Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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| January 7, 2007 - January 13, 2007 »
January 5, 2007
Wow: Did they just change their Web site? It used to be strikingly weak, barely an afterthought, and now it's very elegant (and they're actually posting articles, which they didn't before).
Posted by Christopher Shea at 09:58 PM
January 5, 2007
I was too busy finishing my column to follow up on this till now, but I was amazed Wednesday night, while flipping channels, to come across this piece on ABC's "Primetime," which appeared to replicate -- with the help of a Santa Clara University psychologist -- the famous Milgram experiment at Yale involving electric "shocks" and authority figures.
The unwitting subjects in that experiment were told to administer electric shocks of increasing strength to another test subject. The shocks weren't real and the second subject was in on the experiment. The point was to see how far ordinary people would go in torturing another human being.
I'd thought the experiment was unrepeatable, given modern human-subjects regulations. I've emailed the psychologist, Jerry Burger, to find out how they pulled this off -- and what restrictions, if any, his university placed on him.
Milgram's bogus "shock" regulator
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:24 PM
January 5, 2007
I have in my hands the 75th anniversary edition of The American Scholar, the quarterly journal of literature, science, and culture published by the Phi Beta Kappa Society. (I am not a member, but I'll bet at least one or two of my fellow Brainiacs is; would you care to out yourselves?)
I discovered The American Scholar in the late 1990s, during the editorship (1998-2004) of Anne Fadiman, who -- as I wrote in an Ideas item last winter -- had turned the formerly stodgy journal into a prize-winning redoubt of belletristic personal essays. I always found something in each issue to admire, but it wasn't really my cup of tea.
Under editor Robert Wilson, who took the job in 2005 promising to return The American Scholar to its roots as a forum for public intellectuals, it's been a much better read, in my opinion. I particularly enjoy the fact that it doesn't take itself too seriously, as is evidenced in the 75th anniversary issue by historian Ted Widmer's interesting and funny account of the quarterly's history, which mixes praise for the journal's impressive roster of contributors with wry asides about, for example, how it sometimes fell prey to "some pedantry, some snobbery, and some Babbittry."
Elsewhere in the issue, literary critic Rich Nicholls excerpts a few dozen essays by the likes of Archibald MacLeish, Mark Van Doren, Daniel J. Boorstin, Barbara Tuchman, Marshall McLuhan, Edward O. Wilson, Rita Dove, and Hannah Arendt. Who are the intellectual giants and provocateurs of today? One would like to see their names appear on the cover of The American Scholar; alas, I have not seen them appear there so far during Wilson's tenure. Still, the journal is much improved, and that is no small accomplishment.
UPDATE: I should have used the word "unsung" in front of the phrase "intellectual giants and provocateurs." Also, Robert Wilson cordially argues that TAS does publish the kinds of thinkers and writers I was talking about; see his email here.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:46 PM
January 5, 2007
A ways back, John alerted us all to a cool online phenomenon involving the incredible program Google Earth, which stitches together detailed satellite images of the entire globe. The phenomenon was essentially planespotting. Bloggers were pointing out spots on the Google Earth "map" where planes in flight had been captured in the satellite photo of the relevant area.
So now someone writing for the (UK) Register has discovered that a strange long object that looked like a huge earwig has disappeared from Google Earth. Probably because a newer satellite image was uploaded to the program. But never mind: look at how the Register describes the disappearance.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:58 PM
January 5, 2007
John McCain is showing up on the radar again, which can't be an accident when a guy's got an army of PR reps and consultants, presumably. This morning he was on Don Imus's show on WFAN in New York (syndicated elsewhere), showing off by reviewing Hemingway novels -- "'For Whom the Bell Tolls' is not one of his best..." -- and recounting the plots of war movies. (Say what you will about Imus; he gets people to more or less be themselves, or at least to make comments that are in some small or large way revealing. Once he had the sportscaster Jim Nance on the show and told him he didn't "bring much to the table" on the air, which Nance tried to parry with a joke but soon raised his voice in a very non-showbiz way.)
But the truly revealing recent bit regarding McCain is a new profile by ex-Times reporter Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair, as Ezra Klein points out. In it McCain reveals that he's not quite genuine all the time, that, for instance, he makes little showy announcements designed to flag to reporters a canned statement he doesn't really support.
