From time to time we each run into newspaper or magazine items of interest, things we might want to share, things that others might want to read.
This will be a thread to facilitate that sharing. My hope is that each of our "regulars" will try to find one article per week to share.
If it's freely available on line, just post here a link and brief description.
If it's subscription-only, put the text in the wiki but, to alert others that you've done so, put here a mention with link to the wiki.
I trust everyone will use discretion so that this "sharing" doesn't turn into a battle over politics!
EDIT; PS re arnie's point: Articles are often copied on the web. My thought is that so long as it's with attribution, and is limited to occassional articles rather than a substantial portion of the paper, it constitutes "fair use" and would serve as valued publicity for the paper. Needless to say, any objections received would be honored.
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I've put in the first article, for your enjoyment, from a periodic column that takes a look at some interesting history. This one is about the movement for universal health care in the US a century ago.:
Health insurance "is a dead issue in the United States," reported a committee of the New York State Medical Society almost a century ago. It seems ludicrous today that anyone believed the debate over government-mandated health insurance had been settled forever. But in 1925, that's how things looked.
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Come on, folks! Surely you read enough to come across, from time to time, interesting articles worth sharing. Here's one with bibliophile-interest. The Treasures of Timbuktu: Scholars in the fabled African city, once a great center of learning and trade, are racing to save a still emerging cache of ancient manuscripts. Two brief quotes:
The manuscripts paint a portrait of Timbuktu as the Cambridge or Oxford of its day
Most historians believe that Timbuktu was founded in the 1100s by a Tuareg woman named Bouctou, who ran a rest stop for camel caravans on a tributary of the Niger River. ("Tin Bouctou" means "the well of Bouctou.")
On my computer, I could not get the full version of Jerry's story. If you have the same problem, try here: Fossil finds called 'national treasure'; Cave holds remains of Ice Age bear, many other species.
Originally posted by jerry thomas: Here's one which is not particularly language related, but certainly is Big News of general interest.
Yes, Jerry, that certainly is Big News, and we can make it language related. I got this from another site:
The Riverbluff Cave Site was discovered on September 11, 2001 during construction of a road in Southwest Greene County, Missouri. Workers accidentally blasted a 40 feet wide by 20 feet high fissure into a large room that was heavily decorated with speleothems.
I enjoyed the gestures article, Tinman, though I wonder what the creationists would think.
I loved this article from the NY Times. A 13-year-old is frustrated because his parents can't get political asylum (they should contact my daughter ) so he is taking out that frustration in trying to win the national spelling bee. What a healthy reaction! His room is apparently "stuffed to the ceiling" with sprachgefühl, a word he missed last year in a spelling bee.
Why Astronauts Need Down Time in Space: Some of the most interesting scientific discoveries made by astronauts occur during the all-too-rare free moments on space missionse. Astronauts spend much of their time on a list of tightly scripted research. That gives astronauts little opportunity to tinker with scientific instruments, or simply look at what is around them. That’s a shame, because when astronauts have been able to break from script, it has led to some significant scientific findings.
I was intrigued by this reiew of a book on England's "Glorious Revoution" of 1688-89. Excerpt:
When the English-speaking peoples consider the forces that have made them the global hegemonic political culture since the mid-19th century--representative institutions, the rule of law, religious toleration and property rights among them--they look back to Britain's "Glorious" Revolution of 1688. ... It heralded nothing less than a complete realignment of worldview for the Anglosphere. It changed everything.
I'd never heard of it, but of course I'm a USn. Is this bit of history familiar to you Brits, and is it considered to be of great importance?
(PS: hegemony: dominance, especially by one state or social group over others)
I've definitely heard of it and it's not given that great importance nowadays in England and Wales. However, since it involved the overthrow of King James II (VI of Scotland) and the installation of William of Orange it is still seen as very important in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
It was certainly a period when the power of the monarch became circumscribed, and the country became much more religiously tolerant, apart from to catholics, that is. At the time, the (protestant) population thought it was "glorious" and prods in Scotland and Northern Ireland still do; a feeling not shared by the catholics.
While it was certainly an important event in the development of our country, I wouldn't call it earth-shattering.
Come on you raver, you seer of visions, Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner, and shine!
The man who owns the Internet "Kevin Ham is the most powerful dotcom mogul you've never heard of ... a $300 million empire." He buys up web-addresses, with an eye to re-selling them. A current example:
millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name.
Try it with almost any name you can think of -- Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm -- and you'll land on a page called Agoga.com, filled with ads served up by Yahoo.
Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.
The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com ... . Ham ... reroute[s] the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well.
