Adventures in Wiki Epistemology: Architects

Wikipedia has been making a big push to cite published sources to support the content people have added online. This year, I have been adding a lot of new content to Wikipedia after finding published sources to cite. Unfortunately, sloppy citations and unsupported speculation are just as common in print as they are online. Here [...]

Iran: It All Depends Who You Talk (and Listen) to …

Stratfor’s George Friedman weighs in on what’s going on in Iran in his characteristically hard-nosed way. Here are some excerpts from his take on the situation as of 15 June (via RealClearPolitics).
In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided [...]

Zhao Ziyang’s Secret Journal

Today’s Wall Street Journal offers a few glimpses of what Zhao Ziyang’s posthumously published secret journal reveals about the evolution of his thinking. Both the English and Chinese editions are due to appear just in time for the 20th anniversary of the violent crackdown in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989.
Zhao’s memoirs provide a rare [...]

Hawaiian Names for Proofreading Symbols

One of my side jobs during graduate school at the University of Hawai‘i—after using up both my G.I. Bill allotment and my graduate assistantship eligibility before finishing my dissertation—was double-proofreading publications full of technical jargon and tabular matter. In double-proofing, one person reads aloud from the copyedited manuscript while the other reads along looking for [...]

Scott Meredith Manuscript Rejection Letter, 1952

My maternal grandmother received the following 4-page, single-spaced, detailed rejection letter in response to a novel-length manuscript she submitted between short stints of teaching in various rural schools in West Virginia, Maryland, and Virginia during the 1950s after abandoning her husband, who was 27 years older than her. She got her teaching certificate in 1915, [...]

Wordcatcher Tales: Kara-e/Kōmō-e Mekiki

I came across a few interesting terms, two of them new to me, while browsing through a beautiful and fascinating book: Japan Envisions the West: 16th–19th Century Japanese Art from Kobe City Museum edited by Yukiko Shirahara (Seattle Art Museum, 2007).
唐絵目利き kara-e mekiki ‘Chinese art inspectors’ – When Japan was keeping the outside world at [...]

On the Vital Role of Hermits

The latest volume (#28) of Buddhist-Christian Studies, which has just gone online at Project MUSE (subscription required) contains a couple of anniversary memorials to Thomas Merton, who died in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1968. (It also contains several papers from a panel on the notable contributions of Masao Abe to Buddhist-Christian interfaith dialogue.)
Buddhist-Christian dialogue seems awfully [...]

Gen. MacArthur: 30 Years of Ass Kissing

From: The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War, by David Halberstam (Hyperion, 2007), pp. 103-104:
The [NY] Times, center-liberal in its editorial page, enthusiastic as its homage to MacArthur seemed, was not nearly as fulsome in its praise of the general as Time magazine. Given the passion of its founder and editor, Henry Luce, for [...]

India’s Vibrant Vernacular Press

From India: The Rise of an Asian Giant, by Dietmar Rothermund (Yale U. Press, 2008), pp. 223-224:
The rise of the vernacular press would have pleased Mahatma Gandhi. He disapproved of advertising and printed no ads in his papers. But perhaps he would have relented if he had realized that advertising revenue is the lifeblood of [...]

Why Darfur and Not …?

Black Star Journal recently linked to a long and thought-provoking post back in July by Ethan Zuckerman at My Heart’s in Accra about why the West seems much more concerned about Darfur than about a number of even more horrible conflicts in Africa.
Because you may or may not be an Africa-based journalist, let me unpack [...]