Matins

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

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

A devaluation — but of course not a termination.

Have a Look

¶  Mig goes to Paris. (Metamorphosism)

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

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

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

Matins

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

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

Lauds

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Not us, that’s for sure!

Tierce

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

Matins

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

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

Lauds

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

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

Matins

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

Tierce

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

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

Sext

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

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

— then Clarkson.

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

 

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

¶ Nice Muscles. (Café Muscato)

Matins

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

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

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

I don’t buy it.

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

The coffee was suspiciously bitter that morning.

Vespers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

That’s probably the most politic answer.

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

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

Prime

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

(We repeat: the following is nonsense.)

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

¶ Fabien Clerc. (via The Best Part)

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

Whenza last time that happened?

Compline

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

¶ Felix Salmon decodes Jamie Dimon.

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

Matins

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

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

(via The Morning News)

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

¶ Felix Salmon’s Summer Book Giveaway.

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

The tastiest findings concerned freeloading:

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hear, hear!

Nones

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Matins

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

Have a Look

¶ “Stomp Mel Gibson!” (FAIL)

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

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

Matins

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

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

 

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

Even sharper:

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

Vespers

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

We went straight to Facebook and joined The Shoupistas.

Have a Look

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

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

Mr Lehrer’s explanation is of course rather different.

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

(Yikes.)

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

(Breathe.)

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

Matins

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

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