Archive for April, 2006
Murders
The NY Times has gotten into the whole Google Maps mashup craze with this map identifying every murder committed between 2003 and 2005.
Between 2003 and 2005, 1,662 murders were committed in New York. Men and boys were responsible for 93 percent of the murders; their victims tended to be other men and boys; and in […]
Wheee!
I feel a pain in my chest every time I see someone trying to do work in Internet Explorer. It is like watching someone try to walk with their shoelaces tied together. But I bite my tongue because I know people won’t change unless they want to change.
Still, there are some people who simply never […]
Aggravating
Having never served on a jury, my knowledge mostly comes from the movie, “12 Angry Men“. But I’ve always found the instructions given to juries fairly odd. They seem to imply a very strange idealized notions of language, thought, and discourse that have no bearing on reality. It is as if they were written by […]
Nuestro Himno
Recently some latino celebrities recorded a Spanish language version of the American national anthem, leading president Bush to state:
I think people who want to be a citizen of this country ought to learn English, and they ought to learn to sing the National Anthem in English.
This led Eric Bakovic at Language Log to do […]
White Matter
Although I am somehow now functioning in a Chinese language working environment, I know myself to be a very slow language learner. While many people study languages because they have a natural facility for doing so, I study languages for the opposite reason: because it is so damn hard.
Although I normally wouldn’t touch BBC science […]
Cold War?
Could it be that Bush and Hu are having a Cold War and the rest of us haven’t been invited?
Howard French thinks the Chinese are following a cold war logic in their foreign policy:
As it evolves on a spectrum somewhere between Nazi Germany and contemporary Scandinavia, China will use its growing muscle in trade and […]
Immigration vs. Wages
One of the most interesting debates to arise out of the recent national debate on immigration is whether or not immigration drives down the wages of working class Americans. And Michelle Goldberg’s Salon piece is the best article I’ve found on the subject. In the context of discussing general divisions among progressives over the issue […]
Abu Bakker Qassim & A’del Abdu al-Hakim
A longish title for a Keywords post, but these names are important to remember. They are
the two Uighurs who remain in prison in Guantanamo four and a half years after their capture by bounty hunters in Afghanistan, over a year after they were declared not to be enemy combatants by a military tribunal, and nearly […]
Suspended Animation
Last year I had an opportunity in New York to hear a report from Robert Weil, the author of Red Cat, White Cat, who had just come back from China and talked about how economic “reforms” were affecting China’s working classes. It was an enlightening talk which talked about the heavy toll of privatization, corruption, […]
Zhan Tianyou
The other day I was giving a talk in which I was discussing David Byrne’s defense of Powerpoint during which I said to my students: “You know, the lead singer of Talking Heads.” As I looked at their blank faces I realized there was no way I could expect them to know of the band […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
