Some people love Caitlin Flanagan's wit and prose; others want to wring the essayist's neck, for her tart putdowns of what she sees as the selfish choices made by two-career couples, and particularly by upper-middle-class working women. (She held court for a while as the in-house opiner on matters domestic for the very masculine Atlantic Monthly; now she's at the New Yorker.)
Like her or dislike her, there's a strange sui generis quality about her own family situation that James Wolcott (one of our authors of the day, evidently!) puts his finger on, in the latest New Republic [$], reviewing her book, "To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife."
The anti-Flanagan brigade often points out that her husband is a successful executive and that the couple can afford a nanny and domestic help -- facts working against her authorial identity as a trend-flouting stay-at-home Mom. (She's famously boasted that she's never changed a sheet, or dusted away a cobweb.) But it's her identity as a writer that makes her situation even less representative, Wolcott says:
[M]illions of American mothers do not have the option of enveloping their children in a cotton-candy cloud of unconditional love until they are old enough to soldier off to school with their little backpacks. And there are mothers who do have the option, but choose to remain in the pros not only because of the income and the social prestige, but because, like Flanagan, they have a vocation, a calling -- a talent that will torment them if it goes unused. Flanagan is lucky: her vocation allows her to stay home and work on any flat surface where her computer can sit. If she were irresistibly drawn to medicine, law, education, or social work, she might decide that there are things more (or as) important than scuba-deep mother love. It's easy being a stay-at-home mother when you're already a stay-at-home writer. Being a writer makes agoraphobia redundant.
Stay-at-home parent who, at the same time, sits at the apex of a profession: Nice work if you can get it, I'd say.
Following up on John's post about Tuesday's forum concerning plans for the Rose Kennedy Greenway, two attendees noted the audience reaction to one announcement with some puzzlement. When it was declared that no memorials would be built on the Greenway for at least five years, there was considerable applause, followed by a mass of departures.
A group of Armenian-Americans hoped to see a memorial to the Armenian holocaust built on the Greenway. The Mayor opposed the idea: "We could have 44 [memorials] out there. What prevents that?" Whether Tuesday's attendees left because they were happy to hear that the Greenway would remain memorial free -- and the applause suggests that interpretation -- or because they were storming out in protest is hard to say.
As we near crunch time in the Major League Baseball season, The Wall Street Journal has an in-depth piece (available free online for the day) on the history of clutch hitting. Using a complicated matrix, the Journal ranks baseball's biggest hits, and comes up with some surprising winners. Tony Womack's game-tying double in the 7th game of the 2001 World Series gets the number one slot. Huh?
Alas, David Ortiz gets robbed, as do the Red Sox in general:
On another note, the number of legendary home runs involving the Red Sox that didn't make our list (Carlton Fisk's 1975 World Series home run included), suggests Boston fans lead the league in overestimating their relative importance in the baseball cosmos.
As if missing the playoffs weren't enough of an insult.
Chris's experience watching the Gehry film reminded me of one I had earlier this week reading an article about the architect Eero Saarinen.
Saarinen's most famous commission is the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, better known as the St. Louis Arch. I first visited the Arch two summers ago, arriving at the monument unaware that you can ascend via tram to its top. Unable to get a tram ticket that day, I returned this past summer to complete the tour (OK, and to see the new Busch Stadium). Actually, I was able to do both at once, peering out the windows of the Arch's observatory, I took in batting practice from 630 feet above the park.
Saarinen, who was prominent enough in his day to grace the cover of Time in 1956, also designed the TWA terminal at JFK and, for you college hockey fans, Ingalls Rink at Yale. But apparently his reputation suffered significantly after his death in 1961, in part because his papers and drawings were never collected.
Yale has now collected those papers, and Saarinen is enjoying a bit of a renaissance, at least to hear the Yale Alumni Magazine tell it. I might normally be skeptical of an alma mater's claims, but the magazine musters as back-up the indestructable art historian Vincent Scully (not to be confused with the indestructable Dodgers radio announcer Vin Scully). Though at Yale himself, Scully was long a Saarinen skeptic before having a conversion experience, described in a recent speech. Apologies for the long quote, but I think it's worth it:
I criticized [the TWA Terminal] at the time, reacting to the concrete structure choked with steel and questioning the bird imagery when it was the planes that flew. But what Eero was trying to do with those forced forms is much more important from a human point of view. It is to make those of us who are about to fly move calmly and intelligently from the tin-can containers of our automobiles to those other tin cans out there on the field, in order to be shut up in them and projected into empty space. What an irrational series of actions. Anything could happen at any time, and yet we do it all the time, habituated to it though never entirely free of anxieties. (I suspect the bravest hero of the Middle Ages could not have been induced to climb into one of those things.) But everything about Eero's TWA terminal says, You can do it; it is going to be wonderful up there. The beautiful volutes of the plan sweep us up and forward and into space. . . . It takes this secular act of faith that so many Americans make so often in their lives, this commitment to flight, and transforms it into a sacrament. The first time I flew out of TWA, which I am sorry to say was long after Eero's death, I thanked his shade, and asked his pardon for my blindness.
James Wolcott has a great post today on his wide-ranging blog, which usually focuses on politics. This time he executes a take-down on the spinoffs of the long-running television drama "Law and Order."
Picking apart an episode of "Law and Order: Criminal Intent," he writes with a casual yet snappy style that's generally frowned on in print but thrives in the blogosphere. Here he is on one of the virtues of the original program:
The black comedy of the L & O intros comes from the intrusion of mayhem into everyday New York routine. It's as if no one can run a simple errand without wandering into a crime scene. One second a Typical New Yorker is walking a dog along Riverside Drive or picking a kid up from pre-school, only to find an arm dangling from the dumpster, or the body of a tranny hooker draped over the hood of a gypsy cab.
I've been chuckling since yesterday about a quote Evan highlighted, from Paul Saffo, of a group called the Institute for the Future. Musing on the future of technology, Saffo poo-pooed some dire predicaments about the future and raised some other concerns. As you may recall, he said:
Now, fear of enslavement by our creations is an old fear, and a literary tritism. But I fear something worse and much more likely -- that sometime after 2020 our machines will become intelligent, evolve rapidly, and end up treating us as pets.
I myself think that Mr. Saffo is off the mark. I fear something even worse -- and, as I see it, obviously more likely: Our future robot oppressors will use us not as slaves, and not as pets, but as living targets in their evil war games.
John Sutherland has written a piece for the Guardian that brings to light the contention of some experts that Shakespeare was wildly uneven as a writer -- perhaps because he was sometimes wildly hungover.
Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, suggests the bard's bad-line days were the result of his being blotto the night before (as, often enough, was Ben Jonson. Sometimes they had to bring him home in a wheelbarrow).
Sutherland holds forth on, to his mind, the most vulnerable of William's venerable works:
Apart from Macbeth's soliloquies, the porter's half-pissed prose and Lady Macbeth's mad musings, the play is, to borrow a mixed metaphor, a veritable sea of crap.
The piece has given rise to a lively discussion board on the Guardian site devoted to the mischievously fun topic "Which masterpieces are secretly crap?"
We now have the news that Sony plans to launch a Web bookstore and a much delayed portable e-book device Oct. 1. The electronic books, 10,000 or so to start, will be available for download at a discount from the old paper-style thing.
The key point of interest here is that the e-reader uses a new "electronic ink" technology, developed by E Ink of Cambridge, MA. The screen is not backlit, which saves power, and is meant to mimic the printed page. Portable digital readers have come and gone without much impact, but the closer approximation to the feel of the page is an innovation that Bill Gates was talking about dreamily quite a few years ago. He said, quite rightly, that an e-reader won't truly catch hold unless it's something people will take to bed with them. Whether Sony has beaten Microsoft to that punch remains to be seen.
I should be more aware of such things, but I stumbled on the Frank Gehry "American Masters" documentary (shot by the film director Sydney Pollack) last night on PBS, while channel surfing. (WGBH and public-television stations around the country will be rebroadcasting it.) The word "genius" is unfashionable these days, but there is something otherworldly about the way this unprepossessing man -- schlumpy clothes, no oversized octagonal glasses -- from a lower-middle-class background, who was aimless for a spell in young adulthood (he drove trucks, pondered becoming a pilot), came to envision buildings like Bilbao.
Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead, and its architectural hero, Howard Roark, came to mind, however briefly. (God forgive me.) Gehry displays zero reverence for trends in architecture, and little, too, for architectural history. At one point in his career, in a satirical swipe at traditionalists who think modern architects ought to be looking to Greek temples for inspiration, he asked: If you’re going to look backward, why not look back even further than 2,500 years? And he started designing buildings with elements shaped like primordial fish. Of course, he pulled it off.
Beneath his avuncular surface, Gehry says he has a will to greatness. Yet many other aspects of Gehry contradict the Randian caricature of genius. On a trivial level –- but to Rand, a key one -- Gehry is no prime physical specimen. With that non-sleek beltline, she’d have cast him as a sniveling toady. Second, Gehry is backed by an extraordinarily able team of secondary architects, who amplify, augment, and improve his work. He would not be the genius he is without them, and "his" buildings are not his alone. To Rand, that would make both Gehry and the assistants something less than true artists, if not lowly worms –- of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
This past Sunday in Ideas, the Globe's Robert L. Turner gave a progress report on the Rose Kennedy Greenway, the greenspace planned for the swath of land formerly dominated by the elevated Central Artery.
On Tuesday night, the Boston Society of Architects held a public forum on the project at Fanueil Hall, and it was pretty packed. Representatives of Boston's car-driving, bike-riding, and dog-walking constituencies were well-represented in the Q&A portion of the program. (Though as one questioner noted, Boston's diversity was not as well-represented as it might have been -- the audience was predominantly white, and judging by the architect glasses and the argyle socks, well-heeled.)
Best question of the night: Any chance of expanding the Greenway into City Hall Plaza?
Weirdest moment of the night: Being handed a Starbucks gift card on the way out. Civic engagement never tasted so good.
A second public forum, to be held Oct. 17th, will discuss programming on the new public space, and will feature speakers from other cities that have taken on similar projects. One, from Montreal, will address the pressing question, How to make the best use of greenspace come winter?
Open University, a blog of The New Republic, points to an important article in The New Atlantis, a scientific and technical journal, about the future of the peer review process.
