Jonathan V. Last's Blog, page 31

Everything You Need to Know About the New NikkiFinke.com

This line about score-settling is from the inaugural post:

I barely recognize DH these days. Some of those bylines I never hired and wouldn’t. (Anita Busch or Peter Bart? She’s batshit crazy and he’s an unethical fart.) A lot of those stories I consider a waste of time covering. I never wanted a bland and boring news feed. But that’s what the people running it now want. DH plans to unveil a redesign next week, and the best thing I can say about what I saw the other day is that it’s generic. (Yes, I just threw up in my mouth a little.)

Oh, don’t worry: I’ll have much more to say over the next few days about Little Lord Fauntleroy and Mike Phlegming. Because I don’t fuck on the first date.

Instant classic.

A Quick Explanation of Climate “Skepticism”

It’s unclear exactly what “climate skepticism” really means. It could be anything from

(1) I’m not sure this “global warming” thing is really happening, to

(2) I’m not sure this global warming thing is man-made, to

(3) I’m not sure this man-made global warming thing can be mediated by any reasonable means, to

(4) I’m not sure this man-mad global warming thing is necessarily the end of the world.

Or it could be:

(5) Between the uncertainty in the models, the manner in which reality has so far not conformed to the models, and the relatively recent insistence that global cooling, not global warming, was the problem, I’d like to wait a while and get some more serious study done by people who don’t have any obvious ideological and partisan commitments.

Because most of the time, the popular definition of a “climate skeptic” is simply: A person who does not share my domestic policy preferences at this very moment.

Anyway, if you’re interested in why people might fall into one of those five categories, it might be because of passages such as the following, from a Jill Lepore piece in the New Yorker. The piece has nothing to do with climate change–it’s about the gospel of disruption in the tech sector–but in the notion of historical progress, Lepore writes:

The idea of progress—the notion that human history is the history of human betterment—dominated the world view of the West between the Enlightenment and the First World War. It had critics from the start, and, in the last century, even people who cherish the idea of progress, and point to improvements like the eradication of contagious diseases and the education of girls, have been hard-pressed to hold on to it while reckoning with two World Wars, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, genocide and global warming.

Got that? The two World Wars, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, the advent of state-sponsored genocide, and . . . global warming. As if they’re all of a piece. Even if you believe the most apocalyptic claims of the environmental left, one of those things is not like the other–because it hasn’t caused mass death yet. And, as a purely factual matter, it simply doesn’t fit the list because Lepore is talking about events which dominated the thinking of the 20th century–and for most of the 20th century no one cared a lick about global warming. In fact, they spent more time during last century worrying about “global cooling.”

People don’t like to be force-fed idiocy.

Paperback WTE and Marriage News

As I mentioned yesterday, the paperback of What to Expect ships today, and luckily there’s lots of demographic stuff in the news. But my favorite tidbit, sent along by Galley Friend B.F. is a London Review of Books essay by Zoe Heller trashing Jennifer Senior’s very good book All Joy and No Fun. Heller’s chief complaint seems to be that Senior takes it as given that being married is a good thing, and then mounts an argument that having children can also be a good thing. Here then, is part of Heller’s brief on behalf of non-nuclear families:

Even readers who agree with Senior about the loveliness of this maxim may wonder why warm cuddles and hot sex are being pitched as an either/or proposition. This is a place where Senior’s cursory treatment of single parents is particularly keenly felt. Single parents, as she repeatedly points out, have all sorts of problems, but they do tend to date, fall in love and have unmarried sex more frequently than their married peers. In fact, freed from having to ‘work on their marriages’ in the same cuddly, anaphrodisiac setting in which they are nurturing their children, they are quite likely to conclude that nuclear family life, not parenthood, is the true enemy of heat.

Single parents “have unmarried sex more frequently than their married peers”?

You don’t say!

What’s interesting about this review–besides the simple idiocy, of course–is that normally the Venn diagram of people who are anti-marriage and anti-child is pretty much a circle. The LRB seems to have found a reviewer who occupies one of those tiny segments that’s against marriage, but not completely opposed to kids.

“What to Expect” News

The paperback edition comes out tomorrow–with an all-new introduction by the author!

I’ve written an essay that manages (I think) to serve as both a coda for people who’ve already read the book and as a frame for new readers, which doesn’t spoil anything. Also, it’s funny.

