Daily Blague

Here's hoping: a new Quinnipiac College poll shows that voting New Yorkers oppose the construction of Jets Stadium by a twenty-four percent margin (58/34). The stadium idea is idiotic in many ways, particularly as regards traffic, but what I find deeply stupid about it is the luring of thousands of people to the banks of the North River only to turn their backs on the view.

Meet Harry Hutton, author of Chase Me Ladies, I'm in the Cavalry. He is an Englishman who has taught his native language around the world. Any teacher who wishes he could say to parents, "Your child is an illiterate cabbage," has my vote.

When the Summers kerfuffle has died down, I hope that it will have been established that, while men and women are different in lots of little ways, their differences do not add up in a way that proclaims one gender's superiority to the other. Indeed, new findings at the University of California, Irvine suggest that men and women would be lost without each other. Analysis of differences in the distribution of grey and white matter in brain, according to the researchers,

may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests.

I doubt that Mr Summers is involved in meetings at Harvard this weekend to deliberate standards and practices for the Blogosphere, but I hope that the panelists can come up with something interesting even without him. Adopting codes of ethics would certainly be premature, but it's not to soon to begin outlining some basics. Jessica Mintz writes in today's Wall Street Journal:

Jay Rosen, the New York University Journalism Department chairman who will kick off the conference, says that as bloggers move away from opinion writing and become a what he calls "citizen-journalists," they will inevitably struggle with the same ethics questions that traditional media did. "The blogger system is necessarily evolving and changing and will go through crises and problems and periods of invention, because it's new," he says.

The dictates of capitalism will no doubt begin affecting which blogs survive and which don't, but not yet. "Right now the currency is readership and respect, not money," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who writes Instapundit.com, a well-read blog. "I don't think you can start reading a blog and immediately know who to trust." That relationship is built over time. Mr. Reynolds says he wouldn't knowingly publish or link to something false -- but as one guy at a computer, there's only so much fact-checking he can do.

For my part, I expect that the laws of fads and fashion will affect the survival of blogs long before capitalism does. Setting up a blog is (or can be) simplicity itself, and it's always fun to play with a new toy, tinkering with its design, announcing plans, and so forth. The follow-through, however, is usually more or less tedious; let's face it: writing is work, and most people find it difficult to compose anything more objective than a vent. Everybody's blog roster lists a few sites to which recent contributions have been few or none. And the option of running a blog for free won't last indefinitely. I decline to attribute the inevitable change to "capitalism," however.