Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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January 31, 2007
Back in September, Ideas took a look at the history of viral and guerrilla marketing, and the role these tactics will play in the future of advertising. We didn't quite predict anything like today's fiasco however. This Adult Swim/Aqua Teen Hunger Force stunt makes Smirnoff's Tea Partay look rather quaint by comparison.
A perhaps not unrelated story of note: On Monday, Nielsen finally started counting kids watching in their dorm rooms in its ratings. As the Times reported:
Adult Swim, a block of adult programming on the Cartoon Network that expects its 18- to 24-year-old audience to jump by 35 percent with the new ratings, is so excited about the change that it ran an ad telling viewers about it in mid-October.
...among other things?
Posted by John Swansburg at 06:01 PM
January 31, 2007
At degreetutor.com, apparently an aggregation of sites for online schools, there's a thoughtful article about the future of libraries, an important topic, called "Are Librarians Totally Obsolete?" Those with bibliophile tendencies (and perhaps even some Luddite sympathies) will be happy to know that the piece's answer is in the negative: "Despite their perceived obsoleteness [sic)] in the digital age both libraries -- and librarians -- are irreplaceable for many reasons. 33, in fact."
The number one reason, that "not everything is available on the Internet," is the best one of all. As I noted in an earlier post, Google's man in charge of Google Book Search argues that most of the world's knowledge -- that is, the stuff in books -- is undigitized.
Also pointed out is that a "2005 study of the Illinois School Libraries shows that students who frequently visit well-stocked and well-staffed school libraries end up with higher ACT scores and perform better on reading and writing exams." That makes sense, but it should be added that schools with better Internet access perform better, too, although both may simply reflect the overall quality and wealth of the schools.
The best thinking in the piece goes into reason number thirty-two:
[T]he alluring immediacy of the internet can lead to the false impression that only immediate, interactive and on-the-spot online discussion is of value. Dusty books on tall shelves then seem to represent stagnant knowledge, and their curators (librarians), behind the times. Books and reading easily gets regarded as elitist and inactive, while blogging becomes the here-and-now....
Preserving libraries to store knowledge and teach the limitations of technology can help prevent the hubris and narcissism of technological novelty.
Takes Brainiac down a notch, but I can only approve.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:28 PM
January 31, 2007
I once interviewed a homeland security consulant who claimed that ordinary citizens armed with wi-fi laptops, smart cellphones, and the like would be far more effective at responding to terrorist attacks than any governmental organization. Tonight I have seen the proof of that argument.
The top story on Boston.com and other local news sites and TV stations as I write this is a bomb scare that happened in Boston this morning. It seems that suspicious devices were spotted on bridges, overpasses, in subway stations and other public places. The devices -- described ominously as being "composed of electronic circuit boards with LED lights attached" -- were shaped like little glowing figures who seemed angry. The bomb squad was called in, and they detonated at least one of the devices and removed the others. Traffic was snarled for hours. What were the devices?
The answer to that burning question was available earlier today on blogs and social networking sites like Flickr, thanks to the sharp eyes of pop-culture-savvy young Bostonians. Todd Vanderlin, for example, spotted the devices and recognized right away what they were: a guerrilla marketing campaign for the Adult Swim TV show "Aqua Teen Hunger Force." To be specific, the devices are a sophisticated advertisement -- Vanderlin even figured out who orchestrated the campaign -- depicting Mooninites.
UPDATE: Thanks, Boing Boing, for posting about this entry and updating us on the story.
HELP US PROMOTE BRAINIAC: DEL.ICIO.US | DIGG
READ MORE FROM BRAINIAC: Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub | Marketing Gone Awry | Mooninite Photo Op | Do the Mooninites have a posse? | Malden vs. Mooninites | Mooninite missives 1 | Mooninite missives 2 | Zebro video | Red Sox vs. Mooninites | Danger Bomb Clock | Mooninite kudos | Mooninite Man sighted | Mooninite guru? |
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:21 PM
January 31, 2007
I have just started using Netflix, mostly because there's no good video store in my neighborhood. (Isn't this New York City?) What is particularly great about the service, beyond the deep selection, is that DVDs are shipped to you so fast. It's kind of unbelievable. Every time I send out a DVD, I get the email saying it has reached Netflix the following morning, and early. They send out my new one same day and it reaches me the next. Right now I'm watching the first two seasons of the US version of "The Office" virtually without delay!
I understand they have shipping centers near to just about everyone, and they use a bar code on the envelopes, but seriously, who has this much success with the US Postal Service? Anyone know the secret here? Perhaps this has something to do with it?
