I love mornings. The hour before my family gets up is so quiet and calm. No phone calls. Just a cup of coffee and a keyboard. Ahhh.

That’s how the days before, during and after Christmas feel to me as an American Jew.

Oh, I could do without the cultural assumption that we all celebrate Christmas. I could do without the decorations in every mall and in most towns. I could do without the endless cycle of Christmas jingles. Most of all, I could do without the secret belief that Jews really do enjoy all that Christmasy stuff. The truth is that this Jew does not.

But, at least it all culminates in a couple of days of quiet and calm. Christmas is a lovely time of the year for Jews in America, not because of all the decorations and the ho-ho-ho’s, but because it takes the Christians off the streets and shuts the whole place down. While Christians focus on the sweetness of their faith and deal with passive-aggressive fruitcakes, our calendars are empty and our cellphones are mute. Beautiful.

(PS: NBC has carefully removed the perfect SNL short, Christmastime for the Jews, by Robert Smigel, from YouTube for copyright reasons, thus immensely benefiting NBC’s bottom line. I couldn’t find it anywhere. Jerks. (And if NBC has in fact posted it, I hereby preemptively apologize.) [Ten Minutes Later: See Comments 1 and 2 for the apology])

[Tags: christmas jews ]

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The RIAA has announced that it’s not going to sue music downloaders, although it’s holding open the possibility of suing the most egregious offenders.

I like to think it took one look at Charlie Nesson’s case and fled with its short tail between its legs.

This is good news not only for those who have felt the full, brutal force of the RIAA’s whim-driven prosecutions, but because it helps the clear the ground for a longer, more considered redressing of the balance of rights and values.

[Tags: riaa music copyright copyleft charlie_nesson ]

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NPR.org is featuring a piece I wrote (intending it as an on-air commentary) about why I, as a liberal, am glad that Obama invited Rick Warren to the Inaugural platform. Here’s how it begins:

I’m a liberal. Free the whales, tax the rich, I swear to you that not only do I drive a Prius, I turned in our Volvo for it. If you know any one of my political positions, you know them all. That’s how embarrassingly stereotyped I am. So pardon me if I take a moment to give some advice to my fellow liberals and progressives: Chill out, will you?

You’re already out criticizing our president-elect for betraying our side. He’s gone soft on wiretapping, on raising taxes on the wealthy, and now you’re having conniptions because Barack Obama has invited Pastor Rick Warren onto the Inaugural podium. The shame! The horror!

Rick Warren believes things that are anathema to liberals like me.

Rick Warren is against abortion choice and totally against gay marriage. I’m from Massachusetts. I’m totally for both those things.

But personally I’m delighted that Rick Warren was asked and he agreed to participate in the inauguration.

My lefty friends, you’re not listening…[more]

If you have comments about this, could you please post them on the NPR site? It’d be a personal favor. Thanks!

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The beautiful girl in the blue striped shirt is Jessie. The OLPC laptop she’s carrying is the one I donated through WavePlace. This makes me very happy.

[Tags: olpc waveplace ]

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We now have the second iconic moment of the Bush presidency. This is how he’ll be remembered, if only because shoes seem to be so psychologically powerful: Khrushchev is remembered in this country for pounding his shoe on the UN’s lectern, and Adlai Stevenson is remembered for the hole in his shoe.

(NOTES: The first iconic moment was Bush speaking under the “Mission Accomplished” banner. And this post’s title is a Firesign Theater quote.)

[Tags: bush shoes politics worst_president_ever ]

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Ulrike Reinhard has posted a video of my talk at LeWeb on webby leadership. The slides and notes are on SlideShare (although, because I uploaded a PDF, it doesn’t have the animations).

[Tags: leadership web_2.0 ]

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Ethanz has a great post — abstract yet grounded in the personal — about the difference between those who can explain one culture to another and those who simply fall in love with another culture. Fascinating, as always.

[Tags: ][Tags: bridgeblogger global_voices ethan_zuckerman ]

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Amazon’s own review of the director’s cut of Oliver Stone’s Alexander (the worst major movie ever?) includes the following note:

In Stone’s final cut, epic battles remain chaotic (although Alexander’s strategy is somewhat easier to follow, with on-screen titles indicating left, right, and center during his army’s greatest maneuvers)…

Yes, those are the sort of advanced techniques they just don’t teach you in film school.

[Tags: oliver_stone film alexander bad_movies ]

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Thanksgiving is far and away my favorite national holiday. Family, food, gratitude…what’s not to like?

Just as the meal is slightly more complicated for those of us who don’t eat meat, the holiday is a little more gnarly for those who don’t believe in G-d. We agnostics and atheists have all of the believers’ joy in what we have, as well as the simultaneous sad remembering of those who do not, but we don’t have anyone to thank. That’s a loss; religion as I’ve seen it practiced — my wife is an Orthodox Jew — sanctifies the everyday, which leads us to care ever more for the world we’ve been given and our companions in it.

I don’t have that sense of sanctity because I lack the sense of a Sanctifier. I am left believing that while the Renaissance distinction between Fortuna and Virtus is useful in some instances, in the final accounting when you’re stripped down to bare wood, even your virtues are accidents. If you hadn’t been born to those particular parents, in that particular time and place, with a body that can do this but not that, with the set of experiences that happened to form you, you wouldn’t have the virtues you claim as your own. It’s all Fortuna. I happened to have won the lottery: I have a healthy family, work I love, water, and a roof. I have no One to thank, but that does not make me less appreciative of what is spread on my table and aware that it could be overturned tomorrow.

I’m fine with that, especially since without Anyone to thank for singling me out for a happy life, I also don’t have Anyone to blame for leaving so many behind. That’s a more gnarly question than how to make a good vegetarian stuffing.

Happy Thanksgiving to us all.

[Tags: thanksgiving religion atheism agnosticism ]

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Here’s an odd thing.

I was sure that when Google China first started cleansing its results, a search for “tiananmen” at Google Images did not return the famous photo of the man standing in front of the line of tanks, or other photos of the Tiananmen demonstrations.

Today it does.

Even odder, I was talking with Lokman Tsui of the Berkman Center about this, and he discovered that if you search for “tiananmen” using the Chinese characters (天安门), you don’t get back photos of the demonstrations but sanitized, post-card-ish touristy photos.

On purpose? Fluke? A crack in the structure of control?

[Tags: china google tiananmen oni filtering lokman_tsui search berkman ]

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