Further evidence that Park Slope is a grim and humorless part of town — a socialist suburbia nestling in Hither Brooklyn — will be found in a story filed this morning by two Times reporters, Anemona Hartocollis and Juliet Linderman: “At a Food Co-op, a Discordant Thought: Nannies Covering Shifts.”

Jeremie Delon, 31, an on-again, off-again member, admitted to taking some pleasure from the thought that co-op members might sometimes misbehave.

Mr. Delon said he had dropped out of the co-op five years ago, after a woman yelled at him for leaving his cart in the checkout line while he went back for an item he had forgotten (another violation of co-op rules). He rejoined recently after becoming a father.

He said the co-op had asked for a birth certificate as proof of the baby’s existence, and was now chasing down the baby’s mother, demanding that she join and put in her time, because all adult members of a household are required to work shifts.

“I’m a punk rocker at heart, so rules are tough for me,” Mr. Delon said. “Sometimes I ask myself if the co-op is really worth it.”

Some members conceded that having the nanny do the work was tempting. “In my fantasy, I’d have my nanny cover my shift,” Sarah Rivkin, 39, said. But she added that she knew that would be “inappropriate.”

Anyway, she said she would be too intimidated. A friend of hers had married a Cuban immigrant, who summed up why Ms. Rivkin felt that way.

“His assessment of the co-op is that the co-op is worse than socialism,” she said. “Because at least in a socialist country, if you know the right people, you can get out of it.”

Bon weekend à tous!

What’s the good of having a refrigerator without someone to play with the magnets?  

Here in New York, the weather is unseasonably warm, and no joke. Thinking it a bad idea to overdo the spring-feverish liberation from heavy clothes, I wore what I’ve been wearing lately, minus the sweater and the scarf. A mistake; I got quite hot, running an errand up to Carnegie Hill. I was tempted to take a taxi home, but I couldn’t decide what to do for lunch. The Shake Shack, as you can imagine, was crowded, with a line threading along the window from the door — and then down the stairs, of course; it would have taken forever to do lunch. And I’d left my copy of the London Review of Books at the movies, dammit.

That’s not like me, but I was so bowled over by Unknown that it was all I could do to collect my jacket and my shoulder bag. I’m not going to appraise the plausibility of the screenplay; the best thing to be said about it was that it is never implausible. That’s because what happens to Dr Martin Harris seems so implausible to him, and Liam Neeson knows how to make Martin’s befuddlement so agonizing to us, that we’re not inclined to evaluate the likelihood of anything. The acting is superb all round — even January Jones is riveting — and Berlin provides a sleek and cosmopolitan setting. (The famous Adlon Hotel lends its services, presumably suffering no damage that CGI can’t undo.) The action is breathless but never incoherent.

Unknown depends upon the audience’s misreading of the opening scene, in which Martin and his wife, Liz (Ms Jones) fly into Berlin, where Martin is to make a presentation at a science conference. If you’ve seen the trailer for the film, then you know that Elizabeth is going not only to deny knowing Martin at the conference but also to claim that another man (Aidan Quinn) is her husband Martin. It’s quite the nightmare, but only if you make the assumptions about Martin and Elizabeth that the film wants you to make.  In this way it is different from the Bourne movies, where Jason Bourne, like a patient in analysis, seeks to retrieve memories of a past that trauma has erased. Martin Harris’s trajectory goes in the opposite direction. He wakes from a coma, four days after an accident, alarmed to discover that only he knows who he is.

Diane Kruger, who played the vampish counterspy in Inglourious Basterds, is fierce rather than glamorous this time; she playsGina, an illegal immigrant from Bosnia whose palette of hardscrabble jobs run from driving a taxi to waiting in cheap restaurants. Although Martin promises to make it up to her for bringing so much trouble into her life (and, in the end, delivers on his promise), Gina comes across as Martin’s scrappy protector, almost a patron saint. She’s physically fearless (at least behind the wheel of a car), and she has enough common sense to make up for Martin’s lack of it. Among the supporting actors, Bruno Ganz stands out as a ruminative former Stasi detective who meets his own end with courage; he seems to have seen everything and thought about it all at least twice. Other German actors who make Unknown a first-rate entertainment include Sebastian Koch, as a brilliant genetic biologist, Rainer Bock, as the Adlon’s manager; and Karl Markovics and Eva Löbau as the doctor and nurse who care for Martin during his coma and afterward. All I can about Frank Langella’s contribution is that you know that he’s playing a very bad man just by the way that he sounds like a really nice one.