That's not news per se for a politician. However: 1) as Klein says, it's the fact that he's admitting it that is remarkable, and 2) this is the man who built his political life on being genuine, who called his campaign bus The Straight Talk Express. I suppose we could congratulate him for talking straight to Purdum, but that's a little late for those who reported straight his sham press conferences. Is this a preview of McCain 2008?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:29 PM
January 5, 2007
Evan, you make good points about the differences between baseball and basketball, but I still think my main point stands: If you make attending college a requirement for gaining entry into a professional sports league, academic corruption is inevitable. If you sever that tie, the corruption goes away.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:10 PM
January 5, 2007
Yesterday brought the news, first reported in the New York Times, that the company charged with certifying most of the US's voting machines -- and they have already been doing so nationwide -- has had its certification for the purpose revoked by a national election board, which curiously did not announce this major move. The Election Assistance Commission revoked the authorization and contract with Ciber, Inc. back in the summer, but failed to disclose the decision, which seems curious since it reflects well on the commission for correcting an earlier mistake. (Is there a deeper story here about the original contract?) New York State, which has a $3 million contract with Ciber for assistance in implementing touch-screen voting, immediately announced it would consider suspending testing by the company.
This is a major story, though it's probably something of a snooze for readers. It is one thing for Diebold and other machine manufacturers to be incompetent. It is quite another when the firm assigned to check up on Diebold -- arguably a role that should be governmental rather than private -- also lets flaws go unnoticed. Did the EAC discover that faulty machines were responsible for vote miscounts in live elections? We can't be surprised at this point.
Incidentally, here's a funny piece of irony.
[Revised 1:09 p.m.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:03 PM
January 4, 2007
To respond to Chris's post below, I'd agree that it would be great if there were leagues in all sports into which athletes could go straight from high school, without becoming essentially dead weight to an elite college they wouldn't otherwise see the inside of. (Sorry, truth hurts.) The point would be like conservatories for pre-professional musicians. Only they would form a league to provide the necessary competition. And they'd make a boatload on TV rights, since the best players would clearly end up there, all things being equal.
However, it's a little simplistic and not really accurate to say that baseball cleanly provides an alternative to college with its minor league system. Part of what's great about baseball is that the game is so darn hard that the minor leagues are needed in order to give players some way to improve after college. It may be that exceptional high school players get drafted, as they do with far greater frequency in basketball, but neither high schoolers nor college graduates make the leap -- with very few exceptions -- right to the baseball big leagues. The levels are too different. (Part of what's at work is not pure difficulty; it's that great hitters need testing against great pitchers, and vice versa. You can't develop the raw skills in some pansy college league, as some quarterbacks can, for example, particularly if they're sculpting their body into a machine on the side.) Ken Griffey, Jr. was 19 or so when he played his first day in The Show. No one in the Majors, though, is 17 or 18 and already a bona fide pro star, like the Bryants, Garnetts, LeBrons, etc.
No, it would have to be the colleges, rather than the pro leagues, who would get behind pre-pro leagues in basketball and football, for example. Schools have the interest in dividing sports and academics, at least in theory. To the NBA and NFL, though, college sports are just fine as a minor league system, since after all the undergrad stars can jump right into uniform at the big arena the following season.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:40 PM
January 4, 2007
Over at The Valve, Adam Roberts, a sci-fi author and professor of 19th century lit at the University of London, picks apart an endearing little poem of Paul Muldoon's because ... well, just because. The poem is part of a small series, Roberts tells us. It's a series I didn't know about, even though I'm a Muldoon fan:
This is one of 'Sleeve Notes', a fairly lengthy strung-together series of poems in Muldoon's 1998 collection Hay; brief lyrics that, it seems, flesh out the 'soundtrack of our lives' aspect of music by connecting, often obliquely, events in Muldoon’s own biography to the albums to which he was listening at the time.
OK, how cool is that?? We've all remarked, haven't we, on the role of popular music in our lives and memories. To this day, Blues Traveler's romp called "Run Around" can instantly transport me to the New Haven Green in the summer of 1995. Or maybe it's 1996 -- even Proustian memory isn't perfect.
