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POPSThe Sad State Of Online Comments "Sweetie," "dear," and "zionist stooge liar." Virginia Heffernan, writing about foreign affairs columnist Ann Applebaum, sums up the quality of discourse going on in the reader comment sections of most news sites.
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POPSRe-Coral-Ification Scientists think redeveloping dead and dying coral reefs may one day be as routine as planting sapplings.
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POPSAmazon Titles De-Ranked Meta-Writer is compiling a list of books for which Amazon has removed sales rank figures. This means, among other things, that in the product details for the book, no "Amazon Sales Rank" appears. The company (or, it claims, a wayward algorithm) is apparently targeting gay erotica. Even literary novels by Annie Proulx and Jeanette Winterson have gotten the ax. What next? Portnoy's Complaint? Tropic of Cancer? Lolita? Or must the smut be particularly homosexual in nature? Inquiring minds want to know.
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POPSTolstoy+Twitter Multimedia books on the way. Hope they're more fun than choose-your-own-adventure novels.
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POPSBooks About Columbine Two have been released in the last two weeks, "Columbine," and "Columbine: A True Crime Story," timed to coincide with the 10 year anniversary of the Colorado high school massacre. Janet Maslin reviews the former, with evident disdain for author Dave Cullen's self-promotional efforts. I get where she's coming from but it's hard to tell if the book is really bad or she's just appalled at his macabre media-chase.
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POPSThe Rise Of A Conspiracy Theorist In an excellent piece in the Weekly Standard, Cathy Young does the important leg work of debunking Naomi Klein, mother of the "shock doctrine" doctrine, which purports that every catastrophic event of the last three decades, economic or natural, was part of a vast right-wing conspiracy. I think the comparison of Klein to Chomsky is a bit unfair to Chomsky, since he was at least a ground-breaking linguistics professor early in his career. Nothing I've ever read by or about Klein suggests that she's much of a critical thinker.
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POPSIndia May Sign Test Ban Treaty India's nuclear envoy has indicated that the country might sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Rediff reports -- a potential boon for U.S.-Indian relations.
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POPSAmazon Cheats Book Authors First it was Google, which proposed a few years ago to scan every book in existence without compensating the copyright holders. (A proposal that was amended after an outcry from publishers and authors.) Now Amazon has found a new way to rip off authors, who sell audio rights to their books to supplement generally meager incomes. The Kindle II now delivers books via voice - without compensating authors. Here the head of the Author's Guild explains his position. Time for me to find another online book purveyor.
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POPSCertify Congo Tin? Lydia Polgreen's story on a Congolese mine is a fantastic piece of reporting that deserves to be read in its entirety. Towards the end she raises an interesting question: U.S. politicians have suggested certifying the source of minerals from Congo, in an effort to avoid funding conflicts. I'm not totally sold on such labeling programs -- diamond-certifying schemes have been another popular one. Money being money, won't military groups cut off from one resource just move on to another? Are there strong examples of commodity certification schemes that have actually stopped a conflict? If so I'd love to hear about it.
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POPSWhat's Up With The Period? What editorial genius do you suppose came up with the idea to call the new WSJ magazine "WSJ-dot"? What's the period for? Is it supposed to be youthful? Are they trying to cater to the illiterate market? Ambiguous punctuation makes me uneasy.
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POPSMore Galapagos Than The Galapagos Yemen's Socotra island is a Dr. Seuss land of plants and critters you won't find anywhere else. Now' it's been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Natural Site. I visited in 2004 and can confirm that it's wacky and wonderful...Iwrote about it on Forbes.com in a story about the most isolated places in the world (http://www.forbes.com/2007/05/01/escape-travel-communication-life_cx_ee_07networks_0501grid_slide_3.html?thisSpeed=15000)
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POPSTravel Writing, Courtesy of Uncle Sam I knew that Roosevelt's New Deal created government jobs for blue collar workers. But who knew that travel writers also benefited -- including the likes of Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty? My capitalist tendencies notwithstanding, I can't help but be charmed by writer-employment schemes. Doubly charming (to me anyway): This piece is about my former home state of Washington.
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POPSGoners We've all heard that coral reefs are in trouble, but this is one of the first major studies showing just how much trouble.
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POPSWhy The Silence on This Dictator?
Peter Maass writes on why we rarely hear U.S. criticism of Teodoro Obiang, the draconian ruler of Equatorial Guinea -- when we hear so much about Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe. Maass posits that it's because of U.S. oil investments in the West African nation. There's no doubt some truth to that notion. But it could also have to do with the strange ebbs and flows of the media. Britain's BBC has gone to extraordinary lengths to cover Zimbabwe, in part because it was a former British colony, which Equatorial Guinea was not. But more importantly, perhaps, is the fact that just about every news organization in the world that covers Africa on the ground has a correspondent in South Africa. Call it the Jerusalem effect: Sure, it's newsworthy. But there are more foreign correspondents per capita in Jerusalem than anywhere else in the world. So closer things get covered more, farther things not so much. And Equatorial Guinea is a long, long way away from the foreign press.