I see that there are blogs where users complain about Netflix shipping -- this college student (ouch) is "literally angry with rage!" -- but bloggers like to complain. There are also bloggers offering congrats. Count me one of those.
[Updated at 12:36 p.m.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:06 PM
January 31, 2007
Just wanted to bring some attention to the New York Times's prominent front-page story about the open-arms greeting of investors to the news that the former Philip Morris, the Altria Group, will spin off its less profitable Kraft division. Food? Dead weight compared to more addictive and harmful products!
Wall Street guru James Cramer was onto this story back on Jan. 3, when he named Altria his number one stock pick for 2007, based on the coming Kraft spinoff. As noted by the blog 24/7 Wall St., "He hates their products, but he said someone is going to make money and it might as well be you."
A charity industry blog also recently noted that Altria has cut back its corporate philanthropy to cultural organizations like New York's Whitney Museum. Sigh, more reason to cheer for the bottom line.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:46 AM
January 31, 2007
Quick announcement. As my colleagues already know, I've given notice at the Boston Globe. After four years here, during which time I wrote a column and edited copy for Ideas, briefly filled in as the Ombudsman, and (most recently) played a modest role in the effort to transform this great newspaper into a dynamic media company, I'm heading back to the life of a freelance writer, editor, multimedia producer, and consultant.
I will, however, continue to blog here at Brainiac. And I may begin to contribute more frequently to Ideas -- we'll see what happens!
By way of saying goodbye to the life of a newspaperman (though I was never a reporter), here's a couple of audio clips I published to Boston.com this morning. I was listening recently to the Lux Radio Theater's 1937 production of "The Front Page," starring Walter Winchell as newshound Hildy Johnson, and two scenes in particular cracked me up, for obvious reasons.
In the first clip, Johnson rhapsodizes about how great everything will be once he's quit the newspaper biz ("Boy, what a life!"). And in the second clip, Johnson tells his colleagues from other papers how despicable he thinks their profession is. Funny stuff... and funnier if you already know that Johnson will never actually quit his job. Because he loves it too much.
OK, that's it. Back to Brainiac. But first, an image from "His Girl Friday," the absolutely perfect 1940 film version of "The Front Page." That's Rosalind Russell as (the female) Hildy Johnson.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:23 AM
January 30, 2007
In the last line of today's item on pornography, Evan has a nice example of undernegation.
Acknowledging that it won't be stopped isn't reason to point out that it should be.
He means (as readers surely understood) that acknowledging the permanence of porn is no reason not to oppose it. But it's not unusual to find one too few negations, or one too many, in expressions like this -- not just in unedited blog posts or e-mails, but in cold print, too.
"Been quite a season for mold," observed the Globe Handyman last summer. "Who has not escaped?" (Meaning "Who has escaped?")
And a Times story last winter had this sentence: "Although the Party Ride is a crowd pleaser, it would be misleading to suggest that the experience is not without its bumps." (Meaning "it would be misleading to suggest that the experience is without bumps.)
And even the best publications use "still unpacked" to mean "still not unpacked" – "a duffel bag still unpacked from a recent trip," for instance. After Geoff Nunberg kicked off a discussion about "still unpacked" at Language Log in 2005, the construction turned out to be so common that some linguists doubted it could be called a mistake.
Most faulty negations float by unnoticed, of course. Like the editors who missed them in the first place, readers fill in the intended sense and move on. "I'll miss not seeing my friends," says the retiring colleague, and nobody bats an eye. Only "I could care less" reliably gets a rise out of the blue-pencil brigade. Could it be that what they really object to isn't the grammar, but the attitude?
Posted by Jan Freeman at 09:23 PM
January 30, 2007
Ezra Klein has entered into a little dust-up with Ross Douthat, who works at the Atlantic and writes a right-of-center blog called The American Scene. The debate concerns pornography, not a normal topic for either of them, but they range pretty widely on their blogs. At issue, mostly, is Klein's contention that the Girls Gone Wild franchise -- and it is a Hefneresque franchise, complete with merchandising, private planes and champagne to-dos -- is sexually and economically exploitative.
Douthat doesn't disagree, but replies with sarcasm:
Yes indeed -- thank God that regular, all-American porn doesn't have anything to do with rape or drugs or pressured consent or economic exploitation. It's a shame that bad apples like [Girls Gone Wild entrepreneur] Joe Francis have to go and ruin a perfectly unproblematic industry.
