First off, here is JHK on Colbert (Flash required, methinks). It's smart, it's funny, and it's worth your time (6 min).

For those of you in Canada, the video can also be seen on youtube here.

And, Jim has sent us a reply to the critics of World Made By Hand (link to Amazon)...it is posted here in its entirety.

I don't intend to mount a "defense" against all your complaints, but would like to make a few brief points:

The facts support the position that the Y2K computer situation was a serious problem. Billions of dollars and untold man-hours were spent correcting it. It was, however, a very limited problem, and it is fatuous to assert that just because it was successfully corrected means that we shouldn't have taken it seriously.

Complaints have come from many quarters that in my novel the feminist revolution appears to have been discontinued, or that my female characters are not sufficiently valorized. To me, these complaints show an impressive incapacity to imagine that social arrangements might be different under very different practical circumstances. In "World Made By Hand," the corporate milieu no longer exists. Issues of "glass ceilings" and "equal pay" tend to be irrelevant. All the people in the novel are essentially working within their competence. But the divisions of labor are not what they used to be in the age of WalMart and Time Warner. The major female characters are treated sympathetically as real people with pretty complicated lives.

The supernatural elements in the novel were introduced for a purpose: to suggest that the consensus about reality defined by Enlightenment ideas is yielding to a different consensus about reality -- one less grounded in empiricism and logical positivism. I went this way because it seemed probable that socio-economic changes so profound would have to produce changes in fundamental views of reality.

Robert Rapier's recent review of World Made By Hand can be found here.