Was die Welt verändern wird …

What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?
Von John Brockman (Edge Foundation)
Brockman ist Gründer der so genannten „Edge Foundation“, einer Webseite, auf der Wissenschaftler zu zentralen Fragen von Forschung und Technik Stellung nehmen. Die immer zu Jahresanfang gestellte Frage an dutzende führende Wissenschaftler, Schriftsteller und Journalisten aus aller Welt erscheint dann auch in Buchformat. In diesem Jahr antworten 151 herausragende Intellektuelle auf die Frage: „Was wird alles verändern?“.

Zitat:
New tools equal new perceptions. Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out. Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news. And our politicians, our governments? Always years behind, the best they can do is play catch up.

Literatur des Kalten Kriegs

Books About the Cold War
Von Daniel Johnson (The Wall Street Journal)
Buchautor Daniel Johnson (White King and Red Queen: How the Cold War Was Fought on the Chessboard – Houghton Mifflin, 2008 ) empfiehlt fünf Bücher als essentielle Lektüre zum besseren Verständnis der „Kultur des Kalten Kriegs“, darunter auch Literaturklassiker wie George Orwells 1984 und Mikhail Bulgakows Der Meister und Margarita.

Zitat:
In many respects, Mikhail Bulgakov’s „The Master and Margarita“ is a Cold War book, even though it was written between 1928 and the author’s death in 1940. The novel was not published until 1966-67 in the Russian journal Moskva (Moscow), and even then the editors cut about 60 pages, which soon enough made their way into samizdat publications. This scathing satire on every aspect of life under Stalin immediately caused a sensation.

Balkanisierung der USA

As if Things Weren’t Bad Enough, Russian Professor Predicts End of U.S.
Von Andrew Osborn (The Wall Street Journal)
Eine nahezu verrückt anmutende Theorie des russischen Politikwissenschaftlers und ehemaligen KGB-Mitarbeiters Igor Paranin prophezeit eine Art Balkanisierung der USA. Im Herbst 2009 soll es in den Vereinigten Staaten aufgrund der zunehmenden sozialen, finanziellen und kulturell-moralischen Krisen zu einem erneuten Bürgerkrieg kommen, woraufhin sich das Land in sechs Teilstaaten aufsplittern wird. Darunter auch die „Texas-Republic“ – die wahrscheinlich bald in „Königreich Bush“ umbenannt werden wird.

Zitat:
In September 1998, he attended a conference in Linz, Austria, devoted to information warfare, the use of data to get an edge over a rival. It was there, in front of 400 fellow delegates, that he first presented his theory about the collapse of the U.S. in 2010. „When I pushed the button on my computer and the map of the United States disintegrated, hundreds of people cried out in surprise,“ he remembers. He says most in the audience were skeptical. „They didn’t believe me.“

Obama und Cicero

The new Cicero
von Charlotte Higgins (Link: Guardian)
Um die nächsten vier Jahre US-amerikanischer Politik zu verstehen, muss man auch etwas über Politik im antiken Rom verstanden haben, argumentiert Charlotte Higgins in ihrem Guardian-Artikel über die Parallelen zwischen den Senatoren Cicero und Barack Obama. Nachdem Elvin Lim in seinem Buch The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W Bush eine kontinuierliche Verwahrlosung der Kunst der Rhetorik bei amerikanischen Präsidenten diagnostiziert hat, bricht mit Obama ein neues goldenes Zeitalter politischer Rhetorik an.

Zitat
It is not just in the intricacies of speechifying that Obama recalls Cicero. Like Cicero, Obama is a lawyer. Like Cicero, Obama is a writer of enormous accomplishment – Dreams From My Father, Obama’s first book, will surely enter the American literary canon. Like Cicero, Obama is a „novus homo“ – the Latin phrase means „new man“ in the sense of self-made. Like Cicero, Obama entered politics without family backing (compare Clinton) or a military record (compare John McCain). Roman tradition dictated you had both. The compensatory talent Obama shares with Cicero, says Catherine Steel, professor of classics at the University of Glasgow, is a skill at „setting up a genealogy of forebears – not biological forebears but intellectual forebears. For Cicero it was Licinius Crassus, Scipio Aemilianus and Cato the Elder. For Obama it is Lincoln, Roosevelt and King.“

Germaine Greer und High Heels

Do High Heels empower or constrain?
von Germaine Greer (Link: Times)
High Heels werden immer länger, aber bedeutet das auch mehr Emanzipation oder eher mehr gesellschaftlichen Zwang als Sexualobjekt für Männer zu fungieren, fragt sich die Autorin Germaine Greer, eine der bedeutendsten Feministinnen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Ein kurzer Streifzug durch die Kulturgeschichte des (männlichen) Fuß- und des (weiblichen) Schuhfetischismus.

Zitat
The success of the TV series Sex and the City since 1998 derives partly from the accuracy of its basic tenets that chocolate and shopping are more satisfactory than sex and that all women hanker after extravagant shoes. Improved engineering had by then made Manolo Blahnik’s dizzier heels wearable. Just. Women who wear trainers to travel to work will change into serious heels when they get there, unless they are salespeople or factory workers or nurses. As well as carrying a complex set of sexual implications, heels are a way of signalling vicarious leisure. Some say that foot fetishism gains ground when intercourse becomes too dangerous. Lap dancers, strippers and porn stars wear the highest platforms of all.

Rushdie und die Fatwa

Twenty Years on: internalising the fatwa
von Kenan Malik (Link: Spiked)
Zwanzig Jahre nach der Veröffentlichung des Romans Die Satanischen Verse von Salman Rushdie und der durch Ayatollah Khomeini ausgesprochenen Fatwa, die im Westen zu einer ersten hitzig geführten Debatte über den „Clash der Zivilisationen“ gesorgt hat, ist heute die Angst vor Publikationen, die die islamische Welt provozieren könnten, größer denn je, so Kenan Malik, Autor des 2009 erscheinenden Buches From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and its Legacy (Atlantic Books).

Zitat
In 1989 even the Ayatollah’s death sentence could not stop the publication of The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was forced into hiding for almost a decade. Translators and publishers were killed, bookshops bombed and Penguin staff forced to wear bomb-proof vests. Yet Penguin never wavered in its commitment to keep it published. Today, all it takes for a publisher to run for cover is a letter from an outraged academic. In the 20 years between the publication of The Satanic Verses and the withdrawal of The Jewel of Medina, the fatwa has in effect become internalised.