Photo: Kathleen Moriarty. (To post a comment, visit The Daily Blague)

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)

Now that my grandson can sit up and play with things, he’s got to solve a lot of physics problems, and it isn’t always fun. I watch him with the keenest interest, as he waves a wooden spoon, then tries to grab a snall piece of kitchen equipment that invariably darts farther from him each time he reaches for it.

There are many things to do with the items in Will’s homely colander, and it’s no wonder that every now and then he surrenders to the misery of being overwhelmed. When he cries, what usually works is hunkering down next to him to rearrange his stuff, as a kind of reset. Eventually, though, this doesn’t work, and Will has to be picked up and comforted and carried off to some other place.

Perhaps it’s simply that he wants a playmate. That’s something that the grandparents of bright children are apt to overlook. We think of Will as a self-sustaining genius. In fact, he’s far more sociable than we ever were.

Rest assured, though: we never let Will “cry it out.” We’re there, picking him up and asking what’s wrong, even though we know that he can’t tell us. The idea of charging a child who’s incapable of the most rudimentary self-expression with responsibility for his unhappiness strikes us as a deep barbarity. Equally barbarous is to think in terms of Will’s taking advantage of our sympathy.

About the physics lessons, I ask you to conduct the following experiment. Next time you cross a street, try to figure out how far from the kerb you can tell which foot will step onto it first. You’ll be surprised how far in advance you know which foot it is, even though you haven’t given the matter the slightest thought. So it is with much of what we do during the day, our brains working as mammoth processors for impalpable operations.

Although he is still an angel, Will has been kicked out of the Garden of Eden. He knows that life doesn’t always arrange itself properly, and he’s not happy about it. We can’t wait to talk to him about it.

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

Kingarthurflour.com is good.

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

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

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

We need more of this sort of thing.

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

Have a Look

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

¶ Three Percent‘s Translation Preview.

In the apartment, it is much cooler than I expect it to be, given the heat and the humidity outside; it’s as though the building’s HVAC system has been upgraded (something that I very much doubt). I’m still a prisoner of the bad weather, unwilling to undertake potentially tedious or obtrusive projects — unwilling, even, to sort through the small pile of debris on one of the wing chairs in the blue room. (Meanwhile, where are all my Teach Yourself language books? And my Nederlands dictionary? These used to be easily to hand, but I tucked them away somewhere in the season of household reform and now they are lost.) But although I’m idle, I’m not uncomfortable. I read and I write. Sometimes there is music; often I don’t get round to turning on the Nano of the moment until the middle of the afternoon. I think.

I think, for example, about David Foster Wallace. In the current NYRB, Wyatt Mason writes an almost implacable defense of the late writer’s prose style. Mason spits on the oft-voiced notion that Wallace was prolix or “unedited.” He does not refute it, however. He claims instead that Wallace is an “avant garde writer.” The comment stings with scolding: we had forgotten about the avant garde, hadn’t we? Is it really still possible to be avant garde? Isn’t that like trying to be baroque?

Much of Mason’s argument didn’t engage me, either because I already agreed with it completely (the critique of television), or because the “problem” of David Foster Wallace is one in which sensibility leaches into pathology.

Although it has been said, in the wake of Wallace’s suicide in 2008, that it would be wrong to read his work through the limiting prism of his death, it would be no less wrong were we to evade acknowledging the centrality of depression, addiction, and isolation as subjects in his work.

They say that people get happier once they’re past their fifties, and my own experience certainly bears this out. It seems to me now that I spent my life, up to the age of forty-five or so, fretting. It seemed so at the time, but now the fretfulness seems less like a response to environmental conditions than a faulty setting. I wonder if, one fine day, Scientists will give it a name, a name to list alongside “depression.” It doesn’t matter anymore, because I have survived the disorder (for the most part; as a “no news is bad news” subscriber, I need to know that my loved ones are safe and sound). I enjoy life as I really never used to do, and it soothes for the ticking awareness that I’m not going to be around forever. Am I suggesting that David Foster Wallace might have outlived his depression? I’m not ruling it out. He took his life at an age of maximal self-censure.

