It’s making the rounds. When you type the word “Jew” into Google’s main search window, you get this page, which shows at the top of the rankings a site called “Jew Watch,” an anti-Semitic site.
Google took out its own little ad to comment on it and it has further links to more information. Does this mean that the JewWatch.com website is more popular than any other Judaism-related website? If Google’s objective and automatic rankings are correct, and they probably are, the answer is yes.
But what’s maybe equally sad is that beneath Google’s ad is another ad titled “Jew prints.” What could the sponsor, AllPosters.com, possibly seek to gain from this?
Monthly Archives: April 2004
The Inadequacy of Diversity
I appreciated an article in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine by Walter Benn Michaels, called Magazine > Essay: Diversity’s False Solace” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/magazine/11ESSAY.html”>Diversity’s False Solace. Mr. Michaels (perhaps a little too gleefully albeit boldly) points out the hypocrisy of U.S. universities that show how diverse their student populations are. Mr. Michaels’ point is that their marketing is authentic but that it masks the fundamental class differences in America and American education today. Yes, he says, the racial and ethnic demographics are identified but where’s the beef if everyone attending a university is rich?
I found this to be mostly true at Brown, where I went to undergrad, and at most schools like it. I’m a fan of affirmative action; however, I do wonder what will happen to this country as it slides down a superbly polarized slope where the rich eat the poor for lunch. Who really speaks to and about class these days? There are already two very structured class tiers around health insurance, home ownership, car insurance, daycare, and political representation. Once higher education, jobs, and access to clean water are divided up, it will get really scary.
Here’s an excerpt from the last paragraph of the article:
This, if you’re on the right, is the gratifying thing about campus radicalism. When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people’s problem. And it is also a rich people’s solution. For as long as we’re committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don’t have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don’t have to worry that most people can’t go to them, while others get to do so because they’ve had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won’t have to worry about inequality.
Chicken Dance Elmo
I can’t say I’m proud of it but I also can’t, at the same time, say I’m not elated that my daughter was able to co-ordinate her hand and eyes to click on the various eggs in the Chicken Dance Elmo online game. I watched her subtly and artfully move her hand from egg to egg and clicking squarely on each one (pardon the bad metaphor).
What’s the meaning? Well: a. she’s spending too much time on the computer with me (like me); b. she’s got highly advanced hand-eye coordination and a deep understanding of the relationship between three-dimensional movement, human agency and two-dimensional interfaces; c. she somehow connects with the logic of this sweet and goofy game; d. all of the above plus a mixture of plain old growing and learning.
Whitman and the Written
I was perusing a slim little design catalogue today and came across this quote by Walt Whitman which stuck with me all evening:
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.
I recalled this passage again as I watched my daughter draw aimless strokes around a piece of paper, her eyes intently focused on the task at hand. I thought of the hour in which we’re living and I recognized briefly that this was the only hour, the most precious hour of our ridiculously short lives together. And then I felt the space around her, the breath she was taking and letting out, and I watched her sing a little song while drawing. These un-selfconscious songs are composed of words she knows but doesn’t necessarily understand and they feel like little chunks of the universe falling back on me when sung. I think the words were something like this: “Daddy’s older, he’s nine, he’s older.”
Lessig for Less.
Because (or despite the fact) it’s Passover tonight, I thought I’d post something liberation-relevant: Stanford Professor of Law and all things open technology Lawrence Lessig has made his new book “Free Culture” available for free [link goes directly to PDF] for a limited time on Amazon.com.
Granted this is a 352 page book but, from the excerpt below (from the preface), a potential reader might get the sense that this is an important book, a relevant and current take on the ownership of software, content, and the freedom to create and transmit ideas:
That tradition is the way our culture gets made. As I explain in the pages that follow, we come from a tradition of ‘free culture’—not ‘free’ as in ‘free beer’ (to borrow a phrase from the founder of the free-software movement), but ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ ; ‘free markets,’ ‘free trade,’ ‘free enterprise,’ ‘free will,’ and ‘free elections.’ A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a ‘permission culture’—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.
Happy Passover.
Kinja In Deed
Like so many others, I’m very curious about the future fate of Kinja, the weblog guide, which was just released this week in beta.
It’s got a great number of things going for it. With sweet kid gloves, it makes keeping up on weblogs easy. Adding and subtracting weblogs is as simple as clicking a button on your browser or popping the site URL into Kinja’s add form. It’s got a nice albeit slightly cluttered interface. And it’s got the power of the good folks that invented Gizmodo, Fleshbot, Gawker and Gizmodo behind it.
Here’s the problem: I don’t know why I would actually use it on a very regular basis. Yahoo has a great new (also beta version) RSS aggregator built into My Yahoo! that allows new posts to be seen right from your home page without scrolling down and hurting the forefinger. The design of Kinja is nice but it doesn’t allow one to organize the weblogs by category as Jason Kottke pointed out to me; it would be nice if I could organize the blogs I read by “politics,” “technology,” and “bug spray,” for instance. Preferably, there should be a tabbed interface to control these things.
Finally, what is the business model for this site? It’s not clear. But, it’s a great and highly flexible tool for keeping up on a few blogs and it makes checking on new posts actually pleasurable, something My Yahoo! can probably never do.
mahanuala
Almost every day, it appears that more and more people are “doing” yoga. I admire them and I also wonder if it’s just a trend like the other things that are, consciously at least, presumably not fads, like the Atkins and South Beach diets, the taste for war overseas, and the public’s interest in the rise and fall of celebrities.
But here’s Christy Turlington and her friends at Puma launching mahanuala, a newly branded line of loose, yoga-friendly clothing. I don’t want to be sceptical about this, as anyone who risks time away from work to focus on their minds and bodies is doing themselves and those around them good. And there are clothing lines for skateboarders so why not yoga practitioners?
But I always ask myself regarding new things: “Under what sign was this born?” Websites, for instance, were born under the signs of 90s opulence and a revolution in information technology. The Lewinsky scandal was born under the signs of misplaced values and concern about large government (and large government officials). The rebirth of yoga is sadly born under the signs of poor economic outlook, war, and misappropriation of public and private capital.
The questions then are: Is yoga’s rejuvenation a response to externalities beyond our control and a de-rationalization of our modern life? Or is yoga a retreat from the real, a denial of our own violence to ourselves and others, and admission of the poverty of our daily ways and means?