¶ Jonah Lehrer looks into the Google-makes-you-stupid claim, and finds that it wasn’t being claimed at all. Which we could have told him… At the end, Jonah cites Nicholas Carr’s “contrarian” take. Carr writes, “When we form, or “consolidate,” a personal memory, we also form associations between that memory and other memories that are unique to ourselves and also indispensable to the development of deep, conceptual knowledge.” The associations that we build facts and memories are indeed unique to the human mind and will not be uploadable anytime soon. We believe that Carr’s associations are indeed the jewels of the mind, but they are memories themselves. In other words, if you associate a fact that you’ve off-loaded with one in your mind, the association is itself in your mind. It’s not really an association anymore, but a new fact. So we don’t see any “contrarian.” (The Frontal Cortex)

¶ Felix Salmon appraises the “smart and charming” Larry Summers and finds that his skepticism recedes somewhat. It’s frustrating, though, to see that both Felix and Summers are complacent about the nature of any jobs program: it’s got to be public-sector stimulus. We believe that breaking up large corporations into much smaller units (think franchises) would generate not only a robust jobs market but a greener environment. ¶ All right, it wasn’t the death by a thousand cuts. Maybe just five or six, writes Annie Lowrey at Slate. It’s pretty clear from her analysis that Borders did almost nothing (effectively) to harness the Internet. (Slate)

¶ The reissue of Patricia Highsmith’s The Cry of the Owl gets an irresistible review from Richard Rayner (LA Times; via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Pointers for translators by Humphrey Davies and Jonathan Wright. Mr Davies counsels against consulting native speakers who aren’t readers and translating anything before the contract is signed. (Arabic Literature (In English); via Conversational Reading) 

¶ Scientists enlisted volunteers from the Royal Armories in London to hop on a treadmill kitted out in Fifteenth-Century armor. Guess what? It’s exhausting! But it’s probably unlikely that the wearers of these ceremonial outfits exerted themselves very much while so attired; it was the horses carrying them that bore the burden. That’s just our guess, though. (Discoblog)

Have a Look: ¶ Fabulously fabulous advice from humiliation expert Wayne Koestenbaum @ The Awl. ¶ Julie Kim’s bus-stop coffee table. (via GOOD) ¶ Jim Meskimen “interprets” Clarence’s Dream, from Richard III, in a host of (adroitly chosen) impressions, ranging from Richard Burton to Jack Nicholson and closing with the best match of all. (via MetaFilter)

Noted: ¶ Alex Steinweiss, graphics pioneer, 1917-2011. (The Atlantic; via Arts Journal)

¶ We confess that we find polygamy objectionable, largely because it enshrines what we take to be an exceedingly regressive view of the difference between the sexes. But! We’re aware that similarly-scented objections are routinely raised against homosexuality, which doesn’t trouble us in the least. Jonathan Turley, the constitutional lawyer representing Kody Brown & Family in their challenge of Utah’s anti-polygamy statute, convinces us that our objections are without legal merit, and that we had better stop confusing abusive exceptions with the peaceable rule. If there’s something wrong with the Brown family’s arrangements, it isn’t multiple marriage.

Travel books don’t, as a rule, capture my fancy, and perhaps Ina Caro’s Paris to the Past: Traveling Through French History by Train, which did, shows why. The territory that it covers couldn’t be more familiar to me — unless I  actually visited all of them. I know a lot about the churches and castles that Caro visits on a series of day trips, especially about the personages who built and enjoyed them. I won’t say that I didn’t learn anything from Paris to the Past, but learning was not the point. Spending virtual time with Ina Caro was the point. It would sound snarky to say that this book is all about her, but it is very much her distinctive sharing of encounters with grand old piles and the tittle-tattle that still echoes in them that gives the book its substance. 

The wife of Robert Caro, eminent biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, Ina Caro has already written a book about her earlier travels through France. For many years, the Caros spent their vacations driving around France, and Ina arranged their itinerary so that it corresponded to the chronology. Touring the Loire valley, they visited the famous chateaux in the order in which they were built. If there is a better way of instilling history in the human mind, I’d like to know what it is. 

Traveling chronologically worked not only historically but architecturally, since architecture not only reflects both the spirit and needs of its age, but also evolves over the years, one style developing from another. Each age or style incorporates certain aspects of its predecessor and eliminates those that have become obsolescent or undesirable. For example, arches change. The soaring rounded Roman arch found at Orange, Arles, and Nîmes, built to overwhelm with its magnificence, crumbles. Its stones litter the years of the Dark Ages before it begins to rise again. When it rises, it is first the squat, rounded arch of the early Christian Church. Over the centuries, it rises higher and higher, and is transformed from austerity and simplicity into the elaborate storytelling arch of the eleventh-century Romanesque arch. And then, when at the very pinnacle of this beauty, for example, at Vézelay in Burgundy, it is transformed again into the pointed Gothic arch of Saint-Denis. Over the next period of three hundred years, the Gothic arch evolves from simplicity to flamboyance and then, when simplicity is once again desired, it becomes the simple arch of the early Renaissance. 

To visit the relics of the past in this way animates the evolution of style in a way that easily accommodates all the facts and figures that you can stuff into your head — in their chronological order. 

