Matins

¶ The good news about a New Scientist roundup of AIDS-fighting developments is that there’s good news — especially about that vaginal gel. The bad news is that AIDS is slipping into company with all the other diseases that disproportionately victimize the poor.

In covering the microbicidal gel results, the NYT also mentions a study of 3800 Malawian girls that finds that small cash payments to them and their families – between $1 and $10 per month – reduce HIV infection rates. Just 1.2 per cent of the girls who received cash contracted HIV after 18 months, compared to 3 percent of the girls who did not receive payments. The larger the payment the less likely the girls were to turn to older men for sex, cash and gifts, underscoring the link between poverty and HIV.

That connection holds in the developed world, too. In a study of urban heterosexuals living in the US, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found high rates of HIV infection among the poorest. Those living below the poverty line were twice as likely to have HIV than better off people living in inner cities – 2.4 percent versus 1.2 per cent, Reuters reports.

Lauds

¶ We don’t know anything about “pedigreed” film critic Armond White (or, if we did, we forget), but his brazen dismissal of Roger Ebert brought on one of those Stop And Think moments that make our day. (/Film; via The Awl)

I do think it is fair to say that Roger Ebert destroyed film criticism. Because of the wide and far reach of television, he became an example of what a film critic does for too many people. And what he did simply was not criticism. It was simply blather. And it was a kind of purposefully dishonest enthusiasm for product, not real criticism at all…I think he does NOT have the training. I think he simply had the position. I think he does NOT have the training. I’VE got the training. And frankly, I don’t care how that sounds, but the fact is, I’ve got the training. I’m a pedigreed film critic. I’ve studied it. I know it. And I know many other people who’ve studied it as well, studied it seriously. Ebert just simply happened to have the job. And he’s had the job for a long time. He does not have the foundation. He simply got the job. And if you’ve ever seen any of his shows, and ever watched his shows on at least a two-week basis, then you surely saw how he would review, let’s say, eight movies a week and every week liked probably six of them. And that is just simply inherently dishonest. That’s what’s called being a shill. And it’s a tragic thing that that became the example of what a film critic does for too many people. Often he wasn’t practicing criticism at all. Often he would point out gaffes or mistakes in continuity. That’s not criticism. That’s really a pea-brained kind of fan gibberish.

Mr White can’t have it both ways, though: Roger Ebert can’t have destroyed film criticism if he never engaged in it.

Prime

¶ What we can’t help loving most about Felix Salmon’s thinking is his optimism about smaller institutions prevailing over larger ones. Yesterday, Felix tackled a story, by colleague Matt Goldstein, about how big retail banks believe that they ought to be allowed to become even bigger. Having noted that he has seen no evidence that economies of scale increase beyond a $10 billion asset level has been passed (and he notes that one Wall Street branch of Citibank alone — and not its principal one, either — carries $1.5 billion in deposits), Felix turns his attention to an Accenture report that notes consumer disinterest in “one stop shopping.”

This says to me that there’s a big opportunity right now for smaller banks to capitalize on the unhappiness that the big banks’ customers are feeling. (Not many holders of WaMu checking accounts are exactly overjoyed right now to be banking with Chase.) And as free checking slowly disappears, there will surely be a move to consolidate the many different accounts that people are now opening into one relationship institution. While there are reasons to use a big bank for such purposes, there are also reasons to use someone more local, where they know you personally, and where you’re not at the mercy of some balky computer.

One of the things I’m looking forward to finding out about BankSimple is the degree to which they’ll interact with their customers personally, over the phone, via email, and via Twitter and Facebook, applying human intelligence on a case-by-case basis. It’s high-touch, but also high-reward, if customers end up essentially giving them all their money as a result. What’s more, that kind of thing very hard to scale to a monster organization, the hiring of Frank Eliason by Citi notwithstanding. Small banks can be nimbler and more responsive, and can become very profitable for their owners in that sweet spot between say $1 billion and $10 billion in assets.

Tierce

¶ Ed Yong sends his sputum to 23andme; a month later, he receives his DNA analysis. How cool is that? What’s cool is, precisely, Ed’s very grown-up assessment of the service, which, despite its designer’s best efforts, is not, in his view, for everyone — or possibly even for most people. All the information in the world does not make us better at assessing risk. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

These problems are inherent to the different companies, the tests they use and the information they provide. But further problems arise when that information enters the brains of the customers, where it often comes crashing against an inability to process information about risk. For all the careful phrases around risks and uncertainties, some folks are going to treat their report as nothing more than a sophisticated horoscope, given extra weight by the spectre of genetic determinism. For example, one brown-eyed community member was told that their genes predicted a high probability of having blue eyes with just a 1% chance of having brown eyes. They found the results “unsatisfying” and “confusing”. And this is a trivial example – the emotions that accompany a risk prediction for a severe disease must be even more potent, and especially so for people who aren’t well-versed in genetics.

Clearly, some will need more help than others at interpreting their results and that help will come at a premium. Not every jobbing health professional will have the knowledge to advise people about the implications of their genetic tests. Specialised genetic counsellors exist and 23andme will refer you to one, but you pay for the service out of your own wallet. This comes on top of the standard cost of the test, which would set the average customer back by $499.

I have mixed feelings about whether the cost is justified. The results are wonderful fodder for the curious and the confident but their limitations (especially for non-white ethnicities) prevent them from being of any obviously practical value to your health. This may change over time as more data flood in and the price starts to fall. But this doesn’t feel like a technology where there is a real benefit in being an early adopter.

Sext

¶ We think that John Koblin’s story about Gerry Marzorati and the Times has all of the essential ingredients for a multi-planed meta-loaded novel about Gotham hipsterissimo. A bunch of people edit a chic magazine for a living (the Sunday Times), and of course they’re good at that, for a while at least (nothing lasts forever). But how good at they are presenting themselves to outsiders who ask “What Went Wrong?” The issue of whether Megan Liberman is an “abrasive woman” or a smart cookie who can see the bullshit in “bookish” could take up chapters all by itself. A gifted novelist — calling Jennifer Egan! — could look into Lynn Hirschberg’s eyes when she says, “It makes me sad. I don’t dislike or hate Gerry at all. I feel things went wrong somehow.”  In other words: don’t expect Mr Koblin’s story to clear up a thing. (The Observer; via The Awl)

When looking back at his tenure, Mr. Marzorati twice made the point that he served longer than his predecessor. Yet Adam Moss, the current editor of New York magazine, had a celebrated tenure at The Times Magazine and also had a markedly different style than Mr. Marzorati’s. He was hands-on and wanted to be involved with every decision. There were lots of meetings, and lots of conversations about nearly every page. Mr. Marzorati, who was Mr. Moss’ deputy, has had a different style: He likes to delegate power and puts a lot of trust and authority in his deputies and story editors.

“I think Gerry is a very democratic person,” said Stefano Tonchi, the former editor of T Magazine, who took over Condé Nast’s W Magazine earlier this year.

When all the magazines at The Times were doing well, staffers saw Mr. Marzorati’s approach as a blessing. But by the time budgets started to dwindle, his style was reinterpreted. “When there’s a hands-off approach, when things are going well, everyone’s happy,” said one former staffer, “and when things aren’t going well, it feels like no one cares.”

During the difficult time, some staffers said, Mr. Marzorati seemed to lose some of his energy. “I think I and others felt that Gerry was less ambitious and less engaged in those last couple years,” said a former staffer.

“I don’t even know if he changed, or the situation changed, but that enthusiasm that he had for contemporary culture and art and design and fashion and music somehow was still a part of his life, but not in his magazine,” said Mr. Tonchi.

Nones

¶ In The Nation, Eric Foner reviews two books about the Confederacy and its aftermath that constructively disrupt a few assumptions that were lying around in our attic. It turns out that, as a polity — as distinct from a fighting machine — the Confederacy was not as unifed as we Yankees might have thought — or been encouraged to think when the War was over.

McCurry begins by stating what should be obvious but is frequently denied, that the Confederacy was something decidedly odd in the nineteenth century: “an independent proslavery nation.” The Confederate and state constitutions made clear that protecting slavery was their raison d’être. Abandoning euphemisms like “other persons” by which the US Constitution referred to slaves without directly acknowledging their existence, Confederates forthrightly named the institution, erected protections around it and explicitly limited citizenship to white persons. McCurry implicitly pokes holes in other explanations for Southern secession, such as opposition to Republican economic policies like the tariff or fear for the future of personal freedom under a Lincoln administration. Georgia, she notes, passed a law in 1861 that made continuing loyalty to the Union a capital offense, hardly the action of a government concerned about individual liberty or the rights of minorities.

The Confederacy, McCurry writes, was conceived as a “republic of white men.” But since of its 9 million people more than 3 million were slaves and half of the remainder disenfranchised white women, the new nation faced from the outset a “crisis of legitimacy.” However much the law defined white women as appendages of their husbands, entitled to protection but not a public voice, and slaves simply as property, Southern leaders realized early that they would have to compete with the Union for the loyalty of these groups, treating them, in effect, as independent actors. The need to generate consent allowed “the Confederate unenfranchised” to step onto the stage of politics, with their own demands, grievances and actions.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, J P Smith writes about how he set about reaching his goal of reading Proust in the original, with only three years of (forgotten) high-school French — via, interestingly, the work of Patrick Modiano, which inspired his own first novel.

Adopting French as a second reading language gave me two worlds through which my own work could be filtered. As a novelist (far less so as a screenwriter), I find that reading in two languages has a way of enriching one’s own work. When reading in French I’m really stepping beyond myself and my world, and it’s this tiptoeing into another culture and another way of viewing things, that allows me to look back over my shoulder and find perhaps a whole new way of telling my own story.

¶ Meanwhile, Jean Ruaud muses about “moins” — less — so suavely that we daydreamed that he has kitted out his Paris flat not with stuff but with information. (Mnémoglypes)

Donc l’information, j’aime. Envoyez à pleins tuyaux. Par contre plus ça va plus je pense à me dépouiller du maximum de biens matériels. Les biens matériels ne me rendent pas plus libres, ils m’encombrent, ils m’attachent. Ne serait-il pas mieux de les réduire au minimum de confort dans la société moderne? En restant bien sûr relié au reste du monde et aux sources d’informations via les gadgets informatiques qui me sont devenus indispensables. Plus j’y réfléchis plus je pense qu’on peut se passer d’un tas de choses et en particulier de la consommation effrénée de trucs qui ne servent à rien sinon à affirmer un statut et à calmer notre anxiété. L’informatique moderne et l’Internet et les trucs comme l’iPad et/ou l’iPhone pourraient nous y aider.

Needless to say, we are dying to hear that our friend has acquired an iPad!

Compline

¶ When we were students, teachers were like nannies: if they had personal lives, we never saw them, and we assumed, thinking back later on, that many of them hadn’t had personal lives, just to avoid the complications. Like so much else in the world, that is changing. Not so long ago, we’d have read Josh Barkey’s account of tacitly sharing the breakup of his marriage with his private-school students with a toss of our head: what was he thinking? But we can’t bring ourselves to conclude that, just because he’s a teacher, Mr Barkey has no right to write his life in blog form. Perpend. ( Good)

By that time, I had completed the rough draft of my memoir and had removed it from the internet to begin the laborious process of rewriting until my forehead bled. The administration stood by me but, sadly, the student in question was withdrawn from the school and I was left with a melancholic taste in my mouth and a whole lot of questions in my mind: Did I do the right thing, posting such an intimate, personal story on a public forum my students could access? Could/should I have done more to keep them from finding it? When I knew that they were reading it, should I have changed the content, or even taken it offline?

I don’t know. It has been a struggle, all this year, to search for the balance between honesty and professionalism. While I feel that the students crave reality and that it is my obligation as an art teacher and a human to try and give it to them, I understand that I am a representative of my employers both in and out of the school building. In a private institution such as the one where I teach, I do not believe I have the right to say and do whatever I darn well please when I walk out the doors at the end of the day.

Have a Look

¶ Does this make us laugh because we’re big fans of Mike Judge’s Extract, and couldn’t help thinking of Beth Grant’s character? (FAIL)

Matins

¶ The first three paragraphs of Jeff Bezos’s remarkable commencement address to Princeton’s Class of 2010. A clever man talking to clever kids draws a vital line. (via kottke.org)

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

Mr Bezos’s grandfather’s timing could not have been better.

Lauds

¶ Philip Bell’s plea for more musical education will probably fall on deaf ears — the deaf ears of older people. We must hope that younger people are listening! It strikes us that, as a fundamentally social act, music-making ought to be more prominently features than individualist-oriented “art.”(Nature News; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Yet all these benefits of music education have done rather little to alter a common perception that music is an optional extra to be offered only if children have the time and inclination. Ethnomusicologist John Blacking put it more damningly: we insist that musicality is a rare gift, so that music is to be created by a tiny minority for the passive consumption of the majority⁸. Having spent years among African cultures that recognized no such distinctions, Blacking was appalled at the way this elitism labelled most people ‘unmusical’.

Kraus and Chandrasekaran rightly argue that the marginalization of music training in schools “should be reassessed” in the light of the benefits it may offer by “improving learning skills and listening ability”. But it will be a sad day when the only way to persuade educationalists to embrace music is via its side effects on cognition and intelligence. We should be especially wary of that argument in this age of cost-benefit analyses, targets and utilitarian impact assessments. Music should indeed be celebrated (and studied) as a gymnasium for the mind; but ultimately its value lies with the way it enriches, socializes and humanizes us qua music.

Prime

¶ John Cassidy’s excellent piece on Paul Volcker reminds us that the former Fed chairman is arguably the most authoritative voice in American economics. No quant he! (The New Yorker)

Volcker’s skepticism about bankers and other financiers dates back to his days at the Fed, where he opposed the Reagan Administration’s efforts to deregulate the banking system. In 1982, Congress passed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, which gave struggling thrift banks (also known as savings and loans) the right to make commercial loans. (Previously, they had been restricted to residential lending.) The legislation was intended to enable thrifts to earn higher profits, and it was strongly supported by Treasury Secretary Donald Regan, the former head of Merrill Lynch. Volcker repeatedly disagreed with Regan and with other members of the Administration. Referring to the S. & L.s, he told his staff, “Give ’em commercial lending power, and they’ll end up with all the bad loans.”

This is precisely what happened, and Volcker regards the S. & L. crisis, which ended up costing taxpayers about a hundred and eighty billion dollars in today’s money, as a template for the financial catastrophe of 2007-08. Unlike many economists, who regard financial innovation as generally a good thing, he is suspicious of many things that today’s big financial institutions do, such as creating complex securities and building elaborate mathematical models. Last December, at a conference in England for banking executives, he said that the most important banking innovation of recent decades was the A.T.M.

Volcker is driven by a sense of moral urgency. For years, financiers motivated by the prospect of short-term gains—traders, investment bankers, quantitative analysts, hedge-fund and private-equity-fund managers—have been extracting outsized monetary rewards, while insisting that they earned them by creating wealth for their clients and making markets more efficient. Then came the crisis of 2007-08, in which misguided financial engineering brought down the entire economy. Speaking to the conference in December, Volcker said, “Wake up, gentlemen. Your response, I can only say, has been inadequate.” In an era accustomed to the circumlocutions of Alan Greenspan and the anodyne public statements of Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Volcker’s outspokenness insured that his statements were widely noticed. “He’s got a well-defined view of finance that is very refreshing,” notes Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago professor who is the chief economist of the White House advisory board that Volcker chairs. “He says, ‘You’ve gotta keep an eye on these guys. If you give them the chance, they will use their market position to line their pockets.’ That’s an important world view.”

It’s also an attitude that Volcker extends to his family. A few years ago, Volcker’s eldest grandson, who is a math whiz, informed him that on graduating from college he was planning to become a financial engineer. “My heart sank,” Volcker told me. (After working for a couple of years

Tierce

¶ We love Google to pieces &c &c, but we have to insist that Google’s “renewable energy” deal is far more virtual than actual. (Good)

When a wind farm generates X units of clean electricity, it gets two valuable things. First, it gets the electricity itself, which can be sold out on the market alongside electricity generated in other ways. But it also gets “Renewable Energy Credits,” which are certificates that those X units of energy are clean. An energy consumer can buy those renewable energy credits from the renewable energy producers (or on an open market) to satisfy requirements they’re under to use a certain amount of renewable energy. When that happens, the buyer has, essentially, bought the right to call X amount of energy use “renewable” (and the seller loses that right). This system achieves a few goals. First, it puts a special premium on clean energy. Second, it allows energy consumers who are far away from the sources of renewable energy to still “use” renewable energy by buying RECs.

Who’s stopping Google from moving its servers to North Dakota?

Sext

¶ It seems only right that the magazine for those who read it “for the articles” is aiming to become “the go-to site for those who are bored at work.” Please weldome TheSmokingJacket.com — Playboy made SFW! From Don Babwin’s AP report at Yahoo:

The site, named after one of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner’s favorite pieces of clothing (silkpajamas.com was taken), won’t include the long interviews or in-depth articles found in Playboy.

Instead, it’s meant to be decidedly un-serious. Or, in the parlance of its audience, ROFL — rolling on the floor, laughing. And cool, “basically a juke box of cool,” said Jellinek.

Among the original content visitors to the site will see is a list of signs that show a man has given up trying to attract women. They include wearing Velcro sneakers and pants with elastic waistbands — clothing Hef wouldn’t be caught dead in, if he thought of wearing anything but his trademark jammies.

The site will dip into the Playboy archives with photographs like those from the 1983 Playmate Playoffs, in which bathing suit-clad women competed in games such as a tug-of-war. There will be links to the kinds of things people are already e-mailing their friends, from funny moments on television shows such as “The Colbert Report” and “The Daily Show” to a Korean Parliament brawl that’s been a big Web hit recently.

(via The Morning News)

Nones

¶ Meanwhile, in Managua, Daniel Ortega throws a party for himself, celebrating what former colleagues but now disenchanted opponents dismiss as a “retro-tropical dictatorship with a God complex,” in the words of reporter Tim Rogers. It is sad to read how democracy works in Nicaragua today. (Real Clear World)

Though the Sandinistas represent only 35 percent of Nicaragua’s population, the military discipline and ideological fanaticism make them the most tenacious political bloc in the country. So much so that an M&R Consultants poll released last week shows that if the 2011 presidential elections were held today, Ortega would win with 54 percent of the vote, thanks to a 100 percent Sandinista turnout and an abstention rate that could reach as high as 50 percent among the rest of the population, which has little faith in the country’s election process.

For many ex-combatants who fought to defend the revolution against U.S.-funded contra invaders in the 1980s, defending Ortega’s continuity in power now is part of the same struggle that has shaped their lives.

“For us, the re-election of Daniel is necessary so that there will be continuity in his revolutionary project,” said former Sandinista combatant Santos Abaunza, a jovial man who turned out to the plaza wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and a red-and-back Sandinista bandana. “I think Daniel needs at least another two terms in office (10 years) so that the revolutionary project will be firmly installed.”

Vespers

¶ Tim Parks’s forthcoming memoir, Teach Us To Sit Still, sounds like a fascinating study in holistic illness. Here’s tantalizing tidbit from his Foreword. (Guardian; via The Second Pass)

To date I have written twenty books, with this twenty-one. I may have shaken off my parents’ faith, then, but not the unrelenting purposefulness they taught me, that heady mix of piety and ambition. And like my father I have lived under a spell of words. He read the Bible and wrote his sermons. He told you what was true and how you mut behave. Rhythmically, persuasively, the way politicians do, and the pundits of opinion columns; the people who know everything and are sure of themselves. My novels have tended the other way, suggested how mysterious it all is, how partial anyone’s point of view, how comically lost we are. But even this is preaching of a kind. The fact is, as soon as you start with words you’re locked into a debate, forced to take a position with respect to others, confirming or rebutting what has been said before. Nothing you say stands alone or is complete in the present: it has its roots in the past and pushes feelers into the future. And as we grow heated, marking out our corner, staking our claim, we stop noticing the breath on the lips, the tension in our fingers, the presurre of the ground under our toes, the tick of time in the blood. None of my father’s admirers noticed how tense his jaw was, how much his hand shook when he raised a glass or microphone, what an effort it was for him to assert assert assert, to keep the 2000-year-old faith, giving encouragement to the doubters, finding clever arguments to confound the devil’s advocates. When I think back on Dad’s cancer and death — he was sixty and I twenty-five — there is a certain inevitability about it. Forever ignored, the carnal vessel cracked under strain. Sometimes I think it was the invention of language that started this queer battle between mind and flesh.

Compline

¶ If you don’t read anything else all week, make time for Kyle Minor’s interview with Greg McCaw at The Rumpus. Mr Minor is a straight man who lost his faith; Mr McCaw is a former music pastor who, because he eventually came out as a gay man, lost his job. The dignity, decency, and humanity of this conversation makes it a treasure. And the good news is that today’s young people are almost certain to make a better world.

Minor: Do you think evangelicals are starting to change their minds about issues related to gay, lesbian, and transgendered people? Do you think the evangelical movement as a whole will ever change its positions?

McCaw: Yes and no. Yes, in that institutionally churched people always mimic the general population. Look at any social issue: abortion, divorce, etc., the rate of incidence is the same in churches as it is in the general population. Of course, there are as many LGBT persons, percentage-wise, in the church, as there are in the general population. The increasingly strong trend is no doubt in favor of acceptance of LGBT persons at all levels in the West, and this is trickling into the churched population as well. The truth is that the entire world is changing around them, and they will have to change as well in order to survive. And that is the bottom line of any institution: Survival. Some people and some churches will, of course, never change, but they will be the vast minority. In fact, some of the best motivation toward change in faith is coming from inside faith groups themselves. I am encouraged by the attitudes of younger persons. Within the next ten years, these same younger persons will begin to take the leadership positions in all faith groups. This will lead to enormous changes. The modern mindset [ed.: It is common in contemporary evangelical discourse to speak of the “modernist” evangelical mindset giving way to the “postmodernist” mindset. These categories are mainly used to describe competing dominant generational ideas about the relationship between the church and the broader world, and they don’t seem to have much to do with the way these terms are ordinarily used in discussions of, say, T.S. Eliot or Robert Coover], while fighting to the death, is slowly giving way to a new era of thinkers. That is why I remain encouraged and dearly hope to be influential in this kind of change, not just about LGBT issues, but also about poverty, hunger, homelessness, violence, and creation care. I believe that younger people of faith will begin to lead us back to some good news.

Have a Look

¶ “What You See When a Kingfisher Is About to Eat You.” (Visual Science)

¶ Felix Salmon’s Summer Book Giveaway.

Matins

¶ Sheril Kirshembaum, who writes the Intersection blog with Chris Mooney, was included on a list of “sexy scientists” at Common Sense Atheism, and, boys being boys, this created a “stir,” with some of the boys wanting to know if they were behaving badly. Ms Kirshenbaum’s response was swift and sensible.

