Notes from dissertopia

… I recommend Top Pot Hand Forged Donuts. If you aren’t in Seattle or you don’t want a donut, but want to sit down with something to read over your cup of coffee (I won’t even consider the possibility that you don’t want a cup of coffee), then maybe these recommendations will be interesting.

American Torture: No Knowledge of History, No Sense of Tragedy

“Perhaps so, but their failure to ask historically-based questions also highlights the narrowness of their intellectual training. Like the accused Nazi judges before the bar in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), they asked themselves only what the law is (or what it became under John Ashcroft and John Yoo), not whether it is just. If a legal brief authorized brutal methods such as waterboarding, who were they to question, let alone challenge, the (freshly minted) legal opinion?”

Expert Advice | The American Prospect

“By taking public questions out of the domain of “political answers,” and leaving them to experts, as technical questions, Kennedy gave birth to two backlashes. From the left, in reaction to the failure of the great brains–notably Bundy’s–in Vietnam, the New Left turned to the dream of participatory democracy, which in six years led to the unraveling of the liberal consensus on the streets of Chicago. On the right, a new conservatism found its voice in a kind of disingenuous anti-intellectualism and contempt for experts, exemplified by William F. Buckley’s comment, “I’d rather be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.”

Everest Summit Route — National Geographic

Bob once compared writing a dissertation to climbing Mount Everest (“Passing your comps is like getting to base camp, all you have left to do is climb Mount Everest”) . Perhaps this map will help us all get to our defense dates, hopefully without the tragedy that has already presented itself on the mountain.

Slow Blog

“Slow Blogging is a rejection of immediacy. It is an affirmation that not all things worth reading are written quickly, and that many thoughts are best served after being fully baked and worded in an even temperament.”

Terry » History, history!

“When you begin to look, history is everywhere. In our legal system and ideas on justice and punishment. In the language we speak now. In the sulphur-based chemical reactions that take place in our body, left over from when the earth’s atmosphere was more sulphur than oxygen.”