Matins ¶ Scott Horton talks to C Bradley Thompson about the new book that he has co-authored, Neoconservatism: An Obituary for an Idea, and — wow! “War–perpetual war–is the ultimate means by which the neocons can fight creeping nihilism and promote sacrifice and nationalistic patriotism.” Shout it from the housetops! Given the lack of sacrifice evident during the neocon-accented Bush Administrations, we can only suppose that there just wasn’t enough war. “In the end,” Thompson remarks, “this is what neoconservatism is all about and it’s why we’ve written its obituary in the hopes of killing it. (Harper‘s)

Lauds ¶ What we want to know is, how do you stuff 175 Picassos into a suitcase? (Even a suitcase as big as the Editor’s, which always gets a HEAVY tag from baggage handlers.) There are lots of other mysteries surrounding the trove that an electrician and his wife, Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec, showed to Claude Picasso in September, and you’ll get an idea of just how murky this mess is from Kim Willsher’s breathless account in the Guardian or from Kate Deimling’s less atmospheric account at ArtInfo. From the latter, which is based on a radio interview, we learn that M Le Guennec stored the Picassos in the garage and never looked at them, because “I wasn’t at all aware of their value.” Douteux!

Prime ¶ We were thrilled to read that Don Blankenship was retiring from Massey Energy, even though we didn’t know the story by Jeff Goodell in Rolling Stone that may well have prompted the unexpected move. Mr Blankenship’s wickedness was branded on our minds in the wake of last April’s Upper Big Branch mine explosion, which killed 29 men. Goodell calls him “the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with the business and politics of energy in America today,” and we think that that’s putting it mildly. Like Felix Salmon, we hope that the story doesn’t end the way the coal baron wants it to:

“I don’t care what people think,” he once said during a talk to a gathering of Republican Party leaders in West Virginia. “At the end of the day, Don Blankenship is going to die with more money than he needs.”

Next up? Rolling Stone ought to get Chris Lehmann to expand his investigation of Stewart and Lynda Resnick.

Tierce ¶ We are not thrilled to learn that Jonah Lehrer has retreated behind the paywall at The New Yorker. His article on the replication woes of modern science, “The Truth Wears Off,” is hugely important, not least because it will probably be openly misinterpreted by creationists and other Doubting Thomases as “proof” that research scientists fudge their findings. The problem that Lehrer labels “the slipperiness of empiricism” must now be examined from every angle. Our own suspicion is that we’ve reached a frontier of research that can be crossed only with new tools — language tools especially. Over two hundred years ago, Lavoisier made a science out of alchemy by codifying chemistry’s nouns and adjectives. It may be time to tackle the verbs.

Regarding the paywall, though: if you can afford only one magazine subscription, you ought to make it The New Yorker.

Sext ¶ It has been a while (we think) since Dave Bry entertained us with one of his Public Apologies, and from the latest in the series, we can sort of guess why: he has, astonishingly, run out of things to feel sorry for. In the current offering, he apologizes to his black date for squeezing her hand a bit tightly at a Gravediggaz event (we really cannot bring ourselves to call such things “concerts”). Dave was one of only two white attendees, and when the band rolled out a guillotine… “’Fear’ is a strong word. I never felt directly threatened.” But. (The Awl)

Nones ¶ At Foreign Policy, Charles Kenny re-examines “the resource curse,” which holds that nations with abundant natural resources are prone to poverty and civil war. We’re not sure that we ever subscribed to this idea, which is not quite the same as holding that extractive economies are prone to poverty and civil war. Even Mr Kenny admits that “ countries don’t get rich if all they do is produce crops and dig stuff out of the ground.” (via Real Clear World)

Vespers ¶ Kyle Minor makes explicit a distinction that we have often sensed but never thought through. We must confess that the word “experimental,” when used in connection with the creative imagination, conjures up “the experiment that rises from something like a creative chaos, and which finds whatever form it finds out of a chaotic process and in a state that is often enough mimetic of that chaos.” What Kyle has come to prefer is the fiercely economic and literally conservative experiment embodied in a novel such as Pale Fire, which he has just re-read. “The wild and un-pin-downable effect of the whole thing is paradoxically achieved by a structure of utmost elegance and simplicity, and the overall project is not made of wildness, but rather of utmost control.” In the end, we suppose that we’re guilty of applying the “experimental” label to works that don’t come off. An experiment that succeeds has a way of effacing its own chanciness. (HTMLGiant)

Compline ¶ Revenge of the cattle barons: there’s a new kind of “MBA”: Masters of Beef Advocacy. Its mission: to save the planet from Michael Pollan. In his story at Mother Jones, Wes Enzinna captures the program’s irony: “The next generation of farmers realizes that the days of oil-fueled, corn-fed, resource-intensive agriculture are numbered.” Let’s hope that they can come up with something better than blackmailing universities into denying Mr Pollan a podium.

Have a Look

¶ Green getaway. (Dwell; via The Best Part)

Noted

¶ An online snippet of Jonathan Franzen at the Paris Review.

¶ The diet of worms cure. (Discoblog)

Matins ¶ Until just the other day, what frightened us most about zombies was their immense popularity: The Walking Dead quickly claimed an audience more than twice the size of Mad Men‘s. Had, we worried, the social fabric frayed so badly that Americans have come to regard their neighbors and co-workers as living dead? Then along came Chuck Klosterman in last Friday’s Times. He briskly swept away the nonsense of our grandiose theorizing. “In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche.” Aha! We get it, now. (But we’re still not going to watch. We don’t get 400 work emails a day.)

Lauds ¶ The fiasco of what we have heard was billed as “An Interactive Conversation with Steve Martin” has become New York’s querelle du jour: you must have an opinion regardless of how little you actually know. At Emdashes, Martin Schneider sticks to his guns. Mr Schneider was there, and he insists that interviewer Deborah Solomon made a hash of things by discussing the details of a book that no one in the audience could have had time to read. Not surprisingly, dissatisfaction was expressed digitally — by remote viewers — long before anyone in the hall expressed unhappiness. In the end, however, we think the management’s intervention was inappropriate. The price of a ticket does not include a guarantee that a good time will be had by all.

Prime ¶ Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World was already in our shopping basket before Tyler Cowen hailed it: “I am convinced by the major thesis.” We already were; now all we have to do is read the book. Tyler links to a provocative interview at the National Review, where the author enjoins, “We need a humanomics, not more freakonomics.”

Tierce ¶ Here’s a really bad idea — right out of Idiocracy! Let’s let voters decide which science projects ought to be funded! Democracy in the laboratory! Peerless peer review! That’s what Nebraska omedhaun Adrian Smith is proposing. “ Help us identify grants that are wasteful or that you don’t think are a good use of taxpayer dollars.” The silver lining may be that the request generates a list of projects that ought to be retitled. That’s precisely where a good science writer such as Chris Mooney comes in. Professional elites have a lot to learn about communicating the importance of their work to non-specialists.

Sext ¶ In his Times column this weekend, “She Who Must Not Be Named,” Charles Blow made a very important vow, and right-thinking Internauts ought to do likewise, and let a certain former vice-presidential candidate go nameless. There is no need to feed a fire by trying to extinguish it. “The never-ending attempts to tear her down only build her up. She’s like the ominous blob in the horror films: the more you shoot at it, the bigger and stronger it becomes.”

Nones ¶ What does Julian Assange want? At 3 Quarks Daily, Robert Baird comments on Aaron Bady’s analysis, which is a bit on the complicated side but worth working through all the same. Transparency and muckraking are not the ultimate objectives; destabilizing the “conspiracies of power” is. This is naiveté of an elderly vintage, and nothing demostrates the emptiness of Mr Assange’s theoretical constructs more forcibly than the contents of last week’s mammoth diplomatic dump. Again and again, the cables reveal that official thinking, while more complex and detailed, is more or less in accord with public understanding of official objectives. The idea that power is exercised by secret cabals is laughingly nostalgic: today’s power is quite cynically flexed right out in the open. The American foreign policy problem appears, indeed, to be that everyone else practices conspiratorial duplicity.

Vespers ¶ In the course of doing his day job, Ivebeenreadinglately‘s Levi Stahl came across an old Paris Review interview from 1978 in which Anthony Powell speaks sublime truths on the subjects of children and marriage. “Well, there again it’s frightfully complicated, but clearly people don’t tell you what their life with their wife is like if they’re at all satisfactorily married.” (Not until the Times began encouraging women to write “Modern Love” columns, anyway.)

Compline ¶ Ross Douthat’s reconfigured anatomy of the “culture wars” seems sound to us. Committed Christians have been making great gains in educational status, and now challenge liberals more from within the academy than from without. Meanwhile, these Christians and liberals are in accord about the seriousness of sex and the importance of marriage. On the other side — and apparently outside the arena of cultural conflict — lie that 58% of Americans without a college degree, whose family arrangements increasingly disregard the order of married life and feature high rates of divorced and unwed parenthood. (NYT)

Have a Look

¶ Cameras at auction in Vienna. (The Online Photographer)

¶ Jim Kazanjian’s Fun Houses. (The Best Part)

Noted

¶ College Radio Rag. (NYT)

Matins ¶ Maureen Freely discusses her rich life as a translator of Orhan Pamuk. She doesn’t note, for some reason, that she grew up in Istanbul and makes her home there, but she does remark on the very unusual, not to say unnatural, role that has been projected upon her by Turkish chauvinists who resent the critical cast of their Nobelist novelist’s mind. “Many Turks who feel ambivalent about Pamuk like to attribute his international success and most especially his Nobel prize to his translators, who have, they claim, ‘improved his words for western consumption’.” What kind of bed do you have to get up out of in the morning in order to think such nonsense? (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

Lauds ¶ Maybe you had to be there, the other night at the 92nd Street Y. According to Felicia Lee’s story in the Times, Steve Martin and interviewer Deborah Solomon had an onstage conversation about the art world. That’s what Mr Martin’s new novel, An Object of Beauty, is about. According to Martin Schneider at Emdashes, however, Ms Solomon “alienate[d] the audience” with a clunky book report. Either way, the audience was palpably discontented, and a stagehand was sent out with a note to the intterviewer: “Ask him about his career.” We have only one thing to say about this kind of audience passivism: it is not a good idea, because the artistic reaction against such philistinism will inevitably impose classical-music-concert restraints, leaving the audience no choice but to sit still and applaud at appoointed times. No matter how bad the performance.

Prime ¶ At The Baseline Scenario, Simon Johnson explores the concept of “too big to bail.” Noting that any Eurozone member can veto the easy-out proposition that another member is “merely illiquid,” he goes on to ask how deep are the pockets that Europe can dig into for rescue efforts. How rich, for example, is the IMF? “[B]ottom line: the IMF has no more than $1 trillion, but in terms of usable cash, the experts start to look pale as you discuss committing more than $500bn.”  

Tierce ¶ Recent studies of the hormone oxytocin, written up by Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science, point to an intuitively more correct understanding of just what it is that this chemical does in the brain. Long thought to cause powerful feelings of bonding, oxytocin has now been shown to be more of an intensifier that strengthens existing predispositions — such as resentment for the lack of maternal bonding. By now, you’d think, the claim that any single agent in brain chemistry always triggers something as complex as an emotional state of mind would be laughed out of court, but the hunger for Wonderland cookies that have an immediate and invariable effect is obstinately persistent.

Sext ¶ Don’t miss Jessica Roake’s insight into the “Hide/Seek” brouhaha at the National Gallery. Takeaway pearl: “Which means that all of the works on display at Hide/Seek have been shown before; it’s the context that’s new, and it’s the context that makes people so uncomfortable. The curators built the show because they were tired of seeing, as Katz said, ‘Museum after museum where they don’t mention the partners, the autobiography, the question of gender and sexuality. It’s hiding in plain sight, yet no one has put it together’.” (The Awl)

Nones ¶ One of the most arresting peculiarities of the political development of the United States is its proliferation of competing and overlapping jurisdictions (read: power bases), which makes getting anything done almost as impossible as it was in the European Middle Ages. It is commonly thought that Europe’s patchwork of provinces was stitched together slowly during the Dark Ages, but the sclerotic complication of American governance took place in the clear light of day. Now that our partisan climate is reminiscent of the feuds of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, our political redundancies work to paralyse, not support, civic affairs. As Robert McCartney’s piece about the DC Metro so maddeningly shows. (Washington Post; via Marginal Revolution)

Vespers ¶ Levi Stahl, whose blog, Ivebeenreadinglately, we encountered thanks to Terry Teachout, appraises Virginia Woolf’s gifts as a critic, which we have always regarded as first-rate. Woolf wrote for readers, not for people who wanted to be in the know without actually bothering with books. You may not agree with her judgments, but that is not the point; the point is that they are never ill-considered or foolish. (We especially agree with her remark about Dickens, quoted in the entry; we don’t think that Dickens had the faintest idea what he was doing. The wonder is that there are readers who do.)

Compline ¶ Hard times in Mitchell, SD: “In today’s world, an arena with corn on it is less interesting by the year.” When that’s what the local newspaper has to say about the Corn Palace, melancholy thoughts ensue. Some time ago, we proposed that the city fathers establish a Museum of High School Yearbooks across the street. We freely offer this brilliant idea. We have never recovered from our own visit to the Corn Palace, in 1963. CE. (LA Times; via Arts Journal)

Have a Look

¶ Probe Field (BLDGBLOG)

Noted

¶ Nige appreciates Osbert Lancaster.

Matins ¶ “Keep your identity small” — Paul Graham’s excellent maxim. Don’t identify yourself as anything — Catholic, American, sports-crazed — unless it’s absolutely necessary (and it rarely will be). “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.” Our bet is that most self-labeling is inspired by other people’s thumbnail questions. So the corollary to Graham’s law would be: resist the temptation to describe yourself. Nothing particularly newsworthy here; we followed a link from Tyler Cowen to Ben Casnocha.

Lauds ¶ Blake Gopnik rightly blasts the National Gallery for yielding to the Catholic League and “various conservatives,” in shuttering a video by artist and AIDS victim David Wojnarowicz, allegedly because of an ant-covered crucifix but, hey, let’s not kids ourselves, because the work is rawly homoerotic. We were a little shocked ourselves by a Wojnarowicz show at the New Museum in their old Soho location, but, as Mr Gopnik points out, there is no “common standard of decency” in this country — not at the moment, anyway — and nobody’s distaste is grounds for censorship. Écrazey l’infâme. (Washington Post; via Arts Journal)

Prime ¶ “Books After Amazon,” Onnesha Roychoudhuri’s report on the dark side of the online behemoth’s business dealings — with publishers — may make you wonder if the good people at Amazon have the sense to know when to stop pricing books underwater. Ever inclined to be sanguine, we expect that small publishers will be forced by Amazon’s coercive discounting and co-op practices to rethink their business from the ground up, perhaps setting up a book distribution network of their own (after all, their scale is vastly smaller than Wal-Mart’s or Amazon’s). They’ll think of something. It’s a matter of distinguishing the true books from the cans of soup. (Boston Review; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Tierce ¶ “In silico” — we like the sound of that. It makes digital goings-on sound less “virtual,” even if only by a hair, so far as our actual comprehension is concerned. Have you heard of the Avidians? According to Brandon Keim, they’re “digital organisms” that mutate in distributed computer networks according to parameters that simulate what we know of organic evolution. And, what do you know: the Avidians have evolved the ability to flash synchronously, like fireflies, more or less (not the ones we remember). (Wired Science)

Sext ¶ We know that it’s shameless, but we’re going to direct your attention to The Bygone Bureau‘s list of Best Blogs without having checked out any of their recommendations. You know, you could help out around here if you wanted to. You could send us your own report. Anything that you recommend, we promise to read. So, get on it.

Nones ¶ The recently-ended civil war in Sri Lanka appears to have produced one good thing: a bumper crop of accountants. Another side-effect of the war, equally helpful to the island nation’s bid to sop of lots of outsourced bookkeeping, is that nobody is very well paid there. As William Gibson said, the future is here, but it’s unequally distributed.

Vespers ¶ The Daily Beast reprints Colum McCann’s preface to Aleksandar Hemon’s collection of the Best European Fiction 2011, which begins with a very strange statement: “The writer’s proper destiny is to know where he or she comes from, confront his conscience, draw the border line, then step beyond it.” Did he just make that blarney up? When he later suggests that Europe is now, in a literary sense, more American than America itself, the nonsense of it would be cleared up if he simply said that Europe is a great big New York City. He ought to know that, living here as he does. (via The Morning News)

Compline ¶ The Crimson calls for “randomizing admission” to Harvard by lottery. The model is the medical residency program that has been in place for some time. Having identified the 80-to-90% of Harvard applicants who are qualified to be Harvard students, the university ought to stand back from the process instead of helping privileged kids — the ones with the greatest access to resume-building programs — who don’t need it. (via Felix Salmon)

Have a Look

¶ Mamie and Scaasi. WHO. KNEW. ?. (Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist)

Noted

¶ “Was TGI Friday’s America’s First Singles Bar?” A pressing question! We go to the Baker Street Pub (the bar that’s there now) so often that they just bring us the black-and-tan without our having to ask. That’s about all we pick up, though. (Brainiac)

Matins ¶ Kathleen Seelye’s excellent story about controversial celebrations of the sesquicentennial of the Civil War — there’s going to be a “fun” Secession Ball in Charleston — serves as a semi-official reminder that the aftermath of the War of Northern Aggression remains problematic at best. The concept of celebrating “soldiers’ right to defend their homes” without reference to the casus belli that made such defense necessary — secession from the Union, occasioned by the (likely) preclusion of slavery in the nation’s new territories — will strike Yankees as odd, if not positively hypocritical; but it would be well for northeastern liberals to spend the anniversary mulling over not the old enemy’s “bigotry” but the their own condescension toward the South, which, as you might expect if you bothered to think about it, has made many old Confederates feel bound to a republic that does not really welcome them. Ms Seelye refers to the conflict as the Civil War throughout her article. (NYT)

Lauds ¶ We haven’t seen either of the movies that Dan Callahan pitchforks in his “rich girl cinema” piece at The House Next Door, but we’re certainly going to see Sophia Coppola’s Somewhere, and Mr Callahan has sold us, however inadvertently, on Lina Dunham’s Tiny Furniture. We’re amused by Mr Callahan’s blithe assumption that rich people are not interesting (we take the opposite view), and we’re touched that, at the start of Ms Dunham’s movie, the critic “found it difficult to focus because Dunham looks and sounds and acts exactly like a girl I used to know in college, a rich girl who wrote poetry, plain-faced but magnetic, who always was taking up with pretty boys who treated her badly.” That kind of fresh and immediate personal association makes moviegoing sweet indeed.

