Saturday/Sunday, January 16-17, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN Weekend Edition (Saturday/Sunday, January 16-17, 2010)
(1)- SANTAYANA -- George Santayana (1863-1952). He was once a household name in America: a Spanish-born Harvard professor whose face once graced the cover of Time magazine; a best-selling novelist ("The Last Puritan"), popular essayist and memoir-writer.

(2)- NEW/OLDE HISTORY -- Bertolt Brecht’s poem “Questions From a Worker Who Reads” is a thought experiment, a radical shift in perspective asking us to see – as if for the first time – the hidden lines in our works of history.

(3)- JOE'S DEAD -- People called him the Great Joe Rollino, the Mighty Joe Rollino and even the World’s Strongest Man, and what did it matter if at least one of those people was Mr. Rollino himself.

(4)- NEW BOOK -- Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, Everything but the Coffee places Starbucks at the center of the hypocrisy of the American middle class. The author explores why, for a time, the American middle class saw Starbucks is central to its identity.

(5)- FEAR RULES -- The attack on illustrator Kurt Westergaard wasn't the first attempt to carry out a deadly fatwa. When Muslims tried to murder Salman Rushdie 20 years ago, the protests among intellectuals were loud. Now the reaction among writers and artists is fear.

(6)- SCIENCE JUST SO -- Ever since ethologists, geneticists, and ecologists joined together to create "sociobiology," more recently called "evolutionary psychology" when applied to human beings, practitioners face the accusation their work consists of modern-day just-so stories.

(7)- ETHOLOGY – Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, recently retired as the former Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of New College. His books include...

(8)- IDENTITY MARKS -- It’s that time of year again in wordland--the time when dictionaries choose Words of the Year (unfriend, distracted driving), when the American Dialect Society votes on which terms sum up the times.

(9)- WHAT IS ECONOMICS? -- What is economics? Is it a science? Haven't all its failures of prediction and political guidance proved its lack of respectability? The current financial crisis also reveals a deep crisis of economics.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

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