On the Times's The Caucus blog, Adam Nagourney reports that Google CEO Eric Schmidt said at the recent Republican Governors Association meeting that Google now estimates that the average blog is read by one person.
The new London Review has a long reported article from Shanghai by the excellent writer Pankaj Mishra. The bulk of the piece reports on interviews -- or really conversations from the sound of it -- with prominent figures of various ideological persuasions. It's a nice counterpoint to Mishra's recent take on China's so-called New Left, in a long New York Times Magazine profile of the author and editor Wang Hui [TimesSelect] (pronounced Wong Hway).
This time Mishra's subjects aren't New Leftists. The principal subject is Zhu Xueqin (pronounced Ju Shweah Cheen), a prominent man in politics who calls himself only "liberal." In an apparent stretch of that term, he told Mishra "that China needed more market-oriented reforms, and blamed the growing inequality and injustices on excessive state interference in free market mechanisms -- the 'visible foot' stamping on the 'invisible hand.'"
Mishra's portrait of the society, or, more specifically, the society's view of itself, has the ring of truth (I've been to the country once, a decade ago, and follow it carefully), and it brings to mind life in the post-Communist, 1990s Eastern bloc:
Yu [Hua, author of the new novel "Brothers,"] insisted that he had only described a commonplace reality. 'Things were bad during the Cultural Revolution,' he said, 'but what we are seeing now is total moral breakdown.'
I heard this line of argument often, from all sorts of people, who attested to a daily life that is relatively free from state control, but, deprived of the support networks of community and social security, and exposed to rampant venality, increasingly unstable and anxious.
In response to a question from an undergraduate, the Harvard economist Greg Mankiw offers a tidy explanation of how taxes can "distort" people's choices over how to spend their time. (The student says he doubts that most people even notice a shift of a couple of percentage points either way in the tax rate.)
But what especially struck me was Mankiw's discussion of a much-buzzed-about New York Times story, in which the author profiled several people who headed to Wall Street so they could become truly rich, not just prosperous. Memorably, the author focused on a cancer researcher, but there was also an academic economist. Of the economist, Mankiw says:
Based on the article, he seemed a bit wistful about leaving an academic job behind. At a higher tax rate on his new higher income, might he have stayed with the perks of the ivory tower? Perhaps. But, based on market prices, his talents are more productively applied in private equity, where he is filling the important role of allocating the economy's capital stock. If he gave up that job because of a higher tax rate, the loss to the overall economy would be measured by the deadweight loss.
Many observers of higher education have suggested that it's a tad depressing how many talented college seniors head directly to Wall Street without considering other paths. (Similarly, letter-writers to the Times, including the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, seemed to find the cancer researcher's decision to pursue riches especially distasteful.) But Mankiw neatly turns this p.c. instinct on its head.
An underheralded problem, his argument implies, is the "deadweight loss" to the economy caused by smart people who could land a job on Wall Street, but choose, instead, less economically productive pursuits like teaching, studying biology, or joining the military or the CIA. (One wonders how many people stay reluctantly in such jobs because of the higher tax rates endured by investment bankers.)
Another interesting use of online surveys and instant interactivity: A Web site dedicated to determining what variety of American accent the user has -- ranked in order of likelihood.
It's a short quiz that asks you to compare the way you pronounce various homonyms or near-homonyms, such as "don" and "dawn." (The same, differently, or a hair differently?) Very simple to answer, although you might find yourself speaking aloud (the same as "allowed"?) to determine if there's any difference.
After the first few questions I was smugly thinking I clearly had no accent at all, as one always thinks is the case. (Despite my Boston origins, I don't have that twang, where "car" seems to have no "r," perhaps because of Midwestern parentage.) And in fact, I turned out to have a "Midland" accent, about which the quiz-maker says, "'You have a Midland accent' is just another way of saying 'you don't have an accent.'" Victory to me and my provincialism, I guess.
Despite the Metafilter poster's pronouncement, it is not in fact the entire Nutcracker Suite, which no one would listen to anyway. Nevertheless, it's surprisingly mellifluous. I suspect the players have sliced and diced some of the bicycle's spokes in order to realize the tones of a scale. (Think of the various sizes of the bars on a xylophone.) Is that cheating? Who cares.
An interesting debate has broken out at the University of Minnesota Law School over the hiring of a professor named Robert Delahunty, as reported and analyzed by David Bernstein on The Volokh Conspiracy. Delahunty, as a lawyer for the Bush administration, was the co-author with David Yoo with a well-known leaked memo in which they concluded that "neither the federal War Crimes Act nor the Geneva Conventions would apply to the detention conditions in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or to trial by military commission of al Qaeda or Taliban prisoners." The memo also argued that US soldiers in Afghanistan were not bound by international law regarding war crimes. The administration went on to officially adopt both positions.
Faculty members have written an open letter protesting Delahunty's hiring, which is provided as a PDF in the Volokh post. It's a little dyspeptic -- "We can only assume that the Law School would not have hired Enron officials to teach accounting to our students." -- but it's an interesting document. The nine professors posit, quoting an article in the American Journal of International Law, that government lawyers are in a somewhat unique position; they are not just advocates for their bosses but are in fact responsible for the results of those arguments:
[Due to the deference of courts to administration arguments,] there may be no 'safety net' other than these attorneys' own competence, care, integrity, and good faith; it is only these professional qualities that protct against legal advice or advocacy that might undermine the national interest in respect for law....
I'm not entirely persuaded, as it seems to me that a lawyer is a lawyer, and is not the same as the elected official they happen to work for, but the professors' letter is still worth reading, as is Bernstein's particularly unsympathetic post.
Apparently there's been quite a response to Eric Rauchway's Nov. 20 post on Open University about hatred of Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software. As I noted in an earlier post on the topic, Rauchway joined an already well-stoked debate I hadn't been aware of.
Rachway's new follow-up post points to a long article that is both a primer on proper, or anyway better, PowerPoint use and a warning to stay away from it in most non-sales contexts. The author of the article (no genius writer) points out that the problem with PowerPoint is that it's being used in ways it wasn't meant for, and therefore the medium is altering the message. He draws a parallel with word processing:
Word-processing has not fundamentally changed the art of writing. Paragraphs may be drafted and re-drafted to infinity. Spelling can be corrected over and over. But the basic requirements of writing, correct use of grammar, use of appropriate language and above all having something to communicate remains.
Similarly with PowerPoint, he says, presentation software is about making business presentations; it's not a shortcut to making arguments or writing prose (which is harder work). He does quote, however, a voice that diagnoses the problem differently:
"Which came first on the evolutionary ladder, stupidity or PowerPoint? For all the demonizing, PowerPoint is just a tool." -- Adam Hanft
A blog called Acephalous, written by Scott Eric Kaufman, is running a neat little experiment. How fast, Kaufman wonders, does a "meme" travel across the Internet -- or really the blogosphere, though he seems not to recognize the distinction. A meme, for anyone who hasn't hooked into the meme that propagated this word, is in this usage some cultural artifact -- a word, a band, a trend of some sort -- that is transmitted by repetition to other people in the manner of a biological process like the transmission of genes.
Kaufman's experiment has a certain pleasing simplicity because it's what you might call pure meme; there's no content to it. It just says link back to here, and explain the concept. And in that way pass it on. He's tracking the results in ten-minute intervals, and I look forward to the report.
This is a very nice gotcha story, courtesy of Inside Higher Ed.
The Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, has lately been complaining that colleges, and even her own department, have not provided college applicants and their families with enough information about such things as the degrees that institutions offer, time-to-degree, cost, and whether students receive useful training for the job market. Her stock speech usually goes like this:
The absence of information means we can't answer basic questions families have during the college selection process. For example, how long will it take to get a degree? Will this institution prepare me for the field I want to work in? And how much is this education really going to cost? When my daughter applied to college two years ago, I found it challenging to get the answers I needed. And I'm the secretary of education!
Sounds pretty bad. But actually, Inside Higher Ed points out, almost all that information is available right on the Department of Education's Web site. The article is called "Right Under Her Nose?"
The latest London Review of Books carries a fine and fine-grained piece of analysis on the conflict in Darfur by the expert commentator Alex de Waal. De Waal speaks with great authority on the topic, having not only written about it widely but served in a diplomatic role in the country. About the cease-fire talks in Sudan in 2004, he writes, with parenthetical modesty:
(I was on the margins of these talks, the African Union having called me in as an adviser. The Sudan government vetoed my attendance until the chief AU mediator, Salim Ahmed Salim, overrode their objections and attached me to his personal staff.)
According to a widely respected Africa analyst who spoke to me, de Waal has been doing the finest work on the Darfur crisis. In this piece he says with depressing directness that military intervention is bound to fail. UN troops are not the answer, though they may be overdue to get in there. The hope is in diplomatic talks, because, says de Waal, "the political differences are small." De Waal spends perhaps too much time, for a general magazine article, on the minutiae of earlier failed talks, but there is great value in his stated views, and he discusses facts I was not aware of. For example:
On 28 July, the Sudanese air force used a plane painted in [African Union] colours to resupply the front line and evacuate their wounded. This was an act of perfidy -- a war crime under the Geneva Conventions, with so many dismal precedents in Darfur that paragraph 376 had been specially written into the DPA to prevent it.
But he closes with a merciful expression of cautious hope about the latest glimmers of a diplomatic solution: "Darfur has one last chance, and the formula is the best so far. If there’s a workable peace agreement, the odds are that Khartoum will accept a joint AU-UN force to keep the peace. But is it too late?"
Jian Li, the focus of my column this week -- he filed a complaint against Princeton, which rejected him, charging that the university discriminates against Asian Americans -- was away from his Yale dorm room last week, and unreachable, but I finally connected with him yesterday.
He said he's "not happy" that some students, in the Princeton newspaper and elsewhere, have attacked him in personal terms -- claiming that he's a bitter, SAT-score-collecting nerd who just can't accept that he's failed at something. But he stressed that he has gotten a number of supportive emails as well.
I was struck by how well Li knew the history of discrimination in elite-college admissions. He's read at least parts of Jerome Karabel's book "The Chosen," for example.
I asked him whether he thought there might be any truth to the claim, voiced by some admissions officers, that while Asian Americans surpass white students in grades and test scores, they tend to be slightly weaker when it comes to extra-curricular activities -- a pattern that might explain the 50-point SAT gap between Asian Americans and whites at elite colleges (with Asians scoring higher), as well as lower admission rates for Asian Americans. "If there is some disparity," he said, "I think the disparity is magnified by stereotyping." In other words, admissions officers enter the process "knowing" that Asian Americans don't do much outside the classroom, he suggested, so they fail to see what's actually on the c.v.'s
It's often said that no one is entitled to a spot at an elite college, and Li did not dispute this. "It's not that I deserve to be admitted to Princeton," he said. "It's that I deserve to be considered without regard to my race."
Asked to characterize himself, politically, he said: "This is very strange. I'm a very liberal person in terms of gay rights or whatever." Just not when it comes to affirmative action as currently practiced. In fact, he said, "I think that having the belief that race shouldn't matter [in admissions] is a liberal view."
When Li said it was common knowledge that colleges compare Asian American applicants to other Asian Americans only, whites to other whites, and African Americans to other African Americans, I stoppped him and said college admissions people would deny doing any such thing. He replied, "That's [not a credible claim]."
It is indeed hard to feel bad for Christopher Hitchens when he gets panned, as Chris wrote yesterday, and it is likely that few people do, given his habit of irking everyone under the sun. Anyone whose recent New Yorker profile (not online) is headlined "He Knew He Was Right" and subheaded "How a former socialist became the Iraq war’s fiercest defender" is probably destined to lose friends and enrage people for the remainder of his tenure at the keyboard; who could be happy with both halves of his career?
Incidentally, for the sake of all future reviews of Hitchens, it might have been a mistake to reveal to his profiler (Ian Parker) that he writes everything in one draft, often while drinking.
