Matins

¶ Justin E H Smith argues passionately for the centrality of foreign-language study in the humanities curriculum. In our view, language makes the difference between true education and hot air.

I want to suggest also that it is not just language and literature programs that have been seriously damaged by the changes I’ve described, but indeed all of the humanities. When I say that foreign-language training is the anchor of the humanities, I mean it anchors, or ought to anchor, disciplines apparenty as independent of it as philosophy and history. There is a wonderful model of education that will be familiar to anyone who has read about the Little Russian monasteries in Gogol’s stories, and that also existed in classical India and in the Islamic world. In the Byzantine version of it depicted by Gogol, schoolboys pass through four stages: first they are ‘grammarians’, then ‘rhetoricians’, then ‘philosophers’, and, finally, ‘theologians’. This seems to me pretty much the proper order of things (leaving off, perhaps, the ultimate stage). In the Indian tradition, claiming to be a master of any of the darshanas or doctrines without first demonstrating a deep, thorough, intimate mastery of the elements of phonetics, grammar, and prosody (and I mean a real mastery, comparable to what enables Anne-Sophie Mutter to do what she does with her violin), would be simply absurd. Without mastery of language, a student trying to spin out ideas is like me trying desperately to scrape a few notes from a stringed instrument. Potentially, that mastery could simply be of English, just as the pandits gave their exclusive attention to Sanskrit. But students today are permitted to remain nearly as estranged from the inner workings of their own native tongue as they are from the foreign languages they were expected until recently to at least sample.

Lauds

¶ HTMLGiant‘s Kyle Minor is in town, where he spent a chunk of time at the IFC, watching Olivier Assayas’s Carlos. At 5 hours 19 minutes runtime, the Roadshow Edition of this film calls for serious intestinal fortitude, which is why we’re grateful for Kyle’s report, which also serves to remind us how much political orientations have changed since we were his age.

True enough, but what was most exciting about the movie was that in many ways (and without ever being didactic about it), it served concurrently as a moral interrogation of the militant left, a thing which hardly exists anymore thanks to the unlikely collaborators who served as its joint executioners — the brutal excesses of the Communist bloc (which eventually turned off most leftists who were decent human beings to the idea of revolutionary violence altogether) and the overwhelming victory of the American capitalist global order (which rendered other economic systems implausible, at least for the time being, unless you wanted to become North Korea. Even what we used to call Red China is now on its way to becoming a capitalist power, albeit under the auspices of an authoritarian regime.)

It’s not that nobody talks about these things anymore. It’s more that hardly anyone does, and even to a person of my generation (the Berlin Wall fell when I was in the eighth grade), they have come to seem irrelevant, quaint, and anachronistic. These days most of the really violent stuff seems to come from the right, or at least the really violent stuff that isn’t state-sanctioned (but some of that, too.) Still, those times are closer to ours than I usually consider them to be, and certainly the contemporary obsession with security and the war on terror and so on is largely rooted in those times of too-frequent hijackings and more-public political assassinations and all the other horrors from which Americans are now mostly shielded, despite their continuance in parts of the world distant and near.

Prime

¶ Maybe the practice of economics will be truly scientific some day, but two pieces in the Times over the weekend show where the difficulty of attaining true predictability lies: in economists’ very imperfect understanding of human nature — namely their own, as reflected in philosophical bias. First, in a piece on income inequality, Robert Frank reminds us how far economists have wandered from Adam Smith‘s fundamental concern for moral sentiments.

By contrast, during the last three decades the economy has grown much more slowly, and our infrastructure has fallen into grave disrepair. Most troubling, all significant income growth has been concentrated at the top of the scale. The share of total income going to the top 1 percent of earners, which stood at 8.9 percent in 1976, rose to 23.5 percent by 2007, but during the same period, the average inflation-adjusted hourly wage declined by more than 7 percent.

Yet many economists are reluctant to confront rising income inequality directly, saying that whether this trend is good or bad requires a value judgment that is best left to philosophers. But that disclaimer rings hollow. Economics, after all, was founded by moral philosophers, and links between the disciplines remain strong. So economists are well positioned to address this question, and the answer is very clear.

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, was a professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow. His first book, “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” was published more than 25 years before his celebrated “Wealth of Nations,” which was itself peppered with trenchant moral analysis.

The tile of David Segal’s “The X-Factor of Economics: People” tells you where he’s going.

Which gets to another great variable: personal values. In his textbook “Principles of Economics,” N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard professor, proposed this thought experiment: A town must maintain a well. Peter, who earns $100,000, is taxed $10,000, or 10 percent of his income, while Paula, who earns $20,000, hands over $4,000, or 20 percent of her income.

“Is this policy fair?” Mr. Mankiw asks in “Principles.” “Does it matter whether Paula’s low income is due to a medical disability or to her decision to pursue an acting career? Does it matter whether Peter’s high income is due to a large inheritance or to his willingness to work long hours at a dreary job?”

Economics, Mr. Mankiw concludes, won’t tell us, definitively, whether Peter or Paula is paying too much, because an answer inevitably leads to matters of values, which inevitably leads to different answers.

This is not to suggest that economics is a total free-for-all, lacking a broad consensus on any subject. Polls of economists have found near unanimity on topics like tariffs and import quotas (bad), centralized economies (very bad) and flexible, floating exchange rates (very good). Nor is it fair to say that economists have done little to help in the latest crisis. A depression seemed possible two years ago, and thanks to the ideas of economists, that didn’t happen.

But economics will forever have to contend with the biggest X factor of all: people. As Mr. Solow notes, you feed people poison, and they die. But feed them a subsidy and there is no telling what will happen. Some will use it wisely, others perversely and some a mix of both.

Tierce

¶ Chris Mooney picked up Sam Harris’s new book, and found that it repeated an objection to Mr Mooney’s “accommodationism” to which the blogger had responded before at The Intersection. We take Mr  Mooney’s part in this important discussion, which pits intellectual principles against respect for different views. What Chris Mooney said and still says:

There is a bit of bravado here. The point is not to watch what you say, but to understand the context in which you are trying to communicate—and to recognize that most Americans are not going to be dragged all the way from fundamentalism to atheism thanks to the force of reasoned arguments. No matter how much we may wish it, it just isn’t going to happen. Giving them some more moderate stopping off points along the way is the only common sense approach if you want to change minds, or change the culture. In this sense, what is derided as “accommodationism” is actually an extremely important position between two poles on the intellectual spectrum, a position where many people will want to reside–right or wrong.

Sext

¶ At 1904, our friend George Snyder wonders, improbably we should have thought, if he is turning into his old man. He probably thought that it was improbable as well. If you live long enough, though, life does begin to look like the Princesse de Guermantes reception — minus the footmen and the goodies and mirrors and the feathers.

As for feeling like I’m becoming my dad, I admit there was a time when I might have been dismayed at any resemblance, however superficial, but I am more forgiving and accepting in my old age.  And I hasten to add, my father never possessed a faux leopard throw which he could toss artfully over the headboard (he was not the faux leopard tossing sort of guy), and moreover he preferred a pipe to a cigar.  As for me, the cigar box (which keeps the lamp raised to a proper height) belonged to a friend who does like to indulge in a good Cuban cigar now and then, but not in the house and not in his wife’s presence.  Not in bed certainly.  More likely the barn, to be truthful.

Reading in bed, however, is another matter entirely.  Something I do have in common with the old man.  And a lot of the rest of you, if I’m not mistaken.

Nones

¶ Michael Pettis, an associate of the Carnegie Asia Program in Beijing, advances a modest proposal: instead of buying Treasuries, China ought to fund the rehabiliation of United States infrastructure. (via Humble Student of the Markets)

So why not have China do it directly?  Let China engage in a massive rebuilding of US infrastructure – it can build airports, highways, damns, and railways – which would raise investment levels enough keep the US trade deficit high in a way that benefits the US and China.

Of course China would also have the right to charge for the use of these projects so that it can earn a positive return on its investment.  The return doesn’t even need to be high – just better than the return it gets on its huge expansion in investment in China, which I suspect is negative for the country as a whole.

Even worse, China is lending money to foreign borrowers anyway to boost China’s trade surplus, and I am not sure they can count on a positive return there.  Look at the $5 billion loan Premier Wen pledged to Greece to buy Chinese ships.  That may look like a clever deal economically, but I think there is a very high probability that within five or six years Greece will be forced to default on its debt and will obtain significant debt forgiveness.  In that case China will earn a negative return there too.  You can’t get rich giving away ships.

As long as it earns more than it earns on its USG bond holdings, it will be better off economically even without considering the immense advantage of keeping the US trade deficit high for the eight to ten years China is going to need to rebalance its economy away from its toxic over-reliance for growth on the trade surplus and economically non-viable investment.

Mr Pettis is the first to acknowledge the political implausibility of this “win-win” plan. The best ideas, unfortunately, are always politically implausable — that’s precisely why they’re so good. If they’re really good, the politicians are eventually swept into line.

Vespers

¶ Alexander Chee proffers the syllabus for his graphic fiction course at Amherst — and explains why he did not offer the two-semester expansion that he’d have had no trouble filling.

While the field is considered new at best (it is routinely dismissed as unserious by many) the boom also means that I could have easily taught the course as a year-long class, with a “History of Comics” first semester and a “Graphic Novel” second semester, and if the post I had at Amherst had been tenure track, I might have considered it, and could easily have filled it. Teaching the graphic novel typically means you’ll be popular with students but potentially controversial with colleagues, to be clear—and on the job market, it has been both a plus and a minus, with faculty both intensely interested and intensely repulsed. It is a polarizing form to teach right now, more so than creative writing, which still suffers in the esteem of many academics, despite its popularity.

Compline

¶ At The Awl, Mike Barthel’s engagine reflections on “Bully Crisis 2010,” wherein he asks, “What do we do with the assholes?”

Let me tell you a story. In fifth grade, I was being bullied by this boy named Jason. As a weird little kid, I was not new to this sort of thing, but this experience was particularly shitty. It was one of those situations that you particularly must endure as a child, where you can’t choose to avoid the person who’s tormenting you. Jason was awful to me and yet I had to see him on a regular basis both at school and at Cub Scouts, where his mom was our den leader. It made me miserable. But after a lot of thought (of course!), I decided I was going to stand up for myself the next time the opportunity presented itself. That opportunity happened to be when we were taking our class photo. While getting lined up in the back row, Jason jostled me, and I responded by giving him a bloody nose.

I faced no disciplinary action for this. As I recall, I got a subtle nod of approval from my teacher. I did, however, get a reaction from one of the other kids. During a lull in class, a guy named Dave showed me a piece of loose leaf paper, on which was written a list of all the people in our class. “This is the list of who’s most popular,” Dave explained, and pointed to my name: “See? You moved up.” And indeed, there I was, now four spaces from the bottom of the list rather than two. And at the very bottom was Jason.

I’m pretty sure that was the exact moment I decided that popularity was stupid, an attitude that would cause me no small amount of trouble later in life.

But it also drove home that, as scary as bullies are, they’re not exactly society’s winners. Unless we’re prepared to say that a ten-year-old kid deserves to be a loser and has permanently entered a class of loser-hood by his own fully-informed choice—entering a class that may run him up one side of the criminal justice system and down the other—then we have to be willing to entertain the prospect that people like Jason ended up on the bottom rung perhaps through some situations that were not entirely of their own making.

Have a Look

¶ Planet Berlin. (Strange Maps)

¶ Lisa Breslow’s Urban Silences; Tom Wizon’s Homespun Peregrinations. (ArtCat)

Due to technical difficulties (the death of a very old modem), today’s Daily Office may not be complete by 6 PM.

Matins

¶ In case we all have something better to do tomorrow, it’s been nice knowing you: “Retired NORAD Officer’s New Book Predicts a Tentative Worldwide UFO Display on October 13, 2010.” (Yahoo; via MetaFilter)

Fulham writes it is generally recognized UFOs function beyond our earth’s physical laws, and has concluded answers to questions regarding who they are, where are they from, why are they here, are they a threat, and the mystery of abductions could only be found at a higher dimension of reality.

For more than a decade, through the services of a world renowned channeler, the author has communicated with an ethereal group of entities known as the Transcendors — 43,000 very old souls who combine their vast experience and knowledge through eons of incarnations, providing advice and information to humans in search of basic realities of mankind’s existence.

The book Challenges of Change reports on the author’s years of communication with the Transcendors in a question and answer format intended to inform and challenge. The Transcendors reveal through the author crucial information about urgent global challenges facing mankind such as earth changes, international terrorism, worldwide financial collapse and the environmental crisis. One revelation is al Qaeda has a dirty nuclear bomb and WMD, but faces a moral quandary over “containment of collateral damages.”

Utilizing the theme of the Four Horsemen as symbolic metaphor, Fulham warns mankind will survive all of these future challenges, except the CO2 pollution of our atmosphere. According to information provided to the author by the Transcendors, the build-up of CO2 pollution is rising 1% annually to a “critical mass” of 22% in which mankind could not survive ”without outside intervention.”

We’re dying to know if the UFO pilots can name the Four Horsemen. Also: love “tentative.”

Lauds

¶ Dance director Robert Bettmann considers the “sequestration” of his art form, and the consequent drop in grants and revenues, as an industrial, not artistic, problem. We think that he’s barking up the right tree: dance, like all the fine arts, needs to re-present itself for new patrons. (Dance USA; via  Arts Journal)

Every industry, from steel to cars to buggy whips, wants to preserve itself. Every industry is made of a complex of managers, workers, and their families, all of whom benefit meaningfully from employment by the industry. Industries in slow decline –steel or cars – have shown extraordinary resourcefulness in blaming others, and attacking competition. Hardship breeds insularity, and as working professionals, we are sensibly prioritizing preservation (in every sense), and in so doing are slowly disconnecting from the main which validates our worth. Our cultural value is in decline because we are increasingly sequestered within our own industry (by necessity.)
 
I’m not a guy who 20 years ago could have predicted the iPhone. I marvel at people like farsighted author Jules Verne, who envisioned massive cultural and technological trajectories before they were even really in motion. I can see the problem of declining cultural value, but I don’t have a solution. I do know that art and art forms are born in tiny little revolutions that occur in individual rooms — and individual minds — springing to collectives and communities. And that the somatic sensitivity and creative plasticity that keeps us in thrall within the dance field are not threatened at all. To put it more succinctly: Dance is not in decline; only the industry is struggling.

Some of us today look back on the jazz of the 1930s, or the classical music of the 18th century, and relish the bright lights of those days. Who are we to know if the artistic value of our product today will be valued in two hundred years? Is that question relevant to our industry, or to us as individuals? We will continue to sell tickets, and to the extent that we provide broad value to those not already engaged with our form, our cultural stock will rise, or fall.

Prime

¶ At naked capitalism, Yves Smith comments on a largely-overlooked wrinkle in the foreclosure mess: “Bank of America is now eating title insurance liability on foreclosed properties sold by its servicer.”

It isn’t hard to see that other banks are likely to be required to take the same step as Bank of America, at least if they want to unload foreclosed property.

It isn’t hard to see where this is going. The biggest servicers are part of TBTF banks. The biggest trustees (the folks who were supposed to make sure that the loans all got to the securitization trust properly) are part of TBTF banks. The major structurer/packagers are now all part of TBTF banks.

Isn’t a concentrated financial services industry grand? Any time they screw up, they are too large to be made to pay for their crimes. The die was cast at the beginning of the Obama administration. It was a critical window of opportunity to take over and put new management in the weakest of the big banks (and probably force them to shed operations too) and they instead were coddled and sent back on their merry way.

I guarantee that the losses, between extend and pretend that will no longer be viable (in particular, the unrealistic marks on second mortgages) and the liabilities resulting from this colossal mess, at least one major bank will be insolvent. But the odds of the new special resolution authority being used? I put the odds at pretty much zero.

Tierce

¶ At the Telegraph, Tom Chivers talks to neuroscientist Paul Haggard about free will. Which, scientifically speaking, can’t exist. Which suggests to us, as it does to Mr Chivers, that the concept of free will needs to be revisited rather than junked. (via  The Morning News)

“It’s a rule that we need to have as social animals. You couldn’t have society unless, if you do something wrong, you pay for it. The question is, what do we do when people don’t have the brain machinery to play by the rules – or decide not to play by them? That’s not a scientific question. That’s a moral one.”

Maybe, I suggest, we’ve over-defined free will. Perhaps it doesn’t exist in the mystical breaking-the-laws-of-the-universe way, but there is a sense in which this “me”, this brain and body, responds to the world, reacts to information, tries to shape its environment; takes decisions. Can we not pull free will back to something more defensible? He taps his fingers.

Sext

¶ Simply by announcing, in the title of his blog, that “I Like Boring Things,” James Ward is letting us know that he himself is not boring. Something else, but not that. Be sure to click through for the comic.

A while ago, I mentioned that I wanted people to fictionalise me – to name a character after me in some work of theirs; a novel, a short story, a script, a song, anything.

What I like about this idea, apart from its obvious appeal to my sense of vanity and self-importance, is its slow burn nature. Both Emma Kennedy and Jenny Colgan have said they’ll include James Wards in their books, but book publishing takes quite a long time, so these fictional versions of me won’t come to life until the middle of next year at the earliest. I like that. This is a long, slow process. It will continue long after I have forgotten all about it.

I also like the chaotic nature of the idea. Because this is something I am asking other people to do, I’ll never really be able to monitor it. It happens without any input from me, without my knowledge, and over a timescale I can’t control.

The other day, I got an email from someone called Morgan Seekoo saying they believed a character in a web comic was based on me.

Nones

¶ Although we believe that the first lesson in the study of history is that history does not repeat itself, we’re intrigued by Karim Sadjadpour’s re-reading of George Kennan’s 1947 “Sources of Soviet Conduct” essay, in which “Tehran” is substituted for “Moscow.” Final point:

“It would be an exaggeration to say that American behavior unassisted and alone could exercise a power of life and death over the Communist Islamist movement and bring about the early fall of Soviet power the Islamic Republic in Russia Iran. But the United States has it in its power to increase enormously the strains under which Soviet Iranian policy must operate, to force upon the Kremlin Islamic Republic a far greater degree of moderation and circumspection than it has had to observe in recent years, and in this way to promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet in either the breakup or the gradual mellowing of Soviet Iranian power.”

In other words, hunker down for the long haul. (Foreign Policy; via Real Clear World)

Vespers¶ While a favorable review isn’t necessarilyas informative as it might be, it generally gives a much better sense of what a book is like than a bad review does, and for this very reason, a “good” review can function as a “bad” review. John Brown’s page on The Instructions, by Adam Levin, makes it sound like a hermetic game, not a novel. (The Rumpus)

The Instructions is hyper self-aware. It narrates its own creation. It utilizes false paratextual elements such as a publisher’s disclaimer. It sometimes cross-references by page number. But these elements are not surprising in an era where drawing attention to artifice is no longer innovative in itself. That isn’t to say The Instructions doesn’t have innovative elements. For example, Levin uses e-mail replies to sneak in a bit of anti-chronological narration and creates fun text diagrams that are useful for mapping the physical spaces of the novel, such as “the Cage,” the lockdown program for behavioral disorders at Aptakisic.

[snip]

The Instructions draws heavily from Jewish tradition. Gurion mimics the style of Hebrew scripture, and he uses titles that make direct parallels (e.g. “Story of Stories”). However, the relationship to scripture is much deeper, as it undergirds the symbolic structure of the novel. Gurion possesses many messianic markers (his birthmarks, his scholarly ability, his geneology), and in that respect The Instructions resembles the Gospel of Matthew, which piles high fulfilled prophecies. But The Instructions pre-empts such naïve interpretation by including a discussion of messianic prophecy which concludes that any prophecy can be reinterpreted in retrospect (also providing another example of this book’s sophisticated treatment of interpretation). Readers unfamiliar with scripture may find the exegetical sections tedious, but they are essential, especially the discussion of Abraham’s sacrifice. Levin is meticulous and does not shy away from literacy. Nothing is off-limits from allusion or extended discussion, from Borges to Roth to Salinger. I thought I had caught an anachronism when Obama came up, until I realized that in the timeline of the novel, he was just elected as the junior Senator from Illinois, and the story takes place in suburban Chicago.

Compline

¶ The biggest bone of contention in the labor dispute that has bogged France down in transport cuts appears to be a proposed raise in the retirement age, from 60 t0 62. (The idea that the Editor would have already retired under current rules cracks us up.) We understand why workers would want to collect pensions and days off sooner rather than later, but the youth of France also opposes the age increase. (WSJ)

To extend the pension protest over the next few days, unions are counting on support from young people, who have proven a formidable force in the past. In 2006, the government retreated from plans to introduce a short-term labor contract for young people because of massive student demonstrations.

Some high-school students took part in the marches. At the Montaigne school in central Paris, some students attended classes inside while about 200 pupils picketed in front of the building’s main door as a Coca-Cola Co. marketing crew distributed free beverages. “We must join the movement,” said Karim Boursali, a 17-year-old student at another nearby school and a delegate with the UNL high-school union. “If our parents don’t retire at 60, we won’t get jobs.”

Still, student participation remained limited, with classes disrupted at about one in ten high schools, according to unions and the French education ministry. Mr. Boursali said he wasn’t sure how many of his friends would continue to protest.

Have a Look

¶ Useless Australia. (Strange Maps)

Matins

¶ Although we’re terrified of a Republican takeover of Congress, we try not to show it, even to ourselves, because fear is so bad for morale. We do our best and hope for the best. You’d think that politicians, clever boys that they are, would figure out a way to making doing the best and hoping for the best sound like a satisfying and doable social goal — but perhaps they’re not so clever, after all. And we’re left with the problem of an electorate disappointed by deflated hopes — the subject of an interesting essay by Drake Bennett at the Globe.  (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lauds

¶ With the death of Joan Sutherland, the trio of Space Age voices has deserted Planet Earth.Like Birgit Nilsson and Luciano Pavarotti, Sutherland possessed a voice of superhuman power and accuracy, and reminded opera fans what it’s like to live in an era of exciting voices. As she was the first to say, however, Joan Sutherland was half of a team, and she is survived by the other half, her husband, Richard Bonynge, a man whose influence on his wife’s career brought Svengali to many minds. (NYT)

Paradoxically, Mr. Bonynge contributed to the sometimes dramatically uninvolved quality of her performances. By the mid-1960s he was her conductor of choice, often part of the deal when she signed a contract. Trained as a pianist and vocal coach, he essentially taught himself conducting. Even after extended experience, he was not the maestro opera fans turned to for arresting performances of Verdi’s “Traviata.” But he thoroughly understood the bel canto style and was attuned to every component of his wife’s voice.

Yet if urging her to be sensible added to her longevity, it sometimes resulted in her playing it safe. Other conductors prodded Ms. Sutherland to sing with greater intensity: for example, Georg Solti, in an acclaimed 1967 recording of Verdi’s Requiem with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Vienna State Opera Chorus, and Zubin Mehta, who enticed Ms. Sutherland into recording the title role in Puccini’s “Turandot,” which she never sang onstage, for a 1972 recording. Both of these projects featured the tenor Luciano Pavarotti, who would become an ideal partner for Ms. Sutherland in the bel canto repertory. Ms. Sutherland’s fiery Turandot suggests she had dramatic abilities that were never tapped.

Prime

¶ Two good stories about business technology in today’s Times: Wayne Arnold’s report on the obstacles to cloud computing in Asia — China’s government requires Chinese servers, but the bandwidth isn’t up to the task — and Ashlee Vance’s story about Michael Simon, an entrepreneur who went to Hungary in 1992, after b school, and turned himself into a “mogul.”

Mr. Simon’s latest creation to bubble out of Budapest is LogMeIn, a 400-worker outfit that makes software that allows one computing device to take control of another. Using this technology, a person can tap into a home or office PC while on the road with a laptop. Customer support technicians also use LogMeIn’s products to take control of people’s machines and fix their PC problems.

Similar technology has existed for years. What LogMeIn did was make it quick, easy and cheap to use by shielding people from complex computer configuration work. The company, which went public last year, stands as one of the most profitable of its kind and competes against GoToMyPC from Citrix and pcAnywhere from Symantec.

Mr. Simon, who is 45 and the chief of LogMeIn, attributes the success to the company’s penny-pinching Hungarian roots. “In Silicon Valley, someone comes up with an idea and people pour money into it,” Mr. Simon said. “In Hungary, you’re expected to do a lot more than people expect with a lot less.”

Tierce

¶ Remember being told, when you were little, that deaf people can see better, and vice versa? It turns out to be objectively correct: the brain compensates for sensory deprivation by intensifying certain existing powers — the ones that would be especially useful to the deprived individual. (Wired Science)

Deaf cats don’t have better overall vision than their hearing counterparts, the researchers found. Rather, like deaf humans, the cats are better at two particular visual tasks — seeing objects in far peripheral vision and detecting very slow motion. These particular enhancements might help deaf people assess their surroundings more accurately: “You can’t hear the dog running or the car coming at you, so being able to see it seems like a really good skill,” says Lomber, of the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada.

After establishing that these two visual abilities were enhanced in deaf cats, Lomber and his team tested whether hearing-related brain areas were responsible for the boost. With the help of a 3-millimeter-wide cooling device, the researchers inactivated very particular regions of the cats’ auditory cortices. The coil sits on the outside of the brain and induces a precisely localized hypothermia, causing the region to effectively shut down until the device is turned off.

Deaf cats with chilled hearing-related brain regions lost their visual edge, and in a very specific way. “What we found was, much to our surprise, that these functions were not distributed randomly over the auditory cortex, but they were specifically localized in particular places,” Lomber says.

Sext

¶ A story you gotta love: Speakeasy hounds are sniffing out Mad Men‘s plot twists but doing real-world research. When the American Cancer Society called on Sterling Cooper, in the last episode (this is pretend, mind you), did that herald a return of “Connie” Hilton, the real-life hotelier who appears in the show’s third season, and (also in real-life) a patron of the ACS?

“He did not have an official corporate charity, but if there was one, it probably would have been City of Hope,” said Mark Young, a historian and archivist for the University of Houston’s Conrad N. Hilton College, who worked with the show’s writer’s last year to ensure an accurate portrayal of Hilton.

This morning, Young was away from his office—where a Hilton painting, a gift from City of Hope, hangs—so he did not have full access to his records. But he said he wasn’t surprised to hear about Hilton’s interest in American Cancer Society. “If someone was explaining how they were going after studying cancer, I can see him getting into it,” he said. “He was always fascinated, in a sense, by what made things tick.”

Remember Hilton, the character? He was last seen in the Season Three finale, ruefully informing Don that Sterling Cooper was being sold. He and Don shook hands, postponing a whirlwind relationship that ended as improbably as it began. They expressed mutual desire to work together again. One new firm, lost account and Mrs. Blankenship later—by golly!—it’s possible that the two men could soon shake on another sort of deal.

Or, while we’re speculating, maybe Connie will just introduce Don to one of his pals. Like, say, Walt Disney. “They were pretty good friends,” Young said of Hilton and Disney. “They were in the same business, hospitality, and friendly. I wouldn’t call them competitors, because Disney World hadn’t come about yet.”

Whoa, boys! Don’t go running off to Disney World in your dreams!

