The come-on from The New Yorker is very tempting: subscribers now have access to the WHOLE Archive of the magazine in online form, and today’s annunciatory email quotes a bit from the November 2 1929 issue. So I log in and go to the Archive to see more, and here’s the first paragraph of Talk of the Town from that issue:

Fear, running through the jungle like flame, strong as ever. Doom still makes a crackling sound, like summer thunder. Thousands of minor clerks and small tradespeople, hearing faint noises of railroads they had never seen, mines they had never worked, steel they had never tempered, fled before the terror of the dark. Then came the voices. Two hundred and five for twenty-five thousand steel, said a Morgan, gritting his teeth. The fundamental business of the country is on a sound and prosperous basis, said President Hoover. No buildings were burned down, no industries have died, no mines, no railroads have vanished, crooned Arthur Brisbane. The great comforters. There, there, my children. Try and catch a little sleep. Mother is near.

Kinda makes you wish YOU had a subscription, doesn’t it? I’ve had The Complete New Yorker in the DVD form for a couple of years, but this Web form is much more useable (search function much improved, and navigation too). So now I have one more excuse to sit here in front of the monitor…

The text of Bruce Schneier’s Afterword to Doctorow’s Little Brother is well worth reading. Try this bit:

So when you’re wandering through your day, take a moment to look at the security systems around you. Look at the cameras in the stores you shop at. (Do they prevent crime, or just move it next door?) See how a restaurant operates. (If you pay after you eat, why don’t more people just leave without paying?) Pay attention at airport security. (How could you get a weapon onto an airplane?) Watch what the teller does at a bank. (Bank security is designed to prevent tellers from stealing just as much as it is to prevent you from stealing.) Stare at an anthill. (Insects are all about security.) Read the Constitution, and notice all the ways it provides people with security against government. Look at traffic lights and door locks and all the security systems on television and in the movies. Figure out how they work, what threats they protect against and what threats they don’t, how they fail, and how they can be exploited.

Spend enough time doing this, and you’ll find yourself thinking differently about the world. You’ll start noticing that many of the security systems out there don’t actually do what they claim to, and that much of our national security is a waste of money. You’ll understand privacy as essential to security, not in opposition. You’ll stop worrying about things other people worry about, and start worrying about things other people don’t even think about.

And Andrew “bunnie” Huang’s Afterwordcontribution is, if anything, even more remarkable. Like this:

Have the terrorists already won? Have we given in to fear, such that artists, hobbyists, hackers, iconoclasts, or perhaps an unassuming group of kids playing Harajuku Fun Madness, could be so trivially implicated as terrorists?

There is a term for this dysfunction–it is called an autoimmune disease, where an organism’s defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells. Ultimately, the organism self-destructs. Right now, America is on the verge of going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this. Technology is no cure for this paranoia; in fact, it may enhance the paranoia: it turns us into prisoners of our own device. Coercing millions of people to strip off their outer garments and walk barefoot through metal detectors every day is no solution either. It only serves to remind the population every day that they have a reason to be afraid, while in practice providing only a flimsy barrier to a determined adversary.

Read ’em both here. They’re short and to the point.

I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother with great pleasure and not a few heretical thoughts in the realm of DISRUPTION (continuing thoughts included in Making room for disruptive and emergent technologies, an article I wrote more than FIVE years ago for NITLE News, and still stand by [bits of linkrot here and there, alas]). The book provides a quick bootstrap in re: an array of present-day technologies (RFIDs, encryption, quite a few others) that some of us may be a bit hazy about details and implications of, and offers a clearer explanation of the paradox of false positives than you’re likely to find outside of a statistics text. Here’s a 3-minute snippet from an interview on Viking Youth Power Hour in mid-May 2008 –the whole 53 minutes is pretty interesting.

You can download LittleBrother for FREE, or BUY it. Lotsa people have done one or both of those things, for good reason. Note some of the comments on Little Brother:

I think I just read one of the most important books that I’ve ever read. It was good, too, but that is far outweighed by what I suspect will be the importance of the book to history. Uh, yeah, that sounds a bit dramatic, but bear with me for a little while… (Worlds & Time)

I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless. (Neil Gaiman)

Doctorow shows students what we all know. Educational institutions present themselves as distributors of knowledge and information when it would be more accurate to understand them as guardians of knowledge and information. There’s a perpetual arms race between those who attempt to lock down networks in institutions and those who devise means to unlock them. Schools forbid cell phones, teachers keep computers turned off, professors tell students NOT to bring laptops to class: they don’t do these things b/c they hope students will be able to access and communicate knowledge. (Alex Reid)

About halfway into it, I wanted to stop reading it — not because I didn’t like it, but because I wanted to jam it into the hands of the next 14-year-old I saw and say, “you need to read this more than I do.” (John Scalzi)

…and Chris Pirillo (lockergnome) has a YouTube video commentary, including (from 5:00) a reading of Chapter 1.

