FORGET '68
One can easily believe that Germany is in the midst of a national debate about the events of 1968. Recently published photographs of German foreign minister Joschka Fischer battling police 32 years ago have led to much argument—not just about whether Fischer is fit for office, but about the actions of an entire generation of Germans who took to the streets in the late 1960s in protest over the Cold War. (For Neal Ascherson's column about Fischer, click here.) But well-known poet and journalist {{Hans Magnus Enzensberger#2:http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub={B1311FFE-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88}&doc={D5C73C19-F13A-11D4-B99E-009027BA226C}}} says that the hullabaloo is merely the work of an absurdly fidgety media. In an article published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Enzensberger writes: "Facts that have been known for 30 years are treated as a sensation and turned into headlines. With the sole exception of the relatives of the victims—from Benno Ohnesorg who was shot by the police, to Siegfried Buback who was shot by terrorists—it is obvious that no one is really interested in this story, least of all the people who triggered the jabbering in the first place—not even the millions who stylized themselves into 'members of the class of '68' after the fact, in the delusion that this would confer some sort of distinction. You need only mention that you are a veteran of that era to cause everyone younger than you to roll their eyes in utter apathy."

AYER'S POSITION
Writing in the New Republic, Simon Blackburn appraises the life and thought of A.J. Ayer and corrects a familiar conservative argument against Ayer's views on ethics. "It was the apparent downgrading of ethics that … stung … conservatives…. But in truth Ayer's position is not so very terrible: finding that ethics is a matter of which attitudes to hold does not make it either simple or unimportant. A person who believes this about ethics can still act ethically or unethically. And the positivists' approach to evaluative language—their view that finally it has no foundation in reality, that it must be used on other grounds—is arguably the principal part of their edifice that still attracts significant philosophical support."

ANOTHER BUSH
Few would disagree that Will Ferrell's impersonation of George W. Bush on "Saturday Night Live" is pure genius. To visit "SNL"'s site, click here. In an interview with the New York Times, Ferrell says: "I try to get as good as I can, and then I kind of almost throw it out, and then I go on just mannerism and what comes to me comedically in terms of attitude and play it that way. I don't sound that dead-on like him. It's a blending of trying to get his facial stuff down and just kind of like the beady eyes and his mouth kind of droops a little bit."

WHEN THE WORST IS THE BEST
Malcolm Bull explains the thinking behind Slavoj Zizek's The Fragile Absolute—or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? in the London Review of Books. "Psychoanalysis traditionally inclines toward suspicion—what we take to be goods are actually the expression, or the repression, of their opposite—but Zizek takes it further: perhaps the worst is for the best. Zizek has long fuelled this argument by working the rich seam of black humor that developed under Communism, but in The Fragile Absolute he finds a new source in the New Testament. According to Zizek, hate is the new love. Jesus said: 'If anyone come to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.' Here, hatred does not imply an irrational antagonism, but a self-destructive act of renunciation."

IN NEED OF CARTHARSIS
The anthropologist Clifford Geertz weighs in on the controversy that preceded and followed the publication of Patrick Tierney's book about the Yanomamö people of southern Venezuela, Darkness in El Dorado. (For an article about the book and the furor, click here. To read a controversial article in Slate by John Tooby about the book, click here.) In Geertz's view, the dissemination of ideas and information in the age of the Internet and 24-hour TV news is merely about "velocity and volume," and this development will have an adverse affect on traditional notions of scholarship. "We are entering, we are told, a weightless, frictionless, speed-of-light age in which we will all be but address nodes in an endless flow of information packets, scurrying message handlers continuously assaulted from all directions. So far as scholarly life is concerned, that is still more specter than reality. ... However, to judge from the on-line blizzard of charge and countercharge that has attended the mere rumor of Patrick Tierney's blistering indictment … it may not do so very much longer. Such established academic customs as looking into books before reviewing them, editing drafts before publishing them, and couching even polemic in consecutive argument may well be on the way out. … In cyberspace, it is velocity that matters." But what, exactly, is wrong about velocity and volume? Is it really speed that Geertz deplores, or is that debates which once took place exclusively in universities are now aired in public?