Nones

¶ At Real Clear World, Claude Rakisits, of Australia’s Deakin University, calls for a Marshall Plan for Pakistan. A nice idea, but hardly viable without first abolishing Pakistan’s feudal power structure first. The plea is primarily useful as a reading on how inadequate the national and international response to the summer floods has been.

Unfortunately, the response to what UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon refers to as “the biggest, most complex natural disaster we have faced in UN history”, was pathetic and utterly inadequate relative to the challenge facing Pakistan.
The spokesman for the global aid organisation Oxfam, Louis Belanger, described last month’s meeting as “yet another letdown by the international community”.

The participating countries did pledge more funds in response to the UN’s global appeal to raise $US2 billion ($2.02bn) but managed to reach only 33 per cent of this.

Taking into account all the new pledges, the US has allotted about $US450 million, Britain has doubled its aid to about $US200m and the EU has given about $US315m.

Australia has committed a total of $75m.

Meanwhile, some of Pakistan’s closest friends, China and the UAE, came up with $US47m and $US8m respectively — fair-weather friends indeed.

After a slow start, Saudi Arabia, a country only too happy to spend millions on building in Pakistan madrassas that churn our thousands of unemployable jihadists, has donated more than $US240m. Meanwhile, India, Pakistan’s erstwhile enemy, has given $US25m.

Vespers

¶ Ms NOLA tipped us off to a Tom-Sawyer event that’s going to hosted by the Philippine bloggers who run Literary Stew and Coffeespoons, in the second week in November (7-13): read a book published by the New York Review of Books (nyrb) and blog about it.

During the week, Honey and I will collate your posts and blog about them. As soon as you’ve posted one of your reviews, please leave a link in our comments section. Everyone who participates will get a chance to win prizes at the end of the week which of course will be NYRB books. The prizes come courtesy of
Fully Booked Philippines. Thanks so much Fully Booked! We’ll be giving out a prize for the best book review to be judged by Honey and I and another prize will be chosen at random and given to one of the lucky reviewers who participated. This is open internationally.

Compline

¶ David Brooks writes about “demosclerosis” (Jonathan Rauch’s coinage), the paralyzing effect of pension commitments. While we’re not entirely opposed to public-sector unions, the wrong-headedness of public-sector pensions is obvious. (We believe that pensions generally must be funded by payroll deductions — now, that is, rather than later.) (NYT)

In addition, public sector unions can use political power to increase demand for their product. DiSalvo notes that between 1989 ad 2004, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees was the biggest spender in American politics, giving $40 million to federal candidates. The largest impact is on low-turnout local elections. The California prison guard union recently sent a signal by spending $200,000 to defeat a state assemblyman who had tried to reduce costs.

In states across the country, elected leaders raise state employee salaries in the fat years and then are careful to placate the unions by raising future pension benefits in the lean ones. Even if cost-conscious leaders are elected, they find their hands tied by pension commitments and employee contracts.

In our view, this is a corrupt practice, no matter how “legal” it seems.

The end result is sclerotic government. Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose. But we don’t have that government. We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.

 

Have a Look

¶ Terry Teachout’s “Not Unlike,” an illustrated memoir about color television.

¶ The cloudy future of the Yerkes Observatory. (Wired Science)

Matins

¶ In Context, Amy Schalet writes about how differently adolescent sexuality (pretty much the same thing everywhere) is treated in the Netherlands. (via MetaFilter)

Karel and Rhonda illustrate a puzzle: the vast majority of American parents oppose a sleepover for high-school-aged teenagers, while Dutch teenagers who have steady boyfriends or girlfriends are typically allowed to spend the night with them in their rooms. This contrast is all the more striking when we consider the trends toward a liberalization of sexual behavior and attitudes that have taken place throughout Europe and the United States since the 1960s. In similar environments, both parents and kids are experiencing adolescent sex, gender,and relationships very differently. A sociological exploration of these contrasts reveals as much about the cultural differences between these two countries as it does about views on adolescent sexuality and child rearing.

Today, most adolescents in the U.S., like their peers across the industrialized world, engage in intercourse—either opposite or same-sex—before leaving their teens (usually around seventeen). Initiating sex and exploring romantic relationships, often with several successive partners before settling into longterm cohabitation or marriage, are now normative parts of adolescence and young adulthood in the developed world. But in the U.S., teenage sex has been fraught with cultural ambivalences, heated political struggles, and poor health outcomes, generating concern among the public, policy makers, scholars, and parents. American adolescent sexuality has been dramatized rather than normalized.

At least, we suppose, the christianists and other social conservatives are making sure that, if they do manage to send this country to hell in a handbasket, it will be a proper, gated hell.

Lauds

¶ Will French studios save British fimmaking? Adam Dawltry, at the Guardian, thinks that they might. (via  Arts Journal) 

Historically, the UK and the French film industries have never been as close as they should have been. The British have always looked to Hollywood first while the French barricaded themselves behind the fortress of their language. In cinematic terms, the Channel is wider than the Atlantic, and harder to bridge.

The British mistrust the seriousness with which the French regard the septième art while envying the unshakeable political and financial support their film-makers enjoy. The French laugh at (not with) our floppy-haired comedies while envying our international success. And like Truffaut, who delivered his notorious snub in an interview with none other than Alfred Hitchcock, they love to provoke us with their sense of cinematic superiority – yet cherish our great directors better than we do ourselves.

But some on both sides have always dreamed of an entente cordiale that could unite the contrasting strengths of these two industries and mount a real European challenge to Hollywood.

Prime

¶ In an omnibus review of recent meltdown books, at Naked Capitalism, Satyajit Das has a lot of fun with the Money Honey’s contribution.

In “The Weekend that Changed Wall Street” CNBC “star” Maria Bartiromo aka “Money Honey” provides a “celebrity” take on the crisis. Some readers may be reminded of Groucho Marx’s famous comment: “From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down, I convulsed with laughter. Someday I intend on reading it.”

There was a time, long past, when reporters merely reported on the facts and only occasionally passed opinions. Ms Bartiromo seems to have cast herself as a central and sometime the sole character in the drama. “Weekend” self consciously on each page focuses on the “I”.

The author seeks to share what happened “in a way that ordinary people can understand”. In order to do this, “Weekend” takes us into the author’s boudoir – “my world – behind the curtain of capitalism” (a hitherto unknown financial metaphor) to provide ” an intimate look at the personal stories of those involved…from the richest and most powerful to the average workers.” From the airbrushed “come hither” look on the dusk jacket to highly derivative and, at times, corny text, “Weekend” exceeds the sum of your worst fears. Certainly, as Faulkner noted about Hemingway, there will be no need for the reader to rush for a dictionary in perusing this offering.

There are problems of “time space” as the weekend seems to stretch out for a number of years, emerging through a wormhole into the European debt crisis (imaginatively entitled “A Greek Tragedy”) and the Goldman Sachs indictment over a CDO transaction. There are problems of judgement – Ken Lewis is “a quiet man who masked his masterful business sense…” (page 85) and Goldman Sachs’ “reputation was solid”. (page 183) There are problems of classification – Nassim Taleb’s “Black Swan” is apparently “a critical view of the deception inherent in financial instruments” (Page 177).

There is “in depth” analysis – “Greece was in over its head and didn’t show it.” (Page 179). There is poetry – “Each afternoon, when I alight from my car on Broad Street in front of the New York Stock Exchange, I pause for a moment to look up. I have been doing this for sixteen years; it’s an automatic response. There is majesty to the edifice, and its architectural grace is breathtaking.” (page 208) There is hope, although some readers by this stage may be in despair – “…we must restore fundamental principles. We must, once again, allow integrity to guide and protect us.” (Page 208)

The real insight provided by “Weekend” is unintended. The surreal power of the vapid medium of financial TV and its frequently shallow coverage of events is striking. The “names” that curry favour with the networks for coverage and airtime is astonishing. What they say is perhaps even more astonishing, as is the author’s readiness to share “off air” and presumably private remarks. The book also reveals some interesting things about modern publishing, especially its focus on celebrity rather than content, argument or writing skill.

If the future of democracy and capitalism requires a free, knowledgeable and fearless press then this book does not augur well.

Tierce

¶ Everyone goes through a period, during adolescence if not later, of thinking that saying “thank you” is a meaningless social nicety. So it’s good to know that, quite aside from what your mother told you, expressing gratitude has objectively positive consequences. (PsyBlog)

The idea that saying thank you makes people more likely to help in the future is unsurprising, although the 100% increase is interesting, but what the researchers were interested in was why this happens.

Perhaps Eric’s gratitude made people feel better, or at least less bad? Or perhaps saying thanks boosted the helper’s self-esteem, which in turn motivated them to help again.

In fact the experimenters found that people weren’t providing more help because they felt better or it boosted their self-esteem, but because they appreciated being needed and felt more socially valued when they’d been thanked.

This feeling of social worth helps people get over factors that stop us helping. We are often unsure our help is really wanted and we know that accepting help from others can feel like a failure. The act of saying thank you reassures the helper that their help is valued and motivates them to provide more.

Sext

¶ While it may be true that, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog, it’s different if you’re known to be a woman, especially a young, pretty woman. Patrick Brown reflects on the problem — and it is a problem — by recounting the experience of a disturbing art installation. Do blondes have a life? (The Millions)

A few weeks ago, I went to an performance exhibition by my friend, the artist Charlie White. It was called Casting Call, and according to its website it was meant to further explore “White’s ongoing interest in the complexities of the American teen as cultural icon, image, and national idea.” For the exhibition, an art gallery was converted into two rooms, each separated from the other by a pane of glass.  On one side of the room was a casting call for teen girls exemplifying “the All American California girl” — blonde hair, tan skin, etc. — between the ages of 13 and 16. White and his crew interviewed the models, took a mug shot-style photograph of them, and then brought in the next girl. On the other side of the glass, an audience — mostly art students and hipsters — watched. Our friend Stephanie, White’s partner, pointed out that everyone on our side of the glass was brunette (except, it must be pointed out, Edan) while all of the models were, of course, blonde. White and his crew discussed each girl, both amongst themselves and with the girl, as well, but we could hear none of it. We were left to interpret the scene for ourselves. “Oh, look, they’re letting that girl look at the photo. They must really like her,” I said. “Yeah, either that or they could tell she was upset, and wanted to reassure her she did a good job.”

A seemingly never-ending stream of girls came through the door. What fascinated me most about the entire exhibition is how quickly we could objectify the girls. I don’t mean objectify them in the way that it’s commonly used — to turn them into sex objects — though there was certainly a tinge of the erotic about the event; by objectify, I mean to make them into something not quite human, and in turn, to talk about them as though they were things rather than people. “She’s too old.” “I like that one, in the leopard-print shorts. She’s my favorite.” “Look at how weird her hair is. Why does she look like that?” It was how we talk about people when they’re on television, but these people were merely a few feet away. The pane of glass, and the contrast between the brightly lit casting room and the dim audience space, was enough distance to effectively dehumanize these girls. There were other factors at work, such as the blonde California girl’s status as marketing conceit and sexual totem, but I think a big reason we all felt free to dissect and dismiss these girls is because they couldn’t really see us. We were, more or less, anonymous. It was especially unsettling to turn around after watching for a few minutes and see one of the girls who had been in the call standing just behind us. How long had she been there, the girl in the leopard print shorts? And how did she suddenly become so real?

Nones

¶ As it turns out, John Cutler’s unspeakable syphilis “experiments” in Guatemala, recently unearthed by historian Susan Reverby, were conducted during one of the rare good times in that country. (LRB blog)

So, for Guatemalans, the news that the US was complicit in crimes against humanity in their country is hardly surprising, though the fact that Cutler chose Guatemala precisely because it would permit experiments impossible in the US has made people angry. But above and beyond the revulsion at the details of the experiments, there is the hurt that will be caused by an investigation that in any way tarnishes the memory of Arévalo, one of the best loved men in Guatemala’s recent past. Already, right-wing voices are muttering darkly about the ‘excesses of Communism’.

Vespers

¶ The Millions‘s editorial intern, Ujala Sehgal, has unearthed a What-Is-Literature essay by Nobelist Mario Vargas Llosa that the New York Times published in 1984. Even in translation, its Latin impatience with physicial reality is palpable.

At the heart of all fictional work there burns a protest. Their authors created them since they were unable to live them, and their readers (and believers) encounter in these phantom creatures the faces and adventures needed to enhance their own lives. That is the truth expressed by the lies in fiction – the lies that we ourselves are, thelies that console us and make up for our longings and frustrations. How trustworthy then is the testimony of a novel on the very society that produced it? Were those men really that way? They were, in the sense that that was how they wanted to be, how they envisioned themselves loving, suffering and rejoicing. Those lies do not document their lives but rather their driving demons – the dreams that intoxicated them and made the lives they led more tolerable. An era is not populated merely by flesh and blood creatures, but also by the phantom creatures into which they are transformed in order to break the barriers that confine them.

THE lies in novels are not gratuitous – they fill in the insufficiencies of life. Thus, when life seems full and absolute, and men, out of an all-consuming faith, are resigned to their destinies, novels, perform no service at all. Religious cultures produce poetry and theater, not novels. Fiction is an art of societies in which faith is undergoing some sort of crisis, in which it’s necessary to believe in something, in which the unitarian, trusting and absolute vision has been supplanted by a shattered one and an uncertainty about the world we inhabit and the afterworld.

Compline

¶ Even though she intended to donate the proceeds of her recital in Detroit to the local orchestra’s pension fund, concert violinist Sarah Chang was hounded by union musicians into canceling the event, ostensibly in recognition of the Detroit Symphony’s labor dispute. The wrongheadedness of the campaign to prevent the making of fine music in a distressed city sharpens our sense that labor unions, while not necessarily bad in themselves, have got stuck in legacy issues. The fact that there was for many years an excellent symphony orchestra in Detroit does not mean that there ought to be one now.

The DSO players walked off the job after management implemented the terms of a new contract, including base pay cuts for veteran players from $104,650 to $70,200, rising to $73,800 in three years. The players had offered a cut to $82,000 in the first year, rising to $96,600 in year three. The parties are also at odds over work rules and other issues.

“The musicians of the DSO and professional musicians around the country are very grateful to Sarah Chang for her powerful gesture in refusing to play the replacement concert. … I feel very sorry if she or her manager received any communication which could be perceived as threatening,” said DSO spokesperson Haden McKay, a cellist.

Parsons said that the cancellation of Chang’s recital meant that the public was also victimized by what she called “reprehensible” and “unethical tactics.”

“We were just doing what we’re meant to do, which is present musical experiences at the highest level for our public, and if we can’t present orchestra concerts we have to present other things.”

Star soloists typically steer clear of labor disputes. Chang’s decision to perform as a good will gesture for Detroit music lovers was a tightrope walk from the start. “There’s little hope of not offending either side in a labor dispute when engaging in exclusive artist activity with one side or the other during a strike,” said Chicago-based arts consultant Drew McManus.

Have a Look

¶ Dalton Ghetti’s pencils. (Good)

¶ Photos from the Sixties. The Eighteen Sixties. (The Age of Uncertainty)

Matins

¶ New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s withdrawal of support for a Hudson River rail tunnel was utterly predictable, because expensive infrastructure prrojects are anathema to Republicans. Why? Because everybody gets to use them. (The governor plans to divert funds to road and bridge repair, which is principally useful to automobile owners.) We wish that this were as obvious to Paul Krugman as it is to us, but no. (NYT)

And right now, by any rational calculation, would be an especially good time to improve the nation’s infrastructure. We have the need: our roads, our rail lines, our water and sewer systems are antiquated and increasingly inadequate. We have the resources: a million-and-a-half construction workers are sitting idle, and putting them to work would help the economy as a whole recover from its slump. And the price is right: with interest rates on federal debt at near-record lows, there has never been a better time to borrow for long-term investment.

But American politics these days is anything but rational. Republicans bitterly opposed even the modest infrastructure spending contained in the Obama stimulus plan. And, on Thursday, Chris Christie, the governor of New Jersey, canceled America’s most important current public works project, the long-planned and much-needed second rail tunnel under the Hudson River.

It was a destructive and incredibly foolish decision on multiple levels. But it shouldn’t have been all that surprising. We are no longer the nation that used to amaze the world with its visionary projects. We have become, instead, a nation whose politicians seem to compete over who can show the least vision, the least concern about the future and the greatest willingness to pander to short-term, narrow-minded selfishness.

Yes, yes, Mr Krugman, you’re almost there. All you need to add is that nothing but narrow-minded selfishness can be expected of a free-market democracy.

Lauds

¶ Kyle Minor’s impatience with his own failure to produce a good review of a book that he admires very much, Joshua Cohen’s Witz, explodes in a splat at HTMLGiant.

When I was a less accomplished reader (and yesterday I was a less accomplished reader than I am today, as these things are progressive through time), it helped to have training wheels designed by Frank Kermode or James Wood or Margaret Atwood or William Deresiewicz. Reading difficult books alongside those who intelligently explicated them helped me to become the kind of reader who could read difficult books without those training wheels. Why have I become such a stingy and ungenerous person that I find myself unwilling to offer a similar service to someone else? Criticism costs the critic, is why, and while some of the costs — the upset you invite, the ways in which you open yourself to reciprocal criticism for the things you get wrong, the possibility that you fail to achieve the strong criticism your intentions prescribed – are costs I can live with, the cost of time is a cost I’m increasingly unwilling to pay.

Prime

¶ Someone’s gotta do it — but making a free market in books is something that few people want to think about, much less confront. Perhaps it’s the afterburn of the pre-eminence of the Bible among books, but for some reason or other we balk at treating books as commodities, although that is of course what they are to everyone who hands them on their way to the reader. At Slate, Michael Savitz captures the cloud of bad vibrations in which he does his business. (via MetaFilter)

The bibliophile bookseller, and the various other species of pickers and flippers of secondhand merchandise, would never be reproached like this and could never be made to feel bad in this way. Record geeks are, obviously, crazy music fans. The dealer in used designer clothes or antique housewares, when he considers a piece, can evaluate its craftsmanship and beauty with the same gaze he uses to appraise it. But the aesthetic value of a book—its literary merit—doesn’t have anything to do with its physical condition. Besides, libraries are for readers, not people who see profit in the shelves. When I work with my scanner and there’s someone else shopping near me who wants to read books, I feel that my energy is all wrong—high-pitched, focused narrowly in the present, and jealous. Someone browsing through books does it with a diffuse, forgetful curiosity, a kind of open reckoning that she learned from reading. Good health to you, reader. One day I will be like you again.

More than once, this piece made us think that Mr Savitz and his colleagues could learn a thing or two from morticians.

Tierce

¶ “Small, crazy details” upend five centuries of physics — which is no surprise, since only now can we see what’s really going on in the world, instead of relying on thought experiments. (Wired Science)

For centuries, physicists have thought that the amount of force needed to start a book sliding across a table is equal to the force from friction that keeps book and table stuck together. That frictional force is determined by a number called the coefficient of friction, which is the ratio between the forces pushing sideways and pushing down (basically, how much the book weighs).

These laws were first described by Leonardo da Vinci in the 15th century, and re-derived by Guillaume Amontons and Charles Coulomb a few hundred years later. They’ve been the stuff of introductory physics textbooks for decades.

But when Fineberg’s student Oded Ben-David, first author of a paper in the October 8 Science describing their experiments, tried to reproduce them in carefully controlled lab experiments, the laws fell apart. Ben-David found that he could apply up to five times as much sideways force as the coefficient of friction predicted, and the book still wouldn’t move.

“Even in the lab, he couldn’t predict what was going to happen,” Fineberg said. “Small, crazy details made a really big difference. ”

Sext

¶ A good friend of the Editor has recommended Instapaper, and we look forward to having the time to explore it, especially because it shares our dedication to the pleasures of long-form reading. As usual, we’re too busy reading right now. (Capital; via Tomorrow Museum)

Perhaps, for the small (relative to the whole web) world that has adapted his product, mostly by word-of-mouth, there is a feeling of contributing to the next-next thing by sending Arment a small donation. The fact that Instapaper seems to be heading in the opposite direction from so many sites starting up now—one that encourages reading long-form writing instead of short bursts of text and pictures—is part of what makes Instapaper refreshing. It’s also what makes it a risky bet.

“This is the beginning of the end of design,” said Rich Ziade, the creator of Readability, another online service that strips article pages from their original design and places them into formatted text. He was standing next to Arment, and the pair were in a carpeted room at the Sheraton in Midtown last week, presenting their tools at the Web 2.0 Expo for a discussion titled “The Reading Experience and the Web.” A young man dressed in fitted jeans and Vans sneakers stepped up to a microphone and introduced himself as a user experience designer for websites and applications. He said he is a fan of Instapaper, but wondered if the applications essentially make his job irrelevant.

There was nervous laughter from the crowd, about three dozen or so young people. They were mostly men in button-up dress shirts and khakis (investors and ad sales types) or t-shirts and Converse sneakers (coders and young entrepreneurs). “A few users talk about [our applications] in that it’s a little addictive and I think what they’re speaking to is consistency,” said Ziade.

Take one article on the web and it could be read in dozens of formats. You can view it in a rolodex of web browser choices (Opera! Firefox! Safari!). The text size, font, color and background images can look completely different in each browser, not to mention if the text is squeezed onto a tiny mobile phone or bloated onto a widescreen P.C. “You have particular dimensions and constraints, and all sorts of shapes and sizes on platforms,” Ziade said. “We’re giving people control.”

Nones

¶ China wants to give Norway a spanking. Guess why? Norway just slapped China — with a very unwanted Peace Prize.  (NYT)

The Chinese Foreign Ministry reacted angrily to the news, calling it a “desecration” of the peace prize and saying it would harm Norwegian-Chinese relations. The Chinese government summoned Norway’s ambassador to protest the award, a spokesman for the Norwegian Foreign Ministry told reporters.

“The Nobel Committee giving the peace prize to such a person runs completely contrary to the aims of the prize,” Ma Zhaoxu, a spokesman said in a statement posted on the ministry’s Web site. “Liu Xiaobo is a criminal who has been sentenced by Chinese judicial departments for violating Chinese law.”

Headlines about the award were nowhere to be found in the Chinese-language state media or on the country’s main Internet portals. Broadcasts about Liu Xiaobo (pronounced Liew Show Boh) on CNN, which reach only luxury compounds and hotels in China, were blacked out throughout the evening. Many mobile phone users reported not being able to transmit text messages containing his name in Chinese.

Vespers

¶ Shocking evidence that parents want to spare their children the languors of childhood abounds in Julie Bosman’s report on the decline of picture-book sales. (Is this really a story for Lauds?) (NYT)

“Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’ ” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. “There’s a real push with parents and schools to have kids start reading big-kid books earlier. We’ve accelerated the graduation rate out of picture books.”

Booksellers see this shift too.

“They’re 4 years old, and their parents are getting them ‘Stuart Little,’ ” said Dara La Porte, the manager of the children’s department at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington. “I see children pick up picture books, and then the parents say, ‘You can do better than this, you can do more than this.’ It’s a terrible pressure parents are feeling — that somehow, I shouldn’t let my child have this picture book because she won’t get into Harvard.”

Literacy experts are quick to say that picture books are not for dummies. Publishers praise the picture book for the particular way it can develop a child’s critical thinking skills.

Compline

¶ It is no surprise that New York City and the Federal Government approach counterterrorism in opposite ways. Scott Horton outlines both, at Harper’s. We’re not New Yorkers for nothing.

The German philosophy, which is close to that of the United Kingdom and the New York City Police Department (explained by my friend Mike Shaheen here), runs something like this: the aim of terrorists is to instill fear and to disrupt lives. Therefore it is only doing the terrorists’ bidding when a government makes statements that generally spread anxiety without providing any specific guidance. The approach of these governments is thus to share the basic information but to downplay its significance (usually by stressing that the information is general, that it shows planning but that there is no specific information about an attack). They urge people to go about their lives and to report suspicious activity to the police. Quietly, law enforcement and intelligence agencies will follow up leads, interrogating individuals and making arrests. Generally speaking, however, the aim is to get a good look inside the terrorist cell and follow its threads from within, not moving too quickly. The theory is that, once alerted, the terrorists are less likely to reveal the full scope of their plans or their support network.

The approach that is still favored by the United States federal authorities and the French stresses the need for the state to share its sense of alarm with the public and then to take public measures that show its vigilance even when such measures are not likely to have a high payoff. Compared with its European allies, the United States has also been quick to “spring the trap.” That is, it often arrests individuals believed to be involved in a plot early on, giving up the opportunity to learn more by monitoring them. This has in the past been a point of some friction between Britain and the United States.

Have a Look

¶ Scout explores the Farley.

¶ Special Pencils redux. (Globe)

Matins

¶ We would like to think that mention of the “fragility of Pakistan“ marks an advance of sorts in the awareness of American diplomatic and military officials that our alliance with the government of Pakistan may turn into a pillar of salt at any moment. (NYT)

“We have historically had astonishing sources of resilience in our relations with Pakistan,” said Teresita Schaffer, a South Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “One should not too quickly assume we’re in a breakpoint. But having said that, the time we’re in right now, the intensity of anti-American feeling, the antipathy of militants, all of these things make new crises a little more complicated to get through than the old ones were.”

The overall commander of forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, has been pulling out all the stops — aggressively using the American troop buildup, greatly expanding Special Operations raids (as many as a dozen commando raids a night) and pressing the Central Intelligence Agency to ramp up Predator and Reaper drone operations in Pakistan.

He has also, through the not-so-veiled threat of cross-border ground operations, put pressure on the Pakistani Army to pursue militants in the tribal areas even as the army has continued to struggle with relief from the catastrophic floods this summer.

The fragility of Pakistan — and the tentativeness of the alliance — were underscored in a White House report to Congress this week, which sharply criticized the Pakistani military effort against Al Qaeda and other insurgents and noted the ineffectiveness of its civilian government.

Lauds

¶ We can’t think when we’ve been so keen on Chopin. Never, probably. And what we’re really into is listening to different performances. The music, qua sheet music, has become transparently familiar. Always fond of Vladimir Ashkenazy’s reading of the Nocturnes, for example, we’re surprised by how much more we like Artur Rubinstein’s way with the Ballades and the Scherzos. Now we’re going to look into some of the recommendations made by David Patrick Stearns, in a genial tour d’horizon of new Chopin recordings, at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

For all its meticulous craftsmanship, improvisational inspiration and matchless charm, Chopin’s music asks – but never demands – a degree of self-revelation not all performers are willing (or able) to give. His pieces are soliloquies, invariably written for solo piano, aside from a few concertos, a piano trio, and a cello sonata. Had Chopin a report card, it would read, “Does not play well – if at all – with others.”

Any interventionist collaboration goes badly, whether from jazz players, transcribers wanting to add heft, or just those desiring to spruce up the orchestrations of the concertos: It all comes out sounding cluttered, wrong and strangely exhibitionistic.

Unlike his near-contemporary Franz Liszt, Chopin has a distilled directness that circumvents romantic posturing or playing to the gallery. He was a performer, but in salons. A few years before his 1849 death, he returned to the public concert hall but reportedly could barely be heard. Is that any surprise for a performer/composer used to communicating with friends rather than strangers?