Prime ¶ In an important essay that you will be glad that you read, “A Client Is Not a Counterparty,” The Epicurian Dealmaker draws a line between “proprietary trading” and “proprietary investing” that is clear enough to expose the perniciousness of the latter practice, which almost everyone who hasn’t gotten rich working at Goldman, Sachs (and the lesser firms of its ilk) agrees ought to be stopped.

Tierce ¶ There are two things to cherish about Susan Dominus’s nature tale, “The Mystery of the Red Bees of Red Hook.” The first is the given name of one of the beekeepers embroiled in the mystery, which turns out to be funny on a level that Ms Dominus either missed or was too kind to mark. The other is the unexpected reminiscence of St Augustine that floats up when Cerise Mayo laments her swarm’s “unnatural” fondness for the maraschino cherry syrup, loaded with Red Dye Nº 40, that the bees have discovered at a nearby factory. Like romanticisers of the savage from Montaigne’s day to our own, she is disappointed to learn that bees are no less fallen — er, driven by their appetite for instant gratification — than the children of Adam and Eve, whose lust for pleasure Augustine could explain only by means of his egregious invention, original sin. (NYT)

Sext ¶ If our friend George Snyder is not sitting by the phone waiting for a call from the producers of The A List, that’s because he has a rather more regal sense of what “A List” means. We only wish that Patrick Dennis were still around to correct George’s misapprehension that “being followed about New York City with multiple cameras while you smoke and drink and work out is hardly natural.” (1904)

Nones ¶ Jonah Goldberg dumps on President Obama, in the wake of the Wikileaks release, for relying on “engagement, dialogue, kumbaya” to solve international problems. More specifically, he blasts the president for failing to secure a favorable trade treaty with South Korea. There is a great deal of offstage saber-rattling in Mr Goldberg’s paragraphs, but no specific recommendations, not even an explicit demand that the president “get tough” with America’s antagonists. (LA Times; via Real Clear World)

Vespers ¶ Ben Hamilton makes a persuasive case for not treating rap lyrics as “high poetic art” — and he means no disrespect to either art form. His most forceful objection comes early on: “rap lyrics just do not work on the page.” We found  this to be true of a little volume of Cole Porties verses, which in many case don’t even scan without musical support. Mr Hamilton also worries that the equation of Ice Cube and Wallace Stevens will work to the detriment of the latter. (The Millions)

Compline ¶ Don’t miss Robert McCrum’s account of a spirited talk with Margaret Atwood that conveys the impression that Ms Atwood is one of the great minds of our time, and only incidentally a poet and a novelist. She is the rare person whose interest in the environment has not pushed her into the abyss of misanthropy. “We shouldn’t be saying ‘Save the planet’; we should be saying: ‘Save viable conditions in which people can live’.”

Have a Look

¶ Our great friend, JRParis, is in town, and as always he is taking great photographs, several of which he has already posted. (Mnémoglyphes; [oldest permalink]) 

¶ “Crumpled City” maps. (GOOD)

Noted

¶ “Radiation Rings Hint Universe Was Recycled Over and Over” (Wired Science)

Matins ¶ Cory Doctorow asks: “What Do We Want Copyright To Do?” Putting the question that way cuts through the self-serving claims of “content providers” and the radical eyewash of those who claim that “information wants to be free.” Mr Doctorow offers no detailed proposals, but he argues persuasively that any reasonable copyright system will be (a) based on actual evidence of need and (b) balanced between remuneration and inconvenience. We’re inclined to believe that the question ought to be, “How Do We Want Copyright To Work?” — meaning how, exactly, revenue streams from consumers to creators. But a moment’s thought suggests that this is just another way of framing Mr Doctorow’s call for balance. (Guardian; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lauds ¶ One of the first things that we read on our return from vacation was Peter Schjeldahl’s report on van Eyck’s Ghent Altarpiece, “The Flip Side.” [P] The amount of information packed into this extremely readable account of the panels’ current conservation project is astonishing profuse but never miscellaneous; every sentence is informed by Mr Schjeldahl’s understanding thatt the Altarpiece is, above all, a beautiful thing. We also shared his outrage that the masterpiece is a hostage of the Ghent cathedral’s dependence upon gate receipts; it ought to be in a proper museum. (The New Yorker)

Prime ¶ Is Felix Salmon biting the hand that feeds him? We don’t have any idea, to be sure, of how much revenue  Thomson Reuters pulls in from retail market reports (possibly none), but the idea that individual investors “ should probably check up on the value of their investments no more than twice a year (and even once every two or three years is fine)” seems radically contrarian, at least for anyone who isn’t Warren Buffett. As if that weren’t renunciation enough, Felix wishes that the White House would release the daily report that Treasury prepares for the Oval Office. “I’m sure that the product would be extremely popular on Wall Street and beyond, and help build a fair amount of free goodwill for the White House.” And it would render television’s moronic market reports superfluous.  

Tierce ¶ More from Ed Yong about the strange phenomenon of stereotype threat — strauge because it is really the opposite of a phenomenon, because it is invisible alike to those whose performance falls off simply because they believe that they’re thought to be incapable of doing better, and to those who thrive on the stereotyping, almost always white males. In this double-blind experiment, women taking a university physics course narrowed the gap in gender performance when they completed a writing exercise before the course commenced. Byaffirming their own ideas of what’s important in life in a brief essay, they created a foundation of self-confidence that negated the stereotype threat.

Sext ¶ Bob Cringely has some thoughts about the death — or dying, if you prefer — of email. We thought that it was just us. To the list of factors that Cringely lines up as rendering email less enticing than it used to be, we would add a certain sense of surfeit; those of us who are old enough to have done so certainly gorged on email for about a decade before other media (blogs, social networks) began to alter Internet communication. We said everything that we had to say, and then we said again — and the bums got into the White House anyway. Also unmentioned, and not entirely irrelevant, is the anecdotal evidence that smart people have come to detest phone calls.

Nones ¶ Timothy Garton Ash is astute about the Wikileaks release of US diplomatic cables, noting that State Department officials come off looking pretty capable. What we’re hoping for is that this heap of clear-eyed analyses of foreign affairs will make it more difficult for our politicians to support bankrupt governments and indefensible regimes. (Guardian; via Real Clear World)

Vespers ¶ Emma Garman writes intriguingly about the last NYRB republication of a Stefan Zweig title, Journey Into the Past. Zweig is one of those mitteleuropäisch writers whose name we’ve always known but whose work we’ve never read. This novella, translated by Andrea Bell (and introduced by Andre Aciman), promises an agreeable corrective. (Words Without Borders; via Conversational Reading)

Compline ¶ Bill Morris is one of those guys who like to type — on a typewriter. The way he talks, you’d think that the typed letter was at some point in the past considered to be “correct,” but that’s not how we remember it. Just as condolence notes and love letters are not supposed to be conveyed via email today, so they weren’t supposed to be typed when we were growing up, either. We’re amused by the romance of Mr Morris’s reflections, but we fail to see an intrinsic difference between letters composed at typewriters and with word processors. The fact that many writers don’t take the trouble doesn’t delete the fact that computer-aided writing is vastly easier to polish. (The Millions)

Have a Look

¶ Ancient Madder. (Ivy Style)

¶ The Espresso Book Machine — a reprise. (via HTMLGiant)

Noted

¶ Alexander Chee: Thoughts on writing in a land where it is safe to write anything because writing has been discredited and is considered unimportant. (Koreanish)

Matins¶ It’s not so much who (Nick Hornby) as what is behind Hoxton’s Monster Supply Shop: the London correlative to 826 Valencia, the flagship of Dave Egger’s fleet of after-school literacy enhancement centers. In London, it’s the Ministry of Stories, and the well-polished modesty of Mr Hornby’s account at FT does not obscure his contribution to the project. (We’d probably be killed for putting it that way, but we’re on vacation.) (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lauds¶ In a fine jeremiad that, in lesser hands, would be overkill, Chris Lehmann hurls the shattering wisdom of Max Weber at the celebrity accumulators of kidcult dreck featured in the current issue of Vanity Fair.It would be stupid to complain that Mr Lehmann is cranky, because jeremiads are supposed to be cranky. Not that we expect Amy Sedaris won’t be pleased, but, gee, she gets off with a much lighter spanking than “tedious Upper East Side candy baron Dylan Lauren.” (Somebody really ought to have urged the baroness to pine after bedsheets other than her dad’s.) “After all, as the consummate sociological professionals at Conde Nast remind us, yesterday’s stable of meticulously choreographed taste preferences are merely fodder for tomorrow’s ironically packaged crafts-for-the-poor insta-book.” (The Awl)

Prime¶ We”ll be damned if we can think of a more eloquent denunciation of the soulless agglomeration of local businesses — most of it written in the villain’s own hand — than Thomas Cox’s tale of the client whom he had to advise not to buy a cord of firewood for her soon-to-be-repossessed home. With its crap talk of “committing to providing excellent service” and “responding to your concerns with quality integrity,” Key Bank’s inhumanity makes us wonder if genuine robots would be worse. Mr Cox is the attorney who elicited confessions of “robo-signing” from a GMAC functionary earlier this year. (Naked Capitalism)

Tierce¶ Maria Popova writes up the findings of a new Pew study on marriage, which, as you’ve already elsewhere, is taking on a class-bound coloration, favored by the educated by shunned or indefinitely postponed by the proles. We like the summation that Ms Popova claims that she would make if she were cruder: “So, Americans are still sexist homophobes who believe money buys happiness and human beings are innately evil.” (Brain Pickings)

Sext¶ In a piece that’s much too amusing for Prime, Felix Salmon throws us two tasty bones: Benjamin Wey, soi-disant China finance expert, and 5WPR, a flacketeria that Gawker has been following. The moral of the story? “You really shouldn’t listen to people quoted in the media just because they’re quoted in the media.” But you knew that, right?

Nones¶ What is the French for “brain drain“? You won’t hear us crowing that American higher education is so much better than French higher education that fully 27% of those who left France for the United States from 1996 to 2006 have been academics. You probably won’t see us shedding any tears for France, either. You will see us doubled over at this claim, made by an economist whose only regret is that he didn’t cross the Atlantic sooner: “US universities are havens of knowledge.” Havens — that’s the very word that comes to our lips when we think of Columbia and MIT. (Warning: given that this story appeared The New York Times — albeit based on a study by the Institut Montaigne in Paris — it may be debunked as a “nonstory” any minute now by The Nytpicker.)

Vespers¶ We think that Darin Strauss does a great job of handling the delicate issues of privacy and honesty that bedevil the writing of memoirs, and maybe you will, too, after you’ve read Sari Botton’s interview with the author at The Rumpus — although we must caution that the book itself, Half a Life, is inevitably more satisfying. “She was well liked and pretty, but she wasn’t the prom queen, and it was disrespectful, I think, to pretend she was because that, because that’s mourning someone who didn’t exist.”

Compline¶ A jaundiced view, possibly tendentious, of the “Chinese middle class,” dismissed in this article from the Japanese magazine, Sentaku, as a “mirage” created by the Communist Party that is “on the verge of disintegrating.” (via Real Clear World)

Have a Look

¶ Slimbo’s roof (eave).

¶ Corona: the morning rush. (MTA; via The Infrastructurist) In other subway news…

¶ Bernhardt-Sessions show at Cuchifritos: “Milk is the Morandi Message.” Cheese shop next door. (ArtCat)

Noted

¶ The Better Business Bureau: A ratings agency for the people! (Weakonomics)

Matins¶ At The Baseline Scenario, guests Mark Paul and Anatasia Wilson wring their hands about the unemployment of college grads and other young people. We agree that there’s a problem, but we don’t believe that current economic structures can be repaired. The sad or lucky truth, depending on how you think about it, is that this country has never had had to re-consider any of its initial arrangements — with the single and rather baleful exception of slavery. What we need to do for young people today is to provide them with whatever they ask for to meet the challenge of developing new ways of doing business. At a minimum, we need to make it very clear that creating an economy that will employ them is entirely up to the youth of America.

Lauds¶ Jim Emerson calls for all serious moviegoers to run out and buy a copy of David Thomson‘s New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Is it encyclopedic? No, but that doesn’t matter, and the review is sprinkled with enough nuggets to show why. On Francis Ford Coppola: “There is a talent in American films that makes for adolescent attitudes, veiled fascism, and a work that leads one to recognize the proximity of talent and meretricious magic.” Bring it on!

Prime¶ In the current New Yorker, John Cassidy asks “What Good Is Wall Street?” Not much, it turns out, in an atmosphere governed by the idea that financial markets, if left to themselves, are efficient. On the contrary, they’re as stuffed with “cotton, hay, and rags,” and impervious to sound advice, as Henry Higgins thinks women to be. Toward the end of the piece, Mr Cassidy visits with The Epicurean Dealmaker, who had the good sense to prepare for a lot of first-time visitors.

Tierce¶ There’s at least one thing to take away from Elizabeth Day’s look at reality television, in The Guardian. And that’s that nobody, except possibly a few clueless wannabees, is being exploited by this kind of entertainment. It may give us hives, but there’s no call for looking down on those who enjoy it; and it seems that nobody is taken in by the pretense of artlessness. We do stick to our belief that people who turn to television for a sense of belonging are fleeing the complications of reality community. (via MetaFilter)

Sext¶ Jean-Louis Gassée’s eloquence on the Third Lie of Computers (“You Can Do It”) brought tears to our eyes — we’d thought that it was just us! Mr Gassée wanted to set up a simple site using a simple app, and, hey, if Google isn’t simple, what is it? Impossible, that’s what. The bingo comes toward the end of the piece, where it is discovered that “the big guys” — the Times, the Journal — have given their glowing new-product reviews ZERO long-term follow-up. Hey, they don’t have to pay for anything, right? Men may come from Venus, but Google’s engineers come from a planet known only to Roz Chast. Payoff joke: “In the meantime, while Google has been preoccupied with “killing” Microsoft, Facebook has grown to become the Internet’s most frequented site.” We couldn’t like it more.

Nones¶ At A Fistful of Euros, P O’Neill pens a piece with a title, “Ireland: The timidity of the lawyers,” that seems quite completely controverted by what follows. For the only reasonable conclusion that one can draw coming away from the essay is that Irish lawyers — the Irish lawyers who serve the governments, whether as ministers or advisers — are a bold lot, happy to let the Irish taxpayer shoulder the bust of Ireland’s property bubble. In Mr O’Neill’s Irish turn of phrase, “Somehow the country never rose in importance as the client compared to the party.”

Vespers ¶ The Millions points us to Seth Colter Walls’s absorbing overview of David Foster Wallace’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center. It seems that Wallace followed in Trollope’s footsteps (see: The Eustace Diamonds ) in at least one way: he obtained detailed information from a tax attorney about “the single most confusing sentence in the tax code.” (There was a contest?) This has entirely reconciled us to the posthumous publication of Pale King. (Newsweek)

Compline

¶ The Nytpicker magnanimously calls on the Pulitzer Prize judges to give Frank Rich a prize. Hear, hear! Of all the major writers who are out there arguing for an America that we can be proud of (as distinct from the America that would like to kick us out), Frank Rich is by far the most scrupulous examiner of his own party’s shortcomings — its snotty condescension in particular. The Nytpicker allows that Mr Rich “preaches to the choir,” but we think that he does something much more important: he scolds it.

Have a Look

¶ Just about the silliest things we’ve ever heard of: Map of the World’s Countries Rearranged by Population. We link to it because — finally! — it proves American exceptionalism. American’s are the only peoples of the world who would not have to move! (Strange Maps)

¶ Coralie Pickford-Brown‘s lovely cloth-bound Penguin Classics covers. We’ve linked to them before, but now we own one. (Guess) (Brain Pickings)

Noted

¶ Dance troupe on the run — in the Lincoln Tunnel. (Mail Online; via ArtsJournal)

Matins¶ Harry Cutting’s “Ode to a Flat Place” is an amazingly well-packed trip to the high plains of Kansas. Lots of information, lots of atmosphere. And then, boom, a picture of two weatherbeaten men (father and son) all but waving good-bye. One farmer worries about the image that the rest of us have of today’s farmers. When we learn that today’s irrigation rig can be controlled by BlackBerry; it also sends all sorts of feedback to the farmer’s computer, we see his point.

Lauds¶ Morgan Meis’s writes drolly about the new must-have, The Classical Tradition, a guide for the perplexed. The comparison to Maimomides is just about the funniest thing in the in classical laughs. Far from being an encyclopedic introduction to Greece and Rome that’s aimed at people who can’t tell their Hera from their Juno, The Classical Tradition is designed to help sophisticates regain “the sense of wonder” that, we too often forget, was at least as salient in the ancient world as the passion for ration.  (The Smart Set; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Prime¶ Repeat after us: “Sunk costs are lost costs. Sunk costs that aren’t lost are called “investments.” We like to keep things serious at our financial hour, but the story of Deutsche Bank’s “investment” in Las Vegas’s Cosmpolitan Hotel is too funny to pass over. If ever a hotel deserved to take its name from the great river of Egypt, this is it. Felix Salmon tells it well, but it wasn’t until we got to Bess Levin’s mention of the matter that we learned just how “cosmopolitan” the hotel was intended to be, with its “entry hall featuring 28-foot robots programmed to box, dance and play 12-foot Stratocaster guitars.”

