Hey, this is still here! Just kidding. No, seriously, I haven't written here for a while. Let's begin with the interesting bits.

Intelligent Design

This month's Wired magazine includes a story on how "intelligent design" proponents are still trying to get ID into state curricula. The story -- which is biased, since Wired is pretty science-oriented -- deals with something I never thought of regarding intelligent design. Whereas Darwinism is science, ID is more politics than anything else. ID people do not have a theory to advance; their theory is the negation of another theory. Their tactic is rhetorical, not scientific: they get out in public, appeal to people, exploit misunderstandings about evolution. "The intelligent design movement is using scientific rhetoric to bypass scientific scrutiny. And when science education is decided by charm and stage presence, the Discovery Institute [an ID think-tank] wins," writes Evan Ratliff.

Liberal biases

Next up: a review of a book whose subject has always interested me: high school education. Paula Cohen reviews The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn by Dianne Ravitch, a book that deals with the ways in which minority groups (that's groups whose ideas are in the minority, not groups composed of people who are in the minority) manipulate textbook authoring to suit their own whims. Ravitch provides some interesting justifications for the problem with textbooks: 1) there are only four parents companies in the world that make textbooks, and 2) whatever standards for textbooks are adopted in California or Texas -- the largest textbook markets -- are usually the de facto standards for the rest of the country. Education has taken a back seat to the form of the teaching of education; facts have been altered or removed lest they be seen as "offensive." Grog smash political correctness!

Stealing the past

University of Georgia historian Peter Charles Hoffer offers up a scandalizing indictment of the state of history scholarship in his new book Past Imperfect: Facts, Fictions, Fraud -- American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin. The standards of history scholarship, says Hoffer, have declined severely, rendering it "okay" for people like Ambrose to plagiarize occasionally. Hopefully, Hoffer's book also discusses the "biography-a-month" phenomenon, in which some historian somewhere writes a biography of a guy who's already had a million biographies written. Remember that book about Benjamin Franklin from last year? What did we learn that we didn't already know? Also, be wary of "popular" historians like Stephen Ambrose, who are merely journalists with a book deal. They are not held up to the rigorous standards of scholarly historians, academics who aren't writing a book merely to sell copies.

That's all from this weekend. Do go see I Heart Huckabees. Do not go see The Grudge.