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.

Matins

¶ If a recession officially ends in a jobless recovery, do we need to overhaul the definition of a recession? (The new thing that we learned about today was the Business Cycle Dating Committee, a branch of the National Bureau of Economic Research that doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page yet.) We think not: we need a new scale that looks at employment regardless of other economic factors. Catherine Rampell reports at the Times.

This new pattern of jobless recoveries has led to some complaints that employment should play a more prominent role in dating business cycles and to criticism that a jobless recovery is not truly a recovery at all. Business Cycle Dating Committee members have been reluctant to change their criteria too drastically, though, because they want to maintain consistency in the official chronology of contractions and expansions.

While all three recent recoveries have been weak for employment, the job market has to cover the most ground from the latest recession.

From December 2007 to June 2009, the American economy lost more than 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs, the largest decline since World War II. And through December 2009, the month that employment hit bottom, the nation had lost more than 6 percent of its jobs.

The unemployment rate, which comes from a different survey, peaked last October at 10.1 percent. The postwar high was in 1982, at 10.8 percent. But the composition of the work force was very different in the 1980s — it was younger, and younger people tend to have higher unemployment rates — and so if adjusted for age, unemployment this time around actually looks much worse.

While we don’t hold the government responsible for maintaining a supply of jobs — not yet, anyway — we believe that if unemployment figures were approached as a singular problem, rather than as a consequence of business conditions, then the government would develop more effective and intelligent forecasts and associated policies.

Lauds

¶ By curious coincidence, adjacent Arts Journal feeds concern the problem with reality that today’s Americans seem to be having, thanks in no small part to something called, heaven knows why, “reality television.” First, in a piece that seems motivated largely by disgust over Casey Affleck’s faux documentary, I’m Still Here, Patrick Goldstein resigns himself to the sway of the “mythmakers.”

I don’t mean to put all the blame on filmmakers and publicity seeking scam artists. If you pay any attention to world affairs, you could easily argue that all too many people are no longer swayed by fact-based authority of any kind. They believe what they want to believe, facts be damned, which is why zealots can go around thinking that Barack Obama is a Muslim while untold numbers of people across the Middle East are somehow convinced that no Jews were killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks because they were evacuated before the planes hit the Twin Towers.

When it comes to entertainment, we in the media are sticklers for attributable facts. When a Hollywood biopic stretches the truth, we are the first to raise a ruckus. But in Hollywood, the truth is seen as being much more elastic, in part because film and TV writers create drama for a living, in part because people in showbiz tell so many white lies every day that the notion of a bigger truth often eludes them.

For now, entertainment consumers have sided with the mythmakers. In today’s media-saturated age it is simply too bewildering to try to make sense of what is real anymore. If a reality TV show is totally manufactured–so be it. It doesn’t interfere with our enjoyment of the storyline or the characters. The lines between artifice and reality have become so hopelessly blurred that very few of us take offense at being manipulated anywhere. When it comes to entertainment, we’ve gotten into the habit of lying back and enjoying it.

Meanwhile, a study published in the Journal of Risk Research finds that everyone belongs to a choir and is looking for an agreeable preacher.

After surveying 1,500 people, the researchers found that those who were “egalitarian and resentful of economic inequality” were more likely to assume that there was scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to climate change, but not that it’s safe to dispose of nuclear waste underground. Those who were more “hierarchical, individualistic and connected to industry and commerce” were more likely to make the opposite assumptions.

According to reports from the National Academy of Sciences, human activity is contributing to climate change and nuclear waste can be buried safely in certain designated sites.

“It’s not that one group is paying more attention to what scientific consensus is,” said Dan Kahan, a law professor at Yale and author of the study. But there’s a pervasive tendency to form perceptions of scientific consensus that reinforce people’s values.

Prime

¶ Perhaps we’re wanting in seriousness, but one of the things we love about Joshua Brown is his drolly jaundiced view of homo speculator. He gives great graph, too. (The Reformed Broker)

There is a pattern in place that you may want to familiarize yourself with as history has just repeated itself six quarters in a row.  The pattern has been a run up in stocks at the beginning of earnings season’s opening month followed by the almost inevitable denouement as hearts are broken and focus is diverted elsewhere.

In each of the last six quarters, the Dow Jones was up on average seven of the first ten days of the first reporting month (Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct).  Each of these rallies ended up succumbing to selling, even during quarters with high percentage beat rates.  This action is both a commentary on our Twitter-addled attention spans and a classic embodiment of a Wall Street law so old that Hammurabi himself may have written it -Buy on the rumor, sell on the news.

Tierce

¶ At Wired Science, Lisa Grossman writes about clouds, and how they’re made up of — plants, mostly. Except, that is, when they come from man-made particulates. In which case, they’re bigger, whiter, more reflective and — get this — therefore tending to cooling the atmosphere.

The team also found that clouds and rain in the region mostly came from the plants. Plants emit gases from their leaves and sap, which is one reason why they have distinctive smells. When those gases interact with sunlight, their chemistry changes such that they condense from diffuse gas to liquid droplets less than one micrometer — a thousandth of a millimeter — in size. These droplets then serve as the nucleus of a cloud.

Particles larger than one micrometer, which are important in forming ice crystals, also came from plant matter like pollen, fungus spores and bits of crumpled up leaf.

Sext

¶ What we like most about the Internet is the way it captures what’s best about going to a good school: interesting people talk about interesting things that you may or may not ever know more about. It wouldn’t have occurred to us to say so when we were in school, but now we’d say that knowing someone like Steerforth, the English used book dealer who shares what passes through his hands, is a super way of expanding one’s mental map of the Known-About Universe — which in our humbler moments we call the Map of Ignorance.

The other day, or thereabouts, Steerforth encountered the journalist and novelist Philip Gibbs, who was born when Daniel Deronda was “recent fiction” and who died when the Beatles were getting going.

A liberal by nature who, in addition to his anti-war views, had also been a keen supporter of the suffragettes, Philip Gibbs was a controversial figure at times. But his prominence opened many doors and in the 1920s, he became the first journalist to interview the Pope (Gibbs was a Catholic, which must have helped).

By the time of his death in 1962, Philip Gibbs was one of the most well-known writers of his day. He left a huge body of work, consisting of over 40 novels and around a dozen non-fiction books, which in their day were bestsellers. So why has his name been forgotten?

It could be argued that Gibbs’ obscurity says more about the ephemeral nature of journalism than his gifts as a writer. But George Orwell didn’t suffer the same fate, so perhaps Gibbs’ books just weren’t that good.

During the last few months I’ve read two works by Philip Gibbs: a novel called Blood Relations and an autobiography called The Pageant of the Years. Both books were flawed, but highly enjoyable reads. Neither book deserves to be out of print.

Nones

¶ Status Update: European Royals, Scandals Notwithstanding, Aren’t Going Anywhere. (But they’d better be better at royalishness.) Monarchs are merrier (than politicians)! Patricia Treble, reporting at Macleans, finds that the Swedish crown princess’s consort has an ordinariness problem. (via Real Clear World)

The Swedish backlash, though, offers a surprising clue as to why neither the public nor politicians are throwing dust cloths over Europe’s thrones just yet. Asked why the royals were down in the polls, Joakim Nergelius, a constitutional law professor at Örebro University, suggests that one major problem was the groom. “He came from an ordinary Swedish family,” Nergelius says. “There is nothing special [about] him. He’s not extremely talented, so he’s too boring and people think it makes the monarchy less exciting.” The problem, in other words, was that in egalitarian Sweden, Westling, a gym owner and personal trainer, wasn’t aristocratic enough—not even with a new wardrobe and haircut, training in the crucial art of small talk and a fancy title, duke of Västergötland.

Vespers

¶ As readerly people continue to ponder the fate of David Markson’s library (which also doesn’t have its own Wikipedia page yet — but that’s why there’s Google) — we begin to think that it’s the right fate.The books that Markson owned and annotated were cast to the winds, as it were (and not just after his death; he sold plenty of books just to raise pin money. Having passed through the hands of readers, some of whom will be enriched by having possessed the “Markson edition,” they’ll be collected, in a fine game of acquisitive scholarship, for some university library. Craig Fehrman reflects on authors’ libraries generally, and Markson’s in particular, at the Globe. (via The Morning News)

Compline

¶ What’s the matter with populists, liberals are always asking. Can’t they see that the plutocrats who control the parties of the right are out to oppress them with monopolies and joblessness? In an astringent rebuttal, William Hoagland suggests that the only difference between liberals and plutocrats, in the populist view, is the liberal’s annoying sanctimony. (Boston Review; via 3 Quarks Daily)

The anti-intellectual evangelicalism that Hofstadter saw as inherent in populism and that so upsets liberals today may be witnessed in Bryan’s opposition to teaching Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species, a conservative position that brought Bryan’s career to a dramatic end in the famous Scopes “monkey” trial. Bryan’s antipathy toward teaching evolution—really toward evolution itself—might seem to foreshadow populism’s fateful shift from left to right, when populists began promoting cultural conservatism instead of economic fairness. That is the shift lamented by writers such as Frank and traced by Michael Kazin in The Populist Persuasion, Rick Perlstein in Nixonland and Before the Storm, and Joseph Lowndes in From the New Deal to the New Right.

For Bryan, however, there was no shift. His anger at corruption in entrenched capital was identical to his anger at blasphemy in Darwin’s theory. In Bryan’s populism, the plain people are by definition the last arbiters of truth. On monetary policy, the people rendered their judgment against gold and in favor of silver, and Bryan delivered that judgment to the establishment. On the nature of creation, the people judged against evolution and in favor of the literal truth of the Bible; Bryan delivered that judgment, too. His argument against Darwin’s theory also had an economic element. It outraged his sense of justice to imagine humanity ascending by the survival of the fittest and the destruction of the least fit, the strong forever preying on the weak, the endless quest for dominance he associated with human hatred, greed, and corruption. He saw scientific Darwinism and social Darwinism as one and the same, and he called for a society and a conception of creation based on love, not hate.

Have a Look

¶ Living in Io sono l’amore. (Design Sponge)

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. 

Diarists have a habit of apologizing for not having written much of anything lately; they’ve been too busy, they say, or perhaps they haven’t been doing much of anything. I haven’t been writing much lately, diary-wise, but I’m not inclined to apologize; on the contrary, I think that I ought to be thanked. You really wouldn’t want to know what I’ve been up to. But don’t take my word for it! Let me give you an idea.

About a year ago, I suffered a tremendous nervous shock, something between a conversion experience and electrocution. I saw in a flash that the principles upon which I organized my domestic life were very broadly mistaken. I was running my home as though it were an information-age bomb shelter. I provided for every interest that I might conceivably have in the event of a connectivity blackout — or, in other words, the onset of what used to be called desert island conditions. What books and discs would I want to have on hand in case… but I never spelled out the ghastly eventuality that would throw me back upon the resources of my apartment. Part of last year’s shock — only part — was the realization that I am now quite at home in cyberspace. Without a connection to the Internet, the failure of my books and discs to amuse me would be total.

