May 06, 2004

Links of the Day

Posted by Ed

Some links I've found interesting of late:


  • In The American Prospect, David Greenberg discusses the life of George H.W. Bush and Scott McLemee considers James T. Farrell.
  • Is it possible to create life using RNA, and not DNA or proteins? Carl Zimmer asks this question in Discover, describing research by a scientist at Harvard Medical School.
  • Vladimir Nabokov's memorabilia collection has just been sold, according to this New York Times article.
  • Tom Frank (a U of C history Ph.D., if I'm not mistaken) has written a new book asking what went wrong with Kansas. It's described in this newspaper article (via Bookslut).
  • David Edelstein reviews the documentary Super Size Me.
  • Are we witnessing the rise of a Sino-Japanese alliance? Eamonn Fingleton discusses this question in the magazine Prospect.
  • Scott Stossel, my former editor at The American Prospect, argues in a recent Atlantic Monthly article that the Kennedy family prevented Hubert Humphrey from naming Sargent Shriver as his 1968 running mate--perhaps throwing the election to Richard Nixon. (I'm skeptical about whether Shriver's presence on the ticket would have been enough for HHH to win, but the article--from Stossel's new Shriver biography--is well worth a read.)
  • In The Village Voice, Rick Perlstein discusses "the divine calm of George W. Bush."

The first article (by David Greenberg) and the last (by Rick Perlstein) remind me of the two questions whose answers by future historians I'd most like to see. What does George Bush the elder really think of his son's presidency? And what role has Bush's religion played in his decision-making? I suspect that we'll someday get some really fascinating anecdotal answers to these questions.

Perlstein's article is especially good. (It even mentions a seminar on Bush's theology by a University of Chicago professor...) Check it out!

Posted by Ed at May 6, 2004 05:07 PM
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