Adam Gopnik & M.F.K. Fisher

To those of you who read the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik needs no introduction. His Paris to the Moon, a collection of his letters from Paris almost equal the wonderful essays of Janet Flanner who occupied the position of Paris correspondent for the New Yorker before him. Gopnik here gives a wonderful essay on a pre-eminent food critic of the last generation, M.F.K. Fisher. Here courtesy of Arts and Letters is the piece from the New Yorker.The New Yorker: PRINTABLES

All Fool's Day

April Fool's Day -- History, Traditions, and Foolishness


But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty. -- 1 Cor 1:27
However big the fool, there is always a bigger fool to admire him. -- Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux
[Politicians] never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge. -- Thomas Reed
He who lives without folly isn't so wise as he thinks. -- François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools. -- Herbert Spencer
Sometimes one likes foolish people for their folly, better than wise people for their wisdom. -- Elizabeth Gaskell
Looking foolish does the spirit good. -- John Updike
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. -- Mark Twain
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. -- William Blake
A fool must now and then be right by chance. -- Cowper
It is better to be a fool than to be dead. -- Stevenson
The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year. -- Mark Twain

O'Toole lashes out at the state of modern theatre

A brilliant actor and never one to mince words, Peter O'Toole has lashed out at the state of contemporary theatre. One need not look further than Broadway or the West End to see his point. Both are becoming craven to strictly commercial interests. Regional theatre, on the other hand, is thriving and in an uncompromising way.Guardian Unlimited Arts news O'Toole lashes out at the state of modern theatre

How the GIs got to grips with Britain

As the last of the World War II generation pass from the scene, it is both amusing and poignant to read a Guide for American servicemen serving in Britain during the war. Much has changed but much has stayed the same.Telegraph Expat How the GIs got to grips with Britain

America's Band?

First, I must admit a great affection for the music of the Eagles. However, I am not sure that I would agree with this Canadian that it is "America's Band". I am not sure that a better example exists but they have not recorded in twenty-five years and their appeal my only be to those of 'a certain age'.The Globe and Mail: How the Eagles became America's band

WOW: And I thought That I Enjoyed Reading!

Eight Tousand book reviews! Five books a day. This woman ought to be in the Guiness Book of Records. Ms. Klausner is sending her reviews off to Amazon in bulk according to the Wall Street Journal.OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts

Le Lapin et Les Oeufs

For those of us who couldn't make it to France this year for Easter, here is the lowdown on all Easter traditions.

PARIS (AFP) - Le jour de Pâques marque pour les chrétiens la résurrection du Christ, il est aussi l'occasion d'offrir des oeufs, des cloches et même des lapins. Au fait, pourquoi des lapins?Parce que la tradition chrétienne s'est superposée à des rites païens dans lesquels le lièvre, animal prolifique et sexuellement très actif, symbolisait la fertilité, particulièrement au printemps. La déesse de la fertilité des saxons -Eastre ou Ostara- était d'ailleurs représentée avec une tête de lièvre.
Quand les chrétiens ont commencé à célébrer Pâques -dont la date a été fixée au 1er dimanche après la pleine lune suivant l'équinoxe de printemps par le Concile de Nicée- le lièvre est devenu lapin, mais comme symbole d'innocence.Les oeufs sont également associés à la fertilité. Et comme l'Eglise catholique avait interdit d'en consommer pendant le Carême (les 40 jours précédant Paques), on en avait beaucoup en réserve le jour de la Résurrection. Donc on en mangeait (le pâté de Paques de Touraine-Poitou est farci d'oeufs durs) et on en offrait.
La tradition des oeufs peints remonterait à la Rome antique. Elle a été adaptée de luxueuse manière par les rois qui offraient à leur cour des oeufs couverts de feuille d'or. Le roi Edward I d'Angleterre le faisait déjà en 1200, bien avant Louis XIV, qui faisait aussi collecter les plus gros oeufs pondus pendant la semaine sainte.
Sur un mode plus modeste, il est de tradition d'offrir aux enfants des oeufs qui sont cachés dans les jardins par les lapins (!) ou apportés par les cloches. Les cloches des églises sont en effet muettes du jeudi saint au dimanche de Pâques ce qui leur donne le temps d'aller à Rome chercher les oeufs...
La tradition des lapins et des oeufs est passée en Amérique avec les premiers immigrants venus d'Angleterre et des Pays-Bas.
Quant aux chocolatiers, ils se sont mis de la partie il y a une cinquantaine d'années, avec le succès qu'on constate.