I used to think that I had a lot of bad habits, but now I look at it the other way round: my good habits aren’t quite good enough. I have the habit of writing, yes; but I don’t have the habit of writing hard — of forcing myself to follow implications that aren’t, at the moment, appealing. My habit of reading is faulty: I’m a terrible note taker, always jotting down things that turn out to make no sense later while failing to register the passages that will prove to have stuck in my mind. (This is why I never, never write in books.) My scholarship is labored. I would rather net a phrase of sweet precision than grasp a clear idea.

And I am very slow. I’ve always been slow. It might not seem so, because I resist distraction fairly well (especially now that I’m no longer fretting!), but — where did David Foster Wallace find the time to do everything that he did? When I look at my day, from reveille to taps, I have a hard time finding waste — time that would be better spent doing something else. But there’s not enough of it for the (to me) useful things that I’m doing. It is a limitation that, unlike gravity, I have a hard time accepting.

There is one thing that I waste a lot of time on: deciding what to do next. To put it better: deciding which road to travel. The high road of reading and writing? Or the low road of going through the mail and organizing my desk drawer? I can agonize over whether to create a new Nano playlist. Playlists are tedious to compose, but, perhaps because I composed playlists for a living throughout my twenties (in my radio days, when I was the music director of a classical radio station) — playlists that were printed and mailed out to subscribers; playlists that weren’t supposed to be changed — it’s difficult for me to remember that they’re now — now — so easy to edit. So, in my agonized moments, I dither about whether I really ought take on a project that, in fact, is not nearly as demanding as I make it out to be.

I do a lot of that, now I think of it. I expect things to be more difficult than they turn out to be. I suppose that that is a kind of fretting. And what is fretting, but asking wearisome questions? And what, for the matter of that, is thinking, but asking interesting ones?

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)

Here is the fatal paragraph:

Whatever the cost, Uzaemon vows, I shall free her. But I need help.

Don’t worry: I am not going to unpack this passage. I’m not going to spoil The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet for you by explaining who “she” is, or why Uzaemon resolves to free her, or even who Uzaemon is. For my purposes, none of that is necessary — and that is what is fatal about the paragraph.

What I will do is point out that Uzaemon’s vow is meant to be taken seriously by the reader. There is no irony here, no distancing tug at the reader’s sleeve. So the vow differs in no way from hundreds of other such utterances that the reader may have read, and, especially, read when young. What we have here is the absolutely standard declaration of adventure that, with implicit contractual clarity, promises not so much a measure of excitement and derring-do as a simplification of motive. And it is not the character who utters the vow, either, but the author. The author promises to propel his character as a hero, in the single-minded pursuit of a worthy aim that will end in either triumph or death.

I would call it a boy’s own story, but I’m not sure that girls aren’t equally drawn to oaths of this kind. I speak, of course, of oaths in books, not of real-life commitments. It would be impossible to generalize about the latter; no two personal missions are alike. But in adventure stories, generalization is precisely what’s invited. With his vow, Uzaemon slips beneath the surface clutter of his contingent life as a Japanese man of a certain stature in Nagasaki, circa 1799. He sets aside the problems, great and small, that make up his everyday life. When he has stripped the accidents of existence away, he is seen to be wearing the hero’s armor, which protects him, above all, from ambivalence.

Here is why young readers of any age like declarations of adventure: ambivalence is banished. (Ambivalence — the emotional conjunction of palpably incompatible feelings — takes getting used to, and many people never succeed.) Anyone who makes Uzaemon’s oath is a good person, and a good person pure and simple, no matter how well or ill endowed with capability, intelligence, and fortitude. When a character comes to the oath with a spotted moral history, the vow itself is a redemption. The cost that Uzaemon vows to pay is the suppression of distraction: henceforth, nothing but the mission will matter. This means that nothing else will matter to the reader, either. The mission will part the world into the good and the bad, placing an uninhabitable gulf between the two. The indifferent will disappear: everything in the story, from other characters to the weather, will wear either the badge of help or that of hindrance.

