We tend to think of plastic as semi-permanent: Once in landfills, it can take eons to disintegrate. But modern artworks made of plastic, and seminal examples of design fashioned from the stuff, are falling apart at an alarming rate, reports Slate:

The casualty list is appalling: Antique plastic dolls at the National Museum of Denmark have begun to peel and flake; classic furniture at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London might as well have been left out in the sun for years; the first-ever plastic toothbrush, at the Smithsonian, is collapsing into a pile of crumbs; etc. A whole generation of irreplaceable items that are as representative of our culture as pottery or flintheads were of ancient ones are dying -- and many people charged with their care have no idea how to stop further damage.

We're losing the first-ever plastic toothbrush! (In fact, the issue is quite serious.)

(Image via Slate)

The Baffler, the magazine that punctured business cant and confronted the morally dubious aspects of the New Economy at a time when many publications and pundits were turning a blind eye (or were complicit in the bubble-inflation), is returning -- perhaps to say, "We told you so."

Thomas Frank, who started the magazine-cum-journal in 1988, last put out an issue in 2007. Before that, there had been a four-year hiatus. Frank's work for the Baffler led to the acclaimed, much-debated book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" and he's currently a columnist for the Wall Street Journal.

Frank recently told The New York Observer that he suspected there might be a fresh receptivity to the Baffler's take on things: "We developed this critique of consumer culture and business culture, and lo and behold, a lot of the things that we were saying, instead of being this out-there stuff from the fringes of self-publishing land -- it's stuff that I think will make sense to everybody nowadays," he said. "The world has come a lot closer to our way of seeing things. It's funny how obvious it is now!"

According to the Observer, writers whom Mr. Frank has recruited include the Hermenaut founder (and former Brainiac author) Joshua Glenn, the n+1 editor Mark Greif, the BookForum editor Chris Lehmann, and the University of Illinois at Chicago literature professor Walter Benn Michaels, author of "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Forget Inequality."

The Baffler used to have a notoriously loose publication calendar, with publication deadlines serving as rough targets. Frank says the editorial team has committed to a regular, twice-a-year schedule.

(Image via The New York Observer)

In Dissent, Michael Walzer writes that it is citizens who should be expressing resolute solidarity with the Iranian protesters: union members, human-rights activists, professors, students. But President Obama? He is doubtful:

Right now, the most important task of the U.S. government with regard to Iran is not regime change. The most important task is to persuade or coerce the Iranian government to give up the effort to produce nuclear weapons. Doing that will require some mix of toughness and conciliation -- and that necessary mix will still be necessary whoever actually won and whoever finally wins the Iranian election. What Obama says must be guided by what he has to do.

The rest of us are much freer.

Leon Wieseltier, however, in the New Republic, laments Walzer's "exemption of the president from moral leadership in the midst of one of the greatest explosions of democratic energy in our time." And he dismisses in a parenthetical the argument that for an American president to ally himself with the protesters might, in fact, be to do them a disfavor:

(I am not an Iran expert, unlike almost everyone I meet, but I find it hard to imagine that the young men and women suffering the blows of the Basij would not welcome our support, that they are in the streets with angry thoughts of Mossadegh. If these events have shown anything, it is that their enemy and our enemy are the same.)

But, of course, Walzer wishes to give them "our" support. And history did not stop with the toppling of Mossadegh. It continued on, as it tends to do, through the 1979 revolution, America's backing of Iraq against Iran in the 1980s, and that notorious John McCain ditty "Bomb, bomb, bomb / bomb, bomb Iran."

Is it really self-evident within Iran that the interests of Iranian dissidents and those of official Washington are aligned? I wonder.

UPDATE: Would the dissidents applaud this Op-ed piece, for example, written by someone who declares himself to be an ally of theirs? (It asks, or declares, "Time for an Israeli Strike?")

In a recent column at National Review Online, the economist Thomas Sowell argues that President Obama has done nothing to stop Iran from developing atomic weaponry. That's not a unique argument, but Sowell goes further. Granted, he says, Iran may only acquire a handful of nukes. But that may be all it needs:

Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender -- especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.

I don't cherish the idea of my (hypothetical) granddaughters living under sharia, but, that said, I didn't gain much by pausing to ponder that scenario. But Sowell's column did make me think of a few questions that might inspire a lively discussion in, say, an eighth-grade history class:

Militarily speaking, what resources does the United States have, in 2009, that Japan did not have in 1945?

