Even leaving aside the tacky-at-best practice of referring to people with a strong thinking preference as "Vulcans", something's a little off with David Brooks's review of Al Gore's new book. Most notably, this phrasing struck my attention (emphasis mine):

As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, “The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.”

This sentence doesn't sound like something only a graduate student could come up with; in fact, it sounds like the sort of reasonable yet straightforward analysis tht you might find in an intelligent high schooler's paper. Curious, I did a little Wikipedia-ing; as if we needed confirmation that Brooks should know better, he has an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Chicago! I'd assume that even in 1983 they don't hand out such degrees to students who can't write clear sentences about simple historical trends. So Brooks is presumably aware that the "graduate school" epithet is a little silly here. Throw in descriptions of Gore's prose as "pomposity" that the reader needs to "steel yourself for", and it's clear that Brooks is taking a deliberately exaggerated version of the position that Gore is too intellectual to represent the American people -- and in the New York Times, a publication popular primarily with educated liberals. My interpretation of "graduate school" in particular is that he's trying to play up Gore's supposed over-intellectuality for a mostly college-educated audience; they wouldn't be intimidated by a more realistic description, since it would sound close to their own backgrounds. I wonder what makes Brooks think alienating (literally, with the Vulcan reference in the article's title) Gore from NYT readers is so important, and if it's working.

Meanwhile, over in Slate, William Saletan, whose straightforwardly factual presentations I usually admire, ends up saying something a little weird when talking about the new no-period Pill:

The danger, from a standpoint of emancipation, is that some of these women won't shut off the bleeding to satisfy themselves. They'll do it to satisfy others. On menstrual-suppression Web sites, you can find testimonies from women who hate their periods for making them too moody for their boyfriends or too tired to go to the office. Their menses are getting in the way of their men.

The boyfriend comment I can understand, but if I can't go to work or can't work effectively because of low energy from blood loss, not to mention crippling pain, that's far from my "menses getting in the way of [my] men". That's another example of how menstruation's side effects can be a more than minor obstacle to the "emancipation" that comes from being able to perform at your best in any job or activity, regardless of whether men are involved.

Tail Recursion

At first I was a little daunted by the 700+ page bulk of Gödel, Escher, Bach; but a background in theoretical computer science/formal linguistics plus an almost embarrassingly strong fondness for meta-commentary are enabling me to breeze through it. I'm always a sucker for texts that cleverly clothe the same idea in parallel expressive metaphors, which is the extremely well-executed premise of this book.

Plus, it's often laugh-out-loud funny in an obscurely intellectual way:

[in the context of a dialogue in which the dual meaning of "tonic" as something you drink and the first note of a musical scale] That stuff is renowned for its thirst quenching powers. Why, in some places people very nearly go crazy over it. At the turn of the century in Vienna, the Schönberg food factory stopped making tonic, and started making cereal instead. You can't imagine the uproar that caused.

The proverbial German phenomenon of the "verb-at-the-end", about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nonplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping.