith calls believers to the loving service of all those in need.

The Christian program, the pope said, is the program of the Good Samaritan, it is the program of our Lord. It would be presumptuous, he added, to think that we alone are personally responsible for building a better world, but “in all humility” we must do what we can, for it is the love of Christ that urges us on (2 Cor. 5:14).

BELIEVE OR NO

Joseph Epstein writes a fascinating piece in the Weekly Standard about whether a particular president truly "believes" what he is espousing. I am not sure of the accuracy of his criteria, but it is a good read. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=13111&R=EF2B38411

LISTS

I am a great fan of lists of everything. This time of year all sorts of people are making their lists of bests and worsts and most memorable everything. Then there are the predictions for 2007. I won't try to direct your attention to all of them but this from the Wall Street Journal is as illuminating as any of them.

As far as I am concerned the biggest news of 2006 was:

1. The repudiation of the Iraq War by the American voter; and
2. The failure of the United Nations to .....well, you name it, but Darfur is as good a place to start as any; and
3. The declining state of the US fisc, including the deficit, the fall of the dollar and the creeping feeling that the sovreign credit rating is about to take a tumble.

But here, look at the Journal stories:

What is it about the mix of Google and jets that readers find so alluring?

In 2005, the second-best-read story at WSJ.com reported the news that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page had purchased their own Boeing 767 jet. This year, a story about the same jet1 -- this time involving a legal dispute over the renovation of the plane -- topped our best-read list.

Of course, it wasn't all Google all the time. Other topics sparked your interest over the past year.
Election coverage took three of the top 15 slots, including a not-so-prescient op-ed column from Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee until January 2007, making the case that his party would "make history"

2 by retaining both houses of Congress. Alas, history was made, but it was the Democrats who won the Senate and the House.

The troubled housing market showed up twice in the list, as readers identified with owners and builders suffering from stagnant or dropping prices in one story

3. And in another they clicked, perhaps hopefully, on a piece entitled, "Is the Worst Over for the Housing Bust?"

4 Breaking news had its day, particularly with the unexpected death of Ken Lay

5, former Enron chairman, who suffered a heart attack after his conviction but before his appeals could be heard. Similarly, many of you relied on our constantly updated Mideast Crisis Tracker

6 during the Israel-Lebanon conflict last summer. Then there are the stories that don't fit neatly into any category. Carol Hymowitz's provocative column entitled "Any College Will Do"

7 examined how corporate success can come to those who attended state schools, not just elite private schools. And as in previous years, readers loved to click on our annual roundup of Super Bowl ads

8 especially as we provided you a chance to vote on which you liked most and least. (Showing what a bunch of positive thinkers you are, 50% more readers voted on the "best" ad than on the "worst" one.)

And sometimes, the most valued parts of the site are where we simply give you raw data or information. Many of you wanted to read the entire "Peanut Butter Manifesto"

9 written by Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse. Even more of you delved into the regularly updated Battleground Poll

10 we published, in cooperation with Zogby Interactive, on the most contested Senate and gubernatorial races.

Traffic on any Web site is determined by all kinds of factors -- how the stories are played on the home page, how long they are prominently featured, and whether blogs or other sites link in. (Those third-party links turned out to be especially crucial to the readership of the Google jet stories.) Most-popular lists are often somewhat self-fulfilling as well, since a well-read story winds up high on the list, which encourages more readership, which keeps it high on the list, and so on. Also, our tracking system covers only stories and doesn't include blogs, interactive graphics, photo galleries or videos.

WSJ.com editors and staff are always eager to know what you find most interesting. The data help a great deal, but we're also interested in more personal contact. So if you have additional thoughts about what makes content compelling, please let me know at b.grueskin@wsj.com


Bill Grueskin is managing editor of The Wall Street Journal Online

Top 15 Most-Read Articles of 2006

1) Lawsuits Fly Over Google Founders' Big Private Plane12, 7/07/06
2) Which Travelers Have 'Hostile Intent'? Biometric Device May Have the Answer13, 8/14/06
3) Couric Hits the 'Muted' Button14, 8/05/06
4) Mideast Crisis Tracker15, 9/10/06
5) Republicans See Edge From Early Voting16, 10/31/06
6) 'Republicans Will Make History'17, 9/22/06
7) Clever Gags Score High on Super Bowl Ads18, 2/06/06
8) Lay's Legacy: Corporate Change -- But Not the Kind He Expected19, 7/06/06
9) A Wii Workout: When Videogames Hurt20, 11/25/06
10) A New Breed of Watchdog for Election Day21, 11/06/06
11) Is the Worst Over for the Housing Bust?22, 11/20/06
12) 'Any College Will Do'23, 9/18/06
13) Housing Slump Proves Painful for Some Owners and Builders24, 8/23/06
14) Yahoo Memo: The 'Peanut Butter Manifesto'25, 11/18/06
15) Moguls of New Media26, 7/29/06

