Raymond Davis’s case was returned to a lower court by a Pakistani court of appeals today. The appeals court refused to rule on whether or not he has diplomatic immunity. The New York Times, and other American publications, initially held back reporting that Davis is a CIA contractor after he shot and killed two people on January 27th. The Times’s ombudsman explained that decision here, explaining that the paper didn’t want to repeat charges that had been made in the Pakistani press. The Times all but spelled out that Davis was a spy, saying, “his exact duties have not been explained, and the reason he was driving alone with a Glock handgun, a pocket telescope and GPS equipment has fueled speculation in the Pakistani news media.” That sentence says, without saying, that Davis was not, shall we say, a desk jockey. Continue reading →

“Fall in Love with a New Book and Save 30%” is a really terrible subject line in an e-mail. Falling in love with a book is ipso facto a great and heady intellectual adventure. Saving 30% can be satisfying too. (I’d rather pay 70 cents for that orange juice than an even buck, sure.) But something as [melo]dramatic as falling in love shouldn’t be, even in your sales pitch, put in the same breath as a reasonably good sale. It’s like a guy telling his best friend he just met this wonderful girl he wants to marry because he realized she’s a cheap date.

A thoughtful and vivid report from Tahrir Square by Graeme Wood: Paranoia Strikes Among Egypt’s Protesters: A Day and Night in Tahrir – Graeme Wood – International – The Atlantic.

• Year-End Bonus: More Scientist-on-Scientist Smackdown
  31 December 2010
  From James Fallows :: The Atlantic
  A) James Fallows is very good.B) The blogging medium, which allows him to quote at length from many people--an approach that would not fly in a newspaper article on the same subject--is also kind of great.
  I've had a change of heart. After announcing previously that I would forgo additional back-and-forth from scientists about the hazards, or safety, of new TSA scanning machines, I've received enough interesting mail that I think I should offer at least one more installment. The two original disputants -- a physics professor, and a biophysicist/enzymologist -- were both skeptical of the TSA's overall screening strategy. But they differed on which...
• Shadow Wars Get Big Bucks in Last-Minute Defense Bill
  22 December 2010
  From Wired Top Stories
  Fighting (or pretending to fight) al-Qaida on behalf of the United States? Congress is your private Santa.
• Boxing Day Special: A Physicist Opts-Out
  26 December 2010
  From James Fallows : The Atlantic
  OK, back to business. A physics professor from a college in the East replies to this item, in which a software engineer explained why new "enhanced" backscatter-radiation TSA machines can't be assumed to be safe. The physics professor writes:There is no such thing as a risk-free dose of ionizing radiation. The federal government studied this using beagles right after World War II and found no safe dosage level. And for good reason.The reason Albe...