At some point, the Caros rented an apartment on the Left Bank and liked it so much they gave up driving around and staying at provincial hotels. The author soon discovered, however, that this need not put an end to sightseeing. The French railways had improved over the years to such an extent that the bond between time and distance was broken: a TGV might get you to Orléans in the little more time that a regular train would take to get you to Fontainebleau. The RER commuter trains radiating from Paris made local trips more convenient as well. And there was always the Métro. Paris to the Past is the result. 

Saint-Denis is the first stop, and it sets the tone, because both the abbey itself and getting there are more pleasant than they were when Caro paid her first visits. It’s a happy beginning, because Abbé Suger, the extraordinary monk who advised his former classmate, Louis VII, while overseeing the construction of the first building that we recognized as Gothic (those pointed arches), is one of Caro’s favorite historical figures. She manages to make him sound like one of us, but without wallowing in cloying anachronism. “I should mention that most of what we know about Suger comes from his autobiography. … And, I should emphasize that, like most autobiographies, Suger’s should not be totally trusted.” 

Caro divides all of day-trippable France into five parts: the Medieval, the Renaissance, the Golden Age, the Enlightenment, and the Napoleons. That’s six cathedrals, three fortresses, two Renaissance châteaux, four palaces, three towns, one restoration, and Joan of Arc. And lots and lots of Paris. She goes to Blois; I wondered why she didn’t go to Chambord until I took a look at its location at Google Maps. It’s in the middle of nowhere! As you can tell, I haven’t been. I wish that she had visited Chinon, because that’s he hometown of my friend JR, but perhaps it’s just as well that she didn’t, because she might have had something for saying which loyalty would require me to hate her.

Caro’s favorite place is probably Vaux-le-Vicomte, and she devotes a few very readable pages to a very positive portrait of poor old Fouquet, making it clear that it was not the big party that did him in. Fouquet was already doomed. He had attempted to buy the influence of Louis’s first maîtresse en titre, the (otherwise) saintly Louise de La Vallière — that was a mistake! So was fortifying a private island off the Breton coast. “Fouquet seems not to have taken the measure of the man with whom he was dealing,” Caro writes, “while Louis understood Fouquet all too well.” Another favorite figure is François Premier, who does seem to have fallen into historiographical decline. “As hard as I have tried, I haven’t been able to get Bob, who remains fascinated by Napoleon, even slightly interested in Francis.” Now, there’s a marital discussion that would make for fun eavesdropping. As for Louis XIV, like most admirers of the Sun King, Caro has little good to say about the Widow Scarron, and one senses that her visit to the château at Maintenon is designed to provide an opportunity to say lots of bad. 

Paris appears in four of the  five parts, a reminder that, while Paris is full of old buildings, the really old buildings were not built all at once, but have survived, by the grace of whatever deity oversees cities. (Caro doesn’t mention that the Sainte Chapelle was subjected to the post-Revolutionary travail of being put to use as a granary; perhaps it wasn’t!) Her chapter on the Louvre reminds me how much France has changed in my lifetime. It was the excavations for I M Pei’s celebrated pyramid that uncovered remnants of the foundations of Charles V’s Fourteenth-Century fortress — proof that the artist of the nearly-contemporary Très Riches Heures wasn’t daydreaming when he drew the building. 

Caro closes with Mozart at Palais Garnier (she does not mention Opéra Bastille), where, at the last minute, Ina and Bob are able to pick up some fantastically expensive tickets for “the best seats in the house” — for a matinee. This must make it easier for Caro to imagine the opulent jewels and dresses that appear on the opera nights of our time only in severely anorexic form. Paris has changed so much that it’s perfectly all right to go to the opera in the middle of the day, wearing whatever nice street clothes you had on at lunch. The fact that the true theatre of Napoleon III’s empire took place on the grand stairways, not in the auditorium, is not lost on Caro, but she doesn’t mind that the present doesn’t get in the way. “When we entered the theatre, I looked at the ceiling, designed by Marc Chagall, which was definitely not nineteenth-century neo-baroque, but somehow worked.”

Sitting there in this glorious palace built in a city filled with palaces, my mind drifted back to the soaring cathedrals, the moated fortressees, and opulent castles I had visited, and I could think of no better way to end my magical journey through time. 

Now, that’s an ending!

¶ As August 2 approaches, and, with it, the prospect of making the nation’s creditworthiness walk the plank (see related story, almost anywhere you look), Wall Street “prepares.” Louise Story and Julie Cresswell talk to fund managers around town (and even in Philadelphia), and learn that, for the most part, managers are going to argue for whistlin Dixie. Timothy Sloan, CFO at Wells Fargo, pulls the rug out from under the story with his laconic candor. “Because nobody knows what is going to happen, nobody knows how to prepare,” he said.” Now, if the reporters had only opened with this quote, we’d have known where we were going!

