Matins

¶ Chronicle of a crash foretold: Greece’s Olympic ruins. (WSJ; via  The Morning News)

The vacant venues, several of which dominate parts of the city’s renovated Aegean coastline, have become some of the most visible reminders of Greece’s age of excessive spending. Sites range from a softball stadium and kayaking facility to a beach volleyball stadium and a sailing marina.

As Greece sifts through the wreckage wrought by its enormous public debt, which sent tremors through world finance in recent months, the Athens Games are once again unifying this nation—this time as a target of criticism. They cost an estimated $7.4 billion to $14 billion, minor in light of the more than $370 billion of public debt, but that hasn’t mitigated the resentment.

While We’re Away

¶ The only solution is to sell you car and move into a densely-populated urban neighborhood, like ours for example. The conundrum? Whether or not to buy gasoline at pumps that Brtish Petroleum doesn’t actually own. (The Awl)

Okay so, sarcasm aside… over the last couple years, BP closed down all its company-owned stations, laying off nearly 12,000 people in 2009 alone across the organization in total. Their annual report phrased this as “the transfer of our US convenience retail sites to a franchise model.” So all of the 11,000 or so BP stations in the U.S. are essentially franchises now—and they actually do represent a not-at-all-huge part of the company’s income. But things get tricky when you let CNN explain this to you, in the very small words they like to use.

Have a Look

¶ Fooling around with Loren Ipsum. (PhiloSophistry)

¶ Software to  ease the distortions of wide-angle and panorama photography: the Panini Projection. (New Scientist)

¶ Menus from the restaurants of Old Colorado — well, not that old. Our parents could have ordered for us from one or two of them. Oddly, though, no souvenirs from the Brown Palace. (Colorado College; via  MetaFilter)

It’s not so much a matter of running late as it is one of not having run early. Happy Thursday! Meaning that Will and Megan are here, and we aren’t planning to spend much time online. Ought to that about that last night, right? But we went to the theatre and saw a rather exhausting (if awfully well-done) play about a broken upper-middle-class English family. This required a long restorative dinner, after which there was nothing for it but to go to bed. Up first thing this morning to unpack the Pack ‘n’ Play.

But we did get the Book Review covered yesterday. Can you believe that we’re still doing that? This is the sixth summer. Ha!

More anon, we promise.

Matins

¶ Municipal liability for Newport’s Cliff Walk — they thought that they had settled it, but no. (NYT)

The State Supreme Court reversed a lower court’s decision that Newport was not liable, pointing to an exception in the law that holds landowners responsible for “willful or malicious failure to guard or warn against a dangerous condition” after “discovering the user’s peril.”

In its 3-to-2 decision, the court found that the city had long been aware of the Cliff Walk’s “latent dangers,” including the dirt paths that are in fact erosion trails created by rainwater runoff.

“It is beyond dispute,” the court said in its ruling, “that for many years, the city has had actual notice of the dangerous instability of the ground underneath the Cliff Walk and its eroding edge.”

The ruling found a “haunting similarity” between Mr. Berman’s accident and the 1991 death of Michael Cain, a college student who also stepped from the Cliff Walk onto a patch of ground that gave way and plunged to the rocks. Mr. Cain’s family lost a lawsuit on grounds that he was on the Cliff Walk at 2 a.m., after its closing time, and thus was trespassing.

Although we are wary of the drive to make somebody responsible for everybody else’s problems, we agree with the Court here. Surrounded by Newport’s mansions, which, for the most part, sit on well-tended grounds, it’s cognitively difficult to recognize that those paths leading down to the shore are not paths at all.

While We’re Away

¶ An excellent, inarguable alternative list of “20 Under 40.”   (The Millions)

To be sure, it’s hard to begrudge these 20 terrific writers their honor. We’ve been excited to read in the issue new work from friends (and interested to observe the generational influence exerted by 1999 honoree George Saunders). But, as the accompanying Comment suggests, “to encourage . . . second-guessing is perhaps the best reason to make lists.” And, wishing to see more such second-guessing, we’ve decided to rise to the bait and offer our own, non-overlapping, list of young-ish writers to watch.

¶ Janice Nimura sits on a bench in Carl Schurz Park and remembers the Slocum Disaster, which occurred within view of her perch 96 years ago yesterday.

Six hundred and twenty-two families lost relatives on the General Slocum. Half of the congregation of St. Mark’s Church died. By Memorial Day 1905, more than a quarter of the stricken families had left the neighborhood. By the end of the decade, Little Germany had largely ceased to exist, and thousands of Eastern European Jews had moved in.