Muldoon's poem is about the Beatles's "White Album" and it's a little cutesy for my taste, but Roberts has some perceptive things to say about it. I hope he dissects some more Muldoon pop poems. I even like Muldoon's (somewhat conventional) musical taste, judging by Roberts' description.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:00 PM
January 4, 2007
One of the commenters at Marginal Revolution points to this handy review, at the AAUP Web site, of several books on college sports from a few years ago. (Scroll down to the review by the excellently named Randolph M. Feezell.)
I've always thought the solution to the excesses of big-time college sports is pretty simple (and it doesn't involve eliminating the football team). As with baseball and its system of professional minor leagues, you just have to provide a non-college route into the pros. College baseball never has the scandals of college basketball or football, because if you don't care (at 17) about your college education, if you just want to be the next Roger Clemens, you can do that. You get drafted and go into the minor leagues. You don't have to fake an interest in college. (And the Durham Bulls manager doesn't have to fake an interest in your intellectual development.)
A kid on my high-school baseball team, a shortstop, did that. He didn't make the pro's (good field no hit), but had saved enough of his modest signing bonus to pay for college after his journey ended. At that point, he had an incentive to study, and did. (I think.)
But think of all the people -- from ACC conference coaches to university alums to ESPN talking heads to pro-basketball-team owners (who'd have to develop the whole minor-league structure) -- who want to make sure college basketball keeps the monopoly that makes it so exciting.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 02:29 PM
January 4, 2007
The folks at Marginal Revolution point out that the writers -- or is it just one? -- of the Economist blog Free Exchange, clearly less than transfixed by college football's bowl season, are wondering the following: why do colleges operate semi-professional sports teams? Funny, The Onion was just wondering the same thing, only in reverse. But anyhow, if we wanted, we could go further than the Economist: why do colleges have sports teams at all? (Gasp, I know, but it's not as if there's any law here. For a time Georgetown, not exactly an anti-sports school, didn't have varsity football.)
The Economist writer is perplexed particularly because "overall, the athletics department is a money-losing proposition for most schools. They also bring down the value of the university's core 'product', as schools offer places and often lavish scholarships to academically unqualified student athletes." That's an interesting thesis, only I'm not sure it's true. So sports programs bring down the median student grade, no argument there. But if they really had an immediate effect on the university's bottom line, as the blogger is suggesting, I think we'd know about it, and we would see the cancellation of some more athletic programs. But if Notre Dame folded the football team after last night's loss, watch the alumni donations dry up and the angry letters flood in.
Answering its own question, in part, the Economist post says that "Irvin Tucker has found a significant and positive correlation between a university having a successful football team and higher quality of incoming freshmen, alumni donations, and graduation rates." But they also cite an NCAA-commissioned study that found that spending on sports had no correlation to an increase in student quality.
Jury's out here. Who will take the chance and cut the football team? I've often wondered whether an Ivy school would take the first step, since their academic programs are unlikely to be shunned by alumni and applicants.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:11 AM
January 3, 2007
At WebMetricsGuru, a site I rarely visit about "Web analytics," the writer, Marshall Sponder, who has a search engine marketing consultancy, points out an article in yesterday's New York Times that is currently the most emailed on nytimes.com. It's a pretty fascinating article, summing up with a nice synthesis the current thinking about the old problem of free will vs. determinism -- in other words, the question of whether we act on choices we are free to make or whether we're a bunch of atoms bouncing around in ways already determined by the laws of physics.
Sponder's post isn't too enlightening compared to the piece itself, but he picks out some good quotes and captures what I also took to be the flavor of the research findings reported in the Times -- that sadly things couldn't have gone differently than they have. One example: it seems we actually have conscious thoughts about, say, choosing to punch someone just after our limbs starts moving, though we experience it in the reverse order. In other words, if that finding is to be believed, we interpret what we do in retrospect as the result of a decision that never took place.
Daniel Dennett, the controversial atheist philosopher, is quoted in the piece presenting a "third way" interpretation, trying to make free will compatible with determinism, as other philosophers have. But it isn't clear in the article exactly what he means. Has anyone read the relevant Dennett work? Maybe you, Josh?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:05 PM
January 3, 2007
This morning, NBC's Today Show did the usual two-step that TV news producers use when they want to get exploitative content onto the air but don't want to be called exploitative. Over the caption, "Too Much? Too Far?" (or maybe it was "Too Far? Too Much?" -- the faux concern was the important thing), NBC somberly probed the "issue" of why people were seeking out video on the Web of Saddam Hussein's hanging.
