New Horizons: David Freedman from New Horizons in Education

Bob Kustra interviews David Freedman about his book, "Wrong" about why experts get it wrong and how to discern when their advice is off target.

Download the New Horizons podcast here. Last month, The Atlantic published an article by Freedman called, "Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science." In the article, he describes biostatistician's presentation that asked: "were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good?" This is the way that the protagonist of Freedman's story is introduced, Dr. John Ioannidis; "Ioannidis has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their bad science." The article's definitely worth the time; find it here. See also, this New Yorker article, by Jonah Lehrer. The article's called, "The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?" Find that New Yorker article here.

Majority of Public Deems Afghanistan War 'Not Worth Fighting' from The Takeaway: Early Edition by feedback@thetakeaway.org (Public Radio International and WNYC Radio)

The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that 60 percent of Americans say the Afghanistan war is "not worth fighting." This is a record low in public support of the war. Mary Galeti, the wife of Afghanistan veteran First Lieutenant Russell Galeti, and Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs and author of "How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle," describe their observations of public opinion, and what it might mean for the Obama administration's efforts in Afghanistan going forward. We asked how your support for the War in Afghanistan has changed since it started nine years ago. Here are some of the responses we got by text message.

Download that podcast here. With The Atlantic, Rose recently opined on the whole issue of Wikileaks:

"It's actually pretty striking how generally intelligent and sensible and straightforward the officials involved have been," said Foreign Affairs Editor Gideon Rose. "U.S. policy turns out to be pretty much what we say it is on the surface. There are not secret, nefarious, hidden agendas behind the scenes." The cables revealed a diplomatic corps made up not of soulless, colorless bureaucrats but of perceptive, human, and well-intentioned people, Rose said. If anything, the cable dump makes the U.S. look weak (and incompetent in preventing leaks) rather than hegemonic or scheming. "The United States is seen as trying to do sensible things but blocked by the intractability of various situations and the obduracy of other currents. This does portray a world in which the U.S. is not dominant," Rose said, while noting that such an interpretation may be realistic, given the truth that "diplomacy is always a matter of getting a less bad option."

What Was Clarence Thomas's Wife Thinking? from The Atlantic Wire by John Hudson

Picking at a 19-year-old scab, Ginni Thomas, the wife of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, wants an apology from Anita Hill, the woman who testified against her husband during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings. On Oct. 9, Ms. Thomas called Hill's office at Brandeis University, saying: Good morning, Anita Hill, it's Ginni Thomas. I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband. So give it some thought and certainly pray about this and come to understand why you did what you did. Okay have a good day. Ms. Thomas's voice mail revives a controversy that conservatives and liberals dispute to this day. Before the infamous confirmation hearing, Hill was an aide to Mr. Thomas and accused him of making profane sexual comments, such as discussing his penis size and the placement of a pubic hair on his soft drink. Mr. Thomas denied the allegations, calling attacks by Democrats a "high-tech lynching." When Hill received the voice mail, she notified Brandeis University police.

Read the Atlantic piece, here.

BREAKING RANKS: Sadly, Travel Writing Is Dead from The Atlantic Wire by Erik Hayden

In new series of essays, Foreign Policy magazine declares travel writing dead. The easy culprit to blame is Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love, but the truth is that bestselling memoir was only the final "nail in the coffin" for a once-proud genre that has increasingly become "brainless," asserts Graeme Wood (also a contributing editor at The Atlantic). He explains that an ideal travel writer is "a sort of prophet" who has a "way of seeing the world through the eyes of one who has the time and luxury to look at it directly, rather than through the distortions of propagandists and wishful thinkers." That ideal has now been perhaps irreversibly tarnished by an "internet age frivolity" that threatens to combine "the worst of the traveler and the worst of the homebody":
The writer goes overseas but brings back news about a tedious inner crisis, leaving undisturbed any insights about the places visited. Eat, Pray, Love -- to take only the easiest target as an example -- is a whole memoir premised on the notion that even the most decadent, boring, and conventional kinds of travel somehow heal the soul and can turn a suburban ninny into a Herodotus or a Basho.
But why has travel writing devolved into such a "narcissistic" genre? As best as Wood can see, it's simple: "it is easier than ever to travel, and not at all easier to write well." Now that perspectives of "previously arcane hideaways" are now more numerous, and the accounts written quicker than ever, the views have regrettably become "far less exquisite."

If you don't particularly agree, Foreign Policy has posted a contrasting piece: Travel Writing Lives!

Hear, hear. I honestly couldn't get through it; it read like my kid sister's blog; just, instead of homework and the cool new game on Facebook, there were musings about being abroad, and getting into people's pants. But, really: who cares? I wasn't interested, but I can see the commercial value for something like this, and it's obvious that the thing could take off, given the right sort of marketing. And it obviously accomplished what its masters had in store for the text. Right on. Though: with the right kind of web marketing, the publishers probably could have made more in ad dollars had they released the book in pieces, through a blog. Again, with the right marketing team behind it to take it viral; instead of millions of readers you could have had a few hundred million readers; you know, since it was laid out so linearly, it would've been perfect for the blog format. Just download the free Kindle sample to check it out; it's one of those things that you just want to check out, because all of the kids at school are talking about it.

