The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and his bombed-out house
Using an operating system of unadorned bodily witness, backed by a headlong courage that often tested the grace of his God, Mr. Shuttlesworth was the key architect of the civil rights revolution’s turning-point victory in Birmingham, the mass marches of 1963. Their internationally infamous climax, the showdown between the movement’s child demonstrators and the city of Birmingham’s fire hoses and police dogs, gave President John F. Kennedy the moral authority he needed to introduce legislation to abolish legal segregation, passed after his death as the Civil Rights Act of 1964.True, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the reluctant leader whom Mr. Shuttlesworth virtually goaded into joining him in Birmingham, got the credit — and the Nobel Peace Prize — for their accomplishment. But that’s partly because Mr. Shuttlesworth was the un-King, the product not of polished Atlanta but of rough, heavy-industrial Birmingham. As the public face of the movement, King was its ambassador to the white world, while Mr. Shuttlesworth was the man in the trenches. …
A few years ago, after Mr. Shuttlesworth had survived a house fire, I teased him about his continuing record of close calls, saying that even though the segregationists hadn’t done him in, somebody was going to get him one way or the other. “Yeah, and when they do,” he replied, “God’s going to say, ‘They got a man.’ ”
Neal Stephenson’s new novel begins with a family reunion in the Idaho panhandle, near the Canadian border, during which the “reserved, even hardbitten” men of the extended Forthrast clan engage in shooting practice with an impressive assortment of firearms.
Actually, no — it begins in Iowa, as it says at the top of the first page of text. When the first sentence of your review gets something like this wrong, I’m not really encouraged to keep reading… .
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Since Jobs’s death about a zillion TV programs and websites have featured these words from the 2005 Stanford address. I don’t really care for what Steve says here, and not just because of what Will Wilkinson says in the post I link to below.
The problem I have with Jobs’s address, and especially with this part of the address, is primarily this: He says nothing about the cost of pursuing one’s dreams. It’s true that a lot of people have unrealistic dreams — I’m glad I got over, quite early, my commitment to playing in the NBA — but even when they have dreams that they just might achieve, they invariably fail to understand, fail to come within a hundred miles of understanding, just how much achieving their aspirations will cost them.
The higher the aspiration, the more it will demand of you. Steve Jobs had very high aspirations indeed, and stuck with them, which is one of the main reasons why, by his own admission, he wasn’t around much for his kids: he has said that he cooperated with his biographer because “I wanted my kids to know me”.
But even lesser ambitions will often be costly. Anything really worth doing will take a lot of your time and energy, probably more than most people are willing to give. Which I why I don’t think commencement addresses ought to come in the “Follow your dream” flavor; or when they do, then the message needs to be “Follow your dream, but don’t be under any illusions about how hard it will be to achieve. Prepare to pay a heavy price. And you had better be ready to stop from time to time to count the cost, to decide whether the dream-following you’re doing today is something you’re deeply going to regret some years down the line.” Commencement addresses shouldn’t be discouraging, but they shouldn’t offer empty encouragement either.
And for my money the best commencement addresses are the challenging ones: the ones that tell young people the things that matter most and how hard they are to achieve. In this regard, David Foster Wallace’s much-quoted Kenyon address is everything Jobs’s isn’t.
(Prompted by a conversation on Twitter with my friend David Ryan.)
If Stallman had to make a statement emphasizing his dislike of Jobs’ influence, he could still have done so respectfully. Consider this; “I didn’t share Steve Jobs’ vision of computing, and I wish he’d chosen to embrace free software. I’m very sorry that he’s gone and we’ve lost the opportunity to have that conversation. My sympathies are with his family at this time.” There’s no need to pretend that Stallman liked Jobs, but his post is contemptible.
This is my buddy PEG’s view also. You guys are wrong.
Imagine that the great cause of your life is … let’s say, ending cockfighting. For decades, you devote your best efforts to eradicating the plague of cockfighting. You have some successes, but then this guy comes along who is an eloquent proponent of cockfighting. He’s so persuasive that, despite all you can do, cockfighting spreads, indeed grows wildly in popularity and eventually becomes the dominant sport in the country.
And then the great advocate of cockfighting dies. Do you say, “I’m sorry he’s gone”? Of course you don’t. You say more or less what Stallman said: that you didn’t wish the guy dead but you’re glad he’s off the scene. It would be been better if he had retired, and best of all if he had changed his mind and come over to your side; but at least someone who used enormous gifts to promote something you believe to be repulsive won’t be doing that any more.
That’s how Stallman feels about Steve Jobs. He didn’t say “I’m glad the bastard is dead”; he said, effectively, “I’m glad someone that smart and that persuasive won’t be leading the Bad Guys any more.” I think that’s a defensible thing to say, even though I wouldn’t have said it myself, and needless to say don’t believe that Apple is a curse upon the earth.
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died. As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, “I’m not glad he’s dead, but I’m glad he’s gone.” Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs’ malign influence on people’s computing. Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.
This is what I love about Richard Stallman. And I mean that seriously. Why should he say nice things about Jobs? Stallman really and truly believes that what Apple does is, from top to bottom, thoroughly pernicious. Why should he pretend not to believe that just because Jobs has died?
