One initial reaction of the mainstream media to the Rolling Stone article that got Stanley McChrystal fired as commander of US forces in Afghanistan seemed to be “Rolling Stone? Rolling Stone?” They couldn’t understand why the person in charge of the war in Afghanistan gave so much access to what they saw as a hippy-dippy magazine that mainly covers rock music and popular culture. The issue with the McChrystal article had Lady Gaga on the cover and, as you can see, the article in question did not even get top billing, suggesting that the magazine itself did not realize what its impact would be.
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(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

More and more academics are taking to blogging. Here is a sampling, in no particular order: Pharyngula (biology and science politics), Cosmic Variance (physics), Panda’s Thumb (biology), Volokh Conspiracy (law), Cliopatria (history), Brad DeLong (economics), Informed Comment (Middle East politics), Geniocity (law), Current Epigraphy (classics). You can see a comprehensive list of academic blogs classified by subject matter here.

Some academics contribute to group blogs, thus relieving themselves of the pressure of being solely responsible for creating new content, while some are individual blogs. As a reader of many blogs, I can testify that they save me an enormous amount of time. Although I never watch TV ‘news’ shows (the ironic quotes because they have hardly any news), I have a good idea of when something truly newsworthy happens because blogs alert me. Furthermore, blogs provide me with immediate knowledgeable and specialized information on topics, written by people who care enough about the issue to take the time to study it in some depth and develop expertise in that area. This is different from most mass media journalists these days who, because of budgetary cutbacks, are forced to be generalists skipping from topic to topic and unable to devote a lot of time to detailed study of policies and issues. By harnessing the energy of engaged and informed volunteers, blogs also enable the kind of close reading of official texts that an older generation of journalists like I. F. Stone did with his newsletter.

One important function that academic blogs may play is as a trail of the evolution of ideas. In the old days, academics used to write letters to colleagues where new ideas were discussed and refined and these letters have been valuable for understanding how ideas evolved. With the advent of telephones, easier travel to conferences and meetings and email, written records of embryonic ideas are harder to obtain. Blogs may well be the source material for a future generation of scholars. have of blogs

Blogs also quickly focus attention on stories that the major media do not highlight (because it contradicts then ruling class narrative) or follow up or simply get wrong. The plans by the US to bomb the offices of the news organization al-Jazeera or the Downing street memos are good examples. Blogs can also immediately correct the record when there are attempts to mislead (example: NSA wiretapping, the war on Christmas,) and can clarify complicated issues like Valerie Plame, Abramoff scandal, NSA wiretapping, etc. Best of all, it enables more people to follow in the steps of I. F. Stone’s Newsletter which at its peak had a weekly circulation was 70,000. Now dailyKos gets a daily hit count of many times that.

The reasons why anyone blogs is probably as varied as the number of bloggers itself but I would like to suggest some reasons why they do:

1. The discipline of daily or otherwise regular writing helps to both stimulate thought and increase writing output.
2. The internal dynamic of academia tends to push people into very narrow areas of specialization (i.e., they know more and more about less and less), and thus when it comes to their professional writing output, they tend to stick to their very narrow field of expertise. But most academics are also generalists, having wide interests and interesting opinions on a huge range of topics, which formerly had been restricted to personal conversations. Blogging provides an outlet for such people. I personally enjoy the freedom and opportunity to range far and wide on my blog.
3. Blogging creates links with others and networks of new communities. Academic conferences serve that role too but are more expensive to attend and limited in the range of people one meets. Blogging can be seen as extensions of conferences.
4. Writing a blog can be a means for testing out early versions of ideas.
5. The feedback and comments feature often stimulates new ideas.
6. It is much easier now to assume the role of a public intellectual. Before one had to publish a book or an article and that took time and there was no guarantee that it would be published at all or be widely read. Blogging has greatly lowered the barrier to becoming a public intellectual, more people are doing it, and the tide is shifting away from disapproval of such a role. Some, like political scientist Juan Cole and biologist P.Z. Myers, have become well-known to the public and the media purely as a result of their blogging.
7. There is an increasing realization among academics that the general public has no idea what they do, why they do it, and what benefits they provide society. Scientists especially have been surprised at the rise of anti-science movements that oppose the teaching of the theory of evolution and advocate religious alternatives. Blogging is the most efficient way to increase public awareness of science by providing informed commentary on the new scientific advances that emerge each day.
8. Some academics relish the exchange of ideas but are socially somewhat awkward and inept. It has been suggested that academia maybe has a higher fraction of people with Asperger’s syndrome, people who are high functioning intellectuals but are very poor at picking up the everyday interpersonal cues that are so essential to being able to have cordial relations. Blogging enables such people to navigate that minefield better.

While more and more academics are taking to blogging, there are reasons why some are wary of joining the group.