URL for this article:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116723517450960571.html

PC "Happy Holidays"

Ah, the Christmas season is about over, and soon I shall be liberated from the alarm I experience every time some benevolent authoritarian accosts me with the line, "Have a Happy Holiday." The term is used in all innocence by many, I am sure. Yet there are the forces of political correctness out there, and their meaning is clear: "Have a Happy Holiday Or Else." These are the moralists who somehow always manage simultaneously to identify iniquity of one sort or another in conventional behavior and stamp it out good and hard. Some years ago they discovered cruelty and intolerance laden in the term "Merry Christmas," and now the term is gone or nearly gone.

It has been replaced with "Happy Holiday," and anyone who stands by the term "Merry Christmas" is immediately marked down as a provocateur, probably a bigot, and possibly a cigarette smoker. At this time of year the use of the term "Merry Christmas" is viewed by the politically correct as a rude and aggressive act. Oddly enough, it just might be by now. The politically correct have an inordinate influence over our language and manners. They have lured enough politically innocent Americans to their view that "Merry Christmas" is indeed a term of controversy and a consensus has probably formed that "Merry Christmas" is at least bad manners.

Really quite a pity.

DELIVERY OF THE NEWS (PRE-INTERNET)

WHAT WE HAVE GAINED IN SPEED

MAY NOT BE REFLECTED IN BETTER QUALITY

ELIZABETH DREW

Ms. Drew continues to be probably the most astute analyst of American politics, still practicing the art. Her take on the mid-term elections is just brilliant.

In a speech he gave to a dinner in New York on November 15, Bill Clinton said that the midterm elections were in large part a rejection of unthinking ideology—the Iraq war, extremism on social issues, rancid rhetoric about illegal immigrants. Clinton said that the voters had "elected us to think"—to consider the facts, even inconvenient ones—before acting. He also argued that the Democrats had been given "not a mandate but an opportunity."

Read the rest in NYRB at:http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19795

AMIS on the GULAG

If gulags don't sound like your idea of fun, be forewarned: MartinAmis's new novel, House of Meetings, is not a fun book. It's somethingof a labor, actually -- forced labor, collective labor, the laborof love. And as Amis tells the story of two brothers locked ina slave camp, he labors mightily to make real the nightmare ofRussian history. Often he succeeds. Sometimes the characters getstuck in the fog of tragedy, the prose turning didactic and portentous.(Stalin bad. Got it.) But even when Amis fails, he says thingsbetter and more beautifully than anybody else playing the game.He still owns the subject of male violence, and it's fascinatingto see him turn his attention from the atrocities of the pub tothe megahorrors of the pogrom. And every 20 pages or so, he writesa sentence that reminds you why you've got to read him. So readthis book. And when you're finished, drink a bottle of vodka.Smoke cigarettes. Cry over the inescapable certainty of deathand the impossible beauty of women. Drink more. Smoke more. Thinkabout the ways you are glad that you are not Russian and only be glad for Martin Amis.

FRANCO/US CULTURE WARS

Since World War II the French have been variously surprised, dismayed, irritated and outraged by the power of American culture and its effect on France and the world. Their only consolation has been the conviction that French culture is superior to anything that Walt Disney or Hollywood can offer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/books/26martel.html?ref=arts

What France’s cultural elites have rarely done, however, is examine how both serious and pop culture actually work in the United States. Rather, in the view of Frédéric Martel, a Frenchman and author of a recently released book on the topic, they have preferred to hide behind “a certain ideological anti-Americanism.”

Now Mr. Martel, 39, a former French cultural attaché in Boston, has set out to change this. In “Culture in America,” a 622-page tome weighty with information, he challenges the conventional view here that (French) culture financed and organized by the government is entirely good and that (American) culture shaped by market forces is necessarily bad.

JULIAN BARNES

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I once asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

And so it goes, click for the rest from the NEW YORKER.

To One and All

A very Merry

Christmas!