Prime

¶ The abstract metrics of macroeconomics (does that even makes sense?) tend to fly right over (and through) our heads, but we’re not so hopeless with tangible assets — in today’s case, commercial real estate, which, according to the party line, has bottomed out. Nonsense! cries Jim Quinn — and he backs up his claim that things are going to get worse with a lot of comprehensible charts and graphs. Yves Smith, hosting Mr Quinn’s piece, begins by pointing out that a square-footage-per-capita figure of 24 betokened excess capacity to her when she had occasion to study the market over twenty years ago. Now, according to Mr Quinn, that figure has jumped 46 — compared to 13 in Canada. Jim Quinn:

Retailers expanding into an oversaturated retail market in the midst of a Depression, when anyone without rose colored glasses can see that Americans must dramatically cut back, are committing a fatal mistake. The hubris of these CEOs will lead to the destruction of their companies and the loss of millions of jobs. They will receive their fat bonuses and stock options right up until the day they are shown the door.

All of the happy talk from the Wall Street Journal, CNBC and the other mainstream media about commercial real estate bottoming out is a load of bull. It seems these highly paid “financial journalists” are incapable of doing anything but parroting each other and looking in the rearview mirror. Sound analysis requires you to look at the facts, make reasonable assumptions about the future and report the likely outcome. Based on this criteria, there is absolutely no chance that commercial real estate has bottomed. There are years of pain, writeoffs and bankruptcies to go.

Tierce

¶ In a presentation (delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair) that’s sure to be linked to far and wide, James Bridle pitches Open Bookmark, a proposed medium for storing and sharing the aura of reading a book, which in his view replaces the concept of the copy. Don’t miss it! (booktwo.org; via The Morning News)

I believe that the copy is no longer important, that we can all get the book, the text itself, if we need it. What is valuable and what is core and what we can lend to our friends and pass onto our children is not copies of books but originals of our own experiences, associated with those singular works of art.

Which is where Open Bookmarks comes in.

Sext

¶ Sloane Crosley celebrates the Gotham-as-Gigantic-Hamlet myth as enthusiastically as anybody — she leaves her housekeys in her unlocked mailbox! — but she is finding that there are limits, beyond which “trusting” morphs into “thoughtless.” (NYT)

There’s a real tinge of the smug to this “the world is my safe deposit box” mentality. It’s a luxury to blithely trust that everything will work out in your favor regardless of precaution, a luxury commonly reserved for the very young or the very super-model-y.

Indeed, we’ve ventured so far out on the trust spectrum that it’s not simply a matter of assuming other people aren’t criminals, but assuming they’re an army of personal assistants. In the past year I have twice found someone’s phone in the back of a cab. The first time a woman asked me if I was still in the neighborhood and could drop it off at her apartment. The second time a man asked me if I could have a messenger bring it to him at his office the next morning because he was “super busy.”

I could do that, I told him. Alternatively, I could break the thing and sell the parts online after I texted every woman in his phone to inquire when they had last “been tested.”

What these new mutated strains of extreme faith have in common is a shortage of charm, the very thing we value the most. They lack humility in the face of the unknown, replaced with a hubris for which New York is infamous. Such a shame because, frankly, most of the time our ego is warranted. We have very best and the very most of a lot things. I just don’t want us to have the very most of the clueless and the gullible.

Nones

¶ Daniel Larison’s eloquent and sensible call for the dissolution of NATO. (The Week; via Real Clear World)

Nine years after September 11, it no longer makes sense (if it ever did) to be asking Canadian and British soldiers, among others, to risk their lives for what has always been an American war in Afghanistan. As much as we can appreciate and honor the support our NATO allies have provided, we shouldn’t drag them into conflicts that have never really been their concern. “Out-of-area” missions will just keep happening again and again as the alliance looks for new conflicts to enter to provide a rationale for its existence. European nations are clearly tired of it, and at present they can’t afford it, either. The need for fiscal retrenchment has been forcing European governments, even the new coalition government in Britain, to make deep cuts in their military budgets.

Making NATO into a political club of democracies in good standing is also no solution to the Alliance’s obsolescence. As we saw in the war in Georgia two years ago, proposed expansion of NATO has been more of a threat to European peace and security than dissolving it. Once again, this is something that most European governments understood at the time, and which Washington refused to see. Without the belief that Georgia was eligible for membership and would eventually be allowed to join, it is unlikely that Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili would have escalated a conflict over its separatist regions and plunged his country into war with Russia. That conflict was a good sign that the Alliance had outlived its usefulness. If it isn’t disbanded, it may start to become a menace to the very things it was supposed to keep safe.

America doesn’t need and shouldn’t want to perpetuate an outdated alliance. The creation of NATO was an imaginative solution designed to respond to the security conditions of the immediate aftermath of World War II, and it was an enormous success. But it is time for Americans to begin thinking anew about the world. A first step in doing that is letting go of an alliance neither America nor Europe needs.

Vespers

¶ At 5 o’clock this morning, Mario Vargas Llosa got the call, right here in New York City. The Stockholm call. (NYT)

Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”

In selecting Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Swedish Academy has once again made a choice that is infused with politics. Recent winners include Herta Muller, the Romanian-born German novelist, last year, Orhan Pamuk of Turkey in 2007 and Harold Pinter of Britain in 2005.

In 1990, Mr. Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru and has been an outspoken activist in his native country. The news that he had won the prize reached him at 5 a.m., when he was hard at work in his apartment in New York, preparing to set out on a walk in Central Park, he told a radio station in Peru. Initially, he thought it was a prank.

“It was a grand surprise,” he said. “It’s a good way to start a New York day.”

He is currently spending the semester in the United States, teaching Latin American studies at Princeton University.

The prize is the first for a writer in the Spanish language in two decades, after Mexico’s Octavio Paz won the Nobel in 1990, and focuses new attention on the Latin American writers who gained renown in the 1960s, like Julio Cortazar of Argentina and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, who formed the region’s literary “boom generation.”

¶ Benedicte Page’s list of five MVL must-reads. (Guardian)

Compline

¶ Lucky Nige takes a walk in West Surrey and passes directly in front of a house that we’ve always admired.

Our walk ended with a building that leaves no room for doubt that Lutyens at least was an architect of true genius and outstanding originality. Tigbourne Court, an early masterpiece of his, is a house with a dramatic U-shaped entrance front, great curving single-storey wings sweeping out at either side, crowned with immensely tall paired chimneys. The main house has three gables over three extremely tall and elegant windows over a low plain Doric loggia. The overall effect is simply breathtaking, marred only by the fact that the house stands right on what is now the very busy Petworth road, loud with passing cars. Tigbourne looks best from the far side of the carriageway, but cross over for a close-up view and marvel at Lutyens’s use of vernacular materials and techniques – the Bargate stone used to imitate brickwork, the cheery galleting (chips of dark stone in the mortar), the courses of thin tiles set flat, often in herringbone pattern, that continue right around the house… But enough – you must go and see it for yourself. Or, if you’re driving down that wretched road, turn off, park up and stroll back, and admire this building so startlingly and joyously beautiful it almost silences the traffic. This is the Surrey style in exelcis.

(Thanks, Nige for mentioning the Petworth Road. We found the house right away at Google Maps.)

Have a Look 

¶ Executive Suite Primer. (Weakonomics)

¶ Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Sasha Frere-Jones are not impressed by The Social Network. We loved the movie, but we see their point, and, anyway, the exchange makes us LOL. (The Awl)

¶ The End of the Bacon Bubble? (WSJ; via The Morning News)

¶ The Mandelbox Trip. (via MetaFilter)

Matins

¶ At The Baseline Scenario, historian Lawrence Glicksman makes an appeal that will be familiar to regular readers. For which lack of novelty we would apologize, if it were not for the importance of regular reminders that there is a movement afoot to transfer public wealth into private pockets.

Despite their endorsement of the state’’s role as a creator of markets, provider of infrastructure, and consumer of goods and services, Americans have simultaneously held a longstanding suspicion of the state.  What they most detested about the state as it existed in Europe was the way in which it granted privilege to the powerful and enabled the wealthy to further enrich themselves. They also feared the standing armies and the co-mingling of the military and the civil government that characterized Old World regimes. They feared the kind of arrangement that Cheney and his company profited from––what today we call corporate welfare and the military-industrial complex––and they did so not because they uniformly condemned federal power but because they feared a state that would entrench insiders and elites.

Cheney’’s comment is even more relevant today than it was when he uttered it a decade ago.  Politicians and pundits continue to deny government’’s proper––and historic–place in economic development and equally to deny or minimize the dangers of government power as manifested by secrecy, the revolving door between business and government, and unscrutinized contracts handed out to private businesses like Haliburton.

We desperately need a narrative about the role of the government in our political and economic life  to compete with the one that currently dominates the conventional wisdom. Such a narrative would hold that taxes are a means of  raising funds for necessary collective endeavors, that regulation can just as easily promote as stifle freedom (such as the freedom to avoid toxic drugs and unsafe food), and that government can, as the Founders recognized, promote the general welfare. It need not celebrate all forms of government power and should call attention to the dangers of an overreaching state that we have become especially aware of over the last decade.  Perhaps if such a narrative had been in place in 2000, Americans would be facing our current crisis with a more balanced sense of the strengths and limitations of government, and a more accurate sense of how our predecessors understood them.

Lauds

¶ This story doesn’t really have everything; it just feels like it: “Henning Mankell: The special relationship.” Or, “Bergman in Gaza.” (Independent; via  Arts Journal)

The main subject of my interview isn’t Larsson or Björn Borg. Nor is it the psychology and unlikely appeal of the morose Detective Kurt Wallander. It is Mankell’s ongoing attempts to make an ambitious TV drama and feature film about his father-in-law, Ingmar Bergman – a project interrupted in surreal fashion by the Israeli army.

Earlier this summer, Mankell was aboard the Gaza-bound aid flotilla that was attacked by Israeli forces. To his consternation, part of the screenplay for his new film about Bergman was confiscated by the Israeli soldiers.

“Whatever I do, I am always working on something,” says Mankell, explaining how he happened to have the Bergman screenplay in his possession at the same time as he was taking part in a mission to bring aid supplies to Gaza in defiance of the Israeli blockade. “When everything was stolen and confiscated, they [the Israeli troops] also took the manuscript,” he recalls. “What the hell are they supposed to do with that?”

Four months later, the Israelis still haven’t returned Mankell’s screenplay. He jokes that the Israelis must have thought the screenplay – called Crisis in deference to Bergman’s directorial debut – was written in code. Mankell very much doubts that the young commando soldiers who took the screenplay even knew who Bergman was.

Prime

¶ Megan McCardle is not exactly dazzled by Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From. Innovation, as she suggests, often occurs at a pace that can’t be kneaded into a satisfying narrative. (WSJ; via Marginal Revolution.)

Reverence for the great-discovery model of innovation is what prompts critics of the pharmaceutical industry to declare that all the “real work” of drug discovery is done in university labs, often with taxpayer funding. Drug companies, we are often told, simply steal the ideas and monetize them. And yet what “Big Pharma” does no less crucial to drug discovery than the basic research that takes place in academia. It is not enough to learn that a certain disease process can be thwarted by a given molecule. You also have to figure out how to cheaply mass-produce that chemical, in a form that can be easily taken by ordinary patients (no IV drugs for acid reflux, please). And before the drug can be approved, it must be run through the expensive human trials required by the Food and Drug Administration.

The endless creativity of the human animal is one of the differences between us and a chimpanzee poking sticks into an anthill in search of a juicy meal. But another one is our capacity for the endless elaboration and refinement of ideas—particularly in a modern economy. Toyota’s prowess at this sort of incremental improvement is legendary, even radical. Wal-Mart, it is said, was responsible for 25% of U.S. productivity growth in the 1990s. That’s not because Sam Walton emerged from his lab one night waving blueprints for a magic productivity machine. The company made continual, often tiny, improvements in the management of its supply chain, opening thousands of stores along the way and putting the benefits within reach of virtually every American.

We are all of us, every day, discovering many things that don’t work very well and a few things that do. Reducing the history of innovation to a few “big ideas” misses the full power of human ingenuity.

Tierce

¶ Since James Surowiecki wrote it, you probably won’t want to procrastinate about reading his piece on procrastination, “Later,” in The New Yorker. And, once you begin, you’ll soon be at the end, where there’s an intriguing debate about “the extended will,” which is common sense to Aristotelian humanists but cheating to Kantians. (And you don’t want that on your Kantians!)

The idea of the divided self, though discomfiting to some, can be liberating in practical terms, because it encourages you to stop thinking about procrastination as something you can beat by just trying harder. Instead, we should rely on what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson, in their essay in “The Thief of Time,” call “the extended will”—external tools and techniques to help the parts of our selves that want to work. A classic illustration of the extended will at work is Ulysses’ decision to have his men bind him to the mast of his ship. Ulysses knows that when he hears the Sirens he will be too weak to resist steering the ship onto the rocks in pursuit of them, so he has his men bind him, thereby forcing him to adhere to his long-term aims. Similarly, Thomas Schelling once said that he would be willing to pay extra in advance for a hotel room without a television in it. Today, problem gamblers write contracts with casinos banning them from the premises. And people who are trying to lose weight or finish a project will sometimes make bets with their friends so that if they don’t deliver on their promise it’ll cost them money. In 2008, a Ph.D. candidate at Chapel Hill wrote software that enables people to shut off their access to the Internet for up to eight hours; the program, called Freedom, now has an estimated seventy-five thousand users.

Not everyone in “The Thief of Time” approves of the reliance on the extended will. Mark D. White advances an idealist argument rooted in Kantian ethics: recognizing procrastination as a failure of will, we should seek to strengthen the will rather than relying on external controls that will allow it to atrophy further. This isn’t a completely fruitless task: much recent research suggests that will power is, in some ways, like a muscle and can be made stronger. The same research, though, also suggests that most of us have a limited amount of will power and that it’s easily exhausted. In one famous study, people who had been asked to restrain themselves from readily available temptation—in this case, a pile of chocolate-chip cookies that they weren’t allowed to touch—had a harder time persisting in a difficult task than people who were allowed to eat the cookies.

Given this tendency, it makes sense that we often rely intuitively on external rules to help ourselves out. A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a psychologist at M.I.T., did a fascinating experiment examining one of the most basic external tools for dealing with procrastination: deadlines. Students in a class were assigned three papers for the semester, and they were given a choice: they could set separate deadlines for when they had to hand in each of the papers or they could hand them all in together at the end of the semester. There was no benefit to handing the papers in early, since they were all going to be graded at semester’s end, and there was a potential cost to setting the deadlines, since if you missed a deadline your grade would be docked. So the rational thing to do was to hand in all the papers at the end of the semester; that way you’d be free to write the papers sooner but not at risk of a penalty if you didn’t get around to it. Yet most of the students chose to set separate deadlines for each paper, precisely because they knew that they were otherwise unlikely to get around to working on the papers early, which meant they ran the risk of not finishing all three by the end of the semester. This is the essence of the extended will: instead of trusting themselves, the students relied on an outside tool to make themselves do what they actually wanted to do.

Sext

¶ Philip Greenspun reviews The Social Network in personal terms not available to film critics: “ It was our generation’s job to show his generation how to do stuff, so we did our job and he did his.” (If only he’d commnented on the Winklevoss claims!)

Former students often ask me what I think of Facebook. Many of them are just a little older than Zuckerberg and they say “Philip: you built all of those features in the 1990s. You taught a whole course on how to build online communities. How does it feel to see this guy make billions of dollars without having to do anything innovative?” My response is that I didn’t envision every element of Facebook. I imagined only three levels of publication: private (email), public (Web site), and community (on a Web site accessible only to other registered users of a site such as photo.net). I never had the idea of limiting information based on a network (though on photo.net we did have a “friends” feature starting in 2000 where contributions to the overall community by particular users marked as interesting would be highlighted to the person who’d selected those “friends” and that information would be displayed in reverse chronological order).

Zuckerberg seems to have done everything that the early Internet nerds suggested doing, e.g., starting with a relational database management system, watching user behavior carefully and refining the site’s feature set, providing mechanisms for users to connect and discuss. It was our generation’s job to show his generation how to do stuff, so we did our job and he did his.

My favorite part of the movie experience was a character who says that his girlfriend is “jealous, crazy, and frightening”. I nudged my companion and said “Wow, she’s just like you!” Seconds later the girlfriend says “How come your Facebook page says that you’re single?” My companion had in fact uttered these very words back in 2007 and in much the same tone of suspicion and indignation. I explained that I had set it up back several years ago after being invited by some students and didn’t use Facebook except to acknowledge friend requests. If it made her unhappy I would change the status to “married” and did so. This led to a flurry of congratulatory emails from surprised friends. To each one I had to respond that I had only changed the relationship status in order to quell criticism and there had not been any wedding. That’s when I realized that Facebook was more than simply a diversion for college undergraduates.

Nones

¶ On the differences between Malaysia and Indonesia, fragments of a common territory divided by different colonial experiences. Luke Hunt’s “Love Thy Neighbour?“, in The Diplomat. (via Real Clear World)

Indonesia, divided into 17,000 islands, pressed for unity and independence from their Dutch masters through the 1945-50 conflict, while Malaysia was forged out of British colonial rule in 1957 through diplomacy that united the Malay Peninsula with Singapore, and Sarawak and Sabah in Borneo six years later.

Singapore left the federation in 1965 while the rest of Malaysia—backed by the UK, Australia and New Zealand—was fighting the 1962-66 Konfrontasi against Indonesia for control of the two Borneo states (a fight it won).

‘Indonesians claim they won independence the hard way, through revolution, while they see us Malaysians of having been handed our independence,’ Abdullah says.

The economic realities of the two may cloud relations further. Indonesia’s economy is by far the largest in South-east Asia, with an annual GDP nearing one trillion US dollars.Yet according to the World Bank, Indonesia is ranked 106^th in per capita income, with an average income of about $4000 a year. Malaysia, by contrast, is ranked 49^th, with an average income of $14,000.

Vespers

¶ Sort like discovering the truth about Santa Claus: at The Millions, Frank Kovarik reminisces about being forced to conclude that Franklin W Dixon, purported author of the Hardy Boys mysteries, could not possibly be one man.

These authors’ names relate to an important benchmark in any Hardy or Drew fan’s reading life. It took me four years or so before I finally admitted to myself that neither Mr. Dixon nor Ms. Keene were real people, that in fact the eighty or so adventures of Bayport’s finest (eighty death-defying adventures crammed impossibly into Frank and Joe’s high school years) were not all written by the same person. The single-author theory seemed entirely plausible at first, when my experience with the Boys encompassed only a few books which, though somewhat dated, still contained copyright dates in the 1960s. Mr. Dixon, then, was an aging but still prolific man, who perhaps got up early every morning at his home on the east coast (yes, that seemed right—he should be able to look out at the ocean while orchestrating Frank and Joe’s escape from an elaborate death trap in Egypt, a locked magician’s box in Scotland, a tiger in India) to write five chapters or so. My faith began to crumble, however, as I checked out older editions of the books from my grade school resource room, editions with yellowing paper, which lacked the familiar blue spines and were bound instead in beige covers with brown lettering and, on the front cover, an iconic silhouette of two Hardy Boy-ish figures crouching with flashlights, a sad substitute for the exciting, customized illustrations that graced the newer editions. These editions contained even more outdated language than the blue-spines, using passé terms for African Americans that seemed to place the stories in the 1930s. Indeed, a glance at the copyright page confirmed this estimation.

The single-F. W. Dixon theory was seeming less likely. Even if he had begun writing the mysteries at the age of 20, the secretive (there was never an “about the author” at the end of the books) Dixon would still be in his seventies, much too old to be writing at the rate at which the Hardy novels were churned out. Finally, I came to the uneasy conclusion that there may have once been a real Dixon in the ’20s or ’30s, but he had since passed away, and his series had been edited, updated, and continued by a panel of ghostwriters at Simon & Schuster (I threw out theories which included a single ghostwriter or a Franklin Jr. carrying on his father’s tradition) who used the pseudonym for any number of reasons: to preserve the continuity of the series for youngsters who would be wary of a Hardy Boys tale told by Brian Reynolds or Suresh Desai, or to ensure that all Hardy Boys books would be shelved together in both library and bookstore, rather than scattered about by zealous alphabetizers.

We gulped a bit when we read that Frank found the older mysteries — old in our day, but still arresting when we were still depending on “training wheels” — lackluster.

Compline

¶ Now that RentAFriend is operating in the UK, BBC News asks Claire Prentice to try out the service in our own fair burgh.  

Waiting in a cafe in Greenwich Village, New York, I wonder how I’ll recognise my friend Jenny. She’s running late and I’m starting to feel nervous. The truth is I’ve never met her before. All I know about Jenny Tam is that she just turned 30 and she rents herself out as a “friend” in her free time.

“Hi, I’m Jenny, it’s good to meet you,” says a woman smiling and extending her hand. After the waitress comes over and takes our order, we start chatting.

“I moved to New York from Los Angeles a year ago and I thought this would be a good way to make friends,” says Jenny.

Over lunch we chat about where we’re from, our families and our interests, just as you would on a first date. It feels like a strangely formal way to get to know a complete stranger, but in New York people are forever striking up conversations with people they’ve just met.

Have a Look

¶ Paul Greenwood’s Teddy Bear collection, on the block. (Dealbreaker)

Matins

¶ We’re of the opinion that armed civilian militias are essentially incompatible with civil representative democracy. Our response to Barton Gellman’s story in Time, “The Secret World of Extreme Militias,” however, is not to press for more stringent prohibitions on firearms. We take the growth of these groups as sympatomatic as a breach in the American fabric that needs to be repaired before it can be meaningfully defended. (via Scott Horton)

Regardless of what conscience tells them, what chance do would-be armed rebels possibly have of prevailing against the armed might of the U.S.?

One answer comes from former Alabama militia leader Mike Vanderboegh, who wrote an essay that is among the most widely republished on antigovernment extremist sites today. In “What Good Is a Handgun Against an Army?” Vanderboegh says the tactical question is easy: Kill the enemy one soldier at a time. A patriot needs only a “cheap little pistol and the guts to use it,” he writes, to shoot a soldier in the head and take his rifle; with a friend, such a man will soon have “a truck full of arms and ammunition.” Vanderboegh is hardly a man of action himself, living these days on government disability checks. Even so, when he wrote a blog post in March urging followers to protest the health care bill by breaking windows at Democratic Party offices, they did so across the country.

Another answer comes from Richard Mack, who is holding constitutional seminars for county sheriffs from coast to coast, urging them to resist what he describes as federal tyranny by force. In his presentations, he shows movie clips to illustrate his point, like a scene from The Patriot in which Mel Gibson says, with fire in his eyes, “You will obey my command, or I will have you shot.”

Lauds

¶ Before you see The Social Network, how about a little theory? HTMLGiant‘s Lily Hoang takes Giorgio Agamben to the movies (so to speak), and now she understands The Facebook for what it really is: an Apparatus. You’ve got to love it.

It is not surprising then that Facebook as apparatus is a space of governance devoid of any foundation in being. Whereas profiles created on Facebook may be of real people, the signifier bears little resemblance to its referent. I used to teach at this college in Indiana, and one of the things my first year students told me (again and again) was that they met their roommates on Facebook and when they actually met face to face, there was a rupture, a disappointment between the profile and the person. Facebook offers subjectivity, the making of a subject, but the subject isn’t real. Facebook is a space for quippy one-liner zings. Real identity is necessarily obscured. It is almost entirely impossible to be genuine, to be authentic on Facebook.

Furthermore, Agamben uses the example of confession as apparatus, and no where is confession so realized as through Facebook, where “a new I is constituted through the negation and, at the same time, the assumption of the old I”

Prime

¶ Felix Salmon’s admiring but also surprisingly humble take on Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job has us rethinking our weekly movie plans.

A great Pixar movie manages to do two things at once: it entertains and delights the kids, while also giving their parents a fresh view of life with a remarkably adult perspective. Inside Job is similar, in a way: if you don’t really understand what happened during the financial crisis, it will explain that to you very clearly. If you do know what happened during the financial crisis, however, it will do something else: it will rekindle the anger and dudgeon that you might well have lost over the past three years of being buried in the financial weeds. Ferguson doesn’t do that Taibbi-style, by calling people names: he’s more effective than that and this film will surely galvanize the anti-Wall Street wings of both the Democratic and the Republican parties.

No financial journalist could have made this film: we were all far too close to the people and events depicted in it, which turn out to have really needed an outsider’s perspective. This is surely the first and last piece of financial journalism that Ferguson will ever make and it’s much more effective for it.

Tierce

¶ Sometimes scientists establish that our intuitions are correct. University of Texaas researchers have established an objective test for “style matching,” which is the harmony that any two people establish (or don’t) at the start of any conversation. Any good listener will unconsciously register it. (Telegraph; via The Morning News)

The study suggests style matching has the potential to quickly and easily reveal whether any given pair of people — ranging from business rivals to romantic partners — are psychologically on the same page and what this means for their future together.

“When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds,” Professor James Pennebaker, a psychologist who co-authored the study.

“This also happens when people read a book or watch a movie. As soon as the credits roll, they find themselves talking like the author or the central characters.”

He and his co-author Molly Ireland said that computer analysis of the number of language style matches is an objective way of testing the current state of someone’s relationship.

It works by counting the ways they used pronouns, prepositions and other words in various sentences.

Sext

¶ James Ward’s Boring Conference is taking shape! We probably wouldn’t attend even if we were in London, but we’d buy the Official Souvenir, if there were one. Among the speakers: Naomi Alderman, Joe Moran, and Peter Fletcher — a man who has logged every sneeze since July 2007. (I Like Boring Things)

Since first announcing my plans to hold a Boring conference, I have been quite busy sorting out all of the details. Things have developed since I first suggested the idea, and while I originally thought I’d try to find a venue which could hold about fifty people, this has grown a bit into something bigger. I’ll be announcing the venue details shortly.

In the meantime, I thought I’d give a bit of an update. The conference will take place on Saturday December 11th 2010, probably from about 11am-ish until about 5.30pm, or something like that. There will be lots of speakers, talking for either five, ten or twenty minutes, although the format could change.

Nones

¶ Bernard Porter files a wistful report on recent Swedish elections, at the LRBlog.

I come from the generation, and the political tendency, that used to admire Sweden enormously in the 1970s, as our great political model; the proof that equality, social justice and, yes, solidarity were compatible with prosperity, and could liberate people in a way that unrestrained capitalism didn’t. A Guardian leader recently described Stockholm as our ‘Shining City upon a Hill’; the opposite pole to the more famous American one. That’s how it was to me. Coming here in the mid-1990s, I of course found that not everything was as shining as I had hoped it would be – far from it – but it was still pretty remarkable: wealth spread widely, high taxation accepted as the price of a civilised society, very little poverty or crime by British standards, good and free education, friendly communal interaction, enlightened asylum and immigration policies, very little racism compared to (say) Denmark, and a degree of gender equality – this especially – that I’d never have thought possible.

Vespers

¶ Bill Morris glosses Elif Batuman’s LRB explosé about MFA Programs, at The Millions. Going to school is not the problem: education doesn’t kill writers. But Mr Morris agrees with Ms Batuman: aspiring writers ought to study literature, not “the craft of fiction.” (We believe that there is not only no better but no other way to learn how to write than to read, read, read.)

