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Wednesday, May 07, 2003 |
International Smart Mobs Meetup Day!. Meetup.com has added Smart Mobs as an area of focus for meetings around the world. "Connect with others who understand how to capitalize on the power of collective action as inspired by Howard Rheingold's book...." [Link] [Smart Mobs]
8:36:55 PM 
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I just started
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, by Marjane Satrapi, a graphic novel telling of a ten-year-old girl at the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. And along comes
Veil of
Tears: Two Children of the Revolution Look Back at Iran, by Joy Press, in The Village Voice. It's a review of Persepolis as well as
Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, the story of a literature professor who gathers some of her best female students together, in post-Revolutionary Iran, to doff their chadors and study great, even, um, revolutionary literature.
Press isn't as knocked out by the small-story, personal-universal approach in Persepolis as I am, though she does have nice things to say about it. She has convinced me to put Reading Lolita on my list.
(illustration: from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, Courtesy Pantheon Books)
I pay special attention to these because I lived in Iran, but nowadays it's important for all manner of Americans to acknowledge and learn from such works. As Press says in her review,
For both Nafisi and Satrapi—one a well-respected professor, the other a pampered schoolgirl—government edicts ravage external and internal life. Marji wonders how she'll ever become the next Marie Curie, while Nafisi's whole sense of herself begins to unravel:
Now that I could not wear what I would normally wear, walk in the
streets to the beat of my own body, shout if I wanted to or pat a male colleague on the back on the spur of the moment, now that all this was illegal, I felt light and fictional . . . as if I had been written into being and then erased in one quick swipe.
Satrapi and Nafisi have chosen the perfect moment to write themselves back into being. As the U.S. gazes in the direction of their homeland like a bully contemplating its next target, these books add a crucial dimension to our vague and impersonal understanding of contemporary Iran.
9:29:56 AM
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Well, apparently, Neal Stephenson's
talk
at CMU was cancelled. This leaves us with a number of questions along
the lines of
What's
up with Enoch Root? as we wait for the appearance of
Quicksilver (Stephenson, Neal. Baroque Cycle, V. 1.), which was once
said to be arriving this spring, then
this
summer, now said to be coming 9/23/2003 (according to Harper Collins
-- 944 pages, $27,95 list) or maybe in October (ranked 6,464 at amazon.com).
(Lots of
Neal
Stephenson links on this page of A blog doesn't need a clever name from
back in November. Also, you can read
an
excerpt from the book at the publisher's site or at the end of mass
market paperback of
Cryptonomicon.)
9:29:47 AM
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ISP
dumps 500 user contracts, by Denise Pappalardo, Network World.
Imagine receiving a notice from your ISP that says it is
rejecting your contract, and service will cease in two weeks.
. . .
Barclays Global Investors, BTM Capital, Metropolitan Transit Authority of
New York, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Sun were among the 10% of Genuity's
5,000 customers that received letters saying their service contracts were
being ditched. Some renegotiated, some did not, and some were not even
given the opportunity.
"It's pretty scary when you first get that letter," says Jim Wilder, head
of IT at Nabi Biopharmaceuticals in Boca Raton, Fla. Wilder was surprised
that his contract was among those rejected, although his company eventually
renegotiated its deal for managed firewall services with Genuity's new
parent company.
Genuity filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last December just
before Level 3 Communications acquired it. Any company in Chapter 11 must
accept or reject each of its existing contracts, including real estate,
utility and customer contracts. This falls under Section 365 of the Federal
Bankruptcy Code.
And this provision of bankruptcy law is not a two-way street. Customers
that did not want to work with the bankrupt company or Level 3 were not
allowed to abandon their contracts before they expired.
8:29:36 AM
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xian with a genius idea: Raise the personal exemption!. Mark A.R. Kleiman points to a "fun fact" that reminds me of my idea for a liberal tax-cut initiative that I think would call the bluff of the plutocrats running the show these days. Let's stipulate that it's important to cut taxes by $350 billion, or $550 billion or whatever fakey number the shills on Capitol Hill have agreed to lately. Fine, but why cut from the top down? Why reduce the top marginal rates, or capital gains tax rates, or anything like that that cuts off the top end of curve with some token scratch thrown at the low end to soften the apparent blow? Specifically, why make percentage cuts at all, which are inherently regressive?
Instead, why not cut from the bottom up, by raising the personal exemption until we've achieved the cuts we want? I need to plot this on a graph, but I think that the problem would become apparent immediately. A huge number of people at the low end would end up opting out of income tax payments entirely, as the "cost of doing business" (where business generally means housing and feeding a family) would account for their entire income. In other words, we'd only be taxing disposable income, as defined by income that exceeds the new, much higher personal deduction. Then we'd have some lucky duckies indeed, just what the Wall Street Journal crowd is afraid of. Why is this not any part of the debate? 
6:36:18 AM
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Lawmakers Fight Online Gambling. A House subcommittee approved legislation that would prohibit the use of credit cards, checks and electronic fund transfers to pay for online betting transactions. The panel hopes to make Net gambling tougher, opting against an alternate proposal that could lead to states legalizing and taxing Net casinos. [Wired News]
No word on whether William Bennett supports the measure.
6:31:43 AM
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Blogger: Catch Me If You Can. A mysterious new weblog alleges to be the online diary of a rich heiress who's running from her powerful family to avoid an arranged marriage. The Flight Risk journal is fishy in all kinds of ways, but it's also a good read. By Leander Kahney. [Wired News]
6:29:39 AM
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When Your Peers
Vote Against You, by ''Erika Favor,'' in The Chronicle of Higher
Education.
Most uncomfortably, I had to figure out how to live with those
who had voted "no' on my case. All five members of the committee were, and
are, associate professors -- meaning, they were voting on whether to
promote me over them. None of them are in my department or otherwise close
colleagues of mine, but because we are a small campus, I see all of these
people regularly -- at lunch, in meetings, and in the building where most
of us have our offices.
As I shared my distress with colleagues at other institutions, I was amazed
to find that I was a member of a rather large club of academics whose
promotion or tenure cases ran into trouble. In the spirit of sharing what
I've learned, I offer here some tips for how to deal with a "no" vote,
should it ever happen to you.
1:27:50 AM
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