Returning to the hullabaloo over last week’s “sexy scientists” list, I honestly don’t think any real harm has been done to me personally. And it’s worth pointing out that in 2005 when Chris was named one of Wired Magazine’s “Sexiest Geeks,” no one complained. So while this may not be the way I’d most like to be featured, far worse items pop up across the Internet about me on a regular basis. To survive in the blogosphere, you grow a thick skin and keep in mind that there’s more to life than what happens online.

That said, I would like to see Luke, and others, think more carefully about the ripple effects of such posts. He can moderate his own site, but also doesn’t have to deal with the related extended commentary now percolating about the web because of his actions. For example, I’m currently receiving comments such as “I’d hit that,” which are promptly deleted, but do make me uncomfortable regardless. And since I can only filter content here, who knows what else is being added to message boards and websites elsewhere. In other words, it’s important to remember that words travel well beyond one’s own blog and can quickly get out of hand. That’s the nature of new media communication–you can’t control or keep up with what’s out there. So it’s important to acknowledge that there are often unintended consequences down the line for those unknowingly involved.

When she says that “no one complained” about Chris Mooney’s unsolicited honor, I think that Ms Kirshenbaum really means that no wild and crazy comment thread spooled out from the “Sexiest Geeks” post (if it was a post, but no matter). The sad truth is that sexual arousal puts many men in an offensive frame of mine — just as (and here we refer to the Op-Ed gender imbalance report that got Ms Kirshenbaum started) intellectual debate makes them defensive. It’s a pity that women can’t demand more attractive men.

¶ At least there’s a forum for complaints: My Fault, I’m Female. (via MetaFilter)

Lauds

¶ We try to be nice, at this hour especially; and we’re well known for our disapproval of negative reviews. But we can’t resist Lauren Wissot”s efficient dismissal of Neil LaBute’s twenty years of dramaturgy. (The House Next Door)

Not that LaBute, with his gift for snappy dialogue, doesn’t have anything to say—it’s just that all his ideas can pretty much be summed up in his tour de force In The Company of Men, and since then, he’s merely been repeating himself in variations on the theme of how men and women do wrong by each other. Because the playwright has been stuck on a loop for the past decade without challenging himself, how can he possibly challenge his audience? Interestingly, this goes a long way to explaining why he’s a darling of theater critics to this day. In essence, LaBute serves up classic comfort food for the academically inclined. We’ve come to expect LaBute characters to have the self-control of a five-year-old, thus every mean-spirited thing they say and do becomes wearily predictable. As familiar but no deeper than an episode of Friends. His stage work is only a blank canvas onto which an audience can project its own insights, making them feel self-assured, smug knowing that they’re better people than his immature characters.

Prime

¶ When CNBC runs a “documentary” about the costs of couterfeit luxury goods, Felix Salmon’s eyebrows disappear beneath his hairline.

The show never does those sums; instead, it goes to a big warehouse with “just over $200 million of seized cargo,” adding that “there are 12 more like it around the country.” Hm, that would make $2.4 billion of seized counterfeit goods, if true — but when were they seized, given that ten years ago, customs was only seizing $47 million a year in such material?

And that’s not the only quantitative dissonance. “This year alone, counterfeited medicines will be a $75 billion industry,” says a representative of Big Pharma; there’s no indication that that number comes form a mysterious report which no one can ever seem to produce, which was published in 2005, and which projected the number basically out of thin air. Meanwhile, CNBC’s own slideshow puts the volume of seized counterfeit drugs at just $11 million last year.

But what caught our eye was a link at the end that goes to a piece that Felix wrote before we started following him: the “costs” may be negative.

It seems that fake luxury goods are pretty much the best form of advertising out there: people who buy them and live with them have a very high probability of being converted to the brand and then going out and buying the real thing. What’s more, every time they go out with their fake item, they’re publicly displaying the desirability of the brand.

This explains why smart companies like Dolce & Gabbana refuse to get involved in prosecuting counterfeiters.

Tierce

¶ Don’t ask us how they figured this out with only twelve microphones, but Scientists Have Discovered that bats lower their voices when swooping in for the kill because “lower echolocation frequencies provide a a wider field of view.” (Wired Science)

“A lot of insects can hear ultrasound. If it’s really close to them, they do evasive maneuvers. Fold their wings up, go into power dives,” said biologist Lasse Jakobsen of the University of Southern Denmark. “We thought this could be a way for bats to counteract this.”

In the Daubenton’s Bat species tested by Jakobsen in a July 19 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, call frequency drops by a full octave as bats approach insects. That’s typical of the roughly 500 bat species who use echolocation to snatch insects on the wing, but scientists haven’t known why.

“People thought they couldn’t maintain the high frequencies, or that it had something to with bandwidth,” Jakobsen said.

Something about this stunt deeply appeals to us. We’re filing it away in case it comes in handy.

Sext

¶ The Bygone Bureau anticipates the fourth season of Mad Men. Kevin Nguyen interviews Mad Men Unbuttoned curator Natasha Vargas-Cooper, who claims to watch the episodes as sparingly as possible.

But I don’t watch entire episodes that often because I do not want to ruin the magic of it for me. I’m like this with movies and TV shows I love. It’s a treat, it’s special. And I want things to remain special to me.

The reason why I started [the blog] was because even before the third season started, I had lost my dog and I was really upset. So I thought, “Fuck I really need something to keep my mind off it. Oh you know what, I’ll re-watch Mad Men.” I’d only seen season one and two once through and I really loved it. So I sat down and restarted watching and thought, “Oh this would make a cool blog” and so I started the blog.

Mad Men gives me comfort because it still feels very new… I’d much rather watch specific scenes to get specific details when I need them. But other than that, I like that it exists in the periphery a little bit. Like, I never watch the commentary. I never watch the commentary or the special features on any DVD because I grew up doing theater and I know how messy things are backstage. The second I hear that they were going to say this line instead of that line, that’s the only thing I think of whenever I see that scene again.

(Ms Vargas-Cooper never found her dog, but adopted a new one.)  Meanwhile, Darryl Campbell savors the mysteries of Don Draper.

At the same time, if you try to pin Don Draper down, he comes off as downright confusing. After all, the audience is just as hoodwinked by Dick Whitman’s past as his contemporaries are. We know just enough to feel sympathy for him — that Dick was an orphan, that his adoptive parents were cruel and abusive, that he drove his younger brother to suicide — but not enough to understand how his past affects his motivations or intentions. Except in the pitch for the Kodak Carousel, we never see the Draper family in happier moments, so it’s easier for us to excuse his philandering because we only ever associate Betty with fighting and general misery. And we see Don’s aggressive, bull-headed streak succeed in the conference room and bedroom so many times that we consider it an asset, even though it alienates his wife and children at home.

So when Don drowns his ennui, we the viewers slide into stupor along with Don. We know what he’s escaping from, but not why; in fact, we know so little about Don Draper’s inner life — except through the odd non-verbal metaphor, such as his Christ-like bath in the ocean towards the end of season two — that we can never quite see what makes him tick.

Nones

¶ Tariq Ali explains why no one outside of Kashmir gives a damn about what’s going on there. He’s especially interesting about Pakistan’s indifference. (LRB)

The Zardari government is silent on the issue of Kashmir and there has been little media reaction in Pakistan to the recent killings. For the ruling elite Kashmir is just a bargaining counter. ‘Give us Afghanistan and you can have Kashmir’ is the message currently emanating from the bunker in Islamabad. Zardari, it’s worth recalling, is the only Pakistani leader whose effigy has been burned in public in Indian Kashmir (soon after becoming president he had seriously downplayed Kashmiri aspirations). The Pakistani president and his ministers are more interested in business deals than in Kashmir. At the moment this suits Washington perfectly, since India is regarded as a major ally in the region and the US doesn’t want to have to justify its actions in Kashmir. Pakistan’s indifference also suggests that Indian allegations that recent events in Kashmir were triggered by Pakistan are baseless. Pakistan virtually dismantled the jihadi networks it had set up in Kashmir after the 1989 withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan not long after 9/11. Islamabad, high on the victory in Kabul, had stupidly assumed that they could repeat the trick in Kashmir. Those sent to infiltrate Indian Kashmir were brutal and mindless fanatics who harmed the Kashmiri case for self-determination, though some young people, tired of the patience exhibited by their elders, embraced the jihad, hoping it would bring them freedom. They were wrong.

Vespers

¶ Patrick Kurp discovers Rosamond Purcell’s Owls Head. Now we want to do the same.

“I spend most of my life surrounded by man-made objects. I am familiar with the surface of things. To find them embedded in the natural world was a newfound pleasure—still—I had never seen so much stuff to which so much had happened. Fraying, tattered, cracked, flattened, swollen, dried, scrawny, collapsed, shredded, peeling, torn, warped, weathered, faded, bristling, moldy, clenched, tangled, punctured, battered, bashed-in, scooped-out, withered, engorged, trampled, toppled, crushed, bald, listing, leaning, twisting, hanging, buried, wedged, impaled, straggling, stretched, disjointed, disembowelled, skinned, docked, gnawed, entrenched.”

Purcell isn’t transcribing a thesaurus. Her prose is precise and pared-down, and she never shows off. She’s replicating with words the myriad ways in which Buckminster’s countless tons of castoff objects (the book bears the Lucretian subtitle On the Nature of Lost Things) flourish in decay.

Compline

¶ At The Survival of the Book, Christopher discovers the London Library, and asks: would you pay a membership fee to support your public library? If so, what provisions would be made for lowe-income readers? (We think that libraries ought to be free to anyone under the age of 25, but nodoby’s asking.)

For now, I understand the value of the free public library system but sometime in the not too distant future there will be a reason to start instituting a yearly membership fee to guarantee the survival of these institutions. The notion of government support-from local to national-is under siege and it is not out of the realm of possibility that one day libraries won’t be supported by the municipalities in which they are located. When that happens they will either shrivel up and die or find a new way to survive.

Have a Look

¶ Cool party; even cooler invitation. (Mad Men Unbuttoned)

¶ “I would like to examine, however, a very obscure item on her resume, the lost television series The Avengers.” Diana Rigg’s Emma Peel was the first television character that we hopelessly lusted after. “Obscure”? We didn’t know about the fire. (Hilobrow)

Matins

¶ Over the weekend, Matt Bai published a thoughtful piece about the generational nature of Tea Partying. We love this kind of optimism — everything will be fine when we’re dead. (NYT)

But the insidious presence of racism within some quarters of the movement — or, maybe more accurately in some cases, an utter indifference toward racial sensitivities — shouldn’t really surprise anyone. That’s not necessarily because a subset of these antigovernment ideologues are racist, per se, but in part because they are just plain old — at least relatively speaking. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center in June, 34 percent of Americans between the ages of 50 and 64 — and 29 percent of voters 65 and older — say they agree with the movement’s philosophy; among Americans 49 and younger, that percentage drops precipitously. A New York Times/CBS News poll in April found that fully three-quarters of self-identified Tea Party advocates were older than 45, and 29 percent were older than 64.

This does not mean that there aren’t hateful 25-year-olds coming to Tea Party rallies and letting fly racial slurs. What it does mean is that a sizable percentage of the Tea Party types were born into a segregated America, many of them in the South or in the new working-class suburbs of the North, and lived through the marches and riots that punctuated the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s. Their racial attitudes, like their philosophies of governance, reflect their complicated journeys. (This is true for a lot of older, urban Democrats, too, who consider themselves liberal but whose racial commentary causes their grandchildren to recoil.)

Lauds

¶ Anne Midgette talks to Naxos chief Klaus Heymann about the facts and figures of classical-music CD sales, which are about the only kind of CD sales that look better than half-dead. (Washington Post; via  Arts Journal)

[As for regular sales:] right now, in the first five months our recording of the Spohr concerto for 2 violins sold 7,000 worldwide. Then Vaughan Williams, “Dona nobis pacem,” 6,000 in only 3 months. 4,500 Vaughan Williams Sacred Choral Works. Alsop Dvorak Symphonies 7 and 8, 4,000 in only two months. Petrenko Shostakovich 8 Liverpool also about 4,000 in only 2 months. Khachaturian cello concerto also about 4,000. Haydn Stabat Mater from Trinity New York also 4,000, but that’s not selling so strongly any more. Roussel Symphony No. 4 also 4,000 in 4 months.

It’s a very odd repertory nowadays. It’s in many ways gratifiying that all this material [is selling]. Of course with sales of 4,000, you’re not making any money. [What really sell are things like] The Best of Chopin, which is is probably now up to 300,000 or 400,000 in total. Most of what is downloaded on iTunes is this kind of thing. They download the whole album. [As for our other releases,] many of these things will eventually reach 6, 7,000. Vaughan Williams Dona Nobis Pacem with orchestra and chorus, in copyright, probably loses us $10,000 or $15,000. But long term, with all our other revenue sources, we’ll probably break even.

Prime

¶ Even though we’re not entirely sure what Tyler Cowen is talking about here, we sense that he is correct to set the former productivity of currently unemployed workers at zero. (Output has recovered, but employment has not.)

Some people identify the zero marginal product hypothesis with the “hopeless dregs of the earth” description, but the two are not necessarily the same.  Complementarity, combined with some fixed initial factors, can yield zero or near-zero marginal products of labor.  (You’ll see the phrase “excess capacity” used in this context, though that matches the oligopoly hypothesis more closely.)  The “dregs of the earth” view is pessimistic, but the complementarity version of the zero marginal product idea can be quite optimistic, predicting a very rapid recovery in the labor market, once the interactions turn positive. 

The “dregs” and the “complementarities” views also have different policy recommendations.  The dregs view implies either hopelessness or a lot of fundamental retraining or ongoing assistance, while the complementarity view leads one to ask how we might mobilize positive complementarities (rather than leaving orphaned factors of production) more quickly.  Perhaps there are some fixed factors, such as managerial oversight, and entrepreneurs do not want to strain those fixed factors too hard.  How can we make such fixed factors more replicable or more flexible?

Clicking through, we also agree with Arnold King’s comment about unemployment among older educated workers. (Library of Economics and Liberty)

Older workers may suffer from a human capital vintage problem. Their education and experience may have become obsolete rather suddenly, because of globalization and technological change.

Tierce

¶ Some of the most interesting psychological work being done today concerns pricing — always a mysterious subject. There’s something very heartening about the results yielded by Ayelet Gneezy’s theme-park experiment yielded. Of four pricing options — fixed price; voluntary price; fixed price inclusive of charitable contribution; voluntary price inclusive of charitable contribution — the last was the surprising winner, both with customers and for profitability.

But when customers could pay what they wanted in the knowledge that half of that would go to charity, sales and profits went through the roof. Around 4.5% of the customers asked for a photo (up 9 times from the standard price plan), and on average, each one paid $5.33 for the privilege. Even after taking away the charitable donations, that still left Gneezy with a decent profit.

The tastiest findings concerned freeloading:

There’s more evidence to back up this idea in the experiment – when Gneezy added a charitable donation to the pay-what-you-want scheme, fewer people bought the photo. The option to name your own price attracts a lot of cheapskate customers, who may not actually want the product very much, and who aren’t prepared to pay much, if anything, for it.

We missed this interesting piece at Not Exactly Rocket Science last week; happily, there’s Marginal Revolution to catch us up.

Sext

¶ The Epicurean Dealmaker (of all people) is piqued (by Peggy Noonan) into making some astoudingly assured remarks about wise men.

It is an old saying, but true nonetheless, that the wise person is certain of little but his or her ignorance. A wise man is wise enough to know what he does not know. He believes the world is too mulitfarious, changeable, and miraculous a place to put much trust in feeble humanity’s ability to comprehend and control it as we would wish. Therefore, a wise man counsels caution, and encourages us to pay attention to our ignorance—what we do not and cannot know—as we make our way through life.

A wise man does not provide answers. A wise man asks questions, and encourages us to ask questions of ourselves. For this reason, Peggy Noonan’s implicit identification of the Best and Brightest as “the wise men” of the Vietnam era is flat wrong both chronologically and conceptually. JFK’s whiz kids were a bunch of brilliant, arrogant young Turks, not a collection of grizzled old veterans of the Second World War or the Korean War. And they did not have or offer any questions at all: in contrast, they had all the (in retrospect, wrong) answers. They didn’t offer wisdom. They offered an agenda.

But here’s the rub, Dear Readers. If our beloved wise men, wherever we find them, cannot or will not provide the answers, then we must come up with them ourselves. We may value their sage counsel and radical skepticism concerning the source and security of our own apparent knowledge and opinions, but we’re gonna have to make the difficult decisions ourselves. Wise men counsel caution and care; we the living cannot help but act. If we are truly listening, our wise mens’ counsel will only make those decisions and actions harder to take.

Which is not to say we should not find them, and employ them, and value their advice. But we must understand that cultivating the path of wisdom does not lead to the answers to life—if any such childish fantasies exist. It merely allows us to test and practice our courage in the face of the ineluctable Unknown.

Never forget: every wise man started out a simple fool like you or me. He learned wisdom by questioning, by learning, and by doing. There is no secret stash of wise men waiting at WalMart for us to purchase.

It is time we manned up and learned to become our own wise men.

Hear, hear!

Nones

¶ Is Little England dissolving in Greater Anglophonia? That’s what we took away from Linda Colley’s arrestingly interesting coverage of two new books of “English History.” Boyd Hilton’s 1783-1846 contribution to the New Oxford History suffers by comparison with James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth. How can you write about England without taking into account the drainage of millions of its people, during Hilton’s period, to colonies and other parts of the world?  [P]

One of the major reasons why is brilliantly set out in James Belich’s Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld, 1783-1939. Reading these two formidable and formidably long books back to back is to be alerted to how much the writing of British (and English) history has changed and diversified in recent decades. When the early volumes of the original Oxford History of England were published in the 1930s and 1940s, historians of Britain who hailed from other parts of the world, or worked there, tended usually to defer in their methods and interpretations to those prevailing in the ‘mother country’. Now, British-based historians are increasingly likely to find sections of their own past being rewritten and revised by overseas scholars in different, sometimes uncomfortable, but generally fruitful ways. Belich is a New Zealander of Croatian descent, and his book is an argument against both British and American historical exceptionalism and parochialism.

At one level, Replenishing the Earth helps to explain why the ‘mad, bad and dangerous’ people of England and its adjacent countries were usually kept within political bounds after the 1780s, despite exponential population growth and an explosion of new ideas and economic stresses. As Belich demonstrates, this was due not simply to the contrivances of political actors within Britain, but also to the fact that substantial numbers of its potentially ‘dangerous’ people moved somewhere else. Before the 1780s, British settlement overseas had lagged behind Spanish emigration to the Americas and elsewhere. But ‘after 1780, and especially after 1815’, ‘Anglos’ drew ‘ahead in the settler races’. Whereas some half a million souls emigrated from the ‘British Isles’ in the 18th century, at least 25 million did so between 1815 and 1924, of whom some 18 million never returned. A parallel mass movement of human beings occurred on the other side of the Atlantic. Before 1776, London had restricted westwards migration from its mainland American colonies, in the hope both of maintaining peace with indigenous peoples and of keeping a close eye on its own white settlers. But after the Revolution, American movement westwards surged, not steadily, but in explosive bursts. Between 1815 and 1930, 12 million American-born individuals migrated to the middle and western regions of their continent. So did millions of others born elsewhere. In 1830, Chicago contained half a dozen houses and a few Indian tepees. Sixty years later, it was home to more than a million people.

Vespers

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Colin Marshall interviews David Lipsky, author of the recent David Foster Wallace book, Although Of Course You End Up Being Yourself. We liked these nuggets about the archaic period of DFW’s celebrity, when it was limited to a “campus following” (and to Pauline Kael!).

His first book came out my last year in college, and you’re always looking out, saying, “Hey, who else is publishing?” It was this giant book that was incredibly smart. I’m laughing because he had very mixed feelings about that book. He says to me, Broom of the System — that’s his first novel — “had a lot of fans, but unfortunately they’re all about eleven.” His book of stories came out about two years later, which he was much harder on than we were. When that book came out, I was in New York trying to find ways to write and also not feel incredibly tense and nervous in supermarket lines.

That book came out, and everyone passed it around; it was one of those books were other writers and other really smart readers would say, “Look, you have to read this.” I’d say, “Oh man, another Wallace book, this is great.” There stories in there that were just incredibly sharp. There’s a critic David really loves who we talk about in the book names Pauline Kael, the New Yorker‘s critic for a long time, really a brilliant writer. Wallace was making this march toward the capital city of readers.

About four years after that book came out, Pauline Kael was giving her last interview; she’d retired from the New Yorker. She just mentioned, kind of out of the blue, that her favorite two short stories by a young writer in the last couple of years has been two stores from that book: the story about Lyndon Johnson called “Lyndon”, and the story about a young actress going on the David Letterman show called “My Appearance”. At Rolling Stone there’s a thing we do every year called the “Hot List”, where we say, “Here’s what’s coming that you have to pay attention to.” It became a bit of a joke in the meetings we had every year: me and some other people kept saying David Foster Wallace. After a couple years, those meetings would begin with people saying, “Look, don’t say David Foster Wallace.” There was this great thing in late ’95 when his cruise ship piece came out and literally everybody in the city who read seemed to be talking about it. We could turn to the magazine and say, “Look, he’s great!”

Compline

¶ Ben Brantley remembers the thrill of bumping into Greta Garbo in Midtown (in 1985) — and rather misses the times when stars could be intensely private people. (NYT)

A hunger abides in us to see mere mortals approaching perfection and I, for one, would just as soon not be asked to separate the dancer from the dance, or for that matter the beauty from the beauty. (Imagine Garbo visiting “America’s Next Top Model” to give tips on eyebrow plucking.) Artists of any kind — and that includes pop stars — are almost never as interesting as their art. And those with a superstitious resistance to describing what they do professionally are not wrong. (Note to Lady Gaga: Keep the masks on and the interviews to a minimum.)

When we first fall in love with people, they always seem remote, unattainable. Holding on to love after you’ve crossed the divide between you and the object of your desire is a chapter in achieving maturity; it’s what marriage is supposed to be. But there’s a part of us that needs to keep falling in love with the girl in the mists in the distance or the boy riding away on a horse. You’ve been there, I’m sure, and you know what happens when these dream girls and boys open their mouths or scratch themselves. The mystery dissolves like fog at sunrise. [Emphasis supplied]

Matins

¶ Horrors! The wealthy (annual income > $90,000) are spending less — $119 a day, down from $145. (We can’t believe how silly this is.)

Policy makers are divided on what may be needed to spur economic growth, with a current debate raging over whether to extend unemployment benefits, payments that are usually spent immediately. Even Fed policy makers seem divided, based on the minutes of their recent meeting, on whether they should shift their monetary stance to encourage economic activity.

“In the short term we need to do everything we can to raise the consumption capacity of average American households,” said Sam Pizzigati, associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, a left-leaning research center. “Otherwise, we find ourselves in an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world where average people are hurting and the solution to the hard times that the economy is going through is to help the people that are not going through hard times.”

For now, some affluent spenders are getting thrifty. Linda Stasiak, who sells high-end skin care products to retailers like Whole Foods, said that her biggest sales increase had been for a $15.95 tube wringer, made to get every last drop out of a bottle of lotion.