See you on the 27th

Today is Christmas Day. About 96 percent of Americans say that they celebrate Christmas in one way or another; but Christians didn't start celebrating Christmas until the fourth century A.D. Apparently, the earliest Christians weren't nearly as interested in Jesus' birth as they were in his resurrection from the dead. Historians believe that the Gospel of Mark was the first Gospel to be written about Jesus, around 50 A.D., and it doesn't even mention Jesus' birth. It starts with his adult baptism.
Only the Gospels of Luke and Matthew tell the story of Jesus' birth, and they give slightly different accounts. In the Gospel of Luke, an angel appears to Mary to tell her that she will give birth to the Son of God. In the Gospel of Matthew, it is Joseph who learns in a dream that Mary is pregnant with the Son of God.
The Gospel of Luke tells the story of how Mary and Joseph went to the city of Bethlehem because of the Roman census, and since there was no room at the inn, they were forced to take shelter in the barn, where Jesus was born, wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in a manger. The Gospel of Matthew tells how a group of wise men go to find the baby that has been prophesized as the future king of the Jews. They follow a bright star in the East until they find Jesus, and they offer him gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
Christian bishops only began to celebrate Jesus' birth after a great debate over how human Jesus had really been. Some Christians believed he was just a spirit, with no body at all. But after much discussion, the church in Rome took the official stance that Jesus had possessed a real human body. Scholars believe that the church began celebrating Jesus' birth as a way of emphasizing his bodily humanity. The first mention of a Nativity feast appears in a Roman document from 354 A.D., and that document is the first to list December 25 as his official birthday.
No one knows exactly why the date of December 25th was chosen, but it was probably because December 25th was the date set for a Roman festival honoring the sun god Mithras. It also coincided with the pagan festival of Saturnalia, which was widely celebrated throughout the Roman Empire.
Unfortunately for the church, Saturnalia was usually celebrated with drunken revelry. And for Christians, for the next thousand years or so, Christmas became the wildest party of the year. There were huge feasts and street parties that often led to riots. It was writers who helped turn Christmas into more of a domestic holiday. The poem "The Night Before Christmas," published in 1823, was one of the first works of literature to suggest that Christmas should be focused more on children than adults. And Charles Dickens's novel A Christmas Carol, in 1843, helped popularize the idea that Christmas should be about family.

Written by Fools to be read by Imbeciles

Blogs are very important these days. Even Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one. The invention of the Web log, we are told, is as transformative as Gutenberg's press, and has shoved journalism into a reformation, perhaps a revolution.

The ascendancy of Internet technology did bring with it innovations. Information is more conveniently disseminated, and there's more of it, because anybody can chip in. There's more "choice"--and in a sense, more democracy. Folks on the WWW, conservatives especially, boast about how the alternative media corrodes the "MSM," for mainstream media, a term redolent with unfairness and elitism.

The blogs are not as significant as their self-endeared curators would like to think. Journalism requires journalists, who are at least fitfully confronting the digital age. The bloggers, for their part, produce minimal reportage. Instead, they ride along with the MSM like remora fish on the bellies of sharks, picking at the scraps.
More success is met in purveying opinion and comment. Some critics reproach the blogs for the coarsening and increasing volatility of political life. Blogs, they say, tend to disinhibit. Maybe so. But politics weren't much rarefied when Andrew Jackson was president, either. The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.
Every conceivable belief is on the scene, but the collective prose, by and large, is homogeneous: A tone of careless informality prevails; posts oscillate between the uselessly brief and the uselessly logorrheic; complexity and complication are eschewed; the humor is cringe-making, with irony present only in its conspicuous absence; arguments are solipsistic; writers traffic more in pronouncement than persuasion . . .

The way we write affects both style and substance. The loquacious formulations of late Henry James, for instance, owe in part to his arthritis, which made longhand impossible, and instead he dictated his writing to a secretary. In this aspect, journalism as practiced via blog appears to be a change for the worse. That is, the inferiority of the medium is rooted in its new, distinctive literary form. Its closest analogue might be the (poorly kept) diary or commonplace book, or the note scrawled to oneself on the back of an envelope--though these things are not meant for public consumption. The reason for a blog's being is: Here's my opinion, right now.
The right now is partially a function of technology, which makes instantaneity possible, and also a function of a culture that valorizes the up-to-the-minute above all else. But there is no inherent virtue to instantaneity. Traditional daily reporting--the news--already rushes ahead at a pretty good clip, breakneck even, and suffers for it. On the Internet all this is accelerated.
The blogs must be timely if they are to influence politics. This element--here's my opinion--is necessarily modified and partly determined by the right now. Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought--instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

This cross-referential and interactive arrangement, in theory, should allow for some resolution to divisive issues, with the market sorting out the vagaries of individual analysis. Not in practice. The Internet is very good at connecting and isolating people who are in agreement, not so good at engaging those who aren't. The petty interpolitical feuding mainly points out that someone is a liar or an idiot or both.
Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line. Thus the right-leaning blogs exhaustively pursue second-order distractions--John Kerry always providing useful material--while leaving underexamined more fundamental issues, say, Iraq. Conservatives have long taken it as self-evident that the press unfavorably distorts the war, which may be the case; but today that country is a vastation, and the unified field theory of media bias has not been altered one jot.
Leftward fatuities too are easily found: The fatuity matters more than the politics. If the blogs have enthusiastically endorsed Joseph Conrad's judgment of newspapering--"written by fools to be read by imbeciles"--they have also demonstrated a remarkable ecumenicalism in filling out that same role themselves.