This shares context-of-the-moment with the flurriment and scufflement of edupunk. If the term means nothing to you, explore the Wikipedia entry on the term [expect it to change rapidly], comments at Assorted Stuff and by Janet Clarey, and D’Arcy Norman’s fine summary which includes this aux armes:

It’s about individuals being able to craft their own tools, to plan their own agendas, and to determine their own destinies. It’s about individuals being able to participate, to collaborate, to contribute, without boundaries or barriers. And it’s not new.

See also the gallimaufry included under edupunk as a del.icio.us tag.

And while you’re at it, factor in Cory’s recent BoingBoing post on demonization of photography in public spaces.

I’ve been a student of things Chinese for many years, via heaps of basically-Orientalist books and articles following decades of modernization efforts and historical context. That used to be a leisurely pursuit, with plenty to read and meditate upon, and things seemed not to be happening all that rapidly until the last five years or so. But now the global importance of the juggernaut of China’s development is a whole new ball game, with daily updates across the spectrum of concerns, and pretty much every product that one buys these days is (or anyhow has components that are) Made in China. America’s addiction to consumables is the basic fuel of that juggernaut, and few pieces that I’ve read are more eloquent expositors of that point than Jonathan Franzen’s “The Way of the Puffin” in the New Yorker of 21 April. The full text of the piece isn’t available online, but there’s a detailed abstract and a very worthwhile audio interview (13 minutes, downloadable).

Franzen’s writing is a pleasure for its illustrative digressions. Here’s the second paragraph, a pretty unique mise en scène for an article about China, and even more so for an article about bird watching in China:

My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-sized chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts… (pg. 90)

Franzen drops other charming bits of description:

Xu’s teeth were beautiful. He had the fashionably angular eyeglasses and ingratiating eagerness of an untenured literature professor… (pg. 92)

(of Shanghai) …on the ground, the brutally new skyscrapers and the pedestrian-hostile streets and the artificial dusk of the smoke-filled winter sky: it was all thrilling. It was as if the gods of world history had asked, “Does somebody want to get into some unprecedentedly deep shit?” and this place has raised its hand and said, “Yeah!” (pg. 92)

…southeast Asia: a region well on its way to being clear-cut and strip-mined into one vast muddy pit, since China itself is hopelessly short on natural resources to supply the factories that supply us. The Chinese people may bear the brunt of Chinese pollution, but the trauma to biodiversity is being reëxported around the world. (pg. 105)

Strange are the fragments of mental flotsam and jetsam. This morning the word ‘trump’ surfaced (pretty much unbidden), and I dimly remembered a poem that ended “…Those boy-scouts practising again!”, but I couldn’t remember where I’d read it, or who was the author… so of course Google came to the rescue. The bit I specifically recalled (so Google tells me) was quoted in the lead-in to a story about Joe McCarthy (and legislative pusillanimity) in Time, 15 February 1954. The whole poem is Edith Sitwell’s Solo for Ear-Trumpet, reproduced here (from fullbooks.com’s Miscellany of Poetry) because it deserves to be better known, and might be meditated upon in these parlous times:

SOLO FOR EAR-TRUMPET

The carriage brushes through the bright
Leaves (violent jets from life to light);
Strong polished speed is plunging, heaves
Between the showers of bright hot leaves
The window-glasses glaze our faces
And jar them to the very basis–
But they could never put a polish
Upon my manners or abolish
My most distinct disinclination
For calling on a rich relation!
In her house–(bulwark built between
The life man lives and visions seen)–
The sunlight hiccups white as chalk,
Grown drunk with emptiness of talk,
And silence hisses like a snake–
Invertebrate and rattling ache….
Then suddenly Eternity
Drowns all the houses like a sea
And down the street the Trump of Doom
Blares madly–shakes the drawing-room
Where raw-edged shadows sting forlorn
As dank dark nettles. Down the horn
Of her ear-trumpet I convey
The news that “It is Judgment Day!”
“Speak louder: I don’t catch, my dear.”
I roared: “_It is the Trump we hear!_”
“The _What?_” “_THE TRUMP!_” “I shall complain!
…. those boy-scouts practising again.”