Matins

¶ Ellen Moody writes,

Over on facebook, someone told of a long day’s struggle to order, throw away, pack, and generally empty out his parents’ home (possible so as to sell it). What exhausting work emotionally and physically. Well his words reminded me of a moving diary entry in the LRB by August Kleinzhaler where he told of his experience of selling his childhood home.

The Kleinzahler piece dates from last winter, but it’s instantly engaging, so do click through.

Lauds

¶ The prolific director Raoul Walsh (1887-1980) is the subject of an appreciation by Dan Callahan, at The House Next Door. Two films are singled out for the honor of standing aside White Heat, the great Cagney vehicle: Me and My Gal, with Spencer Tracy and Joan Bennett; and Band of Angels, starring Clark Gable and Yvonne de Carlo.

Walsh was half-Irish, and fond of introducing rowdy drinking humor into his films; this humor is always bracing and often directed straight at the camera. Me and My Gal ends with a man’s face filling the screen and howling at us, “Have another drink!” Whereas John Ford’s Irish humor is usually based in a beer-drinking kind of cuteness, Walsh’s hard liquor talk is as lusty and disarming as his love of sex. In Gentleman Jim (1942), he could even make boxing look like a clean “why not?” kind of sport, with Flynn in tights as an aesthetic object of real beauty in the ring. Given a story of mature romantic disillusionment, Walsh was capable of making something like The Strawberry Blonde (1941), which in my memory stands as a masterpiece about growing up, beautifully played by Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Rita Hayworth and Jack Carson; as Walsh himself must have known by this point, the outwardly demure brunette (de Havilland) is usually the real firecracker in bed, not the high-maintenance redhead sexpot (Hayworth). After World War II, and the Flynn war movies covered in Kehr’s DVD review, Walsh wholeheartedly adopted the noir style for his brooding western Pursued (1947) and remade High Sierra as Colorado Territory (1949) with Joel McCrea, which is just as good as the original and even improves on it for a last shot that stands as the ultimate in male/female romantic solidarity.

Prime

¶ “Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds,” cautions Michael Lewis, in Vanity Fair. His truly sensational account of Greek peccadilloes makes Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief seem muted and forgiving. The following extract, taken from the first half of the piece, is itself relatively forgiving.

Where waste ends and theft begins almost doesn’t matter; the one masks and thus enables the other. It’s simply assumed, for instance, that anyone who is working for the government is meant to be bribed. People who go to public health clinics assume they will need to bribe doctors to actually take care of them. Government ministers who have spent their lives in public service emerge from office able to afford multi-million-dollar mansions and two or three country homes. Oddly enough, the financiers in Greece remain more or less beyond reproach. They never ceased to be anything but sleepy old commercial bankers. Virtually alone among Europe’s bankers, they did not buy U.S. subprime-backed bonds, or leverage themselves to the hilt, or pay themselves huge sums of money. The biggest problem the banks had was that they had lent roughly 30 billion euros to the Greek government—where it was stolen or squandered. In Greece the banks didn’t sink the country. The country sank the banks.

Tierce

¶ What’s this? It seems that the leopard can change his spots! And Alan Turing expounded the general principles that make this, and many other pattern shifts, possible.

Turing explained their partnership in terms of a slightly imperialistic analogy involving cannibals and missionaries living on an island. The cannibals (standing in for the activators) can produce more of themselves, but they can also be converted to missionaries (playing the role of inhibitors). The missionaries, being celibate, can only make more missionaries by recruiting cannibals. On a small island, you’d eventually end up with a stable mix of the two. But the people on the island aren’t just standing still. They move about, and the missionaries can do so faster because they have bicycles. This changes things. Cannibals bolster their own numbers through sex, so in the immediate area, their populations grow. Some of these extra cannibals might get converted to missionaries, who would cycle off to further parts of the island. This means that the far reaches of the island become saturated with missionaries, who convert the cannibals there. Close by, cannibals increase their own numbers. Far away, they actually inhibit themselves by producing missionaries. The two molecules on a fish’s skin interact in the same way. The activator reinforces itself at a short distance but further away, it’s blocked by the inhibitor. These simple rules can produce very complicated patterns, and this brilliant Java applet shows you how. Try playing with different speeds and colours to produce cheetah-like spots or fingerprint whorls. You can enter different numbers into the “diffusion constants” boxes to determine how quickly the cannibals and missionaries are moving. Note that you get very different patterns depending on these speeds, and that stable patterns only emerge if the second number is higher (i.e. if the inhibitor spreads faster than the activator).

Sext

¶ Michael Williams (A Continuous Lean) gets invited to a publication party for True Prep, the sequel to/update of The Preppy Handbook, that came out yesterday. He has a much better time than he thought he would — and what could be preppier than that?

When I arrived at Michael’s I didn’t know anyone, so I looked around the room for the person that looked as uncomfortable as I felt and went to talk to him. Before I get into that let me back up, the scene in the room was borderline ridiculous. Everyone was so overly prepped out it was an insane assemblage of pink and green. I was getting nervous as to what I had gotten myself into with all of these crazy preppies. The uncomfortable guy actually worked for the publisher and after a bit of chatting I asked if he could introduce me to the PR so I could say thank you for inviting me. I spoke with the very nice PR lady for a few minutes when she asked if I wanted to meet the author Lisa Birnbach. Wow, I thought. For some reason I never expected to meet her and I have no idea what to ask her. I certainly didn’t want to come off as a super-fan. As I spoke to Lisa about the book and preps and everything else it started to make sense why, after all these years, she is coming out with a follow-up. True Prep has a sense of humor and it is fun to see how some things have changed and how some haven’t. I was flattered to know that Lisa was aware of ACL’s existence and at the same time I felt slightly rude for my initial apprehension towards the book. But that is sort of my thing — change is bad! Though there are a few style related things in the book that I cannot endorse (which will go unnamed here), I have to say that after reading it with the mindset that the book is not meant to be a “part II,” (it is designed to complement the original) I really liked it. I also must admit that I was wrong about Lisa and True Prep. It is a worthy read and money well spent.

Nones

¶ The least we could do: restoring Iraqi antiquities to the country from which they were looted during our misadventure there. Steven Lee Myers reports, in the Times.

The United States has returned 1,046 antiquities since 2003, when looters ransacked buildings across Iraq, including its museums, according to the American Embassy here. For all the international outrage the looting stirred toward the United States and its allies, many of the items were smuggled out of the country before the invasion, often with the connivance of officials in Saddam Hussein’s government, according to archaeological officials here. They have been tracked and seized by the F.B.I., the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and other law enforcement agencies, often working on tips from experts and officials with the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, which stored many of them at its building on Massachusetts Avenue for safekeeping as Iraq remained engulfed in violence. Only a handful of the items returned on Tuesday once belonged to the National Museum. The most prominent is the statue of King Entemena, the oldest known representation of a monarch from the ancient civilizations that once thrived in Mesopotamia. Carved from black diorite, it is 30 inches tall and headless, and inscribed with cuneiform that says it was placed in a temple in Ur, in what is now southern Iraq, to please the god Enlil. It weighs 330 pounds but disappeared from the museum during the looting, only to be seized in a 2006 sting when someone in Syria tried to sell it to an art dealer in New York. Another Sumerian sculpture, a bronze depicting a king named Shulgi, had been shipped by Federal Express from a London dealer to a collector in Connecticut, but was seized at Newark Liberty International Airport. Many such pieces are items that Iraq never knew it had lost.

Vespers

¶ Garth Risk Hallberg asks: if the Internet is supposed to be shrinking our attention apans, what are we doing buying all these long novels that are coming out these days?

Publishers’ willingness to take a chance on a long book circa 2010 may be directly connected to chances taken in the past. The fierce bidding, in 2007, for Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (992 pp), a demanding work in translation, surely owes something to the rapt reception of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (600 pp) and subsequent widespread anticipation for 2666 (912 pp). McSweeney’s may be hoping The Instructions repeats the success of Chris Adrian’s The Children’s Hospital (615 pp). And David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1104 pp) continues to have a remarkable second life on the backlist, which is still the publisher’s bread and butter. Biographical books and articles by David Lipsky and D.T. Max, as well as copious online discussion, sustain interest in the book. A clerk at a local bookstore told me last week that, for the last two months, it’s been flying off the shelves. Indeed, après Jest, doubters may catch a whiff of decadence, or at least self-consciousness, around the efforts of Cohen, Levin, and other candidates for wunderkindency.

(We think that the word is Wunderkinderei.)

Compline

¶ At The Oil Drum, Ugo Bardi argues cogently that science and technology advance more quickly when sparked by prizes than when fed by research grants.

So, it would be thinkable to organize research on innovation in renewables by offering prizes. Say, the government will award 10 million dollars to the first research lab which succeeds in developing a solar cell with a demonstrable EROEI = 50 (about the EROEI of petroleum in the golden days). Or it will award the same 10 million dollars for the first GWh consistently produced by a high altitude wind power system. Maybe the target is too high, and nobody will succeed in getting the prize, but if that happens, it is at no cost for taxpayers. And think how much money the governments could save dismantling the overblown bureaucracy needed for selecting grant applications and checking that the money is spent according to the promises. Now, why is it not done? Well, I think the reason lies in those lines that I just wrote. The main purpose of all bureaucracies is to perpetuate (and enlarge) themselves, so a reform that would get rid of a large number of government bureaucrats is almost inconceivable. Maybe there are other reasons that make it difficult to stimulate research using prizes, but I do know that there are cases in which public money has been used to reward success: it is the case of feed-in tariffs for renewables.

For the record, we believe that an effective and satisfactory way of getting rid of bureaucrats is buying them off — before they reproduce.

Have a Look

¶ The Future Is In Helvetica. (Joe.My.God)

¶ Joshua Marsh: Ten Things. (ARTCAT)

Matins

¶ Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich welcomes us “the worst Labor Day in the memory of most Americans,” and explains why we can no longer count on consumers to spend the economy out of its rut. Not to mention the inequity of our growing income disparity.

Here’s the point. Policies that generate more widely shared prosperity lead to stronger and more sustainable economic growth — and that’s good for everyone.

The rich are better off with a smaller percentage of a fast-growing economy than a larger share of an economy that’s barely moving. That’s the Labor Day lesson we learned decades ago; until we remember it again, we’ll be stuck in the Great Recession.

Lauds

¶ One of the things we love about Felix Salmon is his sense — rare for a financial writer — that money isn’t everything. Sometimes, in fact, it’s completely irrelevant, as here: “It’s a bad idea to regulate the art market.”

The last thing we need is some kind of formal ratification — by an agency of the Federal Reserve, no less — that art is a financial asset. The art market is broken, we all know that — but so long as everybody knows that the market is broken, there’s a limit to how aggrieved they can reasonably become if they go in with the idea of art being some kind of investment, and end up losing money.

The problem with any kind of regulatory framework for art dealers or even for art funds is that it gives them a veneer of legitimacy which they would then use to woo a huge new class of art buyers. The art market is minuscule in relation to more legitimate alternative investment classes, and even a small amount of “asset allocation” out of say old-school hedge funds and into art would create a lot of unnecessary disruption in the art market, mainly benefitting today’s dealers.

It’s much easier if we all just accept that the game is rigged against us, and that the only reason to buy art is to enjoy it. You can’t be ripped off if you’re paying for your own subjective enjoyment of an artwork. If by contrast you want to buy something which you’ll be able to sell at a profit in the future, you shouldn’t be in the art market at all.

¶ Meanwhile, Philip Greenspun has a “Good book for discouraging independent filmmakers.”

Martin provides some useful advice for people who cannot be talked out of a career in independent film, e.g., try to use available light since it means that you can work twice as fast and not pay everyone to stand around while lights are moved. Mostly, however, he provides sobering tales of the difficulties of getting a film produced and seen legally. A chapter is devoted to obtaining music rights, e.g., if an actor absent-mindedly hums a tune while the camera is rolling, the segment must be thrown out or the rights to the tune secured, possibly costing more than $100,000. Your kid can forget being an independent screenwriter; the on-staff Hollywood studio folks will simply steal the ideas since they know they’ll need to go through some rewrites anyway.

Prime

¶ Joshua Brown’s “outliers,” at The Reformed Broker. “I define an outlier as an event that is unlikely but possible.” We have no idea which is the likeliest (or the unlikeliest), but we can’t help thinking that Item Nº 4 would clear the air.

4.  Ballmer is Audi 5000:  He’ll go out like a lamb before this becomes a shareholder revolt thing.  The truth is, he had everything to lose, inheriting the reins when he did with Microsoft ($MSFT) at the very pinnacle of its power.  But Mayor Michael Bloomberg inherited New York City after Rudy Guiliani had ushered in the Big Apple’s Platinum Age and somehow Bloomberg managed to actually improve things.  Ballmer didn’t.  He’s never been in touch with the kids, doesn’t have a particularly impressive vision, is not possessed of much imagination and he’s not a consumer tech guy.  The anti-Steve Jobs will resign and the board will find a consumer-oriented CEO to replace him.  Bill Gates will not be looking to pull a Michael Dell and return to “save the company”; I think he likes his story exactly the way it reads now.

Tierce

¶ At The American Prospect, Chris Mooney reviews a book about industrial polution in the bad old days before the Environmental Protection Act. Guess what? The EPA didn’t put an end to the good old “spill, study, and stall.” Beyond that depressing reflection, Mr Mooney has a very good idea about putting a stop to tendentious, bogus “science.”

There’s no doubt from this saga that we still need strong government regulation: 100 years of experience shows that companies cannot be trusted to regulate themselves. But we can go further. We probably also need more explicit sanctions to prevent science from being cynically used to stall public policy — the research equivalent of filing frivolous motions in a courtroom. The prostitution of science is much too easy. It happens far too often. And at this point, the evidence is overwhelming that it’s a systematic strategy that industry will continue to employ unless there are penalties to be paid.

Sext

¶ Say that you live in London town, and pay a visit to New York City. How do you compare and contrast these immense and amazing metropolises? Our minds may boggle, but James Ward knows what counts. Which city sells the better souvenir pens? Here is the third wing of his tripartite analysis (which Gotham wins).

SCULPTURAL

The sculptural pen is defined by the inclusion of a local landmark or figure recreated in molded plastic perched on top of the pen. Ideally, it helps if the chosen landmark is quite linear in form so as to continue the line of the pen. For this reason, towers and statues are ideal. Beaches or lakes are not really suitable.

New York, of course, has the perfect sculptural pen icon in the form of the Statue of Liberty. It’s almost as if it had been DESIGNED to appear on the top of a souvenir pen (it wasn’t – the injection molding process used to produce the pens hadn’t been invented in 1886 when the statue was presented to America by the people of France). However, there is one flaw in the design of the Statue of Liberty which impacts on its suitability for this type of pen: the torch. When cheaply produced in plastic, the upraised arm can be fragile. In fact, I bought two Statue of Liberty pens during my trip. The flame of the torch snapped off one. The poor lady’s hand snapped off the other.

London doesn’t really have anything like the Statue of Liberty which sits as well on the top of a pen. There’s Big Ben of course, but that looks a bit odd separated from the Houses of Parliament. Nelson’s Column isn’t iconic enough. The London Eye is too round. Tower Bridge is too wide. The Angus Steakhouse on Shaftesbury Avenue apparently isn’t important enough to justify a pen.

Instead, London is forced to rely on its more mundane features for sculptural pens – red telephone boxes (the sort which don’t really exist anymore) and policeman’s helmets. It is a sad state of affairs when, as a country, the best thing we have to celebrate in pen form is a phone box and a tall hat.

Nones

¶ At The Nation, Robert Dreyfuss looks into the labor movement in China — and the help that it’s getting from Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union. (via  Marginal Revolution)  

That’s why Andy Stern’s efforts in China, despite the criticism, seem so valuable. “I get in trouble on Glenn Beck saying, ‘Workers of the world unite!’ It’s not just a slogan,” Stern says. It’s critical, he adds, for US and Chinese workers to see each other as allies, and he argues that efforts such as his can help shift the ACFTU in a direction that will make it much more representative of its hundreds of millions of members. “There’s a big evolution going on,” says Stern. “And to me, the question is, Where does the union end up, not where it started.” Like Crothall, Stern emphasizes that it isn’t just workers who want the ACFTU to change the way it operates. “The government is pushing them to transform, too.”