The main thrust is that there are clear indications that peer review "will evolve in the next few years as the established journals come to terms with Internet publication." Besides providing a capsule history of peer review, which has been solidly entrenched at the major scientific journals for decades, the piece takes note of some of the widespread complaints about the process:
In a word, reviewers are often not really "conversant with the published literature"; they are "biased toward papers that affirm their prior convictions"; and they "are biased against innovation and/or are poor judges of quality." Reviewers also seem biased in favor of authors from prestigious institutions.
Most significant is the article's dicussion of the trend toward exploring alternate models that take advantage of the Internet to introduce transparency and collaboration to the publication process.
The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that "The Chicago Manual of Style," the august arbiter of prose style and usage, will publish an online version to mark its centennial.
The next to last edition of the manual, the 14th, carried next to zero illustrations, besides a black-and-white photo of a picture being cropped using L-shaped pieces of cardboard. The Chronicle article claims that "if any reference book can be said to exude charisma, it's 'The Chicago Manual of Style.'" Hmm, not so sure about that, and I'm a style geek.
But now the brick-like reference work joins the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, and The New Yorker in going digital. When will it be time to say "Ding, dong, print is dead"?
An article in American Heritage calls attention to a remarkable historical find in a field where documentation can be hard to come by: pre-World War II African-American life. An Oklahoma historian has found twenty-nine cans of silent film documenting some vibrant and successful black communities in Oklahoma in the 1920s, just after the Tulsa riots.
Excerpts from the film -- showing a parade of Packard cars, a graduation ceremony, school children at play, etc. -- are linked in the article.
Harvey Blume interviewed the Glasgow-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson for Sunday's Ideas section, an interview that stirred aome argument online. Daniel Drezner took issue with Ferguson's thought-provoking characterization of Osama bin Laden's worldview as "Lenin plus the Koran," and wanted hard data to back up the assertion that in Europe the appeal of radical Islamism extends beyond Muslim communities.
Ferguson also published an opinion piece Sunday in the Telegraph. He is just as vociferous there, slamming Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speeches before the UN. ("Chavez is just a clown.") Ferguson spends the op-ed scratching his head over the current disconnect he sees between economics and politics. Given Chavez's and Ahmadinejad's views and their economic clout (read: oil), given a coup in Thailand, given the rioting in Budapest, how is it that the world's markets aren't scrambling for cover? Ferguson believes monetary expansion is "encouraging a rather cavalier approach to risk management." He doesn't speculate about the consequences, but the implication of his argument is troubling: investors are seeing security where there isn't any.
PBS's Newshour with Jim Lehrer last night hosted the director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, Lee Rainie. He discussed the results of a recent survey of leading Internet thinkers and policy-makers about their predictions for the state of the Internet in 2020.
The most eye-opening bit to my mind is that 42% of respondents --- a significant minority -- agreed with the following statement:
By 2020, intelligent agents and distributed control will cut direct human input so completely out of some key activities such as surveillance, security, and tracking systems that technology beyond our control will generate dangers and dependencies that will not be recognized until it is impossible to reverse them.
One respondent to this scenario, Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, wrote:
Now, fear of enslavement by our creations is an old fear, and a literary tritism. But I fear something worse and much more likely -- that sometime after 2020 our machines will become intelligent, evolve rapidly, and end up treating us as pets.
In Sunday's Ideas section, Drake Bennett wrote about new forms of advertising that pretend not to be advertising, whether through a sophisticated or clumsy sleight of hand.
Mars Inc. seems to have hit on an advertising technique that isn't meant to fool you, exactly, but that operates in an unusually indirect way. Clicking here will usher you into a strange (and difficult) online video game promoting M&Ms Dark Chocolate. The game involves panning around a Hieronymus Bosch-like painting trying to locate "visual riddles" that represent the titles of thematically "dark" movies. The ad part? Only that there are a bunch of those familiar M&M figures embedded in the painting.
In another advance toward the virtual and away from reality, the novelist Margaret Atwood has completed a transatlantic book signing. Using a device she helped to invent called the LongPen, Atwood signed a tablet in Edinburgh and a robotic arm in Toronto mimicked her inscription, "To Mona," on a copy of Atwood's book.
"Do you believe it now?" said Atwood triumphantly, via video feed. (Shades of Verizon: "Can you hear me now?")
The LongPen includes a video screen and a microphone so that author and fan can interact, sans the arduous process of a book tour. Atwood and the company that manufactures the device -- Unotchit, as in You No Touch It -- see a boon for publishing. I see an invention that stands in the way of the book tour's raison d'etre: making the author real to the reader.
If Mark Liberman's "Sex on the Brain" in yesterday's Ideas aroused your curiosity, you'll find more on the subject at Language Log, the linguistics website Liberman co-founded. Here's the most recent entry, with links to the entire collection (so far).
Last year, in another interesting series, on accurate quotation, Liberman looked at the variations in reporters' quotes from the same interview (with NBA player Rasheed Wallace). I thought of those posts earlier this month, when I found myself accidentally plunged into similar research.
I set out to write a column on the word meds, inspired by a quote (supposedly) from Rosie O'Donnell's first day on "The View": "I'm on my meds, so all is well."
When I watched a recording of the show, though, I didn't hear those words. What Rosie said was:
"I had that crazy, crazy haircut that scared America to death. So it's going to be long from now on, and I'm taking my medicine, so everything's fine."
No one printed the whole quote, but a number of media reproduced parts of it: Here's what they came up with. (Omissions are indicated in brackets; added or changed words are in caps.)
"I had that crazy [omitted] haircut that scared America to death." (Cleveland Plain Dealer, New York Daily News)
"I had that crazy [omitted] haircut that scared America to death," she said. [omitted] "I'VE BEEN taking my MEDICATION." (E!Online)
"I had THE crazy [omitted] haircut that scared America to death," she joked, [omitted] "BUT I'm taking my medicine NOW so everything's GOING TO BE fine." (Newsday)
"I had that crazy, crazy haircut that scared America [omitted] and I am taking my medicine so everything is GOING TO BE ALL RIGHT." (Los Angeles Times)
"I had that crazy, crazy haircut that scared America to death," O'Donnell continued, ruefully. "So, YOU KNOW, it's going to be long from now on and I'm taking my medicine, so everything's fine!" (Toronto Star)
And finally, there's the eight-word "quote" that first caught my eye, in which half the words don't match the original: "I'm ON my MEDS . . . so ALL is WELL." (Grand Rapids Press)
Nobody, of course, would accuse the quoters of bias or malice; the context is trivial, the meaning isn't altered, and Rosie O'Donnell isn't running for office or practicing diplomacy.
Still, I was surprised (despite the Language Log evidence) to see how casually reporters "quoted" from a broadcast that was seen by millions and recorded, surely, by hundreds. As Mark Liberman says, "Even when quotations from sources are largely ceremonial in character, why not make them accurate?"
As Jacob T. Levy notes on Open University, the successful and often contentious "book events" -- imagine an online roundtable -- that are hosted with some regularity by the blogs Crooked Timber and The Valve are now to be published as paperbacks and as freely downloadable PDFs, released under a Creative Commons license in the spirit of Internet free love.
The first seminar/roundtable/forum/event (we might need a new word here) to be published is based on Chris Mooney's "The Republican War on Science." The new book, "Looking for a Fight," reproduces the comments of all contributors, including those of Mooney himself.
This seems to me a can't-lose development for book publishing, whose products often give rise to a smattering or clattering of reviews within a month and then a numbing silence. For academic blogs to extend the conversation about a worthy book is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But I must point, alas, to a different myth debunked. Comic book readers will recall the ads for X-ray glasses, which had the power to see the bones through the skin of the hands, or, more enticingly, to see through a neighbor's clothes. We all wondered. But a low-tech post out there puts the dream to rest. Turns out the secret's only a feather stuck between two pieces of cardboard. How this creates even an illusion of x-ray vision remains, even after reading this site, something of a mystery.
On Tuesday, writing in The Financial Times (London), management editor Tony Jackson exhumed Hegel in order to explain the (lamentable) return of economic nationalism to the EU:
After the death of communism, the American free-trade view of the world achieved the kind of dominance that was bound to produce a reaction. As the German philosopher Hegel would have put it, thesis begets antithesis.
Also on Tuesday, The Mideast Mirror quotes Israeli journalist and columnist Dan Margalit, who appears to have recently dragged Beckett into the middle of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:
Make no mistake about it: if there were some serious, responsible and reliable proposals... I would be willing to negotiate with [the Palestinian Authority] and make painful sacrifices. But Israel is doomed to wait in vain for that moment - just like Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" -- and that moment will never arrive if the government is now unable to stick up for what it believes.
And once more on Tuesday, Dan Di Sciullo, NFL Contributing Editor to The Sports Network, pulled the old "If X were alive" stunt in a story about Kansas City Chiefs coach Herm Edwards and the Chiefs' lousy season so far:
If T.S. Eliot were alive and a Kansas City Chiefs fan, he
might say that the Herm Edwards' era has begun, "Not with a bang but a
whimper."
Then, on Wednesday, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez dropped the A-bomb on the UN General Assembly. By which I mean that while waving a Noam Chomsky book, Chavez name-dropped Aristotle. According to the CNN transcript, this is what he said:
As Chomsky says here, clearly and in depth, the American empire is doing all it can to consolidate its system of domination.... They say they want to impose a democratic model.... What a strange democracy. Aristotle might not recognize it or others who are at the root of democracy. What type of democracy do you impose with marines and bombs?
And on Thursday, the college football correspondent to The Sherbrooke Record (Quebec) got his hands on the same Nietzsche quotebook everyone else seems to have discovered recently (see last two Philosophywatches). Undismayed that, in their most recent game, the Bishop University Gaiters let a 15-9 lead turn into a 38-18 loss, our man in Quebec had this to say:
The German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche once stated "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." Nietzsche may not have been a football fan but his quote is apropos for the 2006 Bishop's football team. They will get stronger, a lot stronger.
A guest blogger on lefty sharpshooter Joshua Micah Marshall's blog Talking Points Memo points to a column on Sunday by New York Daily News sportswriter Mike Lupica.
Lupica, clearly enraged by government attempts to force the San Francisco Chronicle's Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada to reveal their sources for their unmatched investigative reporting on steroids in baseball, took the opportunity to let loose on the whole Bush administration:
So now the reporters are the bad guys, not the ballplayers who used drugs and then, most likely, lied about that in front of the grand jury. Get the reporters, not them. It's a variation of starting a war against somebody who didn't blow up two of your buildings and kill 3000 of your people.
