Matins

¶ Colm Tóibín’s review of The Pope Is Not Gay is an eloquent discussion of the Church’s problem, not so much with pedophilia as with power as well as with homosexuality. As we read it, we began to think that the scandal of priestly abuse is coming to light now, and not at some other time, because it has only just ceased to be a double crime. If homosexual acts as such are no longer condemned by society, then that exposes the other half of the act — forcing minors to engage in them — as a crime with only one perpetrator, not two. As always, Mr Tóibín writes with wry generosity of spirit. (LRB)

It seemed interesting that Kevin Dowd felt as free as Bill Donohue and Tarcisio Bertone to mention the existence of homosexual priests and seminarians as a problem for the Catholic Church. And interesting too that, as quoted approvingly by his sister, he wanted a return to the time before the ‘takeover’ of seminaries by homosexuals; that he deplored the ‘shrinking’ of the ‘priest pool’ that had allowed ‘men confused about their sexuality’ to become priests. It seemed odd that he believed there really was a time when ‘men confused about their sexuality’ did not become priests, when other sorts of men, men not confused in this way, were ordained. He was filled with nostalgia for an earlier Church: ‘The Church I grew up in,’ he wrote, ‘was black and white, no greys. That’s why my father, an Irish immigrant, liked it so much. The chaplain of the Police and Fire Departments told me once: “Your father was a fierce Catholic, very fierce.”’

The issue of homosexuality and the Catholic Church about which Donohue, Cardinal Bertone and Maureen Dowd’s ‘conservative and devout’ brother seem so concerned is not likely to go away in the near future. For the many gay priests in the Church it is deeply disturbing and indeed frightening that their sexuality can be so easily associated with rape, sexual cruelty and the abuse of minors, and that there is a view that somehow before they came along the Church was just fine, and, indeed, if they could be rooted out, and the Church could go back to the ‘black and white’ days of Dowd père, then the problems would all dissolve.

There are very good reasons why homosexuals have been traditionally attracted to the priesthood. I know these reasons because I, as someone ‘confused about my sexuality’, had to confront and entertain the idea that I should join the priesthood. In 1971, aged 16, I gave up my Easter break so I could attend a workshop for boys who believed they had a vocation.

Lauds

¶ Peter Campbell writes about the portrait art of Alice Neel so eloquently that we may just buy the catalogue of the exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery. (LRB)

Andrew Neel, talking about his grandmother’s situation, says that ‘working on something which is unfashionable is hell.’ Those New York painters she spent time with who became successful in the 1940s and 1950s were mostly abstract expressionists. She was known, but not much shown. Later, she made an effort to do something about it: in the exhibition, the 1960 portrait of Frank O’Hara is evidence of that – he was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art as well as a poet – but he never helped her get shown or wrote about her. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when the rise of feminism led to revaluations of women who had been overshadowed in a male-dominated art world, that her profile rose. Her portrait of Kate Millett was on the cover of a ‘Politics of Sex’ issue of Time in 1970 and there was a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974.

In her best pictures faces are loaded with information about attitudes and emotions. They address you, the viewer (who stands where the painter did), and demand that you understand how they feel. Much of the time you confront trouble or anxiety. The 1966 portrait of her son Hartley shows him, hands joined over his head, looking straight at you while sitting slumped back in a chair. He had started medical school and had told Neel at the time she was painting it that he could not bear dissecting a corpse and would have to give it up. In the end he got his degree, but the sense of crisis is powerful. You wouldn’t be surprised if you were told he had been crying. The 1958 portrait of his father, Sam Brody, was painted in the year he and Neel ended a long, sporadic relationship. Arms crossed, eyes not meeting yours (hers), a strong crease created between frowning eyebrows: you read a troubled man who could also be trouble.

Prime

¶ The most obvious way in which the government can ease unemployment is to facilitate small-business credit with grants to banks that then make loans that, at first blush, sound vaguely sub-prime, but that wind up in paychecks, not worthless assets. Sounds great all round, and there’s a generous piece of legislation in the Congress. Whose against it? Big Oil. The money to fund the grants will come from the repeal of a discreditable tax boondoggle. Shamelessly, Big Oil has found cerebral prostitutes to argue plausibly that the repeal with “cost jobs.” Felix Salmon attacks.

Finally, the report’s intrepid author, Andrew Chamberlain, decides that for every $54,881 in reduced household earnings, a job magically disappears. It’s not remotely clear where that number comes from, but using it, Chamberlain manages to conclude that the $35 billion in reduced earnings means that total employment would shrink by 637,195 jobs.

All of this is profoundly silly. The report doesn’t even make an attempt to work through the effects of higher corporate taxes on oil-industry employment: instead, it basically assumes its conclusion, by starting from the assumption that there’s a simple and direct correlation between any kind of oil-industry tax hike, on the one hand, and job losses, on the other. Is there any particular reason to believe that repealing Section 199 “would trigger nationwide job loss of 637,000 workers”? Of course not. There is good reason to believe, however, that passing the Small Business Jobs and Credit Act would help create millions of jobs.

So let’s not let Big Oil, or anybody else, try to get away with saying that passing this act would cost jobs rather than save them. It’s a ridiculous argument, which deserves to go nowhere.

Tierce

¶ At Science Not Fiction, Kyle Munkittrick retails the colorful analogy that Johns Hopkins neuroscientist David Linden spins, between the layered history of our brains’ origins and an ice cream cone with three scoops. Lest this comparison sounds appetizingly luxurious, Professor Linden reminds us that evolution is “the ultimate tinkerer and cheapskate.” That ice cream has been previously owned — by lizards, mice, and apes. The cone? It’s a jellyfish. As the ancient philosophers understood so well, we fall in love because our brains are poorly designed.

According to Linden, the key separation between humans and apes isn’t brain type but size – Humans just got a super-duper-sized third scoop. Start with a jellyfish cone, add scoops of lizard and mouse, then a gigantic ape scoop, throw on some sprinkles for culture, and you’ve got the human brain. Most astounding, however, is not our closeness to animals, nor that the good-enough-for-now parts evolution decided to preserve hinder us from becoming hyper-logical super beings, but that our most human behaviors come from all our brains working together. Linden asserts that love – a mental state that requires instinctual emotion, higher understanding, and logical reasoning while simultaneously transcending all three – would not be present in human beings if our brains were not so poorly engineered by evolution.

Sext

¶ The sixteenth edition of Chicago Manual of Style is out, and principal reviser Russell David Harper talks about it with Carol Saller at her blog, The Subversive Copy Editor. One nugget shone particularly brightly for us, because it seems to glint with a new understanding of authority.

And finally, I worked hard for this edition to pare down our advice wherever practical in favor of single recommendations rather than a host of options and exceptions. Our readers have let it be known since the last edition that they are perfectly able to decide for themselves when it’s best to bend or break a rule. Most come to the Manual to find out what we would prefer rather than merely what we might allow.

Nones

¶ At the NYRBlog, Ahmed Rashid raises the topic that has worried us most about the aftermath of the flooding in Pakistan: the creation of ideal conditions for a fundamental Islamist takeover of significant parts of the country — if, indeed, not the whole. (More than religion would be at stake; a new regime would almost certainly dissolve the extensive feudal holdings of farmland.) We agree that, without super-fast responses by the West and the government that it supports, Pakistan as we know it is doomed.

In Balochistan, the large province in southwestern Pakistan that skirts Afghanistan’s southern border, the floods have deepened an already existing crisis. The country’s poorest region, Balochistan, has long hosted a separatist insurgency as well as Afghan Taliban bases (Quetta, the provincial capital, has been a haven for a number of senior Taliban leaders). Now, flash floods have destroyed infrastructure and what little was working in the region’s below-subsistence economy; the state’s fragile control of the region has become even more tenuous, as Baloch separatists, blaming the government for poor relief efforts, are urging a stepped up struggle for independence. (The last time such major floods hit the country in the late 1960s, the inadequacy of the government’s response led in part to the secession of east Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh.)

Meanwhile, the floods have had little effect on the rampant violence by extremists and other groups that has been occurring across the country. The Pakistani Taliban continue to carry out suicide bombings and have vowed to wipe out the country’s government leaders while in Karachi, inter-ethnic violence between political parties representing the Pashtun, Sindhi and Urdu speaking communities has resulted in some 100 deaths in the past four weeks. Since the flooding began, the Taliban have also been seeking to prevent Pakistani non-governmental organizations from carrying out relief work by threatening their workers, while encouraging militant groups who have set up their own relief camps to expand.

Vespers

¶ How richly just it will be if David Markson’s place in the literary firmament is nailed by the dispersal of his personal library at the Strand, a posthumous wake-up call unlike any other. Colin Marshall, already an admirer, takes us through Markson’s work as it progresses from ostensible (but intelligent) pulp to anti-fiction, and makes it clear that, while it is easy to read, it is easy to read only for erudite readers. It seems that the reading of all those books at the Strand was composted into the writing.

Whether you think Markson’s novels — “novels” — of the nineties and 2000s are his best or worst books, you’re right. You’d be forgiven for not being readily able to tell them apart. You can call them cranky if you like. Granted, few come crankier; if I never have to hear Markson’s ever-less-oblique inveighing against Tom Wolfe, Julian Schnabel, or “critics” again, would I really die unsatisfied? Certainly they’re both accessible and inaccessible; accessible always and everywhere as easily digestible, potato-chippy lists of fascinating facts — in this sense, they’re the finest example of plotless “page turners” — inaccessible without Western-canon grounding and the payment of supremely close attention on at their richest levels of pattern and allusion.

What’s not so up for dispute is that Markson accomplished what, by all rights, should be a literary impossibility. Novels not “about” anything precisely definable. Novels without more than one consciousness inhabiting them, if that. Novels without narrative. Novels built of seemingly unrelated snippets of information about coincidence, connection, poverty, probability, ignominy, ignorance, excretion, expiration. Novels that, over a four-decade career, approach nothing less than the purest time spent in the brain of another found on any page. What a shame David Markson never got to write, file, shuffle, meticulously order, and manually type a line about the death of David Markson.

Not to mention the ongoing library saga.

Compline

¶ We figured that Maud Newton was taking a summer break, but, no: her father-in-law, with whom she was close despite many ideological differences, died in June, a few chapters short of completing a book on Macbeth. Never have we read an “I’m back” blog entry that opened so many windows. It’s not long, either.

When your spouse’s parent dies, grieving is complicated. There is the grief you feel for yourself, for the loss of a person you (if you’re lucky) loved, and there is the grief you feel at seeing the person closest to you dealing with a nearly unfathomable loss. At times the sorrow is literally almost suffocating. These are clichés, but they are also realities, as is the fact that the passing of someone important to you causes you to think about the way you’re spending your own life.

Almost two months after Larry’s death, it’s still very hard to write about him. (Or to think about his book, which Max, Joseph, and I promised him we would finish. We have a lot of reading to do.) And it’s impossible to imagine ever returning to a life in which I treat my writing like a frivolous hobby or prioritize writing about other people’s novels over working on my own.

Have a Look

¶ $500,000 will buy you the world’s largest record collection. The seller, 88 year-old Murray Gershenz, wants to go into character acting full-time. (LA Times; via MetaFilter)

¶ Ryan Freitas’s 35 Life Lessons. (via  The Morning News)

Thursdays with Will come to an end in a few weeks, so we’re making the most of the remaining ones.

Matins

¶ At Prospect, Richard Wilkinson defends The Spirit Level,  his eloquent demonstration of the advantages to everyone of social equality (co-written with Kate Pickett) against a refutation by the Taxpayers Alliance.

Again in contrast to our critics, we offer a coherent theory of why so many health and social problems are linked to greater inequality. Rather than being caused directly by material conditions or being simply a reflection of selective social mobility sorting the resilient from the vulnerable, the link with income inequality suggests that the problems associated with social status are responses to the stresses of social status differentiation itself.

We remain puzzled by the stance the Taxpayers Alliance has taken to our work. As we point out, greater equality need not depend on high taxation. Within the US the state of New Hampshire has amongst the lowest taxes. It has no income tax or state sales tax but, like other more equal states, it does well in terms of a host of social measures including rates of infant mortality, homicides, teenage pregnancies, imprisonment, levels of trust and children’s school performance. It stands as an example of the benefits of a fairer and more equal society.

This chimes well with what we’ve observed about the perception of status: differentials in status disappear to those at the higher end. People of high status become accustomed to deferential or respectful treatment by taking it to be “normal.” Conversely, people remain aware that they possess more in the way of material goods, and fret about theft and expropriation.

Lauds

¶ Alex Balk’s recipe for Bolognese sauce, “passed down through an unbroken chain of Italian grandmothers,” is so delightful to read that we’re going to give it a try any day now, what with the comfortable temperatures. The ingredients are the same as in the recipe that we use (Giuliano Hazan’s), but the order in which ingredients are added is almost entirely different, and nobody ever told us to put the tomatoes in a blender.

Liquid time. Get a cup of dry white wine (if you don’t have any, a cup of dry vermouth will do. Hell, I’ve used a cup of red wine before and the difference has not been particularly notable.) and pour it in. Stir occasionally, but let the meat “drink” the wine so that it kind of evaporates into the mix. Figure a couple of minutes on this one. Next you’re gonna take a cup of milk and do the same thing. Here’s the part where the old Italian ladies will tell you that the milk should be hot, but I think this is something they make up just to keep you busy and show that they’re in control. It doesn’t matter what temperature the milk is, it’s all gonna wind up in the meat all the same. You hear that, nonna? It doesn’t matter. When the milk is gone (it’ll take longer than the wine did) add another cup of wine, same deal as before.

[A NOTE FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO DO NOT LIKE TO COOK WITH ALCOHOL: You’ve got your reasons, I guess. I’m not gonna judge. You can replace the wine with beef stock. BUT, the beef stock should absolutely be made fresh. Nothing from the store, got it? I would have given you my personal recipe for beef stock had I thought about this in advance, but the idea of a life without alcohol is so alien to me that I only just now remembered that there are some people who swing that way. I’m sure there plenty of good recipes on the Internet. Good luck.]

Because we’re probably closer in age to Alex Balk’s grandmother than we are to Balk himself, we’re going to heat the milk.

Prime

¶ Felix Salmon talks PIGS with Carlos Steneri, a veteran of Uruguays economic turnaround back in the 1980s, and suggests that European policy-makers might learn a thing or two from the South American’s experience.

But Carlos reckons that some kind of European Brady plan makes sense — he calls it the Trichet plan. Germany would take the lead in providing the collateral, in the form of zero-coupon 30-year notes — and get money back for issuing them, as well, so it wouldn’t lose out. The PIGS would at the very least be able to term out a bunch of their short-term maturities, dealing with their liquidity problems. And the new instruments, with embedded partial German guarantees, would be more palatable to investors than plain-vanilla Greek debt, making it easier for banks to offload the paper into the secondary market. That’s important, because a large part of the sovereign-debt problem in Europe isn’t the sheer size of the debt so much as it is the leveraged nature of the banks which hold it. If the debt can be moved off bank balance sheets and into the hands of bond investors, the amount of systemic risk would fall dramatically.

This is neither a necessary nor a sufficient solution to the debt problem, of course, but it might be a helpful step in the right direction, and at the very least demonstrate a willingness to face up to the magnitude of the crisis facing Europe. Carlos was adamant that muddling through is simply not going to work — and the longer it seems that Europe is trying just that strategy, the more painful the eventual crunch is likely to be.

Tierce

¶ As concern about the health risks of professional sports in general and pro football in particular mounts, it’s not surprising to learn that Lou Gehrig, the “Iron Man” slugger who routinely “played through” his injuries, may not have had amyotrophic lateral schlerosis — “Lou Gehrig’s Disease.” Alan Schwarz’s report on a study that does not in fact name Gehrig reminds us that there is such a thing as fashion in morals.

“Obviously he played in the days before helmets, and he led with his head and with his shoulders, certainly on the football field,” said Mr. Eig, adding that he found no record of brain injuries in news reports of Gehrig’s football career. “On the baseball field he got knocked around a bit because he could be klutzy. Given the barnstorming he did in the off-season and his football career and style, there’s no telling how many additional shots to the head he took.”

Gehrig’s handling of injuries inspired reverence among fans and the news media. Concussions then almost resembled cigarette smoking, in that what is now known to be harmful was in Gehrig’s time considered benign, even charming. An advertisement for Camel cigarettes that filled the back page of Life magazine included various testimonials to “Larruping Lou’s” playing through injuries, including the 1934 incident.

“Another time, he was knocked out by a ‘bean ball,’ yet next day walloped 3 triples in 5 innings,” the ad reads. “Gehrig’s ‘Iron-Man’ record is proof of his splendid physical condition. As Lou says: ‘All the years I’ve been playing, I’ve been careful about my physical condition. Smoke? I smoke and enjoy it. My cigarette is Camel.’”

Sext

¶ Welcome the Class of 2014: the annual Beloit College Mindset List. (Remember, today’s freshmen were born in 1992 — only yesterday! The Editor’s daughter was in college at the time. (via  Speakeasy)

The America they have inherited is one of soaring American trade and budget deficits; Russia has presumably never aimed nukes at the United States and China has always posed an economic threat. 

Nonetheless, they plan to enjoy college. The males among them are likely to be a minority. They will be armed with iPhones and BlackBerries, on which making a phone call will be only one of many, many functions they will perform. They will now be awash with a computerized technology that will not distinguish information and knowledge. So it will be up to their professors to help them.  A generation accustomed to instant access will need to acquire the patience of scholarship. They will discover how to research information in books and journals and not just on-line. Their professors, who might be tempted to think that they are hip enough and therefore ready and relevant to teach the new generation, might remember that Kurt Cobain is now on the classic oldies station. The college class of 2014 reminds us, once again, that a generation comes and goes in the blink of our eyes, which are, like the rest of us, getting older and older.

Nones

¶ At Foreign Policy, Peter Feaver implores us to stop arguing about the Ground Zero Mosque and start prioritizing aid to Pakistan. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

Yet, all of the focus on the Ground Zero mosque controversy may now be having the ironic effect of distracting us from a much more important and much more urgent issue in that ideological struggle: the vast humanitarian crisis caused by the floods in Pakistan. The human toll is staggering, and that alone ought to be enough to prompt an outpouring of generosity from the American people.

But if you are not moved by the human suffering, perhaps the national-security concerns will prompt you into action. Pakistan is at the epicenter of the war on terror, and it is hard to see how that larger struggle will turn out well if the Pakistani state collapses and the society plunges into anarchy. The country was already teetering on the edge with a bankrupt economy, severe food and water problems, and an ongoing insurgency in Balochistan. And, by the way, al Qaeda and other terrorist networks are primarily in Pakistan, not Afghanistan — indeed, several of the recent attempted terrorist attacks in the United States have originated from or had links to groups in Pakistan. Oh, and Pakistan has a sizable nuclear arsenal.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Jessica Francis Kane worries a bit about developing “writer’s desk,” and learns to make do in libraries. We can hardly write a word when another person is in the room, but otherwise we’re in complete accord: trying to create a lovely working space can become a deadly distraction.

One day, complaining to my father about this lack in my life, he told me a story. He’d known a man—the father of a childhood friend—who spent his retirement building the studio of his dreams. His whole life he’d wanted to write and paint, and now he would have the time to do it. As soon as the studio was finished.

This sounded fine to me. Where was it? Were they still friends of ours? Could I rent it?

He designed it beautifully, my father continued; the man was a good carpenter, worked on it for years. Apparently he showed it to my father at one point. He walked him through this perfect backyard work space, but what struck my father was how the man talked on and on about all the things that weren’t quite right yet.

The story appeared to be over.

What happened? I asked.

He died before it was finished, my father said. Never wrote a thing.

I kept looking for a desk, but I can’t say I wasn’t rattled. I eventually found something I liked and could afford at a very depressing estate sale on the Upper West Side: an antique, Mission-style writing desk that probably should have been found by someone able to afford to have it restored. I brought it home as it was, rough and rickety, for $150 and used it for a year. When I left that apartment, I sold the desk to the next tenant because it wouldn’t have survived another move. She worked in publishing, too, and wanted to write, so it felt like the right thing to do.

But I also think my father’s story had taken root. I began to suspect I was too susceptible to the idea of the “writer’s desk” and decided it might be better to do without one.

Compline

¶ At The Morning News, Robert Birbaum talks with Jennifer Egan, and we’re not telling you this at Vespers because talking about her own work is only a part of what interests Ms Egan. The conversation is fresh from first to last, a makes-you-want-to-be-there exchange of thoughts and feelings, and we heartily recommend reading the whole thing. But what we don’t want you to miss is the sparkling exchange, toward the close, about celebrity. We’re delighted to hear one of today’s most important writers praising an important 50 year-old book.

RB: There is also a shift in the notion of celebrity—people famous for being famous.

JE: That phrase, “famous for being famous,” you know who coined it?

RB: I don’t.

JE: Daniel Boorstin in 1961, in The Image, a book that everyone in America should read every few years. That’s where he pinpointed that tendency, that possibility. This was really before even television had become a mass form. He predicted all of it.

RB: I haven’t read it—

JE: It should be required reading. It explains so many things about how our media has developed.

RB: How did you come across this book?

JE: I loved Boorstin, he’s written a lot of great books. I heard it referred to—Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle is better known, but it comes after The Image and The Image predicts what’s in there, also. It’s a really slim book—I highly recommend. It’s so smart. Anyway, he talked about the possibility of being famous for being famous—that was 1961.

RB: Now we are overwhelmed by those kinds of people.

JE: True, but how new is it, is the point I am trying to make. I wasn’t even born when he wrote that book.

RB: Perhaps it is the glut of everything.

JE: We see a lot more of this stupid stuff. That feels so true. It feels like we are inundated. It’s everywhere. At the same time, I am disgusted by my sense of myself as this middle-aged person complaining. For example, my older son has gotten really into pop music. He wants to listen to the hot radio stations all the time. My first reaction when he was doing this was, “Wow, pop music was a lot better when I was a kid.” But then I started listening and I realized it was no different, it was no better. It was just as silly. In fact, I have totally gotten into the groups he loves. I want to be connected to him. It doesn’t make any sense to stand there judging.

RB: I see pop music as always having a range from mediocre to brilliant. There was bubble-gum tripe like “Sugar Sugar” on the air with Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead.

JE: Exactly.

RB: Who are these women named the Kondrashians?

JE: I don’t know. I have no idea.

Have a Look

¶ The 25 Most Disturbing Films Ever. (Where’s Dead Calm?) (via  MetaFilter)

† Frank Kermode, 90. The London Review of Books, announcing Kermode’s death, published an online chronology of his contributions to the LRB, which range widely over thirty-one years, from a recent review of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity to a consideration of the Nabokov-Wilson estrangement in 1979.

Matins

¶ At You’re the Boss, Jay Goltz tells the remarkable story of a “social entrepreneur,” Seth Weinberger. Mr Weinberger, partner at a major Chicago law firm by day, developed a handheld teaching device that really works — in his spare time (and with some help from clients).

He has gotten major grants from foundations and companies, including JPMorgan Chase Foundation, which has given him $500,000 thus far and has connected him with the Urban Education Exchange, a New York nonprofit that is focused on reading comprehension; and Teach For America, which will use TeacherMate in kindergarten, first-grade and second-grade classes in Phoenix and Chicago this year.

Is Mr. Weinberger doing social good? Obviously. Is he an entrepreneur? Well, he’s not taking financial risk, and he’s not making any money off of this venture. But he clearly has passion, vision, tenacity, and the ability to solve problems. And he’s capable of manic behavior. Sounds like an entrepreneur to me.

But whatever you call him, I take my hat off to him. It has been a long and difficult journey, and the road ahead looks no easier and no shorter.

Lauds

¶ So, now it’s called “time shifting.” (How would we know? We have yet to crack a single disc from the past-season sets of Mad Men.) How does Nielsen keep track of this phenomenon, and how long can the current commercial-advertising model support “television”? (Yahoo; via  Arts Journal)

The upward trajectory of DVR ownership has been well chronicled, but fewer people are aware of how quickly on demand viewership is catching on, Kerekes said. Comcast, which has 23.2 million customers, gets some 350 million orders of VOD programming a month, she said. Television shows now surpass movies, music video and children’s programming, she said.