It Ain't Broke!

George Bush is a true enigma. Does anyone believe that we didn't have the capacity to discern whether there were weapons of mass destruction in pre-occupied Iraq? Now he attacks Social Security. No actuary supports his math. What are we to make of this 'popular' President? Craven? I think not. Badly advised? Pitifully. The deficit is monumental. The dollar is crashing. Foreign investors are not lining up at the discount window to fund our debt. The Euro which has gained 50% in value over the dollar in the past four years stands ready to be the global currency of choice. Should not these problems be addressed rather than tinker with Social Security?AlterNet: It Ain't Broke!

'Annie' Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Woody Allen's latest film, "Melinda and Melinda" has met with critical ennui. Remember when each of his efforts was eagerly awaited and usually highly acclaimed. Well, not so anymore. Has he changed or have we? Here Desson Thomson from the Washington Post gives his opinion.washingtonpost.com: 'Annie' Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Bobby Short, Keeping the Party Going

Leave it to the New York Times to come up with the best appreciation of Bobby Short. There are few about whom one can say he was the best. But he was, and we miss him.The New York Times > Arts > Music > An Appreciation: Bobby Short, Keeping the Party Going

What It Means to be Jewish

I suppose that this is a highly inopportune time -- it being Easter Weekend -- to recommend an article on What it Means to be Jewish, but after all, Christ was a Jew. Anyway the Spectator provides this interesting view. Untitled Document

American Nationalism

An old saying is that liberals desire a world that will never be while conservatives desire a world that never was. An interesting book review making this point is in this week's TLS. America Right or Wrong by Anatol Lieven.Weekly book reviews and literary analysis from the Times Literary Supplement

Iraq

This insight is quite alarming. A piece from this month's London Review of Books.

The gap between the way foreigners talk about Iraq and the reality is monstrous. Our political vocabulary - 'rogue states', 'nation-building intervention', 'WMD', 'neo-imperialism', 'terrorism' - is useless. Does anyone know how to govern Iraq, or what the country will look like in five years' time, or what effect this will have on the international system? Critics are no better informed than members of the administration. Many authorities on Iraq have spent little or no time there. The most to be hoped for of a foreigner's book published today would be the equivalent of an account of Britain written by a non-English-speaking Arab who had spent 18 months in the country, unable to travel freely. But the generals, the journalists, the academics, the politicians (Iraqi or foreign), the diplomats and the aid workers rarely admit that they have almost no idea what Iraq is like or is going to be like. Everyone is an expert.

Bobby Short

It has been a very bad last few months for quintessential New Yorkers with George Plimpton and Jerry Orbach leaving the scene. Now with the news that Bobby Short has joined them, it is an especially poignant bechmark. His enthusiatic approach to his music was a splendid tribute to a world that is quickly disappearing. While we can't revel in nostalgia, it is hard to believe that an era of grace and fun has passed with him. R.I.P Mr. Short. You brought us many smiles and great entertainment.

Globalization

The full impact of the Global Industrial Complex is examined here by Peter Drucker. Whether one likes the idea of the global impact of corporations or not, the article demonstrates that the phnomona is here to stay. Print Article

Arts Jobs in All Congressional Districts

I suppose it is not surprising the New York and California lead the nation in 'arts-centric' jobs. Other statistics form a highly interesting piece from 'Back Stage".Study: Arts Jobs in All Congressional Districts

13 Things That Do Not Make Sense

A fascinating article about thirteen things that do not make sense from the New Scientist. Those who claim that science is becoming more accessible to the layman can read this and weep.New Scientist 13 things that do not make sense - Features

Iraq War -- Legal?

