Weekly Reader
- Thank you to Dr. Tompkins for passing along this encouraging article from Inside Higher Ed about the current crisis in English jobs. Some of the ideas discussed in this article are very similar to my own thinking about what my eventual career path may entail.
- Via Jill, I am slowly engrossing myself in danah boyd’s freshly published dissertation about social networks.
- Cory Doctorow on writing in an age of distraction. More on this from me soon.
- I’ve been thinking about Darwin a lot lately. Conveniently, The Guardian has an article about a few new books discussing him.
- The new issue of The Atlantic has a number of articles about race in the post Obama election world, with mixed results, but also an excellent interview with Desmond Tutu:
Is there ever a time when a leader shouldn’t sit down and talk with an enemy?
If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies. The apartheid government in South Africa used to say they didn’t talk to terrorists, and they said Madiba [Nelson Mandela] was one of those. But of course, there’s no point in talking to someone else—someone who is not a leader, who has really no constituency—when that “terrorist,” so-called, is almost certainly the person that the oppressed regard as their leader. If you choose to talk with somebody else, the people will say, “That’s a stooge.” Any agreements you have with that one will have no credence.
How does peace come? Peace doesn’t come because allies agree. Allies are allies—they already agree! Peace comes when you talk to the guy you most hate. And that’s where the courage of a leader comes, because when you sit down with your enemy, you as a leader must already have very considerable confidence from your own constituency. Then, when you do things that are risky, your people know that you are not likely to do something reckless. If you are doing something that is a bit dodgy, they will give you the benefit of the doubt.
This week’s video is from Black Flag’s very hard (as in, I can’t even find a full copy on the Internet hard to find) “Live 86″ video. Here they are playing the song In My Head:
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