[snip]

In the end, however, there is probably very little that the United States can do to change China’s trajectory. Few, if any, of the economic measures suggested to force China to make changes are likely to work, at least not without backfiring and causing massive dislocation in the United States as well. “Any attempt to get tough with the Chinese would also bite us in the ass,” says Left Business Observer‘s Henwood. If a trade war begins to develop, China can, among other things, wield its vast holdings of dollars and US Treasury bills as a weapon and can look elsewhere for imports that it now buys from the United States. Sophie Richardson of Human Rights Watch says the United States ought to place democratization and human rights far higher on its agenda, even in meetings on other topics, without fear that China will be insulted: “There are all sorts of ways of saying it in meetings between the two countries without it being a giant Fuck you! in the middle of the meeting.” So far, President Obama seems to have sidetracked human rights.

The United States may have little choice but to get used to the fact that China is coming into its own. If that’s the case, though, we may be able to use the Chinese challenge to make sweeping changes in the way America does business at home. “It isn’t just China’s rise, which is tectonic, but it’s our own financial, political and cultural collapse that is cause for even more consternation,” says Orville Schell. “We need to find ways to accommodate China, and to influence it. And it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will be easy, or even peaceable.”

Vespers

¶ A much-discussed book of the moment — a sort of indie Freedom, if you will —is Tom McCarthy’s C. Zachary Adam Cohen’s enthusiastic review, at Slant, bears out our conviction that a favorable review is the most informative kind. We can tell from Mr Cohen’s commentary that C is not for us.  

The concluding section of the novel takes place in Egypt as the British deal with the loss of their colony, indeed their whole empire. And yet Serge is sent as a kind of spy to determine the best location for communication masts to be erected so as to ensure the uninterrupted communication of an empire on the wane. It’s the protuberance of communication lines that mirrors the recession of an empire.

Words, letters, symbols, images, motifs. These constitute the essence of McCarthy’s novel, and as he has chosen to set this novel amid the turn of the century, Serge’s life parallels the birth and development of wireless communications. McCarthy must have known this theme would resonate with today’s audience, beset as we are from all angles by instant, real-time communication technology. We must know that many of our messages simply get lost in the ether. One gets the sense reading C that McCarthy wanted to illustrate how even the most scientific and reasonable of pursuits contains elements that defy our understanding. There is, even in the most progressive of technologies, magic at hand. And this magic is buried deep within the novel, often so full and thick of thematic sorcery, that it threatens to overwhelm the reader.

¶ We kid you not: the New York City Department of Sanitation has its own resident sociologist, Robin Nagle. (No, we didn’t know, either.) The Believer’s Alex Carp talks with Ms Nagle about the highs and lows of garbage collection. (The highs involve the cognitive issue of “invisibilization.”)

BLVR: You’ve also written about how sanitation workers commented on how they get to know a block’s trash on their route over time, down to the specific households. I was wondering if this was at all surprising, or useful, for you in regard to your training in anthropology and social science, which aim to coax out subtle information but in very different ways.

RN: It’s just archaeology. But it’s archaeology in the moment, very temporary, nothing formal. It’s a folk archaeology of contemporary household trash on the curb.

It takes time, because you don’t get a steady route, necessarily, until you have some seniority. But senior men and women who’ve been on the job for a while, who’ve had the same route for a long time, they know. I’ve heard stories of a guy who watched a family: watched a couple marry, move into this building where he picked up, and they had a child. The child came to know him. He watched her grow up. He watched her go to college. He watched her have children of her own. And they became buddies over time. And then when he retired, she was heartbroken. It was a nice little vignette.

We assume when we put our garbage in the bag—especially if, you know, it’s a black bag, usually, or a green bag, we can’t see what’s inside. We don’t want people to see what’s inside. How embarrassing! But those bags break. Or it’s just in a bin and then it’s tipped and all the contents spill. And sure, you can read it. Over time, if you’re doing that same set of blocks for ten years, you will be able to give a pretty savvy account of what’s happened there across that decade.

Have a Look

¶ Rough Seas; Major Unseaworthiness.  Have a drink. (Joe.My.God) 

¶ Casa Kike. (BLDGBLOG)

Matins

¶ Sarah Idzik’s pieces at The Awl about adoption — Sarah herself was born in Korea prior to adoption by an American family living outside of Pittsburgh — is shaping up to be a must-read report on a fact of life that most Americans would prefer to overlook: assimilation into our society doesn’t just happen all by itself. And adoptees are often left with the uncomfortable recognition that no one is to blame for their sense of displacement.

Maybe it’s the idealism of American society that causes us to harbor the implicit belief that adoptees have been assimilated so thoroughly that they won’t have identity issues twenty years or more down the line. And many adoptees don’t feel that their situation is that complex—and others don’t register any complexity until, say, a fellow adoptee comes around asking a bunch of questions.

The phenomenon of assimilation contributed to Barry choosing the term “domesticated” as the best way to describe the Korean-American adoptee experience, though he recognizes how bad it sounds. “I can’t muster any hostility towards my parents, the adoption system, America, or anyone else,” he said. “Everyone’s intentions were altruistic, and I really can’t complain about the outcome. It’s just so frustrating.” He acknowledged that compared to the struggles of other ethnic and racial groups in the U.S., the less clearly defined problems of adoptees may seem “minor or superficial,” but even this doubt seems to be the consequence of the blueprint-less nature of the adoptee experience. There are no recent historical precedents with which to compare or validate an individual’s feelings.

In many foreign countries, including South Korea, adoption—even domestic adoption—is very rarely discussed because of the shame attributed to the act. In cultures that place high value on family bloodlines, adoption is frequently hidden and kept secret. In the U.S., it’s often the opposite. Currently we try to embrace nontraditional families so fully that adoptees become “invisible” in an entirely different way. The impulse to strenuously treat everyone equally can sometimes leave no room for actual discussion.

Lauds

¶ The superb Toni Bentley writes about the first great American ballet, set to music by Tchaikovsky that was not intended for the stage: George Balanchine’s Serenade. (Wall Street Journal; via  Arts Journal)

In this single early work, remarkably, Balanchine made a dance that would become the Rosetta Stone for a new kind of dancer, the American classical dancer. He brought a kind of democracy into the hierarchical land of ballet classicism, lifting it from its dusty 19th-century splendor, and created, simultaneously, an aristocracy for American dancers who had none. But he had plenty, having been a subject, as a child in St. Petersburg, of the last Czar in Russian history. And he was willing to impart his Imperial heritage. In “Serenade” all the female dancers are dressed identically. They are all women—one woman, finding her place among others and her place alone. As a young dancer for Balanchine, I was among them.

As the heavy gold curtain rises at the start of “Serenade,” 17 girl dancers in long, pale-blue gowns are arranged in two adjoining diamonds, tethered estrogen. We do not move, grip gravity, feet parallel, pointe shoes suctioned together side by side, head tilted to the right. The right arm is lifted to the side in a soft diagonal, palm facing outward, fingers extending separately, upwardly, shielding as if from some lunar light. This is the first diagonal in “Serenade,” a ballet brimming with that merging line: This is female terrain.

Prime

¶  At The Baseline Scenario, Peter Boone and Simon Johnson discuss the Irish debt crisis that is looming rather horribly at the moment. Their account of the bailout of Irish banks reminds us that the United States is not the only developed nation in which powerful people are overseeing the transfer of public wealth into private pockets — or, as here, converting private debts into public liabilities.

Ireland had more prudent choices. It could have cut the budget deficit while also acknowledging insolvency and requiring creditors to share some of the burdens. But a strong lobby of real estate developers, the investors who bought banks’ bonds and politicians with links to the failed developments (and their bankers) prefer that taxpayers rather than creditors pay. The European Central Bank, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund share some responsibility; they advocate these unlikely programs in order that European and global banks, which provided the funds to the Irish banks, do not suffer losses from such bad lending decisions.

The Irish government plan is – with good reason – highly unpopular, but the coalition of interests in its favor seems strong enough to ensure that it will proceed, at least until it either succeeds and growth recovers, or ends in complete failure with default of banks or the nation itself.

Under the current program, we estimate each Irish family of four will be liable for 200,000 euros in public debt by 2015. There are only 73,000 children born into the country each year, and these children will be paying off debts for decades to come – as well as needing to accept much greater austerity than has already been implemented. There is no doubt that social welfare systems, health care and education spending will decline sharply.

Tierce

¶ Peter Smith reconsiders the “nitrite scare” — and notes, in passing, that many “nitrite-free” foods are still loaded with naturally-occurring nitrites. (Good)

At least, they’re willing to pay for the illusion of “nitrate-free.” So when you pick up a few links of organic hot dogs or a pound of natural, uncured bacon for the Labor Day festivities, chances are the meat label will emphasize “no nitrates or nitrites.” But all that means is that no nitrate salts have been added. The idea that there are no nitrates at all is simply not true.

To replace the pure chemical nitrites of old, many organic meat producers have been substituting celery juice or a powdered extract. Celery is one of many leafy green vegetables with naturally occurring nitrates—about 1,103 parts per million in the fresh plant—so these labeling claims (while technically correct) can seem misleading. It’s just another instance of the organic food industry accidentally replicating what it set out to oppose. Earlier this year, Cook’s Illustrated tested different types of bacon and found that two brands of “nitrate-free” bacon had significantly more nitrites than their conventional counterpart. “If you want to avoid these compounds,”  they wrote, “you’ll have to avoid bacon—and any other processed meats containing celery juice—altogether.”

It’s all part of lasting legacy of the nitrite scare, which came to a head in 1978 when Paul Newberne, an MIT researcher began poring over thousands of slides documenting the effects of nitrite-rich diets in rats. According to The Washington Post (in a excellent piece called “The Day Bacon Was Declared Poison” that isn’t online), Newberne didn’t find much initially, but after carefully reviewing the data, he dropped his bombshell: Nitrites cause cancer. The Food and Drug Administration’s proposed a ban. The ban failed. The Nation said represented a “new era in which science abdicates its primary responsibility to protect the health of the public in favor of deregulation.” And from then on, meat producers went on processing meats in much the same way they have for 3,000 years.

Sext

¶ Dustin Kurtz is a very nice guy (we’ve met!), but he has the damnedest time trying to articulate his dislike of that big book that everybody’s talking about. But not to worry: this is only the first part of “Two McNally Jackson Booksellers Argue About Jonathan Franzen’s ‘Freedom’.”

Dustin: With Franzen it comes out in a flat omniscient third that just sort of smears everyone and everything with his clunky segue phrasing.

Sam: I was re-reading some last night, and the first line of every chapter (saving the Patty chapters, but probably even those) could be: “Did you hear?”

Dustin: But I don’t even dislike that about him.

Sam: You do dislike something. I still have no idea what it is.

Dustin: He’s very good at the floating narrator who also gives us hints of the attitudes, if not as much the voice, of many characters in quick succession.

Sam: Free indirect discourse! My English degree is worth something. He’s very, very good at that.

Dustin: Easy with that second very. He’s okay.

Sam: I’m still trying to figure what you don’t like!

Dustin: The writing. So, the book.

Nones

¶ It’s possible that we like Uwe Buse’s account of Munich Re, the world’s largest re-insurer, because it sparkles with action-movie flash. (Spiegel Online; via Real Clear World)

The databases include information about disasters that have already taken place as well as those that are just beginning or could occur in the future. They include data on every earthquake and every trembling of the earth’s crust, on the height of ocean waves, air and water temperatures, and on the direction and speed of currents. Reports on glacier melting rates in the Himalayas and snowfall in the Arctic and Antarctic are also documented. New knowledge from the fields of nanotechnology, waste incineration, oil production, shipbuilding, reproduction and transplantation medicine is entered into Munich Re’s computers. The databases also contain studies by the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Chinese Health Ministry and tumor centers in Bavaria, as well as new information on piracy off the coast of Somalia, fluctuations in the European power grid and the worrisome eating habits of the Arab middle class in the Persian Gulf States.

An endless supply of data, probably unparalleled in its breadth and depth, flows from every continent to a cluster of buildings on the edge of the English Garden in Munich. An encyclopedia of life, its dangers, its injustices, its coincidences, is being assembled there. There is probably no other place on Earth where the risks of the modern world are being studied more intensively and comprehensively than at the headquarters of Munich Re, the world’s risk center.

Munich Re insures insurance companies. It takes on risks that are too big for insurance giants like Germany’s Allianz or Gothaer. Together with its subsidiaries, the company employs about 47,000 people on all continents, and more than a quarter of the world’s population, or about 2 billion people, are indirectly insured through the company. The decisions these people make, the accidents they have, the circumstances of their birth and death, all of this information is transmitted to Munich, where data mining methods are used to examine the information, analyze it and constantly link it to other circumstances. The goal is to find patterns within chaos and probabilities in the improbable.

How great is the risk that a freighter accident in Germany’s Midland Canal will cause a power outage in Italy? What might it cost to insure the entire supply chain of an international automobile manufacturer, a total of 4,000 companies scattered across all continents, against every conceivable delivery problem, from strikes to volcanic eruptions? These are the sorts of questions researchers at Munich Re address. Their task is to assess the risks as accurately as possible, because the level of risk determines how often a loss can occur, and the frequency of losses, or claims, determines the amount of the premium. For instance, if a given house is at risk of being flooded by a river once a year, the insurance premium will correspond to the value of the house.

Vespers

¶ The Rumpus has been running a series of personal essays in which writers reflect on the porousness of life and art. We’re particularly taken by the latest entry, Nº 19, in which Edward Schwarzschild muses richly, and never quite as creepily as he might (part of the thrill of the piece, really), on the ways in which his early middle age has touched upon that of fellow writer Nick Flynn.

Elisa and I have been together for five years and we have a fourteen-month-old son, and though we want nothing more than to be good partners and good parents, we sometimes fail. Failing, of course, is to be expected. We simply need, as Beckett says, to fail better. But even that can feel elusive.

The other night we fought and I walked alone to this office in the dark. My plan was to sleep on the office couch and hope the morning would bring some clarity.

A copy of Nick Flynn’s The Ticking Is the Bomb is in my backpack. Reading Nick Flynn has helped me through moments like this before. Crossing paths with him hasn’t hurt, either. I suppose this essay is my way of trying to thank him. I like to believe he’ll understand.

Compline

¶ Sheril Kirshenbaum’s initially dismaying account of sexual harrassment at Duke University goes on, thank goodness, to remind us that the struggle for gender equality and the dismantling of male patriarchy are top priorities. (The Intersection)

If women have increased social power (both politically and economically) they would be better able to resist male sexual coercion due to stronger networks of social support. At the same time this increased social power would be expected to help create a change in male culture that would influence how young men interact with women when trying to gain sexual access. While specific policies that protect women from coercion and exploitation remain important, what we’re ultimately after is social change. While we work on promoting gender parity both politically and economically we should also follow the example of our baboon cousins and model the way that men should interact with women. This means that more men should take issues of women’s rights seriously so that younger men who look up to them will follow in turn.

This is the moral of the story with Dr. Leda and her own case of sexual coercion. Students, both male and female, were outraged by her story and pelted her department with e-mails and phone calls insisting that she be granted tenure. I’m pleased to say that the department was sufficiently embarrassed by the incident to conduct a review of her mid-tenure application only to find that she was not at fault for the criticisms contained in their report. However, as for the would-be swan who thought that his power in the department offered him impunity to engage in sexual blackmail, he remains a senior member of the Duke faculty. At this point in our history such abuses remain possible, but how much longer depends on each generation’s decision whether or not sexual coercion should be a thing of the past.

Have a Look

¶ Clothes on Film (via MetaFilter)

¶ “Don’t Forget to Smile When You Serve Cold Drinks.” (via The Rumpus)

The next edition of The Daily Office will appear on Tuesday, 7 September 2010.