“During peak time, I don’t even really remember selling them,” Ms. Stasiak said.

“Consumption capacity!” How deranged is that? What if frugality — the frugality that we remember so well, from the Fifties and the Sixties — comes back into style? What will turn the economy’s rotos in that case? We tremble.

Lauds

¶ James Rhodes plays Chopin’s E-minor Prelude from an iPad. Total stunt — and as critic Tom Service carps, why did this famously brief piece require a “page turn?”? Nevertheless, we’re glad that we’re not in the music publishing business.

It had to happen. As the press release has it, “The first classical performance using an iPad in place of traditional paper music” – that’s sheet music, to you and me – happened on Wednesday night. Venus went into eclipse with Saturn, Orion traversed Sagittarius. Almost. Pianist James Rhodes did play Chopin’s E minor Prelude off of his iPad at the Parabola arts centre, a concert that was part of the Cheltenham festival. 

A couple of things ring alarm bells (you can watch the performance here and make your own mind up). First is that Rhodes didn’t know the E minor Prelude off by heart anyway (a staple of the grade 5 repertory, or at least it was when I learned it, and it would only take a professional pianist about half an hour to get under his or her fingers).

Concertgoers will know what we’re talking about: Just think: the second player at each orchestral desk could just tap a pedal, instead of reaching forward awkwardly to turn the page.

Prime

¶ James Surowiecki’s piece on the financial reform bill cuts through the fog of might-have-beens and nails two positive developments, the consumer financial-protection agency and the resolution authority. The latter just may drain Too-Big-Too-Fail insitutions of their attractions. (The New Yorker)

Valuable as this new agency will be, the creation of resolution authority for big banks could be even more important for the health of the system as a whole. The bill has been subject to considerable criticism because it doesn’t break up the country’s biggest banks, with people saying that this leaves our Too Big to Fail policy in place. But while the bill doesn’t do much, if anything, about the “Too Big” part, what it does do, at least in theory, is make it possible for even too-big institutions to fail, by creating a mechanism that will allow the government to, in effect, place failing institutions under conservatorship, and wind them down over time, thereby avoiding both the chaos of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy on the one hand, and the need to give troubled banks government-subsidized handouts on the other. With resolution authority in place, big banks and their creditors can’t assume that they will be made whole in the event that they get into trouble, which in principle should reduce the threat of moral hazard and limit the economic advantage that big banks get as a result of the implicit “TBTF” guarantee.

Tierce

¶ Dmitry Chestnykh, the man behind the current rage in parlor games, I Write Like, talks (in English as a second language) to The Awl’s Katjusa Cisar.

Dmitry Chestnykh is the creator of I Write Like. He’s a 27-year-old Russian software developer living in Montenegro. His company, Coding Robots, also offers a blog-writing program and an application to keep diaries.

He answered a few of my questions via e-mail Thursday night, explaining how his algorithm is like a spam-detector, how he plans to sustain the site beyond short-lived meme, and why he’s totally unqualified to analyze writing but still thinks I Write Like is useful.

[A note: since English is not his first language, he asked me to fix any grammatical or style errors in his answers. He barely made any mistakes, predictably putting the typically pitiful American foreign language skills to shame. I just fixed an awkward construction here and there. Based on I Write Like’s calculations, by the way, Chestnykh’s writing style here is most like David Foster Wallace.]

Sext

¶ The other day, Jonathan Harris dispatched a beautiful post from Mykonos, where he has been the guest of a wealthy Greek family. He’s quite brilliant at penetrating the veneer of leisure that both muffles and baffles the lives of the young people whom he meets there.

In this lavish life, the people have had so much sex, bought so much stuff, seen so many cities, slept in so many hotels, ingested so many South American drugs and gobbled down so many excellent meals that to get the same highs they have to go deeper and deeper, at more and more cost to their wallets and bodies, not to mention their spirits. 

So every hour from midnight to sunrise it is back up onto the roof, and then they became a party of supermen, talking so fast and so loud because so much is so funny and brilliant and suddenly needs to be said. And with every line they cross, the gap between me and them becomes bigger and bigger, and as they go up into orbit, I go back down to the ground and think about another day, because the sky is getting bright and sleep is losing patience. 

The post’s ending came as a surprise, because Jonathan seemed to feel so distant from his Greek friends.

 “I know what you mean,” I said, squinting into the brightness all around her. “It’s weird, you know? It’s easy for them, but it’s also hard. You have to play the part, and if you don’t play the part, then that creates other problems, because other people expect you to. So there is a kind of burden with it, even though it seems so easy. I think you can only really understand it from the inside. From the outside you kind of hate the people in it because they get to live like that, but then you’ve never lived like that yourself, so you don’t really know what it’s like, and maybe if you got to live like that for a while, then you wouldn’t really want it, and maybe all the resentment would be replaced with some weird kind of sympathy, or even some kind of pity. But I don’t know — that’s not quite it either.”

Then we remembered: nobody ever feels privileged. We appreciate the privileges that we see other people enjoying; we take our own entirely for granted. I don’t know Jonathan Harris, but I gather that, while his family’s values aren’t those of Mykonos millionaries, his upbringing was relatively privileged, too.

What we hate about people whom we regard as “privileged” (luckier than we are, in some material way) turns out to be exactly what we have in common with them: their inability to see how good they’ve got it.  

(It appears that this entry has been deleted from Jonathan Harris’s site. We quoted from our news feed.)

Nones

¶ More seriousness silliness in Belgium, where nobody seems to be thinking about a Brussels (bilingual) zone. (NYT)

“It is hard to know where this will go,” said Lieven De Winter, a professor of politics at the Université Catholique de Louvain, though like many others he believes breaking up the country would be so complicated as to be impossible, largely because neither side would give up Brussels, the capital.

For Mr. Andries, this state of affairs comes as no surprise. A friendly man of Flemish descent, he has been juggling the tensions between the two halves of Belgium for more than a decade, running a town that is technically on the Flemish-speaking side of the country, but that has become home to many French speakers looking for trees and backyards not far from Brussels.

Mr. Andries’s house was covered in protest placards once because he was accused of forcing his librarian to write letters in French to French theaters inquiring about materials that might be available for the library. Not allowed. He should have sent the letters in Flemish, which is really just a Belgian variant of Dutch.

For those of you who just tuned in, Brussels lies unambiguously in Flanders, but ever since the creation of the Belgian monarchy, in 1830, it has been consciously developed as a Francophone city; as the EU capital, moreoever, it has been a magnet for French-speaking civil servants.

Vespers

¶ If only Lydia Kiesling’s take on The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet had been out there before we bought our copy. Oh, we’d have read the book eventually, maybe in paper, or through Kindle-for-the-iPad. (The Millions)

In addition to enjoying his prodigious stylistic gifts, I find David Mitchell’s novels refreshing  because they are in their way morally unambiguous.  It’s usually not clear right away who the good guys are, and there are lots of bad guys disguised as good ones and good guys doing bad deeds.  Nonetheless, Right and Wrong are things in Mitchell’s universe(s), and his work seems to have a lot invested in righting wrongs.  I’ve read all of his novels but one (Number9Dream), and in each I have been surprised and touched by the author’s care for people.

This novel is no different; by the end, you know just who to root for.  I don’t look for morality in my books, but it’s nice to read something outside of the young adult section that reminds us, just to be on the safe side, what’s what.  It’s kind of retro, actually, considering the decades of post-war literature that told us there isn’t right or wrong, just our own confused, fucked-up feelings (man).  Maybe I’m the victim of some haute post-modern joke, but Mitchell seems very earnest to me.  To throw my own potentially bizarre comparison into the mix, David Mitchell is a little bit like Lois Lowry (The Giver, Number the Stars), writ large and writ for grownups.

Despite that fact that I’ve basically (I realize now) presented The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet as a made-for-TV movie for a juvenile audience (starring Russell Crowe), I loved this book.  It’s the best thing I read on what was supposed to be my summer vacation.  If you have free time or can fashion some, you should read it too.

All the same, we’re happy to own our British edition, with its utterly YA printed book cover (no jacket!)

Compline

¶ At The Last Psychiatrist, some thoughts on why sexing up murders by calling them “honor killings” egregiously indulges the culprits’ narcissism — and what to do about the problem.

Change the form of the argument.  You have to make the narcissistic honor killing a thing of even greater shame; you have to speak their language.   Don’t say it’s wrong– they don’t care if it’s wrong– don’t say it’s against Allah, don’t say it’s tribal, don’t say it’s a backwards practice, none of those things matter.  Say it is a sign of weakness and impotence.  Keep repeating that they aren’t signals that you were strong and steadfast in your faith, but signals that you so petty and unfocused such that you had to resort to this.  Remind them how stupid it is to think that people are now going to forget that you’re the father of a harlot and you’re a cowardly murderer.  No Iraqi will send his sons over to the U.S. to marry your other daughter, and for sure no American will.  Keep saying that, not so the potential murderer hears it but so the kids hear it.

Have a Look

¶ “Stomp Mel Gibson!” (FAIL)

¶ “It’s a kind of ‘Prince of Denmark’ of the hotel world.” (Letters of Note)

¶ Just when you thought it was a stupid question: Scientists prove that the chicken came first. See? You were right. (Metro.co.uk; via  MetaFilter)

Matins

¶ The Asia Society and the Spence School have declined to refund gifts made by Ponzi fraudster Hassan Nemazee. No doubt they’d have done so eagerly if times weren’t so bad, but neither gift was large enough to be worth the bad smell. (NYT)

Both the society and the school argued in letters to the government that they did not know at the time they received the donations that they were the product of Mr. Nemazee’s criminal activities.

“Moreover, the funds were spent long ago, and therefore, are no longer available for forfeiture in any event,” Gary Stein, a lawyer for Spence, wrote in a letter to the government.

The government contends, however, that both institutions have ample resources to pay the money back. The Asia Society had over $8 million in cash, according to its 2009 annual report. And the Spence School had an endowment of $85 million as of January 2009, according to the Manhattan Guide to Private Schools and Selective Public Schools.

Lauds

¶ A fine appreciation of the late conductor, Sir Charldes Mackerras, by Rupert Christiansen. (Sir Charles died yesterday at the age of 84.) (Telegraph; via  Arts Journal)

The music of two composers preoccupied him for over sixty years. One was Mozart and it was fitting that his career should finish a few weeks ago when he conducted Così fan tutte at Glyndebourne. Mackerras pioneered a more ‘authentic’ approach to eighteenth-century opera, and he had a scholar’s knowledge of Mozart’s manuscripts and contemporary performance practice. Yet there was never anything academic about the way he conducted this music: it always had a spring in its step.

The other composer was Janacek. Mackerras studied in Prague when he first came to Europe after the war, and drew on his experience there to introduce Janacek’s operas to England during the 1950s. His readings of these masterpieces are still considered unsurpassed, even in eastern Europe, and they continued to change and develop: there was a new glow and gentleness to The Cunning Little Vixen when he conducted it at Covent Garden last March.

Prime

¶ We read “Economics Behaving Badly,” an Op-Ed piece in today’s Times by George Loewenstein and Peter Ubel, with great interest and no little mystification. The thrust of the piece appeared to be that policy-makers are mis-using the findings of behavioral economics. And perhaps they are. But the examples given all testified to another, more sinister policy drift: blame the consumer. This is right-wing “personal responsibility,” positioned to take the hit for stringent regulations and tax provisions that politicians lack the will to implement.

Or take conflicts of interest in medicine. Despite volumes of research showing that pharmaceutical industry gifts distort decisions by doctors, the medical establishment has not mustered the will to bar such thinly disguised bribes, and the health care reform act fails to outlaw them. Instead, much like food labeling, the act includes “sunshine” provisionsthat will simply make information about these gifts available to the public. We have shifted the burden from industry, which has the power to change the way it does business, to the relatively uninformed and powerless consumer.

The same pattern can be seen in health care reform itself. The act promises to achieve the admirable goal of insuring most Americans, yet it fails to address the more fundamental problem of health care costs. Instead of requiring individuals to pay out of pocket if they choose to receive expensive and unproven interventions, the act tries to lower costs by promoting incentive programs that reward healthy behaviors.

Prevention is certainly a worthy goal; it is much better to prevent a case of lung cancer than to treat it. But efforts to improve public health, even if enhanced by insights from behavioral economics, are unlikely to have a major impact on health care costs. Studies show that preventive medicine, even when it works, rarely saves money.

Tierce

¶ So much for fooling the Blogosphere with the disguise of a cherished persona: we’re betrayed by our language. This comes as no surprise at all, of course, only now it has been demonstrated in a study conducted by Tal Yarkoni at Columbia. (Research Digest Blog; via Marginal Revolution)

Some commentators have suggested that the internet allows people to present idealised versions of themselves to the world. Contrary to that idea, Yarkoni found that bloggers’ choice of words consistently related to their personality type just as has been found in past offline research.

More neurotic bloggers used more words associated with negative emotions; extravert bloggers used more words pertaining to positive emotions; high scorers on agreeableness avoided swear words and used more words related to communality; and conscientious bloggers mentioned more words with achievement connotations. These were all as expected. More of a surprise was the lack of a link between the Big Five personality factor of ‘openness to experience’ and word categories related to intellectual or sensory experience. Instead openness was associated with more use of prepositions, more formal language and longer words.
 

Sext

¶ Mig brings some sourdough starter home to Austria from the Pacific Northwest. After many digressions, bread is baked. This is not to say that it is eaten.

At home, pop the sourdough starter into the fridge and google instructions.

Kingarthurflour.com is good.

Follow the directions inexactly. Here is a fact about bread making: if it were such an exact science, wheat-based societies would have died out thousands of years ago.

Result: two flat loaves no one in the family wants to eat because the crust would stop a .22 and the bread is extra, extra tangy.

Sour dough bread baking is a slow process which you can’t hurry. There is something exhilarating about this. Those bacteria there can’t be rushed. It takes the time that it takes.

We need more of this sort of thing.

Nones

¶ Simon Johnson calls for an international treaty on finance, and claims that there is more support for the idea than there has been in the past. (Baseline Scnario)

All this heads in the right direction but does not yet reach a definite conclusion.  In the last chapter, Peter Boone and I argue that we need an international treaty organization – along the lines of the World Trade Organization, but for finance.  We have to decide, by mutual agreement, what is and is not allowed in the international exchange of financial services – with a view to making the system dramatically safer.

If that sounds too complicated or not appealing for any reason, consider the implicit liabilities that underpin our current arrangements – and the cases (in our chapter) of countries devastated fiscally by their financial misadventures.

If we continue to allow the free international flows of capital alongside national (and antiquated) regulatory systems, the world’s banking system will get out of control repeatedly.  Increasingly, influential people in London and other financial hubs outside the United States begin to see the issue in these terms.

Vespers

¶ Jennifer Jefferson is captivated by C K Williams’s new book of verse, Walt, and her enthusiasm is infectious. It reminds us that Williams is himself an enthusiastic poet. (The Rumpus)

Many of the poems are like short stories or essays, but with the music, language and shapeliness of poetry—there is a narrative arc and unique characters. In “On the Metro” the narrator has to ask a young woman to move her packages to make room for him—

she’s reading, her foot propped on the seat in from of her,
and barely looks up as she pulls them to her.
I sit, take out my own book—Cioran, The Temptations to Exist—and no-
tice her glancing up from hers
to take in the title of mine, and then, as Gombrowicz puts it, she “affirms
herself physically,” that is,
becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before

How much we learn in those eight lines! It is easy to picture the scene—the book the glance, his awareness of her presence—that phrase, “becomes present in a way she hadn’t been before” succinctly characterizes something I too have experienced but never captured conceptually. That is perhaps my favorite thing about the poems of C.K. Williams, dating back to Tar—his ability to paint a very particular moment that can blossom into something personal and meaningful. James Joyce described epiphany as when a piece of art reveals “its soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.” Williams’s poems have an abundance of soul, of whatness.

(Mr Williams has just published a book about Walt Whitman as well.)

Compline

¶ Glen Newey, at the LRBlog, poses that perennial existential chestnut: Why golf?

Why does the world contain golf? The question is strictly analogous to asking why it contains evil. Like chess or darts, golf is clearly not a real sport, which I define as an activity that you can only be any good at with a BMI of less than 35. At school, golf was offered to us as a ‘games’ option in the sixth form. Then, as now, I had no interest in bashing a dimpled pill towards a tiny and distant hole. But it looked less nasty than waddling through sludge in frozen mist after a leather ball, or getting the club-end of a hockey stick in the nuts. I was beguiled by the golfing scenes, in TV soaps as much as sportscasts, where the players were conveyed between strokes in electric buggies, alighting only to swoosh a lazy approach shot to the green. Reality bit when I found that I had to lug the bag of clubs myself, blasted by wind and rain, for a nominal five miles – a purely theoretical figure, bloated by the constant need to divagate onto the beach or into tussocks of marram to track down my wayward ball. It was with relief that I switched the year after to another non-sport, snooker, where you could at least stay in the warm and get a drink.

Have a Look

¶ Jonathan Callan’s used books, at The Best Part.

¶ Three Percent‘s Translation Preview.

Matins

¶ What if the Chinese rebuilt Southern California but nobody came? Holly Krambeck takes us to Chenggong, an uninhabited satellite of Kunming that’s as auto-centric as Detroit’s wildest dreams. Very not up-to-date planning. (Transport for Development; via  Marginal Revolution)

The landscape is characterized by long, 450-meter blocks, gated communities with limited access points, expansive intersections that may be challenging to cross on foot, and a segregation of uses that may require residents to travel great distances to work, buy rice, and to go out for romantic dinners – and compete with other residents for road-space, since the mega-block urban design requires everyone to funnel into the exact same roads. My gut tells me this is a worrisome pattern — though, I haven’t seen traffic forecasts or density plans, so I cannot say for certain what will come to be. 

 

What you cannot see in these images are the new light rail stations (not supported by the Bank) that seem to be placed at a distance from development, in the center of an eight-lane boulevard that can only be safely crossed by bridge. It appears as though the stations will only be accessible by bus —  I hope this is not the case, where every light rail trip will require at least one transfer…we will see what happens. 

Lauds

¶ At The Online Photographer, a haunting portrait gets not one but two close readings. The second one, by the photographer who made the portrait, confirms the first. Rich doings!

And then there’s her expression that really puts the cherry on the sundae. That cocked eyebrow on an angrily confident expression is chilling. I don’t want to get any closer to this woman.

No, this is no happy snap. This appears to be a carefully crafted portrait of a woman prepared to convert potential energy to kinetic energy. Perhaps she’s listening to the response from her just-asked question, ‘Where you been all night?’ Perhaps she’s confronting a pesky salesman and is seconds away from ‘Shoo!’ But we’re left wondering what’s about to happen.

First, I made some pictures of Benita and her five-year-old daughter; those first shots are never the best. And then I moved to the fence. Benita said her daughter had hung the wash up and she couldn’t take it down because it was so cute. I love the fence because it creates that important diagonal line. I like a person’s eye to have something to do in a photograph and that line lets one enter the photo, if the gate were closed we’d be blocked out.

She said no one could take a good picture of her because her face is asymmetrical and her eyebrows are not in line. I told her to lean against the fence, get comfortable and take that contrapposto pose. There is always the problem of what to do with hands, but I take so long with this process that most people just give up and wait. That’s when the real portrait comes. She put her right hand in her pocket, but I didn’t notice the tension on the left hand until I made the contact sheets.

Prime

¶ We are huge admirers of Felix Salmon here at The Daily Blague (does it show much?), but we’re more than ordinarily impressed by an entry about paywalls that gets things just right.

David Brauer seems to be of the opinion that any new paywall should be “robust” and shouldn’t be able to be defeated by means of a plugin (or by using multiple browsers, or by deleting cookies, or various other methods, I suppose). But that’s exactly wrong. The purpose of a paywall isn’t to keep people out, it’s to generate revenue from loyal readers. And the expense of making the paywall harder to circumvent is almost certainly greater than the marginal extra revenue that such an action would generate: after all, the kind of people trying to get around the paywall will most likely simply go elsewhere, rather than pay.

It seems grandiose to say so, but we’re taking this as the first principle of the philosophy of paywalls — or, as we prefer to think of them, Internet subscriptions.

Tierce

¶ How much of a Neanderthal are you? Maybe as much as 4%, according to researchers at Leipzig — and assuming that you have at least some non-African heritage. Knowing what we know about homo sapiens, we can’t say that we’re surprised. What’s interesting is the impact that the news may have on the two camps of evolutionary theory, the Out-of-Africa folks and the Multiregionals. (Scientific American; via  3 Quarks Daily)

Intermixing does not surprise paleoanthropologists who have long argued on the basis of fossils that archaic humans, such as the Neandertals in Eurasia and H. erectus in East Asia, mated with early moderns and can be counted among our ancestors—the so-called multiregional evolution theory of modern human origins. The detection of Neandertal DNA in present-day people thus comes as welcome news to these scientists. “It is important evidence for multiregional evolution,” comments Milford H. Wolpoff of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the leading proponent of the theory.

In a prepared statement, Out of Africa theorist Christopher B. Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London acknowledged that the genome results show that “many of us outside of Africa have some [Neandertal] inheritance.” But Stringer maintains that the origin of our species is mostly an Out of Africa story. Population geneticist Laurent Excoffier of the University of Bern in Switzerland agrees, noting that the alleged admixture did not continue as moderns moved into Europe. “In all scenarios of speciation, there is a time during which two diverging species remain interfertile,” he explains.

When we were young, Scientists declared categorically that prehistoric homo sapiens had never, no way, and no how fiddled around with Neanderthals in a reproductive sort of way. But that was before the Civil Rights Act.

Sext

¶ Dave Bry is still apologizing. Less asshattery, though. (The Awl)

The best part of our night came when Emily saw a sign for the Sheridan Garage across the street from the top of the ramp. I pulled into the parking lot and felt the steering wheel freeze into a locked position just as we rolled through the open door and under the fluorescent lights. “Wow.” I stopped the car and turned to Emily. “That was really lucky!”

This is maybe where the worst part of your night began. You work at the Sheridan Garage. And after I got out of my car and knocked on the frosted-glass kiosk there, it was you who opened the door and stepped out to greet me.

¶ Kari does the laundry. In Paris. (Karigee)

Part of the challenge and most of the reward here is simply realizing you can accomplish the little things, like doing the laundry. I was so nervous about doing the laundry! For months every time I’d think about it I’d have to stop thinking about it because it made me so tense. I never worry about terrorists or volcanoes or muggers or murderers, or losing my passport or even getting lost, but the laundry!

¶ Rupert Murdoch sees all. (Get Excited; via  kottke.org)

I am pretty much paralyzed at the notion that Rupert is staring at me via some hidden camera. So I’m like, “Dude, tell him I’m wearing shorts cause I’m going to the gym” (the gym is on the same floor as the cafe). And so Sal says into the phone, “Mr. Murdoch, he says he’s wearing short pants (for some reason, they keep calling them “short pants” instead of shorts) cause he’s going to the gym.” So while they’re on the phone, I make a beeline to the gym, where I proceed to hang out for 25 minutes before I scope the hallway, make sure Sal is off the phone, and leave.

