Major trauma in the form of a crippling car accident struck my friends Gil and Kim Ahrens while we were still living around the corner from them in San Francisco (though both of us were about to move). Gil’s now published a book, Shattered Shaken and Stirred about his family’s experience and how they got through it
. Gil is both a decent and fun guy and I’m looking forward to read his book.
This post, are we better off without religion? delves more deeply into Gregory Paul’s Successful Societies Scale (and its shoddy presentation) than did mine. (Some of the comments are also interesting.)
One thing that surprises me is that Paul ignores or brushes aside other potential correlates. While the U.S. is clearly more racially diverse than the other nations on his scale, with less than 80 percent of the U.S. being white, vs. more than 90 percent of the populations of countries like Britain, or Germany, he chooses to deal with diversity by looking at foreign-born populations. The U.S.’s white population is also far more diverse than that of any of the countries he examines. Paul also brushes aside the U.S.’s status as a nation with significant slave population in its relatively recent history, saying that was one more sign of its dysfunction due to religiosity. For that matter, he doesn’t seem to note that the U.S. is the only nation without nationalized healthcare. Perhaps that, and not religion, is the factor that matters most for many of the well-being statistics he presents.
If racial diversity is not just a correlate but a cause, I expect we’ll see a steady decline over time in performance of European nations. For instance, Andrew Brown’s book Fishing in Utopia argues that Sweden has failed to establish itself as the enlightened socialist democracy it envisioned becoming. The book documents some of the discrimination faced by immigrants to this supposedly enlightened country. Racial upheaval in Germany and France also come to mind. The biggest unanswered question in his paper is why the U.S. is both tops in religious belief and per capita income. That simply shouldn’t happen. I hope his paper drives more studies. And that they avoid some of the needless errors that plague his paper.
If she’s been a veteran, a woman may have no place to call home, according to this poignant article by Susan Kaplan. That the percentage of homeless female veterans exceeds that of homeless male veterans has caught the military by surprise. We think of institutions like the military as training its soldiers both for war and giving them the discipline for life afterwards (my mother still aspires to make a bed as well as her ex-soldier uncle). But this article suggests that just leaving the safe routine of the military can disrupt some people, especially if they’re leaving the military because trauma has rendered them no longer mentally fit to serve. You get the odd sense that soldiers are like freed prisoners.
Adam Penenberg’s funny and insightful column on why book reviews don’t sell books anymore. Personally, I do sometimes buy and read books because of the review in something like the New York Review of Books. But mostly I read the reviews so I don’t have to read the books. I’ll bet I’m not alone.
My friend Adam Penenberg drinks his own kool-aid, in what might represent a shift in how authors market their books. What he’s doing is notable enough for a piece on it in The New York Observer. Mazel tov!
In the last two days, two friends mentioned RadioLab to me as something I would enjoy. I posted a little note on it on Facebook and Wade Roush responded with his review of what sounds like an eclectic and fun show.
I knew Paul Roberts only virtually until we met at Wagamama’s for noodle soup and a chat about the state of the security market. I can now report it is more secure than the journalism market. I also learned that Paul in his spare time runs a citizen journalism blog, Blogging Belmont. It turns out he had blogged about whether Belmont should adopt some of the ideas in my urban retrofits piece in the Boston Globe, but he hadn’t realized I was the Michael Fitzgerald who wrote it.
I poked around a blog search engine and found a couple of other good posts on articles I’ve written recently. The I’ve Been Mugged blog used my CIO piece on changing privacy expectations as starting off point for a consumer privacy manifesto. The Knockoff Report looked at my virtual goods charticle in Fast Company and warned of the coming of counterfeit virtual goods.
Most Sundays over the last couple of months, I spent my evenings with narrative guru Mark Kramer. He presides over a narrative salon involving radio and print journalists and writers established and aspiring. We talk about narrative writing and what makes it good, and shared pieces of our own.
Kramer offers brilliant observations about prose off the cuff. Give him a little more time and he becomes a jeweler making precise cuts in stone.
He makes writing and reporting vital acts. I approach my work now in ways I only dreamt of in the last 20 years.
I have to take a few Sundays off and I’m missing it already.
Andrew Brown, my friend and fellow Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow, found out this morning that his book “Fishing in Utopia,” won the Orwell Prize, Britain’s top prize for political writing. I hope the book is soon available in the U.S. For now, a hearty congrats to Andrew!
William Dean Singleton’s recent rant about online aggregators wasn’t just old (it’s been done before) but wrongheaded. Adam Penenberg points out why in this piece on misdirected outrage on Marketwatch.