possibleworlds

The end

If you've stumbled here by chance: this blog is no longer active.

I am still blogging but have shifted my attention to other sites

Check out my PhD blog:

apocalyptics

my teaching and learning blog:

blogsperiment

and my media commentary blog:

journalism research

NYT Best Books

The NYT has a list of 100 Notable Books of the Year. I've book marked these to check out:

FICTION

THE AMATEUR MARRIAGE. By Anne Tyler. (Knopf, $24.95.) An ambitious exploration of domestic dislocation, ranging over 60 years of American experience.

CLOUD ATLAS. By David Mitchell. (Random House, paper, $14.95.) A novel that covers about 1,000 years in narratives involving a New Zealand stowaway, a book editor, a goatherd and others.

HEIR TO THE GLIMMERING WORLD. By Cynthia Ozick. (Houghton Mifflin, $24.) A novel of ideas, incarnated in an 18-year-old orphan girl who takes a job in 1935 as secretary to a scholar of an ancient Jewish heresy.

OBLIVION: Stories. By David Foster Wallace. (Little, Brown, $25.95.) Narratives in an exhaustive mode, told by people who notice absolutely everything.

SWEET LAND STORIES. By E. L. Doctorow. (Random House, $22.95.) Like Doctorow's novels, these stories affirm the American theme of self-creation.

THE TYRANT'S NOVEL. By Thomas Keneally. (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $25.) In a country very like Iraq, a fiction writer is ordered to produce, in one month, a novel to be published under a tyrant's name.

NON FICTION

AFTER SUCH KNOWLEDGE: Memory, History, and the Legacy of the Holocaust. By Eva Hoffman. (PublicAffairs, $25.) Hoffman renders the catastrophe as it is revealed to a generation drastically affected by events it is too young to remember.

THE FABRIC OF THE COSMOS: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. By Brian Greene. (Knopf, $28.95.) A discussion of the irreconcilable
differences between the cornerstones of theoretical physics — the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.

NUCLEAR TERRORISM: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. By Graham Allison. (Times Books/Holt, $24.) A Harvard scholar's report on the nuclear threat and how it might be reduced.

PERILOUS TIMES: Free Speech in Wartime, From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism. By Geoffrey R. Stone. (Norton, $35.) A study in historical perspective that shows a constant expansion of free-speech rights.

SONTAG & KAEL: Opposites Attract Me. By Craig Seligman. (Counterpoint, $23.) An appealing meditation on two widely discussed, influential critical icons who arose at the same historical moment (the mid-1960's).

SURPRISE, SECURITY, AND THE AMERICAN EXPERIENCE. By John Lewis Gaddis. (Harvard University, $18.95.) Gaddis argues that three salient elements of President Bush's security strategy — pre-emption, unilateralism and hegemony — have deep roots in America's history.

UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York. By Paul Goldberger. (Random House, $24.95.) The story of the long and complex struggle over what should go up in the place of the World Trade Center.

More Maps

Thanks to Matt at Kairosnews for pointing to this set of alternative maps of the US elections which extends the idea of the purple map that I posted yesterday.

Barry Ritholtz has posted a series of election maps and graphics on his blogs.

The most disturbing one is the comparison of the old free states versus slave states with the new Bush states versus Kerry states. Guess what!

Purple Hearts

US Graphic designer Jeff Culver has come up with a far more informative electoral map than those published by mainstream media.

It is an interesting example of how the graphic devices and rhetorical frames that we use actually construct very different narratives. While the election maps which show the blue and red states (say this example from Time) show a divided America with the red states in the ascendency, Culver's map which shows the gradations of support for Bush and Kerry along a set of hues from red to blue portrays quite a different reality.

The long hual effect

From the The New York Times yet another analysis about what the values vote means. They won the battle we'll win the war!

Evan Wolfson, executive director of Freedom to Marry, a coalition based in New York, said the poll results show remarkable progress made by gay-marriage advocates.

"Civil unions didn't exist five years ago," he said. "If the center of the country has moved to a place of civil union or gay marriage, that suggests that the idea that there's a massive public rejection of gay people is ridiculous."

Mr. Wolfson, author of "Why Marriage Matters," likened the status of gay marriage to the status of racial equality after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, which, he said, led to years of upheaval and backlash before legislation was passed that supported racial equality. "This is the classic American pattern of civil rights advance," he said. "It's patchwork. Some states move toward equality faster, while others resist and even regress."

Yet gay rights' advocates will need to grapple with the surge in voting by evangelical Christians and those who ranked "moral values" first among their concerns. "When the right wing attacks us it hurts, but it can help," Ms. Bonauto [civil rights project director for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders] said. "This is going to be an enormous unifying force for us. They had a good day, so to speak. But not as good a day as they think they had."