In an Op-Ed piece in the Times, about the costs of our unthinking everyday numerologies, Daniel Gilbert plays a quiet little joke on the unsuspecting reader.

In 1962, a physicist named M. F. M. Osborne noticed that stock prices tended to cluster around numbers ending in zero and five. Why? Well, on the one hand, most people have five fingers, and on the other hand, most people have five more.

As with the well-known vase-profile illusion, we’re surprised when a very common figure of speech is put to literal use.

Carrie Fisher is sorry about the cocaine, and wants to work in this town again.

In closing, I suggest you stay away from ingesting this anxious making powder & if you run into Mister Lucas, Please tell him how sorry I am that this ever happened, that I’ve admitted to its occurring & I promise not to do it again should he decide to do another sequel starring a geriatric Mr & Mrs. Han Solo, on the shopping planet- having pedicures & trying on nightgowns from deep space.

Regarding the Senate campaign of Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, the Editors of The New York Times openly deplore the inattentiveness of voters, but their complaint is fairly aimed at right-wing demagoguery.  

The public’s lack of attention to detail, and Mr. Johnson’s willingness to exploit it, could end the career of Mr. Feingold, who in three terms has distinguished himself for trying to bring fairness to campaign finance and decency to national security, among other achievements. He has routinely crossed party lines to work with Republicans and has had the courage to break with his own party more often than almost any other senator.

[snip]

But the Wisconsin electorate he faces seems to have lost its progressive streak and become more like other Midwestern states. Several polls have shown that the number of likely voters who consider themselves conservative has risen from a quarter of the electorate to nearly half. The misinformation and simplistic solutions propounded by talk radio and the Republican Party are having an effect even in a state that preferred Mr. Obama by 14 points two years ago.

In France — “Where Having It All Doesn’t Mean Having Equality” — mothers are still expected to put femininity ahead of feminism. Geneviève Fraisse winds up Katrin Bennhold’s report with a great crack.

Ms. Fraisse, the philosopher, says more than two centuries after France got rid of the king as the father of the nation, it needs to get rid of the father as the king of the family. “We had one revolution,” she said, “now we need another one — in the family.”

We wish we could say that we’re holding our breath. For the time being, can we get that in French?

Legendary editor Diana Athill talks to Sarah Lyall about life in the nineties.

People tend to tell Ms. Athill that she is an inspiration, a word that gives her the willies. But her matter-of-fact, hopeful depiction of life as an elderly woman presents an encouraging antidote to the accounts of writers like Philip Roth, with their self-pitying fetishization of physical decline.

“I think getting old very often is horrible, really,” Ms. Athill said. “But if you’re lucky, if you keep your health, if your aches and pains are not too bad, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have a perfectly agreeable life, in many ways, discovering new and nice things.”

From Sarah Lyall’s Puttenham Journal, a piece about “dogging,” or watching other people have plein air sex. (This in a family newspaper!) What shocks us, of course, is the picturesque old gents who know better than to say “Google.”

Referring to a nearby village, an elderly man at the bar piped up, “At Wisley, there are two sites, one for males and one for heteros.”

Mrs. Debenham said, “I think we should just let them get on with it.”

The man added, “If you want to find out more, just put ‘dogging’ into your search engine.”

Gail Collins, commenting on Connecticut’s Senate race between Attorney General Ralph Blumenthal (Dem) and Girl Gone Wild Linda McMahon (Rep):

Blumenthal also demanded to know why McMahon didn’t create jobs in the United States instead of having W.W.E. action figures made in China. This was the moment when McMahon really should have promised a study. Instead, she claimed that the United States does not “have the kind of policies in place here that are conducive to manufacturing,” citing, among other things, “high labor costs,” which could not have been much of a comfort to the state’s workers.

A concoction spawned as a joke by a kids’ sitcom writer is coming soon to your house. From today’s Dining & Wine Section of the Times: “Spaghetti Tacos: Silly Enough for Young Eaters.”

