Sunday, June 17, 2007

Recommended Reading: Random & Recent Edition

Brad DeLong proposes a heirarchy of honest conservatives; then his commentator John Emerson dissents. (Via Andrew Sullivan, Honest Conservative Class of 2004)

Martha Nussbaum argues against academic boycotts (in general, but in the context of Israel). (For my take on the issue, see here.)

Megan Stack on the horrors of life in a patriarchal theocracy (which just happens to be our country's BFF. Great.)

Tony Karon -- a South African-born Jew -- makes the case for the apartheid label for Israel in a powerful essay.

• Today's Boing-Boing-Did-You-Click-Through?™ Link: SF writer Charlie Stross on the near impossibility of space colonization (not, as the BoingBoing post mistakenly puts it, space exploration, about which Stross says "Exploring our own solar system is a no-brainer: we can do it, we are doing it...", although he does think that even exploring interstellar distances is probably futile too, as well as colonization of any sort). A must for SF fans and geeks of all descriptions.

• A cartoonist's tribulations: in an ongoing saga at Tom Hart's Hutch Blog, Matt Madden is devising a series of increasingly complex constraints for Tom Hart to use in a week of his daily strip Hutch Owen. (Constraints such as: write it backwards, use 20 panels, only words/fx& not images; etc.) Fun reading for anyone interested in the Ou-x-po aesthetic or cartooning. The best way to read it is probably to begin at the beginning and click through, rather than in usual backwards-blog style. (Update: the five finished strips, with summaries of the various constraints, can be viewed here in their final form.)

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