Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 2552

Quote For The Day

"If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting financial regulation, than Scott Brown is a Kenyan anti-colonialist. If Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist for supporting the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero, then Michael Bloomberg is a Kenyan anti-colonialist. If Obama is a Kenyan anti-Colonialist for supporting health care insurance reform, then Ben Nelson is a Kenyan anti-colonialist. The Center for American Progress is a Kenyan anti-colonialist think tank, MoveOn...

Understanding Versus Perception

Jonah Lehrer examines the science of reading, and why new e-readers might make the process too easy:

[T:]he act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica and rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Meanwhile, unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of having to decipher...

Haiku Bandit

Meredith Blake reports on artist John Morse's prank bandit signs, composed in haiku and posted on the streets of Atlanta.

Poetry - Arts - Literature - Forms - Haiku and Related Forms

Too Focused On Democracy?

Texas In Africa reviews Séverine Autesserre's book, The Trouble with the Congo: Local Violence and the Failure of International Peacebuilding:

Autesserre is also interested in the question of why theinternational community failed to address local-level conflicts in theKivus and other areas when negotiating peace. Her conclusion is thatthe culture of international peace building doesn't allow forconsideration of local conflict. In other words, it never even occurredto most of the myriad of...

Chart Of The Day

From Brookings (pdf), via Scott Payne.

United States - Bank of England - United States dollar - New York City - Victoria Beckham

Cold Truths

Eileen Reynolds interviews author Jennifer Ackerman, who spells out why we get sick:

Experts say that the best advice for dodging cold bugs may be the simplest: Wash your hands and don't touch your face. If you can adhere to these two rules, you could be well on your way to cold-free dreamland. But this is easier said than done. Just try not touching your face for a day. Most of us do so one to three times every five minutes, or two hundred to six hundred times a day. (We also pick our noses...

Worst Stump Speech Ever? Ctd

Another contender:

Hosting - Free - Web Design and Development - Sports Related - Video Games

Libertarian Doctrine And Education

Bryan Kaplan believes that there is no country on earth that is under-educated. Here is where you end up when libertarianism becomes dogma:

Education's a good like any other.  If people refuse to spend their ownmoney for more education, then it's presumably just not worth it,right?  This is especially clear because governments habituallysubsidize education.  Libertarians should believe that there's anoversupply of education for the same reason they believe there's anoversupply of sport...

It's A Small, Amazingly Beautiful World

 

The entries for Nikon's Small World photomicrography contest are up and fairly awe-inspiring. Pictured above is soap film, by Gerd Guenther, from Düsseldorf, Germany.

(Hat tip: Betsy Mason)

Germany - NikonSmallWorld - Betsy Mason - Photography - Nikon

Hewitt Award Nominee

"Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism. Certainly that is the way the Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset al-Megrahi portrayed himself at his trial. Obama's perception of him as an anticolonial resister would explain why he gave tacit approval for this murderer of hundreds of Americans to be r...