The Law of Unintended Consequences

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MANILA, April 11 — More than anywhere else in Asia, the soaring price of rice has become a good-vs.-evil drama in the Philippines, one of the world’s largest importers of rice.

Traders who fiddle with the price of the nation’s all-important staple now face life in prison. Police are raiding warehouses in search of hoarders. Soldiers and police have been mobilized to help sell government-subsidized rice to the poor.

Philippines Caught in Rice Squeeze, By Blaine Harden, Washington Post Foreign Service,Saturday, April 12, 2008

I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Peace Corps in the late 1980s; in fact, this story was brought to my attention by the discussion list started last year by the organizers of our 20th anniversary reunion.

I keep thinking about how they used to dry the rice on the roads. I’d go for bike rides and have to go around these patches of grain laid out to dry. The farmers had an incredible sense of balance, too, walking over these slippery, mud-covered ridges that separates one rice field from another.

I hate to invoke the old adage of the right-wing economists, but it is ironic that these farmers are now suffering exactly because their crops are suddenly so valuable. Even more ironic, the scarcity of rice seems linked to the demand for ethanol in the west. Maybe the appropriate saying is some variation on ‘feed the fever, starve the cold.’

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Writing

Inside Oxford: Questions for Niko Pfund

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2. Do you hate Wikipedia?”

Not at all, I’m actually very fond of Wikipedia, which is not only useful to me on a daily basis but one of the most interesting exercises in information-gathering we’ve yet seen. While there are obvious and stark differences between the goals and utility of Wikipedia and traditional reference works—say, the Oxford English Dictionary—we are rapidly moving toward an online environment defined by “multiple levels of authority” (in the words of our online/reference publisher, Casper Grathwohl), in which people know to go to different sites for different kinds of information. As the population becomes increasingly technology-literate and information-literate, as search becomes increasingly sophisticated, and as Wikipedia’s growing influence brings additional challenges (with prominence come expectations…), the one-stop shopping model will likely fragment, as people will know where to go for the best and most appropriate information, or will be led there automatically.

Inside Oxford: Questions for Niko Pfund

Whenever we talk about citation formats (APA,MLA) I always tell my students that the conventions of print are relatively new and the the emerging conventions of the web, including collective authorship, undated material and the like, are much older. Pfund makes a similar point, contending that Wikipedia is simply returning to a type of authorship that created, among many other things, the Oxford English Dictionary. Imagine, the rabble wrote the OED!

Posted in: Language, Professional, Writing

The Normal Neurotic: Stiffs and Stuffeds

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I’m not someone who deals well with change. You would have known this by a recent fixture in my dining room: a large glass tank containing a wooden hutch, a water bottle, and rodent bedding — but no rodent. When our final gerbil, Carmella, died, I couldn’t bring myself to take her cage down and left it there for some months, imagining every morning that she was still alive and well, just a little quiet, “napping” the day away inside her cozy hutch. Not wanting to bury her in our back yard for fear the dogs would dig her up, but also not wanting to simply toss her out with the trash, I had placed her curled body in a zip-lock plastic bag and put her “temporarily” in the freezer. There she still lies in cold, stiff “sleep,” next to the Popsicles, the frozen peas, and Nibbles the guinea pig.

Elise Hempel, March 31, The Normal Neurotic

Elise is one of my favorite writers (ok, she’s my partner too) and I have been trying to get her to get her work online for years. She published a great piece here a few years ago, called “S.A.D., TV, and Me,” but since then has been silent, as far as the web goes. Of course, she’s been writing away, collecting pieces until she found the time or the format to get them published.

Now she’s started her own blog, The Normal Neurotic, and has been busily posting her backlog of columns and short essays. She’s a poet too, and there’s some chance that she’ll publish some of that work as well. I picked, “Stiffs and Stuffed,” because I love her humor when it’s most disconcertingly morbid. I think of that every time I open the refrigerator at her house.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Online Places, Writing

A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq

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The United States invaded Iraq in March 2003. Since then, nearly 4,000 American troops have lost their lives and nearly thirty thousand more have suffered serious injuries, while as many as a million Iraqis may be dead. The financial costs of the war to the U.S. economy will ultimately exceed $3 trillion. More than a year ago, the American public demanded a new direction in Iraq by electing a new Congress, and the bipartisan Iraq Study Group (the Baker-Hamilton Commission) presented a set of recommendations for just such a new direction. President Bush rejected the majority of those recommendations and proceeded – largely unchecked by Congress – on a course explicitly contrary to them.

A Responsible Plan to End the War in Iraq

Posted in: Writing