How might those options affect 1) Iran's decision to strike the U.S. with atomic weapons? Or 2) possible American responses to such an attack?

If Japan had possessed several thousand nuclear-tipped ICBMs in 1945, might that have affected the course of World War II? How?

Not long ago, Dinesh D'Souza, author of "The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11," was nudged out of the Hoover Institution for making arguments that were long on Democrat-bashing and short on scholarship. It was decided that he was an embarrassment to Stanford University, where the think tank is based. Sowell is a far more credible figure, but this column, anyway, is D'Souza-level stuff.

Last year in Ideas, Joanna Weiss wrote that the George Mason economist Peter T. Leeson was at work on a book that would demonstrate that "the democratic tenets we hold so dear were used to great effect on pirate ships. Checks and balances. Social insurance. Freedom of expression."

Leeson's book is finally here, "The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates." And, true enough, the economist gives democratic aspects of pirate life their due. (Pirates elected their captains, for example, and could depose them by a vote.) But what most stands out is just how eager Leeson is to rescue pirates from the clutches of left-wing historians and social theorists, and to claim them as avatars of right-wing economic theory. Pirates, Leeson suggests, were avid Hayekians a full two centuries before the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek was born.

From the 19th-century Christian socialist Charles Kingsley, who wrote a romanticizing poem about pirates, to the University of Pittsburgh historian Marcus Rediker, leftists have hailed pirate ships as spaces of social experimentation in which race and class hierarchies were softened or upended. Leeson, however, argues that democracy and racial tolerance grew out of piratical self-interest, and had zero to do with utopian sentiment.

Take the election of captains. For Leeson, this is an opportunity to explain a dilemma familiar to economists: the "principalple-agent problem." Merchant ships, he explains, were owned by absentee capitalists. ("They were landlubbers.") As a result, the interests of the agents, or doers (the sailors) did not align with those of the principalsples, or owners. In order to keep sailors working, and to prevent them from siphoning off goods and profits, an autocratic captain was required.

In contrast, pirates stole their ships and afterwards shared ownership. They divided up any booty. There was no problem of misalignment: the principalsples were the agents, (To be sure, the pirates elected a captain in part to make sure that no one slacked off, but the incentive to shirk was lower on a pirate ship, as you'd partly be cheating yourself.)

The lesson, for Leeson, is not that workers' democracy is a good thing, per se, but merely that it can make sense in a highly specific and rare economic situation, one with a distinctive set of incentives. Today, for example, some variant of democratic decisionmaking might make sense in a small start-up in which everyone has money at risk. It would not make sense, he says, in a company that makes use of outside capital.

For further reading that will clarify why he's right about pirate democracy and Rediker is wrong, Leeson recommends Hayek's essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society," as well as "Socialism," by Ludwig von Mises.

PS Obligatory pirate-talk joke: one chapter is titled "An-ARRGH-chy: The economics of the pirate code."

PPS Most inadvertently funny sentence: "There is evidence, on the other hand, that at least some pirates were not gay."

Yesterday, just below and to the right of a serious discussion of Robert Wright's new book, "The Evolution of God," on Bloggingheads.tv, there appeared a striking ad for an online role-playing game called Evony. The central image was of a radiant, amply endowed (serious décolletage), quasi-medieval-looking maiden, her head tipped back in an attitude suggestive of incipient ecstasy, and the tag line was, "Play now, My Lord." Come again?

Yes, there's that God-Lord link. But what demographic niche could Evony's makers possibly be shooting for? Is there data to show that consumers of theological debate also like Harlequin-flavored gaming? Interesting, if true!

Several lit-bloggers have flagged this typically allusive passage by James Joyce ("Finnegans Wake"), for its deployment of the word "blog." Consensus seems to be that it's a play on "bog," not any kind of techno-prescience.

Also, everyone seems to agree that the phrase "thomistically drunk" is particularly fine, even if it is hard to parse.

Now from Gunner Shotland to Guinness Scenography. Come to the ballay at the Tailors' Hall. We mean to be mellay on the Mailers' Mall. And leap, rink and make follay till the Gaelers' Gall. Awake! Come, a wake! Every old skin in the leather world, infect the whole stock company of the old house of the Leaking Barrel, was thomistically drunk, two by two, lairking o' tootlers with tombours a'beggars, the blog and turfs and the brandywine bankrompers, trou Normend fashion, I have been told down to the bank lean clorks? Some nasty blunt clubs were being operated after the tradition of a wellesleyan bottle riot act and a few plates were being shied about and tumblers bearing traces of fresh porter rolling around, independent of that, for the ehren of Fyn's Insul, and then followed that wapping breakfast at the Heaven and Covenant, with Rodey O'echolowing how his breadcost on the voters would be a comeback for e'er a one, like the depredations of Scandalknivery, in and on usedtowobble sloops off cloasts, eh? Would that be a talltale too? This was the grandsire Orther. This was his innwhite horse. Sip?