Nones

¶ Martha Nussbaum refutes five Lockean arguments for banning burqas. Particularly keen is her attack on the idea that the outfit is coercive or anti-feminist, and associated with domestic violence. (Opinionator/NYT)

We should reply that of course all forms of violence and physical coercion in the home are illegal already, and laws against domestic violence and abuse should be enforced much more zealously than they are.  Do the arguers really believe that domestic violence is a peculiarly Muslim problem?  If they do, they are dead wrong.  According to the U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, intimate partner violence made up 20 percentof all nonfatal violent crime experienced by women in 2001. The National Violence Against Women Survey, cited on the B.J.S. Web site,  reports that 52 percent of surveyed women said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of perpetrator.  There is no evidence that Muslim families have a disproportionate amount of such violence.  Indeed, given the strong association between domestic violence and the abuse of alcohol, it seems at least plausible that observant Muslim families will turn out to have less of it.

Even sharper:

Suppose there were evidence that the burqa was strongly associated, statistically, with violence against women.  Could government could legitimately ban it on those grounds?  The U. S. Supreme Court has held that nude dancing may be banned on account of its contingent association with crime, including crimes against women, but it is not clear that this holding was correct.  College fraternities are very strongly associated with violence against women, and some universities have banned all or some fraternities as a result.  But private institutions are entitled to make such regulations; a total governmental ban on the male drinking club (or on other places where men get drunk, such as soccer matches) would certainly be a bizarre restriction of associational liberty.  What is most important, however, is that anyone proposing to ban the burqa must consider it together with these other cases, weigh the evidence, and take the consequences for their own cherished hobbies.

Vespers

¶ Even if it doesn’t motivate you to re-read the Bard, or order a copy of Shakespearean Tragedy, Kevin Frazier’s appreciation of A C Bradley’s 1904 classic. (The Millions)

At heart, though, Bradley’s method is personal.  He says what he thinks of Shakespeare’s characters, and why he feels they matter to our understanding of life.  Obviously, this approach exposes him to ridicule.  His only real shield against failure is his own insight into people, based on his inevitably dated and incomplete notions of human nature.  In the end, he can’t begin to tell us more about Hamlet or about the world than Shakespeare tells us himself.  Bradley knows this, and his modesty is appealing.  He assumes that good literature always has more to give us than even the best critics can express in topic sentences and abstractions.  And it’s precisely Bradley’s humility—his willingness to embrace his ultimate defeat—that allows him to polish and display certain facets of Shakespeare we aren’t likely to have seen so sharply on our own.

Compline

¶ We can’t figure out precisely what made “parudox,” a contributor to MetaFilter, link to Josh Stephens’s undated piece on parking lots and spaces in a magazine put out by the North Jersey Transportation Planning Authority, intransition, but it’s a good read about a favorite subject (we don’t like cars much when they’re in motion, but we hate them when they’re parked).

Published in 2005, Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking amounts to an unwieldy volume full of data, regressions, and intricate analysis of these most overlooked squares on the grid of American cities. If America’s streets were a Monopoly board, it would be a dull contest indeed, with almost every space “Free Parking.” Each of the country’s roughly 200 million vehicles typically demands spaces at home and work, with shares of countless spaces at the market, restaurant, post office, mall and every other imaginable destination. Eighty-seven percent of all trips are made by personal vehicle and 99 percent of those trips arrive at a free parking space.

Many of these spaces stem from carelessly planned street parking schemes and arbitrary minimum parking requirements, by which cities dictate the number of spaces that different types of land uses must provide for tenants and customers. The result is a land use that is as ubiquitous as it is vapid and that, according to Shoup, “disfigures the landscape, distorts urban form, damages the environment, and wastes money that could be spent more productively elsewhere.” Shoup estimates that the total annual subsidy of free off-street parking exceeds $300 billion per year.

We went straight to Facebook and joined The Shoupistas.

Have a Look

¶ Einztein. An intereview with founder Marco Masoni. (via Good)

Matins

¶ A study at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy (Harvard) finds that 2004 was the year in which the four principal newspapers in this country stopped referring to waterboarding as “torture.” Kris Kotarski makes short work of the editors’ lame excuses. (Vancouver Sun; via  3 Quarks Daily)

Had journalistic ethics prevailed, Keller might have recognized that “torture” is not a “politically correct term” but a word with a long-standing linguistic, moral and legal definition which cannot be brushed aside simply because the Bush administration and its defenders claim that it is contentious. American law and international law have repeatedly recognized waterboarding as torture, and although administration officials and CIA interrogators might prefer a euphemism like “aggressive interrogation methods” or “enhanced interrogation techniques,” newspaper editors should have different priorities in mind.

Barr, who defended his newspaper’s policies on the grounds that the term was contentious, clearly lost sight of the media’s role in a free society. Had he and his colleagues been brave enough to act as the watchdog that all media outlets claim to be, he might have recognized that even if an issue is politically contentious, the legal and moral landscape should not budge an inch, especially not because accused war criminals contend that their crimes were not crimes at all.

Lauds

¶ JMW Turner’s Modern Rome — Campo Vaccino is bound for the Getty in Los Angeles, having broken the artist’s auction record at £29.7 million. Well, the Getty has pots of money but not many masterpieces. Still Modern Rome is, as you might expect from the title, the pendant to Ancient Rome, a big picture at the Tate. Our suggestion is that the Tate round up a few of its just-ordinarily-marvelous Turners and trade them for Modern Rome.

And now, a few words of disgust from the Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones:

Presumably Britain’s art guardians did not believe it was essential to save this one for the nation. Anyway, a Sotheby’s spokesman declared it a great night for the artist. Turner’s painting “has achieved a tremendous and much-deserved result”, which must delight Mr Turner (wherever he is). His picture, continued the auction house, “shows the artist at his absolute best and, for collectors, it ticked all the boxes – quality, superb condition, provenance and freshness to the market”.

Am I the only one who feels mild nausea reading those words, and this story? Apparently, it is a triumph for Turner that an art market bloated beyond sanity has decided his painting is worth something, and a marvellous day for Britain that a painting on view for decades at one of our free public museums will now be spirited away to LA.

No, this is not a heartening tale of Turner getting recognition. It is a cold, chilly way to think about and see art, this horrible obsession with price. Great art is priceless, full stop, and if your first thought in front of a painting is to wonder how much it’s worth, go and look around antique shops instead. It’s an Antiques Roadshow attitude to art, with posh experts telling us a bit about “quality” and “provenance”, before getting to the juicy punchline of the price tag, and I hate it.

Prime

¶ Is a college degree worth the financial cost? If so, what’s the financial return? These questions are taken up at The Intersection and Felix Salmon respectively. Sheril Kirschenbaum extracts a drolly hair-raising judgment from an article in Chron Higher Ed:

Colleges are taking on too many roles and doing none of them well. They are staffed by casts of thousands and dedicated to everything from esoteric research to vocational training—and have lost track of their basic mission to challenge the minds of young people. Higher education has become a colossus—a $420-billion industry—immune from scrutiny and in need of reform.

That’s from a forthcoming book by Claudia Dreifus and Andrew Hacker, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money &c &c.

¶ Meanwhile, Felix Salmon complains about a silly Business Week ranking of the ROI of over eight hundred institutions of higher education. As Felix says, “there’s a lot to dislike,” but what stands out for us, not so much because Business Week got something wrong as because it highlights the poverty of attaching price tags to everything, is the cultural inability to value a liberal arts education.

What’s more, the survey does a very bad job of quantifying the benefits of a liberal-arts degree. Let’s say you go to college and then earn $45,000 a year working in the theater, or you end up with a steady job in public administration or social services. You’re clearly better off in many different ways than a high-school graduate earning the same amount — you’re probably happier in your job, you’re doing what you want, and you have more job security. But the BW methodology would give you a negative return on your university tuition, on the grounds that you missed out on earning money while you were at college.

Tierce

¶ The more we think about Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex piece, “Will I?,” the more well-duh it seems. If you engage with a task, or any experience, really, with an inquiring mind, you are preparing yourself for details that you haven’t foreseen. If you settle down with grim determination to get the job done, in contrast, you’ve left yourself vulnerable to the unexpected. Asking “Will I?” instead of announcing “I will” is the simplest way of admitting the one thing that we know about life: that we don’t know what’s next.

Mr Lehrer’s explanation is of course rather different.

Scientists have recognized the importance of intrinsic motivation for decades. In the 1970s, Mark Lepper, David Greene and Richard Nisbett conducted a classic study on preschoolers who liked to draw. They divided the kids into three groups. The first group of kids was told that they’d get a reward – a nice blue ribbon with their name on it – if they continued to draw. The second group wasn’t told about the rewards but was given a blue ribbon after drawing. (This was the “unexpected reward” condition.) Finally, the third group was the “no award” condition. They weren’t even told about the blue ribbons.

After two weeks of reinforcement, the scientists observed the preschoolers during a typical period of free play. Here’s where the results get interesting: The kids in the “no award’ and “unexpected award” conditions kept on drawing with the same enthusiasm as before. Their behavior was unchanged. In contrast, the preschoolers in the “award” group now showed much less interest in the activity. Instead of drawing, they played with blocks, or took a nap, or went outside. The reason was that their intrinsic motivation to draw had been contaminated by blue ribbons; the extrinsic reward had diminished the pleasure of playing with crayons and paper. (Daniel Pink, in his excellent book Drive, refers to this as the “Sawyer Effect”.)

So the next time you’re faced with a difficult task, don’t look at a Nike ad, and don’t think about the extrinsic rewards of success. Instead, ask yourself a simple question: Will I do this? I think I will.

Sext

¶ Plus ça change… At the LRB, Jenny Diski writes about that quaint but deadly powder, arsenic. Reviewing James Whorton’s The Arsenic Century, she notes that liberal economics were far more murderous than desperate spouses. [P]

The dogged resistance to laws against the adulteration of products and food with dangerous and unknown substances was as great as the present day corporate and political reluctance to deal with environmental and banking hazards. In the name of the free market and the blessed principle of laissez-faire, manufacturers lobbied successfully against any laws to restrict their practices. In 1831 the Lancet complained: ‘in England alone is it that the principles of popular liberty are so sagely maintained that the people are allowed … to be suffocated in the asphyxiating vapours of manufactories, without the slightest concern being manifested by the rulers of the land.’ In the forefront of resistance to this Victorian version of political-correctness-gone-mad and the nanny state, was the great socialist and leader of the Arts and Crafts movement, William Morris, who decades after the Lancet article, announced in 1885 that the arsenic scare was nonsense. As Whorton notes, he laughed that ‘doctors had been “bitten” by a kind of “witch fever” … blaming wallpaper when they were unable to come up with any other cause for their patients’ problems (it was his own belief that “the source of all illness” was the water closet).’ The free artistic spirit, the British Empire, or, more recently, the human race, hadn’t got where it was by running scared of a bit of environmental poisoning when there were important matters of profit and power at stake.

Ms Diski ends her piece exactly where she ought: in the well-meant but poisoned wells of Bangladesh.

Nones

¶ The Swiss decision not to extradite filmmaker Roman Polanski to the United States appears, in Time‘s Bruce Crumley’s view, to stem from the Americans’ determiantion to withhold testimony by the prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson. 

So why did Swiss officials decide to take the word of a man who plea-bargained an initial rape charge filed by a 13-year-old girl in 1977 — he pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of engaging in unlawful sex with a minor — over that of California legal authorities? The answer appears to be the confidential testimony given Jan. 26 by the original prosecutor in the case, Roger Gunson, that the U.S. last month said it would not hand over to Bern. Swiss officials seem convinced that there may be something in Gunson’s statement that would vindicate Polanski’s claim that either Gunson or the judge in the case — or both — had gone back on a plea agreement that the filmmaker would be sentenced to 42 days in detention.

Surely the refusal to share Mr Gunson’s testimony is not an act of good faith.  

Vespers

¶ Bill Morris reads John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor fifty years on, and writes a beautiful appreciation. (The Millions)

It was only after finishing the novel that I went back and read Barth’s foreword, which he wrote in 1987 for the release of a new, slightly shortened Anchor Books edition.  From the foreword I learned that The Sot-Weed Factor was originally published in the summer of 1960, when Barth was just 30, exactly 50 years before I finally came to it.  I also learned that the novel sprang from an actual satirical poem of the same title published in 1706 by an actual man named Ebenezer Cooke.  Much more interesting, I learned that this was Barth’s third novel, and he originally envisioned it as the final piece of a “nihilist trilogy.”  But the act of writing the novel taught the novelist something: “I came to understand that innocence, not nihilism, was my real theme, and had been all along, though I’d been too innocent myself to realize that fact.”

This realization led Barth to a far richer one: “I came better to appreciate what I have called the ‘tragic view’ of innocence: that it is, or can become, dangerous, even culpable; that where it is prolonged or artificially sustained, it becomes arrested development, potentially disastrous to the innocent himself and to bystanders innocent and otherwise; that what is to be valued, in nations as well as in individuals, is not innocence but wise experience.”

The dangers of innocence versus the value of wise experience.  Here, surely, is a rich theme for any American novelist trying to capture the impulses and foibles and follies of a nation convinced of its own righteousness – in love with its own virtue and virginity, if you will – a nation that historically has had little use for history and therefore has spent several centuries blundering its way, usually uninvited and ill-informed, into the affairs of other nations, beginning with the settlements of native Americans and moving on to the Philippines, Mexico, Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia and, now, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Compline

¶ Also at The Millions, Conor Dillon rhapsodizes about the “jumper colon.” Not Lynn Truss’s cup of tea: the jumper colon starts you off with a little taste of the dish to come.

For grammarians, it’s a dependent clause + colon + just about anything, incorporating any and all elements of the other four colons, yet differing crucially in that its pre-colon segment is always a dependent clause.

(Yikes.)

For everyone else: its usefulness lies in that it lifts you up and into a sentence you never thought you’d be reading by giving you a compact little nugget of information prior to the colon and leaving you on the hook for whatever comes thereafter, often rambling on until the reader has exhausted his/her theoretical lung capacity and can continue to read no longer.

(Breathe.)

See how fast that goes? The jumper colon is a paragraphical Red Bull, a rocket-launch of a punctuator, the Usain Bolt of literature. It’s punchy as hell. To believers of short first sentences–Hemingway?–it couldn’t get any better. To believers of long-winded sentences that leave you gasping and slightly confused–Faulkner?–it also couldn’t get any better. By itself this colon is neither a period nor a non-period… or rather it is a period and it is also a non-period. You choose.

Matins

¶ Frédéric Filloux has a blast with US v Defendants, the DOJ case against the Russian spies. Well, before having a blast he clearly had to do some homework (er, reading the whole thing) — so now, you don’t have to! “Free Spy Novel,” he calls it. We’re not so sure about the “spy” part.  (Monday Note)

For us geeks, the amusing part is the collection of hackerdom gems contained in the DOJ file. From social engineering to ad-hoc WiFi networking, MAC-address filtering, steganography, and unsecured passwords, these supposedly “highly trained” individuals looked more like Keystone Spooks than Hollywood superspies.

A good example of social engineering is described when one of the culprits experiences unspecified software problems with a laptop. (Sound familiar? We’ll refrain from the easy jabs.) Enter an FBI agent passing as a Russian Consulate employee, “I’m here to help”, who borrows the laptop with a promise to fix the problem. The machine is broken into, fully explored, and yields a rich trove of unprotected files.

In another case, the Feds, while “inspecting” a home (legally, of course), find a password left in the open, helpfully written down on a plain piece of paper.

Lauds

¶ In one of those entries that makes us wonder if the site ought to be called 3 Quirks Daily, Ashley Mears compares supermodels to toxic assets. Behind that somewhat puzzling overstatement, however, lies an elegant insight: in financial bubbles, the players are tempted to forget that assets have intrinsic, objective values by the cascade of interest in a partcular asset, one that comes into such demand that its objective value is swamped. This is harmless in the choice of supermodels (Coco Rocha, in the case of Ms Mears’s essay), but disastrous in financial markets.

In fact, the economist John Maynard Keynes likened finance markets to casinos, in that both are based in speculation. To illustrate, Keynes drew on newspaper beauty contests from the 1930s, where readers were asked to rate the contestants, but with a catch. The prize would go to the reader that could guess the highest ranked winner. So readers would rate not what they themselves thought was personally beautiful, but what they thought other readers would find beautiful. The sociologist would add that beauty is always in the eye of the socially-dominant beholder, but as a metaphor for financial markets, it should worry us, as it worried Keynes: Finance assets accrue profits not according to their actual worth, which, at the height of the housing boom we know now were vastly inflated; rather, their worth is generated in how speculators perceive what other speculators will perceive. A finance market, like a fashion market, consists of speculators chasing each other’s tails in disregard for what things are really worth.

But perhaps most worrisome in the fallout of the economic crisis is our ongoing commitment to an ethos of individualism to make sense of it all. We chalk the crash up to a few bad apples and “greedy” executives gone astray—not far off, by the way, from rhetoric in the fashion press celebrating the genius new beauty of Coco. Without a view of the market as a social body—composed of individuals acting in concert with each other, aided by financial models, and bound together by conventions to help them anticipate one another’s actions—we can’t see how participants act together. Yet their collectively attuned steps can inflate or deflate the value of assets, thus building economic values from cultural ones. Don’t take Fashion Week at face value; the catwalk delivers an important sociological lesson for free market enthusiasts.

This point is well taken. Wall Street is no less susceptible to the allure of fashion than any other high-strung environment.

Prime

¶ Much of the material in Sarah Lyall’s Times piece on safety problems at BP (to which several other reporters made contributions) will be familiar to our readers, but we were grabbed by a passage describing the “achievement” of Tony Hawyard’s predecessor, John Browne.

But even as he became the toast of Britain’s business world and was made a knight and member of the House of Lords, Mr. Browne was ruthlessly slashing costs. He outsourced many operations and fired tens of thousands of employees, including many engineers.

Tom Kirchmaier, a lecturer in strategy at the Manchester Business School, said that Mr. Browne tried to run BP like a financial company, rotating managers into new jobs with tough profit targets and then moving them before they had to deal with the consequences. The troubled Texas City refinery, for example, had five managers in six years. [emphasis supplied]

Mr. Browne, now advising Britain’s coalition government on its cost-cutting campaign, declined to comment for this article. In his new autobiography, “Beyond Business,” he said, “I transformed a company, challenged a sector, and prompted political and business leaders to change.”

Tierce

¶ We’re linking to Joe Keohane’s Boston Globe piece, “How Facts Backfire,” only because we CANNOT BELIEVE that a reporter researching the subject of intellectual obstanacy would overlook Kathryn Schulz’s incredibly important book, Being Wrong.

¶ Imagine our delight, this morning, reading through the feeds, and coming across a sweet mention of Ms NOLA!  (Slow Love Life)

The editor of my new book, Slow Love, Lauren LeBlanc, is not only talented with words; she is adept with needles as well. She sews and she knits, and she gives her friends (and lucky writers) gifts she has made. Last winter, I got a pair of gloves without the fingertips, for those cold mornings at the computer. (I think she wanted me to finish the book!) She recently wrote to me about one day having a sewing room, and that sent me into a reverie. I would love a sewing room. Not because I sew, but because I would like to be the kind of person who sews. And weaves. And knits (something other than scarves). And throws pots. And bakes bread. (Oh yes, I already have one of those rooms. That would be the kitchen.)

Nones

¶ Here’s a grease-trap of a story that Graham Greene would have liked. It has got oil, drugs, two layers of colonialism, and a particularly obnoxious populist dictator. The only things missing is a babe. Simon Romero in the Times: “Curaçao Faces Friction With Chávez Over U.S. Planes.”

In Hato, the hulking Awacs and P-3s share the tarmac with Venezuelan airlines, which have flights daily to and from Caracas, Venezuela’s capital.

Some friction with Mr. Chávez’s government might be inevitable since Venezuela emerged in recent years as a major narcotics transshipment point. The United Nations said last month that Venezuela accounted for over half of all detected maritime shipments of cocaine to Europe.

At the same time, Venezuela and Curaçao are important, if uneasy, partners in trade. The rusting refinery here is one of the largest employers on the island; of the 150,000 residents, about 1,000 work at the refinery.

In March, Rafael Ramírez, Venezuela’s oil minister, threatened to abandon the refinery if Venezuela detected signs of aggression from the American planes, and yet the site provides crucial refining capacity for Venezuela’s national oil company, which leases it from Curaçao.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Edan Lepucki profiles Jennifer Egan, our very favorite author at the moment. Her lead-in paragraphs are particularly Egan-esque in content, although the author of A Visit From the Good Squad would probably render it in darker prose.

On a recent Saturday, back in Los Angeles, I held a writing class, and one of the students looked familiar to me, but I couldn’t place him–had I seen him at Skylight?  On my coffee table was an advance copy of A Visit from the Goon Squad.  “Is this out yet?” the student asked, and I explained it wasn’t yet, not until June.  “But I’m interviewing her,” I said–bragged, probably. “I am so excited!” I said.  “Jennifer Egan is one of my favorite writers.”  The student smiled and just then I realized, Hey, he’s on that TV show.  “Jenny’s my sister’s oldest friend,” he said.  This was Paul, of course, Sally’s little brother. Just like that, Paul, Jenny and I were connected, and it felt like a tiny miracle.

It also felt like a page from A Visit from the Goon Squad, where characters move in and out of one another’s lives, and where a minor character in one chapter becomes the protagonist in the next.  When I met Egan for our aforementioned interview, she told me the story of how she knew Paul, saying that seeing him on TV was “the kind of odd surprise that I was trying to capture here,”–she pointed to her book–”the completely unexpected ways that people encounter and see each other over many years.”  We were sitting at a round picnic table outside Diesel Bookstore in Brentwood, where she would be reading that afternoon.  I was born and raised in L.A., but I’d never been here before.

For Jennifer Egan’s extremely interesting remarks about online connections, The Sopranos, and the importance of a good story, you’ll have to click through.

Compline

¶ Following the Carr-Shirky debate about modern media, Elizabeth Drescher found that she “couldn’t help but think about medieval manuscripts. Since the early 1990s, both medievalists and electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts in making complementary claims: medievalists to continuing cultural relevancy and electronic media theorists in continuity to literary tradition.” We immediately donned our anti-cuteness custard-filled armor; only then dared we to read further. (religion Dispataches; via  Marginal Revolution)

But the physical format of medieval books is not the only way in which they seem familiar to many contemporary users of digital media. Medieval reading as a practice was deeply social. Indeed, long after the invention of the printing press, until rather late in the 18th century, reading was a communal affair, with a group of hearers gathering around a reader to engage a book, letter, or other textual production. If the claims of medieval mystic and pilgrim Margery Kempe to have shared wisdom with the priest friend who read “holy bokys” to her or the dramatic relational reading in the novels of Jane Austin are any indication, such bookish encounters were not centered on didactic performances for passive listeners, but were rather fully interactive engagements that enlarged any given book into a much wider social “text.”