Matins

¶ Just in case you were taking consciousness for granted: Daniel Dennett has called it “the last surviving mystery,” and a glance at the Quantum Consciousness theory of Roger Penrose and Stuart Hamerhoff may leave you un-demystified. (Big Think; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Twelve years ago, Cal Tech professors Christof Koch and Francis Crick put forward the idea that consciousness resides in the brain’s prefrontal cortex; they described where in the brain we experience things when we experience them—but not why we do. In 2009, physicist Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hamerhoff advanced a “quantum mind theory” that took Koch and Crick’s ideas to a deeper, cellular level, suggesting that consciousness is a result of quantum mechanics, with microtubules inside the brain working as computing elements in a system they call “orchestrated objective reduction.” The theory suggests that human consciousness is a result of the wave functions of quantum particles collapsing once they reach specific energy levels.  Hamerhoff’s blog, Quantum Consciousness, describes this theory in depth, and details how he and Penrose believe the brain’s neural networks and cells process information that results in consciousness. Critics of the quantum mind theory contend that consciousness is hardly demystified by relating the brain to the rarefied realm of subatomic physics.

Lauds

¶ At the Guardian, Alistair Smith casts a spotlight on the boom in cruise ship theatre productions. (via Marginal Revolution)

And while you’re unlikely to see Chekhov on the high seas, some of the smaller lines do stage a little drama – Crystal Cruises has previously put on one-woman shows by Lynn Redgrave and Susannah York. There is huge scope for employment for people in the theatre industry on cruise lines and because it’s a profit-making industry – the amount these ships take on their bars alone is quite staggering – the number of openings is steadily growing.

Celebrity, for example, is planning to launch two more of its gigantic luxury ships, each with 1,150-seat theatres and jobs for more than 50 entertainers over the next couple of years. People can be a bit sniffy about working on cruise ships and, to be fair, the performers I spoke to on Celebrity admitted the first time they accepted work on a cruise, they thought it would just be filling in between other jobs. But, they came to love it and now see it as a long-term career choice.

One dancer told me: “I always tell my friends, yes, I could be in the West End, but in the West End I’d be doing the same show for six months, just getting enough money together to live, go to auditions and take classes, and I’m not going to save any money from it. Right now, I’m doing amazing shows, getting free training, saving a lot of money [accommodation is free] and seeing the world.”

Prime

¶ Although he writes as though that detox tea that he has been drinking has fermented, possibly, what we like about Philip’s gaze into the future of economics is the idea that we’re still missing some very important pieces of the puzzle — that is, we don’t know what we’re doing. (Weakonomics)

For centuries we tried to defy the law of gravity without really understanding it. I’m sure there were hundreds of thousands of different experiments that failed miserably. But each experiment lasted as long as it took gravity to bring you back to earth. You can’t experiment with economics, and each attempt takes decades to analyze before any consensus can be reached. Even then, consensus is a relative term. There still isn’t agreement on the Great Depression.

In this respect economics is harder than physics. We’ve learned how to work around gravity by using other laws such as lift (planes), molecules lighter than air (balloons), and simply blasting through it (rockets). We’re to the point with gravity that the only thing holding us back (yeah, pun intended) are the resources to develop and expand on the existing knowledge. In other words we could probably get flying cars real quick if we put all our research money into it. There’s a threshold you cross that goes from “figuring it out” to “ah ha, now let’s run with it”. That probably happened with gravity around 1900 in Kitty Hawk NC, and you can see how far we’ve come since then.

In economics, we’re still strapping wings to our arms and jumping off cliffs. That’s because we’re simply trying to repeat what we see in nature. We seem to be better off with low unemployment, so let’s try to keep unemployment low.  Bird fly by flapping wings, so let’s make some wings and flap.  To our 16th century brains, there’s no other way to do it. I don’t even think we’re to the Isaac Newton level of understanding with economics, much less the Wright Brothers.

As my Indian tea buzz wore off, I imagined two futures for economics. Not two different futures, just that one comes first and then the other builds upon the first. They’re both best explained again within the concepts of gravity.

Tierce

¶ Intensive analysis of Sudanese bones dating from (roughly) the late Roman Empire reveals tetracycline saturation, leading scientiest to infer that not only that the local beer was antibiotic but that the brewers knew what they were doing. Jess McNally reports, in Wired Science.

They must have known how to propagate the beer because they were doing it to make wine, Nelson says. There was also so much of it in their bones that it is near impossible that the tetracycline-laced beer was a fluke event.

To make sure that making the antibiotic beer was possible, Armelagos had his graduate students give it a try.

“What they were making wasn’t like a Bud Light but a cereal gruel,” Armelagos said. “My students said that it was ‘not bad,’ but it is like a sour porridge substance. The ancient people would have drained the liquid off and also eaten the gruel.”

Sext

¶ It’s that kind of day: we’re in deep sympathy with The Awl‘s Alex Balk, who fell into the WikiHole of his quest for the truth about Ellen Pompeo’s polydactylism. (And Ellen Pompeo would be — ? Oh.)

I dejectedly clicked through the citation to find the ultimate proof that would shatter my belief that we live in a world where Ellen Pompeo has the normal allotment of podial appendages. As it happens, the source for the six-toed assertion turned out to be… wait for it… the very Daily Mail piece that suggested her extravagance of foot fingers in the first place.

Someone out there wanted me to think that Ellen Pompeo had six toes, but they didn’t understand that I wasn’t going to give up that easy. Not with Google on my side.

I’ve been to some dark places in my time, and I’ve learned some things that no man should ever know, but what I found when I started searching for “ellen pompeo barefoot toes” rocked me to my core. I’ve seen images that even the filthiest fetishists would vomit at. If the government ever searches my computer I’m sure there are now pictures in it that will get me sent to prison. For life.

But I also found wikiFeet, “a free collaborative site featuring Celebrity-Feet pictures. It is Probably the largest celebrity feet database EVER!!”

(I’ll give you a moment.)

Nones

¶ Dexter Filkins reports on the run on Kabul Bank, brought by cronyism to the brink of collapse. (NYT)

Most Afghans do not keep their money in the banking system, and Kabul Bank is tiny by international standards. But creating a credible and stable banking system is an important goal of the American-led effort in the country, which is seeking to help Afghanistan develop a modern economy.

Kabul Bank, one of the biggest private financial institutions that sprang up after the fall of the Taliban, stands at the very center of Afghanistan’s political and economic elite. A brother of Mr. Karzai, Mahmoud, is a major shareholder, as is Haseen Fahim, the brother of the country’s vice president. The bank lent Mr. Fahim, a prominent businessman, as much as $100 million, officials say.

The bank helped finance President Karzai’s re-election campaign last year, giving him as much as $14 million, according to former senior Afghan officials. Mr. Karzai, in turn, chose the bank to administer much of its payroll, which Mr. Frozi desribed as one of the bank’s most lucrative fields of business.

Afghan and American regulators say that it is these very connections that shielded the bank from official scrutiny for so long.

Felix Salmon all but chortles at the “no worries” announcement by the Afghan president’s brother, an owner of the bank who’s speaking from a bank-owned villa in Dubai.

Vespers

¶ Scott Esposito applies Clay Shirky’s distinction between writers and authors to The Shallows, and concludes that Nicholas Carr is the first but not the second. It’s ironic, in a sour sort of way, that a book bemoaning the deleterious effects of the Internet should betray infection by them. (Conversational Reading)

If you try searching The Shallows for proof of the claim that scanning is now “our preferred way of gathering and making sense of information of all sorts,” you will do so in vain, other than to find that some Rhodes Scholar is anti-book.

The Shallows is full of unconvincing claims such as that. I am simply not convinced that we’ve exchanged book-style reading for Internet-style reading, and nor am I convinced that such an exchange is as pivotal as Carr wants to argue. Maybe in Carr’s mind that is the case (he includes an epilogue where he writes, without irony, about how he had to move into the woods away from the Internet just to be able to complete writing The Shallows). But, 1) I don’t think the change is near as pivotal as Carr asserts, and 2) certainly there are other major historic trends that must be taken into account in addition to the shift from books to Internet.

After reading The Shallows, I have to say that I think I’d like Nicholas Carr as a person. He certainly means well in writing this book, and he comes across as sincere. I share his fears of a world that may one day skim more than read, and I’d say we’re both fighting for the same side. To the extent that The Shallows will help convince Internet junkies and iPhone tweakers to put down their devices for a while, it is probably a good thing. But it remains a deeply dissatisfying book on a topic that is still awaiting someone who can truly interpret it for us.

Compline

¶ Chinese rock — how’s that for an oxymoron? “This is not a society of rebels.” The Telegraph‘s Malcolm More chats with impresario Archie Hamilton.

Meanwhile, the emergence of Chinese bands has been limited by the absence of any real market for music. Chinese fans download music for free, and rarely have the money to pay for gigs, for drinks, or even a taxi home. Splitworks lost “a ton of money” on the Yue Festival, Mr Hamilton admits.

Kevin Fritz, the director of Wasted Orient, a documentary about Chinese rock, says: “It’s not glamorous. It’s filthy. It’s filled with despair. It’s very unwanted in that society and is shown in its citizens’ apathetic response to it.”

Take-away for would be promoters:

The key piece of advice for entrepreneurs, says Mr Hamilton, is to remember that the Chinese begin negotiations only after they have signed a contract. “We booked the Shanghai Theatre for Sonic Youth in 2007, and they seemed happy with a fee of 40,000 renminbi (£4,000) for the rent of the venue. So we started the marketing, and the wheels were turning, and we had a contract with the band, so we couldn’t back out. Then they came to us with a demand for 350 seats ‘for government’ out of our 1,600. We gave it to them. A week later they asked us for 20pc of the total, sold-out, gross, in advance as an extra fee. That was before we had sold any tickets,” he says.

Eventually the gig sold out, bar 120 tickets. Could Splitworks use the box office to sell those on the night? “Certainly, they said, for another 20pc.” He laughs: “So you know we lost a bit of money, but we had a great time and the show was awesome.”

Have a Look

¶ “Fightin’ iRish: Notre Dame Class Switches to iPads.” (Good)

¶ secondome. (Design Sponge)

Matins

¶ Only yesterday, we heard for the first time of Mike Rose, whose books about intelligence and education (and the disconnect between them) promise to appear in our reading pile PDQ; now, today, we encounter a blog about apparel manufactoring in particular and the “sustainable factory floor” in particular, Kathleen Fasanella’s Fashion-Incubator. Adverted to this Web log for designer entrepreneurs by the tirely Tyler Cowen, we fastened with great interest on this discussion of the alarming and fundamentally bogus split between “knowledge workers” and worker workers. Complete with references to Mike Rose!

We have a schizophrenic attitude about manufacturing in the US. If we’re not thinking it’s horrible, on the other hand, when we find domestic producers, we celebrate them as some kind of hero, that they are unusual and made of more special stuff than we are. I’m telling you I know they are not. They are no different from you, their sources of information are no different from yours. The only difference I can see is that they don’t think manufacturing is beneath them; manufacturing excites them; they work hard at it. F-I visitors often send me inspiring articles about such and such company producing domestically but I often can’t write about them because I can’t separate what I know directly versus what’s been published in a newspaper or appears in a video -and then it annoys me that some of the facts in the story are wrong and I can’t correct it without betraying confidences.

Grace sent me a link to an interview called The Meaning of Intelligence featuring educator Mike Rose, author of  Lives on the Boundary. Mike could tell you this story both ways. Due to an error in processing his high school test results, he was shunted into remedial classes deemed more appropriate to his IQ. He has a lot to say about the presumed intelligence of workers. He’s probably the nation’s best known advocate for respecting and encouraging education among tradesmen and factory workers. Mike also says that tradesmen and workers harbor deprecatory impressions of the presumed intelligence of college graduates that are likewise dysfunctional with the end result of disrespect between the two camps. I don’t know where the truth of it lies. I only know that mutual disrespect gets us nowhere and if you propose to assume the role of leadership in starting a manufacturing enterprise, it becomes your responsibility to breach and repair the impasse. But you can’t get there by denying your role in the affair because you find manufacturing repugnant to the extent that you deny you’re a manufacturer even though the law says you are. Denial is nothing if not repudiation and distancing.

Lauds

¶ Nige responds to the news that Kazuo Ishiguro’s best-known novel, The Remains of the Day, is being adapted for the musical theatre. We are in complete accord with his dismay.

The mind initially boggles at the prospect, but then musicals aren’t what they were (more’s the pity) in terms of either story or music. With modern ‘serious’ musicals (yes I mean you, Stephen ‘no tunes’ Sondheim) nothing happens, and you’re likely to leave the theatre humming the programme notes rather than the dreary up-and-down-the-scale recitative that passes for song (naturally I speak from a position of near total ignorance here – c’est mon metier). So, as neither happy-ending storyline nor singalong tunes nor showstoppers are required, almost anything could be grist to the musical mill. Ishiguro’s own The Unconsoled could make a terrific night out at the theatre, don’t you think?

Prime

¶ In a wittily-titled entry, “Legends of the Fall,” Joshua Brown deconstructs the swarm of financial pieces that presume to posit seasonal doom based on historical indicators &c. Eyewash, cries Mr Brown. What he says for investors goes for us onlookers as well.

4.  But wait! – About halfway through the post which has just given you all the historical reasons you should just blow your brains out rather than be invested, a White Knight shall come galloping up over the crest of the hill, banners aflutter, with a reason to live, dammit!  The White Knight will be the Chief Investment whatever at an asset-gathering operation whose prima facie mission is to keep you invested, read his commentary accordingly.

5.  The non-conclusion – the last sentence will be exactly the evidence you need to tell you that you’ve just read something with almost zero value to anyone other than Scottrade, who have had the 1 minute-and-15 second opportunity to flash banner ads at you like a 42nd Street vagrant.

Tierce

¶ Here’s a story to chill if not kill the idea that natural ills can be vanquished with genuine once-and-for-all finality. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the cessation of smallpox vaccination 20 years ago opened the door to monkeypox — a not unforeseen development. If you want to see what monkeypox looks like, click here. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

Monkeypox is spread by animals including squirrels and, fairly obviously, monkeys. As humans encroach upon the DRC’s tropical rainforests, the risk of being exposed to an infected carrier grows. Indeed, Rimoin found that the odds of contracting monkeypox were higher for people living near forested areas, and for men. As civil strife continues to affect the DRC, locals are being forced to rely more on hunting to get enough food and that brings men in close contact with furry viral reservoirs.

It’s an emerging threat, but Rimoin isn’t calling for smallpox vaccination to resume. Doing so would be logistically difficult in an area where even collecting data can be fraught. It might be better to take a more targeted approach, vaccinating only health workers who treat infected patients, and people who come into frequent contact with animal carriers. It may also be worth educating local people about the dangers of handling carrier species and the benefits of isolating people who show the very obvious symptoms, until they can be treated.

Sext

¶ New boy in town, “sleight of mind” artist Matthew Michael Cooper makes a big boo-boo mistake (from which he is not shielded by interviewer or editor, and in response to a question out of left field), but he responds well to correction in the comments. New York makes people better people!

What’s your opinion of the Ground Zero Mosque?

I’m certainly against it, not because I don’t subscribe to any religion, but because I think the best response is to rebuild the towers in their entirety. We have to continue with the whole business as usual thing. It’s the only way we can demonstrate our strength as a nation.

In the comments, Mr Cooper apologizes.

As much as it pains me to realize my own ignorance, nothing delights me more than to be enlightened. My thoughts were clearly under false pretenses, which made linernotesdannys remark quite accurate I will admit.
Please do forgive the error, and thank you for the help. I will do my best to grow into a better New Yorker.

Nones

¶ Once upon a time, colonial powers would have dreamed of doing what China is doing, in the way of running railroads into Southeast Asia. China, which still calls itself the Central Nation, is probably untroubled by Western-style pricks of conscience. (China Post; via Real Clear Nation)

The standard-gauge is 1.435 meters wide, compared to Thailand’s existing one-meter tracks. The proposal will herald a new era of rail development in the country. In the next stage, the Nong Khai-Bangkok route will be linked with the same-size track in Laos before crossing into southern China to join Beijing’s national high-speed train network. From Bangkok, the route will be further extended to Thailand’s southern region. In the following stages, China hopes the network will reach Malaysia and Singapore.

