For anyone with some spare time to click around:

The New York Times Magazine has a very fun series of short articles, The Year in Ideas on the various innovations of 2004, both physical and intellectual. I enjoyed the articles on Ebay vigilantism and land mine detecting plants, my theories on demographic trends were confirmed on a couple of counts, and the Anti-Concept Concept Store and the eyeball jewelry kind of scare me. Also, check out the endpaper illustration . Lawyers may have taken over the patent office for the most part with their intricately worded, marginally defensible software patents, but it’s nice to know there are still crazy inventors out there filing “Water Walking Device” (No. 6,764,363) and “Woodpecker Disruption System” (No. 6,749,862).

Also recommended in the same issue is an article by political philosopher Michael Ignatieff, who wrote the inspiring (but also somewhat disappointing) book The Needs of Strangers. It’s a good article, and Ignatieff has always made a good case for democracy and the importance of liberty. I wish it were a bit longer, because a lot of stuff gets left in the air. In some ways a belief in Providence is antithetical to the democratic ideal – or at least the belief that you have a special knowledge of Providence’s plans and thus a duty to carry them out, against the people’s wishes if necessary. On the other hand, a belief in the innate worth of human beings and their dignity seems to be a precondition for democracy. At least it seems to be necessary for a democratic movement; I don’t think people risk their lives to increase the GNP or decrease the infant mortality rate. Can we convince a people who have no tradition of a suffering, loving God to take up democracy purely on economic grounds? We’ll see, I guess.

I’ve been reading Ghost Wars, by Steve Coll, the managing editor at the Washington Post. An engaging history of the CIA’s involvement in Afghanistan from 1979 to 2001. I have a much better picture of the complexity of the situation now, a much lower opinion of Clinton’s foreign policy (it wasn’t great to begin with, but it’s really shocking how readily he confused American business interests with American foreign policy interests), and a better understanding of how American dependence on oil, the Cold War, and a lot of bad will left over from Vietnam have combined to create the surprisingly new fanatic strain in Islam.

I am just full of words today, so I’ll also recommend the article in the most recent New Yorker on Sherlock Holmes. A biographer of Arthur Conan Doyle recently died as he was trying to get hold of some reputedly cursed manuscripts. The article itself is an investigation into the death of the biographer. I don’t think the love child of Umberto Eco and Vladimir Nabokov could have come up with a story this strangely entangled and metatextual. I’m almost afraid to say, “But it’s real!”

And finally, the website my college friends Jeremy and Laura set up to post their research and travel tales is full of all kinds of interesting tidbits.