¶ Apple may design cool products, but nobody ever lost money betting on its corporate ham-handedness; it’s obviously asking too much of Steve Jobs to Grow Up. We’ll know that the New Millenium has arrived when companies like Apple hand out prizes to clever stuntsters like Kyle McDonald, whose clever little guerilla app has landed him what we hope is not too hot or deep a bowl of soup. According to columnist Jim Dwyer, Mr McDonald insinuated a little Webcam program onto the computers on display at two Apple Stores, tweaked the results, and surreptitiously re-loaded. Shoppers interacting with the computers on display viewed an ongoing stream of faces that, suddenly and startlingly, included their own. “People instinctively quit the app less than 10 seconds after recognizing their own face,” he subsequently wrote, thus establishing the important point that we are not the narcissists that we’re said to be, at least when we’re at the computer. Funding is what Kyle McDonald deserves, not felony charges!

Right on schedule, Fairway opened its latest branch here in Yorkville today, and I paid the first of Nⁿ visits. I bought two items, a quart of milk (needed) and a pound of Kona (also needed). Getting a pricetag for the Kona was problematic; in fact, it was impossible. The computer wouldn’t recognize the PLU. So the clerks and the sub-manager devised a sort of written math problem involving two vessels  — don’t ask me, but Ray Soleil thought that it was pretty clever. In case you’re wondering, the Kona is not a bargain, at $39.95; late, lamented Rohr’s, the tea- and coffee-shop that closed a month or so ago, used to sell it for $31. But Rohr’s isn’t in business anymore, is it? Before he ran into the computer problem, the clerk wanted to be sure that I knew how much the coffee was going to cost. What can one do? It’s the best coffee on earth.

The closest I have ever come to a Fairway store in the past is as a years-long FreshDirect customer. FreshDirect was founded, I believe, by a former Fairway partner who left in a huff to start his own business, or words to that effect. But a little of the Fairway gloss glittered on my FreshDirect boxes. FreshDirect used to sell Kona, but it stopped, just as it stopped selling a lot of the special groceries that kept me coming back. Finally it was no better than the brilliant specialty markets that have been in the neighborhood for years, Agata & Valentina and Eli’s. By that time, I’d learned that the last thing I needed was boxes of food delivered once a week. I need small bags of food purchased every day. Every day. I won’t mind, now that there’s Fairway.

On the way home, neighbors on a lower floor who have for years been regular customers at the mother ship, on the West Side, assured me that it’s always going to be like that in there, meaning crowd scenes suggestive of a bus station in an earthquake, with just a hint of menace that the whole place is about to flip over like the Poseidon. I predict that guidebooks will soon be directing Museum tourists to the other end of 86th Street, before or after the art, for a look at New Yorkers in the raw. By local standards, Fairway is immense, with sky-high shelves stocked with unimaginable variety  — unimaginable to Manhattanites, that is. What’s on the shelves will only elicit yawns from sophisticated out-of-towners, especially those within driving distance of a Wegman’s. But the clientèle may take their breath away. If opening day is any indication, the West Side store’s celebrated atmosphere of crazed-grandmas-on-steroids-death -match-roller-derby has been piped into the new store as well.

No matter how hard you beg, the clerks are not going to let you leave by the entryway. You have at least to go around the produce shelves and past the checkout counters. I had hardly walked in when I heard at least two whimpering young men all but pleading entrapment, as though they’d stepped through the door unaware that food was for sale (surely anyplace so happening — see that TV truck? — must be selling Apples) and now wanted only to turn on the heels. Not allowed!

It’s not the exotic variety that I’m after. I don’t mind walking a few blocks to buy something unusual. What I want right across the street, when I need it because, damn it, I thought I had another bottle in the cupboard — and am now going to get — is superb produce and amply-stocked staples. Fairway has turned the local Food Emporium, and, to a lesser extend, the better-run Gristede’s, into dodgy convenience stores. Indeed, I can’t imagine how Food Emporium will last a year. We shall see.

I was not too superior to accept one of the maps that those exit-forbidding clerks were handing out. The key to the aisles has three columns, “traditional,” “organic,” and “specialty.” There’s a kind of honey in each category, and they’re all in different parts of the lower level (along with a tripartition of jams). There are also sodas in all three categories. But what about “specialty organic”? Don’t tell me that Fairway is missing something!

Next Day Update: This time, I went to shop, with a list of ingredients for dinner. I stuck to it, too; the only extras were a ripe avocado (ready to eat! what a concept!) and some of Kathleen’s preferred yoghurt. Some of the items on my list were “specialty” — wild rice, for example — while I was also on the lookout for “traditional” (that is, ordinary) ice cream bars and fruit pops. And then, some beautiful green beans and small button mushrooms. I can’t remember the last time that everything on my list — even a short one like today’s — could be purchased under one roof. And the bill came to pennies more (pennies!) than the cost of a pound of Kona. (A quarter of that went for the wild rice.)

¶ In her column about the populist downfall of the Murdochs, Maureen Dowd says something more astute than she might know. Testifying before a Parliamentary Committee, she writes, News Corp executives “stuck to a hoary formula for scandals, claiming the cognitive advantage that being on top of the world left them out of touch.” Down in the dumps on the 90th Floor? Not bloody likely! That’s what the intervening 89 floors are for: insulation. The exercise of power at a distance without consequence is what the modern large corporate organization has been designed to accommodate. It never works for very long without significant breakdowns, but with luck you’ve snatched and grabbed your sky’s-the-limit take-home by then. When the headlines are sensational, who can be bothered to translate that “hoary formula” into plain English: “We’re so powerful that we don’t have to know what we’re doing.” Would you give these people your car keys?