Tierce¶ First, the good news: we’ve got thirteen million tons of the stuff! Bad news: start digging, yesterday. What are those rare earths, anyways (they’re the “lanthanides“), and who needs ’em (you do). Worse news: China has 97% of the earth’s rare-earth reserves. (New Scientist. )

Sext¶ The saga of Elif Batuman’s (Turkish?) towels, or How to Cut Through Red Tape in Istanbul. (My Life and Thoughts; via The Morning News)

Stepping back a moment from the scene, it occurred to me how remarkable it was that fate had brought me face to face in this way with the author of my bureaucratic troubles. All too often, such struggles just wind to an end without you ever finding out what the deal was, or what human interest was concealed in the heart of the machine.  And the nature of such ordeals is that, by the end, you don’t care anymore, anyway. What a rare treat then for me, as a writer, to actually meet my secret opponent, and to thereby be able to contextualize my own particular situation within the broader field of human activity—within, for example, the life-story of a purple-faced man whose mission was to shut down smugglers, and who believed that I was trying to sell my used towels to the Turkish people without paying import taxes.

Nones¶ Kenyan Mwangi Kimenyi lays out what an independent Southern Sudan is going to need in order to come into existence, with an accent on help from the West — and how important, especially for Kenya, it is that Juba gets what it needs. (LA Times; via Real Clear World)

Vespers¶ At The Millions, Colin Marshall bestows informally magisterial consideration upon the novels of Nicholson Baker, from The Mezzanine to The Anthologist — all of them intimate studies of consciousness, rendered palpable in keenly wrought prose. We’ve read almost anything, and what we hugely admire is Baker’s patient willingness to wait for his material to blossom; nothing is forced.

Compline¶ Our subtitle for a book called Manthropology would be quite different from the one that author Peter McAllister has given us; our view is that, the sooner people shut up about “masculinity” and “manliness,” the happier most men would be. But there’s no gainsaying that Mr McAllister has some sharp insights about a range of topics that stretches from the gene pool to sacrificial sports. (On second thought, that’s not much of a stretch, because almost everything tinctured with “masculinity” connects more or less directly with death.)(Salon; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Have a Look

¶ HTMLGiant’s Index. (After Harper’s)

Noted

¶ via Tyler Cowen: Your (lack of) rights as a cruise ship passenger.

¶ Important advice from Mark Lilla: “To understand someone like Beck, and the people who love him, you need to stay on the surface, not plumb the depths or peek behind the curtain.” (NYRB)

Matins ¶ Dominique Browning asks the two questions that plague all consideration of environmental degradation: how is it possible to be hopeful, and what can any one person do? Commendably, she offers no answers. Our own far from comforting thought is that global warming is only the latest of countless ways in which human beings have inflicted pain and misery upon each other. We’re also aware that much of the panic has roots in complacency: most people over fifty grew up without the shadow of a doubt about fossil fuels. The Editor remembers being far more concerned about the exhaustion of fossil fuels — which, one way or another, with more or less inconvenience, will inevitably solve the problem. (Slow Love Life)

Lauds ¶ The Addison Gallery of American Art has been spruced up, with a green wing and revived exhibition spaces, the better to house a collection that is almost uncertainly unparalleled in the world of — prep schools. The Addison, you see, is attached to Philips Andover, in Massachusetts. Karen Wilkin makes it sound extremely enviable, but we’d really be much happier to pick up the Editor’s grandson at the doors of, say,  Stuyvesant High and take him through the Metropolitan. Much cheaper. (WSJ; via ArtsJournal)

Prime ¶ With rueful but not unbecoming glee, “Thorstein Veblen” tips us off to Revivial, a new book about the Obama White House that shines a glaring light on its most inexplicable denizen, Larry Summers. (We’re not sure that we’re interested anymore to know what made Mr Summers attractive to the President.) Veblen lists three strikes against the outgoing adviser that the HuffPost piece omits, whether because “ the people who are dishing on Summers now don’t realize these were mistakes, or else they too were on the dumb side of these horrific lapses in judgment which have helped to make Obama the great failed hope of our generation.”

Tierce ¶ At the LRB, Peter Campbell presents a brilliant essay on escalators — specifically, the 4o9 moving stairs that operate in London’s Underground. What causes them to break down? Stuff falling in the 4mm gap between steps, mostly. We sat up sharply at the reminder that the Underground runs for only twenty hours a day — “only.”

Sext ¶ It’s not difficult to imagine how the citizens of a modest Midwestern town would have dealt, 150 years ago, with a raving atheist who insisted on denouncing God from the courthouse steps. Such a lunatic, like Waleed Hasayin in today’s Palestine, would certainly have been locked up “for his own protection.” The analogy is imperfect; a blog does not have the nuisance value of an unwanted orator; no one has to read Hasayin’s diatribes. But the offence is the same: how does a town live with someone who vehemently repudiates its core values, and urges others to do the same? We wonder if our compromise — Hasayin ought to be banished, not punished — would suit anyone involved. (NYT)

Nones ¶ As Robert Reich sees it, the reason that the G20 meeting at Seoul didn’t get anywhere is because of income inequality in China as well as in the United States. Wealth in both countries pools at the top, making exports doubly crucial. For the same reason, each country wants to have the weaker currency, because cheaper exports means greater employment. In theory, that is. In a long and somewhat rambling Times article, Motoko Rich and Jack Ewing report that the weakness of the dollar is unlikely to spur exports/job creation to any very significant extent. For one thing, multinational corporations, wherever nominally headquartered, are designed to play around currency imbalances. We wish that Mr Reich had said more about why he’s opposed to “outright protectionism.” (Christian Science Monitor)

Vespers ¶ Romain Gary (1914-1980) was a writer of many names, so it’s no surprise that one of his best novels, La vie devant soi, has been published under two other names, Momo (that’s how the Editor read it, in English) and Madame Rosa, the latter also the title of the film adaptation starring Simone Signoret — still not out on DVD. La vie devant soi won a second Prix Goncourt for Gary, which was a big no-no — that’s a one-per-customer award. Born Kacew de Gari in Vilnius, Gary signed the book “Émile Ajar,” and got a cousin to do the photo-ops for him. Back in the days when novelists were real men, Gary was a Free French hero; he later ran off with Jean  Seberg, and the two made glamorous work of making one another miserable. At the Telegraph, David Bellos writes up the subject of his new biography. (via ArtsJournal)

Compline ¶ Jessica Olien has been living in the Netherlands for a few months now, and she’s scratching her head. “Have we gotten it all wrong?” (Meaning: American women.) Relatively few women work full-time, even when encouraged to do so; and only a quarter of Nederlander women earn enough money to support themselves. Somehow, it seems, the business of making money — a veritable game, if truth be told, for most successful men — has been detached from questions of gender equality. We wonder if it’s really true that Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed — the title of a book, sadly unavailable, by Ellen de Bruin. (Slate; via MetaFilter; NYT)

Have a Look

¶ Ten centuries of Europe — in five minutes. (GOOD)

Noted

¶ How today’s Wii may make tomorrow’s work more fun. (Wired Science)

Although we haven’t left New York, we’re already on vacation, so let’s see what the Daily Office is going to look like for the next two weeks. Mind you, we’re not going to do this every day!

Matins ¶ At The Lede, Robert Mackie takes note of Glenn Beck’s strange ideas about George Soros. While it’s true, as Beck claims, that Soros has bankrolled revolutionary movements in Central Europe and elsewhere, he has invariably supported the proponents of open, genuinely democratic government. It is weirdly appropriate that Beck’s position on Soros sounds just like Iran’s. For anyone still in doubt, Beck’s “attack” is proof that making sense is not what interests the shiller of gold coins. Rebuttal, it follows, is a waste of time. Better just to make noise about the actual achievement of George Soros.

Lauds ¶ At The House Next Door, Paul Brunick writes appreciately of Todd Haynes’s movies, but he finds that Haynes, as an “ethical thinker” who “wants to make the world a better place” is at odds with the “amoral fantasist” Jean Genet, from whom he drew material for his 1991 triptych, Poison. ¶ Leah Rozen looks into why the Hollywood of today is so much less interested in the working class than Depression-era Hollywood was. (NYT) We think that it’s because the Warner Brothers are no longer with us, an idea that we probably picked up from Ethan Mordden.

Prime ¶ We didn’t roll up our sleeves and get to work on the national budget this weekend (the Editor’s wife gave it a shot), but we were dying to know what Felix Salmon would make of David Leonhardt’s learning game. We sensed, as indeed Felix argues, that “You Fix the Budget” oversimplified some things. But his main beef was that the Times didn’t offer enough in the way of tax-hike proposals, in effect making the game too difficult. (We like what Felix has to say about a consumption tax.) In a related entry, Mr Salmon gores the mortgage-interest deduction, mainly by asking just how many Americans benefit by it, and where they’re to be found on the economic landscape.

Tierce ¶ They’re digging up Tycho Brahe again, this time to submit his remains to the latest scanning techniques. Nobody can quite believe that the celebrated Danish astronomer, who worked on the cusp of the Scientific Revolution but remained thoroughly medieval in outlook — he had the best modern equipment, but a premodern mind — died of a bladder infection. When they exhumed him the last time, in 1901, scientists discovered a surfeit of mercury in a hair from his moustache. That’s what you get when you dabble in alchemy. (80 Beats)

Sext ¶ Sarah Bakewell writes one of those lovely Montaigne-was-the-first-blogger pieces that always make us warm and tingly, and often inspire us to pull down the Essais. In the comments that follow, Cecile Alduy complains that Montaigne’s pieces are not really as improvised as they appear to be; that he in fact reworked them repeatedly through three editions. Ms Bakewell heartily agrees, and so do we: blogging doesn’t have to be sloppy and mindless, and good bloggers usually revisit the issues that interest them. (Paris Review Daily; via The Millions)

Nones ¶ It’s possible that Fintan O’Toole intends “Ireland still has the power to make itself a country worth staying in” to be an ironic title for his hortatory essay, which basically calls upon the Irish to effect a complete reform of their government so as to fashion a true republic. We hear suitcases zipping. (Guardian; via Real Clear World) ¶ But Eliot Spitzer is plain as can be about what’s wrong with the United States: “Wall Street’s 30 year carnival.” We assent to his jeremiad against the “self-interested ideology” that conservatives have been spouting, but we wish that the former governor said more about the rupture between finance (investment) and industry (jobs) — American industry. (Slate; via Real Clear World)

Vespers ¶ Emily St John Mandel reads Hint Fiction and cuts right through the hype. Some of the pieces in this collection of “25 words or less” compositions are great — Joyce Carol Oates, Jason Rice, and Donora Hiller are singled out — but far more are “creepy in a cheap way.” She doesn’t say so, but Hint Fiction comes off as a gimmick.

Compline ¶ In a grand long read at The New Atlantis — shame on us for losing track of how we came across it — Algis Valiunis considers the more serious exemplars of self-help literature, which, even if it fails to help most of those who rely on it, at least tells us what we think we ought to be doing. ¶ Terry Teachout insists that no matter how many tens of thousands of hours you put in to developing a skill, you’re still not going to be Mozart. (WSJ) Our own view is that nobody was ever hurt by the Ericsson Rule. If nothing else, it crushes our natural yearning for royal roads and easy steps. The best way to help yourself is to work hard at something for which you have an aptitude. The trick, of course, is buying the time for all that practice.

Have a Look

¶ The new wing at Boston’s MFA. (Globe)

Noted

¶ Other -extings. (The Bygone Bureau)

¶ Richard Crary visits the zoo — bad idea. (The Existence Machine)

{The next Daily Office entry will appear on Monday}

Matins

¶ We begin and end the day with Felix Salmon’s insights, first on Medicare, then on Ireland. What both entries have in common is a stubborn refusal on the part of conservative, “property-owner” officials and business leaders to learn a new way of thinking about oversized liabilities. With respect to Medicare, which liberals acknowledge to be disastrously over-extended going into the future, Kevin Drum’s analysis has been discredited simply because it is liberal. That’s because there isn’t anything more cogent to argue.

The point here is that the deficit commission chairmen are doing everything in their power to perpetuate the intellectually dishonest meme that if we just pare enough excess from the government’s discretionary budget, that can somehow solve the problem of the soaring deficit. It can’t. Liberals like Drum recognize the problem, and can work out the mathematics of Medicare in public. The deficit commission, it seems, can’t.

Lauds

¶ The brouhaha about Cathy Black’s appointment as New York’s schools chancellor, we hasten to note, may be premature, because Mayor Bloomberg’s choice is subject to approval by Albany officials. All the more reason, then, to ask questions about the mayor’s fundamental premise, summed up (mockingly) by Alex Pareene. (Salon; via GOOD)

The New York public schools system serves more than a million students. Picking the woman responsible for keeping Cosmo profitable and publishing anti-literacy newspaper USA Today to run the whole thing is corporatism masquerading as benevolent rule by our wisest technocrats.

The fantasy of the superstar CEO who can parachute into any company — in any industry — and right the ship through time-tested management techniques is common in corporate circles, but so are books of New Yorker cartoons about golf. Only the sort of lucky billionaire convinced of the moral superiority of the financially successful would assume that a random executive with no education experience could manage the New York city public schools better than someone who… you know, has experience managing public schools.

Prime

¶ At Abnormal Returns, a thought experiment about ETFs, lately alleged to cause market pricing distortions. What if the performance of ETFs during the financial crisis were a better measure of their market effects than that during the “flash crash”?

As with all financial products the ETF industry seems to be living up to the old motto of MTV:  “Too much is never enough.”  We have written extensively** about the proclivity of the ETF industry to create me-too and poorly designed funds.  One could also argue that the rise of indexing has helped distort the pricing of individual securities.  There is little doubt that the rise of certain ETFs have changed the underlying dynamics of certain markets.  Further one cannot discount the possibility that additional market meltdowns could be exacerbated by ETFs.

All that being said, the rise of the ETF industry has been net-net a boon to investors.  The allocation of assets in ETFs reflect the collective decision of millions of professional and amateur investors alike.  If the underlying prices of those assets are ultimately proven incorrect, then those investors will pay the price.  In the meantime they provide many investors with the means to invest in a wide range of asset classes in a relatively cost efficient manner.  In that respect, the ETF experiment has to-date proven a success.

Tierce

¶ What a fun story to read, just a week before we take off for vacation: “Advanced jets hitting technological turbulence.” (Short Sharp Science)

But last night’s Boeing 787 emergency landing raises more issues for the much delayed airplane – the first ever to have a carbon-fibre pressurised fuselage rather than an aluminium one.

The source of the smoke that billowed in the cabin is uncertain but if it’s an electrical source in the plane – rather than the test equipment it is stuffed with for the certification programme – that could be a particular headache for Boeing. The reason? Like the A380, the airplane is what is known as a “more electric” design – in which some of the previously hydraulic systems are switched for electronic ones.

The aircraft is in many respects a flying computer network, and a problem with the electrics at this late stage will be unwelcome. Happily, the solution may be electronically identified: Boeing is now beaming data back from the Texas airfield to its base near Seattle, Washington, to diagnose the problem.

Sext

¶ Regular readers know that we like to check in with the raucous outlook of Awl columnist Mary H K Choi from time to time. She can be one sharp-tongued lady! Now we know why: she’s making up for all the repression of her Korean background. In a sweet piece at the Times (you’d never know…), she describes a recent pedicure.

By now, I’ve already fessed up to speaking Korean, because I’d never want to dupe this woman into freely talking smack in the refuge of my perceived ignorance. But that sets in motion the rapid-fire interrogation that, unlike Monty Python and the Spanish Inquisition, you expect every time. Round after round about my education, my apartment, my job, my man, my decision-making skills.

When among acquaintances and casual friends, I am vigilant to string up white lies like police tape around my personal details. But a nod from any woman born earlier than 1970 on our Asian peninsula flanked by the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, however, awakens pre-programmed behaviors I can’t control. I answer every question to the best of my ability, and make my own polite inquiries, always careful to employ deferential syntax, the doily-lined, dustier version of the language that rarely appears in pop songs or the revenge trilogies I stream from the Internet.

Nones

¶ Timothy Garton Ash calls upon EU members to respond en bloc to Chinese tempations to “splittism.” The Nobel Peace Prize controversy is a fine occasion for showing firmness, but already there are signs of wavering from France. (Guardian; via Real Clear World)

Thus, to take a small but richly symbolic example, China is currently trying to persuade everyone – including EU ambassadors – to boycott the Nobel peace prize ceremony for Liu Xiaobo in Oslo on December 10. When it comes to Tibet or Xinjiang, China insists on the importance of total respect for its sovereignty. Yet now it is telling Europeans they should not attend a European ceremony in Europe. So China’s sovereignty is absolute, other people’s sovereignty is negotiable. (The United States has a similar double standard.)

This should be an easy call for Europe. The EU’s 27 member states should simply announce that all their ambassadors to Norway will attend the ceremony. Basta. But in the runup to president Hu Jintao’s imperial visitation to Paris last week, I read that France’s foreign ministry “said it would announce before December 10 whether it intended to attend the Nobel prize-giving”. Europe splits again. More tittering into the teacups at Zhongnanhai.

In Brussels last week for the annual meeting of the European council on foreign relations, a think-and-advocacy tank (on whose board I serve) devoted to developing a European foreign policy, I caught up with some of those charged with pulling together the threads of the EU’s foreign policy. They observed with a mixture of irony and irritation that, in relation to China or Russia, EU member states almost invariably want the EU’s collective stance to be tougher than their own individual stances.

Vespers

¶ Maria Bustillos is crazy about her new Kindle, but, if anything, it has determined her to keep on buying books — because she’d rather own physical objects than license digital ones. The latter leaves the door open to fascist abuse. We advise all purchasers of ebooks to read the fine print.

Keep in mind these are your books that you bought or collected. Can you imagine a bookseller or publisher asserting rights over the contents of your bookshelves in your house? That’s basically what we’re talking about, here.

[snip]

After reading all this, I rang the (excellent, and very polite) Kindle customer service up to learn more, especially about privacy issues. One thing I wanted to know was exactly how much access Amazon has to my private, personal Kindle files (you can put your own files on a Kindle, .txt and .pdf files that you made yourself.) But after being bumped up through a couple of layers of supervisors, I didn’t get very clear answers to my questions. For instance, on the question of Amazon’s remote access to my personal stuff. “We don’t have access to your files,” I was first told. But can you see my personal files? And if you wanted to delete my personal files, as was done with the Orwell books, could you do it? “We don’t do that.”

Yeah, but could you?