I always sit in the back of movie theatres because I don’t want to risk blocking someone else’s view, but today I had another reason to be glad that there were only one or two people sitting in rows further from the screen: it hit me at the end that I must have put on quite a show myself, what with all my flinching and ducking and wincing and eye-hiding. If possible, Unknown is even more viscerally challenging than Mr Neeson’s last adventure, Taken. You can see why I forgot my LRB.

The picture of Will that I wish I’d been able to take would have shown him darting about the apartment with his left hand in his father’s and his right hand clutching a yardstick with the authority of a rudimentary Wotan (or Siegfried, maybe). At one point, he stood still enough for his mother to determine that he is 31 inches tall. He is thirteen and a half months old.  And quite pleased with himself: when he replaced a refrigerator magnet after having just pried it loose, he applauded himself in his soundless way — he doesn’t bring his hand all the way together. In my own soundless way, I applaud his parents.

 

We’ll be damned: there are Times readers who will be surprised to learn that trial lawyers are a superstitious bunch. Or maybe not; maybe Benjamin Weiser and his editors are just pretending, so that they can share a lot of ridiculous anecdotes.  

“Trial lawyers believe in jinxes,” Mr. Finzi acknowledged from White Plains, where he is defending a man in a murder trial. Along with using his keen judgment and legal skills, Mr. Finzi made clear that he was doing whatever else was necessary.

“I’ve been up here 10 days,” he said earlier this month, “and I’ve had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch every single day.”

But Joshua L. Dratel questioned his colleagues’ adherence to superstition, asking, “If where I ate dinner last night decides the merits of a case, then what’s the point of even trying?”

And Steven M. Cohen, another veteran lawyer, observed, “You certainly wouldn’t want to learn that your heart surgeon or your 747 pilot always wears the same pair of underwear when it’s time to perform.”

Ah, but surgeons and pilots actually know what they’re doing. “Keen judgment” and “legal skills” don’t come into it.

No one does outrage more appealingly than Gail Collins. Her target today is Lone Star governor Rick Perry, who seems hell-bent on creating a populous underclass of unwanted, uneducated, and untrained Texans.

Meanwhile, Perry — having chosen not to help young women avoid unwanted pregnancies and not to pay enough to educate the booming population of Texas children — wowed the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington with his states’ rights rhetoric.

Which would be fine, as I said, if his state wasn’t in charge of preparing a large chunk of the nation’s future work force. Perry used to be famous for his flirtation with talk of secession. Maybe we should encourage him to revisit it.

One thing that the Editor learned during his sojourn in Texas in the 1970s was that many people down there seem to think that they’re living in an independent republic that’s occupied by noisome federales. Maybe it’s time for the United States to withdraw its forces (and its moolah) from the alien corn.

The game with time begins right away, although it is subtly played at first. The first paragraph of the first tale begins with an episode of what would be shoplifting if a store were the victim, and not a woman in a toilet stall who has left her purse imprudently outside it. It ends, this paragraph, with Sasha, the thief, describing her feelings  about lifting the woman’s wallet to her therapist. Wo we have a foreground present in the therapist’s office, and midway present, an evening not long before the time in the therapists office, and, in the background, several planes of increasing vagueness, the nearest of which is a summary of Sasha’s treatment and her relationship with the doctor, called Coz. Behind this, an inscrutable past — Sasha’s first days in New York, glimpsed at in a list of edifying things to do that she taped to a wall; at the very back, the disappearance of Sasha’s father when she was six. Somewhere in that dark lies an explanation, presumably, for Sasha’s pathology. But we’re not going to look for explanations. What good would it do to know why stealing things invigorates Sasha. It’s enough to keep “wrong and bad and exactly right” in mind.