In the new issue of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Art Winslow has written a review of Daniel Fuchs's "Brooklyn Novels," recently revived by Black Sparrow Press, who publish a lot of Beat works and other subversive lit. These novels, largely about Jewish life in the city, were published early in Fuchs's career, in the 1930s, before he became a screenwriter, and Winslow sees a lot of the techniques of film in his writing. Here is a quote from Fuchs that Winslow uses as illustration:
In summer Williamsburg lived in the open, on fire escapes, on roofs, in lots, and on the sidewalks. The men sat late into the night without shirts cooling off from the heat of the day, waiting for their rooms to air in the night breeze. The women talked loudly in a social world of their own, drinking soda water and fanning themselves incessantly with strips of cardboard. Periodically a gale of noisy laughter rose to the heavens, which were above the lights of the lamppost.
John Updike recently wrote an introduction-cum-appreciation of Fuchs, which was published with a collection called "Golden West: Hollywood Stories," also from Black Sparrow. (The introduction was also published [$] in The New York Review of Books.) Updike sees weaknesses in Fuchs's stories (as in his screenplays), but recalls an impressive sign of talent:
The first thing by Daniel Fuchs I ever read was a paragraph typed and posted on the bulletin board of William Maxwell, a fiction editor at The New Yorker, when I worked in the magazine's offices in the mid-Fifties. Maxwell, Fuchs's editor, had loved this paragraph—something about clowns and balloons, in my fading memory— enough to type it up and pin it up as an epitome of elation and joy in prose.
Christopher Hitchens has doled out no shortage of clever savagery in his own book reviews, so it is difficult to feel too bad for him when the acid is directed at him. He recently published a short book on Thomas Paine's "Rights of Man" -- and let's just say that John Barrell, who studies 17th and 18th century British politics and literature at the University of York, is not impressed. He writes, in the London Review of Books:
Hitchens remarks that 'it is a deformity in some 'radicals"' -- he has Marx particularly in mind -- 'to imagine that, once they have found the lowest or meanest motive for an action or for a person, they have correctly identified the authentic or "real" one.' Quite right too; and if any radical, misled by George Galloway's description of Hitchens as 'a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay,' should suggest that this book was written out of vanity, he would surely be mistaken. A vain man would have taken care to write a better book than this: more original, more accurate, less damaging to his own estimation of himself, less somniferously inert.
It gets worse. Matching Hitchens in archness, Barrell goes on to call the book pointless, inaccurate, and quite derivative of one previous biography of Paine in particular. In all, one for aficianados of brutal book reviews to savor (as our souls shrink just a bit).
This is quite a video find, thanks to CBS News and a YouTube user. This is the story of a blind boy who lost his vision to cancer at age two. Since then he has navigated the world using, get this, sonar. He has developed a system of using the way the sound of clicks of his tongue bounces back to him, plus a little deductive reasoning, to triangulate the presence of objects around him.
In this clip he has a pillow fight with some siblings or friends and nails them with his throws dead on. Then he walks down a sidewalk with a CBS reporter. "On the right is a fire hydrant," he says, "On the left is a trash bin, I think. Yes ..."
Could a patient have stumbled across a new way to train the blind to "see"?
Author friends of mine tell tales of a, shall we say, collaborative process of selecting the title for a book, especially the first book. The writer might have one in mind, one she wrote the book partly to fit. But the higher-ups at their major publisher have something else in mind, to wit: sales figures. It seems that titles of bestsellers tend to have certain keywords, or so say the studies. One such word is "secret." Everyone wants to be in on the inside of whatever subject one chooses to read about.
One author tells the tale of having some men in suits suggest a title that seemed suspiciously drawn from the first few pages of his foreword, as if that's all that had been read. And the subtitle? The word "secret" somehow found its way in there.
Now we have the product of a study of NY Times bestsellers: a title scorer. You enter a possibility, it tells you a score of likelihood for a bestseller.
Via boing boing, I notice that a friendly zine for the tech set has published an "open source gift guide." (It's the gifts that are open source, meaning modifiable by the user, not the guide.)
So if someone wants to devote that precious week of downtime between Christmas and New Year's to hacking, you can get them a gift that makes that possible -- even necessary. My favorite is a robot you can rig with any laptop and a cheap Web cam serving as the eyes. The folks behind it offer a stripped-down, rather clunky Web site, but there is a movie.
Babysitting for my niece today in California, I ran into what must be a very common problem. Trailing her around the house -- she's tearing around the place on foot at 12 months, that's my girl -- I suddenly got nature's call. But what do you do when you're supposed to be watching the child like a hawk? My sister would kill me if she got home and saw Chloe chilling alone.
So I guess you take the little tyke to the bathroom. After all, she's too young to understand what's happening in there and be grossed out. Not so, thinks one poster over at boing boing. He notices, via a link, that they're now making a harness for toddlers that you can hang up on the bathroom door to keep her occupied those critical minutes.
He thinks it sounds kind of abusive (gotta agree) and posts a spoof image: at least give the kid a gasmask!
As noted in a recent Esquire article not available online, YouTube has presented an opportunity for the nation's youth -- as with MySpace, it is mainly the young who use it -- to publish a huge, democratic talent show, and let the cream rise to the frequently viewed list. Some of this stuff is truly amazing. Don't you think? No, really, though, don't you think? If you like that last one, though, here's my all-time favorite young self-published performer at work. Nice editing!
Finally we have the necessaryitems following each election that everybody once looked forward to but now ignores. These are the report cards on the nation's top pollsters, this one focused on the Senate. If you're heavily interested, The Wall Street Journal does it more exhaustively, with an impressive graph database available free online. But most people just want to know who to listen to next time around.
At Ezra Klein's blog, a guest poster breaks it down simply, noting that each pollster overestimated GOP performance, not such a surprise given the overall mauling:
Rasmussen: 2.15% GOP overestimation, 3.23% average error
Mason-Dixon: 3.73% GOP overestimation, 3.73% average error
Reuters/Zogby: 1.67% GOP overestimation, 4.56% average error
Zogby Battlegrounds: 5.36% GOP overestimation, 6.45% average error
SurveyUSA: 2.55% GOP overestimation, 5.22% average error
Quinnipiac: 3.67% GOP overestimation, 3.67% average error (only 3 polls)
So it appears that Rasmussen is the winner by quite a margin this time, though Reuters/Zogby comes closest to capturing the balance of power. Relying on these guys in '08, however, is a bit like buying stocks that are already hot, though. "Past results are no guarantee..."
At 411mania.com, which is new to me, Ray Robison, a military analyst and FoxNews.com contributor, draws a parallel between Richard Nixon's philosophy in Iraq and today's Democrats' position on Iraq. Nixon wanted South Vietnamese to do the fighting themselves, calling the policy Vietnamization. The Democrats, says Robison, want to leave when possible and allow the Iraqis to police themselves. But isn't that what both parties are saying? Remember "We will stand down as Iraqis stand up"?
In any case, Robison cleverly quotes from John Kerry's own remarks in 1971, in which he predicted that contra others, there would be "no bloodbath" following American withdrawal -- that, in Robison's words, "we are the problem." Democrats do wonder if that's the case now, probably more so than Republicans.
Robison insists that American withdrawal in Vietnam spelled disaster for the region and for US military morale, and draws his conclusions from there. It's a slightly clumsy column logically, but it points to what might be a valid comparison.
Over at Open University, Eric Rauchway wonders whether Microsoft PowerPoint is "like a handgun -- has its place, but should be kept out of the hands of children and the intemperate? Or is it inherently bad?" Apparently those are, to him, the only alternatives.
I hadn't been aware that there was a committed anti-PPT contingent out there, but I guess I'm not surprised. (Is there an anti-Word contingent? Count me in. Great Louis Menand line: "It's time to speak a little truth to power: Microsoft Word is a terrible program.")
Rauchway poses different theories of The Problem with PowerPoint, but seems to suggest the rub is "presentation software creeping into areas of discourse where it doesn't belong (like, e.g., war planning)." As a PowerPoint spoof Matt Yglesias links to illustrates, PowerPoint has a way of flattening and misrepresenting an issue by boiling it down to nothing.
Today's Globe offers the story of a woman who was kicked off a Delta flight from Vermont to New York for breastfeeding her child while she waited for takeoff. According to the article, "dozens of self-proclaimed 'lactivists' plan to suckle their infants in front of Delta ticketing counters around the nation" today, including at Logan.
Delta has apparently reprimanded the flight attendant responsible for removing the woman from the flight, and a spokesperson told the Globe that breastfeeding is allowed on all Delta flights.
Perhaps the whole thing could have been avoided if the world had a universal travel icon for breastfeeding area. It soon will. Via spurgeonblog, Mothering magazine recently sponsored a contest to design such a symbol, and just last week it narrowed down its 12 semi-finalists to three finalists. My favorite submission, however, didn't make either cut:
The stories last week about Milton Friedman were (appropriately) eulogistic, extolling his journey out of the economic wilderness and into the mainstream.
But Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard economist, says that Friedman, who loved to argue, might have most appreciated this reflection by the appeals-court judge and scholar Richard Posner -- because Posner barely pauses to praise before leaping right back into disputation. After mentioning a couple of Friedman papers that influenced him greatly, Posner says he finds "slightly off-putting what I sensed to be a dogmatic streak" in the late scholar.
Correct in so many arenas, Posner says, Friedman refused to accept that there were cases when his free-market absolutism might -- just might -- require some rethinking and amendment. Posner says Friedman "took it almost as a personal affront" that the Scandinavian countries remained impressively affluent, despite their statist approaches.
"I also think that Friedman, again more as a matter of faith than of science, exaggerated the correlation between economic and political freedom," Posner writes -- a correlation that seems to be breaking down in China, for example.
(Posner's co-blogger, Nobel laureate Gary Becker, pays tribute to Friedman here.)
On the new blog of The Economist, called Free Exchange, an item that wonders why American unemployment is so low; at 4.4 percent, it's at its lowest point since before the 9/11 attacks.
What about all this talk about globalization, outsourcing, and the death of domestic manufacturing causing job losses here? It's a good question. Anti-globalists, says the Economist blogger, think that the labor force is shrinking, making the unemployment percentage misleading, and that many more people are now in part-time jobs with less security and fewer benefits, or none at all.
But the numbers don't necessarily bear that out. Economists see "little evidence that job security has declined in the last twenty-five years." And it's difficult to measure what part-time jobs actually mean, since many people (especially mothers) elect them over full-time employment.
Are jobs actually disappearing to Bangalore, never to reappear? Perhaps someone can point to data that confirm that common view.
An interesting new finding from James Lindgren, a law professor-social scientist hybrid at Northwestern who is "a leading scholar in the growing movement of New Legal Empiricists." On The Volokh Conspiracy, where he is on the roster of contributors, he reports, summarizing a new paper of his, that those in favor of more income redistribution are less generous in charitable giving than those who favor limited government and unfettered markets. Those government interventionists are also less likely to engage in altruistic behaviors like looking after pets and houses for neighbors or friends.
This will please adherents and advocates of "compassionate conservatism," a phrase George W. Bush trotted out often during his first Presidential campaign, and displease those who believe that people opposed to higher taxation just want to hold on to their loot.
Lindgren also found, in the same paper, that "redistributionists" were generally more unhappy than anti-redistributionists, measured in various ways: "The data are consistent with redistributionists in the general public being more angry, sad, lonely, worried, and restless, and less happy, at ease, and interested in life." Perhaps that's simply a confirmation that blue-staters are more neurotic.
It appears that at least one other writer for the MSM out there agrees with me that it's lame to mention philosophers' names just for a giggle. Writing about the new CBS show "3 Lbs." on Tuesday, New York Post television critic Linda Stasi had this to say:
Annoyingly, in the first two episodes, we're also offered a variation on the same joke.
"Who said that? Descartes?"
"No, Popeye!"
Week Two: "Who said that?"
"Schaupenhauer -- also Wilt Chamberlain."
Schaupenhauer? (Oh well, you can't choose your allies.)
Stanley Tucci in "3 Lbs."
