Matins

¶ At The Oil Drum — our tickertape for the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe — retired geographer Gary Peters states the case for reducing the human population on Earth — soon. (Note that he brushes aside all optimism triggered by “declining growth rates.”)

Both population and consumption are parts of the problem–neither can be ignored and both are exacerbating the human impact on Earth. More distressing, however, is that many among us don’t even see that there are problems created by both growing populations and increasing affluence bearing down on a finite planet. To pretend that another 80 million people added to the planet each year is not a problem because they are all being added to the world’s poor nations makes no sense at all. Many of them will end up in rich nations by migrating, legally or illegally, and all will further compound environmental problems, from strains on oil and other fossil fuel resources to deforestation and higher emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. As Kenneth Boulding noted decades ago, “Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.”

To us, the Fact of Facts here is that it would be difficult to sustain a population 1/7 the current size on First World terms.

Lauds

¶ Mozart, Vivaldi singlehandedly clear a London library’s entry of loitering teens. And we say “singlehandedly” by design: the repellent sound track run through the library’s tinny tannoys consists of a movement from The Four Seasons and “Voi che sapete.” Period. We’re not sure that the librarians like classical music any more than the clotted teens do. (London Free Press; via  Arts Journal)

Back at the library entrance, the opera music might not be hostile, but it is loud, and pumped through the tinny-sounding speakers it’s a little hard to take.

And it’s not just the teeny bopper set that’s feeling repelled.

After five minutes under the speakers, even Mitchell started to crack.

“Oh my god. It’s the opera now,” she said, as the two-song rotation came around to the beginning.

At 25, library patron Sean O’Connor is in the target demographic for the aural assault.

Along with some friends, he kept a safe distance from the music as he enjoyed a smoke.

“The music could be better,” he said before acknowledging, “it’s a good idea.”

His friend, Frank Gribbon, 58, was less equivocal.

“It’s piercing. It’s annoying,” said the library regular.

He agrees it’s a good idea but he’s skeptical the plan will work in the long term.

“The kids, they’ll find a way around it,” he said.

“They’ll come down here with amplifiers twice as loud or something.”

It’s easy to read teenagers’ dislike of serious music as a dreadful portent of cultural collapse, but, really, it couldn’t be healthier. Can you imagine how creepy it would be to stand amidst a herd of young people surrendering themselves to music’s charms?

Prime

¶ Maura Johnston composes a rueful, appropriately snarky obituary for NewsLabs, the late, self-styled “platform for new journalism.” (The Awl)

What was NewsLabs again? A puff piece on it from the Nieman Journalism Lab makes it seem like a slightly classier Examiner.com or Associated Content — journalists, some of whom brought long, storied careers to the table, were given the technological platform to run free (with no assignment editors or pesky copyeditors!). Once the journalist’s “personal brand” was done being built, the money would come in via ad revenue….

But the quality of content, as any journalist who’s been employed by a web-based publisher can tell you, is actually never the case when it comes to ultimately deciding a publication’s success or failure — because marketing an online venture is a much more difficult affair than simply throwing up a few articles and a couple of Tweets and asking the interns to start multiple Digg accounts. Even the most entrenched online brands out there have stumbled when launching new sites in recent months; take a look at CocoPerez.com, the fashiony spinoff of Technicolor-haired Internet scourge Perez Hilton’s eponymous size that atracted some 160,000 unique readers in May. That’s a paltry number when you notice that the big P’s flagship site ranges from 1.7 million to 2.3 million uniques. (And don’t get me started on his dismal track record when it comes to promoting music.) It is very difficult to get readers regularly returning to any site; it takes a blend of pumping out the content and getting linked by high-profile sites both in and out of its immediate topic — and a not-insignificant amount of luck — in order to do so. Internet behaviors can be very entrenched things!

Tierce

¶ In today’s strapped economy, making smarter use of what we already have ought to be everybody’s Step One. At The Infrastructurist, Melissa Lafsky reports that the freight railroads are beginning to deploy significantly more powerful software in routing trains.

The software works by syncing train schedules and traffic control across the entire network (which can be up to 2,500 trains a day), and creating an optimized traffic plan that tells trains exactly how fast they should travel. Freight train schedules are more labor-intensive to create, and are less predictable than passenger rail. As such, the new software automates and optimizes the dispatch and travel process, from the moment trains are loaded to the moment they reach their destination.

RailEdge is already being put to the test by Norfolk Southern, and the company plans to expand its use of the technology to its entire 22-state rail network by 2012. Who knows — maybe by then we’ll have similar software for Amtrak.

Sext

¶ Grad Night at Disneyland — one of those Southern California experiences that could never, ever, not in a million years take root in the Northeast. Maria Bustillos reports, ambivalently, at The Awl. Her epigram is taken from Shirley Hazzard: “There is no arguing with exultation.”