One heartening sign for networks could be that time-shifting will make many customers apt to try something new. Kim Cooper, an online support specialist from Charleston, S.C., said that’s one thing on her mind when she sits down on a Sunday and programs each of her two DVRs for the week.

“If you see something coming up you’ll say, `Do you want to give it a shot?'” Barcroft said. “We decide in the first five or 10 minutes whether we like it or not.”

Prime

¶ According to a report by P O’Neill at A Fistful of Euros, a great swathe of Ireland’s private sector is being run directly by banks in possession of foreclosed concerns, and the government does not contemplate any immediate action to curtail this curious way of dealing with “troubled assets.” In other words, wait and see.

And yet it’s not clear that the worst is over.  The banks haven’t yet made a big move on distressed home mortgages and no one is clear what will happen when forebearance is no longer a viable strategy.  Notwithstanding the government’s attempts to compare tax revenue to “profile” (i.e. a very recent projection), the fact is that tax revenue is stagnant at last year’s depression-like levels despite an apparent recovery in economic statistics.  And while there are those desperate hotels, the tourists (or at least those who stray from the cautiously priced package tours) will still find fussy and expensive restaurants (plus VAT).

Are there any tricks left in the bag?  The government is looking at privatization, most likely as a way to realize a large amount of cash at fairly short notice — essentially a portfolio switch of state-owned companies for all the bank liabilities it has taken on.  And there are some bizarre Thatcherite echoes in the possible appearance of a poll tax by the end of the year (dressed up as a “flat rate” water charge or property tax).  The public sector unions are back onside for now with a deal guaranteeing no further pay cuts and postponed pension reform for incumbents, so some semblance of the “social harmony” (i.e. lack of riots) that has so impressed international commentators is still there.

But, if you don’t work for the government directly or indirectly (as with the doctors and lawyers) or for some type of export operation, do you have any firm idea what you’ll be doing 3 years from now? For a country facing such inponderables, the statis in its politics is remarkable.  But that’s for another post.

Tierce

¶ At Gene Expression, Razib Khan enthusiastically reviews Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Lamguage History of the World — and at truly informative length. Although the “rice/empire” theory of language spread occupies the center of attention, what caught our eye was the “conventional wisdom” (which we didn’t share until we read it) about the prevalence of Greek in the Eastern Roman Empire.

But one point which the author mentions repeatedly is that the rise and fall of languages of great expanse and utility is the norm, not the exception. In particular, Nicholas Ostler takes time out to emphasize that languages which spread via trade often do not have long term staying power. Portuguese, Aramaic, Punic and Sogdian would fall into this category (the later success of Portuguese was a matter of rice and empire in Brazil). It seems that mercantile communities are too ephemeral, that successive historical shocks inevitably result in their decline when there isn’t a peasant demographic reservoir or imperial power which imposes it by fiat. Even those languages which eventually spread beyond traders and gain cultural and political cachet may fall from grace. Greek is the best case of this. It was the dominant language of the Roman East, and spoken as far as modern Pakistan, and studied in Dark Age Ireland. By the early modern period it was a strange and foreign language in the West, and with the rise of Islam in the east it lost its cultural glamor, and even those Christians in Arab lands who were Melkite, Greek Orthodox who adhered to the theological position of Constantinople, became Arab in speech and identity (in greater Syria the Greek Orthodox have been instrumental in the formulation of Arab nationalism).

And yet to some extent one must be cautious about over-reading the recession of Greek in the face of Arabic after the rise of Islam. Ostler repeats the conventional wisdom that the predominant vernacular in the Roman East was never Greek, but rather Semitic dialects descended from Aramaic. This is manifest in the fact that the Oriental Orthodox churches do not use Greek in their liturgy, but forms of Syriac. Their root is in an alternative intellectual tradition from that of the Greek Church. The transition to Arabic was then predominantly from a closely related Semitic language, not from Greek. One of the theses to explain the spread of Arabic across North Africa, but not into Persia, is that Arabic found it easier to replace other members of the Afro-Asiatic language family. I can accept that people can intuitively perceive differences of language family without a deep knowledge of said languages. In Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World it is recounted that an ambassador to the court of the Hapsburg Emperor in Vienna communicated to the Sultan that apparently the locals spoke a dialect of Persian! Persian and German are of course both Indo-European languages, and set next to Turkish they may sound vaguely similar.

Sext

¶ Joe Moran gets lost — under the highway. Encouraged by French theorists, Joe explores the world of stilts below a huge highway interchange outside of Birmingham, UK. (via Mnémoglyphes)

I had read that in the mid-1990s the council created a gravel beach here, with brave locals bathing in the network of canals underneath the junction. I now wondered if this was an urban myth, a joke designed to lure unsuspecting tourists into this wasteland. There was some sand and gravel, but no evidence that it had been placed there on purpose. I wandered around the whole 30 acres of the junction, and I saw some strange human remains – a Loohire chemical toilet turned on its side, some ripped hi-vi trousers – but no actual human being.

After a few hours I realised I was lost. My atlas was, naturally, no help, because it only showed the roads looping above me. When I tried to retrace my steps I kept encountering unpassable pylons crackling with electricity. Eventually I scrambled through a gap in a fence and walked across a mudbath of football pitch which led me back on dry land recognised by the Birmingham A-Z.

Nones

¶ When the dictator — oops, president — runs the country from home (and nobody’s talking about a “home office”), you can’t be surprised when he proposes doing away with the pesky legislature, if that’s what business leaders want. (Miami Herald: via  Real Clear World)

Ortega wheels around Managua in a Mercedes-Benz sport utility vehicle, and his offspring are known to enjoy luxury cars.

“His sons have already savored the money. Many of them drive Range Rovers, Mercedes and BMWs in Costa Rica. They like what the oligarchs have. Ortega is starting to enjoy it, too,” said Eduardo Montealegre, a center-right politician who lost the 2006 presidential vote to Ortega and plans to challenge him again in 2011.

Curiously, Ortega doesn’t rule from a government building. He presides from his one-story home in a walled compound along Managua’s Parque el Carmen.

“The presidency, the headquarters of the front and his private home are all there. It is a trio: family, state and party,” said Moisés Hassan, a physicist who belonged to the front’s ruling revolutionary junta in the early 1980s.

Vespers

¶ Our first response to news that Jonathan Franzen will be appearing on the cover of Time Magazine was a sharp regret that the writer’s father did not live to see the manifestation of his son’s achievement that, we suspect, would have meant more to him than all the glittering prizes. Our second thought was that Earl Franzen would almost certainly have asked Jonathan if he needed a little financial help, say, to buy a razor.

Craig Fehrman’s more productive response, at The Millions,  is a history of literary recognition on the Luce-id covers of Time. The biggest surprise — or at least the most indigestible one — is the discovery that the honor, such as it was, was bestowed upon Virginia Woolf, a writer who killed herself rather than contemplate exile in the New World.

Time put 14 authors on its cover in the 1920s, 23 in the 1930s, seven in the 1940s, 11 in the 1950s, 10 in the 1960s, eight in the 1970s, four in the 1980s, four in the 1990s, one in the 2000s, and, now, Franzen in 2010. That adds up to an objective-sounding 83, but I should explain my principles in compiling this list. While Time also likes to revive dead authors—Faulkner, for example, submitted to that second cover in 1964, two years after his death—I included only living authors who wrote primarily imaginative work: novels, plays, or poetry. These criteria still left room for some judgment calls—William Allen White did not make the list because he’s better known for his politics and his newspapering (and because White’s cover story focuses on his Kansas gubernatorial campaign), but I kept Upton Sinclair and the cover story on his California gubernatorial campaign. Feel free to dispute my choices or to add anyone I missed in the comments.

Each entry includes the author’s name and, where applicable, the name of the work that prompted the profile. There are also links to a print-friendly version of the cover story and to an image of the cover itself. In fact, thanks to Time’s new paywall, the Franzen cover story is the only one you can’t read online.

Compline

¶ We’re not so crazy that we hate it when Republican Party eminences do the right thing — as New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has done, admonishing his confrères against using a “wide brush” to taint all Muslims with anti-American bias. (Politico; via  The Morning News)

Christie said he agrees that some degree of “deference” must be paid to victims’ relatives, but added, “But it would be wrong to so overreact to that, that we paint Islam with a brush of radical Muslim extremists that just want to kill Americans because we are Americans. But beyond that … I am not going to get into it, because I would be guilty of candidly what I think some Republicans are guilty of, and the president is now, the president is guilty of, of playing politics with this issue, and I simply am not going to do it.”

“All people in our country suffer when those kind of things happen,” he said.

It’s a stunning departure from the national party line, delivered best by National Republican Senatorial Committee head Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) who said on “Fox News Sunday” that Obama’s comments defending freedom of religion in the case of the mosque show he is “disconnected” from voters around the country, and that it was the wrong place for a mosque to exist. Others have raised questions about the beliefs and funding of the imam involved in the project, and suggested that he has radical ties.

¶ Humanoid high-tension pylons. (Wired Science)

¶ A Night-Club Map of Harlem — from when there were night-clubs. (Strange Maps)

Matins

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Namit Arora writes about the caste system in today’s India, citing (and dismissing) many dim-witted objections to “reservations” (India’s affirmative action) that will be familiar to our readers but also distinguishing between the caste problem and our race problem.

It is often said that caste is to India what race is to America. Yet, the attitudes of the dominant social class in the two countries couldn’t be more different (it is instructive to compare them without subscribing to a singular conception of modernity). Since at least the 60s, debate on racial prejudice has been mainstream in America. Civic institutions began combating it as a social evil; whites confronted other whites in the public square; Hollywood, the media, and the elites made it uncool; law enforcement cracked the whip on race crimes; diversity and multiculturalism became priorities. Whites widely read black authors who write about their social milieus. Blacks are highly visible in popular culture, including sports, music, and films, and are fully integrated in the military. White majorities routinely elect black mayors, senators, and governors; a politician can be destroyed by the merest racial slur (recall the ‘macaca’ incident?).

Not so in India. Narendra Modi, Chief Minister of Gujarat, continues to thrive after calling the Dalits ‘mentally retarded children’ who gain ‘spiritual experience’ from manual scavenging. The media has little interest or insight into Dalit lives, nor hires low-caste journalists. Major atrocities against Dalits still go unreported. Law enforcement is often indifferent or worse. There is no effective prosecution for discrimination in employment and housing. A Dalit politician can’t get a majority of upper-caste votes even in South Mumbai. Even among those few elites who read books, how many have read a single novel or memoir by a Dalit? In what is perhaps the most diverse country in the world, there is no commitment to diversity in the elite institutions that decide what is worthy art, music, and literature, or what is the content of history textbooks. In book after book of stories for children, both the protagonist and the implicit audience are elite and upper-caste. Much the same is true of sitcoms, soap operas, and commercials on TV. Dalits are invisible from all popular culture that gets any airtime. The Indian army still has many upper-caste-only regiments. There is nothing like an Indian ACLU. Or a Dalit history month on public TV, or exhibits in museums, that seek to educate the upper-castes about a long and dark chapter of their past (and present). Unless a sizable proportion of elites, benumbed by privilege, open their eyes and learn to see both within and without, can there be much hope?

Lauds

¶ An amusing, slightly flaky description of the art of lucid dreaming, made fashionable again by Inception. (Philosophistry)

When I asked the characters in my dream what they were, I was actually trying to grope at the ethics of the dream world. In my dreams, is it unethical for me to kill whoever I encounter? The answer is no, because they are not real. But assume for a second that you don’t know whether they’re real or not (which is often the uncertainty you live under in dreams), then under that cloud of ignorance, it isn’t okay to commit murder in dreams. I spend most of my dream time unaware that I’m dreaming, and so I try to lead an ethical life. I obey the Ten Commandments and am generally polite to the monsters and angels I meet. I see all sorts of villainous idiots flopping around, and I don’t stab or shoot them because I haven’t realized yet that they’re not real. But when I do recognize I’m dreaming, I become a total nihilist and sociopath. Which is really fun.

That is the scary implication of movies like Inception. If you get people to believe that nothing around them is real, then why not jump whole-hog into nihilism? I wonder if lucid dreaming will reach a moral-panic stage, with newspaper headlines like, “Kansas authorities warn that kids are getting high off ‘lucid dreaming.'” The article would talk about listless teenagers who sleep all the time so that they can get high off actuating their ultimate fantasies. The teenagers get so into it that they disregard the real world, doubting whether the adults in their house are their real parents, and disobeying all authority and rules. This epidemic was kicked off by the film Inception, which fetishized criminals who stole secrets in dreams. Writer/director Christopher Nolan claims that he was simply trying to reflect the beauty of dreams, but didn’t know his film would be a danger to society. And of course Sarah Palin and the Tea Party would come out and decry lucid dreaming, urging lawmakers to ban it.

We would not spend our lucid dreams caressing actresses or slaying dragons. We would try to clear all the junk out of our brain.

Prime

¶ Chopstick math: why China’s government wants to put a stop to disposable utensils. But, also, why restaurants and consumers want to keep throwing chopsticks away.  

With summer floods devastating southern, western and northeastern China, a massive oil spill smothering the Yellow Sea off the port of Dalian, 3,000 barrels of chemicals bobbing aimlessly but threateningly in the Songhua River in the northeast, and nearly half a million newly registered cars — just since January — on Beijing roads spewing who knows how much additional carbon dioxide into the air, you may think that the government is unnecessarily overreaching in waging a war on the disposable chopstick.

But start doing the math and the disposable chopstick, made largely from birch and poplar (and, less so, from bamboo, because of its higher cost) begins to look deeply menacing — an environmental disaster not to be taken lightly. Begin with China’s 1.3 billion people. In one year, they go through roughly 45 billion pairs of the throwaway utensils; that averages out to nearly 130 million pairs of chopsticks a day. (The export market accounts for 18 billion pairs annually.)

Greenpeace China has estimated that to keep up with this demand, 100 acres of trees need to be felled every 24 hours. Think here of a forest larger than Tiananmen Square — or 100 American football fields — being sacrificed every day. That works out to roughly 16 million to 25 million felled trees a year. Deforestation is one of China’s gravest environmental problems, leading to soil erosion, famine, flooding, carbon dioxide release, desertification and species extinction.

Tierce

¶ At the Globe, Drake Bennett drops in on a conference of moral psychologists. What if our moral responses to things are merely “ornate rationalizations of what our emotions ineluctably drive us to do”? (Boston.com)

Sext

¶ Over the weekend, we got wind of a British blog that’s kept by “a gentleman bookseller who works in a warehouse in Sussex processing lorryfuls of used books”: The Age of Uncertainty. It took a day or two to digest, but we are now members of the Cult of Derek. Derek (surname redacted) kept a diary for much of the second half of the last century, only to have it discarded by his heirs. Steerforth, the keeper of The Age of Uncertainty, has rescued it from oblivion.  

Derek is something of a Pooter, but only something; he is also keenly alert to what used to be called the existential crisis, the need to find a meaning in one’s life over and above (or perhaps beneath) the meaning of one’s faith — in Derek’s case, the Mormonism to which he and his wife converted. Here is Steerforth, in the initial comment thread:

I found three new folders today – all from the late 80s – and beyond the humorous elements, what struck me was how brutally honest he was about what it was like to be a man of a certain age and class, living in an age of changing values, with a strong religious faith that was continually tested by experience.

The more I read, the closer I feel to Derek and the idea of throwing his diaries becomes abhorent. But I don’t want to keep them in a cupboard. I think the diaries deserve a wider audience.

I’ll contact Sussex University. Perhaps the fact that I’m not a relative or friend will add weight to the case for preserving the diaries.

We quite agree — and we think that the Internet itself would be an ideal repository. (via MetaFilter)

Nones

¶ We wonder why India bothered developing a nuclear arsenal when, all along, it controls Pakistan’s water supply. Notwithstanding the dreadful flooding that is currently crushing the lives of millions of Pakistanis, Steven Solomon reminds us that the country’s more fundamental water problem is shortage, not inundation.  (NYT)

Like Egypt on the Nile, arid Pakistan is totally reliant on the Indus and its tributaries. Yet the river’s water is already so overdrawn that it no longer reaches the sea, dribbling to a meager end near the Indian Ocean port of Karachi. Its once-fertile delta of rice paddies and fisheries has shriveled up.

Chronic water shortages in the southern province of Sindh breed suspicions that politically connected landowners in upriver Punjab are siphoning more than their allotted share. There have been repeated riots over lack of water and electricity in Karachi, and across the country people suffer from contaminated drinking water, poor sanitation and pollution.

The future looks grim. Pakistan’s population is expected to rise to 220 million over the next decade, up from around 170 million today. Yet, eventually, flows of the Indus are expected to decrease as global warming causes the Himalayan glaciers to retreat, while monsoons will get more intense. Terrifyingly, Pakistan only has the capacity to hold a 30-day reserve storage of water as a buffer against drought.

India, meanwhile, is straining the limits of the Indus Waters Treaty, a 1960 agreement on sharing the river system. To cope with its own severe electricity shortages, it is building a series of hydropower dams on Indus tributaries in Jammu and Kashmir State, where the rivers emerge from the Himalayas.

While technically permissible under the treaty provided the overall volumes flowing downstream aren’t diminished, untimely dam-filling by India during planting season could destroy Pakistan’s harvest. Pakistan, downriver and militarily weaker than India, understandably regards the dams’ cumulative one-month storage capacity as a potentially lethal new water weapon in India’s arsenal.

Vespers

¶ Rosecrans Baldwin, whose new novel, You Lost Me There, was published last week, began a “pre-publication diary” last March, and while most of the entries are a little bit too winning to be genuinely personal, there are plenty of nuggets of writerly insight. This is our favorite. (The Millions)

April 8, 2010

Got off the phone. It happened again. In conversation and correspondence with other writers, two books routinely come up from the last couple years, as in, Dude, have you read this yet? David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder. To the list, I would add Chimamanda Adiche’s Half of a Yellow Sun and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World.

I find it weird to meet writers who aren’t also big readers. Met one the other day at a bar and I looked at him queerly. He said he couldn’t find the time. This reminded me that readers are probably my people first, before writers. Writers are more likely to be dicks. Look at all the thug authors, unsmiling and posing so hard on their book jackets. I spent way too many afternoons in seventh grade reading Piers Anthony and Dragonlance books (and every one of my sister’s Babysitter Clubs) to pretend I’m a thug.

Compline

¶ We’re running this story at the end as a way of pointing out that, notwithstanding its title, Outdoors and Out of Reach, Studying the Brain, it is not a scientific report. Rather it’s an almost blushing account of some hard-nosed research scientists waking up, in remote surroundings, to cognitive insights  that most thinking people have long since ratified. (NYT)

Mr. Kramer says he wants to look at whether the benefits to the brain — the clearer thoughts, for example — come from the experience of being in nature, the exertion of hiking and rafting, or a combination.

Mr. Atchley says he can see new ways to understand why teenagers decide to text even in dangerous situations, like driving. Perhaps the addictiveness of digital stimulation leads to poor decision-making. Mr. Yantis says a late-night conversation beneath stars and circling bats gave him new ways to think about his research into how and why people are distracted by irrelevant streams of information.

Even without knowing exactly how the trip affected their brains, the scientists are prepared to recommend a little downtime as a path to uncluttered thinking. As Mr. Kramer puts it: “How many years did we prescribe aspirin without knowing the exact mechanism?”

As they near the airport, Mr. Kramer also mentions a personal discovery: “I have a colleague who says that I’m being very impolite when I pull out a computer during meetings. I say: ‘I can listen.’ ”

“Maybe I’m not listening so well. Maybe I can work at being more engaged.”

Have a Look

¶ The ghostly town of Cheshire, Ohio. (Visual Science)

¶ Eric Patton visits Petra. (Sore Afraid)

Here’s a thousand words’ worth of explanation for why the Blagueurs took a holiday! Back tomorrow!

Matins

¶ Pascal Bruckner’s The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism (translated by Steven Rendall) has just come out in the UK, and it tosses a smart hand grenade into the body of presumptions known in this country as “political correctness.” Eric Kaufmann reviews the book at Prospect. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

Substituting the complex reality of history for victimology, Bruckner’s spade turns up some awkward truths. For instance, there has not been one slave trade, but three: an Arab, an African and a European. The first two were more enduring and trafficked more people than the western variant. The west’s innovation was to end slavery on moral grounds, while it lingered in the Arab world until the 1980s. Despite these inconvenient facts, any questioning of the idea that slavery is a predominantly European crime immediately places one beyond the pale. On this note, Bruckner neatly juxtaposes the tirades of a contemporary professor who urges reparations for slavery from “the Christian nations” with the actual words of Frantz Fanon, the black intellectual whom the reparationists appropriate without a proper reading: “Don’t I have other things to do on this earth than avenge the blacks of the seventeenth century… I am not a slave of the slavery that dehumanised my ancestors.”

Bruckner seeks a more rounded history. Nations should celebrate their heroes and victories while acknowledging their stains, because there are “no angels and sinners among nations.” In the west, the balance needs to tilt back toward a celebration of achievements and heroes who have fought for freedom and equality. Elsewhere, a little self-criticism would go a long way.

Lauds

¶ At The House Next Door, Tom Elrod goes over the films of Christopher Nolan with an appreciative eye. We hope that the talented director weighs and considers his fan’s astute perception. (By the way, we’d forgotten that the very cool, black-and-white Following is an early Nolan title.)

It comes down to this: Nolan may be not a great storyteller, but he is a great constructer of moments. When Batman first appears in Batman Begins or when Leonard decides to fake evidence that Teddy is his wife’s killer in Memento the “Holy Crap” feeling is genuine. I believe this is what attracts people to Nolan. He plots his films in such a way as to give maximum exposure to the handful of “awesome” moments throughout, allowing them to feel earned in a way they probably aren’t. In an age when Michael Bay can deliver an instinctual or visceral thrill, Nolan offers something just a little bit more: the sense that it’s not all chaos, that the story at least appears to be planned. Thus, when a big moment occurs, you feel the rush of being taken for a ride. It’s not quite the same thing as being told a well-crafted story: almost all of Nolan’s films fall apart or become scrambled at the end. But it’s better than being on a roller coaster with absolutely no sense of direction. In today’s blockbuster environment, that may be enough to turn you into an auteur.

The problem is that as Nolan’s career has progressed, he’s lost sight of how to make those moments feel organic. The moments are there, but how do they connect to the larger film? Nolan’s filmography can perhaps be summed up by the iconic shot of the Joker in The Dark Knight, sticking his head out the police car window, oblivious to the dangers around him—an image of freed chaos. It’s a small, lyrical moment, and it feels like it happened by accident. The shot is surrounded by so much plot detritus that it feels like a scream from a smarter, better film. Alas, such fleeting moments are perhaps the best we can hope for from Christopher Nolan, the plot-master.

Prime

¶ The look of our structural unemployment is beginning to set, and David Leonhardt sketches a few broad outlines. Wages, for those with jobs, are rising, not falling; the states in the dead center of the country, from the Dakotas to Texas, are holding their own (and, aside from Texas, using their enormously leveraged Senatorial power to minimize the expense of aiding the rest of the nation); and this is a white-collar slump. Education is still makes a difference, though; the unemployment rate for college graduates is only 4.5. (NYT)

¶ Of the long-term unemployed, Felix Salmon (back from vacation and most welcome!) writes:

The problem is that persistent unemployment at or around 10% is unacceptable in the U.S., especially with the social safety net being much weaker here than it is in Europe. Leonhardt is right that Euro-style safety nets aren’t particularly innovative, but they do at least keep people housed and clothed and fed and living outside poverty — reasonable expectations for anybody to have, I think, in the richest country in the world. If David Leonhardt can’t think of any bright ideas for solving the persistent-unemployment problem, then the chances are such solutions aren’t going to magically appear. Which means we need to help the long-term unemployed, rather than simply ignore and forget about them.

¶ We’re still pretty new at this, but we’re surprised to see that Tyler Cowen agrees.