That is, as scholars have been reminding us for a very long time by now, private reading and the linear thinking that Carr so values as essential for deep, contemplative thought did not feature much in the lives of the people who pretty much brought us the contemplative tradition. Rather, sorting though the mix of images and ideas, arguing with friends over meanings and interpretations, and mullying it up again with a new bit of this or that seem to have been very much at the center of the thought world of ancient philosophers and medieval mystics.

“So there!” I thought to myself this morning, as I mulled over another point–counterpoint on the issue. “I am absolutely willing to be no more brain addled than Chaucer and no less reflective than Julian of Norwich!” And for good measure, as I headed online to find links to the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, I reminded myself that I have the advantage of not drinking a gallon of high octane ale each day from a vessel infused with lead!

Have a Look

¶ 3 Quarks Daily‘s Abbas Raza is spending the summer in Karachi, the city where he was born, and, in addition to some interesting thoughts that we’d like to follow up on, he shares a collection of interesting photographs.

¶ Jean Nouvel’s Serpentine Pavilion. (Gabion; via City of Sound)

Matins

¶ Is Starbucks poised to bring good wine to a corner near you? At The Awl, Nilay Gandhi reads some very tender tea leaves — we’re only talking about a couple of locations in Seattle so far — but sees a juggernaut at the bottom of the cup  — er, stem.

According to the Seattle Times, future stores will be branded Starbucks. The ungendered PR entity behind the curtain added that the next iteration of Olive Way, Seattle’s next store to transition to alcohol, “will be a traditional Starbucks location that will reflect the character of the surrounding neighborhood and help to reduce environmental impacts.” I didn’t really ask about the environment, but it’s nice to know they care.

You can see the dissonance building, even from their language. How could such a powerful, 18+ billion-dollar company often more concerned with sounding right than being right, possibly pull this off? They have enough money to do whatever they want, but why?

Here’s where I start to buy the corporate speak. They’re doing it because we need it. Because wine bars outside of wine country in America generally fall into two categories: terrible and privileged.

Lauds

¶ The BAM retrospective of Cary Grant’s movies spurs Aaron Cutler to post some interesting commentary on Grant’s physicality — his command of space. (The House Next Door)

David Thomson is right when he claims that Grant was Hepburn’s best screen partner, as they dash like Formula One cars trying to outrace each other (by contrast Hepburn’s later costar, Spencer Tracy, moves like a Winnebago). Grant’s tendency to flip his lid and flee, and flee expressively—leaping full into the air spread like a trampoline—made him ideal for screwball comedies, one of the most popular film genres of the ’30s and early ’40s, whose essence consisted of strong women assaulting men. Grant and his best screwball partners—Hepburn, Irene Dunne, and Ginger Rogers—altered each other physically, and the physical shifts suggest relationship shifts. (An example from Monkey Business: Grant stands above a seated Rogers, dictating, until she gets up dancing, and he bends a little following her.)

In film, the way that people move in relation to each other often suggests the power between them. The tension of watching Grant in comedy comes from watching him try to control space, and the joy comes from watching him adjust or even break his space once another person invades it. The fact that the other person is usually female makes the threat explicitly sexual, but a physical relationship is always simultaneously a sexual one, especially for someone both as free in his movements and as possessive of his clothes as Grant is. Pauline Kael once noted that the most tender relationship in a Cary Grant movie—and, by no coincidence, the most harmonious sharing of space—isn’t between Grant and a woman, in fact, but between Grant and his Indian manservant in the adventure film Gunga Din.

Prime

¶ Simon Johnson puts his finger on the reason why the United States is not a good environment for globally competitive American banks. (The Baseline Scenario)

The problem with this approach is that there is a fundamental and widening gap between how banks are seen in the United States compared with other leading countries.  To some extent this is about tradition – from the early 19^th century the US has a long history of suspicion regarding the political and economic power of banks, whereas Germany has tended to have a more cooperative relationship between the state and big banks.  It is also about what we think government should do – our “pro-banking” group in government draws a lot of support when it insists that the federal authorities should not run banks, but in France there is much less reluctance to mix politics and financial business.

Government support for big American banks is unstructured and unofficial. This means that problems can get very big before bankers call for help. It also explains why so few Americans understand the “bailouts,” why they were necessary, and how they could have been more effective.

Tierce

¶ Fruit flies are adapting to the threat of parasitic nematodes, but the adaptation is parasitic as well, and does not involve the flies’ genes. It’s a  bacterium called Spiroplasma, long resident in fruit flies, that has undergone the evolution. Brandom Keim reports on the findings at Wired Science.

The pattern fits with what’s predicted by traditional evolutionary theory: A beneficial mutation arises, confers a reproductive advantage, and over time spreads through a population — except that the adaptation isn’t genetic, but bacterial. Microbes can be passed from mother flies to offspring, but also carried by mites between flies, and even between species.

This kind of evolution “allows an adaptation in one species to be moved to another species,” said Yale University evolutionary biologist Nancy Moran, who was not involved in the study.

According to Moran, the spread of beneficial bugs gives animals a version of the horizontal gene transfer present in ultra-adaptable bacteria, which can pick up new genetic material over the course of their lives. “This is a way that animals can steal adaptations from each other and from other branches of the tree of life,” she said.

The point of this hour’s link is to remind you of the difficulty of thinking about evolution.

Sext

¶ In “Dictionary Therapy,” Dominique Browning captures the “torpor” and “lassitude” of Northeast Corridor weather this week — and finds solace in the pages of a book that we used to take for granted. (Slow Love Life)

And lassitude–a feeling of weariness, diminished energy, or listlessness. Well, I did stay up until 2 in the morning, reading Patricia Cornwell and eating graham crackers. Then I woke at 5:30, wondering how men become murderers and torturers of women. And, I was annoyed by the sharp crumbs in my bed. No wonder I am listless, and becalmed. But there on the page before me is a picture of a white-haired gent working wood with a lathe; his concentration is admirable, and so are his glasses. This picture must be from the fifties or sixties. He looks nice, not at all like a murderer, but like the sort of guy who might make a table for his children, a table that they would pass on to their children. They would reminisce about his workbench, and how neatly organized it was, and how he took such care of his tools…and now that he is too frail to make furniture, they have no idea what to do with all that equipment, those jars of nails, the thirty different screwdrivers. Why didn’t they learn more from him when he was around to teach them?

But there, hovering over the man and his lathe, is lateen, (rigged with a triangular sail), for those days during which one is not becalmed. Meaning, there’s hope for me yet. But better words–and better bedtimes, and better eating habits, and better reading habits–would help. For now, the dictionary is a good start.

Nones

¶ How Thaksin Shinawatra ruined Thailand for democracy — in one (longish) paragraph. James Stent reflects, at Reuters. Be sure to read the italicized section at the beginning, in which Mr Stent lays out his thinking in the 1990s, when it didn’t see anything like Thaksin coming.

Many of the elite of Thailand, believing in Thai particularism (of which more later), does not reflect on the implications of these historical processes of other countries. Thousands of Thais, mostly drawn from the elite and middle classes, were willing to devote their time and money to the illegal occupation of Government House and Bangkok’s two international airports. They felt that they “know better” what is good for the country, and that therefore an illegal coup and illegal take-over of public property were justified in the cause of preventing Thaksin and his supporters or nominees from ruling the country. When I suggested to some of these people that they were attempting through force to repudiate the results of a properly elected and constituted government, they would retort, “But, Jim, those voters are uneducated,” implying that one cannot leave decisions on who should run the country up to uneducated farmers. Of course, being uneducated does not equate to being stupid, nor does it mean that one is not capable of recognizing where one’s interests lie; moreover, if the majority of the country is uneducated, it makes one wonder what the government of the country had been doing over the previous half century if, in the course of economic development, it had neglected to direct sufficient resources to properly educate the majority of the country’s citizens. When pressed, these yellow shirt supporters would finally say to me, “Well, if democracy means that the majority of the people elect the government, then I am not in favor of that sort of democracy in Thailand.” At least that statement has the virtue of being candid, and it is exactly what the most right-wing faction of the yellow shirts, the People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD), favors—curtailment of the political rights of the majority in favor of democracy guided by the elite. After all, this was arguably what had worked reasonably well over the previous half century prior to Thaksin, and probably was most successful under the leadership of Prime Mininster Prem in the 1980’s, when the country was peaceful, stable, and everyone was optimistic about the future of the country and in agreement on the directions of development under capable technocrats.

Vespers

¶ On the off-chance that you’ve never given blurbs much thought, and still believe that the bits of puffery that well-known writers often write for their less well-known brethren are meaningful, Laura Miller has the antidote.

Most of the people involved in this system are well-meaning: Blurbers want to help other authors, publishers want to win more attention for their books, and authors want to do everything they can to prove that their publishers’ faith in their work has been justified. The result, however, is broken and borderline (sometimes outright) corrupt.

A few celebrated authors have made a point of regularly seeking out and championing books by writers with whom they have no connection — Stephen King is the most prominent example. (That said, I haven’t found King’s recommendations particularly useful.) But overall, blurbs just aren’t very meaningful. Yet, apart from a minority of skeptics, much of the public still seems to take them at face value. One British publisher claims to have seen research showing that as many as 62 percent of book buyers choose titles on the basis of blurbs.

Anecdotal evidence from online discussions and personal experience confirms this baffling preference. “I liked [Sara Gruen’s] ‘Water for Elephants,'” said a woman I spotted studying a copy of Lynn Cullen’s “The Creation of Eve” at my local bookstore, “so maybe I’ll like this one, too.” (Gruen called Cullen’s book “enormously satisfying.”) I haven’t read either book myself, so I can’t weigh in on any similarity between them; for all I know Gruen meant every word of that praise. But when I suggested to this reader that blurbs can be unreliable, she glanced at me as if I were the one with the ulterior motive, nodded vaguely and drifted away, book in hand.

Oh, well, maybe the antidote only works on readers.

Compline

¶ The crux of Arthur Kleinman’s achingly lucid essay on caregiving in general and his wife’s Alzheimer’s in particular is that we have to stop thinking of care as something that we’d rather not be bothered with. (Harvard; via  The Morning News)

Economists configure caregiving as “burden.” Psychologists talk about “coping,” health-services researchers describe social resources and healthcare costs, and physicians conceive it as a clinical skill. Each of these perspectives represents part of the picture. For the medical humanities and interpretive social sciences, caregiving is a foundational component of moral experience. By this I mean that we envision caregiving as an existential quality of what it is to be a human being. We give care as part of the flow of everyday lived values and emotions that make up moral experience. Here collective values and social emotions are as influential as individual ones. Within these local moral worlds—family, network, institution, community—caregiving is one of those things that really matters, but usually not the only thing.

As a scholar, I engage with other medical humanists to understand the dimensions of this moral activity—how it is experienced and organized. In part, I hope it can be better taught. I believe that what doctors need to be helped to master is the art of acknowledging and affirming the patient as a suffering human being; imagining alternative contexts and practices for responding to calamity; and conversing with and supporting patients in desperate situations where the emphasis is on what really matters to the patient and his or her intimates. A program of medical training that makes this happen, however it is innovated, should combine practical experience of caregiving for health catastrophes in homes and institutions, where students actually do those things that families do, with the knowledge that stands behind the art of medicine.

But here, I am writing principally about people like me who give care to loved ones who suffer the infirmities of advanced age, serious disabilities, terminal illnesses, and the devastating consequences of such health catastrophes as stroke or dementia.

 Faced with these crises, family and close friends become responsible for assistance with all the mundane, material activities of daily living: dressing, feeding, bathing, toileting, ambulating, communicating, and interfacing with the healthcare system. Caregivers protect the vulnerable and dependent. To use the experience-distorting technical language: they offer cognitive, behavioral, and emotional support. And because caregiving is so tiring, and emotionally draining, effective caregiving requires that caregivers themselves receive practical and emotional support.

Have a Look

¶ “Columbia? They let him teach at Columbia?!” The hilarious “trailer” for Gary Shteyngart’s new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. (via  The Morning News)

Matins

¶ No one is excited about it but us: we’ve brought the Web log to the iPad. We’ve simplified the design, enlarged the text pane to dimensions that look imbecilic on a conventional monitor, and even closed comments (because who wants to write on an iPad?) At this moment of novelty, then, it’s more interesting than it might be to read The Economist about the slowdown of the Blogosphere, and about how, on the “personal” front at least, it’s losing ground to other media. (via  kottke.org)

The future for blogs may be special-interest publishing. Mr Kelly’s research shows that blogs tend to be linked within languages and countries, with each language-group in turn containing smaller pockets of densely linked sites. These pockets form around public subjects: politics, law, economics and knowledge professions. Even narrower specialisations emerge around more personal topics that benefit from public advice. Germany has a cluster for children’s crafts; France, for food; Sweden, for painting your house.

Such specialist cybersilos may work for now, but are bound to evolve further. Deutsche Blogcharts says the number of links between German blogs dropped last year, with posts becoming longer. Where will that end? Perhaps in a single, hugely long blog posting about the death of blogs.

Not that “the death of blogs” will mean “no more blogging.” That’s never how it works.

Lauds

¶ The fund-drive to buy the Eighteenth-Century portrait of a slave/slave trader shows how Britain’s wonderful National Portrait Gallery is different. (BBC; via Arts Journal )

The painting according to the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is the first known portrait that honours a named African subject as an individual and an equal, and thereby gives a useful insight into Britain in the 18th Century.

This statement tells you all you need to know about what makes the NPG different from and, from the perspective of social history, more interesting than other art galleries. It makes clear that the sitter is more important than the artist. The NPG doesn’t want this painting because it’s an exquisite example of 18th Century British art, but because the story of the sitter and its significance is so compelling.

We don’t believe that the line between aesthetics (the painting’s formal qualities) and reference (the sitter’s identity) is clear at all. To be sure, the NPG contains works by second-rate artists. In many cases, it’s likely that the sitters would not have found first-rate painting to their taste. What’s clear is that, with the exception of a handful of masterpieces, a portrait gallery is a showcase for history.

Prime

¶ We admit that we’ll be going over Tyler Cowen’s mini-treatise, “Why Corporations Matter,” with a gimlet eye. The first installment is certainly full of interesting things. But we’re not surprised by the clever resort to early capitalism, when investors knew where to find the managers to whom they’d given their money, as an explanation for what’s going on now with colossal business organizations that can expand only by resorting to cannibalism. (Zero Hedge)

It was quite normal, before the VOC and corporations, for a business to rise, plateau, then decline, and then ultimately vanish—along with all of the business’s accumulated expertise. That is, presumably, what happened to the makers of the Antikythera clockwork. Ambitious men have been forever trying to get their sons to follow the family business they spent so much time, effort and tears nurturing and growing—only to have their hopes dashed when their sons turned out to be uninterested, or even worse, incompetent.

But starting with the Dutch East India Company’s stock, people could take an active interest in a company for a limited time, before passing on the ownership of the corporation to someone else by way of the sale of stock.

Who would take over the corporate entity? Obvious: Someone who was interested in building it up.

People are not single-minded. People like to talk, hang out, fuck, laugh, play, read a book, etc. But corporations are productivity engines. They are supposed to do one thing: Carry out the business of the corporation.

When people are interested in the business of a corporation, they participate in it via stock ownership. The corporation’s interests and the stock owner’s interests align, and both benefit. When the stock owner’s interest flags for whatever reason, they can sell off their ownership in the corporation to someone else.

Thus the corporation and the owners are meeting each other at the moment when they are of most use to one another. And when the owner leaves the business (ie., sells his stock shares), it’s not just that the owner is “cashing out” when he’s no longer interested in the business: It’s that the corporation is continuing on with a new and interested owner, who will use his best efforts to maximise the business of the corporation.

The benefit of the stock sale is not only to the stockholder, but also to the corporation. Because the corporation is leaving behind an uninterested owner, and continuing on with a new stockholder—a new owner—catching this individual at the peak of his interest in the business of the corporation.

Be sure to ask about our ideas for safe-guarding the relics of bygone technologies.

Tierce

¶ The Dunning-Kruger Effect has been in the news a lot lately — you know, the “fact” that stupid people are too stupied to know how stupid they are — and, not surprisingly, it’s being misinterpreted pretty freely. Tal Yarkoni, a graduate student at Columbia, has compiled a painstaking corrective that, at a minimum, you ought to bookmark for future reference. (Citation Needed; via  Marginal Revolution)

As you can see, the findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are. People who perform worst at a task tend to think they’re god’s gift to said task, and the people who can actually do said task often display excessive modesty. I suspect we find this sort of explanation compelling because it appeals to our implicit just-world theories: we’d like to believe that people who obnoxiously proclaim their excellence at X, Y, and Z must really not be so very good at X, Y, and Z at all, and must be (over)compensating for some actual deficiency; it’s much less pleasant to imagine that people who go around shoving their (alleged) superiority in our faces might really be better than us at what they do.

Sext

¶ Poor Levi Johnson! You wonder if he can actually read the press releases being issued in his name. Gail Collins is right to wonder if he actually hopes, in so many words, that the Palins will “forgive my youthful indiscretion.”

Last year, when his illegitimate fatherdom fame was at its height, Levi had acquired management and was talking about writing his memoirs or pursuing an acting career. But it appears that he has not actually been able to turn his failure to use a condom into a permanent job.

Funny as this story is, it brings huge relief. We must not be speeding toward Idiocracy quite as fast as we feared.

¶ At the opposite socio-economic pole, there’s Mad Hattery!, “bringing you the very best in ridiculous royal hats.” Recently resurfaced Muscato, whom we thank for the link, writes,

…what I really want to do is call attention to one of my favorite recent blog-finds, Mad Hattery! A lighthearted, possibly borderline-obsessive look at topper trends among the titled classes, MH! is presided over by the almost impossibly knowledgeable hostess Ella, and she and her coterie of fascinator-followers make for very good company indeed.

Among other things, we share a level of despair over the sartorial choices of the Princess Royal, a healthy disdain for Princess Michael of Kent, and an unbridled fondness for the slightly demented charms of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, a lady to whom the MH! generally refers to as “Cake,” for reasons obvious to anyone who studies her very distinctive hatting tendencies. Further afield, MH! takes aim from time to time at the studiedly dull dressing of the Japanese Imperials, looks now and again at such regional favorites as Princess Haya of Jordan (and Dubai) and the colorful Sheikha Moza of Qatar, and is now gearing up for the August nuptials involving the erstwhile Greek royals. It’s all in excellent fun, and I really can’t recommend it enough.

Nones

¶ At the Times, Wayne Arnold reports on Vietnamese inflation — fueled by a government that, in classic command-economy mode, wants to hit growth targets in time for a party congress.

Inflation, meanwhile, has been the all too common side effect of Vietnam’s emergence. A recurring feature of the Vietnam War, hyperinflation returned in the late 1980s and early 1990s along with an investment boom that followed doi moi. Now any new sign of it sends the public scurrying for more dollars, creating a vicious circle that puts downward pressure on the dong and pushes prices even higher.

In the past two years, the Vietnamese currency has fallen 15 percent amid such concerns. The local version of the TV game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” offers a top prize of 120 million dong — a potential windfall equivalent to only $6,300. The result is what economists refer to as the dollarization of Vietnam’s economy. Things as varied as hotel rooms and cameras are priced in dollars.

Where do all those greenbacks go? Many go into low-yielding U.S. dollar deposits at banks. But another portion — no one knows how many dollars are circulating in Vietnam — gets stashed at home.

Vespers

¶ Almost unwittingly, Survival of the Book‘s Brian has hit upon the terrible chain that binds high productivity to high unemployment. He is looking at the world of publishing — specifically, the triumphal superiority of Amazon over Barnes & Noble — but what he says is true for most mature corproations, and the net net is more money for the Jeff Bezoses of the world.

I know I’ve gone on and on about labor before, but it does worry me. And something not addressed here is the massive amount of accumulated wealth in this country – the rich have become much, much richer – and yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. Jeff “$4.3 billion worth” Bezos. It’s time to DISTRIBUTE that WEALTH, billionaires! It’s hard to look at that amount of wealth alongside struggling independent bookstores and important independent presses that are getting by on nothing, with employees making pennies (trust me, I speak from experience) and having to cut corners while fatcats question their bottom lines, telling them they should dry up and die if they can’t find a market. That’s not even to mention public libraries facing horrible cuts, to employees, to hours, to branches. I know this is simplistic but on some level, so is the problem: $4.3 billion here and bookstore or library closing there (or here or there), it doesn’t take a math genius to find imbalance.

Compline

¶ Jonah Lehrer campaigns, eloquently, for the rehabilitation of LSD for experimental purposes. (The Frontal Cortex)

This is an elegant experimental paradigm. But it’s also profoundly limited. Even if we can locate the cells that govern binocular rivalry, that’s only a single “neural correlate of consciousness”. It remains entirely unclear if those to-be-determined cells in the visual cortex govern all visual experience, or just the contradictions between our eyeballs.

And this leads me back to LSD. Here’s a compound that can consistently alter our entire sensory experience, so that the brain is made aware of its own machinery. We see ourselves seeing the world. (I wish Kant had tried LSD – he would have loved it.*) From the perspective of neuroscience, the hallucinogen is like a systematic version of binocular rivalry. If we knew how LSD worked, we might also gain insight into how ordinary experience works, and how that chemical soup creates the feeling of this, here, now. In other words, the molecular “joints” tweaked by the illegal compound can tell us something very interesting about the source of our unjointed stream of consciousness. Cary Grant was on to something.

*Kant: “The imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”

We couldn’t agree more. The Editor dropped acid an untold number of times in his misspent youth, and never found it to be what anybody would call “recreational.” Also the kids turned out okay.

Matins

¶ In the Washington Post, education columnist Jay Matthews shares the experience of an Advanced Placement chemistry teacher who was surprised to find that four serious underachievers (“‘Angry’ threw rubber snappers and tried to burn random things in lab.”) were learning all the same. (via Good)

Angry said he never had to study for Chemistry, unlike his roommates. Sweetie said she learned so much in AP that her Chem class is easy now. All the students reported that they had been unmotivated for one reason or another in my class in 2004. Some had family or medical issues that interfered with their learning, some said they were just lazy.

My main point is that they ALL reported that they learned a ton in AP Chemistry, even though their performance in the class did not indicate such. They told me that their performance in college Chemistry was due to what they learned in AP Chemistry. They shared that their classmates who never had AP Chem in high school were really struggling with the college content and the way it was taught. But for my students, the content had finally “clicked.”

Surely the best thing that our most exclusive colleges and universities could do for the United States would be to favor applicants with International Baccalaureates.

Lauds

¶ Rome in the Age of Berlusconi… sigh. Michael Kimmelman, deftly treating the Eternal City as a work of art that’s in grave need of a curator, notes that .21 % of the government’s budget is spent on cultural maintenance; perhaps UNESCO ought to take over. (NYT)

This area where the Pigorini is, by contrast, never took off as it was meant to before the war. Most Romans don’t venture to the ethnography museum after grade school, although they’ll wax nostalgic when reminded of it. Mr. Fuksas’s building adds a giant bauble in what’s still the middle of nowhere, albeit it’s too early to say for sure what this stretch of suburb will become when the congress hall opens, and housing arrives. What’s clear is only that the effort to push Rome’s livable, cultural space outward from the center is a step in the right direction. Just a step.