Sometime shortly before 1910, my teenaged great-grandfather, a Galician Jew, landed at Ellis Island. A baker, he got married and raised three children at 168 East Second Street, a few blocks from St. Mark’s. Perhaps the previous tenants of his tenement apartment had been parishioners. St. Mark’s shut its doors in 1940, and reopened soon after as a synagogue. The remnants of the congregation merged with Zion Lutheran, on East 84th Street in Yorkville.

We’re sitting in Yorkville now. It’s no longer particularly German. But the Upper East Side, of which Yorkville is the easternmost part, was home to more victims of the Sept. 11 attacks than any other Manhattan neighborhood. Another catastrophe that unfolded on a gorgeous day. Remember the General Slocum today, and ponder the currents of history that are part of the view from one park bench.

¶ At The House Next Door, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard have a very lengthy but extremely interesting conversation about Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve.

JB: Well, I guess I don’t disagree with you that the writing is on-the-nose, at least by contemporary standards. But it is very effective in places, and it remains one of the film’s strengths on the whole. However, as for your charge that “virtually every shot in the film is utilitarian and nothing more,” I wouldn’t disagree. Sure, the last shot stands out, as you noted. And I’ve always rather liked the shot of Eve standing just offstage at the end of one of Margo’s performances, watching her idol taking her bows. And yet, in the context of the rest of the film’s visual blandness, that shot is utilitarian, too, upon further reflection; the only difference is that we’re given something comparatively interesting to look at. So much of All About Eve is nothing more than the actors centered in the frame, barking their lines (some memorable, some not), often in front of rather bland backdrops. And so it is that one of the most memorable shots in the film is the one of Eve and Addison DeWitt (George Sanders) walking down a sidewalk—memorable, alas, because it’s so clumsily staged in front of rear-projection.

Sadly, in terms of the cinematography, that’s not the only time that an oddity stands out. Of late, I’ve been puzzled by a shot at the end of Bill’s not-so-happy welcome-back party: The party sequence ends with Eve saying goodnight to Karen (Celeste Holm) and reminding her to put in a good word for her about becoming Margo’s understudy. Karen, standing at the top of a stairway, assures Eve she won’t forget and then descends the stairs. As soon as Karen leaves the frame, the camera zooms past where she was standing to focus on a painting that had hovered unremarkably over Karen’s shoulder during her conversation with Eve. In a very brief closeup, no longer than a second, we see what appears to be woman sitting in a chair, looking to her right, with figures standing over each shoulder—perhaps an angel over her right shoulder and something that looks almost like a court jester over her left shoulder. The painting is there and gone so quickly that it’s hard to say exactly what it portrays. In fact, right now I’m studying the paused image on my computer screen and I still can’t quite tell what I’m looking at.

It’s entirely possible, of course, that the painting is quite famous. I freely admit that my knowledge of that art form is limited. Furthermore, I recognized Toulouse-Lautrec’s Aristide Bruant dans son cabaret hanging in Margo’s living room (hence, she likes famous art). So perhaps you know exactly what that slow zoom reveals, and maybe I should, too, and maybe that’s why neither of the two commentary tracks on my DVD makes any mention of the zoom or the painting. Then again, unless the painting is as recognizable as Mona Lisa, I find the haste with which Mankiewicz cuts away from the painting, after going through the effort to (a) hang it there and (b) zoom in on it, to be baffling. Giving Mankiewicz the benefit of the doubt—and thanks to my close examination of the painting on my computer—I’ll assume that the painting symbolizes Karen’s place between an angel she sees (Eve) and a kind of demon she doesn’t (Eve again). Still, I think it’s telling that one of Mankiewicz’s few attempts at cinematic storytelling is essentially mumbled.

We couldn’t resist snipping this passage, not only because we disagree with the proposition that All About Eve is boring to look at — our guess is that these fellows don’t get to the theatre very often — but because neither one of them seems to be familiar with Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Mrs Siddons “as the Tragic Muse.” Siddons was the great Eighteenth-Century actress who gave her name to the fictional thespian society whose annual awards dinner serves as a frame for the narrative. 

So, yes, “the painting is quite famous.” It can be seen at the Huntingdon.

Have a Look

¶ The first traffic signal (Detroit, 1912).  (Design Observer)

¶ A big, big “Oops!” moment for schmearer Thomas Kinkade. (World Class Stupid)

¶ Choire Sicha labors in the archives of the New York Times and finds that those things you complain about have been besetting sins at the newspaper since at least a century ago. It’s funny to read the scans of old clippings. (The Awl)

So we’ve taken a long look back at the paper in 1910 and 1911, and found pretty much everything there that people complain about now: it’s beholden to Jews! It’s in bed with the President (even while quick to absolutely trash his daughters). It’s devoted to the stupid trends of the rich (and displays a crazy obsession with rich people and their real estate), it gives away information crucial to public safety, prints thinly sourced gossip, and has an insane op-ed page. And 100 years ago, it already had everyone’s favorite thing: a catty, mean profile of a famous popular singer!