Furthermore, I don’t buy the idea that so many of the unemployed are stupidly and stubbornly holding out for a higher wage than they can get, while at the same time they can be reemployed by a mere bit of money illusion.  There are so many blog posts written to the Fed, to Bernanke, etc. “Hey guys, goose up the money supply!  Bernanke, read your old writings!” 

Yet I have seen not one such post to the unemployed: “Hey guys, lower your wage demands!  It’s good for you!  You’ll get a job and avoid the soul-sucking ravages of idleness.  It’s good for the country!  It’s good for Bernanke, you’ll get those regional Fed presidents off his back!  Why not?  The best you can hope for is to get tricked by money illusion anyway!  Show up those elites and get to that equilibrium on your own!  Take control!” and so on.  If such posts would seem patently absurd, we should ask what that implies for our underlying theory of current unemployment.

I sooner think of these unemployed individuals as having gone down economic corridors which are no longer promising and not facing any easy adjustment to set things right again.  Furthermore I consider that portrait of their troubles to be more consistent with the general tenor of liberal, left-wing, and progressive thought, not to mention plain common sense.

Tierce

¶ Anchoring update: birds do it, bees do it — sure they do! They must! Because Physarum polycephalum, a brainless, single-celled slime mold, does it! Ed Yong reports, at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Latty and Beekman did one such test using two food sources – one containing 3% oatmeal and covered in darkness (known as 3D), and another with 5% oatmeal that was brightly lit (5L). Bright light easily damages Physarum, so it had to choose between a heftier but more irritating food source, and a smaller but more pleasant one. With no clear winner, it’s not surprising that the slime mould had no preference – it oozed towards each option just as often as the other.

But things changed when Latty and Beekman added a third option into the mix – a food source containing 1% oatmeal and shrouded in shadow (1D). This third alternative is clearly the inferior one, and Physarum had little time for it. However, its presence changed the mould’s attitude toward the previous two options. Now, 80% of the plasmodia headed towards the 3D source, while around 20% chose the brightly-lit 5L one.

These results strongly suggest that, like humans, Physarum doesn’t attach any intrinsic value to the options that are available to it. Instead, it compares its alternatives. Add something new into the mix, and its decisions change. The presence of the 1D option made the 3D one more attractive by comparison, even though the 3D and 5L alternatives were fundamentally unchanged.

Be sure to click through, to see how it’s done!

Sext

¶ Having read that “local artisanal soda pop is the next hot food trend” (oy!), Chicagoan Claire Zulkey proceeds to palpate the difference that price makes in our moralo-nutritional calculations. (The Awl)

There’s a double standard when it comes to food that’s calorically bad for you. Hell, there’s a double standard even when it comes to food that’s good for you. Those of us who allegedly can afford it and “know better” aren’t supposed to eat baby carrots anymore: we’re supposed to go to the farmers’ market to purchase beautiful fresh-from-the-dirt carrots with green tops, or have them delivered to us in a weekly produce co-op box. You don’t cram them in your face to fill the void and grimly just take it because the food suits its purpose and is filled with these goddamn vitamins and nutrients—you thank Gaia for the soil and the sun that brought it to you and consider yourself one of the “good ones” next time you read a Michael Pollan article.

When it comes to people who live in urban “food deserts” though, we don’t expect that type of worship: they’re lucky to get frozen, even canned, produce. But junk food? That’s when we get snobbish. High-class cupcakes, local pop, hamburgers made by top chefs, these are little indulgences for foodies. But gas-station treats, Coke and Big Macs are part of the nation’s nutrition problem.

Nones

¶ Simon Tisdall’s report on the renewed violence in Kashmir makes us wonder: what if the wealthy nations of the world sat India down and asked what it would take to relinquish its claim on territory inhabited overwhelmingly by Muslims? What would it take? We suspect that the price would not be exorbitant. (Guardian; via Real Clear World)

But Delhi’s blinkered Kashmir policy since partition in 1947 – ignoring UN demands for a self-determination plebiscite, rigging elections, manipulating or overthrowing elected governments, and neglecting economic development – lies at the heart of the problem, according to Barbara Crossette, writing in the Nation.

The violence “is a reminder that many Kashmiris still do not consider themselves part of India and profess that they never will,” she said. “India maintains a force of several hundred thousand troops and paramilitaries in Kashmir, turning the summer capital, Srinagar, into an armed camp frequently under curfew and always under the gun. The media is labouring under severe restrictions. Torture and human rights violations have been well documented.” Comparisons with Israel’s treatment of Palestinians were not inappropriate.

India’s failure to win “hearts and minds” was highlighted by a recent study by Robert Bradnock of Chatham House. It found that 43% of the total adult population of Kashmir, on both sides of the line of control (the unrecognised boundary between Indian and Pakistan-administered Azad Kashmir), supported independence for Kashmir while only 21%, nearly all of whom live on the Indian side, wanted to be part of India. Hardly anyone in Jammu and Kashmir wanted to join Pakistan.

Vespers

¶ Getting a little ahead of ourselves, we want to talk about a book that the Editor picked up this afternoon at Crawford Doyle, never having heard of it before. It’s Helen Vendler’s Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries. The word “magisterial” was invented to describe books such as this one, which will sit very nicely next to Ms Vendler’s edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

So far, there are no online reviews (that we can find), so we’ll have to make do with plush from the publisher, Harvard’s Belknap Press. It’s probably all true, though. If we weren’t so diligent about our duties here, you can bet that we’d be finding out.

In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.”

In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

Compline

¶ Slow Reading — we know that it’s what this site is all about; but what exactly is it? Forget “exactly.” In a Guardian piece from the middle of last month, Patrick Kingsley pins down some foundational differences of opinion.

“If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author’s ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly,” says Ottawa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term “slow reading”, disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader’s creativity, as uncovering the author’s. “My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content,” the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. “I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can’t understand something written in the text, it’s your fault, not the author’s.”

¶ We’re picking this up now because, yesterday, two blogs that we follow wrote about Slow Reading. At The Neglected Books Page, Brad Bigelow notes that while the environment has changed in a way that may make long-form reading more difficult, it has not changed that much — enough, that is, to render long-form reading redundant.

While I side with Darwin and believe that adaptation to its environment is a species’ greatest survival skill, I also believe that we have a tendency, at least in the U. S., to think that momentum carries us further than is the case. As Timothy Wilson shows in Strangers to Ourselves, when it comes to self-knowledge, we don’t know what we don’t know–but we’re finding out that it’s a whole bunch. So while some of us are Twittering into the future, we are still only a few steps from the cave in much of our unconsciously-driven behavior.

And our environment is not changing that quickly, either. Our culture still has strong roots going back thousands of years. Our institutions go back decades and centuries. And our knowledge is still deeply bound to materials, practices, and skills that cannot be mastered in a few clicks. I wouldn’t be too happy to learn that my surgeon earned his license by surfing through “Cardiology for Dummies.” There is a vast amount of information relevant to our world that offers almost nothing of value to a skimmer. I well remember highlighting sentences in my calculus of variations text in college that were grammatically correct and mathematically valid and utterly incomprehensible to a non-mathematician. I’m not sure I could even understand them now, thirty years later. There is no way to unlock material such as this aside from time and close attention.

¶ And Anne Trubek, as a person young enough to have been shaped by environmental changes, is beginning to worry about her reading proficiency.

I have been writing “Signatures,” this column, for almost two years now. Although the title is taken from printing technology, I have always championed digital technologies and gainsaid arguments like Carr’s that would have us believe reading and writing are deteriorating. But I must come clean: I am feeling increasingly worried about my reading capacity. My lifelong habit of reading a book before I fall asleep is turning into a new twitter scrolling habit. I am writing more than I ever have in my life, but I am reading less. I worry.

I still become absorbed in books (Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad is rocking my world). But my attention wanders more quickly than it used to. Email, texts and, most distressingly, this really stupid Tetris-type game I downloaded onto my iPhone beckon. I am not ready to agree with Carr, but I am ready to take one day off the internet a week. I will turn on the perfectly named Freedom software for my Mac, delete that speed-reading email and hopefully find out how to  lose my self again.

¶ It’s customary in these discussions to make some sort of mention, however passing, about the future of books — codices, the things that you buy in a bookstore. In our view, all such talk is rendered moot by Coralie Bickford-Smiths designs for forthcoming Clothbound Classics editions of six Fitzgerald volumes. It’s obvious that, so long as books so lovely are produced, buyers will want them. They may even read them.

Have a Look

¶ Hat tips for ladies and gentlemen. (via  The Morning News)

¶ “Large puter angle – $15.” Now, what do you suppose a large puter angle might be? (You Suck at Craigslist)

Matins

¶ Here’s a page to bookmark for ready-reference: Keith Hennessey, an economic adviser to George W Bush, outlines the roles of the various White House economic advisers. Now, you, too, can master the difference between the NEC and the CEA! In the alternative, you can see the fungal spread of medieval jurisdictional kudzu thick enough to forestall any and all presidential initiative! (via Economists For Firing Larry Summers)

Mr Hennessey sketches the mechanics of proposing a $1/gallon gasoline tax.

If you have two from NEC (running the meeting) and the Chief’s office, and only one from each other shop (don’t forget the other senior White House Advisors listed above), that’s at least 18 people in the room.  At least.  Each has a legitimate claim to be there, and each has a view on whether the President should support a $1 gas tax increase.

I would guess that in the Obama White House they would also include Carol Browner, who has a new role as an Assistant to the President for Energy & Environment Issues (one of the new czars), as well as Valerie Jarrett, who among other things handles State and local issues for the President.  If the Feds raise gas taxes, that makes it harder for the States to do the same.

On a straightforward question like a gas tax increase for which the substantive analysis is easy, there would probably be three meetings:  one of mid-level White House and Agency staff chaired by the NEC Deputy or the NEC Special who handles energy issues, a principals meeting of Cabinet-level officials and senior White House advisors chaired by the NEC Director, and then a meeting with the President.  I’d guess that maybe 200-300 man-hours (of very senior people) would precede a 45-minute decision meeting with the President.

(Hennessey post too long? Try Weakonomics.)

Lauds

¶ At The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones writes about the new Arcade Fire album qua independent label phenomenon. We think it’s totally cool that Arcade fire licenses its recordings to its CD producer, Merge Records. We’d also like to hear more of the sassy wit of Matador Records’ Gerard Cosloy.

Now that the outsized profits of the CD era have disappeared, the music business is rapidly retrenching. With a limited amount of money to make—a sum dwarfed by movies, video games, and sporting events—many bands may figure out that major labels’ publicity budgets are an unsustainable luxury.

The idea of the label as a tastemaker is not dead, though, regardless of size. The major labels will continue to feed hits to radio and, this October, Matador will celebrate its anniversary with an almost entirely sold-out three-day event in Las Vegas called “Matador at 21.” Cosloy wrote to me, “Record labels aren’t nearly as fucking smart as they think they are, otherwise they’d have found a way to have done away with these pesky artists. Conversely, who is actually thriving without the benefit of a trad record label?”

¶ In “I’m With the Brand,” Chris Lehman has a kind of hung-over fun with Paul Keegan’s advice for getting a job in today’s you-know-what. Chris has some sharp advice of his own — to employers. (The Awl)

Of course, the title “search-optimization expert” by itself is enough to make any chronically unemployed person despair that this economy will ever create a real job again. But all this dizzying comment-for-branding’s sake raises a larger question: Why would mastery of the time-killing canons of the blogging and social media worlds recommend anyone as a desirable worker in the first place? Why should a prospective employer assume that if you’re now furiously shoring up your reputation in blogland, then hieing over to Twitter and Facebook to boost your SEO quotient, you’d behave at all differently when he or she grants you a bit of scarce and valuable cubicle space? Transforming yourself into an online brand doesn’t mean you represent anything of real value, any more than commenting on a blog means you really have anything to say.

¶ To offset the foregoing levity (ha. ha.), read about the world’s longest garage sale. (Time; via  The Morning News)

Which leaves Johnston marching her daughters from yard to yard, as Brian follows behind in the family’s new Ford Expedition. “We’ve only spent $20 so far,” she says. “If I’d bought all these clothes in stores, I’d be out at least $250. We just can’t afford that anymore.” Johnston stands in the driveway of Stan Stevens, who tends his yard sale from the porch of a two-story house with new red siding. But the yard doesn’t belong to him. Until last year, Stevens owned the house next door. Then he was laid off from a factory that made gas tanks for minivans. His wife Michelle was laid off from her job as a hospice nurse. They lost the house to foreclosure and the minivan to repossession. Big crowds at the yard sale are the first good financial news that Stevens has received in months.

“This has been huge,” says Stevens, 46. “You can tell that with the economy people are shopping more at garage sales like this and less at stores.” In past years, many in Hudson say, buyers rarely haggled. This year, sellers were keeping their prices especially low, asking $2 or less for most items. Even so, shoppers were still looking for deals.

Great for aggregate demand, eh?

Tierce

¶ Move over, you opposable thumbs! You depend upon — or from, actually — an equally distinctive human characteristic: the shoulder. (NPR; via  3 Quarks Daily)

To understand the shoulder, look at a human skeleton. What you see is an intersection. The head of your arm bone (the humerus) meets your collar-bone (the clavicle) and part of the shoulder-blade (scapula). They’re held together with tendons and ligaments. The whole joint angles out horizontally from the neck, like a coat hanger.

“Because it’s pointing straight out,” says David Green, an anthropologist at George Washington University who studies the evolution of the shoulder, “our arms are allowed to just kind of hang freely, and then we can flex our arms at the elbow and have our hands out front, and that’s useful for manipulation. In apes, the joint actually points almost toward the ceiling.”

The ape shoulder is good for hanging from a tree, but when our ancestors started walking on two legs, the shoulder started to change. Early on, the joint descended lower on the chest. For a while, the shoulder-blade was more on the side, over the rib cage. Then it moved onto the back.

Sext

¶ In case you’re still thinking of branding yourself, notwithstanding Chris Lehman’s caustions, be sure to know what you’re doing when you have your profile picture taken. Christian Rudder crunches the responses to thousands of okcupid photographs. People with iPhones have more sex it seems, but they don’t look as good as — surprise! — SLR subjects. And: “The flash adds 7 years.”  (oktrends; via  The Awl)

Soft light can hide wrinkles, blemishes, devil eyes. The hard light of a flash often brings them out. As I illustrate with the dotted lines below, you can calculate the equivalent “aging” effects of a flash by counting years horizontally between the ‘flash’ and ‘no flash’ lines. For example, a 28 year-old who used a flash is as attractive as a 35 year-old who didn’t.

Nones

¶ Wouldn’t it be nice if all we had to worry about was China’s claim to the Spratly Islands? This diplomatic skirmish is so agreeably reminiscent of the run-up to World War I that we feel an almost Edwardian placidity. “The other” Geoff Dyer refreshes the screen on the South China Sea hypocrisis. (FT)

China has been happy to engage with the US on economic issues, joining the World Trade Organisation and stockpiling Treasury bonds, but Beijing has also accelerated a military build-up that has the US in its sights. Rather than preparing for a fight with the US, Chinese planners want gradually to squeeze the US out of its dominant position in Asian waters by developing a series of missile systems they describe as “anti-access” weapons.

Yet in the last year or so, China’s charm offensive in Asia has run into trouble – not least in the South China Sea, which for many Asian countries is a barometer of how a powerful China might treat them. The Paracel and Spratly islands are claimed in full or in part by Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Brunei. On China’s maps, however, the islands are inside a U-shaped line of its territorial waters, which stretches down to cover most of the South China Sea.

Amid rising tensions, China has reportedly told other Asian countries not to discuss the issue among themselves. According to US officials, Beijing also now says it considers the area a “core interest”, alongside Taiwan and Tibet. Some push-back was inevitable. Sure enough, Vietnam – the one country in the region with a Leninist political system comparable to China’s – lobbied its old nemesis in Washington to get involved. (The USS George Washington aircraft carrier visited Vietnam at the weekend.) Even Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew, who has spent much of the past decade praising Beijing, called last year on the US to remain the Pacific’s “superior power”.

Vespers

¶ Ron Rosenbaum writes with the greatest enthusiasm about a new edition of Pale Fire — just the poem. Illustrated by Jean Holabird, the boxed edition includes simulacra of the file cards on which John Shade wrote his 999 lines of iambic pentameter, and that Charles Kinbote stole from Shade’s widow. (If you haven’t read Pale Fire — as Vladimir Nabokov published it in 1962 — don’t try to make sense of this entry.) (Slate; via  3 Quarks Daily)

And then as I read and reread the novel, and sometimes just the poem, it began to dawn on me. Maybe the poem wasn’t meant as a pastiche, a parody, an homage to Robert Frost. John Shade refers to his reputation with characteristic modesty as being “one oozy footstep” behind Frost, but that doesn’t mean we should take his self-deprecation as gospel.) In fact, I must admit Frost has always left me cold, so to speak. And when I started asking myself what other American poet of the past century has done anything comparable in its offhand genius to “Pale Fire,” I could only think of Hart Crane, the Hart Crane of White Buildings.

Once it dawned on me that the poem might not be a carefully diminished version of Nabokov’s talents, but Nabokov writing at the peak of his powers in a unique throwback form (the kind of heroic couplets Alexander Pope used in the 18^th century), I began to write essays that advanced this revisionist view of the poem. It was actually one of these that came to the attention of Dmitri Nabokov who seemed to indicate this was his understanding as well: That his father intended the poem to be taken seriously.

It would have been nice of Mr Rosenbaum to tease out some of the beauties of Pale Fire the poem, but he’s much too excited about his new toy.

Compline

¶ Nicholas Carr digests the latest Nielsen numbers: depressingly, we’re watching more television (or “consuming media”) than ever — surely more than Nielsen’s 5.6 hours a day. (Rough Type; via  Marginal Revolution)

To give an honest accounting of the effects of the Net on media consumption, you need to add the amount of time that people spend consuming web media to the amount of time they already spend consuming TV and other traditional media. Once you do that, it becomes clear that the arrival of the web has not reduced the time people spend consuming media but increased it substantially. As consumption-oriented Internet devices, like the iPad, grow more popular, we will likely see an even greater growth in media consumption. The web, in other words, marks a continuation of a long-term cultural trend, not a reversal of it.

(Well, of course we’re not. We’re in our two-hours-per-week season. Rest of the time, it’s zero.)

Have a Look

¶ Nederlands dectective-mystery covers. (The Rumpus)

¶ Kari’s bar-fight face. (Feel better soon!)

Matins

¶ At The Morning News, Michael Dacroz compiles an Internet reading list as an admirably suitable memorial to Tony Judt, who died the other day, at 62, of ALS.

I think there’s great value in understanding the perspective of someone who’s seen combat (in the Seven Day war), experienced a debilitating disease, and spent his career trying to understand the failure of the left. If he can sustain optimism, not become cynical in spite of all that, and go on to propose a huge reimagining of what a fair society should look like, then I think he deserves our attention for longer than we’ll spend reading his obituary. Which I why I just brought his book “Ill Fares The Land.”

— A New York profile is full of juicy quotes and Judt offers an apt one to close:

The meaning of our life…is only incorporated in the way other people feel about us. Once I die, my life will acquire meaning in the way they see whatever it is I did, for them, for the world, the people I’ve known.

There you have Tony Judt, fairly confident of being remembered, but aware that it will be in that rememberance that his life acquires its meaning. Might we propose, as Judt’s Law, that “the meaning of (your) life is none of your business.”

Lauds

¶ At City of Sound, Dan Hill shares his notes of the World Design Conference  that he attended in Beijing almost a year ago. At the beginning of his multi-part account, he tells us why it took so long to publish it.

I was in Beijing for the first time, for the World Design Congress conference – where I was a speaker on Tuesday and a panellist on Wednesday – and to launch the aforementioned ‘Designing Creative Clusters’ project. It’s my first visit of any significance to China and as usual I’m fascinated by a new city, a new map, but this is something else, as if I’d been waiting for years to experience this first hand (in truth, I had.) The flurry of thoughts and observations is proving almost impossible to pin down – and new reflections keep emerging, weeks later – so as usual please excuse the impressionistic jottings. This one is organised in broadly chronological order.

I’m also conscious of a note at the beginning of Thomas J. Campanella’s book The Concrete Dragon, regarding visiting academics “discovering” China.

Upon his first visit, the scholar is ready to write a book; after visiting a second time, he decides to settle for an article. By the third visit, our erstwhile academic realizes he knows next to nothing about China, and had better keep his mouth shut.

This is probably the first visit of three for this research project alone, and unfortunately I have new publishing platforms such as this at my disposal, so here goes. (NB. Re-reading this, months later, and a visit to Hong Kong and Shanghai later, I think Campanella’s anecdote is right, in that I already wouldn’t write in the same way about China. But this is the nature of first impressions, after all.)

Prime

¶ At the Opinionator, Allison Areff notes that the strange American practice of choosing a home for its resale value is waning, along with the idea of moving up to something bigger and better with every promotion/pay raise. What stands in the way can only be called regulatory prejudice. (NYT)

The 2009 Builder/American Lives New Home Shopper Survey showed a trend toward smaller house size in 2010. The “unprecedented housing bust, which brought about the largest loss of home equity in history,” the magazine reported, “has fostered fundamental attitudinal changes in new-home prospects…. The desire for a McMansion seems to have been supplanted by the desire for a more responsible home.”

People still want amenities, that same survey suggests, but they also want energy-efficient heating and cooling. Yet the status quo makes such greener options hard to come by: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recently announced a decision to block green financing projects in California, for example, making solar and other energy efficiency projects nearly impossible to achieve. The state is suing to overturn the decision.

Perhaps recognizing that they’ll be staying in their homes longer, buyers are starting to look for universal design, ranging from wheelchair-accessible bathrooms to single-story homes — options that will allow them to “age in place” — in other words, move into a home they can grow old in. They want accessory dwellings (a k a granny flats) to accommodate rising numbers children moving home after college and aging parents needing care. So far, the market isn’t offering many of these, a lack one can chalk up somewhat to inertia but also to legitimate obstacles ranging from zoning and code restrictions to difficulties with financing.

Housing, like many econimic activities, needs to be seen less as a business and more as an amenity.

Tierce

¶ First, the dish: Razib Khan doesn’t appear to like Jonah Lehrer, whom he entitles “the boy-king of the cognitive neuroscience blogosphere.” We hope that this resentful animus is strictly personal, and not a byproduct of different enlistements (Wired Science in MrLehrer’s case; Discover for Mr Khan).

Not that there appears to be a substantive disagreement in their responses to the entry at Neurocritic that’s the reason why, er, we’re here.

The latest search for genetic variants that underlie differences in personality traits has drawn a blank (Verweij et al., 2010). The researchers conducted a genome-wide association study using personality ratings from Cloninger’s temperament scales in a population of 5,117 Australian individuals:

Participants’ scores on Harm Avoidance, Novelty Seeking, Reward Dependence, and Persistence were tested for association with 1,252,387 genetic markers. We also performed gene-based association tests and biological pathway analyses. No genetic variants that significantly contribute to personality variation were identified, while our sample provides over 90% power to detect variants that explain only 1% of the trait variance. This indicates that individual common genetic variants of this size or greater do not contribute to personality trait variation, which has important implications regarding the genetic architecture of personality and the evolutionary mechanisms by which heritable variation is maintained.

We like the way Jonah Lehrer puts it at the end of his piece.

We’re trying to find the genes for personality constructs that don’t exist. It’s not that people don’t have personalities, or that these personalities can’t be measured – it’s that we aren’t the same person in every situation, which is what all these “tests” implicitly assume. It turns out that Shakespeare had it right all along. Just look at Hamlet – the Danish prince wouldn’t fit neatly into the categories of Myers-Briggs. He’s brooding and melancholy in one scene, and then violent and impulsive in the next. But this doesn’t seem strange to the audience. Instead, the inconsistency of Hamlet seems all too human.

We would go a bit further: we don’t believe that the language of humanist psychology — and the metrics, such as the Meyers-Briggs test, that have been built with it — corresponds with useful precision to neuronal events in the brain. It is, instead, a language of speculative ignorance.