I'm not exactly sure where Douthat is going with that line of argument, since saying porn at large is an ugly enterprise hardly contradicts the claim that Girls Gone Wild is part of the problem. But they both have a point (the same one), since porn is so obviously a case of, at best, coerced consent, in which money is the most coercive factor, followed by drugs and/or alcohol. Acknowledging that it won't be stopped isn't reason to point out that it should be. [UPDATE: Last sentence is sic, given Jan's post above.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:26 PM
January 30, 2007
Five months after Jamews Fallows published an Atlantic cover story [sub. req.] called "We Win," Daniel Drezner notes that the debate about the efficacy of the war on Al Qaeda, and indeed the war on terror generally, has been newly stoked -- by, for example, Peter Beinart in The New Republic [$] and The Economist.
Beinart wonders why we haven't captured Osama Bin Laden, who turns fifty this year and who has often been portrayed as a sickly, weakened leader hiding in caves. At a conference Drezner attended on the status of the GWOT, Mia Bloom from the University of Georgia pointed out that the number of suicide terrorist attacks in 2006 was greater than the combined number of attacks in the previous four years. Sobering thought, probably not widely known.
It seems fair to give Bush some credit for the prevention of any attack on American soil in the last five-plus years. It also seems fair to say, pace Fallows and the US intelligence apparatus, that we don't really know where we stand when it comes to terror.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:34 PM
January 30, 2007
Like Josh, I am a great fan of Dalkey Archive Press, which is far less well known than it would be in a better world. Dalkey has heroically published such international greats as Carlos Fuentes, Dubravka Ugresic, Juan Goytisolo, Anne Carson, and Harry Mathews. I could tell you their nationalities but that would almost fly in the face of the insistent cosmopolitanism of the press. There are other, less prominent writers on their list that I'd like to discover, since I trust their taste. (Try Harry Mathews's roman a clef, "My Life in CIA.")
I also know and like Chad Post, who visited the New York Review of Books so often when I worked there that I confess I had no idea Dalkey was located in Illinois. Chad also had the enviable duty, sometimes, of traveling to foreign lands just to get the scoop on who was doing good work in, say, Norway, so the press could buy the US rights to his or her books. I wish him well.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:08 PM
January 30, 2007
Recently got an update from the folks at Dalkey Archive Press, the folks who've kept the great Irish novelist Flann O'Brien in print on these shores, among many others, and who've -- just as importantly -- translated and published new works from around the world, by the likes of (the former) Yugoslavia's Dubravka Ugresic, despite America's indifference to literature in translation.
Here's the news, or the parts that interest me: On January 1, Dalkey Archive Press relocated -- from the campus of Illinois State University, in Normal, Ill., to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Meanwhile, alas, the indefatigable (and shockingly young) Dalkey Archive marketing director, Chad Post, has left the Press to pursue other interests. (I once interviewed Post for Ideas about why O'Brien's novel "The Third Policeman" had appeared in an episode of "Lost"; he's one of the good ones.)
The last review copy that Post sent me was "Joyce's Voices," a reprint of literary critic Hugh Kenner's 1978 monograph on James Joyce's "Ulysses." It officially hits bookstores today. Having recently (finally) almost finished "Ulysses," Kenner's excellent little book -- with its keen insights about Joyce's double narrator, one of whom has a vast repertory of impersonations -- made me want to go back and start "Ulysses" at the beginning.
Thanks, Chad! Keep in touch, willya?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:00 AM
January 29, 2007
In a new survey in the UK, Reuters reports, respondents indicated that twenty-first century technology had helped them lie through their digital teeth.
The British survey found:
"techno-treachery" was widespread with nearly 75 percent of people saying gadgets like Blackberrys made it easier to fib.
Just over half of respondents said using gadgets made them feel less guilty when telling a lie than doing it face to face....
Perhaps the line between virtual and real will blur, such that tech users will feel less guilty about face to face lies and more guilty about digital ones. Either way, the era of lies across the wires is here.
One might think we already knew this from the Jayson Blair scandal, in which Blair was famously described as follows in the Times, after an internal investigation into the scandal: "His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer -- which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts -- as well as round-the-clock access to databases of news articles from which he stole."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:49 AM
January 29, 2007
You may have followed the news -- or at least you heard it -- that English soccer supernova David Beckham is coming to America, in a huge, endorsement-rich contract with the Los Angeles Galaxy of the perennially struggling US pro soccer league, Major League Soccer.
