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.

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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.

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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