At the risk of showing the audience the wires above our little enterprise, I'll say that it is sometimes a challenge to come up with headlines for these posts. It is not as difficult as coming up with "heds," as we call them, for a newspaper or tight magazine column, because there space considerations make things much more difficult than readers tend to realize. Think about it. With a column of a fixed width, you can't use two long words in a row, or else you'll be stuck with two lines with one not-long-enough word per line. This explains why heds often use the vague -- and short-- word "ties," as in "Smith Said to Have Qaeda Ties." (Qaeda for Al Qaeda is another little trick.) You couldn't say Terrorist Sympathies, and even Harboring Terrorists probably would spell trouble.
Over at The Valve, a sophisticated collaborative blog devoted to all things literary and academic, to cover most of it, they're having a little contest: what are the worst and best headlines yet for a post on The Valve? "Yes but it is it Arrt" gets a mention for best, though I'm not sure why. A good candidate for worst: "Troping Prog As Toes" [ed:???].
It's worth noting that The Valve itself has a pretty inspired, if enigmatic tagline under its title: "'the safety valve alone knows the worst truth about the engine.' -- William Empson" That's almost as good as the one John mentioned for the influential political blog Balkinization: "an unanticipated consequence of Jack M. Balkin."
Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram responds to a rebuttal of an earlier post in which he attempted to draw a dividing line in the developed world between economic growth beyond a threshold level and ... well, any measure of social success, including overall happiness.
The rebuttal was by Tyler Cowen, who posited that the coming century in the (post-) industrialized world could see incomparable human progress, citing medical advances, mitigation of tragedies, and "cognitive enhancements" (a touch of sci-fi?).
Bertram's point is in general a solid one empirically; it is supported, though he doesn't say so, by data gathered in the last several years by the British economist Richard Layard and "American Mania" author Peter Whybrow. But I don't find his rebuttal of Cowen very persuasive. It's important to note that economic GDP isn't all there is, so to speak, but it is indeed likely, as Cowen says, that societal wealth will contribute to advances in medical technology, due to the relative luxury of massive R & D.
The new London Review of Books runs a deeply informative article by Jeremy Harding about the Lebanese-Palestinian novelist Elias Khoury, which included an interview as well as a close reading and a capsule biography of this chronicler of the Palestinian experience. Not many people have told the Palestinian story in art -- or at all for that matter. (Ideas did run a story by David Green earlier this year, though, about Palestinian art.) It is an important aspect of any people's quest for recognition, it would seem, to have its perspective aired outside of the realm of political activism and violence.
Khoury's background is complicated and not politically one-sided, as Harding explains. As a matter of fact, Arafat expressed deep displeasure with an article in a magazine Khoury edited:
In the late 1970s Arafat’s eagle eye fell on an article by an Iraqi contributor in Shuun Filastiniya. Khoury no longer remembers, or cares to remember, what it was that caused such a row. Still managing editor, he was lucky that an understanding was reached after the initial threat of a spell in PLO custody. (A passage in Gate of the Sun describes the brutality of Palestinian prison conditions.)
Khoury is now famous enough to grant him a place on the world stage, though the US public has failed to embrace him so far. (He is published by a small but wonderful Brooklyn imprint, Archipelago.)
To honor Milton Friedman's memory, I should probably stop theorizing in such a non-rigorous way about the "economics" of basketball defense.
One reader emailed to say: "Let's try what the philosophy majors call reductio ad absurdum -- If you ban all defense, everyone plays defense equally (ineffectively)." I do think that thought experiment supports my view that rules changes can (theoretically) reduce the importance of defense.
However, an economist friend comments that when rules reduce the variability of defensive effectiveness among players, the "marginal" benefit of a good defensive play rises. He's too polite to say so, but I think he's saying my shot was stuffed.
I drifted away from basketball long ago myself -- a fair weather fan ever since the mid-'80s Celtics -- but I wanted to take issue with Chris's post as a logical argument. I think Yglesias might be on target. It's a fair point that banning hand-checking has taken away a tool of the best defenders. But now of course they've adapted. And if they are still not as dangerous as they were in the hand-check era, that's almost irrelevant because every team has the same disadvantage and is still doing their darnedest to stop the opponent from scoring.