Nobody wants to be an imbecile. Part of it, I think, is that everyone likes shows and entertainments. Mobs are exciting. People also like validation of what they already believe; the Internet, like all free markets, has a way of gratifying the mediocrity of the masses. And part of it, especially in politics, has to do with conservatives. In their frustration with the ancien régime, conservatives quite eagerly traded for an enlarged discourse. In the process they created a counterestablishment, one that has adopted the same reductive habits they used to complain about. The quarrel over one discrete set of standards did a lot to pull down the very idea of standards.

Certainly the MSM, such as it is, collapsed itself. It was once utterly dominant yet made itself vulnerable by playing on its reputed accuracy and disinterest to pursue adversarial agendas. Still, as far from perfect as that system was, it was and is not wholly imperfect. The technology of ink on paper is highly advanced, and has over centuries accumulated a major institutional culture that screens editorially for originality, expertise and seriousness.
Of course, once a technosocial force like the blog is loosed on the world, it does not go away because some find it undesirable. So grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But democracy does not work well, so to speak, without checks and balances. And in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.
Mr. Rago is an assistant editorial features editor at The Wall Street Journal.

LEE SIEGEL : CRITIC

A new book by Lee Siegel collects some of his pieces on contemporary culture. FALLING UPWARDS: Essays in Defense of the Imagination.

Feeling pretty gloomy about the cultural scene, he mounts a sweeping indictment of his contemporaries, dismissing along the way a generation or two of artists, writers and critics. Though he doesn’t name names—which weakens his case—the charges are as follows: an art world obsessed with money; business-savvy cultural producers out for a buck and little else; and a complacent review corps backing the whole thing up by issuing bland, rubber-stamped judgments. Bohemia is just another subsidiary of the Very Big Corporation, Inc.; its motto: “Get your own, and get it fast, and do it behind a virtuous appearance and with an optimistic air.”

The obstacles to unfettered imagination are everywhere: reality TV, memoirs galore, novels propped up by historical “research” (The Da Vinci Code)—all examples of a culture afflicted by a pernicious “art-suspicion.” Fewer and fewer people are willing to submit to the genuinely made-up, to put themselves “in the power of another world—the work of art—and in the power of another person—the artist.”

His complaint is not new: “It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media,” he fumes, “or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts in direct consultation with gallery owners and book and magazine editors.” Enough of that, he declares: “The critic’s passion should be to expose the shams, the false consciousness, the cleverly accommodating patter that are turning expedience into culture …. [The critic] interprets the work under scrutiny almost as if it were a lesson in freedom, or in some of the ways of being, or not being, free.”

WINTER SOLSTICE

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It's officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.

25 & 26 DECEMBER

December 25 -- Christmas Day

The ancient Celts divided the year into four sections marked by Quarter Days -- the days of the two solstices and two equinoxes, on which the seasons begin. Gradually, to conform more closely to the liturgical year of the Christian church, the Quarter Days became identified with the church's high seasonal festivals, which occurred close to the astronomical dates. Christmas, the fourth Quarter Day, was both the culmination of the old year and the first festival of the new year. The day originated as a solstice festival and signaled a time of resting and gathering fertility for a new round of sowing and reaping. This festival merged easily with the Christian celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, which occurred at this time of year.

December 26 -- Boxing Day

This holiday derives from the Old English custom of giving Christmas "boxes" to tradesmen, postmen, and servants. The original boxes were usually made of earthenware and contained money, which could be retrieved only by breaking the boxes open. These days, a gift of money is usually contained in a greeting card and given before the holiday. Where celebrated (Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), Boxing Day is welcomed as a quiet day of recuperation from the season's hectic festivities.

What Are We Searching For?

Each year, Google, the most popular search engine, releases an annual "zeitgeist" of the search terms that gained the most in usage in 2006, giving the world a peek behind its bare-bones home page and a window into the world's mind. This year, in addition to the predictable current events, celebrities and trends summing up 2006, Google's list seems to support the idea behind Time magazine's Person of the Year award, which was given to "You."
The top search terms were words related to user-generated content, such as blogs, social networking sites and podcasts.
Metacafe is a competitor to YouTube, the leading online video site, which surprisingly did not make Google's global top 10 list, while Radioblog is a tool used for streaming audio on a Web site.
"Zeitgeist, to us, is a measure of the pushpins in the bulletin board of worldwide understanding of what we want to know," said Douglas Merrill, Google's vice president of engineering, who analyzes the most rapidly growing search terms every week for clues about the online world's interests. "It's things in the world we want to care about."
In terms of news, the world is unequivocally interested in Paris Hilton, the socialite celebrity who topped Google's most-searched-for on the search engine's news site, which posts the most current news stories from a variety of outlets. Hilton was followed by actor Orlando Bloom and then cancer.
This year's news list contained a hodgepodge of topics, from serious to frivolous. Podcasting came in at No. 4, followed by Hurricane Katrina and bankruptcy. The list continues with Martina Hingis, a tennis star; autism; the NFL draft; and "Celebrity Big Brother."