1. The early image of bloggers as no-life, under-employed losers, living in their parents’ basement and merely venting, may cause academics to worry about how they might be perceived by their peers. This view is changing slowly. A colleague of mine used to blog under a pseudonym for fear that being known as a blogger would harm his chances of being taken seriously as a scholar and getting tenure and promoted. He now feels that there is enough acceptance of blogging to do so under his own name.
2. Blogging takes time, which academics always complain that they have very little of.
3. It requires you to write, which everyone including academics, hate to do, even though it is an important part of our work.
4. It is not yet part of the traditional reward structure in academia.
5. Academics who speak directly to the general public (for example, by writing popular books or magazine or newspaper articles) are often viewed by their peers as not being ‘serious’ or merely seeking fame. The more successful you are at doing this, and the more famous you become with the general public, the less seriously you might be taken by your peers.

But despite these disadvantages, I expect blogging to become even more popular among academics.

POST SCRIPT: Mr. Deity and the Promised Land

(My latest book God vs. Darwin: The War Between Evolution and Creationism in the Classroom has just been released and is now available through the usual outlets. You can order it from Amazon, Barnes and Noble, the publishers Rowman & Littlefield, and also through your local bookstores. For more on the book, see here. You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on WCPN 90.3 about the book.)

My fundamental interest politics is what it says about the state of democracy and not the fake politics that the media wants us to pay attention to. As should be obvious to any observer, political power in this country has been completely hijacked and now resides in the hands of the oligarchy consisting of big business interests, especially in the financial and military sectors, who determine the policies and control the elected leadership. The fundamental problem that we now face is how create an informed and active general public that will seize control of political life and decision-making in this country away from this oligarchy.
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I hardly ever watch TV anymore, mainly because I cannot stand the constant commercial interruptions. This used to bother me less in the past and I used to watch a lot more when I was in graduate school and have fond memories of many shows: comedies such as M*A*S*H, Mary Tyler Moore, Soap, Newhart, Alice and dramas like Lou Grant and Trapper John

Recently I stumbled on another old favorite TV show on YouTube. Someone had posted clips of Barney Miller, and I have been enjoying them online. And the bonus is that there are no commercials, which more than compensates for the poor quality image.

Barney Miller was in many ways an unusual comedy that ran from 1975-1982 and although not a huge hit, it developed a loyal following. It was set in a police precinct in New York’s Greenwich Village and featured the precinct captain Barney Miller and his team of around three or four detectives, and one uniformed officer constantly striving to be promoted to detective.

The show was different in that there was no glamour or action at all. Everything took place in the small and grungy squad room and the adjoining private office of Miller. All the main characters were male and there was little or no romantic or sexual comedy, although some of the characters had relationships that were occasionally referred to but remained off-camera. There was no slapstick or broad humor. It was all low-key. It also had an unusually long opening sequence before the credits kicked in.

In most comedies there are quirky characters with exaggerated and easily labeled characteristics (the dumb, the smart, the oblivious, the eccentric, the greedy, the ambitious, etc.), and the rest play the straight roles that the others get laughs off. But in Barney Miller none of the series regulars were particularly weird, although they each had distinctive personalities and were well-developed characters, and the interactions between them provided a lot of the humor. None of the characters had standard tics or mannerisms or tag lines. There were no obvious eccentrics (a la Kramer in Seinfeld) or doofuses (Joey or Phoebe in Friends) or exceptionally dim people (Coach or Woody in Cheers). In Barney Miller, all the regulars were normal and played, in effect, the straight part and were the foil for the oddball characters that wandered into the precinct room in each episode. These people were usually petty criminals, drunks, vagrants, neighborhood residents and shopkeepers, and so on, and how the detectives dealt with them provided the humor.

In many TV comedies, you get cued mirth (either in the form of a laugh track or a live audience) where there is uproarious laughter for even the lamest of jokes or when characters did some standard shtick they have done hundreds of times before. I find that really annoying. In Barney Miller, the show’s writers did not insult the audience with exaggerated canned laughter. It was subdued and realistic, corresponding more closely to what was called for, sometimes just a chuckle.

Here is one episode, called “The Psychic”, to get a taste of what the show is like.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Most sit-coms periodically fall victim to having a “special” episode where they get preachy about some issue and try to give a “message” full of “meaning”, and in the process forget to be funny. Seinfeld was a notable exception. Barney Miller did not fully escape the temptation but when it did try to send a “message”, it managed to do so briefly and with a light touch, as in this clip about bigotry.

As a childhood fan of the Peanuts comic strip, I enjoyed the running gag of Snoopy always beginning his novels with the line “It was a dark and stormy night.” It was only much later that I learned that this was a actual opening sentence of an 1830 novel Paul Clifford by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents–except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

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As a result of the financial pressures that all papers face, my local newspaper, the Plain Dealer has adopted the cost-saving strategy of cutting back on national and international coverage and op-eds, focusing more on local news and sports. The paper is now a lot thinner with the sports section now the largest, and sports news often dominates even the front page.