¶ Steve Smith writes brilliantly about the series of Brucker-Adams concerts that the Cleveland Orchestra has been giving at the Lincoln Center Festival, conducted by Franz Welser-Möst.

Yet in a spiritual sense, the works felt complementary: presumably the point Mr. Welser-Möst wanted to make. Mr. Adams, contemplating the terror of nuclear Armageddon, calls on poetry: “Batter My Heart,” the magnificent “Doctor Atomic” aria that appears in instrumental guise near the end of the symphony, is an incantatory setting of John Donne, an invitation to divine ravishment. Bruckner, his death at hand, reaffirms an unshakable faith in God with heavenward gestures and allusions to Wagner’s holy-quest drama, “Parsifal.” The work’s anguished dissonances seem to attest to awe rather than to mortal terror.

My latest problem is: Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletins. These quarterly publications pile up! I’ve got nearly a foot of them. That’s a lot of shelf space, if you’re wondering. And I don’t have it. Not for the Bulletins.

Aside from the occasional issue devoted to recent acquisitions, each quarterly bulletin is devoted to one theme: the art of a region, a period, or even of one particular artist. Occasionally, the Museum resorts to bulletin format for minor catalogues, as was the case when Vermeer’s Milkmaid paid a visit from the Rijksmuseum. The format blends light-handed scholarship with texts that the educated general reader will find informative and well-written. But I have yet to encounter a Bulletin that tells me everything I want to know about work that already interests me, and Ican think of only one instance when a Bulletin sent me to a part of the Museum that I’d never been to before in search of works that I hadn’t thought I’d care much about. I ought to read the Bulletins as they come in; that goes without saying. But it would take eight to ten people to get through the stuff that I ought to read. At my pace, anyway. 

So they pile up, unread for the most part. Here, from Summer 2001: Ars Vitraria: Glass in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I don’t know quite how to approach it. It looks like a high-end catalogue of gifts that happen not to be for sale, but there are a few stained-glass windows that have nothin,g beyond their common material, to do with anything else in the book. One of the windows comes from Rouen Cathedral (!) “Theodosius Arrives at Ephesus (Scene from the Legend of the Seven Sleepers),” it’s called. The accompanying passage provides dates for Emperor Theodosius II (a long reign, 408-50) and recites the legend (the sleepers were persecuted Christians who had been tucked into a comfy cave in the Third Century, miraculously resurrected). We’re also told that the panels, of which this is just one, were dismantled and rearranged in the Rayonnant style to fit the lancet windows of side-chapels that were added to the cathedral, presumably in a way that blocked off (or opened up) the panels’ original windows. As a result, the original composition “of cluster medallions against a mosaic ground, like the contemporary windows at Chartres,” has been lost. Very interesting!

In most cases, if I want to see an item that’s written up in the Bulletin, and it belongs to the Museum, I have only to walk down the street, but a glance at Theodosius arriving in Ephesus will require a trip uptown to the Cloisters. By the time I make my next trip, I wonder what I’ll still recall of the information in the foregoing sentences. I’m not an aficionado of stained glass, but I have an abiding interest in Medieval art, so it’s not a waste of time for me to know a little something about this fragment. Nothing in the world, however, is going to make me want to know more about the pair of Syrian blown goblets from the Eleventh Century that, to my eyes, are the one thing that glass ought never to be: dirty-looking.  

Here’s a good one. Summer 2004: “The Flowering of the French Renaissance.” I open up to a handsome chalk drawing of a young man from the middle of the Sixteenth Century, attributed to the Clouet studio, who may be Guy de Laval XVII (who died at 26 in 1547) or Guy XVIII. It belonged to Catherine de’ Medici. “Skilled in diplomacy and in arranging marriages for her children, Catherine was eager to identify noble men and women throughout Europe.” Well, you could say that about her, I suppose, but it would sound better if she’d left a few grandchildren, and hadn’t acquired such a toxic reputation among Protestants. Not that I’m complaining! Page 23 of this bulletin features an image of one of my all-time favorite weird pictures, Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh: An Allegory of the Dinteville Family, by an unknown artist. It hangs, these days, over some furniture somewhere, but it used to be found in the galleries that you’d exit into after seeing a special exhibit in the Old Master Galleries (that’s what I call them). It’s bold and clear (as clear as a Lotto), and homoerotic in a way that manages to be both robust and coy. It’s very naughty, as befits a painting about a family scandal. On page 35, however, there’s a photograph of a set of deluxe pruning tools. More items that aren’t for sale. 

I don’t think that I’ve ever opened Summer 2009 before today. They don’t put the titles on the cover. You have to open them to find out what the subject is, if the cover art doesn’t tell you. The cover art here doesn’t tell you, and you probably wouldn’t figure it out, either — so I’ll let that go. The issue is devoted to “Scientific Research in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Now, it’s clear that we all ought to read this from cover to cover. I’m serious! You should see some of the equipment they’ve got there. Caption: “71. (left) Pendant (fig 65) being placed into the chamber of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) for surface analysis of enamels.” Is that contraption really sitting somewhere in the basement at 1000 Fifth Avenue? On page 41, a chart entitled Marker, showing a schematic Antibody brushing up against a schematic Antigen. This is from “Immunology and Art: Using Antibody-based Techniques to Identify Proteins and Gums in Binding Media and Adhesives.” I expect that a learned version of this paper has been published, eye-glazingly, elsewhere, but it’s stuff like this that keeps me in shape as a know-it-all. With just a few bits and pieces gummed and bound to my conversational palette, I can paralyze up five cocktail-party guests at close range. 