The war of words escalates between (the liberal Princeton economist) Paul Krugman and (the Harvard conservative economist) Greg Mankiw.

Berkeley's Brad DeLong enters the lists on the side of his fellow liberal.

In early June, Charles Guan was part of an M.I.T. team that won first prize, and $100,000, in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, which recognizes projects that have "significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems." The team's "Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility-on-Demand" proposal involved a citywide network of foldable electric scooters and partly collapsible minicars that could serve as alternatives to gas-powered vehicles.

All very high-minded, of course, making it considerably different from Guan's other, simultaneous project (which, you will be amazed to hear, got more attention in the tech blogosphere): At MITERS, the engineering school's "build-anything-you-want" workspace, Guan has been busy fashioning a shopping cart capable of reaching 45 miles per hour. His "LOLriocart" is powered by nickel-cadmium aircraft batteries and a 15 horsepower engine. It boasts grippy aftermarket wheels, a steering apparatus, and brakes that admittedly need a bit more work. On a recent rainy day, the aspiring engineer took his supercart for a spin on the MIT campus (including on public roads) and then posted a video of his adventure on the MITERS Web site.

"Awesome?" he asked. "Or evidence?"

He was helmetless.

Via Gizmodo

Mickey Kaus's often-exasperating, usually highly readable blog celebrates its 10th anniversary.

Kaus looks back on some of his greatest hits (and misses), and nominates a satirical memoir about his supposed friendship with JFK, Jr. as " the best-written piece I've published."

One of the leading proponents of Holocaust denial in the United States lived with a Jewish woman for eight years, in the 1970s. Another has a sister who converted to Orthodox Judaism, and he's terrified that his "peers" in the anti-Semitic underground will find out about her.

Car and Driver recently conducted a real-world test to determine just how dangerous driving-while-texting can be. The editors rented an airport runway, far from any traffic (car or plane), and brought along a Honda Pilot, two willing test subjects, cell phones, and plentiful vodka and orange juice.

The Pilot was fitted with small lights in the windscreen that could be flipped on and off, and the subjects were told to react to them as if they were brake lights suddenly flashing ahead of them. As the lights came on, an observer monitored how long it took the driver to hit the brake pedal, both at 35 and 70 miles per hour. The drivers -- Jordan Brown, 22, and Eddie Alterman, 37 -- went through the test in four conditions: sober and attentive; reading a text while glancing at the road; writing a text; and loaded (BAC of .08 and probably climbing).

The results: DWT was actually worse than DWI. The following chart documents the average delay in reaction time (and, crucially, extra distance traveled) for the two drivers under each condition:

The drunken-driving performances were sufficiently non-scary that the editors felt moved to add the following caveat:

[D]on't take the intoxicated results to be acceptable just because they're an improvement over the texting numbers. They only look better because the texting results are so horrendously bad. The buzzed Jordan had to be told twice which lane to drive in, and in the real world, that mistake could mean a head-on crash. And we remind again that we only measured response to a light--the reduction in motor skills and cognitive power associated with impaired driving weren't really exposed here.

Of course, the main difference is that drunken driving is taboo in most circles while warnings about DWT have, for a large swath of the population, not yet sunk in.

(Scientists have studied the texting phenomenon in the lab, Car and Driver noted, but the editors laid claim to the first real-world test.)

In a development that would have surprised my 20-something self, had he foreseen it, I now do yoga a couple of times a week. This is partly to shake off the feeling of ADD caused by Web surfing, answering emails, checking my Palm, and the general freneticism of life. Okay, I watch the Red Sox simultaneously, but it's a start. And baseball has its own Zen qualities.

Robert Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, has a somewhat different idea about how to counterbalance the frenzy of the working day:

I get up at 4:30 every morning. I like the quiet time. [my emphasis] It's a time I can recharge my batteries a bit. I exercise and I clear my head and I catch up on the world. I read papers. I look at e-mail. I surf the Web. I watch a little TV, all at the same time. I call it my quiet time but I'm already multitasking. I love listening to music, so I'll do that in the morning, too, when I'm exercising and watching the news.

