The historian Tony Judt died last week from complications caused by ALS. Judt had been well-known in the scholarly world for years, but didn’t draw a lot of wider attention until the publication of his 2003 article in the New York Times Review of Books “Israel: The Alternative” lambasting Israel and the pro-Israel lobby in the United States. He similarly raised hackles in a 2006 London Review of Books article called “Bush’s Useful Idiots”, taking to taks American liberals who supported George W. Bush and his war schemes. His book “Postwar: A History Of Europe Since 1945″ is considered a defining work, making the case for the success of social democracy in Western Europe — a topic he would return to in his final book, Ill Fares The Land (see also this NYTRB article of the same title). His death comes just as scholarly and critical voices on the left need to be heard even more than ever. This Guardian obit by Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a good review of his career, and this N+1 obit post considers his role as a scholar of the Left.

The John Madden NFL football video game franchise is entering its 22nd year with the imminent release of “Madden 2011″. This ESPN article by Patrick Hruby chronicles how it all began, how it almost never happened, and how it has had its own impact on the way the real game is played. I had “Madden ’92″ way back then for the Sega Genesis, and even then it took a lot of playing to get the hang of the complex play calling and figuring out how to get the freaking quarterback to throw a pass without getting intercepted. Like most contemporary console video games, the current iterations are just too damn hard for a geezer like me to even begin to figure out, but this article brought back a lot of memories of playing those early versions. Extra bonus: read this short Wired article about the battle between EA and 6,000 former NFL players who are pissed off that the Madden game uses their likenesses but doesn’t give them a cut of the action.

Blogger John Ptak, who writes about a variety of topics on science and social history at his excellent blog, had this lengthy post recently about Vannevar Bush and Robert J. Oppenheimer. I’m sure you recognize Oppenheimer, the man who headed up the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb and who subsequently became the target of a particularly vicious witch hunt during the McCarthy Era. You might be less familiar with Vannevar Bush, but he is a fascinating figure. He was FDR’s science and technology adviser during WWII, and was an instrumental figure in the development of not only the atomic bomb but also the first computer. Bush is probably best known for his landmark 1945 Atlantic Monthly article “As We May Think”, which laid out the public’s understanding of the computer revolution that was about to occur. Ptak’s post looks at the relationship between Bush and Oppenheimer during the hearings and how Bush was one of the few people to support Oppy throughout.

Television writer-director-producer Ken Levine laments the loss of opening credits and theme songs on today’s network TV series. Seriously, guys, would 20 seconds kill you for such a great part of pop culture?

British historian and NYU professor Tony Judt recently gave a lecture in his role as director of the Eric Maria Remarque Institute looking at the successes and failures of social democracy in Europe. The New York Review of Books has an edited transcript of the lecture, which also considers why America is ambivalent toward social democracy: he points to the heterogeneity of our society and to the human tendency to discount the dangers of anything sufficiently far away (physically or in time). Given the current fascination in this country with what is or is not “socialist”, it’s worth having the historical overview about the very nature of the ideas of social democracy. Here is link to a video of the lecture (QuickTime), if you’d rather listen to it than read it.

The political humor website Political Irony has this post today with a short excerpt from a recent interview with Noam Chomsky as a commentary on the ironic situation that Big Business finds itself in as it tries to simultaneously convince Americans to both love and hate our government. On their own, these couple of paragraphs are quite illuminating (as is most everything Chomsky has to say about politics), but the whole interview itself is even better. The interview is ostensibly about the past successes of labor political action and how it could/should be renewed in our present times, but the conversation does drift into this bigger context of how corporations and corporatist government has been able to successfully convince most Americans that big business is good for them. Seen in juxtaposition to the Judt lecture, both pieces take on added layers of meaning when considering the long, slow march away from the social reforms of the mid 20th Century.

So, thirdly, there’s this modern take on Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” from the New Deal 2.0 blog at the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. You may recall that Swift sarcastically suggested that the solution to systemic famine in Ireland was to start eating the Irish children. So, with tongue in cheek and eyes pointed quite firmly at conservative pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the author of the post suggests that the solution to our crumbling economy is to deport the poor until we reach 100% employment. Even though the author, Marshall Auerback, is being as sarcastic as Swift, it is not at all difficult to imagine some right-winger coming up with this idea and running with it sort of the way Lou Dobbs has done with the bugaboo of immigration. I think this post actually goes very nicely with the Chomsky interview as an example, if exaggerated for effect, of exactly how our power brokers work overtime to undermine notions of social justice and economic equality.