Test
Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.
Hot on the heels of the story in Publisher’s Weekly that ‘publishers could be losing out on as much $3 billion to online book piracy’ comes a sudden realization of a much larger threat to the viability of the book industry. Apparently, over 2 billion books were ‘loaned’ last year by a cabal of organizations found in nearly every American city and town. Using the same advanced projective mathematics used in the study cited by Publishers Weekly, Go To Hellman has computed that publishers could be losing sales opportunities totaling over $100 billion per year, losses which extend back to at least the year 2000. … From what we’ve been able to piece together, the book ‘lending’ takes place in ‘libraries.’ On entering one of these dens, patrons may view a dazzling array of books, periodicals, even CDs and DVDs, all available to anyone willing to disclose valuable personal information in exchange for a ‘card.’ But there is an ominous silence pervading these ersatz sanctuaries, enforced by the stern demeanor of staff and the glares of other patrons. Although there’s no admission charge and it doesn’t cost anything to borrow a book, there’s always the threat of an onerous overdue bill for the hapless borrower who forgets to continue the cycle of not paying for copyrighted material.
One night in the mid-1990s when I was working as a journalist in Beijing, I went out to dinner with some Chinese friends. I had just finished reading a book called “The File” by the British historian Timothy Garton Ash. It’s about what happened in East Berlin after the Berlin Wall came down and everybody could see the files the Stasi had been keeping all those years. People discovered who had been ratting on whom—in some cases neighbors and co-workers, but also lovers, spouses and even children. After I described the book to my Chinese dinner companions—a hip and artsy intellectual crowd—one friend declared: “Some day the same thing will happen in China, then I’ll know who my real friends are.”
The table went silent.
One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that “you got messages rather than conversations.” That’s about as an accurate summation of our times as any. Henry, his long white beard contrasting with his young bright eyes told me, “If I had a TV, I’d watch it.” What could be simpler?
From feminist-writer Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayl of the American Man:
As anthropologist David D. Gilmore demonstrated in Manhood in the Making, his comprehensive cross-cultural survey of masculine ideals, manliness has been expressed as laboring-class loyalty in Spain, as diligence and discipline in Japan, as dependence on life outside the home in the company of men in Cyprus, as gift-giving among Sikhs, as the restraint of temper and the expression of “creative energy” among the Gisu of Uganda, and as entirely without significance to the Tahitians. “Manliness is a symbolic script,” Gilmore concluded, “a cultural construct, endlessly variable and not always necessary.”
Why shouldn’t kids watch reality TV? Because kids need better role models, right? But that’s assuming kids are stupid.
This from the New York Times on reasons to like MTV’s over-stereotyped Italian-American reality show, Jersey Shore:
3. YOUNG PEOPLE NEED BAD EXAMPLES. Too many children today are reaching their teenage years armed only with a Disney definition of “bad person”: it’s someone who talks cattily about your wardrobe behind your back, maybe copies a few answers off your math quiz.
They have no idea how much ignorance, narcissism, predatory sexism and hair-gel abuse lurk out there in the real world. Unless they watch “Jersey Shore.” From that perspective the show is a sort of public service.
This is the kind of thought that would never occur to most parents. Instead, they would exhort their kids, “Why are you watching this garbage?”
