Nobel for Congress

Denny Hastert just resigned his seat:

http://www.politico.com/blogs/thecrypt/1107/Hastert_resigning_from_House_later_tonight.html

He will step down early, which means there will be a special election. A leading contender for the Dem nomination is physicist Bill Foster, who helped design the main injector ring at Fermilab. He's used his scientific credentials to land the endorsements of 23 Nobel laureates:
http://foster08.com/main/

That's no small feat, given how apolitical most scientists tend to be. One of the leading Republican candidates, Jim Oberweis, seems like a total tool--he has 4 TV commercials on his website already:

http://jimoberweis.com/multimedia/

and they all make him look like a complete doufus. Unfortunately, sometimes a massive personal fortune is enough to win an election. Let's hope this is one case where reason and intelligence prevail.

Read this!

So the Natl Endowment for the Arts says we don't read enough:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/arts/19nea.html

Probably a fair criticism. Speaking from my own experience, I read far less now than I did five years ago. Here I am speaking of reading books, rather than magazine articles or websites or emails. After all, you do a different kind of reading in a book. The critical difference is the continuity of narrative voice.

In a short article, you're looking for content--what happened, who did it, where was it, etc. You get facts, but not much more. Even opinion pieces usually argue for one point of view on an issue but end up rather one-dimensional.

Books, on the other hand--fiction or non-fiction--have a strong narrative voice. At least good ones do. And I think that's the appeal. You can crawl into the narrator's skull and BE them in the sense that you can see the world through their eyes. Reading Nick Hornby gives me that experience, for example. I've said this before, but I think reading books is the best way of building the capacity for empathy. You simply can't get that from a movie or short articles, because you never get inside someone's thoughts in the same way.

OK, I'd better start contributing to the world wide detritus and crack open by paperback.

First post

I'll explain the purpose of this blog at a later date. For now, let me just reference one of the strongest arguments for Obama's presidency that I've read to date:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200712/obama

Andrew Sullivan is an openly-gay, married (in Mass.), HIV-positive, conservative (!) writer. Hard guy to pigeonhole. He argues persuasively that Obama is the one candidate who can bring our country together. Giuliani or Clinton would continue the political culture war that we've been entrenched in ever since Reagan.

I think this is one of the most valuable qualities in a leader. The presidency isn't student council, but the personal charm that most student council presidents get elected on is a valuable asset to a national leader who has to persuade members of Congress as well as the American public what policies are needed. On policy, Obama and Clinton are hardly distinguishable. But in style and tone they are worlds apart, and that's what I think would give Obama an incredible advantage in the White House.

Here's I think the key thesis of Sullivan's article:

"Obama’s candidacy in this sense is a potentially transformational one. Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us. So much has happened in America in the past seven years, let alone the past 40, that we can be forgiven for focusing on the present and the immediate future. But it is only when you take several large steps back into the long past that the full logic of an Obama presidency stares directly—and uncomfortably—at you.

At its best, the Obama candidacy is about ending a war—not so much the war in Iraq, which now has a mo­mentum that will propel the occupation into the next decade—but the war within America that has prevailed since Vietnam and that shows dangerous signs of intensifying, a nonviolent civil war that has crippled America at the very time the world needs it most. It is a war about war—and about culture and about religion and about race. And in that war, Obama—and Obama alone—offers the possibility of a truce."

Well said, Sullivan. Go Obama go!