Compline

¶ One of the most noxious developments in international finance has been the growth of big banks in small countries. It’s a kind of “globalization” that doesn’t make sense, as the good people of Iceland found out to their cost. Now it’s the turn of the Irish. Felix Salmon:

One of the key lessons we’ve learned in this crisis is that any time a small country takes pride in its large and profitable international banks, everything is liable to end in tears. Big banks are too big to fail, which means their national governments have to bail them out—but when the banks are as big or bigger than the government in question, such a bailout becomes politically and economically disastrous. My feeling is that no government should ever allow its banks to become too big to bail out, because no government can credibly promise not to bail out such banks should they run into difficulties.

If you look down the Financial Stability Board’s list of the top 30 systemically-important financial institutions, there are definitely a few on there which look like they’re too big for a national bailout. The two big Swiss banks certainly are, and possibly the two big Spanish banks, too; then there’s six insurers as well. I have no idea what can be done about this: no one’s going to blunder in and force UBS and Credit Suisse to break themselves up just because they happen to be based in a small Alpine nation. But the lessons of Iceland and Ireland should wear heavily on any government with an oversized financial sector.

Have a Look

¶ Tom Meglioranza sings Rückblick, from Schubert’s Winterreise.

¶ Manhattan: the underlying wilderness. (BLDGBLOB)

Noted

¶ Tyler Cowen: “Which works ought to be read in their original language?”

¶ “How the Gas Tax is Like Keyser Soze.” (The Infrastructurist)

¶ Choire Sicha on corpses in public. (The Awl)

Matins

¶ James Fallows tackles coal, here and in China, as only James Fallows can. (The Atlantic; via The Morning News)

What would progress on coal entail? The proposals are variations on two approaches: ways to capture carbon dioxide before it can escape into the air and ways to reduce the carbon dioxide that coal produces when burned. In “post-combustion” systems, the coal is burned normally, but then chemical or physical processes separate carbon dioxide from the plume of hot flue gas that comes out of the smokestack. Once “captured” as a relatively pure stream of carbon dioxide, this part of the exhaust is pressurized into liquid form and then sold or stored. Refitting an existing coal plant can be very costly. “It’s like trying to remodel your home into a mansion,” a coal-plant manager told me in Beijing. “It’s more expensive, and it’s never quite right.” Apart from research projects, only two relatively small coal-fired power plants now operate in America with post-combustion capture.

Designing a capture system into a plant from the start is cheaper than doing refits. But even then the “parasitic load” of energy required to treat, compress, and otherwise handle the separated stream of carbon dioxide can come to 30 percent or more of the total output of a coal-fired power plant—so even more coal must be burned (and mined and shipped) to produce the same supply of electricity. Without mandatory emission limits or carbon prices, burning coal more cleanly is inevitably more expensive than simply burning coal the old way. “When people like me look for funding for carbon capture, the financial community asks, ‘Why should we do that now?’” an executive of a major American electric utility told me. “If there were a price on carbon”—a tax on carbon-dioxide emissions—“you could plug in, say, a loss of $30 to $50 per ton, and build a business case.”

“Pre-combustion” systems are fundamentally more efficient. In them, the coal is treated chemically to produce a flammable gas with lower carbon content than untreated coal. This means less carbon dioxide going up the smokestack to be separated and stored.

Either way, pre- or post-, the final step in dealing with carbon is “sequestration”—doing something with the carbon dioxide that has been isolated at such cost and effort, so it doesn’t just escape into the air. Carbon dioxide has a surprisingly large number of small-scale commercial uses, starting with adding the sparkle to carbonated soft drinks. (This is not a big help on the climate front, since the carbon dioxide is “sequestered” only until you pop open the bottle’s top.) All larger-scale, longer-term proposals for storing carbon involve injecting it deep underground, into porous rock that will trap it indefinitely. In the right geological circumstances, the captured carbon dioxide can even be used for “enhanced oil recovery,” forcing oil out of the porous rock into which it is introduced and up into wells.

Lauds

¶ Attending the third Avignon Forum, John Thakara is put in mind of the popes and cardinals who once held sway there — and their blithe hypocrisy. For example: the holy principle of copyright protection.

A desire to use culture for social control is not unique to the digital age. The connection between culture and money goes back even further.

I was impressed at this point by the candor of the man from Ernst&Young. His slides featured the “ME Industries” — and I had thought it was just me who believed that modern media fosters mass narcissism. Then I realized that ME was shorthand for Media and Entertainment industries and that no disrespect was intended. On the contrary, the man from E&Y was on a serious quest: “Monetizing digital media and culture: creating value that consumers will buy.”

Monetization, or its lack, was a sensitive issue for this gathering. Digital is proving a mixed blessing. It was not a surprise that the issue of piracy soon took central stage. From the European Commisisoner down, a panoply of popes waxed righteous about the necessity for artists to be paid fairly for their creativity. Any crumbs left over from the cultural cake could be divided among the publishers, they added humbly — but the Rights of the Artist were paramount.

Mind you, those crumbs soon add up. Pope Philippe Dauman of Viacom, for example, was paid about $34 million in 2009. Mr Dauman’s “compensation” is roughly 3,000 times more than what most of my artist friends are paid. It’s fully 48,000 times more than is available to “Bottom of the Pyramid” types — among whose number, in my experience, the most vibrant culture and creativity is often to be found.

But pah! to the politics of envy. These vulgar details commanded little attention in Avignon. The popes and their cardinals spoke as one: copyright protection is a matter of principle, not profit.

Prime

¶ A leading Japanese economist, Noriko Hama, plays the child’s part in the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes — where the dollar is the emperor, or in monetary terms, a currency with no backing. (Japan Times; via Naked Capitalism)

When you say the dollar should have lost its value “a long time ago,” when exactly was that?

I can pinpoint the timing exactly, and that was Aug. 15, 1971.

So long ago?

Yes, because that was the day of the so-called Nixon shock. Until that day, the U.S. dollar could be converted to gold. So anyone who took dollars to the United States could have them exchanged for gold. But on that day, the U.S. declared that it could no longer keep that promise. From that point on, the dollar ceased to be an international, key currency in the world. So from that perspective, the dollar could have fallen to a level that matched the strength of the U.S. economy. But everyone has treated the dollar in the same way they cajoled the emperor in (Hans Christian Andersen’s story) “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

After the Nixon shock there was the Plaza Accord of 1985 (when representatives of the U.S., Japanese, British, French and German goverments — meeting at the Plaza Hotel in New York — agreed to depreciate the dollar by intervening in currency markets), followed by Black Monday (Oct. 19, 1987, when stock prices plummeted in New York and elsewhere). Then came the Asian currency crisis of the late 1990s and the Lehman Brothers shock of 2008. Through all these events, the dollar has shown us what a dangerous currency it is, losing its clout step by step. And now we are in the final stage of the dollar’s demise.

From 1947 till 1971, the dollar established itself as a key currency, and from Aug. 15, 1971, we have been witnessing a long, long epic drama about the dollar’s end — and we are at the beginning of its climax.

Tierce

¶ Ed Yong reviews what looks like the much-needed contemporary re-writing of John Greene’s The Death of Adam: Written in Stone, by Brian Switek The role of the fossil record in the evolution of evolutionary theory is crucial, and all smart people ought to be familiar with the onlines of this story. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

But Written in Stone is really a book about two kinds of fossils. Switek doesn’t just consider bodies entombed in rock; he also digs up fossil ideas. Through quotations and historical anecdotes, Switek unearths the intermediate hypotheses that illustrate how our knowledge has itself evolved. Some of these past ideas are fanciful and seemingly absurd (birds evolving from flippered dinosaurs, anyone?) but they greatly enrich what could have been a textbook account of the fossil record.

Switek tell the stories of the men and women who influenced the way we think, with figures like Lyell, Owen, Darwin and Koch looming larger than life. He tells us not just about the discoveries but the way they were discovered, from the 17^th century to the present day. And I do mean present; the book is remarkably up-to-date and even includes findings about dinosaur colours and Neanderthals that were published earlier this year.

Sext

¶ “Secret optimist” Chris Lehmann marks the recent , first-time upholding of a pre-nuptial agreement by a British panel of judges. “Purple” is too common a word for his account of the Radmacher case; we’ll go with “magenta.” (The Awl)

The only trouble is that the wife-favoring British system may soon be a receding mirage, thanks to a surpassingly odd recent case in which the English high court upheld a prenup drawn up by a German chemical heiress named Katrin Radmacher prior to marrying a French investment banker named Nicolas Granatino. In the buck-passing tradition of French investment bankers everywhere, Granatino claimed that Radmacher concealed the true scale of her family’s £106 million family fortune, and had exploited his “besotted” romantic state (in the classy locution of his attorney) to rush him into a pre-nup that shorted him out of his true stake in their now-sundered union. Radmacher’s legal team countered that it was something shy of a romantic you-and-me-against-the-world gesture for Granatino to promptly quit his day job after his marriage to work as science researcher at Oxford University and loll around his wife’s £2.5 million estate. He clearly had a pretty good idea that he was in the hands of a flush provider—and what’s more, the Radmacher attorneys noted, he was in line for a £30 million inheritance himself once his own parents, a proud pair of French tax exiles, were dispatched to their own earthly reward.

All in all, one can quickly size up the Radmacher case as a piece without heroes. But when the British Supreme Court upheld the pre-nup in an 8-1 ruling, family law specialists began to worry that ushering Mayfair’s financial moguls into the pre-nup age could mark a distinct step backwards in the cause of gender equality. The court’s sole dissenting vote came from its only female member, a family law specialist who is also—of course—a baroness, named Lady Hale. If the Radmacher precedent stands (which, by the way, the change-averse panel tried to guard against by characterizing the ruling as a one-off), it could open up “some profound questions about the nature of marriage in modern law and the role of courts in determining it.” Some far-seeing opulent lovebirds might well elect “to contract out of the guiding principles of equality and non-discrimination within marriage; others may think this a retrograde step likely only to benefit the strong at the expense of the weak.”

Nones

¶ Hürriyet reporter Mustafa Akyol persuasively argues that the Turkish government is not in any meaningful (menacing) way an “Islamist” one. (Daily Star; via Real Clear World)

The point here is that the AKP is not arguing for the abolition of secularism. It only argues for a more liberal interpretation of secularism. Erdogan has publicly stated that the AKP “prefers the American model over the French model.”

But besides all these legal issues, there really is a big transformation in Turkey on the societal level: the socio-economic rise of the religious conservatives who for decades were the underclass or rural poor. The change began with their migration to big cities and then the rise of “Muslim Calvinists,” as a Western think-tank called them. These are religiously conservative but economically entrepreneurial businessmen who have successfully engaged in regional and global markets. The AKP is more the result of this new middle class than its cause, though it is further enhancing its ascendance now by using the power of the state in their favor (nepotism is a well-established Turkish tradition).

In other words, the AKP is not imposing Sharia on Turkey, but it is helping conservative Muslims to be more influential in public life. The secularists are shocked by this change, which they see as the end of the good-old hyper-secular Turkey. But the ideological Islamists are shocked, too, for they think that their fellow Muslims are becoming too pragmatic and worldly. And that is perhaps where the most interesting part of the story lies.

Vespers

¶ The uncollected stories of J D Salinger — published only once, in magazines — are notorious for tempting vandals to cut them out with razors. Emily Darrell writes about “A Girl I Used to Know,” a story that did appear in a book, The Best American Stories of 1949, but that suffered the fate of the uncollected. It took her a while to find an intact copy of the anthology. Good for her! (The Millions)

Evidence suggests that Salinger chose to safeguard these stories not because he doubted their quality, but out of spite towards both the world of publishing and the world at large. Several of these “Uncollected Stories” (as they are officially known by Salinger-philes to distinguish them from the “Unpublished Stories,” the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of stories that Salinger may or may not have written in the final five-plus decades of his life) deal directly with the war, and a few, like “A Girl I Knew” are thought to be autobiographical.

Though I didn’t feel like breaking the law in pursuit of some ramshackle, Xeroxed copy of the “Uncollected Stories,” I saw no moral dilemma in tracking down an un-butchered copy of The Best American Short Stories: 1949 where I could find “A Girl I Knew.”

I made a trip to the Richmond, Virginia public library, which at first revealed another TBASS: 1949 in which “A Girl I Knew” had been ever-so-carefully razored out. But after sending a recalcitrant librarian to the basement to retrieve yet another copy of the anthology – which had been apparently been gathering dust since about 1950 – I was able to read the story. I wasn’t sorry that I’d gone to the trouble.

While a few of the selections in Nine Stories had seemed a bit flat to me (“Teddy” and “Just Before the War with the Eskimos” come to mind) I found “A Girl I Knew” to be positively brimming with humor, pathos, and romance. It managed, in a mere 12 pages, to make me both laugh out loud and to cry.

Compline

¶ How Vikram Akula learned how to help the poor. (Hint: academic education not required — nor even particularly useful.) (GOOD)

But once I was living in the field (literally) I started to understand what Biksham meant. In India there were many examples of projects intended to help the poor that often only backfired. There were government subsidized loans for the poor to buy high-milk-yielding buffaloes—but the buffaloes couldn’t handle drought conditions and died. A project that touted capital-intensive agriculture led to a drop in water tables that caused communities to suffer.
The longer I spent in the field, the clearer it became that the people who knew the most about helping the poor were the poor themselves. It struck me that the poor were seldom asked what they actually needed. This idea was vividly captured in a book I read at that time called “Rural Development: Putting the Last First” by Robert Chambers, a development scholar at the Institute for Development Studies in England. NGO executives and bureaucrats have limited direct engagement with poor people. They get information from large survey questionnaires or brief visits to villages. Their top-down approach to rural poverty meant they got incomplete information and ended up designing inadequate programs that sometimes proved harmful. In reality, poor people themselves are actually far more knowledgeable about their situations than outsiders, and they also have ideas about how to improve things.

By living and working in a village I saw the poor knew far more than I did. I realized that we couldn’t help the poor.

Have a Look

¶ The Roman Army Knife. (Wired)

Noted

¶ Well, well: Alex Ross got his start in college radio.

Matins

¶ Memo to the aptly-named Patrick Hipp: when planning the secession of Gotham from New York State, do not leave the city’s watershed behind. Delaware, Ulster, Rockland and Orange Counties come with. (Water also explains how New York State as it is used to make sense.) What we love about Mr Hipp’s piece is the overall tone of just having had the idea of secession for the first time. (The Awl)

And to the new old New Yorkers (we hope; if not, to the new Gothamites): enjoy packs of cigarettes that don’t require loans, a city-run MTA (did we mention that the City of New York will be absorbing our “public benefit corporations”? Oops! Well, you already signed the papers), city taxes that are your state taxes, and in all likelihood, legalized possession of marijuana, state-wide recognition of gay marriage, and bars that are open all goddamn night. Our state flag will be the front of a pack of Parliament Lights, our state anthem will sound an awful lot like Cee Lo, and our state bird will be the middle finger. And the next time this mercurial little country of ours swings suddenly from the left to the right, we’ll still be anchored in the same place we’ve always been.

Lauds

¶ It’s nice to know that the top of the art market is doing well, thanks to a “new breed” of billionaires from all over the place who share a taste for the “tried and tested.” (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

For ordinary mortals – those dealing with the bleak everyday challenges of recession on both sides of the Atlantic – the prices are staggering. How come, when our own economy is struggling through the deepest downturn since the second world war, the art market seems to have wriggled out of the crash of 2008 and auction houses are mounting what one expert calls “ambitious, pumping, thrusting” sales?

After last week’s impressionist sales, it is the turn of contemporary art to go under the hammer. At Christie’s, Campbell’s Soup Can With Can Opener by Andy Warhol is among the star turns, estimated at $30-50m (£18m-£30m). Sotheby’s has a Coca-Cola bottle canvas by him at $20-25m.

The answer, or part of it, is that the very top of the art market is semi-detached from the movements of individual economies. Rather, it is bound up with the tastes and choices of a number of super-rich people in Europe and America – and, increasingly, Russia, China and the Middle East. As Brett Gorvy, deputy chairman of Christie’s, put it: “The market is not reliant on one single economy at any one time.”

In pockets, at least, the very rich are spending on luxuries – a category into which contemporary art arguably falls – without apparent restraint. In Hong Kong this month, Sotheby’s held an auction of fine wine that saw an Asian buyer purchase three bottles of 1869 Château Lafite for $232,000 each, a new record. Even more surprisingly, cases of wine that retail for $17,000 in New York were selling at the auction for $70,000.

Prime

¶ From Simon Johnson’s letter to the Financial Stability Oversight Council, imploring it to make the Volcker Rule work. (The Baseline Scenario)

With regard to the importance of the Volcker Rule (e.g., for your Question #12), James Kwak and I provided a great deal of supportive evidence in our book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and The Next Financial Meltdown (see http://13Bankers.com).  American prosperity does not rest on having global megabanks of this nature and scale; we definitely do not need them to have proprietary trading businesses.  They pose great dangers to our financial system – and to taxpayers, as seen in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.  Please be sure to take our analysis into account when considering this matter.

The Volcker Rule is not a panacea but if designed and implemented appropriately, it would constitute a major step in the right direction.  The effectiveness of our financial regulatory system declined steadily over the past 30 years; it is time to start the long process of rebuilding it.[1] 

With regard to your Question #6, on capital requirements, which is closely related to these general questions, I urge you to read the latest writings from leading analysts of this issue.[2]

In particular, I would stress that Professor Anat Admati and her colleagues find that stronger capital requirements would not be contractionary for the economy (see footnote 2).  Professor Jeremy Stein and his colleagues show that capital requirements can and should be increased through requiring specific dollar amounts of capital to be raised – rather than through requiring banks to hit a particular capital-asset ratio (see footnote 2).  If you proceed in the fashion that they recommend, stronger capital requirements will make the financial system safer – without any discernible effect on short-run growth and making it more likely that we can sustain reasonable growth rates over the next 10 years.

Tierce

¶ At Bad Astronomy, Phil Platt looks at the Nile at night from a great height, and makes the best case for space travel ever.

Of course, pictures like this are more profound for what you don’t see: country borders. Many astronauts come back from long-durations stays on the ISS with a deep new sense of citizenship not of just their country, but of their planet. I’ve heard several give impassioned talks about this. I sometimes wonder if this may prove to be the long-term benefit of space travel. I’m all for exploration, and getting off this planet to ensure the survival of our species.

