The Original Great Gatsby Film

No need for a dumbed-down text of the novel or a Leonardo DiCaprio film; we just need to find a copy of this lost silent film version.

As it notes, “The Great Gatsby is Great!”

Monday Morning Mental Mix 11 July 2011

The New York Times reviews Honeybee Democracy, which argues that the life and death decisions bees make about issues like moving the colony are much like New England town hall meetings. Somehow, I suspect Henry David Thoreau would enjoy this book.

Joanne Barkan, writing for Dissent, takes on the war against teachers. The opening of the piece offers a sobering assessment: “In a nation as politically and ideologically riven as ours, it’s remarkable to see so broad an agreement on what ails public schools. It’s the teachers.

Rajan Menon argues in the National Interest that Colonel Qaddafi has won the war in Libya: Yet this what the interventionists maintain, never mind that their righteous rendition begs a question: Why, under such favorable circumstances, has the world’s most powerful alliance failed to oust a reviled ruler who presides over what is now a third-rate military machine and faces relentless air attacks, wide-ranging sanctions, and an opposition that is said to reflect the public’s sentiment and now receives external arms, training and money?

David Ralph’s review of Chocolate nations: Living and dying for cocoa in West Africa provides some excellent insight into the ongoing conflict in Côte d’Ivoire and the exploitative practices associated with chocolate production.

Finally, Nissan offers another effective advertisement for its Leaf car.

Monday Morning Mental Mix 27 June 2011

Buzzfeed is featuring the 100 Longest Entries on Wikipedia, which includes some you would expect like Adolf Hitler and “List of Italians,” but I was certainly surprised to see Clavier-Übung III and Wyandanch, New York make the list. I particularly enjoyed the latter entry’s detailed information about Pickle farms in the region.

Ilana Garon, a teacher from New York, argues that we need to move past the myth that education reform needs to be primarily centered on getting rid of bad teachers. She argues that “to assert that this is the #1 problem in education is to plainly ignore the economic and social factors that affect our students during the twenty-three hours a day we’re not with them.”  The Atlantic adds that American teachers are among the hardest working in the world but their students only in the middle of the pack.

The New Inquiry has an interesting dialogue between a professor and someone who has produced over one hundred essays for sale online.

Ted Galen Carpenter offers one the most powerful condemnations of American torture policies I’ve had the opportunity to read. In part, he writes, “Such contempt for moral considerations is both puzzling and alarming coming from citizens—much less leaders—of an enlightened democracy. Even the pervasive use of the Orwellian euphemism “enhanced interrogation” rather than the more honest term “torture” suggests a moral rot within portions of the political and opinion elite.”

David Eagleman examines the increasingly difficult task of determining blame for criminal acts as we learn more about the brain. He writes, ” the choices we make are inseparably yoked to our neural circuitry, and therefore we have no meaningful way to tease the two apart. The more we learn, the more the seemingly simple concept of blameworthiness becomes complicated, and the more the foundations of our legal system are strained.”

Finally, it’s hard to argue with Existential Star Wars.

Monday Morning Mental Mix

Monday Morning Mental Mix is a collection of articles I stumbled across during the preceding week, not necessarily articles written or published in the past seven days. It will generally be an eclectic collection of items that made it into my Diigo feed or onto Instapaper. If you have any great articles to share, please feel free to send them my way.

Eric Alterman argues that that the collapse of the newspaper industry and proliferation of think tank experts had led to a dramatic expansion of “ideologically motivated misinformation.” He places the blame on journalists: “journalists, on the other hand, usually treat anything as true if someone in a position of ostensible authority is willing to say it, even anonymously (and if no one is going to sue over it). The accuracy of anyone’s statement, particularly if that person is a public official, is often deemed irrelevant.”

Kim Brooks criticizes the practice of high school English, suggesting that soft discussion about literature and diminished focus on writing has left students unprepared for college, but acknowledges that the math of grading papers makes teaching writing a challenge: “every English teacher teaches five sections of English, and each section has approximately 25 students — a dream load compared to what teachers at, say, a Chicago public face. But that still means a three-page formal essay assignment would translate into 375 pages of student prose to be read, critiqued and evaluated. The very thought makes a cold, dark dread creep across my soul.”

Philosopher Sam Harris forces us to consider simplistic answers about free will and morality, arguing that “free will is a non-starter, both philosophically and scientifically.” Later in the piece, he asks “Consider what would happen if we discovered a cure for human evil. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that every relevant change in the human brain can be made cheaply, painlessly, and safely. The cure for psychopathy can be put directly into the food supply like vitamin D. Evil is now nothing more than a nutritional deficiency.”

The mere existence of trailers for books is astonishing to me, but some of winners and losers of the 2011 Moby Awards offered even more surprise. I didn’t enjoy Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom at all, but his promotional trailer almost redeemed the book.

Peter Schrag argues in The Nation that vouchers are back with a vengeance, the “been the ultimate weapon in our educational debates, always ticking just under the surface, never quite going off. But after last November’s Republican statehouse victories, the right, sometimes abetted by Democrats and liberals, has brought back vouchers and school privatization with a vengeance.