One of my homiest maxims is that being ahead of the times is just another way of being wrong. You don’t get any points for seeing what’s coming if you can’t persuade anybody else that you’re right. And since almost everything that we see coming involves a shout or two of “Repent!”, it’s no wonder that nobody wants to listen.

But I’m going to venture one of my ahead-of-things ideas anyway. Having read well over six hundred feeds this afternoon alone, I feel moderately comfortable with the claim that “nobody is talking about this.” All that means, though, is that nobody is talking about what I mean to propose in my little corner of the Blogosphere. If you’ve run into this idea somewhere else, please write to me and let me know.

What I’m wondering is why President Obama hasn’t nationalized the Deepwater Horizon problem. Just the one catastrophic well, not British Petroleum! Why is he waiting for the BP people to come up with a plan, when, nearly two months into the disaster, that’s precisely what they’ve so signally failed to do. Does he believe that American voters, most of whom understand embarrassingly little about the complexities of the problem — and I’m talking about the complexities that surround the difficulty of fixing it, not the headache of actually sealing the well itself — does President Obama believe that Americans are going to be reassured by talk of making sure that BP pays for the cleanup?

Until the weekend before last, I was saying that I’d like Deepwater to be placed under military control, if only the military knew how to deal with messes like Deepwater. Then Deborah Solomon asked Christopher Brownfield, a retired submarine captain, what could be done, and it suddenly seemed as though only the military knows what to do about Deepwater. How to seal it by blowing it up, that is. And not with nuclear weapons, either.

Why hasn’t that been done?
I’m very skeptical about why we haven’t done it. I think the reason is that when the oil companies are in charge of bringing the solutions to the table, they are going to advocate solutions that allow them to continue recovering the oil.

The answer to my “why not?” question is, I’m increasingly convinced, that President Obama is a meritocrat, somebody who tested well into the elite and who, ipso facto, is largely happy with the world as it is, because he has, qua meritocrat, been rewarded for understanding how it works. Why would he want to change the game? I don’t mean to sound a note of cynicism; I believe that Barack Obama quite sincerely has the best interests of the United States at heart, and that he would do anything that he could think of to solve its problems. The catch is that there are too many things that he can’t think of, because if he’d allowed himself to be distracted by them on his laudable climb up the ladder — to achieve an honor that will probably shine brighter if he serves just the one term, that of being the nation’s first president of color — he’d never have made it to the top.

So, when the president summons bankers and oilmen to the Oval Office, what he sees is other guys who have tested well, just like him. He’s doing his job; why can’t they? (There is simply no other explanation for his countenancing the presence of the odious Lawrence Summers.)

The president that I wish Mr Obama would model himself upon is not FDR — for a thousand reasons, not the least of which is that the president who succeeded FDR was every bit as important, but also a thousand times more down-to-earth. Harry Truman assumed that the fast-talking experts who paraded through his office were trying in one way or another to pull the wool over his eyes, and, as an accomplished haberdasher, he had an eye for wool. In the history of the Twentieth Century White House, Harry Truman’s firing of the bellicose Douglas McArthur is sadly unparalleled. But there’s still time for Barack Obama to give it a Twenty-First Century try.

Matins

¶ Swedish Paternity Leave. It’s expensive for taxpayers, and inconvenient for employers, but it’s transforming ideas of masculinity. (NYT)

Birgitta Ohlsson, European affairs minister, put it this way: “Machos with dinosaur values don’t make the top-10 lists of attractive men in women’s magazines anymore.” Ms. Ohlsson, who has lobbied European Union governments to pay more attention to fathers, is eight months pregnant, and her husband, a law professor, will take the leave when their child is born.

“Now men can have it all — a successful career and being a responsible daddy,” she added. “It’s a new kind of manly. It’s more wholesome.”

¶ “Belgium will not fall apart because of separatist success” — so says John Palmer in the Guardian. (Real Clear World)

The Flemish nationalists acknowledge that major policy areas such as defence and justice should remain Belgian until they can be transferred to the responsibility of a fully federal EU. Since this is an unlikely development in the near future, the nationalists will, in practice, settle for a further devolution of powers to the regions but within the Belgian federal state. Negotiations to form the next government will be long and difficult. Success or failure will probably come down to the thorny issue of the status of the Brussels region and the extent to which social security should no longer be a matter for the Belgian government but transferred instead to the regions – anathema to the dominant parties of the left in Wallonia.

Most Belgians don’t want to break up the country: point taken. Unfortunately, they don’t want to do much to salve the Fleming-Walloon breach, either.

