Wednesday, February 26, 2020
Time issue for Black History Month covers "Equality Now"
Time Magazine dedicates its March 2, 2020 to Black History
March and “His Legacy” (Dr. Martin Luther King), “Equality Now”.
There are many articles, such as “Survival Mode” by Tressie
McMillan Cottom, focusing on black workerd.
Annette Gordon-Reed discusses “Thomas Jefferson’s
Revolutionary Words”.
Lawyer Bryan Stevenson, whom John Fish interviewed in another
post on this blog, does a QA.
Anne Case and Angus Deaton discuss health care, “The
Sickness of our System,”.
Anny Vesoulis in Charlotte discusses landlords who refuse to
accept federal housing vouchers.
But most remarkably, the issue has “8 Radical Ideas for Equality
Now”. They include baby bonds (based on
family income), no cash bail (which may be dangerous), universal basic income,
bring back the draft (and include women – but ending Selective Service is likely
to be debated soon), no electoral college, universal paid leave
Labels:
conscription,
Newsweek and Time,
periodicals,
race relations
Monday, February 24, 2020
Tracy Walder's "The Unexpected Spy": how an "average girl" became a covert CIA operative, out of college
Tracy Walder’s new autobiography, “The Unexpected Spy: From
the CIA to the FBI, My Secret Life Taking down Some of the World’s Most
Notorious Terrorists”, from St. Martin’s Press, will be offered Feb. 25, on
Kindle and in hardcover, a bit pricey on Amazon.
The Spy Museum in Washington DC is holding an event
Wednesday evening where the hardcover can be bought ($30).
If I have the facts right, she teaches at the Hockaday
preparatory school for girls in Dallas now.
DMagazine (Dallas) gives the details of her life (sometimes
hiding in trunks) catching pretty much “conventional” terrorists overseas here but it sounds like she had to go along with
the fib that Saddam Hussein was connected to WMD’s when he wasn’t (for the most
part). She started work one day before 9/11.
Update: Feb. 26. I was at the booksigning tonight. More on Wordpress tomorrow.
Update: Feb. 26. I was at the booksigning tonight. More on Wordpress tomorrow.
Thursday, February 20, 2020
James Trefil's "Atlas of Space"
Recently I picked up a National Geographic “Atlas of Space”
illustrated coffee table gloss book, 112 pages, authored by James Trefil.
The booklet purports to have twelve maps, but I didn’t find
anything detailed or elaborate.
The Introduction presents “the Three Universes: (1) The
Solar System (2) The Milky Way Galaxy, ours; (3) All galaxies, organized into
clusters and arranged along threads of force. That does not include the idea of
a multiverse.
We are here as a result of a 14-billion year cosmic
billiards game.
There is a good pair of maps of Mars, East and West, and a
presentation of a biosphere experiment in Arizona to simulate living in a
Martian colony. He calls the orbit of Mars “The Frost Line”.
The discussion of Uranus and Neptune indicates that the
atmosphere gradually changes to a slush of unusual ice forms at high
temperature, so they are called “Ice Giants”.
There is some discussion of tidal heating of moons with
subsurface oceans (mainly Jupiter).
The author has another video explaining why (in his opinion)
creationism and intelligent design should not be taught.
Picture: from Baltimore Aerospace museum.
Picture: from Baltimore Aerospace museum.
Saturday, February 15, 2020
Fiction author stranded on Diamond Princess sees some of her novel come to real life
Author Gay Courter, 75, an American novelist, is quarantined
on the Diamond Princess (she and her husband might be among those evacuated),
has the experience of seeing her novels come to real life.
Her novel in question is “The Girl in the Box”. This incident will probably catch Hollywood's attention (or at least Netflix).
Authors who dream up bizarre epidemics and Russian or
Chinese plots may see their predictions play out in front of them, in horror,
or perhaps they say “I told you so.”
There have to be some novel manuscripts around about manufacturing a SARS
virus, it’s just too obvious.
There are cases where publishers actually worry that a
fiction book could spur copycats or unstable heads of state. Putin-ordered assassinations (or North Korean)
in other countries – well, remember “The Interview”.
The novel seems to be self-published and is Volume 1 of theSeven Seas Series (Sept 2019).
There was also a kidnapping of Colleen Stan in the 1950s
that became an episode of a series called “Girl in the Box”
My own novel “Angel’s Brother” imagines a mystery virus that
affects mainly people with poor circulation or at high altitudes, but (with an
unusual radioactive core) that can copy a person’s consciousness and deliver it
back to a “superspreader” who remains healthy.
After infection, the older victim has hallucinations and sudden death
(which may happen with reinfection by Covid-19).
Wikipedia attribution:
By Alpsdake - This file has been extracted from another file: Diamond Princess (ship, 2004) and Port of Toba.jpg, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link
Wednesday, February 12, 2020
Noted elderly French author Gabriel Matzeneff now to be prosecuted for promoting underage sex in some of his books
Norimitsu Onishi reports on the criminal prosecution and
upcoming trial of a noted French author, Gabriel Matzeneff (now 83, hiding out in Italy), apparently for “promoting
pedophilia” in his books. This New York
Times story follows another one January 8 (linked).