Ooh, Madame X. Here’s one I’m never going to throw away: Spring 2000, “John Singer Sargent in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” An all-time beloved picture: Mr and Mrs I N Phelps Stokes. The thing to remember is that ‘P’ comes before ‘S.’ I’m just thinking out loud, here. If I were a real knickerbocker, I’d know that it’s “Phelps Stokes” and not “Stokes Phelps,” but every time I mention this picture I wonder if I’ve got it right, and hesitate so long that it sounds like I don’t know what I’m talking about. The Phelps Stokeses had houses on the same block of Madison Avenue as the Morgan house that’s now part of the Morgan Library; it may even have belonged to them at one point. I remember reading that somewhere. Also that Mrs Phelps Stokes, the wonderful Katharine-Hepburn-like American beauty in Sargent’s picture, died more or less broke in the Fifth Avenue apartment building built by her antiquarian husband. The Crash, you know. He’s in the picture, apparently, because he showed up at the studio instead of his wife’s wolfhound. Is that true? Almost. From page 28: “…. and the dog was unavailable — Stokes had ‘a sudden inspiration,’ he recalled, and ‘offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture. Sargent was delighted, and accepted the proposal at once…'” You can’t make this stuff up. (Although evidently you can mangle the details.)

I don’t know what I’d do if I had to decide between the Sargent bulletin and Summer 1995, and could keep only one. Summer 1995 is devoted to the architectural history of — the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have pored over every page with the enthusiasm of a fanatic child. Because what’s more interesting than almost any individual thing in the Museum is the building itself. I don’t mean beautiful; I mean interesting. To look at the aerial photograph of the Museum taken in 1920, before the lower reservoir was replaced by the Great Lawn, before the first bits of the American Wing were tacked on to the northwest corner, before — just what was tucked into that space before they built Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium (which was still new-ish when I first attended lectures there in the early Sixties)? — to look at this picture is to be confronted with a radically different Manhattan, a place familiar but incomplete, a town where they have no idea what’s coming. The most futuristic designers of Hollywood could never have imagined what would be added to this complex of structures in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. That’s because no one would have foreseen changes in the nature of the Museum itself. No one in 1920 could imagine the fun that my grandson would have running around the Engelhard Court — or the smiles on the guards’ faces. 

Let’s do this again some time! Maybe I’ll come across a bulletin that I can deaccession.

¶ Marcus Stephen, the president of Nauru, a very small island in the South Pacific with an anything-but-idyllic recent past, contemplates the similiar futures that larger, better-known polities may be in for as a result of the same man-made processes that are sweeping Nauru’s ocean tides higher and ever higher. He will address the United Nations Security Council today, and urge them to make it impossible to say, as he does in the Times, “Yet the international community has not begun to prepare for the strain they will put on humanitarian organizations or their implications for political stability around the world.”

¶ In the Business Section, Michael Cieply writes about the latest incarnation of the studio system in Hollywood, which is built on guanxi — personal, rather than contractual, obligation. Amy Pascal is hailed as a success even though her studio, Sony, came in fifth out of six last year. That‘s the studio system. “A nice business” would be another way of putting it. (Although we really have to see How Do You Know? now — romantic comedies are rarely financial disasters on that magnitude — $120/$50WW)

In the London Review of Books, John Lanchester’s comment, “Once Greece goes…” (dated 30 June), approaches its conclusion (on the vexing differentness of the German ecomony) with an eloquent capture of the growing public mood that is pushing back at the consequences of generations of European political condescension. I have rendered the strongiest feelings bold.

The Greek people are furious to be told by their deputy prime minister that ‘we ate the money together’; they just don’t agree with that analysis. In the world of money, people are privately outraged by the general unwillingness of electorates to accept the blame for the state they are in. But the general public, it turns out, had very little understanding of the economic mechanisms which were, without their knowing it, ruling their lives. They didn’t vote for the system, and no one explained the system to them, and in any case the rule is that while things are on the way up, no one votes for Cassandra, so no one in public life plays the Cassandra role. Greece has 800,000 civil servants, of whom 150,000 are on course to lose their jobs. The very existence of those jobs may well be a symptom of the three c’s, ‘corruption, cronyism, clientelism’, but that’s not how it feels to the person in the job, who was supposed to do what? Turn down the job offer, in the absence of alternative employment, because it was somehow bad for Greece to have so many public sector workers earning an OK living? Where is the agency in that person’s life, the meaningful space for political-economic action? She is made the scapegoat, the victim, of decisions made at altitudes far above her daily life – and the same goes for all the people undergoing ‘austerity’, not just in Greece. The austerity is supposed to be a consequence of us all having had it a little bit too easy (this is an attitude which is only very gently implied in public, but it’s there, and in private it is sometimes spelled out). But the thing is, most of us don’t feel we did have it particularly easy. When you combine that with the fact that we have so little real agency in our economic lives, we tend to feel we don’t deserve much of the blame. This feeling, which is strong enough in Ireland and Iceland, and which will grow steadily stronger in the UK, is so strong in Greece that the country is heading for a default whose likeliest outcome, by far, is a decade of misery for ordinary Greeks.

