Self Made Son Decries Expertise: Podhoretz clan edition

I guess it’s appropriate that in this 50th anniversary week of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures lecture, I find via Bora‘s Twitter feed this bit of lazy snobbery from John Podheretz.: This deprofessionalization is probably the best thing that could have happened to the field. Film criticism requires nothing but an interesting sensibility. The more self-consciously [...]

A Bit More Two Cultures Stuff: Arthur Waley/Heian Japan edition.

This is clearly the year for anniversaries.  There’s the Darwin stuff — his own bicentennial, and  The Origin’s 150th.  Then there is the telescope, being celebrated for its 400th anniversary in use as an astronomical tool.*  And then there is the one we just celebrated, the fiftieth anniversary of C.P. Snow’s Rede Lecture, titled “The [...]

Assimilated by the Borg: Twitter Dept.

Ok.  So I have the great pleasure of welcoming Carl Zimmer to my class in the Graduate Program in Science Writing this last Wednesday. So we have a really interesting discussion along two axes:  for one. the experience of discovering and then developing a focus within science writing (how Carl went from a humanities education [...]

Saturday stuff.

Just finished another author questionnaire (more about the whole process of publishing a book — not writing, but publishing it — to come in a series of posts starting Monday), and I bounced to TBogg, who led me to this site, which is NSFW, exactly, and is genuinely horrifying for the parent of a child [...]

Two Cultures notes — and a bit of American Class Mobility Explained

Here I am, really, really trying to get my head around a twenty minute talk I agreed to give at the Harvard/MIT sponsored Cultures in Common conference, one of the many triggered by the 50th anniversary of C. P. Snow’s Rede Lecture titled The Two Cultures.*  (The conference begins tonight with a star-studded gala, including [...]

The Future of Media 2

This from the NY Times, perhaps. I think there is something here, but the appropriate metaphor here seems to me the one I heard Andy Knoll use to describe the situation at the point of the Cambrian Explosion. That is:  the Ediacaran/Cambrian boundary is marked by a mass extinction that eliminate the rich and diverse [...]

The Future of Media…

According to Michael Harrison, talk radio vet and trade-rag editor: AM/FM radio has about five good years left, if that. And what we consider to be radio today will be on the Internet. And the Internet websites will be media stations. The Internet is not only going to change radio; it’s going to change humanity. [...]

Happy Birthday Pete Seeger — a Day Late

I’m of the age for which Pete Seeger’s voice first served as one of the kindest voices of childhood.  I remember the songs from his Weavers years — think  “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”and “Wimoweh.”* It took a while to realize that Seeger was not simply a delightful man with the pick and a voice that [...]

Sighting: Newton and the Counterfeiter Second Review

A few days ago I had happy occasion to tout the first review of my upcoming Newton and the Counterfeiter. (Pre-order at Amazon, or if you prefer Barnes and Noble, or perhaps Target (!) …(who knew? Amazon serves as the back office, I believe) and last in this list but first in my heart, any [...]

Annals of Dumb: GOP Congressional Leadership Dept…

…I know, almost a perfect redundancy these days. But, I mean, I know that GOP as currently deployed has problems with shades of brown (not to mention gray….) but this is ridiculous. I was in or around The Harvard Crimson back when it had a problem with an illustration for a story about African American [...]