Beacon Broadside

Link Roundup: Teaching and Writing, SCOTUS Can't Get No Respect, and Beacon Broadside at One Year

In the New York Times Magazine last weekend, David Gessner, author of Soaring With Fidel, weighed the pros and cons of teaching and writing, and teaching writing.

Salon talks with Carmine Sarracino about our porn-saturated culture. Sarracino is co-author of The Porning of America.

David Moore (The Opinion Makers) was on Greater Boston this Monday (Sept. 22nd) talking about why pre-election polling is suspect. 

On BlackProf, Sherrilyn Ifill analyzes the loss of prestige suffered by an isolationist, ideological Supreme Court.

This Sunday, a handful of politically conservative pastors intend to flout their churches' non-profit status by openly endorsing John McCain from the pulpit. The Interfaith Alliance has countered their action, urging pastors of all political stripes to pledge to refrain from direct political endorsement.

Beacon Broadside is One Year Old

That first year goes so fast! To commemorate our first anniversary, here are the most popular posts of the past year based on page hits. They represent a good cross-section of the topics and voices we've featured here on the blog. If you've enjoyed the blog during this past year, join our Facebook Blog Network or Fan Page. Thanks for reading! 

The Summer Games: Raising an Olympian by Mark Hyman

The Email That Ended a Career: Intelligent Design and Texas Education by Glenn Branch

Sarah Palin: No Friend to Children and Adults with Disabilities by Jane Bernstein

Redefining the Pill: Bush Administration Calls Contraception "Abortion" by Carole Joffe

Obama's Mixed Heritage: A Mother's Perspective by Barbara Katz Rothman

The Porning of Miley Cyrus by Kevin Scott

Wal-Mart Takes Greenwashing to a New Level by Stacy Mitchell

Read This! Instilling a Love of Reading in Kids by Chris Mercogliano

Edna St. Vincent Millay by Mary Oliver

On the Road with Mary Oliver by Helene Atwan

Monday Link Roundup: Fresh Food, Seeds, Bulbs and more

The Seattle-Post Intelligencer ran a feature last week about poor access to fresh, healthy food in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. The article quotes Mark Winne, author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty: "Unless cities begin to realize they have a role to play in ensuring access to healthy food, then we're going to keep stumbling along." Parke Wilde at the U.S. Food Policy blog posted a more personal take on the issue, focusing on the definition of "food desert" and the focus on chain supermarket stores as a marker of access to food. (Parke also recently interviewed Mark Winne for USFPB.)

In the wake of the leaked email showing that the VA tried to downplay the suicide epidemic, Penny Coleman wrote this analysis of the DoD's annual suicide prevention conference at Alternet.

Gristmill posted an excellent review of Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds by Claire Hope Cummings. You can also read an excerpt of Uncertain Peril at Alternet.

Last Tuesday, USA Today columnist Laura Vanderkam discussed Seattle's novel approach to homelessness: give people a place to live. The piece features Rev. Craig Rennebohm, author of Souls in the Hands of a Tender God: Stories of the Search for Home and Healing on the Street.

The other "L" word: Stephen Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity, offers Obama some advice on how to take back the liberal label. (Once he does that, can he take back arugula?)

There's some fantastic coverage of the PEN World Voices Festival over at MetaxuCafe. Nice redesign of that site!

Bookseller David Unowsky offers some advice on how to get your book on the shelves. The piece is aimed at self-pubbed authors, but has some good insights for any author.

And here's a great springtime parable from our friends at UUWorld.

Media and Links

Faith in Public Life are hosting the Compassion Forum this Sunday, April 13th. The discussion of "wide-ranging and probing discussions of policies related to pressing moral issues that are bridging ideological divides now more than ever, including poverty, global AIDS, climate change and human rights," as well as the crisis in Darfur, will include Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama (but not John McCain, who declined his invitation). The event will air on CNN at 8pm. Among the members of Faith in Public Life who will be asking questions at the event is Eboo Patel, author of Acts of Faith and director of the Interfaith Youth Core.

Of interest on other blogs:

Nancy Polikoff explains that the tax advantages of marriage aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Penguin Bookshop in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, has been documenting the green overhaul of their store on their blog.

Patricia E. Bauer posts a memorial to Melissa Riggio, the daughter of Barnes & Nobel CEO Steve Riggio. who died of leukemia recently at the age of 20. "Ms. Riggio, who had Down syndrome, was the inspiration for Barnes & Noble’s creation of a special section of books about children with special needs."

Wendy Kaminer on the lawsuit pending in Indiana that requires bookstores that sell "sexuality explicit material" to register with the state.

Harlyn Aizley agonizes over what to do with her poem-a-day emails.

Dictionary-phile Ammon Shea on how dictionaries ruined his Scrabble game.