But if enough people can get to space, they’ll see the planet for what it is: a fragile, magnificent ball with a thin shell of atmosphere protecting it from the entire Universe… and no artificial boundary lines to be seen. We made those ourselves, and we put an awful lot of stock in them. Remembering that fact might also be an important way to make sure our species endures.

 Sext

¶ At The Bygone Bureau, Darryl Campbell interviews Mark Bittman. Why is it so not a surprise to learn that Mr Bittman started out in community organizing?

Do you think there’s been a transition in the way you write, that you’ve become less of a general food writer and more interested in particular issues in the last few years?

Yeah. I want to talk about the issues. I still want to develop recipes, I want to write cookbooks, I’m going to write more conventional cookbooks than The Food Matters Cookbook, although there’s a way in which How to Cook Everything is the chef d’ouevre of my life. I’m not going to do anything much better or bigger than that.

But there are ways to approach this. People want fast recipes, I can work on that; people want to concentrate on baking, I can work on that; there are other cookbooks that I can do. I think that my style of cooking, as it has been for 30 years, is to encourage people to get into the kitchen. I still strongly believe that one of the three or four most important things I can do or say is that cooking solves a lot of your problems. So I’m not going to stop doing that. And I think my recipes encourage people to cook, because they’re really, really simple. I’m not a chef, I’m not even a great cook. I can make pretty good food on demand and write great recipes.

But to be able to get up here and not do a cooking demo, and instead to give a talk that has a real message, which includes why people ought to cook, it’s totally exciting for me. It’s not a new career, it’s an extension of my career. It’s exactly what I want to do.

I started… I did community organizing, I did political work, I ran a little newspaper in Massachusetts when I was in my twenties, and when I started to write I really wanted to write about politics. No one was at all interested in what I had to say, and the fact is that I didn’t know shit. So I started writing about food. And I thought, well, writing about food — that’s not bad. And then ten years later, I thought, writing about food, well, I’m doing good. And now, I’m writing and talking about food and politics. It’s gone full circle, and it couldn’t have worked out better.

Now, if I could have an impact, then it would really work out great. (laughs) I feel like I don’t have much of an impact, but at least I’m saying something that I think is important for people to hear.

Nones

¶ We’re disappointed by the provincial, Middle-Kingdom-y editorial in today’s Times that calls for France and Britain to devote their new program of military cooperation to manpower, not weaponry — the better to aid our misadventure in Afghanistan.

The Pentagon can easily provide NATO with all the aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles it is ever likely to need. But NATO needs more ground troops, and the United States has been straining to meet that need.

It makes sense for Britain and France to save money on marginally useful aircraft carriers and on the costs of maintaining nuclear weapons they do not really need. The real threat to Europe now lies elsewhere. European cities have suffered repeated Al Qaeda terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, 2001, with new assaults threatened.

Britain and France should use the money they will save on these 20th-century prestige weapons to expand the number of combat troops, trainers and peacekeepers they can contribute to NATO missions like Afghanistan. That would strengthen a vital alliance strained by unequal burden sharing. And it would focus both countries’ military resources on their most pressing 21st-century military needs.

Vespers

¶ At Crawford Doyle this afternoon, we bought a copy of Wait for Me! — the memoirs of a certain dowager duchess whose doings we’ve been following for, oh, decades, ever since we read her sister’s memoir, Hons and Rebels, nearly forty years ago. Although the book has come out over here, and not just in the UK, we weren’t able to rustle up any interesting Stateside reviews. Here are two from England, the Guardian‘s surprisingly sweeter than the (still admiring) Telegraph. From the latter:

Debo had the consolation of being her irascible father’s favourite, which may partly explain why Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity and Decca (Jessica) would chorus at her: “Who’s the least important person in this room? You.” “I read now about the necessity of self-esteem in children,” says the duchess. “We would have become impossibly pleased with ourselves had we been indulged with such a thing.”

Hmm. Some people might say that the Mitfords did indeed become impossibly pleased with themselves. Nancy’s novels may be a timeless tonic and the Communist Decca produced some fine campaigning journalism, but the Mitfords would not, I suspect, have become a thriving publishing industry unto themselves were it not for the beauty and the beast frisson provoked by Diana and Unity’s pash for Fascists. Question: Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? Answer: the Mitfords.

Even hard-core fans must start to wonder how many more publications can be squeezed out of the Mitford mythology: how long, in short, before we are treated to the absolutely spanking diaries of Doughnut the pony and Mr Lay the poultry man? (What else would a Mitford chicken farmer be called?)

It is, however, my duty to report that even those who would gladly see all Honourables strangled at birth will find it hard to resist this book. It’s not just that the youngest Mitford sister has a hereditary talent to amuse; she is also blessed with the democratic ability, uncommon in the posh, to revel in human beings regardless of their station. As Debo wrote in In Tearing Haste, her immortal exchange of letters with the great Patrick Leigh Fermor: “Do admit one gets hold of some odd people in Life’s Rich Tapestry.”

Naturally, the first index item that we looked up was: “Presley, Elvis, 279-80, 311.” Aha!

Compline

¶ Justin E H Smith considers the Okies of California’s Central Valley (where he grew up) as an ethnic group. If they did the same, instead of seeing themselves, spuriously, as “Caucasian” (which means really nothing), perhaps they would have addressed their disadvantages without tumbling into Tea Party resentment. (3 Quarks Daily)

Until the 1960s (just before my era) one could still see ‘No Okies’ signs in stores and restaurants in the Central Valley. Okies had a way of speaking and a way of dressing that would pick them out as ethnic others just as surely as one might pick out a blond Chechen Muslim going through airport security. The Okies were an ethnic group, or an ethno-historical community with shared experiences and shared sources of meaning (embodied in material culture in the form of canned foods, orange cheese, Coors beer; in artistic culture as Bakersfield country; in spirituality as televangelism; in values as a love of independence and a suspicion of the federal government), and to deprive them of the ability to conceptualize themselves as such could not but deprive them of the ability to think about their plight in a lucid way.

It was bound, I mean, to lead them to stupid and reactionary political views, rooted most fundamentally in nativist resentment of non-‘white’ people both American and foreign, and in the valuing of self-sufficient plot-ownership (or, later, tract-house ownership) above community-based social welfare. The shift from ethno-historical community to ‘race’ occludes from view the various commonalities the dustbowl migrants might have with other ethno-historical communities, particularly African-American and Mexican agricultural laborers. An ethno-historical community can grasp that it has been shaped by the same forces that forged a neighboring community, whereas someone who thinks of himself in terms of ‘race’ could never grasp this, since races are conceived as essential and unchanging, and so as never having been historically forged at all. According to a very plausible strain of radical history, racial thinking in the United States has been aggressively imposed upon the self-understanding of disadvantaged communities precisely as a way of forestalling any possible recognition of common cause between these communities. In this respect, it seems reasonable to me to suggest that the Tea Party is a sort of revolutionary force manquée.

Have a Look

¶ Antique paper theatres. (WSJ)

¶ Portaits of the Mind. (GOOD)

Noted

¶ Tarantula Terror Study. (80 Beats)

Matins

¶ David Carr outlines the correct way of evaluating cable personality Keith Olbermann’s campaign contributions: the air time that he has given to Democratic Party candidates is vastly, vastly more valuable. MSNBC ought to re-instate the exile and put this embarrassment behind it. (Note: we have never seen Mr Olbermann’s show.)

Keith Olbermann was suspended for writing a check to support candidates. That was really dumb on Mr. Olbermann’s part. As a die-hard partisan, he had to know that his willingness to provide untrammeled airtime to liberal candidates was a form of in-kind contribution that his measly $7,200, given to three campaigns, could never match.

Then again, the man who suspended him, Phil Griffin, president of MSNBC News, threw down a gauntlet before the election in an interview with The New York Times: “Show me an example of us fund-raising.” Conservative bloggers happily obliged and came up with numerous examples, including Representative Alan Grayson, Democrat of Florida, pitching for dollars on MSNBC.

MSNBC is enforcing a set of standards meant to apply either to another entity — NBC News — or another era, when news people had to act as if they didn’t have political rooting interests. The game has changed, but the rules remain the same, at least at some media outlets.

MSNBC ended up in a fight that resembled nothing so much as a brawl within a political party, with the base — in this case the audience — pushing back against the leadership. While Mr. Olbermann is not talking to the media, he is using Twitter to reach his supporters: “Greetings From Exile! A quick, overwhelmed, stunned THANK YOU for support that feels like a global hug & obviously left me tweetless. XO.”

Before its decision, there were more than 275,000 signatures on a petition demanding the return of Mr. Olbermann. The language seems less like the keening of a group of television viewers and more like an outcry from the progressive wing of the MSNBC Party.

Lauds

¶ Movie maven Jim Emerson tips us off to the blog of The Self-Styled Siren, who writes in a recent entry about having been allowed to watch anything old and black-and-white on television, but forbidden to see an R-fated movie until she was actually seventeen. This gave her an understanding of what good movies ought to be like that’s very familiar to us.

Result was that I grew up watching old movies and thinking this was the way movies were supposed to look, lush or spare, shadowy or sparkling, the camera lingering or gliding and no such thing as acne or pores. And this was how a movie was supposed to sound, resonant, highly individual voices speaking wonderful dialogue against the gentle sonic hiss of the soundtrack, a score trailing the action like a cloud of perfume. Without those things, I can still be enthralled. But sometimes the lack of them is a small barrier to intimacy. “I see you have pores. Gosh no darling, of course it doesn’t matter. I’ve seen them before. Is that a lamp on the side table, sweetness? You know, if we switch it on, we’ll have light coming from three points…”

As usual, I wind up going to my commenters for the real insight. There’s the friend who said simply, “There’s something in the rhythms of these movies that’s in tune with your own.” There’s David Ehrenstein, who maintains that “the 30s, not the 70s, was the great period for American commercial filmmaking,” citing James Whale, Dorothy Arzner and George Cukor as directors doing genuinely experimental work. And there’s Arthur S., who once remarked here that it isn’t nostalgia if what you’re watching is actually more daring and more radical than what’s playing at the multiplex. There’s an overarching style to classic cinema, but within it you can see astonishing variation and innovation, like poets ringing changes on sonnets or terza rima.

It is, essentially, an aesthetic preference like any other, one that was probably imprinted early by the circumstances of my childhood. Which brings me to my own children, now safely asleep. They watch a lot of Pixar, which is fine–Up and Wall*E? Brilliant. Spell-casters for sure. And heavily influenced by classic Hollywood. I haven’t watched that many old movies with my kids. At ages seven and four they are already more in tune with popular culture than Mom. That’s good in a lot of ways. Dragging Astaire and Rogers into everyday conversation didn’t exactly make me queen of the Alabama schoolyard. Maybe I should just let my brood continue like that.

Prime

¶ We had already come across the Erzinger hit-and-run story via MetaFilter when we saw that Felix Salmon had picked it up; as usual, we prefer to link to considered commentary than to regurgitate news items. Apparently on the theory that Denver money manager Joel Erzinger can make financial restitution to New York physician Stephen Milo, the District Attorney in whose jursidiction Vail lies has decided not to prosecute a felony charge. Income inequality has made greater (or more egregious) strides than we had imagined!

Erzinger immediately drove away from the scene of the crime, eventually stopping in a parking lot on the other side of town, where he called the Mercedes auto assistance service and asked that his car be towed.

This kind of egregious hit-and-run is, obviously, a very serious crime. Milo is incredulous at the suggestion from Erzinger’s attorneys “that Erzinger might have unknowingly suffered from sleep apnea”, and wants Erzinger to be charged with a felony. Justice must be served: the case “has always been about responsibility, not money”, he wrote to DA Mark Hurlbert.

[snip]

In other words, Erzinger has bought his way out of a felony charge, over the strenuous objections of his victim; it’s very unlikely that online petitions will do any good at this point. Just another thing to add to the list of things that money can buy, I suppose.

Tierce

¶ Peter Smith sensibly argues that the proper response to the scourge of Four Loko abuse is not a ban but a learning campaign that will teach adolescents how to drink instead of pretending that they don’t. (GOOD)

Perhaps what’s at stake are the larger cultural issues around drinking. As Frank Bruni wrote in The New York Times, “[Four Loko is] a malt liquor in confectionary drag … serving as the clearest possible reminder that many drinkers aren’t seeking any particular culinary or aesthetic enjoyment. They’re taking a drug. The more festively it’s dressed and the more vacuously it goes down, the better.”

Prohibition came and went for good reason. Still, kids who aren’t exposed to drinking in appropriate and safe settings make mistakes, some of which will make the local police blotter. It’s entirely possible to drink “blackout in a can” in a reasonable and prudent manner, so maybe a ban is not the answer. What is in order? A better conversation about drinking. In an earlier debate over provisional drinking licenses (essentially a learners’ permit for inexperienced drinkers), David J. Hanson offered this bit of advice in The Chronicle of Higher Education: “It’s time to open the doors to constructive debate and to teach through trust and potential rather than through blame, accusation, and guilt. It’s time to move beyond the forbidden-fruit syndrome—and its tragic consequences.”

Sext

¶ Jessanne Collins refers to her brief stint as a copy editor for Demand Publications as “ill-fated,” but we can’t agree; she got a very funny piece out of the experience — not to mention $10.50 in carfare remuneration. (The Awl)

My role, as a “copy editor,” was roughly akin to that of Lucy’s with the candy wrapper. I was to be an intermediary between the web at large and the raw, reliably weird substance that results from the unlikely union of algorithmically created topic assignments and writers of, shall we say, widely variable competence. The actual nuts and bolts of style consistency and tone were part of it, of course. But they seemed to be peripheral to what I was actually being asked to do, which was to quality-check each piece of content according to a set of generic yet meticulously detailed standards. It fell on my shoulders to ensure not just that no dangling modifiers marred any directories of Jacuzzi-having hotels, but that the piece wasn’t plagiarized, written off the top of some Jacuzzi-having hotel aficionado’s head, based on obvious or non-information, referencing other websites, or plagued by any of the other myriad atrocities that web content can be subject to these days.

The overarching theme of the trilogy of how-to manuals, as far as I could tell using my admittedly rusty elementary reading comprehension skills, was “cut fluff.” A straightforward enough mission, and obviously, a necessary one. I was to ensure that as many sentences as possible began with vivid, actionable verbs. And that I could clearly picture in my head the step a reader was being instructed to take. If a piece was a total mess, I wasn’t supposed to spend time rewriting. Instead, I was to make very specifically worded comments (there were so many notes on phrasing said comments constructively and politely, I could only assume that this had been a point of prior contention) back to the author. The author then had a few days to turn a rewrite around. I’d review it again, and then I could approve it for publication or reject it if it was still too fluffy or sucky. At the time of publication or rejection I’d also rank the veracity of the article on a numerical scale, and have the opportunity to make notes about the author for internal review.

And then? Then I would get paid $3.50.

Nones

¶ We don’t want to complain, but we do wish that President Obama had mentioned something besides automobiles in his Op-Ed piece about exports — trade suddenly being the subject of his mission to India and Korea — if only because we’d like to know what this country is still manufacturing for export. (NYT)

The great challenge of our time is to make sure that America is ready to compete for the jobs and industries of the future. It can be tempting, in times of economic difficulty, to turn inward, away from trade and commerce with other nations. But in our interconnected world, that is not a path to growth, and that is not a path to jobs. We cannot be shut out of these markets. Our government, together with American businesses and workers, must take steps to promote and sell our goods and services abroad — particularly in Asia. That’s how we’ll create jobs, prosperity and an economy that’s built on a stronger foundation.

If this concluding paragraph makes the United States sound like an emerging market, there’s a reason.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Kevin Frazier flourishes a keeper review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Madame Bovary, with especial attention to the novel’s echoes of Don Quixote.

Emma is full of this alertness, a heady combination of physical, emotional, and intellectual responsiveness that makes her unique in Flaubert’s writing.  Though it’s common for critics to ignore her intelligence, she is by a wide margin the smartest and most perceptive of the novel’s main characters.  The world gives Don Quixote a beating for his romanticism, but he is usually in the honorable position of standing up for his convictions against external circumstances—circumstances that he amusingly chooses to reinterpret to his advantage.  Emma, in contrast, gives most of her beatings to herself.  She faces the difficult task of finding something to believe in when she must constantly fight her own mixed feelings.  She is far too fierce for the tame choices available to her, and far too wise to find fulfillment in the limits of her socially allotted slots as either a contented wife or a secret adulteress.

Often in the novel we join her at the window as she looks outside and struggles with the subtleties of her dissatisfaction.  She wonders how to “express an uneasiness so intangible, one that changes shape like a cloud, that changes direction like the wind…”  At times she works towards a tentative feminist critique, and ponders how much more freedom her hoped-for son might someday enjoy compared to her.  She sees quite clearly that much of her sense of confinement comes from the restraints placed on her as a woman, “always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.”  Soon the gap between what she actually thinks and what she can openly admit grows intolerable:

She was sometimes surprised at the shocking conjectures that entered her mind; and yet she had to keep smiling, hear herself say again and again that she was happy, pretend to be happy, let everyone believe it…

Compline

¶ Zadie Smith’s powerful meditation on Facebook (posing as a review of The Social Network) is the talk of the town. As the footnote that we’ve included suggests, old folks like us probably don’t get what’s most potent — and dangerously reductive — about Facebook in its current version.  (NYRB)

With Facebook, Zuckerberg seems to be trying to create something like a Noosphere, an Internet with one mind, a uniform environment in which it genuinely doesn’t matter who you are, as long as you make “choices” (which means, finally, purchases). If the aim is to be liked by more and more people, whatever is unusual about a person gets flattened out. One nation under a format. To ourselves, we are special people, documented in wonderful photos, and it also happens that we sometimes buy things. This latter fact is an incidental matter, to us. However, the advertising money that will rain down on Facebook—if and when Zuckerberg succeeds in encouraging 500 million people to take their Facebook identities onto the Internet at large—this money thinks of us the other way around. To the advertisers, we are our capacity to buy, attached to a few personal, irrelevant photos.

