If the Democrats want to emerge from this primary ready to face Republicans in the general election, they need to find a cohesive, defensible way to talk about their foreign policy and how it differs from that of Republicans.

How to Talk Foreign Policy

You may not always like Clive Thompson's work, but he may interest you here.

For whatever reasons — maybe the reality fatigue I've felt — a lot of literary writers are trying their hand at speculative fiction. Philip Roth used a "counterfactual" history — what if Nazi sympathizers in the US won the 1940 election? — to explore anti-Semitism in The Plot Against America. Cormac McCarthy muses on the nature of morality in the Hobbesian anarchy of his novel The Road. Then there's the genre-bending likes of Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Susanna Clarke, and Margaret Atwood (whom I like to think of as a sci-fi novelist trapped inside a literary author).

Those aren't writers whose books are adorned with embossed dragons. But that doesn't mean they don't owe that dragon a large debt.

Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing

Edward Tufte video on the iPhone. Said to be a must-see.

The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information--too often leaving users with "Where am I?" puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.

To do so requires increasing the information resolution of the screen by the hardware (higher resolution screens) and by screen design (eliminating screen-hogging computer administrative debris, and distributing information adjacent in space).

This video shows some of the resolution-enhancing methods of the iPhone, along with a few places for improvements in resolution.

Interface design and the iPhone

Flare is a collection of ActionScript 3 classes for building a wide variety of interactive visualizations. For example, flare can be used to build basic charts, complex animations, network diagrams, treemaps, and more. Flare is written in the ActionScript 3 programming language and can be used to build visualizations that run on the web in the Adobe Flash Player. Flare applications can be built using the free Adobe Flex SDK or Adobe's Flex Builder IDE. Flare is based on prefuse, a full-featured visualization toolkit written in Java.

flare | visualization on the web

Memo: war not over. File under: kaleidoscopic.

Despite their advantages, many Diyala tribes are being overwhelmed by the scale of violence in the province, parts of which remain a haven for Sunni insurgents. Accounts of killings of volunteers in Diyala resemble Baghdad’s “intelligence war” less than they do conventional warfare.

Sheik Jafari said that 13 tribesmen were killed during one recent five-hour gun battle. Fighters for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia are also blamed for the assassinations of several high-ranking sheiks in the province, including two tribal chiefs: Faiz Lafta al-Obeidi and Abu Sadjat, who was killed when a suicide bomber leapt onto his car.

While the attacks are taking a toll on Awakening members, they are causing even more damage to the delicate relationships between former insurgents and the government.

In Fadhil, the Awakening leader, Khalid al-Qaisi, said he had little hope that Iraqi politicians would support the movement and offered this opinion of Baghdad’s Shiite-led elite: “The garbage in Fadhil is better than the Iraqi government.”

From the archive:

LAUNCELOT: We were in the nick of time. You were in great peril.

GALAHAD: I don't think I was.

LAUNCELOT: Yes you were. You were in terrible peril.

GALAHAD: Look, let me go back in there and face the peril.

LAUNCELOT: No, it's too perilous.

GALAHAD: Look, it's my duty as a knight to sample as much peril as I can.

LAUNCELOT: No, we've got to find the Holy Grail. Come on!

GALAHAD: Oh, let me have just a little bit of peril?

LAUNCELOT: No. It's unhealthy.

Attacks Imperil US-Backed Militias in Iraq

Jeffrey Goldberg:

A report from the new Middle East—and a glimpse of its possible future

After Iraq

General David Petraeus has a sterling reputation, the love of the press, and the adoration of the GOP.

Don't be surprised if a Democratic presidential win in '08 starts an effort to recruit Petraeus as the Republican candidate in '12.

I wouldn't be surprised but I think it has zero chance of going anywhere.

Petraeus '12

Fouad Ajami:

I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire (*) with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.

(*) From "After the Apocalypse", a review by Michael Chabon of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road":

As they travel the father feeds his son a story, the nearest that he can come to a creed or a reason to keep on going: that he and his son are "carrying the fire." In what this fire might consist he can never specify, but from this hopeful fiction or hopeless truth the boy seems to intuit a promise: that life will not always be thus; that it will improve, that beauty and purpose, sunlight and green plenty will return; in short that everything is going to be "okay," a word which both characters endlessly repeat to each other, touching it compulsively like a sore place or a missing tooth. They are carrying the fire through a world destroyed by fire, and therefore—a leap of logic or faith that by the time the novel opens has become almost insurmountable for both of them—the boy must struggle on, so that he can be present at, or somehow contribute to, the eventual rebirth of the world.

The Clash

George Packer:

The Clinton-Obama battle reveals two very different ideas of the Presidency.

From the recent archive, here's Manohla Dargis:

Americans consume a lot of garbage, but that may be because they don’t have real choices: 16 of the top box-office earners last weekend — some good, almost all from big studios — monopolized 33,353 of the country’s 38,415 screens. The remaining 78 releases duked it out on the leftover screens.

I doubt that most moviegoers would prefer the relentlessly honest “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” which involves a young woman seeking an illegal abortion, over “Juno,” an ingratiating comedy about a teenager who carries her pregnancy to term. But I wish they had the choice.

Here is Anthony Lane, this week:

He is a terminator, expert in the ending of advanced pregnancies, and you should be warned that “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” flinches neither from the procedures nor the outcome of his trade. There is plenty here to fuel both sides of the abortion debate: the grim and possibly fatal results of driving the practice underground will strengthen the hand of the pro-choice lobby, but, equally, when Otilia kneels on the bathroom floor, surveying the remnant of lost humanity, half wrapped in a towel, the look of dark and wondering pity in her eyes is enough to convince us that here is a deed of unutterable gravity.

Yet this is not an issue movie. We are not being forced to vote, and the characters are defined less by any stated beliefs than by the moral texture of their actions. Look carefully at Bebe as he unpacks his briefcase of crude tools: he is made faceless, filmed from chest to thigh, and that suits his status as a predatory machine. And, once he has departed, having exacted a terrible payment for his services, look at Otilia: She leaves Gabita to rest and goes, as promised, to her boyfriend’s parents’ house for a birthday dinner. There she sits at a table, surrounded by gleaming food and idle chatter, her thoughts miles away and fathoms deep. Again, hands reach in from the side, this time for pickles and wine, but the camera holds steady, minute upon minute, and we gaze at her, face to face. How can people feast when she has just come from the pits of degradation, and must shortly return to dispose of an unwanted fetus? Disposal, incidentally, is recommended via the garbage chute of a high-rise apartment building; try going from this film to “Sweeney Todd,” with its corpses dumped for comic effect, and see how long you last.

The Choice

File under Atlanta is just as hosed as Munich:

The last 20 years have witnessed the rise of disaggregated "clusters," "networks," or "ecosystems" of firms in a number of industries, including computers, telecommunications, and pharmaceuticals. In these clusters, different firms design and produce the various components of a complex artifact (such as the processor, peripherals, and software of a computer system), and different firms specialize in the various stages of a complex production process. This paper considers the pricing behavior and profitability of these so-called modular clusters. Baldwin and Woodard isolate the offsetting price effects in a model, and show how they might operate in large as well as in small clusters. Key concepts include:

* Clusters operating under open, public standards may have higher prices and profits than those operating under closed, proprietary standards.
* Cluster forms of industrial organization may not be conducive to all kinds of innovation. In particular, innovations that add new layers of functionality to the system, and thus increase total demand, will not be adequately rewarded relative to the value they create.
* It is important to learn how cluster configurations affect incentives to supply different forms of innovation, and how firms respond to these cross-layer dependencies in formulating their long-term strategies.

Competition in Modular Clusters