Sext

¶ Thanks to Nige, we’ve come across a new blog, The Dabbler, and learned-something-new-every-day, in this case, about the “British Israelite movement” — don’t try to guess what that was! Frank Key reprints a supplicating letter (a true de profundis) written in Buffalo in the late Eighteen Eighties.

I am in great distress and know not my future. My failure is in Buffalo. I have been here so long because I have no money to move away. I have been evicted and have lost all my clothes and goods, am destitute, a stranger in a strange land, friendless, helpless and hopeless; have not had a full meal for a month, am dirty, ragged and in tatters; precisely in the condition that Joshua might be expected to be in, and do not know at all what is to become of me – all seems dark. I am aged, have grown infirm, and badly ruptured with always a swimming in my head. Walk about the streets ready to fall, inclined to think my mission in life has ended, and that this is my last letter… People at home have been secretly working against me. I am too honest to steal, too proud to beg, too old to work, and have no trade at my hands.

We are grateful that “swimming in the head” has not figured among our limited tribulations.

Nones

¶ Jon Lee Anderson’s report from Iran (in The New Yorker) prompts thoughts about the futility of middle-class revolutions. No one ever quite comes out and says so, but it seems to us fairly clear that the regime’s popular, almost semi-official Basiji militias are engaged in a class war against their “betters.”

Some analysts interpret this as part of Mousavi’s continuing attempt to present himself as an unflinching nationalist, in the hope of retaining influence in the reformist movement. But the Iran expert told me that, in the absence of strong leadership, the movement was splintering. He explained, “The Green Movement was made up of different kinds of people: those who hated the regime, those who were offended by the election fraud, and those who joined because they were offended by the treatment of the prisoners. Eventually, they began to separate out.”

One Iranian, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern for his safety, described the movement’s status. “Despotism works,” he said. “That’s what this situation shows. The reformist movement is over. The middle classes aren’t willing to die en masse, and the regime knows this. It has killed and punished just enough people to send the message of what it is capable of doing. The reformist leaders and the regime have a kind of unspoken pact: ‘Don’t organize any more demonstrations or say anything and we’ll leave you alone. Do anything and we’ll arrest you.’ It’s over.”

But the members of the movement I spoke to have not changed their sympathies. In Tehran, I was invited to watch a televised soccer match in the home of an Iranian family. During a break in the action, someone mentioned that I had interviewed President Ahmadinejad that week. One of my hosts, a professional woman in her thirties, immediately put two fingers into her mouth and bent over in a pantomime of gagging. “Oh, how I hate him,” she said. “He makes my skin crawl. He is the worst kind of Iranian; he offends our dignity and our sense of ethics, and the worst thing is he thinks he is so clever.” The mere mention of his name, she said, made her feel depressed. In the crackdown that has followed last year’s unrest, she added, many of her friends and acquaintances—mostly other educated young professionals, of the sort that overwhelmingly supported the Green Movement—had fled the country, or were planning to. She did not plan to emigrate, but she understood the urge to do so. “The frustration is almost too great to bear. People feel so robbed, and their dignity and hopes are so offended. Every day, it is so painful. It hurts. This feeling will not just go away. The Green Movement represents this feeling, and it can’t just disappear. Somehow, maybe in another shape, it has to reëmerge.”

¶ A brief and jaunty encounter with Carl Hiaasen, whose latest entertainment, Star Island, has just come out. James Adams at the Globe and Mail (via  Arts Journal)

With the exception of his three novels for children and a smattering of non-fiction, most of Hiaasen’s oeuvre can be found in the crime or mystery fiction section of your favourite bookstore, racked like so many boxes of brand detergent in bright, candy-coloured covers. Yet it’s a berth Hiaasen finds rather, well . . . mysterious.

“My books are character-driven. They’re not driven by the story,” he explained. “There’s not this precise, linear plotting . . . And there’s no mystery really. If anything, the mystery is how are these people going to get out of this fix or end up.”

In the late 1980s, Hiaasen’s editor at Random House pressured the writer to take a character from his third novel, Skin Tight — a state’s attorney investigator — and hook all his future novels around the investigator’s exploits. Hiaasen begged off becoming a serialist, even though, sipping a big glass of Coca-Cola, he acknowledged it likely would have “made an easier road.”

But, as Mr Hiaasen doesn’t need to tell usw, he gets “bored so easily.”

Compline

¶ We don’t hear much about “cybernetics” anymore, possibly — it occurs to us this afternoon, reading Jaron Lanier’s Op-Ed piece, “The First Church of Robotics” — because the relationship between humanity and machinery implicit in that term has been reversed, so that “technology” is now the grander term, the source of metaphor for human cognition. Some old farts might find in this a worrying development, but we think, along with Mr Lanier, that it’s mostly froth. (NYT)

What bothers me most about this trend, however, is that by allowing artificial intelligence to reshape our concept of personhood, we are leaving ourselves open to the flipside: we think of people more and more as computers, just as we think of computers as people.

In one recent example, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, has suggested that when people engage in seemingly trivial activities like “re-Tweeting,” relaying on Twitter a short message from someone else, something non-trivial — real thought and creativity — takes place on a grand scale, within a global brain. That is, people perform machine-like activity, copying and relaying information; the Internet, as a whole, is claimed to perform the creative thinking, the problem solving, the connection making. This is a devaluation of human thought.

A devaluation — but of course not a termination.

Have a Look

¶  Mig goes to Paris. (Metamorphosism)

¶ “Doing the Reactionary“: Barbra Streisand sings Harold Rome’s 1937 tongue-in-cheek novelty dance item. Thing is, she sounds as though she were singing in 1937. (via MetaFilter)

¶ “Ceremonial Esophagus — $40” (You Suck at Craigslist)

Kevin Nguyen’s “Domestic Conflict, Explained By Stock Photos” (The Bygone Bureau)

Matins

¶ A forceful leader in this week’s Economist connects the dots between secular reform of the Roman Catholic Church and the debate about cultural self-determiantion that Islamic immigrants have brought to politics.

At the same time, with stunning insensitivity, it was declared that “attempting to ordain a woman” as a priest would be treated as a serious offence.

To put it kindly, whoever crafted those statements must be out of touch with the reality that is now catching up with the quasi-theocratic regimes (in other words, situations where religion is immune from state power, and has power of its own) which persist across Europe. In Ireland a point of no return was reached in November when a report found police collusion in covering up clerical misdeeds. Irish citizens, including pious ones, will never again treat the church as untouchable. In June Belgium’s authorities virtually dissolved an internal church inquiry into sex abuse by seizing files and detaining the country’s bishops for several hours. In Germany cosy ties between religious and political authorities have been shaken by news of abuse at prestigious Catholic schools and monasteries. In Italy the church still enjoys a sort of immunity, for cultural reasons, but Italians will surely one day insist that their religion should be answerable to the law of the land. That principle is especially important at a time when Western democracies are struggling to work out what place, if any, they can accord to subcultures that wish to regulate their family affairs under the laws of Islam, or some other minority faith.

Lauds

¶ If you can find a longer, more fleshed out version of this story, please let us know: Chinese state administrator for cultural heritage, Shan Jixiang, is complaining about excessive demolition. Is he on his own here, or is this part of a coordinated goernment attempt to cool down the housing market? (Guardian; via Arts Journal )

The outspoken remarks from Shan, head of the state administration for cultural heritage, echo growing concern about the destruction of buildings which date back centuries.

“Much traditional architecture that could have been passed down for generations as the most valuable memories of a city has been relentlessly torn down,” he said. He warned that without support, much of China’s heritage would be extinguished.

The China Daily reported that in Beijing alone, 4.43m square metres (1,100 acres) of old courtyards had been demolished since 1990 – equivalent to around 40% of the downtown area.

Another planned development will require razing large swaths of land around the capital’s Drum and Bell towers, until now a largely untouched district.

Prime

¶ Simon Johnson holds Timothy Geithner and the Treasury Department to the fire, for their do-nothing disinclination to put some regulatory teeth into the version of the Volcker Rule that was recently enacted, and their equally passive hope that Basel III will make banks safe. (The Baseline Scenario)

The latest details on the international negotiations for higher capital requirements – to which Mr. Geithner continually defers – are not any more encouraging. All the indications from the so-called Basel 3 process are that banks are fighting back hard against having to hold substantially stronger buffers against future losses. The Treasury may not have conceded all the ground on this issue, but it is in retreat – with the Secretary insisting on Tuesday that raising capital requirements could damage growth, despite all the evidence to the contrary (reviewed here last week).

Given this context, we should worry and wonder about the “financial innovation” to which the secretary alludes. Again, this sounds good in principle, but in practice the benefits are elusive, if not illusory – other than for people in privileged positions within the financial sector. Mr. Geithner wants the financial sector to be able to take more risk – but to what end, from the point of view of society as a whole?

Tierce

¶ Why Wrongology is our most needed science: We have seen the rational animal and he is — a talk radio host. The indispensable Jonah Lehrer:

The larger moral is that our metaphors for reasoning are all wrong. We like to believe that the gift of human reason lets us think like scientists, so that our conscious thoughts lead us closer to the truth. But here’s the paradox: all that reasoning and confabulation can often lead us astray, so that we end up knowing less about what jams/cars/jelly beans we actually prefer. So here’s my new metaphor for human reason: our rational faculty isn’t a scientist – it’s a talk radio host. That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false. (Put another way, we’re not being rational – we’re rationalizing.) While it’s easy to read these crazy blog comments and feel smug, secure in our own sober thinking, it’s also worth remembering that we’re all vulnerable to sloppy reasoning and the confirmation bias. Everybody has a blowhard inside them. And this is why it’s so important to be aware of our cognitive limitations. Unless we take our innate flaws into account, the blessing of human reason can easily become a curse.

Men have always known themselves to be capable of gross error. Only recently, however, have we dared to lift the woeful trunkline that leads from reason to error. (The Frontal Cortex)

Sext

¶ At BLDBLOG, a project that sounds almost preposterously meta — until you get to the end of Geoff Manaugh’s entry. The Columbia University students describe their project thus: “By focusing on the space of the document, we can avoid simplistic predictions of the future while creating a database of potential evidence which can be analyzed and interpreted by a wider audience of designers.” Mind-numbing! But here’s what it means:

I only say this here because it is extraordinarily exciting to see a project like this, that out-fictionalizes the contemporary novel and even puts much of Hollywood to shame—to realize, once again, that architecture students routinely trade in ideas that could reinvigorate the film industry and the publishing industry, which is all the more important if the world of private commissions and construction firms remains unresponsive or financially out of reach. The Nesin Map alone, given a screenwriter and a dialogue coach, could supply the plot of a film or a thousand comic books—and rogue concrete mixtures put to use by nefarious underground militaries in Baghdad is an idea that could be optioned right now for release in summer 2013. HBO should produce this immediately.

My point is not that architecture students should somehow be expected to stop doing the very thing they are in school for—i.e. to learn how artificial enclosures are designed and constructed. I just mean that they should never overlook the interest of their own preliminary ideas, notes, sketches, and scenarios. After all, with just a well-timed email or elevator pitch, all of that stuff—all those bulletin boards, browser tabs, sketchbooks, notes from late-night conversations, site maps, and more—needn’t become just more crap to get filed away in your parents’ house somewhere, but could actually be turned into the seed of a film, novel, game, or comic book in another cultural field entirely.

Nones

¶ We would never say the extent of social and structural dysfunction in Pakistan couldn’t surprise us, but when it does, we’re — surprised. At the Guardian, Kamila Shamsie writes about — ready? — Pakistan’s timber mafia.

One of the most powerful and ruthless organisations within Pakistan, the timber mafia engages in illegal logging, which is estimated to be worth billions of rupees each year – the group’s connection to politicians at the local and federal level has been commented on in the media for years. The constant warnings about the timber mafia almost always include mention of the increased susceptibility of de-forested regions to flooding, landslides and soil erosion. But, in the way that horror tends to pile on horror in Pakistan, not only has the flooding been intense in areas where the timber mafia is active but the felled trees, hidden in ravines prior to smuggling them onwards, have caused havoc. Dislodged by torrents of water, they have swept away bridges and people and anything else in their path.

There has been some suggestion that the high volume of timber transported along the rivers has been a factor in the weakening of the dams and retaining walls that are supposed to protect the land from flooding but have proved unequal to the task. Their failure to function has also brought up comparisons to the poor construction that resulted in collapsed government schools during the 2005 earthquake; then, blame landed on corrupt practices and lack of oversight by the authorities in the allocation of construction contracts.

That the timber mafia reportedly gave active support to the Pakistan Taliban when they controlled Swat seems to have done nothing to diminish their influence with the state. Corruption transcends political difference. Where action is taken against the timber mafia it is often in the form of local villagers coming out to defend their trees. Pakistan’s citizens, time and again, find it falls to them to fill in the vacuum where there should be a state.

Vespers

¶ At Survival of the Book, Brian is reading Jason Epstein’s Book business, a book that we’ve decided that everyone interested in books and their contents ought to read (so, yes, we’ve ordered a copy, even though we’ve read what Mr Epstein has had so say upon the subject at The New York Review of Books. The inexorable truth that remains to be accepted is that big business will never make a success in publishing.

(NB: Brian’s somewhat infelicitous phrase, “crap consumers,” means the opposite of “consumers of crap.”)

My point is, this is so much to ask of a book. People that love books aren’t sharks. People who like reading books are by their nature kind of slow movers, and maybe that’s not so bad. In fact, if more shit hits the fan, the world will most likely need people who are patient and thoughtful and attentive to figure out how to fix some major problems. But we can be crap consumers. We like libraries, and used bookstores, and we hold onto books we love for far too long. You can’t get us to buy a stupid gift card to give out on someone’s birthday, because instead we pick out a book we love that makes us think of the birthday boy. We probably don’t have much money anyhow – we work in things like publishing, we teach, we write, maybe we work in a cubical 9 – 5 but daydream during work about what we’re going to read on the train heading home. That won’t get us a big promotion and big raise, now will it?

But these big industries and these rich shareholders are staring at us and saying they want more from us. Well too bad. So leave us be. And for those of us who got jobs at Random House and B&N and Holt thinking, well, it’s not ideal but I get to read here and be involved so I can overlook the evil… we’ll have to use the skills elsewhere, because the writing’s on the wall. The dinosaurs are falling, they’re crippled. They may not recover. That big fat publisher could be one 12 year old pop star away from landing on his face and not getting up again.

Compline

¶ Imagine that a major factor in choosing where to live was proximity to other people in your line of work, people with whom you could meet productively while commuting to the office. Sounds nuts, right? But it’s no crazier than this country’s suburban experiment itself. This is the wild re-alignment of planning priorities that’s envisioned in Melissa Lafsky’s piece at The Infrastructurist inspired by — natch — creative types in Barcelona.

One notion that’s being shaken up is the idea that work must take place in designated work spaces, and cannot be combined with transportation. The above video shows a business meeting taking place on the Barcelona metro. The idea was created by a social and digital innovation firm called Citilab, which describes itself as an “incubator for business and social initiatives.”

Granted, the idea has a few snags — unless you and all your relevant co-workers are taking the same train, coordinating meetings on public transit may be difficult. And what about all the commuters who still doggedly rely on cars? Presenting Powerpoints while driving isn’t really an option. Still, as the developing world continues to expand exponentially, it’s worth asking these questions sooner rather than later.

Have a Look

¶ Comparing New York City (Manhattan, really) to California’s Bay Area, Antonio Garcia-Martinez’s dyspeptic but amusing anti-Gotham tirade reminds us of the problem that Edith Wharton faced: In Boston, she was found too fashionable to be intelligent; in New York, too intelligent to be fashionable. (Adgrok; via Marginal Revolution)

We have fed lots of out-of-towners home-cooked meals.

¶ The Tiger Oil memos have resurfaced at Letters of Note. Weekend fun!

Matins

¶ Christopher Hitchens is not going to give anyone the satisfaction of watching him fail to write about his cancer with lucid humanity. He may not be the most introspective of men, but that is neither a vice nor a virtue. He can be counted on to register the world around him with profoundly interested attentiveness. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

The notorious stage theory of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whereby one progresses from denial to rage through bargaining to depression and the eventual bliss of “acceptance,” hasn’t so far had much application in my case. In one way, I suppose, I have been “in denial” for some time, knowingly burning the candle at both ends and finding that it often gives a lovely light. But for precisely that reason, I can’t see myself smiting my brow with shock or hear myself whining about how it’s all so unfair: I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read—if not indeed write—the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger? But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity. Of course my book hit the best-seller list on the day that I received the grimmest of news bulletins, and for that matter the last flight I took as a healthy-feeling person (to a fine, big audience at the Chicago Book Fair) was the one that made me a million-miler on United Airlines, with a lifetime of free upgrades to look forward to. But irony is my business and I just can’t see any ironies here: would it be less poignant to get cancer on the day that my memoirs were remaindered as a box-office turkey, or that I was bounced from a coach-class flight and left on the tarmac? To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: Why not?

Lauds

¶ At the Threepenny Review, Imogen Sara Smith meditates on the still-life photograph, focusing on work of Josef Sudek and André Kertész — making for a warm mitteleuropäisch vibe. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

Sudek’s still lifes combine solid, durable objects with the most ephemeral phenomena, light and shadow, moisture and reflections. In pictures like his Glass Labyrinths, he blurred the distinctions between light, glass, and water: all are translucent, all are veiled as though by breath, all leave permanent traces in the gelatin-silver print. Despite their softness and absence of strong contrasts, Sudek’s contact prints illuminate the tiny bubbles clinging to the sides of a glass of water, the flaking cracks in old paint, the separate filaments of feathers. Still life is an art of intimacy and nearness; it addresses the world within our reach, the things we touch, hold, smell, and taste. It brings us “tête-à-tête with things.” We know how the rim of a glass feels on our lips, the weight of an egg cradled in our hands, the sound of dry onion skin crackling as it’s peeled. But still life is defined by the lack of human presence; it shows us our rooms when we are not in them, complete without us.

Prime

¶ In an entry that had us wondering if we’d tuned into an episode trimmed from Inception, the Epicurean Dealmaker writes about something called “The Dollar Auction.”

It is an auction, with any number of participants, the object of which is to win a single, unadorned one hundred dollar bill. If you win the auction, you get to keep the money. (No tricks, I promise.) Bidding starts at a minimum of one dollar, and topping bids must exceed the prior bid by no less than one dollar, in even, undivided dollars. There is only one additional rule: the runner up in the auction must pay his or her last bid to the auctioneer, as well as the winner paying the winning bid. So, for example, if the winning bid is $10, and the next highest bid is $9, the winner will pay $10 and collect the hundred dollar bill, and the runner up will pay $9 and receive nothing.²

So, here we go. I am holding in my hands a crisp, new, freshly-issued one hundred dollar bill. Genuine U.S. currency, guaranteed legal tender for all debts, public and private. The opening bid is one dollar. Only one measly dollar to walk away with a crisp new hundo. Who will start the bidding?

Not us, that’s for sure!

Tierce

¶ “How Swearing Works.” We’re not familiar with How Stuff Works (a Web site, not a blog — we think), and we’re not quite sure what we think. The layout is a little on the Golden-Book side, and the material does not appear to be very penetrating (we’re not impressed by anything that we can understand immediately), but the article on swearing is studded with interesting nuggets. (via  kottke.org)

Swearing vs Cursing: A lot of people use the words “swearing” and “cursing” interchangeably. Some language experts, however, differentiate between the two. Swearing involves using profane oaths or invoking the name of a deity to give a statement more power or believability. Cursing takes aim at something specific, wishing for or trying to cause a target’s misfortune.

Sext

¶ At the Guardian, Andrew Brown explains why funerals are better than weddings. Or does he? It occurs to us that there is no funereal correspondent to Mr Brown’s target, the self-centered modern bride and groom who, in his view, risk shortening their marriages with personalized ceremonies. (via  The Morning News)

The great point about completely impersonal ceremonies, whose form is the same for everyone, whether these are religious or entirely civil, is that they remind us that the problems and difficulties of marriage are universal. They come from being human. They can’t be dodged just by being our wonderful selves, even all dusted with unicorn sparkle.

On your wedding day you feel thoroughly special, and your guests will go along with this; so that is the moment when the ceremony should remind you that you’re not all that. What you’re doing isn’t a step into fairyland. And if it does turn out to be the gateway to a new life, that is one that will have to be built over time and unglamorously with the unpromising materials of the old one.

Funerals, on the other hand, should be much more personal. I love the gloom and grandeur of the prayer book service; and there is much to be said for thinking about our own deaths from time to time. But death is the extinction of an individual life, and remembering and celebrating that individual is part of the proper response. And it’s one time when we can be certain it won’t inflate anyone’s self esteem.

Nones

¶ Our wish to see more history in the Blogosphere was given a puff of gratification the other day when Tyler Cowen, at Marginal Revolution, linked to Armarium Magnum, “a repository for book reviews, mainly of books on ancient and medieval history, but also on early Christianity, the historical Jesus, atheism, scepticism and the occasional novel that takes my fancy.” That fancy would be Tim O’Neill’s; we’ll let you find his self-portrait for yourself.

Armarium Magnum is not, alas, a very active blog; going back only three entries took us to February of this year, and a review of a book about the Fall of Rome. Devout subscribers to the view that Rome Crumbled From Within, we all but applauded our way through Mr O’Neill’s description of the Third-Century game, “Who’s Emperor Now?”

But when it broke down in the Third Century the veil was torn off and the Imperial system was exposed as the military dictatorship it had always been.  So now it became clear that any Senator who could win the support of enough of the Army or, failing that, who could simply bribe the increasingly mercenary and predatory Praetorian Guard, could become emperor, albeit (in most cases) very briefly.  All it took was a reverse in a foreign war against the resurgent Sassanid Persians or the increasingly bold Germanic barbarians and a usurper would appear or the Army or the Guard would mount an assassination and the whole process would repeat itself, seemingly on a shorter and shorter cycle of usurpation, civil war and anarchy.

This cycle became so intense that the primary goal of a Roman emperor was no longer wise rule and stability but mere survival.  As the Third Century progressed changes were put in place – changes that were aimed solely at reducing the threat of usurpation.  Senators were gradually excluded from military commands, since a Senator with a sizeable portion of the Army at his back was a usurper in waiting.  But by giving more and more commands to the lower, equestrian order the emperors simply pushed the opportunity for usurpation down the Roman food chain and actually broadened the numbers of those who took it into their heads to jostle for the purple.  The size, and therefore the garrisons, of the provinces were steadily reduced, since this left a governor of any given province with fewer troops with which to mount a challenge.  But this in turn weakened the Empire militarily and strategically, since a governor no longer had the military force to deal with serious local threats himself.  Incursions over the frontiers by barbarians increased in size and number and only the Emperor had the capacity to deal with them.  Cities which had been unfortified for centuries began building walls for protection, both against barbarians and against the next cycle of civil wars.

Vespers

¶ Who knew? There really was a Charlie Chan — sort of. Yunte Huang, a student at Beijing University at the time of the Tienanmen Square protests, and subsequently a Chinese takeout laborer who worked his way through graduate school in Buffalo, shares his obsession with Charlie Chan in a new book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and his Rendezvous with American History. Jill Lepore’s review, in The New Yorker, could not be more fun-teresting.

Chang Apana was recruited by the Honolulu Police Department, which was growing, because of those two developments. In a force of more than two hundred men—the officers mainly Hawaiian and the chiefs mostly white—he was the only Chinese. He excelled, and was promoted to detective. In the nineteen-tens, he was part of a crime-busting squad. His escapades were the stuff of legend. He was said to be as agile as a cat. Thrown from a second-floor window by a gang of dope fiends, he landed on his feet. He leaped from one rooftop to the next, like a “human fly.” When he reached for his whip, thugs scattered and miscreants wept. He once arrested forty gamblers in their lair, single-handed. He was a master of disguises. Once, patrolling a pier at dawn, disguised as a poor merchant—wearing a straw hat and stained clothes and carrying baskets of coconuts, tied to a bamboo shoulder pole—he raised the alarm on a shipment of contraband even while he was being run over by a horse and buggy, and breaking his legs. He once solved a robbery by noticing a strange thread of silk on a bedroom floor. He discovered a murderer by observing that one of the suspects, a Filipino man, had changed his muddy shoes, asking him, “Why you wear new shoes this morning?”

