![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Jul. 31st, 2012
Global Warming
Jul. 31st, 2012 06:00 amCALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
-- Richard A. Muller at The New York Times
Although it is reassuring to see the scientific consensus growing and becoming more consolidated, we cannot expect the Republicans to jump on this bandwagon anytime soon, perhaps never. Worse yet, even if we had universal consensus, I doubt there is a ready answer that is realistic and practical. Any definitive answer would probably entail a serious cutting back on our consumption, and who can see that happening? Remember, everyone wants more, not less.
-- Richard A. Muller at The New York Times
Although it is reassuring to see the scientific consensus growing and becoming more consolidated, we cannot expect the Republicans to jump on this bandwagon anytime soon, perhaps never. Worse yet, even if we had universal consensus, I doubt there is a ready answer that is realistic and practical. Any definitive answer would probably entail a serious cutting back on our consumption, and who can see that happening? Remember, everyone wants more, not less.
Global Warming
Jul. 31st, 2012 06:00 amCALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
-- Richard A. Muller at The New York Times
Although it is reassuring to see the scientific consensus growing and becoming more consolidated, we cannot expect the Republicans to jump on this bandwagon anytime soon, perhaps never. Worse yet, even if we had universal consensus, I doubt there is a ready answer that is realistic and practical. Any definitive answer would probably entail a serious cutting back on our consumption, and who can see that happening? Remember, everyone wants more, not less.
-- Richard A. Muller at The New York Times
Although it is reassuring to see the scientific consensus growing and becoming more consolidated, we cannot expect the Republicans to jump on this bandwagon anytime soon, perhaps never. Worse yet, even if we had universal consensus, I doubt there is a ready answer that is realistic and practical. Any definitive answer would probably entail a serious cutting back on our consumption, and who can see that happening? Remember, everyone wants more, not less.
Strident Feminism Needs Big Undies
Jul. 31st, 2012 09:00 am“Do you have a vagina?” she writes. “Do you want to be in charge of it?” If you said yes to both, “Congratulations! You’re a feminist.”
-- New York Times Book Review
But I thought men could be feminists too, if they had a high respect for vaginas and a little contempt for their penis.
The book is "How To Be a Woman" by Caitlin Moran. Emma Brockes opens her book review:
There are lots of things to love about Caitlin Moran’s “How to Be a Woman,” an invective against backsliding attitudes toward feminism that, this time last year, every woman in Britain seemed to be reading. There is the stand it takes against bikini waxes. There is its protest against the pornography and stripping industries. Above all there is its deployment of sweary British slang to remind us, in this era of manufactured outrage, what a truly great rant should look like: rude, energetic and spinning off now and then into jubilant absurdity. “Strident feminism needs big undies,” Ms. Moran says at one point — it’s in the decidedly anti G-string section — and even if you’re not familiar with all the language, the delivery will leave you sniggering like Muttley the dog.
Maybe Ms. Moran is writing to be amusing, so that she stretches her points. Feminism cannot be any fun alone. I don't think that being sexy should be considered contrary to feminism, but this is an old point. I suppose it's a fun book, but I am more likely to read Neil Strauss's "The Game".
-- New York Times Book Review
But I thought men could be feminists too, if they had a high respect for vaginas and a little contempt for their penis.
The book is "How To Be a Woman" by Caitlin Moran. Emma Brockes opens her book review:
There are lots of things to love about Caitlin Moran’s “How to Be a Woman,” an invective against backsliding attitudes toward feminism that, this time last year, every woman in Britain seemed to be reading. There is the stand it takes against bikini waxes. There is its protest against the pornography and stripping industries. Above all there is its deployment of sweary British slang to remind us, in this era of manufactured outrage, what a truly great rant should look like: rude, energetic and spinning off now and then into jubilant absurdity. “Strident feminism needs big undies,” Ms. Moran says at one point — it’s in the decidedly anti G-string section — and even if you’re not familiar with all the language, the delivery will leave you sniggering like Muttley the dog.
Maybe Ms. Moran is writing to be amusing, so that she stretches her points. Feminism cannot be any fun alone. I don't think that being sexy should be considered contrary to feminism, but this is an old point. I suppose it's a fun book, but I am more likely to read Neil Strauss's "The Game".
Strident Feminism Needs Big Undies
Jul. 31st, 2012 09:00 am“Do you have a vagina?” she writes. “Do you want to be in charge of it?” If you said yes to both, “Congratulations! You’re a feminist.”
-- New York Times Book Review
But I thought men could be feminists too, if they had a high respect for vaginas and a little contempt for their penis.