While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence—the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics—his argument that violence is on the way out does not, in the end, rest on scientific investigation. He cites numerous reasons for the change, including increasing wealth and the spread of democracy. For him, none is as important as the adoption of a particular view of the world: “The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism.” (The italics are Pinker’s.)Yet these are highly disparate thinkers, and it is far from clear that any coherent philosophy could have “coalesced” from their often incompatible ideas. The difficulty would be magnified if Pinker included Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, who undeniably belong within the extended family of intellectual movements that comprised the Enlightenment, but are left off the list. Like other latter-day partisans of “Enlightenment values,” Pinker prefers to ignore the fact that many Enlightenment thinkers have been doctrinally anti-liberal, while quite a few have favoured the large-scale use of political violence, from the Jacobins who insisted on the necessity of terror during the French revolution, to Engels who welcomed a world war in which the Slavs—“aborigines in the heart of Europe”—would be wiped out.
Delusions of peace | Prospect Magazine
I think Gray is right to be skeptical of Pinker’s claims, but I don’t like he way he simply dismisses, without evaluation of any kind, Pinker’s primary evidence for his claim. Saying that Pinker “make a great show of relying on evidence” implies that it’s just a show, that the evidence isn’t there. Saying that the charts and graphs are “impressive-looking” implies that they’re not genuinely impressive. Yet Gray never takes on any of that evidence; instead he just waves it away as being unimportant. Such a dismissal inclines me to think that he can’t be bothered to assess Pinker’s argument on its own terms, and that in turn makes me think that he shouldn’t have reviewed the book at all.
In one sense, X-Ray expands a feature that has been common in early ebook readers: the ability to call up a dictionary definition of a word. But X-Ray goes much further, both in augmenting the author’s original text and in integrating the additions into the reading experience. Some may see the additions as enhancements, others as irritants, but whether good or bad they represent an editorial intrusion into the contents of a book by a third party - a retailer, in this case. As such, they exist, I think it’s fair to say, in an ethical and perhaps legal gray area. That seems particularly true of novels, where the addition of descriptions of characters and other fictional elements would seem to intrude very much into the author’s realm. (I have to think X-Ray will make a lot of novelists nervous.) The fact that the supplementary text is sold along with the actual text makes the intrusion all the starker.
Nick is right that there may be some copyright ambiguities here, but I’m not sure such annotations are as intrusive as he thinks they are. After all, aren’t there many editions of books (especially classic books) that are heavily annotated, with introductions, explanatory notes, timelines, critical essays? what Amazon is doing doesn’t differ in kind — except (and this may be a fairly large “except”) that it’s adding these annotations to copyrighted works without authorial permission. So at least there needs to be an opt-out, or better yet an opt-in, provision. But I’m not nearly as alarmed about this as Nick is.
Steve Jobs
I didn’t expect this news so soon.
It would be disingenuous for me to pretend that this isn’t sobering news. I never thought Steve Jobs was a likable person; I don’t believe he was even a very interesting person. (I actually think that Bill Gates would be more interesting to have dinner with.) But the things that Steve Jobs made — or, to be more precise, the making of which he envisioned and directed and oversaw — have had a huge impact on my life.
I bought my first computer in the spring of 1985: the original 128K Macintosh. (Plus an external floppy drive and an ImageWriter printer.) Since then I have owned or used at work
- an SE30
- a PowerBook 100
- a Performa 6116
- a Performa 7500
- an original iMac (lime green)
- a later-generation iMac (the first one with a slot CD drive)
- a PowerBook G3
- a PowerBook G4
- an iMac G5
- three MacBooks (one each for my wife, my son, and me)
- a MacBook Air
- an original iPod
- a third-generation iPod
- a first-generation iPod Nano
- the first three generations of the iPod Shuffle
- the original iPhone
- an iPhone 3GS
- two iPads
Listing the software would take too long. The hardware list was long enough, and probably incomplete.
I have used these devices for work and play more (far more) than any other devices I have ever owned. My habits as a music lover — and a purchaser of music — have been dramatically shaped by these devices; my habits of labor have been even more fully formed by my use of things Apple has made or enabled. I am what some people call a “knowledge worker” — a teacher, researcher, and writer — and I barely remember what it was like to work with knowledge before I had Apple products to rely on for hours and hours of every working day.
And it is impossible to believe that any of these objects would have existed in anything like the form we know had Steve Jobs not been around. For good or for ill, he has probably had a greater influence on how I live than I even know. Of course his passing moves me. It would be absurd for me to claim otherwise.
And now, having written this, I have some work to do. I’ll listen to some music on iTunes and write in BBEdit, as I have for years. Steve Jobs’s influence on how I go about my day will continue to be great. But from here on out, it’ll be a little less year by year, as others are forced to step up to set the direction for new technologies. They’re not likely to be nearly as good at it as Steve was.
The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. Better witness is borne to the Lord by the splendor of holiness and art which have arisen in the community of believers than by the clever excuses which apologetics has come up with to justify the dark sides which, sadly, are so frequent in the Church’s human history. If the Church is to continue to transform and humanize the world, how can she dispense with beauty in her liturgies, that beauty which is so closely linked with love and with the radiance of the Resurrection? No, Christians must not be too easily satisfied. They must make their Church into a place where beauty — and truth — is at home. Without this the world will become the first circle of hell…. A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.