¶ Matins: In a column in Saturday’s Times, Gail Collins ended a characteristically wry roundup of geriatric Senatorial candidates (“The Revenge of Lacey Davenport“) with the following bit of common sense:

My theory is that the age issue is not all that huge a deal when it comes to legislators. If you’re old and in good shape, the big problem is that it’s hard to think about things in new ways. You tend to get better and better at a narrower and narrower set of skills.

Yes, but does this mean me?

¶ Tierce: The publisher to watch: Philip M Parker, compiler of more than 200,000 titles. They’re all available through Amazon, not that you’d want to read any of them quite yet. There’s a method to his madness, though…

¶ Sext: I’m contemplating a trip to Sleeve City.

(more…)

Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman turns out to be the first of three projected books that, collectively, will propose new ways of managing human behavior for the better. I’m only a few pages into the first chapter, and already I’m overwhelmed by the force of Sennett’s ideas. (more…)

¶ Matins: The damned thing is: he’s right. “The offence seems to be not what I did but the fact that it became public.” Max Mosley on his forays into Sade-en lusts.

¶ Tierce: The state of play in neuroscience: we still learn most of what we know from brain failure. Frontotemporal dementia, for example, teaches art.

¶ Sext: I knew about the subway reefs, but not that they’d make such a big splash. (“Growing Pains for a Deep-Sea Home Built of Subway Cars,” by Ian Urbina.)

By the way, we’re having a gorgeous day here.

¶ Compline: Jason Kottke actually got in to Momofuku Ko.

(more…)

The flagstaff at Carl Schurz Park, captured in an impromptu reflection pool.

¶ Matins: How about those bloggers, dropping off like flies? (“In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop“) No reader of Michael A Banks’s Blogging Heroes, the Takli Makan of this year’s morning read, will be surprised by the news that technews bloggers live like unhappy hamsters.

¶ Tierce: Zose Mosleys vill neffer learn! Grand prix racing czar Max Mosley‘s grandmother, Lady Redesdale, was inured to reading about her daughters’ antics (especially his mother’s) in the newspaper, but this story would probably have given her a nasty turn.

¶ Sext: Surely the most interesting story in the works right now — far outclassing our presidential election — is the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. If you ask me, Liu Qi was out of his mind when it lobbied for the honor of hosting the games.

¶ Vespers: It’s over when the little man squeaks. Sheldon Silver nixes Congestion Pricing.

(more…)

The grim redoubt of Château Gizmo.

¶ Matins: Reading The Sun Also Rises, I feel that I’m looking over Colm Tóibín’s shoulder. Compare Chapter X of the Hemingway with the Compostela pilgrimage chapter of Mr Tóibín’s very interesting “travel” book, The Sign of the Cross. Not that the latter chapter involves Pamplona.

¶ Sext: So, it turns out that willpower is a muscle, after all. You’ve got to work you’re way up to the heavy lifting. Another way of looking it would be that willpower is a habit.

¶ Vespers: A look at this week’s Book Review, at Portico.

(more…)

My favorite restaurant for lunch, Café d’Alsace. To the extreme right, a sign for Elaine’s, which I’m told is a truly awful restaurant. I’ve never set foot inside. So much for Famous Writers’ School.

¶ Matins: I’m thinking of Die Fälscher for this morning. Writing the movie up may be the last bit of sustained writing that I do for a short spell. And no, I’m not taking a vacation. Rather the reverse.

¶ Nones: One of these days, businessmen are going to have to learn to regard “redundancy” as a form of insurance — a legitimate and necessary cost of doing business. This story about a shortage of favorite Passover treats, “It’s ‘Hide the Matzo’ for Real: Tam Tams Are Scarce,” may be cute, but it’s also an object lesson.  

¶ Vespers: This week’s Friday Front visits another part of the subject that I raised two weeks ago. This time, Eric Alterman asks, who’s going to pay for the news that we think we need?

(more…)

As they say in Texas: “All awning and no produce.”

¶ Matins: Pretty soon, Manhattan’s square footage will be too pricey for groceries. We shall be forced to subsist on caviar and foie gras. Bottled water? Forget it! Dom Perignon or die!

¶ Lauds: Kathleen and I were to check in, I thought, at about seven. By the time we actually connected, at about eight, I’d been through a full cycle of dread and despair. It turned out that Kathleen thought that we would talk when she got back from a cocktail party. The moment I heard her voice, of course, I forgot my worries.