So, I started gettting rid of stuff — a lot of stuff. This was no orgy of disencumbrance. Oh, no. I’ve had that inebriated pleasure a couple of times in my life, but never again will I impetuously dump my possessions for the sake of feeling light and free for a week or two — only to have to buy them all back at twice the price. The reason I’m still getting rid of stuff a year later is that it can take a lot of time to determine the point at which the marginal utility of something faces to zero. Sometimes, the heave-ho is obvious, and that’s a great feeling. But it’s unusual.

(I haven’t started giving you the idea yet, just in case you’re wondering.) A few months ago, I bought an Aeron desk chair. Aeron desk chairs are completely passé now and not remotely cool — they always looked funny but now they look funny — but it turns out that the Aeron chair is the right chair for a man of my size. The problem was, the Aeron chair made it clear that my desk was also defective, because its drawers and such kept the chair from pulling underneth the work surface and allowing me to get close to (ie “read”) my computer screens. (Also, they pinched my legs.) So I had to find a new desk. The problem was: I liked my old desk. It might be that I couldn’t use it to write blog entries anymore, but I wasn’t ready to part with it, and this reluctance wasn’t just sentimental.

The new writing table, which arrived in a box from Levenger yesterday, has not been set up yet, because the old desk can’t be moved to where it’s going to go until the dresser in the corner finally moves on to wherever it’s going next — and now, I hope, you’re getting the idea of why I haven’t been writing more. The dresser is going either to charity or to my grandson’s bedroom — it’s his mother’s call. It happens to be the dresser that I grew up with, and I hope that its next stop will be Will’s. But if it’s not, I’m ready to let it go. My old desk, which was never meant for computers anyway, will serve me well at the many jobs that (alas!) aren’t yet digital. (Such as sorting the mail.)

D’you know, this is all so boring that even I can’t figure out where I’m going with it. More accurately: I can’t see what comes next if I’m not going to share with you this morning’s rapture, when I stood in the room and saw — another, milder nervous shock — that if my old desk went there, then I’d need to get rid of a wing chair as well as the dresser, but so what; the old desk really ought to go there. If that, then a thousand other small outcomes, most of them too microscopic to be described in the English language. Let me just tell you, though, that the old desk is going outperform the dresser as a dresser. It’s going to do a much better job of holding my socks and handkerchiefs — I can scarcely believe how much better a job. Aren’t you happy for me?

Or do you want to shoot me? If so, there’s a line.

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.

(Note: The Daily Office will resume on Tuesday, 21 September.)

Matins

¶ It’s our settled idea that the world would be a better, certainly safer, place if narcotic were regulated and not prohibited stands firm, but John Murray’s historical essay on the coincidences that have made Mexico a worse, certainly deadlier country remind us that globalism, like nuclear power, is complicated in ways that may exceed our powers of judgment. (The Awl)

The truth is that the rise of modern drug trafficking has in large part coincided with major changes in the Mexican economy that have displaced and altered the lives of many citizens. Looking at how events have unfolded, and considering widening income class disparity and slow job creation despite the promises of NAFTA, the past and future of drug trafficking in Mexico is in many ways linked directly to its economy and the ability of the government to provide social support for its citizens.

For decades prior to the 1980’s, Mexico’s economy grew under largely protectionist trade policies. While this caused Mexican companies to produce low-quality products with outdated technology at high prices, it also created millions of factory and industrial jobs and had a lot to do with Mexico’s economic growth over the middle part of the 20th century. With little to no foreign competition at the production and retail levels, nothing threatened Mexican businesses. However, the Latin American debt crisis of the 1970’s began to spur talks about moving Mexico further into the private sector and opening it up to international investment.

In 1986, the Mexican economy did just that, under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). Tariff barriers were dropped, the market was flooded not only with American goods but cheap goods from Asia that were produced for a far lower cost, and Mexican companies were ultimately unable to compete. The aim of GATT was ostensibly to lower the price of goods and bring Mexican industry up to speed with the rest of the world technologically and in terms of productivity. In many ways it was an inevitable change. But the suddenness of the decision was resounding, and the immediate cost was millions of factory jobs lost over the next few years throughout Mexico.

Around this same time, as the Caribbean and Miami became increasingly policed and harder to navigate for smugglers, the cocaine trade was shifting out of its traditional routes and into Mexico. With cocaine came cocaine profits, which were astronomically higher than the marijuana and opium profits the Mexican smugglers mainly relied on. So, at the same time that millions of jobs were lost in Mexico, a multibillion dollar industry flush with liquid cash arrived.

Lauds

¶ Whenever we have occasion to take a sip of New York Social Diary, we find that the cocktail’s bang bypasses elation entirely and goes straight to hangover. At the Obersver, NYSD Publisher David Patrick Columbia shares the current esprit de cour about David Koch, the billionaire benefactor whose family’s political activities have made a lot of New Yorkers sit up and take another look at the State Theatre.

“I wrote about how I knew him and what he’s done with his life, the evolution of his life since I’ve known him,” Mr. Columbia said over lunch, “and I’ve known him about 20 years now. He’s basically set up this public image that we call his life over that period of time. And now I can see that he’s done it somewhat deliberately and carefully with the intention—I could guess his overall intention is, like with a lot of people, political. Because he’s gained political power. By his cultural interests, he softens the edge of that objective. It doesn’t look so venal, greedy and ambitious. It looks communal and cultural, and therefore legitimate.”

As recent profiles made clear, Mr. Koch has indeed used his cultural philanthropy to “soften the edge” of his less publicized political activities. It is a reminder that there are multiple dramas playing out in these institutions, not all of them onstage. Opera may not be the compulsory activity it was for the city’s upper classes in the days of Edith Wharton, but it remains an arena where more complex battles are fought. Every major gift and every person recruited to join a board (and every person rejected: Mr. Columbia spoke of the financier Saul Steinberg, blacklisted from the Metropolitan Museum’s board, largely because he was Jewish) means something: an attempt to befriend or outman someone, a move in a larger game.

“What happens in all the philanthropies,” Mr. Columbia said, “is that people get involved through different channels—being recruited, wanting to know somebody—and lots of times they do become converted. They realize how important it is. They go to the performance, they see how people are responding, they see how great this is, they see how much better off the world is to have this. They start taking on more noble ideas of what they’re doing, which makes them feel better about themselves. Not a bad thing.”

That Mr. Koch’s gift was to City Ballet and City Opera, and not to the Met, was a statement. A huge gift to the Met would have offended other people, including, perhaps, the Basses, who give heavily to the Met and are active in the Republican political circles Mr. Koch seems destined to dominate.

Prime

¶ What’s the best way to monetize a blog? Felix Salmon doesn’t recommend trying this at home, but he’s impressed by John Hempten’s Bronte Capital entry about NYSE-listed Universal Travel Group, a Chinese outfit whose shares lost 20% of their value when Mr Hempten’s readers heard what he had to say about his troubles trying to use UTG’s online services, about his diligent inquiries into UTG’s dodgy financials — and about shorting the stock.

Historically, short-sellers have been shadowy types; they like to publicize their findings, but they tend to do so behind the scenes, giving journalists information and having very long conversations off the record.

Hempton’s different in that he’s happy, on occasion, to make his allegations in public, under his own name. He doesn’t always publicize his shorts, even when he suspects outright fraud, but his blog does have enough of a following now that he knows he’ll be widely read if and when he chooses to do so. After today’s big payday, I reckon he might try the tactic more often.

The story of Universal Travel is far from over: if Hempton’s right about the company, and I think that he is, then the SEC and the NYSE are both going to have to answer some very pointed questions about how and why they allowed the company to get this prestigious New York listing in the first place.

But I do love the way that the blogosphere is moving markets. Reading a blog entry from someone with real skin in the game is often a lot more fun than ploughing through “objective” journalism from someone who isn’t allowed to invest in or short what they’re writing about.

Tierce

¶ Kyle Munkittrick argues beguilingly for pursuing the Transhumanist agenda, precisely because, as Francis Fukuyama has described it, it is “the most dangerous idea in the world.”  (Science Not Fiction)

Transhumanism is, at its artificial heart, a simple idea: humans should not be limited by our biology. We forget things, we are irrational, we are vulnerable, we get sick, we age, we die. But we don’t have to do or be any of those things. Science and technology from every branch and every direction is slowly chipping away at each of these problems. Each tiny step aggregates and converges towards a world in which humans are free to live as long as they want, to love and reproduce with whomever and however they choose, to be as smart, as strong, and as happy as possible. The suffering and death that accompany much of our very existence (and perhaps give it meaning) would be reduced and, maybe, just maybe, eliminated. Human nature would be fundamentally altered; which is why Francis Fukuyama has called transhumanism the “Most Dangerous Idea in the World.” I agree, and that danger, that essential threat to what we are, is why I believe we should, nay must, promote human enhancement.

To do so, we must raze human nature itself. Philosophy and religion have spent the past 10,000 years working to make virtues of the necessities of biological life; primal urges, emotional outbursts, problems of procreation, suffering, disease, and death are explained away as essential elements of humanity. But these ideas do not create the meaning and value in human nature. Instead it is human nature that has invested these terrors of the flesh with worth to make existence bearable.

Consider a war hero. In a brutal, hopeless battle, a single soldier rushes into danger, risking her life and limb to rescue a fallen member of her team. She returns with her comrade safely and is heralded, rightly, as courageous and moral. But none would argue that it was the war that made her courageous and moral, or, worse, that we should fight perpetual wars to give everyone an opportunity to exemplify their virtue. Yet that is precisely the logic that drives arguments like “death gives life meaning” and “suffering makes us value the good times.” These statements are backwards. We find life meaningful in spite of, not because of, suffering, disease, and death. If they were to be eliminated, life would not merely still have meaning but it would mean significantly more.

Sext

¶ Kevin Nguyen’s “Monophonic Memoir” about the major ringtones in his life has been around for a few days, but we keep coming back to it, because it captures the sweetness of youth’s dreams, which are vast because the world is so small. (The Bygone Bureau)

Although we got along well, Max and I never had much in common, except for the fact that we both entered freshman year of college with girlfriends from home. We both spent a lot of time that fall on the phone, trying to find spots in our basement dorm room with decent reception.

My girlfriend, who was at another school across the country, always adored Death Cab for Cutie, a band that I could barely stomach. But as a gesture of affection, I set her ringtone to a Death Cab for Cutie song. It didn’t occur to me that I was the only one who could hear it.

The day we broke up, not long after the end of the first semester, I changed the ringtone to a Belle and Sebastian song she didn’t like.

It seems worth adding that Max’s ringtone for his girlfriend was “Wanna Be a Baller” by Lil’ Troy. His relationship lasted about two years longer than mine did.

Nones

¶ The only curious thing about Rachel Donadio’s handy Lega Nord update in today’s Times, “New Power Broker Rises in Italy,” is its title, which the story itself contradicts.

The current political crisis is so complex as to confound even veteran political analysts, to say nothing of average Italians. But what is clear is that Mr. Berlusconi is struggling mightily to hold his coalition together. The restive co-founder of his center-right People of Liberties party, Gianfranco Fini, a former neo-fascist who is finding more support these days in the center, left the party in late July, arguing that Mr. Berlusconi was in danger of becoming a dictator.

The split also strengthened the Northern League’s point man in the government, Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti, who is seen as a contender to one day succeed Mr. Berlusconi.