Is this a bad thing? Some time ago I would have said yes, especially since I rarely read anything in the sports section beyond the first page. It would have signified the further dumbing down of news. But now I am not sure. The coverage of local news seems to have got better and more interesting, and many people do care passionately about sports and can’t seem to get enough of it, so the paper is now perhaps finding a niche. The paper’s regular stable of local and syndicated op-ed columnists is unbelievably vapid so the reduction assigned to them is not something I mourn. In fact, I hardly ever read them, unless they publish the occasional new voice.
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As someone who grew up in Sri Lanka, a country that has a strong newspaper-reading ethos, I feel a sense of regret at what seems to be an irreversible decline in the fortunes of daily newspapers. Growing up, my family subscribed to two morning newspapers and two evening newspapers each weekday, and three papers on Sundays, if you can imagine that. Wherever I have lived I have had a daily subscription to the local paper.

For almost all my life, I used to have a rigid routine in the mornings. I would start the day by getting a cup of coffer and reading the newspaper for national and world news. If for some reason the paper was not delivered, I felt disoriented without my fix of news the first thing in the morning.
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Most people would have heard by now of the Daily Show-Jim Cramer face-off, but I want to comment on it anyway.

It all started when CNBC reporter Rick Santelli tried to fan outrage against Obama’s plan to rescue some homeowners from their current situation. Santelli went on the floor of the stock exchange and riled up the traders there by implying that their money was being used to bail out reckless homebuyers.

Stewart made fun of this cheap populism by running clip after clip of CNBC reporters touting the virtues of one company after another just before those companies went belly up. Several of those clips featured Jim Cramer, who has a daily show on the CNBC network.
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The internet has had one major positive effect and that is that it has reduced the power of the establishment media to control the public discourse. It used to be the case that once you had achieved a position of authority in the media, you could say pretty much what you wanted and, as long as it conformed to the desired narrative of the pro-war/pro-business one party system, you could not be challenged. This enabled the discussion on important topics to be limited to within a very narrow spectrum of views, so that whatever view prevailed within that spectrum, the underlying status quo remained untouched.

It used to be the case that those informed people who read something in the paper or heard on the news that they knew was wrong had very few options, other than (say) writing a letter to the editor, which the paper had the option of refusing and which had only a marginal effect anyway.

Take for example this anecdote from Noam Chomsky’s book Understanding Power (2002) about a column George Will wrote in 1982 (thanks to Jonathan Schwarz).

[A] few years ago George Will wrote a column in Newsweek called “Mideast Truth and Falsehood,” about how peace activists are lying about the Middle East, everything they say is a lie. And in the article, there was one statement that had a vague relation to fact: he said that Sadat had refused to deal with Israel until 1977. So I wrote them a letter, the kind of letter you write to Newsweek—you know, four lines—in which I said, “Will has one statement of fact, it’s false; Sadat made a peace offer in 1971, and Israel and the United States turned it down.” Well, a couple days later I got a call from a research editor who checks facts for the Newsweek “Letters” column. She said: “We’re kind of interested in your letter, where did you get those facts?” So I told her, “Well, they’re published in Newsweek, on February 8, 1971″—which is true, because it was a big proposal, it just happened to go down the memory hole in the United States because it was the wrong story. So she looked it up and called me back, and said, “Yeah, you’re right, we found it there; okay, we’ll run your letter.” An hour later she called again and said, “Gee, I’m sorry, but we can’t run the letter.” I said, “What’s the problem?” She said, “Well, the editor mentioned it to Will and he’s having a tantrum; they decided they can’t run it.” Well, okay.

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A week before his inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of conservative columnist George Will (aka “the man who confuses pomposity with profundity”). Also in attendance were conservative and neo-conservative columnists Bill Kristol (aka, “the man who is almost always wrong”), David Brooks (aka, “the man who can be depended upon to say the most obvious things in the most banal way”), and Charles Krauthammer (aka, “the man who loves torture”).

This caused a stir in the pundit world. A few liberals worried whether Obama would be swayed by this group and abandon his policies and suddenly declare that more tax cuts for the rich, more torture, and more wars was the way to go. Conservatives worried that ‘their’ pundits would be charmed and won over by Obama and put away their knives and become lapdogs.

The very next day, Obama put these alarmed pundits mind at ease by meeting with a group of supposedly ‘liberal’ columnists (Andrew Sullivan, Roland Martin, Rachel Maddow, the Gene Robinson, the Boston Globe’s Derrick Z. Jackson, Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Jerry Seib, Ron Brownstein, DeWayne Wickham and E.J. Dionne Jr.)
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