Bekham and his wife, Posh Spice of the Spice Girls, reportedly liked the idea of a move partly because they can't handle the media attention in Britain. Hm, okay.
To prepare for his entry into the US sports scene, sports geeks may want to read this article in Mechanical Engineering about How Beckham Bends It. As David Shenk writes, in his blog The Genius in All of Us,
The physics are impressive, but nothing compared to the computations taking place inside Beckham's brain in the instant leading up to the kick. "[Soccer players'] brains must be computing some very detailed trajectory calculations in a few seconds purely from instinct and practice," says University of Sheffield's Matt Carre. "Our computers take a few hours to do the same thing."
Those more impatient or less scientifically oriented will be content to watch an extraordinary video compilation of Beckham's best goals. I always thought if I could be incredibly gifted at any sport, it would be baseball. Now I'm not so sure.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 09:02 AM
January 29, 2007
One of the better recurring features in what I seemed to be forced to call the blogosphere is from the impressively named Defective Yeti. The feature highlights the best pans by film critics nationwide -- or really the best lines from bad reviews. When you're done chuckling or full-throat laughing at the zingers, you can link right to the review. For the next installment, by the way, I nominate A.O. Scott's review from Friday of the gorefest "Smokin' Aces,"
a Viagra suppository for compulsive action fetishists and a movie that may not only be dumb in itself, but also the cause of dumbness in others. Watching it is like being smacked in the face for a hundred minutes with a raw sirloin steak.
Some selections from Defective Yeti's Bad Review Revue, including a couple gems by the Globe's Ty Burr:
The Covenant: "Movies like this are why we have eyelids." -- Colin Covert, MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE
Little Man: "One joke short of being a one-joke film." -- Randy Cordova, ARIZONA REPUBLIC
Goal!: "Suffers from a script so outrageously generic you could buy it at Costco." -- Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBE
Basic Instinct 2: "The accidental comedy sensation of the year!" -- Ty Burr, BOSTON GLOBE
Posted by Evan Hughes at 07:45 AM
January 26, 2007
So you're the kind of person who's always late. And you're the kind of person who has been trying to correct that for years. And you're a little clever, so you've set all your clocks forward a few minutes to accomplish this. But, uh, unless you're a fool, you've learned that the clock is in fact fast, since you set it that way, and that you can correct for it and cut it as close as ever. Without allowing for traffic or subway trouble.
But wait! What if there were a clock that was fast, but you couldn't know how fast. You just know that it's probably fast but varies within a certain range of the actual time. So you couldn't trust that it was 15 minutes ahead. Could be two minutes. You better get going.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:58 PM
January 26, 2007
I'm not touching the debate between Chris and Evan with a 10-foot pole. However, the question about differing opinions as to the conflict or non-conflict between reason and faith reminded me that -- writing for Ideas, in April of 2003 -- I once interviewed a woman whom we dubbed (in the item's headline) "the pope's phenomenologist." It is difficult to imagine any field of inquiry less friendly to the claims of faith than phenomenology, but.... well, read about it yourself.
The item does not seem to exist online any longer, so here it is:
ON MARCH 22, Pope John Paul II took a break from his peacemaking efforts to meet with a delegation from the Hanover, N.H.-based World Phenomenology Institute. The Polish-born philosopher Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, the organization's president and an old friend of the pope from his days as Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow, presented him with a copy of the institute's new encyclopedia of "Phenomenology Worldwide." According to a Vatican press release, the pope thanked the group for "this important scientific contribution" -- and then went on to thank God for having allowed him "to participate in this fascinating undertaking."
Founded by the philosopher Edmund Husserl a century ago, phenomenology holds that direct intuitions of the world -- achieved through suspending, or "bracketing," every possible assumption one might have about the nature of objective reality -- form the only basis of truth. In the 1970s, Tymieniecka's close intellectual collaboration with Wojtyla resulted in the definitive, English-language edition of his phenomenology-inspired 1969 treatise "Osoba i Czyn" (The Acting Person), reportedly the source of many of the ideas developed in his later encyclicals. After he became pope in 1978, Vatican officials uncomfortable with Wojtyla's interest in modern, secular philosophy tried unsuccessfully to suppress the revised version of the book.
During her recent audience with him, Tymieniecka recounted to Ideas in a telephone interview, "The pope described phenomenology as 'an attitude of intellectual charity toward man and the world and, for the believer, toward God.' Although we may long to discover the true meaning and ultimate foundation of human, personal, and social existence, we'll never do so until we've learned to view reality, and one another, without any prejudice or schematisms."