As the crisis expands, no one is forgetting that the Northern League, though a partner in every Berlusconi government, has not always been loyal. In 1994, Mr. Berlusconi’s first government collapsed after the party pulled out, and without its backing he lost the 1996 elections. With its support, he won again in 2001 and 2008.

Vespers

¶ Lydia Davis’s remarks about her new translation of Madame Bovary are so concise that she doesn’t mention the translator whose version almost everyone alive today has read, Francis Steegmuller. (Paris Review; via The Rumpus)

But in the case of a book that appeared more than 150 years ago, like Madame Bovary, and that is an important landmark in the history of the novel, there is room for plenty of different English versions. For example, 1) the first editions of the original text may have been faulty, and over the years one or more corrected editions have been published, so that the earliest English translations no longer match the most accurate original; 2) the earliest translators (as was the case with the Muirs rendering Kafka) may have felt they needed to inflict subtle or not so subtle alterations on the style and even the content of the original so as to make it more acceptable to the Anglophone audience; with the passing of time, we come to deem this something of a betrayal and ask for a more faithful version. 3) Earlier versions may simply not be as good in other respects as they could be—let another translator have a try.

Compline

¶ The last of Scott Horton’s Six Questions for Julian Young (Reconsidering Nietzsche), at Harper’s. The topic is postmodernism and reality.

6. You treat postmodern readings of Nietzsche with some deference in your book, but you seem cautious about embracing them yourself. You form the conclusion that Nietzsche is a “plural realist.” What do you mean by that and how is it different from the postmodern interpretation?

I would actually describe myself as treating postmodernist readings with “restraint” rather than “deference.” Postmodernism has its origins in Kant’s observation that all experience is interpretation, that all experience is filtered through the particular structures of the human mind. To this, taking its lead from both Hegel and Nietzsche, postmodernism adds that the filters in question vary from language to language, culture to culture, angle of interest to angle of interest. And so, it concludes, since there are many equally good interpretations of the world, no single one can be picked as the uniquely correct interpretation. From this it follows, so it is claimed, that there can be no particular character that reality has, since to assign it any such character would be arbitrarily to privilege one interpretation over all the others. And if there is no particular character that reality has, then the very idea of “reality” makes no sense. The concept must be abandoned; there is nothing but interpretations.

We “plural realists”–Nietzsche, Hubert Dreyfus (who coined the term), and myself–agree that there are many equally valid interpretations of reality, that there is no uniquely correct interpretation. But from this it does not follow that there is no way reality is, since an equally possible inference is that there are many ways it is. And in fact it is pretty obvious that there indeed are many ways that reality is. Consider a rolling, Provençal landscape. To the property developer it shows up as “valuable real estate,” to the wine grower as a “unique terroir,” to the mining engineer as a “bauxite deposit,” to the cyclist as an “impediment and challenge,” and to the fundamental physicist as “quanta of energy.” We do not have to choose between these interpretations because, quite evidently, they are all true. Each interpretation truly describes reality from, in Nietzsche’s word, the “perspective” of a particular interest. Some interpretations of course we will want to reject as false. That we do, as it were, democratically. If someone claims that the landscape is a papier mâché construction on an alien film-set we will reject that on the grounds of its discordance with the coherent picture built up by all the interpretations we accept as true.

Have a Look

¶ Oddee‘s 10 Coolest Desks.

¶ Coming Soon: Dessicant air-conditioning. 90% more efficient, so they say. (Good)

¶ J Carter: What I Did This Summer. (NYT)

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.

Matins

¶ David Berreby writes about a intriguing phenomenon: a certain kind of terrorist is more likely to be an engineer. What kind? the ones that claim to fight for the pious past of Islamic fundamentalists or the white-supremacy America of the Aryan Nations (founder: Richard Butler, engineer) or the minimal pre-modern U.S. government that Stack and Bedell extolled.” Not leftist, in other words. (NYT; via The Morning News)

The engineer mind-set, Gambetta and Hertog suggest, might be a mix of emotional conservatism and intellectual habits that prefers clear answers to ambiguous questions — “the combination of a sharp mind with a loyal acceptance of authority.” Do people become engineers because they are this way? Or does engineering work shape them? It’s probably a feedback loop of both, Gambetta says.

Economic frustration also matters, Gambetta says. In their sample of militants, there was only one homeland out of 30 in which engineers were less common: Saudi Arabia — where engineers have always had plenty of work. But “engineers’ peculiar cognitive traits and dispositions” made them slightly more likely than accountants, waiters or philosophers to react to career frustration by adopting violent, right-wing beliefs.

William A. Wulf, a former president of the National Academy of Engineering, is, no surprise, no fan of the Gambetta-Hertog theory. “If you have a million coin flips,” he says, “it’s almost certain that somewhere in those coin flips there will be 20 heads in a row.” The sample of militants Gambetta and Hertog used was simply too small for them to be sure they haven’t stumbled into a meaningless numerical accident, he says. The theory, according to Wulf, misrepresents what engineers are about. “A person who is rigid,” he says, “is a bad engineer.”

Okay, a bad engineer.

Lauds

¶ We’ve read through Anthony Grafton’s agreeable little disquisition on Paolo Veronese, the Inquisition, and Renaissance research into the details of Jesus’ life — did Jesus and the Apostles sit or stretch out for the Last Supper? — a couple of times, and we’re still not sure that we’ve grasped the point of it all. But we’re always charmed by Professor Grafton’s ability to make scholarship look interesting. (Cabinet; via 3 Quarks Daily)

But what should a Last Supper look like? What did Christ and the Apostles eat? And how much? When Jesus distributed pieces of bread, was it leavened or unleavened? What other foodstuffs had been on the table? Did the followers of Jesus eat lamb, as Jews normally did at Passover? Over the centuries—as an article in the International Journal of Obesity recently showed—artists made many different choices. Sometimes they put lamb on the table. But they also served fish, beef, and even pork in portions that grew over the centuries. Veronese could be forgiven, then, for thinking that he had some iconographic elbow room. In fact, though, what he encountered in Venice was something new. Presumably he knew that censors were taking more interest than they had in the past in religious paintings. What he did not—and could not—know was that scholars were beginning to look at the Last Supper in a radically new way.

Prime

¶ Yves Smith takes a moment out from banging her head against the wall — “Why Do We Keep Indulting the Fiction That Banks Are Private Enterprises” — to remark on blog entry (missing link!) by “Jay Rosen of NYU” that appears to substitute concentric circles for “frames.” Round or square, this is the kind of analysis that seeks to map and distinguish the discussible from the impermissible in general critical conversations.

3.) In the sphere of deviance we find “political actors and views which journalists and the political mainstream of society reject as unworthy of being heard.” As in the sphere of consensus, neutrality isn’t the watchword here; journalists maintain order by either keeping the deviant out of the news entirely or identifying it within the news frame as unacceptable, radical, or just plain impossible. The press “plays the role of exposing, condemning, or excluding from the public agenda” the deviant view, says Hallin. It “marks out and defends the limits of acceptable political conduct.”

Anyone whose views lie within the sphere of deviance—as defined by journalists—will experience the press as an opponent in the struggle for recognition. If you don’t think separation of church and state is such a good idea; if you do think a single payer system is the way to go; if you dissent from the “lockstep behavior of both major American political parties when it comes to Israel” (Glenn Greenwald) chances are you will never find your views reflected in the news. It’s not that there’s a one-sided debate; there’s no debate.

How can we change this? How can we de-nuttify the propositions that pile up in the “sphere of deviance.” Do we begin by accepting that our notion about large corporations — that, in today’s world, they’re simply joysticks for a handful of CEOs — have to fight for attention alongside the tenets of creationism?

Tierce

¶ Because 9/11 coincided with a new moon last weekend, and followed a week of turbulent weather (remember Hugh?),  thousands of migrating birds were thrown into confusion by the memorial Tribute in Light at the World Trade Center site. (Wired Science)

To navigate, birds rely on a variety of internal compass mechanisms, which are calibrated to Earth’s geomagnetic fields by sunlight, starlight and moonlight. On Sept. 11, the new moon was just two nights old, a thumbnail sliver. In such conditions, birds rely on starlight, but parts of the lower Manhattan sky were overcast.

The buildings resembled stars. Outshining them all was the Tribute in Light above Ground Zero.

Rowden estimates that 10,000 birds entered the beams, becoming confused and circling until the Municipal Art Society, working with New York City Audubon, shut the lights for 20 minutes, allowing the birds to leave. That happened five times over the course of the night.

The spotlights were not directly dangerous to the birds. Instead, risk comes from wasted time and energy needed for later.

“Birds do fly for extended periods of time. It’s not that they can’t do it. But they’re doing it to get south of here. If they spend all their time in that small area, they won’t get to good foraging habitat, and it will compromise them for later parts of their migration,” Rowden said. “But I feel that we did allow them to get out.”

Sext

¶ Kevin Hartnett reflects on the persistence of “friendships,” thanks to Facebook, beyond friendships’ natural life. (The Millions)

We all trail a line of relationships behind us as we grow older, and we all have our own standards that define when and how we let go of people who were once important in our lives (and when and how we accept being let go of ourselves). I could see why it might be rewarding or interesting or comforting to know that with Facebook you never really need to put a friendship to rest completely. But to me it’s comforting and disorienting in the way of ventilators and feeding tubes that sustain a narrow definition of life long after the real thing has run its course.

Ah, but you never know.

Nones

¶ Sudhir Hazaree Singh considers the burnished legacy of Charles DeGaulle, in Turkey of all places, at Foreign Policy. (via  The Morning News)

His political achievements notwithstanding, de Gaulle’s greatest talent was in developing and propagating myths that fortified the nation. By refusing to accept defeat in the depth of World War II and demonstrating a willingness to fight to the death to defend his homeland, he restored pride and grandeur after the disgrace of occupation. (He glossed over the fact that France was largely liberated thanks to U.S. and British armed forces; de Gaulle always preferred falsehoods that elevated the spirit to truths that debased it.) Yet, in a sense, he was France’s Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln all rolled into one — perhaps the only reason the Lincoln analogy is incomplete is that he survived multiple assassination attempts, lending him an additional air of invincibility.

[snip]

Like all great leaders, de Gaulle was a complex figure: At his worst, he was contemptuous of elected politicians, authoritarian, and egotistical. Like an ancien régime monarch, he sometimes seemed to think he was France. But he was also capable of inspiring his people to achieve great things, and this is the most important reason why he remains an international icon, with broad appeal to political leaders across the globe. The general symbolizes a conception of politics that rejects all forms of fatalism — especially when this inevitability is presented as a justification for inequality. He also represents a nostalgia for a time when leaders stood for real principles, irrespective of the pronouncements of political spin doctors. When de Gaulle’s entourage brought in a professional election manager to advise him in the run-up to the 1965 presidential election, he was promptly shown the door. Simpler times, indeed. Yet above all, de Gaulle incarnates an ideal that has taken some battering in this age of globalization and hegemony, but that will remain central to world politics in the 21st century: the desire of peoples to determine their own fate entirely free from foreign intervention — whether economic, political, or military.