Storytelling in Many Media

by Allison Trzop

Boston recently hosted an assembly of smart and passionate people focused hard on the buzzword "change." The event wasn’t a political rally, but the 2008 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism, themed "Storytelling in Many Voices, Many Media." The three-day conference ably met one of the goals of new Director Constance Hale: “Showcasing journalists who are creating exciting work in digital forms while at the same time celebrating those whose work reflects the intelligence, integrity, depth, and creativity that have long been the hallmarks of the best of traditional media.”

From the Pulitzer-Prize winning veterans to J-school students, there was an undercurrent of job anxiety, peppered with optimism, at the conference. Speakers and attendees together tackled tough issues including declining print subscriptions, rapidly evolving technology, and what exactly today’s consumers of news want. There were few definitive answers to that question, but some exquisitely well-informed guesses. Senior Producer at nytimes.com Derrick Henry helpfully pointed to the concise and prescient report, "Creative Destruction: An Exploratory Look at News on the Internet" (pdf). Henry spoke on a panel alongside Russell Contreras, multimedia reporter for the Boston Globe, who also hosts the Globe podcast on minority issues called "Across the Divide." Both Henry and Contreras are doing amazing audiovisual work online and, most importantly, training others--which is crucial to satisfying twenty-first century news' consumers. It seems today that slideshows and sound are important tools in storytelling that are only starting to be used to full advantage.

I was struck by how often I saw the ID "multimedia journalist"--Jane Ellen Stevens was one prominent example--and how many of the speakers’ bios began with a website, like Jessie Scanlon, senior writer for BusinessWeek.com. I think it’s a powerful sign when the nation's top journalists say that they regard their stories placement on the home page as the equivalent to front page, above the fold. And I was excited by the wide range of online work I saw, impressive and varied content beyond the static page--including James Pindell's politicker.com; Josh Benton’s blog; and Brian Storm's multimedia production studio.

Like everyone in book publishing, I think often about the future of the written word, and the viability of our current forms of print. As a book editor, I go to conferences like the Nieman to look for potential projects, and I find journalists--who are working with shorter and shorter word counts as print editions are trimmed--invariably attracted by the length and depth that a book can offer. I'm most encouraged by the journalists who are adapting to new technology with integrity, but who also overwhelmingly continue to find value in what is still one of the fullest and most satisfying forms of storytelling--the printed book.

For more about the conference, check out Charles Donelan’s write-up over at the Santa Barbara Independent.

Allison Trzop is an assistant editor at Beacon Press.

Link Roundup

I was on a semi-vacation last week, so this week's link roundup is a bit larger than normal. Enjoy!

Howard Zinn is adding to his People's History of the United States with a new graphic novel, A People's History of the American Empire. Read about it at Tom Dispatch, and check out this Viggo Mortensen-narrated clip featuring Mike Konopacki's artwork and Zinn's words. 

Fantastic review of Eboo Patel's Acts of Faith at Beliefnet. And don't miss Patel's excellent post on pluralism vs. diversity over at OnFaith.

...[I]t’s not about whether diversity is good or bad. Diversity is a fact, and in America it's not going away. The question is how to best engage the fact of diversity in a way that builds social capital and increases civic engagement. And when the pluralists don't engage diversity by building positive social bonds, then we leave a vacuum that is often filled by extremists or bigots.

In light of the recent Obama/Wright controversy (read Chris Bracey's take at BlackProf), Terri Gross talked with James Cone, author of Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968-1998, about Black Liberation Theology. Also listen to the other interview from that show, with Rev. Dwight Hopkins, for a better understanding of the context Rev. Wright's comments were ripped from.

Kai Wright is in the American Prospect on starting over in AIDS research and in the Dallas Morning News about the danger of the high rate of teen STDs.

Penny Coleman attended the Winter Soldiers' conference, and her thoughtful analysis is appearing on Alternet. Be sure to check out her article about Stop/Loss: "Pentagon Holds Thousands of Americans 'Prisoners of War'."

Rabbi Arthur Waskow urges Jews and others to observe a green Passover.

Kevin Jennings, author of Mama's Boy, Preacher's Son, is a hockey fan. And he doesn't appreciate the homophobic atmosphere at Rangers games.

 

American Dreamers: Analyzing Dreams of Hillary and Barack

by Kelly Bulkeley

As of today a total of 116 dream reports about Barack Obama and 104 about Hillary Clinton have been posted on the metaphysicalpoll.com website. Here are some of the questions I've heard people asking about these intriguing political fables from the nocturnal imagination.

Can we accept these as real dreams? Cautiously, yes. Some of the reports could easily be fake, but most sound genuine to me. (For more on the limitations of this kind of anecdotal data, see my posting of March 19.)