Batuman, a Harvard grad with a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Stanford, argues persuasively that the problem is not that virtually all American fiction writers go to college and that growing numbers of them then go on to grad school; the problem is that they study the wrong things.  She comes down squarely in favor of writers studying literature as opposed to studying how to make fiction.  After conceding that the creative writing program is equally incapable of ruining a good writer or transforming a bad one, she asks: “Why can’t the programme be better than it is?  Why can’t it teach writers about history and the world, and not just about adverbs and themselves?”

One result of the creative writing boom, according to McGurl, is that MFA grads are producing “more excellent fiction…than anyone has time to read.”  Which, according to Batuman, is precisely the problem: “That’s the torture of walking into a bookshop these days: it’s not that you think the books will all be terrible; it’s that you know they’ll all have a certain degree of competent workmanship, that most will have about three genuinely beautiful or interesting sentences and no really bad ones, that many will have at least one convincing, well-observed character, and that nearly all will be bound up in a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about.  All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books!  Who, indeed, has time to read them?”

McGurl’s spurious claim about the place of college and journalism in writers’ lives brought back my own experience as a young man trying to figure out a way to reconcile my urge to write with the need to make a living.  As it turned out, college and journalism figured largely in the solution.

Compline

¶ Although the abuse of intellectual property laws (by those who would unnecessarily extend them to profit business corporations) does not bristle with the menace of armed militias, we believe that it is no less inimical to civil representative democracy. So we embrace Robert Darnton’s advocacy of a National Digital Library. (NYRB)

Behind the creation of the American republic was another republic, which made the Constitution thinkable. This was the Republic of Letters—an information system powered by the pen and the printing press, a realm of knowledge open to anyone who could read and write, a community of writers and readers without boundaries, police, or inequality of any kind, except that of talent. Like other men of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers believed that free access to knowledge was a crucial condition for a flourishing republic, and that the American republic would flourish if its citizens exercised their citizenship in the Republic of Letters.

Of course, literacy was limited in the eighteenth century, and those who could read had limited access to books. There was an enormous gap between the hard realities of life two centuries ago and the ideals of the Founding Fathers. You could therefore accuse the Founders of utopianism. For my part, I believe that a strong dose of utopian idealism gave their thought its driving force. I think we should tap that force today, because what seemed utopian in the eighteenth century has now become possible. We can close the gap between the high ground of principle and the hardscrabble of everyday life. We can do so by creating a National Digital Library.

(Our support does not imply a belief that authors ought not to be paid for their work.)

Have a Look

¶ Buoyancy Bazooka. (Short Sharp Science)

¶ Robert Boyle’s To-Do List. (3 Quarks Daily)

Matins

¶ In case anybody doubted it, black Americans have experienced a higher foreclosure rate than the rest of the population, in the wake of the subprime-mortgage bubble-burst. (via Felix Salmon)

The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, but it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use in mortgage-backed securities that could be sold on secondary markets. We test this argument by regressing foreclosure actions in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas on measures of black, Hispanic, and Asian segregation while controlling for a variety of housing market conditions, including average creditworthiness, the extent of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, the degree of zoning regulation, and the overall rate of subprime lending. We find that black residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation are powerful predictors of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas. To isolate subprime lending as the causal mechanism through which segregation influences foreclosures, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that confirms the causal effect of black segregation on the number and rate of foreclosures across metropolitan areas. We thus conclude that segregation was an important contributing cause of the foreclosure crisis, along with overbuilding, risky lending practices, lax regulation, and the bursting of the housing price bubble.

Lauds

¶ What, according to columnist Mark Stryker, Matthew Barney is up to in Detroit. (Detroit Free Press; via  Arts Journal)

Like an increasing number of contemporary artists fascinated by the urban detritus and blank-slate possibilities of Detroit, Barney has been quietly working in the city off and on for the last two years. His latest ambition is a planned seven-part cycle of films with his longtime collaborator, composer Jonathan Bepler, which loosely translates Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel “Ancient Evenings” from Egyptian antiquity to contemporary times. The metaphysical theme deals with the stages of the soul’s departure from the body.

In Barney’s retelling, however, the main character becomes the 1967 Chrysler, which is reincarnated as a 1979 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and a 2001 Crown Victoria. The first film was shot in Los Angeles. Detroit, the birthplace of the Crown Imperial, is the setting for Act 2, titled “Kuh.” Barney has been shooting a lot of material, including a scene of the Trans Am flying to its death off the Belle Isle bridge.

Okay!

Prime

¶ At the Washington Post, Robert Samuelson looks into a new study showing that any net increase in jobs is the work of entrepreneurial start-ups. (via MetaFilter)

In any given year, employment may reflect the ups and downs of the business cycle. But over longer periods, almost all job growth comes from new businesses. The reason: high failure rates among existing firms. Even successful firms succumb to threats: new competition, products or technologies; mature markets; family feuds and the deaths of founders; shifting consumer tastes; poor management and unprofitability. A company founded today has an 80 percent chance of disappearing over the next quarter-century, report Dane Stangler and Paul Kedrosky of the Kauffman Foundation.

True, some blue-chip firms — the Exxons and Procter & Gambles — endure. Fourth-fifths of the “Fortune 500” were founded before 1970, note Stangler and Kedrosky. But they are exceptions, and many brand names have died: Pan Am (once the premier international airline), Digital Equipment (once the second-largest computer maker) and Circuit City (once a leading consumer electronics chain).

The debate over whether small or big firms create more jobs is misleading. The real distinction is between new and old.

American workers are roughly split between firms with fewer or more than 500 employees. In healthy times, older companies of all sizes do create lots of jobs. But they also lose jobs, as some businesses shrink or vanish. On balance, job creation and destruction cancel each other. All the net job increases occur among start-ups, finds a study of the 1992-2005 period by economists John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland and Ron Jarmin and Javier Miranda of the Census Bureau. Because most start-ups are necessarily small, this gives a statistical edge to tinier firms in job creation. But, the study says, the effect entirely reflects the impact of new businesses.

Tierce

¶ Eliza Strickland cautions the young ‘uns in the audience to bear in mind not only how far 20 light years really is but how much fuel would be required for the journey. Nobody’s going to Gliese 581g anytime soon. (Discoblog)

To do the trip above requires (at least) 530 times as much mass in fuel as in the ship and cargo itself.

That is very bad news.  Let’s put things in perspective and imagine sending the international space station (m= 370 metric tons) to Gliese 581g.  The whole trip would require something like:

• E = 1.8 x 10^25 Joules

Or approximately 5% of the sun’s energy output in a second.  That sounds reasonable, until you realize that that tiny amount would take approximately:

• 3 million years to collect on earth if the entire surface were covered with solar panels.

Sext

¶ James Davidson’s review of A Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Volume V.A, is packed with learn-something-new-every-day goodies. It also takes more than half of its length to get round to the Greeks. Great fun! (LRB; via 3 Quarks Daily)

But the customary licence with which names are bestowed in English-speaking countries is also ideological, a sometimes quite self-conscious expression of an assumed freedom to name children whatever parents want, another of those ‘ancient liberties’ that would in earlier centuries have been confidently ascribed to the Anglo-Saxons. Which is ironic, since one of the most dramatic upheavals in English naming occurred after the Norman Conquest, when parents chose to replace the wonderful and varied names of their grandparents’ generation – Aethelwulf, Aethelflaed, Frithuswith, Ealdred – with less personalised Toms, Dicks and Harrys. It is rather as if an orchestra had been replaced by a recorder ensemble. It is little consolation for this enormous loss to know that the most recent data for the UK places Alfie at number three. The demise of Anglo-Saxon names represented more than just a change of repertoire. All names signify something but most post-Conquest names were semantically opaque to all but the most learned: label-names. Anglo-Saxon names by contrast were mostly transparent: King Aelfraed sounded like ‘King Elf-Counsel’, Lady Aethelflaed ‘Lady Noble Beauty’, King Aethelraed ‘King Noble Counsel’.

Ancient Greek names were much closer to those of pre-Conquest than post-Conquest England. Just as we translate Native American names such as Tashunka Witko (‘Crazy Horse’), Tatanka Iyotake (‘Sitting Bull’), Woqini (‘Hook Nose’) and Tashunka Kokipapi (‘Young Man Afraid of His Horses’), and even those of the ancient Maya (King ‘Jaguar Paw II’, ‘Smoking Frog’, now renamed ‘Fire Is Born’), so we could refer to famous Greeks as ‘He Who Loves Horses’ (Philip), ‘Masters (with) Horses’ (Hippocrates), ‘Flat-Nose’ (Simon), ‘Stocky’ (Plato), ‘Famed as Wise’ (Sophocles).

Nones

¶ At the National Review, Mario Loyola steps back from North Korea’s succession plans to ask how much longer a regime with only one half-hearted friend in the world — China, which consistently votes against North Korea at the United Nations — can continue to totter.

It is true that China has dramatically increased its trade with North Korea; and by some estimates, North Korea receives some 40 percent of China’s total foreign assistance. It is true that maintaining stability in North Korea is a far higher priority for China than resolving the nuclear issue. It is also true that China has frustrated the U.S. goal of ending North Korea’s nuclear program — although, to be fair, only marginally more than our own policies have done that.

Still, consider the fact that China has consistently voted against North Korea in the Security Council since 2006. It could have abstained, but it did not, in any instance. Instead it has assumed an obviously hostile, and even humiliating, diplomatic stance. China tried to water each of those sanctions down, true enough, but they were still hostile votes, and in their cumulative effect, they have proven more than a little painful. For example, as a result of sanctions that Pyongyang can rightfully attribute to Beijing, even Burma has refused docking rights to North Korean vessels.

The truth is that China’s votes against North Korea in the council have been astounding public repudiations, especially given the two countries’ history as brothers-in-arms in the Korean War and steadfast allies for most of the 60 years since. And consider, too, that no regime has ever survived the accumulation of Security Council resolutions that have now passed against North Korea — and Iran.

Vespers

¶ In an engrossing essay that appeared on the last page of the Week in Review section of the Times, novelist Michael Cunningham recounts the insight that enabled him to write the books that he wanted to write —he stopped thinking about himself and began writing for a hostess named Helen.

It wasn’t until some years ago, when I was working in a restaurant bar in Laguna Beach, Calif., that I discovered a better method. One of the hostesses was a woman named Helen, who was in her mid-40s at the time and so seemed, to me, to be just slightly younger than the Ancient Mariner. Helen was a lovely, generous woman who had four children and who had been left, abruptly and without warning, by her husband. She had to work. And work and work. She worked in a bakery in the early mornings, typed manuscripts for writers in the afternoons, and seated diners at the restaurant nights.

Helen was an avid reader, and her great joy, at the end of her long, hard days, was to get into bed and read for an hour before she caught the short interlude of sleep that was granted her. She read widely and voraciously. She was, when we met, reading a trashy murder mystery, and I, as only the young and pretentious might do, suggested that she try Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” since she liked detective stories. She read it in less than a week. When she had finished it she told me, “That was wonderful.”

“Thought you’d like it,” I answered.

She added, “Dostoyevsky is much better than Ken Follett.”

“Yep.”

Then she paused. “But he’s not as good as Scott Turow.”

Although I didn’t necessarily agree with her about Dostoyevsky versus Turow, I did like, very much, that Helen had no school-inspired sense of what she was supposed to enjoy more, and what less. She simply needed what any good reader needs: absorption, emotion, momentum and the sense of being transported from the world in which she lived and transplanted into another one.

I began to think of myself as trying to write a book that would matter to Helen. And, I have to tell you, it changed my writing. I’d seen, rather suddenly, that writing is not only an exercise in self-expression, it is also, more important, a gift we as writers are trying to give to readers. Writing a book for Helen, or for someone like Helen, is a manageable goal.

Compline

¶ The Reformed Broker read the story in the Times over the weekend, but does not feel sorry for Las Vegas, and, now that he’s said so, we feel sorry for Las Vegas — almost.

Let’s begin by reminding you that your economic contribution to this nation is, in fact, deleterious.  Your cultural contribution is your ability to combine all of the worst traits of Sodom, Gomorrah, Disneyland, the French Quarter, Bangkok, Versailles and Pleasure Island with none of the authenticity.  The day you broke ground for the Civil War-themed hotel and casino, complete with bandaged slot machine arms, the Stonewall Jackpot gaming floor and the Underground Railroad nightclub, was simply the final straw.

We are collectively disgusted, and Steve Wynn’s fine art collection bought with the nickels of senior citizens does nothing to dissuade us.

Have a Look

¶ Florida Dreaming. (via kottke.org)

Note: The Daily Office will resume on Monday, 4 October 2010.

Matins

¶ Although we stopped reading Thomas Friedman’s Op-Ed pieces five or six years ago, something about today’s column caught our eye — we have a thing for actual tea kettles — and pretty soon we were reading this:

Democratic Pollster Stan Greenberg told me that when he does focus groups today this is what he hears: “People think the country is in trouble and that countries like China have a strategy for success and we don’t. They will follow someone who convinces them that they have a plan to make America great again. That is what they want to hear. It cuts across Republicans and Democrats.”

To me, that is a plan that starts by asking: what is America’s core competency and strategic advantage, and how do we nurture it? Answer: It is our ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent. That means men and women who invent, build and sell more goods and services that make people’s lives more productive, healthy, comfortable, secure and entertained than any other country.

We stopped reading Thomas Friedman five or six years ago because we got tired of his fondness for cant phrases such as “core competency.” It seems obvious to us that the core competence of every nation is the same: ensuring the freedom and safety of its citizens. The United States’s “ability to attract, develop and unleash creative talent” is a special gift. It is no substitute for ensuring public welfare.

Lauds

¶ Robert Levin, an accomplished man of music who has made a name for himself both as a concert artist and as a completer of unfinished compositions by Mozart and Schubert, among others, puts his fingers (all ten of them) on the jazz heart that beats inside “classical” music. (WSJ; via  Arts Journal)

In such instances, he says, his experience in improvising allows him to inhabit each performance as if he were creating in the moment.

“The most extraordinary benefit I received from those 1½ minutes of panic, fighting my way out of the gunny sack with those improvised cadenzas, is that you begin to see the crossroads everywhere. You see junctions where the composer could have done any one of five things and, whirling wildly, stuttering in panic, reaching for some means of support, veers to the left and then takes the consequences. For someone who just sees the text as something to be played as beautifully as possible, that sense of volatility, the sense of the composer having a choice, isn’t there.”

While he concedes that his approach is less likely to produce performances of Apollonian detachment and perfection, he thinks audiences are willing to trade these in for a unique and singularly live experience. When the orchestra stops before one of his improvised cadenzas, he says, “you can hear the intensity with which people listen. There’s a tension in the air because people know that anything could happen.

“Let’s face it,” he adds. “They’re not going to get Beethoven back. But why not try to get back to a feeling of danger, a feeling of this music being new?”

Prime

¶ Conor O’Clery reports that the inevitable has begun: in yet another Irish diaspora, talented people are leaving their debt-saddled land for brighter economic opportunities. (GlobalPost) 

The new wave of emigrants, however, is not composed of the poorest or most destitute. The best and brightest are leading the way, mainly young college graduates who cannot find work in a country that has lost one in eight jobs since 2007. Today, with U.S. work visas harder to obtain and a high unemployment rate in the United States, young people are looking mainly to other English-speaking countries for economic refuge, mainly Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. 

Laura Cross, a 22-year-old biochemistry graduate from Dublin, is typical of the emigrants. Cross has been seeking work in vain since obtaining her degree in May and is now heading for a new life in Canada. The only job she could find here was as a shop assistant working one day a week, she told the Irish Daily Mail, which on Sept. 22 devoted its front page to a splash heading: “Exodus of Our Young.”

Tierce

¶ Ed Yong writes up a fascinating study about “stereotype threat” — anxiety about living up to the world’s expectations — that shows how crippling and unfair stereotypes really are. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

The duo investigated a well-established phenomenon called stereotype threat, where stereotypes fuel themselves in a vicious circle. People exposed to a stereotype become so worried about conforming to them that they end up doing so. As an example, women do more poorly in maths tests if they have previously been reminded of the supposed male superiority in that subject or even, simply, if their gender is highlighted. Likewise, black schoolchildren do worse in intelligence tests if their race is drawn to attention, but they narrow the gap if they sit through an exercise designed to boost their self-worth.

[snip]

The two researchers explain that our decisions are governed by both conscious, deliberate choices and unconscious intuition. Stereotype threat interferes with the former; it takes up valuable mental resources with stress and worry, leaving the intuitive side of decision-making to call the shots, and leading to more defensive behaviour. It’s this distraction that the Stroop test picks up on, which is why performance on the test explains the degree of risk aversion brought about by stereotype threat.

Carr and Steele write that “similar gender differences observed in previous studies may have arisen not from innate and stable factors, but from powerful but subtle cues of stereotypes embedded in the environment and task instructions.” The fact that gender stereotypes seem to affect men in the opposite way, as shown in the risk-aversion experiment, may help to widen the gender gap even further. Perhaps the knowledge that others are being negatively stereotyped, or that stereotypes don’t apply to you, makes people more confident.

What we see in this final paragraph is the benefit of positive stereotyping: men are supposed to be good at taking risks, and that stereotype is so much wind in their sails. 

Sext

¶ At The House Next Door, Aaron Cutler writes up the new Romanian movie, currently showing at the New York Film Festival, Tuesday, After Christmas; but his piece is really a heart-melting account of how his parents’ divorce made him into a moviegoer.

It was nearly a decade after their breakup when I saw Voyage to Italy. Roberto Rossellini’s film follows a couple on a trip: She wants to explore, he wants to drink and philander, and it grows obvious in a hurry that they never had much in common at all. The man says eventually that he wants a divorce, and I nodded and thought, “Yes that’s good, get away from each other, and get away soon before you fuck up the kids.” But the film ends in a crowded town square, where they lose each other, then find each other again, and embrace and promise never to leave each other while someone cries, “Miraculo!” I’ve grown more attached to this blatant fantasy since then, but on my first viewing I loathed it. It was too close to my dream, long harbored, that my parents would reassemble. Projected now, though, this vision looked fake.

A few years later, I came to Scenes from a Marriage. Rossellini in 1953 had shaken neorealism by shooting actors against documentary landscapes; Ingmar Bergman in 1974 had shot deep into psychological realism by following two people in a room as they argued for an hour. Sometimes they slugged each other, sometimes kissed each other, and the fact that the violence came from love struck me as right in a way I’d never thought. But by the time Bergman’s couple snuck off to the woods together, years after ending their union, and hid from their new spouses with each other in the storm, I’d stopped believing them. Bergman’s film, so honest, had cheated. “And that doesn’t happen in real life,” I thought.

Nones

¶ Reading John Tagliabue’s dispatch from Chur, Switzerland, this morning, we reflected on the plight of languages that are spoken by relatively few people — and even fewer people who speak only those languages. Elisabeth Maranta runs a bookshop in Chur, where she offers books of poetry in Romansh, the fourth language of Switzerland, a legacy of the Roman Empire that is distinct from the Italian that is spoken elsewhere in the mountain nation. (NYT)

Yet Ms. Maranta herself illustrates the fragility of Romansh. A native of Germany, she came to Chur 38 years ago with her husband, but does not speak Romansh herself, which is hardly a liability since virtually all Romansh speakers also speak German. While she is an ardent champion of Romansh, she can be bleak about its future. Asked why most of the books in Romansh she sells are poetry, she muses: “When a patient is dying, he writes only poetry.”

Romansh is the direct descendant of the Latin that was spoken in these mountain valleys at the height of the Roman empire, and shares the same Latin roots as French, Italian or Spanish. So isolated were the people who spoke it in their deep valleys that not one, but five, dialects grew up, though the differences are not substantial.

In the 19th century, monks in the region developed a written language. The valleys produced their own writers in Romansh, mostly poets, yet it was not until 1973 that portions of the Bible were published in the language. In 1997, the first daily newspaper in Romansh, La Quotidiana, appeared.

What will be lost when nobody alive speaks Romansh? While we hope that excellent records will be kept — including vital video clips of people reading that poetry — we can ‘t work up much enthusiasm for a vernacular language that is no longer growing.

Vespers

¶ Getting back to Freedom, John Self’s neutral review is a concise example of what we’ll call the anti-phenomenal response to Jonathan Franzen’s novel. What readers who feel this way would have thought of the book if it had not been a hyper-mega publishing event will probably never be known, because the actual fiction was occluded for them by the trumpets of annointment. In the first paragraph that we’ve snipped, Mr Self considers the book through its title, which is to say, sociologically: Freedom as an “important” non-non-fiction public-affairs text. (Our favorite signal of this response is a phrase such as the one that we remember from Good: “devastating laceration.”)

Having read the book through this expository filter, Mr Self naturally finds himself underwhelmed by Franzen’s prose, which, as we have suggested elsewhere, is designed not to make a case against America today but to open out the well-intentioned dissatisfactions of a handful of smart, bemused characters.

Everyone wants freedom, he seems to say, but look what happens when we get it. The environment goes bang in the noonday sun. Families disintegrate, the responsibilities of parenting seeming to outweigh the prizes, the limitations of being a child viewed as an infringement of rights. Culture atrophies: “There’s never any center, there’s no communal agreement, there’s just a trillion little bits of distracting noise. […] Intellectually and culturally, we just bounce around like random billiard balls, reacting to the latest random stimuli.” Freedom is simultaneously irresistible and unsatisfying, a point Franzen brings home right to the end of the book – an end which, if it didn’t fit in so neatly with the overall theme, would risk looking like a cop-out. “Freedom is a pain in the ass.”

Freedom is not a pain in the ass. It is not a bad book; it is a good book. There is much to see and do, though it drags at times, like a too-long holiday. The characters’ dilemmas are clearly presented and thoroughly explored. But the storytelling is often treated with disdain: Franzen despatches big events – a marriage, a death – almost as asides, as though such compelling human dramas are not worthy of his Big Literature. For the claims of Franzen being a great stylist (made by Ron Charles for one), I rarely found myself taking pure delight in the prose itself. It is a book which demands to be read largely because everyone else seems to be reading it – a quality which, rather than making this a timeless literary (or rather cultural) milestone, actually risks stamping it with a sell-by date. Many will find pleasure in the journey, but those bold enough to take a pass on it may, I feel, not find themselves missing all that much. The paradox is that I had to read it, and had some pleasure myself in doing so, to find that out.

Compline

¶ Ever since the days of the Sokal Hoax, we’ve had a bit of trouble taking Stanley Fish seriously (at the time, Professor Fish directed the Duke University Press, which published Social Text, the journal in which the hoax was perpetrated), but we can’t deny that we endorse his ideas about the counterproductivity of insulting rants in the Blogosphere.

Commentators who explain smugly that O’Donnell’s position on masturbation (that it is a selfish, solitary act) is contradicted by her Ayn Rand-like attack on collectivism, or who wax self-righteous about Paladino’s comparing Sheldon Silver to Hitler and promising to wield a baseball bat in Albany, or who laugh at Sharron Angle for being in favor of Scientology (she denies it) and against fluoridation and the Department of Education, are doing these candidates a huge favor. They are saying, in effect, these people are stupid, they’re jokes; and the implication (sometimes explicitly stated) is that anyone who takes them the least bit seriously doesn’t get the joke and is stupid, too.

We the people hear this and know who is being talked about, and react with anger: “Don’t presume to tell me what to think and whom to vote for just because you have more degrees than I do. I don’t know much about these people but if you guys are against them, I’m going to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

And if they don’t exactly say that, the recently unveiled “Pledge to America” says it for them in its money quote: “An arrogant out-of-touch government of self-appointed elites make decisions, issue mandates, and enact laws without accepting or requesting the input of the many.” The many grow and become more robust every time a self-satisfied voice from the political or media establishment dumps on their spokespersons. Mayor Bloomberg may be right when he says (in explaining his endorsement of Cuomo over Paladino) that “anger is not a governing strategy,” but it sure is a campaign strategy and it is one the Tea Party and the Republicans it has tutored know how to execute.

What to do? It is easier, of course, to say what not to do, and what not to do is what Democrats and their allies are prone to do — poke gleeful fun at the lesser mortals who say and believe strange things and betray an ignorance of history.

As Tyler Cowen, who tipped us to this, says, the word “stimulus,” all by itself and no matter what the context, is probably always exactly that, to the influence of the Republican Party.

Have a Look

¶ Windsor Chairs. (Design Sponge)

Matins

¶ Malcolm Gladwell revisits the Woolworth’s lunch-counter sit in that kicked off the civil-rights struggle of the 1960s, at Greensboro, North Carolina, and argues that it was not the sort of event that might be condensed from a lot of Tweets. (The New Yorker)

These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Some of this grandiosity is to be expected. Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model. As the historian Robert Darnton has written, “The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.” But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

Lauds

¶ How much did Lehman Brothers (and its subsidiary Neuberger Berman) pay for the all the art that sold for $12.3 million at Sotheby’s over the weekend? Just wondering about the ROI. (ArtInfo; via The Awl)

Prices went high and low for no obvious reasons, as when Mark Grotjahn’s color-saturated, roughly seven-foot-by-six-foot cover-lot canvas, “Untitled (Three-tiered Perspective),” from 2000 and estimated at $600-800,000, fetched $782,500, the third highest price achieved in the marathon sale. That buzz didn’t last: the next lot, John Currin’s dour “Shakespeare Actress” from 1991 (est. $500-700,000), sold for a scant $362,500.

Most likely, the reserves were pegged to a “global reserve” formula, so one over-achieving lot could compensate for an underperforming one, like the Currin. That formula also saved Richard Prince’s untitled 2003 joke painting, acquired in the year it was made from Barbara Gladstone Gallery, that sold to a telephone bidder for just $212,500 on a $300-400,000 estimate.

Still, that global formula could not save every underperforming lot. Damien Hirst’s uncharacteristic 1993 steel cupboard of ceramic pots, “We’ve got Style (The Vessel Collection-Blue /Green),” estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million, died without a single bid. The sculpture was acquired from London’s White Cube gallery in 1994.

John Currin, be it noted, doesn’t paint like that anymore.

Prime

¶ Felix Salmon isn’t particularly interested in Gawker Media baron Nick Denton, but he is intrigued by the implications what New York profiler Michael Idoff calls his “gravitating from the diary metaphor to the TV metaphor.”

If Denton somehow managed to find a way to produce just a few minutes of great video content for each of his blogs every day, that could mark the beginning of a game-changing move out of the world where the New York Times is a huge and awesome institution and into the world where it’s a media minnow.

So far, no one has cracked the question of how to succeed by producing video-based content which is designed for web consumption rather than for TV. There have been a few promising hopefuls, but they all fizzled out, even as video has become an ever-growing part of our online diet. It’s pretty clear that if Gawker is going to successfully navigate the transition from writing blog posts to producing video, its budget is going to have to grow a lot. And that’s why I think that Denton might be thinking about bringing in some strategic investors: people with video-production expertise, a real nose for what works online and lots of money.