The episode of stealing ends well: Sasha manages to return the wallet discreetly while confessing to the owner that “It’s a problem I have.” The other woman is so relieved to have her wallet back that she agrees to keep it “between us.” Then Sasha returns to her date, Alex. Until the theft, Sasha and Alex were bored by one another; while she was stealing the wallet, Alex was settling the bill, ready to move on to something else, probably without Sasha. The theft, and then the restoration of the wallet — a sequence of hot maneuvers that Egan manages adroitly — change the date’s temperature, and Alex returns to Sasha’s apartment, where all the things that she has stolen over the years are laid out on two tables. Alex’s attention is caught by the bathtub in the kitchen — a New York arrangement that he has heard about but never seen — but eventually his eyes find the loot.

What’s all this?” Alex asked. 

He’d discovered the tables now and was staring at the pile. It looked like the work of a miniaturist beaver: a heap of objects that was illegible yet clearly not random. To Sasha’s eyes, it almost shook under its load of embarrassments and close shaves and little  riumphs and moments of pure exhilaration. It contained years of her life compressed. The screwdriver was at the outer edge. Sasha moved closer to Alex, drawn to the sight of him taking everything in.

“And how did you feel, standing with Alex in front of all those things you’d stolen?” Coz asked.

Sasha turned her face into the blue couch because her cheeks were heating up and she hated that. She didn’t want to explain to Coz the mix of feelings she’d had, standing there with Alex: the pride she took in these objects, a tenderness that was only heightened by the shame of their acquisition. She’d risked everything, and here was the result: the raw, warped core of her life. Watching Alex move his eyes over the pile of objects stirred something in Sasha. She put her arms around him from behind, and he turned, surprised, but willing.

The tast for me is to relate to this pathology. Not to understand it, much less explain it, but relate to it. The temptation to heave the door shut on Sasha is as overwhelming as is her itch to steal other people’s stuff. That I can fairly grasp. it’s the excitement and the triumph that elude me. I did a lot of small-time rotten things when I was a kid, and they never made me feel anything but desperately ashamed. Each petty crime was its own Fall; until I pulled the chair out from the sixth-grade classmate as she was sitting down, I had no idea just how awful a thing it was to do; the memory, quite vivid fifty years later, still makes me shudder. I was driven by curiosity, but the bits of knowledge turned out to be wildly expensive, and I always wished that I hadn’t wanted to know. With Sasha it seems to be different. I cannot imagine constructing that miniaturist pile. 

But I’m as exciting about trying to get close to this as Sasha was by the woman’s wallet.

Like the lady said… We had never heard of Gene Sharp until reading about him in Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s story this morning. No matter; we’re instant fans of any specialist in non-violent resistance.

Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”

David Leonhardt‘s piece on the importance of cities generally and the impact of de-urbanization on Egypt in particular climaxes with an eye-popping figure.

A 35-year-old urban Egyptian man with a high school education who moves to the United States can expect an incredible eightfold increase in living standards, the researchers found. Immigrants from only two countries, Yemen and Nigeria, receive a larger boost. In effect, these are the countries with the biggest gap between what their workers can produce in a different environment and what they are actually producing at home.

No wonder 19 percent of Egyptians told Gallup (well before the protests) that they would move to another country if they could. Mr. Clemens says that for every green card the United States awarded in a recent immigration lottery, 146 Egyptians had applied

So one of the tasks facing Mr. Mubarak’s successors will be creating places within Egypt where Egyptians want to move, much as Indian workers have flowed into Bangalore and Brazilian workers have flowed into Rio.

How supremely piquant it was to read, in one swallow, Douglas Coupland’s book, Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! (the subtitle comes from a line spoken by McLuhan himself in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall), on the day when Borders’ bankruptcy, long anticipated, was finally announced. Way back when Borders was taking off, expanding nationally, buying WaldenBooks, hadn’t anybody read The Gutenberg Galaxy?

I’m not going to pretend that I read it, not the whole thing. Like everyone else, I thought, at the time, that Marshall McLuhan was hostile to the high culture of the West, and that he relished its immolation in staticky, low-resolution images of bad television. I thought that he welcomed the End of Civilization As We Knew It. I also thought that he was impossible to read. I regarded McLuhan as a mad Canadian, driven by the boredom of the prairies to predict a human cataclysm. But I sensed that he was right about books, somehow or other.