Vespers

¶ Elif Batuman’s review of Mark McGurl’s The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing is a well from which we intend to drain many satisfying drafts. Indeed, her analysis of really rather odd graduate writing program priorities cleared up a number of perplexities that we didn’t even know we had — so accustomed were we to bumping up against them in the unlighted portions of the mind. (LRB; via MetaFilter )

Take Ms Batuman’s dismantlement of the two best-known writing program mantras, “write what you know” and “find your voice.” Try not to disturb the rest of the class with your snorts.

The discussion of Chief Bromden’s narrative ‘voice’ leads McGurl to a particularly ambitious defence of programme fiction (‘as rich and multifaceted a body of literary writing as has ever been’), wherein he decides to prove that the slogans ‘write what you know’ and ‘find your voice’ were enormously productive for 20th-century fiction. As it turns out, he views these catchphrases not as interchangeable exhortations to authenticity, but as philosophically opposed dictates. ‘Write what you know’ really does seem to mean ‘write what you know,’ but ‘find your voice’ actually means ‘find someone else’s voice’: thus Styron ‘found his voice’ in Nat Turner, reimagining ‘authorship as a kind of ventriloquism … which is an offence against the rule of writing what you know’.

McGurl never quite articulates the law that enjoins some writers to write what they know and others to find their voices…

[snip]

There is no arguing with taste, and there are doubtless people in the world who enjoy ‘the virtuosity of Butler’s performance of narrative mobility’. To me, such ‘performances’ are symptomatic of the large-scale replacement of books I would want to read by rich, multifaceted explorations whose ‘amazing audacity’ I’m supposed to admire in order not to be some kind of jerk.

The law of ‘find your voice’ and ‘write what you know’ originates in a phenomenon perhaps most clearly documented by the blog and book Stuff White People Like: the loss of cultural capital associated with whiteness, and the attempts of White People to compensate for this loss by displaying knowledge of non-white cultures. Hence Stuff White People Like #20, ‘Being an Expert on Your Culture’, and #116, ‘Black Music that Black People Don’t Listen to Anymore’. Non-white, non-college-educated or non-middle or upper-class people may write what they know, but White People have to find the voice of a Vietnamese woman impregnated by a member of the American army that killed her only true love.

Compline

¶ Brent Cox decides that, in the Age of the Internet, he’s simply not going to tell anyone — digitally, anyway — about this great place for dumplings that he has discovered. No coolhunter he. (The Awl)

My personal concern is that fetishization begins to replace the actual experience. Were I to opt to fully share my fried dumpling experience with the World of Foodies, then I would take notes on the meal, photograph every element and then spend a good chunk of time composing my initial post detailing the experience and then spend more time ensuring that the post is brought to the attention of the right people. Having done that, what portion of the event is comprised of “eating fried dumplings and finding them awesome”? And if I keep it to myself, or at least just tell friends and family about it with my actual mouth, what then is the portion of the event is “eating fried dumplings and finding them awesome”? See also: people who attend weddings and/or concerts and watch the entire thing through the screen of their mobile phone, which is being used to record, a kneejerk mediation of experience. There is something to be said for Just Experiencing something and letting the sole record of it be your memory. It’s worked for centuries.

It’s a question of coolhunting. The verb “coolhunt” is of course now an archaic term: “so [x] (where [x] = [some date a few years before now]).” But it lives on to this day. At this point, instead of an occupation that’s a subject of a Wired feature, it’s a game we all play at home, as the Internet shifts the load-bearing structures of cool away from the William Gibson protagonists to anyone with a WordPress username. We identify objects, in situ, and tag them. It is hunting, but, coming from a family of actual hunters, it is the lamest kind of hunting because the hunters are not eating what they kill. That sneaker, those vintage eyeglass frames, and, yes, those fried dumplings are definitely cool in the context of where you find them, but they will be less so once their heads are mounted in your study. The coolhunter destroys cool just by geotagging it.

Have a Look

¶ Close Calls. (kottke.org)

Nige reminds us:

It was on this day in 1885 that the famous T.P. Barnum elephant Jumbo was killed, struck by a locomotive while crossing the tracks in a marshalling yard at St Thomas, Ontario. The collision derailed the train, and it took 150 people to haul Jumbo’s body up an embankment… Barnum of course couldn’t leave it at that. In what was then the largest taxidermy project ever undertaken, he had Jumbo stuffed so that he could carry on touring with the circus. After four years, Barnum let Jumbo go, donating him to Tufts University, where he became the university’s much-loved mascot – until he was destroyed in a fire in 1975. His ashes are now kept in a 14-oz Peter Pan Crunchy Peanut Butter tin in the office of the Tufts athletics director, but his tail, which had been removed earlier, resides in the Tufts archives. That peanut butter tin troubles me – surely Jumbo deserves a more dignified resting place after all he’s been through…

Regular readers will have noted, perhaps to their chagrin, that entires at The Daily Blague and The Daily Blague / reader have boiled down to two varieties, the Daily Snip and the Daily Office.

Everything else that we’ve been working on appears at Civil Pleasures. We’re still getting the hang of linking the the Web log to the Web site; we’ve only just begun to see that what’s holding us back is the rudimentary navigation at the site. The menus are paltry, and there’s no way to tell at a glance if there’s something new to read.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of links to recent pages: this week’s Book Review review (reviews have been condensed, with more — and sassier — writing by the Blagueurs, and fewer extracts from the reviews, onto monthly pages): the latest Gotham Diary; and a few (more) words about Freedom, which the Editor fancies only he understands.

Matins

¶ James Surowiecki looks into how “stimulus” came to be a dirty word in Washington — despite the success of the actual Stimulus Bill. The accepted wisdom certainly places the American voter in an unflattering light, but the real default is in our leadership, which can dream up effective policies but can’t be bothered to sell them.

But the most interesting aspect of the stimulus’s image problems concern its design and implementation. Paradoxically, the very things that made the stimulus more effective economically may have made it less popular politically. For instance, because research has shown that lump-sum tax refunds get hoarded rather than spent, the government decided not to give individuals their tax cuts all at once, instead refunding a little on each paycheck. The tactic was successful at increasing consumer demand, but it had a big political cost: many voters never noticed that they were getting a tax cut. Similarly, a key part of the stimulus was the billions of dollars that went to state governments. This was crucial in helping the states avoid layoffs and spending cuts, but politically it didn’t get much notice, because it was the dog that didn’t bark—saving jobs just isn’t as conspicuous as creating them. Extending unemployment benefits was also an excellent use of stimulus funds, since that money tends to get spent immediately. But unless you were unemployed this wasn’t something you’d pay attention to.

The stimulus was also backloaded, so that only a third was spent in the first year. This reduced waste, since there was more time to vet projects, and insured that money would keep flowing into 2010, lessening the risk of a double-dip recession. But it also made the stimulus less potent in 2009, when the economy was in dire straits, leaving voters with the impression that the plan wasn’t working. More subtly, while the plan may end up having a transformative impact on things like the clean-energy industry, broadband access, and the national power grid, it’s hard for voters to find concrete visual evidence of what the stimulus has done (those occasional road signs telling us our tax dollars are at work notwithstanding). That’s a sharp contrast with the New Deal legacy of new highways, massive dams, and rural electrification. Dramatic, high-profile deeds have a profound effect on people’s opinions, so, in the absence of another Hoover Dam or Golden Gate Bridge, it’s not surprising that the voter’s view is: “We spent $800 billion and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Lauds

¶ Jazz pianist Bill Evans died thirty years ago tomorrow. Doug Ramsay reminds us of his legacy and prompts us to pull out The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961. Jazz groups still go for the sound that Evans made with Scott LaFaro and Paul Motian. (WSJ)

Finally, in 1959 Evans formed a trio with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, who felt what Evans had been hearing in his mind for years. Their albums, notably “Portrait in Jazz,” “Explorations” and “Sunday at the Village Vanguard” (all for the Riverside label), set new levels of aspiration for pianists and new standards for interaction in jazz-piano trios.

Regiments of young bassists imitate LaFaro’s ability to play high and fast, but most do not or cannot begin to approximate his lyricism, timing or depth of tone, which Evans likened to the sound of an organ. Many new bassists emulate the technique they hear from LaFaro on the Evans recordings without understanding how it fits into the complex relationship among Evans, LaFaro and Mr. Motian. They miss how LaFaro’s note choices relate to the impressionistic chord voicings that give Evans’s playing so much of its character. Worse, they overlook at least half of what made LaFaro a great bassist: the power of his straight-ahead swing, which meshed with Evans’s own rhythmic concept.

In July 1961, less than two weeks after the trio recorded at the Village Vanguard, LaFaro died in a car crash at the age of 25. His death sent Evans into depression so deep that, according to Mr. Motian, he did not perform for six months. Gene Lees, a close friend of Evans, wrote in his book “Meet Me at Jim & Andy’s” (Oxford), “After LaFaro’s death, Bill was like a man with a lost love, always looking to find its replacement.” Evans’s bereavement over LaFaro affected him the rest of his life, but he went back to work with Mr. Motian and a new bassist, Chuck Israels. In succeeding trios, Eddie Gomez and Marc Johnson—virtuosi heavily influenced by LaFaro—had the bass chair. Evans recorded, unaccompanied and with others, for nearly two more decades.

Prime

¶ Joshua Brown’s piece about overpaid stockbrokers (“registered representatives,” in Wall Street parlance) caught our eye because… we’d forgotten about stockbrokers! And here’s why:

1.  Scarcity of Clean Licenses:  You have no idea how scared to death compliance officers are to bring in producers with multiple complaints on their CRDs.  Headhunters are told in no uncertain terms that in the post-crash, post-Madoff world, they shouldn’t even bother bringing in a candidate with multiple blemishes on their license, no matter how much revenue is on the table.  Compliance simply cannot bear the increased regulatory scrutiny in this environment.  This means that the advisor with both big production numbers and a squeaky clean history is worth that much more to the hiring firm.

2.  Aging Sales Force:  Industry-wide, the average age of financial advisors is in the 40’s!  This is remarkable and in reality, it means that firms are overpaying because of how limited the talent pool is at the up-and-comer end.  When there are fewer rising stars, firms must do what the NY Yankees do – sign aging veterans to massive deals.  We discussed the aging of the industry here at length, in case you missed it:  Why the Kids Don’t Want to be Financial Advisors

3.  Concentration of Millionaires:  There are fewer millionaire households in America post-2008 as a result of the decline of stocks and real estate.  According to the Registered Rep article,  the amount of millionaires peaked at 9.2 million in 2007 and is closer to 6.7 million now.  These millionaire households are also being consolidated at the advisor level as wirehouses prune the lower producing advisors from their ranks and help their top earners pad their books with even more assets – in other words, wirehouses have created their own compensation-hungry monsters by helping them get bigger at the expense of smaller producers.

Tierce

¶ Did you know that Auto-Tune was invented to improve oil prospecting? We didn’t. (Live Science; via  The Morning News)

Auto-Tune users set a reference point – a scale or specific notes, for example – and a rate at which derivations from this point will be digitally corrected.

This rate can be carefully calibrated so a voice sounds “natural,” by tacking the voice smoothly back to the reference pitch. Or, artists can make the correction happen quickly and artificially, which results in the warbling, digitized voices now all the rage in pop, hip-hip, reggae and other types of music.