Tymieniecka in 1978
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:11 PM
January 26, 2007
Bring the theology, baby! [No, that's not the right tone ... let me start over.]
In your last post, I think you eloquently sum up, and defend, the Harris position that you have to make an irrational leap (of faith) to embrace the tenets of any religion. But my intention was never to pick a fight with that view.
My point is that, instead of the excellent recent reviews in TNR, which pitted agnostics against atheists, I hungered to read a clash between someone who holds your views and someone who believes that there is nothing -- nothing -- irrational about religion. By now, I'm persuaded that you think no one holds such a position -- or if they do, they're making a sort of Philosophy-101-level logical error.
The Catholic line of argument, however, on display in a publication like First Things (I just happen to read it more than actual Papal encyclicals!), is that reason alone will guide you precisely to the truths God has revealed through Scripture and the doctrinal writings of the Church. Reason alone will persuade you of God's existence, of the existence of miracles (it is reasonable to believe eyewitnesses, observes the Oxford theologian Richard Swinburne), of the afterlife, of the Resurrection, and so on. You will get to the truth most quickly if you unite reason and faith -- as you correctly point out the Pope himself advocates and embodies -- but, by definition, reason and faith can't conflict (because revealed Truth is, indeed, true).
When Sullivan starts making that argument it strikes you as hopelessly woolly. It bugs you. Exactly! That collision is where I think the action is -- or, at least, the action that's most relevant in, as Harris puts it, a Christian nation.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 01:15 PM
January 26, 2007
Speaking again of the future of the book, a reader sends in a referral to a strange mini-movie, or mini-multimedia presentation (say that five times fast) created by the Museum of Media History, Special Projects Division, about what the media landscape will look like in 2015. It's largely about the voiceover, so you'll need to have the volume on.
In this brave new world, Google becomes Googlezon through the merger that implies and competes with Microsoft to make all the world's information accessible -- and alterable by end users, essentially, obviating apparently the need for journalism. Traditional news outlets cease to exist, or, say, decide to go offline and become "newsletters for the elite and elderly" (that's the New York Times he's talking about).
Gotta say I think this is bunk. First of all, 2015 is way too close for these predictions. Second, the need for journalism is less about information now than it is about having an informed person working a beat in some part of the world you can't get to at the moment -- say, Lebanon -- tell you what's really happening (and not just what happened). The Times will have its place even when it is presented in some heretofore undevised medium wherein a 3-D array of virtual screens appears before us (as it does for Tom Cruise in Minority Report, or was it A.I.) and we select information by pulling one out of the sky.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:49 AM
January 26, 2007
Yes, I still think that religious faith is crazy from any purely rational perspective -- because the Pope, presumably by his own admission, is not purely rational. Perhaps in place of crazy I should have said "in opposition to reason" or "specious." I would cite Sam Harris here, from the opening of his exchange with Andrew Sullivan:
My use of the word [faith] is meant to capture belief in specific religious propositions without sufficient evidence -- prayer can heal the sick, there is a supreme Being listening to our thoughts, we will be reunited with our loved ones after death, etc.
I don't think that's such a bold claim or definition; it's the one I was using. Sullivan replies:
I believe that God is truth and truth is, by definition, reasonable. Science cannot disprove true faith; because true faith rests on the truth; and science cannot be in ultimate conflict with the truth.
But that to me is strange, if not wrong. Science can't disprove truth, he says. Well, what if it were definitively proven that the world wasn't created in seven days? Would the Pope revise? Moreover, belief in the truth that can't be proven may be truthful (tautology) but it is not an example of good science, since science rests on repeatable, undeniable evidence.
I would cite Harris again:
For instance, you claim that many fundamentalists are tolerant of dissent and capable of friendship with you despite their dogmatic views about sex. You also remind me that many devoutly religious people do good things on the basis of their religious beliefs. I do not doubt either of these propositions. You could catalogue such facts until the end of time, and they would not begin to suggest that God actually exists, or that the Bible is his Word, or that his Son came to earth in the person of Jesus to redeem our sins. I have no doubt that there are millions of nice Mormons who are likewise tolerant of dissent and perfectly cordial toward homosexuals. Does this, in your view, even slightly increase the probability that the Book of Mormon was delivered on golden plates to Joseph Smith Jr. (that very randy and unscrupulous dowser) by the angel Moroni?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:29 AM
January 25, 2007
In the underreported story of the last 24 hours, two highly placed Ohio election officials in the crucial 2004 state's most populous county were convicted of "rigging a recount of the 2004 presidential election to avoid a more thorough review." This was one of the longer stories available, four or five times longer than the Times'. The officials "worked behind closed doors for three days to pick ballots they knew would not cause discrepancies when checked by hand, prosecutors said," thereby avoiding a machine recount or a hand count of all votes in the county.