Let's let humorist Andy Borowitz take it from there.

Ben Mezrich, author of the colorfully embellished (to put it mildly) book about an MIT blackjack ring that "took Vegas for millions," "Bringing Down the House," continues his run of commercial success. His forthcoming book, "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal," due out next month, has already attracted the interest of Hollywood. Aaron Sorkin, creator of "The West Wing," has written a script and, according to Variety, Columbia Pictures is trying to recruit David Fincher, director of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," to direct. The picture is slated to be called "The Social Network."

Hollywood being Hollywood, it may not be surprising that no one there seems to be put off by Mezrich's history of producing non-fiction books that turn out, upon examination, to be non-non-fiction. Last year, Ideas staff writer Drake Bennett interviewed several of the MIT graduates upon whose exploits "Bringing Down the House" was supposedly based. They found much of Mezrich's version of their tale unrecognizable. The book "is not a work of 'nonfiction' in any meaningful sense of the word," Bennett concluded.

This week, Brad Stone, of the New York Times blog Bits, got hold of a galley copy of "The Accidental Billionaires," in which the early drama takes place not at MIT but at Harvard. He suggests that there's ample reason to be suspicious of the new book, too. First, there are serious holes in the reporting: "Mr. Mezrich appears to have had access to only one primary source in Facebook's complex founding story: Eduardo Saverin, one of the Harvard friends of Mark Zuckerberg." (Zuckerberg kicked Saverin out of the company, and Saverin sued Zuckerberg.) Stone also identifies some "possible fabrications," including a too-good-to-be-true scene in which Zuckerberg and his pals dine on koala on the yacht of one of the founders of Sun Microsystems.

Stone also reports that there's lots of probably-uncheckable dish about the decadent social life at Harvard.

He does find some evidence that criticism of Mezrich's reporting has registered with the author. Unlike in "Bringing Down the House," sentences like "We can picture what might have happened next …" dot the book, signaling concocted scenes.

Last year, presented with evidence that certain happenings in "Bringing Down the House" were essentially made-up, Mezrich responded: "I took literary license to make it readable." He also said, "The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it's true."

This time, in response to questions from Stone, a spokesman for Mezrich's publisher, Doubleday, said: "This is not reportage. It is big juicy fun."

Of course, it's non-reportage that's still being marketed as nonfiction.

Through a phenomenon called synesthesia, many talented musicians associate notes, or key signatures, with colors: in their mind's eye, at least, they see the music the rest of us only hear. (In classical music, Franz Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov were both famous synesthetes.)

A New York artist named Erik Rosen, previously unblessed with this ability, developed synesthesia during a harrowing bout with lymphoma. After a stem-cell transplant operation last fall, at Sloan-Kettering, he was confined to a sterile room for a month, nodding from the effects of morphine, accompanied only by an iPod dock he'd recently gotten as a gift. At one point, as the Velvet Underground's "Rock and Roll" played, the song's notes and sonic textures began to flash for him on the white wall of his room, he says. And it kept happening, song after song. "The notes," he writes, "echoed against the white masonry in an opiate-laden kaleidoscope of colors."

Post-recovery, Rosen embarked on creating software that would render images that offered a decent approximation of what he was seeing. Vaguely suggestive of modernist paintings, Rosen's printed images are rectangular, composed of rows of smaller boxes. Read from left to right, the width of each box represents the length of a note, while color suggests pitch. An exhibition of Rosen's work, featuring such songs as "Hey Jude," "Satisfaction," and "Positively 4th Street," is on display through mid-July in the Condé Nast building, in Times Square.

Rosen also sells his prints via a Web site, cnoteart.com. And he'll even do requests. Which makes him something like a synesthetic version of a wedding band, no?

Via Allerton's Point

Martin Amis: genius, energetic philanderer, wearer of velvet suits, Lazy [Sod]. A portrait of the artist in his youth, by a former girlfriend who has, despite an earlier, angry pledge, largely forgiven him. At the time, Julie Kavanaugh, lacking a college degree, was cowed by the repartee of Amis, Clive James, and "the Hitch." Then she surprised everyone by grinding her way into Oxford and earning a coveted First in literature, the same honor the author of "The Rachel Papers" had received. Amis was … surprised.

Via A & L Daily

Last year, in the journal Science, two Duke University business professors demonstrated just how misleading the fuel-efficiency measurement Miles Per Gallon (MPG) can be. Now Congress has underscored the professors' findings by failing to take into account the complexities of MPG when writing the new "cash for clunkers" bill. This has produced some economic incentives that are slightly askew.