Tierce

¶ Joanne McNeil was in New York recently, and she lost her wallet, she thinks, to a pickpocket. Maybe it fell onto the sidewalk, and maybe she might have found it — if she had been using the Nike+ iPhone app that day. (She wasn’t, because it’s a drain on the battery.) We’re on the cusp, it seems, of an era in which records of the little things that we do are converted by devices of one kind or another into information, information that might be very useful to us. Or would it be just more “digital clutter”? (Tomorrow Museum)

The majority of us will never need to keep personal records. But the benefit is discovering patterns and optimizing with it. If I average more words written on Wednesdays than Thursdays, I’ll likely schedule lunch meetings and phone calls on Thursdays. And then there is the data that means nothing: why do I always eat soba noodles on Monday?

Would I like a version of Foursquare that is always on and doesn’t require me to login and check in anything? (Of course, hypothetically given the possibility of privacy when requested.) I’m not sure “always on” data tracking is what I want either. While I partake lightly, I also question the worth of it. Am I going to use this? Will patterns emerge or will it just factor in as more digital clutter in my life?

Sext

¶ We were saddened to learn, today, that George W S Trow died — nearly four years ago, a recluse in Naples. (No wonder we missed the news!) Trow was a New Yorker writer whose discomfort with developments in this country’s professional class was very congenial; his writing was driven to the conflicting aims of exactitude and comprehensiveness. To mark his birthday at Hilobrow, Joshua Glenn dances one of his mad cohort tangos, fitting Trow “on the cusp between the Anti-Anti-Utopians and Boomers.” A little rootling around brought up Brendan Bernhard’s 2007 memorial.

John Seabrook, author of the book “Nobrow,” wrote in 1997 that Trow “saw the future so long before it happened that he wrote about it in the past tense.” This judgment is founded principally on “Within the Context of No Context,” the elliptical and still occasionally baffling essay that appeared in the New Yorker on November 17, 1980.

Its opening paragraph attempts to take in all of American history, from the arrival of the Pilgrims to the dawning of yuppiedom, in a single glance:

“Wonder was the grace of the country. Any action could be justified by that: the wonder it was rooted in. Period followed period, and finally the wonder was that things could be built so big. Bridges, skyscrapers, fortunes, all having a life first in the marketplace, still drew on the force of wonder. But then a moment’s quiet. What was it now that was built so big? Only the marketplace itself. Could there be wonder in that? The size of the con?”

Trow asserted, in cryptic fashion, that size, or demography, had become the defining element of American existence, sweeping all other concerns aside, and he fingered television as the symbol of the new reality. “The work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts; finally, to establish the context of no-context and chronicle it.”

Nones

¶ As with the Nile, so with the Colorado: great rivers flowing through thirsty sovereignties pose knotty allocation problems. In addition, the Colorado River is drying out. (NYT)

The impact of the declining water level is visible in the alkaline bathtub rings on the reservoir’s walls and the warning lights for mariners high on its rocky outcroppings. National Park Service employees have repeatedly moved marinas, chasing the receding waterline.

Adding to water managers’ unease, scientists predict that prolonged droughts will be more frequent in decades to come as the Southwest’s climate warms. As Lake Mead’s level drops, Hoover Dam’s capacity to generate electricity, which, like the Colorado River water, is sent around the Southwest, diminishes with it. If Lake Mead levels fall to 1,050 feet, it may be impossible to use the dam’s turbines, and the flow of electricity could cease.

The fretting that dominates today’s discussions about the river contrasts with the old-style optimism about the Colorado’s plenitude that has usually prevailed since Hoover Dam — then called Boulder Dam — was completed 75 years ago, impounding the water from Lake Mead.

The worries have provoked action: cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas have undertaken extensive conservation programs. Between 2000 and 2009, Phoenix’s average per-capita daily household use has dropped almost 20 percent; Las Vegas’s has dropped 21.3 percent.

Nonetheless, “if the river flow continues downward and we can’t build back up supply, Las Vegas is in big trouble,” Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said in an interview.

We thought that Las Vegas was in big trouble already.

Vespers

¶ Patrick Brown, surprised himself a bit ticked off by Flavorwire‘s list of “Top 10 Bookstores in the US,” gives the manner some thought and makes a very sound observation: there’s only one “best bookstore,” and it’s the one that you patronize whenever you can. (The Millions)

In the end, it’s irrelevant, as the only bookstore that anybody cares about is the one near them, the one whose staff knows their tastes, the one that hosts your favorite author when he or she comes to town.  For some of you, that’s no doubt a chain store.  I grew up outside Syracuse, NY, and I will absolutely shed a tear the day the Borders in the Carousel Center Mall closes, as it was place I remember visiting when I was in high school and just discovering the pleasure of reading.  The rest of the stores, though – the big, nationally known bookstores – exist for you, unless you live around the corner from one of them, more as monuments than as businesses.  They’re kind of like those iconic bars and restaurants that people make a point of stopping at every time they’re in New York or LA – they’re the McSorley’s or the Musso & Frank’s or the Rendezvous of bookstores. If they went away, you’d read about it in the paper.  It would be an “important moment,” but its impact on your life would be minimal unless they are your store. It’s the proverbial store around the corner that you care about, and if that store continues to serve you well, I think it will survive.  If it doesn’t, well, hopefully someone will put it on some sort of “best of” list before it goes.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to celebrate the fact that my local bookstore is still kicking.  Maybe you should do the same. 

Compline

¶ The upshot of Greensboro’s pivotal location in the civil-rights struggle may have turned it into a quiet place that’s just right for writers, as Bill Morris surmises. (The Millions)

Or maybe Greensboro’s exposures to the limelight have left its residents – writers and non-writers alike – relieved that the town is so rarely in the news.  It was in downtown Greensboro that four black students from N.C. A&T State University had the audacity to sit at the whites-only F. W. Woolworth lunch counter in February of 1960, a gesture that enraged many whites, inspired many blacks, and helped ignite the civil rights movement.  And it was in Greensboro in November of 1979 that five communist organizers were shot dead by Ku Klux Klansmen and American Nazis at a “Death to the Klan” rally, leaving the city deeply traumatized.  These two visitations of klieg-light glare were, respectively, noble and brutal; they were also utterly out of character in this city that has always prided itself on its willingness to compromise, to accommodate, and to get along.  Greensboro, after all, is the site of one of the South’s first universities built for African-Americans during Reconstruction, and it was one of the first Southern cities to willingly and peaceably integrate its public schools after the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954.  Greensboro, as Marshall Frady wrote about South Carolina in a slightly different context, “seemed merely to lack the vitality for any serious viciousness.  It was as if its defense were a colossal torpor.”

Torpor is a funny thing.  While most people find it stifling, many writers find it alluring, even necessary.  The cliche of the writer toiling in his remote shack, much like the reality of Philip Roth toiling in his remote New England retreat, are two equally valid illustrations of the writing life’s solitary nature.  And Greensboro’s genial brand of torpor goes a long way toward explaining the place’s allure to writers – both to the young ones who keep coming here to launch their careers, and to the established ones who work here, quietly, often apart, usually alone.  There’s a sense here that if your writing is not always avidly read by your neighbors, at least its making is regarded with genuine respect by them.  Al Brilliant, owner of one of the town’s few surviving independent bookstores, expressed this perfectly: “People treat writers as workers here.”  Not as special aesthetic creatures, not as eccentrics or pariahs or freaks, but as people who work hard to make worthwhile things.  That’s an intangible but vital thing for any writer to feel, and I’ve lived in dozens of places in America where it was utterly absent, and sorely missed.

It certainly doesn’t hurt that in a country of flowering creative writing programs, UNCG’s is consistently ranked among the top 25 by Poets & Writers magazine.  While this is not the place to debate the merits of such programs – are they incubating genuine talent, or are they spawning a torrent of technically accomplished books that are devoid of felt life? – there is no doubt that the UNCG program’s rich history and its continuing reputation for quality are a spring that keeps replenishing the city’s literary life.

Have a Look

¶ How China blows up its GDP. (Zero Hedge)

Matins

¶ At The Economist, a knuckle-rapping for Constitution-worshiping Tea Partiers, who seem unaware of what manner of men wrote the document.

When history is turned into scripture and men into deities, truth is the victim. The framers were giants, visionaries and polymaths. But they were also aristocrats, creatures of their time fearful of what they considered the excessive democracy taking hold in the states in the 1780s. They did not believe that poor men, or any women, let alone slaves, should have the vote. Many of their decisions, such as giving every state two senators regardless of population, were the product not of Olympian sagacity but of grubby power-struggles and compromises—exactly the sort of backroom dealmaking, in fact, in which today’s Congress excels and which is now so much out of favour with the tea-partiers.

More to the point is that the constitution provides few answers to the hard questions thrown up by modern politics. Should gays marry? No answer there. Mr Klarman argues that the framers would not even recognise America’s modern government, with its mighty administrative branch and imperial executive. As to what they would have made of the modern welfare state, who can tell? To ask that question after the passage of two centuries, says Pietro Nivola of the Brookings Institution, is to pose an impossible thought experiment.

None of this is to say that the modern state is not bloated or over-mighty. There is assuredly a case to be made for reducing its size and ambitions and giving greater responsibilities to individuals. But this is a case that needs to be made and remade from first principles in every political generation, not just by consulting a text put on paper in a bygone age. Pace Ms Bachmann, the constitution is for all Americans and does not belong to her party alone. Nor did Jefferson write a mission statement for the tea- partiers. They are going to have to write one for themselves.

Lauds

¶ In a lovely piece about James Franco that is really about staying true to yourself while being dazzled by somebody famous, Jeff Price acknowledges the scorn that his friends heap upon him when he tells them his story about not accepting Mr Franco’s invitation to get a cup of coffee for the good reason that celebrities are best appreciated at a distance. (The Millions)

When the fifteen-minute break arrived, I asked James Franco about the book he was carrying.  “It’s for… class,” he said, turning to smile on the last word before asking if I knew of anywhere nearby to get coffee.  His manner was bemused, a Jonathan Lethemcartoon man.  He was in his own synch, the pleasure of recognition trailing every gesture, consciousness of that pleasure gleaming in his eyes.  It was part and parcel to the thrill of his being there, the spectacle of someone who had believed in the love of an imagined audience, the romance of possibility.  There was just one thing: I didn’t drink coffee.

When I tell the story to friends, their faces invariably darken.  And I could have saved them that look by simply saying “Sure.” But then I would have been walking across campus in tow to James Franco to get a coffee I didn’t actually drink with James Franco for the sake of telling the story of how I got a coffee with James Franco.  So I pointed him in the direction of another student who was going to get coffee and James Franco turned away.  Then, just as quickly, turned back.  “Thank you,” he said, clasping two hands together, gesture performed as if in a vacuum, no eye contact, beatifically gracious.

Prime

¶ “Structural Unemployment” is the new “personal responsibility” — crocodile tears from the Money Party. It’s not that there aren’t any jobs, they say, it’s just that today’s workers lack the proper training to fill them. Such eyewash hardly deserves rebuttal, but it gets it anyway from Yves Smith, Robert Reich, and Paul Krugman.

Krugman : I’ve been looking at what self-proclaimed experts were saying about unemployment during the Great Depression; it was almost identical to what Very Serious People are saying now. Unemployment cannot be brought down rapidly, declared one 1935 analysis, because the work force is “unadaptable and untrained. It cannot respond to the opportunities which industry may offer.” A few years later, a large defense buildup finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs — and suddenly industry was eager to employ those “unadaptable and untrained” workers.

But now, as then, powerful forces are ideologically opposed to the whole idea of government action on a sufficient scale to jump-start the economy. And that, fundamentally, is why claims that we face huge structural problems have been proliferating: they offer a reason to do nothing about the mass unemployment that is crippling our economy and our society.

Reich : The issue isn’t just economic. We’re back to tough love. The basic idea is force people to live with the consequences of whatever happens to them.

In the late 19th century it was called Social Darwinism. Only the fittest should survive, and any effort to save the less fit will undermine the moral fiber of society.

Republicans have wanted to destroy Social Security since it was invented in 1935 by my predecessor as labor secretary, the great Frances Perkins. Remember George W. Bush’s proposal to privatize it? Had America agreed with him, millions of retirees would have been impoverished in 2008 when the stock market imploded.

Smith: “New normal” is particularly insidious, since it implies that we must accept current conditions, since they are “normal” hence it would be abnormal and/or require exceptional effort to experience anything else. “New” acknowledges things have changed, but “new” usually has positive connotations, and masks the fact that pretty much nobody except the banksters and some members of the top 1% are exactly keen about present conditions. It also had no footprint of how things changed; if you didn’t know what it stood for, it could just as easily be used to describe a dramatic natural shift, for instance, how the weather changed in the wake of the Krakatoa eruption.

“Structural unemployment” is not only sneaky, but also downright misleading. The catchphrase is meant to convey that unemployment just can’t be helped, it results from fundamental problems in the job market. Now since we have on average something like one job opening for every five unemployed people, even if structural unemployment was a real phenomenon, it is far from sufficient in explaining why we have U6 unemployment at over 16%.

[snip]

The narrative behind the “structural unemployment” spin goes something like “there really are jobs, but those crappy workers, they don’t have the skills (i.e., as in they didn’t work hard enough at the right stuff earlier in their life) or they are in the wrong location.” We’ve seen the MSM dutifully take up this narrative, and had readers point out that in many cases, the “jobs are going a begging” is due to companies making such lowball pay offers that they are coming up short on takers.

Tierce

¶ At Gene Expression, Razib Khan considers a recent paper arguing that ancient cities fostered the natural selection of an anti-tubercular gene. His thoughts about the populations of ancient cities leads to a different, and very interesting conclusion.

As I said before there are strong reasons to assume that natural selection reshaped the genomes of populations over the past 10,000 years. It really isn’t if, it’s how and what. The authors present some evidence for a particular variant of the gene SLC11A1 being the target of natural selection. To really accept this specific case I think we’ll need some follow up research. Rather, I want to focus on the narrative which is being pushed in the media that cities were the adaptive environments which really drove the shift in allele frequencies. I don’t think this was the case, I think the cities were essential, but I don’t think ancient urbanites left many descendants. Instead, I think cities, or urbanization, is first and foremost a critical gauge of population density and social complexity. Second, I believe that cities serve as facilitators and incubators for plague. In other words both urbanization and disease adaptation are derived from greater population density, while urbanization also serves a catalytic role in the spread of disease. This could explain the strong correlation we see.

I believe that the Eurasians who may have been subject to natural selection due to the rise of infectious disease are almost all the descendants by and large of ancient rural peasants, or, their rentier elites. These peasants were subject to much greater disease stress even without living in urban areas than hunter-gatherers and pastoralists because their population densities were higher, and quite often they were living a greater proportion of their lives snuggly against the Malthusian lid. Hunter-gatherers may have been healthier on average because of a more diversified diet as well as lower population densities due to endemic warfare. In contrast, agriculturalists lived closely packed together and were far more numerous than hunter-gatherers, and, their immune systems were probably less robust because of the shift away from a mix of meat, nuts and vegetables, to mostly grains.

A downstream consequence of agriculture was the rise of cities through the intermediate result of much higher population densities. I accept the literary depiction of ancient cities as filthy and unhealthful. There’s almost certainly a reason that pre-modern elites idealized rustic life, and had country villas. Additionally, though I assume that both the rural peasantry and urban proletarian led miserable lives, I believe that in terms of reproductive fitness the former were superior to the latter. From what I have read city life only became healthier than rural life in the United States in 1900, in large part due to a massive public health campaign triggered by fear of immigrant contagion. The high mortality rates and low reproductive fitness of urbanites implies that evolutionarily the more important role of cities were as nexus points for trade and the spread of disease. The book Justinian’s Flea chronicles the pandemic in the Roman Empire in the 6th century, in particular its origin in Constantinople from points east. We’re well aware today that a globalized world means that there’s an interconnectedness which can bring us strength through comparative advantage, but also catastrophe through contagion. This is a general dynamic, not simply one applicable to disease, but in the world before modern medicine the utility of trade networks for pathogens would have been of great importance.

Sext

¶ New Yorker writer Susan Orlean (author of The Orchid Thief) notes that the good advice that she used to offer to aspiring writers has “passed its sell-by date.”

So what happened? First of all, many of the medium-sized cities I used to recommend (say, Portland, Oregon) are now overrun with aspiring writers, and have gotten too expensive to qualify anymore as the place to go when you’re an aspiring writer with no hope for gainful employment. The newspapers—well, you don’t need me to tell you that the alternative newsweeklies have folded, the local rags have migrated online, and the community newsletters have been Craigslisted into oblivion. As for my admonition about graduate school, it turns out that if you get a teaching position as part of your deal, it probably pays better than many jobs you might get in that medium-sized city with the non-existent newspaper.

At Brainiac, Christopher Shea notes that Ms Orlean omitted her own solution.

Nones

¶ In the Times, Thanassis Cambanis writes about the potential for water wars up and down the Nile.

Ever since civilization first sprang forth here, Egyptians have clustered along the Nile’s silt-rich banks. Almost all of the country’s 80 million people live within a few miles of the river, and farmers like Mr. Sharkawi have hardly changed their farming methods in four millenniums. Egypt’s population is growing briskly, however, and by the year 2017 at current rates of usage the Nile’s water will barely meet Egypt’s basic needs, according to the Ministry of Irrigation.

And that is assuming that the river’s flow is undiminished. Under British colonial rule, a 1929 treaty reserved 80 percent of the Nile’s entire flow for Egypt and Sudan, then ruled as a single country. That treaty was reaffirmed in 1959. Usually upstream countries dominate control of a river, like the Tigris and Euphrates, which are much reduced by the time they flow into Iraq from Turkey and Syria. The case of the Nile is reversed because the British colonials who controlled the region wanted to guarantee water for Egyptian agriculture.

The seven upstream countries — Ethiopia, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Rwanda — say the treaty is an unfair vestige of colonialism, while Egypt says those countries are awash in water resources, unlike arid Egypt, which depends on just one.

Vespers

¶ Now that everyone has had a chance to read it, Freedom is much in the Net news. This week, we’re going to collect a variety of responses to the novel (which we loved), beginning with Bookslut’sJessa Crispin’s principled refusal to read it. (Smart Set; via The Morning News)

There is no such thing as a canon — what you should read or want to read or will read out of obligation is determined as much by your history, your loves, and your daily reality as by the objective merits of certain works. If anything, the homogeneity of the responses to Freedom proves only the homogeneity we have in people discussing books in the U.S. It would take me, I’m guessing, four days to read Freedom, four short days out of my life. But here I am, refusing out of principle. I might think the book is a work of genius, the book of the century, but I’m willing to risk that loss, because the book I don’t read in place of Freedom might also be that book. I have always been bored by mysteries after I’ve figured out the ending, the who-done-it. The mystery of Freedom is solved: It’s a masterpiece. And so I’m bored.

Did Franzen write the most important book of the century? Of course not. A series of circumstances — the right gender, a progression of increased skill and style, a controversy that stoked sales, an aura of seriousness paired with an ability to capture certain things that critics and readers enjoy in their fall reading — put him where he is. He probably didn’t even write the best book of the year, as if that could even be determined. The madness created around his book will continue for the rest of the year, if not longer now that Oprah is involved again, choosing it as her next book club pick. That isn’t going to make Freedom any better, or more profound. It’s simply going to make it more difficult to avoid reading.

There may not be a canon, but there is a conversation, and the only way to join in is to understand the topic, which, in the case of Freedom, requires reading the book. Aside from that, however, we support Ms Crispin’s conviction that she ought to read books that seem more pressing and important to her.

Compline

¶ We can’t decide. Does Curtis Eichelberger’s Bloomberg story, “Ivy League Football `Mafia’ Gives Wall Street a Talent Pipeline,” tell us that Ivy League colleges are recruiting athletes with promises of post-graduate positions on Wall Street? You decide. But you should have heard the Editor’s lady wife snort when the following was read out to her. (via Dealbreaker)

Athletes can bring something extra that’s necessary for success in finance, Werner said.

“In a business where it tends to knock you down a lot, they tend to get back up,” he said. “That drive, that level of discipline, the rigor they have in their own personal lives and their willingness to take on hard challenges; a lot of that gets taught to you on an athletic field.”

Have a Look

¶ Ivy Style readers remember the clothes they wore in college, way back in the middle of the Twentieth Century — and, in many cases, still wear, as the Editor can attest)

Matins

¶ Here’s a “big government” story for you: for over twenty years, the federal government has dragged its feet about Jack DeCoster’s atrocious record as an egg-poisoner, forcing the states to adopt a patchwork of partial solutions. Mr DeCoster has only now been summoned to account for himself before Congress. Whatever he has to say, it will be the testimony of a man with friends in “big government.” (NYT)

Mr. DeCoster’s frequent run-ins with regulators over labor, environmental and immigration violations have been well cataloged. But the close connections between Mr. DeCoster’s egg empire and the spread of salmonella in the United States have received far less scrutiny.

While some state regulators took steps to clamp down on tainted eggs, the federal government was much slower to act, despite entreaties from state officials alarmed at the growing toll.

Farms tied to Mr. DeCoster were a primary source of Salmonella enteritidis in the United States in the 1980s, when some of the first major outbreaks of human illness from the bacteria in eggs occurred, according to health officials and public records. At one point, New York and Maryland regulators believed DeCoster eggs were such a threat that they banned sales of the eggs in their states.

“When we were in the thick of it, the name that came up again and again was DeCoster Egg Farms,” said Paul A. Blake, who was head of the enteric diseases division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the 1980s, when investigators began to tackle the emerging problem of salmonella and eggs.

By the end of that decade, regulators in New York had forced Mr. DeCoster to allow salmonella testing of his farms and, along with other states, pushed the egg industry in the eastern United States to improve safety, which led to a drop in illness.

But the efforts were patchwork. For example, Iowa, where Mr. DeCoster has five farms tied to the current outbreak, required no testing.

Lauds

¶ The Liberace Museum in Las Vegas is closing — as how could it not? Most Americans alive today can’t remember the phenomenon personally, and unless they’re charged by actual memories, the entertainer’s relics become lifeless dreck. Stephany Anne Golberg reanimates Liberace just long enough to remind us what he was really all about. (The Smart Set)

“Even in this abstract atomic age, where emotion is not fashionable, Chopin endures,” the acclaimed pianist Arthur Rubinstein once said, knowing that even when people are embarrassed by it, emotion never goes out of style. Liberace knew this better than anyone. He was never ashamed of emotion. Whatever his personal fears, onstage you saw a man almost completely devoid of shame. Because shame, Liberace knew, is death to magic. In a performance, shame breaks the spell, turns up the lights and exposes us all. When a performer feels shame, it takes us collectively outside the moment, makes the audience worry about tomorrow, fear what’s going to happen next. Don’t be afraid, Liberace told us when he performed. Everything that you want is here. Focus on the sparkles, the fairytale. Let’s not worry about tomorrow. Let us live in the enchantment of now. Scott Thorson, Liberace’s former companion and lover, once told Larry King that he believed Liberace’s fans wouldn’t have cared if he came out of the closet. I believe he’s right. To be ashamed of Liberace would have meant living outside his world, and his fans loved him too much for that.

In a way, Liberace the man was quite plain. Scott Thorson said Liberace spent his quiet time puttering about the house, picking up dog doo doo in the yard. If Liberace weren’t so genuinely private, I think he would have invited us all into his home. Instead, he created the Liberace Museum — a fantasy on the corner of East Tropicana Avenue and Spencer Street — and invited us into his dreams. Liberace made himself into a living present, like one of those ladies who jump out of a giant cake. He wrapped himself in ribbons, placed himself into a gift box — the Liberace Museum — and gave himself away. Liberace’s museum was never a memorial to his life, but an extension of it. Which is why, to those last few who care, its closing feels like a second (and likely final) death of the man himself.

Every time I listen to “Étude Op. 10, No. 12 in C Minor,” I hear the Funny Valentine in it. And every time I watch the Funny Valentine/Chopin Medley performance, I feel I am watching a complete expression of Liberace: funny, gaudy, sad, beautiful, stupid, simple, extraordinary. It is the denouement of an entire life’s work. In the Funny Valentine/Chopin Medley, Liberace shows us something quite rare: a performer who has given you his all, and has taken you to the end of himself.

Prime

¶ You may know that Jeffrey Stephan, a former executive at GMAC, has confessed that he “robo-signed” foreclosure-related affidavits despite the fact that he had none of the personal knowledge required to validate such documents. (This makes Mr Stephan one whopping perjuror.) GMAC’s successor, Ally Capital, has responded by halting foreclosures. Or has it? We’ve read Yves Smith’s probe of the fiasco with cold-fusion despair — what can be expected of financial companies, and yet how are we ever to extricate ourselves from their muck? — but we’re going to let Felix Salmon point the moral of the tale.

All of this is complicated, too, by the fact that the US Treasury owns 56.3% of Ally. At most banks, it’s generally assumed that the shareholders just want to see the maximum possible returns, over the long run. That’s not a safe assumption, however, when your shareholder is Treasury, which has been ploughing billions of dollars into schemes designed to prevent evictions.

It would be wonderful if GMAC could take the high road here, and act with full transparency in a manner consistent with the best possible practices that Treasury would like to see in the mortgage market. Judging by its press release, there’s not much indication that’s happening yet. But maybe a couple of phone calls from Washington might change its mind. I wonder how Elizabeth Warren is settling in to her new job.

Tierce

¶ The idea of a self-organizing system of traffic lights — one that responds to actual traffic conditions instead of working from a timer — is very, very cool, of course. But marks the story for us is the deeper and wider trend that stories such as this reflect. We are moving away from the authority of binary systems (yes/no; right/wrong; on/off) and toward the understanding of live complexity. In other words, We’re learning who we really are, and not trying to be something that we think we ought to be.

Helbing and his colleague Stefan Lämmer from the Dresden University of Technology in Germany decided to scrap the top-down approach and start at the bottom. They noted that when crowds of people are trying to move through a narrow space, such as through a door connecting two hallways, there’s a natural oscillation: A mass of people from one side will move through the door while the other people wait, then suddenly the flow switches direction.

“It looks like maybe there’s a traffic light, but there’s not. It’s actually the buildup of pressure on the side where people have to wait that eventually turns the flow direction,” says Helbing. “We thought we could maybe apply the same principle to intersections, that is, the traffic flow controls the traffic light rather than the other way around.”

Their arrangement puts two sensors at each intersection: One measures incoming flow and one measures outgoing flow. Lights are coordinated with every neighboring light, such that one light alerts the next, “Hey, heavy load coming through.”

That short-term anticipation gives lights at the next intersection enough time to prepare for the incoming platoon of vehicles, says Helbing. The whole point is to avoid stopping an incoming platoon. “It works surprisingly well,” he says. Gaps between platoons are opportunities to serve flows in other directions, and this local coordination naturally spreads throughout the system.

“It’s a paradoxical effect that occurs in complex systems,” says Helbing. “Surprisingly, delay processes can improve the system altogether. It is a slower-is-faster effect. You can increase the throughput — speed up the whole system — if you delay single processes within the system at the right time, for the right amount of time.”

Sext

¶ This just in! Commander Lightoller’s granddaughter tells why the Titanic hit the iceberg! 98 years later, his coverup is revealed! (Guardian; via The Morning News)

That Titanic hit the iceberg could be down to a misunderstanding. Because the ship sailed during the transition from sail to steam there were two different steering communication systems in operation: rudder orders for steamships, and tiller orders for sailing ships. “The two steering systems were the complete opposite of one another,” said Patten. “So a command to turn ‘hard a-starboard’ meant turn the wheel right under one system and left under the other.”

