Daily Office: Wednesday

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¶ Matins: Sorting out the ancient but crippling rift on the Left, between the people who listen to Paul Krugman and the people who listen to Noam Chomsky, Michael Bérubé gets it dead right in his final paragraph. (Dissent; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Here’s how we deal with it: when we’re talking to ourselves in the mirror, we follow Chomsky. When we talk to other people with the hope of encouraging them to do something good, we follow Krugman. And we don’t think for a minute that we’re being inconsistent.

¶ Lauds: At a blog that’s new to us, Nail Your Novel, Roz Morris outlines the plot twists that make The Hurt Locker such a fresh film to watch.

¶ Prime: While we were off doing other things, Felix Salmon questioned Henry Blodget’s decision to fire a top writer at TBI. Mr Blodget questioned Mr Salmon’s blog post, &c &c. The matter is of interest to us not only because it involves being paid for what we’re doing, but because what we hope that what we’re doing is what Felix Salmon says that we ought to be doing. Feel free to take issue!

¶ Tierce: Where hair comes from — aside from your head, that is. “The Temple of Do,” at Mother Jones. (via The Morning News)

¶ Sext: How Rob Weir, who teaches college somewhere (?!), deals with the Wikipedia problem on students’ research papers. (Has anybody out there got a copy of Gerald Nosich’s Learning to Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum?) (Inside Higher Ed; via Arts Journal)

¶ Nones: As the Murphy scandal washes over Europe, a “widespread apathy toward all things religious has turned into aggression,” according to Der Spiegel‘s Alexander Smoltczyk. Even Italians are beginning to mobilize.

¶ Vespers: British writer Robert McCrum is working on Globish. If you can read this, you do not have a head start on “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium.” (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: At dinner last night, there was discussion of David Elkind’s Op-Ed piece about the end of “the culture of childhood,” and we brought up something much nicer to think about on the subject than bullies. From Nigeness: Â