As we ponder this divide between the general public and “money,” it seems that our navigational charts are severely out of date. Territories previously marked “Here Be Communists” are now otherwise occupied. Almost everyone wants a decent change to do better, which means that almost no one is interested social levelling. But we have learned the hard way that while financiers may know how to make money, that’s usually all they know. Allowing them to set public policy is what produced the the worldwide debt crisis.

Our old poles — communist/capitalist, liberal/conservative — are less and less magnetic; they don’t serve to organize our ideas effectively. Complicating the current world situation is the gradual withdrawal of a one-time outgoing tide of social conservatives who will never be replaced — not, at least, for a very long time. Which are the problems that will persist in the wake of that ebbing, and that therefore require serious consideration?

Our governments, for all their modern apparatus, date back to ancien régime foundations. The distinction between public and private sectors has its origins in Renaissance state formantion, and represents the breakdown of the feudal hegemony, in which the distinction made no sense. Prior to the Seventeenth Century, the state was looked to for little more than military defense and the odd festal monument. It was supposed to uphold the tangle of established rights that had grown up in the highly localized Middle Ages, but this was just another kind of military support; the state wasn’t supposed to take initiative with respect to these rights. That changed with the activist centralizers of early modern France, and the conflict between government and private interests was launched.

I think that we’re due for a new model.

¶ News that President Obama will nominate Rick Cordray and not Elizabeth Warren to head the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, which Ms Warren more or less invented, is the latest example of White House expertise at pleasing nobody. The Senate is apparently no more likely to confirm Mr Cordray, an activist former attorney general of Ohio who has worked well with Ms Warren, who, for her part, gallantly supports her colleague. What’s the difference? Binyamin Appelbaum writes that Ms Warren’s “independent streak and her outspokenness … put her at odds with the administration.” Maybe that’s another way of saying that, like the President, Mr Cordray is a Midwesterner, if you know what we mean by that.

¶ Juan Cole’s list of ten things that emerging Arab democracies ought to do in order to avoid the failures that endanger that of the United States merits a ringing endorsement. (We would add only a caution about definining the legal status of corporations very carefully, with a view to ensuring that no business organization has more power than a human being.) It’s a reminder that our country has sunk back into the unsociable individualism of the Gilded Age. ¶ In case you think we’re exaggerating about Gilded Agery, have a look at Chris Hedges’s highly critical review of Andrew Rossi’s documentary, Page One: Inside the New York Times. As Yves Smith notes in her commenting blog entry, the ugly behind-the-scenes reality that Hedges outlines is common, with variations, to American elite organizations. (TruthDig; via Naked Capitalism)

¶ Never enthusiastic about Barack Obama, we have nevetheless resisted, until it was no longer possible, giving up on him entirely. We’ll let Yves Smith, as progressive a voice as we know, make the (ghastly) case for Obama as the worst president since Herbert Hoover. We can only hope that his failure will put an end to the elite faith in testable meritocrats who may or may not possess crucial political vision. (Naked Capitalism) ¶ The awful truth about H&M, which Sarah Laskow confesses she already knew, but how is one to stay cool in the summer heat? (GOOD)

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Jeff Strabone writes about Cy Twombly’s classicism, about which there is nothing neoclassical. “Were Twombly’s chalk-scribble paintings the next step beyond cryptography or its opposite?” ¶ John Warner writes about his great-uncle, Alan Seager, author of the widely copied and altered story, “The Window.” Will a New York Review Books edition of Amos Derby be long in coming? (The Morning News)

¶ Joe Moran watches the cricket at Old Trafford. Many of the other spectators don’t.

I never cease to marvel at the extent to which groups of men, despite having paid forty pounds each for a ticket and over the odds for countless pints of inferior lager with a fake German name, will spend the entire day doing almost anything – playing bongos, making towers out of empty plastic beer glasses, screaming at Robbie Savage in the executive boxes to try to get him to wave – rather than watch the unfolding spectacle in front of them.

Also in the entry, some neat quotes from Duncan Hamilton’s book, A Last English Summer. ¶ Infrastructurist‘s Melissa Lafsky is getting married, but she knows so much about the cyclotron of wedding planning that you wonder if it’s for the first time. “5. THE REAL STRESS OF WEDDING PLANNING IS THINKING EVERYTHING MEANS SOMETHING.” Major wisdom! (The Awl)

¶ Our admiration of Sam Sifton’s prose, whether or not he’s writing about restaurant, is second to no one’s — which is perhaps what reduced us to giggling with delight at Darryl Campbell’s parody, “Sam Sifton Reviews His Late Night Snack,” at The Bygone Bureau. Lashings of delight!