Lupica is not the only one, obviously, who's in a pique over the administration's attitude toward the First Amendment, but not many in the mainstream media have been willing to be as cheeky about it. (His column is called "Shooting from the Lip.")
The prolific writer and critic Liesl Schilling has written a piece for Slate comparing the French, German, British, and American versions of "The Office" -- the hit television satire of cubicle life. To the horror of her friends, she says, she prefers the American program to the British (which preceded the ABC spinoff by several years). What's most worth noting about the article, though, is her analysis of just what characteristics of the British and American temperament account for the differences between the shows:
[T]he base-line mood of David Brent's workplace [on the BBC show] -- resignation mingled with self-loathing -- is unrecognizably alien to our (well, my) sensibility. In the American office, passivity mingles with rueful hopefulness: An American always believes there's something to look forward to. A Brit does not, and finds humor in that hopelessness.
Since Fox TV is calling its new comedy series "'Til Death," my comments in today's Word column deal only with the absurdity of the spelling 'til, not the mystery of the phrase from which the title is taken. But "till death us do part" presents a puzzle beyond the proper spelling of till: Why the plural verb do?
I learned the answer only a few months ago, when a colleague e-mailed to ask "why the traditional Christian wedding vow has 'till death do us part' instead of 'till death does us part.' I cannot think of a reason, or of a grammatical explanation that makes sense," he said.
Me neither, though I vaguely thought there must be a subjunctive in there somewhere. Luckily, the Random House Mavens' Word of the Day website has the explanation.
"In a way, we can thank the six-times-married Henry VIII for this ringing affirmation of lifetime devotion," writes James E. Clapp, since it was Thomas Cranmer, named archbishop of Canterbury by Henry, who wrote the liturgy for the new Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer.
In the marriage ceremony prescribed in that 1549 book, the marriage vow included the phrase: till death us departe. In those days the word depart (with or without the final e) meant 'to divide, separate'. . . .
The reason that the verb was depart rather than the third person singular indicative departeth (which today would be departs) is that in those days it was customary to use the subjunctive mood in subordinate clauses describing action to take place in the indefinite future.
A century later, however, depart had lost the sense of "separate," and in the 1662 prayer book, "depart suddenly became do part." That maintains the rhythm of the phrase, and the verb is still a subjunctive, notes Clapp: "The indicative would have been doth -- in modern English, does."
The Word of the Day site shut down, sadly, in 2001, but the hundreds of words and phrases its contributors covered remain available in the archive.
A post on Crooked Timber by Maria Farrell, who works in Internet policy, calls attention to the fact -- unknown to just about everyone, I should think -- that today is OneWebDay, a day to celebrate the ways the Web has changed our lives.
Farrell says the Web has made "expat life a bit less like living with a running sore," enabling her to keep in touch with family and friends and the news around the globe. It is indeed hard to imagine how we all managed before we could, from the comfort or discomfort of anywhere, do thorough research, plan and book travel, search for a house or a job, chat with friends without our bosses knowing it, etc.
One commentator on Farrell's post, though, take another position: "[The Web] has reduced my productivity by roughly 80%. lotta time wasted. Thanks WWW!"
Evidently there are some people who believe NASA has been concealing evidence of life on Mars for three decades -- ever since NASA's Viking 1 spacecraft recorded images of a region of the planet called Cydonia. Those images, these hopeful observers contend, reveal the presence of pyramids constructed by intelligent beings -- and even a large face carved into the Martian terrain. (Here's one Cydonia enthusiast's Web site, which seems to be dormant.)
New Scientist reports that the latest images of Mars, courtesy of the European Space Agency's Mars Express, which visited in 2003, conclusively demonstrate that the rock formations are, as scientists expected, natural. (It's interesting in itself that European scientists were eager to lay the "controversy" to rest. "So many people wrote me emails -- hundreds -- saying, 'Why don't you image Cydonia, tell us the truth, we don't believe NASA,'" Gerhard Neukum of the Free University of Berlin, Germany, told New Scientist.)
Of course, another take on this news might be that what we have on our hands now is a Euro-American scientific conspiracy.
The prolific liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias has a pretty fantastic post about the hip fashion sense of the president of Iran, whose duds stood out among the gathered stuffed shirts this week at the UN.
Earlier this year, Thomas Meaney wrote a fine dissection of Saddam Hussein's sartorial choices during his war-crimes court appearances for Slate. Meaney suggested there were some tactics in play: suit and necktie to establish himself as a legitimate partner in the world community, a caftan (or dishdasha) to court the Islamists.
A remarkable Wikipedia entry has been making the rounds. It demonstrates -- or tries to demonstrate, anyway -- that the following sentence is grammatically valid: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." The entry is awfully convoluted in places, but if you're willing to make your head hurt for a few minutes, you can parse the sentence using the numerical guide. The three definitions in play here are
1) a city in New York State.
2) the animal, in the plural form
3) a verb meaning to baffle or intimidate
Go ahead and try it. Similar head-benders are listed at the end of the entry. For instance: "Who polices the police? The police police. So, who polices the police police? Police police police police police police."
The Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, in Alabama, is legendary -- having played host to the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan and Lynyrd Skynyrd, among many other musicians -- but I had no mental picture of the place. If I had to guess what it looked like, I would never have come anywhere near this.
Imagine Jagger spending the day there, then leaving for the rich nightlife of ... northwest Alabama.
The "Swampers," the go-to rhythm section name-checked by Skynyrd in "Sweet Home Alabama" ("Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers ...": an oft-misheard lyric), held court in this particular building from 1969 to 1978, when they moved on to a bigger one. (A key attraction of Muscle Shoals was that the backup musicians themselves owned and ran the place.) After that, according to Preservation Magazine, the building was used by an appliance store and a record shop, until a Chicago musician and businessman bought it in 1999. Now it's a studio again, and a museum.
"Ronnie and Neil," a song by the Drive-By Truckers, makes nice use of Muscle Shoals as as symbol of, as the band puts it it, "the duality of the Southern Thing."
"Bloggers with some knowledge of and interest in pre-modern history" -- a larger percentage of the blogosphere's population than one might imagine -- are invited to host the October edition of Carnivalesque, a monthly blog "carnival" (a showcase of recent posts, from a variety of blogs, on a single theme; in this case, anything that happened in the mid-fifteenth or early sixteenth centuries CE).
Confused? Tune in to Blogenspiel next week to check out the September edition of Carnivalesque.
One of the most insidious dangers of grad school is that it's packaged and sold as a temporary state, rather than as the substantial chunk of our lives it actually is. The sales pitch tends to influence us to such an extent that many of us make bad choices about taking care of ourselves, our finances, our stuff, and our relationships--because we believe we'll get around to it later, once we actually have a predictable income and some security.
So reads an extremely tortured post on the unfailingly interesting blog of "Ancrene Wiseass," a self-described "would-be medievalist."
I've been realizing with increasing frequency how damaging that kind of thinking can be, particularly since predictable incomes and modicums of security are scarce on the ground for new academics. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder whether this isn't, perhaps, the very worst effect of the Big Lie about graduate "education" within the corporate university. How many of us are damaging or losing our physical, emotional, and financial health while we continue to do the lion's share of undergraduate teaching and scramble to meet professional standards that are set higher and higher every year, all the while being told not to look as though we're eager to "pre-professionalize"?
As a refugee from graduate school myself, I feel her pain. I took one look at the walking-dead Ph.D. candidates in my department and dropped out. That was almost 15 years ago. No regrets. I feel your pain, Ancrene!
Following up on John's post, the photo shown of the New York scale model doesn't nearly do justice to the real thing, which is the centerpiece of the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows (a short walk from Shea Stadium, if you're headed there for the baseball playoffs) and the site of tennis's US Open.
The museum's own pictures on the Web do better, but the panorama, as they call it, really has to be seen. There are even model plains taking off from LaGuardia.
Via The Map Room, a link to an archive of photographs of scale models of cities. Boston isn't represented, at least as of yet, but since someone seems to have created a painstaking rendering of Cincinnati, one hopes there's a mini-Boston out there somewhere.
Be sure to check out the particularly impressive model of Shanghai. And the one of San Francisco made of jello.
Hugo Chavez yesterday unleashed a fiery speech at the UN calling Bush "El Diablo," and praising President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Even those on the left are being forced to admit that Chavez, who crushes dissent in Venezuela with the threat of imprisonment and has built around himself a dangerous cult of personality, went too far.
Every time he faces an election --and he had to face a recall referendum despite numerous attempts to disallow it on techicalities -- he somehow pulls through, often under mysterious circumstances, largely because he has the support of the poorest in Venezuela. Some advocate a contain-by-ignoring policy -- the US seat at the UN during the speech was occupied by a junior staffer -- but it's difficult to carry that off with the fifth largest oil exporter in the world.
Speaking of the right to an attorney, the ACLU has filed a petition to the Ohio Supreme Court calling for better protection of children's right to counsel. As many as 80% of juveniles accused of crimes there waive their right to counsel, often before meeting with an attorney at all. Without an understanding of the law governing their case, many children enter guilty pleas or are quickly convicted, and end up requiring mental health care and/or special education while incarcerated.
The stories of some of these kids support the ACLU's contention that a rule requiring children to at least meet with a lawyer before deciding to represent themselves is in order.
Picking up on Evan's thought about cellphone etiquette in the concert hall: A post over at Concurring Opinions points to some choice YouTube footage. Two questions to consider here:
1. What is the appropriate way for an instructor to handle poor cellphone etiquette in the classroom?
2. Can this video possibly be for real?
As the recent lonelygirl15 brouhaha has made clear, YouTube is hardly a bastion of authenticity (did anyone ever think it was?). But this is a pretty well-executed fake job, if it is one.
For more on how such ruses (often aided and abetted by YouTube) are changing the world of advertising, tune in to Ideas this weekend for a piece by Drake Bennett on the place of the hoax in the ad game.
Don’t die. If you do, a dozen artists who ripped off all your ideas while you were alive (and one of whom will almost certainly be Sheryl Crow) will record overly reverent, roundly uninspired versions of your songs for a tribute album. This album will be ignored and/or quickly forgotten, or will spur a revival in your music that you won’t be around to enjoy and profit from.
The list is all about pop music, but I'd add a bit about classical: The Decline of Audience Etiquette. There's the ringing cellphone, the snoring, the hearing aid gone berserk (I suppose that one's excusable), and the fidgeting that seems to peak when the music is deliciously pianissimo. The worst offenders seem drawn to New York's Avery Fisher Hall, where I watched one woman riffling through multiple shopping bags looking for who-knows-what.
