Bookworm

Wyoming

"Wyoming is under assault here, Ms. Fuller said, standing on a road buffeted by the infamous high plains wind. She believes people are being used by the energy industry. In the past several years, dozens of workers have died on the rigs around the West.

“Throwing warm beating hearts at a failed energy policy is a tragedy, whether it’s the war or the oil fields,” Ms. Fuller said. “The jobs are a good thing. But going after it so frantically and doing so much damage is wrong.”

“I travel between these worlds. I couldn’t leave the oil field behind when I came home to Teton County,” she said. It has been hard, Ms. Fuller allows, to tell her friends about the other Wyoming. “I can’t talk about my childhood, I can’t talk about the war, and its hard to talk about what’s going on in the oil field. That’s why I wrote the book.”

. . .“Rather than write in the rhetoric of conflict, she’s chosen to tell a story of one young man,” said Terry Tempest Williams, a neighbor of Ms. Fuller in Wilson, who has long written about the West. “That’s much more powerful because it touches our humanity.”

It is critical, Ms. Fuller said, that people know who to blame. “Teton County has a huge carbon footprint with heated driveways, roofs and huge houses heated all winter long with no one in them,” she said. “I don’t see this as something the roughnecks or the oil companies or the administration alone is doing. It’s something we’re all doing.”

~ Jim Robbins, in the New York Times

Short-Sighted Leadership?

"It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. . .

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite."

~ Thomas Friedman, New York Times

Why I Enjoy Brijit (and response to Barbara Kay piece)

What makes Brijit worth reading?

• Brijit abstracts and reviews nonfiction content -- from newspapers, magazines, a few top tier blogs, radio, and television -- in no more than one hundred words.  It also rates the piece from zero to three "dots" (including half dots), with three dots being the best.
• Brijit reviews some content that isn't available online for free.  This is helpful if you're trying to decide whether to pick up the newest New Yorker or New York Review of Books, or can even help you target the choicest pieces in your slithery stacks of O magazine and Entertainment Weekly. 
• You can subscribe to RSS feeds for individual sources or particular subjects.
• The red, white, and black design is crisp and the interface is clean with a few Web 2.0 touches (for example, you can click to open or close the top headlines on the main page without a page refresh).

What if I want to write for Brijit -- how does it work?

1. Register as a writer.
2. Choose an open assignment (but make sure you can access the content first). Most assignments can be claimed by up to three individuals; a few sources call for only two submissions and one source (The Onion) calls for as many as five.
3. Read the article, listen to the audio, or watch the video.
4. Write the abstract, include relevant tags, and choose your dot rating.
5. Submit your work prior to the deadline.
6. The Brijit editors choose the best submission, edit it, and publish it on the website.
7. You can (obsessively) check the status of your submissions within your profile pages, haunt the main page for a familiar headline, or (for the more Zen among you) simply wait for the congratulatory email telling you of a published abstract.
8. Writers of published abstracts of print sources earn $5 for each; published abstracts of audio and video broadcasts earn $8.  Brijit pays by PayPal or check once a month.

Response to Barbara Kay's article

Yesterday I read an article on canada.com by Barbara Kay, who expressed her distaste for the competitive nature of writing abstracts for Brijit.com.  Her son, Jonathan Kay, gets a thrill from competing against a few other writers (in one particular case, a co-worker) for the prize of getting an abstract published, whereas Kay "shuddered at the very thought of exposing myself to such humiliation," and began talking about gender differences with regard to competition. 

1. First of all, presumably most people aren't making a game out of it the way Jonathan did (although it is very satisfying when your abstract is chosen).  Therefore, in most cases no one but you and the Brijit staff know when your lovingly crafted abstract was not the chosen one. So, really, how humiliating is that?
2. Also, we live in a world where, for better or for worse, we all find ourselves in competition for places on a sports team, for acceptances to the college of our choice, or for our dream job.  I can't imagine a safer environment than the Writers Area of Brijit.com to embrace a little private humility (when someone else writes a better abstract) and deserved, earned pride (when yours is selected and hits the front page). 
3. You can even benchmark yourself against the most successful writers to try to improve your skills.  Brijit is really an English major's dream -- you can get paid for reading and writing.
4. Kay calls the pay scale "nugatory".  Sure, most of us wouldn't be able to afford to work full time for this rate of pay or with this degree of uncertainty.  But perhaps there is sufficient benefit if you think of it differently.  Writing for Brijit causes someone to read, listen to, or watch high quality nonfiction, and hone his or her skills of critical thinking, synthesis, and concise writing.  And, if the skill is sufficient, some extra cash can be had (which is no small thing in the current economy).
5. Finally, Kay states: "Just as most war gamers are male, I bet this Brijit website has been inundated with male “reviewers” and very few women writers." I'm not privy to the overall statistics, but she might be surprised to know that, as of today's date, five of the top ten most prolific and successful writers on Brijit are women.