Imagine defenders were suddenly able to slap the ball carrier in the face. Defense would become more effective, sure, but not exactly more important vis a vis offense. You still gotta score, and that means getting past the other team's face-slappers.
True, if defenders were now bound to chairs the entire game, defense would be less important than offense, so in that sense Yglesias' point may have been stated too broadly. But that is nothing like the current situation. Hand-checking at the perimeter can't have been that crucial (he says from a position of relative ignorance). It only creates a turnover a game, if that, and a little added anxiety about good ball-handling. That's not such a big deal.
Missed this for a ten days, but on election night David Byrne, Talking Heads front man and general public intellectual of Lower East Side-style culture, posted one of those meandering but thoughtful mini-essays that blogs were known for before they began to be co-opted as a genre by journalism (pot, meet kettle) and corporations. OK, Byrne's opening is really odd. But in any case he had seen some early returns and noticed that the Democrats had "at least taken a few seats back, maybe enough to give them a majority."
Immediately he says, "I sang 'This Land Is Your Land' to myself as I rode my bike downtown -- I got choked up and started to cry." Don't you love our hipster poet? But it turns out he was thinking of just what would not change even in a radical election turnover. His analysis is of a certain culture that has flourished of late but isn't really political. It's worth quoting at length, even if it's a bit teary-eyed:
Push in line, build your building right in front of someone else’s, destroy a neighborhood, be a winner, a survivor. To me, those reality shows 'teach' bully culture -- that’s the lesson that is imparted -- and that includes ones like Laguna Beach, which seems to promote backstabbing, lying, duplicitous behavior and entitlement -- all in a world where no one works.
He closes with a prescient observation that gained resonance the very next day: "Rummy and the others have proven that they are incompetent and are jeopardizing the lives of thousands if not hundreds of thousands."
Speaking of reflexive fear and hatred of Islam, as I did yesterday, can this possibly be real??
It's an interview by CNN's Glenn Beck of the first ever Muslim elected to the US Congress, Keith Ellison. Given attitudes like Beck's, it is remarkable that America elected a Muslim in this particular era. He said responsible Muslims ought to be "lining up to shoot bad Muslims in the head" (am I my brother's keeper?) and that he feels like asking Ellison to "prove to me that you are not working with our enemies."
Guilt by association -- not only bigoted but the oldest trick in the book of politics: use a big brush when smearing.
The new Economist blog posts an entry that is far less arch than the one I linked to yesterday; it's about what will happen to Social Security now that the Democrats, who have been far less concerned about its health than the GOP generally and President Bush in particular (which strikes me as odd). It's a good question, because Social Security is still in trouble, and in fact grows more troubling as the time dwindles before the Baby Boom becomes the Geezer Boom.
Paul Krugman and others on the left have been arguing against SSA alarmism through a strange rhetorical move [$]: they point out that Medicare and Medicaid and other government programs are in far worse straits. Social Security, Krugman adds, must be considered part of the overall Federal budget rather than as a stand-alone program. Or anyway it can be thought of that way, in which case more flexibility is introduced because you can pay for shortfalls in a variety of ways. A privatization program, which Bush proposes, doesn't in fact solve the problem, because you're merely replacing bond debt with stock that won't cover the shortfall (and putting the poor in a rough position, since they are not accustomed to playing the stock market); no matter which way you go, you're not putting in enough money to cover what's going to begin coming out.
In any case it would be a big mistake to table the whole issue, because it's the same type of problem as climate change; the longer you wait, the deeper the soup.
Part of the charm of the pundit Matthew Yglesias comes from the way he enthusiastically deploys his philosophical training -- he has a recent b.a. from Harvard in the field, and clearly loved his studies. (He uses "ex ante," a lot, for starters.) But I think he's dropped the ball in a recent Slate piece on basketball defense. It seems analytically weak.
He's trying to demolish the widely held view that, since the NBA, to increase scoring, has banned certain types of defensive moves -- namely "hand checking" on the perimeter -- strong defensive teams have been stripped of a key advantage. He describes the conventional wisdom this way: defense doesn't matter as much.
But Yglesias writes:
I concede that the new rules have made it harder to play defense. I fail to see, though, how that makes defense less important. Two factors determine who wins a basketball game: how many points your team scores and how many points the other team scores.[!] Since you have the ball roughly half the time and the other team has the ball roughly half the time, it stands to reason that offense and defense should have exactly the same importance. You could even argue that, in an era when it's easier to score than to defend, a guy who can stop the other team from scoring is more valuable than someone who can put the ball in the basket.