But I need help. A second adventure! Freeing the girl requires the hero to field a team of loyal supporters with special skills, and this, too, is an adventure, no less clouded by the threat of disappointment and betrayal than the main event. (I see it — the rounding up of the helping posse — as a kind of temporal forecourt to the inner sanctum of dangerous rescue.) A complementary host of ritual obstacles confronts writer and reader alike with the satisfactions of knowing exactly where things stand with respect to the story, no matter how uncertain the hero’s arrangements might chance to be.

To the question, why does David Mitchell, a sophisticated novelist, issue a declaration of adventure at just about the point where an adult novel would be heading in the opposite direction, toward the uncertain resolution that George Eliot taught us to treasure, I don’t have an answer. My guess is that the writer is more concerned with genre than with character, more interested in a game whose rules are known to all than in the ineffable oddity of each human heart. When I saw what he had done, my curiosity about his novel — a book whose surface generates a turbulence of puzzlement — underwent a heroic simplification of its own, and I hunkered down with the sole aim of all genre fiction: to find out how it all comes out in the end.

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.

 

What with the heat, I’ve nothing to report. I haven’t done anything; I haven’t been anywhere. I did go out today, but I didn’t go far: the HousingWorks branch at 90th and Second and the Barnes & Noble at Lexington and 86th (the destination of my last street-crossing outing, last Thursday) were the far points.

Kathleen had packed three fat bags of donations for HousingWorks, but she had neglected to Fill Out the Form. To be exact, she didn’t know that we had any forms in the house. She had composed comprehensive lists, specific to each bag, but No Form. “If you want a deduction, you have to name a figure,” I told her on the phone, when I was ready to go out but had just noticed the No Form problem. Kathleen named a figure, and I Filled Out the Form. It was duly stamped, and the appropriate yellow copy is sitting with Kathleen’s mail.

After lunch, I went to Barnes & Noble, in search of books by Jennifer Egan. It will come as no surprise to experienced bookshoppers that notwithstanding the acclaim that has greeted A Visit From the Goon Squad, Ms Egan’s new book (have I mentioned this???), B&N’s “Fiction and Literature” shelves proffered but one title, The Keep. As this was secretly the very title that I was looking for, I didn’t complain. What’s hard, though, is having promised not to open The Keep until I have finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet — a book that, I’m happy to report, has really picked up in the past thirty pages or so.

I also bought some CDs. All of Mozart’s string quartets, in a $40 box from DG (the Amadeus Quartet — good late-mid-century stuff). An album of dance music from the halcyon days of Louis XIV. I bought this to go with an article about Versailles in the latest issue of L’Express. Poor Quatorze will simply have to sit there as I ladle it out — did he know about the Musée Lambinet? Can he bear to listen to another cut of Lully? Competitive Versaillesomanie is not a pretty sport, especially when expensive teacups are involved. I don’t gloat; Q’s revenge can be fearsome.

Buying CDs in a store — now that’s a novelty. I’m serious! It has been so long since it occurred to me to do such a thing that I’m ready to write a mash note to the management: what a neat idea, this selling of CDs! It would be utterly pathetic if the odd jewel didn’t turn up. My heart just about stopped when I saw that Keith Jarrett’s recording of (some of) Handel’s keyboard suites is still on the market! I bought my first copy nearly fifteen years ago, at a Borders in Portland, Maine. It is one of the best recordings that I have ever heard, clearing any top-ten list that you can devise. I’m amazed because what makes the recording great is its fantastic taste: Mr Jarrett plays with a scrupulous virtuosity that puts everyone else in this repertoire to shame. Is that why the CD is still out there? It seems too much to hope for.

Here’s why I really braved the scorching heat (but I do exaggerate) to venture all the way to Lexington Avenue: I wanted to see how our local branch of the Shake Shack is coming along. And it is coming along! Whether they’ll be open by the end of the month (some reports) or the end of the summer (per lettering on the window), it won’t be long before I can put on an extra fifty pounds with the Danny Meyer Gutbomb Diet. Yumm!

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

To post a comment, visit The Daily Blague)

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

Although I don’t believe in parking children in front of the TV, or imprisoning them in some sort of rolling toychest, it’s always wonderful to see a child playing by itself, wrapped up in things — and the homelier the things, the better. Megan had the idea last week of assembling a batch of safe found objects in a colander, and I did the same thing this week.