THE BIT BETWEEN HER TEETH
Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth, did not win the Whitbread Prize; it was awarded to Matthew Kneale for a novel called English Passengers. In the New York Review of Books, John Lanchester explains the brilliance of Smith's book. In part, as Lanchester says, White Teeth is a response to a speech made by British politician on the subject of immigration in the 1980s. "He imagined Asian and Afro-Caribbean citizens of the United Kingdom watching a cricket match between their former homelands and their adopted country, and posed a question: 'Which side do they cheer for? It's an interesting test. Are you still looking back to where you came from or where you are?' " Lanchester writes: "As Northrop Frye once pointed out, 'To answer a question is to consolidate the mental level on which a question is asked.'White Teeth is not so much an attempt to answer "the cricket test" as to encompass it, to move beyond it, and to show why things are more complicated and more multivalent than it implies."

TOO BIG FOR ME
Writing in Lingua Franca, Jim Holt takes up the question of how to comprehend staggeringly large numbers. "How big is a killion? That, in case you didn't know, is a legendary number so enormous that the mere apprehension of it is fatal to humans. It stands to reason that such a number exists. Humans are finite; numbers go on forever; eventually numbers must become lethal in their sheer immensity. But how do we come to know truly huge numbers? One way is by naming them. ... The first really impressive number that most of us encounter as children is 1 million. … Far larger numbers, however, can easily be named. In English, we can get up to a primo-vigesimo-centillion (10366) or even a milli-millillion (103000003). These two numbers greatly exceed a googol (1 followed by a 100 zeros), a neologism famously coined by the nine-year-old nephew of the mathematician Edward Kasner. Yet the googol system of nomenclature can be effortlessly extended by the term 'googolplex' (1 followed by a googol of zeros, or 10googol), which leapfrogs far beyond a milli-millillion."

BROADCAST NEWS
In response to the news that the execution of Timothy McVeigh might be broadcast on national television, a correspondent to the New York Times writes: "If the death penalty acts as a deterrent, this execution, if not all executions, should be televised nationally to promote such deterrence." In Writ, Edward Lazarus says that we can expect many more federal executions now that George W. Bush is in the White House and with John Ashcroft's likely arrival at the Department of Justice. He goes on to say: "The new President is a staunch proponent of the death penalty. He also avows a deep devotion to racial justice and equality. One of the first great challenges of George W. Bush's presidency will be to reconcile these two irreconcilable commitments—that is, to come to terms with the fact that Timothy McVeighs of the world deserve to die, yet the system that would put them to death remains, despite the best of intentions, seemingly irreparably flawed."

CHINA TIME
What should be the first book George Bush reads in (or perhaps just acquires for) the Oval Office? The president is obviously uninterested in poetry (there was no poet at the inauguration), and though the new first lady is an enthusiast for literature (The Brothers Karamazov is her favorite novel), W.'s reading tastes are murky. With China likely to be major part of the new administration's foreign policy, how about The Tiananmen Papers? In the New York Times Book Review, Jonathan Spence says of the book: "Like the compilers of 'The Pentagon Papers' before them, the anonymous Chinese author and his American editors clearly want their revelations to have a somewhat similar effect, opening up for scrutiny and debate a host of issues that have been covered up by government silence or misrepresentation, and assigning responsibility to those political leaders who most clearly should bear it." Writing in Feed, Scott McLemee suggests that the new president's views on China could be informed by taking a look at Titanic. "Released in China during the spring of 1998, James Cameron's film saturated post-Maoist society to a degree uncannily familiar to residents of late-capitalist America. As Jonathan Noble writes in a recent issue of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Titanic-mania included the full compliment of promotional tie-ins: posters, trivia contests, photo spreads in major newspapers, even advertisements on the sides of buses in Beijing and other cities (a first). You could buy Titanic beer, cosmetics, and bath accessories. A new expression had to be coined, shishang xiaofei kuangchao, meaning 'crazy frenzy of fashionable consumerism.' "

SELF PORTRAITURE
Two well-known writers are composing their memoirs. Gabriel García Márquez, according to Vanessa Thorpe, "has been writing the definitive work of his life. ... The new project is an autobiography and its theme is the way we misremember and re-tell our own stories. In it, using a liberal dose of hokum and his own brand of special effects, García Márquez sets out a version of his life for readers to remember him by." The historian Eric Hobsbawm is also writing about the time of his life, and you can expect that an aspect of his book will also be about how the past can be so easily forgotten. Quoted in the Observer, Neal Ascherson says of Hobsbawm's generosity as a host: "Eric is still very much a Fifties bohemian, in a way. He loves, say, the idea of some weird drink brought back from Slobodnia in an odd-shaped bottle. You have to watch yourself or you are falling over before the food arrives."