As the world’s second largest economy since overtaking Japan in the second quarter of this year, China has grand designs for its high-speed railway diplomacy. Besides Southeast Asia, the Chinese plan to export technology to other parts of the continent, including Central Asia.

Vespers

¶ Lizzie Skurnick does a bang-up job of highlighting the comical parallels — sure to be savored no more richly than by the author himself — between the media hoo-ha already surrounding Freedom, the Jonathan Franzen book that came out, officially, only yesterday, and the awkward scrutiny that’s brought to bear on the novel’s characters, all of them “frequently undone by how poorly their public selves match their private desires.”

These are people defined not by their public selves but by the pettiness, chaos, and squalor of their interior ones. Sure, the novel takes us everywhere—from trips to buy rusty munitions in Paraguay, to music-festival campaigns against population explosion around the country, to mountaintop clearing to create bird sanctuaries, to unsatisfying artistic careers in Brooklyn—generally signs a novelist has lost the thread.

But these forays are purely incidental, as if Franzen spun a globe with no particular goal in mind. For instance, Joey’s trip to Paraguay to buy rusty munitions isn’t important because it’s about Iraq. It’s important because that’s where he digs through his own shit to find the wedding ring he’s inadvertently swallowed before the flight, on a trip where he plans and abandons a sleazy affair. It’s an apt metaphor: in Freedom, Joey and each character seek only the slim circlet of truth hidden in their own moral waste.

So while it’s probably annoying to Franzen that his novel’s launch has been occluded, yet again, by an unrelated media frenzy, it’s also refreshing. Freedom’s characters also found their interior motivations revealed at odd, inappropriate moments. The cultural tsunami provoked by Franzen’s Time magazine cover, too, has apparently been lying in wait for some time.

Compline

¶ George Packer marks the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the mission that has achieved nothing in over seven years. (Interesting Times)

Matins

¶ Much as we liked James Surowiecki’s column in this week’s New Yorker, “Are You Being Served?,” we wish that it were a tad more penetrating. Take the following incontestable observation:

For a start, most companies have a split personality when it comes to customers. On the one hand, C.E.O.s routinely describe service as essential to success, and they are well aware that, thanks to the Internet, bad service can now inflict far more damage than before; the old maxim was that someone who had a bad experience in your store would tell ten people, but these days it’s more like thousands or even, as in Carroll’s case, millions. On the other hand, customer service is a classic example of what businessmen call a “cost center”—a division that piles up expenses without bringing in revenue—and most companies see it as tangential to their core business, something they have to do rather than something they want to do. Although some unhappy customers complain, most don’t—one study suggests that only six per cent of dissatisfied customers file a complaint—and it’s tricky to quantify the impact of good service. So when companies are looking for places to cut costs it’s easy to justify trimming service staff, or outsourcing. The recession has aggravated the problem, as companies have tried to cut whatever they could—the airlines, for instance, have trimmed payrolls by sixteen per cent since 2007—but even in more prosperous times there was a relentless emphasis on doing more with less. That’s how you end up with overworked flight attendants, neglected passengers, and collective misery.

It seems pretty clear to us that “most companies have a split personality when it comes to” human beings. And this is only natural: the modern company, boosted by the extraordinary leaps in productivity that were realized by the Industrial Revolution, has always sought to employ as few human beings as possible. It is for the machines to do the work; in an ideal world, machines can run the factory as well. And who were the customers of large companies? Other companies. It is difficult to imagine, but until the Second World War, the different kinds of mass produced goods intended for the general public could all be sold through a few catalogues and some not-very-large stores.

“The Consumer Society” has been, by and large, a nighmare for the modern company. And, in the everlasting fashion of modern companies, it has simply passed on the headache of that nightmare (the cost of doing business) to customers and employees alike.

Lauds

¶ Anisse Gross begins her interview with the incredible kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson with what might be the stickiest question that one could ask: what distinguishes Ganson’s constructions from amusing toys? Be sure sure to click through to The Rumpus and enjoy the YouTube clips of Ganson’s art.

The Rumpus: I was thinking about something Hegel wrote about truth and the way truth impresses itself upon our consciousness and that it can’t happen unless it’s through an emotive or sensory experience.  I think that in your art there’s a deeply emotive place, and yet it walks a fine line, because some of your machines will have this tiny literal narrative but then it’s really just suggestive of this larger bigger mystery.  How do you walk that line and prevent your work from just becoming just a visual pun?

Arthur Ganson: Well, I feel very rooted in wanting to make work that exists purely in the physical realm but I see the physical object as a kind of a conduit, and this whole question of truth and what’s true. I can’t prevent anything and I don’t want to try to, so to whatever degree someone were to look at anything and have the sense that it was for them a visual pun and if that’s where it resided then that’s the truth of it.  And I feel very comfortable with any and all interpretations because I know that they are all personal.  I think when we talk about the truth I feel that whatever that truth is it has to be personal.  And there’s no right or wrongness to it.  There can’t be a right or wrongness to it, because the object itself is both clear and ambiguous.  I think that’s an interesting place, a catalyst, enough information to go from but not so much that it could define it.  I think it really depends on any person’s capacity to dream.  Because really it’s about dreaming.

(We think that it has something to do with his work’s blend of mechanical parts — cogs, rods, wheels, and so on — with more organic elements, such as the bentwood chair in Machine With Chair.

Prime

¶ At Baseline Scenario, guest Ilya Podolyako outlines the improvidence of relying, as the Dodd-Frank Act does, upon clearing houses to stabilize the market in derivatives. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Herein lies the problem. A clearinghouse is a private business that puts its own money on the line. It works by ensuring that its members are actually well-capitalized institutions capable of paying for bets they made, and thus closely scrutinizes the risk profile of each participant’s portfolio on an ongoing basis. This access permits a clearinghouse to observe otherwise opaque OTC markets with great precision and provide valuable data on concentration, exposure, and capitalization to regulators. Meanwhile, under normal circumstances, the clearinghouse can neither borrow from the Federal Reserve nor receive government backing for its capital. So what could go wrong with using these organizations to grab control over derivatives?

Well, while in theory the model sounds good, history has demonstrated that private sector risk aggregators routinely underprice systemic, correlated risk. AIG provides the most startling example of this behavior. From 2005 to 2008, its Financial Products group essentially acted like a clearinghouse gone mad, willing to become the counterparty to nearly every bet by writing billions of dollars (in then-notional, subsequently real value) worth of credit default swaps without holding on to capital or hedging its reference product risk. A similar tendency to charge too little for catastrophic risk undermined the finances of MBIA (initially formed by a consortium of principal insurance companies in a structure reminiscent of the OCC) and AMBAC, the main monoline insurers, whose credit ratings were rapidly cut during the credit crisis. Fannie and Freddie are even better examples, because government housing policy exacerbated their natural tendency to underestimate the likelihood of fat-tail events and charge too little for their guarantees of conforming RMBSs.

 Tierce

¶ In case you’re bothered this evening by a grouch who believes that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket &c, you might consider passing on this bit of news: archeologists working in Turkey have discovered evidence of “successful” brain surgery (ie, it didn’t kill the patient) among reamins of a Bronze Age settlement. (New Scientist)

You have found what appear to be scalpels.

That’s right. We have just found two cutting blades made of obsidian, a volcanic glass that forms a sharp edge when it fractures. The obsidian must have been imported from another region as there is no natural source of it in the area. We found the blades next to a circular clay platform that may have been used for religious ceremonies. The blades are double-sided, about 4 centimetres long, and very, very sharp. They would still cut you today.

What makes you think they were used for surgery?

We have found traces of cuts on skulls in a nearby graveyard. Out of around 700 skulls, 14 have these marks. They could only have been cut with a very sharp tool. At this time, 4000 years ago or more, it could only have been an obsidian blade. The cut marks show that a blade was used to make a rectangular opening all the way through the skull. We know that patients lived at least two to three years after the surgery, because the skull has tried to close the wound.

No evidence of Bronze Age anesthetics is mentioned.

Sext

¶ Having mistaken Elif Batuman, author of the wildly popular lit crit romp, The Possessed, to be a person of the masculine gender, Ujala Sehgal, our favorite Millions intern, attempts to make amends. As penance, the author suggests that she buy the book.

At first I couldn’t find The Possessed in the Barnes and Noble on 6th Avenue where I sought it, but the salesperson at the information desk, his eyes lighting up in recognition, walked me purposefully to its spot.

“It’s pretty popular for a book on Russian literature,” he remarked good-naturedly.

“Well, she’s very funny,” I agreed, possibly with an excess of familiarity.

“Oh, do you know her?”

“Well… you know… we’ve corresponded!” I trilled demurely, in a manner suggesting we’d been hand-writing deeply personal letters to each other for years and were practically the best of friends, instead of having emailed exactly once.

Nones

¶ Was anybody else surprised by the absence, from Steve Coll’s Pakistan piece in this week’s Talk of the Town, of the word “feudal“? It’s true that we’ve felt a bit wild throwing “feudal” around in our discussions of the broken rump of the Raj — or did, that is, until we read Sabrina Tavernise’s story in Saturday’s Times, “Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Pakistani Elite.”

In elite circles, Mr. Dasti is reviled as a thug, a small-time hustler with a fake college degree who represents the worst of Pakistan today. But here, he is hailed as a hero, living proof that in Pakistan, a poor man can get a seat at the rich men’s table.

Mr. Dasti’s rise is part of a broad shift in political power in Pakistan. For generations, politics took place in the parlors of a handful of rich families, a Westernized elite that owned large tracts of land and sometimes even the people who worked it. But Pakistan is urbanizing fast, and powerful forces of change are chipping away at the landed aristocracy, known in Pakistan as the feudal class.

The sooner American voters understand that our foreign policy has been propping up a “feudal class,” the sooner our foreign policy will make sense. (“Maybe yes, maybe no,” you counter; but you can’t profess a faith in democracy — American democracy in this case — without believing that it must be so.)

Vespers

¶ At Good, Mark Peters laments the perverse misusage of the term “Orwellian” — “It’s as if we called criminal scum “Batmanistic” because Batman is so effective in beating them senseless” — but acknowledges that the pigs are out of the barn:

While I do think there is something sketchy about the many cries of Orwellianism, I believe there are three things that can be done about it: zip, nada, and diddly. Outrage at the watering down of “Orwellian” is not that different from other language peeves. For example, some folks cling to what was once the established meaning of “nauseous,” insisting that it can only mean something that causes the queasies. These quirky hardliners say it should never be used to describe a person who feels funny in the tummy, even though that sense has been common since the late 1800s, which hardly qualifies it as newfangled. More recently, look how this Jersey Shore doofus has basically ruined the word “situation,” or at least basted it with a mimbo-ish flavor. That’s the worst case of word abuse since Dubya ruined “Mission accomplished,” but these things happen.

Language change may make us nauseous, but complaining about it is as useless as a chimpanzee pundit saying chimps aren’t pant-hooting the way they used to, and that chimps these days don’t even know a pant from a hoot. Language evolves, and even the name of a great author isn’t safe.

Hopefully, Mr Peters’s piece will be read by all.

Compline

¶ It goes without saying that we had to read anything with a title as wrong-headed as this: “Urban Legends: Why suburbs, not cities, are the answer.” The further we got in Joel Kotkin’s piece, however, the righter it all seemed, provided that we understood it to be about the deleterious impact of unnecessarily large business organizations, not that of population densities. Cities don’t produce poverty. Mr Kotkin reverses his cause and its effect. (Foreign Policy: via Real Clear World)

Consider the environment. We tend to associate suburbia with carbon dioxide-producing sprawl and urban areas with sustainability and green living. But though it’s true that urban residents use less gas to get to work than their suburban or rural counterparts, when it comes to overall energy use the picture gets more complicated. Studies in Australia and Spain have found that when you factor in apartment common areas, second residences, consumption, and air travel, urban residents can easily use more energy than their less densely packed neighbors. Moreover, studies around the world — from Beijing and Rome to London and Vancouver — have found that packed concentrations of concrete, asphalt, steel, and glass produce what are known as “heat islands,” generating 6 to 10 degrees Celsius more heat than surrounding areas and extending as far as twice a city’s political boundaries.

When it comes to inequality, cities might even be the problem. In the West, the largest cities today also tend to suffer the most extreme polarization of incomes. In 1980, Manhattan ranked 17th among U.S. counties for income disparity; by 2007 it was first, with the top fifth of wage earners earning 52 times what the bottom fifth earned. In Toronto between 1970 and 2001, according to one recent study, middle-income neighborhoods shrank by half, dropping from two-thirds of the city to one-third, while poor districts more than doubled to 40 percent. By 2020, middle-class neighborhoods could fall to about 10 percent.

Cities often offer a raw deal for the working class, which ends up squeezed by a lethal combination of chronically high housing costs and chronically low opportunity in economies dominated by finance and other elite industries. Once the cost of living is factored in, more than half the children in inner London live in poverty, the highest level in Britain, according to a Greater London Authority study. More than 1 million Londoners were on public support in 2002, in a city of roughly 8 million.

Have a Look

¶ Ted Wilson, housesitting, kills the neighbors’ dog. (The Rumpus)

¶ Ask for directions and save thou$ands. (Good)

¶ Linda “Lovelace” declines to provide an autograph, but sort of does so, anyway. Good for her. (Letters of Note)

Matins

¶ What’s this? Golf courses promote biodiversity? In England, it appears, a study that looked at over two hundred links found that a large majority were as ecologically beneficial as parks and preserves. The bottom line is, as usual, that we didn’t know as much as we thought we did. (via The Awl)

Not only is our knowledge of the totality of species poor, but so is our understanding of how species will adapt to environments altered by human intervention. While it may be true that the salamander would have been pushed to the brink of extinction had development proceeded unchecked around the Springs, this doesn’t mean that other species wouldn’t have thrived in unanticipated ways. One school of ecological thought rests on the premise that “biodiversity often peaks” in ecosystems that have been moderately disturbed by human development. Given this point, it’s worth noting that an influential land developer in Austin wanted to build a series of golf courses in the vicinity of the sacred pool. Could such an aggressive form of human intervention into the comparatively natural landscape have actually fostered species diversity?

The question seems heretical until you start looking into the research being done on golf courses and biodiversity. Writing in the journal Ecosystems, two Swedish scientists found that a large majority (63 percent) of the 200+ golf courses they studied in the UK “were found to have ecological values similar to or higher than nature-protected sites” such as forest areas, state parks, and biological preserves. They concluded that “golf courses play an essential role in biodiversity conservation and ecosystems management.” This is no anomaly. Other studies have found that golf courses can provide ideal ecological niches for a variety of species, that they are often a reservoir for bumblebee populations, and that “green keepers can contribute greatly to conservation by providing . . . habitats for endangered local species.” Habitats like that for the Barton Springs salamander.

Lauds

¶ Although we’re still enthusiastic about going to the movies, we agree with Bob Lefsetz, writing at The Rumpus, that “If you truly want to succeed in the entertainment industry today, if you want to have a long career, you’ve got to think small.”

You’ve got to do exactly what you want, appealing at first to only those inside, who get it. Ratings/sales might start slow, but you’ve got longevity. Jay Leno reaches more people, but Jon Stewart means more. You believe in Jon Stewart, you tell your friends about “The Daily Show”. “The Tonight Show” is something you watch between your toes before you fall asleep and forget about as soon as you shut off the TV. Like the radio hits. Who wants to hear them once their time in the spotlight is done?

I can’t say that I watch a lot of TV. But I find it more satisfying than going to the movies.

The small records, released independently, are the ones that touch my heart, that I testify about.

[snip]

Ever wonder why so many of the Top Forty wonders can barely play clubs? And acts most people have never heard of can work year after year on the road in theatres and arenas?

We don’t live in the mainstream world the mainstream news outlets tell us we do. We live in an alternative universe.

Prime

¶ At Weakonomics, Philip offers one of those contrarian, too-good-to-be-true solutions to an everyday problem — pet animal overpopulation, in this case — that really ought to be put to the test right away.