Is it possible that we have begun to think of ourselves that way? It seemed significant to me that on the way to the movie theater, while doing a small mental calculation (how old I was when at Harvard; how old I am now), I had a Person 1.0 panic attack. Soon I will be forty, then fifty, then soon after dead; I broke out in a Zuckerberg sweat, my heart went crazy, I had to stop and lean against a trashcan. Can you have that feeling, on Facebook? I’ve noticed—and been ashamed of noticing—that when a teenager is murdered, at least in Britain, her Facebook wall will often fill with messages that seem to not quite comprehend the gravity of what has occurred. You know the type of thing: Sorry babes! Missin’ you!!! Hopin’ u iz with the Angles. I remember the jokes we used to have LOL! PEACE XXXXX

When I read something like that, I have a little argument with myself: “It’s only poor education. They feel the same way as anyone would, they just don’t have the language to express it.” But another part of me has a darker, more frightening thought. Do they genuinely believe, because the girl’s wall is still up, that she is still, in some sense, alive? What’s the difference, after all, if all your contact was virtual?

We don’t know why, but the intriguing footnote at the end of this quote (#4) has been truncated online. The full footnote reads:

Perhaps the reason why there has not been more resistance to social networking among older people is because 1.0 people do not use Web 2.0 software in the way 2.0 people do. An analogous situation can be found in the way the two generations use cell phones. For me, text messaging is simply a new medium for an old form of communication: I write to my friends in heavily punctuated, fully expressive, standard English sentences—and they write back to me in the same way. Text-speak is unknown between us. Our relationship with the English language predates our relationships with our phones.

Not so for the 2.0 kids. When it comes to Facebook the same principle applies. For most users over thirty-five, Facebook represents only their e-mail accounts turned outward to face the world. A simple tool, not an avatar. We are not embedded in this software in the same way. 1.0 people still instinctively believe , as Lanier has it, that “what makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent it to completion.” But what if 2.0 people fee their socially networked selves genuinely represent them to completion?

Have a Look

¶ A Jolly Day Out in London. (The Age of Uncertainty)

¶ Prank casserole. (The Awl)

Noted

¶ Essential books — in 1974. Where are they now? (Guardian; via 3 Quarks Daily)

{The next Daily Office entry will appear on Monday, 8 November.}

Matins

¶ We’ve looked at Sabrina Tavernise’s story about Washington’s storeys, but we can’t find what triggered it. As you know, an old Act of Congress limits the height of buildings in the nation’s capital to a multiple of the width of the street on which they stand. This most excellent law is not about to be repealed or seriously amended — or is it?

Now, on the act’s centennial, a small tribe of developers, architects and urban experts are questioning the orthodoxy of the rule’s application. A modest change, they argue, would inject some vitality into the urban scene, would allow for greener construction, and could eventually deliver bigger tax receipts for the badly pinched city budget, currently in a hole of about $175 million.

But raising the limit is nothing short of sacrilege for preservationists here, who fear that any change, however slight, will open the door to more.

“I don’t think you get it — it’s a very special place,” said Ann Hargrove, a resident and ardent defender of the limit. “Our capital was designed in such a special way to be different. One great feature is its height.”

It is an emotional debate, largely because the limit has defined Washington’s character for generations. Its original designer and planner, Pierre L’Enfant, came from Paris, another low-built city, and Washington residents say they love its light, airy quality, contributing to the city’s “livable” feel.

For some, that is a dubious distinction, not unlike calling a woman you went out with for one date, and one date only, “nice.” Without high-rise residential buildings to sustain a vibrant shopping and restaurant scene, downtown D.C. tends to empty out at night and on weekends.

If there is a movement to change the law, Ms Tavernise is helping it to keep a low profile.

Lauds

¶ Here’s good news: HM Government have postponed the grant of an export license for JMW Turner’s Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino, to give British buyers a chance to meet the Getty Museum’s winning auction bid. Campo Vaccino is a pendant to Turner’s Ancient Rome, and it belongs alongside it, at the Tate. (LA Times; via Arts Journal)

The Getty had bid for the Turner knowing that the sale could be negated, as happened in 2004, when the National Gallery of London was able to match the $46.6 million price the Getty had agreed to pay  to buy Raphael’s “Madonna of the Pinks” from the Duke of Northumberland. In 2005, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge balked the Getty’s bid to acquire the Macclesfield Psalter, a medieval illustrated manuscript, for $3.2 million.

“We anticipated there would be a decision to delay the export license,” David Bomford, the Getty Museum’s acting director, said Wednesday in a prepared statement. “We greatly respect the export process in the U.K. and look forward to the possibility of having this masterpiece in our collection.”

In a 2005 commentary for The Times, James Fenton, a trustee of the National Gallery of London, noted after the failed bids for the Psalter and the Raphael, that “it makes sense for the Getty to have a go at bidding for the probably unobtainable, on the principle that you never know your luck.”

Prime

¶ For the most concise account of the pros and cons of Quantitative Easing II is, predictably, Yves Smith’s, at Naked Capitalism. But Felix Salmon makes a important general point about the way in which the plan was announced by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke.

So while I welcome Bernanke trying to explain his actions in the form of an op-ed, I’d be much happier if he did so in the form of a press conference, or some other place where people could ask him questions. He’s good at communicating; why doesn’t he use those skills better?

Tierce

¶ From the Dept of Whizbang (meaning, don’t hold your breath), researchers have brought the refresh rate for holographic teleprojections down from four minutes to two seconds. Thet’s about two-thirds of the way  to an acceptable rate of 30 times per second. The secret ingredient is a new type of plastic. (Wired Science)

Then the researchers trained the laser onto a newly developed plastic called a photoreactive polymer, which is coated with a material that converts light into electrical charges that create and store the image. The charges move around the plastic in such a way that when light bounces off the material, it reaches your eyes as if it had bounced off the toy plane or the researcher’s head.

“With this material, since you can move the charge around, you can erase the hologram and write another hologram on it,” Blanche said.

Two years ago, Peyghambarian’s team made a similar material that could only refresh the image every four minutes. The images in that material were also disturbed by vibrations and temperature changes, so the screen had to be kept in a highly controlled box.

The new material rewrites every two seconds, a 100-fold improvement, and isn’t bothered by changes to its environment, the researchers say.

Sext

¶ Even more whizbang: James Somers imagines the Deskotron, the perfect personal assistant. The bit at the end would be the beauty part. (jsomers.net)

He would understand strategic relationships between tasklets. By that I mean that he would understand which tasklets feed well into one another. For instance, I might write better after perusing my Google Reader queue, or I might write worse; deskotron would know which. He would know how many programming tasklets I can do before getting exhausted, and how to stagger hard and easy tasklets to squeeze the most effort out of me. He would know that I don’t like to read too many serious magazine articles in a row, and that I have to be primed in a certain way before I want to solve a Project Euler problem.

deskotron would be like a good personal trainer, demanding nearly too much of me, holding me to my commitments, pushing me when I falter, and knowing when to give me a break. He would monitor my mood and gauge my engagement. He would be like the logical extension of that Mercedes feature that wakes you up when you doze off.

With all this, deskotron would be able to dynamically pack my days. He would turn me into one of those high-powered guys who’s scheduled down to the minute, except that I wouldn’t feel constrained by him. Instead, I’d feel like he had the perfect answer every time I asked, “What’s next?” 

Nones

¶ In Hanoi, last weekend, the members of ASEAN held a summit meeting with China. China continues, however, to insist on treating its South China Sea claims as bilateral agreements with ASEAN members. Simon Roughneen reports, at Asia Times.

In recent months, China has alarmed countries in Southeast and East Asia with some remarkably strident Freudian slips, which wary neighbors have interpreted as the hegemonic aspirations behind Beijing’s “peaceful rise” rhetoric. Some influential commentators, including American Walter Russell Mead, have made the historical analogy with post-Bismarck Germany, which famously, and disastrously, abandoned the Iron Chancellor’s relatively cautious diplomacy for a more strident and clumsy approach under Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In July, China’s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reminded Southeast Asian countries that China is a big country. This not-so-subtle language amplified alarm bells set off when US officials leaked Chinese statements that the South China Sea is viewed by Beijing as a “core interest”, a term usually used to describe its claims over Taiwan and Tibet. ASEAN members Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and non-ASEAN Taiwan, all have competing claims in the maritime area.

Vespers

¶ We thought that the VQR was in abeyance, but Kyle Minor caught an extraordinary interview with Alice Munro (with Lisa Dickler Awano) that, among other things, explains that blush-making dinner-for-two in the celebrated story, “Wenlock Edge.”

LDA: At one point in the story, while the student is at the home of a near-stranger, an older man named Mr. Purvis, she finds herself complying with his wishes, although they make her feel uncomfortable. Mr. Purvis, who is fully dressed, desires that she sit naked at his dining room table while they eat together. Later, while she is still undressed, he leads the way into his library, where he asks her to sit in a revealing way while she reads poems to him from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. Although he doesn’t use force to win his way, the student doesn’t refuse him.

AM: Actually that was something someone told me that had happened, but I wanted very much to use it in a way of finding out why the girl would do that, and what she would feel like before and afterwards. So I put myself in that position, thinking it out.

After that story was published, I was at a party, and the men there all thought it was unrealistic; they thought it would never happen. And the women all said, “Oh, yeah?” I think (the men) wanted to think that way. Because what the student does is her own investigation, which she doesn’t realize the implications of. She really thinks that she is in power, even though it’s a thing she has to force herself to do. She doesn’t realize actually how much power Mr. Purvis has over her and her mind and her future until it’s all over.

LDA: Both the student protagonist and her roommate, Nina, seem like victims to me.

AM: The student has all kinds of smarts to keep her afloat in the world. But Nina is totally a victim because she has nothing. And Nina finds an implausible sort of romance that she is nevertheless willing to invest in and our heroine doesn’t even allow her to keep that. So in a way, it’s a bleak story. But I don’t think it’s bleak in terms of being not what people would do. “Dimensions,” the first story in the book is fairly unusual—it’s an extreme story—and I don’t think “Wenlock Edge” is extreme.

Compline

¶ Simon Johnson hopes that President Obama will boldly confute incoming House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s claim to be a fiscal conservative, which Mr Johnson challenges on three grounds (Mr Ryan wants to cut taxes, has no spending cuts in mind beyond the blather of the “Pledge to America,” and has yet to say anything about Medicare’s future). (The Baseline Scenario)

Mr. Ryan has an important job in the next Congress and will no doubt have great influence on Republican policy in the run up to the 2012 presidential election.

The White House would do well to take him and his colleagues on directly.  We should have the debate about our long-term fiscal future and lay out a path to sustainability that is consistent with an economic recovery. 

It is up to the Obama administration to explain clearly and widely why Mr. Ryan’s proposals do not deal with the first order problems that have increased government debt dramatically in the past decade and that threaten future fiscal stability.  Let us hope the White House has learned from the midterms that there are dire electoral consequences when the president shrinks from directly confronting misleading ideas.

Have a Look

¶ Sketches from Chris Roth’s jury duty. (The Rumpus)

¶ Written in stone. (Letters of Note)

¶ “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” for our whatevs times. (GOOD)

Noted

¶ Google’s “creepy line.” (Short Sharp Science.)

Matins

¶ In “Caucasion Nation,” Marco Roth  reflects on racism in America in its surreptitious but no less malignant modern form: the crisis of “white victimhood.” We haven’t read anything so in accord with our own view of the problem — ever. (n + 1; via 3 Quarks Daily)

In spite of Sherrod’s vindication, the affair was another political triumph for the right. The White House went no further than to blame the fake scandal on technology and the 24-hour news environment, probably because polls show that distrust of the media is bipartisan. The actual content of the fake scandal, unlike its form, could hardly be discussed by respectable parties. We all know that racism has been sufficiently anathematized in America that it can no longer present itself directly, perhaps no longer even to the minds of those who engage in it. A paradoxical consequence of this apparent progress is that only in extreme cases can racism be referred to publicly by people in a position to condemn it. One begins to think of race in Obama’s America like sex in some caricature of Freud’s Vienna: simultaneously the main theme of all conversation, and the one that can’t be mentioned. Instead of being “overcome,” historic American racism against nonwhite people has gone into deep cover and, with the irrefutable illogic of the unconscious, emerged as a newfangled American antiracism for the protection of white people.

[snip]

Despite “40 acres and a mule” talk of land redistribution, most freed slaves signed contracts to sharecrop for their former masters within a few months of the war’s official end. Defeated only on the battlefield, the Confederate army rapidly reorganized into the rifle clubs and citizens’ watch councils that would come to be known as the Ku Klux Klan. President Andrew Johnson granted full amnesty to all but a handful of secessionist Southern representatives, because he was their President too, and one year after Lee’s surrender, a former slave-hunter turned gunman could openly plot race murder, writing in a local paper about the need to “thin the niggers out and drive them to their holes.” The Civil War continued by other means and the South did rise again.

Racist vigilante groups derived a sense of their legitimacy from the idea that they were defending themselves against lawless blacks and Northern “carpetbaggers.” Their tactics were the perennial tactics of terrorists everywhere: attacks on lines of communication, both railway and telegraph; attacks on schools and teachers who wanted to educate the minority population; night visits to prominent but poorly protected ideological opponents. Cross burning happened later. In those early days, the Klan was likely just to beat a man for twenty minutes with a horse stirrup before either hanging him or agreeing to let him go as a warning to others. More relevant for our more repressed era, they also scored a remarkable PR success with the aid of rehabilitated Southern congressmen, who dismissed reports of white Southern violence as mere “waving the bloody shirt”; that is, as fictions spread by northern “radicals” to incite more civil violence. In a 2008 case study of what he calls “terror after Appomattox” in Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, the historian Stephen Budiansky concludes that the Confederate vigilantes “made a victim of the bully and a bully of the victim, turned the very act of Southern white violence into wounded Southern innocence, turned the very blood of their African American victims into an affront against Southern white decency.”

Lauds

¶ We knew that David Hockney began creating art on his iPhone the moment he got one; we’re not surprised to find that he has moved on to the iPad. Nor is it really unexpected of him to prefer to display his digital art on the tablet as well — instead of printing and framing it. (BBC; via Arts Journal)

When he’s worked with computers in the past he has printed the images and framed them before hanging them on the gallery wall.

But for the Paris show, he did not want to display copies. Instead, he wants visitors to see the works just as he created them with his fingers on the various iPads.

Visitors to the show are shown this process up close.

Inside the cathedral-like space, with low-lighting to enhance the luminosity of the images on the iPad, visitors are also treated to a short film in which he snappily draws the Eiffel Tower in real time.

[snip]

“You know sometimes I get so carried away, I wipe my fingers at the end thinking that I’ve got paint on them.”

Prime

¶ Felix Salmon is back, and he has lost no time picking up on a guest post by Barbara Kiviat that we linked tothe other day about whether financial regulation ought to be rules-based or principle-based. Felix agrees with the Michael Lewis rule that Barbara captured, banning “any sort of position-taking at the giant publicly-owned banks.” He goes further to make an extraordinarily interesting point, one that we’re still chewing on.

More generally, I suspect that a lot of people who blame Gramm-Leach-Bliley (the repeal of Glass-Steagal) for the financial crisis should really be blaming the broker-dealers going public instead. After all, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were both entirely Glass-Steagal compliant, as, for that matter, were Fannie and Freddie and AIG. The problem wasn’t that they were merged with commercial banks; the problem was that they had far more leverage than any private partnership would ever be comfortable with.

People who blame the repeal of Glass-Steagall &c — that would be us.  

Tierce

¶ Tyler Cowen tips us off to the blog of former Scientific American editor John Rennie, The Gleaming Retort. (And he has us on “retort,” always our favorite piece of chemistry-set glassware.) In “Height, Health Care, and I Q,” Mr Rennie makes a very strong case for attributing variations across populations to environmental, rather than genetic, factors.

What’s noteworthy about this observation that the varying heights of populations are not limited primarily by their genetic differences is that the best estimates peg the heritability of height at around 80 percent. That is, within a population in a consistent environment, 80 percent of the variation in height owes to genetic factors. (Or if you prefer, your parents’ height was 80 percent predictive of your own because their height suggested how much your height might vary from the mean.) In the case of height, those genetic factors are still rather obscure—a Nature Genetics paper published last summer suggested that tiny nudges might be scattered throughout the genome rather than concentrating within a few clearly identifiable “tallness” or “shortness” alleles. But whatever the case, two facts are undeniable: (1) a genetic signal in height is undeniable, and (2) environmental influences can swamp—not erase, but overwhelm—the variation otherwise attributable to genetics, which is why the traditionally short Japanese are nearly the height of Americans now and we are nine inches taller than the Frenchmen who stormed the Bastille.

Remember this the next time you read about the genetics of I.Q. and the arguments that are framed around differences in intelligence between races or other population groups. The heritability of I.Q. can be hard even to define (read this lengthy but worthwhile post by Cosma Shalizi to understand why) but good estimates often place it at around 50 percent—well below that of height. Environmental influences on I.Q. should therefore be huge, and one should be very skeptical of arguments that imply (or state outright) that any alleged differences between those groups are innate or unchangeable. Indeed, if Komlos and his colleagues are right that differences in health care explain the plateau in U.S. height, one might expect that those same health care differences—which certainly correlate with economic status and race in this country—could have a very marked effect on I.Q., too.

Sext

¶ Someone’s gotta do it, and Roxane Gay steps up to the plate. She not only makes the case for money, but she suggests that, in the wake of the Virginia Quarterly Review debacle, everybody in the lit world did.  

Poverty is not awesome. I cannot say I am at all acquainted with poverty but I have certainly seen it (both relatively, in the US, and absolutely, abroad). Graduate school taught me that it’s a pain in the ass to live on an extremely tight budget. There was nothing cool or special about it. Just because we can live on some absurdly low sum of money does not mean we should if it is within our means to do otherwise. Just because we can produce a good literary magazine on, say, $5,000 a year, doesn’t mean we should turn our noses up at producing a magazine for $25,000 a year or even $250,000 a year.

