Our Political Beliefs Are Boring
The publishing debate carries on. We here at DSM say viva print, viva digital. Last night, our president spoke on another divisive issue: health care reform. The U.S. is divided. Intellectuals are a splintered group, but they seem to unite in their antipathy for Google’s book search. Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses exemplified American partisanship. Look at nature, it’ll give you an idea of the empathy we need. Medicine will help. If not now, then in the future. At least it helps us remember that other opinions exist. And, In Case You Missed It, David Brooks lauds National Affairs, a new quarterly examining the morals of the current socio-political atmosphere. Now, posthaste, we merge back into the left lane. – Andrew Geer
– Whether the Google books settlement passes muster with the U.S. District Court and the Justice Department, Google’s book search is clearly on track to becoming the world’s largest digital library. No less important, it is also almost certain to be the last one. Google’s five-year head start and its relationships with libraries and publishers give it an effective monopoly: No competitor will be able to come after it on the same scale. Nor is technology going to lower the cost of entry. Scanning will always be an expensive, labor-intensive project. Of course, 50 or 100 years from now control of the collection may pass from Google to somebody else—Elsevier, Unesco, Wal-Mart. — Google Book Search in The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Master Builder?
– For urbanists and others, the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was the great titanic struggle of the twentieth century. Like the bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, their conflict has magnified significance, as the two figures have become symbols. Jacobs is the secular saint of street life, representing a humane approach to urban planning grounded in the messy interactions of the neighborhood. Moses is the icon of infrastructure established by power, the physical reconstruction of cities with great bridges and wide expressways and tall apartment buildings. — Jane Jacobs in The New Republic
– Every day the world seems more like Aesop’s “Fables”. Rooks are found to use ingenious tools; dolphins are overheard talking to whales; and pigs, while not yet flying, play a passable game of football—at least according to the BBC. As for apes, they would hardly make headlines any more if they were found to be adept at composing limericks. — The Age of Empathy in The Economist
The Meds Help Us Sleep
– On 6th December 2004 a baby girl named Yan was born. Her father, an internet entrepreneur, is called Shen Tong. Yan was Shen’s first child, and you might have expected him to have an excitable, sleepless night. But oddly the opposite occurred. He slept better than he had done for 15 years, six months and two days. It’s possible to be exact about the timing because 15 years, six months and two days earlier was 4th June 1989 and on that day Shen had been on a boulevard just off Tiananmen Square in Beijing. He was a 20-year-old student, and like thousands of others he was demonstrating in favour of political reform. — Pharmaceuticals in Prospect
– In 1965, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell started a magazine called The Public Interest. Their idea was that the great ideological clashes between socialism and capitalism were in the past. In the age of consensus what was needed was a policy journal that would pragmatically weigh costs and benefits. — National Affairs in The New York Times
Video: A Printing Press at Work
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