The resulting change seems not to have altered the results of the election, though of course no one can say what a county-wide recount would have yielded, since they were hand-picking ballots. It seems safe to say that that wouldn't have made any difference, either, since Bush's margin of victory in Ohio was over 100,000 votes. Nevertheless, this represents a gross violation, and one that unfortunately is so unsurprising to newspaper editors and the country that it merits only a short AP story.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:44 PM
January 25, 2007
Evan, do you think the Pope (not to mention Sullivan) shares your view that the Christian beliefs of ordinary Americans are "of course ... crazy from any purely rational perspective"?
In fact, he -- they -- would say that reason and faith dovetail precisely. In fact, the current Pope's major theological statements so far have all stressed that the division you think is so obvious -- faith here, reason here -- is a disorder of modern secular society.
In the debate I linked to, Sullivan makes that point at great length (though he departs from the Pope on the subject of what reason implies and faith compels, raising a whole other set of issues).
You write that if faith were provable, "we'd call it knowledge." They do call it knowledge.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 01:25 PM
January 25, 2007
I wanted to respond to Chris's post about exchanges over faith and atheism, some of which were sparked by recent books deliberately attacking religion, like Richard Dawkins's book "The God Delusion." Chris says reviews by big-time book critic James Wood and by the eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel were "brilliant and literate" but didn't really get to the heart of things because they "seemed detached from the debate the atheist authors were trying to start about the actual beliefs held by actual religious Americans."
I suppose that is true, but of course those reviews (and I think Nagel's was particularly fascinating) meant to achieve that detachment -- to take a wider view and challenge the assumptions of a Dawkins or a true believer. I agree with them that if we want to have an intellectual debate about "the actual beliefs held by actual religious Americans," that's something of a non-starter. Of course they're crazy from any purely rational perspective, as Sam Harris says, because religion rests on faith in something that can never be proved. If it could, we'd call it knowledge.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:56 PM
January 25, 2007
Tom Friedman argues [subscriber-only] that what the Islamic world needs is a Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Peretz, co-owner of the New Republic, calls Friedman "deluded," and his hopes for reform "desperate and pointless," given the primitive, tribal nature of politics in the Islamic world.
Poor Tom Friedman. He is looking for a Muslim Martin Luther King. There is none, Tom. If one were living on earth, they'd break his windows. Imprison him. Or kill him. Finished.
Matthew Yglesias asks: Ahem, what happened to the real Martin Luther King, Jr., here in the tolerant, liberal West?
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:15 PM
January 24, 2007
At Radar, which is hard to keep track of, what with folding and relaunching three or four times, Maer Roshan and co. have come up with a good idea for a feature piece: the worst colleges in America. Their teaser line on the article: "Twisted teachers! Suicidal students! Courses on 'Silence!' and 'Leisure.' Come along on our exclusive tour of the worst colleges in the country." Pretty cool.
Wow, California State University-Chico comes in for a beating, but hard to argue they don't deserve it: "While Chico is the most notorious party college on the planet -- 69 students were arrested on St. Patrick's Day last year -- on average, a full 15 percent of them actually manage to graduate in four years." (By the way, that sentence is sic: I have a strong view that the antecedent of "them" can't be inside em-dashes. Moreover, there's an unintended implication that we're talking about 15 percent of those 69 arrested students rather than the student body.)
Bennington College gets laurels for Worst Trust-Fund Baby College. That happens to be true, in my anecdotal experience. The tuition is $44,000. Need I say more? Worst Ivy goes to Cornell, where a student gets quoted with this zinger: "'I haven't overheard a single intellectual conversation in three years, unless it was between Indian or Asian students,' writes an architecture major on Students Review." Ouch. Worst college of 'em all? University of Bridgeport, as if Bridgeport didn't have enough bad press.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:57 PM
January 24, 2007
The International Rescue Committee, a highly respected Non-Governmental Organization -- by the way that's kind of a dumb term. My elementary school is an NGO -- that rates highly whenever charities are compared or rigorously monitored, is deeply involved in Darfur at the moment. (If that isn't a situation calling for a rescue committee...)