Compline

¶ Richard Posner, of all people, reviews David Kilpatrick’s The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, taking pains to explain the details that might not mean much to old farts like us. Of course, it reads more like an opinion than a review, but that’s the fun of it. (The New Republic; via MetaFilter)

We may laugh at Socrates, in the Phaedrus, for denouncing literacy, which he said would create “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves…. They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” But maybe his anxieties about the cultural consequences of communications technology were just premature. Still, I doubt we need worry too much about the effect of Facebook on the psychology or the cognition of its adult users. They each have their social network created mainly the old-fashioned way, and Facebook will help them maintain it. But what about the teenagers, enabled by Facebook to form immense social networks? They are said to be abandoning “best friends” in favor of having looser relations with more friends, a trend surely accelerated by Facebook—if you spend a lot of “face time” with just one or two of your “friends,” you will have no time for the other 398 or 399. A Facebook network is a social collective, a virtual kibbutz, and studies have found that children brought up in a traditional kibbutz have difficulty forming strong emotional relationships as adults.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin led one hundred children into a cave from which they never emerged. Some 500 million people, of whom about 10 percent are thirteen to eighteen years old and another 25 percent are eighteen to twenty-five years old, are now marching to the digital pipes of Mark Zuckerberg, who is twenty-six years old. I have no idea where they are marching, and whether they will ever return.

Have a Look

¶ From the editors of The Bygone Bureau, an Internet reading list. Some of the writers on the list (if not the actual pieces) will be familiar to regular readers. iPad owners really ought to set aside a Field Day.

Matins

¶ If it were up to us, of course, students who expressed views consonant with deficit-hawks such Concerned Youth of America would be flunked out of elite schools such as Andover for solipsistic social stupidity. A school that does not inculcate the paramountcy of equity is a bad school. (There; we’re done.) Christopher Shea picks up a chilling development at CNN. (Brainiac)

Both Gruskin and Matthews attended Phillips Academy, Ryan McNeely points out (writing at Matt Yglesias’s blog), a boarding school with tuition and fees of $41,000. Indeed, that is where the group was born, and its leaders now attend such colleges as Harvard, Penn, Yale, Duke, and Georgetown. “Now, there’s nothing wrong with going to Phillips,” McNeely writes, or to a highly selective college. But McNeely, for his part, is concerned that these demographically distinct and well-connected students–a slice of America “least affected by the current downturn”– are getting an outsize amount of media and political attention. They have testified before the president’s federal deficit commission. “Will the debt commission,” McNeely asks, “listen to young Americans who didn’t go to Phillips Academy?”

Lauds

¶ A propos of the apparent ban on music (!) in Iran, Frank Oteri writes about the act of listening to music in terms that are new to us. It made us realize that we secretly believed that composers discover music, instead of inventing it. We’re not sure that we’re wrong to do so! But we’re savoring Mr Oteri’s thoughts all the same. (NewMusicBox; via  Arts Journal)

Last week I remarked in passing that music’s greatest asset is that if you truly listen to it, you are allowing the input of someone other than yourself into your consciousness. For leaders who don’t want their citizens to challenge them, this is extremely subversive. If you really want to be open to other ideas and other points of view, and you don’t want to unquestioningly do what someone else tells you to do, listen to music. For even if the act of listening is in some sense an act of submission to someone else, it is an open-ended submission that ultimately leaves you with a new perspective. Since it is impossible in the process of listening to completely lose your memory of everything you have listened to before, everything you listen to adds to that memory rather than negates it—so it is never a monolithic experience. Plus if you make music as well as listen to it, you have the opportunity to share that perspective with someone else.

Prime

¶ James Kwak struggles to maintain a hopeful tone, but his thoughts about new financial regulation fill us with despair. He puts one thing very, very well:

The regulators in all these agencies should realize that they are going to spend the next two years fighting against the Wall Street banks and their legions of lobbyists. If they do their jobs right, they will never work in the financial sector again (except maybe at a hedge fund or a buy-side investment consultancy). And if they’re not up for that fight, we need someone else who is.

We have always believed that financial regulators ought to be paid financial-industry standards, to insure that they do fight the good fight, without being asked to be heroic about their income as well. (The Baseline Scenario)

Tierce

¶ Think about it for a moment, and it’s obvious: curiosity is an emotion. Jonah Lehrer writes about a recent Caltech study that “extended this information gap model of curiosity. (The Frontal Cortex) 

The lesson is that our desire for abstract information – this is the cause of curiosity – begins as a dopaminergic craving, rooted in the same primal pathway that also responds to sex, drugs and rock and roll. This reminds me of something Read Montague,  a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told me a few years ago: “The guy who’s on hunger strike for some political cause is still relying on his midbrain dopamine neurons, just like a monkey getting a sweet treat,” he said. “His brain simply values the cause more than it values dinner…You don’t have to dig very far before it all comes back to your loins.”

The elegance of this system is that it bootstraps a seemingly unique human talent to an ancient mental process. Because curiosity is ultimately an emotion, an inexplicable itch telling us to keep on looking for the answer, it can take advantage of all the evolutionary engineering that went into our dopaminergic midbrain. (Natural selection had already invented an effective motivational system.) When Einstein was curious about the bending of space-time, he wasn’t relying on some newfangled circuitry. Instead, he was using the same basic neural system as a rat in a maze, looking for a pellet of food.

Sext

¶ Will the English language survive Sarah Palin? Of course it will! It will co-opt her many unwitting (and witless) contributions, of which the wonderful “refudiate” is simply the latest. Who knows what a future this word has? We surmise that, if anything, it will be the former governor’s ticket to immortality. After all, what singles out Boss Tweed from a host of Nineteenth Century political operatives? Excess! (Tweed didn’t invent corruption any more than Ms Palin coined “refudiate.”)  Mark Peters explores. (Good)

As almost always seems to be the case, this “new word” is not entirely new. New York Times On Language columnist Ben Zimmer found a use going all the back to 1925, in an Atlanta Constitution headline: “Scandal Taint Refudiated in Teapot Case by Court, Fall Says in Statement.” In 2006, Historical Dictionary of American Slang editor Jonathan Lighter pointed out Senator Mike DeWine using the word a couple of times, and there’s enough in common meaning-wise and sound-wise between “refute” and “repudiate” to assume lots of others have made the same mistake. Still, if and when “refudiate” appears in a dictionary, it will feature a picture of Palin and no other: She is to “refudiate” as Homer Simpson is to “d’oh.”

Perhaps because of her folksiness, if the collected Palinisms took on physical form, they would fill several barnyards: there are animals aplenty. Her nickname “Sarah Baracuda” preceded her step into the national spotlight, and when John McCain picked her as his running mate, a joke of her own choosing linked her with a pit bull. The oft-repeated punchline of that joke led the Palin camp to take offense when Barack Obama used the common expression “lipstick on a pig.”  Palin professes a love for hunting wolves, caribou, and moose, and those critters are shorthand for her, like when a writer described her campaign as having “Moose-mentum.” When Palin resigned as Alaska governor, she said, “It would be apathetic to just hunker down and ‘go with the flow.’ Nah, only dead fish go with the flow.” With that zooful of words, it’s no wonder a writer mistakenly referred to “Sarah Palin and her elk.”

“…and her elk”! Ha! We’d never heard that one.

Nones

¶ Regular readers will not be surprised to hear about the New Great Game, or to be unaware of who’s playing it and on what field. Matteo Tacconi’s essay, (translated by Francesca Simmons) concludes with the prospect of a rather unstable Central Asian Islamic heartland. (Reset DOC; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Will there be a domino effect? Such a risk exists, and, in addition to the Americans and the NATO countries involved in Afghanistan, Russia too fears this possibility. In Moscow the thesis is that if the Afghan front spreads to Central Asia, it is possible that it will then also expand into the borders of the Federation, reigniting the never-sedated separatist desires of Islamic movements in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia, always rather active on the stage. But the risks do not end here. According to the respected and authoritative analyst Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the world of the Taliban, to the rise of radicalism one must also add another danger; the prospect of a regional conflict, pitting any one of these former Soviet republics in Central Asia against the other. According to Rashid such a war could break out due to a number of border controversies, widespread poverty and the chronic lack of water. On the other hand, it is known that the intense exploitation of water basins in Central Asia in the days of the USSR has added to the more recent effects of global warming, which have slowly melted part of the surfaces of glaciers situated locally at high altitudes. This has resulted in each of the former Soviet republics in Central Asia becoming annoyed and blaming their respective neighbours. The bomb may not necessarily explode. The fuse, however, has been lit.

¶ Meanwhile, in “Is Pakistan a Failed State?”, Ali Hashmi rephrases the question. We wish that the American foreign policy elite would do the same. (Daily Times of Pakistan; via Real Clear World)

For our purposes, let us assume that the average citizen of Pakistan has not read Weber or Engels and for him or her, the state simply means those organs of government power outlined above with which he or she interacts on a daily basis. In Pakistan’s case (as in the case of the US and any other society based on the capitalist mode of production), this means that the state (the institutions named above) always represents the interests of the wealthy and influential. That being the case, the Pakistani state is failing the vast majority of its citizens by not providing the bare essentials of existence, i.e. clean affordable food and water, basic services (energy, healthcare, education, etc) as well as physical security in the form of protection of the citizens’ lives and property.

This offends the nationalistic sensibilities of our intelligentsia (those who write the opinion pieces) but is a stark fact for the vast majority of Pakistan’s citizens. As such, were the question to be rephrased from “Is Pakistan a failed state?” — which engenders lots of excited but confusing discussion about states, public sector debts, foreign policy, elites, electoral process, etc — to “Is the Pakistani state failing the majority of its citizens?”, the answer would be a simple yes.

Vespers

¶ Doug Bruns writes engagingly on the solution (imprisonment) to a problem (piles of unread books). It is not the optimal solution, certainly, and we find that we read best when we feel most free to put the book down and do something else. But we enjoyed contemplating Doug’s prospect, and that was a surprise. (The Millions)

Prison cells. Towers in Bordeaux. Cabins in the woods, and tents on the sides of mountains. At work behind the scene is the argument that life can be forced into an edifying and redeeming corner. It is a persuasive, if not compelling notion: That when everything is lost or set aside or taken from you, only then do you have the opportunity to do what it is you truly wish to do, to review your list of what is worthy and what is wasteful. The theme rings true. “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, To put to rout all that was not life and not when I had come to die discover that I had not lived.” I never grow tired of this quote. Thoreau’s desire to live deliberately resonates and is at the heart of Socrates’ observation that the unexamined life is not worth living. Although I cannot personally attest to its efficacy, it carries weight that I suggest prison a good thing because it would strip one of everything extraneous. Extraneous to reading, of course.

Compline

¶ Taking Jean Twenge, author of The Narcissism Epidemic to task for overdramatization — “Words such as ‘epidemic’ should only ever be preceded by words like “smallpox,’ and should henceforth be stricken from the social scientist’s lingo. — Charles Ferguson argues for excitement-avoidance among fellow social scientists (Chron Higher Ed; via  The Morning News)

Twenge and her colleagues are not the first to lambaste the self-esteem movement. Others have been identifying it as the source of all that ails us for years. I’m no fan of it myself. All the efforts to ban competitive sports, encourage group hugs, and say nary a negative word to a child do seem to run the risk of turning today’s youth into some socialized version of the Children of the Corn. I’m the first to acknowledge a certain absurdity at the core of the self-esteem movement and the implication that competition is harmful and children so delicate that any failure will be horribly crushing rather than an opportunity for learning and growth. However, the notion that children are so malleable that the self-esteem movement, or anything else, could twist them into an antisocial horde is equally absurd.

There’s nothing wrong with examining narcissism rates over time. It’s an interesting question. Yet once we start throwing sneering labels around and started talking about “epidemics” and “crises,” we have left the realm of science and entered that of polemics and pseudoscience. The narcissism debate is, I’d argue, no extreme case in the social sciences either. The rush to slap young people with the tag “Generation Me” is simply one more spin of the “kids today” wheel, as in “kids today, with their music and their hair. … “

Have a Look

¶ “The Truth About Boscoe.” We have no idea what he’s up to, but we’re tickled by Sean Adams’s impersonation of a very naughty teacher. (The Bygone Bureau)

¶ “The paradox of an earlier, more primitive time that was more advanced than ours“: Frank Jacobs muses on a TWA ad from a mid-Sixties issue of Paris-Match. (Strange Maps)

¶ The beautiful, sand-flooded rooms of Alvaro Sanchez-Montañes. (The Best Part)

Matins

¶ At Salon, Michael Lind writs about the faux upper middle class, saddled with “worthless degrees from diploma mills, negligible amounts invested in stocks, and suburban trophy houses they cannot afford.” Cui bono? The left and the right are pretty much in pari delicto. (via The Awl)

But many have profited from the peddling of the dream of the mass upper middle class. The claim that everyone should go to college served the interests of the educational-industrial complex, from K-12 to the universities, that now serves as an important constituency of the Democratic Party. (Along with Wall Street investment banks, universities provided Barack Obama with his largest campaign donations.) And the claim that everyone needs to pour money into the stock market, to be managed by banks and brokers who fleece their clients, served the interests of the financial-industrial complex that has replaced real-economy businesses as the dominant force in the Republican Party. Both the educators and the brokers have successfully lobbied Congress to subsidize their bloated industries, swelling them even further, by means of tax breaks for student loans and personal retirement savings. The big losers have been the millions of working Americans whom many Democrats and Republicans alike have persuaded, against their interests, to indulge champagne tastes on beer budgets.

Lauds

¶ Ellen Moody assesses The Kids Are All Right as a serious women’s film that updates, without substantially revising, our idea of the American family.

Though again we are confronted by the ritual humiliation of the woman character. After all, it is Jules who plays the woman in this marriage who almost destroys it by having sex with Paul; Jules who must apologize and beg for forgiveness. At the same time to be fair (and explain why I so enjoyed the film), as Jules Julianne Moore holds the family together for real. Her loving interventions, her continual kindnesses and urging of everyone to get along; the way she goes over to Joni and Laser after Nick makes it clear she has gone to bed with Paul — the film values someone intensely who has no career, makes no money. It’s she who has to sleep downstairs when Nick throws her out of their bed, and she holds no grudges. I’ve usually liked the characters Julianne Moore plays and this film showed the best sides of her typology. Not abject, giving and then appreciated.

What saves this film are the nuances of the individual scenes and dialogue — script, acting, the perfect timing, and discordant moments. Especially the ongoing little jarring comments by Jules and Nick at and to one another. Jules reminds Nick that she has drunk too much. Nick cuts across Jules’s super-kindness to the kids (Jules is the woman reconciling everyone) to insist on making choices based on remembering harder dangers: riding on motorcycles the way Paul loves to is dangerous, statistically you are courting death or crippling, so she works hard to prevent Joni and Paul from doing it.

¶ Noting an interesting paradox about Christopher Nolan (“he’s fascinated by identity but not much good with character”), The Owls (Ben Walters and JM Tyree) air their disappointment with Inception.

BW: Well, his protagonists tend to (mis)remember and investigate rather than, um, live. We root for them because they’re the narrative engine, not because we’re actually invested in their welfare to any great degree. And I think this brings us to another problem with Inception – this lack of facility for the quirks and charms of actual present people result in a film basically comprised of really boring, thuddingly rational dream sequences.

JMT: They’re not that dreamy. A friend pointed out that the snow level of the narrative/dream is a Bond film. And really it’s also an Inception video game. Blam! I’m using the bigger gun now. Someone else I talked to reminded me, though, that since the dreams are constructed they would tend to be less weird than “real” dreams. So that can be unwound as possibly more interesting…

BW: Cop-out! Dreams should be weird and woozy and hot and fickle. Inception plays like a two-and-a-half-hour American Express ad

In their utterly different ways, these are the big movies of Summer 2010 — the shows that anyone interested in film must see. We’ve had our say here and here.

Prime

¶ At the Boston Globe, Michael Fitzgerald talks to Mark Valeri about Heavenly Merchandize, his intriguing reconsideration of the relationship between Puritanism and capitalism in Colonial America. How did the austere Puritans become energetic businessmen? It seems to have something to do with settling down and discovering home in exile.

Tierce

¶ At Not Science Fiction, Kyle Munkittrick considers how handy an AI Physician X Prize-winning tricorder would be at solving the problem that too many doctors are poor diagnosticians.

Now imagine an app as smart and accurate as a panel of ten doctors in the hands of a trained MD or EMT, emphasis on the “trained.” Walker’s essay focuses on allowing patients to self-diagnose, but the huge benefit would be for professional diagnoses. Instead of being required to memorize thousands of potential diseases and syndromes, each with their own fickle and bizarre permutations, a doctor’s two primary goals would become 1) ensuring accurate, exhaustive entry of symptoms into the tricorder and 2) giving comprehensive, patient oriented care. Diagnoses, particularly esoteric ones, would become the prerogative of the device, instead of certain hobbled, cantankerous MDs named “House.” In addition to the symptoms entered by the doctor, the tricorder would have access to the patient’s entire medical history — including reoccurring issues, worsening conditions, potential genetic dispositions, and a plethora of other minutia — that could be the difference between sending someone home with “drink fluids and come back if it gets worse” and hospitalization. Furthermore, long, infection-prone hospital stays for “observation” would be reduced or even eliminated thanks to better initial diagnoses. The health industry as we know it might change so much as to become unrecognizable.

Sext

¶ Choire Sicha has fun with the strangely overlapping interviews of highbrow actresses in the Sunday Times. Laura Linney’s alabaster complexion graced the Magazine, while, in a much pithier Arts & Leisure piece, Michelle Orange interviewed Patricia Clarkson. Choire wants to know if you can attribute fifteen snips correctly. Of course Choire picks the most generically puffy bits. Here they are on the subject of family life. First Linney —

She declared her husband and her family off-limits for interviews. Friends who talked with me about her worried aloud that they might be straying into areas she might not want them to. And while Linney never took offense or balked at any question I asked, she would dispense with some topics — like whether she ever wanted, or still wants, children — with a just a few inconclusive, anodyne words. She clearly meant to be professional and polite, but she just as clearly had no intention of serving up a quivering, tremulous heart on a platter.

— then Clarkson.

Living the dream doesn’t leave much room for sleep. Or settling down, an expression that makes Ms. Clarkson — who has never married and has no children, nor a computer or an assistant, for that matter — visibly recoil.

“I have very strong ideas and strong convictions, and I think I have brought to fulfillment the life I’ve really always wanted,” she said. “There isn’t really anything I would change about my career right now.”

She paused, the mischief returning to her eyes. “O.K., a few things,” she relented. “Usually involving a check with some zeros.”

Nones

If we weren’t ticked off at The Economist ourselves (all that tendentious reporting!), we probably wouldn’t link to this story, in which Edward Hugh, of A Fistful of Dollars, is ticked off at The Economist, for its anti-Catalonian approach to the bullfighting ban in the region. (And the age of unsigned articles is so over!)

At the same time it is hard not to notice that the correspondent does his best not to find too many positive things to say about Catalans. In an article back in July 2009 “All must have prizes”, he also argues that one of the reasons for Mr Zapatero’s continuing spending spree was to keep Catalan politicians happy, without mentioning – as the group of young professionals who for Collectiu Emma point out – that there is a net fiscal transfer annually from Catalunya to the rest of Spain of around 10% of GDP. Indeed trying to hold Catalonia responsible for Spain’s economic woes makes about as much (and as little) sense as holding Germany responsible for the Greek economic mess. In fact, the comparison goes further, since it is reasonably clear that Catalonia has an external surplus with the rest of the world just like Germany does, which is why the Catalans share the same kind of reputation inside Spain for being thrifty and austere as their German counterparts on the European level.¶

Vespers

¶ We’ll read anything by or about Jennifer Egan, and Patricia Z0hn’s intereview at The Huffington Post is a nice “addition to the literature.” But in answer to a question about the Sixties, Ms Egan deftly binds the overtly Sixties-era themes that have freckled her fiction with the covert activities, also beginning in the Sixties, that have inspired her technique.

CZ: Though you were born a decade late, you seem to have been defined by the Sixties. People who were adolescent then are tired of hearing all of us say it was, so far, the most interesting time to come of age. Yet you have not only embraced these years but have made their themes–sex, drugs, rock and roll, politics, and the subsequent disillusionment and burnout–the calling cards to your work. Why, and what was missing from your own era that they were so easily able to eclipse it?

JE: I’d say that I’ve been defined by missing the Sixties. My mother and stepfather moved us to San Francisco in 1969, when I was seven, and I grew up there convinced that everything spontaneous and raw and thrilling had passed me by. Had I actually experienced the sixties, I might have a more nuanced memory of that era. I guess what I’m saying is that in San Francisco, anyway, “my” era was mostly about processing the era that had just passed. Until the punk rock scene of the late seventies, there wasn’t much, counterculturally, to compete with it.

Looking back, though, I’d say that my era has actually been defined by dizzying technological change. I grew up before there were answering machines, and in 47 years I’ve watched us hurtle into a hyperconnected state whose implications none of us can fully grasp. Funnily, the origins of that change can be traced right back to the San Francisco Bay area in the 1970’s–the very same years when it seemed like nothing new was happening! Things were happening, it turns out, but we couldn’t see them yet.

Compline

¶ Ann Jones, seneior citizen and embedded journalist, tootles around an American operation in Afghanistan that makes Men Who Stare At Goats look like a documentary. On top of all the surreal weirdness, she plops the following sundae cherry, which might explain why COIN isn’t working as well as we might like. (Asia Times; via MetaFilter)

On the base, I heard incessant talk about COIN, the “new” doctrine resurrected from the disaster of Vietnam in the irrational hope that it will work this time. From my experience at the FOB, however, it’s clear enough that the hearts-and-minds part of COIN is already dead in the water, and one widespread practice in the military that’s gone unreported by other embedded journalists helps explain why.

So here’s a TomDispatch exclusive, courtesy of Afghan-American men serving as interpreters for the soldiers. They were embarrassed to the point of agony when mentioning this habit, but desperate to put a stop to it. COIN calls for the military to meet and make friends with village elders, drink tea, plan “development”, and captivate their hearts and minds. Several interpreters told me, however, that every meeting includes some young American soldiers whose locker-room-style male bonding features bouts of hilarious farting.

To Afghan men, nothing is more shameful. A fart is proof that a man cannot control any of his apparatus below the belt. The man who farts is thus not a man at all. He cannot be taken seriously, nor can any of his ideas or promises or plans.

Blissfully unaware of such things, the army goes on planning together with its civilian consultants (representatives of the US State Department, the US Department of Agriculture and various independent contractors who make up what’s called a Human Terrain Team charged with interpreting local culture and helping to win the locals over to our side). Some speak of “building infrastructure”, others of advancing “good governance” or planning “economic development”. All talk of “doing good” and “helping” Afghanistan.

In a typical mess-up on the actual terrain of Afghanistan, army experts previously in charge of this base had already had a million-dollar suspension bridge built over a river some distance away, but hadn’t thought to secure land rights, so no road leads to it. Now the local American agriculture specialist wants to introduce alfalfa to these waterless, rocky mountains to feed herds of cattle principally pastured in his mind.

Have a Look

¶ Clandestine grilled cheese sandwiches. Should this be “Anywhere But New York”? Or is it a hoax? (New York Post; via The Awl)

¶ Design Disasters of the Past 25 Years. (The Infrastructurist) Our favorite is the top-rated Lotus Riverside Complex.

Matins

¶ An interesting piece about the improving the levees of New Orleans, not just as engineering necessities but as features of the landscape, throws light on a big shift in contemporary thinking, away from the Enlightenment project of triumphing over nature, from making environmental problems disappear to making them feel at home, for everyone. (Good)

Living in a city bisected by the Mississippi River and abutting Lake Ponchartrain, New Orleanians have a complicated relationship with water. Where other cities might take advantage of these shorelines for recreation and community activities, prizing a natural access to water in a sweltering urban center, New Orleans is, instead, walled in—its residents’ interactions with nature is mediated by 104.8 miles of levees and floodwalls. These structures are, of course, necessary for the safety of the city (even if they have been far from perfect), but they create a visually forceful divide between the city and its surrounding wetlands. With pumping stations behind walls, even the infrastructure hides itself. It’s as if there is no water at all.