Of course, using sexed-up graphics, Today showed as much of the clip as possible, given reigning decency standards -- always stressing the abiding mystery of why anyone would ever want to see it. They showed it again and again -- all but the money shot, which they tantalized you with. Throughout the segment, sociologists and psychologists, including Northeastern's Jack Levin, usefully explained that human beings sometimes are titillated by shocking sights. One expert, to his partial credit, said that the only surprise is why anyone would be surprised that numerous people sought out the clip. (Yet he didn't feel strongly enough about the banality of NBC's exercise to give up his TV slot.) The on-air reporter gravely explained how mainstream news organizations could never, ever air such a barbaric clip.
As a bonus, Today showed more of the Paris Hilton sex tape than I'd ever seen (to back up the claim that some weird Americans -- but not Today viewers! -- are interested in watching perverted things.)
Today, of course, is correct: the Internet is breeding a kind of sick voyeurism previously unheard of in human history.
Kentucky's last public execution, 1936
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:06 PM
January 3, 2007
This past weekend, an article of mine about online writers' workshops was published in the Ideas section.
It has come to my attention that there is a site I didn't mention that is based in Newton, MA. Sol Nasisi, the director of The Next Big Writer and a companion site, Booksie, wrote a note to let me know about them. The Next Big Writer has over 4,000 members and also publishes a ranking of top-rated fiction. They accept novels and hold competitions for short stories and poems as well. Booksie afford anyone the ability to "publish" their stuff and get feedback and exposure while retaining all rights to their own work. Nasisi: "We provide writers with the tools to develop, and fine-tune their writing (TheNextBigWriter) and also to start promoting and making a name for themselves (Booksie.com)."
These sites don't promise to send the best material to an agent or editor, as The Frontlist does. But most writers there probably hope to draw the eyes of the book powers that be.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:28 PM
January 3, 2007
Just wanted to announce the soft launch of a new monthly podcast by brilliant/cantankerous Globe columnist Alex Beam. (Hopefully he will not read this; he hates praise, says it "saps the strength.") Beam's opinions provoke a lot of angry reader mail; in today's column, he describes the best letters he's received recently.
The podcast features Beam reading and responding to his hate mail. Here are the first two episodes -- produced, amateurishly, by yours truly.
Beam's December 2006 podcast, in which he responds to November's hate mail.
Beam's January 2007 podcast, in which he responds to December's hate mail.
Alex Beam
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:22 AM
January 3, 2007
I might have mentioned this long ago, but there's a site I love that publishes a new comic Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. (Today's comic here.)
The overall aesthetic, if that's what to call it, is very hard to define, and takes shape over weeks and months, though there's a math/science flavor unique in the comics world. Sometimes the comics are a scream; other times they're weirdly existential and slightly depressed; and then there's the ones that are just really sweet. I feel like they're written by my good friends, who project an air of sophistication and irony at nearly all times but are really just big softies looking for the big chance to let it out (usually in the form of romantic love).
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:25 AM
January 2, 2007
CUNY, famously the training ground for a couple of generations of New York intellectuals with humble backgrounds, is making a comeback, according to City Journal.
Its Honors College snagged the winner of last year's the 2005* Intel Science Talent Search, the most elite science competition for high-school students. And generally it is attracting more of the best and brightest than it did only a few years ago. It helps that tuition is free, and students get laptops and a $7,500 "study stipend." (With elite private colleges turning away so many superb students, for reasons both understandable and dubious, someone was going to figure out how to profit from that trend.)
For context, I wish the article explained how the rest of CUNY interacts with the Honors College, and what the admissions standards are in the university's various subdivisions.
*Doh!
Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:18 PM
January 2, 2007
While we're on the topic of year-ending and year-opening roundups, Slate has a feature collecting the views of various big-shots on the landmark cultural events of 2006. I can't help thinking the list doesn't make it look like a banner year, and maybe it just wasn't. Nobody names a newly published book; a new edition of "Hamlet" doesn't count. (I'd say Claire Messud's "The Emperor's Children" was the most buzzed-about novel, and "The Looming Tower" the most discussed nonfiction title, and they were both worthy, but hardly Nobel efforts.) Of the TV shows cited, there is "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip," which is good but also a poor man's "West Wing," also created by Aaron Sorkin. That was really good. The other named is "Ugly Betty." No comment.
I'd say the best answer comes from Robert Pinsky, and it's a surprising one from him. He notes the tremendous rise of political comedy, which is in a golden age, although nothing he cites started in '06:
Political comedy -- funny, passionate, informed, smart -- not long ago seemed not an American form....
Now [again], in the mysterious life cycles of art, we have The Onion, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and South Park's Matt Stone and Trey Parker: all bringing it, American-style. The separate show for Colbert this year confirms the transformation. Bless cable ... or thank Cheney for his February quail shoot?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:56 PM
January 2, 2007
At Edge.org, the influential online online forum of philosophy and tech culture that is closely watched by various geeks, has published its question of the year, which is, charmingly, "What are you optimistic about? Why?"
One hundred and sixty contributors, all prominent in their fields, have weighed in and all their answers, some quite long, are online at the page linked above. One struck me right away: Nancy Etcoff, a psychologist and a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School, foresees the possibility that we can all raise one's normal state of happiness:
happiness levels are durable, withstanding sweeping changes in health and wealth. Life changes, [my research] suggests, but you don't. It showed that there is a substantial genetic component to happiness. People have a personal baseline of happiness that is influenced by stable personality traits.
So far so bad, but it turns out that after people get married, some are significantly less happy on the average day than before (that's the adaptability in action); others are less happy; and an equal number are more so. Not a surprise in theory, but Etcoff notices "the fact that one can" raise the baseline through a durable arrangement like marriage suggests that becoming more happy than one's genetic norm is possible, so why can't we make it happen other ways?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:17 PM
January 2, 2007
Last Friday, a Brainiac post from Evan invited us to participate in a game -- one sparked by Tyler Cowen's response to a recent book by Ron Rosenbaum -- of listing one's favorite Shakespeare movies.
As it happens, back in September the Globe's Susan Vermazen, who is photo editor for both Ideas and the various Arts sections, put together a snazzy photo gallery version of Rosenbaum's list, to support a Globe story on Rosenbaum's book. Take a peek!
My own favorite Shakespeare movie, for purely sentimental reasons, is Laurence Olivier's "The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France" (1944).
When I was 9 or 10, and vacationing at my beloved Aunt Maggie's summer house in a small town in the mountains of Pennsylvania, my aunt rented the movie and projected it (this was pre-DVD, of course) onto an interior wall of the fire station one evening, and the whole town showed up to watch it. My cousins and I sold popcorn. Magic!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:15 PM
January 2, 2007
In the field of weird research, psychologists and survey-givers take note: it appears that surveys taken on paper may be marred by the left-right bias. Wazzat? It's the tendency to answer more positively -- e.g. "definitely agree" vs. "mostly agree" -- when the checkmarks are listed down the left side of the page rather than listed laterally from left to right; we have a preference, in a sense, for the left-hand side of the page.
Researchers at the University of Melbourne (Australia) led by Andrea Loftus found that tendency in students taking a classroom satisfaction survey. Strange as it is, this finding would appear to have wide-reaching implications for paper polling, as argued by this blog of "digestible" psychological research.
What's strange is that newspaper editors have long published the most important story of the day, or "lead story," in the right-hand column, figuring, perhaps, that the right column is closest to the part of the page that gets turned and looked at more closely or often. Does this bring that into question, too?
Thanks to Marginal Revolution.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:02 PM
January 2, 2007
As I was putting away the Christmas tree lights, I noticed something kinda ironic about the box -- formerly used to store books of mine. Check it out:
Happy New Year, anyway, Brainiac readers! Among my resolutions for 2007 is to get the comments functionality turned on for all Globe blogs. (I have no power or authority to make that happen, but in my current role as a web editor here, I have a tiny amount of influence.) I look forward to communing with you when that happens, as do my fellow Brainiacs. Until then, please keep the e-mails coming.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 08:41 AM
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