Radio is cleaning up the nation

So I'm at work but I had to share this with someone (typing on my lunch break, obviously!):

I'm listening to my Launchcast internet station (which I should stop doing - they are pushing new songs I'm uninterested in hard, and obviously because it's new material that the record companies are trying to sell) and every now and then a commercial comes up, but I don't really listen to that very hard. But suddenly I notice what the woman is saying:

It's a commercial for a company called (I think) Esurance. She's going on and on about how seriously they take the climate crisis, and how Esurance customers are just so climate-friendly because they are saving all this paper, see, because they have all their documents online! "The road to a better tomorrow starts here", she says, all chipper, like. She's all about saving the rainforest.

The road-metaphor turns out to be apt: it's AUTO-insurance they're selling. That's AUTO as in cars. As in exhaust fumes. As in American cars, because it's a US company. That's the US as in the world's largest emitter of climate gases, with over one fifth of all carbon emissions, despite having only 1/50th of the world's population. And yes, that's cars, as in the second-largest source of carbon emissions in the US, providing roughly a third of total emissions, second only to coal-burning power plants.

Teoretiske jenter

I morgen klokken 20.00 blir jeg intervjuet på radioprogrammet "Teoretiske jenter" på Radio Nova. Jeg skal snakke om blogging og - tilsynelatende - neonarsissisme. Jeg har ennå ikke helt forstått hva neonarsissisme er, men jeg mistenker at det ikke er et voldsomt fruktbart begrep for å forstå blogging.

Siste gang jeg var i studio der var det så varmt at jeg nesten besvimte (på den annen side ble jeg dødssyk samme dag, kan ha hatt noe med det å gjøre). Kanskje du blir heldig og hører meg blacke ut live denne gangen! Tune in, turn on, black out. Lytt på nett eller på FM 99.3. Onsdag klokken 20.00.

Radio is cleaning up the nation

I morgen mellom 17 og 18 en gang kan du høre Marianne Bråthen og meg på Radio Nova.
Vi kommer til å offentliggjøre vårprogrammet for Litteratur på Blå på Tekstbehandlingsprogrammet. Vårprogrammet legges ut på nettsidene til Litteratur på Blå kort tid etterpå.

Du kan høre Tekstbehandlingsprogrammet på Radio Nova FM 99.3, eller på radionova.no eller på podcast som du finner på bloggen deres. Programmet sendes hver tirsdag fra kl. 17-18, og i reprise hver onsdag fra kl. 11-12.

Too Much Heidegger

I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
-- Jürgen Habermas in an obituary of Rorty

Well, amen to that. I know I'd die of something if I sat down to read Heidegger. It's a very nice obit. Habermas and Rorty were friends and each others best critics for most of their lives.

More things one can read and listen to by Rorty:

Here's a series of lectures and radio shows with Rorty. And here's a conversation between him, Hilary Putnam and James Conant. In both of these, just search the page for Rorty to find the right link.

Here's an essay by him called "Trotsky and Wild Orchids", a very funny personal essay which tracks his own development as a thinker through his Freudian obsession with orchids as a child.