With that in mind, GOOD asked a few of New Orleans’s finest designers to re-imagine, improve upon, or replace these floodwalls and levee spaces. What we got were ideas that are at once community-enhancing, dynamic, and effective—a testament to the power of thoughtful design and public art, especially in blighted areas.

Lauds

¶ Move over, Mad Men: Sherlock’s back in town. Or will be, presently: the BBC has exhumed and updated Anglophonia’s most famous sleuth, and engaged Benedict Cumberbatch to impersonate him. (Guardian; via MetaFilter)

Coming to BBC1 next Sunday, Sherlock is a re-imagining of the Conan Doyle stories, with Benedict Cumberbatch in the title role and Martin Freeman as his Watson. The three 90-minute episodes were commissioned on the strength of a pilot that was never shown and have already been sold around the world. Resembling a cross between Withnail and I and The Bourne Ultimatum, there is also a hint of Doctor Who about the drama; hardly surprising, since it has been written and created by Doctor Who writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat….

“What appealed to us about the idea of doing Sherlock in the present day is that the characters have become almost literally lost in the fog,” he said. “And while I am second to no one in my enjoyment of that sort of Victoriana, we wanted to get back to the characters and to why they became the most wonderful partnership in literature.”

Casting Cumberbatch as Holmes was a natural decision, but finding the right Watson was harder. “But as soon as they came together, it was obvious.” Freeman’s dependable, capable Watson unlocks this modern Holmes, a man who now describes himself as “a high-functioning sociopath”.

Prime

¶ At Private Sector Development Blog, Ryan Hahn compares microcredit to the ropes that lashed Odysseus to the mast of his ship when the Sirens sang. (He goes on to point out that Odysseus himself, like most men, would not resort to microcredit for self-help purposes.) (via  The Awl)

A recent paper by Jonathan Morduch of the Financial Access Initiative and coauthors Michal Bauer and Julie Chytilova takes a look at the behavioral underpinnings of microfinance. The authors find that women with hyperbolic discount preferences — i.e., individuals who have a tendency to give in to the temptation of consumption in the moment — turn to microfinance as a way to force themselves to save….

So would Ulysses have taken out a micofinance loan as a way to overcome the temptation of current consumption? Probably not. Morduch et al. find that men who are present-biased aren’t particularly likely to take out loans through self help groups but at the same time don’t have lower savings levels than men without this bias. Why this difference between men and women? In a sentence that cries out for further explanation, the authors note that “we didn’t find lower saving levels for present-biased men as we did for women, which suggests that, unlike women, they have access to other ways to cope with self-discipline problems.”

What might these ‘other ways’ be, and why don’t women have access to them? The paper doesn’t speculate on the answer. But this sounds like an avenue for future research that is screaming for attention.

Tierce

¶ At Wired, Kevin Kelly has a short interview with Fred Brooks, author of (most recently) The Design of Design, a book that we’ve enjoyed dipping into. via kottke.org) Some nuggets:

Wired: In your experience, what’s the best process for design?

Brooks: Great design does not come from great processes; it comes from great designers.

Wired: But surely The Design of Design is about creating better processes for great designers?

Brooks: The critical thing about the design process is to identify your scarcest resource. Despite what you may think, that very often is not money. For example, in a NASA moon shot, money is abundant but lightness is scarce; every ounce of weight requires tons of material below. On the design of a beach vacation home, the limitation may be your ocean-front footage. You have to make sure your whole team understands what scarce resource you’re optimizing.

Wired: How has your thinking about design changed over the past decades?

Brooks: When I first wrote The Mythical Man-Month in 1975, I counseled programmers to “throw the first version away,” then build a second one. By the 20th-anniversary edition, I realized that constant incremental iteration is a far sounder approach. You build a quick prototype and get it in front of users to see what they do with it. You will always be surprised.

Wired: You’re a Mac user. What have you learned from the design of Apple products?

Brooks: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.

Sext

¶ Nige takes a walk in the beautiful Leicestershire countryside, where the land still tells of a past that was by no means bucolic and charming. 

Villages were deserted for various reasons – epidemic disease reducing population below viable levels, marginal sites proving unsustainable, loss of crops causing famine – life was hard, and people more mobile than we commonly think – but Ingarsby is a classic case of 15th-century enclosure driving the population off the land. Those sheep pastures, so peaceful and picturesque today, represented the end of village life for the inhabitants of Ingarsby and many another village, at a time when, in Thomas More’s phrase, sheep ate men. While the sheep barons grew fat in their big houses (and indeed abbeys – it was Leicester Abbey that enclosed this land), those who had once lived off the land around were evicted and thrown on their own meagre resources, many becoming beggars, many dying of disease and want. To walk amid the remnants of their village life – which survive only because the heavy land has remained as unploughed pasture – is a poignant reminder of a historical experience that resonated for centuries, continuing in different forms (read John Clare!) and still feeds into the unique English relationship with the countryside, into that faint unease behind our enjoyment of it, a sense of brutal disruption, shameful appropriation, of something lost beyond recall.

Nones

¶ Burma — land of the future? The “military junta” that controls Myanmar’s wealth is nothing but a retro-patriarchal plutocracy. That it should flourish in the Twenty-First Century is shocking — until we consider growing income disparties around the world. Hannah Beech at Time. (via Real Clear World)

The red sign blocking the main entrance to the half-built Yadanabon Cybercity looks innocuous enough to someone who doesn’t read the local language, a swirl of curved Burmese letters and numbers. But the people of Burma have been conditioned to fear this sign: “This area is under military order 144,” it says. “Shoot to capture.” It’s a measure of Burma’s peculiar mix of isolationist paranoia and technological ambition that its future Silicon Valley has been declared a military zone inaccessible to normal civilians. Inside the 4,050-hectare construction site, I drive along empty stretches of tarmac, past plots of land that will soon boast offices for Burma’s biggest crony companies: Htoo Trading, Tay Za’s conglomerate; IGE, headed by the son of Burma’s Minister of Industry General Aung Thaung, who is barred by the European Union; Redlink Communications, owned by the sons of the junta No. 3, General Thura Shwe Mann, one of whom is on the U.S. visa blacklist. Thai, Malaysian, Russian and Chinese firms have staked their ground too. Burma’s state media reports that foreign companies have so far invested $22 million in the first phase of Yadanabon.

Ever since images of protesting monks escaped from Burma during the crushed demonstrations of 2007, the regime has been scrambling to centralize control over the Internet. Thousands of websites have been blocked, cyberdissidents jailed and debilitating strikes launched against exile-media websites. Yadanabon will be the nerve center of Burma’s Internet operations. But it’s not all computer cubicles and high-tech wizardry. On a point overlooking the famous hills of Shan State, $200,000 vacation villas are being built. One model drawing shows a BMW SUV in a garage, and the half-finished houses already feature Tudor trimmings and spacious verandas. Nearby, a farmer toils on a sliver of land that has belonged to her family for at least three generations. Soon the Cybercity will eat up this tiny plot too. The woman doesn’t expect any compensation since she received nothing when the rest of her fields were confiscated a year ago. “We are little people, so we cannot complain,” she says. “All we can do is concentrate on feeding ourselves.”

History suggests that the junta class will disintegrate from within over time. But that is only a suggestion.

Vespers

¶ At Critical Mass, Mark Athitakis talks to David Pritchard, founder of the literary Web site Critical Flame.

Reviews for the site have no specific word-count limits (the guidelines require only that “an article’s length never exceed its coherence”). Still, the Critical Flame strongly embraces long-form essays. What has your work on the site taught you about how willing online audiences are to read such articles?  

As an editor, I never cut for the sake of length. Maybe this section is redundant, or that one needs to be re-written for clarity — but no, word count is no longer a controlling force. Not for internet reviews. I’m also not sure that a book worth reviewing at all can be dealt with in 300 words anyhow, not with the depth that we aim for. I think our shortest essays are 800-1000 words, and they do feel a bit short to me.

 

But, we’ve found no problem with readership in regards to length, nor correlation between length and readers at all. There is — well, I am suspicious of questions regarding length and online audiences. For really good content, people will read until their eyes peel (which takes longer and longer as technology gets better) but they won’t read 300 words of crap, or 600 words of mediocrity, on paper or on the internet. Treat readers as if they deserve to be involved in the conversation, as equals, with enthusiasm and insight, discussing a book that is worth consideration: length will never be an issue.

Compline

¶ “Our T-shirt will read: I just don’t know.” Ron Rosenbaum is lucid about agnosticism, which ever way it faces.

Huxley originally defined his agnosticism against the claims of religion, but it also applies to the claims of science in its know-it-all mode. I should point out that I accept all that science has proven with evidence and falsifiable hypotheses but don’t believe there is evidence or falsifiable certitude that science can prove or disprove everything. Agnosticism doesn’t contend there are no certainties; it simply resists unwarranted untested or untestable certainties.

Agnosticism doesn’t fear uncertainty. It doesn’t cling like a child in the dark to the dogmas of orthodox religion or atheism. Agnosticism respects and celebrates uncertainty and has been doing so since before quantum physics revealed the uncertainty that lies at the very groundwork of being.

Have a Look

¶ New York art critic Jerry Saltz’s favorite NYC paintings. (via The Morning News)

¶ There goes the garden! What happens to a (dying) washing machine when you toss a brick into its spin cycle. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Nice Muscles. (Café Muscato)

Matins

¶ At The Infrastructurist, Scott Huter, author of On the Grid, argues that life “off the grid” is a mirage.

I found myself on a radio show one day with someone who wrote a book about going off the grid, and before even going on the air he told our host he didn’t wish to be identified as speaking from the United Kingdom. He was in London, the host was in Massachusetts, and I was in Raleigh. We spoke to one another as though we were in the same room – and he was arguing against the grid. I’ll leave you to determine whether there’s irony there, though I’ll point out that data centers, filled with the computers and air conditioners that run the communications grid, are enormous industrial users of grid power.

I’m not against sustainability – I’m for anything that saves resources, improves systems, and may save our planet before we fry it in its own petroleum-based oils. But driving your grid-produced pickup to get your grid-produced lumber at a big box store, driving on grid-paved highways to your mountain acres whose streams are protected by multiple layers of grid-powered government, and then using your grid-supplied plans to build a windmill to power your grid-produced computer as it gathers its information from grid-produced satellites? And then pointing at your windmill and your satellite dish and your septic tank and saying, “Look at me! I’m off the grid!”

I don’t buy it.

We don’t, either. We want very smart, well-maintained grids.

Lauds

¶ “It’s not our issue.” Marc Wolf, writer and performer of the one-man show, Another American: Asking and Telling (appearing Off Broadway through the end of August) pinpoints the socioeconomic divide that has deprived gay men and women in the military from the support of the gay-rights movement. (NYT; via  Arts Journal)

Most gay people that I know here in New York City have no interest in serving in the military nor have any idea why a gay person would want to serve in the military. And the gay civil-rights movement, at both national and grass roots levels, has only recently embraced the issue.

An example of this: A straight couple came to see “Another American” and, after the performance, the woman asked if she could approach the gay and lesbian Center in the Ohio city where she lived to see if they would present my show. I agreed, and she called me in shock a few days later. The center had told her: “It’s not our issue.”
Why is that? Randy Shilts points out in “Conduct Unbecoming” that the gay civil-rights movement was heavily influenced by the peace movement of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.

As a result, there has always tended to be an anti-authoritarian and anti-militaristic slant to the gay-rights movement. Couple this with the fact that most gay people in the military do not come from the higher socio-economic, more urban communities that traditionally have staffed the national gay rights organizations, and you begin to understand why this has not always been our issue.

Prime

¶ Joe Quinn’s eloquent denunciation of “the elites,” at Zero Hedge, seems straightforwardly populist — but this is not the universal populism of popular theory (pitting millions of “little people” against the “fat cats”). It’s rather the indignation (populism is always indignant) of the non-professional middle class. There is also a certain slippage in the address: we suspect tha Mr Quinn’s most enthusiastic readers will not have piled up consumer debt, piling up rather contempt and pitilessness for those who did.

Here is the message from the ruling elite to you ignorant masses: Debt got us into this mess and it sure as hell is going to get us out. They have convinced the mainstream media that the reason the economy is sputtering is because the average Joe is not doing their part. This crazy concept of saving for a rainy day seems to be catching on. This is very dangerous. Savings could lead to investment and long-term stability. The ruling elite will have none of that foolishness. The mainstream media is telling you that this new found austerity will push us back into recession. The talking heads continue to pound away that you have reduced your spending too much, when anyone with a calculator and half a brain (Krugman doesn’t make the cut) can determine that the decrease in consumer debt outstanding is completely the result of write-offs by the mega elite banks. Consumers are living off their credit cards at this point.

The military industrial complex continues to do the heavy lifting for this economy. If they weren’t blowing up bridges, power plants and orphanages in foreign countries and then rebuilding them at ten times the expected cost, how would they possibly spend $895 billion per year. It ain’t easy to waste that kind of money annually. Whenever some crazy dude like Ron Paul questions the need to spend as much as the rest of the world combined on the military, some potential terrorists are captured in the nick of time and the threat level is raised to Orange (thanks Tom Ridge). The “professional” journalists on the major networks then do their part in this farce by spreading fear among the general population. Rinse and repeat.

Tierce

¶ First, the good news. Stanford scientist Mark Jacobson has determined, from computer simulations, that reducing soot would work an immediate reversal of global warming. (Wired Science)

“If you just eliminate soot, you get a significant climate benefit, and you can do it on a short time period, because soot has a life of just a few weeks,” said Jacobson. “You don’t get the full response for a while, as there are deep ocean feedbacks that take a long time, but it’s a lot faster than controlling CO2.”

Jacobson simulated the effects of curtailing soot from fossil-fuel emissions, something that’s already possible with tailpipe and smokestack filters. He simulated the effects of replacing wood- and dung-burning cookfires with clean-burning stoves. And he simulated both advances simultaneously.

If soot disappeared overnight, average global temperatures would drop within 15 years by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, maybe a little more. That’s about half the net warming — total global warming, minus cooling from sun-reflecting aerosols — experienced since the beginning of the industrial age. The effect would be even larger in the Arctic, where sea ice and tundra could rapidly refreeze.

¶ Now, the bad news. China’s filthy air. We passed over this Times story yesterday, because it’s not really news to anyone who has been awake for the past ten years. But in conjunction with the Jacobson simulations, it shows how difficult any kind of soot clean-up is going to be.

The quality of air in Chinese cities is increasingly tainted by coal-burning power plants, grit from construction sites and exhaust from millions of new cars squeezing onto crowded roads, according to a government study issued this week. Other newly released figures show a jump in industrial accidents and an epidemic of pollution in waterways.

The report’s most unexpected findings pointed to an increase in inhalable particulates in cities like Beijing, where officials have struggled to improve air quality by shutting down noxious factories and tightening auto emission standards. Despite such efforts, including an ambitious program aimed at reducing the use of coal for home heating, the average concentration of particulates in the capital’s air violated the World Health Organization’s standards more than 80 percent of the time during the last quarter of 2008.

Sext

¶ Our Man in Manila, Migs Bassig, has set up a new blog, Oh, Dear!, and we see in an instant how right he was to disregard our advice (develop the new writing, then move the blog). Sometimes the medium and the message are in bed together!

The new blog’s first post concerns a very popular television show, Wowowee.

One of these segments was called “Hep Hep, Hooray”. Twenty random audience members lined up on the kindergarten-colored stage (the Wowowee set is in Quezon City) for a simple elimination game. The rules were simple: they had to complete the title phrase once it was their turn to cheer. If the host put the microphone right in front of one contestant, that contestant had to say “Hep Hep” while clapping his or her hands below the waist, or “Hooray” while raising his or her hands. Contestants who broke the cheer or made a mistake with the gestures were eliminated. The grand prize was ten thousand pesos; the nineteen losers, meanwhile, each walked away with a thousand pesos and a gift pack containing deodorants.

Another segment was called “Questune”, where contestants had to guess the titles of songs. Until they pressed the buzzer, however, they had to keep their hands below their chins, so that they looked as though they were mimicking monkeys.

In a future entry, we hope to learn why Wowowee was canceled.

Nones

¶ At The Bygone Bureau, a further dispatch from Pohnpei, in Micronesia, where Jonathan Gourlay has gone native, to the extent that witches’ spells and brews really do “work.”

The Pohnpeian secretaries at the college where I work are hatching a plan to slip some magic in our coffee pot. They cast a little spell into eight mashed leaves. The spell causes divorce. But, they think, what if other people drink the magic coffee? There would be a divorce epidemic among coffee drinkers in Faculty Building B. They can’t think of a way to make me think clearly.

The cleaning crew, librarians, secretaries and even various vice presidents are all united in hoping that I can break the spell that Popo’s mother has cast upon me. This spell causes me not to understand what is going on. Popo runs around every night and yet I don’t seem to register this fact. I’m in a daze where what is normal keeps shifting around. It just seems natural that my fate is to be sucked dry of money, thoughts, dreams, while Popo spends her nights partying at the Skylight Hotel, crashing our car. More than once she has ended up in jail, where she likes to yell at the guards about the affairs she knows they’re having. They’re glad to be rid of her in the morning.

There was no magic, no remedy, no special herbal concoction that caused my mind to realize what I surely already knew. No, it was an American who has that direct quality of Americans that is the opposite of magic. He said that he was my friend and therefore could no longer listen to people laughing at me because my wife is running around with some guy and spending all of my money. He said it in simple sentences that I could understand. I had to leave. Take my daughter, Peanut. Say goodbye to Polynn. Run away.

The coffee was suspiciously bitter that morning.

Vespers

¶ At the Guardian, English literature professor Gabriel Josipovici lets loose on the lions of modern English literature. Born in 1940, Mr Josipovici is no young Turk, but his views appear to have currency among the Man Booker judges. As everyone and his aunt has observed, this year’s list is missing the once-great names of Amis, Barnes, Rushdie, McEwan, &c. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

While great novels deal with complex events beyond the full understanding of both the characters and the reader, too many contemporary works follow traditional plots with neat endings, he said.

Referring to graduates, like McEwan, of the University of East Anglia’s famous creative writing course, Josipovici said: “They all tell stories in a way that is well crafted, but that is almost the most depressing aspect of it — a careful craft which seems to me to be hollow.”

He singled out The Comfort of Strangers, McEwan’s story of obsession, as easy to read but lacking “a sense of destiny, of other worlds suggested but lying beyond words”, unlike that experienced through Proust or Henry James. McEwan’s novel is read “to pass the time”, he said.

Such novels had a “lack of vision and limited horizons”.

“One finishes them and feels, ‘So what?’ – so very different from the gut-wrenching experience of reading Herman Melville’s Bartleby or William Golding’s The Inheritors,” said Josipovici.

We disagree on the sole point of Ian McEwan, beneath the banked fires of whose brilliantly poised prose we sense a throbbing companionship of grief.

Compline

¶ The confessions of a one-time “warblogger” — remember them? (Remember paying attention to them, that is.) A reminder that a life built on anger and hostility really does work for some people, some of the time. Michele Catalano at This Ia a Thing. (via The Awl)

People would say, how could you align yourselves with them? How could I still say I was anti-religion and for gay rights and all that other stuff I stood for, how could I say that if I was part of the other side now? And I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to answer that. I didn’t know how to say “I have no idea what I believe I just know that if I stop screaming I might end up killing myself so I’m going to stay here with the screaming people.”

Do you know how easy it is to lie to yourself? Do you know how easy it is to make yourself believe all the things you want to believe like, your life is good and you’re happy and carefree and everything is really fucking great? Lying to yourself with ease makes it so much easier to lie to everyone else. Oh yes, I’m perfectly happy being a bitter, angry blogger. I’m perfectly happy having 20 anxiety attacks a day. I’m perfectly happy living in a basement apartment with two kids and a second husband who makes me feel like my soul has sprung a leak. Happy. Happy, happy, happy. Life is good. And so is gin.

And so it went. I went on appearing to everyone online (and at this point my blog had about 10,000 hits a day and I was doing interviews with the BBC and such) like I was some rabid warmonger and as my old friends left in droves most of my new friends proved to be nothing more than sharks who were all too happy to feed off of me.

Matins

¶ At BBC News Magazine, an anecdotal report on women who choose not to have children. Friends and acquaintances continue to believe that this is their business.

But it can be the most passing of acquaintances who pass comment.

“Many people assume if you a single and child-free that you haven’t met the right man yet. But if you are in a relationship, they ask ‘when are you taking the next step?’ A woman’s fertility status is still very much considered public property. There are still assumptions about women’s role in society, about families and about family size.”

Lisa Davies, 38, says the assumption is often that she cannot have a baby. “What I’m unhappy about is people looking at me and speaking to me – very often unashamedly – as if there is something wrong with me. As with other choices that you make, the key is it’s not for everyone.”

In the United States, New Yorker Melanie Notkin, founder of the Savvy Auntie website, wants a national day to celebrate child-free women who are loving aunts or godmothers.

“It would be a chance for these women to feel whole, for everything that they are, instead of having to focus on all the things they’re not – ie mothers.”

We’re appalled by the idea that anyone would think it a good thing to have a child in order to fulfill one’s personal destiny.

Lauds

¶ Of a exhibition of paintings by the women of the Hudson River School, the museum director says,

 “The number one question we’ve been asked is ‘why hasn’t anyone done this before?’ I don’t know how to answer that,” she says.

That’s probably the most politic answer.

Though their paintings were largely left out of the story of American art, the exhibition displays work that reflects the same romantic sensibility, respect for balance, luminosity and love of picturesque landscapes as those of artists like Cole, Asher B. Durand and Frederic Church. “These paintings aren’t particularly feminine; they’re not flowery,” Jacks says. “If you walked into the show, you’d just say these are a group of Hudson River school paintings. They are part of the movement. It’s our own problem that we haven’t included them in the history of the Hudson River school.”

We hope that this show travels, in some form, to our fair city at the mouth of the Hudson. (Smithsonian)

Prime

¶ Gregor Macdonald considers California’s State of Emergency: “Collapse is a process.” What really astonishes him is the persistence of elderly economists who don’t understand the new economic order. (via Abnormal Returns)

As if to add a touch of comedy to this news, Alan Blinder and Mark Zandi are out with a Mission Accomplished paper today, which details how the FED and the Government saved the US from a depression. Perhaps a short walk through San Bernardino County (picture above) or several other California counties with their white paper in hand might be in order, as a way to augment some of those views. I would suggest that the US Dollar is probably indicating already some of what lays ahead, here. California’s broad unemployment figure at nearly 22.00% is yet another new high, and indicates the trend is still in place. While Blinder and Zandi are stuck in post-war recession-land, the US Dollar is pointing towards California.

Tierce

¶ At Replicated Typo, Hannah is reading a book about psychosis and the “social brain.” The question is, where did madness come from?

Our hominid ancestors evolved a sophisticated neural network supporting social cognition and adaptive interpersonal behaviour (in other words the social brain). This has been identified, using functional imaging, to be comprised in the fronto-temporal and fronto-parietal cortical networks. Psychosis (and schizophrenia in particular) are characterised by functional and structural deficits in these areas and hence the term ‘social brain disorders’ are fitting.

Schizophrenics display abnormalities in a wide range of social cognition tasks such as emotion recognition, theory of mind and affective responsiveness and as a result individuals with schizophrenia find themselves disadvantaged in the social arena and vulnerable to the stresses of their complex social environments.

So, since there is such evidence to support that the areas which comprise our ‘social brains’ are the same regions which contribute to the disorder of schizophrenia when functional and structural deficits are present it becomes clear that schizophrenia exists as a consequence to the complex social brain.