When the VQR story broke, a lot of people, myself included, were simply staggered by the kind of money they had to work with–not thousands or tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of dollars. The death of Kevin Morrissey and the accusations of bullying were troubling and tragic, but really, it was the money we were interested in discussing. Being able to produce a magazine with that kind of capital was (and is) simply flabbergasting. Many of us began composing wish lists of everything we could do with a mere fraction of the VQR money (unicorns! ponies! cupcakes!) and there was an undercurrent of anger in many of the discussions. We weren’t worried about a man’s unfortunate passing or the events leading up to his death. We were outraged, I think, that a magazine dared to spend money, and a lot of it and did so without explanation or apology.

Nones

¶ Yves Smith, who lived in Australia for a few years, insists that they’ve got some things terribly wrong Down Under; but, when it comes to elections, they put us to shame. No TV ads, and no shirking the ballot.

One of their strong points was politicking and voting. Australia didn’t, and I hope still does not, permit paid TV ads. Each party (or was it candidate? I never was clear on the mechanics) who scored above a very low threshold got a certain amount of free air time. This took the big reason for fundraising out of the picture. And the result, a limit on how much TV advertising their was in total, seemed to have the effect that people got proportionately more of their information about politics via print, which allows for longer form discussion.

Another interesting feature was that voting is a duty not a right. I was surprised at about month three in my apartment there to get a sternly-worded official notice, which wanted to know who the hell I was and why hadn’t I voted. If you don’t vote, you get fined.

Vespers

¶ As Yevgeniya Traps argues, in her discussion of Howard Jacobson’s Man Booker winner at The Millions, the real “Finkler Question” is one of just how different Jews are from everybody else. Not that it can be answered clearly; but one point that the book doesn’t make is the Family-of-Man thesis that Jews are “just like everybody else.”  And she turns to the author himself for an eloquent rebuttal.

Some British reviewers have suggested that the novel’s concern with Jewishness is merely cover for a larger concern with the self. Writing about the novel in the Observer, Edward Docx concludes that “Jewishness” is here “a metaphor for human culture in general.” This is true in so far as The Finkler Question is finally interested in the way a particular personal identity intersects with the larger world and in what it means to be an outsider in the very worlds that we expect to be most welcoming. But it also seems false to deny the particularity of the way in which such issues are explored in The Finkler Question. For one thing, there is Jacobson’s own identity, which, despite his lack of religious feeling, he has repeatedly identified as Jewish: “What I feel is that I have a Jewish mind, I have a Jewish intelligence,” he remarked in a 2004 interview with Tablet Magazine. “I feel linked to previous Jewish minds of the past. I don’t know what kind of trouble this gets somebody into, a disputatious mind. What a Jew is has been made by the experience of 5,000 years, that’s what shapes the Jewish sense of humor, that’s what shaped Jewish pugnacity or tenaciousness.” There seems to be, for Jacobson, a personal concern with what it means to be a Jewish writer, especially in a country that has given rise to a number of anti-Israel boycotts, measures that Jacobson has publicly opposed, and it is this concern that gives The Finkler Question so much of its energy, its frisson. Having said that, it would indeed, be unfortunate to reduce the novel to identity politics, or, rather, to any one set of identity politics, given Jacobson’s enthusiasm for poking fun at the highmindedness brought to discussions of what it means to be anything. And anyway, what the novel is about is hardly half as important as how it goes about being about anything. The Finkler Question is never portentous, never precious. It swells with laughter and with sorrow, and you are glad to be its reader, whatever your identity.

Compline

¶ At Salon, Michael Humphrey interviews Ted Fishman, author of Shock of Gray, a book about “How old people will remake the world.” We certainly sat up. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

You have a section title in your book called “Why We Don’t Like Old People.” Do you really think we don’t?

I think it is true. In general, we don’t like them because for people who are not in late life yet, late life remains a mystery. And it’s a mystery fraught with danger. Lots of things start happening to people at age 60 and the people who are on the young side of that divide see those as frightening and threatening. But there’s also another divide: We think very differently about people in our own lives who are above that age than we do about the general population above that age.

There’s a notion that certain cultures do better by their elderly than we Americans do. You looked at this as a worldwide phenomenon. What did you conclude?

One of the really dumbfounding truths of the book is that very often the places that insist that they are the most loyal and faithful to their families are the places that do the most violence to them. As soon there are geographic distances, the things that once bound the family break up very rapidly. Almost all these very traditional places have driven down birthrates to among the lowest in the world. I think there’s a relationship between the mythologies — and expectations of people to be bound to their families — and the desperation to escape those bonds.

Have a Look

¶ Antonio Rubino. (The Rumpus)

Noted

¶ Amazing retinal implant. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

¶ Facebook knows when you will break up. (GOOD)

Matins

¶ At The New Yorker Online, Eric Osnos posts a bracing Letter from China: what we look like to the Chinese as we thrash through the midterms. Actually, it makes more sense to us than anything we’ve heard here.

Bottom line: All in all, the Chinese have been left puzzled by the midterms, which appear, from afar, to be defined by a kind of cognitive dissonance. From the Chinese perspective, Americans appear to be thrashing against the realities of a new era: faced with a sudden sense of weakness and global changes in power, Americans look unable to summon the energy or unity to make even the simplest self-sustaining choices, and instead, are seeking refuge in the tinny appeals and false comfort of demagogues. “Americans are feeling quite contradictory,” as a piece in the Southern Daily put it recently. “[T]hey want to build more railroads, train stations and schools, they want to use clean energy, but they don’t want to pay higher taxes in order to do all of these. They are the offspring of immigrants and feel very proud of that, and yet they also oppose the idea of immigration.”

Lauds

¶ Via Arts Journal, a couple of pieces about classical orchestras that, taken together, show us where we’re going (compact, traveling jazz-like bands) and what we’ve left behind (city-centered behemoths).

Comparing the Kremerata Baltica with the Knights of the Many-Sided Table, Mark Swed writes (LA Times):

It would be easy, on the basis of these performances, to write off the Knights as a kind of club experiment. These hapless Knights in a battle of the bands with the deep, technically superb Kremerata would seem almost Pythonesque.

But not so fast. The Knights brings out a dazzling spectrum of color in Frank’s “Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout.” And in Osvaldo Golijov’s “Last Round,” which rounds out the CD, the band reveals a level of sizzle that even Kremerata can’t match in its Piazzolla.

Maybe the Ives and Copland aren’t so bad either when you consider that the Knights so often need to cut through a background of food, drink and talk. Their rough-and-ready CD, moreover, seems equalized for the iPod. It sounds better through ear buds or cheapo computer speakers than it does on a stereo. And as much as “Appalachian Spring” captures the spiritual essence of America for many of us, the Knights remind us that Copland did write it for the dance.

Coincidentally, the Kremerata and the Knights also have recent Mozart. Evgeny Kissin leads the Kremerata from the keyboard in sublime performances of the Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 27 ( EMI Classics). The Knights back up the Canadian violinist Lara St. John in excitable performances of the First and Third Violin Concertos as well as the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola (with her brother, violist Scott St. John).

Meanwhile, Mark Stryker writes from Detroit:

The Detroit Symphony Orchestra strike has reached day 28 with the parties no closer to a settlement than when talks stalled in July.

The sides have not met since Aug. 27, no bargaining sessions are scheduled, concerts are canceled through Nov. 7 and feelings remain raw. Drew McManus, a Chicago-based arts consultant, said if neither side substantially alters its position, and the players stay unified through the holidays, the entire season could be lost.

Prime

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Nick Werle explains the preference for fiscal austerity or Keynesian stimulus in terms of Foucault’s distinction between discipline and security. And he’s perfectly lucid, too, so once you’ve finished throwing up your hands, give his page a read.

Political economy first entered the realm of security when Keynes invented macroeconomics as a way of managing unemployment and taming the business cycle. For the first time, economists could attend to a population and direct their policies at the economy as a whole. Indeed, the concept of unemployment only makes sense for a whole economy; it has no microeconomic analogue. In his General Theory, Keynes shows how governments can use fiscal policy to keep their unemployment rates within reasonable bounds, consistent with long-term economic growth and social stability. Government’s deficit spending is the distinctive technique of this regime of Foucauldian security. An economic stimulus is not intended to help any particular individuals – though some sectors certainly benefit more than others – but rather boost aggregate demand. Its target is the whole economy, the population. Indeed, classical economics did not admit the economy per se as an organic object, since it was seen as merely a large collection of individual, rational actors. Insofar as macroeconomic policy has this population as the target of its interventions, Keynes can be said to have invented the economy as an object.

It is easy to see where austerity fits in Foucault’s taxonomy: It is a disciplinary force exerted against free-spending governments. Just as the structures of school buildings make rambunctious children into docile bodies, pressure to embrace public austerity is an effort on behalf of international capital to restrain the free-spending tendencies of welfare states. This fiscal discipline, sold as a virtuous and commonsensical “pain after the party,” is intended to produce chastened governments, which maintain capital-friendly tax policies at the expense of social services and in the name of stability, predictability, and job creation. Even though newly streamlined corporations are again flush with cash but have not rehired the workers laid off during the worst of the financial crisis, business leaders continue to argue for an emergency loosening of labor laws that would allow them to fire employees more cheaply. 

Tierce

¶ A study of the bluffing brain, reported simply at the Times, a bit more richly at Not Exactly Rocket Science. Are you a strategic deceiver? If so, there are three parts of your brain that will give you away to a mind-reader.

As the players made their moves, the brains of the strategists were more active than those of the other groups in three areas. The first – Brodmann area 10 (BA10) – sits at the very front of the brain. It has been implicated in many complex behaviours including keeping our goals in mind and looking ahead to the future. Both are important to the strategist, who must bear in mind the long-term goal of making as much money as possible, while playing the short-term tactic of building up the seller’s trust.

The second – the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) – also sits to the front of the brain, but slightly off to the side. It’s active during tasks that involve memory, complex decision-making, mental control and social understanding. Again, all are important to strategists; they need to remember their previous suggestions, while holding back the impulse to play a simpler strategy. The more deceptively the players played, the stronger the blood flow in both BA10 and the DLPFC.

The third area – the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) – runs down the middle of the brain and has been implicated in understanding other people’s beliefs and switching attention between different goals. It was unique in that its activity also depended on the value of the different objects. The greater the value and the higher the prize at stake, the greater the activity in a strategists’ TPJ. It’s in these rounds when the ability to know what the seller is thinking really matters. By contrast, the different stakes had no influence on the TPJs of conservatives and incrementalists.

We threw in the mind-reader bit only because Ed Yong predicted that we would.

Sext

¶ We love  Ted Wilson — or whoever it is who writes under his name for The Rumpus; he is a breath of fresh air on the Internet, because you don’t have to wonder if he’s out of his mind. He is out of his mind. And yet he is much too funny to be suffering from actual dementia. His gift for dropping deadpan bombs reminds us of Robert Benchly; perhaps Ted Wilson has tacked down a Mergenthaler Laugh Detector!

I searched a thrift store for the cheapest costume available. Between a box labeled “sexy nurse” and another labeled “sexy cat” I found one labeled “used Borat” for only $1.50. There were dozens of them. The costume revealed a bit more skin than I would have preferred, so I wore a pair of evening gloves I found with a pair of panty hose. Halloween isn’t Halloween without a mask, so I also threw on an old homemade Howdy Doody mask I had in my attic.

No one had invited me to a party, so I drove my van all over town until I found one. I had to drive very slowly, because it was hard to see through the mask, but I eventually found a big party. Unfortunately, the partygoers didn’t have the Halloween spirit. Whenever I asked any of them to trick or treat me – instead of offering candy – they would say things like, “Did George invite you?” or “Ew.”

Nones

¶ The always-provocative Bob Cringely has a theory about India and China. It’s crazy, but so crazy that we’re inclined to agree.

China has the population, the will, the educational system, the foreign currency reserves — everything to make it the next global superpower except two things: 1) an emerging middle class generation comparable to our Baby Boomers, and; 2) a functional diaspora (look it up, I’ll wait).

In contrast to China, India has only those two things: 1) a real Baby Boomer class, and; 2) a functional diaspora (did you look it up?). Nothing else about India works at all — nothing. India is corrupt and divided. While India has a commercial tradition it isn’t an especially functional one. Fractionalism and factionalism, whether economic, social, or religious, will keep India from ever truly pulling together. But that doesn’t matter because my two original points are enough.

Vespers

¶ We almost forgot! Cathleen Schine wrote a terrific review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad in the NYRB. It works especially well as an appreciation of the book, to savor after it has been read. How’s this for a tight little wow:

If all the characters in A Visit from the Goon Squad are inevitably on their own Suicide Tour—where else are we all headed, after all?—they are also, some of them, survivors who, after so much running away, so much drunken stumbling, so much ambitious clawing, and so much aimless yearning, have found what they didn’t know they wanted where they least expected it. It is this sense that distinguishes Egan’s book from one more clever piece of prose about disconnected and dissipated young people in New York City and makes it a rich and unforgettable novel about decay and endurance, about individuals in a world as it changes around them, as grand in its scope as, say, Buddenbrooks or Tanizaki’s The Makioka Sisters.

Compline

¶ We don’t want to carp, but there is something a trifle disingenuous about Cornell University president David Skorton’s plea for humanities funding. Forgetful, anyway. Swamped by “theory” and other deconstructive programs, the liberal arts curriculum has tended more to undermine civility, in the past thirty-odd years, than to bolster it. (Inside Higher Ed; via Arts Journal)

He would make the case this way: “You can’t recreate the past and relive it again, but we can understand so much more,” he said, and that can be to the benefit of American goals. “When I hear military leaders talking about winning the so-called hearts and minds of people in other countries, the way I translate that is all based on humanistic and social science disciplines. That requires that we understand the language, the culture, the religion, and the values of those societies — and that is the humanities.”

Turning to current headlines, he said that the lack of civility in society points to the need for the humanities. “Watching the midterm elections, they seem nasty to me, not civil. The tragedy at Rutgers — isn’t that a lack of civility and a lack of values?” Skorton said. If people want to restore civility to public life (a goal of James Leach, the NEH chair), then “the values of the humanities need to be emphasized.” He also argued that ethics problems in the business world and in academic research (with recent misconduct scandals) illustrate the importance of the critical thinking that is taught in the humanities.

Have a Look

¶ Edward James, rememberd at Mondoblogo. (Note: Monkton is a Lutyens house.)

Noted

¶ The John Evelyn Institute of Arboreal Science. (BLDGBLOG)

Matins

¶ At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith is persuaded by a commenter to retrieve, from one of her daily roundups, a link to Johann Hari’s persuasive essasy on the efficacy of protests and demonstrations. The most curious thing is that it’s the powerful, the exponents of policies that demonstrators are protesting, who appear to be the most sensitive. And — a point that Anthony Trollope would appreciate — protestors may never know how effective they’ve been.

And protest can have an invisible ripple-effect that lasts for generations. A small group of women from Iowa lost their sons early in the Vietnam war, and they decided to set up an organization of mothers opposing the assault on the country. They called a protest of all mothers of serving soldiers outside the White House – and six turned up in the snow. Even though later in the war they became nationally important voices, they always remembered that protest as an embarrassment and a humiliation.

Until, that is, one day in the 1990s, one of them read the autobiography of Benjamin Spock, the much-loved and trusted celebrity doctor, who was the Oprah of his day. When he came out against the war in 1968, it was a major turning point in American public opinion. And he explained why he did it. One day, he had been called to a meeting at the White House to be told how well the war in Vietnam was going, and he saw six women standing in the snow with placards, alone, chanting. It troubled his conscience and his dreams for years. If these women were brave enough to protest, he asked himself, why aren’t I? It was because of them that he could eventually find the courage to take his stand – and that in turn changed the minds of millions, and ended the war sooner. An event that they thought was a humiliation actually turned the course of history.

Lauds

¶ In today’s Times, two pieces on ephemeral art. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Starn brothers are dismantling Big Bambú, while at an undisclosed,abandoned subway station somewhere in the city, an exhibition of graffiti closes immediately upon opening, and not because the MTA shut it down, either.

They hadn’t planned, for example, to have bamboo cup holders, which sprouted throughout the piece (the climbers put them in), or the cresting wave of bent bamboo at the top, or the spontaneous wind chime that turned up toward the southern end. They could not have predicted that the roof’s wisteria would wend its way all the way up the piece; that the red-tailed hawk Pale Male would regularly circle overhead; or how breathtaking Central Park would look from “Big Bambú” as the seasons changed. The installation had to close every time it rained and the climbers and the Starns had to stop work for a week when the artists ran out of cord, which was used to lash the poles together.

***

They set some ground rules. Since bringing artists in and out of the space required careful planning — by now they had figured out that the active platform was emptiest on late nights early in the week — and since one or both of the curators had to be on hand, Workhorse and PAC set strict schedules and limited each artist to one visit, with four hours of working time. The artists were not allowed to go out for more materials if they ran out. (Workhorse and PAC supplied lighting in the form of camping lanterns. “We went through hundreds of batteries,” Workhorse said.) And in addition to their materials, the artists had to pay for their transportation, regardless of the distance.

Of the international artists approached, most were from Europe. (Banksy, the most famous of this group, turned them down: He was promoting his film “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” Workhorse said, and told them through a mutual friend, “ ‘Great project, love it, but I can’t risk going in.’ ”) But more contributors were American, among them well known names like Ron English (whose most recent work has been priced at up to $200,000), Swoon and Revok.

Prime

¶ At Felix Salmon, Barbara Kiviat weighs and considers the utility of legal vagueness: Paul Volcker believes that financial regulations ought to be vague, to make gaming them difficult; but Michael Lewis thinks that they ought to be starkly unambiguous. Her conclusion:

If you have little faith in regulators’ ability to keep up with Wall Street behavior and to use flexible rules to their fullest, then maybe Lewis’s approach is the smarter one. I’m sympathetic to that argument; I’ve voted to chop up overly large and entwined financial institutions before. But I don’t know if at this point that path is politically feasible. Dodd-Frank could have broken up the banks, but it didn’t. And I’m not sure that since the bill passed, the political clout of the be-tough-on-Wall-Street camp has grown.