Why E-books Are Such a Big Deal from Books - Culture - The Atlantic by Peter Osnos

So far, it is fair to say that the book is off to an excellent start, poised for success. But here is where the traditional method of publishing books, as it has long functioned, becomes so frustrating. PublicAffairs printed 8,010 copies of the book, and to date has shipped 4,964. The total sales in the first two weeks, according to our tracking report, are 304 copies. Most brick and mortar stores--the major chains and the independents—cannot possibly have more than two or three copies on hand, and these are unlikely to be displayed in any significant way. For all the whining about those numbers, however, the important fact to point out is that The New Nobility is available to anyone with interest in the subject, even if it admittedly is geared to an audience of finite size. Not only that, the consumer can choose from a variety of formats and price points in deciding where and how to make the purchase. The surest way to get the book is from Amazon, where the hardcover is in stock at $17.79 (discounted from the retail price of $26.95) along with a Kindle e-book version at $14.82 and a downloadable audio from Amazon's Audible for $14.96. From Apple's iPad bookstore, you can have the e-book for $12.99. Barnes & Noble has the hardcover for sale, but not the e-book. The likelihood of The New Nobility becoming a bestseller is, let's face it, nil. But instead of being lost in the great mountain of new releases that are unloaded at stores each month and almost immediately returned as excess inventory, the book is, at most, a few clicks away from ownership—and that represents a heartening development for authors and publishers. Even more encouraging is the pace at which the digital marketplace is growing. According to Publishers Weekly, sales of e-books for the first seven months of 2010 are up 191 percent over the past year, and totaled $219.5 million in revenue. In a report last week, IMS Research predicted sales of 15.6 million iPads for 2010, and an astonishing 46 million in 2011. I've done my e-book reading on the iPad since it was released in April, not just because of the quality of the reading experience, but because my wife has taken full possession of the Kindle, on which she maintains a library of fiction that assures she is never without something worth reading.

Read on at the Atlantic, here.

Do Atheists Know More About Christianity Than Christians? from The Atlantic Wire by Heather Horn

A new Pew survey is pretty much guaranteed to ruffle the feathers of the faithful. In a survey of religious knowledge, Americans did fairly poorly, displaying little knowledge of world religions. More provocatively, Americans did not even know much about their own religions. A shocking forty-five percent of Catholics incorrectly answered a question about Catholicism and Communion, for example. To make matters worse, it seems that those who scored highest on this survey were, in fact, atheists and agnostics. The next-highest scoring groups were Jews and Mormons. 'Religion Congruence Fallacy' That's what "academics call it," writes Jeffrey Weiss at Politics Daily, referring to the phenomenon of "Americans who say they belong to a particular religious tradition tend[ing] not to act like it," whether through premarital sex or divorce or what-have-you. He points out that, until this survey, there had been little evidence to support scholar Stephen Prothero's claim that "Americans are both deeply religious and profoundly ignorant about religion." Weiss is skeptical, though, about some of the questions (on which Prothero, apparently, was consulted), which, he says " read to me as if they were taken from a religion version of Trivial Pursuit." That said, he's fascinated by the fact that Jews, Mormons, and the "religiously unaffiliated" do so well, and is particularly struck by the responses to two questions [...]

Read the full Atlantic article here. See also: Statistics on Religion in America Report -- Pew Forum on Religion, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert

The Case Against Jonathan Franzen: Responses from Books - Culture - The Atlantic by Eleanor Barkhorn

When Jonathan Franzen's Freedom was released last month, critics showered it with praise. NPR called it "surprisingly moving and even hopeful"; the New York Times said it's "an indelible portrait of our times"; New York Magazine declared it "a work of total genius." Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club—despite her fraught past with Franzen.

Oh, how they parry and joust, over a whole lot of nothing. It's a fine book, quit marketing already. Read The Atlantic hoopla here.

William Gibson and the Future of the Future from Books - Culture - The Atlantic by Douglas Gorney

Compared to the AI entities and digitally-enhanced hackers of his debut novel, Neuromancer, William Gibson's current cast of characters is remarkably dialed-down. But their quest is the same—to gain an edge by identifying critical, emerging patterns of data among the noise. In his new novel, Zero History, global marketing genius Hubertus Bigend and his team find themselves in less virtual though equally dangerous realms of military contracting and fashion, chasing the holy grail of post-modern marketing—the secret brand.

Leave to The Atlantic to fill in, just as we thought that we'd cleared our plate. "Oh yeah, Zero History came out the other week!" And it's out on the Kindle, which is a relief; 'cause we're getting awfully bored of stumping the old Kindle catalog, e.g. when are we going to see Neuromancer on the Kindle?

SPATWATCH: Michael Moore's Labor-Day Rant Against Rahm Emanuel from The Atlantic Wire by Erik Hayden

Last week's release of ex-Obama administration "car czar" Steven Rattner's book "Overhaul" came bundled with one strategically placed leak intended to drum up buzz: Rahm Emanuel saying "Fuck the UAW [United Auto Workers union]." The backlash to the throwaway line, which garnered predictable reactions from Beltway pundits, appeared to dissipate during the Labor Day weekend daze. Liberal gadfly Michael Moore, however, wasn't going to let that one slide. In an article for The Daily Beast, Moore declares a "Happy F---ing Labor Day" to you, Rahm, before railing against Obama's White House Chief of Staff in a 1,200 word expletive-filled screed. While the filmmaker admits that he "likes" Emanuel, he can't understand why Rahm would choose to target organized "working people" in such a way. "Maybe Rattner got confused because you [Rahm] drop a lot of F-bombs," Moore mused. Here are the highlights from his history lesson/tirade:

Read the full Atlantic story here.