The man at the wheel, Quartermaster Robert Hitchins, was trained under rudder orders – but tiller orders were still in use in the north Atlantic. So when First Officer William Murdoch first spotted the iceberg and gave a ‘hard a-starboard’ order, a panicked Hitchins turned the liner into the course of the iceberg.

“The real reason why Titanic hit the iceberg is because he turned the wheel the wrong way,” said Patten. By the time the error had been corrected, two minutes had been lost. Nothing could stop the iceberg breaching the hull.

Nones

¶ Times columnist David Leonhardt explains why the Chinese renminbi exchange rate is more important than the Chinese say that it is, if less important than American businessmen claim. It’s a matter of little stimulus packages — if $10 million is your idea of “little.”

The car business makes for a good example of what might change and when. The industry may not seem typical of the China story, because it has more to do with American exports than Chinese imports. But exports probably matter more for American jobs anyway, given that low-end toy manufacturing in Guangdong Province isn’t moving to Alabama or Michigan.

Like other first-time visitors to China, I have been struck by the number of Buicks on the roads here. In one Beijing traffic jam, three different Buick minivans were idling in the lane next to mine. When was the last time you were surrounded by Buicks?

Unfortunately for American autoworkers, though, none of those Buicks minivans was made in the United States. Buick exports only the high-end Enclave sport utility vehicle to China and makes the rest of its vehicles locally, with a Chinese partner. BMW, similarly, makes the 3- and 5-series here but ships in the costlier 7-series and Z sports cars.

With a stronger renminbi, you could see how carmakers might draw the dividing line in a different place, especially as the Chinese car market grows. The highest-margin vehicles would no longer be the only ones that could support the higher labor and shipping costs — not to mention China’s 25 percent vehicle tariff.

Vespers

¶ Inspired by Blake Butler’s compendium of books that David Foster Wallace held in high regard, M Rebekah Otto shares her disappointment with books recommended by writers whom she admires. (The Millions)

I suppose if I can find an author and grow to love them outside of a direct inheritance, maybe, too, I could reject select elements of my more obvious literary heritage. Hesitantly, I have begun to dismiss other favorites’ favorites. When a former student of his published David Foster Wallace’s syllabus, I promptly downloaded the PDF. As I read the list, I was very self-assured: I’d been meaning to read Waiting for the Barbarians!  I loved the Flannery O’Connor story he assigned (“A Good Man is Hard to Find”). He boldly included young contemporary writers like Aimee Bender and Sam Lipsyte. But Silence of the Lambs. Really? I would not follow him there. Maybe I am only disadvantaging myself. Silence of the Lambs may be the literary masterwork that could forever change my outlook on literature and fiction, just like Updike was supposed to.

Where I formerly swallowed recommendations whole, I now cull through them – not exactly on my own but in a more independent fashion. I find books, I do not just receive them. Or, I try to.

I am not a bad reader nor am I intellectually and creatively deficient, or, if I am, it is not because I do not like John Updike but for entirely different reasons.

Compline

¶ At the end of her warm review of Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry, Connie Schultz offers some really, really good advice — plus a reminder that the young men who “radicalized” Traister’s feminism by denigrating Hillary Clinton are probably not themselves going to become any friendlier to the cause of women’s equality. (Washington Post)

Despite the setbacks and disappointments, Traister believes the 2008 presidential race breathed new life into the women’s movement, in part because a new generation came to own it. Such a youthful embrace of the women’s work yet to be done is exhilarating — for her generation and for mine.

And therein lies my only caveat, which Traister may see as a matronly reprimand: Do resist tagging all of us over-50 feminists as dour discards. Your youthful vision is better than our crinkled eyes for navigating the future, but we hold your history in our hearts. We are still in the fight, increasingly with men foolish enough to mistake a woman’s sags for surrender. We were once you, and one day you will be us.

Have a Look

¶ Seven Highly Effective Habits of Facebook. (PsyBlog)

¶ Der Tiefstapler. (Metamorphosism)

¶ Anti-Vampire gizmo. (Good)

Matins

¶ If a recession officially ends in a jobless recovery, do we need to overhaul the definition of a recession? (The new thing that we learned about today was the Business Cycle Dating Committee, a branch of the National Bureau of Economic Research that doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page yet.) We think not: we need a new scale that looks at employment regardless of other economic factors. Catherine Rampell reports at the Times.

This new pattern of jobless recoveries has led to some complaints that employment should play a more prominent role in dating business cycles and to criticism that a jobless recovery is not truly a recovery at all. Business Cycle Dating Committee members have been reluctant to change their criteria too drastically, though, because they want to maintain consistency in the official chronology of contractions and expansions.

While all three recent recoveries have been weak for employment, the job market has to cover the most ground from the latest recession.

From December 2007 to June 2009, the American economy lost more than 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs, the largest decline since World War II. And through December 2009, the month that employment hit bottom, the nation had lost more than 6 percent of its jobs.

The unemployment rate, which comes from a different survey, peaked last October at 10.1 percent. The postwar high was in 1982, at 10.8 percent. But the composition of the work force was very different in the 1980s — it was younger, and younger people tend to have higher unemployment rates — and so if adjusted for age, unemployment this time around actually looks much worse.

While we don’t hold the government responsible for maintaining a supply of jobs — not yet, anyway — we believe that if unemployment figures were approached as a singular problem, rather than as a consequence of business conditions, then the government would develop more effective and intelligent forecasts and associated policies.

Lauds

¶ By curious coincidence, adjacent Arts Journal feeds concern the problem with reality that today’s Americans seem to be having, thanks in no small part to something called, heaven knows why, “reality television.” First, in a piece that seems motivated largely by disgust over Casey Affleck’s faux documentary, I’m Still Here, Patrick Goldstein resigns himself to the sway of the “mythmakers.”

I don’t mean to put all the blame on filmmakers and publicity seeking scam artists. If you pay any attention to world affairs, you could easily argue that all too many people are no longer swayed by fact-based authority of any kind. They believe what they want to believe, facts be damned, which is why zealots can go around thinking that Barack Obama is a Muslim while untold numbers of people across the Middle East are somehow convinced that no Jews were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks because they were evacuated before the planes hit the Twin Towers.

When it comes to entertainment, we in the media are sticklers for attributable facts. When a Hollywood biopic stretches the truth, we are the first to raise a ruckus. But in Hollywood, the truth is seen as being much more elastic, in part because film and TV writers create drama for a living, in part because people in showbiz tell so many white lies every day that the notion of a bigger truth often eludes them.

For now, entertainment consumers have sided with the mythmakers. In today’s media-saturated age it is simply too bewildering to try to make sense of what is real anymore. If a reality TV show is totally manufactured–so be it. It doesn’t interfere with our enjoyment of the storyline or the characters. The lines between artifice and reality have become so hopelessly blurred that very few of us take offense at being manipulated anywhere. When it comes to entertainment, we’ve gotten into the habit of lying back and enjoying it.

Meanwhile, a study published in the Journal of Risk Research finds that everyone belongs to a choir and is looking for an agreeable preacher.

After surveying 1,500 people, the researchers found that those who were “egalitarian and resentful of economic inequality” were more likely to assume that there was scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to climate change, but not that it’s safe to dispose of nuclear waste underground. Those who were more “hierarchical, individualistic and connected to industry and commerce” were more likely to make the opposite assumptions.

According to reports from the National Academy of Sciences, human activity is contributing to climate change and nuclear waste can be buried safely in certain designated sites.

“It’s not that one group is paying more attention to what scientific consensus is,” said Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale and author of the study. But there’s a pervasive tendency to form perceptions of scientific consensus that reinforce people’s values.

Prime

¶ Perhaps we’re wanting in seriousness, but one of the things we love about Joshua Brown is his drolly jaundiced view of homo speculator. He gives great graph, too. (The Reformed Broker)

There is a pattern in place that you may want to familiarize yourself with as history has just repeated itself six quarters in a row.  The pattern has been a run up in stocks at the beginning of earnings season’s opening month followed by the almost inevitable denouement as hearts are broken and focus is diverted elsewhere.

In each of the last six quarters, the Dow Jones was up on average seven of the first ten days of the first reporting month (Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct).  Each of these rallies ended up succumbing to selling, even during quarters with high percentage beat rates.  This action is both a commentary on our Twitter-addled attention spans and a classic embodiment of a Wall Street law so old that Hammurabi himself may have written it -Buy on the rumor, sell on the news.

Tierce

¶ At Wired Science, Lisa Grossman writes about clouds, and how they’re made up of — plants, mostly. Except, that is, when they come from man-made particulates. In which case, they’re bigger, whiter, more reflective and — get this — therefore tending to cooling the atmosphere.

The team also found that clouds and rain in the region mostly came from the plants. Plants emit gases from their leaves and sap, which is one reason why they have distinctive smells. When those gases interact with sunlight, their chemistry changes such that they condense from diffuse gas to liquid droplets less than one micrometer — a thousandth of a millimeter — in size. These droplets then serve as the nucleus of a cloud.

Particles larger than one micrometer, which are important in forming ice crystals, also came from plant matter like pollen, fungus spores and bits of crumpled up leaf.

Sext

¶ What we like most about the Internet is the way it captures what’s best about going to a good school: interesting people talk about interesting things that you may or may not ever know more about. It wouldn’t have occurred to us to say so when we were in school, but now we’d say that knowing someone like Steerforth, the English used book dealer who shares what passes through his hands, is a super way of expanding one’s mental map of the Known-About Universe — which in our humbler moments we call the Map of Ignorance.

The other day, or thereabouts, Steerforth encountered the journalist and novelist Philip Gibbs, who was born when Daniel Deronda was “recent fiction” and who died when the Beatles were getting going.

A liberal by nature who, in addition to his anti-war views, had also been a keen supporter of the suffragettes, Philip Gibbs was a controversial figure at times. But his prominence opened many doors and in the 1920s, he became the first journalist to interview the Pope (Gibbs was a Catholic, which must have helped).

By the time of his death in 1962, Philip Gibbs was one of the most well-known writers of his day. He left a huge body of work, consisting of over 40 novels and around a dozen non-fiction books, which in their day were bestsellers. So why has his name been forgotten?

It could be argued that Gibbs’ obscurity says more about the ephemeral nature of journalism than his gifts as a writer. But George Orwell didn’t suffer the same fate, so perhaps Gibbs’ books just weren’t that good.

During the last few months I’ve read two works by Philip Gibbs: a novel called Blood Relations and an autobiography called The Pageant of the Years. Both books were flawed, but highly enjoyable reads. Neither book deserves to be out of print.

Nones

¶ Status Update: European Royals, Scandals Notwithstanding, Aren’t Going Anywhere. (But they’d better be better at royalishness.) Monarchs are merrier (than politicians)! Patricia Treble, reporting at Macleans, finds that the Swedish crown princess’s consort has an ordinariness problem. (via Real Clear World)

The Swedish backlash, though, offers a surprising clue as to why neither the public nor politicians are throwing dust cloths over Europe’s thrones just yet. Asked why the royals were down in the polls, Joakim Nergelius, a constitutional law professor at Örebro University, suggests that one major problem was the groom. “He came from an ordinary Swedish family,” Nergelius says. “There is nothing special [about] him. He’s not extremely talented, so he’s too boring and people think it makes the monarchy less exciting.” The problem, in other words, was that in egalitarian Sweden, Westling, a gym owner and personal trainer, wasn’t aristocratic enough—not even with a new wardrobe and haircut, training in the crucial art of small talk and a fancy title, duke of Västergötland.

Vespers

¶ As readerly people continue to ponder the fate of David Markson’s library (which also doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page yet — but that’s why there’s Google) — we begin to think that it’s the right fate.The books that Markson owned and annotated were cast to the winds, as it were (and not just after his death; he sold plenty of books just to raise pin money. Having passed through the hands of readers, some of whom will be enriched by having possessed the “Markson edition,” they’ll be collected, in a fine game of acquisitive scholarship, for some university library. Craig Fehrman reflects on authors’ libraries generally, and Markson’s in particular, at the Globe. (via The Morning News)

Compline

¶ What’s the matter with populists, liberals are always asking. Can’t they see that the plutocrats who control the parties of the right are out to oppress them with monopolies and joblessness? In an astringent rebuttal, William Hoagland suggests that the only difference between liberals and plutocrats, in the populist view, is the liberal’s annoying sanctimony. (Boston Review; via 3 Quarks Daily)

The anti-intellectual evangelicalism that Hofstadter saw as inherent in populism and that so upsets liberals today may be witnessed in Bryan’s opposition to teaching Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species, a conservative position that brought Bryan’s career to a dramatic end in the famous Scopes “monkey” trial. Bryan’s antipathy toward teaching evolution—really toward evolution itself—might seem to foreshadow populism’s fateful shift from left to right, when populists began promoting cultural conservatism instead of economic fairness. That is the shift lamented by writers such as Frank and traced by Michael Kazin in The Populist Persuasion, Rick Perlstein in Nixonland and Before the Storm, and Joseph Lowndes in From the New Deal to the New Right.

For Bryan, however, there was no shift. His anger at corruption in entrenched capital was identical to his anger at blasphemy in Darwin’s theory. In Bryan’s populism, the plain people are by definition the last arbiters of truth. On monetary policy, the people rendered their judgment against gold and in favor of silver, and Bryan delivered that judgment to the establishment. On the nature of creation, the people judged against evolution and in favor of the literal truth of the Bible; Bryan delivered that judgment, too. His argument against Darwin’s theory also had an economic element. It outraged his sense of justice to imagine humanity ascending by the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the least fit, the strong forever preying on the weak, the endless quest for dominance he associated with human hatred, greed, and corruption. He saw scientific Darwinism and social Darwinism as one and the same, and he called for a society and a conception of creation based on love, not hate.

Have a Look

¶ Living in Io sono l’amore. (Design Sponge)

(Note: The Daily Office will resume on Tuesday, 21 September.)

Matins

¶ It’s our settled idea that the world would be a better, certainly safer, place if narcotic were regulated and not prohibited stands firm, but John Murray’s historical essay on the coincidences that have made Mexico a worse, certainly deadlier country remind us that globalism, like nuclear power, is complicated in ways that may exceed our powers of judgment. (The Awl)

The truth is that the rise of modern drug trafficking has in large part coincided with major changes in the Mexican economy that have displaced and altered the lives of many citizens. Looking at how events have unfolded, and considering widening income class disparity and slow job creation despite the promises of NAFTA, the past and future of drug trafficking in Mexico is in many ways linked directly to its economy and the ability of the government to provide social support for its citizens.

For decades prior to the 1980’s, Mexico’s economy grew under largely protectionist trade policies. While this caused Mexican companies to produce low-quality products with outdated technology at high prices, it also created millions of factory and industrial jobs and had a lot to do with Mexico’s economic growth over the middle part of the 20th century. With little to no foreign competition at the production and retail levels, nothing threatened Mexican businesses. However, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1970’s began to spur talks about moving Mexico further into the private sector and opening it up to international investment.

In 1986, the Mexican economy did just that, under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Tariff barriers were dropped, the market was flooded not only with American goods but cheap goods from Asia that were produced for a far lower cost, and Mexican companies were ultimately unable to compete. The aim of GATT was ostensibly to lower the price of goods and bring Mexican industry up to speed with the rest of the world technologically and in terms of productivity. In many ways it was an inevitable change. But the suddenness of the decision was resounding, and the immediate cost was millions of factory jobs lost over the next few years throughout Mexico.

Around this same time, as the Caribbean and Miami became increasingly policed and harder to navigate for smugglers, the cocaine trade was shifting out of its traditional routes and into Mexico. With cocaine came cocaine profits, which were astronomically higher than the marijuana and opium profits the Mexican smugglers mainly relied on. So, at the same time that millions of jobs were lost in Mexico, a multibillion dollar industry flush with liquid cash arrived.

Lauds

¶ Whenever we have occasion to take a sip of New York Social Diary, we find that the cocktail’s bang bypasses elation entirely and goes straight to hangover. At the Obersver, NYSD Publisher David Patrick Columbia shares the current esprit de cour about David Koch, the billionaire benefactor whose family’s political activities have made a lot of New Yorkers sit up and take another look at the State Theatre.

“I wrote about how I knew him and what he’s done with his life, the evolution of his life since I’ve known him,” Mr. Columbia said over lunch, “and I’ve known him about 20 years now. He’s basically set up this public image that we call his life over that period of time. And now I can see that he’s done it somewhat deliberately and carefully with the intention—I could guess his overall intention is, like with a lot of people, political. Because he’s gained political power. By his cultural interests, he softens the edge of that objective. It doesn’t look so venal, greedy and ambitious. It looks communal and cultural, and therefore legitimate.”

As recent profiles made clear, Mr. Koch has indeed used his cultural philanthropy to “soften the edge” of his less publicized political activities. It is a reminder that there are multiple dramas playing out in these institutions, not all of them onstage. Opera may not be the compulsory activity it was for the city’s upper classes in the days of Edith Wharton, but it remains an arena where more complex battles are fought. Every major gift and every person recruited to join a board (and every person rejected: Mr. Columbia spoke of the financier Saul Steinberg, blacklisted from the Metropolitan Museum’s board, largely because he was Jewish) means something: an attempt to befriend or outman someone, a move in a larger game.

“What happens in all the philanthropies,” Mr. Columbia said, “is that people get involved through different channels—being recruited, wanting to know somebody—and lots of times they do become converted. They realize how important it is. They go to the performance, they see how people are responding, they see how great this is, they see how much better off the world is to have this. They start taking on more noble ideas of what they’re doing, which makes them feel better about themselves. Not a bad thing.”

That Mr. Koch’s gift was to City Ballet and City Opera, and not to the Met, was a statement. A huge gift to the Met would have offended other people, including, perhaps, the Basses, who give heavily to the Met and are active in the Republican political circles Mr. Koch seems destined to dominate.

Prime

¶ What’s the best way to monetize a blog? Felix Salmon doesn’t recommend trying this at home, but he’s impressed by John Hempten’s Bronte Capital entry about NYSE-listed Universal Travel Group, a Chinese outfit whose shares lost 20% of their value when Mr Hempten’s readers heard what he had to say about his troubles trying to use UTG’s online services, about his diligent inquiries into UTG’s dodgy financials — and about shorting the stock.

Historically, short-sellers have been shadowy types; they like to publicize their findings, but they tend to do so behind the scenes, giving journalists information and having very long conversations off the record.

Hempton’s different in that he’s happy, on occasion, to make his allegations in public, under his own name. He doesn’t always publicize his shorts, even when he suspects outright fraud, but his blog does have enough of a following now that he knows he’ll be widely read if and when he chooses to do so. After today’s big payday, I reckon he might try the tactic more often.

The story of Universal Travel is far from over: if Hempton’s right about the company, and I think that he is, then the SEC and the NYSE are both going to have to answer some very pointed questions about how and why they allowed the company to get this prestigious New York listing in the first place.

But I do love the way that the blogosphere is moving markets. Reading a blog entry from someone with real skin in the game is often a lot more fun than ploughing through “objective” journalism from someone who isn’t allowed to invest in or short what they’re writing about.

Tierce

¶ Kyle Munkittrick argues beguilingly for pursuing the Transhumanist agenda, precisely because, as Francis Fukuyama has described it, it is “the most dangerous idea in the world.”  (Science Not Fiction)

Transhumanism is, at its artificial heart, a simple idea: humans should not be limited by our biology. We forget things, we are irrational, we are vulnerable, we get sick, we age, we die. But we don’t have to do or be any of those things. Science and technology from every branch and every direction is slowly chipping away at each of these problems. Each tiny step aggregates and converges towards a world in which humans are free to live as long as they want, to love and reproduce with whomever and however they choose, to be as smart, as strong, and as happy as possible. The suffering and death that accompany much of our very existence (and perhaps give it meaning) would be reduced and, maybe, just maybe, eliminated. Human nature would be fundamentally altered; which is why Francis Fukuyama has called transhumanism the “Most Dangerous Idea in the World.” I agree, and that danger, that essential threat to what we are, is why I believe we should, nay must, promote human enhancement.

To do so, we must raze human nature itself. Philosophy and religion have spent the past 10,000 years working to make virtues of the necessities of biological life; primal urges, emotional outbursts, problems of procreation, suffering, disease, and death are explained away as essential elements of humanity. But these ideas do not create the meaning and value in human nature. Instead it is human nature that has invested these terrors of the flesh with worth to make existence bearable.

Consider a war hero. In a brutal, hopeless battle, a single soldier rushes into danger, risking her life and limb to rescue a fallen member of her team. She returns with her comrade safely and is heralded, rightly, as courageous and moral. But none would argue that it was the war that made her courageous and moral, or, worse, that we should fight perpetual wars to give everyone an opportunity to exemplify their virtue. Yet that is precisely the logic that drives arguments like “death gives life meaning” and “suffering makes us value the good times.” These statements are backwards. We find life meaningful in spite of, not because of, suffering, disease, and death. If they were to be eliminated, life would not merely still have meaning but it would mean significantly more.

Sext

¶ Kevin Nguyen’s “Monophonic Memoir” about the major ringtones in his life has been around for a few days, but we keep coming back to it, because it captures the sweetness of youth’s dreams, which are vast because the world is so small. (The Bygone Bureau)

Although we got along well, Max and I never had much in common, except for the fact that we both entered freshman year of college with girlfriends from home. We both spent a lot of time that fall on the phone, trying to find spots in our basement dorm room with decent reception.

My girlfriend, who was at another school across the country, always adored Death Cab for Cutie, a band that I could barely stomach. But as a gesture of affection, I set her ringtone to a Death Cab for Cutie song. It didn’t occur to me that I was the only one who could hear it.

The day we broke up, not long after the end of the first semester, I changed the ringtone to a Belle and Sebastian song she didn’t like.

It seems worth adding that Max’s ringtone for his girlfriend was “Wanna Be a Baller” by Lil’ Troy. His relationship lasted about two years longer than mine did.

Nones

¶ The only curious thing about Rachel Donadio’s handy Lega Nord update in today’s Times, “New Power Broker Rises in Italy,” is its title, which the story itself contradicts.

The current political crisis is so complex as to confound even veteran political analysts, to say nothing of average Italians. But what is clear is that Mr. Berlusconi is struggling mightily to hold his coalition together. The restive co-founder of his center-right People of Liberties party, Gianfranco Fini, a former neo-fascist who is finding more support these days in the center, left the party in late July, arguing that Mr. Berlusconi was in danger of becoming a dictator.

The split also strengthened the Northern League’s point man in the government, Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti, who is seen as a contender to one day succeed Mr. Berlusconi.

As the crisis expands, no one is forgetting that the Northern League, though a partner in every Berlusconi government, has not always been loyal. In 1994, Mr. Berlusconi’s first government collapsed after the party pulled out, and without its backing he lost the 1996 elections. With its support, he won again in 2001 and 2008.

Vespers

¶ Lydia Davis’s remarks about her new translation of Madame Bovary are so concise that she doesn’t mention the translator whose version almost everyone alive today has read, Francis Steegmuller. (Paris Review; via The Rumpus)

But in the case of a book that appeared more than 150 years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For example, 1) the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original; 2) the earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. 3) Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.

Compline

¶ The last of Scott Horton’s Six Questions for Julian Young (Reconsidering Nietzsche), at Harper’s. The topic is postmodernism and reality.

6. You treat postmodern readings of Nietzsche with some deference in your book, but you seem cautious about embracing them yourself. You form the conclusion that Nietzsche is a “plural realist.” What do you mean by that and how is it different from the postmodern interpretation?

I would actually describe myself as treating postmodernist readings with “restraint” rather than “deference.” Postmodernism has its origins in Kant’s observation that all experience is interpretation, that all experience is filtered through the particular structures of the human mind. To this, taking its lead from both Hegel and Nietzsche, postmodernism adds that the filters in question vary from language to language, culture to culture, angle of interest to angle of interest. And so, it concludes, since there are many equally good interpretations of the world, no single one can be picked as the uniquely correct interpretation. From this it follows, so it is claimed, that there can be no particular character that reality has, since to assign it any such character would be arbitrarily to privilege one interpretation over all the others. And if there is no particular character that reality has, then the very idea of “reality” makes no sense. The concept must be abandoned; there is nothing but interpretations.

We “plural realists”–Nietzsche, Hubert Dreyfus (who coined the term), and myself–agree that there are many equally valid interpretations of reality, that there is no uniquely correct interpretation. But from this it does not follow that there is no way reality is, since an equally possible inference is that there are many ways it is. And in fact it is pretty obvious that there indeed are many ways that reality is. Consider a rolling, Provençal landscape. To the property developer it shows up as “valuable real estate,” to the wine grower as a “unique terroir,” to the mining engineer as a “bauxite deposit,” to the cyclist as an “impediment and challenge,” and to the fundamental physicist as “quanta of energy.” We do not have to choose between these interpretations because, quite evidently, they are all true. Each interpretation truly describes reality from, in Nietzsche’s word, the “perspective” of a particular interest. Some interpretations of course we will want to reject as false. That we do, as it were, democratically. If someone claims that the landscape is a papier mâché construction on an alien film-set we will reject that on the grounds of its discordance with the coherent picture built up by all the interpretations we accept as true.

Have a Look

¶ Oddee‘s 10 Coolest Desks.

¶ Coming Soon: Dessicant air-conditioning. 90% more efficient, so they say. (Good)

¶ J Carter: What I Did This Summer. (NYT)

Matins

¶ David Berreby writes about a intriguing phenomenon: a certain kind of terrorist is more likely to be an engineer. What kind? the ones that claim to fight for the pious past of Islamic fundamentalists or the white-supremacy America of the Aryan Nations (founder: Richard Butler, engineer) or the minimal pre-modern U.S. government that Stack and Bedell extolled.” Not leftist, in other words. (NYT; via The Morning News)

The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions — “the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority.” Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? It’s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says.

Economic frustration also matters, Gambetta says. In their sample of militants, there was only one homeland out of 30 in which engineers were less common: Saudi Arabia — where engineers have always had plenty of work. But “engineers’ peculiar cognitive traits and dispositions” made them slightly more likely than accountants, waiters or philosophers to react to career frustration by adopting violent, right-wing beliefs.

William A. Wulf, a former president of the National Academy of Engineering, is, no surprise, no fan of the Gambetta-Hertog theory. “If you have a million coin flips,” he says, “it’s almost certain that somewhere in those coin flips there will be 20 heads in a row.” The sample of militants Gambetta and Hertog used was simply too small for them to be sure they haven’t stumbled into a meaningless numerical accident, he says. The theory, according to Wulf, misrepresents what engineers are about. “A person who is rigid,” he says, “is a bad engineer.”

Okay, a bad engineer.