Instead of paying a fee to register your animal with the county, how about the county pay you a fee? A hypothetical budget of $200k a year goes to running an animal shelter. It can cost about $100 or so to fix a dog. Cats can be done for a fraction of that. The government will eat this cost and also give you a check for $100 for getting your animal fixed. They’ll also chip your animal in case it goes missing. At that price the county could fix 1000 animals a year with the same budget. But then that leaves no money for operating a shelter. The humane society is interested in taking over shelters in some areas. Some humane societies are no kill but others do put animals to sleep. But they have advantages that animal control does not. First, they operate with volunteers, which is much cheaper to run. Second, many have networks of foster parents, which can house animals with the facilities are over capacity. Third, they can raise money much faster than a county government can while still charging adoption fees.

Tierce

¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about that most Proustian of science topics, time and memory. Why does time seem to slow down in a crisis? (The Frontal Cortex)

It turns out that our sense of time is deeply entangled with memory, and that when we remember more – when we are sensitive to every madeleine and sip of limeflower tea – we can stretch time out, like a blanket. This suggests that the simplest way to extend our life, squeezing more experience out of this mortal coil, is to be more attentive, more sensitive to the everyday details of the world. The same logic should also apply to our vacations. If we want our time off to last longer, then we should skip the beach naps and instead cram our days full of new things, which we will notice and memorize.

Furthermore, the link between the perception of time and the density of memory can also work in the other direction, so that it’s possible to increase our memory by speeding up our internal clock. In 1999, a team of psychologists at the University of Manchester demonstrated that it was possible to tweak our “pacemaker” by exposing people to a sequence of click-trains, or acoustic tones that arrive in rapid progression. It turns out that such click trains accelerate our internal clock – it beats a little bit faster – which means that everything else seems to take just a little longer. (Perhaps this is why, when companies put us on hold, they always play sluggish muzak – the adagio sounds might slow down our clock, thus making the frustrating experience of waiting on the phone pass more quickly.)

A new study, by the same Manchester lab, uses click trains to explore the implications  of this accelerated tick-tock. It turns out that when our internal clock is ticking faster, we don’t just perceive the external world as moving slower – we can actually remember more about it. In other words, our sense of time isn’t just a perceptual illusion, but instead seems to regulate the pace of information processing in the brain. When it ticks faster, we can process more. It’s like getting a faster set of microchips embedded in the cortex.

Sext

¶ From a site that we’ve begun following: I Like Boring Things. What to do when a conference called “Interesting” is canceled? There’s something almost daring about hosting a deliberately Boring Conference — considering all the inadvertent ones. 

So now I am having to think about numbers and venues and things. Interesting is held in the lovely Conway Hall. The first year they limited the tickets to 200 (which sold out immediately – I was lucky to get one) and I think they increased that to 350 for the later ones (which also sold out immediately – I was lucky again). The tickets were £20 each. Boring will be smaller, much smaller. I doubt we’ll sell more than fifty tickets, and I don’t think we could charge more than a fiver. That doesn’t give us (I keep saying “we” and “us”, at the moment it’s just me, I’m sure other people will help though, right? Guys? You’ll help, won’t you? Guys?) much money to play with. We’ll need a small-ish venue, preferably with some sort of projector to connect to a laptop. I can’t really think of anywhere suitable off the top of my head. I had considered The Mission Room in Exmouth Market as I once went to a thing called Crispival 08 (“the world’s first ever crisp festival”) held there and it was quite a nice place. Unfortunately, their website seems to have died and the place might not exist any more. Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club is probably too expensive. There must be other places. I don’t think it should be a pub though. This is a conference, after all. If you know any good venues, let me know.

I also need to think about who is going to talk, and what they are going to talk about. I have a few ideas, and might start emailing people soon, but if you want to talk about something boring, email me here.

It might be nice if we could get someone to film it, or record it in some way. Maybe even stream it live on the internet. I am not sure how complicated that would be.

If any grown ups want to get in touch with sponsorship ideas, or financial backing or whatever, I would be very grateful. Of course, it does mean your brand will be associated with the word “Boring”, which might not be ideal. Also, if any journalists or media type people want to get involved, please do.

Nones

¶ William James week at The Second Pass — last week marked the centenary of the philosopher’s death — has been extended a bit, to accommodate a guest post by James biographer Robert Richardson, who writes about James’s interest in finding a “moral equivalent of war.”

By the time he wrote “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James had dropped the idea of voluntary poverty or simplicity—the sort of thing advocated in Walden, and by Wendell Berry, and by the modern “freegans”—in favor of something very close to the modern idea of the Peace Corps. “To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road building and tunnel making, to foundries and stoke holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youth be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”

It was not an accident that when the Civilian Conservation Corps built a leadership camp in Sharon Vermont in 1940, it was called Camp William James. But many Americans still have an unshakable belief that violence is the only real way to settle disputes and is fundamental to manhood. James himself noted that the only tax we pay willingly is the war tax.

Vespers

¶ Sonya Chung is re-reading The Great Gatsby — she’s going to be teaching it. Among the thoughts that a third reading has occasioned, the most intriguing, if somewhat irrelevant is that in Heath Ledger we lost an actor who might truly have realized the strange Mr Gatz. Her more classroom-appropriate observations are, even so, fresh and astute. (The Millions)

Gatsby is both skillfully, and conventionally, plotted.  The yellow car/mistaken identify device, upon which the story’s climax and resolution hinge, feels almost Hitchcockian in its nod to the murder-mystery mixup.  Who’s driving which car and why convincingly fuels (literally) Gatsby’s inevitable demise, Tom and Daisy’s flight, and Nick’s final revulsion towards the excesses of Eastern privilege. Fitzgerald also makes deft use of setting descriptions to evoke complex emotions, imminent conflict, and juxtapositions throughout; and his physical descriptions of characters are concrete and evocative, frequently making excellent use of similes and metaphors.  In other words, it’s no wonder the book is on class reading lists; it conforms to/exemplifies so many of our writing-craft tricks of the trade.

[snip]

In Gatsby, Fitzgerald also gets the essential doubleness of human nature so terribly, perfectly right.   Every character is pulled in (at least) two directions; love and hate, admiration and disdain, are of a piece in almost every relationship.  And the reader ultimately feels an unresolved, and yet somehow perfectly coherent dividedness about each character.

Compline

¶ In an interview with Salon‘s Alex Jung, labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan makes some interesting points about the difficulty of comparing productivity in the US and in Germany. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

But the Germans have a lower GDP than we do. Doesn’t that mean that our quality of life is better?

One day we’ll get beyond that and see that the European standard of living is rising. You can pull out these GDP per capita statistics and say that people in Mississippi are vastly wealthier than people in Frankfurt and Hamburg. That can’t be true. Just spend two months in Hamburg and spend two months in Tupelo, Mississippi. There’s something wrong if the statistics are telling you that the people in Tupelo are three times wealthier than the people in Germany. Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work and delivers the goods and it’s the only model that an advanced country can do to be competitive in this world. I mean that not just in terms of exports, but in terms of being green at the same time. That we can raise the standard of living without boiling the planet shows how our measure of GDP is so crude.

What are we missing when we measure the GDP?

We don’t have any material value of leisure time, which is extremely valuable to people. We don’t have any way of valuing what these European public goods are really worth. You know, it’s 50,000 dollars for tuition at NYU and it’s zero at Humboldt University in Berlin. So NYU adds catastrophic amounts of GDP per capita and Humboldt adds nothing. Between you and me, I’d rather go to school at Humboldt.

So much of the American economy is based on GDP that comes from waste, environmental pillage, urban sprawl, bad planning, people going farther and farther with no land use planning whatsoever and leading more miserable lives. That GDP is thrown on top of all the GDP that comes from gambling and fraud of one kind or another. It’s a more straightforward description of what Kenneth Rogoff and the Economist would call the financialization of the American economy. That transformation is a big part of the American economic model as it has morphed in some very perverse directions in the last 30 or 40 years. It’s why the collapse here is going to take a much more serious long-term toll in this country than in the decades ahead.

Have a Look

Matins

¶ With a manner only slightly less facetious than that of Gail Collins, Claire Berlinski holds Turkey’s Iran policy up to something like ridicule. The only way that she can explain it is by analogy to the Turkish preference for emotion over logic. Not safe for the politically correct! But good fun withal. (World Affairs; via Real Clear World)

Many in the West have interpreted the Turkish position as evidence that the place is under the control of Islamic crypto-fundamentalists. This is certainly part of the picture and a very important part, but do not make the mistake of thinking that’s all there is to it. The West is overlooking something both more subtle and more obvious: Emotions are running the show. The Turks have a good feeling about their recent encounters with Iran and a bad feeling about their recent encounters with Israel. Long-term, rational economic and geostrategic interests? To hell with those. The patient, subtle advancement of an Islamist agenda? To hell with that, too. This is a logic-free zone. Iran’s not a threat. No sanctions need be applied.

The only real material advantage that accrues to Turkey from the bargain is the chance to do trade with Iran—in the short term, at least. I single out Turkey for no special opprobrium in noting that its government finds it commercially advantageous to pretend there’s nothing going on in Iran requiring any urgent further attention from the world; France and Russia have long followed the same policy. But France and Russia are both nuclear powers in their own right. Should Iran acquire the Bomb, they at least have a deterrent. Turkey is not a nuclear power. Iran is a state with whom it has a very long history of enmity and quite a number of significant outstanding geostrategic and religious conflicts. The Ottoman and Persian Empires have been competing for regional hegemony since the Safavid and Qajar dynasties. As the nineteenth-century Ottoman statesman Fuad Paşa remarked, in comments no less true today,

The government of [Iran], which is in a state of continual disorder and in the grip of Shiite fanaticism, has always been at one and in agreement with our enemies. Even in the Crimean War, she came to an agreement with Russia and united her ambitions with hers. The fact that she was unable to bring her hostile calculations to fruition was due to the West’s prudent and vigilant diplomacy. Today, the Shah’s government follows in the wake of [Russia]. As long as the Ottoman government is not occupied elsewhere, the discredited Iranian government, being impotent, ignorant, and incapable of taking any initiative on its own, dares not quarrel with us. However, at the moment of our first confrontation with Russia, Iran will take her place among our most irreconcilable enemies, due to her political dependence and, more important, her blind jealousy, in spite of our cautious and well-intentioned attitude.

Russia’s fear of rising nationalism among its Turkic minorities gives it good reason to favor Iran. An Iran in possession of nuclear weapons would almost certainly cooperate with Russia to the detriment of Turkey, dominate Central Asia and the Caucasus, and put an end to Turkish aspirations to be a great power. A regional nuclear arms race would likely ensue. Iran has close diplomatic relations with Armenia; Turkey has no diplomatic relations with Armenia. Tehran has supported the Kurdish-separatist PKK, with which Turkey is at war. The Iranians are still Shiite fanatics who deplore both Sunni Islam and the Turkish secular state. There is no way whatsoever that it could be in Turkey’s long-term military or economic interests to live next door to a nuclear Iran, however impressive the short-term trade benefits of this deal might be—and they are not even that impressive.

¶ Writing about the extent of classical-music ignorance in Britain, Lynsey Hanley makes an eloquent plea for “a common culture, the riches of which are shared, rather than hoarded.” (Guardian)

Notions of what culture is remain fundamentally split between what we persist in regarding as high and low art. When we talk about a cultured person, it’s clear we’re also making an inference based on class. To use Tony Harrison’s words: Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those / Shakespeare gives comic bits to: prose! Britain’s ingrained economic inequality doesn’t help the cause of a unified culture one bit.

In such a context there’s no way that “we” – and I’m allying myself here with my social place of origin, rather than the easier place I inhabit now – can learn that we are also “kings”, as much the rightful readers of poetry as of prose. There’s nothing like being told, in any number of ways, how undeserving, how ripe for being patronised, you are to make you reject the lot.

At present it feels like there’s little useful communication between consumers of high culture and that third of Britain that has never listened to classical music – for reasons to do with mutual contempt, ignorance, and the accretion of privilege and disadvantage at opposite ends of the divide. There is a well-poisoning tendency towards saying that cultural choices are all about money – take Glyndebourne, or this weekend’s Serenata Glastonbury-style classical camping festival, with some day tickets at £295 a pop – when money forms only part of the complex knit of social relations. Our culture contains symbols less visible and more powerful: keys that can’t be bought, which gain access to rooms whose contents can’t be envisaged until entered.

Prime

¶ At The Awl, “Carl Hegelman” directs our attention to two goodly solutions to our economic disarray: Robert Reich’s proposal to turn defense contractors into infrastucturists, and Milton Friedman’s negative income tax. (If that isn’t one from Column A and one from Column B, we don’t know what is.)

Why bring this up now? Well, the creation of an egalitarian society is a worthy goal. It seems particularly pertinent now, at a time when the gap between The Rich and the Not Rich is as wide as it’s been since the Robber Baron days—the so-called “gilded age”—before Teddy Roosevelt was President. Politicians are arguing over the best way to tackle our current economic difficulties, and in November economic policy will probably be a key issue. It’s an opportunity for a creative restructuring which can both help us out of this mess and create a more equitable, less polarized society. In order to do it, we need to know what works and what doesn’t. The Reaganomics/Thatcherite/Free Market model didn’t work—is that pretty clear now?

But the English socialist model didn’t work, either. So what to do?

[snip]

Really, it’s been one long battle between Left and Right for as long as most of us can remember. Can’t we just call it a draw and focus on fixing the mess?

Tierce

¶ E O Wilson, once an early proponent of kin selection theory — an attempt to square the selfishness of natural selection with manifestations of altruism — now spearheads what he thinks is a better idea, which Brendan Keim, writing at Wired Science, never quite calls “colonial selection,” although that’s what it sounds like to us.

The researchers propose a theoretical narrative that begins with a primordial, solitary ant — perhaps something like the ancient Martialis heureka — that lived near a food source and developed genetic mutations that caused it to feed its offspring, rather than letting them fend for themselves. Called progressive provisioning, such nurture is widespread in insects.

Another mutation could result in offspring that stayed near the nest, rather than leaving. They would “instinctively recognize that certain things need to be done, and do them,” said Nowak, describing real-world examples. “Put two normally solitary wasps together, and if one builds a hole, the other puts an egg in it. The other sees the egg, and feeds it.”

That would be enough to form a small but real colony — and from there, eusociality could emerge from an accumulation of mutations that led to a hyper-specialization of tasks, limited reproduction to queens alone and favored the colony’s success above all else. Within this colony, a queen would be analogous to a human egg or sperm cell — a unit that embodies the whole. Worker self-sacrifice is no more nonsensical than that of a white blood cell.

The researchers called this series of steps a “labyrinth,” one that isn’t easily navigated. Hence the rareness of eusociality, which is believed to have arisen just 10 to 20 times in history. But their theory explains everything that kin selection does, plus what it doesn’t.

Sext

¶ Daniel Adler approaches comfort food from the vantage of a road warrior, and attempts to make bánh mì in his hotel bathroom. It’s all about process. (The Bygone Bureau)

The sandwich is awful. The marinade for the tofu is tinny and insipid; it tastes like it’s been soaked overnight in Mountain Dew. Too many seeds have been removed from the jalapenos, so there is not enough spice to draw my interest. Worst of all is the bread. It is soft and tacky, providing none of the resistant crackle that a decent baguette should have. The inner parts of the bread get mushy from being in contact with the daikon and carrots. As I finish off the sandwich in several more bland, matted mouthfuls, I think about going back to the Middle Eastern place.

To my surprise, over the next few days I make and eat the sandwich again and again. Even though I practically choke it down, even though added experimental ingredients (avocado, nori) can’t rescue it, I continue to suffer through until the package of six baguettes is finished. I just can’t pass up the chance to “cook,” even if the results are disappointing. The food itself might not be good, but every time I hunker over the fluorescent-lit bathroom counter, I am comforted, because I am making something, I am focused, and I forget I am alone.

Nones

¶ We continue to believe that the instability of Pakistan, brought to some sort of tipping point by dreadful flooding that has brought about a devastation that the government seems unable or unwilling to redress, is the most alarming crisis on the planet today. Of all the pieces to which we’ve linked in recent months, none has displayed the scope of Ahmen Rashid’s “The Anarchic Republic of Pakistan,” at The National Interest. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

However, no real change is possible without a change taking place in the army’s obsessive mind-set regarding India, its determination to define and control national security, and its pursuit of an aggressive forward policy in the region rather than first fixing things at home.

