Daily Blague

Permit me to call attention to a new addition to my Affinities list. Laura Garcia, who signs herself LTG, keeps a thoughtful blog at Embracing Chaos. Writing in central Massachusetts, Laura came upon the Daily Blague via the shout-out conferred by Joe.My.God in October. She has been posting at Embracing Chaos with ever-increasing frequency, and her entry about Google Earth the other day made it clear to me that a kindred soul belonged on my list.

When I launched this site a year ago, I kept the usual blog roster - a few personal sites that interested me, and a few national brands, such as Fafblog and Obsidian Wings. It ended up looking something like this. What I didn't understand until well into 2005 was the deforming effect of starting a blog during an election cycle. As the dust settled, the national brands seemed less vital, and sometimes a great deal less healthy. I do not wish to be a monument to the failure - which I hope will prove temporary or even curable - of my country's electoral system (the actual one, skewed by campaign financing and de facto disenfranchisement, and not so much the one ordained by the Constitution). Issues are important, certainly, but I believe that they ought to be refracted through the texture of a lived life. Theorists and academics strike me as deeply out of touch with, and frankly not interested in, the thought of the "ordinary" people in their lives. 

We need to temper the practice of professionalism. While we can't take our specialties seriously enough, we need to do more to make sure that they're open to intelligent comment by laymen. I know from experience that lawyers have a lot of bizarre and not terribly humane ways of doing things, some of them quite literally medieval. Doctors are beginning to learn that failure to be frank and cordial with patients is the surest predictor of malpractice litigation. Research scientists have failed miserably at maintaining a literate public. It is their responsibility to make what they're doing interesting and comprehensible to nonscientists. Blaming the general public, or even the educational system, as Nicholas D Kristof does in today's Times, is a waste of time. There's probably not a profession or line of work in the world that couldn't be "taught" by a clever video game.

Because I'm positively neurotic about  giving offense, and would feel terrible about taking anyone off my Affinities list, I've grown somewhat cautious about additions. I visit the sites on the list every weekday, and comment as frequently as anything intelligent pops into my head. I also visit the sites on a list that I began keeping privately about two months ago. Embracing Chaos is the first to make the jump.

Because Mr Kristof's Op-Ed piece is available only to TimesSelect subscribers, I have not provided a link.