Or, as Mr. Fuksas phrased it, “Architecture is interesting, but by itself it means nothing.”

Especially when some of the best of it is falling down. Exhibit A: the Domus Aurea, the Golden Villa that Nero built near the Colosseum, where a vaulted gallery fell this spring. Nobody was hurt, fortunately. That’s because the place has been closed since 2008, plagued by structural problems and humidity, which threatens the frescoes. To much fanfare, the city opened part of the site for tourists in 1999. Then heavy rain collapsed a section of roof, the site was closed, reopened a while later, then closed again.

A commission assigned to address the problem spent millions but didn’t forestall the latest mishap. Construction workers were fussing with earthmovers, bits and pieces of ancient columns, broken pots and scaffolding one recent morning. Fedora Filippi, a veteran archaeologist lately put in charge, pointed out where the roof gave way in what is actually an adjacent gallery built under Trajan, after Nero. Rain seeped from a park above, she said. Everybody has known about the leaking for ages. But the park is city-owned, and the Domus Aurea is national property, so the problem is no one’s to solve.

Prime

¶ Felix Salmon is delightfully unimpressed by Sebastian Mallaby’s claim that the quants at Renaissance Technologies are too, too special to suffer regulation, and he makes short work of that. And, furthermore….

Besides which, I’m not at all convinced that the best way to deal with investment risk is to start paying billionaires 2-and-20 to manage your money for you. For a good example, look at RenTech itself: the funds which are available to the public, RIEF and RIFF, have dropped to $6 billion of late, down from $30 billion in 2007; they might be closed down altogether. Clearly, RenTech’s management are better at enriching themselves than they are at building a long-term franchise for stewarding other people’s money.

Tierce

¶ What language instinct? At Northumbria University, Ewa Dabrowska makes the shocking discovery that many high-school dropouts really don’t understand English grammar. (via  The Awl)

“Of course some people are more literate, with a larger vocabulary and greater exposure to highly complex literary constructions. Nevertheless, at a fundamental level, everyone in a linguistic community is supposed to share the same core grammar, in the same way that given normal development we can all walk.”

The supposition that everyone in a linguistic community shares the same grammar is a central tenet of Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar. The theory assumes that all children learn language equally well and that there must therefore be an underlying common structure to all languages that is somehow “hard-wired” into the brain.

Dr Dabrowska has examined other explanations for her findings, such as limitations to working memory, and even so-called “test wiseness,” but she concluded that these non-linguistic factors are irrelevant.

She also stressed that the findings have nothing to do with intelligence.

¶ At the Telegraph, a rather sweet interview with Noam Chomsky, in London to give a talk. It’s interviewer’s Nigel Farmdale’s perspective that’s interesting. (via  3 Quarks Daily)

Having said there would be no more linguistics, I find myself back on the subject. What does Chomsky make of stories about undergraduates at British universities having to be taught grammar in their freshman years? To a linguist, one whose own literary style favours phrases such as ‘generative transformational grammar’, that must seem an abomination.

‘Yes, there is that. It is probably down to the texting culture. The use of textonyms and so on. But it is also to do with the way young people read on screen. The digital age cuts back reading and, as a consequence, young people are losing the ability to think seriously. They get distracted more easily, breaking off to check an email. Speed-reading is exactly the wrong thing to do. You have to think about what you are reading.’ He gives me his sideways look. ‘You have to ponder.’

Sext

¶ Yesterday, The Bygone Bureau took us to India. Today, it’s New York. Laura Yan writes about growing up to become something like the woman she hoped to become when she arrived as an NYU student — only now she understands that the glamour and excitement are a bit besides the point.

I think of the parties, the concerts, the strange performances in Brooklyn warehouses or costumed affairs in antique mansions. I think of the days wrapped in the covers of my bed, weekend nights spent reading by a soft lamplight. I think of the countless people I’ve met, personalities I never expected. I think of the places I’d worked and the things I encountered, and the adventures I’ve yet to write. I think of how, still, when the city does its worst and failures dance on tense strings in my mind, I can step outside for a walk, and the silky blue green of the water, the orange sunset cast against the rafters of the Williamsburg bridge will remind me of the beauty that is worth all the sacrifice.

And I think, yes, but better. For though I came to New York in part for that elusive inspiration, and that mystical love of the city, I found something far more complex. Bleak in a way, hopeless in a way, but beautiful. And this, as with all love affairs, is endlessly complicated, heavy, wrought with conflicts and dangers at every turn. But as with all affairs worth keeping, when it does go right, it’s the same delirious ecstasy I found on my first day in New York alone. Only this hardly requires elaborate occasions, forced effort. This is a love affair that carries on whether I ask for its attention or want it to slide by. Anyway, when that skyline calls, who am I to resist its summons? I throw on a dress and Ferragamo flats, swing the purse strap over an shoulder, and walk, waiting for New York to answer the prayers I’ve yet to speak.

Nones

¶ Barbara Demick’s harrowing piece about the collapse of North Korea’s economy — not much helped by a shotgun devaluation last autumn — is available online only to New Yorker subscribers, but perhaps this passage will convey the sense of a social catastrophe.

Before the devaluation, the Korean won had been trading on the black market at thirty-five hundred to one US dollar. The devaluation would close the gap between the black-market rate of exchange and the official rate, which was about a hundred and sixty won to one dollar, by knocking two zeroes off its value. The economists Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard, who write frequently about North Korea, point out that this is a credible method of shorting up a weak currency; in recent years, Turkey, Romania, and Ghana have executed similar currency devaluations to give their weak currencies respectability. In those cases, though, there was a transition period. In Ghana, the government began a campaign to inform the public seven months before the 2007 changeover took effect, and both the old and the new currency circulated in tandem for six months.

Many North Koreans were given less than twenty-four hours’ notice. Some were informed around noon, and had until 5 PM that day to take their money to cashiers at their workplace. The exchange limit was set at a hundred thousand won, roughly thirty dollars. Panic spread throughout North Korea’s cities. “High-ranking officials with connections changed their money first, and let their relatives know,” Song-hee said. They rushed to get rid of their Korean money, either converting to foreign currency or buying up whatever food or merchandise they could at the market. “But ordinary people — those who live not too well but not too badly, either — they were the ones who were hurt. They all went bust. I don’t know how to explain it. It was as though your head would burst. In one day, all your money was lost. People were taken to the hospital in shock.”

¶ In the Times, Martin Fackler writes about the one remaining link between the two Koreas, the industrial park at Kaesong.

Still, the managers’ biggest difficulty has been a decline in orders from South Korean buyers, who they said had stopped buying from Kaesong factories for fear the complex might suddenly be closed down for political reasons. They also said they were worried that the North would close the complex if the South resumed its political broadcasts.

“We are being used as bargaining chips in a political game,” said Jimmy Bae, director of strategic planning at Cuckoo Electronics, a South Korean electronics company that has a $10 million factory in the complex.

While discerning the North’s intentions is always a challenge, South Korean officials say North Korea has made it clear that it wants to keep the complex open. In late May, North Korean officials told South Korean Ministry of Unification officials that they still wanted to develop the complex, the ministry said. North Korea also announced new rules to restrict the ability of South Korean companies to remove equipment from factories in Kaesong — a move that the South Korean news media interpreted as an attempt to discourage companies from pulling out.

Vespers

¶ What could be more refreshing than previews of coming literary attractions. From The Millions, the big names: Franzen, Petterson, Shteyngart, Moody, Cunningham, and many others. Anne Yoder’s thumbnail sketch of Antonya Nelson’s new book, Bound, certainly got our attention.

If two women can bond by mutual disdain for a third, then reading Antonya Nelson’s fiction is like being the second woman listening as Nelson dishes tales of family, friends, and small town life with precision, venom, and humor. Typical to Nelson is a swift and biting portrait that’s as honest as it is unsentimental–consider this line from her story “Incognito” for example: “My mother the widow had revealed a boisterous yet needy personality, now that she was alone, and Eddie, least favorite sibling, oily since young, did nothing more superbly than prop her up.” Nelson’s latest novel, Bound, returns to her hometown of Wichita, Kansas, and depicts the turmoil of a couple on the rocks–the wife haunted by her past and the husband a serial adulterer–while a serial killer, the BTK (Bound Torture, and Kill), reappears after a long silence, taking vicious to a new level.

Meanwhile, at The Second Pass, a quieter list, modestly described as a “Supplement” to the Millions‘. We chuckled:

The Instructions by Adam Levin (November 1)

Levin’s debut novel runs to more than 900 pages, and chronicles four days in the life of Gurion Maccabee, a 10-year-old with a messiah complex. The publisher (McSweeney’s) says the novel combines “the crackling voice of Philip Roth with the encyclopedic mind of David Foster Wallace.” So, no pressure or anything.

Compline

¶ At The Infrastructurist, Melissa Lafsky picks up on the story that the Times ran the other day about movie theatres in small Midwestern towns.

Take movie theaters. Towns with a single movie house have long been a symbol for closed-minded intolerance and resistance to change, not to mention the inexorable decline of the small-town lifestyle (think of the dusty, dying Anarene, Texas in The Last Picture Show). But despite the seeming-unstoppable rise of home theaters, cable, and Netflix, the local movie theater is enjoying a revival, maintaining its grasp as a powerful place in rural American communities.

As New York Times reports, these theaters are reclaiming their throwback role as vital community centers — the Saturday night destination for teenagers and couples seeking quality time together, as well as the meeting place where locals can discuss farming practices and watch highlights from the high school football game.

If this is a trend, it will be interesting to watch, because it suggests a profoundly communitarian shift in the heartland of rugged individualism. If you want to live in a small town, you’re going to have to help make it viable.

Have a Look

¶ “10 Crazy-Looking New Deep-Sea Creatures.” (Wired Science)

¶ Project Doodle: Summer in the City. Also: BP’s 1970 board game, Offshore Oil Strike. (Good)

¶ Reports on the relief wells at Zero Hedge, The Oil Drum.

Matins

¶ Like so many New York Magazine must-read articles, Jennifer Senior’s piece on unhappy parents, “All Joy and No Fun,” is touched by depravity. (“Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses.”) But she seems to miss the connection between the problem (too many choices) and the solution (socialized child care).

One hates to invoke Scandinavia in stories about child-rearing, but it can’t be an accident that the one superbly designed study that said, unambiguously, that having kids makes you happier was done with Danish subjects. The researcher, Hans-Peter Kohler, a sociology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, says he originally studied this question because he was intrigued by the declining fertility rates in Europe. One of the things he noticed is that countries with stronger welfare systems produce more children—and happier parents.

Of course, this should not be a surprise. If you are no longer fretting about spending too little time with your children after they’re born (because you have a year of paid maternity leave), if you’re no longer anxious about finding affordable child care once you go back to work (because the state subsidizes it), if you’re no longer wondering how to pay for your children’s education and health care (because they’re free)—well, it stands to reason that your own mental health would improve. When Kahneman and his colleagues did another version of his survey of working women, this time comparing those in Columbus, Ohio, to those in Rennes, France, the French sample enjoyed child care a good deal more than its American counterpart. “We’ve put all this energy into being perfect parents,” says Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, “instead of political change that would make family life better.”

Of course we love our children because they’re ours. But burdening oneself with full responsibility for how a child turns out is as fantastical — and as true-blue American — as believing that “self-made men” really are self-made.

Lauds

¶ The wonderful thing about “con” (“confidence man,” swindler) is that all you have to do is italicize it to produce an apt name for the victim. Michael Grann’s jolly good piece about Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal expert who authenticates art works by means of fingerprint identification (how scientific is that), suggests a story with a few as of yet unwritten chapters. (The New Yorker) 

Biro soon asked Ken Parker—whose late father and stepmother had won several million dollars from the New York Lotto—to make a much larger investment. Biro was part of an effort to launch a venture named Provenance, which would provide, as he put it, the “clever strategy” necessary to sell “orphaned” paintings for tens of millions of dollars. According to a business prospectus, marked confidential, Provenance would acquire art works that had been forensically validated by Biro and several colleagues, and sell them in a gallery in New York City. The company chose a thumbprint for a logo. The driving force behind the venture was Tod Volpe, an art dealer who had once represented celebrities, including Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand. Biro, who had suggested that Volpe might serve as the Parkers’ dealer, described him, in an e-mail, as “brilliant, resourceful, and extremely well connected.” Biro said that his brother, Laszlo—whose “knowledge was invaluable”—would also be a central part of the company. Once Provenance was established, Biro told the Parkers, “there really is nothing we can no[t] do.”

The plan called for raising sixty-five million dollars from investors, part of which would go toward buying J. P. Morgan’s old headquarters, on Wall Street, and turning it into a palatial arts complex anchored by a gallery. Surprisingly, at least five million dollars of investors’ money would also go to purchasing Teri Horton’s painting—even though Biro had authenticated the work and Volpe had tried to sell it. By capitalizing on the media interest surrounding the painting, the plan said, the work could be resold for between forty and sixty million dollars, maybe even a hundred million. Although Biro has always publicly maintained that he had no financial stake in Horton’s painting, Horton sent an e-mail to the Parkers saying that after the sale of her painting Biro would “collect” and that it would “set him for life.”

Prime

¶ Chicago’s Raghu Rajan makes a good case for the Fed’s raising interest rates soon. (And a quieter one for printing money to fund unemployment benefits.) (via  Marginal Revolution)

What many people forget is that interest rates are also a price, and shape not only the level of economic activity but also the allocation of resources and the relative wealth of buyers and sellers of financial savings. A sustained period of ultra-low interest rates will favor the segments of the economy that took us into the crisis – housing, durable goods like cars, and finance. And it will encourage households to borrow and spend rather than save. With policies focused on reviving the patterns of behavior that proved so costly the last time around, it is ironic that President Obama wants the rest of the world to change and spend more to displace the United States as spender of first resort, even while the United States is unwilling to make any changes itself.

Put differently, aggregate demand is indeed insufficient to restore the economy to old patterns of production. But that production was absorbed only through an unsustainable debt-fueled, asset-price-boom-supported consumer binge. And even if we think U.S. consumers have become excessively cautious (it is hard to see a savings rate of 5 percent as excessive caution, except in relation to the extravagant past), moving them back down the same path seems unwise.

More important, the United States also has a problem of distorted supply. Prices in the economy should reflect the past misallocation of resources and move resources away from areas like housing and finance. A lot of people have to be retrained for the jobs that will be created in the future, not left lamenting for the jobs they had in the past. A Fed that keeps real

Tierce

¶ We haven’t been following Felix Salmon on the subject of wine, but his recent post, “The more you know, the better it tastes,” accords with Paul Bloom’s essentialist theory of pleasure.

That’s why so many wineries put so much effort into wine tours and that’s why you’re much more likely to enjoy your bottle of pinot noir if it has been preceded by a short explanation from the sommelier of who the winemaker is, where they’re from and what exactly they’re doing. There’s really no way of telling how or whether any particular part of the story affects the taste, but the simple telling of the story makes an enormous difference.

Sext

¶ Kassia Karr is no match for the wily chancellor of an aspirational engineering college in Tamil Nadu. Having asked her to speak to “ten or twenty” students, he hauls her up before two hundred, and proceeds to translate her multicultural politeness right into thin air. (The Bygone Bureau)

Finally, a young man in the audience stood up.

“Why do you think the American way of eating food is better than the Indian way?” he asked.

For a half-second I was baffled — when had I said that? I quickly realized that the chancellor had been putting opinions in my mouth when he was translating for me. I went to the mic to try to clear up the confusion. “I do not think America’s customs are better than Indian customs! I like them both the same,” I said, almost pleadingly, trying to indicate the mix-up with an exaggerated expression of worry. But then the chancellor started translating for me again, and I did not return to the podium again as he regaled the students with his opinion on why eating with a fork and spoon, American style, was more proper and more hygienic than the Indian way of eating with hands.

Nones

¶ Landon Thomas reports on Turkey’s healthy economy — more Euro-worthy than many in the Eurozone itself. It’s only initially surprising that the boom  is attributable in no small part to the socially conservative but more sincerely democratic administration of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AK Party.

Mr. Ak, the car leasing executive, exemplifies this new business elite of entrepreneurs. He drives a Ferrari to work, but he is also a practicing Muslim who does not drink and has no qualms in talking about his faith. He is not bound to the 20th-century secular consensus among the business, military and judicial elite that fought long and hard to keep Islam removed from public life.

On the wall behind his desk is a framed passage in Arabic from the Koran, and he recently financed an Islamic studies program just outside Washington at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., where Mr. Erdogan recently spoke.

Whether he is embracing Islam as a set of principles to govern his life or Israeli irrigation technology for his sideline almond and walnut growing business, Mr. Ak represents the flexible dynamism — both social and economic — that has allowed Turkey to expand the commercial ties with Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria that now underpin its ambition to become the dominant political actor in the region.

Vespers

¶ We’re not running out and buying every cool-sounding novel anymore, but we’ll be watching to see what other people have to say about Jenny Hollowell’s Everything Lovely, Effortless, Safe. Valerie Brelinski’s somewhat uneven review is studded with memorable images. (The Rumpus)

In L.A., Birdie meets her match in Redmond, a man even more coolly pragmatic and self-protective than she, who wisely refuses to sleep with Birdie, all the while recognizing her unusual beauty or star-quality. Redmond becomes her agent—he finds her work and a place to live, he takes her to important parties and makes sure she meets the right people. These star-lit parties are almost Gatsby-esque in both their descriptive glamour and frantic unhappiness. It is in these scenes that Hollowell frequently does her best writing, infusing the gorgeous California evenings and the beautiful people drifting through them with a sadness as palpable as the lemon-scented air.

Hollowell also perfectly captures the humor and the horror inherent in Birdie’s climb toward fame. During her nine-years sojourn in L.A., Birdie makes the requisite sacrifices required of young attractive females in Hollywood. She laughs at unfunny jokes and performs at humiliating auditions and fucks unfuckable men, all for the dubious honor of starring in a tampon commercial (“Ultra-extra-mega-dry”) and as an “ass double” for more famous actresses. Though Redmond keeps promising that soon, soon she’ll land the part that will change everything, all Birdie knows is that she is getting older. And sadder. And less marketable.

Compline

¶ Evgeny Morosov. reviewing The Shallows, Nicholas Carr’s alarmist book about the Internet, echoes our thoughts about the drift of the Web, from geeks’ toy to social resource. (Prospect; via  Marginal Revolution)

Then there is the question of the internet’s political economy—a subject that, judging by his blog, Carr understands well, and yet The Shallows fails to analyse in any real depth. Internet users spend their time clicking on link after link, but this is not an inevitable feature of the web. Google and other companies create these “link traps” to entice us to click again and again, as the more is known about what interests us, the better the companies can customise adverts and other services. Our distraction is not pre-determined; it is the by-product of a bargain in which we have agreed to become targets of aggressive and intrusive advertising in exchange for free access to the internet’s goodies. In the future one could imagine Google offering a premium version of its service, where users would be charged a penny for each search but wouldn’t be shown any of the ads. Similarly, one can imagine the website of the New York Times that did not include links to external sources. This, in fact, is what it looked like ten years ago—and how the Kindle edition of the newspaper still looks today. For all his insights into the plasticity of the brain, Carr is blind to the plasticity of the internet itself. Today’s internet—with its profusion of hyperlinks, widgets, tweets, and pop-ups—is only one of the possible “internets” in the future. Equally, the level of concentration we can expend on reading the New York Times only matters as long as there is someone willing to publish it. To attack the net for ruining our concentration while glossing over how it disrupts the economics of publishing is like complaining about too many calories in the food served on the Titanic.

Have a Look

¶ Time‘s Best Blogs.

¶ Tyler Cowen on Hamburg’s HafenCity. (Marginal Revolution)

¶ Dead Malls. (The Morning News)

¶ Being Tyler Brûlé junkets at Schloss Hubertuslöhe. (Audio alert!)

Matins

¶ We can’t remember when it was that we first read some politician’s eyewash about old manufacturing jobs being replaced by technologically advanced new ones — with workers taking some time out for “retraining.” We can’t remember reading such a story without raising our eyebrows. Motoko Rich’s front-page story in today’s Times, “Factory Jobs Return, But Employers Find Skills Shortage,” serves as a kind of hangover-update.

For now, the company urgently needs six machinists to run what are known as computer numerical control — or CNC — machines. An outside recruiter has reviewed 50 résumés in the last month and come up empty.

The jobs, which would pay $18 to $23 an hour, require considerable technical skill. On an afternoon last month, Christopher Debruycker, 34, was running such a machine, the size and shape of a camper van parked on the factory floor.

Mr. Debruycker, who has been an operator for 15 years, had programmed the machine to carve an intricate part for a flight simulator out of a block of aluminum, and he monitored its progress on a control pad with an array of buttons.

“We need 10 more people like him,” Mr. Peterson said.

Lauds

¶ W S Merwin has been named Poet Laureate — about time, you might say. Mr Merwin is 82, and he lives in Hawai’i, so it’s unlikely that he’ll be commuting to Washington with any frequency. Libarian of Congress James Billington, who oversaw the appointment, is considering remote communications hookups that will allow the poet to entertain Americans with, if not his poetry, his important work with endangered species (Mr Merwin has repopulated a “denuded plantation” with plants at risk). But don’t expect the new laureate to take to digital composition. (NYT)

Mr. Billington said he is confident that Mr. Merwin can broaden the audience for poetry through technology, if not in person: “We even discussed the possibility of doing something using remote technology from Hawaii.”

Mr. Merwin moved there in the mid-1970s to study Zen Buddhism, and now lives with his wife, Paula. He said he has cultivated more than 700 endangered species of indigenous plants on the formerly denuded plantation, including the hyophorbe indica, a palm tree he helped save from extinction.

Using his home as a backdrop would illustrate the connection between Mr. Merwin’s work and “his extraordinary interest and devotion to the natural world,” Mr. Billington said, adding that no definite plans have yet been made.

A high-tech solution to the geographical problem is somewhat unexpected for Mr. Merwin, who said he has never composed a poem on any sort of mechanical or electronic device, preferring a small spiral notebook or even a paper napkin. “It’s the nearest thing to not writing,” Mr. Merwin said. “The more self-conscious it gets, the stiffer it gets.”

Prime

¶ In the wake of Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission hearings, the government’s handling of AIG’s collateral crisis has attracted attention. We’re in complete accord with Felix Salmon with regard to the very divided loyalties of Dan Jester and Henry Paulson, Goldman alums who appear to have put their old firm’s interests ahead of all others.

Essentially what happened at AIG was that it bought subprime assets high and was forced, by the government, to sell those same assets low. In doing so, it lost so much money that it had to get bailed out by the government.

Now if the government was going to put up all that money anyway, why not simply lend it to AIG and then let AIG post it as collateral? Or better yet, just provide a government guarantee on AIG’s CDS exposures, in return for a fee, which in turn would keep AIG’s counterparty risk at AAA levels, and would mean that AIG didn’t need to post any collateral at all.