Lauds

¶ We’ve read through Anthony Grafton’s agreeable little disquisition on Paolo Veronese, the Inquisition, and Renaissance research into the details of Jesus’ life — did Jesus and the Apostles sit or stretch out for the Last Supper? — a couple of times, and we’re still not sure that we’ve grasped the point of it all. But we’re always charmed by Professor Grafton’s ability to make scholarship look interesting. (Cabinet; via 3 Quarks Daily)

But what should a Last Supper look like? What did Christ and the Apostles eat? And how much? When Jesus distributed pieces of bread, was it leavened or unleavened? What other foodstuffs had been on the table? Did the followers of Jesus eat lamb, as Jews normally did at Passover? Over the centuries—as an article in the International Journal of Obesity recently showed—artists made many different choices. Sometimes they put lamb on the table. But they also served fish, beef, and even pork in portions that grew over the centuries. Veronese could be forgiven, then, for thinking that he had some iconographic elbow room. In fact, though, what he encountered in Venice was something new. Presumably he knew that censors were taking more interest than they had in the past in religious paintings. What he did not—and could not—know was that scholars were beginning to look at the Last Supper in a radically new way.

Prime

¶ Yves Smith takes a moment out from banging her head against the wall — “Why Do We Keep Indulting the Fiction That Banks Are Private Enterprises” — to remark on blog entry (missing link!) by “Jay Rosen of NYU” that appears to substitute concentric circles for “frames.” Round or square, this is the kind of analysis that seeks to map and distinguish the discussible from the impermissible in general critical conversations.

3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.

How can we change this? How can we de-nuttify the propositions that pile up in the “sphere of deviance.” Do we begin by accepting that our notion about large corporations — that, in today’s world, they’re simply joysticks for a handful of CEOs — have to fight for attention alongside the tenets of creationism?

Tierce

¶ Because 9/11 coincided with a new moon last weekend, and followed a week of turbulent weather (remember Hugh?),  thousands of migrating birds were thrown into confusion by the memorial Tribute in Light at the World Trade Center site. (Wired Science)

To navigate, birds rely on a variety of internal compass mechanisms, which are calibrated to Earth’s geomagnetic fields by sunlight, starlight and moonlight. On Sept. 11, the new moon was just two nights old, a thumbnail sliver. In such conditions, birds rely on starlight, but parts of the lower Manhattan sky were overcast.

The buildings resembled stars. Outshining them all was the Tribute in Light above Ground Zero.

Rowden estimates that 10,000 birds entered the beams, becoming confused and circling until the Municipal Art Society, working with New York City Audubon, shut the lights for 20 minutes, allowing the birds to leave. That happened five times over the course of the night.

The spotlights were not directly dangerous to the birds. Instead, risk comes from wasted time and energy needed for later.

“Birds do fly for extended periods of time. It’s not that they can’t do it. But they’re doing it to get south of here. If they spend all their time in that small area, they won’t get to good foraging habitat, and it will compromise them for later parts of their migration,” Rowden said. “But I feel that we did allow them to get out.”

Sext

¶ Kevin Hartnett reflects on the persistence of “friendships,” thanks to Facebook, beyond friendships’ natural life. (The Millions)

We all trail a line of relationships behind us as we grow older, and we all have our own standards that define when and how we let go of people who were once important in our lives (and when and how we accept being let go of ourselves). I could see why it might be rewarding or interesting or comforting to know that with Facebook you never really need to put a friendship to rest completely. But to me it’s comforting and disorienting in the way of ventilators and feeding tubes that sustain a narrow definition of life long after the real thing has run its course.

Ah, but you never know.

Nones

¶ Sudhir Hazaree Singh considers the burnished legacy of Charles DeGaulle, in Turkey of all places, at Foreign Policy. (via  The Morning News)

His political achievements notwithstanding, de Gaulle’s greatest talent was in developing and propagating myths that fortified the nation. By refusing to accept defeat in the depth of World War II and demonstrating a willingness to fight to the death to defend his homeland, he restored pride and grandeur after the disgrace of occupation. (He glossed over the fact that France was largely liberated thanks to U.S. and British armed forces; de Gaulle always preferred falsehoods that elevated the spirit to truths that debased it.) Yet, in a sense, he was France’s Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln all rolled into one — perhaps the only reason the Lincoln analogy is incomplete is that he survived multiple assassination attempts, lending him an additional air of invincibility.

[snip]

Like all great leaders, de Gaulle was a complex figure: At his worst, he was contemptuous of elected politicians, authoritarian, and egotistical. Like an ancien régime monarch, he sometimes seemed to think he was France. But he was also capable of inspiring his people to achieve great things, and this is the most important reason why he remains an international icon, with broad appeal to political leaders across the globe. The general symbolizes a conception of politics that rejects all forms of fatalism — especially when this inevitability is presented as a justification for inequality. He also represents a nostalgia for a time when leaders stood for real principles, irrespective of the pronouncements of political spin doctors. When de Gaulle’s entourage brought in a professional election manager to advise him in the run-up to the 1965 presidential election, he was promptly shown the door. Simpler times, indeed. Yet above all, de Gaulle incarnates an ideal that has taken some battering in this age of globalization and hegemony, but that will remain central to world politics in the 21st century: the desire of peoples to determine their own fate entirely free from foreign intervention — whether economic, political, or military.

Vespers

¶ Elif Batuman’s review of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing is a well from which we intend to drain many satisfying drafts. Indeed, her analysis of really rather odd graduate writing program priorities cleared up a number of perplexities that we didn’t even know we had — so accustomed were we to bumping up against them in the unlighted portions of the mind. (LRB; via MetaFilter )

Take Ms Batuman’s dismantlement of the two best-known writing program mantras, “write what you know” and “find your voice.” Try not to disturb the rest of the class with your snorts.

The discussion of Chief Bromden’s narrative ‘voice’ leads McGurl to a particularly ambitious defence of programme fiction (‘as rich and multifaceted a body of literary writing as has ever been’), wherein he decides to prove that the slogans ‘write what you know’ and ‘find your voice’ were enormously productive for 20th-century fiction. As it turns out, he views these catchphrases not as interchangeable exhortations to authenticity, but as philosophically opposed dictates. ‘Write what you know’ really does seem to mean ‘write what you know,’ but ‘find your voice’ actually means ‘find someone else’s voice’: thus Styron ‘found his voice’ in Nat Turner, reimagining ‘authorship as a kind of ventriloquism … which is an offence against the rule of writing what you know’.

McGurl never quite articulates the law that enjoins some writers to write what they know and others to find their voices…

[snip]

There is no arguing with taste, and there are doubtless people in the world who enjoy ‘the virtuosity of Butler’s performance of narrative mobility’. To me, such ‘performances’ are symptomatic of the large-scale replacement of books I would want to read by rich, multifaceted explorations whose ‘amazing audacity’ I’m supposed to admire in order not to be some kind of jerk.

The law of ‘find your voice’ and ‘write what you know’ originates in a phenomenon perhaps most clearly documented by the blog and book Stuff White People Like: the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures. Hence Stuff White People Like #20, ‘Being an Expert on Your Culture’, and #116, ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore’. Non-white, non-college-educated or non-middle or upper-class people may write what they know, but White People have to find the voice of a Vietnamese woman impregnated by a member of the American army that killed her only true love.

Compline

¶ Brent Cox decides that, in the Age of the Internet, he’s simply not going to tell anyone — digitally, anyway — about this great place for dumplings that he has discovered. No coolhunter he. (The Awl)

My personal concern is that fetishization begins to replace the actual experience. Were I to opt to fully share my fried dumpling experience with the World of Foodies, then I would take notes on the meal, photograph every element and then spend a good chunk of time composing my initial post detailing the experience and then spend more time ensuring that the post is brought to the attention of the right people. Having done that, what portion of the event is comprised of “eating fried dumplings and finding them awesome”? And if I keep it to myself, or at least just tell friends and family about it with my actual mouth, what then is the portion of the event is “eating fried dumplings and finding them awesome”? See also: people who attend weddings and/or concerts and watch the entire thing through the screen of their mobile phone, which is being used to record, a kneejerk mediation of experience. There is something to be said for Just Experiencing something and letting the sole record of it be your memory. It’s worked for centuries.

It’s a question of coolhunting. The verb “coolhunt” is of course now an archaic term: “so [x] (where [x] = [some date a few years before now]).” But it lives on to this day. At this point, instead of an occupation that’s a subject of a Wired feature, it’s a game we all play at home, as the Internet shifts the load-bearing structures of cool away from the William Gibson protagonists to anyone with a WordPress username. We identify objects, in situ, and tag them. It is hunting, but, coming from a family of actual hunters, it is the lamest kind of hunting because the hunters are not eating what they kill. That sneaker, those vintage eyeglass frames, and, yes, those fried dumplings are definitely cool in the context of where you find them, but they will be less so once their heads are mounted in your study. The coolhunter destroys cool just by geotagging it.

Have a Look

¶ Close Calls. (kottke.org)

Matins

¶ James Surowiecki looks into how “stimulus” came to be a dirty word in Washington — despite the success of the actual Stimulus Bill. The accepted wisdom certainly places the American voter in an unflattering light, but the real default is in our leadership, which can dream up effective policies but can’t be bothered to sell them.

But the most interesting aspect of the stimulus’s image problems concern its design and implementation. Paradoxically, the very things that made the stimulus more effective economically may have made it less popular politically. For instance, because research has shown that lump-sum tax refunds get hoarded rather than spent, the government decided not to give individuals their tax cuts all at once, instead refunding a little on each paycheck. The tactic was successful at increasing consumer demand, but it had a big political cost: many voters never noticed that they were getting a tax cut. Similarly, a key part of the stimulus was the billions of dollars that went to state governments. This was crucial in helping the states avoid layoffs and spending cuts, but politically it didn’t get much notice, because it was the dog that didn’t bark—saving jobs just isn’t as conspicuous as creating them. Extending unemployment benefits was also an excellent use of stimulus funds, since that money tends to get spent immediately. But unless you were unemployed this wasn’t something you’d pay attention to.

The stimulus was also backloaded, so that only a third was spent in the first year. This reduced waste, since there was more time to vet projects, and insured that money would keep flowing into 2010, lessening the risk of a double-dip recession. But it also made the stimulus less potent in 2009, when the economy was in dire straits, leaving voters with the impression that the plan wasn’t working. More subtly, while the plan may end up having a transformative impact on things like the clean-energy industry, broadband access, and the national power grid, it’s hard for voters to find concrete visual evidence of what the stimulus has done (those occasional road signs telling us our tax dollars are at work notwithstanding). That’s a sharp contrast with the New Deal legacy of new highways, massive dams, and rural electrification. Dramatic, high-profile deeds have a profound effect on people’s opinions, so, in the absence of another Hoover Dam or Golden Gate Bridge, it’s not surprising that the voter’s view is: “We spent $800 billion and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Lauds

¶ Jazz pianist Bill Evans died thirty years ago tomorrow. Doug Ramsay reminds us of his legacy and prompts us to pull out The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961. Jazz groups still go for the sound that Evans made with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. (WSJ)

Finally, in 1959 Evans formed a trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, who felt what Evans had been hearing in his mind for years. Their albums, notably “Portrait in Jazz,” “Explorations” and “Sunday at the Village Vanguard” (all for the Riverside label), set new levels of aspiration for pianists and new standards for interaction in jazz-piano trios.

Regiments of young bassists imitate LaFaro’s ability to play high and fast, but most do not or cannot begin to approximate his lyricism, timing or depth of tone, which Evans likened to the sound of an organ. Many new bassists emulate the technique they hear from LaFaro on the Evans recordings without understanding how it fits into the complex relationship among Evans, LaFaro and Mr. Motian. They miss how LaFaro’s note choices relate to the impressionistic chord voicings that give Evans’s playing so much of its character. Worse, they overlook at least half of what made LaFaro a great bassist: the power of his straight-ahead swing, which meshed with Evans’s own rhythmic concept.

In July 1961, less than two weeks after the trio recorded at the Village Vanguard, LaFaro died in a car crash at the age of 25. His death sent Evans into depression so deep that, according to Mr. Motian, he did not perform for six months. Gene Lees, a close friend of Evans, wrote in his book “Meet Me at Jim & Andy’s” (Oxford), “After LaFaro’s death, Bill was like a man with a lost love, always looking to find its replacement.” Evans’s bereavement over LaFaro affected him the rest of his life, but he went back to work with Mr. Motian and a new bassist, Chuck Israels. In succeeding trios, Eddie Gomez and Marc Johnson—virtuosi heavily influenced by LaFaro—had the bass chair. Evans recorded, unaccompanied and with others, for nearly two more decades.

Prime

¶ Joshua Brown’s piece about overpaid stockbrokers (“registered representatives,” in Wall Street parlance) caught our eye because… we’d forgotten about stockbrokers! And here’s why:

1.  Scarcity of Clean Licenses:  You have no idea how scared to death compliance officers are to bring in producers with multiple complaints on their CRDs.  Headhunters are told in no uncertain terms that in the post-crash, post-Madoff world, they shouldn’t even bother bringing in a candidate with multiple blemishes on their license, no matter how much revenue is on the table.  Compliance simply cannot bear the increased regulatory scrutiny in this environment.  This means that the advisor with both big production numbers and a squeaky clean history is worth that much more to the hiring firm.

2.  Aging Sales Force:  Industry-wide, the average age of financial advisors is in the 40’s!  This is remarkable and in reality, it means that firms are overpaying because of how limited the talent pool is at the up-and-comer end.  When there are fewer rising stars, firms must do what the NY Yankees do – sign aging veterans to massive deals.  We discussed the aging of the industry here at length, in case you missed it:  Why the Kids Don’t Want to be Financial Advisors

3.  Concentration of Millionaires:  There are fewer millionaire households in America post-2008 as a result of the decline of stocks and real estate.  According to the Registered Rep article,  the amount of millionaires peaked at 9.2 million in 2007 and is closer to 6.7 million now.  These millionaire households are also being consolidated at the advisor level as wirehouses prune the lower producing advisors from their ranks and help their top earners pad their books with even more assets – in other words, wirehouses have created their own compensation-hungry monsters by helping them get bigger at the expense of smaller producers.

Tierce

¶ Did you know that Auto-Tune was invented to improve oil prospecting? We didn’t. (Live Science; via  The Morning News)

Auto-Tune users set a reference point – a scale or specific notes, for example – and a rate at which derivations from this point will be digitally corrected.

This rate can be carefully calibrated so a voice sounds “natural,” by tacking the voice smoothly back to the reference pitch. Or, artists can make the correction happen quickly and artificially, which results in the warbling, digitized voices now all the rage in pop, hip-hip, reggae and other types of music.

Auto-Tune’s invention sprung from a quite unrelated field: prospecting for oil underground using sound waves. Andy Hildebrand, a geophysicist who worked with Exxon, came up with a technique called autocorrelation to interpret these waves. During the 1990s, Hildebrand founded the company that later became Antares, and he applied his tools to voices.

The recording industry pounced on the technology, and the first song credited (or bemoaned) for introducing Auto-Tune to the masses was Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe.”

Although a success with audio engineers, Auto-Tune remained largely out of sight until 2003 when rhythm and blues crooner T-Pain discovered its voice-altering effects.

Sext

¶ One stop shopping: pro and con responses to Camille Paglia’s takedown of Lady Gaga can be had at The Awl. Truth to tell, Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper aren’t all that pro. Maria Bustillos is definitely con, reponding with a smackdown.

Because Paglia cannot understand the new voices, she claims they “have atrophied.” Because she doesn’t understand the subtleties of communicating via text message, she claims the youngs are “communicating mutely,” which, what? Was communicating by letter in the 18th century also “mute”, “atrophied”? What does that even mean? Because she must not know any, I guess, she supposes the kids have “abandoned body language in daily interactions.”

Then there is Paglia’s complaint that Gaga is not sexy, that drag queens are far sexier than Gaga. Does it not occur to her that our whole world is already awash in “sexy” young women, singers, dancers, models, actresses, who are trying and trying and trying to “be sexy”, and/or that the public is maybe really so sick of that? Or that Lady Gaga’s appeal relies, in part, on precisely the fact that she inflates and distorts that “sexy” iconography in order to force the viewer to question his assumptions about sexuality, performance, gender?

Nones

¶ At a site that’s new to us, Humble Student of the Markets, Cam Hui (a portfolio manager by day) writes an entry “Diagnosing America’s Ills.” We couldn’t agree more with this level-headed assessment.

I believe that America’s ills stems from neglect, largely from the short-term nature of American thinking. There has been a neglect of infrastructure, a lack of focus on basics of innovation and wealth creation, as well as an erosion of the advantages bestowed by education.

The most recent infrastructure report card gives American physical infrastructure badly failing grades: Aviation (D), Bridges (C), Dams (D), Drinking Water (D-), Energy (D+), Hazardous Waste (D), Inland Waterways (D-), Levees (D-), Public Parks and Recreation (C-), Rail (C-), Roads (D-), Schools (D), Solid Waste (C+), Transit (D), and Wastewater (D-). Fixing this shortfall requires spending of over $2T. Nevertheless, there are calls for greater infrastructure spending as a way to build an economic recovery.

Vespers

¶ We can’t tell just whom Louis Menand is parodying in the third paragraph of his review of The Oxford Book of Parodies, but we’re sure that he’s parodying somebody. We’ll probably get the new anthology, but we won’t be parting with Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm, the still-better collection that Dwight Macdonald put out in 1960, back when, as Mr Menand nails it, “Modern Library Giants strode the earth.”

It is a characteristic of our top-rated species that any natural disposition will, over time, undergo development, variation, and refinement in excess of its importance to reproductive success. Evolutionary psychologists refer to the artifactual residue of this process, the biologically pointless stuff the organism compulsively churns out, as “culture.” In the making-fun-of-others department, the highest cultural rung — it is sometimes regarded as an art form — is parody.

Compline

¶ Regular readers know that we discuss books and bookish things at Vespers; that is why we’re mentioning Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of City Boy, Edmund White’s latest volume of reminiscence, here. The deadliest thing we’ve read in ages, the piece is almost too magisterial to show its claws. It is hard to tell whether Mr Mendelssohn holds Edmund White’s advocacy of “gay literature,” or Mr White himself, in greater contempt. The dishing begins with the title, “Boys Will Be Boys,” and every paragraph draws blood. Animus notwithstanding, the review is a cogent argument against the proposition that homosexuals are alien mutants. (NYRB)(P)

Our candidate for “most savage single sentence”: “It’s interesting to speculate how the young White, who was capable of an impressive elegance and was clearly preoccupied, as well, with interesting formal questions, would have evolved as a novelist.” The finale, however, takes devastation to artistic heights.

This is a far cry from the attitude of the young White who had once resentfully criticized Poirier and other gay writers he knew when he was starting out—even the ones who were unabashedly out of the closet, like Merrill and Ashbery—for wanting to assimilate aesthetically, as he saw it: to write for the larger world instead of—well, preaching to the converted, to that small “community [that] we want[ed] to celebrate in novels that would create our identity while also exploring it.” Hence although City Boy, like many a bildungsroman, ostensibly culminates in a happy attainment of maturity—the young man’s successful quest to be a published gay writer—there is another, deeper education that plays out in these pages: the one that leads, however disjointedly, to an apparent acknowledgment that real literature is neither a form of social therapy nor a vehicle for political advertising, but is, in fact, “universal,” and seeks to dissolve rather than create intellectual and artistic ghettos.

Still, you suspect that White, unabashedly a product of the era he recalls in City Boy, takes pride in the fact that what he has been writing all these years—the earnest if increasingly artless transcription of gay life and gay lives, of which City Boy is the latest installment—has aimed to fill a niche instead of a universe. What he wanted, after all, was to become part of a scene, to have a reputation, to be known as a writer, whatever the sentiments and ideas he wrote about. The niche he helped create allowed him to achieve all this; and who would begrudge him the satisfaction that he got exactly what he wanted?

Have a Look

¶ Stanford Kay’s Gutenberg Project, at The Best Part.

¶ At Strange Maps, the “Fool’s Cap” Map of the World.

Matins

¶ When the serious overhaul of America’s health-care reform was first broached eighteen years ago, we were dismayed that health care insurance was being addressed before health-care costs. In our view, you ought to worry about price before you worry about payment. We remain dismayed. Only today, at the bottom of an entry at Naked Capitalism, do we catch the lightbulb’s sudden glow in another venue.

Yves here. It is hard to believe that the people in the Obama Administration tasked to develop a health care reform plan were not aware of this research. The failure to take on the core issues leading to health care costs run amok shows a lack of imagination and will. Admittedly, any solution to the problem would need to be far-reaching (for instance, the huge cost of often-student-loan-financed medical education would need to be addressed in parallel with efforts to restrict physician excesses). But a realistic problem is that most patients are unwilling to think that their doctor might be racking up unnecessary costs on their behalf, even when the evidence is compelling that that sort of behavior is widespread.

Lauds

¶ Dominique Browning introduces her Beauty of the Beach Salon, where the pedicures are free.

First, there is the exfoliation factor. No razors, ever. Just nice, soft, crumbly sand, alternating between wet and dry. It is an excellent idea to dig your feet into the sand and get a real rub going, the way a dog does when she is wantonly digging for…well, what exactly are those dogs always getting excited about? Who knows, but they have a few things to teach us about having fun at the beach–in particular, we could all do with a few more leaps and bounds, to say nothing of licking faces and wagging tails. But I digress. The main thing for optimum exfoliation is to make sure you dig in your heels. Always a good idea, anyway, particularly if you are having an argument with a certain someone.

Next, the seaweed treatment. I have not a clue what seaweed does for the skin, or for most things, but there must be a reason people pay gazillions of dollars for beauty treatments containing seaweed. Or maybe not? Is seaweed part of the Weird Ingredient Racket? Anyway, I always let the seaweed squoosh between my toes because it is a delightfully childish thing to do. Children particularly, and men too, think you are quite brave if you touch seaweed, so this is an excellent way to score points.

Prime

¶ We are intrigued by the coincidence, in our Google Reader, of two items that aren’t so distantly related as their authors might think. In “Winner-take-all economics,” Alex Tabarrok blandly attributes the pile-up of huge fortunes to “the size of the market that can be served by a single person or firm.” (Marginal Revolution)

Rowling’s success brings with it inequality.  Time is limited and people want to read the same books that their friends are reading so book publishing has a winner-take all component.  Thus, greater leverage brings greater inequality.  The average writer’s income hasn’t gone up much in the past thirty years but today, for the first time ever, a handful of writers can be multi-millionaires and even billionaires.  The top pulls away from the median. 

This is not the end of the story, though, as a piece at The Baseline Scenario begs to remind us. James Kwak has just read a new book called Winner-Take-All Politics. What goes up, it seems, has an appalling tendency to come down into the pockets of political campaigners.

That shift occurred in the 1970s because businesses and the super-rich began a process of political organization in the early 1970s that enabled them to pool their wealth and contacts to achieve dominant political influence (described in Chapter 5). To take one of the many statistics they provide, the number of companies with registered lobbyists in Washington grew from 175 in 1971 to nearly 2,500 in 1982 (p. 118). Money pouring into lobbying firms, political campaigns, and ideological think tanks created the organizational muscle that gave the Republicans a formidable institutional advantage by the 1980s. The Democrats have only reduced that advantage in the past two decades by becoming more like Republicans–more business-friendly, more anti-tax, and more dependent on money from the super-rich. And that dependency has severely limited both their ability and their desire to fight back on behalf of the middle class (let alone the poor), which has few defenders in Washington.

At a high level, the lesson of Winner-Take-All Politics is similar to that of 13 Bankers: when looking at economic phenomena, be they the financial crisis or the vast increase in inequality of the past thirty years, it’s politics that matters, not just abstract economic forces. One of the singular victories of the rich has been convincing the rest of us that their disproportionate success has been due to abstract economic forces beyond anyone’s control (technology, globalization, etc.), not old-fashioned power politics.

Which sounds like what Mr Tabarrok was saying, doesn’t it?

Tierce

¶ The sad news is that, if you’re going to take up a life of environmental depravity, you want to make sure to have dozens, if not hundreds, of victims. The more egregious an offense, the milder the penalty our all-too-human nature is likely to call for, according to a study of jury awards.

The bias, which the researchers named the scope-severity paradox, has implications for a wide variety of fields, including the politics and media coverage of large-scale issues such as climate change or mass genocide.

“It fits well with a line of research that shows that as the number of people who are victims of some problem — whether it’s a crime or a famine — the responsiveness to it, and the likelihood of taking action to reduce the problem, decreases,” said psychologist Paul Slovnic of the University of Oregon, who was not involved in the study.

It has to do with the way empathy works, Slovnic said. People empathize with people by putting themselves in the other persons shoes. The more shoes there are, the harder it is to empathize with any single individual. People don’t multiply their feelings of empathy by the number of people involved.

¶ Jonah Lehrer connects the “halfalogue” perplex, which makes it impossible to block out an overheard telephone conversation, with the delights of serious music. The difference between “too much” and “just right,” we think.

In other words, listening to Beethoven is the artistic form of the halfalogue – it is a sensory stimulus that draws us in precisely because of what it doesn’t tell us. The information is incomplete – we don’t know when, exactly, the tonic will return – and so we eagerly await its completion. Meyer would later apply this principle to all narratives. He pointed out, for instance, that the moment of most suspense in a movie is also the moment of peak unpredictability. We are riveted because we have no idea what will happen next.

Sext

¶ We were almost wondering how long it would take Chris Lehman, tireless cataloguer of Rich People Things, to tackle Penelope Green’s New York Times irony-laden visit to the Newport, Rhode Island mansion of Richard Saul Wurman, the genius behind TED.

But when Wurman hails her into the cavernous interior with the disarming greeting, “Isn’t it pretentious?” Green immediately takes the bait. Wurman may be grinning at his own excess, she writes, but “the joke’s not on him. It’s on his adopted city, its name still associated with the last vestiges of high WASP society.”

And how does that joke work, exactly? As Wurman’s designer confrere Massimo Vignelli explains things, the fusty smart set in Newport “need each other. They need their booze at 5, their costume parties. They need to know who is who, and who married what and how much money. It’s a kind of zoo. In that zoo, of course, Ricky has his own private pavilion, and he never goes out. I think he is considered an alien.”

In reality, of course, American prophets of social mobility have been marveling at the decay of the WASP establishment practically from the moment it first arrived on the Mayflower, not too far from the stately spreads of Newport. So it’s a safe bet that many diehard fixtures of the Newport scene, from to Caroline Astor to Claus von Bülow, haven’t imagined themselves born to those particular manors, either. Long before it became the province of hipsters and (what amounts to the same thing) TV writers, social irony was a diverting plaything of the members of the power elite—and they relished nothing more than the chance to deploy it on their own social backgrounds.

Mr Lehman even wraps up his entry with “plus ça….”

¶ We’re reminded of a mordant piece about the “bit of a paradox” that TED helps to solve. It appeared at Stuff White People Like last week.

Sadly, TED Talks are not all roses and NPR approved comedians. For many white people, TED Conferences are actually a source of sadness and depression. This comes from their dreams to attend a future TED Conference in person. But with a price tag of $6000 and an invite-only policy, many white people are simply unable to attend. This is a new concept for white people as they have successfully been creating and joining expensive exclusive clubs for over one thousand years. Popular examples include: private schools, politics, and ice hockey.

Note: It is not advised to try to use sarcasm when trying to console a white person about their lack of an invitation to the TED conference.

“It must hard for you not being able to get into an expensive, invitation only club. As a non-white person, lets just say I have some experience in that field.”

“You didn’t get into MENSA either huh?”