I heard the bells of Christmas Day,

Their old familiar carols play.

And wild and sweet the words repeat

Of peace on earth, good will to men.

--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)

Clinton & GWB43

The British correspondent Martin Walker titled his book on Clinton “The President We Deserve.” Clinton practiced leadership as it is taught by management consultants and assorted gurus. “Leadership,” in this sense, is the pseudoscience of listening to employees or customers or voters and giving them back a mirror image of themselves. It is, as the historian James MacGregor Burns puts it, a “dynamic, participatory, mutually empowering relation between leaders and followers,” and those roles are easily confused. It was possible to love Clinton’s charm in the belief that it was somehow ours. When he fell into a sex scandal, of course, voters felt betrayed. But they weren’t really betrayed. What they were was embarrassed.
Bush is another president we deserve. He, too, is often accused of betraying Americans — by campaigning as a humble man and governing as something else. But this is also wrong. Bush has governed as he promised to — with the kind of phony-demotic cocksureness that many people like in pickup-truck commercials and think of themselves as embodying. When he let it be known that he didn’t “do nuance,” it was an invitation to say: “Good. Neither do we.” But this banty self-assurance — our self-assurance — appears not such a great trait when it leads you into a bloodbath in Iraq. The feeling circulating since the election is relief — relief that this unflattering mirror is a bit closer to being taken away. It should not surprise us that this feeling is as strong among those who supported the president as among those who did not.

Julian Barnes

A splendid story in this week's NEW YORKER by Julian Barnes. Click above.

HAPPINESS to an ECONOMIST

Affluence

Happiness (and how to measure it)

From The Economist year-end edition

Capitalism can make a society rich and keep it free. Don't ask it to make you happy as well

HAVING grown at an annual rate of 3.2% per head since 2000, the world economy is over half way towards notching up its best decade ever. If it keeps going at this clip, it will beat both the supposedly idyllic 1950s and the 1960s. Market capitalism, the engine that runs most of the world economy, seems to be doing its job well.

But is it? Once upon a time, that job was generally agreed to be to make people better off. Nowadays that's not so clear. A number of economists, in search of big problems to solve, and politicians, looking for bold promises to make, think that it ought to be doing something else: making people happy.

The view that economics should be about more than money is widely held in continental Europe. In debates with Anglo-American capitalists, wily bons vivants have tended to cite the idea of “quality of life” to excuse slower economic growth. But now David Cameron, the latest leader of Britain's once rather materialistic Conservative Party, has espoused the notion of “general well-being” (GWB) as an alternative to the more traditional GDP. In America, meanwhile, inequality, over-work and other hidden costs of prosperity were much discussed in the mid-term elections; and “wellness” (as opposed to health) has become a huge industry, catering especially to the prosperous discontent of the baby-boomers.

The things you never knew you wanted

Much of this draws on the upstart science of happiness, which mixes psychology with economics (see article). Its adherents start with copious survey data, such as those derived from the simple, folksy question put to thousands of Americans every year or two since 1972: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days—would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?” Some of the results are unsurprising: the rich report being happier than do the poor. But a paradox emerges that requires explanation: affluent countries have not got much happier as they have grown richer. From America to Japan, figures for well-being have barely budged.

The science of happiness offers two explanations for the paradox. Capitalism, it notes, is adept at turning luxuries into necessities—bringing to the masses what the elites have always enjoyed. But the flip side of this genius is that people come to take for granted things they once coveted from afar. Frills they never thought they could have become essentials that they cannot do without. People are stuck on a treadmill: as they achieve a better standard of living, they become inured to its pleasures.

Capitalism's ability to take things downmarket also has its limits. Many of the things people most prize—such as the top jobs, the best education, or an exclusive home address—are luxuries by necessity. An elite schooling, for example, ceases to be so if it is provided to everyone. These “positional goods”, as they are called, are in fixed supply: you can enjoy them only if others do not. The amount of money and effort required to grab them depends on how much your rivals are putting in.

Some economists think the results cast doubt on the long-held verities of their discipline. The dismal science traditionally assumes that people know their own interests, and are best left to mind their own business. How much they work, and what they buy, is their own affair. A properly brought-up economist seeks to explain their decisions, not to quarrel with them. But the new happiness gurus are much less willing to defer to people's choices.