Grad Nite started in 1961, just a few years after Disneyland opened. It’s a very complicated business to arrange, with all sorts of extra security precautions and elaborate paperwork, dozens and dozens of chartered buses from all over California and even as far away as Arizona, and so on. Our kids, on fire with the excitement of their graduation ceremony that afternoon, departed from school on three buses, each with a few wary chaperones on board. We had all kinds of stuff we were supposed to read to them about throwing out all their drugs and booze in the parking lot, OR ELSE. They were all way too wound up to give a damn what we said, naturally. I wandered through the bus, handing out colored wristbands and exhortations to simmer down, would you for pete’s sake. One kid was yelling very loudly about that South African artificial vagina dentata condom-thing. “It will cut your balls right off!” he shouted, suddenly catching my eye and shooting me a guilty look.

“Oh, I read all about that,” I said. “Indeed, you’d best watch yourself. It’s a dangerous world. ”

Nones

¶ Following a link from Marginal Revolution the other day, we stumbled on to Let a Thousand Nations Bloom, and while much of the conversation there has a takes-our-breath-away strangeness, this is more a matter of style than content. We actually agree with a good deal of Brad Taylor’s “Liberal Nationalism in a Competitive Market for Governance” — although not with the choice of title.

While parochialism might always cause problems, its harm is amplified in the large democracies we see today. As Bryan Caplan has argued, democracy provides no check on our evolved xenophobic prejudices. Politics isn’t about policy, but status: we vote to increase the status of our tribe at the expense of the other guys. Democracy tends to exacerbate this tendency.

Given that our parochial stone-age brains are here to stay, we should prefer those institutions which minimize the costs of the people’s romance. Rather than fighting nationalist movements seeking to align state borders with the boundaries of group identities, we should be supporting them.

We’ll be puzzling over the site for a while.

Vespers

¶ Lesley Chamberlain contemplates Vladimir Nabokov’s sojourn in Berlin, the first stage of his life-long exile from a vanished Russia, and reminds us that Nabokov was a first-rate recorder of a vast and aimless émigré community. (Standpoint; via  3 Quarks Daily)

Perhaps tying works of art to their originating topography is vulgar and needs to be kept discreet. But history needs Nabokov. During the artistically formative years, he lived here in the 1920s and 1930s, he peerlessly described how Berlin’s 300,000 Russian émigrés endured life after the Bolshevik Revolution. A city “swarming with ragamuffins” (Despair) and here and there “an urban vagabond with an early evening thirst” (The Fight, 1925). Here were thousands of lonely people haunted by poverty and nostalgia. Divorce or widowhood sealed their fate. In An Affair of Honour (1927), the cuckolded Anton Petrovich went through the motions of a classic Russian duel only to find himself stuck in a shabby Berlin hotel after his opponent didn’t show. “He looked at the moth-eaten plush, the plump bed, the washstand, and this wretched room…seemed to him to be the room in which he would have to live from that day on…[With] the door shut, he grabbed [a] sandwich with both hands, immediately soiled his fingers and chin with the hanging fat and, grunting greedily, began to munch.” So the writer imagined the crude Germanisation of a lost man. Nabokov, for whom all life after 1917 contrasted with his childhood on a Russian country estate, was a perfectionist, who noticed how even his own mother fell from wealthy grace. Miraculously, his brutal insights produced their own kind of beauty on the page.

Compline

¶ Although we’re pretty rigid about the difference between listening and reading, we don’t see any harm in finally polishing off a few of those unread classics with audiobooks. Laura Miller sketches a pretty accurate picture of what’s available these days. There certainly ought to be more. (Salon)

I first turned to audiobooks because I get motion sickness from reading in cars, buses and other moving vehicles. I soon graduated to listening as I cooked, cleaned house, ran errands, worked out and, of course, drove. As someone who reads for a living, I’m eager to get out of my armchair and give my eyes a break after a long day’s work, but with audiobooks I’ve been able to squeeze in a lot of recreational reading around the edges.

Audiobooks are, furthermore, an ideal way to finally get to those bypassed literary classics. I was never going to find the time to sit down and read all 1,072 pages of “Don Quixote,” but I listened to the whole thing over the course of a month’s worth of waiting in post-office lines and doing lat pulls. With the advent of downloadable digital audiobooks and portable MP3 players, it’s possible to keep recordings of several titles on hand at all times, snatching 15 minutes of Balzac here and there. Still, a long car trip accompanied by an audio version of a Dickens or Austen novel may be the most sublime use of the form.

Have a Look

¶ Designer Mirko Ilic’s collection of posters and other illustrations featuring the salt and pepper of punctuation marks. (via  Hilobrow)

¶ Not surprisingly, William Steig dreaded public speaking (but was very good at it). (Letters of Note)

¶ A French Ivy site — pourquoi pas? Greensleeves to a Ground. (via  Ivy Style)

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 3:25 pm.