¶ Tierce: Gail Collins predicts that Barack will lose interest in the fight before Hillary does: “I say her strategic desire to keep fighting trumps his strategic desire to put the lid on it.” Read her hilarious Op-Ed piece, in which “The Uncle Al Show” has nothing to do with a former vice-president.  

¶ Nones: Édouard visits Foxwoods in the universal language of photography, so you can see the nightmare for what it is. Scroll down a bit, through the sylvan pictures, until you find yourself asking, “What the hell is that?” It’s a casino, that’s what. In the middle of a forest. Una selva not nearly oscura enough.

¶ Compline: This isn’t news, I don’t suppose, but I just heard about it: all of Mad Magazine on two DVDs.

(more…)

Pot Cove, at Hell Gate.

¶ Matins: Today’s Friday Front: “Exposure.” The story behind the Abu Ghraib photographs.

¶ Tierce: Something completely different: all three Times editorials are sober must-reads: “Socialized Compensation” (CEO remuneration — say no more), “Turkey’s Democracy on Trial” (perhaps the most interesting cultural argument going on in the world today), and “Saving a National Treasure,” (the countenanced vandalization of the Palisades).

¶ Vespers: Oh, dear. Ashley Dupré. Girls Gone Wild. Been there, done that. Underage, too! (Thanks, Roman.)

(more…)

La grosse Pomme, vu du comté de la Reine. (Le nord à droite.)

¶ Matins: A look at this week’s Book Review.

¶ Tierce: Within a little more than a week — Eliot Spitzer’s scandal erupted in public only last Monday — the complexion of American politics seems to have changed, and the change is marked by two speeches, delivered, respectively, by Barack Obama and David Paterson.

And don’t miss a Great American Car Story by the Ganome.

¶ Sext: Women of the world (not to be confused with Women of the World — although most of them probably are both) discuss Eliot Spitzer’s lapses. “Bad manners,” says Nancy Lee Andrews, at one point Ringo Starr’s fiancée.

¶ Nones: Confused about which way is up in FreeMarketLand? This report in the Times, which, for all I know, may be a daily feature, does a fine job of connected all the dots with a remarkably clear coherence.

(more…)

In beautiful downtown Niantic, the splendid Morton Hotel.

¶ Matins: It was great to get out of town, and I really must get out more often — especially to New England. On Friday night, though, I was very glad to be in town. Listening to the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.

¶ Tierce: So, there’s a Gold’s Gym in Haiti. It’s not for everyone, though. Why does this example of global free-market capitalism seem so totally unprogressive?

¶ Sext: Rah! Rah! Rah! My prep school’s latest claim to fame! Go Cecil! (Blair’s development office must be thrilled by this — development.)

¶ Vespers: How cool is that: your cell phone is your boarding pass! (The airline sends you a message containing a two-dimensional bar code that’s very hard to counterfeit.)

¶ Compline: Souvenir of the Weekend Past: a song that I had never heard in my life. I even thought that Riann was making it up. But Kathleen sang it lustily when I asked her about it last night. In her day, “boppin'” was replaced by “bashin’.”

(more…)

¶ Matins: This week’s Friday Front, at Portico. It may be that the question is not: how important are newspapers? But rather: how else can their vital functions, if any, be performed?

¶ Nones: I wonder if we’ve gotten any better at forecasting. Here’s an amenity that New York surely ought to have boasted by now…

¶ Vespers: He came in wanting to be the new McKinley, but he’s going to go out as a second Hoover. Oh, let’s hope not — no matter how hard he doesn’t try.

(more…)

Intimations of le printemps

¶ Matins: Finally, our tickets for Come Back, Little Sheba. Sooner or later, all the Off-Broadway supporting actors appear on Law & Order. In a twist, one of the Law & Order stars sppears on Broadway!

¶ Tierce: The lesson of 142,000 free parking passes: understanding the difference between a perquisite and a privilege.

¶ Sext: A new reader of Portico just wrote to me to comment on The Devils of Loudun, which is very nice indeed, but I mention it here because the writer happens to have a site that shares many of my ambitions, The Pequod.

¶ Vespers: At long last, a disgrace in the Bronx will be cleared up. The Bronx Borough Courthouse, a beaux-arts jewel that sits at the end of a long vista, will become a charter school in the fall. Read Timonthy Williams’s story in the Times, but be sure to click on the photo, the better to see the building and how it has been defaced over the years. 