[Disclaimer: I am a Brijit writer.  But even if I wasn't, I'd be reading the content on the site.]

William Kristol on Obama's Speech & Race

"The last thing we need now is a heated national conversation about race.

What we need instead are sober, results-oriented debates about economics, social mobility, education, family policy and the like — focused especially on how to help those who are struggling. . . A new national conversation about race isn’t necessary to end what Obama calls the “racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years” — because we’re not stuck in such a stalemate. In fact, as Obama himself suggests in the same speech, younger Americans aren’t stalemated. They come far closer than their grandparents and parents to routinely obeying Martin Luther King’s injunction to judge one another by the content of our character, not the color of our skin.

. . Problems remain. But we won’t make progress if we now have to endure a din of race talk that will do more to divide us than to unite us, and more to confuse than to clarify. [NY Times]

I'd buy a Kindle if. . .

• If it cost about $100.  (I do understand why they currently cost $399 -- Amazon pays for the wireless connectivity -- there is no monthly or annual fee -- you just connect.)
• If you could buy books from other vendors, not just Amazon.com (much as I love them)
• If it worked everywhere.  Right now, if you live in Montana or Alaska, you're completely out of luck, and there are wide swaths of other states where service isn't available. 

Obamamania

Why Obamamania? Because He Runs as the Great White Hope
in The Washington Post 'Outlook' by David Greenberg, 13 January 2008

David Greenberg expertly analyzes the phenomenon of Barack Obama, which he calls Obamamania, from a historical perspective. He compares Obama's speechmaking skills to those of William Jennings Bryan and Martin Luther King, but contrasts him with predecessors such as Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who brought new ideologies and innovative policy ideas to the table. Greenberg acknowledges how tempting it is to vote for this optimistic African American man as a way to symbolically wipe out our racially troubled past, but warns that this would be just a temporary sidestep of the many difficult racial issues the U.S. faces.

NPR : Being Content with Myself

Link: NPR : Being Content with Myself.

"Why don't you 'act black'?"

Since my middle school years, I've been asked this question more than any other. It seems to me that too many people have let society program into their brains what should be expected of me, a black person, before ever interacting with me. But I believe in being who I am, not who others want me to be.

The new snail mail: E-mail losing ground

"Everyone sends e-mails because you have to e-mail your instructors, you have to e-mail your grandma, that's the way the world works," he said. But, he added, "it's sort of an old fogey way of communicating."  [CapeCodTimes.com - The new snail mail: E-mail losing ground]

Guess we shouldn't ask the Millenials whether they ever send postal mail. *grin*  It's just interesting to me that today's 13-24 year olds dismiss technology that kids in prior generations would've loved to have!

Whither Thou, Trust?

"James Joyce, whose spirit is everywhere in Dublin, once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” This is about child care only in its particulars. It is not a tale of evil nannies lurking around every corner, or a declaration that children are not safe with anyone other than their mothers. More universally, it is about trust, and the harsh reality that as well as you ever know anyone, you can know only what he or she allows you to see.

We know this, and yet we trust. We trust strangers not to poison our food in their restaurants, not to drive drunk when we board their buses. We trust loved ones, even though each year brings news stories of husbands leading double lives, wives whose hidden demons cause them to kill. We hire office workers after a few hours of interviews, at best, and trust them not to steal or destroy all that we have built. We go to a doctor based only on the fact that our neighbor seems to like him. We hand employers our Social Security numbers, and valets our car keys, and bank tellers our balances, and nannies our children.

James Joyce, whose spirit is everywhere in Dublin, once said, “In the particular is contained the universal.” This is about child care only in its particulars. It is not a tale of evil nannies lurking around every corner, or a declaration that children are not safe with anyone other than their mothers. More universally, it is about trust, and the harsh reality that as well as you ever know anyone, you can know only what he or she allows you to see.

We know this, and yet we trust. We trust strangers not to poison our food in their restaurants, not to drive drunk when we board their buses. We trust loved ones, even though each year brings news stories of husbands leading double lives, wives whose hidden demons cause them to kill. We hire office workers after a few hours of interviews, at best, and trust them not to steal or destroy all that we have built. We go to a doctor based only on the fact that our neighbor seems to like him. We hand employers our Social Security numbers, and valets our car keys, and bank tellers our balances, and nannies our children." [NY Times]

Forbes hankers for the '50s

Forbes published an article wherein the author, a man, tells other men they'd be better off not marrying career women.  Boing Boing blogged it, lots of people commented on it and/or parodied it, Forbes took it down for a while and then reposted it alongside a counterpoint article by a woman. 

Link: Boing Boing: Don't Marry Career Men: Forbes hankers for the '50s.

Link: Boing Boing: Don't Marry Career Women: Let the remixes begin

Link: Boing Boing: Forbes Kills Article?