Using the advent of Web technology in all corners of the world, they're now getting the word out not only about the disaster but about all the good work that donated money is doing: they've got a blog going, written by an aid worker in the field. That's right, apparently Darfur has Internet access? Could this be? Anyway, the blog isn't navigated in the usual way; use the Next and Previous links at the top to move between entries.
All very interesting. Particularly the fact that IRC and others are giving locals a chance to do more than eat and be sheltered. They're loaning cameras and displaying the resulting photos. They're looking at art work. They're sitting down and talking about lives and dreams. It's pretty great.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:10 PM
January 24, 2007
To me, there was something dissatisfying about many of the reviews of recent pro-atheism books by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Many of them -- notably those by the literary critic James Wood and the philosopher Thomas Nagel, in the New Republic [both links subscriber-only] -- took the position that of course many of the literalist beliefs of religious Americans were absurd (belief that God cares about one's bank balance, that one has direct conversations with the deity, that God saved your grandmother because you prayed for her -- but oddly did not respond to the prayers of Grandma's roommate in the hospital).
Rather than dwell on such "obvious" false beliefs -- obvious to the reviewers and the authors under review, that is -- the reviewers directed their polemics against Harris's and Dawkins's purported arrogance and lack of imagination, for failing to concede that there might be, philosophically speaking, something superhuman and supernatural out there, however unlike the Christian God.*
However brilliant and literate, the reviews seemed detached from the debate the atheist authors were trying to start about the actual beliefs held by actual religious Americans.
This exchange is more satisfying. Beliefnet has asked Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," and the devout pundit Andrew Sullivan to exchange a series of email messages on the subject of faith and atheism. (Sullivan doesn't just believe it's philosophically possible a supernatural entity exists, but embraces the Holy Trinity, miracles, and the Resurrection.) They start out polite, but things really heat up here.
*Maybe it's a New Republic thing. Literary editor Leon Wieseltier took exactly the same approach in reviewing Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell," in the New York Times Book Review.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 12:40 PM
January 24, 2007
As reported in today's Globe, Boston is now looking into the idea of appointing a Poet Laureate for the city -- or at least one councilman is advocating the plan. (I was trying to figure out if Massachusetts has a designated poet, and came across the answer via this amusing page.) It's a neat idea, no? Someone should sing for the city that is among the most literate (the most literate?) in the country and world, but has been drained of all publishing houses and prominent magazines (other than the Globe's, bien sur). If New Jersey gets Bruce Springsteen, who's our guy or gal? Tell me it's not Aerosmith or the Cars.
It has been remarked by an Ideas editor that the late Peter Davison would have made an excellent Boston laureate were he alive today. I would add that Robert Lowell's, um, a little downbeat, but what a poet, and a Boston man. Davison can be heard reading from Lowell's work here, if you have an Atlantic subscription.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:26 PM
January 24, 2007
The New York Times has a very cool feature on its website today -- I think I remember them doing something similar last year -- that allows you to search the text of the president's State of the Union addresses since 2001 for a particular term ("Social Security," for example, or "Bin Laden"), and then to compare the frequency of that term, year by year, against other terms.
The term "freedom," for example, appears eight times in Bush's 2001 address, 14 in 2002 ("freedom's price," "freedom's power," "freedom's victory," etc.), five in 2003, eight in 2004, then a whopping 21 in 2005 (all in the last half of the speech) and 17 in 2006 (mostly in the first half; what to make of this shift?), and then a paltry three last night. One could spend all day monkeying with this software...
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:12 AM
January 24, 2007
Maybe President Bush thought he was quoting the Bible (or maybe not) in last night's State of the Union. But actually, he was quoting John F. Kennedy Jr. Back in 1997, in a Word column, I rapped an editor's letter in JFK Jr.'s magazine, George, for its execrable prose, including the syntactically defective misquotation "To whom much is given, much is expected, right?"
President Kennedy had used a version of the quotation -- "For of those to whom much is given, much is required" -- that was grammatically complete, though less florid than the King James version of Luke 12:48: "For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required." But John-John's stripped-down version is the one Bush has been using for years.
Of course, lots of familiar quotations get shortened or sweetened in everyday use: "Nice guys finish last," "Money is the root of all evil," "Play it again, Sam." (See Ralph Keyes's excellent book, "The Quote Verifier," for hundreds more.) But most of them remain grammatically sound, even when their sense is warped.