It is insufficient for the army to merely acknowledge that its past pursuit of foreign-policy goals through extremist proxies has proven so destructive; it is also necessary for the army to agree to a civilian-led peace process with India. Civilians must have a greater say in what constitutes national security. Until that happens, the army’s focus on the threat from New Delhi prevents it from truly acknowledging the problems it faces from extremism at home.

The army’s track record shows that it cannot offer political or economic solutions for Pakistan. Indeed, the history of military regimes here shows that they only deepen economic and political problems, widen the social, ethnic and class divide, and alienate the country from international investment and aid.

Like Burma, Pakistan appears to be a state that exists to serve military fantasies. At least Burma dispenses with the pretense of democracy.

Vespers

¶ Michelle Dean unpacks the “Franzenfreude,” and shakes out the possibility that Jonathan Franzen is highly regarded by critics because he’s the best writer to cover what is uncritically understood to be the American Scene. She notes that Mr Franzen himself is not as deluded on this point as his admirers seem to be. (The Awl)

What collective American experience do these critics envision Franzen as describing? I have a suspicion they simply imagine their own white, male, middle class experiences as the “American experience,” because it’s always been presented that way to them, not least in the novels of Updike and Mailer and sometimes Roth that they so often list as favorites. And since Franzen does seem to have a knack for describing that particular strain of the American experience, the critics elide all the issues.¹ As an American resident for just five years, what I left there with was a profound sense that there was very little one could generally say about American culture without profoundly ignoring certain communities, without writing them right out of existence. And I lived in Brooklyn, which, it bears mentioning, is a far more diverse borough than these middle-class white narratives about it might have you believe. And I suspect there are a lot of people there, never mind in the rest of the country, who don’t relate to Franzen’s work, or Jonathan Lethem’s, or David Foster Wallace’s.

That doesn’t mean that people answering to other demographic characteristics can’t like these books. You can relate across chasms of experience and even prejudice—no one can tell you this better than, say, a person of color who’s spent her life studying and loving E.M Forster’s work. But should she always have to? Isn’t it fair for her to ask critics to value for something that speaks more closely to her actual life?

And of course it isn’t necessary, for an individual writer trying to write one good book, to make sure that it represents, in every significant respect, every experience out there under the sun. Yes that’s demanding too much. But it might, indeed, be the task of literary fiction as a whole to continually be revising it’s standards to be sure it’s being as inclusive as it can be. In the age after we’ve realized that white men are not the end-all and be-all of humanity, it seems worth trying to build a canon that says if we are separated from one another by class and race and gender and any number of things, the very least we can do is recognize that in a literature that’s really about “what it is to be human,” every single one of those experiences must be given airtime. It’s not a request; it’s a requirement.

Reading Freedom with the greatest relish, the Editor wishes that more readers would bracket Jennifer Egan with Jonathan Franzen as a smart, generous, comprehensive American writer with a first-class prose style. Ms Egan happens to be white, but even if you can’t have everything you can have a more inclusive pantheon.  

Compline

¶ Hats off Andrew Price, for asking “Does Anyone Know What the Point of Prison Is, Anyway?” It’s a very practical question, because only a clear and distinct idea of the point of incarceration will fix our bloated, if not entirely broken, prison system. (Good)

But what is the service that prisons are supposed to deliver? There isn’t much agreement on this question. Most people probably have a vague mix of ideas swimming in their head about what prisons should deliver. Prisons should sequester criminals to protect the public; prisons should provide a deterrent to potential offenders; prisons should rehabilitate; prisons should punish criminals by giving them an unpleasant experience that they “deserve.”

How the hell do we know if prisons are delivering with a mandate like that? The aims of prison, as understood by the public and articulated by politicians, are often contradictory, or at least apparently so. Do therapeutic rehabilitation programs compromise the deterrent effect of prison, or make the punitive element too weak? Do punitive policies make it hard to rehabilitate?

[snip]

This total lack of clarity about the service prisons are providing, combined with the twisted economic incentives of guards’ unions and the opportunistic fearmongering of politicians, has created a system of punishment that’s totally divorced from the public interest. It’s a problem for public and private prisons alike.

Have a Look

¶ Flat Plans. (The Best Part)

Matins

¶ GOP panjandrum Kenneth Mehlman has come out as a gay man. (Atlantic)

Mehlman’s leadership positions in the GOP came at a time when the party was stepping up its anti-gay activities — such as the distribution in West Virginia in 2006 of literature linking homosexuality to atheism, or the less-than-subtle, coded language in the party’s platform (“Attempts to redefine marriage in a single state or city could have serious consequences throughout the country…”). Mehlman said at the time that he could not, as an individual Republican, go against the party consensus. He was aware that Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief strategic adviser, had been working with Republicans to make sure that anti-gay initiatives and referenda would appear on November ballots in 2004 and 2006 to help Republicans.

Mehlman acknowledges that if he had publicly declared his sexuality sooner, he might have played a role in keeping the party from pushing an anti-gay agenda.

We disagree. We believe that an earlier self-outing would have been self-defeating, in the sense that Mr Mehlman would have put an end to his career as a Republican Party operative. We like to think that this announcement is opportunistic — in the sense that it’s opportune, signalling a marginalizing shift in the role of homophobia in American politics. We do, however, share Joe’s exasperation.

Lauds

¶ It’s a commonplace — at least among serious readers — that even the greatest novels change over time: the Emma that you read at sixteen is not the Emma that you’ll read at forty, even though not a single word in Jane Austen’s text has been changed. We do the changing. At The Online Photographer, Michael Johnston reports on an interesting variant of that phenomenon: you can never really go back to using equipment that you used to rely on every day.

Then it occurred to me…that always happens when I try to replace a favorite camera or lens from the past. I’ve done it at least six or eight times…tried to re-purchase a favorite camera that I let go at one time, but still miss. I sold my Leica M6 in 1993 and tried to buy another one in 1999—the lens design had changed, and the newer camera didn’t have the same feel. Wish I had just kept the first one. One of the best lenses I ever used was a Schneider lens on a funky old Practisix update called an Exakta 66. I got rid of that camera because of some anomalies that were purely user error, I’m embarrassed to admit. This gets worse: when I tried to replace it with another one, the brand-new camera came straight from the box with its focusing screen installed upside-down. Who knew? All I knew was that it didn’t focus right. I sold it. Only later did I find out about the upside-down screens. I even had a guy send me a beat-up old Spotmatic once so I could try the lens. I loved it. Did a lot of good work with it. Would you know, I never found another Spotmatic body that I liked as well as that first one. Go figure.

In fact, I think that every attempt I have ever made to re-purchase or re-acquire a fondly-remembered camera from my past has ended in failure or disappointment somehow.

Prime

¶ So, it has come to this, the current debate about unemployment: “Strucs vs Cycs.” Will “business cycles” restore jobs? Or is there a mismatch between jobs and workers that the market will not solve (in anyone’s lifetime, that is)? We agree (as usual) with Felix Salmon’s refinement on the structuralist position.

I also think it makes sense to break the Struc argument down into its component parts: the inability of the unemployed to find work, on the one hand, and the inability of employers to find good employees, on the other. The first part seems to be undeniable, and it’s surely getting worse as the length of time that people have been looking for work rises inexorably. The longer you’ve been without a job, the harder it becomes to get one, until you become unemployable.

Meanwhile, just because it’s hard to find good employees doesn’t mean that your business is booming and that there are lots of incentives for the unemployed to join your industry. The Cycs could well have a point here — if we get an uptick in total demand, then that might help increase employment in the parts of the economy with tight labor markets. But for the time being, employers who can’t find the employees they want seem to be resigned to simply keeping on going with the employees they’ve got: dreams of expansion have given way to grim survival and a refusal to take on extra debt or risk. And they certainly don’t want to risk raising their prices in this economy, even if they suspect they could get away with doing so.

Tierce

¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about the crash in housing prices in terms of the cognitive bias known as “loss aversion.” Clearly, what’s needed is a positive rhetoric for freeing homeowners from albatross properties.

Classical economics assumes that people will adjust to the new reality. They’ll realize that the market has changed, and that they made a costly mistake. But that’s not what happened. In their paper, “Loss Aversion and Seller Behavior: Evidence From the Housing Market,” Mayer and Genesove found that, for essentially identical condos, people who had bought at the peak of the market (between 1989-1992) listed their properties for nearly 35 percent more than those who had bought after the collapse. Why? Because they couldn’t bear to take a loss.

The end result, of course, is that these overpriced properties just sat there, piling up like unwanted inventory. According to the economists, less than 25 percent of the properties bought during the condo bubble sold in less than 180 days.

Sext

¶ 4chan, a site that the Guardian calls “the id of the Internet,” is about to be transformed, via initial public offering, into Canvas. Julian Dibbell writes about Christopher Poole’s venture at MIT Technology Review. (via kottke.org)

It says something that investors in Canvas–who include Marc Andreessen (creator of the first graphical Web browser) and Ron Conway (an early Google backer)–would bet on a track record like Poole’s. For all of 4chan’s eye-popping traffic stats, it’s doomed to bare-subsistence revenue by the combination of its scandalous content (palatable only to low-rent advertisers like porn sites) and Poole’s profound discomfort with, as he puts it, the “tons of ways I could essentially rape the site for dollars” (including pop-ups, ads with sound, and other high-paying but obnoxious forms of advertising that would antagonize 4chan’s community). And whether it was the 2006 “dirty bomb” incident, in which 20-year-old Jake Brahm flooded /b/ with threats to detonate radioactive explosives at NFL games, or the harrowing of Jessi Slaughter this July, in which the troll hordes of /b/ rained death threats and other anonymous harassment on an 11-year-old Florida girl, the portrayal of 4chan in the national news has mainly reflected the image of a menace to be contained rather than an enterprise to watch.

And yet, many in the Internet business have been watching 4chan with interest. The steady growth of its traffic and the viral spread of its content, after all, represent the kind of social success that Web businesses require. “Getting engaged users is the tough part,” says David Lee, who invested in Canvas as a partner in Conway’s SV Angel firm. Profit or no profit, he explains, 4chan shows that Poole “is the rare entrepreneur who can get engaged users.” And given how firmly anonymity is held to be a recipe for social-media failure, it’s intriguing that the site works at all. 4chan “was a thing that challenged people’s assumptions in the Web industry,” says Jonah Peretti, CEO of the viral-media startup BuzzFeed and cofounder of the Huffington Post. “It was just so different from the way other people were thinking about community.”

Nones

¶ Tyler Cowen on Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: “This is the book which everyone is reading…” Our copy is on order!

This is the book which everyone is reading, and reviewing, right now.  It has good coverage of Nigeria, Somalia, Sudan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, and the clash between religions in those areas.  I can definitely recommend it.  My major complaint has to do with framing.  The author reminds us that “the main fault lines are within Islam,” or something like that, etc., yet if you read only this book, or for that matter its subtitle, you would come away with a different impression altogether.  The very premise of the book selects for clash among the two major religions surveyed and I don’t think the author quite comes to terms with this fact.  She is torn by conflicting impulses to pursue her initial premise to its logical conclusion, and yet also to provide a more politically correct account than what she sees in front of her eyes.

Vespers

¶ Richard Greenwald writes perceptively about the quest for authenticity in today’s urban writing, which, although he doesn’t mention them, clearly betray “out-of-towner” anxieties. The work of Jonathan Lethem is a perfect foil for this discussion, because the writer grew up in a gentrifying household: Is he really Dean Street?

New York City has witnessed rapid swings in fortunes during Lethem’s own lifetime that we are still trying to comprehend. The urban unrest of the 1960s sped up white middle-class flight, so that by the 1980s many cities saw increasing concentrations of poverty and people of color. With lower tax bases, services were cut and a cycle of decline seemed set. Cities like New York City seemed doomed. The summer of 1977 was the nadir for New York City. A time I know Lethem remembers, as do I. 1977 was the summer of the Son of Sam (the serial killer), a blackout with massive looting and lawlessness, and what has been termed “the burning of the South Bronx” as arson destroyed dozens of square blocks of the borough, and the bankruptcy of the city itself. But as thousands left, many stayed and “discovered” new neighborhoods that made them feel real rather than artificial (urban rather than suburban). Moreover, this first wave of counter-culture gentrifiers, on the Lower East Side, SoHo, or Lethem’s own parents in Brooklyn, committed themselves to an urban utopia where race and class disappeared in their minds as divisions (though we know it couldn’t ever disappear). These older artists and activists made a political and creative choice to stay in the city, to stand with it and therefore, the city’s culture became theirs and defined them. But this generation also made it easier some years later for others to join them, who were less idealistic, as they were ironically also the leading edge of gentrification.

Compline

¶ One of the Editor’s most electric memories is the look on his adoptive mother’s face when he announced, at the age of ten or so, that he was going to change his name when he grew up — anything but the name that he’d been given would be better. 

In those days, the routine, common among immigrants, of changing names, especially from foreign, difficult ones into tony English ones, was just beginning to fade. Now, Sam Roberts reminds us in the Times, it has become quite unusual.

The New York Times examined the more than 500 applications for name changes in June at the Civil Court in New York, which has a greater foreign-born population than any other city in the United States. Only a half dozen or so of those applications appeared to be obviously intended to Anglicize or abbreviate the surnames that immigrants or their families arrived with from Latin America or Asia. (A few Russians and Eastern Europeans did, but about as many embraced their family’s original surnames as adopted new ones.)

The vast majority of people with clearly ethnic surnames who applied to change them did so as a result of marriage (belatedly adopting a spouse’s surname or creating a new hyphenated one) or childbirth (because they were legally identified when they were born only as a male or female child or were adopting a parent’s name).

Iyata Ishimabet Maini Valdene Archibald of Brooklyn changed her name to Ishimabet Makini Valdene Bryce. Guo Wi Chan of Forest Hills, Queens, changed his to Ryan Guowei Chan. And after Jing Qiu Wu, the Flushing, Queens, mother of 5-year-old Star Jing Garcia, divorced, she renamed her daughter Star Rain Wu, dropping her husband’s surname.

Have a Look

¶ A project that perfectly captures the mentality of Ayn Rand’s fans. (Brainiac)

Matins

¶ In an Op-Ed piece in the Times, Christine Stansell reviews the rearguard — some would say shameful — history of Southern opposition to women’s suffrage, noting that Mississippi did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1984. (Why’d they bother?) We have now come to take the view that the American Civil War ended in an armed truce, not a Union Victory.

Lauds

¶ At The House Next Door, Elise Nakhnikian argues concisely that Swing Time is the best of the Astaire-Rogers movies.

There’s a contradiction at the heart of even the best of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies. When those two dance, or when Astaire sings (the rhythm that made him such a great dancer also makes him an excellent singer, although his voice was nothing special), they’re as elegantly expressive as anything ever captured on film, and as perfectly suited to their medium as Shakespeare was to his. But when they’re just acting, their movies go flat, as earthbound as the song and dance numbers are airy and uplifting.

Swing Time may be their best movie (it’s a toss-up for me with Top Hat). That’s mainly because it includes several of their best duets, but it also helps that director George Stevens makes us believe in their love for each other even between those magical numbers. That’s something no other director ever quite managed.

As always, Fred falls for Ginger at their first meet-cute encounter, but it’s hate at first sight for her. And as usual, their feelings are expressed most intensely through the singing and dancing with which he woos and wins her. This time, though, their feelings are also clear in their body language and their close-ups, particularly the gorgeous shots of Rogers’ guardedly softening face and widening eyes. (Yesterday for the first time, her dignity and understated humor reminded me of Jennifer Aniston, while Astaire’s hurt-puppy eyes and bowler hat under the gazebo where they sing A Fine Romance reminded me for the umpteenth time of Stan Laurel.) The nostalgia that Fred’s Lucky and Ginger’s Penny share for their love even as it’s just starting to bloom, since one or both of them always fears that it can never be, give this meringue of a movie a light dusting of melancholy.