Auto-Tune’s invention sprung from a quite unrelated field: prospecting for oil underground using sound waves. Andy Hildebrand, a geophysicist who worked with Exxon, came up with a technique called autocorrelation to interpret these waves. During the 1990s, Hildebrand founded the company that later became Antares, and he applied his tools to voices.

The recording industry pounced on the technology, and the first song credited (or bemoaned) for introducing Auto-Tune to the masses was Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe.”

Although a success with audio engineers, Auto-Tune remained largely out of sight until 2003 when rhythm and blues crooner T-Pain discovered its voice-altering effects.

Sext

¶ One stop shopping: pro and con responses to Camille Paglia’s takedown of Lady Gaga can be had at The Awl. Truth to tell, Julie Klausner and Natasha Vargas-Cooper aren’t all that pro. Maria Bustillos is definitely con, reponding with a smackdown.

Because Paglia cannot understand the new voices, she claims they “have atrophied.” Because she doesn’t understand the subtleties of communicating via text message, she claims the youngs are “communicating mutely,” which, what? Was communicating by letter in the 18th century also “mute”, “atrophied”? What does that even mean? Because she must not know any, I guess, she supposes the kids have “abandoned body language in daily interactions.”

Then there is Paglia’s complaint that Gaga is not sexy, that drag queens are far sexier than Gaga. Does it not occur to her that our whole world is already awash in “sexy” young women, singers, dancers, models, actresses, who are trying and trying and trying to “be sexy”, and/or that the public is maybe really so sick of that? Or that Lady Gaga’s appeal relies, in part, on precisely the fact that she inflates and distorts that “sexy” iconography in order to force the viewer to question his assumptions about sexuality, performance, gender?

Nones

¶ At a site that’s new to us, Humble Student of the Markets, Cam Hui (a portfolio manager by day) writes an entry “Diagnosing America’s Ills.” We couldn’t agree more with this level-headed assessment.

I believe that America’s ills stems from neglect, largely from the short-term nature of American thinking. There has been a neglect of infrastructure, a lack of focus on basics of innovation and wealth creation, as well as an erosion of the advantages bestowed by education.

The most recent infrastructure report card gives American physical infrastructure badly failing grades: Aviation (D), Bridges (C), Dams (D), Drinking Water (D-), Energy (D+), Hazardous Waste (D), Inland Waterways (D-), Levees (D-), Public Parks and Recreation (C-), Rail (C-), Roads (D-), Schools (D), Solid Waste (C+), Transit (D), and Wastewater (D-). Fixing this shortfall requires spending of over $2T. Nevertheless, there are calls for greater infrastructure spending as a way to build an economic recovery.

Vespers

¶ We can’t tell just whom Louis Menand is parodying in the third paragraph of his review of The Oxford Book of Parodies, but we’re sure that he’s parodying somebody. We’ll probably get the new anthology, but we won’t be parting with Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm, the still-better collection that Dwight Macdonald put out in 1960, back when, as Mr Menand nails it, “Modern Library Giants strode the earth.”

It is a characteristic of our top-rated species that any natural disposition will, over time, undergo development, variation, and refinement in excess of its importance to reproductive success. Evolutionary psychologists refer to the artifactual residue of this process, the biologically pointless stuff the organism compulsively churns out, as “culture.” In the making-fun-of-others department, the highest cultural rung — it is sometimes regarded as an art form — is parody.

Compline

¶ Regular readers know that we discuss books and bookish things at Vespers; that is why we’re mentioning Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of City Boy, Edmund White’s latest volume of reminiscence, here. The deadliest thing we’ve read in ages, the piece is almost too magisterial to show its claws. It is hard to tell whether Mr Mendelssohn holds Edmund White’s advocacy of “gay literature,” or Mr White himself, in greater contempt. The dishing begins with the title, “Boys Will Be Boys,” and every paragraph draws blood. Animus notwithstanding, the review is a cogent argument against the proposition that homosexuals are alien mutants. (NYRB)(P)

Our candidate for “most savage single sentence”: “It’s interesting to speculate how the young White, who was capable of an impressive elegance and was clearly preoccupied, as well, with interesting formal questions, would have evolved as a novelist.” The finale, however, takes devastation to artistic heights.

This is a far cry from the attitude of the young White who had once resentfully criticized Poirier and other gay writers he knew when he was starting out—even the ones who were unabashedly out of the closet, like Merrill and Ashbery—for wanting to assimilate aesthetically, as he saw it: to write for the larger world instead of—well, preaching to the converted, to that small “community [that] we want[ed] to celebrate in novels that would create our identity while also exploring it.” Hence although City Boy, like many a bildungsroman, ostensibly culminates in a happy attainment of maturity—the young man’s successful quest to be a published gay writer—there is another, deeper education that plays out in these pages: the one that leads, however disjointedly, to an apparent acknowledgment that real literature is neither a form of social therapy nor a vehicle for political advertising, but is, in fact, “universal,” and seeks to dissolve rather than create intellectual and artistic ghettos.

Still, you suspect that White, unabashedly a product of the era he recalls in City Boy, takes pride in the fact that what he has been writing all these years—the earnest if increasingly artless transcription of gay life and gay lives, of which City Boy is the latest installment—has aimed to fill a niche instead of a universe. What he wanted, after all, was to become part of a scene, to have a reputation, to be known as a writer, whatever the sentiments and ideas he wrote about. The niche he helped create allowed him to achieve all this; and who would begrudge him the satisfaction that he got exactly what he wanted?

Have a Look

¶ Stanford Kay’s Gutenberg Project, at The Best Part.

¶ At Strange Maps, the “Fool’s Cap” Map of the World.

¶ Clyde Haberman in the Times: “Everyone’s Really Mad; Almost Mad Enough to Vote.” The important line in this litany of iratitude is the last one.

Everybody seems to be mad as hell.

Carl P. Paladino, running as a Republican for New York governor, can’t stop saying how mad as hell he is.

Mark Levine, a Democrat running for a State Senate seat from parts of Manhattan and the Bronx, mailed a campaign brochure showing a man and a woman with faces hideously contorted by rage — that’s how mad as hell they are.

New Yorkers testifying at a series of hearings that began Monday night can be counted on to tell the Metropolitan Transportation Authority over the next few weeks that they are mad as hell over proposed fare increases.

Former Mayor Edward I. Koch, who has never found a limelight he cared to avoid, has gadded about the state telling the electorate to get mad as hell at Albany and “throw the bums out” if they don’t agree to a batch of political changes he proposes.

Out in Modesto, Calif., homeowners have banded together saying they are mad as hell over property taxes.

An editorial last week in The Wyoming Tribune-Eagle urged people to get mad as hell over their school system.

The title of a new book about the Tea Party is “Mad as Hell,” which is what Tea Party types keep saying they are.

Several groups unhappy with the blitz of new airline fees have proclaimed Sept. 23 “Mad As Hell Day!” Presumably, without that exclamation point we would not grasp how really and truly seething they are.

One group seems to be exempt as a target for this free-flowing rage. Nobody ever says to voters that it may be time for them to get mad as hell at themselves.

Matins

¶ When the serious overhaul of America’s health-care reform was first broached eighteen years ago, we were dismayed that health care insurance was being addressed before health-care costs. In our view, you ought to worry about price before you worry about payment. We remain dismayed. Only today, at the bottom of an entry at Naked Capitalism, do we catch the lightbulb’s sudden glow in another venue.

Yves here. It is hard to believe that the people in the Obama Administration tasked to develop a health care reform plan were not aware of this research. The failure to take on the core issues leading to health care costs run amok shows a lack of imagination and will. Admittedly, any solution to the problem would need to be far-reaching (for instance, the huge cost of often-student-loan-financed medical education would need to be addressed in parallel with efforts to restrict physician excesses). But a realistic problem is that most patients are unwilling to think that their doctor might be racking up unnecessary costs on their behalf, even when the evidence is compelling that that sort of behavior is widespread.

Lauds

¶ Dominique Browning introduces her Beauty of the Beach Salon, where the pedicures are free.

First, there is the exfoliation factor. No razors, ever. Just nice, soft, crumbly sand, alternating between wet and dry. It is an excellent idea to dig your feet into the sand and get a real rub going, the way a dog does when she is wantonly digging for…well, what exactly are those dogs always getting excited about? Who knows, but they have a few things to teach us about having fun at the beach–in particular, we could all do with a few more leaps and bounds, to say nothing of licking faces and wagging tails. But I digress. The main thing for optimum exfoliation is to make sure you dig in your heels. Always a good idea, anyway, particularly if you are having an argument with a certain someone.

Next, the seaweed treatment. I have not a clue what seaweed does for the skin, or for most things, but there must be a reason people pay gazillions of dollars for beauty treatments containing seaweed. Or maybe not? Is seaweed part of the Weird Ingredient Racket? Anyway, I always let the seaweed squoosh between my toes because it is a delightfully childish thing to do. Children particularly, and men too, think you are quite brave if you touch seaweed, so this is an excellent way to score points.

Prime

¶ We are intrigued by the coincidence, in our Google Reader, of two items that aren’t so distantly related as their authors might think. In “Winner-take-all economics,” Alex Tabarrok blandly attributes the pile-up of huge fortunes to “the size of the market that can be served by a single person or firm.” (Marginal Revolution)

Rowling’s success brings with it inequality.  Time is limited and people want to read the same books that their friends are reading so book publishing has a winner-take all component.  Thus, greater leverage brings greater inequality.  The average writer’s income hasn’t gone up much in the past thirty years but today, for the first time ever, a handful of writers can be multi-millionaires and even billionaires.  The top pulls away from the median. 

This is not the end of the story, though, as a piece at The Baseline Scenario begs to remind us. James Kwak has just read a new book called Winner-Take-All Politics. What goes up, it seems, has an appalling tendency to come down into the pockets of political campaigners.

That shift occurred in the 1970s because businesses and the super-rich began a process of political organization in the early 1970s that enabled them to pool their wealth and contacts to achieve dominant political influence (described in Chapter 5). To take one of the many statistics they provide, the number of companies with registered lobbyists in Washington grew from 175 in 1971 to nearly 2,500 in 1982 (p. 118). Money pouring into lobbying firms, political campaigns, and ideological think tanks created the organizational muscle that gave the Republicans a formidable institutional advantage by the 1980s. The Democrats have only reduced that advantage in the past two decades by becoming more like Republicans–more business-friendly, more anti-tax, and more dependent on money from the super-rich. And that dependency has severely limited both their ability and their desire to fight back on behalf of the middle class (let alone the poor), which has few defenders in Washington.

At a high level, the lesson of Winner-Take-All Politics is similar to that of 13 Bankers: when looking at economic phenomena, be they the financial crisis or the vast increase in inequality of the past thirty years, it’s politics that matters, not just abstract economic forces. One of the singular victories of the rich has been convincing the rest of us that their disproportionate success has been due to abstract economic forces beyond anyone’s control (technology, globalization, etc.), not old-fashioned power politics.

Which sounds like what Mr Tabarrok was saying, doesn’t it?

