Discoveries of the day
Perhaps I shouldn’t put these two items together in one blog post. It’s possible (if not probable) that the Venn diagram showing the overlap between the parties interested in one and those interested in the other is rather small. But they come together in one day for me, and I’m both excited and inspired by both of them. Who knows? Perhaps someday someone will find themselves landing on this page after searching for emacs and United States Senate.
The first item is another emacs discovery trail. This morning’s RSS feed delivered JTR’s function to convert an org file to docx, which led me to dwim-shell-command. I’m pretty sure I’d seen something about dwim-shell-command before, but I hadn’t grasped its power. Add this to my growing (but largely undocumented) list of emacs excitement moments.
The second item is The Sealed Envelope: Toward an Intelligent Utopia, a recently published collection of essays by George Scialabba. Before last weekend’s visit to our local bookstore, I knew absolutely nothing about George Scialabba. I don’t remember now why I picked this book up from the table displaying new arrivals, though I think I might have seen a brief note about it in some news publication. In any case, I was intrigued, and I’m very glad that I brought it home with me. Would that I could write so clearly and concisely about such a broad range of topics. I’m jumping the gun here — ordinarily I wait until I’ve finished reading a book before writing notes about it for my what I’m reading section, updated more or less monthly. I’ve not finished reading the book yet — in fact, I’m just over halfway through — but I’ve come out of the first half of the book with a renewed interest in philosophers and cultural critics whose work I read long ago and a new interest in such people about whom I knew next to nothing. I’ve decided that I simply must go back to Charles Taylor’s The Sources of the Self, a massive book that I began reading when it first came out but abandoned (checks copy from shelf) roughly 200 pages in. I might even reread Richard Rorty and read Russell Jacoby for the first time. And Dwight Macdonald. But what moves me to write about the book today is this rant from Scialabba’s brief essay on Robert Dahl, first published in The American Prospect in 2002:
According to Article V [of the United States Constitution], “no state, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.” Each state, regardless of population, was to have two senators. As a result, two centuries later half the U.S. population sends 18 senators to Washington while the other half sends eighty-two. Twenty senators represent 54 percent of the population; another twenty represent less than 3 percent. California gets two senators; the twenty least populous states, which combined have roughly the same number of people as California, get forty senators. Senators elected by 11 percent of the population can kill proposed legislation with a filibuster; senators elected by as little as 5 percent of the population can block a constitutional amendment (p. 133).
At the general level, there’s nothing here that I didn’t know. But, in my mind at least, the specifics — so clearly and concisely stated — add significantly to the weight of the general. I read Dahl years ago and taught one of his small books in a course on democracy and social change. I think it’s time to read him again.
So many books, so little time. But at least I now have a quick and easy way to convert one of my org files to a docx file so that my wife can open it on her computer!