Historians and Biographers will have a grand time deconstructing who said what to whom in the run up to the war in Iraq. Lawyers amongst them especially will want to examine the premise for the invasion. Here is an early break in this quest from the British Foreign Office. I fear that the news will be little appreciated by those in command.Independent News

Bushonomics

The Economist raises the question of quality in George Bush's economic team. Aside from being relatively light in backround they have witnessed an astonishing rise in the deficit and a precipitous fall in the dollar. This is good? Economist.com

SANITY

Do we need a new definition of sanity! Do we need Freud anymore. (Did we ever need him?)

What "we" do need is an understanding of how the brain works. The nature of consciousness is the most exciting unsolved scientific problem of the day. How is memory stored? How does vision work? What makes dreams?In the last 20 years of his life, the Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA, shifted his curiosity from molecular biology to brain science. Crick formulated the theory that consciousness lies in the interaction of neurons—nerve cells. "To understand the brain," he says in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, "you must understand neurons and especially how vast numbers of them act together in parallel."Another academic neurologist, Antonio Damasio, also locates consciousness in the mechanics of the body. The way that the body reports, in thousands of ways, the state of its cells and tissues and strives to keep them stable adds up to consciousness, he says in The Feeling of What Happens. The net effect on the body's owner is a sense of self, "a revelation of existence." Going further, Damasio sees consciousness, with the help of memory, reasoning and language, as "a means to modify existence."Modifying existence is where neuroscience meets psychoanalysis. Freudian theory is having to make peace with the new theories of the causation of behaviour. Surprisingly, Crick, the arch rationalist, had some good words for Freud: "A physician who had many novel ideas and who wrote unusually well." Damasio goes further. Freud, in his eyes, woke up the world to the reality of the unconscious, the importance of sexuality and of childhood. But, Freud himself, who trained as a neurologist, foresaw that psychoanalysis would be superseded by neuroscience. In 1909, at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, he admired the attempt of a surgeon to find the neural basis of mental states. He himself could not reduce his psychological theories to neuroscientific ones but he believed that these problems "may be on the agenda a century after us."
Prospect - article_details

Resolved

So: We invaded Iraq. Change is afoot in the Middle East. Therefore, the Middle East is changing because we invaded Iraq. Q.E.D. G.W.B. Please vote up or down.

Leave it to The French

How, charming! How, je ne sais quoi. The French Income Tax authorities host sessions to help one with one's tax return, SERVING CHAMPAGNE!

More French

Here is a tremendous review of Bernard-Henri Levy's biography. How did it come about, we want to know, that BHL has made himself France’s eternally angry, eternally young man, even though he is now well over fifty? He is described, if ironically, as the Pico della Mirandola de nos jours, the only person capable of having the last word on all the big questions of the moment. He has made himself “the quasi-official successor of Sartre and Malraux, figures whom he has ‘appropriated’ in his work . . . . He is the writer in the eyes of those millions of readers without books . . . who cannot extract themselves from their one-to-three hours of television each day”. The laurels and the millstone are indistinguishable in the author’s effusive denunciation. http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2110265

Fun Blog

Try it. I believe that you will agree.This is a fun way to spend an idle hour. We have the Wikepedia. It is a highly entertaining and often amusing journal. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/wiki_pr.html

Baghdad

This piece by Boris Johson and printed in the Spectator is two years old. It applies today as well as then (unfortunately).The Spectator.co.uk

New Yorker Tops Magazine Award Nominees

If I had just one magazine subscription on my desert island it would be the New Yorker. David Remnick has restored a franchise that had soiled just a bit. It remains at the top of the heap. Yahoo! News - Conde Nast's New Yorker Tops Magazine Award Nominees

UN/UNE

France is the latest country to air a TV competition to determine its greatest citizen and this week's announcement of the top 100 has riled many.
As in other incarnations of the program, which originated in 2002 as the BBC series Great Britons, popular culture and contemporary figures dominated the list.