On Wednesday, there was a humdinger of a Philosopher-Name-Drop (PND) in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis, Missouri). In a story about St. Louie Chop Suey, Malcolm Gay cooked up a conceit about Socrates and forced it down readers' throats till they gagged:
In a life beset by uncertainty we can be sure of this: Socrates never ate a St. Paul Sandwich. How do we know? Why, simple logic. Premise A): Socrates the Greek philosopher who died in 399 B.C. never visited St. Louis, Missouri. Premise B): The St. Paul Sandwich - comprising an egg foo young patty slice of tomato, pickle and iceberg lettuce sandwiched between two slices of mayonnaise-laden white bread - is cultivated exclusively in the culinary soil of the city's chop suey houses. Ergo Conclusion C): Socrates never ate a St. Paul Sandwich.
It goes on and on like that. Here's one more taste of Gay's prose:
Be it a meal, a man, or a concept, Socrates believed all earthly things were but imperfect replicas of their idealized forms.... Can there be any doubt but that egg foo young, chop suey, crab Rangoon and, of course, the St. Paul Sandwich are but imperfect descendants of their unimpeachable Chinese archetypes?
This kind of thing almost makes a run-of-the-mill misappropriation of a philosopher's sayings seem harmless. There was a good example of that in today's issue of Business First of Louisville (Kentucky). Phil Scherer, president of Commercial Kentucky Inc., was asked, "What is the best job advice anyone has ever given you?" Scherer replied:
I like to go back to Socrates, who said, "Know thyself. The unexamined life is not worth living." Understanding what you do and understanding the business you are pursuing is important from the standpoint that your clients look to you for advice, and that advice is strengthened by the knowledge you have of the market and the product.
Phil Scherer
I don't think that's what Socrates meant. On the other hand, when John G. Brokopp wrote the following, in a Chicago Sun Times story about slot machines (on Friday), his analogy wasn't too bad:
Much like Diogenes, the ancient philosopher, who is said to have wandered the streets of Greece carrying a lantern in search of an honest man his cynical nature told him didn't even exist, slot players more than 2,000 years later find themselves in a similar quest for the truth about their favorite games.
Still, quoting a philosopher in a story's opening sentence is cheesy stuff. A high-school newspaper editor would never let that line stand!
OK, that's it for this week. As noted in an earlier post today, this will be the last installment of "Philosophywatch," for at least a couple of months. Though I will continue to contribute to Brainiac every week, I'm going to take a break from this particular feature. If you have strong feelings about this matter, please drop me a line!
For some years I have been following with giggles and enthusiasm the introduction of new products from a company called Despair, Inc. Despair offers the logical and extremely funny answer to those motivational management posters advertised in in-flight catalogs, the ones that say something like: "ACHIEVEMENT: Decide carefully, [comma is sic] exactly what you want in life, then work like mad to make sure you get it!"
Posters and mugs and calendars from Despair offer the same glossy photographs but the message are of a different kind. "Sometimes the best solution to morale problems is just to fire all the unhappy people." "A company that will go to the ends of the Earth for its people will find it can hire them for about 10% of the cost of Americans." "The only consistent feature of all of your dissatisfying relationships is you."
Now Despair is advancing on the Internet and showing itself a worthy competitor to the cubicle humor, of, say, The Office (BBC or NBC). Despair is now offering monthly video podcasts for management training. The message of a training spot about handling employee complaints: Implement the "It Could Be Worse" Program, in which you remind the call center worker that while she may not be happy with her headset, she might like to know that the boss is considering outsourcing her entire division.
The podcasts are funny enough that you might want to subscribe. Because "Sooner or later, everyone comes to Despair."
An overt admirer of the health care plan and legislation Gov. Mitt Romney was able to hammer out with the Democratic legislature in Massachusetts, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is making a priority -- perhaps his number one priority -- of creating a plan to increase the reach and decrease the cost of health insurance in the nation's largest state. California, no surprise, won't be offering a single-payer program; it will be looking to expand coverage through "shared responsibility"; in other words, employers, patients, and the state will all be required to pay more, as in Mass.
As noted in this article in the Los Angeles Times, Schwarzenegger is running into some troubles and is bound to run into more:
Hospitals, doctors, insurers and consumer groups are already scrambling to present their own proposals and to blunt alternatives, such as efforts to regulate insurance rates -- anathema to insurers -- or redirect hospital subsidies.
"There are a lot of people in Sacramento who will line up to defeat any proposal that's not their own," said Dustin Corcoran, vice president for government relations of the California Medical Assn., which represents doctors.
But the bigger problem may be that "adopting a Massachusetts-style plan could cost as much as $9.4 billion more than California now spends on healthcare." In a state running about a $5 billion deficit. Massachusetts was lucky in this sense. They had funds already earmarked for insuring the poor; they had fewer uninsured; and they had a legendary system of hospitals and clinics. It will be interesting to see how far Arnold is able to go in emulating the Mass. model, which the whole nation is watching along with him.
A reader named Dan Parker accuses me of hypocrisy, because I write this "Philosophywatch" feature for Brainiac, but *gasp* sometimes mention intellectuals and philosophers in my own writing.
Here's what Parker wrote in an email yesterday:
[Here's you Sept. 11, 2006:] Once upon a time, I dreamed up and co-edited a column called Philosophywatch, which kept a sharp eye on the MSM for gratuitous references to philosophers, theorists, critics, and artists. Dragging Sartre and Martin Amis into a CD review is the definition of bathos, if you ask me, and it still cracks me up when magazine and newspaper writers do stuff like that.
[Here's you June 27, 2006, at snotty Slate:] Thinkers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari offered up theories of how social control was now exercised not through class domination but increasingly subtle mechanisms. In 1972, for example, Deleuze and Guattari claimed in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia that Westerners have been "oedipalized" (normalized, trained to desire their own repression) at home, at school, and at work. [etc.]
A common misconception about "Philosophywatch," I've found, is that its author must be opposed to any and every use of an important thinker or writer's name in print. Not so! I'm ticked off (or amused) when magazine and newspaper writers drag such names into their prose without offering any meaningful context, just to show off -- or for comical effect. But as readers of "Philosophywatch" know, I will sometimes defend a writer's decision to mention a philosopher... if it strikes me as an un-gratuitous mention.
That said, today's (forthcoming) installment of "Philosophywatch," the 10th since I started penning it for Brainiac, will be the last for a while. The holiday season is upon us, and this feature requires a lot of work. Also, I have some other ideas for weekly Brainiac features that I may want to explore. So... stay tuned!
The History Channel's three-hour treatment of the Mayflower voyage, "Desperate Crossing" (which airs tonight and repeats all week) may turn out to be terrific. But the tagline for the print ads is a headscratcher:
It was a True Test of Manhood
Even for the Women and Children
Since the traits most in demand for Pilgrims seem to have been disease resistance, endurance, and luck – virtues not especially "manly" in anyone's dictionary -- "manhood" seems like an odd word to choose. And the verbal paradox -- manhood for women! -- adds an incongruously joky note to the otherwise solemn ad. What were they thinking? (Seriously: What were they thinking?)
The jokiness is entirely intentional, on the other hand, in the current Dunkin' Donuts ad mocking Starbucks' menu language. "Is it French? Or is it Italian?" sings the chorus of customers. "Maybe Fritalian?"
The punchline: "Delicious lattes from Dunkin' Donuts. You order them in English, not Fritalian."
Wait -- you order "lattes" in English?
OK, "latte" is English, in a sense; it's in our dictionaries, defined as the short form of Italian caffe latte. But it's not fully assimilated English, like "ghetto" and "casino." We cook fettuccine al dente, but we don't brush our "dente" with Colgate. And we order lattes, but we don't call the milk in the fridge "latte." So DD gets points for humor -- but it loses a few for its fuzzy linguistic logic.
At the risk of showing the audience the wires above our little enterprise, I'll say that it is sometimes a challenge to come up with headlines for these posts. It is not as difficult as coming up with "heds," as we call them, for a newspaper or tight magazine column, because there space considerations make things much more difficult than readers tend to realize. Think about it. With a column of a fixed width, you can't use two long words in a row, or else you'll be stuck with two lines with one not-long-enough word per line. This explains why heds often use the vague -- and short-- word "ties," as in "Smith Said to Have Qaeda Ties." (Qaeda for Al Qaeda is another little trick.) You couldn't say Terrorist Sympathies, and even Harboring Terrorists probably would spell trouble.
Over at The Valve, a sophisticated collaborative blog devoted to all things literary and academic, to cover most of it, they're having a little contest: what are the worst and best headlines yet for a post on The Valve? "Yes but it is it Arrt" gets a mention for best, though I'm not sure why. A good candidate for worst: "Troping Prog As Toes" [ed:???].
It's worth noting that The Valve itself has a pretty inspired, if enigmatic tagline under its title: "'the safety valve alone knows the worst truth about the engine.' -- William Empson" That's almost as good as the one John mentioned for the influential political blog Balkinization: "an unanticipated consequence of Jack M. Balkin."
Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram responds to a rebuttal of an earlier post in which he attempted to draw a dividing line in the developed world between economic growth beyond a threshold level and ... well, any measure of social success, including overall happiness.
The rebuttal was by Tyler Cowen, who posited that the coming century in the (post-) industrialized world could see incomparable human progress, citing medical advances, mitigation of tragedies, and "cognitive enhancements" (a touch of sci-fi?).
Bertram's point is in general a solid one empirically; it is supported, though he doesn't say so, by data gathered in the last several years by the British economist Richard Layard and "American Mania" author Peter Whybrow. But I don't find his rebuttal of Cowen very persuasive. It's important to note that economic GDP isn't all there is, so to speak, but it is indeed likely, as Cowen says, that societal wealth will contribute to advances in medical technology, due to the relative luxury of massive R & D.
The new London Review of Books runs a deeply informative article by Jeremy Harding about the Lebanese-Palestinian novelist Elias Khoury, which included an interview as well as a close reading and a capsule biography of this chronicler of the Palestinian experience. Not many people have told the Palestinian story in art -- or at all for that matter. (Ideas did run a story by David Green earlier this year, though, about Palestinian art.) It is an important aspect of any people's quest for recognition, it would seem, to have its perspective aired outside of the realm of political activism and violence.
Khoury's background is complicated and not politically one-sided, as Harding explains. As a matter of fact, Arafat expressed deep displeasure with an article in a magazine Khoury edited:
In the late 1970s Arafat’s eagle eye fell on an article by an Iraqi contributor in Shuun Filastiniya. Khoury no longer remembers, or cares to remember, what it was that caused such a row. Still managing editor, he was lucky that an understanding was reached after the initial threat of a spell in PLO custody. (A passage in Gate of the Sun describes the brutality of Palestinian prison conditions.)
Khoury is now famous enough to grant him a place on the world stage, though the US public has failed to embrace him so far. (He is published by a small but wonderful Brooklyn imprint, Archipelago.)
To honor Milton Friedman's memory, I should probably stop theorizing in such a non-rigorous way about the "economics" of basketball defense.
One reader emailed to say: "Let's try what the philosophy majors call reductio ad absurdum -- If you ban all defense, everyone plays defense equally (ineffectively)." I do think that thought experiment supports my view that rules changes can (theoretically) reduce the importance of defense.
However, an economist friend comments that when rules reduce the variability of defensive effectiveness among players, the "marginal" benefit of a good defensive play rises. He's too polite to say so, but I think he's saying my shot was stuffed.
I drifted away from basketball long ago myself -- a fair weather fan ever since the mid-'80s Celtics -- but I wanted to take issue with Chris's post as a logical argument. I think Yglesias might be on target. It's a fair point that banning hand-checking has taken away a tool of the best defenders. But now of course they've adapted. And if they are still not as dangerous as they were in the hand-check era, that's almost irrelevant because every team has the same disadvantage and is still doing their darnedest to stop the opponent from scoring.
Imagine defenders were suddenly able to slap the ball carrier in the face. Defense would become more effective, sure, but not exactly more important vis a vis offense. You still gotta score, and that means getting past the other team's face-slappers.
True, if defenders were now bound to chairs the entire game, defense would be less important than offense, so in that sense Yglesias' point may have been stated too broadly. But that is nothing like the current situation. Hand-checking at the perimeter can't have been that crucial (he says from a position of relative ignorance). It only creates a turnover a game, if that, and a little added anxiety about good ball-handling. That's not such a big deal.
