Diary, Must Know
What a finale! A few days ago after Hillary Clinton gave her magnificent speech, I worried that Obama speech would appear anticlimatic. But he outperformed everyone else at the Cconvention and reminded us why he is the person to lead America forward. Even readers of the Wall Street Journal agreed that he gave a fantastic speech. Click on “More” to see details of the reader poll. You read watch or read the most highly watched convention speech on NYtimes.com. Obama gives an electrifying speech in Denver
You can see the introductory film preceding the speech on Youtube.com
and read Andrew Sullivan’s reaction.
Diary, Must Know
This is one of DAVID BROOKS’S best columns. He has done a lot of reading for you to be able to write about a revolution in our understanding of our brain and what this means for our view of the meaning of life. Enjoy. In 1996, Tom Wolfe wrote a brilliant essay calledThe Neural Buddhists
Diary, Must Know
I have been improving my diet over the past five years. But the new scientific recommendations prompted me to re-evaluate my eating habits. I did not know that processed meet like salami is so bad for you while red meat properly cooked is healthy. Click on “More” to see what foods you should eat or avoid.The latest recommenations for achieving an optimal diet
Diary, Must Know
Ray Fisman filed this interesting report in Slate:When economists began broadly applying their theories of rational choice-making, love and marriage were among the first areas they colonized. Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker laid the foundations back in 1973 with his two-part article “A Theory of Marriage.” Becker imagined society as an immense cocktail party with rational-minded daters searching for the most desirable partner who would have them. His analysis predicted a pattern of “positive assortative matching,” where men and women of similar desirability would partner with one another.Are men and women different in how they chose their dates?
Diary, Must Know
As readers of this web diary know, I love the New Yorker magazine. It happens rarely that I truly dislike an article in what I consider the best magazine in the world. A few weeks ago, however, I was quite disappointed with Jane Kramer’s portrait of Pope Benedict. I felt that she was uncharacteristically off mark, failing to get at the core of what makes Benedict tick. As I wrote previously, the tragedy of the present Pope is that when having to choose between his deep love for the traditions of the church and his love for humans beings, he sides with the traditions. But he is clearly not a reactionary nor a fool. A few days ago, I read an summary of what the Pope says about evolution in a recent German language book on Creation and Evolution, which was based on a conference attended by the leader of the catholic church. The Pope, confirming my sense that he is a darn smart fellow, did not claim that the Darwin’s theory of evolution is wrong, but simply holds that it does not explain everything. Even a hardcore Darwinist can agree this position. Last night I read a fantastic article in the Economist surveying the present backlash against Darwinism, which did a much better job in portraying Benedict’s intellectual positions. For me the most interesting part of the article was to see how the catholic church itself is divided on how to deal with Darwin’s insights. Father George Coyne takes the most interesting position.News from the battle between Science and Religion
Diary, Must Know
The reason why people who are convinced of the existence of God are called believers and not knowers is that there is so little direct evidence that God is in charge of our lives. If God appeared in the sky over Manhattan and announced for all New Yorkers to hear that he or she (God may be a she after all) was going to lift the Empire Sate Buidling and to drop it in Mecca, and made good on his or her deed, nobody could dispute the power of this giant. The spy satellites now encircling the globe would record this amazing deed and those who still think it was a hoax could travel to New York and Mecca to verify God’s action. Psychologists have recently conducted experiments that shed light on why people all over the world subscribe to the idea that there is a God who micro-manages our fates although God does not appear in public outings of the kind I just described. Sharon Begly reported on these illuminating experiments in an article published in the Wall Street Journal.God and the Human Brain
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