I can't argue this empirically, having drifted away from the NBA, but as a matter of logic, my English-major brain balks at this. Posit that under the old system there was a wide range of defensive talent, and that the best defensive players did a lot of hand-checking. (That's reasonable: You put one of your best defenders on the guy who handles the ball a lot. And one-on-one is when hand-checking occurs.) With the elimination of hand-checking, it is possible that the best defensive players have been hamstrung, and that they've drifted toward the median of defensive ability.
If the defensive differences among players and teams shrank, it would make sense to say that defense, relatively speaking, has become less important. You wouldn't pay a defensive star a huge sum, because he wouldn't be that much better than Joe Blow Defender. Meanwhile, a scorer like Allen Iverson remains as valuable as ever.
The last thing Yglesias says in that excerpt seems correct: It's possible that a wide range of defensive performance would persist. (Skills other than hand-checking and pestering guards would then become important. A new kind of defensive star might emerge.) But his claim is bigger than that: It's that, by definition, no rule change can reduce the importance of defense in basketball. That can't be right.
Anyone who has studied game theory care to comment on whether Yglesias's argument works?
On Open University, Eric Rauchway charts the makeup by party of the Congress since the New Deal and wonders what it means in terms of interpreting what happened last Tuesday. In one interpretation, he says, it was a classic throw-out-the-bums victory, or rather loss, a comment on what the GOP has done on Capitol Hill since they took over with Newt Gingrich at the helm in 1994. Seen another way, it was the Republicans' anomalous 12-year reign that was the result of a purge of an unsuccessful regime.
Rauchway sees more legitimacy to the second reading than might be apparent. The GOP, he thinks, never really had a mandate for a radical reshaping of government, despite what Newt thought. They were just the beneficiaries of a voter-driven coup. As such, they couldn't really succeed in overturning the fundamental tenets of US governance. They had to speaking of "saving" or "strengthening" Social Security -- even though they meant radically altering it, and uninsuring it -- and not of jettisoning it entirely, even if that's what they had in mind.
The question is whether the Dems now find themselves in a similarly restrictive majority position. For one thing, they don't control the White House (and neither did the GOP for the first six years). For another, America may not be ready for a radical legislative program. Already we have a barometer in the nation's reaction to the Democrats' proposal of a withdrawal from Iraq to begin within 4-6 months. It hasn't been met with open arms.
Usually I point to good stuff online, but Crooked Timber has linked to an interview so repellent that it needs to be discussed. It's not that the subject, Mark Steyn, is conservative, though he is. (The fact that he wrote recently for the Atlantic is evidence of its rightward shift, even if he was writing on Sinatra.)
It's that the xenophobic, homophobic Steyn, author of the appropriately named book "America Alone" -- because that's what we'll be if we follow his prescriptions -- creates a paranoid vision of a world dominated by subversive lesbians (who are simply victims of bad marriages), radical female Muslims (ditto), restive Muslims, dirty rotten Muslims.... Here he is on the Muslims in the British or European housing projects:
So you have this grotesque license, the sense of license and self gratification that your ordinary English yobbo would have merge with the sort of basic misogyny of the Muslim community and it produces something quite terrifying in these rape gangs they've now got in Scandinavia and France and Belgium and places. I think it's that the western world impacts on a lot of young Muslims in ways that make them far more alienated, far more fiercely Islamist in effect than to some goat herder in Afghanistan.
There was a very good, web-only essay in The Nation yesterday, a meditation by Rolf Potts on Allen Ginsberg's 1966 anti-Vietnam poem "Wichita Vortex Sutra," which Ginsberg first chanted into a tape recorder while driving across the American heartland.
Potts notes that Ginsberg's insights into the way language -- as employed by the government, and by the MSM ("Rusk Says Toughness Essential For Peace"; "Vietnam War Brings Prosperity") -- can make war seem unreal and far away apply very much to our current situation. But he also notes that Ginsberg didn't finally seem to believe that poetic language was any antidote. According to Potts,
Poetic language might aspire to have political potency in a censored society, where brave dissent could be heard amid the repressive silence--but Ginsberg's free, media-saturated America had come to the point where truth and untruth, politics and entertainment, had become so intermixed as to become indistinguishable.