Tierce

¶ The sad news is that, if you’re going to take up a life of environmental depravity, you want to make sure to have dozens, if not hundreds, of victims. The more egregious an offense, the milder the penalty our all-too-human nature is likely to call for, according to a study of jury awards.

The bias, which the researchers named the scope-severity paradox, has implications for a wide variety of fields, including the politics and media coverage of large-scale issues such as climate change or mass genocide.

“It fits well with a line of research that shows that as the number of people who are victims of some problem — whether it’s a crime or a famine — the responsiveness to it, and the likelihood of taking action to reduce the problem, decreases,” said psychologist Paul Slovnic of the University of Oregon, who was not involved in the study.

It has to do with the way empathy works, Slovnic said. People empathize with people by putting themselves in the other persons shoes. The more shoes there are, the harder it is to empathize with any single individual. People don’t multiply their feelings of empathy by the number of people involved.

¶ Jonah Lehrer connects the “halfalogue” perplex, which makes it impossible to block out an overheard telephone conversation, with the delights of serious music. The difference between “too much” and “just right,” we think.

In other words, listening to Beethoven is the artistic form of the halfalogue – it is a sensory stimulus that draws us in precisely because of what it doesn’t tell us. The information is incomplete – we don’t know when, exactly, the tonic will return – and so we eagerly await its completion. Meyer would later apply this principle to all narratives. He pointed out, for instance, that the moment of most suspense in a movie is also the moment of peak unpredictability. We are riveted because we have no idea what will happen next.

Sext

¶ We were almost wondering how long it would take Chris Lehman, tireless cataloguer of Rich People Things, to tackle Penelope Green’s New York Times irony-laden visit to the Newport, Rhode Island mansion of Richard Saul Wurman, the genius behind TED.

But when Wurman hails her into the cavernous interior with the disarming greeting, “Isn’t it pretentious?” Green immediately takes the bait. Wurman may be grinning at his own excess, she writes, but “the joke’s not on him. It’s on his adopted city, its name still associated with the last vestiges of high WASP society.”

And how does that joke work, exactly? As Wurman’s designer confrere Massimo Vignelli explains things, the fusty smart set in Newport “need each other. They need their booze at 5, their costume parties. They need to know who is who, and who married what and how much money. It’s a kind of zoo. In that zoo, of course, Ricky has his own private pavilion, and he never goes out. I think he is considered an alien.”

In reality, of course, American prophets of social mobility have been marveling at the decay of the WASP establishment practically from the moment it first arrived on the Mayflower, not too far from the stately spreads of Newport. So it’s a safe bet that many diehard fixtures of the Newport scene, from to Caroline Astor to Claus von Bülow, haven’t imagined themselves born to those particular manors, either. Long before it became the province of hipsters and (what amounts to the same thing) TV writers, social irony was a diverting plaything of the members of the power elite—and they relished nothing more than the chance to deploy it on their own social backgrounds.

Mr Lehman even wraps up his entry with “plus ça….”

¶ We’re reminded of a mordant piece about the “bit of a paradox” that TED helps to solve. It appeared at Stuff White People Like last week.

Sadly, TED Talks are not all roses and NPR approved comedians. For many white people, TED Conferences are actually a source of sadness and depression. This comes from their dreams to attend a future TED Conference in person. But with a price tag of $6000 and an invite-only policy, many white people are simply unable to attend. This is a new concept for white people as they have successfully been creating and joining expensive exclusive clubs for over one thousand years. Popular examples include: private schools, politics, and ice hockey.

Note: It is not advised to try to use sarcasm when trying to console a white person about their lack of an invitation to the TED conference.

“It must hard for you not being able to get into an expensive, invitation only club. As a non-white person, lets just say I have some experience in that field.”

“You didn’t get into MENSA either huh?”

Nones

¶ At Haaretz, Alon Liel writes an almost helplessly admiring portrait of Recip Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish Prime Minister who, flsuh with victory in yesterday’s constitutional referendum, seems set to leave an imprint comparable to that of Kemal Ataturk —”even if we in Israel are largely united by our distate for him.” A distaste shared by Turkey’s Kemalist elite.  

Many in Turkey and abroad view Turkey’s transformation – more religious, more eastward-looking – as cause for concern. But to the majority of Turks, the reforms have made the republic more democratic, more humane.

Erdogan will remain hated by the Turkish secular elite, which is concentrated in the army, universities and business community. But he is beloved by Turkey’s poorer, devout periphery. The prime minister has straightened the backbone of the marginalized, and in return has received their undying loyalty.

Fears that Erdogan will turn the country into an Iranian-style Islamic republic are unfounded. Support for the prime minister rests not only on ideology but also on modernization and the prosperity he has helped bring.

We in Israel know Erdogan primarily for his hard-line Mideast policy, less so for his economic platform. But the prime minister’s every step is taken with fiscal growth in mind. Erdogan will abandon neither modernization nor democracy, the system allowing his government to stay in power.

Mr Liel closes by charging Mr Erdogan with developing a solution to the demand for Kurdish autonomy — a project that may become more realizable if the Prime Minister holds on to his office in elections next July.

Vespers

¶ At The Millions, Chris Graham rootles about in the rather absurd idea of “reading for pleasure” — by which he means not so much reading fun books (certainly not!) as reading books simply because you want to — and bumps up against the persistence of the bêtise that work and pleasure are incompatible.

The problem for the librarian, no less than for the career consultant, the occupational health and safety supervisor, and the beleaguered investment banker, is that the notion of a “work-life balance” is a terrible false dichotomy, the Marxist equivalent of giving all your chips away before the deck is even shuffled and then borrowing from the dealer to buy a round for the table. It is manifestly impossible to divide one’s life into neat or even approximately spherical compartments (how many New York Times crossword puzzles have been completed with a “Eureka!” exclaimed while on the family dog’s midnight promenade), and the decision to deny the obvious is generally employed by those who actually know better, which is why they are forever unsatisfied with the level of the scales. While it is plainly true that one can read a book more or less closely (substitute a beach blanket and a daiquiri for a pencil and a desk), it is equally true that something of everything we read is retained, to be recalled, by chance more often than design, on some or another future occasion, a dinner conversation, a tutorial essay, or a game of Trivial Pursuit. As every student who has written an examination knows all too well, it is impossible to predict when the most felicitous recollections  – legend has it, the essential ingredients in the making of a “Congratulatory First” – will occur, but the chances are most assuredly increased in direct proportion to the number of books we read.

Even, just for pleasure.

Compline

¶ The three final paragraphs of the late Tony Judt’s essay on Czeslaw Milosz’s classic study of intellectuals and totalitarianism, The Captive Mind, ought to chill every thoughtful reader of this site, suggesting as it does the lightning ease with which an ideology defeated in Eastern Europe transplanted itself to flourishing conditions in the United States.

Above all, the thrall in which an ideology holds a people is best measured by their collective inability to imagine alternatives. We know perfectly well that untrammeled faith in unregulated markets kills: the rigid application of what was until recently the “Washington consensus” in vulnerable developing countries—with its emphasis on tight fiscal policy, privatization, low tariffs, and deregulation—has destroyed millions of livelihoods. Meanwhile, the stringent “commercial terms” on which vital pharmaceuticals are made available has drastically reduced life expectancy in many places. But in Margaret Thatcher’s deathless phrase, “there is no alternative.”

It was in just such terms that communism was presented to its beneficiaries following World War II; and it was because History afforded no apparent alternative to a Communist future that so many of Stalin’s foreign admirers were swept into intellectual captivity. But when Miłosz published The Captive Mind, Western intellectuals were still debating among genuinely competitive social models—whether social democratic, social market, or regulated market variants of liberal capitalism. Today, despite the odd Keynesian protest from below the salt, a consensus reigns.

For Miłosz, “the man of the East cannot take Americans seriously because they have never undergone the experiences that teach men how relative their judgments and thinking habits are.” This is doubtless so and explains the continuing skepticism of the Eastern European in the face of Western innocence. But there is nothing innocent about Western (and Eastern) commentators’ voluntary servitude before the new pan-orthodoxy. Many of them, Ketman-like, know better but prefer not to raise their heads above the parapet. In this sense at least, they have something truly in common with the intellectuals of the Communist age. One hundred years after his birth, fifty-seven years after the publication of his seminal essay, Miłosz’s indictment of the servile intellectual rings truer than ever: “his chief characteristic is his fear of thinking for himself.”

This has nothing to do with the ideology of communism or the pragmatics of capitalism. It is the dogma — inexorable to all those who recognize it — of Hegelian necessity. The same wind that propelled collectivism now fills the sails of free-market orthodoxy.

Have a Look

¶ “Anyway, if your name is also Ted Wilson, expect a lawsuit.” (The Rumpus)

¶ Joanna Neborsky shares a raft of fantastic unused drawings from her forthcoming illustrated edition of the Fénéon/Sante Three-Line Novels. (The Rumpus)

Now the truth can be told, apparently. The wise men at the Times have decided to share some juicy inside information.

Partners get investment opportunities not offered to other employees, and are typically the highest paid at the firm. Goldman will even book tables for them at fashionable New York restaurants.

What Susanne Craig’s somewhat breathless account doesn’t tell you is that, having booked that fashionable table, Goldman will eat your dinner for you.

Tomorrow: “Traffic on Fifth Avenue is Southbound.”

Matins

¶ Samuel Freedman’s piece on the Muslim Prayer Room on the 17th floor of the World Trade Center’s South Tower is required reading. The fact that there was such a spiritual center is unlikely to persuade opponents of the Parc51 center to change their minds — we fully expect to hear someone claim that the Twin Towers were doomed by the contaminating presence of an Islamic facility — nor will it make radical extremists stop to think what terrible damage they do to their values by corrupting them with violence. It’s up to the rest of us to bear in mind what’s right, and to speak out for it. (NYT)

“It was so freeing and so calm,” Mr. Sareshwala, 47, said in a phone conversation from Mumbai, where he is now based. “It had the feel of a real mosque. And the best part is that you are in the epicenter of capitalism — New York City, the World Trade Center — and you had this island of spiritualism. I don’t think you could have that combination anywhere in the world.”

How, when and by whom the prayer room was begun remains unclear. Interviews this week with historians and building executives of the trade center came up empty. Many of the Port Authority’s leasing records were destroyed in the towers’ collapse. The imams of several Manhattan mosques whose members sometimes went to the prayer room knew nothing of its origins.

Yet the room’s existence is etched in the memories of participants like Mr. Abdus-Salaam and Mr. Sareshwala. Professor John L. Esposito of Georgetown, an expert in Islamic studies, briefly mentions the prayer room in his recent book “The Future of Islam.”

Lauds

¶ In what amounts to a letter of admonition, The Economist berates Damien Hirst for enriching himself at the expense of his “investors.” Since, in our view, the focus of Hirst’s art is in its marketing, we don’t see how investors can lose, no matter how much value their purchases lose. Really, the conned investors are part of the picture.

In 2008 and 2009, Mr Hirst repeatedly made statements like “The first time you sell something is when it should cost the most” and “I’ve definitely had the goal to make the primary market more expensive.” The artist was frustrated by the speculators who were buying from his galleries then quickly reselling his work at auction. Moreover, the acquisition of a package of 12 of his own works from Charles Saatchi for £6m in 2003, far more than what Mr Saatchi had originally paid, may have led to an Oedipal determination to overthrow all the high-rolling dealers and collectors who thought they might lord it over the little artist.