The Lee Siegel brouhaha is just about dying down, yet the moral philosophizing about his ethical lapse, such as it was, continues.
Siegel was a blogger at the New Republic, caught praising and defending his own work -- in outlandish terms -- under an assumed name, in the comments section of his own blog. TNR pulled the plug on the blog and suspending Siegel from writing for TNR.
There's been much hand-wringing over the precise nature of his offense. Now, on the legal-affairs blog Balkinization, the University of Texas law professor Sandy Levinson points out that John Marshall, the fourth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court -- one of the most distinguished in American history -- engaged in a very similar practice. When a key opinion of his was attacked by commentators, he wrote articles defending it in a Philadelphia newspaper, under the names "A Friend of the Constitution," and "A Friend to the Union."
Admittedly, Marshall's self-praise lacks a certain flair. Siegel's sock-puppet wrote that Siegal "has the fire and guts of a young man." Marshall's called Marshall "a politician of some note before he was a judge."
On his blog Creek Running North, a freelance nature and science writer named Chris Clarke has produced a clever spoof -- all in good fun, it seems -- of Michael Bérubé's book "What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts?", a defense of liberalism on campus. The spoof is a graphic adaptation of the book in PDF form depicting life at People's Revolutionary State College, whose courses include Bush Is Hitler.
Bérubé responds in good humor, calling Clarke "impudent and talented (not to say 'spunky')." The graphic adaptation is worth downloading for a laugh, especially for those down in the trenches of contemporary campus politics.
"What do you get when you combine an over-educated populous, beer, and the lure of fabulous prizes?" asks the Harvard Book Store's website, plugging an upcoming spelling bee to benefit the Brattle Film Foundation.
I don't know if that was a test, but even if you can't spell populace, you can enter the open bees -- one for all ages, another for adults -- scheduled for Oct. 5 at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard Square. The theater, the bookstore, and cosponsor Houghton Mifflin -- publisher of the American Heritage dictionaries -- are coughing up prizes, among them "100 Words to Make You Sound Smart." (There'll be a movie, too, but I don't know where the beer is coming from.)
So if you've always been a spelling-bee spectator, complacently watching as contestants struggled with seiche and haulm, it's time to find out how the other half sweats. Info and tickets here.
For the J.R.R. Tolkien junkies out there, and they are legion, a bizarre blog called RecordBrother has posted an MP3 of an old vinyl record of Tolkien reading and singing (in elvish?) from his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy. This link might not last long.
The legend goes something like this: A student gets to math class late, jots down an equation on the blackboard that he assumes is part of the homework assignment, goes home and solves it -- only to learn later, from his dumbstruck professor, that the equation wasn't homework at all but rather an example of a problem mathematicians had been unable to solve for decades.
As Snopes notes, hints of the legend can be found in the opening (dream) sequence of Rushmore and in the set-up of Good Will Hunting. Well, turns out they're both based on a true story -- about mathematician George Dantzig.
Kudos to Snopes for also getting a bead on how the real story entered the realm of legend.
If you follow Evan's link to the Almodovar review (below), stay at the London Review of Books to read Jerry Fodor on Michael Frayn.
It's not enough that Frayn is a noted novelist ("Headlong") and playwright ("Noises Off"). He's also sufficiently well versed in philosophy to weigh in on virtually every topic that the greatest minds in that field are wrestling with, in the forthcoming book "The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe." But Fodor, a philosopher at Rutgers, says that Frayn falls victim to a fashionable, Richard-Rorty-esque "relativist epistemology," in passages like this:
I look out of the window . . . I tell you that the sun is setting . . . But, even here, in this simple factual report of what is before my eyes . . . there is also a performative element . . . I am deciding that the sun is setting . . . even though we have no agreement on what precise relationship between sun and horizon constitutes the sun’s setting . . . All narration and description . . . is indissolubly subjective because it involves selection.
I’m not saying the bridge is open because it is; it’s open because I say it is.
Pedro Almodovar's superb new film "Volver" (meaning "to return," roughly) will screen at the New York Film Festival in October and open in US theaters in November, but it has been showing in other countries since the spring. (I saw it a screening in June.) Michael Wood's review in the London Review of Books has some spoilers; you should probably stop reading when he says so. But Wood puts his finger on a source of the success of some of Almodovar's recent films, including this one, "Talk to Her," and "All About My Mother":
I don’t need to describe the now unfolding details of ... a whole heap of unforgiven family history. It’s all too much and too little, the material of sensationalist newspapers and weepy movies. And it’s all just right, since it works through the clichés rather than just with them or just against them.
The Diebold AccuVote-TS [we tested] and its newer relative the AccuVote-TSx are together the most widely deployed electronic voting platform in the United States. In the November 2006 general election, these machines are scheduled to be used in 357 counties representing nearly 10% of registered voters. Approximately half these counties — including all of Maryland and Georgia — will employ the AccuVote-TS model.
The researchers found that "the machine is vulnerable to a number of extremely serious attacks that undermine the accuracy and credibility of the vote counts it produces." Perhaps the most unsettling part, if you are cynical enough: "Malicious software running on a single voting machine [and installable in about a minute] can steal votes with little if any risk of detection. The malicious software can modify all of the records, audit logs, and counters kept by the voting machine, so that even careful forensic examination of these records will find nothing amiss."
One would have hoped that in the six years since the 2000 election debacle, we would have developed more reliable and accurate voting systems. Diebold is a favorite whipping boy on the left, due to ties between the company and the GOP, but this is not a partisan issue. Any vote-counting system has its flaws -- the ancient metal boxes used in New York City are plenty confusing and don't inspire total confidence -- but devoting resources to see that our votes are secure and verifiable (a paper trail is a good place to start, says the study) shouldn't be so hard.
Also of note in the new Washington Monthly: In another sign of growing dissension within the right-wing ranks, Jeffrey Hart, a true conservative who was a speechwriter for Nixon and Reagan and is a senior editor at National Review, has written an articulate piece assailing Bush's radicalism (as noted by Andrew Sullivan). This passage is particularly eye-opening:
The United States has seen political swings and produced its share of extremists, but its political character, whether liberals or conservatives have been in charge, has always remained fundamentally Burkean. The Constitution itself is a Burkean document, one that slows down decisions to allow for “deliberate sense” and checks and balances. President Bush has nearly upended that tradition, abandoning traditional realism in favor of a warped and incoherent brand of idealism. (No wonder Bush supporter Fred Barnes has praised him as a radical.) At this dangerous point in history, we must depend on the decisions of an astonishingly feckless chief executive: an empty vessel filled with equal parts Rove and Rousseau.
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled onto a story (archived, fee only) in the MetroWest Daily News about a Marlborough man who'd been livening up the evening commute with his one-man anti-Bush protest. John de Bairos, the report said, was demonstrating several times a week at a busy intersection, sometimes with a placard that read "Impeach the lying bastard."
A parent had objected to the public use of bastard, the writer said, but the police chief had declared the sign legal. Then came a bit of language commentary:
"As most people know, dictionary.com defines bastard as "a person born of unmarried parents . . . an illegitimate child.
"It's also a term used in the printing business. A bastard width, for
example, is a column width not consistent with the standard one-column or
two-column measures.
"But we all know that's not what de Bairos is implying. He's suggesting
the insulting meaning that we can't print in this newspaper."
He is? And we "all know" this secret meaning? It was news to me -- and to everyone I've asked since -- that bastard was a euphemism for some ruder, more vulgar insult. I e-mailed the writer, asking what word she had in mind – she must think it's pretty obvious, since she assumes it's what de Bairos really meant -- but so far she hasn't replied.
Eventually, I did come up with a guess, but I'm not going to throw a red herring into this kettle of fishiness till I have more information. So tell me: When you see the word bastard, do you think some other, nastier word is intended? (And if so, what is it?) Or is bastard simply bastard, and neither better nor worse than I've always believed?
The new issue of the Washington Monthly has a rather hilarious piece on how various federal agencies present themselves to kids. In March, the Washington Post saw fit to cover the Federal Reserve's introduction of a new animated eagle on its kids site, but the Monthly uncovers a veritible managerie of creatures designed to make our federal agencies approachable to children. There's Ginger (CIA/bear), Woodsy Owl (Forest Service/owl), Rex (Homeland Security/mountain lion-human hybrid), and Stanley Stat & Pie Chart Pam (National Agricultural Statistics Service/talking graphs).
Naturally there's great sport to be had at the expense of these creatures, but the Monthly does an admirable job of letting the creatures skewer themselves. See, e.g., this choice quote from the CIA's Ginger:
"Hi! My name is Ginger. That's short for Virginia, where my home is...I love walnuts, but I never thought you could hide a secret message in the empty shell."
Somebody ought to tell that bear that loose lips sink ships.
The data show, for instance, that women are more emotional than men; that they "hear a broader range of sounds in the human voice" than men do; that teenage girls and young women mostly want to socialize and to "nurture," while men want to achieve great things and have a lot of sex. And so on.
All this, of course, has substantial political implications. "Once radicals dreamed of new ways of living," Brooks writes, omitting specifics -- democracy? free love? women in the workplace?-- "but now happiness seems to consist of living in harmony with the patterns that nature and evolution laid down long, long ago."
I can't refrain from adding a comment to Jan Freeman's fine column in Sunday's Ideas section. She writes in defense of so-called "flat adverbs" -- adverbs whose customary -ly ending has been cut off:
"Eat healthy" isn't missing an adverb; it just happens to have borrowed healthy, the adjective form, to serve in place of healthily or healthfully. That doesn't make healthy an adjective, though; it's the job, not the uniform, that counts.
Jan mentions Apple's advertising slogan "Think Different," which led many a fusty grammarian to slap Apple's hand with a ruler. It's worth noting that Apple itself, in an official statement (reproduced here), defended the slogan on quite different grounds. Besides arguing that a little use of questionable vernacular is good for advertising ("Winston tastes good like a cigarette should"), Apple said it didn't intend "Different" in "Think Different" to act as an adverb at all:
Although some might want "different" to perform as an adverb in this phrase, complete with an "ly" ending, Apple and its advertising agency intend it as a fanciful category, just as we might say "Think yellow," "Think change" or "Think playful."
