Alan Jacobs

1. A goatskin notebook for writing down dreams
2. Mont Blanc fountain pen (extra credit if it belonged to Mme Blavatsky)

3. A Chinese coin or a stone in your pocket for rubbing

4. Frequenting places where you can overhear things

5. Tiny recorders, spyglasses, microscopic listening devices

6. A little man at the back of your head

7. The Ghost-Companion

8. Susceptibility to hypnosis

9. Large sheets of homemade paper, a stack a foot thick

10. A subscription to cable TV

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landscapelifescape:

Vermont, Smugglers Notch State Park (by Kevin McNeal)

I’m especially looking forward to Windoro, the robot that cleans both sides of your windows at once; Kitara, the guitar with no strings but rather a video screen that can display strings or any number of other wild music-control interfaces; Sony’s new camcorder with built-in projector; Motorola’s Atrix 4G, an app phone that snaps into a docking station and becomes a computer; Iomega’s tiny iPhone charging dock that also backs up the phone to a memory card; and InteraXon’s prototype thought-control headset for iPad games.

Quotations from politicians have been getting shorter for more than a century. According to a new article in the academic journal Journalism Studies by David M. Ryfe and Markus Kemmelmeier, both professors at the University of Nevada, newspaper quotations evolved in much the same way as TV sound bites. By 1916, they found, the average political quotation in a newspaper story had fallen to about half the length of the average quotation in 1892.

One way to interpret this, of course, is that we’ve been getting dumber since 1892 instead of since 1968. But Ryfe and Kemmelmeier also suggest that the truth is more complicated. The sound bite, they argue, stems less from a collapse in standards or seriousness than from the rise of a more sophisticated and independent style of journalism — which means the sound bite might not be such a bad thing. Letting politicians ramble doesn’t necessarily produce a better or more informative political discourse. Daniel Hallin, the professor behind the original study on TV sound bites, actually made the same point back in 1992, but Dukakis and his fellow critics passed right by it in their excitement over those ugly statistics. And that’s one of the ironies here: The best research on sound bites was itself turned into a sound bite.

plans

If you want to be a New Atheist, first and foremost, you need to possess an unrelenting desire to help. The desire may seem at times cruel, but you have to start focusing on a higher good: the goal here is to get the cannibals to put down their wafer and wine glass. It’s not for your wellness, but for the good of mankind. As Georgetown University professor John Haught wrote in his diagnosis of the New Atheists, ‘To know with such certitude that religion is evil, one must first have already surrendered one’s heart and mind to what is unconditionally good.’ The New Atheists may wrap themselves in torn one-liners and haggard scientism, but beneath their cynical swaddle there lies a charming Perfectionism. Charming insofar as it is usually in the body of admittedly sinning and struggling men—if you want to be a New Atheist, you’re going to be a man—so the Perfectionist tendencies will be transporting you from a particularly devilish here to a right-minded necessary there. 'Religion must die,’ Maher argues, 'for mankind to live.’ Their descriptions of religion may be flat-footed, but it’s all for an endgame that surpasses their previous personal struggles. They are not converting you to their model lives (every New Atheist will happily tell you of wayward days with hookers or Hezekiah), nor to their model educations (every New Atheist parlays a populist revolution). Rather, they are converting you—as swiftly as possible, as dramatically as possible—to their ontology of the now. Apocalypse is coming, and although the New Atheists name the source and form of this apocalypse differently, if you want to be a New Atheist, you had better pull on your Oneida pants and start shoveling in an Adventist diet, because these are some millennial folk. 'The irony of religion,’ Maher remarks at the end of Religulous, 'is because of its power to divert man to destructive forces the world actually could come to an end.’

I propose we abandon the Internet, or at least accept the fact that it has been surrendered to corporate control like pretty much everything else in Western society. It was bound to happen, and its flawed, centralized architecture made it ripe for conquest. Just as the fledgling peer-to-peer economy of the Late Middle Ages was quashed by a repressive monarchy that still had the power to print money and write laws, the fledgling Internet of the 21st century is being quashed by a similarly corporatist government that has its hands on the switches through which we mean to transact and communicate. It will never truly level the playing fields of commerce, politics, and culture. And if it looks like that does stand a chance of happening, the Internet will be adjusted to prevent it.

The new Aston is beautiful. Chest-squeezing, arrythmia-inducing, stunningly gorgeous. I had occasion to park our willow-green-metallic test car next to a Porsche Panamera Turbo—one of the Aston’s direct rivals—and the Porsche looked like Harold Bloom in a thong… .

But in terms of industrial design, the Rapide’s beauty is illicit because it fails to account for the inconvenient bits of protoplasm that will occupy it. Design, after all, is applied aesthetics. If you’ve ever had occasion to think to yourself, ‘People are stupid,’ well, Aston’s chief of design, Marek Reichman, seems to agree… .

But, seriously, acceleration, tight rear seats, outward visibility, Pep Boys-quality navi system, Austrian papers? None of it matters. The way this car looks people would buy it if it smelled like a rotting corpse.

If one censors Mark Twain’s use of the word, why not censor the black writers who use the term? Whose characters use the term? My new book, Barack Obama and The Jim Crow Media, The Return of the Nigger Breakers, uses a term in the title that that was employed in slave times to refer to workers whose specialty was breaking unruly slaves. One was Edward Covey to whom Frederick Douglass was sent to be broken. This account appears in Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, an 1881 classic which includes the word ‘nigger’ at least ten times.

Like Douglass and other 19th Century authors, Twain used the words with which he was surrounded and to insist that he omit words is not only to put a gag on his characters but a gag on the Age. Instead of doing a gotcha search on Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, I recommend that its critics read it.

saint preserve us . . . from microfilm