Was reading through a couple recent articles from Salon earlier.
Enjoyed a write-up/review of a book titled Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid. Far from being a Dr. Laura-style tome of snarky judgementalism, it's a rather scholarly collection of papers by authors from a variety of academic backgrounds. My favourite bit is the list of "eight deadly sins of the stupid smart person":
...impulsiveness (doing something rash), neglect (ignoring something important), procrastination (actively avoiding something important), vacillation (dithering), backsliding (capitulating to habit), indulgence (allowing oneself to fall into excess), overdoing (like indulgence, but with positive things) and walking the edge (tempting fate).
(Has this guy been spying on me, or something?)
The reviewer at Salon rather enjoys taking the piss out of the academics, which makes for a fun read.
Wasn't so taken with a Salon article titled "The strange triumph of electronic music", which is largely an examination of why electronica hasn't really caught on in America, and also examines some of the criticisms against electronic music, mainly that it's "...repetitive; it's empty fluff; it's soulless; the people who make it play with computers, not instruments..."
For a much more interesting treatise on electronic music, check out a segment that aired on the CBC Radio show Ideas a few years back:
"Tick Tock Bang: Noise in Modern Art
first broadcast on IDEAS 27 January 1999
Novelist Russell Smith (How Insensitive; Noise) devises a sound essay examining Futurism, minimalism, poetic collage, abstract painting, and the most listener-unfriendly music ever recorded, the style called Rotterdam, beloved of art students and disenchanted punk-rockers."
(Hey, I like the Rotterdam sound (a sub-genre of an electronica genre known as Gabber); I don't think it's that unfriendly)
Here's a direct link to the streaming Real Audio version (68 minutes) of the show, or you can download it (8.5 MB).
And do check the audio files from other Ideas segments.
(Addendum (21 June 2002): I edited the above post slightly to link the title "Tick Tock Bang" to its corresponding feature page on the Ideas site. There's also a transcript of the show available.)