Potts concludes with a swipe at those in the poetry community who've been so busy advertising the 50th anniversary of "Howl" this year -- because, he suggests, "it's more enjoyable to celebrate the First Amendment triumph of an old sex-and-drugs anthem than wrestle with a poem that reminds us of the limitations of language in a political world."
The Economist has a new blog. In keeping with magazine tradition, the contributions are unsigned, but some of them have a surprisingly feisty or contentious flavor, as though the writers had been waiting for a genre in which to spoil for a fight.
Case in point: a post from today takes up, in pointing to a working paper from the IMF, the question of how the French and their economy have been affected by the 35-hour work week. The writer's closer, allegedly summing up the IMF findings:
(i) why and how do the French fool themselves into thinking that such crazy laws can have any useful effect?;
(ii) what elaborate public policy mechanism prevents them learning from past errors?
(iii) does anything ever make the French happy at all, even inadvertently?
Whoa there, that level of snark is positively Gawkerish. Imagine The New Yorker having a blog of this kind. I don't see why the French labor restrictions get everyone so riled up (even the non-French). Are we all secretly jealous? Is it that any worker-friendly policies have become hopelessly backward?
And now for something completely different. Some video hackers have stitched together scenes from vintage cartoons into an animated version of the "Communist Manifesto."
It's very flattering that you want to know what my forthcoming Argonaut Folly essay is about, Chris. But I can't spill the beans before n+1 hits the stands. Let's just say that it's an exercise in outsider-intellectual history, examining a particular fantasy that many of my favorite thinkers and artists of the past have entertained.
Josh finishing his essay for n+1
I wrote a similar outsider-intellectual history essay for the first issue of n+1. The earlier essay, titled "The Black Iron Prison," looked at the 19th-century origins of the widespread conviction (which is mistakenly considered to be the invention of Adorno, Foucault, and other midcentury European thinkers) that a democratic-capitalist society only appears to be a free social order, when it's actually a prison.
Both of these essays draw upon the massive collection of notes I took, several years ago, when I tried and failed to write a book about outsider intellectuals, from Baudelaire to Bruce Lee. As I wallowed in the debt-ridden aftermath of my failure, Alex Star and The Boston Globe approached me about lending a hand with a new Sunday section, to be called Ideas. Hallelujah! I was rescued from bankruptcy.
Josh, did you really think you were going to get away with dropping that phrase and not explaining it? In the interview you link to, Gessen also offers not a hint. What folly are you tilting at in the next n + 1? (Google confirms you are the first person on the planet to identify it, or to give it that name.)
(And that gyroball? In that video, it looks like a good old fashioned fast curve. It's not spinning like a football, as Slate says it should be.
I agree that, so far, Lucas Hanft's piece on the gyroball for Ideas remains the definitive take on its bafflements and mythical qualities. He quotes a Yale physicist as saying it "may be impossible" to throw a fast pitch with a spiral. Moreover, the scientist says, "there's also no point.")
The Word of the Year is carbon neutral, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, which announced its 2006 pick today.
Being carbon neutral involves calculating your total climate-damaging carbon emissions (your carbon footprint), reducing them where possible, and then balancing your remaining emissions, often by purchasing a carbon offset -- paying to plant new trees or investing in "green" technologies.
Not that NOAD gets the last word -- or the first word, or the only word. The Word of the Year parade started in early October, when the Oxford English Dictionary chose bovvered, from a catchphrase on Catherine Tate's BBC comedy show. ("Am I bovvered?" means "Am I bothered? Do I look like I care?" See it in action here.)
Next, on Nov. 1, Webster's New World chose Crackberry -- a play on the addictive properties of the BlackBerry PDA -- as its 2006 WOTY. (But the WNW word squad, like NOAD's, was thinking globally; one of its runners-up was carbon footprint. Will it be a green year in the WOTY world?)
These are just for starters; dozens of WOTYs will be proposed in coming weeks, and the season won't end till the American Dialect Society votes on its list in January. We'll be back for more.
