Category: ideas

What is this “activist judges” charge that George Bush keeps flinging around? What he means, of course, are courts with whose rulings he disagrees. “Still, the charge isn’t going away. Though it is misused by partisans, scholars have for generations held serious debates about judicial activism – and have sometimes even found ways to embrace it.”

A thousand years ago the Arab world was a center of learning, a civilization that led the world. So what happened? “According to a number of highly self-critical reports that have come out in the past few years, the 21 countries that make up the region are struggling to teach even basic science at the university level. For poor countries, such as Yemen and Sudan, the problem is a lack of money and resources. For wealthier ones, such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, complacency and a relatively new and underdeveloped university system have hampered progress.”

As the US Congress struggles to find a reasonable way to update copyright law for the digital age, an alarming possibility has emerged. A draft bill known as the Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act is designed to allow companies which collect and disseminate data (online search engines like Google, say) to protect their product from being copied. “But critics say the bill would give the companies ownership of facts – stock quotes, historical health data, sports scores and voter lists. [If that’s true, t]he bill would restrict the kinds of free exchange and shared resources that are essential to an informed citizenry.”

Is the way we teach kids music in America wrong? Libby Larsen thinks so. It’s a system that hasn’t evolved much since colonial times. “We have a musical education system that was developed out of a displaced European sensibility that was brilliant, but we have a culture now in which the music is ever so much more complicated and diverse in the world. The music education system has a crisis in relevancy.”

“The three-day international event pits mnemonic experts from around the globe in competitions that include memorizing a previously unpublished and non-rhyming lengthy poem in 15 minutes, and writing it down complete with proper spelling and punctuation; memorizing a list of 400 random words and reciting them back in order; and the dreaded “binary competition,” in which competitors have a half hour to memorize a random string of thousands of 1s and 0s.”

“Linguists now estimate that half of the more than 6,000 languages currently spoken in the world will become extinct by the end of this century. In reaction, there are numerous efforts to slow the die-off — from graduate students heading into the field to compile dictionaries; to charitable foundations devoted to the cause, like the Endangered Language Fund; to transnational agencies, some with melancholic names appropriate to the task, like the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages. But how does one salvage an ailing language when the economic advantages of, say, Spanish are all around you? And is it possible to step inside a dying language to learn whether it can be saved and, more rudely, whether it should be?”

America sells more and more to the rest of the world. And more and more of its good are manufactured abroad. But increasingly the country is closing its eyes and ears to foreign culture – movies, books, music… all are having a more difficult time getting into the country and being seen/heard/read.

America often gets criticized for being consumerist and driven by its appetite for consumption of goods. Yet, writes one historian, it may be precisely this talent for shopping that allowed America to break from Britain back in the 1700s and create a modern nation that works.

“A large ongoing survey of American communities seems to show, uncomfortably, that levels of trust and co-operation are highest in the most homogenous neighbourhoods. People living in diverse areas, it turns out, are not just more suspicious of people who don’t look like them; they are also more suspicious of their own kind. Because of that, they suffer socially, economically and politically.”

How are portable electronics changing our behavior? Take iPods, for example. “Music allows people to use their eyes when they’re listening in public. I call it nonreciprocal looking. Listening to music lets you look at someone but don’t look at them when they look back. The earplugs tell them you’re otherwise engaged. It’s a great urban strategy for controlling interaction.”