The Enlightenment dream of mass readerships turns out not to have been psychologically acute. For most people, reading is an escapist, not an instructive pastime. Few people read to learn if they’re not required to do so. The vast run of retail history books, for example, is hardly more scholarly than the romance fiction and knitting manuals that “history buffs” look down their noses at on their wives’ and girlfriends’ nightstands; weighty tomes as they may be, the books simply massage pre-existing accumulations of facts relating to this or that war. Reading, ironically, is not a visual activity; it puts our ocular apparatus to an unintended use. (Nothing is more natural than unintended uses.) Most people would rather sit back and watch something. For a century and a half or so, beginning in 1800, a combination of civic virtue — democracies have been thought to depend upon literate electorates —and the absence of alternative entertainments conspired to create the illusion of a vast reading public. Well, there may actually have been a vast reading public, for a while. But it was not a willing one, and when technology advanced after World War II, and authority retreated, books were replaced by screens.

Coupland’s biography, of course, is merely an extended essay, blending stories from McLuhan’s life with glancing meditations on the vastness of Canada, academic pettifoggery, and the Internet — something that McLuhan would have loved to hate, according to the author. This is the kind of book that we like to read now: brisk, knowing, and personal. Of course a biography ought to be personal, you might say, but I mean personal with respect to the writer, who is something of a cultural groundbreaker himself. (Coupland coined the term “Generation X.”)  It will not replace the serious studies by Marchand and Gordon that are mentioned at the outset (but identified only in the notes), but who would read those now save students of intellectual history? You Know Nothing of My Work! links the mad scientist to the mad world that he foresaw. If it fails to deliver a plausible account of the transformation of a Renaissance scholar into a media guru for whom that very term had to be invented, it does a fine job of suggesting why nobody — not McLuhan, not the businessmen who retained him, not even Pierre Trudeau — was able to mine any practical advantage from his work. If McLuhan sensed the outlines of a coming era, he was nevertheless unable to speed the coming. Much of the time, he comes across as a more successful John Forbes Nash, possessed of a beautiful mind that was better attuned to perceptible patterns.

At the end of the book, Coupland tells us that he was inspired to write it by the history of his own Canadian family, and he evokes the life of his cement-salesman grandfather in a passage that’s worthy of Alice Munro.

What thoughts would fill the mind of Arthur Lemuel Campbell? Did he hate the past? Did he want to drive into the future, and, if so, where did he perceive the future as being — to the west? To the east? Above his head? All that driving and all that flatness, all thoses Sundays and rooming house meals with pursed lips and ham hock dinners with creamed corn and the fear of God. Our Father, who are in heaven. And always the family left behind — High River; Regina; Edmonton; Swift Current — family gone crazy, family gone religious, family dying young. Don’t complain and don’t explain. Cut your losses. Cut your family before they cut you. Be weak. Be crazy. Be insane. Be humble. Bow before God. Pretend you’re something you’re not. Rise above your station and pay the price. Keep you opinions to yourself. Die alone, even when surrounded by others. You will be judged. There will never be peace. There will never be sanctuary, because there will always be something lurking on the other side of the horizon that will be a threat to you. Pay cash. Credit is the devil.

Indeed.

Of all the bookstores that I’ve ever visited, Borders was easily the most decadent, the most intoxicated by the idea that books are precious objects that radiate their contents in glimmering auras; there can’t be any need to read books if you’re surrounded by so many excellent titles. (The only thing missing was a line of fragrances named after beloved classics and redolent of the freshest sawdust.) I detected nothing cynical about this projection; the good people at Borders were good people. But there were far too many of them. A proper bookshop ought to be a bit creaky, inconvenient, and forbidding — just a bit. Borders was entirely too dreamy.

There’s an exciting movie to be made in the story of Ahmed ElShabrawy, an Egyptian entrepreneur who managed to puncture the Mubarak régime’s Internet shutdown.  

With the streets unsafe because of marauding bands of looters, he decided to risk having a driver bring $7,000 in satellite equipment, including a four-foot dish, from Cairo, and somehow he was connected internationally again by Monday evening.