Have a Look: ¶ Ekaterina Smirnova. (Art Cat) ¶ Maria Popova has a little list. A list of lists! (She would be missed!) ¶ Andwhile we’re on the Popova, Strange Maps with a vengeance! (Brain Pickings)

Noted: ¶ Violinist/Violist/Composer Josef Suk, great-grandson of Antonin Dvorak, 1929-2011. (Telegraph) ¶ “Under the Sea: Life on a lost shipping container.” (BoingBoing; via Marginal Revolution) ¶ “Cities Soak Up More Carbon Than We Thought” (GOOD) ¶ The Turing Test, played between human beings (liberals versus conservatives; believers versus atheists). We’re not sure that the Turing template is helpful, because both players are, after all, human. and this sounds a lot like the Clarence Darrow test. (Cosmic Variance) ¶ There’s only one thing that we know about boat racing and that is J Class. (A Continuous Lean) ¶ Learning Chinese in Sweden. (GOOD)

Instead of going to the movies today, I watched one at home. Watching videos has become somewhat unusual in recent months. I don’t know why, but it hasn’t stopped me from buying them, especially the used ones at the Video Room that go for five dollars a pop — about a dollar more than a rental. Most of them are movies that I saw in the theatre, and I’ll watch them when I get around to it; but one of them, Catherine Corsini’s Partir (Leaving), I haven’t seen. Why did I buy a DVD of a film that I haven’t seen? Because, in this case, it stars Kristin Scott Thomas.

How many stars,  if any, have had two such distinct film careers? It’s not that Ms Scott Thomas is bilingual, it’s that she plays entirely different sorts of women in her two languages. In the movie that she made after Partir (2009) — it was the next to be released, at any rate — she played John Lennon’s hyper-respectable Aunt Mimi. Other recent anglophone roles include the exasperated Mrs Whittaker, in Easy Virtue, and Anne Boleyn’s mother, in The Other Boleyn Girl. In the latter film, she is almost as upholstered as Carol Burnett in Went With the Wind. In French, however, the actress is both haunted and passionate.

Partir is the story of an adultery. Suzanne, the wife of a well-connected physician (Yvan Attal) in Nîmes, and  the mother of two student-age children, falls in love with Ivan (Sergi Lopez), a laborer who has just come out of prison for “bricolage.” The affair comes as a surprise to her, because in the course of her marriage she has put sexual satisfaction out of her mind. Once reawakened, her longing spins her life out of control. Her first response to its terrifying power is to confess her love to her husband and to promise that “c’est fini,” but of course it isn’t. Her husband doesn’t want to let her go, and his way of showing his affection is to beat her up — and then to withhold financial support, blocking her savings account and having the laborer fired. Although we are persuaded that Suzanne and Ivan are very much in love, there can have been few depictions of star-crossed romance as dismal as this one. (At one point, the couple are forced to take jobs as migrant workers at a melon farm.) Suzanne’s response to hardship and humiliation is to dig in her heels, but the novelty, perhaps, of having to scrounge eventually inspires her to talk Ivan into doing something stupid.

Ms Scott Thomas, who looks hardly a day over forty, much less her actual age of 48, has rarely, if ever, played anyone as naive and impulsive as Suzanne; her characters usually crackle with intelligence. This gives a movie a strange power, because as you watch it you think, Even Kristin Scott Thomas can’t prevent this awful mess. Suzanne is not very gifted at prevarication, and her persistent belief that her husband will come round to see the justice of her position is almost stupid — as is the childlike pleasure that she takes in Ivan’s company. In her view, the fact that she can’t help loving him makes everything all right, and she suffers no pangs of conscience. She behaves like a passenger who has awakened to find that she has boarded the wrong train, an error that she tries to correct with steadfast determination. Her huaband is the wrong train. Her family is the wrong train. On two occasions, she argues that her husband owes her something for having raised his children. Ms Scott Thomas is radiant, but Suzanne is far from entirely sympathetic.

On the verge of the affair, Suzanne brings a big bunch of flowers to Ivan, whom she has inadvertently injured in a scene that would in almost any other movie be comic. As she walks down the corridor to his low-income apartment, she looks less like someone who might be making a mistake than someone who is unhappy to see someone else make a mistake. This is the moment for Suzanne to stop, but she has no will do so. It is also the moment when she’s about to find out what it’s like to touch Ivan and to let him touch her. Who wouldn’t be apprehensive? Suzanne has no idea of the force that she is about to unleash.

A few years ago, I believe, Ms Scott Thomas was invited to play the title role in Racine’s Phèdre with a French touring acting company. I wonder how much of that performance is on view in Partir. Suzanne is no Phèdre, but she acts with the Greek queen’s intense helplessness and brings everything crashing down around her. That’s what makes this umpteen-thousandth French movie about infidelity compelling. Notwithstanding some sweaty sex scenes, the experience that we share is Suzanne’s alone. Even when she hugs her lover, she is frighteningly solitary, as we all are, at the mercy of fate and circumstance. There are no lessons in this movie. There is only the stunning portrayal of an ordinary, middle-aged woman who has the dramatic good fortune to be played by Kristin Scott-Thomas.

¶ Now that the resignation of Rebekah Brooks has been accepted by Rupert Murdoch (finally!), we’re trying to figure what’s next. Will the outrage over hacking the phones of ordinary people work itself out in a determination by the British government that Mr Murdoch is not “fit and proper” to run his media empire? Or will attention shift, more problematically, to an investigation into collusion by the police? When the history books are written, will the wreck of News Corp International make up the opening chapter, or constitute the entire story? Will the arrest of Neil Wallis, an editor/publicist who “appears to have unusually close ties to top officers at the Metropolitan Police Service,” come at the end or the beginning?

