Elizabeth Anne Roodhouse (Penn): The Voice from the Base(ment): Stridency, Referential Structure, and Partisan Conformity in the Political Blogosphere. From Seed, a falling out over creationism at Bloggingheads.tv and muddled reactions to a report on geoengineering illustrate what’s at stake in the “framing wars”. Six degrees of trivia, and knowledge: Knowledge, shared, becomes synonymous with the act of sharing frequently leading to a deeper sense of connection, empathy, even love (and more). From Literary Review, dollar sign on his heart: A review of Joseph P Kennedy's Hollywood Years by Cari Beauchamp; and a review of An Infinity of Things: How Sir Henry Wellcome Collected the World by Frances Larson. A review of Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters by Louis Begley. Sea Change of Japan: A landslide victory for Japan's opposition party could have profound effects on regional security. The Soul of Japan: Japan's crisis is not political, but psychological. The man who invented health care's public option: Jacob Hacker reflects on the academic proposal he made a decade ago — and the political fixation it's become. Instead of seeking to justify policies on economic grounds, why don't politicians make "moral cases", or even "romantic cases" for their arguments?