Prime

¶ Gee whiz, here’s a great idea: let’s turn a major chain of department stores into virtual warehouses and fulfillment centers for online shoppers! That way, they can buy what they want and pick it up at a nearby location, checking it out in the process. It’s certainly working for Nordstrom. Stephanie Clifford reports, in the Times.

In September 2009, the company wove in individual stores’ inventory to the Web site, so that essentially all of the stores were also acting as warehouses for online.

Results were immediate. The percentage of customers who bought merchandise after searching for an item on the site doubled on the first day, and has stayed there (although, Mr. Nordstrom cautioned, that doubling was from a small base).

“Customers that were looking for an item, we had their size,” he said. That meant the company hired a few more shipping employees to wrap and send items from each store. But, he said, increased sales more than offset the cost.

It also means that inventory is moving faster, and often at higher prices. “If we’re out of something on the Web site, it’s probably late in the season and the stores are trying to clear it out,” he said. “By pulling merchandise from the store, you’ve now dramatically lessened the likelihood that you’ll take a markdown.”

You’d think that everyone would be doing this, but no:

“You’re talking about traditional retailers that have traditional ways of doing things, and sometimes those barriers are hard to break down,” said Adrianne Shapira, an analyst at Goldman Sachs.

Tierce

¶ Finally! An explanation of TED! What “TED” stands for. (“Technology. Entertainment. Design.”) Who started it and who runs it. (Richard Saul Wurman; Chris Anderson). Who pays for what? (Fast Company; via The Morning News)

Think of online video and what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Piano-playing cats? Lady Gaga? Maybe Paris Hilton? The instant popularity of TED talks might say something more promising about both our collective consciousness and our collective attention span. Cohen tells me, “When we launched, the example I used to help size the opportunity was a Malcolm Gladwell podcast that had been downloaded 40,000 times. Actually, the talks were watched 10.5 million times in the first year.” People emailed Cohen from all over the world, saying that they had shared a video with their entire address book, or that they’d watched a video with tears running down their face. That passion reset TED’s mission. “Within three months, we relaunched ted.com and realigned the entire organization around this mission of spreading ideas,” says Cohen.

It was a risk. Would lecturers who typically pull down five-figure fees agree to sign release forms and give their speeches away online? Would attendees grumble about sharing the secret sauce? “Releasing all the content to the world for free had the potential to capsize our business model,” Cohen says. Not so. TED first put the talks online in 2006. “That year,” she says, “we increased the fee for the conference by 50%, and sold out in one week with a 1,000-person waiting list.”

Sext

¶ We hereby resolve to become better Netizens by following Slate‘s slayer of “bogus trend stories,” Jack Shafer. We like to think that we can smell an under-researched story, heavy on anecdotes contributed by the writer’s friends of friends, but doubtless Mr Shafer can teach us a thing or two. Here, he goes after a recent story in the Times that attributed a rising number of National Park Service searches and rescues to the misguided use of “technology.”

Heggie and Amundson chart the long-term NPS search-and-rescue trends, while Heggie and Heggie put a microscope to search-and-rescue operations conducted by the NPS from 2003 to 2006. Heggie and Heggie advocate preventive education for the most frequent clients of search-and-rescue services. According to their study, almost half of those requesting search-and-rescue were weekenders; visitors ages 20 to 29 years made up 23 percent of incidents in the study; and males (no surprise!) were the requesters in 66.3 percent of incidents. Day hikers, boaters, and swimmers were the most frequent classes of requesters, and it’s my sense that many of the crises they faced were self-made and could have been averted by securing the right equipment, the right clothing, the right training, and better provisions, and by applying a little common sense.

Similar instructions—minus the ones about clothing and provisions—could have rescued the Times from publishing this bogus story.

Nones

¶ It is regrettably difficult to interest Americans in the problems of campaign financing and political contributions (not the same thing), and Jane Mayer’s exposé (in the current issue of The New Yorker) of the activities of Charles and David Koch, oilmen whose businesses have only to lose from enhanced environmental protection, is unlikely to rouse an angry citizenry.

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” The Kochs have given millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support lower taxes for industry. Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”

Some critics have suggested that the Kochs’ approach has subverted the purpose of tax-exempt giving. By law, charitable foundations must conduct exclusively nonpartisan activities that promote the public welfare. A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

The Kochs have gone well beyond their immediate self-interest, however, funding organizations that aim to push the country in a libertarian direction. Among the institutions that they have subsidized are the Institute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations; the Institute for Humane Studies, which underwrites libertarian academics; and the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution. Many of the organizations funded by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits. David Koch has acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”

Given the thick enthusiasm of the Tea Party movement, it’s unlikely that David Axelrod’s proposed disclaimer would change any minds.

“What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

Vespers

¶ Alexander Chee tops off an entry about being a published novelist who keeps a blog, and why he continues to keep a blog, with eight pieces of advice for anyone following a similar path. Especially if keeping a blog is the publicist’s idea. Mr Chee is on his second blog.

I began blogging to get over burnout after the publication of my first novel. I had debut author fatigue and had lost a sense of writing as being fun in any possible way, and this was alienating to me. Also, I had many former students and was tired of answering their questions via email one by one, and the blog seemed like a good place to put the answers to the FAQ.  I shut down that first blog and opened this one a few years ago, and what I have learned is that keeping a blog has helped me more than it has hurt me. It’s helped me get teaching jobs, kept me in touch with people and introduced me to new people I would never have met, people I wanted to meet. Also, it’s helped me drive traffic to online sites posting my work. All the same, there were many times I thought of just shutting it down in exasperation, like when I printed my first blog after closing it and discovered it was 723 pages long (one friend even said it had a narrative arc).

Compline

¶ A reader of Marginal Revolution asks Tyler Cowen what he thinks of the profession of diplomacy. Not much, is Mr Cowen’s unsurprising answer.

I see diplomacy as a stressful and unrewarding profession.  A good diplomat has the responsibility of deflecting a lot of the blame onto himself, and continually crediting others, while working hard not to like his contacts too much.  And how does he or she stay so loyal to the home country when so many ill-informed or unwise instructions are coming through the pipeline?  Most of all, a good diplomat requires some kind of clout in the home country and must maintain or manufacture that from abroad.  The entire time on mission the diplomat is eating up his capital and power base, and toward what constructive end?  So someone else can take his place?  And what kind of jobs can you hope to advance into?

[snip]

Presumably diplomats either enjoy serving their country or they enjoy the ego rents of being a diplomat or both.  It is a false feeling of power, borrowed power from one’s country of origin rather than from one’s personal achievements.  For the spouse the required phoniness is even worse.

We see it very differently: diplomats are men of peace who work almost exclusively with other diplomats, with a professionality loyalty to the preservation of peace that imposes the supra-nationalist allegiance that rightly excites the suspicion of leaders back home.

Have a Look

¶ Tastes like chicken. (Discoblog)

¶ Central Asian majesty. (3 Quarks Daily; from Boston Globe)

¶ Pillar of Fire. (Telegraph; via Bad Astronomy)

This isn’t what we were planning for today’s Daily Office, but late-summer schedule changes required some last-minute flexibility, so Tuesday became Thursday, or the other way round. All we had to work with was this photograph, together with a note from the Editor.

The photo was taken just before Will and I set out for an indefinitely long walk. He had not so much as closed his eyes all day and needed to be rocked to sleep the modern way. A neighbor’s advice (“take small steps”) turned out to be helpful. Will turned into a sack of cement at the corner of 87th and Second and didn’t budge until we ran into a stiff breeze at the end of 91st and East End, hard by the FDR Drive. After looking round a bit, Will passed right out again, waking up for good in the playground at Carl Schurz Park. He remained quiet and grave until we walked in on his mother, who had gotten some work done while we were out.

Sorry for looking as though I’d just performed in one of Ingmar Bergman’s less cheerful dramas. Megan said, “But you always look serious.”

Matins

¶ We begin and end the day with pieces about the late Tony Judt. First, friend and colleague Timothy Garton Ash writes about the spectateur engagé at NYRBlog. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Sharp and cutting his pen could be, but his work was always about seeking the truth as best we can, with all the search tools at our disposal—from the toothpick of Anglo-American empiricism to the searchlight of Gallic overstatement. Unlike the other kind of polemical intellectual, he was always in good faith. And he was always serious. Not drearily earnest—he enjoyed the acrobatics of intellectualism as others enjoy baseball—but morally serious. This was as true in private chat as in public discourse. In what he said and wrote, there was always that moral edge. He felt what he himself called, in a study of three French political intellectuals, the burden of responsibility.

Every stage of his biography contributed ingredients to a cosmopolitan mix. America was his last staging post, one of the longest and most enjoyable, but perhaps not the deepest influence. He delighted in the mega-Czernowitz that is New York. The New York Review and New York University, in particular, provided stages on which, and company in which, a talent already largely formed could flourish and expand. His personal discovery of Central and Eastern Europe, made while he was teaching at Oxford in the 1980s, was both passionate and formative. Before that, he was a West Europeanist, a specialist in the intellectual and political history of France, and especially of the French left. To this he devoted no fewer than five scholarly books, from the published version of his doctoral thesis on socialism in Provence to Past Imperfect, a carefully researched and acerbic reckoning with what he saw as the postwar failure of (most) French intellectuals.

Yet while he liked to contrast the political and moral responsibility of Central European intellectuals such as Václav Havel or Czesław Miłosz (the subject of one of his last short essays) with the irresponsibility of Jean-Paul Sartre or Maurice Merleau-Ponty (especially in relation to the horrors of Stalinism), the truth is that he found a great positive exemplar in France too—Raymond Aron—and the French influence on his way of thinking was profound. His conversational style, with its frequent use of paradoxes or near paradoxes of the form “this is at the same time X and Y,” sometimes felt like a translation from the French.

Lauds

¶ At the Guardian, Stephen Emms makes a bold claim — but one with which we’re in complete agreement: the Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring,” twenty years old next month, is the best pop single of all time. (via  Joe.My.God)

None the less, certain factors are incontestable. Being Boring is a classic minor-key grower, its imprint on the soul deepens with repeated plays. Over to Tennant (in a 1996 BBC Radio 1 documentary) to shed some light: “We were always fascinated about the way Stock Aitken Waterman would change key for choruses. And so the verse of Being Boring was in A minor or D minor, maybe, after we went up a semi-tone into A flat for the chorus. Which we would never have done before. It wasn’t an attempt to be mature; it was actually an attempt to be like Stock Aitken Waterman.”

Intriguingly, what began as an attempt to do out-and-out pop (if we are to believe the sometimes disingenuous Tennant) morphs into something else. And it’s this juxtaposition, this delicate balance between disposability and maturity that forms part of the song’s elixir.

[snip]

There are other factors that, like an elegant interior, don’t add anything structurally to my argument, but are still intriguing: the oddly successful (though often unscannable) rhyming couplets (“When I went I left from the station/With a haversack and some trepidation”); the sophisticated production; harp flourishes, wah-wah guitar, eerily extended opening note (from which the “overture” breaks out in an unexpected direction); the subtle irony of the title, with Pet Shop Boys playing on the perception of them as “boring”; and the black-and-white Bruce Weber-directed video, a thing of beauty, with its nudity, poodles, white horses, tap dancers, writhing couples and handwritten scrawl of intent: “The song is about growing up …”

The best single single of all time, however, is of course Artie Shaw’s “Begin the Beguine.”

Prime

¶ The Reformed Broker (Joshua Brown) foresees civil strife in America arising from contention about public-sector pension benefits and other entitlements.

Pension funds are somewhere north of being $3 trillion underfunded.  Public sector union officials have learned a thing or two from the Captains of the Financial Services Industry in terms of throwing tantrums and making threats about the end of the world.  They will pull the same shenanigans and more for their own bailouts; sit-ins, walk-offs, freeze-outs, lock-outs and protests were not a part of the banks’ repertoire, but expect the public unions across the nation to engage in all of these activities.

And the majority of the people in the United States will be completely unmoved by their threats and their cries.  Taxpayers will tell their elected officials to simply find people who will do the job for a reasonable cost; there is a 17% under-employed labor pool in this country, after all.  There will be a push for privatization and outsourcing where the unions have priced themselves out of their own jobs.  The disparity between salaries and benefits of public employees vs their private counterparts (now at 3x according to some estimates) has probably peaked.

It’s over.

Our response to this scenario (which seems realistic enough) is that the public/private sectors ought to be largely if not entirely merged, into a third sector that is neither private nor public: highly regulated not-for-profit business organizations. We don’t see a reason for tegarding housing as a private good, but teaching as a public one; all we see on this point is sentimental muddle.

And when we say “highly regulated,” we don’t mean “by the government.” Even the regulators ought to be not-for-profit organizations. (How nice it would be if the Securities and Exchange Commission could be one!)

Tierce

¶ At Wired Science, Duncan Geere writes about the first manned space ship that will be launched without the support of a government. Think on’t!

A team of Danish volunteers has built a rocket capable of carrying a human into space, and will be launching it in a week’s time. The project, which has been funded entirely by donations and sponsorship, is led by Kristian von Bengtson and Peter Madsen.

The rocket is named HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE, and its first test flight will carry a crash-test dummy, rather than a human, so that the safety aspects of the design can be analyzed. It’ll launch from a floating platform that the team has also built, which will be towed into the middle of the Baltic Sea by a submarine called Nautilus that the pair built as their last project.

The creators are members of the SomethingAwful web community, and have been posting pictures and answering questions there. In response to one question asking what the chances of the person inside dying are, they replied: “Unlike Columbia we’re not moving at orbital speeds so ‘dying a gruesome death burning up on re-entry’ with our kit has a very low outcome probability.”

¶ Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things is available for pre-ordering, if, like us, you’ve come to recognize in the Awl writer one of our more mordant social prophets. Today’s target is the vaguely-defined fear of a weak recovery and of “Obamanomics” that supposedly prevents firms from hiring.

And funnily enough, the leaders of the heavily unionized auto sector are managing to do what their anxious counterparts in Santelli-land still lack the stomach for: They’re adding jobs. While Michigan’s economy, which was in recession well ahead of the 2008 collapse, is still in desperate straits, the state led the United States in job growth last month, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Labor. More than 20,000 of the 27,800 new jobs in Michigan were in manufacturing, and the vast majority of those, of course, are in the auto industry.

Such suggestive, uneven regional trends in job growth and manufacturing again only strengthen the case for addressing the question of our sluggish overall recovery at a deeper structural level, beyond reporting that employers, like the rest of us, are easily spooked these days. Consider, for instance, the testimony of a recent New York Times op-ed contributor, who decried the influence of a “cadre of ideological tax-cutters,” “the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector,” and “the hollowing out of the larger American economy”; as we’ve “lived beyond our means for decades by borrowing heavily from abroad,” we’ve also “steadily sent jobs and production offshore.” The predictable results of all these trends, we learn, is that “we will not have a conventional recovery now, but rather a long hangover of debt liquidation and downsizing.”

That wasn’t Paul Krugman—we know that from a parting warning about “recycled Keynesianism” and a call for renewed fiscal discipline. But it was former OMB Director David Stockman. You might remember him from the Reagan Revolution.

Nones

¶ At The Wilson Quarterly, Daniel Akst writes about the friendship deficit in American life. We’re widely recognized as friendly people, but we’re not correspondingly committed.

Friendship can even prolong our lives. For loneliness, the experts tell us, has to do more with the quality of our relationships than the quantity. And we now know that loneliness is associated with all sorts of problems, including depression, high blood pressure and cholesterol, Alzheimer’s disease, poor diet, drug and alcohol abuse, bulimia, and suicide. Lonely people have a harder time concentrating, are more likely to divorce, and get into more conflicts with neighbors and coworkers.

But of course friends are not vitamins, to be taken in daily doses in hopes of cheating the Grim Reaper. The real reason to prize our friends is that they help us lead good and satisfying lives, enriched by mutual understanding. This special way of knowing one another was once exalted as “sympathy,” and Adam Smith described it as “changing places in fancy.” As Caleb Crain made plain in his excellent book American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (2001), the 18th and 19th centuries were the heyday of sympathy, when the fervor of friends was evident in their letters as well as their comportment. Sympathy persisted in popular discourse and was studied as a scientific fact under various guises until, in the 19th century, Charles Darwin came along to replace cooperation with competition in the intellectual armament of the day.