The book is "How To Be a Woman" by Caitlin Moran. Emma Brockes opens her book review:
There are lots of things to love about Caitlin Moran’s “How to Be a Woman,” an invective against backsliding attitudes toward feminism that, this time last year, every woman in Britain seemed to be reading. There is the stand it takes against bikini waxes. There is its protest against the pornography and stripping industries. Above all there is its deployment of sweary British slang to remind us, in this era of manufactured outrage, what a truly great rant should look like: rude, energetic and spinning off now and then into jubilant absurdity. “Strident feminism needs big undies,” Ms. Moran says at one point — it’s in the decidedly anti G-string section — and even if you’re not familiar with all the language, the delivery will leave you sniggering like Muttley the dog.
Maybe Ms. Moran is writing to be amusing, so that she stretches her points. Feminism cannot be any fun alone. I don't think that being sexy should be considered contrary to feminism, but this is an old point. I suppose it's a fun book, but I am more likely to read Neil Strauss's "The Game".
-- New York Times Book Review
But I thought men could be feminists too, if they had a high respect for vaginas and a little contempt for their penis.
The book is "How To Be a Woman" by Caitlin Moran. Emma Brockes opens her book review:
There are lots of things to love about Caitlin Moran’s “How to Be a Woman,” an invective against backsliding attitudes toward feminism that, this time last year, every woman in Britain seemed to be reading. There is the stand it takes against bikini waxes. There is its protest against the pornography and stripping industries. Above all there is its deployment of sweary British slang to remind us, in this era of manufactured outrage, what a truly great rant should look like: rude, energetic and spinning off now and then into jubilant absurdity. “Strident feminism needs big undies,” Ms. Moran says at one point — it’s in the decidedly anti G-string section — and even if you’re not familiar with all the language, the delivery will leave you sniggering like Muttley the dog.
Maybe Ms. Moran is writing to be amusing, so that she stretches her points. Feminism cannot be any fun alone. I don't think that being sexy should be considered contrary to feminism, but this is an old point. I suppose it's a fun book, but I am more likely to read Neil Strauss's "The Game".
Dmitri Nabokov
Jul. 31st, 2012 12:00 pmI missed the news that Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Valdimir, died this year. We'll save some paragraphs from a Times report.
_ _ _
Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, died in Switzerland in the first hours of Thursday, Feb. 23. Like his father, Dmitri went — in the words of one of his attendants — “light as a butterfly.” Like his father 35 years ago, and at 77, almost the same age (they were both buried at 78), he succumbed to a pulmonary infection. He had been a professional opera singer, and a racer of fast boats and faster cars. But according to his own father, whom he often referred to as “Nabokov,” he had also been — perhaps above all else in the end — his “best translator,” devoting the last two decades of his life to translating his father’s earlier work from Russian to English and Italian.
[...]
Dmitri was also a womanizer, once known in the Italian press as “Lolito,” seducer extraordinaire. His life — mountaineering in Wyoming and British Columbia, singing in Medellín and Milan, racing cars and boats along the Mediterranean, carousing with handsome girls — was something out of a James Bond film. When I asked him why he had never married, he told me life had slipped away too quickly. Sensing he was being disingenuous, I later ventured to ask again. This time, quietly, almost in a whisper, he said his parents had been “twin souls,” and he knew it would “always remain impossible to match what they had had.”
Yet the more I saw him and spoke with him over the last nine or so years, the more I realized something altogether surprising. It was connected neither to his father’s fame nor to his own glittering life-reel. It was, in fact, what had first caught my attention, so many years ago, in that final page of “Speak, Memory”: “something in a scrambled picture . . . that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” It was, quite simply, the moment of departure. Anyone who’s ever been an exile as a child knows the anguish of parents as they wonder if papers will be accepted, if immigration and customs officers can be appeased, if the borders will be thrown open. The arc of the Nabokovs’ lives had been drawn by loss. First, the loss of a beloved homeland, then of closest kin murdered or left behind enemy lines, and finally the loss of an “untrammeled, rich” Russian tongue. As the three Nabokovs boarded the Champlain in May 1940, they were leaving behind Europe; Nabokov’s gay brother, who would perish of hunger and exhaustion in a Nazi concentration camp; numerous Jewish friends; homes, memories, manuscripts. This was the history that, quite unwittingly, the young Dmitri carried with him as he left for America, holding each of his parents by the hand as they walked toward that yellow funnel deftly concealed in the landscape.
What became apparent in Dmitri in later years was the remnant of that lost world. It came with a sense of compassion and dignity, of patience and nobility, despite his foibles, his occasional childlike demands, his folie des grandeurs. As he neared the age of his father’s death, it remained just as impossible for Dmitri to accept that “Father” was no more. Often, when he evoked his parents, Dmitri’s ice-blue eyes would begin to drift out of focus. I caught him at his desk one afternoon watching a YouTube montage called “Nabokov and the Moment of Truth,” which juxtaposes film clips and stills of his parents and himself. He was in his wheelchair, leaning deeply into the computer screen, silently crying.
-- LILA AZAM ZANGANEH at The New York Times
_ _ _
Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, died in Switzerland in the first hours of Thursday, Feb. 23. Like his father, Dmitri went — in the words of one of his attendants — “light as a butterfly.” Like his father 35 years ago, and at 77, almost the same age (they were both buried at 78), he succumbed to a pulmonary infection. He had been a professional opera singer, and a racer of fast boats and faster cars. But according to his own father, whom he often referred to as “Nabokov,” he had also been — perhaps above all else in the end — his “best translator,” devoting the last two decades of his life to translating his father’s earlier work from Russian to English and Italian.
[...]
Dmitri was also a womanizer, once known in the Italian press as “Lolito,” seducer extraordinaire. His life — mountaineering in Wyoming and British Columbia, singing in Medellín and Milan, racing cars and boats along the Mediterranean, carousing with handsome girls — was something out of a James Bond film. When I asked him why he had never married, he told me life had slipped away too quickly. Sensing he was being disingenuous, I later ventured to ask again. This time, quietly, almost in a whisper, he said his parents had been “twin souls,” and he knew it would “always remain impossible to match what they had had.”
Yet the more I saw him and spoke with him over the last nine or so years, the more I realized something altogether surprising. It was connected neither to his father’s fame nor to his own glittering life-reel. It was, in fact, what had first caught my attention, so many years ago, in that final page of “Speak, Memory”: “something in a scrambled picture . . . that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” It was, quite simply, the moment of departure. Anyone who’s ever been an exile as a child knows the anguish of parents as they wonder if papers will be accepted, if immigration and customs officers can be appeased, if the borders will be thrown open. The arc of the Nabokovs’ lives had been drawn by loss. First, the loss of a beloved homeland, then of closest kin murdered or left behind enemy lines, and finally the loss of an “untrammeled, rich” Russian tongue. As the three Nabokovs boarded the Champlain in May 1940, they were leaving behind Europe; Nabokov’s gay brother, who would perish of hunger and exhaustion in a Nazi concentration camp; numerous Jewish friends; homes, memories, manuscripts. This was the history that, quite unwittingly, the young Dmitri carried with him as he left for America, holding each of his parents by the hand as they walked toward that yellow funnel deftly concealed in the landscape.
What became apparent in Dmitri in later years was the remnant of that lost world. It came with a sense of compassion and dignity, of patience and nobility, despite his foibles, his occasional childlike demands, his folie des grandeurs. As he neared the age of his father’s death, it remained just as impossible for Dmitri to accept that “Father” was no more. Often, when he evoked his parents, Dmitri’s ice-blue eyes would begin to drift out of focus. I caught him at his desk one afternoon watching a YouTube montage called “Nabokov and the Moment of Truth,” which juxtaposes film clips and stills of his parents and himself. He was in his wheelchair, leaning deeply into the computer screen, silently crying.
-- LILA AZAM ZANGANEH at The New York Times
Dmitri Nabokov
Jul. 31st, 2012 12:00 pmI missed the news that Dmitri Nabokov, the son of Valdimir, died this year. We'll save some paragraphs from a Times report.
_ _ _
Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, died in Switzerland in the first hours of Thursday, Feb. 23. Like his father, Dmitri went — in the words of one of his attendants — “light as a butterfly.” Like his father 35 years ago, and at 77, almost the same age (they were both buried at 78), he succumbed to a pulmonary infection. He had been a professional opera singer, and a racer of fast boats and faster cars. But according to his own father, whom he often referred to as “Nabokov,” he had also been — perhaps above all else in the end — his “best translator,” devoting the last two decades of his life to translating his father’s earlier work from Russian to English and Italian.
[...]
Dmitri was also a womanizer, once known in the Italian press as “Lolito,” seducer extraordinaire. His life — mountaineering in Wyoming and British Columbia, singing in Medellín and Milan, racing cars and boats along the Mediterranean, carousing with handsome girls — was something out of a James Bond film. When I asked him why he had never married, he told me life had slipped away too quickly. Sensing he was being disingenuous, I later ventured to ask again. This time, quietly, almost in a whisper, he said his parents had been “twin souls,” and he knew it would “always remain impossible to match what they had had.”