Welcome back to Philosophywatch, a weekly look at pointless mentions of important writers and thinkers in newspapers and magazine stories.
Two weeks ago, a Times columnist wedged Camus into a story on rock-climbing. This past week, the Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City) shoehorns Nietzsche into a story on Glacier National Park:
Take a few of these hikes, and you may soon be identifying with Friedrich Nietzsche: "In the mountains, the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that you have to have long legs."
Um, I think Nietzsche was speaking metaphorically? Nietzsche also made an appearance in a story about Ohio State receiver Anthony Gonzalez in the Akron Beacon Journal last week:
[Gonzalez] has the speed to blow past defenders, as he did a week ago in the Buckeyes' resounding 24-7 win over Texas. He also has the intellect to huddle up with fellow philosophy majors and discuss why a life unexamined is not worth living. The big Aristotle isn't Shaquille O'Neal in the eyes of Gonzalez. And Nietzsche? Gonzalez knows you won't find his bust in the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Ideas columnist Christopher Shea forwarded me an item which he and I agree isn't so bad, really, since the bathos is self-conscious; a writer can get away with this sort of thing once in a while, as long as they don't make a habit of it. (Besides, in this case the writer seems to be onto something.) It's from Ben Ratliff's profile of the alterna-metal band Mastodon, which ran last week in the Times:
Heavy-metal fans gravitate toward a certain kind of sublimity, to use the term Edmund Burke defined in his book "A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful." Published in 1757, it was the last word on the subject in its time; Melville owned a copy. Burke's notions about the sublime -- which he seemed to prefer to the beautiful -- could be a checklist of heavy-metal qualities: darkness, largeness, incomprehensibility, repetition, things conducive to loneliness and terror.
Meanwhile, a roundtable on Artifical Intelligence in the Oct. 1 issue of Computer Gaming World yielded this exchange between CGW reporter Matt Peckham, and "[gaming] industry bigwigs" Peter Molyneux, Todd Howard, Brad Wardell, and Warren Spector:
CGW: Descartes said, "I think, therefore I am." You say?
PM: I play with him, therefore he thinks!
TH: I prefer Socrates: "I drank what?"
BW: I think beyond a set scope, therefore I am.
WS: Wow, Descartes in an interview about games? I'm too blown away even to answer!
Thank you, Warren Spector. If only everyone were more like you...
The Independent in London and the National Review Online both report, citing unnamed sources, that there are rumblings in Washington that the White House is about to change course drastically on global warming. Bush plans, they say, to set a more aggressive policy to reduce greenhouse gas and carbon emissions and promote the use of alternative energy sources.
The Independent article , not exactly thorough, is a celebratory dance that seems gleeful not only at the possible policy change but at the prospect of Bush feeling it necessary to make "an astonishing U-turn." The National Review piece is, an editorial and a considerably different animal. Iain Murray scolds the global warming alarmists who don't seem to recognize the economic damage of emissions reduction -- and scolds the White House, too:
the policy will almost certainly be unsuccessful, even if the goal set is very long-term.
Thus, we are left with the unpleasant conclusion that the only motivation is political -- an effort to take an issue “off the table” for the forthcoming midterm elections.
Ezra Klein, the writing fellow for The American Prospect, discusses a new Commonwealth Fund report on the exorbitant cost of private health insurance. He notes the report's most striking finding -- that nearly 9 of 10 people who seek private insurance never buy it.
Klein's most interesting point, also made in different terms by the economist Paul Krugman, is that supporting government-guaranteed insurance needn't be justified solely on the basis of social concern. The gulf between the cost of personal and employer-based health insurance can have the effect of stunting innovation and weakening the economy:
Assume you've got a great [entrepreneurial] idea, a dull job, and a kid with asthma. You look into private market insurance and realize it's too expensive, or risky. So you stay at your job. That's not precisely the outcome I'd think our society would, or should, favor.
When the Supreme Court struck down state laws banning sodomy in 2003, social conservatives said the Court had stepped onto a slippery slope: If consensual sexual autonomy was a Constitutional right, could the legalization of adult incest and polygamy be far behind?
Hyperbole? In a recent issue of the Harvard Law Review, an unsigned student "Note" makes the case -- far from disapprovingly -- that Lawrence v. Texas renders laws banning consensual incest "at least problematic."
Statutes that forbid family members to have sex with underaged relatives are vitally important, the author argues. Those that have the effect of breaking up a happy marriage between, say, a stepmother and stepson, or brother and sister, years after the wedding, serve no purpose. Indeed, they're anti-family -- if the couples in question have children.
(This opens a pdf of "Inbred Obscurity: Improving Incest Laws in the Shadow of the 'Sexual Family,'" from the June 2006 issue; this takes you to the law review's home page, which as of today still displays that issue.)
Today we have the news that newly formed cities are farming out their own government to private contractors, citing
better services for less money; more flexibility, because private employees can be hired and fired more easily than workers under civil service rules; and lower debt, because they can own fewer buildings and less equipment.
Remember when the Bush administration asserted Federal control over airport security and baggage screening in the wake of 9/11? That seemed a rare admission that some things are too vital to be privatized. Now city hall apparently doesn't make that cut.
It's worth adding a note to John's post about Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's veto of an ordinance requiring big-box retailers like Wal-Mart to provide better wages and benefits in Chicago. (John was himself following up on an Ideas article by Harvard law professor David Barron.) Now The Chicago Tribune has endorsed Daley's decision in a vituperative editorial [free registration required] whose tone is downright snarky:
Unfortunately, supporters of the big-box law won't stand down. "... We may have lost this battle with the mayor. It doesn't mean the war is over," warned Dennis Gannon, president of the Chicago Federation of Unemployment.
Sorry, we meant the Chicago Federation of Labor.
The losers have come up with even worse ideas. There's talk of forcing a higher minimum wage on all companies that have at least 1,000 employees.
Yes, let's single out the most successful companies and push them to the suburbs.
Another measure of how far labor's stock has fallen.
Google has released another new service with another host of potential implications for the world of research. Now users of Google News can search the news of days past, up to 200 years back. Enter a search term -- say, "blog" -- and see news stories from years ago -- like an article in the New York Times from 2000 headlined "Invasion of the 'Blog': A Parallel Web of Personal Journals." (A search for "Berlin Wall," naturally, takes you back farther.) Results include free and pay-per-view articles.
The Internet is often hailed for its speed and its currency, but the new Google archive search aims to help users reach back into history -- not a core strength of the Web, since the vast majority of what you find there was written after the Internet was born.
American Heritage has an enlightening (if uneven) piece on Ernesto Miranda, the man who gave us the Miranda warning. The article recounts Miranda's crime -- the kidnapping and rape of an 18 year old girl -- and the long legal road that followed from it.
Miranda, of course, won before the Supreme Court, in 1966, lending his name to the new process of reading suspects their rights. What I hadn't realized, though, is what became of Miranda himself.
The American Heritage piece explains that while the confession that cost Miranda his first trial was tossed out thanks to his Supreme Court victory, he nevertheless was convicted at retrial and sentenced to serve 20-30 years in Arizona State Prison (after a rather bizarre deus ex machina moment for the prosecution). He was paroled in 1975 and killed in a knife fight in a Phoenix bar in January 1976.
Harvey Mansfield's recent book, "Manliness," the subject of a story in Ideas in March, did not always receive the most respectful treatment from reviewers.
As you might expect, Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard, is not one to take an attack on his thesis -- i.e., modern society is emasculating -- lying down. Here are two of his recent letters to the editor. (The original reviews are available only to subscribers.) As far as I can tell, these letters are not available online.
From the New Republic, August 14 & 21 double issue:
Among the many errors and misrepresentations in Martha Nussbaum's review of my book on manlinesss is the statement that I have retired from a chair at Harvard. Not so. Apart from that, I say that I did not want a product quite as earnest as the books she has done lately. Nor do I desire the servile future of caring males listening raptly to righteous females that she has in mind for us.
Harvey Mansfield
From the New York Review of Books, Sept. 21:
In a recent issue, Garry Wills, reviewing my book "Manliness," and thinking to annoy me, closed with the cheap gibe that I am a mouse, not a man. Since he wants me to worry about my manliness, and manly men do not elaborate, I will tell him without explanation that his review was full of clumsy errors. Your intelligent readers will find them easily.
A reader in New York writes in response to my post last night bemoaning the lack of Nascar scholarship:
On your point about the absence of scholarly interest in NASCAR, there is a little out there, but not on the structure of the playoffs, your topic of discussion. Check this out: www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_2/ronfeldt. It's about game theory -- specifically the dynamics of drafting on long racetracks like Daytona. The paper is in an online journal called First Monday and written by a RAND social scientist.
Sounds fascinating. Then again, I'm planning to spend this weekend at the New Hampshire International Speedway taking in the Sylvania 300. Are there other scholarly articles on stock cars I'm missing? If so, send them along and I'll pack them in my cooler this weekend to read during breaks in the action.
We all get loads of junk email, or spam, and none of us likes it. But there's a hidden thrill to it if you're ever bored enough to read over it. The fun is in reading the bursts of language spammers use to beat the filtering techniques of Internet service providers.
The Register, a UK site, once published a compendium of spam poetry. One offering: "turning softly, springtime, nothingness, cat is on fire." It brings to mind Robert Frost's comment that poetry is the uncommon arrangement of common language. Brainiac readers are invited to send in their own examples. I'll publish the best ones.
A story in the Times yesterday took a lighthearted look at the rumors of crushes and trysts that seem to follow around Condoleezza Rice, our single Secretary of State. One piece of evidence jumped out at the Ideas editors:
In April, a headline in The Boston Globe promised a tale of “Jack and Condi: A Love Story,” after Ms. Rice gave the pullout bed aboard her plane to the former British foreign minister, Jack Straw, during a surprise trip to Baghdad from Blackpool, England, where she was visiting Mr. Straw’s hometown.
Perhaps. But loyal readers of Jan Freeman's The Word column will recall that what the piece actually delivered was a survey of the euphemism and innuendo dreamed up by the British press to describe the whole "affair." My favorite of Jan's examples: "Jack 4 Condi: He Tried Diplomacy but Wants a Special Relationship" -- The Sunday Mirror
Sean R. Roberts, Central Asian Affairs Fellow at Georgetown University … said:
"I have found that more Americans are aware of Kazakhstan than four years ago when I last lived in the United States.
"The increased knowledge of Kazakhstan, however, is not due to the country's economic successes or its role as a U.S. ally in the war on terror.
