:: Media Times Review Blog ::

The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century
Thomas L. Friedman

Edited transcript of remarks, 04/06/05 Carnegie Council Books for Breakfast (Merrill House, New York City).

JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I’m Joanne Myers, Director of Merrill House Programs. On behalf of the Carnegie Council, I would just like to thank you all for joining us on this very special morning.

Tom Friedman is our speaker, and his book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, will be available for you to purchase at the end of the program today.

Author: Lee Harris, Policy Review

America has been in the midst of a culture war for some time and will probably remain so for some time longer. But culture war is not peculiar to this country. Indeed, there have been at least three great culture wars fought in the course of Western history, including one contemporaneous with the rise of the Sophists in ancient Greece, the epoch identified with the French Enlightenment and the German Aufklärung, and our own current battle. The first two ended in disaster for the societies in which they occurred — the outcome of the third is still pending.

Author: John Battelle, Wired Magazine

Larry thought Sergey was arrogant. Sergey thought Larry was obnoxious. But their obsession with backlinks just might be the start of something big.

It began with an argument. When he first met Larry Page in the summer of 1995, Sergey Brin was a second-year grad student in the computer science department at Stanford University. Gregarious by nature, Brin had volunteered as a guide of sorts for potential first-years - students who had been admitted, but were still deciding whether to attend. His duties included showing recruits the campus and leading a tour of nearby San Francisco. Page, an engineering major from the University of Michigan, ended up in Brin’s group.

Read more: http://wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/battelle.html

Author: Avram Agov, Media Times Review

The period between the Sino-Japanese and Russian-Japanese wars is one of crucial importance for Korea, as the two wars were caused primarily by regional rivalries over the Korean peninsula. At the same time, these two wars were also turning points for all the countries involved. The Sino-Japanese War marked not only the defeat and humiliation of China but also the break up of the Sino-centric regional order and the demise of the imperial system in China in 1911. It also signaled the rise of Japanese might. The Russo-Japanese War solidified Japan’s regional assertiveness and threw Russia into a chain of dramatic internal shifts that ultimately led to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

Read more: http://mediatimesreview.com/july05/Korea.php

Author: Russell A. Berman, Media Times Review

What provokes the anti-American is American activism: not the role America plays in the world but that it is in the world at all. Whatever the American action, the anti-Ameican denounces it, but particularly when the action is couched in a policy of defending the freedom to act, which in turn implies a set of democratic values. The absence of freedom in particular locales—Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans—is typically of concern only for tiny non-governmental organizations, not for the mass-movement public, except when the United States intervenes. There were no mass demonstrations in Paris, Berlin, or Barcelona against Milosevic, the Taliban, or Saddam ever. There were no demonstrations for regime change, ever. The mass movement only emerges when the authoritarian regime is challenged.