Yet the more I saw him and spoke with him over the last nine or so years, the more I realized something altogether surprising. It was connected neither to his father’s fame nor to his own glittering life-reel. It was, in fact, what had first caught my attention, so many years ago, in that final page of “Speak, Memory”: “something in a scrambled picture . . . that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” It was, quite simply, the moment of departure. Anyone who’s ever been an exile as a child knows the anguish of parents as they wonder if papers will be accepted, if immigration and customs officers can be appeased, if the borders will be thrown open. The arc of the Nabokovs’ lives had been drawn by loss. First, the loss of a beloved homeland, then of closest kin murdered or left behind enemy lines, and finally the loss of an “untrammeled, rich” Russian tongue. As the three Nabokovs boarded the Champlain in May 1940, they were leaving behind Europe; Nabokov’s gay brother, who would perish of hunger and exhaustion in a Nazi concentration camp; numerous Jewish friends; homes, memories, manuscripts. This was the history that, quite unwittingly, the young Dmitri carried with him as he left for America, holding each of his parents by the hand as they walked toward that yellow funnel deftly concealed in the landscape.
What became apparent in Dmitri in later years was the remnant of that lost world. It came with a sense of compassion and dignity, of patience and nobility, despite his foibles, his occasional childlike demands, his folie des grandeurs. As he neared the age of his father’s death, it remained just as impossible for Dmitri to accept that “Father” was no more. Often, when he evoked his parents, Dmitri’s ice-blue eyes would begin to drift out of focus. I caught him at his desk one afternoon watching a YouTube montage called “Nabokov and the Moment of Truth,” which juxtaposes film clips and stills of his parents and himself. He was in his wheelchair, leaning deeply into the computer screen, silently crying.
-- LILA AZAM ZANGANEH at The New York Times
_ _ _
Dmitri Nabokov, the only child of the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, died in Switzerland in the first hours of Thursday, Feb. 23. Like his father, Dmitri went — in the words of one of his attendants — “light as a butterfly.” Like his father 35 years ago, and at 77, almost the same age (they were both buried at 78), he succumbed to a pulmonary infection. He had been a professional opera singer, and a racer of fast boats and faster cars. But according to his own father, whom he often referred to as “Nabokov,” he had also been — perhaps above all else in the end — his “best translator,” devoting the last two decades of his life to translating his father’s earlier work from Russian to English and Italian.
[...]
Dmitri was also a womanizer, once known in the Italian press as “Lolito,” seducer extraordinaire. His life — mountaineering in Wyoming and British Columbia, singing in Medellín and Milan, racing cars and boats along the Mediterranean, carousing with handsome girls — was something out of a James Bond film. When I asked him why he had never married, he told me life had slipped away too quickly. Sensing he was being disingenuous, I later ventured to ask again. This time, quietly, almost in a whisper, he said his parents had been “twin souls,” and he knew it would “always remain impossible to match what they had had.”
Yet the more I saw him and spoke with him over the last nine or so years, the more I realized something altogether surprising. It was connected neither to his father’s fame nor to his own glittering life-reel. It was, in fact, what had first caught my attention, so many years ago, in that final page of “Speak, Memory”: “something in a scrambled picture . . . that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.” It was, quite simply, the moment of departure. Anyone who’s ever been an exile as a child knows the anguish of parents as they wonder if papers will be accepted, if immigration and customs officers can be appeased, if the borders will be thrown open. The arc of the Nabokovs’ lives had been drawn by loss. First, the loss of a beloved homeland, then of closest kin murdered or left behind enemy lines, and finally the loss of an “untrammeled, rich” Russian tongue. As the three Nabokovs boarded the Champlain in May 1940, they were leaving behind Europe; Nabokov’s gay brother, who would perish of hunger and exhaustion in a Nazi concentration camp; numerous Jewish friends; homes, memories, manuscripts. This was the history that, quite unwittingly, the young Dmitri carried with him as he left for America, holding each of his parents by the hand as they walked toward that yellow funnel deftly concealed in the landscape.
What became apparent in Dmitri in later years was the remnant of that lost world. It came with a sense of compassion and dignity, of patience and nobility, despite his foibles, his occasional childlike demands, his folie des grandeurs. As he neared the age of his father’s death, it remained just as impossible for Dmitri to accept that “Father” was no more. Often, when he evoked his parents, Dmitri’s ice-blue eyes would begin to drift out of focus. I caught him at his desk one afternoon watching a YouTube montage called “Nabokov and the Moment of Truth,” which juxtaposes film clips and stills of his parents and himself. He was in his wheelchair, leaning deeply into the computer screen, silently crying.