While We’re Away

¶ It was easier to be wild in the old days. Bright young thing Teresa “Baby” Jungman, proposed to by Evelyn Waugh but turned down because he was already married, died at 102, an observant Catholic from beginning to end. (via  The Awl, sort of)

She was, however, very strict in her adherence to the Roman Catholic faith. Lord Longford was convinced that none of her admirers “got anywhere with her sexually”, and described her as “more like a nun, like a very friendly and fascinating nun”.

¶ Twentieth-Century Best-Seller lists, one for each decade. (Washington Post; via  The Morning News) Top-Ten CEOs in prison. Steve Tobak asks “why they did it.” (The Corner Office)

 Personality Disorder. Delusional, narcissistic psychopaths, call them what you want, it sounds like a no-brainer to me. I mean, most of these folks maintained their innocence to the end. That implies compartmentalization so they didn’t actually feel empathy for those affected by their actions. Denial is a powerful thing. Sure sounds like a behavioral disorder to me. Anyway, there’s no denying that each of these men functioned, and functioned exceptionally, until their issues caught up with them.

¶ Heading north means climbing uphill — according to our mental defaults. (Admit it: learning that the Nile flows north was a real shocker.) (Wired Science)

Volunteers also estimated that it would take considerably longer to drive between the same pairs of U.S. cities if traveling from south to north, as opposed to north to south, says psychologist and study director Tad Brunyé of the U.S. Army Research, Development, and Engineering Command in Natick, Mass., and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. For journeys that averaged 798 miles, time estimates for north-going jaunts averaged one hour and 39 minutes more than south-going trips, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Memory & Cognition.

Have a Look

¶ Building a re-polarizing bridge from Hong Kong to China. (kottke.org)

¶ Neat signage: “Interventions urbaines et françaises.” (TrendyGirl; via The Rumpus)

We’re running a little late this morning: we are pooped. Specificially, HTML-pooped. We launched a new site yesterday, Civil Pleasures, the “tablet edition” of Portico, our ten year-old Web site. Fiddling obsessionally with details — endlessly re-adjusting the style sheet; resizing logo images (no longer dependent upon your computer’s library of typefaces are we!);  concocting precious inaugural copy — this sort of thing can be very amusing (although not at all funny) once you decide that you can’t put the dirty work off for another day, but we are, ahem, ten years older than we were when were struggling to make Portico as complicated as we thought it ought to be — and we are trying to keep things simple this time. That’s why we’re pooped.

We’ve linked to Civil Pleasures not because we want to show off the new site — designed to look good on an iPad, it looks terrible on a conventional monitor —but because we’re too tired to cross-post last night’s diary entry, which features a screenshot from Google Maps of a building that nobody but John D Rockefeller Jr would have called a “playhouse.”

Matins

¶ Just hold on there a minute: About those Afghan minerals that are supposedly worth $1 trillion…. (Foreign Policy; via  The Morning News)

But I’m (a) skeptical of that $1 trillion figure; (b) skeptical of the timing of this story, given the bad news cycle, and (c) skeptical that Afghanistan can really figure out a way to develop these resources in a useful way. It’s also worth noting, as Risen does, that it will take years to get any of this stuff out of the ground, not to mention enormous capital investment.

Moreover, before we get too excited about lithium and rare-earth metals and all that, Afghanistan could probably use some help with a much simpler resource: cement.

While We’re Away

¶ Jeff Strabone’s sermon on corporations, shame, and the law is crucial. You may think that you know all of this stuff, but Jeff’s vigorous dusting will probably expose a misconception or two. (3 Quarks Daily)

One person, a liberal stalwart of the House, says, I’ve got documented evidence that your company behaves horridly in a way that causes people to die because you’re greedy. The other person, the corporate VP, says that her company only wants people they can profit from. And of course, the law allows insurance companies to make such choices: to dump the ‘disadvantageous’, i.e. the ill, and to court the advantageous, i.e. the premium-paying healthy. The VP’s answer to the accusation is the correct one: she explained that the corporation does what it can to make profits. The fault here is Representative Waxman’s for not saying instead that he was going to make Wellpoint’s practices punishable by law. Did he really think he could shame the CEO and the VP of the company into doing good at a loss to the company? As usual, it’s the liberal who doesn’t get it. It is futile to appeal to corporations to behave better or more generously or more philanthropically. Corporations lack such capacities. There is no such thing as morality when it comes to corporate conduct. Only the force of law can change corporate conduct.

¶ Eryn Loeb claims that Amy Bender’s new novel is “remarkable,” but so is her review. (The Millions)

While I’m obsessed with food, I don’t really cook. For years, I didn’t even have a working oven. I love the idea of cooking: I bookmark recipes regularly and with optimism, and whenever I get it together to actually make something—peanut butter brownies for my boyfriend’s birthday, gnocchi with summer vegetables, a simple sauce made from cream, vegetable stock, lemon zest and capers—I’m overly impressed with myself. Mostly I eat overpriced takeout, and otherwise rely on jarred sauce, frozen burritos from Trader Joe’s, Indian food that comes in a little silver pouch and like magic, needs only two minutes in the microwave. While I eat, I watch the Food Network. I read the articles and passionate blogs about how cooking is so easy—and so worth the pay-off!—and I nod my head in agreement. I mean to do it. I aspire to do it. And then I order Thai.