Sext

¶ You’d think that, if anyone, Dave Bry would be able to coax an apology from the Swastika, now that it’s no longer considered exclusively anti-Semitic. Far from it. (The Awl)

Do you feel that perhaps your best days are in the past? That you may in fact be losing some of that power by spreading yourself too thin?

Please, baby, there’s enough of me to go around! But seriously, no. Not at all. Did you see what Rabbi Abraham Cooper said, from the Simon Wiesenthal Center? “The swastika is shorthand for every racist and bigot on the planet.” That’s right! I’m worldwide now. He said that it was amazing that 70 years after the holocaust, I hadn’t lost any of my potency. That is pretty amazing, when you think about it. They’re no dummies, those Jews. I’m taking it to a whole ‘nother level.

Nones

¶ Maybe now that it has appeared in Time, it’s official: Afghanistan is a sideshow. Thanks, Joe Klein.

Are you confused yet? Let me make things more complicated: Afghanistan is really a sideshow here. Pakistan is the primary U.S. national-security concern in the region. It has a nuclear stockpile, and lives under the threat of an Islamist coup by some of the very elements in its military who created and support the Taliban. The one thing the U.S. can do to reduce that threat is to convince the Pakistanis that we will be a reliable friend for the long haul — providing aid, mediating the tensions with India; that we will help stabilize Afghanistan; that we will support the primacy of Pakistan’s civilian government. Over time, this could reduce the extremist influence in the military and Pakistan’s use of Islamist guerrillas against its neighbors. If it does not — well, the alternative is unthinkable.

Vespers

¶ Seth Colter Walls was late to the fair, but he managed to pick up a few items from David Markson’s library at the Strand, including an annotated Sartre. (“Dear Jean-Paul — how can you be sometimes so smart and sometimes so stupid?”) (Newsweek; via The Awl)

Passages like this get at the underlying tragedy of Markson’s scattered library. It’s not just about his fans’ emotional attachment to his legacy (though it’s also about that). What’s really at stake here is the chance to glean more information about his famously allusive late style. While he started out writing entertainingly pulpy crime and Western stories (one of which was turned into a movie starring Frank Sinatra), the final postmodern works for which he is best known were all built from a personal library of culled aphorisms, anecdotes from the lives of artists, and literary quotes. In The Last Novel, the unnamed narrator (called “Novelist” by Markson) quotes both Elie Wiesel and Hitler on the subject of Jewishness. Thus, Markson’s reactions to Sartre’s writing on anti-Semitism are frankly worth a hell of a lot more than the $10 I paid to acquire them.

We’re heartened to read about the Facebook group that is compiling an online catalogue of Markson’s books.

Compline

¶ It’s official: the Tower isn’t going to Lean any further. English soil engineer John Burland not only saved the Pisan campanile from toppling over but drained the water table in a way that stablizes the tower permanently. (Since 2001, there has been no movement.) Not everybody’s happy. (Telegraph; via The Morning News)

The Pisans, though, are a hard people to please. Some accuse Burland et al of sterilising their tower – for, part of its old mystique had been the possibility it might collapse at any moment, the frisson that a voyeuristic visitor might witness such a fall. ‘You can’t please all of the people all of the time,’ Burland shrugs.

He’s fascinated now by architectural advances in the UAE, where developers are striving to surpass each other with ever-taller, and ever-tiltier, buildings. Last month, the gravity-defying Capital Gate tower in Abu Dhabi – a giant, computer-concocted web of steel diagrids, which leans four times as far as Pisa’s belfry – entered the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s most inclined building.

‘It’s amazing that the Tower of Pisa should remain so fashionable, even at 800 years old,’ Burland smiles. Not bad for a building that was never meant to lean to begin with.

Have a Look

¶ two very dissimilar treats from The Best Part: Jake Hakenwerth and Trey Speegle. Both are very colorful, though!

Matins

¶ We’re frowning deeply, but trying not to scowl, over Peggy Nelson’s “post-Enlightenment” apologia for texting at the dinner table. Her scenario sounds like one of those glamorous movies that you wish you could inhabit — but can’t. Which is not to say that Ms Nelson is entirely wrong about the increasing fluidity of social context, or about the significance of a shift from points (you and me) to connections (us). But the promised land that she claims to inhabit lies very far from where we’re standing. (Nieman Storyboard; via kottke.org)

Eventually I learned to stop worrying and love the flow. The pervasiveness of the new multiplicity, and my participation in it, altered my perspective. Altered my Self. The transition was gradual, but eventually I realized I was on the other side. I was traveling with friends, and one of them took a call. Suddenly, instead of feeling less connected to the people I was with, I felt more connected, both to them and to their friends on the other end of the line (whom I did not know). My perspective had shifted from seeing the call as an interruption to seeing it as an expansion. And I realized that the story I had been telling myself about who I was had widened to include additional narratives, some not “mine,” but which could be felt, at least potentially and in part, personally. A small piece of the global had become, for the moment, local. And once that has happened, it can happen again. The end of the world as we know it? No — it’s the end of the world as I know it, the end of the world as YOU know it — but the beginning of the world as WE know it. The networked self is a verb.

We’re beginning to inhabit ad hoc, overlapping, always-on virtual salons — you’re talking to someone, and then you both get pulled off into different directions, to form different shapes and vectors within the conversations, and then come together again, having never really been apart. You can even have multiple conversations via multiple media with the same person in the same span of time. Single conversations are one-dimensional chess; our language games have increased in complexity. And, potentially, in reward. Because with its ability to feel distant stories in a more personal manner, the expanded self points a way towards those stories becoming more relevant, and perhaps more actionable.

Lauds

¶ How does James Franco do it all? A portrait of the movie star as a performance artist, Sam Anderson’s New York piece has us wondering about what goes up… Having servants who masquerade as pals helps. (via MetaFilter)

Franco’s main artistic obsession—the subject that echoes across all of his various media—is adolescence. This seems appropriate on several levels. His own adolescence was unusually formative: It turned him from an obedient young math prodigy into a turbocharged art fanatic. His defining characteristic, as an actor, is an engaging restlessness—adolescence personified. In fact, you could say that Franco’s entire career is suspended, right now, in a kind of artistic adolescence. We’re watching him transition, a little awkwardly, from one creature (the Hollywood-dependent star) to another (the self-actualized, multiplatform artist). Like real adolescence, it’s a propulsive phase in which energy exceeds control. It’s about extremes—the hysteria to distinguish oneself, to break the rules, to leap into the world and do impossible things. Franco is developing all kinds of new strengths, but at the cost of some of his dignity: His intellectual skin is a little spotty, his artistic legs are suddenly too long for the rest of his body.

It’s the kind of ragged transition that most actors pay good money to have smoothed over by publicity teams. Yet Franco is making a spectacle of it. Which is, in a way, brave. One of the central points of Franco’s art and career, as I read them, is that adolescence isn’t something we should look away from, a shameful churning of dirty hormones. It’s the crucible of our identity, the answer to everything that comes later, and we need to look long and hard at it, no matter how gross or painful it might sometimes feel.

Prime

¶ James Kwak suggests another reason why Elizabeth Warren would be a great consumer advocate: she doesn’t believe in “Mickey Mouse economics.” That would be the generation of “facts” about economic behavior that are squeezed from unrealistic assumptions about homo economicus. Mr Kwak refers to a blog entry in which Ms Warren complained about a contracts class of first year law students at Harvard that talked itself into believing that the following analysis (of a forum-limiting clause as a benefit to consumers) actually made sense — which it does, but only if you’re in a law-school classroom trying to sound sharper than everyone else. (The Baseline Scenario)

(We repeat: the following is nonsense.)

Forcing people to sue in Florida (or to accept binding arbitration in the forum of the company’s choice) deters frivolous lawsuits and lowers costs for the company, and it can pass those savings onto consumers. Why does it pass those savings onto consumers instead of putting them into shareholders’ (or managers’) pockets? Because in a perfect competitive market, if Alpha Cruise Lines doesn’t, then Beta Cruise Lines will, and Beta will underprice Alpha, . . . Consumers will read the fine print and can make an informed choice between the lower price with the forum selection clause and the higher price without the forum selection clause.

Tierce

¶ At You Are Not So Smart, a helpful word about the The Anchoring Effect.

When you need to choose between options, or estimate a value, you need footing to stand on.

How much should you be paying for cable? How much should your electricity bill be each month? What is a good price for rent in this neighborhood?

You need an anchor from which to compare, and when someone is trying to sell you something they are more than happy to provide one. The problem is, even when you know this, you can’t ignore it.

When shopping for a car, you know it isn’t a completely honest transaction. The real price is probably lower than what they are asking for on the window sticker, yet the anchor price is still going to affect your decision.

As you look over the vehicle, you don’t consider how many factories the company owns, how many employees they pay. You don’t pore over engineering diagrams or profit reports. You don’t consider the price of iron or the expensive investments the manufacturer is making into safety testing.

The price you are willing to pay has little to do with these considerations because they are as far from you at the point of purchase as the population of Venezuela.

At last we have a term that explains the difference between describing someone as “wise but irritable” and as “irritable but wise.” The term that follows the conjunction is the anchor.

Sext

¶ Theo discovers Joni, causing “awash” of memories in his mother, Dominique Browning. (Slow Love Life)

This week I’m going to listen to all the Joni discs I own; as I sit here, I’m playing Clouds, from 1969. (And yes, I know, that means the music is in the background, but I was so moved to write that I couldn’t help myself. I’ll listen to the record again after I publish the post. And take Theo to the grocery store. And finish the laundry.) She sings the anti war anthem, The Fiddle and the Drum, with no instrumentation at all–that’s how strong is her voice–and her confidence. “Can we help you find the peace and the star…” Joni Mitchell’s songs have always had a profound moral decency–in the political, do what’s right, sense. Even the wild abandon with which she lost her heart seemed important, to me, in my twenties. That she has been able to accompany those of us who love her through our entire lives–and through hers–must be one of the miracles of our days.

Another is watching a new generation discover, and appreciate, the beauty that our generation can bequeath to them–in some enormous, global ways, we are leaving our children such a mess, that it helps to think also about the great things we have given them. Joy began to flicker through my aching sadness. There is nothing lovelier than sharing moments of transcendent beauty. I yearned to reconnect with the girl that I once was, the girl who believed that art would burn through grief, and that love was transformative. “Songs to aging children come; Aging children, I am one.” 

We like nothing better than listening to all three performances of “A Case of You” — Blue, Miles of Aisles, Both Sides Now — in a row, especially because we like the last one best.

Nones

¶ Niall Ferguson on the sudden setting of the United States’s imperial sun. Nobody knows when our overstretched economy will “go critical,” but we have a fairly clear idea why it will. (Real Clear World)

For now, the world still expects the US to muddle through, eventually confronting its problems when, as Churchill famously said, all the alternatives have been exhausted. With the sovereign debt crisis in Europe combining with growing fears of a deflationary double-dip recession, bond yields are at historic lows.

There is a zero-sum game at the heart of the budgetary process: even if rates stay low, recurrent deficits and debt accumulation mean that interest payments consume a rising proportion of tax revenue. And military expenditure is the item most likely to be squeezed to compensate because, unlike mandatory entitlements (social security, Medicaid and Medicare), defence spending is discretionary.

It is, in other words, a pre-programmed reality of US fiscal policy today that the resources available to the Department of Defense will be reduced in the years to come. Indeed, by my reckoning, it is quite likely that the US could be spending more on interest payments than on defence within the next decade.

We do not believe that a drastic reduction in American military forces is possible or even desirable: the United States is socializing and upward-mobilizing thousands of young people with no occupational alternatives other than crime. But it is clear that military expenses and commitments are going to have to be reconsidered from the ground up, with arms manufacturers and other contractors forced to fold their tents.

Vespers

¶ We wish that Dylan Suher had published his appreciation of the classic Chinese Novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, back in the spring, because then we would have planned a summer re-read. Here is a novel that makes Proust sound like Elmore Leonard. It’s not too late! (The Millions)

What is most striking to me about the experience of reading this book, however, is not the length. It is the vast distance between The Dream of the Red Chamber and the modern sensibility. In the post-Lish verbal economics of the contemporary novel, where every word has to count, the dramatic waste of words in Red Chamber is astoundingly alien. I am aware, of course, that not every novel is plot-driven, but most novels do tend to have some sort of force propelling them forward, some sort of urgency, whether that urgency is derived from the events, the character, or themes alluded to by the work. Dream of the Red Chamber, on the other hand, is unbelievably comfortable with its own languor. It is often content to bring the story to a complete standstill while it explains the minutiae of household management. The novel often seems to proceed only with a great reluctance.

I won’t tell you it isn’t occasionally boring to read this novel. I also won’t tell you that it isn’t maddening. Or that, after reading every excruciating detail of the umpteenth drinking game, I didn’t want to angrily trample it, like an apostate stomping on the cross. But the extravagant waste of the prose is also part of the overall design of the novel. The low signal-to-noise ratio causes the mind to actively search for the tiny anomalies that reveal the profundity behind the endless series of parties.

Compline

¶ Jesse Smith deconstructs that snappy but meaningless phrase, “state of the art.” Who knew that its first use, a century ago, was apologetic? “In the present state of the art, this is all that can be done…” (The Smart Set; via  Arts Journal)

Of course the phrase is used for much different purposes today. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “state of the art” as “the current stage of development of a practical or technological subject; freq. (esp. in attrib. use) implying the use of the latest techniques in a product or activity.” Nothing about “current” or “latest” is inherently qualitative, and yet over the last century, the phrase itself has taken on an almost exclusively positive connotation.

Nobody, for example, describes the Gulf oil spill as a state-of-the-art environmental disaster, even though the deepwater drilling technology that made such an event possible is as state-of-the-art as it comes (according to Oxford’s official definition). But take a refrigerator ad: “The GE Profile refrigerator has a state-of-the-art 3-stack drawer system with a deli drawer, a fresh food drawer and a CustomCool™ drawer that can thaw meat in hours or chill a bottle of wine in minutes.” GE doesn’t describe its refrigerators as being state-of-the-art to suggest limitations or any possible technological glitches that could come with so new a technology as the CustomCool drawer. The phrase instead implies that you can’t do any better than a GE refrigerator — what with its ease of thawing meat and chilling wine — and isn’t doing better the whole point?

Have a Look

¶ Check out the buckle. Check out the story. (NYT)

¶ Fabien Clerc. (via The Best Part)

¶ “Inside the Glenn Beck Goldline Scheme.” (Good)

¶ The late novelist David Markson’s library, on sale at the Strand. (LRBlog)

Matins

¶ We did not read the justly-praised Washington Post story about the nation’s topsy-turvy, unaccountable security system, any more than we’re going to read the Wikileaks papers about Afghanistan. We don’t claim to know everything that’s in these reports, but we are certain that both are stuffed with evidence that unreconstructed masculine types have all too naturally found refuge behind weapons of one kind or another — rifles or surveillance cameras, it doesn’t matter which — from which it will be difficult to dislodge them. But if confronting these nightmares directly cripples us with despair, we can at least welcome the esteem with which they have been greeted, and join a bit in the applause. Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker:

The story the Post tells is not about criminal conspiracies or rogue elements or corruption in the usual sense. No one’s dedication to the cause of protecting America is questioned. The tale has no villains—unless you count the pathologies of secrecy and bureaucracy and the panicky bravado that led the White House, Congress, and the public to frame the response to Al Qaeda as an essentially unlimited War on Terror. It is an exposé about a secret world, but it exposes no secrets. Interviewees who asked for anonymity did so not in order to “leak”—to reveal classified information—but to express judgments that their bosses and colleagues might hold against them. Virtually all the data that the paper collected in the two years it took to prepare the series was already in the public record.

And the bulk of the public record is no longer to be found in library stacks, dusty courthouse files, and microfilm rolls. Just as its subject is a new kind of bureaucratic enterprise, “Top Secret America” is a new kind of journalistic enterprise, pairing expert reporting of the traditional shoe-leather variety with the information-gathering power of the Internet. One of the series’ lead writers, Dana Priest, is a winner of two well-deserved Pulitzer Prizes, for her stories on abuses at Walter Reed and the C.I.A.’s overseas “black sites.” The other, William M. Arkin, is that despised creature, a blogger—or was until he put aside the national-security blog that he conducted on the Post’s Web site to begin his collaboration with Priest. While she worked the phones and racked up the miles, he sat in his converted barn in Vermont, surfing oceans of data. The result is a portrait of a problem. Laying it all out is a start. Reining it all in will be harder.

¶ Another unsurprising story: “US ‘fails to account’ for Iraq reconstruction billions.” (BBC News)

Lauds

¶ At Dance Magazine, Wendy Perron cautions choreographers against writing up their creative process — “You should be utterly at a loss for words…” — but what she says has very wide application. It serves equally as a caution to readers who imagine that artists can tell us “how they do it.”

I think this rush to explain is part of a larger trend of people thinking a simple how-to set of instructions can make them into an artist. In The Atlantic’s Fiction 2010 annual issue, the novelist Richard Bausch says, with dismay, that there are 4,470 titles under the rubric “How to Write a Book.” He thinks they are pretty much useless. “One doesn’t write out of some intellectual plan or strategy,” he says, “one writes from a kind of heartfelt necessity.” (Click here to read his essay.) 

And no one can tell you how to transform that necessity into art.

Prime

¶ Joshua Brown writes about “Recovery Apartheid“: businesses without comfy cash cushions to protect them from spotty consumer demand — that would be small businesses — are doing the opposite of thriving. (The Reformed Broker; via Abnormal Returns)

Imagine if, instead of Earnings Season for the S&P 500, we had a 4 week stretch in which we heard from a different sector of Small Business each night on a series of conference calls.  Imagine, if you will, that Monday night we heard from local restaurant and catering companies throughout the nation, then on Tuesday night we heard from auto dealerships, Wednesday night was machine repair shops, Thursday was real estate agencies, etc.

With my hypothetical Small Business Earnings Season in mind, I ask you the following…would the stock market have just posted an almost 4% gain since July 13th had that have been the case?  Would anything said by a majority of America’s business owners on conference calls each night even come close to matching the positivity on the Alcoa ($AA) and the Intel ($INTC) calls that kicked this earnings season off?

Probably not.  Because away from the S&P 500, record-breaking cash hoards are not the norm for business owners, nor are trips to the Fed’s discount window or financings done in a bond market voracious for yield of any kind.

Tierce

¶ Someday, it will be understood that truly great conversation is better than sex,  but for the moment we’ll have to be satisfied with some preliminary findings: when two people are talking and they “click,” feeling that they’re on the same “wavelength,” that’s not an illusion. Something measurably correspondent is probably occcurring in their brains, namely, similar blood flows. Brendan Keim at Wired Science:

They found that speaking and listening used common rather than separate neural subsystems inside each brain. Even more striking was an overlap between the brains of speaker and listener. When post-scan interviews found that stories had resonated, scans showed a complex interplay of neural call and response, as if language were a wire between test subjects’ brains.

The findings don’t explain why any two people “click,” as synchronization is a result of that connection, not its cause. And while the brain regions involved are linked to language, their precise functions are not clear. But even if the findings are general, they support what psychologists call the “theory of interactive linguistic alignment” — a fancy way of saying that talking brings people closer by making them share a common conceptual ground.

“If I say, ‘Do you want a coffee?’ you say, ‘Yes please, two sugars.’ You don’t say, ‘Yes, please put two sugars in the cup of coffee that is between us,’” said Hasson. “You’re sharing the same lexical items, grammatical constructs and contextual framework. And this is happening not just abstractly, but literally in the brain.”

¶ Our friend Jean Ruaud has been writing about his corner of Touraine. He is currently vacationing at a family member’s home outside Chinon, where he grew up. St-Benoît-la-Forêt, the town where he’s staying, stands in a clearing carved out of the Forét de Chinon about a thousand years ago, perhaps longer. You can survey the area here. Don’t forget to zoom in on Rochambeau Village, the American suburb built for GIs stationed at the NATO base in the Forêt. De fil en aiguille…

Les soldats allaient parfois dépenser leur paye le jour du “pay day”, dans les bars des villes du coin. La MP (Military Police) qui était autorisée à patrouiller dans la ville de Chinon était crainte par tout le monde, soldats et civils. Quand j’étais enfant j’étais particulièrement impressionné par les MP, mon souvenir en est très vif. Je les revois encore aujourd’hui, assis dans leur jeep au coin de ma rue à Chinon, des gros noirs très costauds qui mâchaient du chewing-gum d’un air nonchalant en reluquant les filles, avec un casque vert foncé et brillant sur lequel étaient peintes les lettres MP et deux bandes blanches qui faisaient le tour du casque et le colt à la ceinture.

Certains soldats US sont restés en France, d’autres ont marié une fille du coin et l’ont emmené aux States, d’autres ont fait des enfants aux filles du coin mais ne les ont pas toujours reconnus (j’avais en classe avec moi au lycée un métis qui s’appelait Jones de son nom de famille, j’ai connu aussi dans mon jeune temps un Franky Lee Pierce qui vivait avec sa mère qui était Française mais s’appelait d’un autre nom de famille, son père était retourné aux US mais l’avait reconnu).

Nones

¶ Secretary of State Clinton has turned up the heat under Chinese claims to sovereignty over the South China Sea, a bit of overreaching that has China’s neighbors looking to Washington to broker a resolution. This makes for an interesting counterpoint to the Korean minuet. Willy Lam reports at Asia Sentinel. (via Real Clear World)

While individual countries, in particular the Philippines, had in the past indicated a willingness to hold bilateral talks with the Chinese over joint development of disputed islands in the Spratly chain, Asean members are now convinced that internationalizing the talks – possibly under American auspices – is the best way to safeguard their interests. Some confrontations have already taken place, including an incident in 2009 when Chinese naval vessels intercepted a US spy ship near a Chinese submarine base on Hainan Island. The US ultimately sent destroyers to escort the spy ship out of the area and no escalation took place.

Meanwhile, rivalry between China and the US has manifested itself on another front: Beijing’s opposition to joint U.S.-South Korea sea-and-air military drills which started July 25. While the maneuvers were meant as a warning to Pyongyang, which is accused of torpedoing the South Korean warship Cheonan in late March, Beijing has fingered Washington for exacerbating its “anti-China containment policy.”

Vespers

¶ It’s the talk of the town: Michiko Kakutani LOVES Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. (NYT)

Gary Shteyngart’s wonderful new novel, “Super Sad True Love Story,” is a supersad, superfunny, superaffecting performance — a book that not only showcases the ebullient satiric gifts he demonstrated in his entertaining 2002 debut, “The Russian Debutante’s Handbook,” but that also uncovers his abilities to write deeply and movingly about love and loss and mortality. It’s a novel that gives us a cutting comic portrait of a futuristic America, nearly ungovernable and perched on the abyss of fiscal collapse, and at the same time it is a novel that chronicles a sweetly real love affair as it blossoms from its awkward, improbable beginnings.

Whenza last time that happened?

Compline

¶ Huge fans of micropayments that we are, we perhaps read more into Melissa Lafsky’s piece about tolling roads than we were meant to do. (The Infrastructurist)

While many might leap to shoot down any pro-toll movement, there’s some evidence that American drivers are far more likely to pay more tolls than they are more taxes. The latest America THINKS poll by HNTB Corp. found that the 1,005 people surveyed supported tolls on roads and bridges to generate transportation revenue, especially those that save them drive time. And when given a choice between 1) new roads funded by a higher gas tax, 2) new roads funded by new tolls, or 3) no new roads at all, the survey respondents preferred tolls (41%) or no new roads at all (41%) over increased gas taxes (18%).

Granted, this potential love for tolls isn’t unlimited — 61% of respondents said they’ve purposely avoided a road or bridge with tolls at least once. The reasons are what you’d expect: 43% felt that tolls are too expensive, and another 24% think of most toll plazas as high-traffic areas. The latter assumption is often true, and could be a barrier to adopting the more-tolls-less-taxes model of transportation funding. But then, if we collect more cash through tolls, then perhaps we can devote more money towards fixing the larger problem of congestion as a whole. The bottom line is that we need to figure out a way to refill the Highway Trust Fund and drag our infrastructure out of the proverbial stone (or gravel) ages. If that means doubling toll plazas in the country’s most congested areas, well, perhaps American drivers can stomach it.