-- LILA AZAM ZANGANEH at The New York Times
Common Diary Fodder
Jul. 31st, 2012 03:00 pm
I laughed for quite a while until there were tears in my eyes, and then I wasn't sure if I was laughing or crying.
Common Diary Fodder
Jul. 31st, 2012 03:00 pmI laughed for quite a while until there were tears in my eyes, and then I wasn't sure if I was laughing or crying.
About Israel's Nukes
Jul. 31st, 2012 06:00 pmThe US Government’s failure to seriously address Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program and its stockpile of hundreds of such weapons, which include thermonuclear weapons in the megaton range, makes the Administration’s policy towards nuclear nonproliferation elsewhere, look two-faced. Calling for more intrusive inspections of Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities is particularly incongruous in light of Israel’s refusal to accede to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and its refusal to allow weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its nuclear facilities – about which the whole world has known for some time.
-- News/LJ
Ah, this old double-standard. It's been a long time since I have seen it put so bluntly. It must be a far-lefty source. We obviously trust the smart Jews, the people who have given us our Bible and our God. We are naturally more skeptical when it comes to those governments that are colored a little heavily by radical, anti-Semitic jihadists who would love to blow up Israel and the West and see it go up in a puff of smoke.
-- News/LJ
Ah, this old double-standard. It's been a long time since I have seen it put so bluntly. It must be a far-lefty source. We obviously trust the smart Jews, the people who have given us our Bible and our God. We are naturally more skeptical when it comes to those governments that are colored a little heavily by radical, anti-Semitic jihadists who would love to blow up Israel and the West and see it go up in a puff of smoke.
About Israel's Nukes
Jul. 31st, 2012 06:00 pmThe US Government’s failure to seriously address Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program and its stockpile of hundreds of such weapons, which include thermonuclear weapons in the megaton range, makes the Administration’s policy towards nuclear nonproliferation elsewhere, look two-faced. Calling for more intrusive inspections of Iran’s alleged nuclear facilities is particularly incongruous in light of Israel’s refusal to accede to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and its refusal to allow weapons inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect its nuclear facilities – about which the whole world has known for some time.
-- News/LJ
Ah, this old double-standard. It's been a long time since I have seen it put so bluntly. It must be a far-lefty source. We obviously trust the smart Jews, the people who have given us our Bible and our God. We are naturally more skeptical when it comes to those governments that are colored a little heavily by radical, anti-Semitic jihadists who would love to blow up Israel and the West and see it go up in a puff of smoke.
-- News/LJ
Ah, this old double-standard. It's been a long time since I have seen it put so bluntly. It must be a far-lefty source. We obviously trust the smart Jews, the people who have given us our Bible and our God. We are naturally more skeptical when it comes to those governments that are colored a little heavily by radical, anti-Semitic jihadists who would love to blow up Israel and the West and see it go up in a puff of smoke.
Contrarian View On Rape
Jul. 31st, 2012 09:00 pm[N]uance is felt as a threat by activists who cling to their depiction of rape as the ultimate horror. They seem to think that if it’s not the superlatively worst human experience, it will become acceptable or even more prevalent.
[T]he notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available. Common sense instructs us that it is far more "dangerous" to insist to young women that they will be broken by an unwanted sex act than it is to propose they might have a happy, healthy, and sexually pleasant future ahead of them in spite of a sexual assault.
-- Charlotte Shane
[T]he notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available. Common sense instructs us that it is far more "dangerous" to insist to young women that they will be broken by an unwanted sex act than it is to propose they might have a happy, healthy, and sexually pleasant future ahead of them in spite of a sexual assault.
-- Charlotte Shane
Contrarian View On Rape
Jul. 31st, 2012 09:00 pm[N]uance is felt as a threat by activists who cling to their depiction of rape as the ultimate horror. They seem to think that if it’s not the superlatively worst human experience, it will become acceptable or even more prevalent.
[T]he notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available. Common sense instructs us that it is far more "dangerous" to insist to young women that they will be broken by an unwanted sex act than it is to propose they might have a happy, healthy, and sexually pleasant future ahead of them in spite of a sexual assault.
-- Charlotte Shane
[T]he notion that a man can ruin me with his penis strikes me as the most complete expression of vintage misogyny available. Common sense instructs us that it is far more "dangerous" to insist to young women that they will be broken by an unwanted sex act than it is to propose they might have a happy, healthy, and sexually pleasant future ahead of them in spite of a sexual assault.
-- Charlotte Shane