French soccer player Zinedine Zidane ranked higher on the list than writer Emile Zola, architect Gustave Eiffel, painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir and even French President Jacques Chirac. (AP Photo)
"Dial one for Zizou, two for Zola" read a headline in Le Figaro, which questioned how soccer player Zinedine (Zizou) Zidane (21) could place higher than the 19th century novelist (26).
"What the hell were they thinking?" asked Le Parisien, noting that film director Luc Besson (91) beat writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (96).
Other prominent figures on the list included playwright Marcel Pagnol (11), architect Gustave Eiffel (25), chansonnier Charles Aznavour (29), Joan of Arc (31), bombshell actress Brigitte Bardot (66), French President Jacques Chirac (42), The "Sun King" Louis XIV (50) and impressionist master Pierre-Auguste Renoir (77).
Academics were also aghast that Napoleon Bonaparte (16) – who aside from his military conquests is credited with reforming France's civil law, education, tax, banking, road and sewer systems – failed to crack the top 10.
Producers of the series, which airs on the state-owned channel France 2, revealed the list of 100 on Monday. The top 10 candidates will compete for the title of The Greatest French Person of All Time:

Military and political leader Charles de Gaulle
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Marie Curie
Chemist and microbiology pioneer Louis Pasteur
Comedian Coluche
Prolific comic actor and singer Bourvil
Poet and novelist Victor Hugo
17th century playwright Molière
Singer Edith Piaf
Undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau
Jesuit priest Abbé Pierre, a poverty activist who also helped Jews escape from the Nazis (and, at age 92, the list's only living candidate).
Though de Gaulle, Piaf and Hugo are seen as predictable favourites, the selection of Coluche and Bourvil baffled many, as the two were popular in their day but not typically even considered among the country's greatest comedians or widely known outside of France.
As in other incarnations around the world, the French series will enlist "celebrity" figures to champion each of the 10 candidates in half-hour instalments. Viewers can then vote for the winner via telephone, text messaging or the internet. The winner will be revealed during a live broadcast

Power and Morals

Realists argue that foreign policy is necessarily amoral. Liberals contend that there is no distinction between the moral standards that apply in domestic policy and those in international politics. Both views are flawed. Morality does count in foreign policy, but it is usually the morality of the lesser evil. Prospect - article_details

ART, HISTORY OF....

For all the immediacy and force of so much great art, many of us welcome the instruction of connoisseurs and historians like H.W. Janson, whose famous "History of Art" first appeared in 1962. Such surveys have their shortcomings, of course, but they often help to make art more fully comprehensible, placing it in a narrative line, highlighting interpretive detail, guiding our untrained eye to see a great deal more than we would otherwise see.
Janson's book was for years a staple of art-history classrooms, and efforts like it have followed since, some concentrating less on the entire sweep of Western art than on some period within it, like H.H. Arnason's "History of Modern Art." Now we have "Art Since 1900" (Thames & Hudson, 704 pages, $85)--all 704 oversize pages of it, with 637 reproductions. It appears to be the latest such book, bidding to be a magisterial guide to the art of the modern period, broadly defined. What are we to make of it?