The problem, as Richard Larrick and Jack Soll explained in their Science article, is that MPG (unlike, say, height) is a non-linear measurement. It can be confusing to work with, especially off the top of your head. Did you realize, for example, that you save significantly more gas moving out of a car that gets 12 MPG into one that gets 14 MPG than you would shifting from a 22-MPG into a 24-MPG vehicle? (Take out a pen and do the math: assuming 10,000 miles driven in each case. the former move saves 119 gallons, the latter a mere 38.)

Now consider the incentives Congress plans to provide SUV drivers. They will qualify for cash payments if their old vehicles get fewer than 18 miles per gallon and they buy more-efficient ones. They get $3,500 if the new car or truck gets 2 MPG more than their old vehicle, $4,500 if they increase MPG by 5. (Their old trucks must be junked, too.)

As a result of those rules, a driver improving from 18 MPG to 23 MPG will get $1,000 more from the Feds than one who boosts her MPG from 12 to 16. But over 10,000 miles, the latter driver will actually save more fuel: 208 gallons versus 121 gallons.

Larrick and Soll have proposed making "Gallons Per 10,000 Miles" the fuel-efficiency metric of choice. That would allow much more straightforward comparisons among cars and trucks: no pen-and-paper needed, and even Senators could do the math.

While it's praiseworthy that, according to Bloomberg News, eight Amherst College seniors will "shun" Wall Street and join Teach for America -- making the program among the largest single employers of the Class of 2009 -- let's not get carried away by this idea that students at private colleges no longer want to enter the financial elite, given the chance.

Bloomberg reports that Amherst students now want to "save the world," not taste the high life in Boston or Manhattan. Amherst's president, Anthony Marx, gets much credit for "extolling public service and teaching" during his six-year tenure at the small liberal-arts college. All quite laudable, but signing up for a Teach for America stint is not quite the same thing as signing up for a life of teaching low-income students, or even for a life of teaching. More than a few young grads have used a TFA interlude as resumé-fodder for a future law-school application. (Teach for America's high selectivity has itself become a lure for meritocrats.)

Yes, people are rethinking some things during the downturn. And an impressive 53 percent of Amherst's May graduates entered education, government, or the nonprofit world. But let's not get too Pollyannaish about the degree to which American priorities are being remade. Existing financial incentives remain in place. And they'll only strengthen when the inevitable recovery hits. It's not simply that teachers make a fraction of what businessmen and financiers make, it's that, under the American system, access to all sorts of things, including quality education for one's children, is tied to income. A temporary contraction on Wall Street and exhortations from President Marx (whose total compensation in 2006-2007 was $475,026, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education) won't change that.

(Photo -- of Amherst? -- via Bloomberg)

If you're still pondering the "X … changed everything" route for your next book title, peruse this list first.

(The following approach has a certain charm, though: "Billy: The Untold Story of a Young Billy Graham and the Test of Faith that Almost Changed Everything." My emphasis.)

When Marx wrote about the alienation of labor, he was thinking of former craftsmen shunted onto assembly lines and hating what they were doing. But Matthew B. Crawford, a University-of-Chicago-Ph.D.-turned-motorcycle-mechanic, argues that alienation is increasingly a feature of the white-collar world, too. There are few objective standards by which office work can be judged, no way to make a distinctive contribution to the world at large.

Skilled trades, Crawford argues, in his new book "Shop Class as Soulcraft," offer an escape hatch from an alienated work life. True, many G.M. jobs won't be coming back. But consumers will need their hybrid cars fixed at some point, and neither plumbing nor plumbing problems are going away anytime soon. (No one in India can unclog your sink.)

What's more, Crawford contends, the satisfactions of attacking a broken-down engine can be every bit as rich, including intellectually rich, as those much-hyped "information age" jobs we're all supposed to be steering our children towards.

Crawford's own view of the world may be unduly Manichaean: he's as airily dismissive of office work, or the work of professors, as office workers or professors can be of people with grease under their nails. Nor is it precisely clear where women fit in his view of the working world. (The world of garage savants he describes is almost exclusively, and aggressively, male.) But he's written a usefully contrarian polemic, one that's been hailed by such unlikely right-left bedfellows as Harvey Mansfield, Jackson Lears, Richard Sennett, and Rod Dreher.

The New Yorker has more on "Shop Class as Soulcraft."