Steeling himself for the blast of complaints from angry customers — his company also provides texting services in Europe and the Middle East — Mr. ElShabrawy found time to post videos of the protests in Mansoura on his Facebook page. But with security officials asking questions about what he was up to, he did not dare hook up his domestic subscribers.
Then, gingerly, he reached out to his international customers, his profuse apologies already framed in his mind.

The response that poured in astonished Mr. ElShabrawy, who is nothing if not a conscientious businessman, even in turbulent times. “People said: ‘Don’t worry about that. We are fine and we need to know that you are fine. We are all supporting you.’ ”

Scientists have discovered that low-grade bullying among social rivals is far more common in high schools than the thuggish kind. The battle for popularity may not break bones, but it becomes more unpleasant as contestants approach the top of the tree — only to disappear, according to Tara Parker-Pope, among the top two percentiles.

“At the very top you start to see a reversal — the kids in the top 2 percent are less likely to be aggressive,” Dr. Faris said. “The interpretation I favor is that they no longer need to be aggressive because they’re at the top, and further aggression could be counterproductive, signaling insecurity with their social position.

“It’s possible that they’re incredibly friendly and everybody loves them and they were never mean, but I’m not so convinced by that, because there are so many kids right behind them in the hierarchy who are highly aggressive.”

Over all, the research shows that about a third of students are involved in aggressive behavior. In another paper presented last year, Dr. Faris reported that most teenage aggression is directed at social rivals — “maybe one rung ahead of you or right beneath you,” as he put it, “rather than the kid who is completely unprotected and isolated.”

It occurs to us that social bullying is a kind of vaccine that renders inoculated adolescents immune to the worst ravages of adult envy and jealousy. There might be something good to say about high school, after all.

I left my cap at the restaurant where a friend and I had croques monsieur for lunch today. Happily, I missed it right away — when, crossing Madison Avenue, I stepped into the sunlight; it was still frigid, but my scalp went into immediate sunburn alert — so we didn’t have to retrace too many steps. As we turned the corner by the restaurant, I saw my cap hanging on a sort of post just outside the door. My friend assured me that I had not put it there myself. I was a bit put out; why would the restaurant staff put my cap outside where anyone passing by might take it? “Because they knew you’d be back in ten seconds, it’s so cold,” said my friend. There was no arguing with that; it’s exactly what happened.

***

Tidying the bedroom yesterday afternoon, I watched Les Choristes, Christophe Barratier’s heartwarming reform-school film, starring Gérard Juqnot. Even before it began, the sight of M Juqnot on the menu screen choked me up, and I wept more or less copiously through the movie. If you haven’t seen it, Les Choristes is about a discouraged musician, one Clément Mathieu (M Juqnot) who takes a job as prefect at a boarding school for troublesome boys. The headmaster is a monster who believes in “action-reaction,” or crime and punishment, and every infraction is punished lavishly. To put something positive in the lives of his wretched charges (who are, however, amply troublesome and always up to some mischief), Mathieu forms them into a chorus. Barratier isn’t so naive as to propose that the transformative power of music &c tames the boys’ savage breasts. It’s Mathieu’s interest and concern that restores their faith in humanity. The music is lovely, though. I should not have thought that Rameau could make me blubber like a baby. 

Gérard Jucqnot plays a very similar role in Faubourg 36,  Barratier’s other movie. Patiently self-effacing, bottomlessly good-natured, a careworn saint. Has anyone in Hollywood specialized in this kind of role? Aside, that is, from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton; has anyone played such parts earnestly, not for laughs?

When Les Choristes was over, I had the most awful sinus headache.

***

In a recent email, a good friend shared a dream that she’d had — about us.

I had a very strange dream the other night involving you and Kathleen. I was in your apartment admiring a lovely glass-fronted bookcase and Kathleen said that the two of you had decided to get rid of it. I asked what was going in its place and Kathleen responded ‘a guillotine.’ When I asked where one would get a guillotine, Kathleen told me that she found one that could be rented for $600.

I wish that I could tell you why I find this so funny, but I can’t, and it’s not because I don’t know. It’s because I don’t want to get anybody into trouble. Let’s just say that, if there were no repercussions to the use and enjoyment of a guillotine in the privacy of one’s home, aside from the $600 rental fee, then somebody in that dream — and I’m not saying who — would definitely arrange to have one delivered immediately.