¶ Here’s a new one (insofar as there can be anything new under the sun): a handful of British firms have taken to funding their employees’ pension funds with illiquid assets that, in the case of Diageo, maker of Johnnie Walker, are all-too-liquid.

As part of the deal, Diageo agreed to pay the pension partnership £25 million a year as it sells the recently distilled whiskey once it matures after three years and replaces it with new stock. The agreement would expire after 15 years, at which point Diageo would buy back the whiskey, which comes from distilleries such Oban on the west coast of Scotland.

Tierce

¶ We’re not surprised to learn that national IQ scores correlate with rates of infectious disease, given that “children under five devote much of their energy to brain development.” (Guardian)

The scientists found that the level of infectious disease in a country was closely linked to the average national IQ. The heavier the burden of disease, the lower the nation’s IQ scores. Thornhill believes that nations who have lived with diseases for long periods may have adapted, by developing better immune systems at the expense of brain function.

“The effect of infectious disease on IQ is bigger than any other single factor we looked at,” said Chris Eppig, lead author on the paper. “Disease is a major sap on the body’s energy, and the brain takes a lot of energy to build. If you don’t have enough, you can’t do it properly.”

“The consequence of this, if we’re right, is that the IQ of a nation will be largely unaffected until you can lift the burden of disease,” Eppig added

We hope that this story will come home, as it were. It applies to poor families everywhere.

Sext

¶ Who better to capture the anomie of Pride weekend than Eric Patton? (SORE AFRAID)

Asaph had not wanted to go because he felt that the pier dance is never a fun event, and also that he had too much schoolwork to do.  I have had plenty of terrible times at that dance — in fact, I think I only had fun once, and maybe not even that.  But I had felt like I was missing out last year when I didn’t go.

Darius and I headed over to the pier, where we were first forced to wait in an extremely long line to get in.  Then, once we were inside the pier, we had to wait in another long line to buy drink tickets, and then in another long line to obtain the drinks.  It was like the entire thing had been designed by refugees from the Soviet Union.  I suspected the pornographic director and anti-Muslim advocate Michael Lucas, né Andrei Treivas.

The event was fine, although, in addition to waiting in lines, another key feature is getting lost from everyone you know and experiencing profound alienation and loneliness while surrounded by thousands of euphoric and shirtless men.

This reminds us of what Jonah Lehrer was saying about prediction error. Age seems to be the key. One of the great consolations of old-farthood is that anxiety of maybe missing something evaporates entirely.

The last line of Eric’s entry caused guffaws. We’re sure that we’re seen the joke before (what joke?), but on Eric it looks fresh.

Nones

¶ The name of Harlan Ullman, a Washington think-tanker, is new to us, and we have no idea what sort of sharp knives might line his sleeves. But we agree with his “9 Reasons US is Losing in Afghanistan.” From what we can tell, each and every one of the reasons is good, but we especially like the first and the last, which are deeply complementary. (Atlantic Council; via  RealClearWorld)

First, the so-called AfPak strategy is backward. It should be called PakAf as Pakistan is the strategic center of gravity, not Afghanistan. Yet, virtually all of our energy and resources are going into Afghanistan.

Finally, the strategy assumes a largely bilateral approach. Yet, only a regional solution that engages Afghanistan’s neighbors is likely to produce a lasting effect.

Mr Ullman’s list reminds us that our engagement in Afghanistan is doomed only to the extent that it’s basis is stupid.

Vespers

¶ John Self’s enthusiasm for a book that arrived unsolicited, and that he almost cast aside, is invigorating, even if we’re not sure that we would respond to Greg Baxter’s A Preparation for Death (not a novel) quite so positively. (Asylum)

A Preparation for Death is an account of the frustrations and consolations of literature. In struggling to do it justice, or at least explain its seduction (how it had its easy way with me, as I blushed and giggled like a teenager), I am reduced to impersonating Martin Amis on Saul Bellow, and just quoting paragraph after paragraph.

There are too many days in the week. Too many weeks in the year. Too much space to fill. I would like to have lived for an afternoon only, born at the age of twenty, dead eight hours later, experienced life, all by myself, in a corner apartment with a high view of a busy junction, an ambulance route, a metro entrance, the back of a restaurant, warring neighbours in the corridors, a broken television, an empty bookshelf, and learned only sensitivity, because I would have missed nothing, gained the same experience of life, and would not have grown so addicted to existence that the thought of not existing gives me indigestion and bad dreams.

This passionate ambivalence is all through the book, yet we keep getting trills of warning toward the end that it all might be altering forever. Baxter, we learn, is to become a father. That is why, on the penultimate page, “I plan to separate the self that I shall leave here from the self that will return: to cast the author of this book into a condition of permanent aimlessness,” for fear that otherwise “he will forget the perfection of inexistence. He will grow out of the despair that he worships.” This is the only indication we get of the tsunamic changes parenthood painfully brings. This is not a book about redemption or epiphany. There is light at the end, but it is still around a corner. The book is not about a triumph from disaster; the book is the triumph.

Compline

¶ The good folks (kids, sorry) at The Bygone Bureau look back into the distant past… sometime in the Nineties, from the look of it, and remember the creative things things that they used to do with their dial-up connections to the Internet. (Note to Editor: there’s a missing “/” tag somewhere.)

My dad spent a long time on the phone with Mindspring tech support (an ISP that would later merge with Earthlink) while we tried to figure out how to upload Isle Net to our family’s five megabytes of webspace. By the time we had gotten everything up, I had become so enchanted by the idea of making websites that I had decided that I wanted a real domain name. Back then, domains cost $50, and I’ll never understand why my dad spent that money and still let me pick cowfarm.com.

Have a Look

¶ Jay Sauceda’s glorious captures of bygone adverts painted on brick walls. That these signs are still as vividly-colored as they are is amazing. (via  The Best Part)

¶ 8 Fitzroy Street. (The Persephone Post)

Will was with us all day, and we were unprepared to continue this week’s return to Daily Office postings in the face of our conflicting cnmmittment to him. We’re professional up to the point where it turns out that grandchildren come first.

¶ At The Awl, Mat Honan explains yet another ugly truth about Califronia: why the coming gubernatorial race makes the current incumbent look like a genuine statesman. (But not, we must aver, in so many words.)

What I do know is that if Brown is removed from political office, he loses his physical form, and returns to his natural state: swamp gas. You’ll note that Brown’s last private sector job was hosting a radio show. That was because it was one of the few jobs Brown could find that required no corporeal presence. Brown is a purely political creature so embedded in the status quo of California governance that his election would guarantee that nothing will change in the nation’s most populous state….

And then there’s Meg Whitman, a power-mad, bullying, shoving, former CEO who, after purchasing the Republican primary, seems poised to buy the general election. Perhaps this is appropriate. After all, she is essentially running on the platform that she is a billionaire, and you are not. But as our nation’s first CEO president proved, experience running a business that runs itself doesn’t translate into effective executive governance. (Although, to be fair, I’m sure she will be just as competent a governor as W. was a president.)

¶ A big, juicy story in the Times barks like an enraged but leashed dog at Benedict XVI. No blood is drawn. Eventually, however, this is the sort of story that will shrink collections in the parishes.

But the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.

As pope, Benedict has met with victims of sexual abuse three times. He belatedly reopened an investigation into the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, a powerful religious order — and a protégé of John Paul’s — and ultimately removed him from ministry. He gave American bishops greater leeway to take a tough line on abuse in the United States, and recently accepted the resignations of several bishops elsewhere. And on June 11, at an event in St. Peter’s Square meant to celebrate priests, he begged “forgiveness from God and from the persons involved” and promised to do “everything possible” to prevent future abuse.

But today the abuse crisis is still raging in the Catholic heartland of Europe: civil investigators in Belgium last week took the rare step of raiding church headquarters and the home of a former archbishop. The Vatican under Benedict is still responding to abuse by priests at its own pace, and it is being besieged by an outside world that wants it to move faster and more decisively.

¶ Why Alcoholics Anonymous works (maybe): Jonah Lehrer at Frontal Cortex. You so have to read the whole piece if you don’t know what “prediction errors” are, and how the mind deals with them — or fails to do, addled by addiction. But Mr Lehrer’s “blatant speculation” feels sound.

Now here’s some blatant speculation. I think one reason AA is successful, at least for many of those who commit to the program, is that it’s designed to force people to confront their prediction errors. Just look at the twelve steps, many of which are all about the admission of mistakes, from step number 1 (“We admitted we were powerless over alcohol–that our lives had become unmanageable”) to step number 8 (“Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all”) to step number 10 (“Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it”). I’d suggest that the presence of these steps helps people break through the neuromodulatory problem of addiction, as the prefrontal cortex is forced to grapple with its massive failings and flaws. Because unless we accept our mistakes we will keep on making them.

Matins

¶ At The Oil Drum — our tickertape for the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe — retired geographer Gary Peters states the case for reducing the human population on Earth — soon. (Note that he brushes aside all optimism triggered by “declining growth rates.”)

Both population and consumption are parts of the problem–neither can be ignored and both are exacerbating the human impact on Earth. More distressing, however, is that many among us don’t even see that there are problems created by both growing populations and increasing affluence bearing down on a finite planet. To pretend that another 80 million people added to the planet each year is not a problem because they are all being added to the world’s poor nations makes no sense at all. Many of them will end up in rich nations by migrating, legally or illegally, and all will further compound environmental problems, from strains on oil and other fossil fuel resources to deforestation and higher emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. As Kenneth Boulding noted decades ago, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

To us, the Fact of Facts here is that it would be difficult to sustain a population 1/7 the current size on First World terms.

Lauds

¶ Mozart, Vivaldi singlehandedly clear a London library’s entry of loitering teens. And we say “singlehandedly” by design: the repellent sound track run through the library’s tinny tannoys consists of a movement from The Four Seasons and “Voi che sapete.” Period. We’re not sure that the librarians like classical music any more than the clotted teens do. (London Free Press; via  Arts Journal)

Back at the library entrance, the opera music might not be hostile, but it is loud, and pumped through the tinny-sounding speakers it’s a little hard to take.

And it’s not just the teeny bopper set that’s feeling repelled.

After five minutes under the speakers, even Mitchell started to crack.

“Oh my god. It’s the opera now,” she said, as the two-song rotation came around to the beginning.

At 25, library patron Sean O’Connor is in the target demographic for the aural assault.

Along with some friends, he kept a safe distance from the music as he enjoyed a smoke.

“The music could be better,” he said before acknowledging, “it’s a good idea.”

His friend, Frank Gribbon, 58, was less equivocal.

“It’s piercing. It’s annoying,” said the library regular.

He agrees it’s a good idea but he’s skeptical the plan will work in the long term.

“The kids, they’ll find a way around it,” he said.

“They’ll come down here with amplifiers twice as loud or something.”

It’s easy to read teenagers’ dislike of serious music as a dreadful portent of cultural collapse, but, really, it couldn’t be healthier. Can you imagine how creepy it would be to stand amidst a herd of young people surrendering themselves to music’s charms?

Prime

¶ Maura Johnston composes a rueful, appropriately snarky obituary for NewsLabs, the late, self-styled “platform for new journalism.” (The Awl)

What was NewsLabs again? A puff piece on it from the Nieman Journalism Lab makes it seem like a slightly classier Examiner.com or Associated Content — journalists, some of whom brought long, storied careers to the table, were given the technological platform to run free (with no assignment editors or pesky copyeditors!). Once the journalist’s “personal brand” was done being built, the money would come in via ad revenue….

But the quality of content, as any journalist who’s been employed by a web-based publisher can tell you, is actually never the case when it comes to ultimately deciding a publication’s success or failure — because marketing an online venture is a much more difficult affair than simply throwing up a few articles and a couple of Tweets and asking the interns to start multiple Digg accounts. Even the most entrenched online brands out there have stumbled when launching new sites in recent months; take a look at CocoPerez.com, the fashiony spinoff of Technicolor-haired Internet scourge Perez Hilton’s eponymous size that atracted some 160,000 unique readers in May. That’s a paltry number when you notice that the big P’s flagship site ranges from 1.7 million to 2.3 million uniques. (And don’t get me started on his dismal track record when it comes to promoting music.) It is very difficult to get readers regularly returning to any site; it takes a blend of pumping out the content and getting linked by high-profile sites both in and out of its immediate topic — and a not-insignificant amount of luck — in order to do so. Internet behaviors can be very entrenched things!

Tierce

¶ In today’s strapped economy, making smarter use of what we already have ought to be everybody’s Step One. At The Infrastructurist, Melissa Lafsky reports that the freight railroads are beginning to deploy significantly more powerful software in routing trains.

The software works by syncing train schedules and traffic control across the entire network (which can be up to 2,500 trains a day), and creating an optimized traffic plan that tells trains exactly how fast they should travel. Freight train schedules are more labor-intensive to create, and are less predictable than passenger rail. As such, the new software automates and optimizes the dispatch and travel process, from the moment trains are loaded to the moment they reach their destination.

RailEdge is already being put to the test by Norfolk Southern, and the company plans to expand its use of the technology to its entire 22-state rail network by 2012. Who knows — maybe by then we’ll have similar software for Amtrak.

Sext

¶ Grad Night at Disneyland — one of those Southern California experiences that could never, ever, not in a million years take root in the Northeast. Maria Bustillos reports, ambivalently, at The Awl. Her epigram is taken from Shirley Hazzard: “There is no arguing with exultation.”

Grad Nite started in 1961, just a few years after Disneyland opened. It’s a very complicated business to arrange, with all sorts of extra security precautions and elaborate paperwork, dozens and dozens of chartered buses from all over California and even as far away as Arizona, and so on. Our kids, on fire with the excitement of their graduation ceremony that afternoon, departed from school on three buses, each with a few wary chaperones on board. We had all kinds of stuff we were supposed to read to them about throwing out all their drugs and booze in the parking lot, OR ELSE. They were all way too wound up to give a damn what we said, naturally. I wandered through the bus, handing out colored wristbands and exhortations to simmer down, would you for pete’s sake. One kid was yelling very loudly about that South African artificial vagina dentata condom-thing. “It will cut your balls right off!” he shouted, suddenly catching my eye and shooting me a guilty look.

“Oh, I read all about that,” I said. “Indeed, you’d best watch yourself. It’s a dangerous world. ”

Nones

¶ Following a link from Marginal Revolution the other day, we stumbled on to Let a Thousand Nations Bloom, and while much of the conversation there has a takes-our-breath-away strangeness, this is more a matter of style than content. We actually agree with a good deal of Brad Taylor’s “Liberal Nationalism in a Competitive Market for Governance” — although not with the choice of title.

While parochialism might always cause problems, its harm is amplified in the large democracies we see today. As Bryan Caplan has argued, democracy provides no check on our evolved xenophobic prejudices. Politics isn’t about policy, but status: we vote to increase the status of our tribe at the expense of the other guys. Democracy tends to exacerbate this tendency.

Given that our parochial stone-age brains are here to stay, we should prefer those institutions which minimize the costs of the people’s romance. Rather than fighting nationalist movements seeking to align state borders with the boundaries of group identities, we should be supporting them.

We’ll be puzzling over the site for a while.

Vespers

¶ Lesley Chamberlain contemplates Vladimir Nabokov’s sojourn in Berlin, the first stage of his life-long exile from a vanished Russia, and reminds us that Nabokov was a first-rate recorder of a vast and aimless émigré community. (Standpoint; via  3 Quarks Daily)

Perhaps tying works of art to their originating topography is vulgar and needs to be kept discreet. But history needs Nabokov. During the artistically formative years, he lived here in the 1920s and 1930s, he peerlessly described how Berlin’s 300,000 Russian émigrés endured life after the Bolshevik Revolution. A city “swarming with ragamuffins” (Despair) and here and there “an urban vagabond with an early evening thirst” (The Fight, 1925). Here were thousands of lonely people haunted by poverty and nostalgia. Divorce or widowhood sealed their fate. In An Affair of Honour (1927), the cuckolded Anton Petrovich went through the motions of a classic Russian duel only to find himself stuck in a shabby Berlin hotel after his opponent didn’t show. “He looked at the moth-eaten plush, the plump bed, the washstand, and this wretched room…seemed to him to be the room in which he would have to live from that day on…[With] the door shut, he grabbed [a] sandwich with both hands, immediately soiled his fingers and chin with the hanging fat and, grunting greedily, began to munch.” So the writer imagined the crude Germanisation of a lost man. Nabokov, for whom all life after 1917 contrasted with his childhood on a Russian country estate, was a perfectionist, who noticed how even his own mother fell from wealthy grace. Miraculously, his brutal insights produced their own kind of beauty on the page.

Compline

¶ Although we’re pretty rigid about the difference between listening and reading, we don’t see any harm in finally polishing off a few of those unread classics with audiobooks. Laura Miller sketches a pretty accurate picture of what’s available these days. There certainly ought to be more. (Salon)

I first turned to audiobooks because I get motion sickness from reading in cars, buses and other moving vehicles. I soon graduated to listening as I cooked, cleaned house, ran errands, worked out and, of course, drove. As someone who reads for a living, I’m eager to get out of my armchair and give my eyes a break after a long day’s work, but with audiobooks I’ve been able to squeeze in a lot of recreational reading around the edges.

Audiobooks are, furthermore, an ideal way to finally get to those bypassed literary classics. I was never going to find the time to sit down and read all 1,072 pages of “Don Quixote,” but I listened to the whole thing over the course of a month’s worth of waiting in post-office lines and doing lat pulls. With the advent of downloadable digital audiobooks and portable MP3 players, it’s possible to keep recordings of several titles on hand at all times, snatching 15 minutes of Balzac here and there. Still, a long car trip accompanied by an audio version of a Dickens or Austen novel may be the most sublime use of the form.

Have a Look

¶ Designer Mirko Ilic’s collection of posters and other illustrations featuring the salt and pepper of punctuation marks. (via  Hilobrow)

¶ Not surprisingly, William Steig dreaded public speaking (but was very good at it). (Letters of Note)

¶ A French Ivy site — pourquoi pas? Greensleeves to a Ground. (via  Ivy Style)

Matins

¶ A warning, from Andrew Bacevich, about the danger to the Republic of a volunteer army fighting a long, indefinite war. (Washington Post; via  The Morning News)

To be an American soldier today is to serve a people who find nothing amiss in the prospect of armed conflict without end. Once begun, wars continue, persisting regardless of whether they receive public support. President Obama’s insistence to the contrary notwithstanding, this nation is not even remotely “at” war. In explaining his decision to change commanders without changing course in Afghanistan, the president offered this rhetorical flourish: “Americans don’t flinch in the face of difficult truths.” In fact, when it comes to war, the American people avert their eyes from difficult truths. Largely unaffected by events in Afghanistan and Iraq and preoccupied with problems much closer to home, they have demonstrated a fine ability to tune out war. Soldiers (and their families) are left holding the bag.

Throughout history, circumstances such as these have bred praetorianism, warriors becoming enamored with their moral superiority and impatient with the failings of those they are charged to defend. The smug disdain for high-ranking civilians casually expressed by McChrystal and his chief lieutenants — along with the conviction that “Team America,” as these officers style themselves, was bravely holding out against a sea of stupidity and corruption — suggests that the officer corps of the United States is not immune to this affliction.

We’re glad that we don’t have to explain to any soldiers’ families why their men are fighting and dying in Afghanistan, but we wish that no one had to.

¶ Reading Prof Bacevich’s admonition ought to put you into a state of keen appreciation for Robert Dreyfuss’s appraisal of the looming showdown between the commander in Afghanistan and the Commander in Chief. When you get to the end, though, try not to stare at the last paragraph as long as we did. (Mother Jones) 

The only silver lining in the Petraeus cloud is that the general has close ties to the military in Pakistan who slyly accept U.S. aid while funneling support to the insurgency in Afghanistan. If Obama decides to pursue a political and diplomatic solution between now and next July, Petraeus’s Pakistan connection would be useful indeed. Time, however, is running out.

Lauds

¶ Wesley Morris wishes that Hollywood stars would at least make movies as exciting as their Broadway appearances. (Boston Globe; via Arts Journal )

Prime

¶ Mrs Cringely stands on line for a new iPhone (then wishes that she hadn’t), prompting some intriguing cerebration in her husband.

And get ready for a big leap of strategic thinking from Cupertino.

The number one game console in the USA is Nintendo’s Wii, primarily because it has a Bluetooth-connected motion-sensing remote control. Well iPhones and iPod Touches have Bluetooth, too — and WiFi, accelerometers, and now even gyroscopes. A Mini-turned-AppleTV controlled by the installed base of tens of millions of iPhones and iPod Touches is a game market waiting to be exploited. Yes, the “console” costs more (for now) but thanks to the App Store the games can cost less, making the total user expenditure the same or less. It’s the old Return-On-Investment (ROI) argument only applied to games.

Video games are the one huge market Apple has yet to touch and the last one where Microsoft can still pretend to contend for technology leadership. A $299 AppleTV that has a serious content strategy, HD-Wii performance, and good games priced from $2.99-$6.99 would kick ass at Christmas. Yes, it is too expensive and the games are too puny for real gamers, but not too expensive or too puny to sell the 2-4 million units Apple likes when entering any new market.

That’s $1 billion in easy Christmas revenue for Apple from what’s essentially a marketing head feint.

Although we never owned an Apple product (other than a Nano) until this April, we conur with Mr Cringely’s appraisal of the Apple outlook:

Competitors that still think strictly in terms of individual features and form factors won’t grasp the significance of what’s going-on here. Steve is out to make them obsolete. Apple has mothballed the whole notion of vying for computer market share and is instead moving as fast as it can to redefine the whole computing model for consumers using networked mobile devices.

Remember when Ballmer talked through his hat a few years ago about how Microsoft was headed to a model of Windows based primarily on ad revenue? There’s no way in Hell that business model can be sustained for Windows or the PC (or for Macs, either). But make the platform cost $199 and be replaced every 24 months, build-in mobile subscription revenue, MobileMe subscription revenue, content revenue, app revenue and ad revenue, with none of those involving much effort or expense on Apple’s part at all and the future becomes clear.

And Apple plans to own it

Tierce

¶ The most exciting thing about being alive today is watching the development of a cohesive new theory of intelligence, covering everything from the nature of memory to the fundamentals of ethics. We don’t know where to begin talking about it; we didn’t even know that it was happening until we picked up Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong and Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works — we’re in the middle of Being Wrong and suffering Most-Important-Book-Ever seizures — but Jonah Lehrer’s patient critique of the IQ test’s shortfall seems a very good place to begin. (The Frontal Cortex)

Here’s where the data gets really interesting: These individual differences in unconscious processing correlated with academic performance on a wide range of subjects, from foreign language to math. In other words, students who did better on the seemingly mindless implicit learning task were also better at conjugating French verbs, even when controlling for the effect of “psychometric intelligence”. This clearly demonstrates that much of our intellectual variation has nothing do with the intellectual skills we measure and valorize. Instead, our intelligence is deeply influenced by all sorts of subliminal talents that we can’t control, influence or directly access.