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POPSNot Dead Yet Apparently people are actually starting to use the Segway. But does a couple really need three?
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POPSDunkin Donuts Goes Completely Insane There are certain times in history that make us look back and wonder, "how is it possible that civilized people behaved in such craven and irrational ways?" The Salem Witch trials, for instance. The present moment will likely be looked back on as another such time. Case in point: Dunkin Donuts just pulled an ad in which TV cook Rachael Ray wore a scarf that somewhat resembled a traditional Palestinian head dress -- because imbalanced bloggers accused the company of promoting terrorism. I'll skip speculating on the sheer pandering nuttiness of Dunkin's decision, to point out merely what a dumb business decision this was. It's a global company. There are 1.3 billion Muslims out there. The math is simple.
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POPSWar and the Big Melt Scott G. Borgenson argues in the most recent Foreign Affairs that arctic disputes could lead to armed conflict. Full text available online.
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POPSHot Times in the Arctic Canada, the United States, Russia, Denmark, and Norway meet today in Greenland to negotiate sovereignty over the Arctic -- an issue that will continue to heat up as Arctic ice melts. One interesting ramification of the big melt: These countries will now have to start worrying about people and stuff coming in over their northern borders.
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POPSWatergy Saving water is good -- but taking shorter showers won't have much impact on overall water supply. William Pentland reports on Forbes.com on just how much water agriculture and industry use.
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POPSLocal Currencies I first heard about local currencies when I was researching a story on modern-day utopians (www.forbes.com/utopia). They didn't seem to make much sense. So it's refreshing to see economist Tim Harford debunk the idea on Slate.
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POPSChild Exploitation I just saw this moving documentary about young prostitutes struggling to leave the life behind. It reminds us that for all the preoccupation over human rights abuses in foreign lands, there are plenty to be found right in our own back yard. It doesn't seem to be having a wide release, but I highly recommend seeing it at a festival or on DVD.
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POPSIf You're a Free Trade Voter... Gregory Mankiw (whose name you may recall from the cover of your college econ text book) gives a detailed breakdown of the McCain, Obama, and Clinton records on free trade. The winner on a slew of issues: McCain.
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POPSWar in the Antarctic Activists lobbing chemicals and trying to ram whaling ships. Hunted Japanese whalers wondering if they're allowed to shoot. The whaling war in the Antarctic is heating up, and for the moment the activists are winning: With the whaling season about to end, Japan has not even taken half the 900 Minke whales it planned to kill this year.
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POPSDvorak Diplomacy The U.S. State Department has mostly abandoned the kind of cultural diplomacy it practiced during the Cold War, when it funded libraries and concerts around the world. In their place we got Al Hurra television and Radio Sawa, both mocked by their target audiences as propaganda. The New York Philharmonic's trip to Pyongyang -- approved but not funded by the State Department -- marks a return to the old-fashioned approach. Perhaps it can create a tiny trickle of a thaw where six-party talks have failed.
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POPSChinese the African Lingua Franca? I have lingua francas on my mind these days, so I was fascinated by a BBC radio report this morning on Chinese language schools opening in Khartoum. I couldn't fnd the BBC report online, but this Times of London story mentions the phenomenon. It seems some Sudanese see Mandarin as more useful than English in terms of future employment.
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POPSSpanish Readers More signs that old-fashioned book-reading is alive and kicking -- The Economist highlights growth in Spanish-language publishing, sure to get an even bigger boost in coming years.
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POPSText Lit Henry James may be rolling over in his grave, but it was only a matter of time: Works of fiction composed on mobile phone keypads have been transformed into bound novels -- and are selling out more traditional works on Japanese bestseller lists. How long until this trend leaps the Pacific? Come to think of it, James, Dickens, and others launched some of their greatest works in serial form.
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POPSAnother Day, Another Medical Tell-All The disease memoir may be an old standby for the book industry, but these days it's the doctors going on book tour. Following on the success of Jerome Groopman's "How Doctors Think," Atul Gawande's "Better," and "The Surgeons" by Charles Morris, we have, reviewed in last weekend's New York Times, "Intern" by Sandeep Jauhar. Not for the faint of heart, or anyone who's ever wondered if their doctor really knew best.
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POPSWorld War III Cancelled So it turns out that Iran stopped developing nuclear weapons in 2003, according to the new National Intelligence Estimate. It's easy to distrust the U.S. intelligence community, which not only made mistakes on Al-Qaeda and Iraq, but also told us in 2005 that Tehran was determined to build nukes. But there's at least one thing we can all be relieved about today: Imminent open warfare between the U.S. and Iran is almost certainly off the table.
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