(more…)

This week’s article isn’t online yet, for which I apologize. Christopher Leinberger looks at the forecast for suburbia, particularly the more recent, far-flung areas of sprawl, which are typically remote from long-established lines of public transportation. If you’d asked me what I expected two years ago, I’d have pinned change on rising energy costs. It looks, though, as though what began as the “subprime” mortgage crisis has actually tilted the trends.

At Windy Ridge, a recently built starter-home development seven miles northwest of Charlotte, North Carolina, 81 of the community’s 132 small, vinyl-sided houses were in foreclosure as of late last year. Vandals have kicked in doors and stripped the copper wire from vacant houses; drug users and homeless people have furtively moved in. In December, after a stray bullet blasted through her son’s bedroom and into her own, Laurie Talbot, who’d moved to Windy Ridge from New York in 2005, told The Charlotte Observer, “I thought I’d bought a home in Pleasantville. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that stuff like this would happen.”

¶ Christopher S Leinberger on the Future of Suburbia, in The Atlantic.

The housing of the Temple of Dendur complex at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — the crooked made straight.

This picture reminds me of an article that I clipped out of a New Yorker from last December, a piece by Malcolm Gladwell about IQs that I missed at the time.

To the I.Q. fundamentalist, two things are beyond dispute: first, that I.Q. tests measure some hard and identifiable trait that predicts the quality of our thinking; and, second, that this trait is stable—that is, it is determined by our genes and largely impervious to environmental influences.

Isn’t it astonishing that “IQ fundamentalism” is so tenacious, in the teeth of so much evidence and, even more, experience to the contrary? The IQ test itself seems like little more than yet another feeble attempt to rationalize the universe by adding epicycles to the epicycles.

Consider this: because the IQ test is keyed to a benchmark of 100 points for intelligence at the 50th percentile, and because — what’s this?! — test scores go up over time, the test has to be “re-normed” every ten years or so. That’s French for “made more difficult.” Why, if IQs are absolute — genetically hardwired and unvarying throughout a lifetime — do test scores go up? Do people really become smarter? Uh, no. What happens is very simple: the tests create a climate in which people do better at them. The assumptions underlying the test, which are, as Mr Gladwell points out, merely “cognitive preferences” that have nothing to do with intelligence — zero relevance — become the assumptions of everyday life. Making the test more difficult simply diffuses a more nuanced set of assumptions throughout the test-taking society — which would be everybody. To the extent that you are socialized and engaged in some kind of competitive activity (i e, work), you receive free tutoring in IQ test skills.

I loved the story about the Kpelle of Liberia. Asked to arrange things in a “smart” manner, they did so functionally, placing the knife with the potato, so that the potato could be peeled and sliced. Asked to arrange things in a “foolish” manner, they put the knife with the other tools. To the spluttering crypto-supremacist, no doubt, this thinking explains the backwardness of Africa.  

What’s more likely, I think, is that Western-style thinking strips people down to a relatively stupid phase in order to make them much, much smarter. Sadly, it’s the in the stupid phase that a lot of “educated” minds get stuck. Pope’s great lines, from the Essay on Criticism, are well worth repeating.

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.”

“Largely” there means “a lot,” as in “all one’s life long.”

Angel Franco for the Times

You’ll have to trust me on this, but I have long maintained that, in an era of cheap and fast communications, rivers leave much to be desired as political boundaries. Deserts and mountain wastes make much better frontiers, because distance trumps even the best-maintained stone walls when it comes to good neighborliness. Now, fresh evidence of my thesis comes straight from Ohio. Or is it Kentucky?

With any luck, the major Democratic Party candidates will take opposing positions on the future of the so-called Portsmouth Rock, thus introducing a healthy if novel note of substantive debate into the ongoing campaign.

On Fifth Avenue, literally.

It’s Friday morning, but there’s not a single tempting movie showing in New York City. That I haven’t already seen, that is. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I’ve been advised, is mushy and sentimental in a way that its true-life subject would have hated. As for 27 Dresses, which is showing, conveniently, right across the street, no one I know has actually seen it. This leaves No Country For Old Men, which I’m not sure I could sit through. Que faire? Meanwhile:

¶ James B Stewart on Stephen A Schwarzman, in The New Yorker.

It was only a little over four years ago, in the fall of 2003, that M le Neveu began to insist that I start up a blog. My strenuous opposition to the idea was partly rooted in my fear that I’d become a slave to the project — a not unreasonable misgiving, if easily lifted when I recognized that the only difference between slavery and a vocation is the vocation — and ownership. Far more than that, though, I was put off by odor of sophomoric self-indulgence that blogs seemed — or were reported — to give off. One man I talked to dismissed blogs as “what I had for dinner last night.” The very term, Web log, suggested dear-diary entries, and the feedback element, the comments, seemed thoroughly questionable. Not for me!