Missed this for a ten days, but on election night David Byrne, Talking Heads front man and general public intellectual of Lower East Side-style culture, posted one of those meandering but thoughtful mini-essays that blogs were known for before they began to be co-opted as a genre by journalism (pot, meet kettle) and corporations. OK, Byrne's opening is really odd. But in any case he had seen some early returns and noticed that the Democrats had "at least taken a few seats back, maybe enough to give them a majority."
Immediately he says, "I sang 'This Land Is Your Land' to myself as I rode my bike downtown -- I got choked up and started to cry." Don't you love our hipster poet? But it turns out he was thinking of just what would not change even in a radical election turnover. His analysis is of a certain culture that has flourished of late but isn't really political. It's worth quoting at length, even if it's a bit teary-eyed:
Push in line, build your building right in front of someone else’s, destroy a neighborhood, be a winner, a survivor. To me, those reality shows 'teach' bully culture -- that’s the lesson that is imparted -- and that includes ones like Laguna Beach, which seems to promote backstabbing, lying, duplicitous behavior and entitlement -- all in a world where no one works.
He closes with a prescient observation that gained resonance the very next day: "Rummy and the others have proven that they are incompetent and are jeopardizing the lives of thousands if not hundreds of thousands."
Speaking of reflexive fear and hatred of Islam, as I did yesterday, can this possibly be real??
It's an interview by CNN's Glenn Beck of the first ever Muslim elected to the US Congress, Keith Ellison. Given attitudes like Beck's, it is remarkable that America elected a Muslim in this particular era. He said responsible Muslims ought to be "lining up to shoot bad Muslims in the head" (am I my brother's keeper?) and that he feels like asking Ellison to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."
Guilt by association -- not only bigoted but the oldest trick in the book of politics: use a big brush when smearing.
The new Economist blog posts an entry that is far less arch than the one I linked to yesterday; it's about what will happen to Social Security now that the Democrats, who have been far less concerned about its health than the GOP generally and President Bush in particular (which strikes me as odd). It's a good question, because Social Security is still in trouble, and in fact grows more troubling as the time dwindles before the Baby Boom becomes the Geezer Boom.
Paul Krugman and others on the left have been arguing against SSA alarmism through a strange rhetorical move [$]: they point out that Medicare and Medicaid and other government programs are in far worse straits. Social Security, Krugman adds, must be considered part of the overall Federal budget rather than as a stand-alone program. Or anyway it can be thought of that way, in which case more flexibility is introduced because you can pay for shortfalls in a variety of ways. A privatization program, which Bush proposes, doesn't in fact solve the problem, because you're merely replacing bond debt with stock that won't cover the shortfall (and putting the poor in a rough position, since they are not accustomed to playing the stock market); no matter which way you go, you're not putting in enough money to cover what's going to begin coming out.
In any case it would be a big mistake to table the whole issue, because it's the same type of problem as climate change; the longer you wait, the deeper the soup.
Part of the charm of the pundit Matthew Yglesias comes from the way he enthusiastically deploys his philosophical training -- he has a recent b.a. from Harvard in the field, and clearly loved his studies. (He uses "ex ante," a lot, for starters.) But I think he's dropped the ball in a recent Slate piece on basketball defense. It seems analytically weak.
He's trying to demolish the widely held view that, since the NBA, to increase scoring, has banned certain types of defensive moves -- namely "hand checking" on the perimeter -- strong defensive teams have been stripped of a key advantage. He describes the conventional wisdom this way: defense doesn't matter as much.
But Yglesias writes:
I concede that the new rules have made it harder to play defense. I fail to see, though, how that makes defense less important. Two factors determine who wins a basketball game: how many points your team scores and how many points the other team scores.[!] Since you have the ball roughly half the time and the other team has the ball roughly half the time, it stands to reason that offense and defense should have exactly the same importance. You could even argue that, in an era when it's easier to score than to defend, a guy who can stop the other team from scoring is more valuable than someone who can put the ball in the basket.
I can't argue this empirically, having drifted away from the NBA, but as a matter of logic, my English-major brain balks at this. Posit that under the old system there was a wide range of defensive talent, and that the best defensive players did a lot of hand-checking. (That's reasonable: You put one of your best defenders on the guy who handles the ball a lot. And one-on-one is when hand-checking occurs.) With the elimination of hand-checking, it is possible that the best defensive players have been hamstrung, and that they've drifted toward the median of defensive ability.
If the defensive differences among players and teams shrank, it would make sense to say that defense, relatively speaking, has become less important. You wouldn't pay a defensive star a huge sum, because he wouldn't be that much better than Joe Blow Defender. Meanwhile, a scorer like Allen Iverson remains as valuable as ever.
The last thing Yglesias says in that excerpt seems correct: It's possible that a wide range of defensive performance would persist. (Skills other than hand-checking and pestering guards would then become important. A new kind of defensive star might emerge.) But his claim is bigger than that: It's that, by definition, no rule change can reduce the importance of defense in basketball. That can't be right.
Anyone who has studied game theory care to comment on whether Yglesias's argument works?
On Open University, Eric Rauchway charts the makeup by party of the Congress since the New Deal and wonders what it means in terms of interpreting what happened last Tuesday. In one interpretation, he says, it was a classic throw-out-the-bums victory, or rather loss, a comment on what the GOP has done on Capitol Hill since they took over with Newt Gingrich at the helm in 1994. Seen another way, it was the Republicans' anomalous 12-year reign that was the result of a purge of an unsuccessful regime.
Rauchway sees more legitimacy to the second reading than might be apparent. The GOP, he thinks, never really had a mandate for a radical reshaping of government, despite what Newt thought. They were just the beneficiaries of a voter-driven coup. As such, they couldn't really succeed in overturning the fundamental tenets of US governance. They had to speaking of "saving" or "strengthening" Social Security -- even though they meant radically altering it, and uninsuring it -- and not of jettisoning it entirely, even if that's what they had in mind.
The question is whether the Dems now find themselves in a similarly restrictive majority position. For one thing, they don't control the White House (and neither did the GOP for the first six years). For another, America may not be ready for a radical legislative program. Already we have a barometer in the nation's reaction to the Democrats' proposal of a withdrawal from Iraq to begin within 4-6 months. It hasn't been met with open arms.
Usually I point to good stuff online, but Crooked Timber has linked to an interview so repellent that it needs to be discussed. It's not that the subject, Mark Steyn, is conservative, though he is. (The fact that he wrote recently for the Atlantic is evidence of its rightward shift, even if he was writing on Sinatra.)
It's that the xenophobic, homophobic Steyn, author of the appropriately named book "America Alone" -- because that's what we'll be if we follow his prescriptions -- creates a paranoid vision of a world dominated by subversive lesbians (who are simply victims of bad marriages), radical female Muslims (ditto), restive Muslims, dirty rotten Muslims.... Here he is on the Muslims in the British or European housing projects:
So you have this grotesque license, the sense of license and self gratification that your ordinary English yobbo would have merge with the sort of basic misogyny of the Muslim community and it produces something quite terrifying in these rape gangs they've now got in Scandinavia and France and Belgium and places. I think it's that the western world impacts on a lot of young Muslims in ways that make them far more alienated, far more fiercely Islamist in effect than to some goat herder in Afghanistan.
There was a very good, web-only essay in The Nation yesterday, a meditation by Rolf Potts on Allen Ginsberg's 1966 anti-Vietnam poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra," which Ginsberg first chanted into a tape recorder while driving across the American heartland.
Potts notes that Ginsberg's insights into the way language -- as employed by the government, and by the MSM ("Rusk Says Toughness Essential For Peace"; "Vietnam War Brings Prosperity") -- can make war seem unreal and far away apply very much to our current situation. But he also notes that Ginsberg didn't finally seem to believe that poetic language was any antidote. According to Potts,
Poetic language might aspire to have political potency in a censored society, where brave dissent could be heard amid the repressive silence--but Ginsberg's free, media-saturated America had come to the point where truth and untruth, politics and entertainment, had become so intermixed as to become indistinguishable.
Potts concludes with a swipe at those in the poetry community who've been so busy advertising the 50th anniversary of "Howl" this year -- because, he suggests, "it's more enjoyable to celebrate the First Amendment triumph of an old sex-and-drugs anthem than wrestle with a poem that reminds us of the limitations of language in a political world."
The Economist has a new blog. In keeping with magazine tradition, the contributions are unsigned, but some of them have a surprisingly feisty or contentious flavor, as though the writers had been waiting for a genre in which to spoil for a fight.
Case in point: a post from today takes up, in pointing to a working paper from the IMF, the question of how the French and their economy have been affected by the 35-hour work week. The writer's closer, allegedly summing up the IMF findings:
(i) why and how do the French fool themselves into thinking that such crazy laws can have any useful effect?;
(ii) what elaborate public policy mechanism prevents them learning from past errors?
(iii) does anything ever make the French happy at all, even inadvertently?
Whoa there, that level of snark is positively Gawkerish. Imagine The New Yorker having a blog of this kind. I don't see why the French labor restrictions get everyone so riled up (even the non-French). Are we all secretly jealous? Is it that any worker-friendly policies have become hopelessly backward?
And now for something completely different. Some video hackers have stitched together scenes from vintage cartoons into an animated version of the "Communist Manifesto."
It's very flattering that you want to know what my forthcoming Argonaut Folly essay is about, Chris. But I can't spill the beans before n+1 hits the stands. Let's just say that it's an exercise in outsider-intellectual history, examining a particular fantasy that many of my favorite thinkers and artists of the past have entertained.
Josh finishing his essay for n+1
I wrote a similar outsider-intellectual history essay for the first issue of n+1. The earlier essay, titled "The Black Iron Prison," looked at the 19th-century origins of the widespread conviction (which is mistakenly considered to be the invention of Adorno, Foucault, and other midcentury European thinkers) that a democratic-capitalist society only appears to be a free social order, when it's actually a prison.
Both of these essays draw upon the massive collection of notes I took, several years ago, when I tried and failed to write a book about outsider intellectuals, from Baudelaire to Bruce Lee. As I wallowed in the debt-ridden aftermath of my failure, Alex Star and The Boston Globe approached me about lending a hand with a new Sunday section, to be called Ideas. Hallelujah! I was rescued from bankruptcy.
Josh, did you really think you were going to get away with dropping that phrase and not explaining it? In the interview you link to, Gessen also offers not a hint. What folly are you tilting at in the next n + 1? (Google confirms you are the first person on the planet to identify it, or to give it that name.)
(And that gyroball? In that video, it looks like a good old fashioned fast curve. It's not spinning like a football, as Slate says it should be.
I agree that, so far, Lucas Hanft's piece on the gyroball for Ideas remains the definitive take on its bafflements and mythical qualities. He quotes a Yale physicist as saying it "may be impossible" to throw a fast pitch with a spiral. Moreover, the scientist says, "there's also no point.")
The Word of the Year is carbon neutral, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, which announced its 2006 pick today.
Being carbon neutral involves calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions (your carbon footprint), reducing them where possible, and then balancing your remaining emissions, often by purchasing a carbon offset -- paying to plant new trees or investing in "green" technologies.
Not that NOAD gets the last word -- or the first word, or the only word. The Word of the Year parade started in early October, when the Oxford English Dictionary chose bovvered, from a catchphrase on Catherine Tate's BBC comedy show. ("Am I bovvered?" means "Am I bothered? Do I look like I care?" See it in action here.)
Next, on Nov. 1, Webster's New World chose Crackberry -- a play on the addictive properties of the BlackBerry PDA -- as its 2006 WOTY. (But the WNW word squad, like NOAD's, was thinking globally; one of its runners-up was carbon footprint. Will it be a green year in the WOTY world?)
These are just for starters; dozens of WOTYs will be proposed in coming weeks, and the season won't end till the American Dialect Society votes on its list in January. We'll be back for more.