It helps to begin by looking at a small but telling detail, like the smile on Leonardo's "Mona Lisa"--the index, in this case. If you thought Picasso and Matisse were the most important figures in 20th-century art, you might want to adjust your scale of values. For the authors, Marcel Duchamp--the man who put a urinal on a pedestal and called it art--is the reigning deity. He garners more references than either Picasso or Matisse. Among critics, Clement Greenberg is awarded due recognition (35 citations). But he must share space with the likes of Walter Benjamin (30), Michel Foucault (24) and Jacques Derrida (10). Then there are entries on topics you don't normally find in art books: "castration anxiety" (nine entries), "fetish, fetishism" (26) and "Oedipus complex" (eight). What exactly is going on here?
Call it the mainstreaming of postmodernism--and a play for the college-textbook market. Since the early 1980s, the authors have been at the forefront of "the new art history," an interpretive school whose fullest expression can be found in October magazine, a quarterly they founded in 1976. (The name is meant to evoke revolutionary associations.) It was in October that Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh led the charge against the traditional, aesthetic appreciation of art, supplanting it with psychoanalysis, political ideologies such as Marxism and various forms of French theory, like those derived from linguistics. According to this school of thought, a painting isn't merely an abstract or representational image on canvas but a social "text" to be interpreted and deconstructed.
"Art Since 1900" begins by offering four "methodological introductions." The idea is to prepare the reader, if possible, by explaining the different modes of interpretation that the authors will use--for instance, "formalism and structuralism." A good thing, too, because forewarned is forearmed.
Did you think that Picasso's wonderful 1942 sculpture "Bull's Head"--in which a bike's saddle serves as the bull's head and its handlebars the horns--was a brilliant feat of prestidigitation, in which the forms of one thing are transfigured into another? Well, you were wrong, or at least naive. Here is what the authors say: "This metaphoric transformation indicates that, contra [Roman] Jacobson, Picasso is not bound to the metonymic pole. Instead, he seems to particularly relish composite structures that are both metaphoric and metonymic."
Such prose can be found throughout the book. The funny part is that, when you parse the passage from which this excerpt is taken, it comes to something much simpler, something close to, well, "a brilliant feat of prestidigitation transforming one thing into another." The authors routinely dress up commonplace observations in the jargon of theory. Just as often, they mix obscurantism with ideology. The Guggenheim Museum's plan to expand its New York landmark into a series of international satellites is, according to the authors, nothing more than "the forced unlocking of noninvested surplus capital and the propulsion of it into motion. This is the way late capitalism has industrialized sectors of social life--such as leisure, sport, and art--hitherto thought impenetrable by industry's hallmarks: mechanization, standardization, overspecialization, and division of labor."
As for the evolution of painting and sculpture, "Art Since 1900" presents a familiar "postmodern" narrative. Essentially, the authors see art proceeding more or less as we have been given to understand--Cézanne's late work to Cubism to abstraction--until the antimodernist reaction of Marcel Duchamp and his "Readymades" (commercial objects transferred to the gallery or museum). These overturned the idea of a subjective, individually invented style as the vehicle of artistic content. And indeed, one probably does have to accord Duchamp a large measure of recognition since--by making art a kind of joke on its own higher aspirations--he exercised a considerable, if baleful, influence on the artists who came after him.
For the authors, painting all but came to an end in the early 1960s. It was then that, in the authors' view, Conceptual Art triumphed over orthodox painting and sculpture. About the only "major" artists that they consider worth discussing after 1965 are: Josef Beuys, who parlayed the story of his rescue as a downed Luftwaffe pilot in World War II into a career as performance artist; Hans Haacke, whose "project" involved creating photographic installations to expose the allegedly nefarious economic and political underpinnings of contemporary life; body artists like Vito Acconci, one of whose works consisted of biting himself all over, inking the toothmarks and printing them on paper; and Sherrie Levine and Cindy Sherman, who have used photography to "critique" fine art and consumer culture.

It's one thing to include these people in a history of modern art--they have, after all, acquired considerable reputations. But to do so to the exclusion of figures of equal or greater importance--Richard Diebenkorn, Fairfield Porter, Brice Marden, William Bailey, Chuck Close--is a fatal flaw. "Art Since 1900" presents a history so skewed as to be nearly useless.
Indeed, "Art Since 1900" is less a historical narrative than an extended piece of art criticism arguing for a particular point of view. In this one respect the book has something in common with Paul Johnson's recent "Art: A New History." The difference is that Mr. Johnson's approach is traditional and art itself is, for him, front and center; his insights grow out of his close look at the works of art that he is writing about. In "Art Since 1900" works of art are subordinated to one theory or another, reduced to little more than illustrations. And most of the theory itself is tendentious in the extreme, pushing a political "reading" of culture that amounts to a tired paean to Karl Marx and Walter Benjamin.
It's appalling to think that a book like this may enter classrooms and inflict itself on young minds with little or no acquaintance with art history. So I have a suggestion for parents of high-school students: Find out whether the college that your child hopes to attend plans to assign "Art Since 1900" in its art-history courses. If so, apply elsewhere.