• The Microdistilling Myth
  27 December 2010
  From Food : The Atlantic
  Andrew*/flickr In a recent profile of New York-area micro-distillers, The New York Times praised the way that, like craft charcuteries and urban apiaries, these small-bore labors of love churned out a better product than their larger, more established cousins. "Virtually all craft distillers use small pot stills rather than the huge column stills used by the industry giants," wrote author Toby Cecchini. "Though more labor-intensive, these more...
• Frank Bessac
  23 December 2010
  From Obituaries - Latest obituaries
  in which buckle is swashed.
  Spy turned anthropologist who made an epic journey to Tibet as the CIA plotted against the Russian A-Bomb and Chinese communists
• At Kaplan University, 'Guerrilla Registration' Leaves Students Deep In Debt
  23 December 2010
  From www.huffingtonpost.com
  Tragic & Infuriating
  Arlen Castillo had just begun an online associate's degree program at Kaplan University when a family emergency forced a change of plans. Her mother in Florida learned she needed extensive surgery that entailed months of recuperation.
• Hacker’s challenge
  25 October 2010
  From TPM: The Philosophers' Magazine
  Peter Hacker tells James Garvey that neuroscientists are talking nonsense Peter HackerSo long as people read Wittgenstein, people will read Peter Hacker. It’s hard to imagine how his work on the monumental Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations could possibly be superseded. He spent nearly twenty years on that project (ten of them in cooperation with his friend and colleague Gordon Baker), following in Wittgenste...
• The diplomat, the bishop, the bomber, and the fruit bat
  25 November 2010
  From Language Log
  What speech acts are permitted under the various restrictive laws current in the British Isles, and what penalties accrue to people who step outside the bounds laid down by the law? As I have often mentioned here before, the UK has no real constitutional guarantee of free speech, so a lot of things that any American would take to be unquestionably expressible turn out to bring down fines or imprisonment if you say them in the UK. But since all...
• The Asian Challenge to Jon Stewart's Dominance
  01 November 2010
  From James Fallows : The Atlantic
  Yes, of course, I'm scare-mongering. As with many other "imminent threats" from the unstoppable Chinese and their East Asian neighbors, the idea that Comedy Central will soon lose its #1 rank in politics-based humor is an exaggeration. And yet....!! You can't minimize what the NMA ("Next Media Animation") group in Taiwan could be capable of. They've made an art form out of campy but compulsively watchable CGI reenactments of events in the news, w...
• Airport Security Reports: 'Where Are the Airlines?'
  15 November 2010
  From James Fallows : The Atlantic
  Really, I'm not trying to overdo this, but reports keep flowing in 1) This is being sent from the United/Air New Zealand holding area at Sydney airport, waiting for the flight to Los Angeles. Sydney airport security system: simple metal detector, shoes kept on, no pat down of any sort. Background anxiety: often at the last minute, there's an extra security surprise inspection for passengers on flights to the US. Will know one way or another soon....
• Where Did Our Debt Come From?
  16 November 2010
  From James Fallows : The Atlantic
  Chuck Spinney, who spent his career as a budget analyst in the Pentagon -- that's him, on the cover of Time for his defense-reform work in the Reagan era -- has an idea about the answer. The green in the chart below shows periods when America's overall federal debt burden shrank; red, when it grew. Spinney, by the way, is no one's idea of a standard liberal. He's more a deficit hawk than anything else, meaning both that he's hard-line against exc...
• Lasting Press Conferences
  09 November 2010
  From Close Read
  The first video is particularly worth watching...
  How much does a midterm decide? Let’s look back at 1962—not at the national level, where Kennedy’s Democrats held the Senate and House, before his Administration came to an awful end, but at California, and the governor’s race between Richard Nixon, coming off of his defeat in the 1960 Presidential race, and Pat Brown (the father of Jerry). Here is one of the ads Nixon ran; it is disconcertingly jangly: And here he is, after his loss,...
• Think Nobody in the White House Knows How to Explain Economic Policy?
  30 September 2010
  From James Fallows : The Atlantic
  That's what I have often feared. Here's an exception. Austan Goolsbee, new head of the Council of Economic Advisers, with a visual aid to explain the difference between the Republican and Democratic proposals for extending the Bush-era tax cuts: That's a static screen shot; embedded player with his full two-minute presentation from the White House site, below. One way to look at it: what has taken so long? Another way: at least they're starting...
• Remembering Murray Sayle
  23 September 2010
  From Hendrik Hertzberg
  Last weekend, an e-mail from Jennifer Sayle, in Sydney: Dear Rick Just to let you know that Murray passed away peacefully in his sleep at 2.30 am this morning (Sunday). He had had a good life and it was a great relief that he wasn’t in pain or distressed—I visited him yesterday afternoon for a few hours and he was quite perky, if a bit tired…. love Jenny Murray Sayle (January 1, 1926-September 19, 2010) was a wonder—a journalist of P...
• Knowledge vs. Pedantry
  09 September 2010
  From The New York Review of Books
  Sam Abrams, reply by Tony Judt To the Editors: It is truly discouraging to see, in a column by Tony Judt about sensitivity to language, “inchoate” used as a synonym for “chaotic” [“Words,” NYR, July 15]. Although this solecism is quite common, it still pains the ears of those few of us who are sensitive to the etymological resonances of English words. Didn’t Professor Judt learn Latin at the fancy school he went to? “We ......
• A Date That Will Live in Oblivion
  01 September 2010
  From Interesting Times
  What President Obama called the end of the combat mission in Iraq is a meaningless milestone, constructed almost entirely out of thin air, and his second Oval Office speech marks a rare moment of dishonesty and disingenuousness on the part of a politician who usually resorts to rare candor at important moments. The fifty thousand troops who will remain in Iraq until the end of next year will still be combat troops in everything but name, because...

How on earth do you write a long (and in many ways, very good) essay about the late night talk show without mentioning Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? Seriously.

Dick Cavett and the battles for late night : The New Yorker.

Waiting for the December Atlantic to arrive, and reading some of it on-line. There’s a very strange article, a caring attack on Freeman Dyson.

The scientific infelicities are few, like this, surely accidental one:

Their schedule had them landing on Mars by 1965 and Saturn by 1970.

and there’s some smooth writing in the story, including this gem, about the asteroid Eros:

The Erotic climate is not perfect.

But the article, which is meant to be a critique of Dyson’s controversial position on climate change, never really engages his arguments. (Hence the absence of scientific infelicity; there is an outright absence of discussions of science.) Now I’m pretty skeptical of Dyson’s arguments myself, but just calling him smart, but crazy, is not the way to go:

The question that phrases itself now, in the minds of many, is: how could someone as smart as Freeman Dyson be so dumb?

It seems there was raw material here both for an interesting story about Dyson (who is a fascinating figure) and an examination of good-faith criticisms of mainstream thought on climate change. There are clearly people with a vested interest (ahem, Exxon, etc.) in critiquing the scientific mainstream; there are also clearly thoughtful people, like Dyson, who criticize it on other grounds. Unlike the first class of “skeptics” the skeptics, sans quotation marks, should, at the very least, have their arguments examined in good faith, in a venue like this.

The Danger of Cosmic Genius – Magazine – The Atlantic.

In which a robot helicopter wanders around Washington DC. The tough question is what happens when these things become deliberately autonomous.

Navy Drone Wanders Into Restricted Airspace Around Washington – NYTimes.com.

This is very sad, but also very interesting. There’s something touching about the earnestness of the government’s reaction. And a 111-year old mummy, upstairs for the sake of fraud, is too strange for words.

Japan, Checking On Its Oldest, Finds Many Gone – NYTimes.com

Kind of interesting musings on how journalists assimilate information. Michaels suggests we “widen our aperture”, which would of course lead to narrower depth of field, rather than wider. He’s maybe optimistic in supposing that journalism can do much to anticipate events, rather than capture them in retrospect. But his central point that 24/7 news doesn’t necessarily bring timeliness is a good observation…

Fog of war: What are we missing? – USATODAY.com