¶ Although it may be parting ways with mainstream journalism, film criticism remains robust. (The Bygone Bureau)

Of course, Stoklasa’s review came out eleven years after Phantom Menace did, and it is probably not going to affect too many people’s buying habits. But it does show that people are interested in nuanced film criticism, as opposed simple reviews, which are released a few days before a movie opens in order to tell people why they should or shouldn’t go see it. Put another way, reviews are ephemera, designed to exert pressure on the moviegoing public and then fade away, while criticism, at its best, is much more permanent, and has much less economic influence. Opinionated viewers can do the former task just as well as anyone; but it takes a little more time and enthusiasm to do the latter.

¶ Liz Dwyer proposes a standardized-tests mutiny. (Good)

One of my fantasies is that kids across the country will start a grass-roots rebellion against standardized testing. They’ll form Facebook groups where they’ll agree to purposely bubble in the wrong answer on every single test question. What would administrators, teachers, and parents do if every child “failed” the standardized tests? Would such a rebellion force educators to find some other less lazy way to measure student learning?

¶ Stay away from Chinese pine nuts! (Megnut; via  kottke.org)

I’m happy to report my case is resolving and I actually enjoyed my breakfast, but until today food’s been so off-putting, I haven’t wanted to eat. My pine nuts were from Whole Food’s bulk bin, and I stored them in the fridge. They didn’t taste rancid when I prepared them, so I’m not thinking it’s rancidity-related. I’m going to go back and investigate where they’re from to confirm China. And if I can bare to eat pine nuts again this summer, I’m splurging for Italian imports. Right now, that’s a big if.

Have a Look

¶ “Gaze Upon the Epic Prow of Christina Hendricks” (Let There Be Blogs)

¶ Megan, don’t click through! (FAIL)

¶ Notre cher ami Jean se trouve à la compagne — des cérises; une grenouille .(Mnémoglyphes)

(To post a comment, visit The Daily Blague.)

We’ve been having fun this week, publishing the blank form for “Must Mention” and then republishing it again each time we add a link. It’s childish, we know; something like playing with ice cream after dinner. You can tell that we’re finished when the header date is complete.

¶ This space reserved for the story explaining the capture of American government by business interests, lately evidenced in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, that seems to be taking journalists a long time to write. (If you’ve found it, please let us know.)

Update: Timothy Egan’s Op-Ed piece, “How Failure Became An Option,” is not exactly what we were looking for, but it outlines the scope of our dismay.

The drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico was supposed to represent some of the most advanced technology on the planet. It was so advanced that BP and other big oil companies were exempted in 2008 from filing a plan on how they would clean up a major spill. They had no fire department because, well, there would never be a fire, silly.

That’s what we mean by “capture” — entrepreneurism amok.

¶ Further evidence that true education does not involve testing. (NYT)

While We’re Away

¶ The Remnick interview at The Morning News.

¶ Serotonin vs Love. (Brain Pickings)

¶ Celine Dion may need Neptune’s help on Jupiter Island. (via  The Morning News) Ten “insanely luxurious” mansions. (Oddee)

¶ The London Review of Book‘s view of Tory writer Paul Johnson is predictably jaundiced — but fun. Actually, it’s all Johnson’s rope. Mr Johnson’s Home Truths.

¶ She was always on his mind: Elissa Bassist conducts an exit interview with ex-boyfriend (sic?) Dan. (The Rumpus)

¶ “The Happy Ghost” — perhaps there’s a rubric here about what kind of books (ie, “products”) don’t merit printing. (The Millions)

Have a Look

¶ “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” (Slow Love Life)

¶ Jules Anderson’s woodwork. (The Best Part, Slow Love Life; Design Sponge)

Killers is one of those brightly entertaining movies that reveal their charms — or the lack thereof — in repeated viewings. It’s impossible to tell, the first time, whether Katherine Heigl is credible as Jen, the dumped fiancée of a computer geek, a shy girl who is so taken with Ashton Kutcher’s smirking abs that she “follows” him to the beach by inferring his destination from his shirtlessness and heading in that direction a few paces ahead. Is Mr Kutcher credible as Spencer, a top assassin who has tired of his profession and wants only to put down roots? Only time will tell. The meet-cute prologue to the movie, set in lovely and luxurious Nice, France, is not difficult to sit through, but Killers might have been a better movie without it.