It has been a long winter. “Everyone’s being crabby,” said Somebody, “and I’m being crabby right back.” 

We can’t think what the Times is up to, publishing William Glaberson’s “A Legal Manual for an Apocalpytic New York.” It’s not that readers ought to be protected from awareness of such dismal reckonings. But if we’re going to be told how the courts are preparing to deal with quarantines and evacuations and worse, let’s hear the news in a more interactive forum. or at least in a context that encourages reflection and preparation instead of panic.

Perhaps the point of the story is to show that the courts don’t really know what they’re doing.

But the guide also presents a sober rendition of what the realities might be in dire times. The suspension of laws, it says, is subject to constitutional rights. But then it adds, “This should not prove to be an obstacle, because federal and state constitutional restraints permit expeditious actions in emergency situations.”

When there is not enough medicine for everyone in an emergency, it notes, there is no clear legal guidepost. It suggests legal decisions would most likely involve an analysis that “balances the obligation to save the greatest number of lives against the obligation to care for each single patient,” perhaps giving preference to those with the best chance to survive. It points out, though, that elderly and disabled people might have a legal claim if they are discriminated against at such moments of crisis.

That is almost the opposite of news. On a “news you can use” scale, this report rates a 0.5.

The sale of Arianna Huffington’s collaborative Web site to AOL has induced a rash of overdue head-scratching. This morning, David Pogue wonders if Twitter is such great idea after all.

It will be interesting to see how the legions of unpaid bloggers at The Huffington Post react to the merger with AOL. Typing away for an upstart blog — founded by the lefty pundit Arianna Huffington and the technology executive Kenneth Lerer — would seem to be a little different from cranking copy for AOL, a large American media company with a market capitalization of $2.2 billion.

(And it’s going to seem very different to some other media companies. The Huffington Post has perfected the art of — how shall we say it? — enthusiastic aggregation. Most of the news on the site is rewritten from other sources, then given a single link to the original. Many media companies, used to seeing their scoops get picked off by HuffPo and others, have decided that legal action isn’t worth the bother. They might feel differently now.)

Perhaps content will remain bifurcated into professional and amateur streams, but as social networks eat away at media mindshare and the advertising base, I’m not so sure. If it happens, I’ll have no one but myself to blame. Last time I checked, I had written or shared over 11,000 items on Twitter. It’s a nice collection of short-form work, and I’ve been rewarded with lot of followers … and exactly no money. If and when the folks at Twitter cash out, some tiny fraction of that value will have been created by me.

There is no good reason for not metering traffic for micropayments. You may heard of an amazing inventrion that keeps track of gazillions of computations: the “digital computer.”

Brian Christian’s feature article in the current issue of The Atlantic, “Mind vs Machines,” is billed on the cover as “Why Machines Will Never Beat the Human Mind,” which nicely captures the distance between what the magazine’s editors think will sell and Christian’s rather different point, reflected in the title of his forthcoming book, from which the piece was adapted: The Most Human Human: What Talking With Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive. You can win an award for being “the most human human,” as Christian himself has done, if you participate in the Loebner Prize, an annual event that recreates the Turing Test, and snatch victory from the jaws of artificial-intelligence engineers more frequently than the other human  contestants. The crux of Christian’s report is that what makes the Turing Test compelling is the insight that it generates into human complexity. The funhouse aspect of the exercise — trying to fool judges into thinking that they’re talking to people when they’re in fact talking to machines — makes for good headlines, but if Brian Christian is correct, we can expect a jockeying back and forth between man and motherboard in which human beings, regularly losing the title to ever-smarter computers, just as regularly figure out how to win it back. 

Christian reminds us of Alan Turing’s brilliant condensation of the thorny question that emerged after World War II: would the new computing machines ever be capable of thought?

Instead of debating this question on purely theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. Several judges each pose questions, via computer terminal, to several pairs of unseen correspondents, one a human “confederate,” the other a computer program, and attempt to discover which is which. The dialogue can range from small talk to trivia questions, from celebrity gossip to heavy-duty philosophy — the whole gamut of human conversation. Turing predicted that by the year 2000 computers would be able to fool 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation, and that as a result, one would “be able to speak of machines as thinking without expecting to be contradicted.” 