Charity begins at Homo sapiens

A question that philosophers is whether humans are naturally or genetically prone to do good to others even to the point of self-expense. The New Scientist suggests the answer is yes.New Scientist Charity begins at Homo sapiens - Features


Why are we so generous?
1. JUST FOR KICKS
In 2002, a team of researchers led by psychiatrist Gregory Berns from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, used brain imaging to find out what is going on inside our heads when we cooperate. They discovered that when players work together in the prisoner's dilemma game (see Diagram), the active parts of their brain include the orbitofrontal cortex and the striatum - areas associated with processing reward (Neuron, vol 35, p 395). And, last year, economist Ernst Fehr and psychologist Dominique de Quervain of the University of Zurich discovered that we get a similar mental buzz when we punish cheats, even when it means incurring a personal monetary cost (Science, vol 305, p 1254).
2. IT's GOOD FOR THE IMAGE
Punishing others who don't toe the line can boost your reputation, as a recent study by anthropologists Rob Boyd and Karthik Panchanathan of the University of California at Los Angeles shows. Using computer simulations, they explored the benefits of a strategy of punishment that entails simply shunning others with a bad reputation and helping those with a good reputation. By doing this, individuals can enhance their own standing, they found. What's more, by altering their behaviour according to people's reputations, these individuals minimise the cost of meting out punishment and gain the edge over indiscriminate cooperators who help anyone regardless of reputation (Nature, vol 432, p 499).
3. TO PLEASE TEACHERS (AND GODS)
Despite our altruism, generosity may not be in our genes. If true altruism has evolved through competition between groups, as some researchers maintain (see main story), then it is more likely to be the product of cultural evolution. Genetic evolution works by selecting individuals with traits that are well adapted to their environment, but it has a far weaker grip on traits that benefit the group. So altruism is more likely to be learned. After all, every human culture invests considerable effort in instilling children with moral norms that help further cooperation. Often these are enshrined in powerful religious beliefs and reinforced by promises of salvation and threats of eternal damnation.

Diary

The author here takes the position, with which I do not disagree, that diaries are most difficult to write. From the Spectator comes a well written riposte from the commentator himself! Untitled Document

Monty Python Comes to Broadway

Those of you Monty Python fans (and if you are not, you are most likely not reading this) need to make note that the boys are now lighting up Broadway. This alone is worth a trip to the Apple -- that and the fact that Garrison Keillor is in town. Yahoo! News - Monty Python Comes to Broadway with Musical 'Spamalot'

China

Old Shaghai with its memories of foreign enclaves, intrigue and Cole Porter at the Peace Hotel are now the stuff of hazy nostalgia. To those who have not seen what has been constructed in Shanghai in the last ten years need to come to attention. Economist.com | China

Empires of the Word

The book reviewed in the Guardian provides a fascinating look at the world's lanuages. English maybe number four but it is strong as a second langage.Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Review: Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler

Journalists as Lemmings

Remember Japan Inc.? If you were a semi-sentient consumer of news in the 1980s, it was hard to avoid the impression that Japan would soon overtake the U.S. in global economic clout, if its corporations didn't just purchase the country outright. They've got Rockefeller Center! They're gobbling up Hollywood! Chalmers Johnson, Clyde Prestowitz and other soi-disant experts pronounced sagely on the invincible Japanese model of industrial organization, while the media supplied a diet of stories about how companies such as Sony or Honda remained world-beaters, year-in and year-out.
Now consider the amazing media about-face in recent weeks on Iraq. Prior to Jan. 30, dateline Baghdad was dateline Götterdämmerung. Now it's dateline Democracy. Bombs are still exploding, but we aren't reading much anymore about how we're losing hearts and minds, or how Iraq is ethnically too fractious to have a meaningful democracy. Instead, the media connect the dots between elections in Baghdad and events in Beirut, Cairo and Ramallah, and talk about 1989.
It's right that they should do so. But we should also connect the dots between today's Iraq and 1980s Japan. The myth of Japan Inc. took hold because there was so little Western reporting to suggest that not all was well with the Japanese economy. So, when Japan's real-estate bubble burst and the economy flatlined for over a decade, the world was caught unawares. The myth of an Iraqi quagmire took hold for similar reasons--the media was so busy telling the story of everything that was going wrong in Iraq that it broadly missed what was going right.

