Intelligence Patrol
Oct. 15th, 2001 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupThis article on war and what people remember-- or don't remember-- about it was excerpted on This American Life a couple of weeks ago. It is one of the smartest, and scariest, things I have heard in the past month about the way people change during war--what war means, what it does to people and societies. It is really, really, really long, but worth reading in its entirety. Or just listen to the 13-minute piece they extracted for the audio broadcast.
Also, though I'm sure it will soon become banal Net-legend (like the Zapf Wingdings terrorist conspiracy), this business with Bert and Bin Laden absolutely cracks me up every time I see it. It is just too hilarious to be believed. I only found out about the Bert Is Evil website a few weeks ago, too.
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Went to Long Island for the weekend. Fall is the best time to be on the North Fork and we made sure to get all the things I like to get there: pumpkin ice cream, unpasteurized apple cider, roasted corn dipped in butter. Other than not getting any sleep-- always a problem there, for some reason-- we had a good time. I'm reading Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club with an eye toward writing a review and submitting it for Slate's "be our book reviewer" contest. I should at least get a clip to be able to send off for applications and all that. It's been something like three years since I wrote a pop piece. Anyway, it will hopefully make me a better reader of a book that just might single-handedly resurrect the field of intellectual history, thus saving my career... Oh yeah, and it is also really interesting too.
In the meantime, working on freelance copyediting this sociology journal. I am always stunned by just how badly educated people can write. It's as though the extensive use of obfuscatory jargon allows people to dispense with subject-verb agreement or consistent use of tenses. I am at a loss as to how much to change, since the assumption here is that the pieces have been corrected by peer reviewers. But some of this stuff makes no sense. Also, what I can decipher is completely banal and could easily be summed up in something like one tenth the length of the article. Academia is such an incredible racket. And I am doing what is easily several weeks worth of work for a measley $525, just a hundred bucks more than I would get for sitting it out and getting unemployment for a week. What a mess.
In the meantime, some unpleasant realities are starting to become unavoidable. We need to get health insurance, and that probably means I need to start temping, up to my allowance for not losing unemployment. Have to make a lot of phone calls today. Not looking forward to that at all.
Also, though I'm sure it will soon become banal Net-legend (like the Zapf Wingdings terrorist conspiracy), this business with Bert and Bin Laden absolutely cracks me up every time I see it. It is just too hilarious to be believed. I only found out about the Bert Is Evil website a few weeks ago, too.
***************************************
Went to Long Island for the weekend. Fall is the best time to be on the North Fork and we made sure to get all the things I like to get there: pumpkin ice cream, unpasteurized apple cider, roasted corn dipped in butter. Other than not getting any sleep-- always a problem there, for some reason-- we had a good time. I'm reading Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club with an eye toward writing a review and submitting it for Slate's "be our book reviewer" contest. I should at least get a clip to be able to send off for applications and all that. It's been something like three years since I wrote a pop piece. Anyway, it will hopefully make me a better reader of a book that just might single-handedly resurrect the field of intellectual history, thus saving my career... Oh yeah, and it is also really interesting too.
In the meantime, working on freelance copyediting this sociology journal. I am always stunned by just how badly educated people can write. It's as though the extensive use of obfuscatory jargon allows people to dispense with subject-verb agreement or consistent use of tenses. I am at a loss as to how much to change, since the assumption here is that the pieces have been corrected by peer reviewers. But some of this stuff makes no sense. Also, what I can decipher is completely banal and could easily be summed up in something like one tenth the length of the article. Academia is such an incredible racket. And I am doing what is easily several weeks worth of work for a measley $525, just a hundred bucks more than I would get for sitting it out and getting unemployment for a week. What a mess.
In the meantime, some unpleasant realities are starting to become unavoidable. We need to get health insurance, and that probably means I need to start temping, up to my allowance for not losing unemployment. Have to make a lot of phone calls today. Not looking forward to that at all.