The author had been “renowned” although his books had
stopped selling. The trouble is that some of them, as far back as 1974, had
described sexual activity with girls (15 is the legal floor in France) and some
books circulated in the Philippines had included boys.
Nevertheless, the issue did not come to light until recently
when one of his victims, Vanessa Springora, had a book called “Consent” (“Le
Consentement”) about her experience with him, published in 2019. The whole narrative fits into the “Me Too”
movement, the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein and Ronan Farrow’s “Catch and
Kill” (2019, Little Brown, 448 pages), which I am reading now (as well as the
film “Scandalous”).
The New York Times article notes that the French “aristocracy”
had gotten away with behavior not normally considered acceptable. But it’s rather puzzling that establishment
trade publishers (as opposed to porn publishers) would have accepted these
books and bookstores would have sold them for so long.
The books, if they contained only words and not photos
(drawings would be on the legal edge) would not have been illegal in the United
States.
Again, this bizarre story related to printed books, not to
websites and social media, where usually terms of service violations would get
this content taken down or drive it to the dark web.
On the other hand, the French prosecutors are blaming the
author for his influence on impressionable young men who then, perhaps lacking
impulse control, go out and commit crimes.
This is a similar moral dilemma that we have on the Internet with
radicalization (especially on the Right). People are to be held responsible for the acts of others if they are in able to function as a public influencer, perhaps.
Monday, February 10, 2020
David Brooks: "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake", and an aberration; but eveyone needs to have a place to belong
“The Atlantic” has a booklet-length essay by David Brooks,
link (paywall, maybe), "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake". The tagline is “The family structure we’ve held
up as the cultural ideal for the past
half-century has been a catastrophe for many. It’s time to figure out better ways
to live together.”
Part 1 is called “The
era of extended clans.” Brooks talks
about the evolution of the extended family, in an era when people couldn’t
afford privacy. You were forced to
accept intimacy with people who were less than ideal, “the best you could do.”
Then came hyper-individualism, led by women and competitive
gay men.
Part II is called “redefining kinship”. It needs to happen, to bring back some localism,
as the “anywhere’s” leave the “somewhere’s” behind and risk being stranded in
outer space themselves, alone.
Friday, February 07, 2020
Booktube presents Bryan Stevenson, author of "Just Mercy"
Booktube is a professional YouTube original channel that presents
comprehensive panel interviews of authors of important recent books.
Danielle Bainbridge, Jesse Chalwick Small, and John Fish
interview author and lawyer Bryan Stevenson, author of “Just Mercy: A Story of
Justice and Redemption”, from Spiegel and Grau, 368 pages (2015). The 18-minute video is presented in the style
of a short film, directed by Martin Akins.
This is also an important film from Warner Brothers,
directed by Destin Daniel Creton (my detailed review). The film is said to have been made with an
inclusion rider for diversity in casting and production staff. For cast, that
is not possible for all films.
Stevenson runs a non-profit called the Equal Justice Initiative and employs persons previously released after wrongful
convictions. The movie and book focus
particularly on the narrative of Walter McMillan, who was held 15 months on
death row before his trial and was convicted despite having been at a party and
fundraiser miles away at the time as an alibi.
The panel also talks about Harper Lee’s “The Killing of a
Mockingbird”, which became a film in 1962 and is often shown in high
school. In that film, the suspect is
convicted wrongfully despite many people’s knowing he had a good alibi and
could not have committed the crime.
There is the discussion of hidden white privilege as disguising
the need from most (white) people to recognize the problem of wrongful
conviction. The concept of “proximity”—more social purposeful social
interaction with others not like you, is presented as essential to overcoming
this.
Stevenson and other panelists do describe what it is like to grow up "black" in all but the most well-off black families.
Picture: Selma, with Pettus Bridge in a distance, my trip, May 2014
Stevenson and other panelists do describe what it is like to grow up "black" in all but the most well-off black families.
Picture: Selma, with Pettus Bridge in a distance, my trip, May 2014
Labels:
book previews,
Booktube,
race relations,
wrongful conviction
Tuesday, February 04, 2020
"Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work" by Robert Frank (book preview)
I received an unsolicited complimentary hardcopy of a book “Under
the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work”, by Robert H. Frank, professor at
Cornell’s Business School. It is published
in 2020 by Princeton University Press.
The book has a prologue and four parts, thirteen chapters. The last chapter title relates to me, “Ask,
Don’t Tell”. Be polite ask questions,
and don’t order people around to achieve your social goals.
The book appears to present the issue of getting individual people
(in a democracy) to behave personally in some sort of deliberate coherence with
a public goal, such as countering climate change.
Other issues would include
health related behaviors, like smoking cessation (or dealing with alcohol and
drug abuse).
I think this question applies now to the “social justice
wars” where people particularly on the “woke” Left are starting to go after
visible Internet (especially YouTube) personalities essentially for not showing
appropriate sympathetic attention to oppressed minorities as such. That can involve pressuring platforms and the
advertisers the platforms depend on for profitability.
But is also applies at a more personal level, in trying to
coax politically moderate or seemingly indifferent people to join in and take
action on issues, rather than mere talk about them in social media.
I’ll review this on a Wordpress blog soon.
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