The Orchestra is tuning up. Students are back on campus; freshmen are moving about chaotically, many trying to understand life without everything they've known before.

I'm going to try to capture the atmosphere this week with Twitter instead of my usual entries. The whole thing lends itself better to snapshots than lengthy thoughts.

From Marietta College's Flickr site: 2008's Freshmen arriving in the dorms.

What do you feel when you think about this moment? What questions did you have that got answered, or never got answered? How would you re-do the moment of arrival, if you could?

I’ve been a fan of Amazon.com for far longer than they deserve; that’s how fanship works, I guess. And I’ll continue to shop there.

On this blog, I’ve usually linked books I’m discussing to the respective Amazon pages, in part because they usually have sizeable page previews. Others, most notably Google Books, have those same previews, but I’ve stuck with Amazon.

My recent work (grad-school in history) has had me open several books unavailable on Amazon, though. Some are foreign-language, but mostly it’s that they’re too old, or at least too old to have page previews (i.e. more than, say, ten years).

Most of those books are scanned and available in limited preview at google books, and suitable for citation in a blog. So I was already considering the move.

But a recent event around the Kindle has pushed me: the remote-controlled deletion from Kindle owners’ hard-drives of several books that had been mistakenly posted on the Kindle store without the publisher’s permission.

It was a few old books by George Orwell. People bought them on Amazon for their Kindles. The copyright holder notified Amazon of a violation, and Amazon withdrew the product to respect the copyright.

So far so good. It’s what they did next that concerns me: they remotely deleted it from customer’s computers. That they had this power shouldn’t surprise me; that they exercised it is very disturbing, even if the books were illegal.

It was as if a store gave away a product—a book, say—and subsequently discovered the store copy had been a stolen copy, and, rather than making amends with the publisher, secretly entered customers’ houses and took the books back.

The New York Times notes the great irony here: the books in question were 1984 and Animal Farm, about oppressive governments and fascism:

In George Orwell’s “1984,” government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the “memory hole.”

But a more piercing critique comes from David Ulin at the LA Times:

Meanwhile, we embrace Amazon and the Kindle with little real consideration for what it all means, as we move increasingly toward an electronic model for intellectual and literary life. Much of the talk about the digital future has to do with its inevitability, but though that may be true, it overlooks more subtle questions of engagement and control.

For Amazon, books are a business, and the more hegemony it exerts over the market, the better off it is. For the culture, though, books and information serve as a collective soul, a memory bank, something bigger than mere commerce that shouldn't be merely bought and sold.

The president of Estonia spoke recently at Turku University in Finland, on the issue of geography and identity. Drawing on the re-understanding of nationhood that has emerged in the last twenty years, which focuses on the social construction of nationhood—and, accordingly, its imaginary existence—Toomas Hendrik Ilves suggests the hardly controversial solution that “we should consider ourselves Europeans.”

Since European in this line of thinking is innocent as a lamb and incapable of hurting its neighbors around the world, he’s really saying “let us be citizens of the world.”

It’s been said endlessly, but Ilves adds a twist: regional geography. The Baltics, to which three countries he adds a fourth—that of his audience, Finland—have been subjects of various empires and foreign rulers for the last millennium, and have accordingly an important contribution to bring to the discussion of European identity: the Baltic Sea as a mare nostrum, as a European lake:

Today we can discern or imagine several competing or even co-existing concepts and theories regarding our region. The traditional view (if I can use that term for something with such a short history) distinguishes between the Nordic and Baltic countries, a distinction that itself is barely 70 years old. Another sees Balto-scandia as single space, as I would argue it was before the arrival of imperial rule from East and West. We have a northern dimension in the European Union and we will see under the Swedish presidency in the second half of this year a Baltic Sea Strategy that will recognize the Baltic Sea littoral as what it fundamentally and by and large is: an EU lake, a mare nostrum.

