Daily Office: Friday
¶ Matins: “Social scientists do counterinsurgency” — an important overview by Nicholas Lemann. Effective measures are very important, of course; and General Petraeus, among others, reminds us that thinking big is rarely effective. Beyond trying to decide how to respond to terrorism, however, there lies the problem of sovereign integrity: of the four Middle-East nations that are currently on the boil, the only one strong enough to suppress terrorism is Iran, perhaps our most mortal enemy.
¶ Lauds: A word on that fringe theatre in London that has sent two productions to Broadway — showing in theatres on opposite sides of West 48th Street. David Babani and the (Menier) Chocolate Factory. (LA Times; via Arts Journal)
¶ Prime: Since it’s Friday, we’re only too happy to let Michael Lewis itemize, with his trademark clarity and coherence, three game-changing effects of the SEC’s Goldman Sachs case. His peroration will be widely cited:
Indeed, the social effects of the SEC’s action will almost certainly be greater than the narrow legal ones. Just as there was a time when people could smoke on airplanes, or drive drunk without guilt, there was a time when a Wall Street bond trader could work with a short seller to create a bond to fail, trick and bribe the ratings companies into blessing the bond, then sell the bond to a slow-witted German without having to worry if anyone would ever know, or care, what he’d just done.
The part that we especially like, though, is Mr Lewis’s clear-headed appraisal of the ACA problem, which amounts to recognizing that there is an ACA problem, sticking to Goldman’s coattails like a bad smell. (Bloomberg; via Felix Salmon)
¶ Tierce: Two economists at Emory, Andrew Francis and Hugo Mialon, have developed a thesis that social tolerance of homosexuality correlates to low rates of HIV infection. If this is true, then the social price of religious opposition to homosexuality increases sharply. (via Marginal Revolution)
¶ Sext: Two of our friends, Patricia Storms and George Snyder, have recently blogged about books in their lives. In Patricia’s case, this is a matter of creating an inviting library in her Bloor West Village home (and framing some nifty Penguin-cover postcards). George writes about the well-timed appearance in his life of Michael Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey, which came out in 1967.
¶ Nones: How Toomas Ilves, the president of Estonia, grounded like everyone else, drove home from Istanbul. (NYT)
¶ Vespers: Ken Auletta’s essay about Amazon, the big six book publishers, and the “agency model” — occasioned by the arrival of the iPad — would seem to quell any fears that the giants of Siliconia are ever going to do (or do without) the work of conventional publishers. (The New Yorker)
¶ Compline: Garrison Keillor argues that, notwithstanding the claims of sociobiology, young men really ought to text less and talk more. We can only add that the locked-up demeanor of many intelligent young people makes us worry that we’re living at the wrong end of the Matrix. (IHT)