For forty-five minutes, Will examined, chewed on, and banged the following miscellany of items: a shortish but venerable wooden spoon; a mushroom brush, and a brush for combing silk from ears of corn; a knob of brain coral; an empty jelly jar with its lid; a crystal kniferest, in the shape of a barbell, that had never been used for any purpose until yesterday; and a 2/3 cup measure. Scratch the measure: I’d needed the night before to make a vinaigrette, and I hadn’t put it back. In the past couple of weeks, Will’s ability to sit upright for as long as he wants to has firmed up nicely, but there were a few tumbles, all suffered in good humor, brought on by some very basic physics lessons. The lidded jar was at first too large to deal with, and occasioned some frustration; Will was not about to allocate both hands to handling it. Eventually, though, he managed to sweep it into his arm. It was his favorite thing.

In the afternoon, Will found the these rudimentary toys too boring to contemplate. Done that! After a bit of mild fussing and whimpering, I took him out onto the balcony, where we’ve stuffed a garden chair with pillows, so that he can lean into the back of the chair and survey our patch of Yorkville and beyond. Sometimes, his gaze is fixed on the ironwork of the chair, which he grips with the firmness of a racing driver, but yesterday it was very clear that he was watching the traffic on 86th Street. What else to do in this weather?

Later in the day, I prepped dinner, setting the table, shucking corn, seasoning the steak, and popping some vegetables into the oven — and then I went out. I walked up the street to the new (consolidated) Barnes & Noble at Lexington Avenue, descended to the Events space, and attended a reading. I mean to do this sort of thing all the time, but I forget, or I feel too busy at home — the usual excuses. But I really wanted to see Jennifer Egan, and I wanted a signed copy of her great new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. Announcing that this was the last reading of her tour (what a relief that must be!), Ms Egan told us that she had decided to read from a chapter that she hadn’t read from before: “A to B.” This is the more or less conventional social comedy cut from a book that the author describes as a record album, and it was great fun to listen to. Afterward, I surprised myself by asking the kind of question that an author would like to be asked (“Can you tell us something about the PowerPoint chapter?”) and was thanked for doing so when I got my signature.

I was home within seventy-five minutes of leaving, but the reading injected a strong second current into my thoughts during dinner, one that I couldn’t share with my family, both about the book (A Visit From the Goon Squad is a grave book) and about the literary life, such as I’ve glimpsed it. I wasn’t entirely distracted, however. At the end of dinner, Will took to slapping the table, and I took to echoing him. He did not think that this was silly, but he did not find it irritating, either. I wish that I could describe the look of sizing-up that he gave me throughout our impromptu game. But I probably don’t have to.

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

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

Hats off! To Steve Laico, of Searchlight Consulting, for all the fantastic work that he has put into making The Daily Blague / reader look as good as it does. Armed as he is with the patience of ten saints, there isn’t anything that Steve can’t do.

As with any renovation, there is a lot of dust left to settle. A creature of routine, I haven’t mastered the new one, and I forget tasks left and right. More than that, my attention is so flattened by stepping over the new construction that I don’t notice anything interesting; I’m just trying to keep my balance. It’s a dull season outside of my head as well. The big excitement this week has been worrying about a power outage: the very opposite of inspiring.

One thing that I’m trying to get used to is the dismal fug that I wake up to most mornings. Having stayed up reading RSS feeds, I’m primed with news, most of it not good. How are we ever going to work our way out of this mess, I ask myself, knowing that the only hopeful answer involves a combination of luck and inertia. This has worked well for humanity over the centuries: the idea is that the inertia keeps anything from happening until the luck sails in. Which, however, it doesn’t always do.

Here’s a tidbit for the Luddites in the audience: I’m well-informed about the bad news of the world because the iPad makes it so easy to read the Internet. I used to skim through feeds — when I didn’t simply bunch hundreds of them together and “mark as read.” If it weren’t for the iPad, I’d be a happier man.

No, I don’t believe it, either.

