I’m pretty sure books are going to be gone.

All this has led to a new phrase in the book and newspaper industries: Is this the “iPod moment”? It is a layered and loaded analogy. On the one hand the iPod, Apple’s now legendary music-player, and its associated iTunes store opened up a new market for legal digital-music downloads. On the other hand, the iPod accelerated the decline in CD sales and shifted power from record labels to Apple. Will the Kindle similarly put Amazon in a dominant position, while weakening publishers?

This is unlikely. Books, says Penguin’s Mr Makinson, are different from music. Sales of CDs were harmed because iPod users could “unbundle” the albums that record labels had forced on them, and download only the songs they wanted. By contrast, there is no obvious reason to unbundle narrative books into individual chapters or paragraphs. A book sold via a Kindle thus has no marginal cost, but adds revenues. Another difference is that music was being widely pirated before Apple made legal downloading attractive. There is no such crisis in the book business.

The speculation starts!

This stuff is really interesting:

Q: Why is creationism gaining ground in the Muslim world?
A: Now you have more access to the Internet, to false and true information about evolution. In the next five to 10 years, views will solidify over what is the perspective of Islam regarding evolution. We do not have a central pope-like authority, especially in Sunni Islam, and there are different parties jockeying to be spokespersons. At the present time, the most dominant voice we have is from creationists like Harun Yahya, defining evolution as a Western propaganda or worse, linking it purely with atheism. For Muslims, if evolution gets equated with atheism, they will reject it because religion plays a central role in their culture.

This seems a bit too earnest to me, but it’s cute.

I do get a bit tired of these jokes.  Honestly, I think BC is the best Jesuit school in the country, mostly because I’ve always thought it was the firmest in its Catholic, Jesuit identity.  Loyola New Orleans, I love you like my mother, but, with the obvious caveat that New Orleans is 8,000 times better than Boston, BC does everything Loyola does and does it better.  It’s just a really solid Jesuit school.  And now it’s focusing on its Catholic identity.  That’s good, but I don’t feel like it really slipped up in the first place:

During the tenure of the current BC president, the Rev. William P. Leahy, the university has taken multiple steps that emphasize its Catholicness, strengthening its relationship with the Archdiocese of Boston, creating a new institute studying Catholicism in the 21st century, absorbing the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, and even canceling classes once each fall for a campuswide open-air Mass.

But the school has also emphasized its diversity, establishing minors in Jewish and Islamic studies.

About 70 percent of the student body at BC is Catholic. Student leaders interviewed were uniformly supportive of the new emphasis on symbols, and Dunn said he has heard no complaints from students.

I’m sympathetic to the arguments in this article, whose author would have gone just about bankrupt had she lived in New Zealand and had to privately pay for her cancer drugs.  She’s right that governments will check costs and might well be cruel as a means of saving money rather than helping people.  That’s true.  But I still don’t see how that is any worse than it would be with insurance companies trying to save money now (that’s thing one).  Thing two is a question of innovation: it might well be true that medical science will not move as fast if there’s not as much money in it, but the government has a lot of money–military science is publicly funded, and it’s doing just fine.  Honestly, I would much rather worry about a medical industrial compex than the military one.  Here’s a bit from the article:

Looking at the crazy-quilt American system, you might imagine that someone somewhere has figured out how to deliver the best possible health care to everyone, at no charge to patients and minimal cost to the insurer or the public treasury. But nobody has. In a public system, trade-offs don’t go away; if anything, they get harder.

I’m posting this here because Jeff Jensen’s e-mail isn’t working at EW.com and because, well, I’m too impatient to break it up into bits and post it at EW.com’s comments section.

Dear Jeff,

First off, you’ve got a fine name.  Second, I’ve been a LOST addict from the early parts of the second season and I’ve been reading your commentary the whole time.  I’m just about the biggest LOST fan that exists in the universe (I’m sure there are many such people) and a good amount of my time here in graduate school (I’m doing a PhD in sociology at Yale) is spent reading LOST commentary, checking out the blogs, and feeling both guilty and giddy about various and sundry spoilers.  My favorite thing to read each week, though, is your commentary–often it’s as much fun as the episode itself.  I love your mix of highbrow and lowbrow, the breezy writing style, and the unpretentious love of all sorts of knowledge.  You’re the kind of guy who can quote Gravity’s Rainbow and not make it look pretentious, and let me tell you: being in graduate school, you come to really appreciate folks like that.  I’m also a huge fan of Totally Lost: if any editor tells you to cancel it, let them know that they would make a certain graduate student weep pathetically.  I’m not really sure that would help your case, but it’s kind of like when your wimpy little brother says he’ll help you in a bar fight: totally useless but nice to know.

Anyways, I have a few LOST theories/question I wanted to share with you:

1. Waiting until Season 5 just about killed me.  I’m increasingly aware that eventually LOST will, in fact, end.  We fans need to begin planning how we will deal with such a colossal loss.  My suggestion is either finding the island or joining a doomsday cult.  I’m aware there might be other options.