Take work, for instance. In 1930 John Maynard Keynes imagined that richer societies would become more leisured ones, liberated from toil to enjoy the finer things in life. Yet most people still put in a decent shift. They work hard to afford things they think will make them happy, only to discover the fruits of their labour sour quickly. They also aspire to a higher place in society's pecking order, but in so doing force others in the rat race to run faster to keep up. So everyone loses.

Yet it is not self-evident that less work would mean more happiness. In America, when the working week has shortened, the gap has been filled by assiduous TV-watching. As for well-being, other studies show that elderly people who stop working tend to die sooner than their peers who labour on. Indeed, another side of happiness economics busies itself studying the non-monetary rewards from work: most people enjoy parts of their work, and some people love it.
As for capitalism's wasteful materialism, even Adam Smith had a problem with it. “How many people ruin themselves by laying out money on trinkets of frivolous utility?” he complained. It is hard to claim that pyramid-shaped tea-bags (developed at great expense over four years) have added much to the sum of human happiness. Yet if capitalism sometimes persuades people to buy stuff they only imagine they want, it also appeals to tastes and aptitudes they never knew they had. In the arts, this is called “originality” and is venerated. In commerce it is called “novelty” and too often dismissed. But without the urge for material improvement, people would still be wearing woollen underwear and holidaying in Bognor rather than Bhutan. Would that be so great?

The joys of niche capitalism

If growth of this kind does not make people happy, stagnation will hardly do the trick. Ossified societies guard positional goods more, not less, jealously. A flourishing economy, on the other hand, creates what biologists call “a tangled bank” of niches, with no clear hierarchy between them. Tyler Cowen, of George Mason University, points out that America has more than 3,000 halls of fame, honouring everyone from rock stars and sportsmen to dog mushers, pickle-packers and accountants. In such a society, everyone can hope to come top of his particular monkey troop, even as the people he looks down on count themselves top of a subtly different troop.

To find the market system wanting because it does not bring joy as well as growth is to place too heavy a burden on it. Capitalism can make you well off. And it also leaves you free to be as unhappy as you choose. To ask any more of it would be asking too much.

A Christmas Carol

It was on this day in 1843 that Charles Dickens published A Christmas Carol. Dickens wrote the novel after his first commercial failure. His previous novel, Martin Chuzzlewit (1842), had flopped, and he was suddenly strapped for cash. Martin Chuzzlewit had been satirical and pessimistic, and Dickens thought he might be more successful if he wrote a heartwarming tale with a holiday theme.

He got the idea for the book in late October of 1843, and he struggled to finish the book in time for Christmas. He no longer had a publisher so he published the book himself, ordering illustrations, gilt-edged pages and a lavish red bound cover. He priced the book at a mere 5 shillings, in hopes of making it affordable to everyone. It was released within a week of Christmas and was a huge success, selling 6,000 copies the first few days, and the demand was so great that it quickly went to second and third editions.

At the time, Christmas was on the decline and not celebrated much. England was in the midst of an Industrial Revolution and most people were incredibly poor, having to work as much as 16-hour days six days a week. Most people couldn't afford to celebrate Christmas, and Puritans believed it was a sin to do so. They felt that celebrating Christmas too extravagantly would be an insult to Christ. The famous American preacher Henry Ward Beecher said that Christmas was a "foreign day" and he wouldn't even recognize it.

When Dickens's novel became a huge best-seller in both the United States and England, A Christmas Carol reminded many people of the old Christmas traditions that had been dying out since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of cooking a feast, spending time with family, and spreading warmth and cheer. Dickens helped people return to the old ways of Christmas. He went on to write a Christmas story every year, but none endured as well. Dickens wrote, "I have always thought of Christmas time, as ... the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore ... though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it

Rembrandt at 400

Click above for an interesting piece on Rembrandt from the Weekly Standard.

QUIZZES

One of life's greater pleasures is to make it to the end of each year and be able to partake of the wonderful quizzes put forth by several British publications. The Spectator leads off this year: http://www.spectator.co.uk/, but The Economist and the FT will soon follow. Don't miss the opportunity to test yourself and relieve some of the holiday......

Peter Ackroyd at Christmas

Peter Ackroyd writes a lovely Christmas story available here from the Spectator in both a written form and also splendidly read in podcast form: http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/

MARK STEYN

Mark Steyn, the Canadian columnist who lives in "blue" New Hampshire, is a true "red-stater" whose genius ranges somewhere between Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce. He has got punch, wit, and smarts, and if he were teaching in a North American humanities department, they would send him off to "sensitivity training" for life, without parole.

