archive

Art, social policy, and the media

China’s Values Vacuum: Artists and intellectuals search for meaning in a society devoid of values. Want to know how culture develops, or where humour and the arts spring from? Ask a group of robots. Ian Stewart on what his book Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry is really about.

Are book reviewers out of print? All across the country, newspapers are cutting book sections or running more reprints of reviews from wire services or larger papers. From The Scholar and Feminist Online, a special issue on Blogging Feminism: (Web)sites of Resistance. An article on GodTube, where the rightwing Christians surf. From Harper's, an article on "The Mormons" and Johann Gottfried Herder.

Form TCS, an article on The Real Solution to Poverty. From the inaugural issue of Crimes and Misdemeanours: Deviance and the Law in Historical Perspective, Heather Shore (Leeds Metropolitian): Undiscovered Country: Towards a History of the Criminal "Underworld" doc. From the Manhattan Institute's City Journal, an article on Broken Windows at 25: It has worked wonders on both coasts. Missing the Middle: Fifteen years after the riots, L.A. embodies the progress and problems of America's increasingly two-tier cities. Baby Boomers hoped to die before they got old. They lied. And now they’re dragging the whole country down.

From National Review, an interview with Angela McGlowan, author of Bamboozled: How Americans Are Being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda. A review of The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O'Reilly. From CJR, how conservative congressman from Indiana Mike Pence became journalism's best ally in the fight to protect anonymous sources. If you want to understand the wrenching dislocations in today's newsrooms, look to the advertisers whose purchasing decisions drive the business.

From Business Week, crazy like a Fox: Rupert Murdoch's bid for Dow Jones may seem foolishly pricey, but he's got his reasons. Inside Murdoch's surprise attack. The Threat to the Wall Street Journal: Rupert Murdoch’s audacious bid to grab Dow Jones underscores the larger issue of news consolidation and the shrinking number of major media voices, and more on Murdoch's trophy hunting by The Economist. And from TNR, Jonathan Chait on how the netroots are important, but they're still paranoid