Christopher Hitchens writes in the latest issue of City Journal:

The most alarming sentences that I have read in a long time came from the pen of my fellow atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith, at the end of a September Los Angeles Times column upbraiding American liberals for their masochistic attitude toward Islamist totalitarianism. Harris concluded:

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists. To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

As Martin Amis said in the essay [part 2, part 3] that prompted Steyn’s contempt: “What is one to do with thoughts like these?” How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?

See also this interview with Amis:

The novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme. It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow.

Facing the Islamist Menace

We keep trying to explain away American fundamentalism.

Through a Glass, Darkly | Harper's

There is some truth here.

The larger problem with blogs, it seems to me, is quality. Most of them are pretty awful. Many, even some with large followings, are downright appalling.

Presumably MemeStreams can help with this.

This element -- "here's my opinion" -- is necessarily modified and partly determined by the "right now." Instant response, with not even a day of delay, impairs rigor. It is also a coagulant for orthodoxies. We rarely encounter sustained or systematic blog thought -- instead, panics and manias; endless rehearsings of arguments put forward elsewhere; and a tendency to substitute ideology for cognition. The participatory Internet, in combination with the hyperlink, which allows sites to interrelate, appears to encourage mobs and mob behavior.

The memetics model within MemeStreams needs to enable all of the genetic operators -- namely, replication of entire genomes via cross-over and with mutation.

Because political blogs are predictable, they are excruciatingly boring. More acutely, they promote intellectual disingenuousness, with every constituency hostage to its assumptions and the party line.

Grieving over the lost establishment is pointless, and kind of sad. But in acceding so easily to the imperatives of the Internet, we've allowed decay to pass for progress.

Why Blogs Suck | WSJ

This is a breezy little piece about the tough competition to get into the New Yorker.

It's Wednesday afternoon and David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, is picking cartoons. A few minutes ago, Bob Mankoff, the magazine's cartoon editor, entered Remnick's office carrying three wire baskets and 81 cartoons. The baskets are labeled Yes, No and Maybe. The cartoons are the ones Mankoff chose from the nearly 1,000 he received since the previous Wednesday's meeting. Now, with the help of Managing Editor Jacob Lewis, Remnick will decide which ones the magazine will buy.

Very Fine Lines | Picking Cartoons for the New Yorker

MOST DANGEROUS 25:

1 St. Louis, MO

St. Louis Named Most Dangerous U.S. City

Having spent time getting to know young British Muslims, I believe that comments like Mr. Straw’s will be counterproductive. That is because the niqab is a symptom and not a cause of rising tensions.

"The young women who choose to wear the niqab, Mr. Rehman told me, are "rebelling against what their parents tell them to do, they’re trying to differentiate themselves.”

Following up on the "let it go" thread.

Covered Faces, Open Rebellion

The tone of the video -- a seven-minute clip, entitled “Impossible is nothing” -- seems too serious to be parody, yet too over-the-top to be credible.

Mr. Vayner’s experience shows the not-so-friendly side of the social-networking phenomenon.

He said he may have lost his chance to work on Wall Street, and added that he may not succeed in securing a financial job at all.

This should be a lesson to those in the APC program.

A Student’s Video Résumé Gets Attention (Some of It Unwanted)

His bedroom is at one end of a dusty old apartment on a chaotic street in the center of the city. At the other end is his office, his desk piled high with papers. In between are books — some 30,000 of them — arranged neatly on floor-to-ceiling shelves. One section is devoted to the 100 or so books he has written and translated over the course of his lifetime.

"Gamal al-Banna has opinions that fall outside the scope of religion. The people, of course, oppose anybody who talks about things that violate religion."

He doesn’t press his ideas, but instead takes the long-term view, hoping to plant a few seeds that will, in time, take root and spread. He recognizes that, at the moment, the other side is winning the contest of ideas in Egypt, and the region.

"If religion was correctly understood, it would be a power of liberation. But it is misunderstood, and so it is driving us backward."

"My idea is that man is the aim of religion, and religion only a means. What is prevalent today is the opposite."

"They don't want freedom of thought. Free thought, that will condemn them."

A Liberal Brother at Odds With the Muslim Brotherhood

Anyone who has ever taught at a college or university must have had this experience.

You’re in the middle of something that you do every day: standing at a lectern in a dusty room, for example, lecturing to a roomful of teen-agers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones; or running a seminar, hoping to find the question that will make people talk even though it’s spring and no one has done the reading; or sitting in a department meeting as your colleagues act out their various professional identities, the Russian historians spreading gloom, the Germanists accidentally taking Poland, the Asianists grumbling about Western ignorance and lack of civility, and the Americanists expressing surprise at the idea that the world has other continents.

Suddenly, you find yourself wondering, how you can possibly be doing this.

The Nutty Professors | The New Yorker

When Europeans hear the words “America”, “religion” and “family values”, they think of brimstone preachers raging against unconventional domestic arrangements. They often forget the more positive role American churches play in nurturing conventional families.

What is striking, though, is the gulf between the fertility rate in the United States and other rich countries.

The fertility rate in Italy and Spain is [such that] without immigration, the number of Spaniards and Italians would halve in 42 years.

Can America cope with a relentlessly expanding population?

Whereas in the EU by 2050 there will be fewer than two adults of working age for every person over 65, the proportion in America will be less scary, at almost three to one. The problems of growth, says Mr Klineberg, are easier to deal with than the problems of decline.

If demography is destiny, [the world] will not have to find out what a Chinese hyperpower looks like: the fertility rate in China is only 1.7, and there are almost no immigrants.

Now we are 300,000,000