Following up on John's post about the high-priced bidding war for Japanese weird-windup pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, it's worth showing a look at Matsuzaka's supposed gyroball. (You get a look at his weird, Hideo Nomo-style slow-motion windup too.) The pitch just looks like a typical but nasty forkball or split-finger fastball, a pitch Roger Clemens rode to success for his last five years in the league, after he'd lost a crucial foot or so on his fastball. But look at the slo-mo second replay. He's not holding the ball with split fingers. He's throwing a kind of quasi-curveball from the looks of it, his fingers imparting sidespin and topspin at once. Can't wait to see this in person -- in Fenway, I hope. (I may live in New York, but the Red Sox love runs deep.)
Fiction writer, book critic, and sometime Ideas contributor Keith Gessen was interviewed last week by the New York Inquirer about another of his undertakings, the literary-intellectual journal n+1. (NB: I have contributed to n+1; and I've written about n+1 for Ideas; and Keith mentions my forthcoming n+1 essay on what I call the "Argonaut Folly.")
Gessen (standing) and other n+1 editors
Diego Uchitel for The New York Times
In the comments section over at The Valve, an n+1 reader says that Gessen's interview responses sum up what he dislikes about the journal:
There’s something about the editorial combination of "we are the only ones who will get harsh on writing that we don't like, no one else does that" and "we only write about contemporary lit, not about those dusty old dead people" and naive politics that is deadly enough to overcome some of the merits of the individual essays, which are occasionally very good.
Gessen -- not interested in dusty old dead people? This is misguided, to say the least. For example, check out Keith's great essay about Alexander Herzen from the Oct. 30 issue of The New Yorker, here.
Last Monday, York Dispatch (Pa.) columnist Jeffrey A. Johnson dragged a philosopher into his writeup on the Baltimore Ravens:
Ancient philosopher Baruch Spinoza said, "If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past." If Spinoza were alive today he would make a fine general manager for an NFL franchise.
That's a Philosophywatch classic. Not to mention: "ancient"? Really?
On Friday, I learned from a story in the Chicago Tribune that Anthony Gonzalez, hotshot receiver for the top-ranked Ohio State football team, is a philosophy major with a 4.0 GPA. That's a great topic; too bad journalist Teddy Greenstein gets smarmy and drops the N-bomb:
Gonzalez knew he wanted to become a lawyer, like his grandfather, before settling on a major at Ohio State. His grandfather's advice: Study English or philosophy. Nietzsche won out.
Homo ludens
On Thursday, 33-year-old British singer/DJ/composer Jamie Lidell also dropped the N-bomb, in an interview with Pitch Weekly. Asked about the influence of Motown on his music, Lidell, who studied philosophy as an undergrad, we're informed, replied that motive is more important than influence:
"You should have an intention behind something," [Lidell] says. "Like Nietzsche for example, and the way that his concept of the Superman led many people to believe that he was propping up Nazism. That's one way of reading that material. I think it's important as an artist to clarify your motives."
Not that Nietzsche knew anything about Nazism...
The artist (Lidell) as Clark Kent
On Friday, in an interview with the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (New York) about "Stranger Than Fiction," Dustin Hoffman, who plays a literature professor in the movie, dropped the K-bomb. Asked whether life is a tragedy or a comedy, Hoffman replied:
There's a line in [Soren] Kierkegaard. He said being alive is like being suspended on wires over the deep ocean. What else can you do but laugh? You can't be frightened your entire life.
I don't know that particular quote (is it correct?), but I like how the Democrat and Chronicle inserted that [Soren], in case readers thought Hoffman was referring to another Kierkegaard.
Hoffman as Prof. Jules Hilbert
Speaking of whom, when interviewed on Sunday by the Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), a 74-year-old John Updike had this observation to make:
I imagined years ago that in my old age -- and now I guess I'm in it -- I would abandon fiction and instead write general, Kierkegaard-like small works of existential wisdom. But I haven't reached that stage yet when I really feel I have enough wisdom to package that way.
"Tuesdays with Updike," apparently, does not loom on the publishing horizon. Thankfully. (Or would he be really good at it?)
In the late 1990s, Columbia University started a much-hyped venture called Fathom. It was supposed to "leverage," as they say, the Columbia University faculty -- as well as resources at several other elite institutions -- to produce an online-education site that would conquer the world (and, natch, earn dot-com amounts of money). Fathom focused on humanities courses, a laudable impulse, but not, as it turned out, a profitable one. (The places that make money on online education today, like the University of Phoenix, offer courses that students/consumers view as necessary for career advancement.)
Inside Higher Ed interviews Ann Kirschner, the former head of Fathom, here. She puts an awfully positive spin on the now-defunct* venture, and is instantly rebutted by someone in the comments section, who seems pretty familiar with the project. (See the first comment.)
The failure of Fathom does not seem to have hurt the careers of the people involved in it. Kirschner is the new dean of an honors program at CUNY, while Michael Crow, Columbia's former new-media big-think guy, became president of Arizona State University.
Crow doesn't mention Fathom in his online biography.
I remember Fathom because I was one of the many journalists to traipse up to Columbia to get a tour and imbibe the hype.
*The Fathom site itself still exists, as an archive of free material.
The word on the street is that the Red Sox will be revealed, probably later today, as the high bidders for the services of Daisuke Matsuzaka, the young (26) ace of Japan's Seibu Lions. ESPN.com has reported the Sox may have offered between $38 and $45 million. Mind you, this is not salary we're talking -- this is just for the "posting fee" necessary to compensate the Lions for letting him come to the States.
Sox fans warming their hands by the hot stove are naturally curious whether Matsuzaka is worth it. (Unless you paid very close attention to the World Baseball Classic, you probably haven't seen this guy pitch.) The Globe's Nick Cafardo seems to think the answer to that question is yes.
But there's another question that's starting to get more attention: So does this guy really throw a gyroball? (Also: what's a gyroball?) Back in August, Lucas Hanft wrote a piece for Ideas exploring whether a Japanese physicist had indeed invented a new baseball pitch, as much Web buzz (and some rather grainy Web footage) suggested.
Slate has now dedicated an explainer column to the pitch, which is a good bit less skeptical of it than Hanft was, and the pitch is popping up in all the coverage of the Matsuzaka bidding war. But the mystery remains. Newsday reporter David Lennon caught up with Tadahito Iguchi, the White Sox second baseman, who faced Matsuzaka when he played in Japan. Asked about the gyroball, Iguchi responded through a translator, "I don't know what a gyroball is or what you're talking about."
The question of whether or not Matsuzaka will be packing a new pitch when he comes to the Majors is still an open one. Boston fans, however, will be heartened by the rest of Iguchi's repsonse:
"I can tell you this about Matsuzaka -- he's got a great fastball. Even when he's behind in the count, he's got so many pitches that he can throw to get the count even. He's got so many pitching sequences that we all don't know what he will throw because his form is so similar all the time. His pitches are just so dominating."
The New Republic staff blog, The Plank, points outa short and slightly cruel item in this week's New Yorker that picks apart the relationship between Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Defense Policy Board, and Donald Rumsfeld, friends for thirty-six years, as Rumsfeld sank toward his demise.
Adelman bravely tells New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg that as far back as 2003, “When Rumsfeld said, in reaction to all the looting, ‘Stuff happens,’ and ‘That’s what free people do,’ I was just so disappointed ... This wasn’t what free people did; it’s what barbarians did.”
Adelman, who was given notice by Rumsfeld days before Rums was felled, as the New York Daily News put it (Adelman remains in his job), closes with another zinger: "The Donald Rumsfeld of today is not the Donald Rumsfeld I knew, but maybe I was wrong about the old Donald Rumsfeld. It’s a terrible way to end a career. It’s hard to remember, but he was once the future.”
A journalist named Christopher Hayes audited a course taught by a member of the famed economics department at the University of Chicago, and has now written about the experience [pdf] for the left-wing magazine In These Times. Hayes has an agenda, but the paper is generally well argued, though it might be that it seems likely that it leaves out some counterexamples. His claim, a powerful and ambitious one, is that economics is taught in universities in a way that pretends to objectivity but assumes the rectitude of the neoclassical model and the above-all primacy of the market:
Because neoclassical economics always presents itself as a value-neutral description of the world, its ideological commitments can be adopted by those who learn it without any recognition that they are ideological.
One commenter on Ezra Klein's balanced post on the article has an interesting follow-up:
I'm in the opposite situation as an instructor. I teach an environmental economics course for both environmental science and econ majors. The bottom 10% of my instructor ratings are always from economics majors complaining that dealing with externalities and market failures isn't a real economics course because they haven't seen the topics before.
James Joyce gets his comeuppance today, nine decades or so after the fact: he's subjected to a writers' workshop of "Ulysses." A few young writers miss the point entirely; others make trivial points that suggest a certain hostility to experimentalism ("Typo: last word capitalized." I'm reminded of a classmate who once suggested that Virginia Woolf could have used a run through the grammar check in Microsoft Word.)
One interlocutor is an incurable enthusiast: "'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.' So true." Another critic -- isn't there always one of these? -- says it's "way too long." (She might be right about that.) In essence it's a typical workshop.
Now that the Democrats are soon to have control of both branches of Congress, it is time to reassess ideas for what the Democrats have been calling "a new direction" for the country that were not likely to get off the ground under Republican dominance. In the case of Iraq, the Democrats have further cause for ambitious planning now that President Bush has seen to the political demise of his longtime Defense Secretary and, in so doing, called for a "fresh perspective" while acknowledging that Iraq "is not working well enough, or fast enough."
One plan that has been floated for several years but never taken seriously, as far as we know, by those in power, is the tripartite division of Iraq. Might it decrease the level of sectarian violence if each ethnic group -- Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds -- had its own nation and didn't feel a compulsion to dominate an entire traumatized country the size of California? Such a plan is particularly likely to be aired again because Joe Biden will in January become the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Biden, along with Leslie Gelb, has co-authored a plan for Iraq that proposes this very solution.
One blog, American Footprints, has called for reconsideration of the idea. Peter W. Galbraith, a highly perceptive Iraq observer who has spent a great deal of time there, discussed the idea [$] in the New York Review of Books in May 2004 and mentioned it again [$] there in his (optimistic) dissection of the Iraqi Constitution:
The outcome of the Iraqi constitutional process will therefore very likely be the three-state solution that I described in these pages in May 2004. Iraq is well on the way to becoming a loose union of three separate and radically different states (or more, if the Shiites choose to divide themselves into two regions).
Many abortion supporters have argued against the personhood and moral significance of the fetus, claiming that a fetus is clearly not a child. An acorn isn't an oak tree; a blueprint is not a building, etc. (Moral philosopher Thomas Nagel: "It cannot be said that not to be born is a misfortune.") A critical, almost fatal problem with this approach is that it begs the question in the abortion debate, because pro-lifers just argue or assume the exact opposite -- that a fetus is just like a child, morally speaking. And one is hardly likely to convince a devout member of the Catholic Church that life doesn't begin till after birth (or late in pregnancy) just by saying so loudly. (Similarly, the contention that gays are not sinners is a nonstarter in an argument with a hard-line Catholic.)
But Thomson's brilliant move was this: let's just assume the fetus does have a right to life. Couldn't it be, she asks, that abortion is still permissible? What about the competing claims of the mother -- her rights to certain freedoms, including the risk of harm, etc. In fact, Thomson goes a step further. Her argument reconceives the fetus as a famous violinist -- i.e., you might think, a particularly socially valuable human being. And yet she questions whether a person should be required, at great personal cost, to nurse a violinist to health over a period of nine months, just because she happens to find herself in a position to do so. Sure, if she agreed to do it she'd be praiseworthy, but isn't that supererogatory, as philosophers say -- in other words, above and beyond the call of duty?
Evan, after you mentionedJ.J. Thomson's classic 1971 essay on abortion -- rather prosaically titled "A Defense of Abortion" -- I pulled a copy of a legal-philosophy anthology off my shelf, to refresh my memory of it.
She raises the self-defense issue this way:
Suppose you find yourself in a tiny house with a growing child. I mean a very tiny house, and a rapidly growing child -- you are already up against the wall of the house and in a few minutes you'll be crushed to death. The child, on the other hand, won't be crushed to death ...
