Here is a preview of BloggerCon and a taste of the Varieties of Blogging Experience. Elizabeth Spiers has been called “the Dave Eggers of the Blogolution.” A child of small-town Alabama, she graduated from Duke and took a run at Wall Street in the bubble years, tried blogging on her own and then backed into […]
I listened to Wesley Clark in Henniker, New Hampshire at the start of the weekend and heard between the lines the classic warning of a first-class warrior against the folly of limitless empire: “Beyond the Euphrates began for us the land of mirage and danger, the sands where one helplessly sank, and the […]
Cornel West is a modern Emersonian. Come to think of it, Cornel West may just be the contemporary Emerson: an adventurous Christian thinker who keeps extending the question of what it means to be American, to be modern, to be human. West is entertainingly serious and seriously entertaining. He is a moral and political provocateur, […]
Paul Krugman gets it, brilliantly and bravely, about the crisis of the republic in Bush II. He doesn’t get it about the Web remedy at all. Professor Krugman and I had a long public gab last night before a roaring SRO echt-Cambridge crowd in Harvard Square. Of course he was scathing, as in his New […]
Wesley Clark’s leap into the presidential race reminds me of the astute Gary Hart’s observation years ago: don’t look for the effect political “events” will have; events are the effect. What the Clark candidacy confirms to me, beyond President Bush’s vulnerability, is that the Internet has rewritten all the rules of the nomination game, […]
Listen up. Jeffrey Sachs of the Earth Institute at Columbia University seems to have been designated unsafe for op-ed readers since the war madness cranked up a year ago, but he was back this weekend in the Boston Globe with a piece full of home truths too tragic, too obvious for most of the Bush-besotted […]
Listen here. There’s a nice chicken-and-egg argument to be had whether Howard Dean harnessed the bloggers or, contrarily, the blog zeitgeist found and inflated the Dean candidacy. Either way, I think the late Theodore (Making of the President) White would begin his narrative of the 2004 cycle with the “open thread” of the Dean blog, from […]
Joi Ito could make you feel better about the digitized global time, space, psychology and politics that we’re all, willy nilly, entering. He has been living out there all his 37 years, bobbing and weaving between Japan, the States and Canada through his school years (college never completed). He’s been dancing with Internet technology since his childhood, politicking, investing, thinking hard about democracy […]
John Edwards looks and sounds too smooth for traction in this Democratic scramble. On the stump in New Hampshire last night, the millionaire trial lawyer and first-term Senator from North Carolina reminded me of the old Downeast joke about the Maine fella spinning his wheels in the Spring mud. Passer-by: “Are you stuck?” Maine […]
“If God appeared in 19th Century America,” Harold Bloom told me, “it was as Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the 20th Century it would have been as Charlie Parker.” Who knew that Yale’s monumental literature man was a bebopper? No mere record collector, either. Bloom remembers haunting Minton’s and other Harlem hatcheries of the new jazz in the 1940s. A half century […]