 #14: Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation by L. Maarten Troost (2008)
The first time I landed in Shanghai, I couldn’t believe how big everything was. The terminal stretched off to some Whovian vanishing point. It was like that driving through the city, too—mile after mile of skyscraper, each as interesting to look at as the last. This was a city that wanted to be Manhattan but bigger, richer, busier.
But the bus windows showed me something distressing, too, as we rumbled across the coastal plain from the airport to the city: muddy canals choked with floating garbage, heaps of garbage and rubble scattered in back lots and side yards, an armada of small blue flatbed trucks jockeying for first place in a race that wasn’t even happening.
China turned my brain into an Escher landscape, constantly challenging me at every turn. I found new things to be amazed about, new things to wonder about, and new things to worry about. Full story »
The U.S. House of Representatives recently voted to pass — with only six nays — the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011. At the Hill’s Congress Blog, Jamir Abdi explains that (as you may have heard) it contains “a provision—inserted without debate in committee after garnering the majority of its cosponsors—that would outlaw contact between U.S. government employees and certain Iranian officials.”
Abdi reveals how dire the consequences of such a policy can be.
This would not just tie the hands of our diplomats, it would prevent U.S. troops in the field—particularly members of the U.S. Navy operating in the tense Persian Gulf—from making military to military contacts with their Iranian counterparts. … If an Iranian vessel were to approach aggressively a U.S. vessel – as happens all too often – our sailors would be legally barred from making contact with the offending ship. Our sailors would have to send a request up the chain of command to the President, who would have to submit a waiver to Congress. They would then need to wait 15 days for the waiver to take effect before they would have permission to communicate with the Iranian vessel. These sailors barely have fifteen minutes to defuse these situations, let alone fifteen days. Full story »
I’ve always found it somewhat ironic, if that’s the word, that two of the best novels I’ve ever read about America—Dvorak in Love and The Bride of Texas—were written by a Czech expatriate author who lived in Toronto. In fact, they’re two of the best novels I’ve ever read, period. Skvorecky, who died this past week at 87, had what one might call an interesting life—he grew up in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (experiences which formed a substantial focus for much of his fiction), got into constant trouble in Communist Czechoslovakia for his writings, and was banned repeatedly. He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1968, and he spent the rest of his life writing excellent novels and short stories, teaching literature, and publishing other Czech expatriates through his publishing house. Lots more details can be found in the NY Times obituary, or in the Telegraph obituary. A fuller literary appreciation will undoubtedly show up in the NY Review of Books soon.
Full story »
 What the hell is up with all the Jobsophilia since Steve Jobs died? The Tech Curmudgeon has noticed that there’s a hell of a lot of supposedly smart people reporting and blogging on “technology” claiming that Steve Jobs was the most visionary tech guy in the last 30 or 40 years. Or they’re fellating Jobs’ reputation and going so far as to claim that the man changed the world more than anyone else in the history of technology. The Tech Curmudgeon wants some of what they’re smoking, because it’s clearly better than mescaline and LSD.
So lets look at some of Jobs’ contemporaries who are more important than he was to things that, you know, actually matter to the real world. Full story »
 Toronto GM Brian Burke misses the good old days. And just the other day, he got all misty about having to send his enforcer down the minors because, well, he couldn’t find a dance partner. Or something.
“If you want a game where guys can cheap-shot people and not face retribution, I’m not sure that’s a healthy evolution,” he said Thursday. “The speed of the game, I love how the game’s evolved in terms of how it’s played. But you’re seeing where there is no accountability.”
According to numbers provided by the NHL, fighting is down significantly this season. Through play Wednesday, there was an average of 0.8 fighting majors per game compared with 1.2 at the same point last year. Full story »
 #14: The Living Great Lakes: In Search of the Heart of the Inland Seas by Jerry Dennis (2003)
Lake Erie taught me how important it is to watch the sun set. It was the summer of 2010, and I was in the middle of my divorce. The semester, my worst ever, had just ended, followed immediately by a whirlwind trip to China. I had a younger woman giving me the yo-yo treatment. I needed to figure out a way to calm the tumult in my life.
So for nearly a week, in early June, I found myself a spot along the breakwall that stretches out from Walnut Beach toward the lighthouse that guards the entrance to Ashtabula’s habor. I watched the sun, bright as a blood orange, dip to the horizon and vanish into the lake. Full story »
 #13: The Frog Run by John Elder (2002)
My own experiences in Vermont constitute the worst times of my life, through no particular fault of the Green Mountain State. There, in a third-floor cinder block tenement in Montpelier, I spent most of my eighth-grade year living in fear of my mother’s drug-abusing boyfriend. A decade and a half later, I thought it ironic to find myself back there for a low-residency M.F.A. program, uncomfortable about facing the bad mojo from my past—little realizing that I was about to deal with more bad mojo there as my marriage began to unravel.
So my Vermont and John Elder’s Vermont strike me as two different places—different states of mind, at the very least. Full story »
Paul Isom is looking for a new job today. He was the student media director at East Carolina University. Why was he canned?
On Nov. 8, the [student] newspaper published a full-frontal photo of a streaker who ran onto the field during that weekend’s home football game. The decision prompted outcry from some readers and from university administrators who said it was “in very poor taste.”
If this photo was so controversial and in “very poor taste,” why did the university require two months to decide to give Isom four hours to clean out his office and get outta Dodge?
No doubt lawyers were consulted. After the photo was published, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs, Virginia Hardy, presaged what would come to pass:
We will be having conversations with those who were involved in this decision in an effort to make it a learning experience. The goal will be to further the students’ understanding that with the freedom of the press comes a certain level of responsibility about what is appropriate and effective in order to get their message across.