The very term mare nostrum ("our sea"), which describes the Roman view of the Mediterranean as a lake of Roman imperial dominion, shows how transitory our regional mental geography can be. Today, discussions of Northern Africa as a home of European civilisation would strike us as odd. Yet what would European civilisation be without St Augustine's De Civitate Dei? St Augustine was born and lived and did his seminal work in what today is Algeria. Yet today, in the European Union, we have something called the Barcelona Process, which is supposed to bring Northern Africa – the Southern Littoral of the Roman's mare nostrum – closer to the European Union. But also not too much closer, for today, the region is considered to be non-European. Yet St Augustine of Hippo lies at the core of what we consider Europe to be.

So, too, during the Cold War mental geography underwent a dramatic shift. In his classic essay from the early 1980s, "The Idea of Central Europe", Milan Kundera expressed his exasperation that in the post-war era, Vienna was considered a bastion and reigning capital of western civilisation, while Prague, the home of Franz Kafka and long-time home of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, two hundred kilometres to the West of Vienna, had quickly become a symbol of the grey and listless totalitarian East. Just as happened to Estonia, to Poland, to Hungary, countries once a part of European civilisation that found themselves in a matter of just a few years, thrust into an altogether different civilisation, as so brilliantly described by Nobel prize-winner Czeslaw Milosz in his book The Captive Mind.

Alongside the unbelievable growth of the global church has come a flowering of new forms of ecclesiastical art.

He Qi is one of the best. This image, published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, is entitled The Risen Lord. Check out He Qi’s online gallery. This is amazing stuff.

The Economist is running a special feature on the Arab world, which is worth reading in its entirety. As a teaser, check out these observations from the lead article:

The political instability of the Arab world is in turn connected to another problem: the missing glue of nationhood. Many years ago an Egyptian diplomat, Tahsin Bashir, called the new Arab states of the Middle East “tribes with flags” (though he exempted Egypt). His point still holds. In countries as different as Lebanon and Iraq, ethnic, confessional or sectarian differences have thwarted programmes of nation-building.

That is why Iraq fell apart into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish fragments after the removal of Saddam despite decades of patriotic indoctrination. Syria could follow suit if the minority Alawi sect of the ruling Assad family were somehow to lose control of this largely Sunni country. Sudan has seen not one but two civil wars between its Arab-dominated centre and the non-Arab minorities in its south and west.

Now, there is an assumption here, and that is that democracy and prosperity find better soil in Nation-States, especially ones that successfully transcend clan and tribe. The Economist, which is largely a hymnal in praise of global capitalism, seems to be channeling the spirit here of Ferdinand Tönnies, and his distinction between Community and Civil Society (usually known by the German names Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft).

Specifically, following Tönnies, the Economist suggests that democracy requires a civil society that can trump loyalties to clan. I don’t dispute that, but there’s got to be more. And indeed, the Economist points out oil.

Wars can happen anywhere. What makes the Middle East especially prone to them? Just count the ways. First is oil. In the late 1990s Mr bin Laden wrote a letter to Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban, in which he pointed out that 75% of the world’s oil was found in the Persian Gulf region and that “whoever has dominion over the oil has dominion over the economies of the world.” So long as that remains broadly true, the interests of energy-hungry powers from near and far will continue to grind against each other there.

That can't be the whole story. Missing here is any discussion of religion, following the Economist's general vision that capitalism is secular in the sense that capitalism belongs to the world. One need only point to the incredible capitalist engine that is the UAE to see Muslim wealth creation, even if much of the wealth there is actually created by foreigners and non-Muslims.

As I head to grad school next week, after a decade on staff with InterVarsity, I’m thinking about academic values. Specifically, about the difference between an education and a degree.

An education is what you go for; the degree is a certificate that you’ve passed some standards. I am going for both. I want to learn how to be a scholar, and I need the paper to get a job as a scholar.

Colleges and universities, it seems, are very jealous of their reputations. Reputation is a soft human value that bridges education and degree: Your degree is worth its reputation, while the education is much more priceless.