Once Killers settles down to business, we discover that it is a new kind of screwball comedy. In the standard screwball, two people who are clearly made for one another are obliged to overcome stiff resistance to acknowledging that fact. In Killers, the quarrel lies not between the lovers but between Spencer and his father-in-law (Tom Selleck). This is not immediately apparent, but its eventual inevitability overcomes its improbability. The movie’s argument is that Spencer will have a hard time walking away from his past, even though he and Jen have enjoyed three years of marital bliss and, more to the point, Spencer has adapted to a career as a residential developer. When Spencer gets a call from his former boss (Martin Mull), he naturally begins acting nervous, and a suspicious postcard that falls into his father-in-law’s hands makes it seems that he has not been true to Jen.

The trouble begins the morning after a birthday party for Spencer that Jen — she all unaware of his past life (and the associated déformation professionelle that would contra-indicate events beginning with totally unexpected crowds shouting “Surprise!”) — has managed to pull off. Spencer is thinking about breakfast when an overly hearty colleague who seems to have passed out in the living room after the party lunges at Spencer with a knife — and he is not joking! Other friends and neighbors morph into unneighborly enemies. What’s going on? And who is offering them so much money to kill Spencer that they’ll kill each other for the chance?

Miss Heigl is a very attractive young woman, not least because she seems to be unaware of just how attractive she is. Her Jen is the opposite of a femme fatale: someone who intends to earn her way through life. Someone who worries that she is so happy in her marriage that her husband might be getting a little bored with her. When she confesses to having been wearing her “fat jeans” for the past few weeks, she convinces you that even knockouts have beauty problems. Without going too far in the Margaret Dumont direction, Ms Heigl knows how to make the lack of imagination funny. Jen clearly has no idea why anyone would take up espionage as a line of work, to the extent that she doesn’t really grasp why it’s dangerous. I can’t think of another actress who could have pulled off Jen’s need, at the end, for a “trust circle” with her husband and her parents, all of whom are not quite whom she thought they were. We can understand Jen’s not grasping her father’s true identity, but surely she ought to realize that her mother (the killingly funny Catherine O’Hara) can’t have a good reason for drinking Bloody Marys straight from the pitcher. Ms Heigl’s way of looking past her mother’s drinking problem is really rather sweet. What may be at work here is the revival of an old, suffragette-era charm: this actress is game. And when the game is over, she really wants to go home.

Mr Kutcher is also winning and sweet, especially as action heroes go. His fight scenes are filmed in a mercifully incoherent blur by director Robert Luketic. Some might find his way with badinage a trifle unconstructed, if you know what I mean; and I for one find heavy bangs even less attractive on men than on women. But the actor never looks out of place in this film. Not the first time, anyway.

¶ Dimwits in Detroit: No more “Chevy to the levee”? There is so much stupidity in this story that we were crying before we stopped laughing. (NYT)

¶ More on the nuclear option for Deepwater Horizon. (Zero Hedge)

While We’re Away

¶ The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. (via  kottke.org)

¶ At Being Tyler Brûlé, they don’t have to make things up. Elaborate “out of the office” messages are a telltale sign of vulgar lowlife. Stay in touch!

Have a Look

¶ Ragnar Kjartansson, in Chelsea this summer. (ArtCat)

¶ Barf. (Jan Chipchase; via  Mnémoglyphes)

Why, I wonder, have the editors at The New York Review of Books drafted Sue Halpern to cover the iPad, when it’s clear that she is unsympathetic to the device? Her long piece in the 10 June issue of the Review never touched on the iPad’s function — its primary function, in my view — as an Internet reader. Now, in an entry at NYRBlog dated 8 June (but obviously written long after the printed piece), she comes closer, but lets the point slip out of her hands.

As it is built now, the iPad is the ultimate consumer device, meant primarily to consume media, not to produce it. That’s why, in its first iteration, it has no native printing application, no camera, no USB ports for peripherals.

Because Ms Halpern wants the iPad to be a computer. Why on earth, I wonder?

But the impulse to make it into something else, a lightweight computer that can stand in for a PC in the classroom, at a meeting, on the road, wherever, is strong. This is why iPad users have been buying keyboards to bypass the touchscreen, and finding apps that allow for rudimentary multitasking, printing, and remote access to one’s home computer in order to use non-iPad-enabled software like Microsoft Word. The paradox of having designed the ultimate consumer device is that ultimately the consumers will make of it what they want—if Google, with its rumored Chrome Tablet, doesn’t get there first.

Doesn’t she already have a computer?

