* Michael Silverblatt is profiled in the Oprah Magazine. Normally I don’t care much for Podcasts, but I subscribe to Bookworm, Silverblatt’s show.
* The WSJ predicts “The Next Youth-Magnet Cities,” where D.C. ties for first with Seattle. No mention of Tucson on the list.
* Sergey Brin on “A Library That Lasts Forever” in the New York Times, in which he dispels some of the myths around the Google Books Settlement.
* Teachers’ Unions and the media, or a public relations warning for entrenched incumbents.
* From the New York Times (and linked to by virtually every blog): Chicago’s [Olympic 2016] Loss: Is Passport Control to Blame? The thrust of the answer: at least in part. America’s immigration process is screwed up, and so is its border control, which manages to combine ineffectiveness with invasiveness.
* “Judy Blume: ‘I Was Margaret’; An interview with the YA Writer Who Couldn’t Wait For Puberty.”
* Harry Potter and the childish adult was written by A.S. Byatt in 2003 but still rings true.
* Language Log on Letterman blackmailer Joe Halderman. The post is both hilarious and relevant to books, but I don’t want to reveal the joke.
* Why do women have sex? An interview Cindy M. Meston David M. Buss, who wrote Why Women Have Sex: Understanding Sexual Motivations from Adventure to Revenge (and Everything in Between).
* Reading incomprehension: problems with scoring standardized tests.
* When state universities lose support:
Declining state support leads to higher sticker prices. Overall, tuition and fees paid by students and their families now account for about 36 percent of all educational revenues at public institutions in the United States, up from 24 percent in 1983.
* Paul Krugman on the uneducated American.
* Robert Fisk predicts The demise of the dollar in The Independent. It seems impossible to doubt that many of the United States’ current foreign policy problems can be traced back to oil; for more background, see my post on $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better.
(But Foreign Policy’s Dean Baker says the article linked to above is BS.)
(In addition, maybe increased natural gas supplies will render some of these points less important over the long term.)
* What you need to know on health care reform, which I keep promising I won’t link about again and then do anyway.
* What happened to Argentina? The country was extremely wealthy by world standards in 1900 but has fallen substantially relative to its position then. Some, or perhaps a large part of the answer appears to be education:
Schooling is measured by the share of the relevant populations that was enrolled in primary, secondary or tertiary schooling. Argentina may have been rich, but it was not that well-educated. In 2000, Argentina was doing about as well as would be expected based on its education levels in 1900. Long-run national success is built on human capital, both because of the link between schooling and technology and because of the link between education and well-functioning democracy.
* How the New Yorker copy edits.
* The state of the book review: trouble in paradise. See also my comments on Gail Pool’s Faint Praise: The Plight of Book Reviewing in America.
* Scary: police arrest someone for tweeting based on police locations.
* Along the same lines: The dangers of over-criminalization.
* The cost of scholarly monographs might have something to do with the fact that few faculty members buy them.
I think of a book like The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Volumes 1 and 2 in One). It’s an excellent book on the intersection of technology, art, and culture, but even at Amazon, it’s $60—down from the $68 retail price. $60 will buy between four and six standard trade paperbacks on Amazon and a little more than three recently released hardcovers. Older books in hardcover often go for $4 – 8.
As Burnstein says in the blog post: “Given that many publishers key their book prices to institutional buying power, it cannot come as a great shock that most of us prefer to leave the monograph-buying to the institutions.”
