Much as I hate to admit it, I found myself wondering today about this possible relationship between Bush and this.

Hey, they seem to be able to find everyone with those International Male catalogues (I got one at work today); why not the president?

Wal-Mart Enters NetFlix's Business [Slashdot]

Oh, crap. Imagine what the selection of movies will be like.

Easily Distracted, writing about the home-grown terrorist Eric Rudolph

Eric Rudolph appears to have had the aid and sympathy of more than a few people in the area where he conducted his fugitive existence. It also seems there is broad agreement among pundits and bloggers that this is a vexing thing. Am I wrong in thinking, however, that conservative commentators have had, on average, only a small proportion of the vehemence they would have had about such sympathy in comparison to what would happen if there were a number of people spotted in Santa Cruz, California with ?Go Osama!? t-shirts on?

Slavoj Zizek has been writing a lot about this phenomenon, the sympathy for terrorism that can be found within "amerique profonde" itself. It's worth recalling, as he points out, that Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson responded to the 9/11 attacks by giving justifications that could easily have come from the mouths of the terrorists themselves. As Zizek writes:

Every feature attributed to the Other is already present in the very heart of the US: murderous fanaticism? There are today in the US itself more than two millions of the Rightist populist "fundamentalists" who also practice the terror of their own, legitimized by (their understanding of) Christianity. Since America is in a way "harboring" them, should the US Army have punished the US themselves after the Oklahoma bombing? And what about the way Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson reacted to the bombings, perceiving them as a sign that God lifted up its protection of the US because of the sinful lives of the Americans, putting the blame on hedonist materialism, liberalism, and rampant sexuality, and claiming that America got what it deserved? The fact that very same condemnation of the "liberal" America as the one from the Muslim Other came from the very heart of the Amerique profonde should give as to think. America as a safe haven?

Easily Distracted (Timothy Burke) provides some rather -- vivid -- advice about going to grad school:

Should I go to graduate school?

Short answer: no.

Long answer: maybe, but only if you have some glimmering of what you are about to do to yourself. Undergraduates coming out of liberal arts institutions are particularly vulnerable to ignorance in this regard. For four years, they've been asked to take chances, experiment, change course when it suits them, freely enrich their minds and their hearts...

Just don't try graduate school in an academic subject with the same spirit of carefree experimention. Medical school, sure. Law school, no problem. But a Ph.D in an academic field? Forget it. If you take one step down that path, I promise you, it'll hurt like blazes to get off, even if you're sure that you want to quit after only one year.

Two years in, and quitting will be like gnawing your own leg off.

Past that, and you're talking therapy and life-long bitterness.

 

But I'm not bitter! I can talk for three to four hours a time about exactly how bitter I'm not! 

(Thanks to Frogs and Ravens again for the pointer to that article. I had read it a while back and had been looking all over for it.)

Just stumbled across an overlay for Userland Radio called FM Radio. It provides tabbed browsing, a news aggregator, and a nice interface for writing and editing posts (including the ability to keep drafts.) The tabbed browsing is really slick (Joel on Software as written about this feature in another product).

The major annoyances are that it lacks bookmarks/favorites (they say they are working on this on their website), and the fact that you can't get install the google toolbar on it (I use that thing a million times a day.) I'd like to see more integration between the browser, the news aggregator, and the post editor -- a button in the browser that would let you easily create a blog entry about what you're reading. The spell checker -- a great feature to have in the post editor--sometimes seems to think that when hit Ignore All you really mean Ignore All, and it then ignores all the spelling errors from that point forward, not just the one spelling that you want it to skip. But so far it seems like a great interface and enhancement to Userland Radio.

Update: RSS autodiscovery would also be nice... unless it's there and I've missed it somehow.

Via a post from Matthew Yglesias I found an article by Sean Wilentz about the clash between journalists and historians over The Clinton Wars. But Wilentz makes an important point about this disturbing story Blumenthal tells about the impeachment scandal:

Clearly, looking back, the anti-impeachment historians get to say we told you so. But the more disturbing point is this: Impeachment isn't just "history." Some of the key "right-wing fanatics" who peddled "tainted, planted, unfounded, retracted, distorted, misleading and plain nonexistent evidence" that led to a "Kafkaesque" political "show trial" have more power than ever in politics and the media -- and have, it seems, actually benefited, personally and politically, from their attacks on the Constitution.

Which makes you wonder if Blumenthal is doing himself any favors by insisting on his book as a work of history, especially in the format of short radio and television interviews. It's not at all clear what he means by "history." He seems to be making the claim so often that he really should give a better explanation.  

I've caught a few interviews with Sid Blumenthal talking about -- actually more defending, it seems -- The Clinton Wars. Blumenthal pointed out that the best reviews are coming from historians, while journalists were attacking the book. His is the first book, he claimed, to put the scandal in its full historical context.

What surprised me was how he responded to the negatives reviews that have come from journalists. He replied that none of them found any "historical inaccuracy" in his book. I know that it's an off-hand remark -- though he has repeated it -- but it left me wondering what in the world he means by "historically accurate."

The "historical sense" of his book (of which he may be justifiably proud) is not primarily about accuracy -- that would be journalism, no -- but about the larger historical claims that it makes. But is it really possible to make an objection that the historical arguments he makes are "inaccurate?" He seems to me mixing the languages of journalism and history here, and validating his book by claiming that it has not been subject to claims (historical inaccuracy) that are not really possible to make.

(Not that I think that his book needs defending. I like what I've read so far of it.)

Nice interview this morning on Fresh Air with B.D. Wong. It started on a slightly tense note (as tense as things ever get on Fresh Air). B.D. Wong was talking about his new memoir, Following Foo, the story of how he and his partner decided to have a child, and their anxious months caring for the child who was suffering from the results of a rare prenatal complication.

Terry's first question, predictable, was "why did you decide to have a child?"  B.D. Wong replied that he though the desire to have a child is nearly universal, and wondered if Terry was asking him the question because there was "something strange" about a gay man wanting to have children.

This reply must have come as a surprise to Terry--I'm sure few people ever suggest that she is any any way homophobic--but her reply put things in perspective. She pointed out that she didn't want to have children, that, for many people, children "just happen" to them, and that B.D. and his partner had to go though complicated medical procedures involving him, his partner's sister, and a surrogate mother.

I can understand why Terry asked the question -- B.D. Wong had just written a memoir about having a child after all--but I can also imagine what it must be like for him to be asked the question all the time. Terry did a good job of giving him a different perspective of why people ask the question.

Oddly, it reminded me of a time when Terry interviewed the Uta Hagen  and asked her a question she didn't like. Uta Hagen, in Respect for Acting in other books, is famous for complaining that people don't respect acting, because it doesn't involve the obvious acquisition of technical skills, such as learning how to play a musical instrument. Terry asked Uta a question about technique, and Uta, in her full respect for acting mode, essentially replied that Terry couldn't possibly understand: acting is a technically demanding profession, and it does not make any sense to talk about technique with someone who is not an actor -- just as it would make so sense to ask a violinist about his bowing arm technique. Terry convincingly replied that, yes, she does ask such questions all the time, and that he helps her learn more about artists and their work. Uta Hagen was clearly taken aback. She had been given this response for years in order to impress on people the difficulty of acting, but she could clearly tell that Terry was in fact asking a relevant question.