The Useless Tree

Sam Crane

  • If its Sunday, It must be “Modern Love”

         Today, the "Modern Love" column in the NYT seems to be about sex blogging.  A woman discovers that her twenty-something nanny has started a blog that talks about sex, bringing back for the older woman uncomfortable memories of,… Continue reading

  • The Secular as Sacred

         In his "Beliefs" column in today’s NYT, Peter Steinfels addresses the question of secularization.  A good part of the piece is taken up with a synopsis of a book by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular:… Continue reading

  • Grandparents

        Yesterday’s NYT piece about grandparents caught my eye, especially this paragraph:      Vern Bengtson, a sociologist and gerontologist at the University of Southern California, says the growing involvement of grandparents has been just as dramatic a change… Continue reading

  • Blame and the London Bombings

        A debate is brewing between Norm Geras and Chris Bertram over how to respond politically to the London bombings.  Norm argues that we should not be distracted by the broad social-economic-political conditions that might have created suicide bombers,… Continue reading

  • Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly

         I found this surfing around.  I do not know the artist or dates, but the site that I took it from said it is a picture of Chuang Tzu dreaming he is a butterfly, or is it that… Continue reading

  • Confucian Capitalism?

    Here’s a brief item from The Press Trust of India, via China Digital Times, that reports: Family-run businesses form the core of China’s private enterprises. More than 90 per cent of three million plus such businesses are family owned and… Continue reading

  • Bernie Ebbers, Meet Mencius

         This just in:      Bernard J. Ebbers, the founder and former chief executive of WorldCom, was sentenced to 25 years in prison today for his role in an $11 billion accounting fraud that brought down the telecommunications… Continue reading

  • Karl Rove and Han Fei Tzu

         Cynical, power-hungry, hard-ball politics were not invented by Machiavelli, even though we often invoke the adjective he inspired.  Rather, Machiavelli is the Italian Han Fei Tzu (ca. 280-233 BC).  Han is primarily concerned with how the ruler can… Continue reading

  • Infanticide and Moral Progess

         Missed the NYT Magazine yesterday (off at Tanglewood), so I was glad to be directed to Jim Holt’s piece on infanticide by Laura over at 11D.  The question of whether society should permit the killing of disabled babies… Continue reading

  • Sublime

    Tanglewood, July 10th, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Tchaikovsky’s "Serenade for Strings." In Ch’i, after hearing the music of Emperor Shun, it was three months before the Master noticed the taste of food again.  He kept saying, "I never dreamed music was… Continue reading