"Instead, most Americans who have heard of Kazakhstan have heard of it through a satire of a Kazakh journalist named Borat."
So thoroughly has Cohen alienated Kazakhstan that the country's president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, plans to voice his displeasure with Borat's antics -- kissing his sister, living with a horse, mocking Jews, etc.--in talks with our own president during a planned state visit in the coming weeks. The power of HBO. Borat's official response is unlikely to smooth things over.
As I noted last week, Sunday's race in New Hampshire is the first in Nascar's 10-race playoff, known as the Chase. The Globe's Fluto Shinzawa has a good piece in today's paper about the Chase format, now in its third year. Previously, Nascar's champion was simply the driver with the most points at the end of the season. Nascar introduced the Chase to create a more competitive finale: Only ten drivers make the playoffs, but those drivers' point totals are reset so that they all are within striking distance of the Nextel (nee Winston) Cup when the post-season starts.
The system is far from flawless, however. Two of the drivers in this year's Chase didn't win a single regular season race. And some of the Chase drivers won't so much be gunning for victories as trying to avoid a wreck. As Fluto notes, Nascar is thinking of increasing the points awarded to race winners in order to stoke the competition.
Stock car racing isn't a darling of academics the way baseball is. (More scholarly ink has probably been spilled on the infield fly rule alone than on Nascar. Seriously.) Too bad. It would be a great question for an economist to consider: How do you modify the Nascar points system to strike the proper balance between winning and consistency?
A new London street art project, documented online, places miniature dolls around the city, posed doing the things people do. This is a neat idea, and well-executed. Doesn't everybody love miniatures?
For those with a yen for the macabre, too, look for a book called "The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Deaths." It features frighteningly detailed doll-house dioramas made in the 1940's that replicate unsolved murder scenes as training tools and visual aides for detectives. It's beyond creepy.
The odium heaped on Hewlett-Packard for its internal spying has spilled over, in several commentaries, to the word for H-P's particular brand of subterfuge. Among those questioning its legitimacy was Hal Plotkin:
"The word 'pretexting" is simply a euphemism -- invented by its practitioners -- for obtaining something that does not belong to them by lying and committing fraud."
"Like a rock star who becomes an overnight success, pretexting is [a] word that seems to have come out of nowhere."
Not so fast, folks. Euphemism it may be, but pretexting isn't a nasty neologism dreamed up by middle managers to torment the buzzword-averse. In fact, it’s a French- and Latin-derived verb that had a respectable 300-year run, according to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, which quotes, among others, Horace Walpole: "A decency was observed, and conscience always pretexted" (1797).
Of course, in that earlier incarnation, pretext meant merely "put forward as a pretext or excuse," not "pretend to be someone else in order to get his private phone records." But its revival in this modern, tweaked sense doesn't make it a new word.
And having faded into obscurity more than a century ago, pretexting seems unlikely to muscle out scamming, lying, and impersonating this time around. In fact, it faces a new 21st-century barrier: In the text-messaging era, pretexting sounds as if it should be a kind of texting. (Pre-texting -- is that texting a friend to warn that you'll be texting her later?)
No, I think pretexting, the revival, is probably doomed to a life in the jargon demimonde. But it won't have earned that fate by being new, ugly, euphemistic, ill-formed, or lacking in pedigree.
Just coming across this now (hat tip to MIT's Technology Review blog), but Tivo announced last week that it is teaming up with CBS Sportsline to offer a service that will allow you to monitor and adjust your fantasy football team using your Tivo remote, thus reducing the risk of spilling a Coors Light on your laptop.
TR's Brad King notes that "fantasy football probably isn't the outlet that technologists envisioned for an interactive television experience." But it perhaps should come as no surprise that fantasy sports have become a driver of technology. Pornography has long been credited as a catalyst for technological advance -- it helped launch the VCR's star, to say nothing of the Internet. And what are fantasy sports if not sports pornography?
Another blip: The Wall Steet Journal reports today on the exploding popularity of fantasy investment sites, which allow you to learn, for example, how to play the options market by doing so first with fake money. See, e.g., Fidelity's Wealth-Lab Pro. Of course, Bob Kraft is probably not going to give you a job based on your fantasy football success. Fidelity -- and E*Trade and Charles Schwab -- on the other hand, will be happy to welcome you to the big time once you think you've figured the market out using play money.
The UK newspaper the Telegraph has published an open letter, signed by a long list of academics, psychologists, etc., that sounds an alarm about the rising incidence of depression among children. The letter points to junk food, long hours in front of video screens, and competitive and formal schooling too early on, among other factors.
It's hard to argue with the general premise of the letter, but it seems to me that it focuses too much on children and not enough on their parents: "Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust -- as full-grown adults can -- to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change." Isn't it parents that are having a hard time adjusting? Kids are pretty adaptable. It's the parents who are having a hard time coping with the encroachment of powerful cultural forces.
*Gasp* -- I just finished reading a (typically) epic post on Le Blog Bérubé, owned and operated by literary-cultural theorist Michael Bérubé. It took me all morning -- I don't know he finds the time to do so much theory-explicatin' (as he calls it).
After a year off, earlier this month Bérubé resurrected "Theory Tuesday," a series in which he introduces readers of his blog to the classic works of capital-t Theory. Today's post revisits British theorist Raymond Williams's famous distinction between "residual," "dominant," and "emergent" cultures (constellations of meanings, values, practices, significances) within any given society. I've been amused/horrified, in recent years, to see these terms, which Williams coined to improve the quality of Marxist theory, employed by young, university-educated advertising and marketing whizzes aiming to improve the quality of Nike and Coke ads. So I applaud Bérubé for pointing out the flip side of the coin in academe, which he describes as
the creation of Marxist Culture Charts according to which cultural practices are weighed in the scales and valued chiefly (or exclusively) for their degrees of cool radical emergentness and even cooler resistance to incorporation. When that kind of culture-charting meets up with the ritual glorification of the "counterculture" characteristic of some of the academic left, you wind up with . . . surprise! Reductive and predictable celebrations of this or that allegedly transgressive or counterhegemonic practice, whose transgressive counterhegemonicality is secured by its doubleplusgood position on the "emergent" "not incorporated" side of the grid.
Heady stuff -- and a much better way to waste time at work than watching funny penalty kicks on YouTube.
Responding to Chris's post about Harvard eliminating its early action admission program, I would say that the post he quotes, from David A. Bell, smacks of sour grapes. (Harvardfreude?) Bell is mildly approving of Harvard's decision but prefers to focus on the college's tendency to favor and thereby perpetuate the social elite. Sure, but this is hardly news, and the bold decision to be the first to give up the early application, which does favor wealthier applicants, can only be a step in the right direction. As for eliminating the application essay and replacing the SAT with advanced subject matter tests, that would seem to move things toward a purer form of meritocracy. But as Bell notes, the French system of that kind produces a student body "more socially exclusive than ours." If I were an admissions officer, I'd like to read an essay, even a ghost-edited one, and hear about what the young man or woman has been up to outside of class.
Reza Aslan's lead article in Sunday's Ideas paints Osama bin Laden as not only a terrorist but a radical figure in the worldwide battle to define Islam, a religion in which "religious authority ... is not centralized within a single individual or institution." The piece gains resonance with the release online of the latest Bin Laden video tape, a 92-minute documentary that purports to show Bin Laden meeting with others to plan the 9/11 attacks. The tape is directed not only at the West but at other, less radical Muslims. On it the Al Qaeda leader says, "Talk yourselves into martyrdom operations, encourage yourselves a lot. At the beginning you will not be used to the idea and you will think it is a difficult thing."
At "Open University," the New Republic's new blog about academic ideas and life -- an excellent concept for a blog! wish we'd thought of it -- the Johns Hopkins historian David Bell offers two cheers for Harvard's decision to scotch early admission.
But he adds that
there is something vaguely comical about [President Derek] Bok's worry that "the existing process has been shown to advantage those who are already advantaged." Well, yes. The existing process does that. So, to a very large extent, does the entire institution called Harvard College. In modern societies, elite universities tend to function as mechanisms for reproducing existing social elites, and no matter how much their well-meaning directors try to do to level the playing field, social elites will usually find a way to tip things back in their favor again.
Still, Bell says, the next reforms ought to be: doing away with the SAT, and canning the admissions essay. Both have been "corrupted" by coaching (or editing), especially in the case of wealthy kids. (Bell, a historian of France, would replace the SAT with advanced subject-matter tests -- which is what French teenage achievers face.)
Interesting news out of Chicago: Mayor Richard Daley has vetoed the so called big box ordinance passed by the city's board of aldermen in July. The ordinance would require big box retailers like Wal-Mart and Target to pay higher wages and provide better benefits in any store operating in Chicago.
Writing in Ideas last month, Harvard law professor David Barron explained that the ordinance was a healthy sign:
This surge of interest in regulating big-box retail shows that, at last, America's cities are beginning to think of themselves as choosers rather than beggars. They have emerged from decades of decline with newfound financial strength, and they are now beginning to assert their public powers to decide the kind of cities they want to be.
Daniel Drezner, an associate professor at the Fletcher School, took some exception (!) to Barron's piece on his blog. (A selection: "Having lived close to the area where Wal-Mart was planning on putting its South Side location, I can assert that Barron doesn't know what he's talking about.") Barron returned fire on his blog, Law and Culture.
If all this sparring doesn't give you a sense of how heated this debate is, consider this: The veto is Daley's first in some 17 years as Chicago's mayor.
An astute reader writes in to point out that the "Match Point" example in my Classicswatch post is not the best one I could have chosen. In fact the tennis teacher, played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, reads Dostoyevsky for a beat but then turns to the "Cambridge Companion" to Dostoyevsky, with the implication, perhaps, that he's less interested in "Crime and Punishment" than in being armed for upper-crust conversation.
The ever-provocative Shelby Steele, the author of "The Content of Our Character" and a prominent black opponent of affirmative action and other liberal policies on race, writes a lively post on, of all places, a Guardian site called "comment is free." Steele says he hopes for the success of white parents who have sued two US school districts for instituting "numerical targets" for minority enrollment, in a case slated to be considered by the Supreme Court in the fall. Steele, who, like Yale Law School professor Stephen Carter, has argued that affirmative action has a crippling effect on black self-esteem, doesn't shy away from hot-button argument: "Diversity is a bit of hair from the dog that bit you -- a discrimination that creates a look of parity between the races where none exists. Today's racial disparity is largely the result of minority underdevelopment, not white racism."