Four years later, in any case, I have certainly changed my mind about blogging. Comments remain to be sorted out, I think, and I’ve been thinking hard about how to reconceive them (without requiring any changes in the code). I expect that I shall, though, and my belief in the virtues of the Web log as a literary form has never been more intense. It’s dispiriting, therefore, to see that The New York Review of Books is still publishing the kind of thinking that would have kept me away from reading blogs, much less writing one myself, if it had not been for a brilliant graduate student’s impassioned advocacy. (I refer to M le Neveu.)

As promised on Monday, a few words about the kind of coverage that Web logs are getting — almost as childish as the blog writing that it focuses on.*

¶ Sarah Boxer on Blogs, in The New York Review of Books.

* Once again, thanks to George Snyder for linking me to Ms Boxer’s piece a day before the hard copy arrived.

Suddenly, things are simpler. We’re down to four serious presidential candidates, two for each party. Once upon a time, their intramural competition for the two election spots would have taken place pretty much out of sight. Modern television news hadn’t discovered itself, hadn’t learned how different it was from print journalism. The process of self-discovery is still ongoing. Consider Fox News’s bundling of the Super Bowl on Super Sunday with the nationwide primaries on Super Tuesday. Super!

My aunt, like everyone I know, is very excited about Barack Obama. I would be, too, if it weren’t for Hillary Clinton. And if we weren’t seven or eight months away from the Democratic Party’s convention. Seven or eight months of fratricidal structure, conducted in full view of friend and foe alike! The prospect is so curdling that I take positive comfort in the “suspension” of John Edwards’s campaign. Perhaps, when the “black” candidate and the “woman” candidate have knocked each other out with their croquet mallets, Mr Edwards will return, to pose a serious threat to the Republican Party contender. Now that he is out of the race, however, the one thing that I am prolbablyh not going to do is follow my aunt’s advice and watch tonight’s debates.

Clearly I have become a deep-dyed cynic in my old age, like the Adolphe Menjou character in Frank Capra’s State of the Union — a film that I urge everyone to see every time a presidential election comes round. I really don’t care who’s in the White House so long aa it (a) is a Democrat but (b) is not Jimmy Carter. You would think that we don’t have to worry about the second part anymore, but Democrats have an alarming ability to bloom into Jimmy Carter hybrids. Mrs Clinton is just as tedious to listen to as the Georgia president, while Mr Obama has all of those outsider’s disadvantages.

If I were a normal person, I would find a candidate that I liked — at this point, with John Edwards out of the race, it would probably be Hillary Clinton (my mistrust of Barack Obama is as visceral as everyone else’s dislike of Hillary) — and content myself with hoping that she’d win in November. But I left that kindergarten behind a long time ago. I don’t allow myself to think how grand my favorite candidate would be in the White House any more than I waste my time plannint how I’d spend lottery winnings (it helps in the latter instance that I never buy tickets). I save that for the happy January day a little less than a year from now when, if things go well, a Democrat walks through the White House door.

Happily, I’ve got the victory party covered. My daugher has fixed the date for her wedding, a few days after the election. She may think that she’s just getting married, but if the right candidate wins, her nuptials will certainly be sailing a great wave of euphoria. And if not, I’ll still be happy as can be.

Although I haven’t received my copy, George Snyder was kind enough to pass along the link to Sarah Boxer’s survey, “Blogs,” in the current issue of The New York Review of Books.

George wrote,

I will be very interested to know what you make of Miss Sarah Boxer’s piece on Blogs and books on blogs in the 14 February issue of the NYRB, for one can say she covers some ground, it was my opinion she leaves out an important element —

Us.

Or people like us.

Indeed. The curious thing about these surveys is that, even when they acknowledge Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (Ms Boxer does not), they don’t seem to understand how it underlies what is really remarkable about the Blogosphere. It allows the handful of “people like us” to gather in a way that was never before possible in the history of mankind. There are never enough of us in any one place to begin to form a group, and our affinities don’t bring us together geographically. Web logs have changed that.

Unlike other small bands of agglutinated aficionados, however, “people like us,” George, are very, very articulate. We would not be fired by The New York Review of Books for writing as we do — although there are several editors of other periodicals whom we should certainly fire!

I hope to have more to say about this on Friday.

¶ On why it is inappropriate for thinking people to talk about Stephen King — unless perchance they have something good to say.