Why are so many people having dreams of Hillary and Barack? It's turning into a perfect storm of political dreaming. First, the core supporters of both candidates (older white women for Hillary, multicultural youth for Barack) tend to be especially active dreamers--they are exactly the kinds of people who show up most often in dream classes and workshops, and I think it's natural their political hopes and fears would find expression in their dreams.  Second, many Democrats are genuinely torn in both directions, and one thing we know from modern dream research is that people often experience an upsurge of dreaming during times of uncertainty and indecision. And third, the feverish campaign coverage by the 24-hour news media has prompted unusually intense feelings of familiarity and intimacy with the candidates' personal lives, to the point where we hear and think and talk about them almost non-stop. In this kind of cultural environment, it would be surprising if we did not find at least some people dreaming about these omnipresent figures in the public eye.

Color Me Gay

by Harlyn Aizley

Oh sure I'm a daughter/ sister/ mother/ partner/ friend/ Jew/ writer/ runner/ painter/ cook/ researcher. But when it comes to my daughter's kindergarten all I'm aware of being is a LESBIAN.

"Yoo-hoo, you in the carpool line, aren't you a LESBIAN?"

"Hey you in the front row at the winter concert, I hear you're a LESBIAN."

This is mostly my problem. Apparently the majority of the other parents at this unnamed, posh private school are not thinking about my sexual orientation every time they see me. The problem is I think they are.

Link Roundup: Margaret Seltzer a sociopath? The Sexing of Science. Lowlights of the Presidential Race.

Is Margaret Seltzer, aka Margaret B. Jones, aka the latest memoirist to be exposed as a fraud, a sociopath who skillfully manipulated her benefactors in the publishing industry? Amy Alexander, co-author of Lay My Burden Down: Suicide and the Mental Health Crisis among African-Americans, ponders the question of blame in the Nation:

Could it be as simple as a case of innocent victims--the editor, the agent, the writing teacher--being duped by one sociopathic young lady?

Maybe. But it also may also be true that when it comes to a hard-luck gang story, McGrath, Bender and others involved in the publication of Love and Consequences were more inclined to err on the side of sensationalism and exploitation over the hard work of grooming an author who might give readers genuine authenticity. And it is more than a bit ironic that their apparent quest for vividly told ghetto authenticity led them to nurture and promote a white woman writer whose story, even if it were true, represented only a one-dimensional version of the Authentic Black Experience.

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The Nantucket Independent highlights the life of native daughter Maria Mitchell, whose life in science is explored in the forthcoming Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science by Renée Bergland.

Throughout the book, Bergland examines Mitchell's rise from 1847, when she witnessed the flash of a comet... to becoming the "computer of Venus" employed by the Nautical Almanac to calculate by math the orbit of that planet; to her hiring as the first professor of astronomy at Vassar College for women; and to the close of the 1800s when women's roles in the sciences were discouraged and Mitchell lamented that she might be the last of the nation's female scientists.

Bergland notes that while the word "scientist" had no masculine association at the start of the 19th century, by 1873 a male Harvard Medical School faculty member posited that women were physiologically unable to study science and that those who pursued the subject with vigor risked becoming "thoroughly masculine in nature or hermaphroditic in mind."

As of 1875, 10 years after Mitchell was appointed to her professorship, the move toward a male scientific role model had gained societal dominance.

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The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy compiles the worst moments in the race for "Pastor-in-Chief." Watch them on YouTube, where the video has been added to the Beacon Broadside favorites. Mitt Romney's speech on faith in America didn't even make Gaddy's top ten.

Link Roundup: UUs on Street Prophets, Human Guinea Pigs, Teaching Kids About Racism

A link rescue from the not-to-distant past: Carl Elliott, who has a forthcoming Beacon book about consumerism and corruption in the medical industry, had a harrowing piece in the New Yorker about professional human guinea pigs, which is now available on their website.

Most professional guinea pigs are involved in Phase I clinical trials, in which the safety of a potential drug is tested, typically by giving it to healthy subjects and studying any side effects that it produces. (Phase II trials aim at determining dosing requirements and demonstrating therapeutic efficacy; Phase III trials are on a larger scale and usually compare a drug’s results with standard treatments.) The better trial sites offer such amenities as video games, pool tables, and wireless Internet access. If all goes well, a guinea pig can get paid to spend a week watching “The Lord of the Rings” and playing Halo with his friends, in exchange for wearing a hep-lock catheter on one arm and eating institutional food. Nathaniel Miller, a Philadelphia trial veteran who started doing studies to fund his political activism, was once paid fifteen hundred dollars in exchange for three days and two G.I. endoscopies at Temple University, where he was given a private room with a television. “It was like a hotel,” he says, “except that twice they came in and stuck a tube down my nose.”