Inspired by Josh's post re-introducing Philosophywatch, I thought I'd point out a related funny/irritating phenomenon. In movies and television shows, how often do you see the director resort to the crutch of illustrating a character's alleged seriousness by introducing one shot of the guy or gal reading one of the classics, pencil poised between the lips? In Woody Allen's "Match Point," which I saw over the weekend, the tennis instructor of humble origins takes in some Dostoyevsky one evening. End of scene.
John Robb writes a post with an interesting take on US perceptions of the war in Iraq. Robb is a prominent technocrat with longstanding ties to the military, including service with the counter-terrorism unit of the Department of Defense. (In his online bio, presumably auto-, he notes that not including the Air Force Academy, from which he graduated, "the goverment spent over $2.5 million training John.")
Robb takes it as a given that we've lost the war.
We are now at the start of a long process of rationalization over the US defeat in Iraq. The most common of these rationalizations include: if only we had "...not disbanded the Baathist army," "...sent in more troops," or "...become better at nation-building."
But we're too focused on our own failures, he says: "the simplest explanation for the outcome in Iraq is that we were just beaten by a better opponent." What he means, it seems, is that the behemoth coalition forces have been outstrategized by a fast, adaptable insurgency. This echoes an Op-Ed he wrote for the Times last year about "open-source warfare," which noted the slowness of American miitary bureaucracy and added: "The insurgency uses an open-source community approach (similar to the decentralized development process now prevalent in the software industry) to warfare that is extremely quick and innovative."
Once upon a time, I dreamed up and co-edited a column called Philosophywatch, which kept a sharp eye on the MSM for gratuitous references to philosophers, theorists, critics, and artists. Dragging Sartre and Martin Amis into a CD review is the definition of bathos, if you ask me, and it still cracks me up when magazine and newspaper writers do stuff like that.
So I thought I'd resurrect Philosophywatch for Brainiac. Every Monday, if I can find enough to write about, I'll tell you what I've found. Readers, please send me any examples that you run across.
Here's that CD review I mentioned, from the Sept. 10 issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Beck, The Information. Is that title of Beck Hansen's new album cribbed from Martin Amis' 1996 novel about professional jealousy? Is the former boy wonder irked that all his musical skills can't help sell records? It could have been reading Jean-Paul Sartre, or maybe listening to the music that now tops the charts, that inspired him to pen the strummy funk tune "Nausea."
An "Executive Pursuits" essay that appeared in the Business section of the Times on Sept. 9, meanwhile, dragged Camus (kicking and screaming) into an account of rock-climbing in upstate New York:
Terrified, I stared back at the rock wall, crouching into a semifetal position and puzzling over my apparently contradictory case of acrophobia.... I felt a sudden kinship with the mythical rock-roller Sisyphus. But rather than calming my nerves, that only prompted me to remember an observation of my existentialist philosopher hero Albert Camus: 'A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself.'
I understand, BTW, that Sacha Baron Cohen name-checks Camus in the movie "Talladega Nights," but that's another, less odious phenomenon.
Speaking of poetry: When we last met the British biographer Bevis Hillier, he was confessing to having been the hand behind a clever hoax letter that A.N. Wilson unwittingly included in his recent biography of the English poet John Betjeman. (James Parker discusses the incident in his Ideas column; the letter* includes a hidden slur against Wilson.)
According to the British newspaper the Times, that wasn't Hillier's first bit of literary mischief. He also sabotaged -- via a character-assasinating poem -- a rival biographer of Betjeman before she could get her project off the ground.
*Post edited on 9/13/06. This originally said "the poem," when I meant to say "the letter." A few other tweaks, too, for clarity.
A new biography of the mistress of former poet laureate Ted Hughes is full of juicy and damning details. The book won't be published in the US till December but the Guardian covers it here. The biography, written by two Israeli journalists, portrays Hughes as even more of a domestic tyrant and misogynist than his previous reputation would suggest. The novelist Fay Weldon comes to his defense in the article, but the facts as the authors present them are rough: "[Hughes] banned [Wevill] from staying in bed beyond 8am, ordered her to dress straight away and told her not to catch up on sleep. The two pages of typed instructions [he gave her] said that she should teach the children German, play with them for at least an hour a day and introduce at least one meal with 'a recipe we have never had before' on a weekly basis. Hughes made clear he had no intention of cooking 'except in emergencies.'"
On Friday researchers reported that a severely brain-damaged woman in a vegetative state showed clear signs, in a functional MRI test, that she was aware of what was happening around her. Activity levels in different areas of her brain in response to verbal and other stimuli mimicked those of healthy volunteers. In an interesting short piece in the Times, Benedict Carey notes that the report, which emphasized that the study, while important, involved only one person and could not be generalized to all brain-damaged people, nonetheless exposed a rift between two ways of understanding consciousness:
"The public is inclined to liken awareness to a lamp, either on or off. Brain-injured patients are either there or not there.
For researchers, however, unconsciousness is less like a lamp than a bundle of old Christmas lights: some dark, others with lights blinking here and there, still others flickering. It is a diverse, changeable condition."
The latter view may be little comfort to the families of vegetative patients, but it does seem to square with our own subjective experience of consciousness -- as a rough spectrum rather than a binary opposition. I'd like to see the philosopher Thomas Nagel weigh in on this.
Every week since the Ideas section launched, four years ago this month, the front page of the section has advertised a message board inviting discussion on one of that issue's stories.
If you're discovering Ideas via this blog, you might be interested in participating in one of these message boards, which can be found here.
Fair warning: Any registered Boston.com user can start a message board in this forum. So right now, for example, in addition to the board that Ideas started to spark discussion about Drake Bennett's "Survival of the Harmonious" story, there's a discussion on the topic, "What is a Democrat" that was started by a user calling himself Farty McCrablice. Don't let this sort of thing put you off -- the Ideas message boards tend to be quite thoughtful indeed.
Good news: It turns out that the CBS News logo I complained about the other day – "freeSpeech," with the quotation marks included – is not the official name of the broadcast's new commentary segment, just the whimsy of an overcaffeinated graphic designer. The preseason press releases called the feature "Free Speech," presumably intending those quote marks to be the usual, detachable kind.
Better news: Of the 150 mentions of the "Free Speech" segment in the Nexis news database this week – not counting CBS's own transcripts -- 118 ignored the idiosyncratic style, calling it simply "Free Speech." And of the 32 that did print it as "FreeSpeech" or "freeSpeech," several made fun of its "oddCapitalization."
Journalists sometimes forget that there's no reason to style the PBS show as "NOVA," or the restaurant as dante, or the musical as "Oklahoma!" – and good reasons, like reader comfort, to ignore most stylistic quirks. It's not illegal to capitalize k.d. lang and bell hooks, and nobody stopped the presses till they could find a way to reproduce that symbol Prince tried to substitute for his name.
I could go on, but I don't have to: Bill Walsh,chief of the Washington Post business copy desk, has wrestled the weird-orthography monster to the ground, and he covers both theory and practice in his 2000 book, "Lapsing Into a Comma," and (more briefly) in an entry at his website. A taste:
"You might be hard pressed to find a consumer product or show-biz title whose packaging or publicity doesn't take liberties with the rules of capitalization. But does that mean we have to write THREE'S COMPANY or KRAFT Macaroni and Cheese DINNER? Of course not."
Of course not. Let's stamp out "freeSpeech" before it spreads.
Drake Bennett's piece for Ideas this past Sunday, on the origins of music, has touched off a very lively discussion on its message board. One of the comments that a bunch of readers have made -- both on the board and in emails to Drake -- is about rhythm. One poster to the message board made the point pithily:
Music began with rhythm, not harmony. Rhythm began with the heartbeat.
I asked Drake about how rhythm factors into the study of why we first developed music. He sent along some thoughts in an email:
A few readers wrote in to suggest that the key to music's appeal might be less the tune itself than the rhythm underneath it. In other words, it's tapping our toes, rather than humming a tune, that is the original, atavistic musical response.
In fact, there is some research that suggests that our appreciation for rhythm in music may be the result of an inborn human rhythm, a constant pulse that regulates everything from our heart rate to our walking pace.
Carolyn Drake of CNRS, Rene Descartes University, in Paris, has found that the rate at which people tap their fingers idly on a desktop is remarkably consistent, not only across time but between people, suggesting that we all have a sort of internal metronome set at around the same speed. She suggests that the temporal scaffolding provided by this beat is not only what allows us to learn language, but even to understand the basics of chronology. Just as our ability to differentiate colors allows us to see objects, she argues, our tendency to divide time into beats allows us to differentiate one event from another.
Like all explanations for the origins of music, it's deeply speculative, but in this model, musical rhythm, with its varying speeds and complexity, might have arisen as a way to hone rhythmic abilities vital to both learning and perception.
The Pocket Part, an "online companion" of the Yale Law Journal, has posted an essay by Jack Balkin in which the Yale law prof describes how his blog, Balkinization, played a surprising role in the debate over the NSA's domestic surveillance program.
Balkin says that his blog became an important forum for discussion of a bill proposed by Sen. Arlen Specter and touted as a check on programs like the NSA's. He notes that the analysis on his blog changed the timbre of coverage the bill was receiving in the press, and even led Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Select Intelligence Committee, to ask if she could share her views as a guest blogger on Balkanization.
Balkin uses the Specter example en route to a larger discussion of the ways that online media are changing how legal scholarship works. I've found that legal bloggers have an unfortunate propensity for wondering aloud (on their blogs) about how important their blogs are, but Balkin's analysis is compelling.
(I should also note that Balkinization has one of the funnier blog taglines out there. It's "Balkinization: an unanticipated consequence of Jack M. Balkin.")
I'm reading "The Price of Admission," the new book by the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, based in part on his Pulitzer-winning articles from 2003 documenting all the advantages elite colleges give the children of wealthy alumni at admissions time. (The children of just plain rich people -- non-alumni -- get the red-carpet treatment, too.)
It's an amazing, infuriating read. Elite-college admissions officers love to say that what they do is like assembling a symphony orchestra -- all those kids with perfect SAT's have to get rejected so that people with other brilliant facets can be admitted. You wouldn't want an orchestra full of only trombonists ... blah, blah, blah. Golden says the analogy would work -- if orchestras, rather than the "blind" auditions that they currently use, hired musicians based on their connections to wealthy donors. Then wouldn't the BSO sound great!
