Letters to the Editor
cbarney1
Published Letters: 21 Editor's Choice: 7
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design tool
[Read the article: Intelligent designer]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]john milton may be considered to have weighed in on the intelligent design controversy in book vii of paradise lost:
...in his hand
He took the golden Compasses, prepar'd
In Gods Eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things:
One foot he center'd, and the other turn'd
Round through the vast profunditie obscure,
And said, thus farr extend, thus farr thy bounds,
This be thy just Circumference, O World.
Thus God the Heav'n created, thus the Earth....
here we have not only a designer, but a design mechanism.
cliff barney
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Digital Highwayman
[Read the article: Throwing Google at the book]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The example of the benefits of the Google system given in Mr. Manjoo's article is totally farfetched: an obscure reference giving exactly the fact one needs, one otherwise unavailable. This is possible but certainly a rare event in most of our lives. The reality Google wants to offer, he indicates, is quite different: the texts of Lolita, the great Gatsby. and other books still under copyright, some of them still selling. Though it poses as a knight of literacy, by digitizing libraries, scanning copyrighted books and offering them online, Google is simply a highwayman, ripping off the coyright owner. The result will be to drive down the value of content, since the rewards of creating it will be lessened, and hence possibly its quality also. We will not see the gems for the dreck.
Google already scans an enormous digital library, namely the global web content it normally searches. Content thus accessed, however, can be protected by the website owner That is not the case with libraries, which are mere repositories of material. It is true that no one knows the copyright status of all the books in the library, but the status of most books can be determined.
One wonders how far Google will get when it decides it has the rights to scan the Barnes and Noble catalog as well.
Cliff Barney
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who leaked the memo?
[Read the article: Dazed and confused]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]isn't it likely that the white house itself approved of leaking the maliki memo? no one in the administration seems at all upset about it although previous iraq leaks have led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, and judith miller went to jail trying to protect a source. now an embarrassing memo is leaked on the eve of a summit, the summit is derailed, at least temporarily, and the administration pretends that nothing has happened.
one doesn't expect the times to out its own source. but doesn't anyone else in the press care how this situation came about?
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carpet bombing
[Read the article: How Edward Said took intellectuals for a ride]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I thought the underlying thesis of Orientalism, and Said's later book, Culture and Imperialism, was that the West's portrait of the Orient, defining a culture from the outside, objectified it in a way that made racism and imperialism sensible. "Orientalism" was a European epithet; in the U.S. we used to hear about "the mysterious East."
I quite agree with the letter citing Salon's flying carpet illustration as an apt demonstration of Said's point.
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the gamut from y to z
[Read the article: The Fix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]" we've expanded our coverage to include what's happening across the whole spectrum of culture."
such as
Ryan O'Neal arrested. The latest word on Stoppard, Prince, and Mac vs. PC. Plus: Britney on singlehood: "It's awesome!"
got it.
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black enough for oakland
[Read the article: Sympathy for the devil: Leave Rev. Al alone!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]112,000 people, most of them african-american, turned out to see obama in oakland (ca) saturday; perhaps this will put a rest to the charge that obama doesn't have the right ancestry to be truly black.
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oops
[Read the article: Sympathy for the devil: Leave Rev. Al alone!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]i meant 12,000, not 112,000, in oakland to see obama. slip of keyboard...sorry.
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if king kaufman said it, should he stay on the job?
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]let's turn king kaufman's question around: if he were to report on the rutgers team and call them what imus called them, would salon be justified in firing him?
i think the answer is yes, because there is room for only one sports columnist on salon, and it should not be given to a racial bigot. the situation is not exactly parallel, but imus occupied a unique slot on radio, and there is no reason he should be permitted to use it to perpetrate slander. now that imus is fired, the world is free of his verbal pollution. no, we didn't have to listen to it, but many people did choose to listen and to assimilate his racist, sexist views, which they can then direct toward other black women. it's not a free speech issue -- imus is still free to say anything he pleases. he just can't use the public airwaves to say it. he may well wind up on satellite radio, like howard stern, free to rant at will. but he has at least been shamed publicly for his actions.
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afterthought: what if king kaufman had written imus's slur?
[Read the article: King Kaufman's Sports Daily]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]mr. kaufman's position, that people don't have to listen to imus and thus he needn't have been fired for his racial slur, implies that had king kaufman himself written a column with such a slur, it wouldn't matter because not everyone reads salon.
doesn't make sense to me.
(one assumes that salon's editor's would have deleted such a slur. but suppose they hadn't? after all, who's really hurt?)
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vollman's imagination
[Read the article: Embarrassment of riches]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]yeats, i think, somewhere defined rhetoric as the will doing the work of the imagination. william vollman's books, especially the seven dream series, which are novels about the contact of indigenous and european people, are not rhetoric but true products of his imagination working on and illuminating obvious facts of existence. i never heard of vollman pursuing sex for money; he paid prostitutes for their time in order that they could tell him about their lives without losing income, an honorable practice. last year's prize novel, europe central, was an imaginative reconstruction of struggle over political and artistic boundaries. in all of these cases he pursues the issue of what divides people, which is surely a worthy theme. i think that's what is worth paying attention to, not vollman's own human frailties.