2. Your nod towards zero point is fascinating, and I think it actually ties into a lot more religious stuff than you’re acknowledging.  In his recent book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor talks about the difference between sacred time and secular time: the idea is that sacred time is all about communal experience and the eternal present, while secular time is about one moment leading into another.  A good example of this is Easter: Christians believe that every Easter is in some way in touch with a cosmic truth in a way that no other day is–in this way, each Easter has more in common with every other Easter than it does with the days before and after it.  You can also get this experience at a U2 concert, or any meaningful communal experience: it feels much more like the other intense experiences you’ve had than like the mundane experiences right before or right after it.  So what if the left-behinders are in a kind of sacred time, a moment that is above and beyond the mundane world?  In fact, it seems as though the island itself is a part of this sacred time, and that would explain why those who are really from the island (like Richard Alpert etc) don’t move with the Left-Behinders: they are a part of the timeless sacred.  However, those who are from the “regular world” can’t quite ride correctly with the “jump” the island took.  The sacred island changed its position in the secular world, which doesn’t really matter to the sacred all that much (the divine is still the divine wherever it goes) but it would make the non-divine living on the island a bit confused and messed up.

3. So the show really doesn’t want to look at the Grandfather paradox of time travel: (I think of Robert Heinein’s short story By His Bootstraps about this especially).  That only makes sense of we think of time not as a necessarily logical place where every action has a logical reaction, but rather the result of a linear narrative.  This can be kind of justified with quantum mechanics (at least the rule breaking can) but I’m not sure the time-has-a-purpose-and-meaning-and-direction can be justified by quantums, which, if anything, make the world look even more meaningless.  What matters about LOST, though, is this cosmic sense of purpose: if history does have a purpose (and is not just one damn thing after another) than it is actually a dimension with a clear end (like distance or length) and so it is entirely known already.  This also fits with a lot of theology and ties in with the idea of sacred time.  So if time has an endpoint that we’re all going to get to, then it really doesn’t matter if people go back in time and affect people in the past–if they do so, the end-point of history is still the same.

4. The problem with this view of history–the idea of course-correcting–is that it runs the risk of totally limiting agency.  If there will be course correction, why the worry about saving the world?  I’m not sure about this.  After all, part of the attraction to the sacred is that it’s pretty tough.  However, there have been moments when the sacred came down and needed humans–Jung wrote all about this.  If that’s the case–if this is one of those moments–then suddenly the sacred has come to Earth and needs real help to reach an endpoint for which it either cannot or has chosen not to be able to correct.

Just random thoughts.  Again, I’m a huge fan.  I’d love to hear back from you but I know you’re extremely busy.  Keep up the good work!

Jeff

These are the kinds of men that made me want to be a priest.  Of course, as the article points out, foreign-born priests aren’t any more courageous that those from Brazil (or other parts of Latin America).  The trick is that they can’t be cowed by threats of violence to their families.  And that’s a big deal.  If someone threated my family if I spoke out, it’d be a lot harder for me to take action. Keep fighting the good fight Fathers.

Latin America has historically been among the most dangerous regions for Catholic missionaries. Five Catholic clergy were murdered in the continent in 2008 out of 20 worldwide, according to Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.

The risks the clergy face in Brazil became clear in February 2005 when 73-year-old U.S. Catholic nun Dorothy Stang was gunned down holding her Bible in the remote Para town of Anapu, where she had been defending peasants’ rights against powerful landowners.

Church and human rights officials say there is no shortage of Brazilian priests to take the place of the aging foreign-born bishops. But with lower profiles and family members living in the country, they are often more vulnerable to the threats.

Llosa says it’s because Darwin liked spontaneous order.  Fine, yes: this might convince the 17 conservatives who don’t like Darwin primarily because they still associate him with collectivism or eugenics.  But most conservatives, I think, are smart enough to know that’s not the case, or, if they don’t like Darwin for these reasons, they are secondary.  The main reason is because he contradicts the Bible in a much more substantial way that either Aristotle (at least, the Aristotle we learn about) or Copernicus did.  That’s a big deal, particularly in light of modern readings of history as literally accurate, a trend that has then been retro-actively applied to the Bible.  Whether or not the writers or original audiences took Genesis and Revelation literally (or stories about wars, or stories in general), a whole bunch of people, now, do.  And that makes Darwin’s theories unpleasant.  So while I like the following idea, I’m not sure it really works:

It is fascinating that conservatives who advocate for a spontaneous order–the free market–in political economy and decry social engineering as a threat to progress and civilization should resent Darwin’s overwhelming case for the idea that order can design itself. In an essay in the British publication The Spectator, the conservative science writer Matt Ridley reflects on the paradox that the left has claimed Darwin even though leftist political ideas contradict his basic teaching: “In the average European biology laboratory you will find fervent believers in the individualist, emergent, decentralized properties of genomes who prefer dirigiste determinism to bring order to the economy.”

Big words getting thrown around MIA.  It  gets really complicated when art and politics mix.  A good example of this is MIA, whose music I really love, and who supports the Tamil Tigers (her Dad was in the leadership).  I know pretty much nothing about this (here’s a good New York Times article–there’s a selection below) but I do know that a lot of people have strong opinions on both sides, and that neither group look like saints.  Honestly, I’m all for MIA doing this–and for people responding in turn.  The whole world knows about American politics–it’s time we learned about everybody else’s.

M.I.A. — who has been nominated for an Oscar for the song she co-wrote for the hit film “Slumdog Millionaire” — has branded herself through music videos and interviews as the voice of the country’s Tamil minority. In the video for her song “Bird Flu,” for instance, children dance in front of what looks like the rebels’ logo: a roaring tiger.

“Being the only Tamil in the Western media, I have a really great opportunity to sort of bring forward what’s going on in Sri Lanka,” she said in an interview on the PBS program “Tavis Smiley” last month. “There’s a genocide going on.”

But her political views rankle some people at a time when most Sri Lankans are clutching to the hope that the rebels, branded by the United States and European nations as a terrorist group, are on the verge of military defeat by government troops.