The discussion involving waking up and finding you've been kidnapped and attached to a dying, renowned violinist who needs your organs (kidnapped by the Society of Music Lovers, no less!), arises in a context slightly different from self-defense. Thomson says that while it would be nice if you agreed to stay bedridden for nine months, or longer, so the virtuoso might live, you are under no obligation to do so. For her, bringing an unwanted fetus to term is like being a Good Samaritan.
Whatever you think of the essay's conclusions, it's clearly brilliant as rhetoric: Once you read about those thought experiments, you can't get them out of your head. (The whole essay assumes that a fetus has the full rights of a human, and Thomson memorably ends by saying: "A very early abortion is surely not the killing of a person, and so is not dealt with by anything I have said here.")
In my anthology, Thomson is paired with a reply by the legal philosopher John Finnis, which is formidable and contains some memorable lines, too. I'd quote one involving Henry Fonda, and how aspects of his personality were evident in his genes "at the moment of his conception" -- but it requires too much context.
I wanted to point out a really great post on The Valve from a few days ago devoted to the need for -- and proposal of -- new terms to be used in criticism. The pomo high/low humor here is that the occasion for the post is the author's completion of Lost: Season Two on DVD.
In poster John Holbo's view -- hey, his blog's URL rips off Josh Glenn! -- "Lost is one of the great exercises in sustained infoclench in the history of World Literature." What is infoclench? "A large (often wieldy and digestible) amount of information that is not provided at any time, by some characters to the others, lest the background become too clear, or the narrative advance too sensibly." Holbo seems frustrated, here, judging by tone.
But of course, what he is observing is the very essence of the beauty and mass appeal of Lost, to wit: we don't know what in darnation is going on. This season, finally, we have met The Others, and they do not appear to be extraterrestrial or otherwise superfreaks. They have a weird little mini-society, apparently riven by internecine tensions, that is ruled by a deeply creepy guy with the deceptively gentle and prosaic name Ben. An astute friend points out part of his creepiness, besides the bug-eyes: he's always utterly still.
But the narrative withholding -- wow. It's something to behold. It's whodunit where what's being dun is also withheld from view.
In a series of inter-related posts on medical ethics, Eugene Volokh has written a thought-provoking essay, or actually an essay excerpt, arguing that the denial of experimental drug therapies to dying patients is unconstitutional.
In a way this is an intuitive argument. Many AIDS patients of the 1980s and '90s, and cancer patients across the decades, have found themselves in pitched battles with the Food and Drug Administration over the availability of cutting-edge drugs still awaiting approval by the (in)famously careful agency. And it is hard indeed to side with the government in these cases. Why not let the fatally ill decide what risks to take, even if death could thereby be hastened?
Volokh's tack is an interesting one. He grounds his claims in the right to self-defense, which is difficult to actually point to in the Constitution but has been held up in crucial court cases of the last century:
This is not a general autonomy argument, premised on the theory that all people should be free to ingest whatever they choose into their body. Rather, it’s an argument specifically focused on the right to self-defense, a right supported both by the Court’s caselaw (Roe and Casey) and by the longstanding acceptance of the right to lethal self-defense.
I thought the Roe decision was founded on what the Supreme Court called the right to privacy (a strange way to look at it, I've always thought), but perhaps they referred to a right to self-defense in the context of cases where the woman's health is at risk? I know that in a famous paper on abortion, the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson posed abortion rights as a byproduct of a right to a kind of self-protection. Her thought experiment was to imagine that you wake up one day and find that you have been hooked up to another being, like a Siamese twin, who depends on your body for survival. Are you therefore bound to provide that help, for nine months, at increasing discomfort and risk? She thought not, even if health were not an issue.
I've come across an underreported story via a post on Metafilter. It seems that a man killed himself in Chicago by self-immolation in protest over the Iraq war. Shades of the monk who was famously captured in the act by an American photographer on the streets of Saigon. This would seem to be an example of the kind of public, direct protest that Drake Bennett hasn't seen much of this time around.
We know the man killed himself over the war because he left a long suicide note, at least according to the transcript posted here. On this evidence the man is clearly troubled; he regrets not slashing the throat of outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he passed by him on Delaware Avenue in 2002. His beef is with more than the war; it's with the state of the nation as a whole. But his focus is on politics and on the killing of innocent civilians.
The Metafilter writer sarcastically notes that this story hasn't exactly been all over the media. What if there were a picture, one wonders?
Superman isn't the only one to have his reputation slandered.
I'm pilfering the link from Arts & Letters Daily, but this article is worth it for the first few paragraphs alone. Robert Fulford, of the Canadian newspaper the National Post, defends the honor of the hapless Onan.
Let's just say there's no evidence that the biblical Onan, from whose name onanism derives, did what he's famous for. Now that's a bad rap.
Yesterday, Evan directed our attention to a blog post, by Seattle-area comics buff David Campbell, speculating on the politics of various superheroes. It's amusing stuff, but I was distracted by what seems like a glaring error in the very first example. Campbell claims that Superman is a moderate Republican, despite the fact that Clark Kent works for the liberal MSM, on the strength of this argument:
He’s moderate on most social issues like gay rights (Jimmy Olsen is his best pal) but is pro-capital punishment. Hey, Superman, it doesn’t matter if you cry after executing some Kryptonian criminals -- you’re still pro-death penalty.
But Superman doesn't kill Kryptonian criminals, he banishes them -- to the Phantom Zone. Remember? Here's evidence:
PZ inmates plan recidivist activities
And here's more evidence, from a different medium:
Jor-El sends criminals to the PZ
I demand a recount. Superman is one of those fire-breathing, Kansas-bred populists whose passing Tom Frank laments!
I mentioned in a recent post that local -- but internationally renowned -- art photographer (and radical curator) Rosamond Purcell has a new book out, "Bookworm." The Arlington-based essayist and lit-mag editor Sven Birkerts contributes an essay offering us ways to think about Purcell's gorgeous photos of decaying and insect/rodent-worried books (among other things), not to mention her "associative intelligence." I'm reading it this week, slowly, taking my time with each photo.
I bring up Purcell again because, earlier this week, my children and I were delighted to discover her photos of natural-history museum specimens illustrating a sharp essay on evolution in the latest issue of National Geographic.
Orthoporus ornatus, photographed by Purcell
Her three books with Stephen Jay Gould, for which she went spelunking in Harvard's natural history collections, among other places, were ahead of their time. Now that evolution has been challenged, as "just a theory," by the president himself, we're going to see many defenses of Darwin's theory. The illustrations are ready to go: Purcell has spent years figuring out how to photograph natural-history specimens in a new way, one that eschews the natural and makes you think.
UPDATE: I just noticed that, some time this morning, Slate published a slideshow-style review of Purcell's new book. Like me, the reviewer, Amanda Schaffer, argues that Purcell is both supremely un-contemporary and right up to date:
Purcell treats old objects with a sense of wonder. Her aesthetic has sometimes been described as pre-Enlightenment. Yet the work is far more contemporary than it first appears. The obsessive focus on selecting, classifying, and repurposing -- the culling of favorites from other peoples' favorites -- makes it like some ultracool group projects on the Web.
What she said!
ANOTHER UPDATE: It turns out that David Pescovitz at Boing Boing is another Purcell fan.
A contributor to the Guardian blog working in the field of "neuroeconomics" (?), Paul J. Zak, has an interesting post about the moral dimensions of capitalism. Not a contradiction in terms, he argues.
Zak points out that a market economy relies on a certain web of trust:
[The] decentralized delivery of goods relies on employees working for two weeks before receiving a pay cheque, companies offering each other lines of credit, and banks offering bridge loans.
Furthermore, Zak says, there are biochemical reasons, or at least incentives, that kick in an a capitalist transaction: "We have found that trust causes a spike in oxytocin and begets reciprocation -- the sharing of money. We are 'wired' to cooperate, and we find it rewarding in the same way that our brains identify eating a good meal or sex as rewarding."
Occasionally, about 2% of the time, you run across someone who doesn't provide trust in return for trust, a freeloader. "The technical term in my lab for these people is 'bastards.'"
Jacob T. Levy has a perceptive post over at The New Republic's Open University about yesterday's landslide. Can we say landslide? Perhaps only if the Senate tips to the Democrats, which is starting to seem possible, though it may take weeks to know.
Levy notes that with the losses of Nancy Johnson and Lincoln Chafee and Deval Patrick's overwhelming win, not to mention dramatic local results in Levy's own famously independent New Hampshire, the Democrats have firmly consolidated control of New England. It's a level of domination Levy compares to the GOP's in the South.
Of course, the story of the Republicans in the South is much more significant, both politically and historically. That was once Democratic territory, the roots that gave rise to Bill Clinton in Hope, Arkansas. The right-wing takeover there was part of what Thomas Frank puzzled over in his highly influential 2004 book "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Frank wondered why the relatively poor rural heartland was and is being won by the Republicans, who favor taxation that gives such voters less help and fewer guarantees should things turn worse in the family. The leftward lean of New England yesterday was less momentous, though the Democratic takeover of the Mass. statehouse is still a nationwide story.
A former test pilot and current galactic police officer, Green Lantern has always been a running dog for The Man. Dude carries a WMD on his ring finger and flies around reshaping reality according to his idea of The Way Things Should Be. Total neocon.
And a quick take on Ghost Rider, who he thinks is politically unaffiliated: "The Spirit of Vengeance, Ghost Rider is the ultimate protest voter. He always votes against the incumbent and anyone who endorses helmet laws."
Taking a break from all things electoral... The Valve offers up a refreshingly untimely post on cult-novelist-turned-mainstream-success Haruki Murakami, and the art of the Generation X novel. Under examination is Murakami's "Norwegian Wood," which was published in Japan in 1987, and in the West about a decade later. There was and remains a hunger for Murakami's work, particularly among college kids and young adults, most of all in Japan.
The author of the post, U. Cal grad student Joseph Kugelmass, has something interesting to say about the talk in the novel (and in Murakami generally):
First, the characters indulge in a hyperreal sort of dialogue, unusual enough to warrant a closer look. Second, the main character’s friendships and love affairs are based on a strangely passive aestheticism that may, finally, be of concern to Murakami.
I happen to think that "Norwegian Wood" is utter trash -- highbrow, poseur trash, yet still definitely trash. But I agree exactly with Kugelmass's description, which intends praise. There is a kind of mannered, elliptical speech that Murakami indulges in that actually more closely echoes cheap films like "Reality Bites" than Murakami would like to admit. Young women and men sit around passively talking in vague, faux artistic rhetorical test flights. Things sound nice, and philosophical, but actual depth is merely faked rather than achieved.
Today will see the latest chapter in the intriguing story of election days conducted during the Information Age -- i.e., roughly since the birth of CNN. Part of what is interesting is just how poorly the rapid and wide dissemination of election day information has actually predicted or otherwise captured the reality of what is happening on that day.
Today, inevitably, exit poll information will pour forth onto the Internet at a certain late-afternoon hour. When is a matter of question. News articles today report that the tabulation of exit polls and actual results will occur, until 5 p.m. Eastern, in a kind of quarantined area where only those without electronic communication devices can tread. Could this actually work? And why 5 p.m., when all the polls are still open? (Indiana polls, which host several close House races, close at 6 p.m., so those will be the first hard numbers we get.)
We'll all be trying to keep a lid on any afternoon bouts of pessimism and flights of euphoria. But most likely we'll fail, or at least thosecommentators who live for this day will fail for us.
Can this be real? There are plenty of YouTube hoaxes circling around -- remember lonelygirl15? -- so we would do well to be wary. But today there are reports online and on MSNBC that the FBI is investigating allegations of voter intimidation and suppression in Virginia. It appears that telephone calls are being made to heavily Democratic areas giving inaccurate or misleading information about polling sites. The video below purports to be a recording of one such call.
Universities have what are called Institutional Review Boards, to ensure that all research on humans involves informed consent, and no undue risks. They're essential, given the outrages that have been committed in the past against unwitting subjects (as in the infamous Tuskegee studies conducted on African Americans).
