Alan Jacobs

[gallery] the Etherington brothers

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[gallery] portrait arabesque, by Roger de La Fresnaye. Via Wood s hole

This year, as Thanksgiving bleeds into the rest of the winter holiday season, as Republicans sharpen their knives for the fight with Obama over his executive action—or ‘executive amnesty,’ whatever you choose to call it—keep this in mind: American immigration law is perhaps one of the most mercurial sets of laws we have. It is not set in stone, nor has it ever been. Historically, it has depended on racism, trade priorities, and geopolitical considerations, just as it does today. And as Senator Ted Cruz, son of a Cuban immigrant, rails against Hondurans and Mexicans for coming to America illegally, keep in mind just how lucky his family is to come from a country that got the kind of special status that allowed, and still allows, Cubans to come to U.S. in ways that would be considered illegal for other populations and to get a green card in a year. Consider that this is not because of a law passed in the U.S. Congress, but because some guy we didn’t like seized power in 1959 and a few American presidents decided to help the Cuban bourgeoisie—and to stick it to Nikita Khrushchev. It’s why I and my 60 relatives are here, too. And it is quite likely that one of your ancestors got in through some giant, executive loophole ages and ages ago. Or got here when there were no loopholes because there were simply no laws pertaining to immigration.

As you celebrate tonight, consider that the lesson here isn’t so much that Cubans or Soviet Jews shouldn’t be there, but that maybe some other people deserve a shot at an American Thanksgiving rather than an ill-informed lecture on the 'law.’

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This is what book covers should look like.

Security researcher GironSec has pulled Uber’s Android app apart and discovered that it’s sending a huge amount of personal data back to base – including your call logs, what apps you’ve got installed, whether your phone is vulnerable to certain malware, whether your phone is rooted, and your SMS and MMS logs, which it explicitly doesn’t have permission to do. It’s the latest in a series of big-time missteps for a company whose core business model is, frankly, illegal in most of its markets as well.

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smithsonianlibraries:

Tips for the fancy [Thanksgiving] table courtesy The dining room and its appointment (1896). They also have some helpful etiquette tips for dinner conversation

Grievous or appalling events should not be mentioned, and mischievous gossip should be carefully avoided, as should also [sic] remarks of a political or religious nature that may be offensive to anyone present.

What, then, does detective fiction say about her? ‘That I am a woman who likes life to be ordered. In a long life, I have never taken a drug or got drunk, and I say that not as a matter of pride: it’s because the idea of being out of control is appalling to me. I think that when one writes detective stories one is imposing order, and a form of imperfect but human justice, on chaos.’ In fact, as with the later work of her hero Dorothy L Sayers, a great deal of the fascination of James’s detective fiction lies in the way chaos flourishes in the midst of the novels’ rigid structure – the internal psychological mess that brings about murder. 'I think there’s been a huge change since the novels of the Golden Age,’ she suggests. 'What was popular then was the puzzle: such qualities as psychological truth or even atmospheric location were secondary to it. For me, characterisation is at the heart of my books. From the start, I felt that what I was doing was examining human beings under the strain of an investigation for murder. And such an investigation tears down all the walls of privacy that we build round ourselves and reveals us for who we are. It’s a fascinating way of dealing with people.’

attnmgmtblog:

Alan Jacobs, on The Attentive Reader.

So it turns out that if we want to think seriously about how we read and the conditions under which we read, we require at the very least three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates:

There were particular books that donned the shelves and coffee tables in pretty much every Christian home in the 70s and 80s. There was, of course, Joni — the autobiography of Joni Erikson, the Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis, and a book called My Utmost for His Highest. Parenthetically, I went on Twitter recently asking what I should title my latest book and my very favorite suggestion was, My Lowest for His Highest…but anyway… Another book that was on every Christian coffee table when I was growing up was titled “How Should We Then Live” which was a brilliant title since basically it felt like that was the main question being answered in church. Being Christian was — more than anything — a lifestyle — one that demanded great discipline and restraint. The good thing was that it was pretty easy to know how you should then live because you could rely on the preacher to let you know the law — what to do and not do so that you would be righteous and God would bless you — what to do and not do so that you would be a sheep at Jesus’ right hand and not a goat at his left — and if you started doing the wrong things, there was a group of old straight white men, called the elders who would discipline you. So things were pretty clear…. Anyhow, given that we were taught to read the Bible literally — I find it fascinating that the list I was provided for what Christians should do — never seemed to include feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, and welcoming the stranger.