From Sarah Lyall’s Puttenham Journal, a piece about “dogging,” or watching other people have plein air sex. (This in a family newspaper!) What shocks us, of course, is the picturesque old gents who know better than to say “Google.”

Referring to a nearby village, an elderly man at the bar piped up, “At Wisley, there are two sites, one for males and one for heteros.”

Mrs. Debenham said, “I think we should just let them get on with it.”

The man added, “If you want to find out more, just put ‘dogging’ into your search engine.”

Matins

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

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

Which is where Open Bookmarks comes in.

Sext

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

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look 

¶ Executive Suite Primer. (Weakonomics)

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

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

¶ The Mandelbox Trip. (via MetaFilter)

Gail Collins, commenting on Connecticut’s Senate race between Attorney General Ralph Blumenthal (Dem) and Girl Gone Wild Linda McMahon (Rep):

Blumenthal also demanded to know why McMahon didn’t create jobs in the United States instead of having W.W.E. action figures made in China. This was the moment when McMahon really should have promised a study. Instead, she claimed that the United States does not “have the kind of policies in place here that are conducive to manufacturing,” citing, among other things, “high labor costs,” which could not have been much of a comfort to the state’s workers.

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

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

A concoction spawned as a joke by a kids’ sitcom writer is coming soon to your house. From today’s Dining & Wine Section of the Times: “Spaghetti Tacos: Silly Enough for Young Eaters.”

Julian, now 10, had never had them before and had never heard of anyone else making them besides Spencer and the cast of “iCarly.” “But I wanted them because they looked really delicious and fun to eat,” Julian said. “They’re really crunchy and they have my two favorite foods, spaghetti and tacos.”

Every kid at the party ate them, even Julian’s picky friend, Henry.

“P.B. & J., that’s the extent of this kid’s repertoire,” Ms. Burns said. “His mother was shocked.”

PS: Even more fun, at least for us grown-ups.

Matins

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

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

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Prime

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

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

Have a Look

¶ Buoyancy Bazooka. (Short Sharp Science)

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

Ken Dilanian, writing about counterterrorism information-sharing, inthe Los Angeles Times, talks to Russell Travers, of the National Counterterrorism Center. (via The Morning News)

The Herculean task of separating relevant information from background noise makes terrorism analysis an extraordinarily difficult art, he said, and there is no button to push to identify non-obvious relationships.

“What I think we can do,” he said, “is shrink the haystack and make it somewhat easier for the analysts.”

Matins

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

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

Lauds

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

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

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

Okay!

Prime

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

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

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

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

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

Tierce

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

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

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

• E = 1.8 x 10^25 Joules

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

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

Sext

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

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

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

Nones

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

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

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

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

Vespers

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

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

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

“Thought you’d like it,” I answered.

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

“Yep.”

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

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

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

Compline

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

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

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

Have a Look

¶ Florida Dreaming. (via kottke.org)

Pankaj Mishra writes about the failure of social progress in India. 

Certainly, the four million Muslims of Kashmir, who every day suffer the brutalities of what’s arguably the world’s largest military occupation, cannot be blamed for failing to make meaningful distinctions between Hindu nationalists and the current government, led by the more moderate Congress Party. Their fate remains that of a minority kept under perpetual siege by a paranoid nation-state.

Like hundreds of millions of other voiceless Indians, the migrant laborers in my village are even less able to distinguish between the oppressions of old feudal India and the pitiless exploitations of the new business-minded India. I wonder if the recent destruction of their fragile shelters doesn’t hold some symbolism. Perhaps the greatest danger to India’s image is that they may one day cease to cower in those shacks, and, like their counterparts in central India, erupt in armed revolt.

Interesting times! (I wish.) My friend Migs, in Manila, writes to say that he may have one of those English editions of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom that published an earlier draft of the novel. Migs doesn’t want to read it if it’s not the author’s final cut (so to speak), and I couldn’t agree more. But I’d love to get my hands on the draft. What did Mr Franzen think that he ought to change? Almost forgot: I’ll send Migs the copy of Freedom that I bought two weeks ago, when I couldn’t find the copy that I’d read. The copy that I’d read did eventually turn up, but in a very strange place. That’s how it has been around here this year: things get stashed in very strange places.

It occurred to me today that this urge to sweep out cluttered corners, getting rid of books that I’m probably never going to look at again and pitching bags of old papers as if I were unfamiliar with the very concept of “archives,” is the masculine correlative of what women of a certain age call “work.” The object is the same: I want to travel lighter and with fewer wrinkles. I want to get rid of the part of my past that is mere dead weight. The clincher to this metaphor is the fact that I find the process of streamlining my life to be the most important thing that’s going on in it — together with an awareness that it is no more interesting to anyone else, and only slightly less repulsive, than immediate effects of plastic surgery. The difference is that recently rejuvenated women have the sense to retreat to wings of private hospitals. Retiring in decorous silence doesn’t seem to be an option for me: in the Blogosphere, silence is, if not death, non-existence.

There are good reasons for hoping that the work is almost complete, at least in its most disruptive phase. The domestic upheaval that began last month, when we had the entry to the apartment painted (what New Yorkers call the “foyer,” heaven knows why), may have ended yesterday morning, when Quatorze gave me a hand with schlepping eight shopping bags full of books to the storage unit. The books were displaced by CDs, which lost their shelving (Ms NOLA has it now) when I decided that the hallway leading to the blue room, painted the same deep green as the foyer, ought to be — but never mind; this is too boring to write about. It’s enough to say that my CD collection, which is very large for one that’s free of freebies, has, while remaining quite accessible, become invisible. I don’t really play CDs anymore. I still buy them by the bushel, but after they’ve been uploaded onto iTunes, they go back into their sleeves more or less permanently. I listen to MP3 playlists on my Nano collection, which is colossal for one that’s free of freebies.

In the meantime, I acquired a new computer and a new table to put it on. I can say that for the first time in 25 years of computer use I am sitting comfortably. Working with a new text editor (KompoZer) is not so comfortable, but FrontPage is not compatible with Windows 7; at least one basic operation (inserting hyperlinks) crashes the app. Can’t have that.

The TV season galloped toward its finale this evening. In three weeks, we’ll be back to having Sunday dinner at any old time, and the cable box will go dark for another three quarters. Rubicon wasn’t nearly as terrible as it usually is, even if we all knew that Will Travers would survive the assasination attempt in a more or less rinky-dink manner. I hope that I’ll get to the bottom, before the season ends, of my visceral dislike of Michael Cristofer, who may be doing such a good job of playing the bizarrely-named former Fisher’s Islander Truxton Spangler that I want to kill him. And, while I like the actor John Slatttery perfectly well, I hope that Roger Sterling will kill himself next week. I was ready for suicide to occur this evening, and rather disappointed when it didn’t.I think that Joan was, too.

Speaking of Christina Hendricks, Life As We Know It, with Katherine Heigl and Josh Duhamel, opens on Friday, and I can’t wait. The scene in which Mr Duhamel’s character pushes a newly-walking toddler back down onto the floor so that the moment can be virginally re-enacted for his domestic collaborator is already the funniest thing that I have ever seen in a trailer.

Barack Obama, in Rolling Stone.

I’m not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need.

(via kottke.org)