Heading the blog piece is the image of an extravagantly marked-up book; we’re told that it is David Foster Wallace’s copy of Don DeLillo’s Players. Ms Halpern helpfully outlines a hack for writing notes on books that you’re reading on your iPad, although she complains that you have to know what you’re doing “to avoid getting tripped up.” Awkward or not, I won’t be giving the hack a try, because I don’t write in books. Except to insert the odd “Ex libris,” I do not mark my books. Possibly because I am really very bad at multitasking, I find taking notes to be unhelpful. I find that it’s better to let strong impressions simmer untended; if I feel that I have something to say when I’ve finished reading, then I try to write it out in as finished a manner as possible, often in the form of entries that, without too much editing, appear on this site. But that is me; that is my idiosyncrasy. In the end, reading books is not what the iPad is really for.

Well, that’s precisely what the iPad may be for — the specific tablet sold by Apple — that and all the other apps that Apple markets. I don’t have much time for apps, and, like James Kwak, I think that there’s something retrograde about them. Eventually, there will be other tablets, with or without their own apps markets. Some of them may support browsers superior to Apple’s Safari. I may come to prefer one of them to the iPad. All that is down the road. As Jason Kottke wrote when the iPad first appeared, it’s a “proof-of-concept gadget for adults.” But the concept that it proves is that reading the Internet can be as pleasurable as, or at any rate no less pleaurable than, reading a book or a magazine.

Since my way of reading the Internet is pretty much the same as my way of reading books, I am not incommoded by the difficulty of taking notes in a browser. The Daily Blague might indeed be regarded as a notebook, even if it’s a notebook that’s designed to be intelligible to other readers. Or just plain intelligible: in my note-taking days, I was often at a complete loss to make sense of a good many scribblings, even when they were perfectly legible.

When I acquired my first personal computer — an IBM Peanut — in 1985, I had high hopes of using it to organize my life. But life is far too complicated to be addressed by one machine. For several years now, I’ve been writing longer things on a laptop, in another room, without opening any email apps. The sensed difference between the computer where I work (with its two screens) and the one on which I think (in order to write) is intense. Now the iPad has introduced a third — and, I suspect, a completing — mode: a computer on which to read. Sue Halpern may try to tarnish the device by using the dirty word “consumer,” but I’ll embrace the description. As I stroke through Safari, I’m letting the other guy speak.

¶ Edward Hugh’s long years of thinking about the Eurozone begin to — pay off? (NYT)

¶ A concise snapshot of Dutch populism on the eve of elections. Also covered: Geert Wilders’s blond mop. (Spiegel Online; via  RealClearWorld)

While We’re Away

¶ The ideology of academic economics. (Baseline Scenario)

¶ Maria Bustillos shows how very shallow The Shallows is. (The Awl)

Have a Look

¶ Fantastic illustrations to a 1968 Czech edition of Gullver’s Travels. (The Rumpus)

¶ In the Tourist Lane. (Improv Everywhere; via  The Morning News)

I’ve been reading The New Yorker for nearly fifty years (OMG!), but it has hardly ever upset me, and, until today, it has never presented me with anything that I would call, simply, odious.

What was notable in all the writing, above and beyond a mastery of language and of storytelling, was a palpable sense of ambition. These writers are not all iconoclasts; some are purposefully working within existing traditions. But they are all aiming for greatness: fighting to get our attention, and to hold it, in a culture that is flooded with words, sounds, and pictures; fighting to surprise, to entertain, to teach, and to move not only us but generations of readers to come. 

Nothing, nothing in the world, could disgust me more, in the pages of a magazine that cares about writing, than “a palpable sense of ambition.” Does it all come down to bats, hoops, and statistics — forever? Do the pimply ados rule, even though they’re in their forties? If so, shoot me now! (I leave for another time the way this passage echoes an upbeat quarterly report.)

It’s true: I think that public ambition is a terrible thing — if you’re not doing something better just for the private, personal sake of it, then go hang! I would rather die than push what I’m doing. It’s up to me to find out who’s doing good things, not the other way round. Serious culture rests on the the authority of connoisseurship. Everything else is just horrible awful preening.

I am so not an Anglophone at heart.

¶ “The War Chatroom.” (NYT)

¶ “Helen Thomas, Christopher Hitchens, and being wrong.” Hear, hear! (Felix Salmon)

While We’re Away

¶ Crazy-Popular new Web log on the block: You Are Not So Smart. Topic for today: “The Introspection Illusion.” But don’t miss “Fines.”

¶ Sonya Chung on Jennifer Egan. (The Millions) Ann Beattie muses. (NYT)

¶ Scott Esposito e-reads. And likes it. (Conversational Reading)

¶ David Olivier addresses British Petroleum et al. We have requested a podcast. (Slimbolala)

Have a Look

¶ More “affordable art” via Brain Pickings. (We’re out of wall space!)