Sympathy’s long-ago advocates were onto something when they reckoned friendship one of life’s highest pleasures, and they felt themselves freer than we do to revel in it. It’s time for us to ease up on friending, rethink our downgrade of ex-lovers to “just” friends, and resist moving far away from everyone we know merely because it rains less elsewhere. In Asimov’s vision, Solaria was a lonely planet that humans settled with the help of robots. People weren’t made to live there.

Vespers

¶ In “Beauty, Youth, and Their Discontents,” Ujala Seghal ruminates on four beautiful protagonists who don’t end well, Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Eustacia Vye. (The Millions)

Eustacia’s textual description is not exactly an exercise in restraint. On Hardy goes for two pages, describing the curve of her lips, her “pagan” eyes, the weight of her figure – and two paragraphs alone devoted to the sheer bounty of her dark hair, of which “a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form its shadow.”

Like Julien Sorel, Eustacia Vye is naive, egotistical, self-serving, and obsessed with the idea of Paris, “the centre and vortex of the fashionable world.” She is far too human to achieve the Platonic ideal of beauty, “transcending sex, sensuality and ‘mere’ physical beauty” to “the region where gods dwell.” Nevertheless, Hardy gives a nod to “the fantastic nature of her passion, which lowered her as an intellect, raised her as a soul.”

And like Julien Sorel, Anna Karenina, and Emma Bovary, Eustacia – mired by the societal constraints on her free will – ponders:

“But do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life – music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world?”

Beauty calling out to beauty!

Compline

¶ At The Bygone Bureau, Darryl Campbell, who never met Tony Judt or even went to New York University, testifies to the impact that Judt’s engagement with the world had upon his intellectual (and professional) development.

Of all the arguments that Judt makes in Postwar, his criticism of intellectuals struck me the hardest. No serious engagement with the outside world, no real anger about contemporary issues, no general goal beyond self-replication on the one hand; too much “high-cultural pretension” and “hardening crust of knowing cynicism” on the other.

Well, that was me, wasn’t it? Part of the process of becoming an academic “lifer,” I thought, meant that you had to give up the active life in favor of the contemplative. I would condescend to set someone straight about medieval conspiracy theories (“You don’t actually believe what Dan Brown says, do you?”), but I couldn’t be bothered to care much about the modern Middle East. I rolled my eyes, as did many of my colleagues, whenever someone mentioned the name “Bush,” and could regurgitate received opinion about his policies if pressed, but I usually just kept my mouth shut about such things. As long as I wanted to be a professor, I felt that it was better to restrict myself to the library or the classroom.

Postwar began to draw me out of my complacent reverie. Over the next year or two, I took a particular interest in Judt, even though he was technically outside of my area of academic interest (of course, to a medievalist, much is proscribed). I read his book Reappraisals, a book of previously-published essays which again beat the drum of intellectual engagement. Alongside portraits of the select few leftist intellectuals who tried to make a difference in the postwar world — Arthur Koestler, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi — Judt also blasted people like Eric Hobsbawm who were too in love with ideology to see the world as it was, rather than as it should have been, and contemporary liberal “intellectuals” who failed to speak up against the Iraq war as “Bush’s useful idiots”. And, for the first time, I heard Judt’s voice, even though he was in Manhattan and I was in northern Indiana, thanks to NYU’s broadcast of his lecture “Disturbing the Peace: Intellectuals and Universities in an Illiberal Age.” I wrote down one passage in particular from his lecture:

“Those of my academic colleagues who spend their days substituting meaning for fact — “meaning,” with heavy scare quotes, and “fact,” with even more — cannot expect to be taken seriously at night when they condemn George Bush or some pompous neo-con for sneering at reality-based views of the Middle East. If we want to be taken seriously, we’d better stop talking about positional verities. If we want to be taken seriously, we should stop placing “truth,” “reality,” in witty scare quotes. And not just stop it when we walk out the doors of the campus, but stop it in the classroom too.”

Have a Look

¶ Bertrand Russell’s “Liberal Decalogue” — ten commandments for good wrongologists. (Common Sense Atheism)

¶ Quicksand: some people crave it! (via kottke.org) 

¶ Reddi-Bacon. (No, not a WIN)

¶ International Druthers List. (Let a Thousand Nations Bloom)

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

Sext

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

Not to mention the ongoing library saga.

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

The story appeared to be over.

What happened? I asked.

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

RB: I don’t.

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

RB: I haven’t read it—

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

RB: How did you come across this book?

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

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

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

RB: Perhaps it is the glut of everything.

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

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

JE: Exactly.

RB: Who are these women named the Kondrashians?

JE: I don’t know. I have no idea.

Have a Look

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

April 8, 2010

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

¶ Eric Patton visits Petra. (Sore Afraid)

Matins

¶ Why professional football must change or die: the scandal of glossed-over concussions. Cord Jefferson, at The Awl, goes on to target the economic foundation of sports-pension inequities. (“Boxing, which drops the niceties of football and lets minorities and poor whites pound each other’s heads sans helmets, sometimes until someone dies, has no nationwide pension plan at all.”)

Exacerbating its unwillingness to accept that football can cause brain damage is that the NFL isn’t doing everything within its power to prevent head injuries in the first place. As recently as February, helmet-manufacturers were questioning the league’s helmet-testing program, worried that it was dangerously flawed. The tests proved so bad, in fact, that one manufacturer pulled out, with its CEO saying the NFL’s tests are “not deserving of credibility.”

For reasons that are obvious yet difficult to describe, the NFL’s policy of allowing its players to gradually destroy themselves would probably be less offensive were African Americans involved in ways other than just running, jumping and hitting. They aren’t. As of today, there are still no black majority owners in the NFL, and only one who comes close (Reggie Fowler owns 40 percent of the Minnesota Vikings). Out of 32, only six of the league’s head coaches are African American, a dearth that may be part of why blacks don’t even watch the NFL. According to an ABC study, less than 13 percent of the league’s viewership is black. Football fans are primarily white and relatively wealthy, earning $55,000 annually on average. 40 percent are over the age of 50. “Football has demographics that baseball would kill for,” said one CNN analyst, who, were he more direct, would have said, “White guys with hefty disposable incomes watch football.”

Maybe it’s a fair trade–black kids losing the ability to remember their mother’s name in exchange for a decade of big checks and fame amongst middle-aged white men. What’s not fair by any reasonable metric is what comes next, when players retire. Although the NFL recently started a fund that will give ex-players with dementia $50,000 a year for medical treatment, it’s also installed a byzantine bureaucracy between the patients and that money. Brent Boyd, a former Vikings lineman who now suffers from dizziness and chronic headaches, has been deemed ineligible for funds multiple times by league doctors, who say that one of his major on-field concussions “could not organically be responsible for all or even a major portion” of his symptoms.

Lauds

¶ Ellen Moody writes so persuasively about the virtues of Alejandro Amenábar’s film, Agora, starring Rachel Weisz, that we’re going to make a point of seeing it while it’s still in the theatres; we had planned on waiting, but no longer.

It’s a parable which is intended to comment on theocracries in the middle east which (just yesterday it was reported) stone women to death for pregnancy outside marriage.

It does makes a strong use of ritual scenes and large crowd ones (part of the point) but these are made more interesting by also moving out to shoot the earth from a distance. We have a metaphysical take or perspective (dazzling visuals as Izzy says), and as in George Eliot’s films, intertitles (yes intertitles are used and skilfully) persist in framing these events as universal and felt somehow further off or in history (writing) as in Eliot’s poem (above).

But at its heart is something quiet: there are so many intimate quiet scenes of learning, of reading, and of teaching, thinking, trying to understand how the earth relates to the sun, and both to the cosmos. The script is intelligent and the acting subtle and vivid, the stage business filled with intensities, including Hypatia’s large sandbox where she traces out with her faithful servant different visions of the planet’s movements. There’s a sequence of Hypatia aboard a ship with Orestes on the water with Orestes in a classical kind of boat. I don’t know if historically accurate but it was visually stunning and I liked to see her enjoy herself out in the open too.

Prime

¶ At the end of a lengthy piece about deficits, fiscal austerity, and other bugaboos, Simon Johnson and James Kwak remind plutocrats that cake cannot be had and eaten — not even theirs. You say that tax cuts ought to be extended, as a form of drip-down stimulus. Well, this is probably idiotic, but assuming it’s not, then the tax cuts should be terminated as soon as the unemployment drops to healthy leavels. We think that you’ll have a lot of fun pondering this object lesson. (The Baseline Scenario)

What do matter are taxes and entitlements. Therefore, the coming battle over the Bush tax cuts is of real importance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, extending the Bush tax cuts would add $2.3 trillion to the total 2018 debt. The single biggest step our government could take this year to address the structural deficit would be to let the tax cuts expire. And a credible commitment to long-term fiscal sustainability should reduce interest rates today, helping to stimulate the economy.

Critics say that this amounts to increasing taxes at a time of high unemployment, and that instead the tax cuts should be extended as a stimulus measure. This overlooks the fact that tax cuts are an inefficient form of stimulus, because many people choose to save their additional income instead of spending it.

If the goal is to boost growth and employment immediately, it would be better to let the tax cuts expire and dedicate some of the increased revenue to real stimulus programs. Alternatively, if some tax cuts are extended – as it seems likely that at least those for the middle class will be – there should be provisions to eliminate them automatically when unemployment falls to a preset level. 

Tierce

¶ At You Are Not So Smart, a frontal attack on the Hydraulic Theory of Anger — to which you are, in all likelihood, an unwitting subscriber. Far from dissipating toxic frustrations, it seems, catharsis — well, venting, anyway —creates a need for them.

Thanks to Freud, catharsis theory and psychotherapy became part of psychology. Mental wellness, he reasoned, could be achieved by filtering away impurities in your mind through the siphon of a therapist.

He believed your psyche was poisoned by repressed fears and desires, unresolved arguments and unhealed wounds. The mind formed phobias and obsessions around these bits of mental detritus. You needed to rummage around in there, open up some windows and let some fresh air and sunlight in.

The hydraulic model of anger is just what it sounds like – anger builds up inside the mind until you let off some steam. If you don’t let off this steam, the boiler will burst. If you don’t vent the pressure, someone is going to get a beating.

It sounds good. You may even look back on your life and remember times when you went batshit, punched a wall or broke a plate, and it made things better, but you are not so smart.

Sext

¶ Dear Choire Sicha: the Daily Blagueurs want you to know that they totally get you. We never, ever complain about how hard it is to do what we do here, never.

Behind the scenes, however, the controversy has not subsided.

In daily telephone calls, Fred Sainz, vice president of Human Rights Campaign, said he was talking with top Target executives about “making it right.”

“Among the bullets in our gun is their continued relationship with the LGBT [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender] community,” Sainz said. “Gay and lesbian customers are among Target’s most loyal customer base.” The company is seen by many in the gay community as “the progressive alternative” to Walmart.

Human Rights Campaign has also targeted Best Buy Co., another company that donated to MN Forward.

Best Buy spokeswoman Sue Busch Nehring said the donation “was focused solely on jobs and an improved economy.…We’ve learned from this and we will review the process we use to make political contributions to avoid any future confusion.”

Never! Not ever. (If anything, our labors have made the Editor somewhat insufferable; he likes to boast to friends that “now,” (and this would be thanks to us), he’s “staggeringly well-informed.” (But then we’ve always known that his role model is the Jodie Foster character in Inside Man.)

Nones

¶ Why is Beijing cozying up to the PRC’s ancient enemy, the KuoMinTang party of Chiang Kai-Shek? Well, things evolve, and it’s the KMT’s opposition that China would like to keep out of power.  (It is our expectation that the democratization of China will be accomplished by a gradual Taiwanese takeover of the Mainland.) Nicholas Consonery at Foreign Policy:

The Chinese government is looking for ways to bolster support within Taiwan for Ma and the KMT — and, by extension, for the current direction of cross — Strait relations. Ma’s government has moved Taiwan toward ever-closer economic integration with the mainland and is probing the political implications of this integration. But Beijing is aware that skepticism of the mainland’s intentions remains strong in Taiwan, and that Ma must avoid being cast as overly solicitous of Beijing. 

That said, a major driver of Beijing’s approach is a trend I laid out on this blog last year: Beijing is seeking to avoid steps that create opportunities for Taiwan’s major opposition party — the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) — and is working hard to avoid any risk of a DPP resurgence. The Chinese leadership does not want to revisit the lows reached during the presidency of former DPP head Chen Shui-bian in Taiwan.

Beijing is playing this game deftly. For the past year, Ma has promised Taiwanese voters that he would boost Taiwan’s international profile by signing the controversial Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China, a deal he said would open the door to trade agreements with other countries. If Beijing had pressured Singapore to back away from these negotiations with Taiwan after ECFA, it would not only have raised Taiwanese ire toward Beijing — it would have inflicted serious harm on Ma’s domestic credibility and strengthened DPP arguments that Taiwan should simply go it alone.

Vespers

¶ Yes, yes, we ought to read The Huffington Post on our own more often, instead of waiting for other people to find the fun. It has been days and days and days since Anis Shivani published his list of the 15 most overrated American writers. but if his list is no longer news, exactly, it’s still a gas to read. Here he is on the last writer on his list — whom he rushes to insist is not a writer — the Times’s own Michiko Kakutani. Rude and impolite it may be, but we dare you to look away. (via MetaFilter)

Not a writer, by any stretch of even my novelistic imagination, but I include her here as the enabler-in-chief for the preceding mediocrities. Simply the worst book critic on the planet. Possesses only one criterion to judge fiction–does it fit her notions of the mid-twentieth century realist novel? No postmodern experiments for her, nothing radical that doesn’t fit her naive realist mold. If she loves a book, avoid it like hell (it’s bound to be banal). If she dislikes it, consider buying it. If she really hates it, run to the bookstore and get it, right now! Every good book is Chekhovian or Jamesian or Forsterian or Updikean–she has mastered the technique of saying nothing in a review by comparing books to an author’s previous books and to classics which have nothing to do with the book at hand. Judges books as if the entire modernist and postmodernist canon had never existed. One of the world’s great purveyors of mindless philistinism–it’s divine justice that she would be the New York Times‘s chief book critic (and soon to go behind the pay wall). Sample judgments: “What’s amazing is that Mr. [Denis] Johnson [in Tree of Smoke] somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original–and potent.” “A Chekhovian sense of loss blows through these new stories: a reminder of Ms. Lahiri’s appreciation of the wages of time and mortality and her understanding too of the missed connections that plague her husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and friends.” I limn you, Michiko, lapidarily!

Compline

¶ The fracas ensuing from Target’s contribution to the campaign of a gubernatorial candidate with an anti-LGTB agenda has thrown an unholy practice into a new and probably darker zone. While Target has endeavored to make nice with gay activisits, many lobbyists feel that the affair will just push corporations to figure out more anonymous ways of giving. We hope that the Human Rights Campaign will seize the day by demanding verifiably transparent campaign-contribution disclosures from targeted companies. We heartily support business boycotts. (Los Angeles Times; via  The Morning News)

Behind the scenes, however, the controversy has not subsided.

In daily telephone calls, Fred Sainz, vice president of Human Rights Campaign, said he was talking with top Target executives about “making it right.”

“Among the bullets in our gun is their continued relationship with the LGBT [lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender] community,” Sainz said. “Gay and lesbian customers are among Target’s most loyal customer base.” The company is seen by many in the gay community as “the progressive alternative” to Walmart.

Human Rights Campaign has also targeted Best Buy Co., another company that donated to MN Forward.

Best Buy spokeswoman Sue Busch Nehring said the donation “was focused solely on jobs and an improved economy.…We’ve learned from this and we will review the process we use to make political contributions to avoid any future confusion.”

Have a Look

¶ Has somebody remembered Giambologna’s Marina from Art 101? Cool. (Mila’s Daycreams)

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

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

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

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

(Hennessey post too long? Try Weakonomics.)

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great for aggregate demand, eh?

Tierce

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

¶ Nederlands dectective-mystery covers. (The Rumpus)

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