For whatever it’s worth: I never knew until now that once a paperback version comes out, that edition supersedes the hardcover edition in all of the ebook formats. So if you bought WTE on your kindle (or nook) before, you should be able to re-download it tomorrow and get the new introduction.

The Nerd Gettysburg

In that last post, Galley Friend P.G. posits that the Battle of Hoth is the nerd’s Gettysburg. Which is to say, the most picked over and revered battle in the collective imagination of geek culture.

That sounds about right, but I wonder what the other contenders are. Certainly the Second Battle of the Deathstar (“It’s a trap!”) ranks high on the list, because unlike the First Battle of the Deathstar, it was a fleet action, with clear strategies and interesting tactical choices. Though perhaps that makes the Second Battle of the Deathstar is more like Midway.

What else ranks high in the world imaginary battles? The Siege of Helm’s Deep, obviously. In fact, this might be the only real challenger to Hoth for the Gettysburg title. Unlike Hoth, we know an enormous amount about Helm’s Deep, from troop strength to precise movements of companies, and even external forces.  (And it, too, has ample Lego devotionals.)

We know comparatively little about the Romulan-Klingon War–only bits and pieces of lore–but it retains a fascination all its own because it’s a stand-in for an alt-universe, 20th century, Russo-Sino War.

Those are, I think, the biggies. Though I may be missing things. There’s the Crisis on Infinite Earths, or the Battle of Endor (a sub-conflict in the broader Second Battle of the Deathstar), and the Battle of Pelennor Fields. They all fit in that list of battles that every nerd knows pretty much by heart. You may have others to add to the list.

Lego Battle of Hoth

That is all.

Exit question: In the collective nerdist imagination, how large a space does the Battle of Hoth occupy?

Strange New Respect for Francis

On Monday, Pope Francis started lecturing the childfree about, well, this:

Pope Francis on Monday (June 2) warned married couples against substituting cats and dogs for children — a move that he said leads to the “bitterness of loneliness” in old age.

The pope made his comments as he celebrated daily Mass with 15 married couples in the chapel at the Santa Marta residence where he lives inside the Vatican.

He reminded the couples, whose marriages ranged from 25 to 60 years, of the need for faithfulness, perseverance and fertility in maintaining a Christian marriage.

But he went a step further and strongly criticized those couples who choose not to have children, saying they had been influenced by a culture of “well-being” that says life is better without kids.

“You can go explore the world, go on holiday, you can have a villa in the countryside, you can be carefree,” the pope said.

“It might be better — more comfortable — to have a dog, two cats, and the love goes to the two cats and the dog. Is this true or not? Have you seen it?

“Then, in the end this marriage comes to old age in solitude, with the bitterness of loneliness.“

I can only imagine that the New York Times is not amused.

Ayn Rand Harry Potter: Chamber of Secrets

Part 2 is pretty good:

“How can you let others decide for you?”

“But you see, I’m not sure, Harry. I’m never sure of myself. I don’t know whether I’m as good as they all tell me I am. I wouldn’t admit that to anyone but you. I think it’s because you’re always so sure that I–”

“I didn’t know it before. But it’s because I’ve never believed in God.”

“Come on, talk sense.” Hermione twisted the emerald cuff on her thin wrist.

“Because I love this earth. That’s all I love. I don’t like the shape of things on this earth. I want to change them.”

“For whom?”

“For myself.”

“Kiss me, you fool,” Hermione cried.

Harry did, efficiently. “You don’t have to applaud,” he said. “I don’t expect it.”

Politico and Political History

I know Politico is all about up-to-the-moment politics, and doesn’t have time for weird historical nuggets from the Cleveland administration or what have you, but I was struck by this piece today on Obama and the problems in the VA system:

There’s a well-worn Obama playbook: Let conservative critics burn hot, put off decisions during a fact-finding mission, quietly set up a procedure that starts to tackle the problems. Count on his allies on the Hill to have his back. And definitely, definitely don’t appear to be cowed into firing people.

April of 2012 was a long time ago and everything, but does anybody at Politico remember Martha Johnson?

This doesn’t even require you scrap your lede! All you have to do is replace “definitely, definitely don’t” with “almost never allow yourself” and it’s fixed.

Ayn Rand and Harry Potter

It’s genius. My favorite lines:

Voldemort began to melt. Harry lit a cigarette, because he was the master of fire.

And:

“I made myself, Ron,” Harry said firmly.