Trouble -- or at least potential confusion -- arises, though, when these IRB's, conceived mostly with medical research in mind, assert authority over research in the social sciences, including history. I wrote about this six years ago, in the late, lamented magazine Lingua Franca. Sociologists doing field work have been told they need to carry consent forms out onto the streets, which makes chatting up a drug dealer tricky, to say the least. A demographer at Berkeley who befriended a 112-year old man in a nursing home was hauled before an IRB for failing to get permission beforehand. Oral historians were told that they couldn't depart from scripted questions approved by an IRB. And the IRB could veto questions.
This week, in a substantial piece of reporting, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that these problems persist. Among the scholarly horror stories: An IRB tells a student he's not allowed to write about an interview he conducted with his father, because the interview had not been approved by an IRB.
It's clear some IRB's are being heavy handed, but it's hard to tell how pervasive these problems are. If you're a social scientist, and an IRB has demanded changes in a research project you think was reasonable, I'd love to hear the details. Click on my name, on the left rail of this page, to get my email address.
For a taste of the view of our strange politics from other shores, one could do worse than to read the marvelous critic John Lanchester's "Diary" in the new London Review of Books.
Lanchester, previewing tomorrow's D-Day, looks back with a mixture of wistfulness and anger at the final days of the 2004 US election season. Wistfulness for what seemed possible for the Democrats, anger at the bloggers and other non-mainstream media that made it seem possible. (At one point he singles out electoral-vote.com, which I've just highlighted, for blame.)
But along the way he gives political blogs their apportionment of credit. He says the blogs are a very powerful force within the Democratic party, citing MoveOn.org, and the surprising candidacy of Connecticut's Ned Lamont. He also adds, with a witty and very English keyboard touch:
The blogs point out that the MSM [mainstream media] ignored Stephen Colbert’s speech at the White House, or treated it as an embarrassment, when it was in fact the most powerful piece of political comedy (and political theatre) since the Cheney administration came to power.
In Thursday's Dallas Morning News, Kristie Ramirez claimed she'd heard some heavy-duty discourse at Dallas's Inwood Lounge, a martini bar located inside a cool old movie theater:
Scene: St. Mark's alums, and media and art intellects who argue the finer points of Kierkegaard and bagel dogs. Heard: "Kierkegaard would totally approve of the Inwood's reluctance to conform and sell mainstream hot dogs. It's all about keeping it real."
Now, it's possible that someone at the Inwood tried to explain Kierkegaard's notion of authenticity to someone else in this fashion... which might or might not be ridiculous and lame. But Ramirez seems to believe that doing so is automatically lame. Why?
The Inwood
On Saturday, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Tirdad Derakhshani piled on the pop culture, literary, and philosophical in-jokes:
It was Mouseketeer Justin Timberlake's night Thursday at the MTV Europe Awards in Copenhagen - hometown of former MTV VJ Hans Christian Andersen and Head Bangers Ball head case Sřren Kierkegaard. Justin, who sizzled as MC, also won for best male and best pop act!
"Head Bangers Ball head case": Ha!
Justin
Also writing on Saturday, the Scotsman's Tom Lappin opened a soccer (aka football) story like so:
Football's continuing status as the planet's most popular diversion has something to do with its ability to conjure up neat 90-minute portions of most human forms of expression. If Tuesday's Barcelona v Chelsea encounter was vindictiveness in its most entertaining form ... Wednesday's match at the Emirates Stadium was surrealism crossed with existentialism, the unlikely tinged with a sense of human futility. Arsenal's inability to score could have been scripted by Albert Camus, who as a goalkeeper, would have a appreciated the blank beauty of that 0-0 scoreline. All it lacked was a Cure song as the soundtrack.
*GROAN*. Speaking of Camus, on Sunday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Texas) trotted out a familiar quotation:
Bagwell neighborhood residents are not alone in their fondness for fall color. On the subject, French playwright Albert Camus said, "Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower."
As I've said before, I'm not sure this is really a Camus quote. I'd like to ask all journalists to stop using it till I've found out for sure. Please don't ignore this piece of advice...
Finally, in today's issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, whose "Babel" just opened, is asked: What compels you to look at people and tell their stories? He answers in an extremely philosophical fashion, which I'll quote at length:
I am interested in humanity. I feel a lot of compassion when I develop these projects. Compassion is a key word for me. Babel is about compassion and that's something we have lost, the ability to judge or see things with compassion. The more contradictory the character, the more attracted I am to him. Western cultures deny the fact that we will die.
As different as animals are, they're immortal because they don't know they will die. I remember my kids' eyes -- I remember seeing the change when they found out their father could disappear forever. But we run away from it, we try not to get old, we get surgery, use Viagra -- use everything. We cover the sun with a finger and it's ridiculous.
Doing that, we lose the opportunity to live a life full of intensity and we do the opposite of what we are really trying to achieve. When I watch TV, I get so depressed. The news, all the wars as entertainment have commercials selling medicine. These guys are selling fear and depression really. (Philosopher Jean-Paul) Sartre and (author James Joyce) were kids compared to the existentialism you see on TV (laughs).
My films have been called a trilogy of death, but I think they're about life; life with shadows and light and accepting the fact that death is part of the process. What will happen to the flower that doesn't have the opportunity to be born again?
Inarritu
He makes some good points! And on that note, I bid you adieu -- till next Monday.
Way back in 2002, shortly after the Ideas section was launched, I interviewed Brookline native Jody Rosen -- now firmly entrenched in Brooklyn, he's a music critic for The Nation and for Slate -- about his then-new book, White Christmas, a fascinating account of how a Jewish songwriter composed what quickly became America's most popular Christmas song. And last year, in another Ideas item, I quoted Rosen's blistering response to an offhand remark that NYT columnist David Brooks made about French rap. I also followed his blog, The Anachronist, which was dedicated to early-early pop music, until he stopped updating it.
Now Rosen is back on my radar with the release of Jewface, a compilation of vaudeville-era Jewish novelty songs (songs largely written by Jewish composers, including Irving Berlin, published by Jewish-owned Tin Pan Alley music firms, and performed by Jewish vaudevillians before cheering Jewish audiences) -- from 1905-1922 that he has collected over the years on wax cylinders and 78s. (The label is Reboot Stereophonic.) This is minstrelsy, Jewish-style: or "coarse ethnic lampoon as ethnic in-group entertainment," as Rosen has put it.
In the preceding paragraph, I purposely left out the adjective between "a" and "compilation" because any adjective used here would have to be a thoroughly dialectical one. Like "Borat," this collection is creepy-yet-hilarious, fascinating-yet-depressing, great-yet-terrible. "Perhaps the Most Offensive Album Ever Made," trumpets the CD cover -- and a couple of the song titles alone -- "When Mose With His Nose Leads The Band," "Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollars" -- make one tend to agree. But like many cultural phenomena that attract and repel simultaneously, I find "Jewface" enchanting; I'm obsessed with it.
Decide for yourself: Take a listen to Ada Jones's 1908 tune "Under the Matzos Tree," here.
I've been writing a lot on Ezra Klein and his various Internet finds, but he has an interesting post today pointing to a more interesting bit from the right-leaning Ross Douthat, who is a staffer at the increasingly right-leaning Atlantic.
Douthat argues that the Bush administration's bungling in the Middle East is in a way a greater betrayal than we tend to think now, five years after 9/11 launched their frenzy. At the time, whatever we felt about the hawks' politics, we thought of Rumsfeld, Powell et al. as highly experienced and trustworthy when it came to foreign military policy:
If you had asked me, circa 1999, to pick out a group of senior GOPers who I would have wanted at the table in a national-security crisis - well, I'm not sure I could have done better than Colin Powell, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld, with (in theory, though of course it didn't turn out that way) Brent Scowcroft whispering in Condi's ear, and George H.W. whispering in his son's.
But now, as Douthat says, instead we have this, if we're inclined to listen to Bob Woodward.
We at Brainiac have resisted taking part in tracking the daily charges and stumbles of the political horse race this year. Plenty of blogs do it, usually with a partisan slant.
But at one point I did mention Votemaster, where an American computer science professor living in the Netherlands compiles all the available polls, weights them somehow according to methodology and sample size, and attempts to predict the election outcome. (He did the same thing, anonymously but to a lot of press attention, in 2004.)
Just thought I would check in with him with one day more. He has the Senate at 50-49-1, in favor of the Democrats, and has a whopping Democrat advantage in the House of 239-196! It's also worth noting (bottom of the Votemaster home page) that he lists the predictions of several other vote gurus. Every one has the Democrats taking the House. Three have the Democrats gaining a tiny edge in the Senate, with two predicting a tie ballgame. (By the way, tie goes to the GOP, because of Cheney. They would still be the majority party.)
Food porn, apartment porn, investment porn: "As a kind of nominative suffix, porn is in," writes William Safire in today's "On Language" column. "In is not a dirty word," he adds. "Neither is porn."
He's right about that: Porn, the word, is not itself taboo, whether you're talking dessert porn, house porn, or sex videos. But not everyone gets the distinction. In January, for instance, cartoonist Scott Adams told his blog readers that his editor had made him substitute "smut" for "porn" in a "Dilbert" strip.
And last month, Ireland's internet registrar banned the word porn in the country's domain names. (The Dublin man who owns Sex.ie was surprised to hear that his next venture, Porn.ie, had been rejected as a danger to public morality.)
More important, though: What the heck does "nominative suffix" have to do with anything? Last time I looked, a nominative suffix was a word ending that marked grammatical case, like the –us on domus in Latin. Unless I'm missing something, the porn in "apartment porn" is a plain old noun (with an attributive modifier) -- not a suffix, not necessarily nominative, and not at all in need of a fancy new name.
Remember the SAT scandal last March, when nearly 5,000 college-bound students learned that their tests had been misscored? That was no fluke, say Bloomberg reporters David Glovin and David Evans. Bad tests and faulty scoring, their new report says, have affected "at least 500,000 people taking tests from 2000 through 2006 -- from Nevada third graders to aspiring teachers."
The SAT snafu was a hardware problem, but human scorers are also fallible – and sometimes unqualified. Florida's testing contract specified that scorers would have bachelor's degrees in academic subjects, but the records show that promise wasn't kept:
A person from Hungary wrote he was a "pyshical education'' major. A physical education major from Methodist College in Fayetteville, North Carolina, wrote that she had attended "Methidist College.''
Sometimes the problem is the test itself:
In 2003, the Minnesota Department of Education found flaws in questions proposed by [its test provider]. About 6 percent had no correct answers or multiple correct answers.
Money, of course, plays a part, especially when companies bid on low-margin No Child Left Behind contracts.
Companies often scrimp when they bid on No Child contracts, Eduventures analyst Tim Wiley says. . . . ``As with any bidding situation, it definitely requires a lot of cost cutting,'' Wiley says. ``Or, in some cases, cutting corners.''
Educational Testing Service, which wrongly flunked 4,100 teachers on certification tests, will pay $11 million to settle their lawsuit. But one of those teachers, fired after four "failures" on the test, remains bitter: ``I was just about to get tenure, and I had to start all over again.''
In the past, I've inclined toward the view that much of the hand-wringing about negative ads is overdone. Why shouldn't a Republican who believes that the Iraq war has struck a blow against terrorists argue that his or her opponent, who considers it a strategic debacle, is weak on national security? Similarly, why can't a Democrat who supports stem-cell research argue that a Republican who opposes it stands in the way of medical breakthroughs -- without getting tut-tutted by goo goo pundits? We define ourselves in part by what we stand against. I wrote about a (not entirely convincing) book called "In Defense of Negativity" earlier this year. (Sample quote: "If negativity ever happened to disappear from our electoral battles, we can safely assume that so would our freedoms.")