As we’ve seen in New York, transponder-based automatic toll-paying systems like E-Z Pass take the congestion out of tolling. Nor do tollgates have to be few and far between. It also occurs to us that lower-income drivers could be relieved of tolls altogether with special accounts — a very important benefit as American cities revert to the historic urban norm, pushing the poor toward the outer suburbs.

Have a Look

¶ Mila’s Daydreams. (via kottke.org; The Awl)

¶ “Confessional can’t become sauna, church rules.” (via Marginal Revolution)

Matins

¶ At the Monday Note, Frédéric Filloux unpacks a recent study of “Digital Natives,” 18-24 year-old French people. No surprises, but some very interesting nuances — especially concerning the concentric groups to which Digital Natives belong.

The Group they trust. The Digital Native does not rely on a single group but on several, each with a different degree of trust. The three concentric circles are : close friends and family as the core, a group of 20 to 30 pals whom they trust, and the “Facebook friends” of 200 or so, which acts as an echo chamber. Beyond these groups, behaviors such as elusiveness, temptation to trick and circumvent the social system will prevail.

How do they get the news? No wonder why the group is crucial to the Digital Native getting his information. First of all, the fastest is the best. Forget about long form journalism. Quick TV newscasts, free commuter newspapers, bursts of news bulletins on the radio are more than enough. The group will do the rest: it will organize the importance, the hierarchy of news elements, it will set the news cycle’s pace.

More chilling: the group’s belief in its power to decide what’s credible and what’s not. Truth – at least perceived truth – seems to emerge from an implicit group vote, in total disregard for actual facts. If the group believes it, chances are it is “true”. When something flares up, if it turns out to be a groundless rumor, it’s fine since it won’t last (which is little consolation for the victim of a baseless rumor); and the news cycle waves are so compressed that old-fashioned notions such as reliability or trustfulness become secondary. Anyway, because they are systematically manipulated, the Digital Natives don’t trust the media (when they themselves are not the manipulators).

Lauds

¶ The Kids Are All Right is going Brokeback — maybe. (Speakeasy)

The independently produced dramatic comedy, about a lesbian couple and their two offspring, is quickly becoming the indie hit of the summer. When the film opened three weeks ago on seven screens, per-theater ticket sales averaged $72,127, the highest for any movie this year. This weekend, after growing from 35 to 201 venues, “The Kids” continued its winning streak, generating more than $2.6 million (with another robust per-theater average of $13,173, the best of any film in release), bringing its cumulative box-office to just under $5 million.

Acquired at the Sundance Film Festival for a reported $4.8 million by Universal subsidiary Focus Features, the film has benefited from excellent reviews (”universal acclaim,” according to Metacritic.com; 96% on Rottentomatoes.com) and early award-season chatter, pegged to stars Annette Bening, Julianne Moore and Ruffalo as well as director/co-screenwriter Lisa Cholodenko.

Like past summer sleepers “(500) Days of Summer” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” the film is rolling out gradually, building on word of mouth and hoping to play in theaters for months. In another sign of its forward momentum, sales over the weekend increased significantly from Friday to Saturday by a sizeable 57%. (As comparison, the new Angelina Jolie action vehicle “Salt” increased just 6%.)

When we saw the movie a second time over the weekend, our normally sleepy nabe was packed.

Prime

¶ At The Awl, a pseudonymous corporate bond analyst writes about fictive nature of “restructuring charges” — and what they suggest about the (ill) health of the economy.

Just as an aside here, there’s a reason for them breaking it out like that as a separate line-item in their expenses: that way, they can present it as a “one-time charge”. Analysts like me are supposed to discount it in looking at their “real” underlying cash flow and in forecasting their financial futures. It’s a one-time charge. Trouble is, it almost never is a one-time charge. That line, Restructuring Charges, appears, for most of my companies, every single quarter. Sometimes you begin to wonder what’s left to restructure.

Most CEOs and CFOs on earnings calls are not taking the big-picture view. They’re focused on the details of their own particular business. Still, I often ask myself if they see the connection that’s staring you right in the face: when is “the consumer” going to start spending again? Well, maybe when you stop firing him.

This really seems to be the root of the problem here in the US, and these earnings calls are like a microcosm of the whole US economy. You’ve probably read a hundred times that consumers are responsible for about two-thirds of GDP. (In the last four quarters up to 3/31/2010 it was close to 71%). So if they don’t have any spendable money because they’ve been fired (or are afraid they’re going to be fired), demand will be weak.

In other words: If I  fire everybody, then who is going to buy the stuff I make? You can see how this turns into a vicious circle.

Our idea: the deliberate “inefficiency” of more, smaller employers. As we see it, the only impact of “economies of scale” in the information age is inordinate executive compensation.

Tierce

¶ For Jonah Lehrer, the “mystery” of Inception is no mystery at all: the movie is a dream that evokes the dream-like mentality with which we watch movies.

What these experiments reveal is the essential mental process of movie-watching. It’s a process in which your senses are hyperactive and yet your self-awareness is strangely diminished. Now here’s where things get interesting, at least for this interpretation of Inception. When we fall asleep, the brain undergoes a similar pattern of global activity, as the prefrontal cortex goes quiet and the visual cortex becomes even more active than usual. But this isn’t the usual excitement of reality: this activity is semirandom and unpredictable, unbound by the constraints of sensation. (This is usually blamed on those squirts of acetylcholine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, percolating upwards from the brain stem.) It’s as if our cortex is entertaining us with surreal cinema, filling our strange nighttime narratives with whatever spare details happen to be lying around. Furthermore, the dreaming state is accompanied by an increase in activation in a wide range of “limbic” areas, those chunks of the cortex associated with the production of emotion. This is why even the most absurd nightmares cause us to wake up in a cold sweat. We care about what happens in our dreams, even when what happens makes no sense.

I’d argue that Inception tries to collapse the already thin distinction between dreaming and movie-watching. It gives us a movie in which most of the major plot points are simultaneously nonsensical – Why are we suddenly watching a thriller set in the arctic? Why are all the subconscious mercenaries such bad shots? Why don’t Cobb’s kids ever age? – and strangely compelling, just like a dream. And so we bite our fingernails even though we “know” it’s just a silly movie. Thanks to the subdued activity of the frontal lobes coupled with the over-excitement of the visual cortex, we sit in our plush chairs munching on popcorn and confuse the fake with the real. We don’t question the non-sequiturs or complain about the imperfect special effects or shallow characters. Instead, we just sit back and watch and lose track of the time. It’s almost as if we’re being manipulated by Dom Cobb himself, as he effortlessly travels deep into our brain to plant an idea. But this Dom Cobb – we’ll call him Christopher Nolan – doesn’t need a specially formulated sedative. He just needs a big screen.

¶ Steve Almond’s new book, Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life, got a dismissive review in this week’s New York Times Book Review. Steve’s not happy about it, and, like us, he wishes that the editors at the  Book Review took their jobs (instead of themselves) more seriously. But his ultimate response is acceptance.

Books – especially literary books – should be filled with smart, provocative ideas that deserve a response. They are intended to initiate a conversation about what it means to be human. A good review enlarges that conversation.

But it’s a loser move – an imitative fallacy, actually – to dismiss a bad review. As unpleasant as it’s been to read the assessments of my work in the NYTBR, both of the reviews in question had something to teach me – about dumb decisions I made at the keyboard, about the limited appeal of my sensibility, about certain habits of excess borne of my own doubt.

So, yeah, it’s okay to get pissed, maybe even inevitable. But we must not stop learning as writers. Even our least sympathetic reader has something to offer.

Second, as writers (of whatever sort) we should discuss books as seriously as we want ours to be discussed. I truly believe this. And not just in print, but in our daily lives, in how we talk about books with friends and colleagues, on our blogs, or even within some aggrieved comment thread. To degrade another writer without a respectful consideration of his or her intent and labor is to degrade our own vocation.

It would be wonderful if the NYTBR had a bunch of editors who held themselves to this standard. But that’s not really their job – as much as they might think it is. Their job is to drum up interest in a cultural artifact (the book) that keeps sliding further out onto the margins of our frenzied visual culture.

Nones

¶ We’re always delighted when Strange Maps turns up something piquant for this hour, even if it does involve Switzerland. Who knew that there are no fewer than three movements to expand the Alpine federation? But of course there would be three, just as there are three languages.

Although it doesn’t take in all the areas covered by the first and second proposal, the third plan is the most ambitious one. Launched in June of 2010 by the right-wing populist Schweizerische Volkspartei (SVP), it would expand Switzerland into all its neighbours–except tiny Liechtenstein, which would be enclaved inside a truly Greater Switzerland. “We’re always discussing Switzerland joining the EU, never the other way around,” said SVP-president Toni Brunner, approving of to the proposal by one of his party-members. SVP-parliamentarian Dominique Baettig said he would neighbouring regions that “suffered under their national and the European political classes” to join the Swiss “democracy with a human face.” Ideally, he would like to see Switzerland snatch the Land Vorarlberg from Austria; the province Aosta, Varese, Como and Bolzano (‘Bosen’ in German) from Italy; the départments Jura, Ain, Savoie and Haute-Savoie and the région of Alsace (‘Elsass’ in German) from France. The single biggest chunk would be the German Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, bringing in almost 11 million new Swiss citizens. If all went according to the Mr Baettig’s plan, the new, Greater Switzerland would count around 25 million inhabitants and would be a mid-sized European power to be reckoned with… at least by the Libyans.

The crack about Libya refers to the beginning of the entry, which discusses Muammar Gadaffi’s “crackpot” desire to liquidate the Confoederatio Helvetica.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Darryl Campbell presents George Orwell as a pamphleteer — Orwell thought of himself as such — whose references to the essentially ephemeral controversies that inspired his work fade and (much like some hyperlinks) break. This makes it possible for people to make whatever use they want to of his work, and now Tea Partiers decry anything vaguely socialist as Orwellian — notwithstanding Orwell’s strong socialist sympathies.

Never mind that, for most of his life, Orwell advocated nothing short of a socialist revolution in England! As far as these people were concerned, Orwell’s works amount to nothing more than an anti-government, anti-change screed.

Overuse on the one hand, distortion on the other: what perversely fitting tributes to a writer who underscored the dangers of reductionism, revisionism, and willful ignorance. Clearly, George Orwell is a victim of his own success, and in a peculiar way – there are no public fights over the legacy of Hemingway or Joyce or even over other midcentury political writers like Hannah Arendt that rival the ones for Orwell’s posthumous stamp of approval.

So Orwell was right to consider himself more pamphleteer than novelist. Many critics have dismissed this as a kind of false modesty, but in this case, Orwell was not merely managing expectations. Pamphlets are designed to make a specific point to a specific audience, and then to be thrown away because they can no longer serve the purpose for which they were intended. Orwell’s works are ephemeral too, in the sense that they cannot really be understood without some semblance of historical and intellectual context. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of reading, and a lot of extracurricular effort to do so, however. Obviously, many readers simply find it easier to shout down any opposite political position with Orwell’s own words – Big Brother, thoughtcrime, Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others – than to really understand what these words, in context, were supposed to represent….

Until Orwell’s readers bother to do so – which, as a rule, they don’t – then we can look forward to another sixty years of use and abuse.

Compline

¶ At a local library’s used-book sale, Michael Blim picks up Robert Sherwood’s Hopkins and Roosevelt, a book as old as we are. (We haven’t read it, alas.) The shift in political vision twixt then and now is depresing. (3 Quarks Daily)

Sherwood cites a passage from a remarkable speech Roosevelt as Governor of New York gave to an extraordinary session of the state legislature on August 21, 1931. I quote it at length because of its germinal significance for the political beliefs of Roosevelt the man, before he became Roosevelt the president:

“What is the State? It is the duly constituted representative of an organized society of human beings, created by them for their mutual protection and well-being. ‘The State’ and ‘The government’ is but the machinery through which such mutual aid and protection are achieved. The cave man fought for existence unaided or even opposed by his fellow man, but today the humblest citizen of our State stands protected by all the power and strength of his Government. … The duty of the State toward the citizens is the duty of the servant to his master. … One of these duties of the State is that of caring for those of its citizens who find themselves the victims of such adverse circumstance as makes them unable to obtain even the necessities for mere existence without the aid of others. … To these unfortunate citizens aid must be extended by Government, not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of social duty.” (Sherwood, 1948, 31)

Roosevelt’s beliefs seem almost embarrassingly simple. The state serves the greater social purpose of protecting and supporting all of its citizens, but most especially those in need. Full stop.

For reasons that continue to be perplexing and profoundly enraging, neither the Administration nor the Democratic Party in Congress seems capable of upholding this one basic proposition under which they were rewarded with power in the first place. 

Have a Look

¶ Superlative Mad Men recapping at Tony & Lorenzo. (via MetaFilter) Ben Zimmer on Mad Men-ese. (NYT)

¶ The pancake-flipping robot (on the off-chance that you haven’t seen it already; the iPad wouldn’t let us watch it, and we kept forgetting to check it out at the computer.) PS: we wish we were as coordinated as the robot. (at kottke.org)

¶ “Just How Bad Is the Summer Air Quality in Your City?” (The Infrastructurist)

Matins

¶ People who wonder why bullying is suddenly such a big issue may be encouraged to remember that there came a day when the drawing and quartering of criminals seemed wrong somehow. We seem to have arrived at a similar moment regarding schoolyard cruelty among children. Susan Engel and Marlene Sandstrom caution against glib, one-size-fits-all approaches.

But our research on child development makes it clear that there is only one way to truly combat bullying. As an essential part of the school curriculum, we have to teach children how to be good to one another, how to cooperate, how to defend someone who is being picked on and how to stand up for what is right.

To do this, teachers and administrators must first be trained to recognize just how complex children’s social interactions really are. Yes, some conflict is a normal part of growing up, and plenty of friendly, responsible children dabble in mean behavior. For these children, a little guidance can go a long way. That is why the noted teacher and author Vivian Paley once made a rule that her students couldn’t exclude anyone from their play. It took a lot of effort to make it work, but it had a powerful impact on everyone.

Other children bully because they have emotional and developmental problems, or because they come from abusive families. They require our help more than our punishment.

The kind of bullying, though, that presents the most difficulty in figuring out how and when to intervene falls between these two extremes: Sometimes children who aren’t normally bullies get caught up in a larger culture of aggression — say, a clique of preadolescent girls who form a club with the specific function of being mean to other girls. Teachers must learn the difference between various sorts of aggressive behaviors, as well as the approaches that work best for each.

Ms Engel and Ms Sandstrom also note that a successfull anti-bullying program in Norway involves all school personnel, including janitors and bus drivers.

Lauds

¶ Sally Potter and Tilda Swinton have done a lot of talking lately about their collaboration on the recently-re-opened Orlando (1992). Much as we adore Ms Swinton onscreen, we’re worried about the transponder that’s relaying her remarks from orbit. If you can figure out, from the following, why she gave up stage acting, please let us know. (The House Next Door)

GR: When did you decide on Tilda Swinton for the part of Orlando?

SP: I can’t remember the exact point. What I did know in the early treatments was that the most important, the overarching task actually, was to find a key collaborator who could embody Orlando’s entire journey. People proposed to me at the beginning that we have two people to play the part and that was absolutely a non-starter. So finding that person was obviously crucial.

I saw Tilda in Man to Man [the solo play by Manfred Karge, in which Swinton played a woman who adopted her late husband’s identity in order to keep his job] and I also saw her in a film called Friendship’s Death made by Peter Wollen, and of course knew Derek’s films. There were a couple of things: In Friendship’s Death there was, let me put it this way, evidence of extreme presence. Okay, that was ding. The second thing, in Man to Man, there was this moment, at the very end of the show, Tilda had to take off this wig thing and take a bow. I remember sitting bolt upright in the theater, because there was that presence again and in a twinkling of a flash, there was, first of all, an absolute radiant connection with the audience, and then a coming into the present moment from the play. It was those two things that in my mind added up.

TS: It was the only way that I could imagine taking a bow standing in front of the audience without the disguise, because it was an encounter between me and the audience. I suppose that was the very beginning of the idea of Orlando [addressing the audience]…at that stage, it so happens, I don’t think I had made a film in which I didn’t look into the camera. The very first film I was in, Caravaggio, I remember asking Derek if I can look into the camera, because I was negotiating this relationship with the camera at the time. I was not completely comfortable at being watched, so I wanted to make friends with the camera full on. That also went into my performance work doing Man to Man. That’s one of the reasons why it was the last piece of theater that I ever did. I loved the relationship with the audience so much that I’ve never been a great one for the fourth wall ever since.

SP: The lens is the portal, a very intimate portal to the gaze of the audience, so negotiating that portal is key.

Also: did it really take seventeen years to make and release I Am Love?

Prime

¶ Simon Johnson surmises that the most effective regulation under the Dodd-Frank banking reform act may occur in Congressional hearings. (The Baseline Scenario)

The final way in which regulation could actually make progress would be through continued congressional pressure.  It is slightly too early to discern the exact contours of what may be possible, but early discussion suggest we will see established a series of revealing oversight hearings in both the House and the Senate.

Just as the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board appears at regular intervals to explain and elaborate on monetary policy, the chair of the Systemic Risk Council (i.e., the Treasury Secretary) may soon be appearing to discuss the level and determinants of risk in the global financial system.  This is a central concept for the Kanjorski Amendment, the radical language within the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act that gives regulators the right and the responsibility to break up big banks when they pose a “grave risk” to the financial system.

Such congressional hearings could become a vague or meaningless discussion, of course.  But the early indications are that there is likely to also be a great deal of substance, e.g., about new methodologies, global developments (such as in China), and even incidents when major firms with “state-of-the-art” risk management systems manage to lose a great deal of money (e.g., as with Goldman Sachs’ equity trading in the last quarter).

Tierce

¶ In “The Future of Rocket Scientists,” Brandon Keim talks to Chicago’s Andrey Rzhetsky about — well, how it’s the computers that will decide what robots will do, not humans. Sitting down recommended. (Wired Science)

Wired.com: Cornell’s Hod Lipson designed a program that discovers equations to explain relationships between data. Researchers then have to figure out what the equations mean. It’s like interpreting an oracle’s pronouncements. Is that the role of the human in all this?

Rzhetsky: It’s an interesting question. I talk to electrical engineers who use genetic algorithms to design circuits, and the circuits end up being completely alien to humans. They’re very robust, but designed in such a way that it’s not obvious how to understand them. That’s similar to what Lipson discovers: non-human logic. In Lipson’s analysis, he wants to make it transparent and understandable to humans. I’m not sure that’s necessary.

Wired.com: Some scientists say that being able to crunch huge datasets makes hypotheses obsolete — why worry about testing when you can find connections. You don’t like that idea, though. Why not?

Rzhetsky In the movie Memento, a man has only a short-term memory. Every 15 minutes has to reconstruct causal relationships. He observes people talking to him, and doesn’t know who’s a friend and who’s a foe. That’s my metaphor for abandoning hypothesis and context.

There are a lot of approaches claiming you can reverse-engineer the world from the flow of data. With an infinite dataset, the statement probably gets close to truth. But I don’t think it’s true for individual datasets. Prior hypotheses and contextual knowledge need to be used.

Wired.com: So is the role of human scientists to come up with hypotheses?

Rzhetsky: The tools can come up with hypotheses, too.

Sext

¶ The wonders of the Internet! A story that we missed earlier this week (you might say that we miss stories for a living) has been picked up by Jenny Diski, at the London Review Blog. You will recall that Ms Diski recently wrote about arsenic; this story involves cyanide.

Moving on from arsenic, we come to cyanide. Is that a kind of maturity? Like going from cheesy triangles to morbiers? What I know about cyanide comes from Agatha Christie or somesuch and is, in totality: smells like bitter almonds. So, you think, why would anyone drink it in their coffee without first wondering if their nearest and dearest were trying to kill them. Answer: because almost certainly Starbucks has an almond syrup latte that has breathed new life into the wife-poisoning industry. Then again people are always knocking back cyanide in their champagne in Christie without complaint, until their hand flies to their throat, their face contorts into a hideous mask and they fall writhing and then lifeless to the ground. Miss Marple and M. Poirot only have to bend their heads down to the lips of the corpse to get a whiff of almonds and know exactly how, why and who done the deed. I suggest you just say no if your beverage smells of bitter almonds.

The wonder of the literary imagination is that Ms Diski easily and amusingly spins a story that’s vastly longer than her source.

Nones

¶ A complex referendum system is about to be implemented in Europe, giving half a billion people supernational rights. Will this make people from Poland and Portugal work closely on common causes? Will there be common causes? Note to California: there’s a built-in filter that protects the EU from frivolous fads. (NYT)

The final step is to amass the one million signatures. At that point, the commission would be obligated to propose legislation or give a reason why not within four months. Alain Lamassoure, a French member of the European Parliament who fought to include the initiative in the Lisbon Treaty, said many of the proposed restrictions were reasonable, though some fine-tuning might be needed.

He believes that citizens can make important legislative contributions in areas that are sometimes overlooked, like the complications couples from different European countries face getting a divorce in the European Union, or difficulties transferring education credentials across borders.

But Mr. Lamassoure does not want to hear too much from the citizenry. “Once a month is about right,” he said. “The risk is too little or too much. Once every two years would be too little.”

Vespers

¶ The Millions has a new intern (?), Ujala Seghal, and she débuts winningly with the confession that she has always been motivated to read books so that she can show off having read them.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care for reading. There were many other proper, compelling books that I had proper, compelling reasons for wanting to read. But I didn’t want to read the books I wanted to read. I wanted to read the books I didn’t want to read. Let me rephrase: There was a divide between the books that I wanted to read, and the books that I wanted to want to read.  And the latter category won over the former time and time again.

No doubt the years have stitched up the gap between what I want to read and what I want to want to read, because only children have that much to prove – right? We’ll see. Several years later, in high school, my English teacher assigned Gravity’s Rainbow to our class. This may come as a shock to no one, but about 100 pages or so in, she gave it up as a bold experiment gone hideously awry. Still, she was an unconventional teacher (there was a sign on the classroom ceiling that said, “If you can’t eat it, smoke it!”), so she gave the few of us who wanted to keep reading the option to form a satellite class. In exchange for being able to skip school, set our own assignments and conduct this “class” at our leisure (responsibilities we handled with unwavering diligence, if I recall), we had to successfully convince her why we wanted to continue with this mad novel when (in what I assume to have been her subtext) we had already demonstrated ourselves to be Pynchon-unworthy morons. ….

I want to read the harder stuff, too. I don’t exactly recall what I wrote to my teacher about Gravity’s Rainbow in school. I probably breezed over the fact that I didn’t understand it much, and that I was intimated both by its size and by the bizarre labels it seems to generate, like: “Requires Proficiency in Calculus for Even Elementary Understanding.” But I do remember writing to her that although I wasn’t quite sure what sort of reader I was yet, I wanted to read Gravity’s Rainbow because I knew that was the sort of reader I wanted to be.

Compline

¶ We don’t know whether to laugh or to cry: Rentafriend. (KansasCity.com; via The Morning News)

Rentafriend receives 100,000 unique views every month and has almost 2,000 members who pay $24.95 a month, or $69.95 a year, for a log-in and password so they can peruse the photos and profiles of 167,000-plus possible pals.

Christopher Barton, 31, of Boulder City, Nev., first tried Rentafriend about six months ago during a business trip training clients for an online university. Living on the road, he hates to eat alone in restaurants and wants to make the most of his downtime.

“I’m in different cities all the time,” he said. “You kind of get a tour guide to a certain extent.”

He chooses young, attractive women because “I’d just feel weird paying to go out with a guy.” A rent-a-pal in Chicago took him to a fun, hole-in-the-wall restaurant that he never would have found himself. In New Orleans, he and another rental hit Cafe du Monde in the French Market and Jackson Square.

Have a Look

¶ Felix Salmon decodes Jamie Dimon.

¶ How to walk through Grand Central (if it’s not nearby to teach you). (Wired Science)

¶ This just in: the Library of America has a blog. (Thanks, LJL!)