And one more link rescue, to a story that has timeless importance and made the rounds of AP newspapers a week or so ago: "Ignoring Racist Remarks Is Wrong Lesson For Kids." Many of us have been faced with an uncomfortable situation where someone has made a racially insensitive or offensive comment. Beverley Daniel Tatum, author of Can We Talk About Race, urges parents to broach the issue with the speaker,   but in a way that isn't accusatory or confrontational. The article is a great guide for how to teach children about racism and the importance of honesty, integrity, and diversity.

Over at Street Prophets, this week's Weekly Faith Roundtable is on Unitarian Universalism. Here are a few of the highlights from the discussion:

Lonespark's explanation that she picked the UU church because "I didn't fit into any other boxes."

On the plus side, I love being in a place where my agnostic husband would fit right in if he ever got up that early, where some of my favorite childhood hymns get performed, where all families are valued, where "service is our prayer," and where a dude in my covenant group is very interested in hearing about how I blot to Thor.

A lengthy discussion of where the Seven Principles originated and the possibility of being a "devout UU."

So here's a broader one. We lay claim--lightly--to all of human experience, all science, all scripture, all wisdom traditions as being the heritage of humanity. We draw from those and from individual, personal experience.

So...
    Scripture--check. Our canon is a shade larger and not sealed, however.
    Tradition--check. We see it not as a foundation, but rather as more of a sea anchor.
    Reason--check. Oh yeah. Fiercely. We're coming back around to a wary acceptance of the non-rational, but the irrational is going to be savaged--and that's tradition going back at least to Servetus.
    Experience--check. Very, very much so.

A selection of UU jokes

Great job on the part of Sister Quarterstaff, ogre, lonespark, and bleeding heart, who hosted the discussion.

Memories of Burma, 1998

Editor's Note: Today, thousands of bloggers around the world are taking part in an International Bloggers Day for Burma. Instead of the usual blogging, they've put up just one post with a image (like the one here) showing their support for the peaceful revolution brought to the streets by thousands of Buddhist monks. We applaud these bloggers for their attention to this struggle, but instead of going dark today ourselves we wanted to share with you this story, from scholar and Beacon author Sarah LeVine, which gives some context to the great acts of courage we've recently witnessed and the vicious reprisals in their wake.

by Sarah LeVine

In mid-September when I began to hear news reports that thousands of monks—and a few days later, nuns as well—were out in the streets of Yangon and other Myanmar cities demonstrating against the government, I could hardly believe my ears.

In April 1998 I joined a group of Nepalese Theravada Buddhists on a pilgrimage to Myanmar. Led by a nun who had been trained many years before in what was then Burma, we flew from Kathmandu to Bangkok, a veritable fleshpot, where we visited temples and hung out with Nepalese novices; and then we flew on to Yangon where, though it was a charming well-laid-out city and the people were strikingly attractive, the military were much in evidence and the atmosphere was palpably repressive and austere.

International Non-Violence Day

October 2 is Gandhi's birthday and also the first International Non-Violence Day. Does this mean that the headlines tomorrow will be devoid of murder, war, and oppression? Unlikely, but it does give us a chance to reflect of the teachings of Gandhi and what they mean to us today.

Banned Books Week begins tomorrow

Banned Books Week officially begins tomorrow, and Beacon Broadside has already begun our tribute to free speech with Chris Finan's discussion of censorship in America, Helene Atwan's interview with the oft-banned Lois Lowry, and a little nudge in the direction of something we're quite proud of around these parts: a fantastic page devoted to the publication of the Pentagon Papers over at our sister site. The page features a compelling panel discussion from last year's UU General Assembly, and Allison Trzop's Beacon Press and the Pentagon Papers, a master's thesis that's more gripping than that mass-market thriller you've been carrying in your bag.

Banned Books Week has us thinking about censorship and free speech, but the recent controversy over book banning in prisons also got us fired up (along with Chris W. over at Philocrites). Fortunately, the public outcry over this egregious violation of the First Amendment made the government back off for now. It just goes to show that in order to protect speech, you've got to speak up! Of course, there's still more to come on this story, so we'll keep an eye on any future developments.

We have more exciting things on deck for next week, including continued Banned Books Week coverage from Rick Ayers, co-author of Great Books for High School Kids, plus thoughts from Rabbi Arthur Waskow in advance of the Interfaith Fast on October 8. Be sure to add us to your RSS reader, or sign up to receive Beacon Broadside by email.

Thoughts on the launch of Beacon Broadside

Before Beacon Broadside launches, setting off into new territory for our press, I thought it might be good to think about the ways in which blogging distinguishes itself from print publication. 

I Googled the phrase “books not blogs,” and found this, from Dec. 31, 2004,  by Bob Baxley of the blog Drowning in the Current. I don’t know Baxley, and he seems to have let this blog go fallow earlier this year, but I was intrigued by these sentences from his New Year’s Eve reflection: