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Andrew Sullivan posts about “a challenging analysis” of the U.S. position in the Middle East with reference to gas and oil sources, but I don’t think that’s sufficient. The pertinent sentence from the portion of the Star-Telegram article he quotes:
Any group, nation or coalition of nations able to dominate this region would hold the keys [...]

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Yesterday I was on a panel in Second Life for a University of California Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism fellowship program project. The fellows had researched and created reports on “Faces of Faith: God Sex Family” and decided to bring their reports into Second Life. As part of their weeklong exhibit, they organized this panel [...]

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I’ve been reading again, and I have some catching up to do with titles I’ve already finished.
First up: Mainspring by Jay Lake. This is in a strange, small category. It’s kind of Steampunk, but it’s also theology or fantasy. The closest thing to it I’ve read before are J. Gregory Keyes’s alchemical Ben Franklin and [...]

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You’ll need to watch an ad to get a one-day pass if you don’t already subscribe to Salon, but this essay made my day: Let us now praise editors
I’ve also worked with writers who have reacted to my gentle suggestion that one of their precious, ungrammatical commas might perhaps be removed as if I’d insisted [...]

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Astronomy Picture of the Day rationalizes including this really good optical illusion by relating it to the virtues of non-human observation in science.

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148 - Oh, Inverted World « strange maps. I subscribe to the RSS for the strange maps site. Sometimes what they find is just weird, but others it is mind-bending, like this one.

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Sometimes I read something that both makes my editor’s heart go pitter-pat and feeds my spirit. Doug Muder, a writer I’m glad to be getting to know better, has posted The Go(o)d Crutch at his blog Free and Responsible Search. I heartily recommend it.

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Read an interesting interview with Francis Fukuyama about the difference between “negative freedoms” (freedom from) and “positive freedoms” (freedom to), and the challenges faced by modern liberal societies.
The practical problem is whether you can generate a set of values that will politically serve the integrating liberal purposes you want. This is complicated because you want [...]

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