The Defense Science Board will conduct a summer study on a topic that would have been inconceivable when the Defense Department established the board 50 years ago this year: the military implications of Internet search engines, online journals and "blogs."

The terms of reference are available.

Defense Science Board to Study Impact of MemeStreams on War in Iraq

This article seems likely to provoke discussion.

In a nutshell: it sure looks like everything is going to hell, but it's really going to be coming up roses here in a little while. (Maybe.)

What the world has now is new cities with young populations and old cities with old populations. How the dialogue between them plays out will determine much of the nature of the next half century. The convergence of the two major trends, globalization and rampant urbanization, means that all cities are effectively one city now.

It's one city, and it's a Temporary Autonomous Zone.

The TAZ by its very nature seizes every available means to realize itself--it will come to life whether in a cave or an L-5 Space City--but above all it will live, now, or as soon as possible, in however suspect or ramshackle a form, spontaneously, without regard for ideology or even anti-ideology.

Having said that, while we're on the religion tip:

"Pentecostalism is ... the first major world religion to have grown up almost entirely in the soil of the modern urban slum” and “since 1970, and largely because of its appeal to slum women and its reputation for being colour-blind, [Pentecostalism] has been growing into what is arguably the largest self-organized movement of urban poor people on the planet."

In Gibson's version of the Sprawl, most people are poor, but I don't remember anything about everyone being deeply religious.

City Planet, by Stewart Brand

Some notes about Finite and Infinite Games:

There are at least two kinds of games: finite and infinite.

A finite game is a game that has fixed rules and boundaries, that is played for the purpose of winning and thereby ending the game.

An infinite game has no fixed rules or boundaries. In an infinite game you play with the boundaries and the purpose is to continue the game.

Finite players are serious; infinite games are playful.

Finite players try to control the game, predict everything that will happen, and set the outcome in advance. They are serious and determined about getting that outcome. They try to fix the future based on the past.

Infinite players enjoy being surprised. Continuously running into something one didn't know will ensure that the game will go on. The meaning of the past changes depending on what happens in the future.

Your daily dose of McLuhan (here excerpting Life magazine):

The traditional enemies of the Willigiman-Wallalua are the Wittaia, a people exactly like themselves in language, dress and custom ... Every week or two the Willigiman-Wallalua and their enemies arrange a formal battle at one of the traditional fighting grounds. In comparison with the catastrophic conflicts of "civilized" nations, these frays seem more like a dangerous field sport than true war. Each battle lasts but a single day, always stops before nightfall (because of the danger of ghosts) or if it begins to rain (no one wants to get his hair or ornaments wet). The men are very accurate with their weapons -- they have all played war games since they were small boys -- but they are equally adept at dodging, and hence are rarely hit by anything.

The truly lethal part of this primitive warfare is not the formal battle but the sneak raid or stealthy ambush in which not only men but women and children are mercilessly slaughtered ...

This perpetual bloodshed is carried on for none of the usual reasons for waging war. No territory is won or lost; no goods or prisoners seized ... They fight because they enthusiastically enjoy it, because it is to them a vital function of the complete man, and because they feel they must satisfy the ghosts of slain companions.

Back to the book:

You can do what you do seriously, because you must do it, because you must survive to the end, and you are afraid of dying and other consequences. Or, you can do everything you do playfully, always knowing you have a choice, having no need to survive the way you are, allowing every element of the play to transform you, taking pleasure in every surprise you meet. Those are the differences between finite and infinite players.

Exactly who are the ... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

The US Census Bureau, due to issues related to the separation of church and state, does not ask questions related to faith or religion on the decennial census. Accordingly, there are few sources of comprehensive data on church membership and religious affiliation for the United States. Perhaps the leading organization to address this gap is the Glenmary Research Center, which publishes Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000. The following series of county-level choropleth maps, which reveals the distribution of the larger and more regionally concentrated church bodies, draws on this resource. The maps are in GIF format.

Map Gallery of Religion in the United States

To those of you who don't know, our country has never been served by a more competent and professional military. For that reason, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent statement that "we" made the "right strategic decisions" but made thousands of "tactical errors" is an outrage. It reflects an effort to obscure gross errors in strategy by shifting the blame for failure to those who have been resolute in fighting. The truth is, our forces are successful in spite of the strategic guidance they receive, not because of it.

Why Iraq Was a Mistake

On newsstands starting April 25, 2006

* Jorge Castaneda contends that only Latin America's ex-communist left can stop the region's populists.
* Lawrence Freedman declares that Margaret Thatcher's forgotten war turned Tony Blair into "Bush's poodle."
* Michael Shifter shows how Washington can checkmate Hugo Chavez.
* John Rapley argues that the future of international relations will be a lot like the Middle Ages.
* Martin Feldstein says that a rise in U.S. household savings could be a catastrophe for the world economy.
* Ruth Greenspan Bell explains that stopping climate change will require empowering developing countries.
* Samuel Palmisano, CEO of IBM, hails the advent of the global corporation.

Plus: Pro-Americans in Europe: Walter Russell Mead reviews Bernard-Henry Levy's American Vertigo and Josef Joffe's Uberpower, and Haaretz columnist Tom Segev reviews Gershom Gorenberg's The Accidental Empire.

Try a Google search for

"John Rapley" "middle ages" "foreignaffairs"

UPDATE: The essay is available in HTML. The full text is available in PDF (though it is rather poorly formatted). See also this PBS special on El Salvador, which reprints extended excerpts from the essay.

In the Next Issue of Foreign Affairs

Today, we're happy to release the beta version of Google Toolbar 2 for Firefox.

This new release includes feed integration with the Google Personalized Homepage and a number of other feed readers. We've made searching better by including previous queries, spelling corrections, and suggestions for popular choices. Gmail fans might appreciate having the mailto: links in Firefox open a compose window in Gmail -– no more copying and pasting email addresses. And to combat the ever-increasing threat of phishing, we've integrated the Safe Browsing extension into Toolbar to alert you when a page is trying to steal sensitive information.

Google Toolbar v2 for Firefox fans

It should be clear to anyone who has read Kakutani's reviews that she has an estimable intelligence; she backs this up with what must be many real or virtual all-nighters in which she digests every word ever published by the writer under review. She takes books seriously, a valuable and ever-rarer trait. Furthermore, in my observation, she is more or less right in her judgments most of the time.

Assessing Michiko Kakutani. By Ben Yagoda

According to one who was present, Churchill suddenly blurted out: "Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?"

Among the Dead Cities

Having spent the past 23 years editing a scholarly journal, Philosophy and Literature, I have come to know many lucid and lively academic writers. But for every superb stylist there are a hundred whose writing is no better than adequate — or just plain awful.

Fed up, I resolved to find out just how low the state of academic writing had sunk. I could use the Internet to solicit the most egregious examples of awkward, jargon-clogged academic prose from all over the English-speaking world. And so the annual Bad Writing Contest was born.

Denis Dutton on Bad Writing