How SciFi Found Religion...And Lost Its Way

That's what the headline should read in this article from City Journal. While it paints a great picture of the genre today, it doesn't critically asses the implications of the growing influence of religion on a genre that stands in direct opposition to it.

A Step in the Right Direction for Open Government...

Obama's Online Town Hall today was more meaning than substance. It gave Obama another opportunity to plug his agenda, and reiterate talking points we've all heard before.

More importantly, it shows that our leaders can talk to us on the medium which, in many ways, defines our generation. And it is a step in the direction of having a more open, and perhaps even responsive government.

An important development Via Wired:

The General Services Administration inked landmark agreements with several new media companies that clear up legal issues surrounding liability and government sunshine rules — thus easing their use by government agencies' websites.

This announcement marks a big step for agencies that are trying to become more transparent and connect with citizens, but find themselves saddled with antiquated websites. Now that the bureaucratic brush has been cleared, government agencies will be free, for example, to embed videos and create photo widgets that citizens can embed into their MySpace or Facebook pages.

The Times' Nicholas Kristof Joins Jon Stewart...

...in "holding pundits accountable," admittedly, in a slightly less amusing (but no less interesting) way.

As it turns out, everyone is an expert (contrary to a previous post on the subject). Kristof makes reference to a study by Philip Tetlock, made famous in a 2005 piece from New Yorker, which draws upon some interesting empirical data to show that those that we call "experts" are no better at predicting current events (or financial outcomes), for example, than the rest of us.

From the 2005 New Yorker piece:

The expert also suffers from knowing too much: the more facts an expert has, the more information is available to be enlisted in support of his or her pet theories, and the more chains of causation he or she can find beguiling. This helps explain why specialists fail to outguess non-specialists. The odds tend to be with the obvious.

While Tetlock's study ascends into the realm of cognitive science and probability theory to explain the theory, the implications are plainly obvious.

Kristof:

One is that we tend to choose the blowhards for quotes and soundbytes, rather than the people who are more ambivalent, more cautious and more likely to be right. Second, there’s no accountability in any of this. A pundit from the news media or from the outside never gets in trouble for being consistently wrong.

Kristof might've missed Stewart v. Kramer, but there are plenty of other lazy and dishonest talking-heads shaping public opinion.

He goes on...

Why couldn’t a foundation or journalism school as a public service do more to track our judgments and report on how we do?

Nick, I think they're called bloggers.

Awaiting tomorrow's column...

George Orwell's Son Speaks...

...and gives us another look at George Orwell, the man.

A Secret Plot to Take Over the World?

There's no denying the appeal of Hulu, the now widely popular video site that lets you stream popular TV episodes and movies free-of-charge. For those who have a busy schedule and lack the luxury of a DVR, its heaven-sent. But its no miracle product.

Most networks (like NBC) make available videos of its most recent popular shows on their websites. Hulu finds its niche as yet another aggregator, bringing together content that already exists on the interwebs in one place, and simplifying searching, sharing, and viewing (along with a fancy flash player).

With the importance and prevalence of social media on the rise, Hulu would (and in some ways should) be welcomed as another heavy-hitter that's here to stay. But what makes it a little hard to appreciate is its disingenuous tag line: "A Secret Plot to Take Over the World," as though it was conceived in and risen out of the depths of online obscurity. Surprise, Surprise, it is owned by NBC and NewsCorp. Too bad they've already taken over the world. Now they're taking over the web.

Suddenly, Everyone's a Finance Expert...

There's plenty of commentary & analysis out there on the financial crisis; how it happened, who's to blame, and what's to be done. Everyday, there's an outpouring of opinion, and suddenly, everyone is talking the language of collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps.

While the actual experts debate the intricacies of finance and recovery, and the talking heads opine, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi pierces through the layers of artificial complexity and political obfuscation:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

The most galling thing about this financial crisis is that so many Wall Street types think they actually deserve not only their huge bonuses and lavish lifestyles but the awesome political power their own mistakes have left them in possession of. When challenged, they talk about how hard they work, the 90-hour weeks, the stress, the failed marriages, the hemorrhoids and gallstones they all get before they hit 40.

The Debate Over Socialism Needs Some Clarity...

I suppose there's still a few intellectually honest voices in the media establishment. The New Republic's Alan Wolfe is one of them.

All these commentators--right, left, and middle--may want to take a deep breath. We aren't headed for an era of socialism at all, since socialism is not a natural outgrowth of liberalism. Liberalism is a political philosophy that seeks to extend personal autonomy to as many people as possible, if necessary through positive government action; socialism, by contrast, seeks as much equality as possible, even if doing so curtails individual liberty. These are differences of kind, not degree-- differences that have historically placed the two philosophies in direct competition. Today, socialism is on the decline, in large part because liberalism has lately been on the rise. And, if Barack Obama's version of liberalism succeeds, socialism will be even less popular than it already is.

More...

Spiegelman Exposed

I haven't picked up my copy of Maus, the Pulizter Prize-winning "comic" graphic novel about the Holocaust (told through depictions of Nazis as cats and Jews as mice), since receiving it as a graduation present almost two years ago.

Though I read it for the first time years before, I remember being captivated by Art Spiegelman’s intricately woven depiction of his father’s Holocaust survival tale, while exploring his own acceptance of it--all told in vivid detail the way a comic book only can.

I knew Spiegleman designed a few covers for The New Yorker, but I had no idea he was responsible for this:

Sipping from a glass of white wine and secretly itching for a cigarette (he later admitted), Art Spiegelman glibly entertained a gaggle of British adult comic-book fans. We were all in a small theatre at London's Institute for Contemporary Arts, where Spiegelman explained his rationale for what is perhaps one of his most shocking drawings from the 1970s: a decapitated man getting fucked in the neck.

More...

Turns out he also prefers "comic" to "graphic novel."