As you may be aware, Rupert Murdoch has proposed to purchase the Wall Street Journal. In that context, today's Journal has a truly remarkable editorial on
... the question of journalistic "independence." There's been a lot of debate lately about what that means. We thought our readers might like to know what it has meant at the Journal ... over the decades.
It begins,
"Don't believe the man who tells you there are two sides to every question. There is only one side to the truth." So wrote William Peter Hamilton, one of the first men to hold the job of editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal ...
I feel alone in this thread. Doesn't anyone else ever read anything of interest in the papers?
Modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well, not quite nothing. There were wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture -- but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people's lives. Almost everyone lived on the modern equivalent of $400 to $600 a year, just above the subsistence level.
Then -- just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations -- people started getting richer. And richer and richer still. Per capita income, at least in the West, began to grow at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year. A couple of decades later, the same thing was happening around the world.
The underlying expectation -- that the present is supposed to be better than the past -- is a new phenomenon in history. No 18th-century politician would have asked "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" because it never would have occurred to anyone that they ought to be better off than they were four years ago. - Steven Landsburg, A Brief History of Economic Time. More excerpts here.
from a Newspaper column: My Only Son by Dutch novelist Leon de Winter. I cite for the sociological point, trusting that we can keep political division out of this.
Americans manage to deal with the fact that tens of thousands of people will be killed each year on the roadways. But [as to Iran] the nation may soon decide that 3,500 deaths over four years is too much.
German genocide expert Gunnar Heinsohn investigates family size in various societies in relation to the frequency of violent conflict since 1500 A.D. His conclusion is disturbingly simple: The presence of large numbers of young men in nations that have experienced population explosions—all searching for respect, work, sex and meaning—tend to turn into violent countries and become involved in wars. He cites, as an example, the Palestinian territories, where many families have as many as four sons.
Most countries in which Islamofascism has taken root have experienced population explosions. Huge numbers of young men are searching in vain for a respectable future. They legitimize their frustration with a radical ideology that channels their dissatisfaction and finds roots in the ancient religious traditions of Islam.
Mr. Heinsohn’s explanation shows the extreme pacifism of today’s Europe to be more than a response to the horrific experiences of World War II. He sees Europe’s low birthrate as the basis for the remarkable period of peace Europe has nurtured since 1945. Europe’s sons have become too precious for war.
Maybe too precious for religion, too. One of the Joseph Campbell televised lecture series starts out with clips of different religions around the world -- Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis, Buddhist monks, Shinto priests, Muslim imams -- the point being the universality of man's spiritual quest. Men's spiritual quest, actually, as there were no women shown at all. It made me wonder why religion is such a guy thing, and it occurred to me that maybe men are just more expendable. In fact, sending a bunch of them to go live on a mountaintop probably made things run more smoothly. And maybe that's why the number of European men going into the clergy has plummeted in recent decades: sons have become too precious.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. - Voltaire
In After the Empire Emmanuel Todd argues that when developing societies hit a certain literacy rate their birth rate drops precipitously, but before the drop occurs they go through a period of chaos and warfare. I think he argues that this is what happened during the protestant reformation, and that is is happening now in the Islamic world.
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one. - Voltaire
The fact that so many fundamentalists of the Judeo-Christian model are against any form of birth control plays right into these social observations. I did a little checking & found that Muslims' interpretation of the Koran allows for birth control in moderation. However, the Sharia also allows for multiple wives, which might balance that in the other direction.
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Every summer the Chicago Tribune writes about their 50 favorite magazines. The books/literary/writing categories include: The Believer, Granta, The New York Review of Books, and of course The New Yorker, though they missed some good ones, such as Verbatim.
Here are the online journals they recommend: Mothering.com, NewScientist.com, The Onion A.V. Club (avclub.com), Pitchfork Media (pitchforkmedia.com), and Slate.com.
This lady must have been someteacher! A retiring teacher wrote a column remembering some of her students. It makes you realize how very much our teachers mean to kids.
Not word-related, but interesting. I don't know if this article (by a former lieutenant governor of New York) is available to non-subscribers, so I'll give some excerpts.
... in the U.S., women have a 63% chance of living at least five years after [cancer] diagnosis, and men have a 66% chance -- the highest survival rates in the world. These figures reflect the care available to all Americans, not just those with private health coverage. In Great Britain, which has had a government-run universal health-care system for half a century, the figures were 53% for women and 45% for men, near the bottom of the 23 countries surveyed.
... women in the U.S. are more likely to get a PAP test every two years than women in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K., where health insurance is guaranteed by the government. In the U.S. 85% of women ages 25-64 have regular PAP smears, compared with 58% in the U.K.
The same is true for mammograms. In the U.S., 84% of women ages 50-64 get them regularly, a higher percentage than in Australia, Canada or New Zealand, and far higher than the 63% of women in the U.K.
