I’m always amazed when very intelligent people say very stupid things. But it’s happened again. This time it’s in The Grand Design, the latest book by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge for thirty years, a chair held by no less than Sir Isaac Newton, himself no slouch. Mlodinow has his own pedigree to be proud of. So what did they say?
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Unpaid Critics
A friend, David Horton, once said, “Some get paid to be critics. Everyone else does it for free.”
We, like any organization or business, get our share of criticisms and complaints. How do we deal with it? Here are my guidelines.
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Google Editions Is Here
With almost as much delay and anticipation as the launch of Kindle, the Google e-bookstore opened its virtual doors yesterday.
When I met with Google at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October, they gave me chocolate, smiled broadly and said it was really, really coming after months of delay. But they still wouldn’t give me (or anyone) a date. Now it’s here.
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Five-Year Plans Are Ridiculous
Can we possibly be serious about creating a five-year plan? In an era of breakneck changes in technology, cultural tastes, the economy and 24-hour news cycles, futurists look suspiciously like palm readers.
Just some of the recent, and massive, changes in book publishing we are all familiar with include
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No Ordinary People
While sitting in a limo in Manhattan wondering if she is overdressed for the party, Jeannette Walls looks out the window and spots her homeless mom rummaging through garbage in an alley.
Walls’ astonishing memoir, The Glass Castle, begins here and then chronicles a childhood in which alcohol, dysfunction and bad choices conspired to keep her whole family
destitute. After she and her siblings moved to New York City and clawed their way out, her well-educated parents continued to live in poverty. And when the pair moved to New York to join their children, ultimately the two of them were without a home.
The book contains one incredible episode after another of pain, hardship and disappointment. Yet one that struck me the most took place after Jeannette had scraped together enough funds to go to college. There she took a course from a professor she enjoyed who began teaching about the effects of economic and social forces on people.
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The Importance of What You Don’t Publish
Sometimes what a publisher doesn’t publish is just as important as what it does publish.
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To Change the World 5: Seeking the Common Good
James Davison Hunter tells us, in To Change the World, that the political frameworks of the Christian Right, the Christian Left and the neo-Anabaptists are inherently defective. Is there another option besides these three, which Hunter reframes as “defense against,” “relevance to” and “purity from” the culture? What’s his solution?
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To Change the World 4: Three Choices Both the Same
Often [I have wondered](http://andyunedited.ivpress.com/2010/09/uncommon_decency.php#more) in frustration, Why does everything seem so politicized? Why are the extremes the only apparent option? Where are the sober, even-handed, reasoned, moderate alternatives?
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To Change the World 3: Between Presumption and Hope
What’s the central dilemma for Christians who want to change the world? James Davison Hunter answers: Even though populism is organic to American Christianity, what actually brings about change instead is the
combination of powerful institutions, networks, interests and symbols. And when it comes to the latter, American Christianity is decidedly on the outside looking in.
The ten biggest independent foundations give away billions; the ten biggest religious foundations give away millions (pp. 82-83). Professors at Christian colleges have twice the teaching load of their counterparts at elite and research universities—so they are at a huge disadvantage in any ambition to lead their academic disciplines (p. 86).
Then he quits preachin’ and starts meddlin’.
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