In "America Alone" (Regnery, 224 pages, $27.95) Mr. Steyn aims his rhetorical sandblaster at three targets: Europe, Islam, and the welfare state. Why this trio? Europe is dying for lack of babies, Islam produces a surfeit thereof, and the fault lies, au fond, with the postmodern welfare state that relieves the individual of ever more responsibility while shouldering him with boundless guilt about past sins, such as racism and colonialism plus an equally boundless "respect" for "The Other." Hence, he predicts: "Go to any children's store in Amsterdam or Marseilles ... Look at the women in headscarves or full abaya. That is the future."

Rejoice in the Light

A Fascinating Look in the Mirror

Who Americans Are and What They Do, in Census Data

By SAM ROBERTS (NYTimes)

Americans drank more than 23 gallons of bottled water per person in 2004 — about 10 times as much as in 1980. We consumed more than twice as much high fructose corn syrup per person as in 1980 and remained the fattest inhabitants of the planet, although Mexicans, Australians, Greeks, New Zealanders and Britons are not too far behind.
At the same time, Americans spent more of their lives than ever — about eight-and-a-half hours a day — watching television, using computers, listening to the radio, going to the movies or reading.

This eclectic portrait of the American people is drawn from the 1,376 tables in the Census Bureau’s 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States, the annual feast for number crunchers that is being served up by the federal government today.

For the first time, the abstract quantifies same-sex sexual contacts (6 percent of men and 11.2 percent of women say they have had them) and learning disabilities (among population groups, American Indians were most likely to have been told that they have them).
The abstract reveals that the floor space in new private one-family homes has expanded to 2,227 square feet in 2005 from 1,905 square feet in 1990. Americans are getting fatter, but now drink more bottled water per person than beer.

Taller, too. More than 24 percent of Americans in their 70s are shorter than 5-foot-6. Only 10 percent of people in their 20s are.

More people are injured by wheelchairs than by lawnmowers, the abstract reports. Bicycles are involved in more accidents than any other consumer product, but beds rank a close second.
Most of the statistical tables, which come from a variety of government and other sources, are presented raw, without caveats; and because the abstract is so concrete, the statistics can suggest false precision. The table of consumer products involved in injuries does not explain, for example, that one reason nearly as many injuries involve beds as bicycles is that more people use beds.

With medical costs rising, more people said they pray for their health than invest in every form of alternative medicine or therapy combined, the abstract reports.
Adolescents and adults now spend, on average, more than 64 days a year watching television, 41 days listening to the radio and a little over a week using the Internet. Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.

“The demand for information and entertainment seems almost insatiable,” said James P. Rutherfurd, executive vice president of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, the media investment firm whose research the Census Bureau cited.

Mr. Rutherfurd said time spent with such media increased to 3,543 hours last year from 3,340 hours in 2000, and is projected to rise to 3,620 hours in 2010. The time spent within each category varied, with less on broadcast television (down to 679 hours in 2005 from 793 hours in 2000) and on reading in general, and more using the Internet (up to 183 hours from 104 hours) and on cable and satellite television.

How does all that listening and watching influence the amount of time Americans spend alone? The census does not measure that, but since 2000 the number of hobby and athletic nonprofit associations has risen while the number of labor unions, fraternities and fan clubs has declined.
“The large master trend here is that over the last hundred years, technology has privatized our leisure time,” said Robert D. Putnam, a public policy professor at Harvard and author of “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”

“The distinctive effect of technology has been to enable us to get entertainment and information while remaining entirely alone,” Mr. Putnam said. “That is from many points of view very efficient. I also think it’s fundamentally bad because the lack of social contact, the social isolation means that we don’t share information and values and outlook that we should.”
More Americans were born in 2004 than in any years except 1960 and 1990. Meanwhile, the national divorce rate, 3.7 divorces per 1,000 people, was the lowest since 1970. Among the states, Nevada still claims the highest divorce rate, which slipped to 6.4 per 1,000 in 2004 from 11.4 per 1,000 in 1990, just ahead of Arkansas’s rate.

From 2000 to 2005, the number of manufacturing jobs declined nearly 18 percent. Virtually every job category registered decreases except pharmaceuticals. Employment in textile mills fell by 42 percent. The job projected to grow the fastest by 2014 is home health aide.
One thing Americans produce more of is solid waste — 4.4 pounds per day, up from 3.7 pounds in 1980.

More than half of American households owned stocks and mutual funds in 2005. The 91 million individuals in those households had a median age of 51 and a median household income of $65,000.

That might help explain a shift in what college freshmen described as their primary personal objectives. In 1970, 79 percent said their goal was developing a meaningful philosophy of life. By 2005, 75 percent said their primary objective was to be financially very well off.

Among graduate students, 27 percent had at least one foreign-born parent. The number of foreign students from India enrolled in American colleges soared to 80,000 in 2005 from 10,000 in 1976.