Following up on John's post about the high-priced bidding war for Japanese weird-windup pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, it's worth showing a look at Matsuzaka's supposed gyroball. (You get a look at his weird, Hideo Nomo-style slow-motion windup too.) The pitch just looks like a typical but nasty forkball or split-finger fastball, a pitch Roger Clemens rode to success for his last five years in the league, after he'd lost a crucial foot or so on his fastball. But look at the slo-mo second replay. He's not holding the ball with split fingers. He's throwing a kind of quasi-curveball from the looks of it, his fingers imparting sidespin and topspin at once. Can't wait to see this in person -- in Fenway, I hope. (I may live in New York, but the Red Sox love runs deep.)
Fiction writer, book critic, and sometime Ideas contributor Keith Gessen was interviewed last week by the New York Inquirer about another of his undertakings, the literary-intellectual journal n+1. (NB: I have contributed to n+1; and I've written about n+1 for Ideas; and Keith mentions my forthcoming n+1 essay on what I call the "Argonaut Folly.")
Gessen (standing) and other n+1 editors
Diego Uchitel for The New York Times
In the comments section over at The Valve, an n+1 reader says that Gessen's interview responses sum up what he dislikes about the journal:
There’s something about the editorial combination of "we are the only ones who will get harsh on writing that we don't like, no one else does that" and "we only write about contemporary lit, not about those dusty old dead people" and naive politics that is deadly enough to overcome some of the merits of the individual essays, which are occasionally very good.
Gessen -- not interested in dusty old dead people? This is misguided, to say the least. For example, check out Keith's great essay about Alexander Herzen from the Oct. 30 issue of The New Yorker, here.
Last Monday, York Dispatch (Pa.) columnist Jeffrey A. Johnson dragged a philosopher into his writeup on the Baltimore Ravens:
Ancient philosopher Baruch Spinoza said, "If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past." If Spinoza were alive today he would make a fine general manager for an NFL franchise.
That's a Philosophywatch classic. Not to mention: "ancient"? Really?
On Friday, I learned from a story in the Chicago Tribune that Anthony Gonzalez, hotshot receiver for the top-ranked Ohio State football team, is a philosophy major with a 4.0 GPA. That's a great topic; too bad journalist Teddy Greenstein gets smarmy and drops the N-bomb:
Gonzalez knew he wanted to become a lawyer, like his grandfather, before settling on a major at Ohio State. His grandfather's advice: Study English or philosophy. Nietzsche won out.
Homo ludens
On Thursday, 33-year-old British singer/DJ/composer Jamie Lidell also dropped the N-bomb, in an interview with Pitch Weekly. Asked about the influence of Motown on his music, Lidell, who studied philosophy as an undergrad, we're informed, replied that motive is more important than influence:
"You should have an intention behind something," [Lidell] says. "Like Nietzsche for example, and the way that his concept of the Superman led many people to believe that he was propping up Nazism. That's one way of reading that material. I think it's important as an artist to clarify your motives."
Not that Nietzsche knew anything about Nazism...
The artist (Lidell) as Clark Kent
On Friday, in an interview with the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle (New York) about "Stranger Than Fiction," Dustin Hoffman, who plays a literature professor in the movie, dropped the K-bomb. Asked whether life is a tragedy or a comedy, Hoffman replied:
There's a line in [Soren] Kierkegaard. He said being alive is like being suspended on wires over the deep ocean. What else can you do but laugh? You can't be frightened your entire life.
I don't know that particular quote (is it correct?), but I like how the Democrat and Chronicle inserted that [Soren], in case readers thought Hoffman was referring to another Kierkegaard.
Hoffman as Prof. Jules Hilbert
Speaking of whom, when interviewed on Sunday by the Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), a 74-year-old John Updike had this observation to make:
I imagined years ago that in my old age -- and now I guess I'm in it -- I would abandon fiction and instead write general, Kierkegaard-like small works of existential wisdom. But I haven't reached that stage yet when I really feel I have enough wisdom to package that way.
"Tuesdays with Updike," apparently, does not loom on the publishing horizon. Thankfully. (Or would he be really good at it?)
In the late 1990s, Columbia University started a much-hyped venture called Fathom. It was supposed to "leverage," as they say, the Columbia University faculty -- as well as resources at several other elite institutions -- to produce an online-education site that would conquer the world (and, natch, earn dot-com amounts of money). Fathom focused on humanities courses, a laudable impulse, but not, as it turned out, a profitable one. (The places that make money on online education today, like the University of Phoenix, offer courses that students/consumers view as necessary for career advancement.)