The millennium turned without smiling on Turing’s forecast, but, in 2008, a computer program came within a hair of winning the Loebner Prize.  This inspired Christian to participate in 2009 — and not only that, but to go for the “most human human” award while he was at it. There was nothing frivolous about his undertaking; it’s quite clear that he didn’t sign up for the test so that he could write a breezy article about it. He was motivated by the fear that human beings were giving up too easily — weren’t, in fact, trying to win. While the AI teams poured boundless time and effort into the design of their simulators, the human confederates were being advised, fatuously, to “just be yourself.” As Christian says, it’s hard to tell whether this pap reflected an exaggerated conception of human intelligence or an attempt to fix the fight in the machines’ favor. 

To the extent that “just be yourself” means anything, it is better expressed in one word: “Relax.” That’s what coaches always seem to be telling their athletes before the big fight, and for highly-trained minds and bodies, it’s probably sound. You can’t show your stuff to true advantage if you’re worrying about what you’ve got. But ordinary people — this is what “ordinary” means — don’t have any stuff to show. What “just be yourself” says to them is “don’t sweat it.” So, on one side, we have ardent engineers, with their brilliant insights and excruciating attention to detail — and probably some serious funding. On the other, “don’t sweat it.” Rocket scientists versus slackers — not much of a contest. 

Christian doesn’t follow this peculiar asymmetry (not in The Atlantic, anyway), but what’s at work here is the same decayed snobbishness with which the Educational Testing Service insists that special preparatory courses and other preliminary efforts are irrelevant to success on its examinations. This is patently untrue, but the cachet of the ETS achievement and aptitude tests remains bound up in the idea that success in life does not require specialized training. This was the lesson taught to us by the great English gentleman of Victorian fact and fiction, men who, by following their whims as far as fortune allowed, acquired skills and insights of almost universal application. Boy Scouts varied this theme by straining to remain semper paratus while carrying the lightest backback. Executive suites are still stuffed with affable generalists who have learned what they know about life from playing golf. In this clubby atmosphere, study and preparation, “boning up” of any kind, looks like a kind of cheating. 

Even Christian is blown sideways by the gale force of this prejudice; he sounds crashingly unsportsmanlike. 

And so another piece of my confederate strategy fell into place. I would treat the Turing Test’s strange and unfamiliar textual medium more like spoken English, and less like the written language. I would attempt to disrupt the turn-taking “wait and parse” pattern that computers understand, and create a single, flowing chart of verbal behavior, emphasizing timing. If computers understand little about verbal “harmony,” they understand even less about rhythm. 

If nothing was happening on my screen, whether or not it was my turn, I’d elaborate a little on my answer, or add a parenthetical, or throw a question back at the judge — just as we offer and/or fill audible silence when we talk out loud. If the judge too too long corresponding to the next question, I’d keep talking. I would be the one (unlike the bot) with something to prove. If I knew what the judge was about to write, I’d spare him the keystrokes and jump in.

It’s almost funny, how shot through this passage is with the air of deception. All these conscious little tricks, all designed to “fool,” you almost think, the judge into regarding Christian as exactly what he is: a real person.  

“Mind vs Machine” shares some invaluable observations about vernacular discourse. In heated exchanges, for example, people respond more and more exclusively to whatever has just been said, and less and less to the overall tenor of the argument. Researcher (and three-time winner of the “most human computer” prize) Richard Wallace has discovered that “most casual conversation is ‘state-less,’ that is, each reply depends only on the current query, without any knowledge of the history of the conversation required to formulate the reply.” This is a windfall for programmers, because a sudden lurch into ill-tempered language is all too convincing evidence of a human-ature tantrum, and very easy for a machine to fake. Christian draws a very practical lesson: 

Aware of the stateless, knee-jerk character of the terse remark I want to blurt out, I recognize that that remark has more to do with a reflex reaction to the very last sentence of the conversation than with either the issue at hand or the person I’m talking to. All of a sudden, the absurdity and ridiculousness of this kind of escalation become quantitatively clear, and, contemptuously unwilling to act like a bot, I steer myself toward a more “stateful” response: better living through science. 