As recently as 1980, only 12 percent of doctors were women; by 2004, 27 percent were.
In 1970, 33,000 men and 2,000 women earned professional degrees; in 2004, the numbers were 42,000 men and 41,000 women.

Be Thou Calm

Something to think and pray about this week:

Psychiatrists say they are at their busiest in the weeks coming up to Christmas. The feast stirs up anxieties linked to memories of childhood, and relationships within the family. It pushes us to difficult decisions about sending invitations or cards or gifts. No wonder people talk about "getting over Christmas". But our real friends do not judge us by those decisions. They like us to be calm and contented in ourselves, with a clean emotional palate so that we can enter into and taste other people's joys.

Music Lists

Here for gift ideas and a general sanity check on your own collection is an excellent listing of the outstanding CD's of 2006. Came from the FT, which needs to give download information next year.

More Dawkins

Just in time for Christmas the FT enjoys a luncheon with Professor Dawkins. Click the arrow.

DAMN!

Railing against Graham Greene’s tendency to glamorize evil in the New Yorker in 1948, George Orwell wrote that Greene “appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned”. Trying to persuade people otherwise is a thankless task. As anybody who has seen the recent Meryl Streep movie The Devil Wears Prada knows, Satan is back in vogue.

It is unsurprising, then, that some of the Devil’s sparkle has rubbed off in Western universities. The past two decades have witnessed an efflorescence of academic studies in witchcraft, demonology and the occult. Perhaps the volume of works about the Devil is appropriate: when Jesus met a man possessed by an evil spirit and asked the demon to reveal itself, it replied, “My name is Legion: for we are many”.

In Satan: A biography, the American scholar and former Jesuit Henry Ansgar Kelly talks of “the unjustifiably bad press given to Satan over the centuries”. This is not a new idea – more than a hundred years ago, Samuel Butler jotted in his notebook, “An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case; God has written all the books”. But Kelly’s use of the word “unjustifiably” betrays his innate sympathy for his subject: he is of the Devil’s party. In this succinct study, he adopts the role of Satan’s unofficial spin doctor. The result is entertaining as well as rigorous.

From this week's TLS.

Trim Your Own Tree

Click the arrow above to link you to the Guardian's answer to instant Christmas decoration. cleverly done and fun.

America Viewed from accross the Pond

From today's Telegraph:

Introduction:

Since their independence from the British in 1776, the United States has rapidly succeeded in her goals in conquering a largely empty continent and securing the first place among world economies.

Concept of status:

This is based on wealth. Old money tops new money, provided there is enough of it. Top managers and magnates are more popular than professors or soldiers.

Cultural Black Holes:

The American Cultural Black Hole is the American Dream, or the phenomenon of the Frontier Spirit, which underpins the mentality of the mainstream American culture. Americans imbued with this spirit or credo firmly believe that the Dream exists and is obtainable only on American soil.

Self-image:

The American self image is that of the man-of-action. They wish to initiate action (leading to business and profits) as soon as possible and they see the US way of dealing as the most efficient to this end.

Concept of time:

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries vast tracts of open, unclaimed land to the west beckoned with some urgency to poorer settlers and new arrivals. For decades it was first come, first served – you staked your claim, cleared the land, tilled, planted and defended it. The modern American continues at the headlong pace of his nineteenth century forbears. Work equates with success, time is money, he has to get there first.

Manners and taboos:

Americans make quick friendships and drop them just as quickly. This is partly because the average American executive changes jobs and homes 14 times in his lifetime.
Communication patterns: Outsiders often see Americans as aggressive communicators, thanks to their directness. Americans are quite willing to reveal personal details, and may ask personal questions. They also share their opinions and expect to hear yours. Americans do not hesitate to express disagreement, and often find confrontation and conciliation an exercise in skilful and successful communication.

CHINA

January PROSPECT includes a quite intriguing speculation on China's future.

It is a commonplace to observe that the rise of China is transforming the world. Extrapolate from current growth rates and China will be the world's largest economy by the middle of this century, if not before. If it remains communist, the impact on the world system will be enormous and very damaging. Britain and the US are, for all their faults, democracies that accept the rule of law. This is not true of China. If an unreformed China takes its place at the top table, the global order will be kinder to despotism; the fragile emergence of an international system of governance based on the rule of law will be set back and the relations between states will depend even more nakedly on their relative power.

All that, however, is predicated on two very big "ifs"—if the current Chinese growth rate continues, and if the country remains communist. I think there are substantial doubts about each proposition. What is certain is that both cannot hold. China is reaching the limits of the sustainability of its current model, and to extrapolate from the past into the future as if nothing needs to change is a first-order mistake.