Yet that camp is, admirably, still fighting. A group of senators, led by Carl Levin, recently wrote a letter to the new Financial Stability Oversight Council, urging regulators to really crack down and not let Dodd-Frank get watered down in the rule-making. It’s a good thing for people to hear, but so is Volcker’s message—that often the toughest rules are the ones that specifically prohibit the least.

Tierce

¶ Anybody who types will be fascinated to read about the two independent feedback loops that alert us to typographical errors. The first, surprise surprise, is called “proofreading,” but there doesn’t seem to be a name for the second, unless it’s “You can just tell.” Ed Yong reports at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

According to Logan and Crump, this “illusion of authorship” reflects the fact that typing involves two different groups of skills that spot mistakes in different ways. The “outer loop” involves the language centres of the brain and is involved in producing the words that we type. It detects errors by checking what appears on the screen and matching it to our original intentions. If what turns up looks right, the outer loop thinks all is well and if what appears is wrong, the outer loop raises the alarm. The outer loop falls for the illusion.

Meanwhile, the “inner loop” sets up the right sequence of hand movements that type out the words put forward by the outer loop. It detects errors by checking the feedback from the fingers and no matter what Logan and Crump do on the screen, it knows what the typist actually typed. The inner loop sees through the illusion but it operates at a largely unconscious level. It’s the one that slows down the typists’ fingers when they sense that the wrong keys were pressed.

Sext

¶ Have you seen the Feltron Annual Report before? In it, Nicholas Felton (note the interpolated “r” in the report’s title) compiles masses of mundane data about how he has spent a given year. Then he works them up into a spankingly handsome, beautifully printed object. Would you pay for hard copy ($23)? Sean Patrick Cooper does, hopeful that the Report will achieve, one of these years, genuine narrative thrust. That hasn’t happened yet, though. (The Rumpus)

That said, there’s something worth taking at face value from the statement Felton released just prior to the publication of his ‘09 Report and from something he said in a conference talk not too long after the publication. The former, “I have strived to sort and collate the data in a clinical and repeatable manner that could be reproduced by someone looking for the same stories I have selected.” The latter, “As a graphic designer, I’d been searching for a while for means of telling stories.” Implicit in both statements is that Felton fashioned his Reports to contain what are essentially stories. If we look at the Reports this way, the data is not simply numbers and stats about Felton life; the data becomes a mode of stories about Felton’s life. The distinction is small but significant. It’s a matter of elevation and orchestration. If Felton transforms the raw data (1.5:1::social dinners:solo dinners | Report: 2006 Page 6) into the frame for a story: In 2006, Felton spent more time eating in the company of others than eating in solitude—then Felton has orchestrated an elevation of the data to a level of story telling. Despite what Felton has stated as his intent, the orchestrated elevation does not occur. The data never communicates anything beyond what it is. The frames are never built. It never tells more than it shows.

If Felton wished for the graphs, charts, and lists of his Reports to become stories, he would have to provide some context to give them meaning. Otherwise, the data acts much as a photograph does—and, as Susan Sontag said, “strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.” The Report data is in many ways a context-free snapshot of a very particular part of Felton’s behavior. In 2007, Felton traveled 7.4 miles over the course of 5 bus trips via the M15 route. Sontag again, “In contrast to the amorous relation, which is based on how something looks, understanding is based on how it functions. And functioning takes place in time, and must be explained in time. Only that which narrates can make us understand.” The data on Felton’s bus activity over the course of the year amounts to nothing more than data about Felton’s bus activity over the course of a year. A Report Owner cannot understand anything more about Felton’s life if the Report Owner does not know how these bus trips functioned within Felton’s life. Were these bus trips taken to visit an aunt recovering from surgery in a hospital uptown? Were these bus trips taken to see a favorite painter showing for a limited time in a gallery downtown? The data never reveals the context that embeds that data with significance and the Report Owner is left with only a photograph of a very particular part of Felton’s activity.

Nones

¶ Simon Johnson’s essay on the background of the now-averted “currency wars” has our heads spinning, largely because we can’t believe that a respectable columnist asserts that the emerging-markets portion of the G2o is in better economic health than the 0ld G7 rump. The problem that interests Mr Johnson, however, is the EMs’ determination to keep their currencies cheap and their reserves “safe.”

This is exactly the kind of issue – inherently cross-border and very political – for which a structure like the G-20 is needed. But it will do nothing about these flows for three reasons:

1. The emerging markets want to save in this fashion, thinking they can dodge the consequences.
2. The United States needs to borrow, big time. Our politicians refuse even to think about the first-order causes of our recent fiscal disaster; they would rather just continue to borrow (at least as long as interest rates remain low).
3. The big banks like this approach. Their influence is in no way diminishing, and there is nothing about their recent track record that has diminished their appeal in the eyes of policy-makers (just this week, for example, the I.M.F. appointed a senior Goldman Sachs executive to head its high-profile European Department).

Accommodating emerging markets in global governance structures is appealing; their aspirations are legitimate, and the G7 looks outmoded. The profound instability of global financial structures and the broader “doom cycle” today is not the fault of emerging markets – the blame lies squarely with the United States and Western Europe, which have consistently failed to rein in their global megabanks.  (For an 8-minute primer on the “doom cycle,” if you are not familiar with the concept, try this video.)

Vespers

¶ Sonya Chung offers an appealing modest defense of teaching the writing of fiction. At no point is it a rebuttal of Elif Batuman’s thunderclap, but this only makes it more eloquent. (The Millions)

When you teach writing, you have to have a sort of world-view about it, or else you’ll go a little nutty. Here’s mine: at a certain level, there is pretty-good writing (“capable,” in Emily [St John Mandel]’s words), there is really-good writing, and there is great writing. Those of us who set ourselves to the work of writing well will move among these categories throughout our lives; we’ll aim for greatness and more often than not land somewhere along the way. If you are earnest in this endeavor, if you understand that your pretty-good writing can and must always be getting better, then I can’t see why I, as a teacher, shouldn’t encourage you and help you along as best I can.

The truth is that your pretty-good writing may very well get published and make you famous; it’s happened before. Your great writing may never see the light of day. Your really-good writing may get published and be read by very few. You may write something great this time around and something pretty-good next time around and something not-very-good-at-all a few years down the road and never get published at all. It’s happened before. (Read this, and this, if you don’t believe me.) I don’t decide these things. I’m only here to help you write better, because I think it’s important and worthwhile.

Compline

¶ “If television is, indeed, our art form, we need to start treating it as such.” So says Daniel D’Addario, who proceeds to demonstrate why we can’t. (The Bygone Bureau)

Like baseball broadcasts, a season-long narrative with jolts and twists for each team’s partisans, television knows how to give its viewer what he or she wants. For instance, when Mad Men began, Joan Holloway was a delightful supporting character whose presence alerted the viewer to all manner of uncomfortable prejudices in the 1960s. In a book or film, her evolution would have taken place in the viewer’s mind, turning over all of her complex valences, rather than at the hands of producers who turned her into something out of fan fiction. Consider the conversation between Joan and her fiancé in the season-four finale: the revelation that Joan has kept her baby says nothing more about her character. It’s just an OMFG moment, capped off with the campy and tonally bizarre “Yes, they’re bigger” comment. Whoever’s putting words in Joan’s mouth knows how the audience feels about actress Christina Hendricks’s breasts.

Have a Look

¶ Steerforth visits the second-oldest building in Britain. (The Age of Uncertainty)

¶ The photographs of Evan Leavitt. (A Continuous Lean)

Noted

¶ Khoi Vinh’s iPad Magazine Stand. (via kottke.org)

¶ Hungarian is just, what with everything else on one’s plate, too Hungarian. (Sore Afraid)

The next edition of the Daily Office will appear on Monday, 1 November.

Matins

¶ A bit of concrete poetry from Roxane Gay. We Are All Very Busy Being Busy! (HTMLGiant)

We say I’m busy, I’m busy, I’m busy—an exultation. We say we are busy and feel flushed.  We are busy, therefore we are. To be busy is to be important and to be important is everything. We will Twitter and Facebook and blog our busyness and we will do so with the conviction of martyrs. We will bear our busy burden. The burden of busy must be borne because to be busy is to be important and to be important is to matter. We matter and are made of matter which is meta.

Lauds

¶ Newsweek has published a list of the top-15 highly-compensated heads of not-for-profit organizaations — museums, orchestras, foundations, and hospitals. At the top (owing more to a blip of deferred compensation — if you can call $1,649,540 a blip) is the New York Philharmonic’s Zarin Mehta. (Add a million in base salary.) At Good, Alex Goldmark asks some good questions.

For the arts groups, have a look at what percentage of the overall budget is going to the top of the pyramid. Sometimes its just 1 percent or less. Others its more than four times that. In this sphere there is certainly an influence from the extremely wealthy donors and culture of the upper crust that bleeds into notions of appropriate pay.

Thanks to Charity Navigator for crunching the numbers and keeping watch on what is certainly sometimes, excessive pay … but not always.

How much should the head of a charity earn? How much is too much? What if they bring in more than their salary in extra donations? Or extra impact? How much should someone forgo to serve a cause?

We don’t believe that anyone ought to “forego” anything to serve a cause; if anything, there ought to be a premium. But executive compensations schemes, profit and non-profit alike, are embarrassingly outsized. Nobody is worth a salary that is hundreds of times greater than rank-and-file pay.

As for not-for-profits specifically, we believe that executive positions ought to be endowed, and therefore non-negotiable.

Prime

¶ On page A3 of this morning’s Times, the continuation, from the front page, of Stephanie Clifford’s “Why Wait? This Year, Retailers Push Black  Friday Into October” sits atop “Gulfstream Orders Suggest Recovery in Business Jets,” a story by Christopher Drew. Such juxtapositions, droll to say the least, can be appreciated only in newsprint. (Just for fun, there’s an add for Tiffany’s Lucida rings — “From $3900” — in the corner.) From Ms Clifford we learn that “Customers have been trained to buy merchandise only on sale.” Mr Drew tells us that “Analysts watch the sales of business jets as an indicator of how willing corporations are to spend money as the economy rises and falls.”

Heidi Wood, an analyst at Morgan Stanley, said in a research note on Wednesday that business jet flights had increased since late last year, and that a recovery “appears under way.”

She said earlier this week that there was consistent demand for large planes, while the market for midsize and smaller ones remained “painfully quiet.”

This gives us a better picture of what a jobless recovery looks like, no?

Tierce

¶ For a different angle on yesterday’s story about epileptic patients, neural implants, and Marilyn Monroe, we turn to Carl Zimmer, at The Loom. We try not to repeat ourselves in this way, but we’re stunned by the factoid toward the end of the second paragraph.

Fried’s collaborators discovered that some of these individual neurons responded faithfully to certain kinds of sights. Some only responded to faces with sad expressions, others only to happy faces. Some only responded to houses. In 2005, however, Christof Koch of Caltech and his colleagues decided to get more fine-grained. They showed pictures of actors and actresses. They found individual neurons that responded almost exclusivey to Jennifer Aniston. Others only responded to Saddam Hussein, others to Pamela Anderson, and so on.

Later, the researchers found that people can develop these so-called “Jennifer Aniston neurons” for anyone they become familiar with in a matter of days. The neurons start out relatively weak, but get stronger with familiarity. The picture of a loved one will trigger a loved-one neuron to fire a lot more strongly than a neuron dedicated to an obscure D-list celebrity. Fortunately, these neurons are not limited to Hollywood celebrities. They seem to be the medium in which we encode any kind of concept. We probably can store ten to thirty thousand concepts in our brains, each of which is encoded in an estimated several thousand Jennifer Anniston neurons. (I talk more about the history of this research in Brain Cuttings, and in this column for Discover.)

In a flash of mad genius, Koch and his colleagues wondered if people could use biofeedback to control the strength of these neurons. They interviewed twelve patients, and in each case they identified four celebrities who triggered particularly strong responses from their individual neurons. Then they superimposed two of those celebrities–in one case, Josh Brolin and Marylyn Monroe–on a computer screen. The patients were told to try to shift the picture to one celebrity or the other. The computer was programmed to alter the balance of the images in response to the firing of the Brolin and Monroe neurons. As the Monroe neurons got stronger and the Brolin neurons weaker, for example, the screen would go all Monroe.

Ten to thirty thousand concepts! What a concept!

Sext

¶ Roman Hans, ever the self-improver, struggles with the “language barrier” (“chuse,” “sallad”) posed by Pride and Prejudice. Predictably, he loses. (World Class Stupid)

The book concerns several hundred people, all related, who alternately love and hate each other with the skill of Italians. At the center of the story are the Bennets: Mr. Bennet, Mrs. Bennet, and their daughters. Lots of daughters. The number is never specified, and it seems to change by the hour. We start off with Elizabeth and Jane, then page by page discover Lydia, Beth, Kitty, Mary, Lizzy and Eliza, though someone smarter than myself may discern that four of these could refer to the exact same person.

The big romance is between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, a guy who doesn’t even get a first name until page 187. There’s a roadblock flung in their path: we’re supposed to think that Mr. Darcy is unforgiveably rude because he went to a ball and only danced twice. That’s rude? the guys reading will ask. Hell, if he showed up in his underwear, guzzled scotch from a bottle and asked the hostess to pull his finger maybe she’d have a case. Then we learn that a dance lasts fifteen minutes, that you have to book them like appointments with the cable guy, and that dancing with the same woman twice is roughly equivalent to proposing marriage. Under these conditions even Fred Astaire would be hanging around the buffet table stuffing rumaki in his gob. Besides, that’s unforgiveably rude? That’s an obstacle to a relationship? Once I forgave a hubby who had sex with a preoccupied paraplegic.

The characters hook up and break off straight out of daytime drama. Miss Bingley likes Mr. Darcy, Mr. Darcy likes Elizabeth, Mr. Bingley likes Jane but seems destined to marry Countess De Burgh’s daughter (his cousin) to unite their estates. Elizabeth ought to marry Mr. Collins, her cousin, but since she hates him she pawns him off on Charlotte Lucas, the only character who’s not a relative. There are like eight sets of cousins who consider each other for marriage, yet for some reason they’re more concerned with estates and property than bearing children who have bat ears and duckbills.

Nones

¶ When George Will sighs that campaign spending’s not so bad — after all, we spend more on potato chips! — Robert Reich is there with a pitchfork. “The number of dollars spent isn’t the issue; it’s the lopsidedness of where the dollars come from.” (By the way, how much do we spend on advertising potato chips?) And we spend a lot more on lobbying that we do on election campaigns.

Why $4.2 billion and not ten times that amount? Because the high-rolling political investors don’t need to spend a dollar more in order to exert overwhelming influence.

This figure, by the way, leaves out the tens of billions of dollars dedicated to lobbying, lawyering, and public relations — all of which deliver specific legislative outcomes the campaign money fuels. The economy of Washington, D.C. depends on this gigantic flow of funds (supporting the polished facades of refurbished hotels, fancy restaurants, trendy bistros, office complexes of glass and polished wood, well-appointed condos, hotels with marble-floored lobbies and thick rugs, restaurants serving $75 steaks and offering $400 magnums of vintage French wine.) Washington’s seven suburban counties are listed by the Census Bureau as among the nation’s twenty with the highest per-capital incomes.

Failing to include this larger apparatus in an estimate for how much money now greases the legislative skids is analogous to estimating the cost of private transportation in America by what’s purchased at the gas pump without mentioning automobiles, roads, and bridges.

Vespers

¶ Alexander Chee makes a very compelling case for John Dos Passos.

The term “fragmented narrative” comes to mind when I think of him but this has always seemed like a fraught phrase to me.  Many have done it who are just imitating something they saw stylistically without understanding the architecture of it.  They don’t display a sense that the fragmentation is intentional, not random, and moves towards being understood. Fragmented narrative is too often the hiding place of someone who fears being understood.  But this was not Dos Passos.  He greatly wanted to be understood. And the fragments of his narratives move toward creating an unforeseen (by the reader) whole out of their disparate parts.

The phrase I use for this is “articulate complexity”—something that when you take it apart seems intensely complicated, perhaps even chaotic, but that, when fit together, creates something the reader experiences as that direct communication Cheever spoke of in his Paris Review interview.  Dos Passos was my earliest apprehension of why you’d use a fragmented narrative, the way something could be broken apart in order to describe something larger than what it could if it were whole.  Reading Dos Passos, I had the feeling of watching a DJ put together tracks to make a whole—the movement between the pieces in the novel was called a collage, but that has never seemed very interesting to me.

Compline

¶ Sandra Day O’Connor, Stanley Prusiner, and Ken Dychtwald team up to issue a powerful Op-Ed exhortation to mount a federal campaign to brake Alzheimer’s Disease.

In the mid-1980s, when our country finally made a commitment to fight AIDS, it took roughly 10 years of sustained investment (and about $10 billion) to create the antiretroviral therapies that made AIDS a manageable disease. These medicines also added $1.4 trillion to the American economy. The National Institutes of Health still spend about $3 billion a year on AIDS research, while Alzheimer’s, with five times as many victims, receives a mere $469 million.

Most of the medical researchers who study Alzheimer’s agree on what they have to understand in order to create effective drugs: They must find out how the aberrant proteins associated with the disease develop in the brain. They need to model the progression of the illness so they can pinpoint drug targets. And ultimately they must learn how to get drugs to move safely from the blood into the brain.

A breakthrough is possible by 2020, leading Alzheimer’s scientists agree, with a well-designed and adequately financed national strategic plan. Congress has before it legislation that would raise the annual federal investment in Alzheimer’s research to $2 billion, and require that the president designate an official whose sole job would be to develop and execute a strategy against Alzheimer’s. If lawmakers could pass this legislation in their coming lame-duck session, they would take a serious first step toward meeting the 2020 goal.

Medical science has the capacity to relegate Alzheimer’s to the list of former diseases like typhoid, polio and many childhood cancers. But unless we get to work now, any breakthrough will come too late to benefit the baby boomers. Whether the aging of America turns out to be a triumph or a tragedy will depend on our ability to fight this horrific disease and beat it before it beats us.

Have a Look

¶ Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews. (via The Awl)

¶ “Let the Children Kodak” (The Online Photographer)

¶ Ration Books. (A Continuous Lean)

¶ John Lennon complains. (Letters of Note)

¶ Non-Official Movie State Map. (via Joe.My.God)