Julian, now 10, had never had them before and had never heard of anyone else making them besides Spencer and the cast of “iCarly.” “But I wanted them because they looked really delicious and fun to eat,” Julian said. “They’re really crunchy and they have my two favorite foods, spaghetti and tacos.”

Every kid at the party ate them, even Julian’s picky friend, Henry.

“P.B. & J., that’s the extent of this kid’s repertoire,” Ms. Burns said. “His mother was shocked.”

PS: Even more fun, at least for us grown-ups.

Ken Dilanian, writing about counterterrorism information-sharing, inthe Los Angeles Times, talks to Russell Travers, of the National Counterterrorism Center. (via The Morning News)

The Herculean task of separating relevant information from background noise makes terrorism analysis an extraordinarily difficult art, he said, and there is no button to push to identify non-obvious relationships.

“What I think we can do,” he said, “is shrink the haystack and make it somewhat easier for the analysts.”

Pankaj Mishra writes about the failure of social progress in India. 

Certainly, the four million Muslims of Kashmir, who every day suffer the brutalities of what’s arguably the world’s largest military occupation, cannot be blamed for failing to make meaningful distinctions between Hindu nationalists and the current government, led by the more moderate Congress Party. Their fate remains that of a minority kept under perpetual siege by a paranoid nation-state.

Like hundreds of millions of other voiceless Indians, the migrant laborers in my village are even less able to distinguish between the oppressions of old feudal India and the pitiless exploitations of the new business-minded India. I wonder if the recent destruction of their fragile shelters doesn’t hold some symbolism. Perhaps the greatest danger to India’s image is that they may one day cease to cower in those shacks, and, like their counterparts in central India, erupt in armed revolt.

Barack Obama, in Rolling Stone.

I’m not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need.

(via kottke.org)

Henry Alford, never one for the simple life, decides to invite a restaurant inspector into his home while he prepares for a dinner party. His score: “Flunkadelic.”

Simultaneously, I was whipping up two corn soufflés. The trifecta of guest arrival, soufflé preparation and government-backed humiliation was, for this host, a lake of fire. Imagine that your war crimes tribunal is being filmed while you broil scallops. As guests spilled in and egg whites were whipped, Ms. Torin continued zealously snooping around the kitchen, brandishing a tiny flashlight to look for rodent excreta, and telling me that I should sand down my aged cutting boards and retrieve ice from my freezer with a scoop. I grimace-smiled like a polar bear at a world climate summit.

Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, when informed that atheists (along with Mormons and Jews) know more about religious matters than most Americans, was not surprised.

“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”

Steven Lee Myers, in a Times article about 8000 personal computers that were supposed to go to Iraqi students but that “went missing” at the port of Umm Qasr, looks on the bright side:

Today’s Iraq may be corrupt, saddled with a bureaucracy from Saddam Hussein’s era that has changed little, and hobbled by a political impasse that has blocked the formation of a new government nearly seven months after parliamentary elections. But Iraqis — the media, politicians, average citizens — are freer than ever to denounce the wrongdoing of bureaucrats and thieves, even if to little effect.

Sam Sifton, responding to a reader’s request for reasonably-priced steakhouses in Manhattan, reminds us why, romantic celebrations aside, good restaurants are often more agreeable than fantastic ones.

The easy answer is Le Relais de Venise L’Entrecôte , on Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, where there’s an inexpensive prix-fixe steak-frites dinner available that is hardly top-tier but that certainly fulfills the mandate for a good steak dinner. It’s like eating in a Paris designed by the people who were behind Horn & Hardart. Another option, though, is to voyage south to the financial district, where you can reliably find a good steak dinner at Harry’s in the basement of the old India House on Hanover Square, and another at the blue-collar financial services tavern that is Bobby Van’s on Broad Street. These aren’t cheap restaurants, but they’re fairly priced and enjoyable ones in which you can have a good steak and a better conversation with your family. That is sometimes the whole and complete point of going out to dinner.