So if my degree will be worth its reputation, I ought to be very concerned if my institution is putting its academic reputation at risk by tolerating plagiarism. Plagiarism, of course, is a grenade of a word, which is why I say “if my institution,” withholding judgment for the time being.

But, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel is reporting, Wisconsin medical researchers have been putting their names on other people’s work. And worse: they’ve been publishing studies written by big pharmaceutical companies (and extolling the drugs sold by said companies).

One of the scholars laughed off the journalist:

Speroff, reached at his home in Oregon, said the practice of ghostwriting remains commonplace, and he defended it.

"There is nothing dishonest about it," he said.

He laughed at the idea that someone might be offended by the lack of transparency. "If you don't like the way it works, that's your business," Speroff said.

But another UW scholar disagrees:

James Stein, a UW cardiologist, said he was approached twice in the last week to put his name on educational material for different drug companies. He said he turned down both offers because, "frankly, it's plagiarism."

"If an undergraduate did this, he would be expelled," Stein said.

When a drug company puts a doctor's name on an article that actually was written by a professional writer, it is able to present a more biased and promotional version of an issue as though it were coming from an independent source, Stein and others say.

 

As a fairly poor freelance writer/graduate student with a fairly modest but doable and predictable income, I’m somewhat insulated from the recession.

Which is more than I can say for this neighborhood, a mixture of blue-collar and below-blue collar owners, renters and drifters: a shrinking economy has been truly hard on the working poor.

Handimen are begging to mow my lawn (which is small enough that the lawncare companies don’t even advertise around here), and scrap metal collectors (Southeast Asian women, mostly) go through our trash for cans; and many others are underemployed at Taco Bell etc.

One of my neighbors, in the construction trades, hasn’t had work for some time, so was really happy even for the lousy job he’s got: on call at a cheese factory forty miles away. He’s got to be there by 4:30 in the morning if he wants a good shot at getting some hours.

“You try to be one of the first four in line,” he told me last night. “If you’re down around eighth, there’s no way you’ll get in that day.” How many people show up, I ask: “forty or fifty.”

Forty or Fifty, in line for day-wages repackaging returned cheese; no guarantees about tomorrow—“It’s like one of the jobs Roosevelt gave people,” he joked, while looking at my kitchen clock. “Got to go to bed.”

Roosevelt’s jobs—the CCC, the WPA, and the CWA among others—were backbreaking work for the unemployed. In the case of the CCC, the employees were young men in camps, with the wages being sent home to hungry families. This was the stuff of poverty. And it’s the stuff today’s underclasses could use.

Maybe it's always been that way. I don't know. But I haven't always cared, and I do now.

I love this picture. It’s off NASA’s photo gallery.

This summer marks 40 years since humans set foot on the moon. Presumably most readers of ATN were not around to follow the events.

So: what do you think when you see this, you who’ve always lived in a world where this is possible?

More Germans moved overseas last year than repatriated. This reports a Swiss newspaper.
In several 19th Century waves, hundreds of thousands of Germans left their homes for better lives in other countries, especially in North and South America and Australia and, after the German Imperial expansion into Africa, into today’s Tanzania.

It has been argued that part of the motive for obtaining colonies in the first place—never really part of German tradition—was a felt need to retain emigrants within the internal economy of the German empire.

From the vantage of today’s wealthy Germany, the economic engine of Europe, it’s hard to remember the brutal poverty in 19th century Germany, not entirely unlike that in today’s Africa. Germans were starving to death.

That’s why the very news of German emigration is eye-popping. The article doesn’t explain who these people are or why they’re moving. Without knowing better I’d guess a high number would be retirees moving to Italy or Spain, now part of Schengen’s borderless Europe. I’ve heard tell of German communities in Goa, India, serviced by German doctors and dentists.

Germans have a long-established culture of roaming and distance tourism; they gave us the word Wanderlust, after all. Still, it’s remarkable when a people loses interest in living at home.