The goal of making the primary works more expensive may benefit Mr Hirst’s personal income in the short-term, but it makes no sense from the perspective of his market. Part of the reason that art costs more than wallpaper is the expectation that it might appreciate in value. Flooding the market with new work is like debasing the coinage, a strategy used from Nero to the Weimar Republic with disastrous consequences. If Mr Hirst were managing a quoted company, he would be unable to enrich himself at the expense of his investors in quite the same way. But Mr Hirst is an artist and, in Western countries, artists are valued as rule-breaking rogues.

Two developments could help Mr Hirst’s secondary market. He has started compiling his catalogue raisonné, a complete list of all the works he has made, which will comfort those who suspect he has made hundreds more spot and spin paintings than he admits to. According to Francis Outred, Christie’s European head of contemporary art, “As with Warhol, this could bring reassuring clarity to the question of volume within each series.” Mr Hirst is also discussing with the Tate a retrospective show to coincide with the Olympic games in London in 2012.

Prime

¶ Yves Smith is not hopeful that the heightened SEC investigation of accounting fraud at Lehman Brothers will lead to criminal penalties. In part, as Ms Smith points out, this is because the complexities of financial litigation can be counted upon to overpower juries’ judgment. But it also owes, we think, to the hushed respectability of the courtroom environment, in which groomed and suited white-collar types exude blamelessness.

One factor that would seem to improve the odds of success in pursuing former Lehman executives is they were directly involved in the preparation of the dubious financial statements, while at AIG, the dubious behavior occurred at the operational level, and accounting and management controls appear to have been weak (which serves to give corporate level executives plausible deniability). But you have a thicket of other problems. The biggest is if any of these cases were to go to trial, complex financial fraud cases are very hard to win. As Frank Partnoy explains long form in his book Infectious Greed, defense attorneys can win simply by confusing the jury. And given some of the stunning decisions he recounts, that approach seems to work with some judges too.

An a further obstacle is that the SEC is just not practiced at this sort of case. For many years, they limited their focus to insider trading cases. Their botched suit against Ralph Cioffi, the manager of the Bear hedge funds that blew up in July 2007, has no doubt made them more cautious in their choice of targets.

Despite the obstacles to winning in court (which in turn weakens the government’s ability to extract a juicy settlement), Lehman is such a high profile case that the SEC may feel politically that it has not choice other than to file the best suit it can. If so, it will be revealing to see how they frame it and who they decide to pursue. The Goldman Abacus suit suggests that they will focus very narrowly. And that in turn means its potential to have broader impact is likely to be limited.

Tierce

¶ At Wired Science, Brendan Keim writes up an interesting study: “Early Warning Signs Could Show When Extinction Is Coming.” As populations are challenged, they rebound less robustly from environmental challenges.

In a study published Sept. 9 in Nature, Drake and University of South Carolina biologist Blaine Griffen tracked population changes in 60 laboratory colonies of water fleas. Half were given a steady food supply, while the others received one-quarter less food every month. Lacking the nutrients needed to reproduce more frequently than they died, the latter colonies inevitably went extinct, long before the food ran out.

In any animal population, the number of individuals oscillates naturally. A few extra offspring are born, putting a strain on resources; that leads to a few extra deaths or a drop in births, which frees up resources that allow the population to grow again. These fluctuations converge on an equilibrium somewhere in the middle. Both the control and nutrient-deprived populations followed this pattern.

But when Drake and Griffen looked closely at the data from declining groups, they found that populations took much longer to return to equilibrium. That’s a telltale sign of critical slowing down. Under too much stress, a system loses its balance easily, and takes longer to recover that balance. It was evident up to eight generations before extinction.

Sext

¶ You can close down Spy Magazine, but you can’t take the stunt out of former Spy-meisters like Tad Friend, who was determined to make his way from the Empire State Building to Central Park without setting foot on Fifth or Sixth Avenues. There’s a burly doorman on Fifty-fifth Street who owes Mr Friend a cigar. Or something. He didn’t think that our hero would find a mid-block route (through some building or other) to Fifty-sixth street. We wouldn’t have been surprised if Mr Friend had hitched a ride with low-lying window washers.

From Rockefeller Center’s underground concourse, I rose by escalator to glimpse the statue of Atlas, kneeling in welcome. Was it enough? Somehow, no. As I had three blocks of safe passage in the cozy Art Deco warren, I impulsively decided to carry on—all the way to Central Park, if possible.

An office building, a plaza, and two more parking garages got me to Fifty-fifth Street, but Fifty-fifth was pitiless. No plazas or arcades, and all three garages were squatty bolt-holes. The burly doorman at 65 West Fifty-fifth declared, “You’re going to have to hit Fifth or Sixth.” The doorman at the Shoreham Hotel, down the block, shook his head. And the guard at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church had no interest in liberation theology. As I trudged westward, the burly doorman crowed, “I told ya!” It was after 5 P.M., so I ducked in for a drink a few doors down at the Whiskey Trader bar, where the weekend was noisily under way. Downstairs, by the rest rooms, was a door with a sign warning “Siren Will Sound.” But siren didn’t sound. In the adjacent basement were a mop and a bucket, odds and dead ends—and a stairwell, leading up. On the landing I eased open a fire door . . . into a gleaming lobby off Fifty-sixth. Ha!

Nones

¶ Gordon Chang tells us what to watch for as the Korean Workers’ Party’s national conference — the first since 1966 — unfolds. Will Kim Jong-Il have his way as regards succession plans? (The New Republic; via Real Clear World)

Almost anything can occur at the party conference. Everyone will be watching what happens to the youngest Kim. More interesting, however, will be events surrounding Jang Sung-Taek, widely seen as the regent for young Jong-Un. Jang, Kim Jong-Il’s brother-in-law, has already accumulated substantial authority in the last two years, especially over the security services. In all probability, Kim Jong-Il is uneasy about handing over so much responsibility to a non-Kim, but he has no choice if he wants his not-too-well-prepared son to eventually take over.

So far, Kim has given his son a post inside the National Defense Commission, the most powerful body in North Korea. The army, the regime’s backstop, is generally on board with Jong-Un because most flag officers realize their favored position in society is dependent on the Kim family. 

But Jong-Un’s future is by no means assured. China probably wants him out of the way so that there can be a collective leadership. Moreover, ambitious generals and even-more-dangerous colonels could be scheming. Finally, Jang Sung-Taek may not want to relinquish power when Kim Jong-Il has passed from the scene, either naturally or otherwise. 

What should we be looking for this week? If Jong-Un is proclaimed successor at the party conference, we know his dad, Kim Jong-Il, is close to death. It’s not his father’s style to cede power quickly. It’s more likely the young son will be given one or more party posts. It’s even possible that the party machinery will be merely reorganized to allow the young Kim to build his power base. The last outcome would indicate continued resistance to Kim’s succession planning.

Vespers

¶ Venerable Oxford bookseller Blackwell’s, in order to avoid “awful takeovers,” is going to adopt the employee-owned business model developed by John Lewis, the British department store. (Guardian; via Survival of the Book)

Blackwell’s decision comes after several years of losses and at a time when booksellers are facing mounting competition from supermarkets, the internet and e-books. Borders has closed down in the UK and HMV is facing shareholder pressure to sell its underperforming Waterstone’s chain. But Blackwell expects to move back into profit this year and its owner said he was convinced his chain had a bright future: “We must concentrate on being a specialist. We have some of the best specialists in the world. As long as there are people who want to speak to a specialist, we will stay in business.”

He said he was doing much of the work on the new constitution himself because “I don’t want to hire a lot of consultants”.

The Blackwell business traces its roots back to the 19th century, when it was founded as a small bookseller on Broad Street in Oxford. It expanded on to the internet and to London in the 1990s and also had a publishing arm until it was sold to rival John Wiley in 2007. Control has been handed down through the family.

Compline

¶ From the look of it, Miles Klee already lives in the dystopian near-future sketched by Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Which makes his dissatisfied review of the novel a kind of pendant to it. Also it will absolve would-not-be readers of the venial sin of procrastination. (Having heard Shteyngart read from Absurdistan, we have no idea why his publisher hasn’t cajoled him into making an audiobook of Super Sad.) (The Awl)

I’d wager that Super Sad has more “the way we live now” commentary per sentence than Jonathan Franzen’s present-set Freedom does, because it needs to plow through as formidable a laundry list of grievances as any manifesto could muster and create redundant prophecy based on those complaints, all while kicking a doomed-romance subplot along like some crumpled beer can that happened to be in its path.

[snip]

You could claim that I’m just projecting my own generational or writerly neuroses. You could argue that I’m a hypocrite, or that I’m pushing for a more escapist type of fiction, or attacking a genre’s very foundation, the now-future concept being virtually sacrosanct. I’ll accept all that and yet I can’t shake the inkling that we should demand more than a well-polished fun mirror when it comes to social critique. I want some surprising membrane: warped, restless and permeable. I need, more than anything, to be startled.

Have a Look

¶ Virtual restoration of the Abbey of Cluny, founded 910 and one of the great medieval institutions. (Le Monde; via Ionarts)

¶ Reading list recommendations from Jonathan Franzen. (Book Beast)

David Hare on Mad Men. (Guardian)

It needs courage to withhold, and withholding is what this series is all about. Feature films in the English language seem to obsess more and more on only one thing at a time – they concentrate on their given subject with a kind of furious, exhausting dullness. But in Mad Men, nothing is dwelt on very long and, as in life, lots of things happen at once. It’s entirely typical of Matthew Weiner’s complicating techniques that when at the climax of three series, Don Draper drives home to find that his wife Betty has finally opened his desk drawer and come upon evidence of his previous self, he meanwhile has another woman waiting for him in the car outside. Even when facing the crisis of his life, our hero’s mind can’t help, partly at least, being on something else.

Matins

¶ At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong tackles a muddle — if we may propose an awkward image to reflect a category mistake that has flooded the intellectual territory once overseen by the mainstream media — “Of Writers and Activists — Are Science Bloggers Being Ambitious Enough?”

My goals are different – they are not to change the way research gets done or they way policies are set. I lack the experience, background, energy and time. I can only hope to do what I do best – talk about science in a way that encourages people to listen. My goals are: to inspire people about science by providing good writing (well, communication, but primarily writing); and to improve the quality of science journalism by providing an example and by engaging with the science writing community, at conferences and on social media.

Is blogging the most productive way I could be doing this? Sarah Kendrew asked me this question at Science Online London 2010 (15:00 in the third video), and I thought it a fair one. I can only answer: it is for me (leaving aside the fact that I also try to be active on social media, speak at events, and so on). It’s the best way I can make use of my abilities. If people had infinite time, skills and opportunities, I’d probably tell them to be science teachers; Alom Shaha makes an able case for why our need for science educators surpasses our need for science communicators.  But I am not a teacher; I’m a writer and I’m a journalist.

As a journalist, being an advocate can be detrimental to my job. Dan Vergano from USA Today says, “Science reporting ain’t advocacy. That takes the field in the wrong direction, back to the 1950’s.” Nobody would benefit from journalists who cheerlead for science without holding it to account when necessary.