¶ Janet Maslin gives Ben Mezrich’s new book, Sex on the Moon, a review that seems both doting and frosty. Yes, Mezrich writes cinema-friendly page-turners. But perhaps it’s time for him to confine his literary effort to scenarios that don’t take an age to read. If the passage that Ms Maslin quotes is any indication, Mezrich ought to leave his paintjobs to the cinematographer.

Nowadays Mr. Mezrich displays the confidence of someone on a roll. He no longer pretends to be telling true stories. He fakes and pads so excitably that his own tricks are better than his characters’. What is “an angry whirl of gargantuan white flakes”? Mezrich snow. What is “thick and dark and ominous, like the intertwining ropes of an immense fishing net cast across the sky, swallowing up every inch of visible air, obscuring everything, even the muted glow of the nearly full moon”? A Mezrich cloudy night. What is “Hollywood’s next big thing?” Mr. Mezrich himself, according to this own Web site.

We don’t think that we’d have liked David Fincher’s The Social Network more if we had read the book of the same title.

Ordinarily, I reserve the “Big Ideas” heading for bright ideas, my own or someone else’s, that in my opinion, it would do everyone good just to think about. Today, however, I want to call attention to a big idea from a milennium ago. It has become a very bad idea for its host institution — the Roman Catholic Church — but, owing to a couple of other very bad ideas that have cropped up since (particularly the relatively recent notion of papal infallibility), it will be very difficult to pull the Church out of its pickle.

In the latest news about the Church’s ongoing pedophile crisis, critics are calling for the resignation of John Magee, the Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland. Magee admits that he may have failed to implement new anti-coverup policies in his diocese, but there’s more to it than that; he is said to have caressed a would-be seminarian. We’re not talking ancient history here. Meanwhile, in Germany,

[T]he Catholic Church’s decision to open its personnel files was an effort to restore some of the public trust in the church that the scandals have eroded. Record numbers of Catholics left the church in Germany last year after hundreds of cases of previously unreported child abuse came to light, including a case of a priest with a history of molesting boys who was returned to pastoral duties by the archbishop of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. The priest was later convicted of molesting more boys.

Actually, I did have a bright idea, and it overlays the one that energized a series of popes at the end of the Eleventh Century. I asked myself, what does the Roman Catholic Church really stand for? What is the doctrine that it would be least likely to alter or abandon? I quickly discarded the possibility that this most vital tenet would be purely theological. The Magisterium might announce a new understanding of the Trinity tomorrow, and nothing would change. In fact, Catholic theology has undergone a largely healthy evolution during the past two thousand years. (Consider those Reformation bugaboos, Purgatory and Mariology.) There is only one matter that has not evolved, or that, rather, has devolved,  or done whatever recessive evolution would be called. If you think that “celibacy” is the answer to my question, you’d be largely right, but not right enough. Celibacy is just an aspect of the core Catholic doctrine.

Thanks to Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity, I can cite this dogma as it was pronounced in a papal encyclical, Vehementer, issued by Pius X in 1906. It comes at the end of the following passage, taken from Christianity, that describes the first formal compilation of what we now call “canon law,” the Concordia discordantium canonum (known as the Decretum) attributed to the Bolognese jurist Gratian.

The Decretum and canon law in general also specifically embodied that principle of the Gregorian Revolution that there were two classes of Christians, clerical celibates and laypeople. Only a century ago, this could still be pithily spelled out in an official papal pronouncement: “The Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful.

The Roman Catholic Church is, at heart, a confraternity of celibate males who subordinate themselves to a well-established hierarchy, with the Pope at the top. Nuns, and friars who have not been ordained as priests, do not, although celibate, figure in this scheme. Neither do the parishioners whose financial contributions support the organization. Why these churchgoers expect the Church hierarchy to put their needs (and the needs of their children) first is beyond me. What club has ever prioritized non-members over members?

We’d like to know more about where those “record numbers” of Germans went. We think that they’ll be having plenty of company.

The Gregorian Revolution took place less than half the Church’s lifetime ago. It seems eternal now, but a thousand years ago it bore no more than a bogus patina of venerability.

¶ The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, one of Hamid Karzai’s six brothers, has dealt the Afghan president a body blow at a very inconvenient time, to say the least.  Alissa Rubin writes, “Without his brother, who gave the president the assurance that he could count on the political and economic backing of at least a quarter of the country — the south — Mr. Karzai’s government appears increasingly adrift.” Her report goes on to catalogue the very serious problems — a blizzard of election fraud and impeachment charges fluryying between the president and Parliament, and the corruption-induced failure of the major banks — that make Taliban-style austerity look functional, however undesirable.

¶ Joseph Berger fills in the background on the other night’s fire story. The fire itself, it seems, will be ruled accidental, which is good to hear. And the building is insured. We knew that Kehilath Jeshurun and its affiliated Ramaz school had lost a lot of money to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but we didn’t know about the rabbinical dynasty that has overseen the synagogue since 1906 (Hankel Lookstein, the incumbent, is the great-grandson of Moses Zevulun Margolies, the rabbi whose initials gave the school its name). We wish the congregation a speedy recovery.