The ads this year, though, test the fiber of even the most staunchly pro-negative among us. Evan has cited the ad targeting U.S. Senate candidate Harold Ford, but that's kid stuff compared to this, which Paul R. Nelson, a Republican, is running against Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wisc.). The shock jocks Opie and Anthony have been bowing down before this ad, citing it, partisanship aside, as a work of demented genius. (The ad says Kind votes against military spending and cancer research, preferring to use tax dollars to research "the masturbation habits of old men" and to pay "teenage girls to watch pornography with probes attached to their genitals." An earlier version of the ad was used against Democratic Rep. Brad Miller, of North Carolina.) Here's another Nelson ad, ridiculing a fictional marriage between "two dudes."
No shortage of bunkum on either side, but whether it's because they're behind in many races, or because they are running on "values" issues -- and therefore want to portray the Democrats as morally impaired -- the Republicans are running nastier, more personal ads this year, the group concludes.
How did I miss this? The collaborative blog D___ Interesting has a darn interesting post today about the spontaneous birth of a language. The brief essay isn't particularly well done, but it introduced me to a fascinating bit of news. Maybe everyone else knows this.
It seems that a group of deaf, illiterate students at the same school in Nicaragua developed their own intricate sign language, complete with a system of syntax that included, get this, subject-verb agreement. Again, they were illiterate. These children, lacking all but the most basic language skills to begin with, had a lot of trouble learning existing worldwide sign languages.
Prior to these attempts at teaching them to communicate, deaf children in Nicaragua had interacted with their respective families via idiosyncratic systems of very rudimentary gestures (known as mimicas in Spanish). This meant that deaf children from different families couldn't even understand each other, let alone form friendships.
But an interesting effect appeared once the many deaf children had begun interacting in the group setting of the schools. The children started learning and elaborating on one another's mimicas, and the resulting system of signs rapidly grew. The amazed teachers watched as their students began to communicate quite successfully among themselves.
I find it particularly remarkable that the language was not in fact collectively created whole cloth. It involved meshing together existing signs that kids brought from home. A language wiki. This had to mean resolving conflicts, e.g. how to choose between competing signals meaning "I'm hungry."
This was one of those magic moments when a group of people essentially created the conditions for an enormously important experiment without anyone organizing the game. And what a success the experiment was.
A Metafilter post draws attention to a smattering of new research into animal consciousness, including an update of a Stanford study. This is an issue that has obvious ethical implications in a time when the global food economy relies heavily on animal products of various kinds. Whether it is morally permissible to slaughter animals for our pleasure, when alternate foods with the requisite nutritional value exist, might be thought to hinge on just how these creatures experience their own death.
In an essay called "Consider the Lobster," from the book of the same name, David Foster Wallace fretted over the cruel (?) fate of the tasty crustaceans, who, after being tricked into capture by a clever enter-only trap (have you seen how this works?), are routinely killed by being dunked head first into boiling water. Peter Singer, a Princeton professor and a polarizing figure in ethical philosophy for a multitude of reasons, is by far the most prominent voice for animal rights in the academic world, and possibly in society as a whole.
Another reason to care about animal consciousness even if we think we aren't interested: As the Stanford essay begins to suggest, one important way we define what it means to be a person, and what it takes to be endowed with certain rights, is to distinguish between us and the "lower" animals. Why is it acceptable to kill a monkey (or is it?) and not a person? It's a harder question to answer than it might appear. Is it our capacity to feel pleasure and pain, our ability to to plan for the future, to have dreams, to carry out complex reasoning? But what if monkeys have all that, or have enough of it to trump a person in a vegetative state, or even an infant?
These and other questions might gain some clarity soon, as our science improves. To see where we are now, there's also an episode of the PBS program Nature, on the same topic.
Ezra Klein, who is really gathering steam as a thoughtful blogger, has a gutsy post today after a few days of thinking about L'Affaire Kerry -- the joke John Kerry seemed to make about the education level of American soldiers in Iraq. (For the record, I'm still not sure that's what he meant. That he was making a joke about the Administration seems plausible enough to me.)
But Klein takes seriously the question of troop education level, and in general the demographic profile of the men and women who are over there representing the country. Klein risks the backlash against frank talk about soldiers to say that we don't do the troops, or the debate about the war, any favors if we "dreamily speak of the great sacrifice, magnificent courage, inspiring intellect, and extraordinary characters of our troops. It's ... designed to make us feel better, so we don't have to face what we've done to these children, and don't have to imagine the toll a warzone takes on real humans, rather than imagined supermen." I think it's worth quoting a bit more:
I had a friend who ended up a biohazard unit during the early days of the invasion. He's an amazing person: gentle, empathic, wise, and courageous. He went to a top college and enlisted after 9/11. He's precisely the soldier we like to describe. But he spent his days terrified, waiting for calls back home, waiting for his tour to close. He performed his duties well and displayed enormous personal strength, but he was just a kid, and his expression of patriotism had landed him in hell.
An 18-year-old blogger from Singapore's upper crust has created a surprisingly far-reaching series of ripples with a single post. Her online screed, now removed from her blog but reproduced here (did anyone doubt it would live on?), rips a hole or five in the fairly innocuous views of a young man named Derek Wee, who expressed concerns about the economic insecurity of many people in Singapore. Both Derek Wee and his younger critic, Ms. Wee Shu Min, are the children of prominent politicians in the country.
Ms. Wee leveled her sights at Mr. Wee (no relation) without even a nod at the norms of decorum, which seem to be particularly exacting in Singapore. Ms. Wee also touched some hot buttons by accusing Mr. Wee, apparently below her position in the class structure, of laziness and entitlement:
derek, derek, derek darling, how can you expect to have an iron ricebowl or a solid future if you cannot spell?
if you're not good enough, life will kick you in the balls. that's just how things go....
dear derek is one of many wretched, undermotivated, overassuming leeches in our country, and in this world. one of those who would prefer to be unemployed and wax lyrical about how his myriad talents are being abandoned for the foreigner's, instead of earning a decent, stable living as a sales assistant. it's not even about being a road sweeper. these !!^#bags don't want anything without "manager" and a name card.
This is just a particularly nasty and polarized forms of an old debate about political philosophy. But again, it's remarkable how much these off-the-cuff remarks have gone beyond Singapore's borders. Ms. Wee's name was for a time the third most popular search term at the blog search engine Technorati.
Art Spiegelman, the graphic novelist and memoirist, best-known for "Maus," which won a Pulitzer in 1993, has been working on an autobiography, after his own fashion. The Virginia Quarterly Review is publishing sections of it as Spiegelman finishes them. Only excerpts are available online, but from them you can still get a sense of the arc of a distinctive -- not to mention idiosyncratic and, by now, improbably distinguished -- life.
VQR and the artist are now up to Episode Three, in which Spiegelman meets his mentor, the filmmaker and SUNY-Binghampton professor Ken Jacobs, and stumbles toward the idea that will form the basis of his breakthrough book.
In an earlier installment, a young Spiegelman discovers a cultural object that will change his life: Mad magazine, which he calls "my Talmud."
(Fun fact: From 1966 to 1989, Spiegelman worked for Topps Chewing Gum -- that's how he paid his rent -- helping to create Wacky Packages and, later, the Garbage Pail Kids. Josh Glenn mentioned that aspect of Spiegelman's career in an "Examined Life" column last year.)
By now you know that William Styron, a writer best known for the wrenching novel "Sophie's Choice," has died in Martha's Vineyard of pneumonia. Styron had, as Norman Mailer said yesterday, an incomparably "omnipresent and exquisite ... sense of the elegiac." Whether his struggles with severe depression contributed to his gentle yet penetrating touch with the dark side of the human condition is hard to know, but a difficult conclusion to resist.
Styron is to be commended, I believe, for his frank and even beautiful discussion of his mental illness, long before it was fashionable, or even acceptable in certain polite circles, to commit such private pain in print. His "Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness," to be re-released by the Modern Library in Janoary, remains a keystone of the literature. It was illuminating and universal rather than merely revealing and personal. In that book he memorably rejected the word depression as flat, misleading, and insufficient to capture the horror of the lived experience. "Brainstorm" would come closer to describing the attack from within, he felt, if it were not already in use for another, lowlier purpose. Styron will be missed.
For those who have been tracking mysmallobsession with Diebold and the perils of today's touch-screen voting machines, or for those who would rather trust another source, a documentary called "Hacking Democracy"is to air tonight at 9 on HBO.
The film seems to cast an even more suspicious eye toward Diebold, the foremost voting machine manufacturer (whose chief executive once inadvisedly promised President Bush in writing "to deliver the electoral votes of Ohio"). The doc features a dowdy-looking grandmother who has made it her cause, along with a group of committed friends and colleagues, to exposes the security weaknesses of computerized vote counters. She's disturbed by what she's found. With so many races across the country hanging in the balance come Tuesday -- rather than one Presidential race -- perhaps we should be disturbed as well.
This month brings a new coffee table book from the creators of Spy magazine, "Spy: The Funny Years." An admission that not all their years were funny, or are they saying the funny years all belonged to Spy? Who cares?
The brains behind Spy, Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis, are responsible for the book, too, although you wonder how much time Carter and Andersen, busy guys, really put in. But never mind.
Print magazine has published a snappy review by a good editorial choice, Village Voice gossip hand Michael Musto. His memories of the satirical mag makes me wish I were in New York in the heyday. It seems mainstream media hadn't started hitting power below the belt till these young guys came in and started ransacking the apartments of the sassy and too-powerful. Now wannabe insiders have Gawker, an all-day free version of Spy in Musto's interpretation, but it ain't the same, especially when it's already been done better.
A good bit from Musto, about Spy: "It made spitting at famous people a spectator sport, and did so with academic humor that elevated it from tabloid-trashy sniping into the realm of sophisticated spite."
ABC News is reporting that computer disks sent this week to Maryland legislators from an unknown sender "contained the secret source code for vote-counting that could be used to alter the votes cast through Maryland's new electronic voting machines." Diebold denies that the disks are dangerous because election workers can reset passwords -- which seems a tacit admission that the disks could otherwise be effectively used.
Moreover, ABC says that a report commissioned by the state reveals that many Diebold machines in use today still have the factory default passwords. (Haven't we all lazily "forgotten" to change an automatically provided password?)
ABC adds a sobering roundup of technical glitches already experienced by Diebold machines, including adding phantom votes in Texas and providing directions for voters with vision problems in Vietnamese. Again, we don't have to suspect Diebold or anyone else of vote tampering to find this troubling. Unintentional technical bugs are more likely and still threaten to undermine the value of each American vote.
On the collaborative blog of the longtime New York Press film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, a lively forum has broken out over the the top five movie monologues of all time. Seitz friend and fellow contributor Edward Copeland, an active blogger on a range of topics, started the thread with this post.
Copeland cites "Dr. Strangelove," "Network," "Jaws," "Pulp Fiction" -- "I'm tryin' reeeal hard to be the shepherd" -- and "Witches of Eastwick" (?). In the comments section below the post, which has gathered some traffic from other sites, things get more interesting. "Judgment at Nuremberg" gets a mention, as does Judd Nelson in "The Breakfast Club" (quite a range), and two personal favorites:
1) Alec Baldwin's outright theft of "Glengarry Glen Ross," as the merciless boss of some desperate salesmen. "What's my name? What's my name? I drove in on a BMW. You drove in on a Hyundai. THAT's my [bleeping] name."
2) Woody Allen, playing Isaac in "Manhattan" but really playing himself, lies on the couch on the phone with a friend, enumerating the little things that make life worth living: "Groucho Marx, to name one thing... uh... um... and Wilie Mays... and um... the 2nd movement of the Jupiter Symphony... and um... Louis Armstrong, recording of Potato Head Blues..."
Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz, author of numerous important books examining, among other things, what he called "the systems of meaning, beliefs, values, world views, forms of feeling, styles of thought, in terms of which particular peoples construct their existence," and a longtime professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, died on Monday, at the age of 80, of complications following heart surgery.
Geertz
Geertz was one of the last of a vanishing breed, the public intellectual. He was a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, and wrote perhaps the best work (IMHO) of meta-social-science ever, "Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author" for which he was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Prize in Criticism, in 1988. Those of us impatient with the jargon-laden and trivial output of today's over-professionalized academic will miss him greatly.
An exhaustive obituary was published yesterday on the website of the Institute for Advanced Study.