The cliché is that journalism is the first draft of history. Yet a historian searching for clues about the origins of many of the great stories of recent decades--the collapse of the Soviet empire; the rise of Osama bin Laden; the declining American crime rate; the economic eclipse of Japan and Germany--would find most contemporary journalism useless. Perhaps a story here or there might, in retrospect, seem illuminating. But chances are it would have been nearly invisible at the time of publication: eight column inches, page A12.
The problem is not that journalists can't get their facts straight: They can and usually do. Nor is it that the facts are obscure: Often, the most essential facts are also the most obvious ones. The problem is that journalists have a difficult time distinguishing significant facts--facts with consequences--from insignificant ones. That, in turn, comes from not thinking very hard about just which stories are most worth telling.
Take Western coverage of Israelis and Palestinians over the past dozen years. During the years of the peace process, a succession of journalists trooped through the region, reporting a handful of stories: the expansion of Israeli settlements; the chemistry between Yasser Arafat and the Israeli prime minister, and their relationship with Bill Clinton; the exact percentage of land offered by Israel at various stages of negotiation; the conflict between moderates and "extremists on both sides."
These were "true" stories, in the sense that they were (for the most part) factually accurate and reflected the realities of the peace process. But the peace process was not the only relevant reality of the time. Arafat and his lieutenants continued to call for Israel's destruction in speeches to Arab audiences. Palestinian Authority maps of the region, posted in schools and public buildings, had nothing named "Israel" on them. Billions in foreign aid were pumped into the PA, but there was little to show for it in terms of a better economy. Arafat's political opponents were sacked from their jobs, arrested, tortured or simply shot by masked men in the street.
All this was public knowledge throughout the 1990s. But because the information sat so awkwardly with the central premises of the peace process--namely, that Arafat was committed to peace and that the Palestinian problem was foreign occupation, not domestic tyranny--it tended to be dismissed as so much trivia. So the PA is corrupt: What else is new? So Arafat makes incendiary speeches? Rhetoric for the masses. Few people could recognize then that Arafat wasn't the key to peace, but the principal obstacle to it. Today that's conventional wisdom.
A similar dynamic took place once the intifada began and the media meta-narrative switched from "peace process" to "cycle of violence." Here, supposedly, Israelis and Palestinians engaged in acts of tit-for-tat killing; whenever a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up in a Jerusalem café, one could be sure to learn that his brother had been killed by the Israeli army. Yet while the cycle-of-violence hypothesis was highly convenient for reporters reluctant to pin the blame on one side, it was also falsifiable--and false: When the Israelis invaded the West Bank and killed the top ranks of Hamas, the incidence of terrorism didn't rise. It peaked.

It is, of course, impossible to anticipate "events," in Harold MacMillan's sense of the word. But none of the examples listed here belong in that category. Norman Podhoretz predicted the peace process would lead to war. Charles Wolf saw the hollowness of Japan Inc. Daniel Patrick Moynihan predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. And George W. Bush understood, and said, that a free Iraq would serve as a beacon of liberty for the oppressed Arab world.
As for the media, it shouldn't be too difficult to do better. Look for the countervailing data. Broaden your list of sources. Beware of exoticizing your subject: If you think that Israelis and Palestinians operate from no higher motive than revenge, you're on the wrong track. Above all, never forget the obvious: that the law of supply and demand operates in Japan, too; that the Soviet Union was a state governed by fear; that Iraqis aren't rooting for their killers; that, if given the chance, people will choose to be free.
Simple maxims, but how much embarrassment would the media be spared if only they followed them.

Chuck's Devoted Mom

Herewith the New Yorker suggests the Queeen's schedule on the day of her son's remarriage:

ROYAL WEDDING DAY SCHEDULE FOR HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH
by PAUL RUDNICK
Issue of 2005-03-14Posted 2005-03-07
7:00 a.m. Arise and greet corgis. Tell them it’s a very special day: they’ll be trying new Iams Lamb & Wild Rice in Gravy.
7:30 a.m. Breakfast with Prince Philip. Remind him that, even if they offer him a Jaguar, Al Qaeda are not friends.
8:00 a.m. Pick Corgi of the Day. Comfort and encourage remaining corgis.
8:30 a.m. Phone Fergie. Get her to send Camilla Weight Watchers frozen lasagna as gag wedding gift.
9:00 a.m. Answer correspondence. Send Charles and Camilla a five-pound note as a wedding gift, with card reading, “So sorry can’t attend ceremony in person. Hope face on this will suffice.”
9:30 a.m. Gather corgis to watch TiVo of “Desperate Housewives.” Discuss how much more romantic show would be if all characters were corgis.
10:00 a.m. Open local hospital. If asked about Charles and Camilla, reply, “Are they here? Has there been an accident?”
10:30 a.m. Summon Andrew and Edward. Inspect hair loss. Close eyes and do “eeny, meeny, miney, mo” to get their hopes up.
11:00 a.m. Watch videotape of Charles’s wedding to Diana. Consider Disney’s request to turn ceremony into stage musical. Messenger DVD of “Shrek” to C. and C.
12:00 p.m. Lunch with corgis. Discuss Blair, Bush, Iraq—what do they think? Show them special surprise: photo mockup of U.N., with all delegates as corgis.
1:00 p.m. Phone Clint Eastwood; congratulate on Oscar. Suggest he next direct “Camilla,” inspirational love story à la “Bridges of Madison County.” Also suggest he play title role.
2:00 p.m. Dress up corgis as participants in low-key royal wedding. Use bits of sirloin to stimulate barking as vows. Videotape and send anonymously to BBC.
3:00 p.m. Nap. Dream of being Virgin Queen, or LaToya Jackson, anything with more dignity.
4:00 p.m. Awake. Ask secretary if C. and C. ceremony has concluded. Ask if Angelina Jolie was in attendance.
5:00 p.m. Call Charles on cell. Congratulate him, then make connection-breaking- up noises, so only words he hears are “king,” “never,” and “hee hee hee.”
6:00 p.m. Dinner with corgis. Tell them that C. and C. are now married, just like Britney. Serve tiny wedding cake made of liver. In honor of ceremony and late Queen Mum, let corgis have bourbon.
7:00 p.m. Watch “Lost.” Wonder if C. and C. will take plane on honeymoon.
8:00 p.m. Call Camilla, to interrupt wedding night. Ask if she has Prince Charles in a can. Hang up.
9:00 p.m. Read corgis “Cinderella” as bedtime story, but change all characters to corgis, so happy ending will be believable. Tell them only King Charles will be a spaniel.
10:00 p.m. Put on crown. Take Ambien.

He's Back!

There is perhaps no one more insightful of American Politics than Elizabeth Drew. Since she left the New Yorker; her published work is all too infrequent. That is why this piece on Gingrich is so good.The New York Review of Books: He's Back!

But Seriously, My Fellow Americans...

Dick Cheney for Oscar host next year. He might be the best stand-up comedian around. The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: But Seriously, My Fellow Americans...

America can rise to Asia's challenge

This week the Financial Times ran several articles on the remarkable growth in the economies of both China and India. Clearly their continued growth will be a substantial factor in the world's economy as this century unfolds. Competition fueled by free trade may be the answer to the West's dealing with this phenomona. FT.com / Comment & analysis / Columnists - Amity Shlaes: America can rise to Asia's challenge

Pope Nextus?

Here the Spectator speculates. This is a remarkably well researched commentary on who should be and who might be the next Pope. The article focuses on the problems and challenges to be faced by Christians and the Roman Catholic Church as this century progresses. The Spectator.co.uk

Thanks to America

It is remarkable that American foreign policy, especially the war in Iraq have generated such vicious acrimony and antipathy in the rest of the world. Let me make it clear that I am no fan of this war. We must however keep things in perspective and contemplate the fact that the recent elections prove that Iraq will be better for America's intervention than continue under a despot. The war was a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral arrogance. But it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome which would not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics advocated, right though they were in most respects.’

Your Top Books Revealed

Xerxes seems to be on a book binge today, but here the Beeb gives us the most "popular" books as supplied by its listeners all in honor of National Book Day.BBC NEWS | Magazine | Your top books revealed

Best Sellers

Booktrade annually publishes the sales for the previous year on a country by country basis. This year they rely on Amazon to generate the data. It is interesting to see this recapitulation. booktrade.info

NYPL, Digital Library

What an absolutely marvelous resource! The New York Public Library has put its digital library of images on the net. It includes an incredible number of photographs and other visual material in an easy to access format.NYPL, Digital Library