Nones

¶ At Haaretz, Alon Liel writes an almost helplessly admiring portrait of Recip Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister who, flsuh with victory in yesterday’s constitutional referendum, seems set to leave an imprint comparable to that of Kemal Ataturk —”even if we in Israel are largely united by our distate for him.” A distaste shared by Turkey’s Kemalist elite.  

Many in Turkey and abroad view Turkey’s transformation – more religious, more eastward-looking – as cause for concern. But to the majority of Turks, the reforms have made the republic more democratic, more humane.

Erdogan will remain hated by the Turkish secular elite, which is concentrated in the army, universities and business community. But he is beloved by Turkey’s poorer, devout periphery. The prime minister has straightened the backbone of the marginalized, and in return has received their undying loyalty.

Fears that Erdogan will turn the country into an Iranian-style Islamic republic are unfounded. Support for the prime minister rests not only on ideology but also on modernization and the prosperity he has helped bring.

We in Israel know Erdogan primarily for his hard-line Mideast policy, less so for his economic platform. But the prime minister’s every step is taken with fiscal growth in mind. Erdogan will abandon neither modernization nor democracy, the system allowing his government to stay in power.

Mr Liel closes by charging Mr Erdogan with developing a solution to the demand for Kurdish autonomy — a project that may become more realizable if the Prime Minister holds on to his office in elections next July.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Chris Graham rootles about in the rather absurd idea of “reading for pleasure” — by which he means not so much reading fun books (certainly not!) as reading books simply because you want to — and bumps up against the persistence of the bêtise that work and pleasure are incompatible.

The problem for the librarian, no less than for the career consultant, the occupational health and safety supervisor, and the beleaguered investment banker, is that the notion of a “work-life balance” is a terrible false dichotomy, the Marxist equivalent of giving all your chips away before the deck is even shuffled and then borrowing from the dealer to buy a round for the table. It is manifestly impossible to divide one’s life into neat or even approximately spherical compartments (how many New York Times crossword puzzles have been completed with a “Eureka!” exclaimed while on the family dog’s midnight promenade), and the decision to deny the obvious is generally employed by those who actually know better, which is why they are forever unsatisfied with the level of the scales. While it is plainly true that one can read a book more or less closely (substitute a beach blanket and a daiquiri for a pencil and a desk), it is equally true that something of everything we read is retained, to be recalled, by chance more often than design, on some or another future occasion, a dinner conversation, a tutorial essay, or a game of Trivial Pursuit. As every student who has written an examination knows all too well, it is impossible to predict when the most felicitous recollections  – legend has it, the essential ingredients in the making of a “Congratulatory First” – will occur, but the chances are most assuredly increased in direct proportion to the number of books we read.

Even, just for pleasure.

Compline

¶ The three final paragraphs of the late Tony Judt’s essay on Czeslaw Milosz’s classic study of intellectuals and totalitarianism, The Captive Mind, ought to chill every thoughtful reader of this site, suggesting as it does the lightning ease with which an ideology defeated in Eastern Europe transplanted itself to flourishing conditions in the United States.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

It was in just such terms that communism was presented to its beneficiaries following World War II; and it was because History afforded no apparent alternative to a Communist future that so many of Stalin’s foreign admirers were swept into intellectual captivity. But when Miłosz published The Captive Mind, Western intellectuals were still debating among genuinely competitive social models—whether social democratic, social market, or regulated market variants of liberal capitalism. Today, despite the odd Keynesian protest from below the salt, a consensus reigns.

For Miłosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the Eastern European in the face of Western innocence. But there is nothing innocent about Western (and Eastern) commentators’ voluntary servitude before the new pan-orthodoxy. Many of them, Ketman-like, know better but prefer not to raise their heads above the parapet. In this sense at least, they have something truly in common with the intellectuals of the Communist age. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Miłosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”

This has nothing to do with the ideology of communism or the pragmatics of capitalism. It is the dogma — inexorable to all those who recognize it — of Hegelian necessity. The same wind that propelled collectivism now fills the sails of free-market orthodoxy.

Have a Look

¶ “Anyway, if your name is also Ted Wilson, expect a lawsuit.” (The Rumpus)

¶ Joanna Neborsky shares a raft of fantastic unused drawings from her forthcoming illustrated edition of the Fénéon/Sante Three-Line Novels. (The Rumpus)

Matins

¶ Samuel Freedman’s piece on the Muslim Prayer Room on the 17th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower is required reading. The fact that there was such a spiritual center is unlikely to persuade opponents of the Parc51 center to change their minds — we fully expect to hear someone claim that the Twin Towers were doomed by the contaminating presence of an Islamic facility — nor will it make radical extremists stop to think what terrible damage they do to their values by corrupting them with violence. It’s up to the rest of us to bear in mind what’s right, and to speak out for it. (NYT)

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

How, when and by whom the prayer room was begun remains unclear. Interviews this week with historians and building executives of the trade center came up empty. Many of the Port Authority’s leasing records were destroyed in the towers’ collapse. The imams of several Manhattan mosques whose members sometimes went to the prayer room knew nothing of its origins.

Yet the room’s existence is etched in the memories of participants like Mr. Abdus-Salaam and Mr. Sareshwala. Professor John L. Esposito of Georgetown, an expert in Islamic studies, briefly mentions the prayer room in his recent book “The Future of Islam.”

Lauds

¶ In what amounts to a letter of admonition, The Economist berates Damien Hirst for enriching himself at the expense of his “investors.” Since, in our view, the focus of Hirst’s art is in its marketing, we don’t see how investors can lose, no matter how much value their purchases lose. Really, the conned investors are part of the picture.

In 2008 and 2009, Mr Hirst repeatedly made statements like “The first time you sell something is when it should cost the most” and “I’ve definitely had the goal to make the primary market more expensive.” The artist was frustrated by the speculators who were buying from his galleries then quickly reselling his work at auction. Moreover, the acquisition of a package of 12 of his own works from Charles Saatchi for £6m in 2003, far more than what Mr Saatchi had originally paid, may have led to an Oedipal determination to overthrow all the high-rolling dealers and collectors who thought they might lord it over the little artist.

The goal of making the primary works more expensive may benefit Mr Hirst’s personal income in the short-term, but it makes no sense from the perspective of his market. Part of the reason that art costs more than wallpaper is the expectation that it might appreciate in value. Flooding the market with new work is like debasing the coinage, a strategy used from Nero to the Weimar Republic with disastrous consequences. If Mr Hirst were managing a quoted company, he would be unable to enrich himself at the expense of his investors in quite the same way. But Mr Hirst is an artist and, in Western countries, artists are valued as rule-breaking rogues.

Two developments could help Mr Hirst’s secondary market. He has started compiling his catalogue raisonné, a complete list of all the works he has made, which will comfort those who suspect he has made hundreds more spot and spin paintings than he admits to. According to Francis Outred, Christie’s European head of contemporary art, “As with Warhol, this could bring reassuring clarity to the question of volume within each series.” Mr Hirst is also discussing with the Tate a retrospective show to coincide with the Olympic games in London in 2012.

Prime

¶ Yves Smith is not hopeful that the heightened SEC investigation of accounting fraud at Lehman Brothers will lead to criminal penalties. In part, as Ms Smith points out, this is because the complexities of financial litigation can be counted upon to overpower juries’ judgment. But it also owes, we think, to the hushed respectability of the courtroom environment, in which groomed and suited white-collar types exude blamelessness.

One factor that would seem to improve the odds of success in pursuing former Lehman executives is they were directly involved in the preparation of the dubious financial statements, while at AIG, the dubious behavior occurred at the operational level, and accounting and management controls appear to have been weak (which serves to give corporate level executives plausible deniability). But you have a thicket of other problems. The biggest is if any of these cases were to go to trial, complex financial fraud cases are very hard to win. As Frank Partnoy explains long form in his book Infectious Greed, defense attorneys can win simply by confusing the jury. And given some of the stunning decisions he recounts, that approach seems to work with some judges too.

An a further obstacle is that the SEC is just not practiced at this sort of case. For many years, they limited their focus to insider trading cases. Their botched suit against Ralph Cioffi, the manager of the Bear hedge funds that blew up in July 2007, has no doubt made them more cautious in their choice of targets.

Despite the obstacles to winning in court (which in turn weakens the government’s ability to extract a juicy settlement), Lehman is such a high profile case that the SEC may feel politically that it has not choice other than to file the best suit it can. If so, it will be revealing to see how they frame it and who they decide to pursue. The Goldman Abacus suit suggests that they will focus very narrowly. And that in turn means its potential to have broader impact is likely to be limited.

Tierce

¶ At Wired Science, Brendan Keim writes up an interesting study: “Early Warning Signs Could Show When Extinction Is Coming.” As populations are challenged, they rebound less robustly from environmental challenges.

In a study published Sept. 9 in Nature, Drake and University of South Carolina biologist Blaine Griffen tracked population changes in 60 laboratory colonies of water fleas. Half were given a steady food supply, while the others received one-quarter less food every month. Lacking the nutrients needed to reproduce more frequently than they died, the latter colonies inevitably went extinct, long before the food ran out.

In any animal population, the number of individuals oscillates naturally. A few extra offspring are born, putting a strain on resources; that leads to a few extra deaths or a drop in births, which frees up resources that allow the population to grow again. These fluctuations converge on an equilibrium somewhere in the middle. Both the control and nutrient-deprived populations followed this pattern.

But when Drake and Griffen looked closely at the data from declining groups, they found that populations took much longer to return to equilibrium. That’s a telltale sign of critical slowing down. Under too much stress, a system loses its balance easily, and takes longer to recover that balance. It was evident up to eight generations before extinction.

Sext

¶ You can close down Spy Magazine, but you can’t take the stunt out of former Spy-meisters like Tad Friend, who was determined to make his way from the Empire State Building to Central Park without setting foot on Fifth or Sixth Avenues. There’s a burly doorman on Fifty-fifth Street who owes Mr Friend a cigar. Or something. He didn’t think that our hero would find a mid-block route (through some building or other) to Fifty-sixth street. We wouldn’t have been surprised if Mr Friend had hitched a ride with low-lying window washers.

From Rockefeller Center’s underground concourse, I rose by escalator to glimpse the statue of Atlas, kneeling in welcome. Was it enough? Somehow, no. As I had three blocks of safe passage in the cozy Art Deco warren, I impulsively decided to carry on—all the way to Central Park, if possible.

An office building, a plaza, and two more parking garages got me to Fifty-fifth Street, but Fifty-fifth was pitiless. No plazas or arcades, and all three garages were squatty bolt-holes. The burly doorman at 65 West Fifty-fifth declared, “You’re going to have to hit Fifth or Sixth.” The doorman at the Shoreham Hotel, down the block, shook his head. And the guard at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church had no interest in liberation theology. As I trudged westward, the burly doorman crowed, “I told ya!” It was after 5 P.M., so I ducked in for a drink a few doors down at the Whiskey Trader bar, where the weekend was noisily under way. Downstairs, by the rest rooms, was a door with a sign warning “Siren Will Sound.” But siren didn’t sound. In the adjacent basement were a mop and a bucket, odds and dead ends—and a stairwell, leading up. On the landing I eased open a fire door . . . into a gleaming lobby off Fifty-sixth. Ha!

Nones

¶ Gordon Chang tells us what to watch for as the Korean Workers’ Party’s national conference — the first since 1966 — unfolds. Will Kim Jong-Il have his way as regards succession plans? (The New Republic; via Real Clear World)

Almost anything can occur at the party conference. Everyone will be watching what happens to the youngest Kim. More interesting, however, will be events surrounding Jang Sung-Taek, widely seen as the regent for young Jong-Un. Jang, Kim Jong-Il’s brother-in-law, has already accumulated substantial authority in the last two years, especially over the security services. In all probability, Kim Jong-Il is uneasy about handing over so much responsibility to a non-Kim, but he has no choice if he wants his not-too-well-prepared son to eventually take over.

So far, Kim has given his son a post inside the National Defense Commission, the most powerful body in North Korea. The army, the regime’s backstop, is generally on board with Jong-Un because most flag officers realize their favored position in society is dependent on the Kim family. 

But Jong-Un’s future is by no means assured. China probably wants him out of the way so that there can be a collective leadership. Moreover, ambitious generals and even-more-dangerous colonels could be scheming. Finally, Jang Sung-Taek may not want to relinquish power when Kim Jong-Il has passed from the scene, either naturally or otherwise. 

What should we be looking for this week? If Jong-Un is proclaimed successor at the party conference, we know his dad, Kim Jong-Il, is close to death. It’s not his father’s style to cede power quickly. It’s more likely the young son will be given one or more party posts. It’s even possible that the party machinery will be merely reorganized to allow the young Kim to build his power base. The last outcome would indicate continued resistance to Kim’s succession planning.

Vespers

¶ Venerable Oxford bookseller Blackwell’s, in order to avoid “awful takeovers,” is going to adopt the employee-owned business model developed by John Lewis, the British department store. (Guardian; via Survival of the Book)

Blackwell’s decision comes after several years of losses and at a time when booksellers are facing mounting competition from supermarkets, the internet and e-books. Borders has closed down in the UK and HMV is facing shareholder pressure to sell its underperforming Waterstone’s chain. But Blackwell expects to move back into profit this year and its owner said he was convinced his chain had a bright future: “We must concentrate on being a specialist. We have some of the best specialists in the world. As long as there are people who want to speak to a specialist, we will stay in business.”

He said he was doing much of the work on the new constitution himself because “I don’t want to hire a lot of consultants”.

The Blackwell business traces its roots back to the 19th century, when it was founded as a small bookseller on Broad Street in Oxford. It expanded on to the internet and to London in the 1990s and also had a publishing arm until it was sold to rival John Wiley in 2007. Control has been handed down through the family.

Compline

¶ From the look of it, Miles Klee already lives in the dystopian near-future sketched by Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Which makes his dissatisfied review of the novel a kind of pendant to it. Also it will absolve would-not-be readers of the venial sin of procrastination. (Having heard Shteyngart read from Absurdistan, we have no idea why his publisher hasn’t cajoled him into making an audiobook of Super Sad.) (The Awl)

I’d wager that Super Sad has more “the way we live now” commentary per sentence than Jonathan Franzen’s present-set Freedom does, because it needs to plow through as formidable a laundry list of grievances as any manifesto could muster and create redundant prophecy based on those complaints, all while kicking a doomed-romance subplot along like some crumpled beer can that happened to be in its path.

[snip]

You could claim that I’m just projecting my own generational or writerly neuroses. You could argue that I’m a hypocrite, or that I’m pushing for a more escapist type of fiction, or attacking a genre’s very foundation, the now-future concept being virtually sacrosanct. I’ll accept all that and yet I can’t shake the inkling that we should demand more than a well-polished fun mirror when it comes to social critique. I want some surprising membrane: warped, restless and permeable. I need, more than anything, to be startled.

Have a Look

¶ Virtual restoration of the Abbey of Cluny, founded 910 and one of the great medieval institutions. (Le Monde; via Ionarts)

¶ Reading list recommendations from Jonathan Franzen. (Book Beast)

Matins

¶ At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong tackles a muddle — if we may propose an awkward image to reflect a category mistake that has flooded the intellectual territory once overseen by the mainstream media — “Of Writers and Activists — Are Science Bloggers Being Ambitious Enough?”

My goals are different – they are not to change the way research gets done or they way policies are set. I lack the experience, background, energy and time. I can only hope to do what I do best – talk about science in a way that encourages people to listen. My goals are: to inspire people about science by providing good writing (well, communication, but primarily writing); and to improve the quality of science journalism by providing an example and by engaging with the science writing community, at conferences and on social media.

Is blogging the most productive way I could be doing this? Sarah Kendrew asked me this question at Science Online London 2010 (15:00 in the third video), and I thought it a fair one. I can only answer: it is for me (leaving aside the fact that I also try to be active on social media, speak at events, and so on). It’s the best way I can make use of my abilities. If people had infinite time, skills and opportunities, I’d probably tell them to be science teachers; Alom Shaha makes an able case for why our need for science educators surpasses our need for science communicators.  But I am not a teacher; I’m a writer and I’m a journalist.

As a journalist, being an advocate can be detrimental to my job. Dan Vergano from USA Today says, “Science reporting ain’t advocacy. That takes the field in the wrong direction, back to the 1950’s.” Nobody would benefit from journalists who cheerlead for science without holding it to account when necessary.

All writing is advocatory. Some writers advocate taking political action, while others advocate developing a rigorous understanding of the world. The two groups are often at temperamental odds even when facts are not in dispute; one fact that is always in dispute is the urgency of taking action of one kind or another. We think it sufficient for writers to be clear about which kind of advocacy they’re engaged in.

Lauds

¶ The Jewish High Holidays prompt Miles Hoffman to discuss the lack of anything like the classical liturgical music that serious Western composers went on composing long after the Age of Faith. (NYT)

It’s certainly strange that their very liberation as Jews led to composers’ leaving the substance of Judaism behind, at least artistically. But is it realistic to expect brilliant Jewish composers, exposed to some of the most magnificent artistic creations of Western civilization and struck by the universal impact and appeal of those creations, to be satisfied setting Hebrew texts for their local congregations?

Yes, it’s possible that if some of these great composers had written monumental works for the synagogue, those works might eventually have found a broad public. And some have: Ernest Bloch’s “Avodath Hakodesh” (“Sacred Service”), for example, is widely performed — in concert halls more than synagogues — and Leonard Bernstein’s settings of Hebrew texts have not lacked for mixed audiences.

More recently, contemporary Jewish composers like Paul Schoenfield, Osvaldo Golijov and Max Raimi have made compelling use of traditional Jewish tunes and styles in music for the concert hall and found a sizeable audience.

But historically speaking, many Jewish composers simply felt compelled to strike out well beyond their parochial origins, and to avoid at all costs the possibility of being pigeon-holed as composers of “Jewish music.”

There is more here than Mr Hoffman seems to realize. The musical tradition of Western Christianity is weighted toward triumphalism; even non-celebratory music (such as Requiem Masses) are grand more often than not. This reflects not only the overwhelming dominance of Christianity in Western history but also the imposing churches that, beginning with Hagia Sophia, have no counterpart in Judaism.  

Prime

¶ At Weakonomics, Philip takes issue with the notion that the recession has hurt blue-collar workers the most — or, in educational terms, that workers with the least academic attainments have been hurt the worst. His figures suggest just the opposite, and, indeed, people with some college education have witnessed the highest increase in unemployment rates. (For our part, we believe that the unemployment problem is so structural that it preceded the recession and will outlast it, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Every recession is referred to as a blue collar recession because many blue collar jobs rely on the economy itself. Manufacturing is very much cyclical, in that when the economy is good so is the sector. When the economy suffers, they get laid off. But the truth is white collar workers have it just as bad, and may have it worse.

It all comes down to how you market the data. It’s easy to spin the employment data to fit the blue collar recession headline. One common citation is unemployment divided up into educational attainment. The categories are: less than high school diploma, high school diploma, some college or associates degree, and college degree or higher. The unemployment rates start high and work their way down: 14%, 10.3%, 8.7%, and 4.6%. By this metric it does look like a blue collar recession since blue collar jobs typically require less education. But what if we measured the % increase in unemployed from 2007 to today? Do the numbers tell the same story? Hardly

Tierce

¶ We’re not sure that we know exactly what bothers Jonah Lehrer about the ease of e-readers, or how the problem that he foresees can be addressed, but we’re going to file away the distinction between ventral and dorsal reading, one of the rich cognitive findings associated with Stanislas Dehaene. 

So here’s my wish for e-readers. I’d love them to include a feature that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s the point: Only then will we process the text a little less unconsciously, with less reliance on the ventral pathway. We won’t just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.

My larger anxiety has to do with the sprawling influence of technology. Sooner or later, every medium starts to influence the message. I worry that, before long, we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink – to these screens that keep on getting better – that the technology will feedback onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts. We’ll forget what it’s like to flex those dorsal muscles, to consciously decipher a literate clause. And that would be a shame, because not every sentence should be easy to read.

Mr Lehrer concludes with an interesting sidenote: in order to proofread his writing, he has to print it out. If our experience is applicable, it isn’t the printing that’s key. Nothing enhances our attention to detail than reading something that we have published something online. OMG!

Sext

¶ Bess Levin (Dealbreakder) and Jessica Pressler (Daily Intel) chat LOLlingly about Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. As Bess says in her introduction, “ I’m not going to say it’s so bad you shouldn’t see it, but that’s just because it’s so bad it needs to be seen to be believed and we want more people to be able to share in our collective trauma.” The movie does promise some unintended fun for Wall Streeters.

ohbabyitsbess: We should get into all of the characters who were real but not real. Like the head of Not Bear Stearns, Not Jimmy Cayne.
jessaballs: Yeah, Not Jimmy Cayne was more like Ace Greenberg than Jimmy Cayne.
jessaballs: He dressed like Ace.
jessaballs: in a bowler hat and bow tie
ohbabyitsbess: And he had a dog he loved
jessaballs: And he had not idea what was going on at his own bank.
ohbabyitsbess: But you felt bad for him anyway, especially when Not Jamie Dimon was like, “I will buy Not Bear Stearns for $3 a share, AND NOT A PENNY MORE.”
ohbabyitsbess: Not Jamie Dimon was kind of amazing
ohbabyitsbess: Not Jamie Dimon wears leather and rides bikes
jessaballs: And wears red velvet smoking jackets and hosts opera singers in his Upper East Side mansion.
ohbabyitsbess: and throws Goyas across the room when he’s angry
jessaballs: And after Jake starts spreading rumors that bring down Not JP Morgan’s stock in order to punish him for what he did to Not Bear Stearns, Not Jamie offers him a job at Not JP Morgan.
ohbabyitsbess: Because even though he lost him money, Not Jamie Dimon is the kind of guy who likes moxie
jessaballs: He wanted to hate fuck him, in a business sense
ohbabyitsbess: And then later Jake becomes a star at Not JP Morgan, because he is also the only one who knows about Chinese customs
ohbabyitsbess: And knows to give a gift for the Chinese guy when they come visit to potentially give them capital
jessaballs: That’s what its all about, really, these billion-dollar deals
jessaballs: Toblerones, and being polite

Nones

¶ We try not to go out of our way to be gloomy in these pages, but we must admit that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s address to the Council on Foreign Relations — her sixth, personally, and her second as Secretary — is a disappointment, for failing to be specific about much of anything in general, and for discussing the narcotrafficking issues that plague our hemisphere without even a whisper about the decriminialization of drugs. Here is her entire response to a question asked by Carla Hills. (via  Real Clear World)

CLINTON: Well, first, Carla, thank you for asking about this hemisphere, because it is very much on our minds. And we face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency, in Mexico and in Central America.

And we are working very hard to assist the Mexicans in improving their law enforcement and their intelligence, their capacity to detain and prosecute those who they arrest. I give President Calderon very high marks for his courage and his commitment. This is a really tough challenge. And these drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency — you know, all of a sudden car bombs show up, which weren’t there before.

So it’s becoming — it’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narcotraffickers control, you know, certain parts of the country — not — significant parts; in Colombia, it got to the point where, you know, more than a third of the country — nearly 40 percent of the country at one time or another was controlled by the insurgents, by FARC.

But it’s going to take a combination of improved institutional capacity and better law enforcement and, where appropriate, military support for that law enforcement, you know, married to political will, to be able to prevent this from spreading and to try to beat it back.

Mexico has capacity, and they’re using that capacity, and they’ve been very willing to take advice. You know, they’re wanting to do as much of it on their own as possible, but we stand ready to help them. But the small countries in Central America do not have that capacity, and the newly inaugurated president of Costa Rica, President Chinchilla, you know, said, we need help and we need a much more vigorous U.S. presence.

So we are working to try to enhance what we have in Central America. We hear the same thing from our Caribbean friends, so we have an initiative, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative. And our relationship is not all about drugs and violence and crime, but unfortunately that often gets the headlines. We’re also working on more economic programs, we’re working on Millennium Challenge grants, we’re working on a lot of other ways of bolstering economies and governments to improve rule of law. But this is on the top of everyone’s mind when they come to speak with us.

And I know that Plan Colombia was controversial. I was just in Colombia, and there were problems and there were mistakes, but it worked. And it was bipartisan, started, you know, in the Clinton administration, continued in the Bush administration. And I think President Santos will try to do everything he can to remedy the problems of the past while continuing to, you know, make progress against the insurgency.

And we need to figure out what are the equivalents for Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. And that’s not easy, because these — you know, you put your finger on it. I mean, those drugs come up through Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, through Central America, southern Mexico, to the border, and we consume them. And those guns — you know, those guns, legal and illegal, keep flooding, along with all of the mayhem — it’s not only guns; it’s weapons, it’s arsenals of all kinds that come south. So I feel a real sense of responsibility to do everything we can. And again, we’re working hard to come up with approaches that will actually deliver.

Vespers

¶ A brief profile of reluctant entrepreneur Tim Waterstone. Alex Clark begins: “A man who went on to sell the company to the firm that had made him redundant, and then bought it back; and who, after apparently parting ways with his bookshops for good, made four separate attempts to gain control of them once again? This strikes me as almost a dictionary definition of an entrepreneur. So what’s the beef?” (Guardian)

His quibble, it turns out, has its basis in good manners. “I can’t bear the self-congratulatory thing of applying it to oneself, really,” he says: softly spoken and courteous, he appears, in tone and bearing, far more like a gentleman publisher than a cut-throat boardroom monster. Indeed, our semantic discussion has been prompted by his description of the bankers whom he met during a deal he was working on a few years ago and who make up a major strand in his new novel, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, an everyday tale of high finance, newspaper dynasties and the world of books. They were, he says, “so awful” that he started jotting down their conversations during meetings, and soon began to form an idea for a fictional parody of them. He was particularly struck by what seemed to him “like this endless drive towards the accumulation of personal wealth”, a motivation at odds, he is at pains to point out, with his own impulses.

“You know, as an entrepreneur, and I hate calling myself an entrepreneur” – here our digression begins – “you don’t do it for the money at all, really you don’t; you’re doing it because you get caught up in an idea and you want that idea to work.” The ultimate achievement, according to Waterstone, is to see your vision realised, often against the odds: almost all entrepreneurs, he thinks, are fighting against received wisdom.

Compline

¶ President Obama has deplored Rev Terry Jones’s plan to burn copies of the Qur’an on Saturday. We wish that the president had done something this exciting before now, but we’ll take what we can get.

“If he’s listening, I just hope he understands that what he’s proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans,” Mr. Obama said in an interview shown Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” referring to Terry Jones, a pastor from Gainesville, Fla.

“As a practical matter, as commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States, I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women in uniform who are in Iraq, who are in Afghanistan,” the president said.

Mr. Obama said that the Koran burning would be a “recruitment bonanza for Al Qaeda” and other terrorist groups looking for people willing to “blow themselves up” in American or European cities.

Have a Look

¶ Eraserhead — in a one-page panel. (HTMLGIANT)

¶ So that’s it! We’re supposed to like and admire Vincent Karthesier! (Well, we do.) (Thanks, Greg X!)

¶ How many points of Helvetica would it take to stretch from the Earth to the Moon? If you have to ask, you can’t apport it. (kottke.org)