What does this have to do with Walter Benn Michaels, subject of my Ideas piece this week? Well, he says that we shouldn't care about unfairness to individuals in the admissions process until the unfairness between groups is resolved -- until the poor and working class have a shot at a good K-12 education.
But Golden's book drives home how upper-middle-income kids can, indeed, get completed shafted. Over and over, a hard-working, brilliant, upper-middle-class kid -- often Asian -- is denied admission to Elite U., while Sally Scion waltzes in ... as the ink dries on her father's million-dollar donation.
I say "Elite U." but Golden names names (often Harvard's). We'll be hearing more about this book.
In an entry on his unsurprisingly rich online journal, Talking Heads front man David Byrne says he just saw the film "V for Vendetta" and can't imagine how it was made in the current political climate -- a fine question: "To me, it’s a pointed and direct critique of the present U.S. government… secret prisons, politicized religion and symbols, militarism, accusations of insufficient patriotism and terrorism." Also worth checking out on the site, repeatedly, is Byrne's "Radio" feed, an audio playlist he changes each month.
For the political horse race geeks out there, Votemaster, a site that proved extremely popular during the run-up to the 2004 election, has relaunched, this time to track senate races nationwide. (There is little discussion of the House so far.) Their current projected outcome is 48 Democrats and 52 Republicans. The identity of the man operating this site, subject to much speculation in '04, is now known and acknowledged. He's an American living abroad and teaching computer science at a university in Amsterdam.
I can't let a brief aside from Josh go by without chiming in. He mentions an article in Time, in 2003, about
the development of the new SAT -- which was then evolving from an abstract-reasoning test into a test of classroom material
If the SAT I were really a test of classroom material, there would be no need for it: Students could just take the so-called SAT II: Achievement Tests, which really are tests of classroom material. In fact, a lot of people think the SAT I should simply be ditched in favor of the Achievement Tests.
But to compare kids from schools with wildly different curriculums, colleges say they need a test that's specifically untethered from classroom material.
What kind of test can discern intelligence without reference to subject matter? When the SAT was born, in the mid-20th century, most people were unembarrassed about saying the SAT tested IQ. Then IQ became a contentious subject.
John Cloud's Time cover story in 2003 argued that the SAT tested some important quality located midway between abstract reasoning and mastery of subject material. This is pretty much the College Board's position, too. (However, Cloud complained, as I recall, that the changes to the SAT in 2003, which many educators were applauding, actually weakened the test's usefulness.)
Nicholas Lemann, author of "The Big Test: A Secret History of the American Meritocracy" (and dean of the Columbia Journalism School), disagrees with Cloud. He has said the SAT test remains an IQ test in disguise -- an IQ test with a few tweaks around the edges and a substantial PR makeover.
In short, the question "What does the SAT test?" is a Pandora's Box.
The last race of Nascar's regular season is Saturday night in Richmond; it will decide which ten drivers will make the "Chase," a playoff that encompasses the final 10 races of the long Nascar season. The governing body thus can't be thrilled about this story, about a lawsuit stemming from a racially charged incident at the New Hampshire International Speedway back in 1999.
As Geoffrey Gagnon reported in Ideas back at the beginning of the season, Nascar has made diversity a top priority, though it's still very much a work in progress, both in the pits and in the stands. Bill Lester, an African-American driver who competes in Nascar's Craftsman Truck Series (the stock car equivalent of double-A ball, more or less), has driven in a few races this year at the Nextel Cup (big league) level, but without much success.
Nascar's attempt to woo more women to the sport, meanwhile, has also taken something of a hit lately. Jeremy Mayfield, a driver who made the Chase last year but struggled this season, blamed (in more legal filings) the owner of his car for his poor performance. Mayfield said Ray Evernham, of Evernham Motorsports, didn't pay enough attention to the #19 Dodge because of a relationship he was carrying on with one Erin Crocker, one of the young female drivers being groomed for Nascar stardom (and an Evernham employee to boot).
These setbacks notwithstanding, Nascar does seem to be legitimately committed to continuing its efforts to fight its image as an all white, all male sport, which if nothing else is a typically savvy business decision. But we're probably still several years away from seeing a minority driver, or a woman, in the Chase.
The other day I posted a note about Scott McLemee's eulogy for the cancelled HBO show "Deadwood." In a reader chat that Globe TV critic Matthew Gilbert did elsewhere on Boston.com today, he had the following to say:
You should know that the "Deadwood" finale was not the series finale. HBO and David Milch are bringing back "Deadwood" for two two-hour movies, in which they plan to wrap up the story. And that will be the end, according to both HBO and Milch. It's a VERY expensive show to make, and it attracts a relatively small audience.
So... it's going, but not gone. Just wanted to make that clear.
In the course of a set-to with Brad Delong, the libertarian economist Jane Galt has written an often hilarious rant about the significance of status in our lives. One bit:
Most rich people don't spend enough time thinking about the poor to maintain spite's emotional intensity and strong other-focus. The people they want to spite are Ted in the New York office and Susan from Pilates.
Worth a read, particularly for those who admired Alain de Botton's excellent book "Status Anxiety."
The New York Times recently ran a stunning photo of Susan Sontag that I'd never seen before. It's a black and white photo in which she's shot from the waist up, lying on her back with her hands behind her head, and gazing into the distance.
Even better: Floating over Sontag's head is the barely visible image of Diana Ross, in glorious color -- an accidental effect due to the fact that the Times ran a 1981 Warhol Polaroid of Ross on the flip side of the page. As a result, Sontag appears to be a gloomy beatnik dreaming of a sexier, more vibrant world.
The Times story is here, if you are a registered member.
I couldn't find a good quality JPEG of the Sontag photo, sorry.
Empirical Legal Studies (a blog that often belies its empiracally boring title with very interesting posts) has an insightful take on a story out of the legal academy.
Last week, law.com reported on a lawsuit against the St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami, filed by a former student. The lawsuit alleges that, starting in 2003, the school began admitting more students, only to expell some 30 percent of them after their first or second years for failing to maintain a 2.5 grade point average. The idea, the suit claims, was to boost enrollment, collect a couple years of tuition, and not hurt the school's bar passage rate in the process.
A St. Thomas official quoted in the law.com piece says the scheme would have been illogical, but the Empirical Legal Studies post explains its clear economic benefits, including the fact that a higher bar passage rate might very well kick a school higher up in the U.S. News rankings. Of course, the benefits would be offset somewhat if the school were in fact in violation of federal anti-racketeering laws.
ELS is mum on the merits of the case, but get this: The post notes that the scheme St. Thomas stands accused of perpetrating is actually quite similar to the way that law schools used to go about admitting students -- essentially a system of trial and error based on first year exams. But the system was born of necessity, not malfeasance. Before the LSAT, schools had a really hard time gauging who would be able to hack it as a lawyer, and who wouldn't.
Evan's post reminds me that on my train ride home last night I read an essay in Time Magazine by John Cloud, who wrote a Time cover story on the development of the new SAT -- which was then evolving from an abstract-reasoning test into a test of classroom material -- in October 2003.
Responding to the news that the combined average for the SAT's math and reading sections fell 7 points, Cloud suggests that it's no big deal. Statistically speaking, out of a possible 1600 points on those two sections, a 7-point decline or increase (less than the value of a single question, which is about 10 points) doesn't mean much, he claims. He also points out that the test got radically longer, so fewer kids wanted to take it more than once in order to improve their performance, so fewer had an opportunity to improve their performance.
That's one explanation... But the MySpace theory sounds reasonable too. Anyone else have a theory? Or seen one in print somewhere?
The College Board recently reported that mean scores this year on the SAT fell by more than they have in decades. So what's going on? Why this year? Are kids too wrapped up in online games, MySpace, and other ephemera to leave room for much in the way of reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic? National trends in education are always overdetermined and difficult to parse. But the profusion of electronic and other online stuff must be playing a role. The Internet has boosted productivity and efficiency, but it's also been a great boon, as we know too well, to distraction.
Last week's New Yorker had a strong article by Peter J. Boyer about the Duke lacrosse furor. It was a piece of deep reporting that not only raised questions about the prosecution of the case but also addressed the tension between big-time athletics and top-tier academics. (Boyers calls Stanford and Northwestern the only other private institutions besides Duke that attempt to combine the two.)
This issue was well handled last year in a review by Benjamin DeMott of William G. Bowen and Sarah A. Levin's "Reclaiming the Game: College Sports and Educational Values" in The New York Review of Books. The article and the book both bring solid research to bear on the treatment and behavior of athletes not at the giant state schools but at the most elite colleges in the country.
Funny, I just this morning cut through the John Hancock Tower lobby so my impressionable kindergartener could see how fancy it is inside.
Here's some Hancock Tower trivia, excerpted from an item I wrote for Ideas in April of 2003, when the Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould's book "The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox" was published posthumously.
The 60-story building pops up near the end of Gould's account of Abbott Handerson Thayer, a New Hampshire painter and amateur ornithologist who in 1896 provided an explanation for countershading, a type of protective coloration in which a bird's feathers are dark on its back but light on its belly. Just as painters produce the illusion of three-dimensionality on a flat canvas through shading, nature can create the opposite effect, argued Thayer. Countershading protects birds from predators by making them look flat in a three-dimensional world.
"I learned to appreciate Thayer's point viscerally when I recognized the same principle behind one of the triumphs of modern architecture: the John Hancock Building, Boston's tallest," recounts Gould in a lyrical footnote. One day, he "looked up and recognized that the Hancock building, a very narrow parallelogram in plain view, has been cleverly sited so that, from nearly every crucial vantage point, one sees only the two dimensions of a single wall of glass (or just two sides as they meet at a highly obtuse angle, with no shadow cast across)." Instead of overwhelming the late-Victorian architecture around it, Gould concludes, "the utter flatness renders the building effectively invisible, or at least entirely unobtrusive, if not actually enhancing as a blank 'canvas' of sky to highlight the low buildings of Copley Square."
The Globe is reporting that the John Hancock Tower is up for sale. Back in May, Ideas published an appreciation for the skyscraper, which I have the good fortune to have a view of from my desk.
I grew up in the Boston area, so I'd always sort of taken the building for granted. It wasn't until I read our piece on the tower, which turned 30 this year, that it occurred to me how unlikely it was to find this paragon of modernist design just a flying window pane away from the hardly avant garde Trinity Church and Boston Public Library.
