Our friend Ori Pomerantz has published another little e-book (I got mine free, for the record). This one is called Manual of Mockery, and its ostensible purpose is to instruct people in how to create good Internet memes.
In fact, it’s an accessible short course in basic logical argument.
Recommended.
“What relevance does Christianity have in our societal system? What place does the church have in a system that so often seems to be ordered only by the ultra-complex machinery of state power and corporate strategy?”
Hunter Baker answers these questions and more in his collection of essays, The System Has a Soul: Essays on Christianity, Liberty, and Political Life. Get it today for almost half-price.
Cary Elwes, whom you may know as Pierre Despereaux from Psyche, has written a book on his experiences making the film The Princess Bride. The book, As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride
Fox bought the movie rights to the book as soon as it was published in 1973, but it was 1987 when it finally played in theaters. In the meantime, many directors wanted to do it, including Robert Redford. Can you imagine Redford as The Dread Pirate Roberts (if he cast himself in his own film)?
Author William Goldman had seen many of his screenplays produced before The Princess Bride, but he was unprepared for the filming of this one. He freaked out on the first day when they were filming the scene in the fire swamp. “As soon as the gas geyser lit up her dress, Goldman burst out screaming, ‘OH, MY GOD! HER DRESS IS ON FIRE! SHE’S ON FIRE!!!’ Later, he scolded Reiner: ‘You’re setting fire to Robin on the first day?! What are you, nuts? It’s not like we can replace her!'”
There’s a word for that reaction, if I could only think of it.
Thomas Kidd has a new biography on one of America’s great evangelists, George Whitefield.
Although I deeply respect and appreciate him, my Whitefield is not a perfect man. As Whitefield readily admitted, he struggled with the temptations of fame, and I also show his besetting difficulties in relating to other evangelical leaders such as the Wesleys. Most disappointing (as Dallimore noted too) was Whitefield’s advocacy for slavery, and his personal owning of slaves.
I thought I had read that he opposed slavery and got into trouble with some Georgian businessmen for saying so.
When director William Desmond Taylor was murdered, no one in 1922 Los Angeles knew who did it. William Mann spins all the details into a wild noir that “seems far too cinematic to be credible. Yet every word of it is true,” writes Stefan Kanfer.
… the author spins a terrific yarn, though he frequently goes into overdrive, with staccato, machine gun-style sentences, as if to keep his readers’ attention from wandering: “Three long blond hairs. Clearly not Taylor’s. With a tweezers, the detective removed the hairs and placed them in an envelope. Now he just needed to match them to someone’s head.”
(via Prufrock)
Former CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson could not pursue her line of questioning on many interesting stories because her sources in The White House or her own bosses at CBS were interested in advocating their side, not revealing the truth. Attkisson says this and more in her new book, Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington
The New York Post gives us many details:
“Many in the media,” Attkisson writes, “are wrestling with their own souls: They know that ObamaCare is in serious trouble, but they’re conflicted about reporting that. Some worry that the news coverage will hurt a cause that they personally believe in. They’re all too eager to dismiss damaging documentary evidence while embracing, sometimes unquestioningly, the Obama administration’s ever-evolving and unproven explanations.”
One of her bosses had a rule that conservative analysts must always be labeled conservatives, but liberal analysts were simply “analysts.” “And if a conservative analyst’s opinion really rubbed the supervisor the wrong way,” says Attkisson, “she might rewrite the script to label him a ‘right-wing’ analyst.”
She says she asked by Katie Couric about a possible interview with Attorney General Eric Holder on the Fast and Furious scandal. Attkisson, who had done many reports on that subject, said it should be a relevant interview, but after that weekend (without a Couric interview on air) the network began cancelling her stories, saying she had reported everything already. Attkisson wonders if Holder ordered CBS to stop talking about it.
She also believes the Obama administration had someone hack her laptop to listen to her and plant classified documents on her hard drive, possibly intending to use them to prosecute her as needed.
A 1959 essay on creativity by Issac Asimov, that has not been published, has been released by a friend at MIT. In it, Asimov talks about the origin of the theory of evolution, which he says was devised by two men independently, Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.
A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.
Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)
He goes on to say a team hoping to develop great new ideas needs to become comfortable with each other and inspire each other to look forward. (via Prufrock)
I love history because I love romance (by which I mean, not novels by Barbara Cartland, but romantic adventure – swashbuckling and gunplay in long-lost times and distant places). I picked up The Brothers Laffite: The Treacherous World of the Corsairs of the Gulf, by William C. Davis, to get some of the facts behind the legend of Jean Laffite and his brother Pierre. I knew what I was getting into, and was already aware of their sordid side, so I read it with interest.
Most of us know the Laffites as “the pirates who helped Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans.” And they did that, though they weren’t quite as noble as the movies make it seem. They were operating a smuggling operation out of Barataria Island, taking advantage of political instability and the difficulties the US government had enforcing its laws in the newly extended territories of the Louisiana Purchase. When the British fleet sailed in, they seem to have tried to play both sides against the middle (a recurring theme in their story), but the Americans got their hands on them first, so they helped them.
Like most criminals, they never actually got very rich, although they tried to live like it. They seem to have been rather courtly with their (white) prisoners, but at bottom their reality was pretty ignoble. They violated America’s ban on importing slaves through a clever manipulation of the law, first importing the miserable captives illegally, then turning them in as contraband and collecting the reward (Jim Bowie partnered with them in this scam). They were also “filibusters,” a term which originally referred to adventurers, mostly Americans, who set up bogus “revolutionary republics” in Spanish America and then issued letters of marque giving their acts of piracy a cloak of legality. But the Laffites added a characteristic twist of their own – they informed on their fellow filibusters to the Spanish, for pay.
There’s little heroism to find in this story, but what it does offer is a fascinating look into a formative but little-known era of American history. The book is very long, but half of it is footnotes.
According to Michael J. Kruger’s review of Professor Peter Enns’ new book, The Bible Tells Me So: Why Defending Scripture Has Made Us Unable to Read It
But perhaps most illuminating was the inside flap, where the publisher describes the book’s purpose: “In The Bible Tells Me So, Enns wants to do for the Bible what Rob Bell did for hell in Love Wins.”
Not until after I read the book in its entirety did I realize how accurate this comparison actually is. Of course, Bell’s book (also published by HarperOne) challenged a core historical tenet of the Christian faith, namely the belief that hell is real and people actually will go there. Christianity has just been wrong, Bell argues, and we finally need to be set free from the fear and oppression such a belief causes. Bell positions himself as the liberator of countless Christians who have suffered far too long under such a barbaric belief system.
Likewise, Enns is pushing back against another core historical tenet of the Christian faith: our belief about Scripture—what it is and what it does. The Bible isn’t doing what we think it’s doing, he argues. It doesn’t provide basically reliable historical accounts (instead, it’s often filled with myth and rewritten stories). It doesn’t provide consistent theological instruction (about, say, the character of God). And it doesn’t provide clear teaching about how to live (ethics, morality, Christian living). Although Christians have generally always believed these things about Scripture, Enns contends that scholars now know they simply aren’t true. And when Christians try to hold onto such beliefs, it only leads to fear, stress, anxiety, and infighting. Like Bell, Enns is positioned as a liberator able to set believers free from a Bible that just doesn’t work the way they want it to.
In the end, Kruger says Enns’ book wants it both ways. Discover God in the pages of Scripture while understanding most of what’s written there is imaginary and contradictory. Repent and believe in Christ on the cross, but the Bible’s morality is untenable and inapplicable to you.
Ori Pomerantz is a personal friend of mine, and of this blog. So my endorsement of his new e-book, Lying With Memes: Quick, Concise, and Wrong, might be a little suspect (I got a free review copy, by the way, so you can factor that in). But I thought it was a valuable and entertaining little book.
Memes, those short messages pasted on art, like digital posters or vertical bumper stickers, are part of my life, and probably of yours too, if you’re reading this blog. If you use a service like Facebook, you’ve probably laughed or done an arm pump on seeing some, and promptly shared them. Sometimes you learn later that they’re false or misleading, and feel embarrassed. You’ve probably also been angered by some memes, and they may have even sparked arguments and lost you friends.
Ori’s short book is an explanation of how memes are constructed (with how-to instructions), and also a plea for more rational, decent memes. He provides a simple short course in logic (something much needed in our time) and admits that the information he gives may be used or misused. “I hope you will use this knowledge for good,” he writes, “to identify when people try to cheat you, rather than for evil, to cheat people yourself.”
A quick read and not expensive. Recommended.