Tuesday, January 12, 2010

WEB BOHEMIAN (Tuesday, January 12, 2010)
(1)- EUROPE'S WOES -- Muslims aren't integrating as well as many Europeans would like to believe. American political journalist Christopher Caldwell argues that taboos and wishful thinking prevent an honest discussion of the issue.

(2)- DIED -- David Levine, whose macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and rarely flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates showcased The New York Review of Books has died.

(3)- A BOOK -- Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, the new book, “Everything but the Coffee” places Starbucks at the center of the hypocrisy of the American middle class.

(4)- GRACE KELLY -- Donald Spoto, in his new book about her, takes the unfashionable decision to deny anything that smacks of rampancy. That distinct clatter you can hear is the sound of skeletons being crammed back into the closet.

(5)- REMEMBER -- The so-called Y2K problem, the inability of computers to read dates beyond 1999 threatened to turn Jan. 1, 2000 into a nightmare. As the turn of the century loomed, it seemed that humankind faced a litany of horrors...

(6)- BRING BACK MARLOWE -- Fifty years after Raymond Chandler died, we need his ‘shop-soiled’ Galahad Philip Marlowe as much as ever to put our mixed-up world to rights.

(7)- GO THERE! -- Why should humans go to Mars? Many reasons for and against have been cited over the years, and many still struggle to see the relevance of this priority. We need to look at Mars in a different context.

(8)- ART INSTINCT -- New Zealand professor of philosophy Dennis Dutton, founder of the web portal Arts & Letters, picks up on Darwin's "other theory". From it he has woven a rich and persuasive argument for the centrality of art in our evolution.

(9)- WHAT IT IS -- Cool is self-direction, self-possession, self-sufficiency, capability, discretion, and a bit of wit. Not-cool is angst, conspicuous display, disdain, tropisms toward bright lights, crowds, and media.

POLITICAL COMMENTARY

ENDIT