Inside Higher Ed interviews Ann Kirschner, the former head of Fathom, here. She puts an awfully positive spin on the now-defunct* venture, and is instantly rebutted by someone in the comments section, who seems pretty familiar with the project. (See the first comment.)
The failure of Fathom does not seem to have hurt the careers of the people involved in it. Kirschner is the new dean of an honors program at CUNY, while Michael Crow, Columbia's former new-media big-think guy, became president of Arizona State University.
Crow doesn't mention Fathom in his online biography.
I remember Fathom because I was one of the many journalists to traipse up to Columbia to get a tour and imbibe the hype.
*The Fathom site itself still exists, as an archive of free material.
The word on the street is that the Red Sox will be revealed, probably later today, as the high bidders for the services of Daisuke Matsuzaka, the young (26) ace of Japan's Seibu Lions. ESPN.com has reported the Sox may have offered between $38 and $45 million. Mind you, this is not salary we're talking -- this is just for the "posting fee" necessary to compensate the Lions for letting him come to the States.
Sox fans warming their hands by the hot stove are naturally curious whether Matsuzaka is worth it. (Unless you paid very close attention to the World Baseball Classic, you probably haven't seen this guy pitch.) The Globe's Nick Cafardo seems to think the answer to that question is yes.
But there's another question that's starting to get more attention: So does this guy really throw a gyroball? (Also: what's a gyroball?) Back in August, Lucas Hanft wrote a piece for Ideas exploring whether a Japanese physicist had indeed invented a new baseball pitch, as much Web buzz (and some rather grainy Web footage) suggested.
Slate has now dedicated an explainer column to the pitch, which is a good bit less skeptical of it than Hanft was, and the pitch is popping up in all the coverage of the Matsuzaka bidding war. But the mystery remains. Newsday reporter David Lennon caught up with Tadahito Iguchi, the White Sox second baseman, who faced Matsuzaka when he played in Japan. Asked about the gyroball, Iguchi responded through a translator, "I don't know what a gyroball is or what you're talking about."
The question of whether or not Matsuzaka will be packing a new pitch when he comes to the Majors is still an open one. Boston fans, however, will be heartened by the rest of Iguchi's repsonse:
"I can tell you this about Matsuzaka -- he's got a great fastball. Even when he's behind in the count, he's got so many pitches that he can throw to get the count even. He's got so many pitching sequences that we all don't know what he will throw because his form is so similar all the time. His pitches are just so dominating."
The New Republic staff blog, The Plank, points outa short and slightly cruel item in this week's New Yorker that picks apart the relationship between Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Defense Policy Board, and Donald Rumsfeld, friends for thirty-six years, as Rumsfeld sank toward his demise.
Adelman bravely tells New Yorker staff writer Jeffrey Goldberg that as far back as 2003, “When Rumsfeld said, in reaction to all the looting, ‘Stuff happens,’ and ‘That’s what free people do,’ I was just so disappointed ... This wasn’t what free people did; it’s what barbarians did.”
Adelman, who was given notice by Rumsfeld days before Rums was felled, as the New York Daily News put it (Adelman remains in his job), closes with another zinger: "The Donald Rumsfeld of today is not the Donald Rumsfeld I knew, but maybe I was wrong about the old Donald Rumsfeld. It’s a terrible way to end a career. It’s hard to remember, but he was once the future.”
A journalist named Christopher Hayes audited a course taught by a member of the famed economics department at the University of Chicago, and has now written about the experience [pdf] for the left-wing magazine In These Times. Hayes has an agenda, but the paper is generally well argued, though it might be that it seems likely that it leaves out some counterexamples. His claim, a powerful and ambitious one, is that economics is taught in universities in a way that pretends to objectivity but assumes the rectitude of the neoclassical model and the above-all primacy of the market:
Because neoclassical economics always presents itself as a value-neutral description of the world, its ideological commitments can be adopted by those who learn it without any recognition that they are ideological.
One commenter on Ezra Klein's balanced post on the article has an interesting follow-up:
I'm in the opposite situation as an instructor. I teach an environmental economics course for both environmental science and econ majors. The bottom 10% of my instructor ratings are always from economics majors complaining that dealing with externalities and market failures isn't a real economics course because they haven't seen the topics before.