Sext

¶ A mash note from Ellen Moody to Joan Rivers is not something we were expecting to see, ever. Which just makes it all the more impressive. (Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Too)

Joan Rivers lives high and luxuriously and this takes money. She calls her home (very fancy) a kind of Marie Antoinette place, evoking her understanding of how envy and resentment towards a woman who flaunts her riches easily rises. At the same time she has never managed to achieve the status of any of the men nor the kind of teams they have. We see how she goes anywhere — including a devastating gig in Wisconsin to a fundamentalist (Republican) type audience.

Her raw comedy is still daring for a woman and she is admonished on HBO for her use of “fuck” — which I loved her for ignoring. The men utter it all the time.

She manages to get 17 people on thanksgiving and gets in a big table. She has her few close relatives, close staff and brings in people in her building who she knows have nowhere to go and some street people she passes regularly. Before that she goes round giving out meals on wheels. She supports the children of her staff members by sending them to the best private schools.

Although the discourse is not explicitly as this is a woman’s life in the comedy business and outlook on life itself, that’s what is at its core. She’s aware of this and how as a woman she’s been in the paradoxical position of suffering from the very things she advocates.

Nones

¶ We hadn’t realized how much we missed the Cold War!

The story has all the elements of a thriller or, considering some of the details described in court documents, a sitcom about people who had fraudulent passports and used code words. The suspects had learned enough American slang to get by — enough, anyway, to start a sentence with the words “Everything is cool.” They had also been taught lines to recite, lines that only another spy was supposed to recognize and respond to, although some of those lines apparently came from an undercover F.B.I. agent who was pretending to be an employee of the Russian Consulate in New York. (NYT)

“Donald Heathfield” of the Boston couple does seem to have talked to some well-connected Americans, but that is not hard to do, and claimed to have spoken to an expert on nuclear “bunker-busting” bombs.

But you do not know if this was an exaggeration – and reminiscent of the hapless non-agent Jim Wormold in Graham Greene’s novel Our Man in Havana, who made up agents and information and passed off drawings of the vacuum cleaners he sold as secret weapons.

In one conversation, a couple is heard complaining that Moscow was demanding sources for their information. In fact, Moscow seemed desperate enough to ask in one message for “tidbits”. (BBC News)

It is heartening to know that even alleged Russian spies have problems with their computers. Anna Chapman complained about the difficulties she had establishing a private wireless local area network to her handler UC-I, so that she could communicate with the van parked outside the coffee shop. Suspicions were mutual. C or Moscow Centre never quite understood why the couple who went under the name of Richard and Cynthia Murphy had to buy that house in New Jersey: “We are under the impression that C views our ownership of the house as a deviation from the original purpose of the mission,” they said in an intercepted message.

The Murphys told C, perhaps somewhat defensively: “It was a convenient way to solving the housing issue, plus ‘to do as the Romans do’ in a society that values home ownership.”

What did C expect? If they want 11 “illegals” to go native in America in order to establish a long-term, deep cover, then obviously home ownership in New Jersey beckons. Mrs Murphy did a good job. She certainly fooled the neighbours. “They couldn’t have been spies,” said Jessie Gugig. “Look what she did with the hydrangeas.” (Guardian)

Vespers

¶ Tim Parks tackles the bugaboo of America’s literary provinciality: we don’t read enough in translation, goes the complaint. Fine and good, but, having read his way through Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon (no less), Mr Parks (unsurprisingly) comes to a surprising conclusion.

I have no problem with this. All the contributions are interesting and some impressive. That is enough for me. But it does make one wonder whether we are learning much about other cultures from this venture, whether it is true, as Hemon claims, that “ceaseless” and “immediate” translation of literature from abroad is a “profound, non- negotiable need.” Similarly, as if in response to Grossman’s concerns about eventual conflicts brought on by cultural isolation, frequent references here to the recent wars in the Balkans remind us that familiarity with each other’s literatures has never prevented Europeans from slaughtering one another. Remarking, in her short preface, on this reluctance of the anthology’s contributors to be identified with their national cultures, Zadie Smith nevertheless feels that

if the title of this book were to be removed and switched with that of an anthology of the American short story, isn’t it true that only a fool would be confused as to which was truly which?

Truly, truly, aside from superficial markers like names and places, or the fact that it is fairly easy to distinguish translated texts from those in their original tongue, I am not sure that Smith is altogether right. It seems to me rather that as we tackle intriguing stories from Latvia and Lithuania, Bosnia and Macedonia, we are struck by how familiar these voices are, how reassuringly similar in outlook to one another and ourselves.

Compline

¶ Who knew? New Yorkers live longer. Not by much, but measurably. Why? Harvard’s Edward Glaeser looks into the numbers and finds — murk. One thing’s for sure: Gotham is much, much safer for young people. (NYT)

It is easiest to understand why New York is less deadly for younger adults. About 81 of every 100,000 New Yorkers aged 25 to 34 died in 2006, as opposed 106 out of every 100,000 in the nation. Accidents and suicides are the two leading causes of death for these younger people. The suicide rate in New York City among this younger group is substantially less than the rate in the nation as a whole. Ten years ago, David Cutler, Karen Norberg and I studied youth suicides. We noted the tendency of suicide rates to be highest in low-density areas, which may be explained by the strong relationship between suicide and gun ownership, as measured by hunting licenses per capita.

The gap in accidents between city and country is even larger. New Yorkers between 25 and 34 are more than 75 percent less likely to die in a motor vehicle accident than their counterparts nationwide. Driving drunk is far more deadly than taking the bus while tipsy.

But the bulk of the mortality difference between New York and the nation occurs among older cohorts, and here the situation is far murkier. The death rates in the nation are 5.5 percent higher for 55-to-64-year-olds than in New York, 17 percent higher for 65-to-74-year-olds and more than 24 percent higher for 75-to-84-year-olds. There is no single smoking gun for these groups. Deaths from cancer are lower for these groups, but deaths from heart disease are not.

Have a Look

¶ At Good, the most interesting (and certainly one of the most beautiful) graphic renderings of a piece of music that we’ve ever seen. Stephen Malinowski’s rendering of Debussy’s “Clair de lune” makes it possible for people who don’t read music to reap the surprising rewards of “following the score.”

¶ In case you think that BP’s no-problemo initial response to the Deepwater Horizon disaster was at all uncharacteristic of corporation behavior, consider the telegram that White Star Lines sent to England’s General Post Office (for which it contracted Transatlantic mail service) on a long-ago April 15th. (Letters of Note)

Matins

¶ As proponents of the idea that “building to last” is nowhere near as desirable as “building to upgrade,” we’re piqued by Robin Sloan’s Snarkmarket entry, “Only Crash.” What begins as a sort of hygeinic principle for writing code swells out into this:

What else could we apply crash-only think­ing to? Imag­ine a crash-only gov­ern­ment, where the tran­si­tion between admin­is­tra­tions is always a small rev­o­lu­tion. In a sys­tem like that, you’d opti­mize for revolution—build buffers around it—and as a result, when a “real” rev­o­lu­tion finally came, it’d be no big deal.

To this tempting pipe dream, Robin’s colleague Tim Carmody administers a well-chilled (if largely implicit) reminder (see the Comments) that most politicans are in it for the long haul, outcomes be damned.

Speak­ing of pol­i­tics, this reminds me of some­thing Ezra Klein said back dur­ing HCR debate, although I can’t find the link. Polit­i­cal par­ties like to try to engi­neer “per­ma­nent majori­ties.” And all the struc­tural incen­tives, from politi­cians to staffers to lob­by­ists and fundrais­ers, push you in that direc­tion. But if you look at his­tory, every party that has a major­ity loses it, and loses it pretty quickly. The idea he pushed is that majori­ties aren’t to be kept, but to be gained, used in the ser­vice of long-term goals of your party, and then lost. You lose seats, maybe you even lose power for a while, but you get health-care reform.

Lauds

¶ All we can think of is the Emperor’s New Clothes: Terry Teachout, having gotten his hands on a 1988 study entitled “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” began thinking that Modernism’s more complicated masterpieces might “never find an audience” because they take too long to apprehend. (About Last Night)

It immediately occurred to me when I read his paper that the same inborn limitations on intelligibility might apply to practitioners of other art forms–and no sooner did I come to that conclusion than I felt the first stirrings of a “Sightings” column for The Wall Street Journal.

Do click through to the WSJ piece. You wouldn’t want to miss the zinger at the end, James Joyce’s astonishing demand. We can remember when such imperatives were intimidating. Now, like those “new clothes,” they only seem grandiose.

Prime

¶ A Federal Reserve economist, Kartik Athreye, has brought down the wrath of the Blosophere upon himself by suggesting that “economics is hard” — and therefore not to be trusted to hoi polloi without advanced degrees. From the ensuing kerfuffle, Tyler Cowen sounds a truly grown-up note.

My view is a little different than Brad’s. I would say that economics is really, really, really, really, really, really, really hard. And that’s leaving out a few of the “reallys.”

It’s so hard that experts don’t always do it well. The experts are constantly prone to correction by non-experts, by practitioners, by people who are self-educated economic experts but not professional economists, and by people who know some economics and a lot about some other field(s). It is very often that we — at least some of us — are wrong and at least some of those other people are right. Furthermore those other people are often more meta-rational than a lot of professional economists.

That’s why, Mr Cowen concludes, he be lost without the real-world input of amateurs.

Tierce

¶ A word about “blind taste tests.” (You Are Not So Smart)

At first, the researchers thought they should put some sort of label on the glasses. So, they went with M and Q.

People said they liked Pepsi, labeled M, better than Coke, labeled Q.

Irritated by this, Coca-Cola did their own study and put Coke in both glasses. Again, M won the contest.

It turns out, it wasn’t the soda; people just liked the letter M better than the letter Q.

Sext

¶ Gen McChrystal seeks the Directorship of the Institute of Dead and Dying Languages. (Emdashes)

A little about my background: in 1972, I founded and led the Dampal, Adynyamathanha, and Matagalpa Platoon, or DAMP, at West Point. We celebrated our appreciation of these dying languages by kidnapping pledges in the dead of night, throwing them in the back of a ice truck, and handcuffing them to an oil rig in their underwear.

They had to find their way back by following instructions written in Dampal, Adynyamathanha, and Matagalpa. The guys who made it back became full members of DAMP. That’s the kind of idea and initiative your Institute needs.

I also actively use Pig Latin, which not too many young people know these days, which qualifies it as an endangered language.

Nones

¶ Now that there is talk of a pipeline running from Iran to Pakistan, it’s really time for the United States to develop a policy that comprehensively ecompasses Afghanistan and the western Muslim rump of India. And to begin, we might listen to Pakistanis themselves. Cyril Almeida, writing at Dawn, does not seem to be sure of very much, but perhaps that’s the point. (via RealClearWorld)

The other example of strategic confusion is how the dots may be connected in GHQ over the McChrystal firing. A common fear among long-time observers of security policy here has been that the army has still not ‘got it’, that it still has not understood the nature of the beast that is militancy, that it still has not understood the potential for Afghanistan to destabilise Pakistan, the notion of ‘reverse strategic depth’.

True, the generals are aware of the dangers, but they seem too quick to discount them and focus too much on the ‘opportunity’ side of the threat coin. And few in GHQ would ever admit to confusion, least of all of the strategic kind. They believe they know what they’re doing, as surely as they have over the last 62 years.

But that, as the rest of us know, doesn’t mean there isn’t confusion. Already there was talk that there was something in Afghanistan before the Americans arrived and there could be that same something, with necessary adjustments, after the Americans leave. If you were a Pakistani general and that’s what you believed, then how could you connect the dots after the McChrystal debacle? Surely catching a glimpse of the disarray would reinforce your beliefs.

Vespers

¶ One paragraph of Richard Eskow’s “appropriating” review of David Schields’s Reality Hunger stands out, not because it’s the funniest, but because it handily dispatches the entire book-review problem. We refer to the paragraph numbered 18. (3 Quarks Daily)

At the end I sorta liked the guy. He sounds like a lot of my friends, some of whom can be irritating sometimes too. So I either need to give this book a better review or find new friends. I was entertained by the book, for sure. It helped me survive a cross-country flight, even if it had fewer insights per mile than I expected. Still, it was awfully hard to see past the over-reaching and excesses. It almost seemed as if someone decided it would be a good idea to write a provocative book about our appropriating mashup culture, wrote a successful proposal, then retrofitted the whole book to the marketing proposal-ish concept.

Compline

¶ Dick Cavett remembers Arthur Godfrey. We remember Arthur Godfrey, although we’re not sure why. We’d forgotten, though, how sharp he was. His faintly sidelong manner is hard to describe, but easy to see in the video that accompanies Mr Cavett’s reminiscence. (Which — and why is this still disappointing — turns out to be mostly about Mr Cavett’s relationship with the Nixon White House.) (NYT)

He was a colossus of the entertainment world to a degree that may never be equaled; if only for the fact that he had — count ‘em — three network shows at the same time on CBS: a simulcast talk show in the morning, and not one but two (live) prime-time shows every week, consistently in the top ten.

Arthur Godfrey was not just an entertainer. If the phrase ever applied to a human being, he was an industry.

That must be it. There was a time when Arthur Godfrey was more inescapable than McDonald’s, Julia Roberts, and Apple all rolled into one.

Have a Look

¶ Catalog Living: why bother with Sims or Second Life, when you can spend well-appointed hours with Gary and Elaine? Who knows what tragedies — not to mention inconveniences — lurk in their airbrushed interiors? (via MetaFilter)

Matins

¶ What kind of a nation is Pakistan? Islamabad professor Pervez Hoodbhoy professes to be hopeful, but he’s honest about foundational tensions that make it difficult for Pakistan to behave like a nation. (Himal; via  3 Quarks Daily)

Dangling the utopia of an Islamic state raised expectations but did little else. To the chagrin of the political and army establishment, it ultimately backfired and became the cause of infinite division. The post-Zia generation – which believes that every issue would be solved if the country were to go back to the fundamentals of Islam – muddles on in a state of deep confusion and deadly divisiveness. It believes that adherence to ‘true Islam’ will solve all problems and lead to a conflict-free society. But, in reality, the Quran and Hadith can be interpreted in multiple ways, and ‘Islamic fundamentals’ can be defined in many contradictory ways. These differences fuel violent political forces, each convinced that they alone understand god’s will. Murderous wars between Sunni and Shia militias started during the late 1980s. Today, even those favouring the utopian vision of an ideal Islamic state are frightened by the Pakistani Taliban, which seeks to impose its version of Sharia through the Kalashnikov and suicide bombings.

All this was easily predictable, as sectarian divides are almost as old as religion itself. Basic questions are fundamentally unanswerable: Which interpretation of Islam, for instance, is the ‘right’ Islam? Of the four schools of Sunni jurisprudence (Hanafi, Shafii, Maaliki, Hanbali), which version of the Sharia should be adopted? Will all, or most, Pakistanis accept any non-elected amir-ul-momineen (leader of the pious), or a caliph? And what about the Shia? Democracy is excluded in any theocratic state, which, by definition, is a state governed according to divinely revealed principles wherein the head of state, elected or otherwise, interprets such principles and translates them into practical matters of the state.

Meanwhile, Arnaud de Borchegrave takes a look at Turkey’s rapidly-reconfiguring alignments, and goes so far as to assert that the Turkish government sees its American counterpart as “in decline.” (Washington Post; via  RealClearWorld)

Mr. Erdogan, like most world leaders, had high hopes for President Obama. But now they see he is unable to master a dysfunctional system of government; that he may lose one or even both houses of Congress in November; and that Afghanistan appears to be headed for another debacle comparable to Vietnam circa 1975 (when Congress stripped South Vietnam of military aid, in effect inviting North Vietnam to administer the coup de grace). Turkey still maintains 1,750 soldiers in Afghanistan, albeit in a noncombat role to train Afghan soldiers.

One cynical Turkish ex-foreign minister, speculating about the Afghan war, confided, “The way things are going, your Congress will have made Afghanistan secure for China to make a deal with a new Taliban regime to exploit the $3 trillion worth of minerals verified by U.S. intelligence.”

Turkish officials who see the global balance of power trending eastward also can see over the horizon a great Turkic nation that spans most of Central Asia. For them, this is a more exciting vista than a slow NATO retreat from Afghanistan. Or a European Union, where Turkey’s nemesis, Greece, the sick man of Europe, almost collapsed the painfully erected House of Europe.

Vespers

¶ At The Survival of the Book, Brian considers the possibility that the iPad is a great resource for mid-list books.

Ihara goes on to explain why this happens, that we all want to feel we’re moving forward and the endless march of exciting new fiction and revelatory new non-fiction is evidence that yes, there are yet new things to explore and discover. But then he does his magic trick, throwing together the sound argument he has just made – luring us bookie technophobes in with that line about the bookstore, that dog! – by bringing up the opportunity offered by the digital future:

The potential for the iPad to contemporize and repackage novels is endlessly exciting. Novels could get the full “Criterion Collection” experience and come with a wealth of supplementary information: a comprehensive history of a novel’s covers, links to online book communities, reviews, biographies, photgraphs, authors interview, short stories, etc. Zeitgeist would come included.

While We’re Away

¶ From You Are Not So Smart, a word of caution about Confirmation Bias to Internauts and other consumers of I-Know-What-I-Like.

Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.

The examples above are a sort of passive version of the phenomenon. The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.

Punditry is a whole industry built on confirmation bias.

Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter – these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing world-views.

If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them.

Whether or not pundits are telling the truth, or vetting their opinions, or thoroughly researching their topics is all beside the point. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

This is sadly true. We like Rachel Maddow, a lot. But she’s no less a cheerleader than Rush Limbaugh.

¶ So, you wish you could have gone to Shakespeare and Company’s fourth biannual literary festival? What with all the World Cup metaphors, not to mention the usual floods of high-minded eyewash, we don’t. But this passage from Lauren Elkin’s account (at The Millions) gave us a pang:

Saturday night, we headed to the very exclusive private party at an hotel particulier in the 7th.  Kristin Scott Thomas is there, in sky-high Louboutins.  Jeanette Winterson wears a dress. All the big writers and big sponsors are here.  We underlings are thrilled to be at this kind of event: everyone is nervous; everyone is on their best behavior.  Some of us congregate outside in spite of the unseasonable chill.

“What is this place?” Nam Le asked, fresh off a plane from Italy, looking up at the house.

The girl who fetched him from the airport took this as a sign of Nam’s unfamiliarity with Parisian geography, and launched into an explanation. “Well you see if someone were to frown” — she frowned — “then the frown is the Seine, it goes like this, see?” and she began to point out all the monuments of Paris on her face. “So we’re here,” she said, indicating a point right under the middle of her frown.

“Oh,” Nam said. “I was actually wondering about the history of the mansion.”

Kristin Scott Thomas sat on the floor while Natalie Clein gave a transcendental cello performance; meanwhile the kids in the crowd passed around a piece of wood on which someone had painted the words “post-cello dance party!” Natalie eventually finished playing but no one danced.

Have a Look

¶ Another great Volkswagen romp. We think that this is not something that anybody outside of Germany ought to attempt. Joe Jervis writes,

Man, I’d love to see this next to that horrid six-story monster at Lex and 53rd.

Er, all we can conjure is a scene drawn by R Crumb.

For the second week in a row, a late night out after the theatre bumped up against an early morning with Will. We beg your pardon.

Matins

¶ Friday thoughts on how cars have made us stupid: At Good , Rosie Sparks picks up Treehugger‘s urban-sprawl feedback loop.

A roundabout connect the dots: Sprawling urban areas mean more trees cleared –» with larger housing spaces, increasingly cooled by air conditioning powered by greenhouse gas spewing sources –» means increasing average temperatures –» means more air conditioning usage –» [repeat]. Time to rethink this norm from both an energy and architectural/urban planning perspective.

Meanwhile, Felix Salmon wonders why “minimum parking requirements” still figure in urban planning.

For me the biggest and most invidious cost of parking lots is also the most difficult to measure: the way that they kill any attempt at decent architecture, both on the level of individual buildings and on the level of city development more broadly. Your favorite buildings, your favorite cities, and your favorite vacation destinations all have one thing in common: a distinct absence of massive parking lots. So why are these things mandated by zoning regulations across the U.S.? It makes precious little sense, and it’s high time that minimum parking requirements died a long-overdue death.

Vespers

¶ Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad is such a cool novel that even non-fiction editor Ms NOLA is reading it. You’ll want to, too, after you read Ms Egan’s incredibly smart Rumpus interview, in which she supplies a way of thinking about some novels that seem to be more than just stitched together from short stories: the fiction album. Why didn’t we think of that?

It evolved very organically. I started with the first piece, “Found Objects.” At the time, I was between projects and thought I’d just write a story. I had gone in to a bathroom and seen a wallet lying under the sink, and I found myself pondering the wallet and postulating an alternate version of myself who would take the wallet. Who would that person be? Why would she take the wallet in the bathroom? That’s where I started writing out of, and then there was a mention of the wallet-thief’s boss, Bennie Salazar. I write pretty instinctively, so it’s not like I was thinking about it much, but at the time I intended it as a humorous sketch about a neurotic record producer, who sprays pesticide under his arms and sprinkles gold flakes in his coffee as an aphrodisiac. You know, these decadent rock-and-roll habits. But then I found myself thinking who is Bennie Salazar? Why does he do that stuff? Which prompted me to write the next chapter. And the same thing happened again: a minor character would catch my eye, and I’d want to crack them open. I knew pretty early that it wasn’t a conventional novel, or a story collection—it didn’t fit into the standard literary genres that were available to me, so I thought, well, it’s a record album.

While We’re Away

¶ Choire Sicha apanks the gays. (This is FYF; via  The Awl)

Once upon a time, people built daring, gorgeous houses in the Pines. Horace Gifford, an architect, now deceased, who seems to have worked very infrequently off Fire Island, built a number of houses in the Pines and they are some of the most exceptional, handmade, faggoty modernist homes in the world. He built them, big and small, for men who believed in the value of the craft of a house, not so dissimilar from the way that straight people built their houses a hundred years ago. (“Horace was a friend, and he and I had a great working relationship. He would come up with ideas and I would draw them.”)

I’m sure it was something of a competition back then, one’s residence. Can you imagine commissioning Eero Saarinen to build you a small shack on the beach? But someone did, and it’s still, largely, standing, toward the west side of the Pines. It is of course a gorgeous swooping thing. Sometime after the original house was built, someone crammed a second floor atop the building, and now it looks like some giant asshole took an enormous wooden dump on it. Each turd is in the shape of squared-off Burger King paper crowns.

The structures being built there now, though, makes that addition look like John Lautner‘s best. They are garbage, made out of garbage; tiny plastic pools sunk into crappy decks in the glare of horrid, boxy, dumb houses that most likely will never survive their first tropical storm. And in the houses, the plates are plastic and the glasses are plastic and the clothes are plastic and the music is plastic and the drugs, especially, the drugs are plastic.

Have a Look

¶ An unidentified strange man spanks himself. (via Joe.My.God)