I hope that Christian’s book will make that final point more clearly and happily than his article does. I was deeply put off by a passage that I read before I knew what Christian was up to, when, that is, it seemed that he was doing nothing more interesting than moaning about the possibility that we might some day be overtaken by our mechanical creations. 

The story of the 21st century will be, in part, the story of the drawing and redrawing of those battle lines, the story of Homo spaiens trying to stake a claim on shifting ground, flanked by beast and machine, pinned between meat and math.  

That’s pungent prose, but the metaphor of military conflict could hardly be less welcome — or less apposite to Christian’s far more gracious point, which is that computers, instead of supplanting us, can show us how to be better at what we already are. 

***

If you believe that human beings are the Lords of Creation, then there is nothing to worry about when you sit down to dinner; but if you believe rather that we’re just one species among many, then eating becomes tragic, because it requires us to kill. My own view is that only the only way to draw a line between eating flesh and eating anything at all is to subscribe to a variant of the pathetic fallacy, according to which animals, being more like us than plants, merit kinder treatment — so it’s okay to finish your vegetables. We have to wonder what the editors of The Atlanticwere thinking when they assigned a passel of recent “foodie” books to BR Myers, the Green and vegan professor of North Korean literature. Oh, they were probably hoping for exactly what he delivered, a steaming denunciation of the lot. It’s easy to see why the prim Myers would dislike the louche Anthony Bourdain or the spiritual Kim Severson. But Michael Pollan? 

The moral logic in Pollan’s hugely successful book now informs all food writing: the refined palate rejects the taaste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans — from which it follows that to serve one’s palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself. This affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals — but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction. 

If you can find a passage in which Michael Pollan endorses any of the crimes enumerated in the second sentence, please write to Myers to thank him for the tip. Otherwise — and I’m fairly confident that it will have to be “otherwise” — you must still deal with Myers’ attack on everyone else mentioned in his review. I feel none of Myers’s hostility to today’s chic food writers, but I have lost interest in what they have to say, partly because they don’t begin to be honest about the economic elitism that underpins their outlook — those simple, slow-food pleasures are luxury goods, and always will be — and partly because, without getting excited about it, I do agree with Livy (referenced by Myers), that “the glorification of chefs” is probably unhealthy. Writing about food ought to be modest — that’s one of the appeals of Julia Child’s books. Child agreed with the fundamental French precept that there is one (1) right way to do everything, and she sought to convey the rules as clearly as possible to heterodox Americans; but she never raised her voice or succumbed to rapture. Today’s foodies haven’t got Child’s good manners.

The more lives sacrificed for a dinner, the more impressive the eater. Dana Goodyear: “Thirty duck hearts in curry — The ethos of this kind of cooking is undeniably macho.” Amorality as ethos, callousness as bravery, queenly self-absorption as machismo; no small perversion of language is needed to spin heroism out of an evening spent in a chair. 

Well, I couldn’t put it down.  

***

In his favorable review of Sean McMeekin’s The Berlin-Baghdad Expresss: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, Christopher Hitchens identifies the people who ought to read this book (which would include me): 

If asked to discuss some of the events of that period that shaped our world and the world of Osama, many educated people could cite T E Lawrence’s Arab Revolt, the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement portioning out the post-war Middle East, and the Balfour Declaration, which prefigured the coming of the Jewish state. But who can speak with confidence of Max von Oppenheim, the godfather of German “Orientalism” and a sponsor of holy war? An understanding of this conjuncture is essential. It helps supply a key to the collapse of the Islamic caliphate — bin Laden’s most enduring cause of rage — and to the extermination of the Armenians, the swift success of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the relative independence of modern Iran, as well as the continuing divorce between Sunni and Shia Muslims. 

Check!

On a hunch, the Times asked “an expert in online search,” Doug Pierce, to look into “search engine optimization” at JC Penney, which was placing the department store’s links at the top of Google searches for all sorts of things. The upshot was that Google performed a “manual action” to undo Penney’s contractor’s black-hattery. The report, by David Segal, was the weekend’s best long read.

The links do not bear any fingerprints, but nothing else about them was particularly subtle. Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.

Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.

There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on.

Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”