Content & Context
The Books & Culture Weblog
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WEEKLY DIGEST
Note: In light of B&C's year-end book roundup, the book blog will not appear this month. Here are some of the most intriguing articles that have been linked from this blog over the past year.
- Every time I hear a politician or pundit rattle off the cliché "weapons of mass destruction," I think back to an important article last year by Gregg Easterbrook in The New Republic. Despite the rhetoric, he says, chemical and biological weapons have never caused mass destruction. Historically, terrorist use of chemical and biological agents has been an ineffective and weak alternative to bombs. It succeeds in spreading a unique brand of terror, but not in causing massive casualties. Which is not to say we should naively no longer fear such agents, or assume that they will never be massively destructive. But we should clarify this point a currently confusing debate: we are worried about the annihilative potential of nuclear weapons; chemical and biological weapons, scary as they are, are not "weapons of mass destruction." Full story (3/17)
- Why were we doomed to February's NBC two-hour investigation into Michael Jackson's plastic surgery, and other such low points of Western civilization that are clustered together each TV sweeps period? The answer lies in the 2.5 million viewing logs Nielsen distributes to sample viewers four times a year to measure ratings. The archaic system that has billion-dollar implications is not only ridiculously imprecise, as everyone agrees—it is biased toward splurges of sensationalism. It could easily be reformed, but network affiliates are in no hurry to get a system that would be more truthful about people's viewing habits. "There are three important things to know about sweeps," says James Surowiecki in the New Yorker. "The first is that they are deeply flawed, and of little use, in the end, to the networks, the advertisers, and the viewers. The second is that everyone in television knows this. The third is that no one has done anything about it." Full story (2/17)
- "Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared that the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance." So begins Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, which "is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right." The completion of a six-volume collection of Huxley's essays (published by the Chicago-based Ivan R. Dee) prompts John Derbyshire to reflect on Huxley and metaphysics in The New Criterion. "Yes, certainly there is an outer reality, 'the universe,' made up of material objects whose behavior, thanks to four hundred years of diligent scientific inquiry, we can understand, or at any rate predict, in fine detail. And yes, there is an inner reality, 'the self,' comprised of mental objects about which science has much less to say, and some irreducible core of which, we are inclined to think, exists independently of the material world." Full story (2/17)
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