Tyler Cowen sums up the value of a liberal education quietly, succinctly, and inarguably. And at the expense of “testing,” to boot!

A liberal arts education helps us think with greater subtlety, even if it does not improve our performance on subsequent standardized tests.  I see an impact here even on the lesser students in state universities.  It also helps explain how the U.S. so suddenly leaps from having so-so high schools to outstanding graduate schools; how many other countries emphasize liberal arts education in between?

Liberal arts education forces us to decode systems of symbols.  We learn how complex systems of symbols can be and what is required to decode them and why that can be a pleasurable process.  That skill will come in handy for a large number of future career paths.  It will even help you enjoy TV shows more.

For related reasons, I believe that people who learn a second language as adults are especially good at understanding how other people might see things differently.

Bob Herbert in today’s Times, writing about the primary defeat of DC Mayor Adrian Fenty.

The idea that we had moved into some kind of postracial era was always a ridiculous notion. Attitudes have undoubtedly changed for the better over the past half-century, and young people as a whole are less hung up on race than their elders. But race is still a very big deal in the United States, which is precisely why black leaders like Mr. Fenty and Mr. Obama try so hard to behave as though they are governing in some sort of pristine civic environment in which the very idea of race has been erased.

These allegedly postracial politicians can end up being so worried about losing the support of whites that they distance themselves from their own African-American base. This is a no-win situation — for the politicians and for the blacks who put their hopes and faith in them.

Felix Salmon, impressive in many ways, continues to astound us with his feet-on-the-ground optimism about the marriage of journalism and hypertext. He’s also adept at spotting quirky pockets of professional resistance to the digital way of doing things. In his view, new technology improves journalism by making it easy — and therefore obligatory — for reporters to read before they write.  

The reason, fundamentally, is that journalism is becoming much more conversational. It started with the rise of the blogs, and if blogs are now slowly dying out, that’s only because the conversation has overtaken them. It’s moved to Twitter, and Facebook, and many mainstream websites, too: the web is social now. You no longer need a blog to be part of the conversation; you don’t even need a Tumblr. Everybody is a publisher now, and all these new networks have helped to create a new vibrancy in public discourse.

[snip]

Think about it this way: reading is to writing as listening is to talking — and someone who talks without listening is both a boor and a bore. If you can’t read, I don’t want you in my newsroom. Because you aren’t taking part in the conversation which is all around you. 

The following excerpt from Harper’s Magazine (October 2010) does not appear online, but we think that it’s too important to miss; in any case, it dovetails with something much on our mind. Reviewing Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land, Terry Eagleton writes:

The upshot of all this is that market societies are plunged sooner or later into a crisis of legitimation. Authority and obedience, as Edmund Burke warned long ago, are too fragile a bond to hold social orders together for very long. We may fear the law, but we do not love it. Indeed, as this book argues, once we abandon the public for the private, there was scant reason why we should value law (“the public good par excellence”) over force. For lasting political stability, Burke thought, you need to engage the loyalties and affections of the populace as well; and that means culture and politics, not just economics. The problem with market societies is that they erode the symbolic, affective dimensions of social existence, and thus have little chance of grappling their underlings to them with hoops of steel. They rely instead on the self-interest of their subjects. But self-interest is a notoriously faithless, ficle affair. It may inspire you to kick someone in the teeth as much as vote him into power.

Without suggesting that the mid-century legislative and judicial activism that strove to achieve racial equality in the United States ought not to have happened, or that progressive objection to our Vietnam misadventure was wrong-headed, we believe that these movements alienated “the loyalties and affections of the populace” — of a very large part of it, anyway — and that the American fabric will not begin to be repaired until our belief is recognized as fact.

Elif Batuman, in the London Review of Books, takes an elegant swipe at conceited, adolescent ignorantism.

Not knowing something is one way to be independent of it – but knowing lots of things is a better way and makes you more independent. It’s exciting and important to reject the great books, but it’s equally exciting and important to be in a conversation with them.