All writing is advocatory. Some writers advocate taking political action, while others advocate developing a rigorous understanding of the world. The two groups are often at temperamental odds even when facts are not in dispute; one fact that is always in dispute is the urgency of taking action of one kind or another. We think it sufficient for writers to be clear about which kind of advocacy they’re engaged in.

Lauds

¶ The Jewish High Holidays prompt Miles Hoffman to discuss the lack of anything like the classical liturgical music that serious Western composers went on composing long after the Age of Faith. (NYT)

It’s certainly strange that their very liberation as Jews led to composers’ leaving the substance of Judaism behind, at least artistically. But is it realistic to expect brilliant Jewish composers, exposed to some of the most magnificent artistic creations of Western civilization and struck by the universal impact and appeal of those creations, to be satisfied setting Hebrew texts for their local congregations?

Yes, it’s possible that if some of these great composers had written monumental works for the synagogue, those works might eventually have found a broad public. And some have: Ernest Bloch’s “Avodath Hakodesh” (“Sacred Service”), for example, is widely performed — in concert halls more than synagogues — and Leonard Bernstein’s settings of Hebrew texts have not lacked for mixed audiences.

More recently, contemporary Jewish composers like Paul Schoenfield, Osvaldo Golijov and Max Raimi have made compelling use of traditional Jewish tunes and styles in music for the concert hall and found a sizeable audience.

But historically speaking, many Jewish composers simply felt compelled to strike out well beyond their parochial origins, and to avoid at all costs the possibility of being pigeon-holed as composers of “Jewish music.”

There is more here than Mr Hoffman seems to realize. The musical tradition of Western Christianity is weighted toward triumphalism; even non-celebratory music (such as Requiem Masses) are grand more often than not. This reflects not only the overwhelming dominance of Christianity in Western history but also the imposing churches that, beginning with Hagia Sophia, have no counterpart in Judaism.  

Prime

¶ At Weakonomics, Philip takes issue with the notion that the recession has hurt blue-collar workers the most — or, in educational terms, that workers with the least academic attainments have been hurt the worst. His figures suggest just the opposite, and, indeed, people with some college education have witnessed the highest increase in unemployment rates. (For our part, we believe that the unemployment problem is so structural that it preceded the recession and will outlast it, but that’s a discussion for another day.)

Every recession is referred to as a blue collar recession because many blue collar jobs rely on the economy itself. Manufacturing is very much cyclical, in that when the economy is good so is the sector. When the economy suffers, they get laid off. But the truth is white collar workers have it just as bad, and may have it worse.

It all comes down to how you market the data. It’s easy to spin the employment data to fit the blue collar recession headline. One common citation is unemployment divided up into educational attainment. The categories are: less than high school diploma, high school diploma, some college or associates degree, and college degree or higher. The unemployment rates start high and work their way down: 14%, 10.3%, 8.7%, and 4.6%. By this metric it does look like a blue collar recession since blue collar jobs typically require less education. But what if we measured the % increase in unemployed from 2007 to today? Do the numbers tell the same story? Hardly

Tierce

¶ We’re not sure that we know exactly what bothers Jonah Lehrer about the ease of e-readers, or how the problem that he foresees can be addressed, but we’re going to file away the distinction between ventral and dorsal reading, one of the rich cognitive findings associated with Stanislas Dehaene. 

So here’s my wish for e-readers. I’d love them to include a feature that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s the point: Only then will we process the text a little less unconsciously, with less reliance on the ventral pathway. We won’t just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.

My larger anxiety has to do with the sprawling influence of technology. Sooner or later, every medium starts to influence the message. I worry that, before long, we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink – to these screens that keep on getting better – that the technology will feedback onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts. We’ll forget what it’s like to flex those dorsal muscles, to consciously decipher a literate clause. And that would be a shame, because not every sentence should be easy to read.

Mr Lehrer concludes with an interesting sidenote: in order to proofread his writing, he has to print it out. If our experience is applicable, it isn’t the printing that’s key. Nothing enhances our attention to detail than reading something that we have published something online. OMG!

Sext

¶ Bess Levin (Dealbreakder) and Jessica Pressler (Daily Intel) chat LOLlingly about Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. As Bess says in her introduction, “ I’m not going to say it’s so bad you shouldn’t see it, but that’s just because it’s so bad it needs to be seen to be believed and we want more people to be able to share in our collective trauma.” The movie does promise some unintended fun for Wall Streeters.

ohbabyitsbess: We should get into all of the characters who were real but not real. Like the head of Not Bear Stearns, Not Jimmy Cayne.
jessaballs: Yeah, Not Jimmy Cayne was more like Ace Greenberg than Jimmy Cayne.
jessaballs: He dressed like Ace.
jessaballs: in a bowler hat and bow tie
ohbabyitsbess: And he had a dog he loved
jessaballs: And he had not idea what was going on at his own bank.
ohbabyitsbess: But you felt bad for him anyway, especially when Not Jamie Dimon was like, “I will buy Not Bear Stearns for $3 a share, AND NOT A PENNY MORE.”
ohbabyitsbess: Not Jamie Dimon was kind of amazing
ohbabyitsbess: Not Jamie Dimon wears leather and rides bikes
jessaballs: And wears red velvet smoking jackets and hosts opera singers in his Upper East Side mansion.
ohbabyitsbess: and throws Goyas across the room when he’s angry
jessaballs: And after Jake starts spreading rumors that bring down Not JP Morgan’s stock in order to punish him for what he did to Not Bear Stearns, Not Jamie offers him a job at Not JP Morgan.
ohbabyitsbess: Because even though he lost him money, Not Jamie Dimon is the kind of guy who likes moxie
jessaballs: He wanted to hate fuck him, in a business sense
ohbabyitsbess: And then later Jake becomes a star at Not JP Morgan, because he is also the only one who knows about Chinese customs
ohbabyitsbess: And knows to give a gift for the Chinese guy when they come visit to potentially give them capital
jessaballs: That’s what its all about, really, these billion-dollar deals
jessaballs: Toblerones, and being polite

Nones

¶ We try not to go out of our way to be gloomy in these pages, but we must admit that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s address to the Council on Foreign Relations — her sixth, personally, and her second as Secretary — is a disappointment, for failing to be specific about much of anything in general, and for discussing the narcotrafficking issues that plague our hemisphere without even a whisper about the decriminialization of drugs. Here is her entire response to a question asked by Carla Hills. (via  Real Clear World)

CLINTON: Well, first, Carla, thank you for asking about this hemisphere, because it is very much on our minds. And we face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency, in Mexico and in Central America.

And we are working very hard to assist the Mexicans in improving their law enforcement and their intelligence, their capacity to detain and prosecute those who they arrest. I give President Calderon very high marks for his courage and his commitment. This is a really tough challenge. And these drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency — you know, all of a sudden car bombs show up, which weren’t there before.

So it’s becoming — it’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narcotraffickers control, you know, certain parts of the country — not — significant parts; in Colombia, it got to the point where, you know, more than a third of the country — nearly 40 percent of the country at one time or another was controlled by the insurgents, by FARC.

But it’s going to take a combination of improved institutional capacity and better law enforcement and, where appropriate, military support for that law enforcement, you know, married to political will, to be able to prevent this from spreading and to try to beat it back.

Mexico has capacity, and they’re using that capacity, and they’ve been very willing to take advice. You know, they’re wanting to do as much of it on their own as possible, but we stand ready to help them. But the small countries in Central America do not have that capacity, and the newly inaugurated president of Costa Rica, President Chinchilla, you know, said, we need help and we need a much more vigorous U.S. presence.

So we are working to try to enhance what we have in Central America. We hear the same thing from our Caribbean friends, so we have an initiative, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative. And our relationship is not all about drugs and violence and crime, but unfortunately that often gets the headlines. We’re also working on more economic programs, we’re working on Millennium Challenge grants, we’re working on a lot of other ways of bolstering economies and governments to improve rule of law. But this is on the top of everyone’s mind when they come to speak with us.

And I know that Plan Colombia was controversial. I was just in Colombia, and there were problems and there were mistakes, but it worked. And it was bipartisan, started, you know, in the Clinton administration, continued in the Bush administration. And I think President Santos will try to do everything he can to remedy the problems of the past while continuing to, you know, make progress against the insurgency.

And we need to figure out what are the equivalents for Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. And that’s not easy, because these — you know, you put your finger on it. I mean, those drugs come up through Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, through Central America, southern Mexico, to the border, and we consume them. And those guns — you know, those guns, legal and illegal, keep flooding, along with all of the mayhem — it’s not only guns; it’s weapons, it’s arsenals of all kinds that come south. So I feel a real sense of responsibility to do everything we can. And again, we’re working hard to come up with approaches that will actually deliver.

Vespers

¶ A brief profile of reluctant entrepreneur Tim Waterstone. Alex Clark begins: “A man who went on to sell the company to the firm that had made him redundant, and then bought it back; and who, after apparently parting ways with his bookshops for good, made four separate attempts to gain control of them once again? This strikes me as almost a dictionary definition of an entrepreneur. So what’s the beef?” (Guardian)

His quibble, it turns out, has its basis in good manners. “I can’t bear the self-congratulatory thing of applying it to oneself, really,” he says: softly spoken and courteous, he appears, in tone and bearing, far more like a gentleman publisher than a cut-throat boardroom monster. Indeed, our semantic discussion has been prompted by his description of the bankers whom he met during a deal he was working on a few years ago and who make up a major strand in his new novel, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, an everyday tale of high finance, newspaper dynasties and the world of books. They were, he says, “so awful” that he started jotting down their conversations during meetings, and soon began to form an idea for a fictional parody of them. He was particularly struck by what seemed to him “like this endless drive towards the accumulation of personal wealth”, a motivation at odds, he is at pains to point out, with his own impulses.

“You know, as an entrepreneur, and I hate calling myself an entrepreneur” – here our digression begins – “you don’t do it for the money at all, really you don’t; you’re doing it because you get caught up in an idea and you want that idea to work.” The ultimate achievement, according to Waterstone, is to see your vision realised, often against the odds: almost all entrepreneurs, he thinks, are fighting against received wisdom.

Compline

¶ President Obama has deplored Rev Terry Jones’s plan to burn copies of the Qur’an on Saturday. We wish that the president had done something this exciting before now, but we’ll take what we can get.

“If he’s listening, I just hope he understands that what he’s proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans,” Mr. Obama said in an interview shown Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” referring to Terry Jones, a pastor from Gainesville, Fla.

“As a practical matter, as commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States, I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women in uniform who are in Iraq, who are in Afghanistan,” the president said.

Mr. Obama said that the Koran burning would be a “recruitment bonanza for Al Qaeda” and other terrorist groups looking for people willing to “blow themselves up” in American or European cities.

Have a Look

¶ Eraserhead — in a one-page panel. (HTMLGIANT)

¶ So that’s it! We’re supposed to like and admire Vincent Karthesier! (Well, we do.) (Thanks, Greg X!)

¶ How many points of Helvetica would it take to stretch from the Earth to the Moon? If you have to ask, you can’t apport it. (kottke.org)