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

The Instructions by Adam Levin (November 1)

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

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

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

What’s the word for it? The word for this “new science” that’s everywhere on the Internet: can we do better than “new”?

In the old days, I’d rack my brains, trying to think of a handy term that just might catch on. But I haven’t got the gift for it. I don’t have much faith in the things that I make up — it’s as if I knew better. I believe in the connections that I make between things, in the web of references and corroborations that has assembled itself, galaxy-like, in my brain. But I don’t put much stock in my own inventions, not, at least, where words are concerned.

In a recurring nightmare from which I invariably awaken in a state of sharp discomfort, I am reading a book. As I am reading the book, it occurs to me that I am also writing the book, and as this impression deepens the words  become paler and paler on the page, fading eventually into invisibility. I try to read them but cannot. I try to read, but since I am writing, or supposed to be writing, there is nothing there to be read.

It took me years to grasp one of the things that this dream was telling me: that I would never write fiction.

Anyway: the “new science.” It’s all about “cognition,” which is the new word for “epistemology.” They’re not perfect synonyms, of course. Cognition is the material, almost mechanical, study of how sensation becomes perception. Epistemology, in contrast, has a metaphysical ring to it, suggesting theories of how we know things in spite of our sensations. For example: how do we know about God? The new science is agnostic at best on that subject.

It turns out that almost everything that we thought that we knew about our minds is rubbish. Out with it! It’s not even interesting rubbish — it’s not fertile with new possibilities, as all good rubbish is. It’s just, frankly, the sort of tripe that you get when you decide to think about big issues while seated in a comfortable chair with a snifter of cognac. “Just so.” “Armchair.” Take the foundational piece of crap: “Man is a rational animal.” What a desperate bluff that is! No matter, though: it’s not in the least bit worth arguing with. Into the tip with it.

A fine place to begin studying the irrationality of man is Kathryn Schulz’s zesty and cogent treatise, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. We will be much better off when everyone has read this book. I wouldn’t mind affixing one of those warranty panes at the entry to my sites, asking potential visitors to “agree” to or “decline” an understanding of Ms Schulz’s findings. First, though, I’d have to distill some a declaration or manifesto from Being Wrong’s lively collection of anecdotes. Take Chapter 11, for example, “Denial and Acceptance.” Much of this chapter is taken up with the aftermath of the rape of a Wisconsin woman, Penny Beerntsen. Beerntsen was gently but firmly railroaded into identifying the wrong man, Steven Avery, as her assailant; years later, she would ask for his forgiveness. She would also have to come to grips with the seductive fallibility of a bad human habit called “confirmation bias.”

At the trial, sixteen separate witnesses had testified that Avery had been at work on the day of the rape, but Penny dismissed their stories as too similar to each other to be believable — an outstanding example of interpreting the evidence against your theory as evidence for your theory instead.

And that’s just one nugget. The red meat of the chapter is the stuff about bull-headed prosecutors who invest too much self-worth in their decisions to admit that they’ve been mistaken. But what’s the word for that? While you’re at it, work up a catchy label for “interpreting the evidence against your theory as evidence for your theory.”

It’s not that the misguided behavior parading through Being Wrong is anything new. (The late, great character actor J T Walsh built a career out of impersonating deluded men who knew they were right.) What’s new is Kathryn Schulz’s conviction that being wrong is such a common state of affairs that we might as well learn a few things about it, instead of pushing it away, as Thomas Aquinas did, as abhorrently abnormal. Ms Schulz proposes that we stop treating error as defect, and begin to understand it as the inevitable byproduct of otherwise healthy and necessary psychological functions. It’s admirably humble to be able to admit that we’ve been wrong about something; Being Wrong shows us how much more pleasant and relaxed life would be if we desensitized ourselves to the bitterness of having failed to get something right.

Being wrong about something isn’t great. Kathryn Schulz isn’t proposing that aeronautic engineers adopt a more relaxed attitude toward the exactness of their calculations. Her target is “the experience of being wrong.” For too many people, this experience is unacceptably painful, to be avoided at all costs no matter how wrong they’ve been. The attempt to avoid the experience of being wrong has a fearful tendency to compound the original, underlying error with even bigger mistakes. It is one thing to identify the wrong man in a lineup. It is a much worse thing to stick with that misidentification, in the teeth of mounting evidence to the contrary, simply to protect (as we all unconsciously do) the roots of our vanity from the acid of error — at the cost of sending the wrong man to prison.