Learning experience my ass. The goal of the lesson being taught here is to warn student journalists and their advisers to not cross the university when it comes to maligning its image.
Full story »
[*B.S. means “Bad Science.” What did you think it meant?]
by Peter H. Gleick
Crossposted at Forbes and Huffington Post. To see S&R’s climate-related posts, click here
[Correction: Katharine Hayhoe was misidentified as a Republican in the original post at Forbes and HuffPo. This has been corrected below.
Peter Gleick updated the original posts at HuffPo and Forbes and removed Ben Webster from the Second Place text. S&R has updated this post to bring it in line with Gleick's update.]
The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011 – a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world. The scientific evidence for the accelerating human influence on climate further strengthened, as it has for decades now. Yet on the policy front, once again, national leaders did little to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe consequences of climate changes, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea-levels, loss of snowpack and glaciers, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and much more.
Why the failure to act? In part because climate change is a truly difficult challenge. But in part because of a concerted, well-funded, and aggressive anti-science campaign by climate change deniers and contrarians. Full story »
 #12: About This Life by Barry Lopez (1998)
The pieces collected in Barry Lopez’s About This Life profess to be “journeys on the threshold of memory.” They take the shape of essays, travel stories, and memoirs, although Lopez firmly plants them all in the first-person perspective. Most relate in some way to a specific place. At the heart of the book, though, his essay “The American Geographies” speaks most directly to the importance of landscape—and how people continue to misunderstand and even misrepresent what that really means.
“The real American landscape is a face of almost incomprehensible depth and complexity,” he says. Full story »
 The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is a joke. I think we all know this, but if you’re new to the issue a quick illustration should suffice: Madonna is in it. Rush, Kiss, Cheap Trick, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Deep Purple, Big Star, The Cure, Devo, Dire Straits, ELO, Hüsker Dü, INXS, Jethro Tull, Judas Priest, The Moody Blues, Motorhead, My Bloody Valentine, New Order, Peter Gabriel, The Replacements, Warren Zevon, XTC, Yes and Graham Parker aren’t. I could go on. And on. And on and on and on. But, in the interest of brevity, I won’t.
This is frustrating for a lot of people. Many of the artists would probably like to be acknowledged, and their fans no doubt take the slight personally. And the critics, gods, imagine trying to think about this if you’re a serious professional covering music. Full story »
 by Robert S. Becker
Stay ‘til the end – and a rich payoff of Carl Sagan’s gemlike insights. A little clean-up work first, to clear the palate.
I don’t regularly read Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer (CK, as in crank), often regret when I do, ending with gnashing teeth. From time to time, perplexity or hilarity moves me to the dark side, hunting out the loopy logic behind the latest fringe skullduggery. I used to read that wily conservative wordsmith, Peggy Noonan – a far better stylist – until I gagged at her unctuous Vatican sycophancy.
So, I brightened suspiciously at Krauthammer’s seemingly apolitical title, “Are we alone in the universe?” Full story »
Have you seen the vid on Youtube called “Iowa Nice”? If not, let’s start there.
The producer of the video, Scott Siepker, is an Iowa State University grad and host of Iowa Outdoors on Iowa Public Television. Full story »
 #11: Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams (1991)
“[W]ithout a mother,” writes Terry Tempest Williams in her book Refuge, “one no longer has the luxury of being a child.”
I am at my own mother’s, thinking about Williams’ words, thinking about Williams’ book. I was first introduced to Refuge last year during a Creative Nonfiction class I was taking, but I didn’t have the time then to read it. Months later, at the start of my “25 Books in 30 Days” challenge, it is one of the first books I turn to. I’ve not been able to write about it yet, though. I’ve had to wait until I’ve come here to my mother’s house in Ashtabula, Ohio, before I could fully process the nature of Williams’ loss.
Full story »
 With apologies to Pete Seger
Where have all the Tebows gone?
Zero passing
Where have all the Tebows gone?
Can’t pass at all
Where have all the Tebows gone?
Corners picked them every one
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?
I know, I know, this is mean-spirited. But I was pretty darn gracious when he was winning, and even posited that maybe he would be successful. Full story »
 #10: Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World by Linda Hogan (1995)
With the light patter of rain on the awning outside, I stole an afternoon nap on the living room couch. It was a quick one, fifteen minutes or so. When I woke, the rhythms outside had shifted. A gust of wind sang through the slits of the awning instead. I didn’t realize it yet, but it was the sound of winter finally coming.
I’m not as intuitively tuned into such sounds, such rhythms, as I’d like to be, but my subconscious seems to be working on that level today because Linda Hogan’s book Dwellings has challenged me to do so. There is, Hogan contends, a way of looking at the world that’s different than the way most of us are accustomed to. Since I’m exploring books that explore places, I thought it would be useful to have Hogan help me see place in a different way. Full story »
 Obama’s 2012 prospects: now for the bad news
John Cassidy, The New Yorker
December 30, 2011
“Consider yet another survey from Gallup, released on Thursday, which examined the ideological views of about a thousand people, who were roughly equally divided between Democrats, Republicans, and independents. (Actually, there were slightly more independents.) Despite this relatively even partisan split, forty-two per cent of the respondents described themselves as “conservative” or “very conservative.” Thirty-seven per cent described themselves as “moderate,” and just nineteen per cent described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
If you think this sounds promising for the Republicans, I would agree with you, especially since fifty-seven per cent of the respondents described President Obama as “liberal” or “very liberal” and only twenty-three per cent described him as “moderate.” Full story »
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