¶ The real-world atmospherics of esoterica. (Scouting New York)

¶ Eagles and Dragons Galore: flags from the bad old days. (Dark Roasted Blend; via  Marginal Revolution)

Like everyone else today, I worried about the Kord Campbells. I can’t have been the only reader who felt that this family of four was as metabolically unprepared for the long-term onslaught of the Internet as Native Americans were for “firewater.” Maybe everything will work out. Mr Campbell is evidently a producer of viable businesses, something that very few Internet addicts can claim to be. But it’s hard to push aside the sense that he and his son have some painful rehab time ahead.

In the middle of a chat this morning, Megan told of doing a fair amount of clucking when she encountered a mother with a stroller in one hand and a cell phone in the other. (I see this every live-long day up here on Planet Yorkville.) Then she saw a second mom doing the same thing, only this woman was carrying one of her children in a sling. A sling and yet on the cell — this did not compute for Megan. (I can attest that carrying a child in a sling is so profoundly satisfying that I can’t imagine wanting to trash the experience with the noise of a phone call to someone who isn’t there.) When I mentioned all of this to Kathleen, however, I was surprised to hear her take the part of the other mothers, whom in her predication were stuck at home day after day (as Megan is not) with infants and without adult contact. Point taken. But I’m still appalled by the people (and, up here, they are mostly women) who want to turn my sidewalk into their living room.

In short, the Internet bristles with manners issues. But they’re not like the old manners issues. The old manners issues were all about code, about knowing how to cue your awareness of comme il faut. That’s why the earnest boomers of my generation agitated against manners on principle: by the time the Fifties were over, there was nothing but code to good behavior. It was all a matter of signalling. The underlying objective of providing comfort to one’s companions had been forgotten.

(If it hadn’t been for Trollope, I’d never have understood what being a gentleman was all about, and why it’s so important to be one — even if you’re a woman.)

I’m sure that Kord Campbell sees himself as an active entrepreneur, as someone who acts upon the world in ways that lead, inter alia, to million-dollar start-up sales. I would propose, however, that he learn to regard his dependency on manifold Internet connectivity as a passive, almost hydrostatic search for the most satisfying environment that the Internet can provide. I would urge him to replace this cosy project with a determination to make the  room in which his body finds itself lodged the most interesting place in the world.

Something tells me that Brenda Campbell is ready and waiting to help him do just that.  

¶ Simon Johnson cheers for Richard Fisher: “TBTF” = too big to be permitted. (Baseline Scenario)

¶ Ross Douthat: “Israel and Outremer.” (NYT)

¶ What “rugged individualism“? (Boston Globe)

While We’re Away

¶ Personal time zones. Don’t miss this! (via  kottke.org)

¶ Left to their own devices, what will become of the Kord Campbells? (NYT) Let’s hope that they tune into the discussion that Shallows author Nicholas Carr and Jonah Lehrer are having about multitasking. (Frontal Cortex)

¶ Tye Pemberton on “the great strength of Lipsky’s book.” (The Rumpus) Ahmad Saidullah on the shapely legs of Sylvia Beach. (3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Mig remembers his remarkable Uncle Phil. (Metamorphosism)

Have a Look

¶ Visualizing Color Composition. (Brain Pickings)

¶ Which way is up? (via Snarkmarket)

It’s a lovely summer evening here in New York, with clear skies and cool, dry air. The heat wave that was supposed to be extinguished by thunderstorms seems to have spontaneously dissipated. I have rarely been more disgusted with the weather.

Kathleen, who is visiting her father and brother in North Carolina, was to fly home this afternoon, but given those predicted thunderstorms and the estimated delays, I urged her to rebook a flight for tomorrow, and to stay where she was. As she’s been having a very pleasant time, she was happy to humor me. So I’m the one who’s home alone.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, if I hadn’t had a completely inane day. The air-conditioning and the Vornado fans kept physical discomfort at bay, but there is no way to ease the psychological displacement of really humid weather. I was counting on some atmospheric violence to shock me out of my torpor. Curses foiled again!

There were all sorts of things to do, but not a volt of energy to get me off my duff. I read and read and read. Then I watched The Iron Giant, an animated adaptation of a kids’ book by Ted Hughes. Quatorze brought it over, about a hundred years ago, along with a number of other recommended titles that it has taken me a shameful length of time to get to. Truth to tell, I haven’t been watching many DVDs lately, not out of the kitchen anyway — and in the kitchen I play only movies that I know quite well. I’m ashamed to confess that I wept almost all the way through The Iron Giant. My eyes are still sore, and it’s difficult to read what I’m writing. What a sap I am.

What to do about dinner? What to do about dinner, that is, in the wake of my movie snack? Salami, Jarlsberg, Smartfood. I feel larded up enough for swimming the English Channel — well, I could be towed across, maybe; I can hardly get out of my chair and across the room.

Sixes and sevens isn’t the half of it!

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