Is there a term for that?

The term that I’m really looking for would cover the stacks of findings, studies, and fMRI analyses that have piled up in the past half century or so, ranging from the Milgrim experiments to the prisoners’ dilemma to the strange phenomenon of anosognosia. When I was young, the field was pretty much covered by “behavioral science,” but there’s a lot more to it now than behavior. Consider Paul Bloom’s essentialist theory of pleasure: we like what we like because we know that we like it. The irrationality of our pleasures has little to do with the inputs, considered debased by the philosophers, of the senses; it is all in our once-supposedly rational minds.

There is an ethical urgency to this work. In an autocratic age, it’s enough to understand the pathologies of individual despots. In democracies, however, we need working theories of everyday human understanding — theories that aren’t grounded in the idea that we’re fallen, defective creatures. We need to learn how to make mistakes without feeling existentially diminished by them. We need to study what Kathryn Schulz calls “wrongology” as a tool for being right a lot more often than we are now.

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

Sext

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

Finally, a young man in the audience stood up.

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

Have a Look

¶ Time‘s Best Blogs.

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

¶ Dead Malls. (The Morning News)

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

Photo: Kathleen Moriarty.

7:30 AM It’s only fair that, since we’re in no mood for a holiday, we’re not going to get one.

When we got home from a fireworks-viewing party last night, there was a message on the answering machine. It was Megan, calling to ask if she and Ryan could spend the holiday at with at our house, working. That is, they would work and we would take care of Will. So of course that’s what we’re going to do.

Or at least that’s what we were going to do as of late last night. Who knows, in this heat, what will happen. We were not cheered by the taxi driver who brought us home, not when he asked if we thought that there would be a blackout this week. It’s going to be sunny and awful right through Friday.

10:15 AM Holiday conditions persist at the apartment; we’ve had no word from downtown. We’re hoping that everyone is sleeping. We’re hoping that nobody read the foregoing and concluded that our welcome wouldn’t be warm. We’re told that we are not as funny as we think we are, sometimes.

Here’s what it is: we’re in no mood for other people to have a holiday. Oh, that’s not right, either. But we like our Mondays to be Mondays. Mail, packages, dry-cleaning &c. 

If we’re not keen on holidays for ourselves, that’s only because we have so many of them. When you get right down to it, we work about three and a half days a week. The rest of the time is spent emptying the dishwasher — and we’re lucky to have the dishwasher!

Running two errands between eight and nine, we found the air to be sweet and not to humid. We tried to fix that memory, to give us something to look forward to in the weeks or months to come. After this week of torrid summertime.

Then we read the Times. Hmmm, what’s this? A long story about the Staten Island Cricket Club, and no mention of Joseph O’Neill? Have we missed something?

NB: We are ALWAYS in the mood for Will.

3:45 PM Kathleen is napping in the living room, because Megan and Will are resting in the bedroom. Such is the aftermath of a lunch delivered by Burger Heaven. Ryan, it’s true, is hard at work, but all he had for lunch was a bagel.

Megan suggested that we assemble a colander-ful of safe items for Will to play with. The corn brush (for flossing silk from corn cobs), the mushroom brush (for removing dirt), a stainless steel measuring cup. Scouting for items brought us up against a number of utensils that were greasy from hanging over the stove. They’re in the dishwasher now. We’re lucky to have the dishwasher!

 4:30 PM Everyone gone. Megan and Ryan did what they had to do — even though Will got wind of the fact that a meeting was in progress somewhere in the apartment, and fussed accordingly. The O’Neills will be back on Thursday, after Will’s first swimming lesson and his six-month checkup. That, at any rate, is the plan.

Kathleen drifted from the love seat in the living room to her proper bed, and is still napping. She has had a big weekend: lots of closet re-org. Also shopping; hours at Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s.

Now what?

Photo: Kathleen Moriarty. To post a comment, visit The Daily Blague)