So how does this abbreviated Bible quote keep chugging along when essential parts of it have fallen off? I've always assumed that its users think that since it sounds quaint, it doesn't have to make sense -- like the people who think "their cups runneth over" is adorably archaic.
So I was pleased to see that theory echoed by Mark Liberman, at the end of a long and erudite discussion with fellow linguists, at Language Log this morning:
My current guess is that we encounter fused relatives in historical sources -- Shakespeare, some bible translations, and so on -- and we grasp the intended meaning without being able to process the form. . . . There's a sort of grammatical get-out-of-jail-free card given to high-sounding old-fashioned sentences in which relative clauses serve as noun phrases. Thus if you come across such a sentence, you should figure out what it ought to mean, and not worry too much about how it gets there."
That shouldn't be read as an endorsement of the mangled quote, though. Liberman headlines his blog post "Ungrammatical timeless truths."
Posted by Jan Freeman at 10:30 AM
January 24, 2007
Quick note.
Globe film critic Ty Burr has just swapped places with colleague (and sometime Ideas contributor) Wesley Morris at the Sundance Film Festival. Wesley reported from Sundance every day via their Movie Nation blog, and now Ty is doing the same. They're also using that forum to comment on the Oscar nominations.
Here's Wesley after one day at Sundance:
You know a Sundance movie when it happens to you: the navel-gazing, that jaunty, slightly whimsical music, the unmitigated angst of a certain class.
Check them out!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 07:32 AM
January 24, 2007
Yesterday I opened a package from Fantagraphics Books containing their latest treasure: "The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora." As those of us wowed by the 2004 Fantagraphics release "The Mischievous Art of Jim Flora" can attest, Flora -- best known for his jazz record covers of the 1940s-50s -- was way ahead of his time. His deconstructed, surreal, grotesque (yet somehow cute) commercial illustrations would not look out of place hanging on the same museum wall with much of what is now hailed as high art.
Don'tcha think?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 07:17 AM
January 23, 2007
There is some new research into urban sprawl, boing boing reports. (Shouldn't it be called suburban sprawl? Always wondered that: the whole problem is that urban density doesn't hold up during growth, resulting in land area too large for the population. Anyway.)
What the research tried to determine, according to Science News, is whether sprawl makes you fat, basically. You never walk when the car is needed just to get milk. Picture L.A. and you see the problem. How far away is your mailbox?
One set of researchers decided there wasn't enough evidence, but others aren't so sure:
In 2004, [Deborah] Cohen and Roland Sturm of RAND asked more than 8,000 residents of 38 U.S. communities to list their health problems. The researchers also assessed the degree of sprawl in each resident's community.
"People reported more complaints -- more health problems -- when they lived in more sprawling areas," Cohen says. The excess of physical problems such as arthritis linked to sprawl was comparable to the change that would occur if the entire population suddenly aged by 4 years, Cohen and Sturm concluded.
Does vanity argue for moving to Manhattan?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:10 PM
January 23, 2007
Matthew Yglesias today jumps into the fray concerning the Bush administration's recent efforts in Somalia. Yglesias agrees with their most recent move -- "arranging for the safe passage of Sheik Sharif Ahmed formerly of the Islamic Courts Union to Kenya and encouraging the Transitional Federal Government in Somalia to work with him. Ahmed was one of the more moderate figures inside the ICU but also a very high-ranking official with perhaps a large following among the ICU rank-and-file."
An encouraging sign, to be sure. But Yglesias wonders whether it will work. Always a sticking point. He may be biased against the administration (he frequently is), but he paints a convincing and dispiriting picture, worth quoting at length:
[A]ny deal Ahmed may or may not cut stands at least as good a chance of reducing his credibility (he'd be selling out to foreign invaders and corrupt warlords) as it does of enhancing the [Transitional Federal Government]'s credibility.
Noting the ideological diversity of the ICU, we can also sketch out a very pessimistic scenario here. Already, Somalia is starting to "former Islamist fighters, who are suspected of being the backbone of Somalia’s growing insurgency" fighting against the Ethiopians and the TFG. The Ethiopians say they want to withdraw soon since Ethiopia isn't the USA and actually can't afford a prolonged occupation of a foreign country.
A few years from now, in short, the ICU or its lineal descendants may be back running Somalia again, except they'll have had their moderate elements purged.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:31 PM
January 23, 2007
The novelist Chang-rae Lee, a faculty member at Princeton, says all you need to know about the now-in-full-bloom controversy involving a "joke" op-Ed in the campus newspaper there that retailed numerous stereotypes about Asians: "Frankly the piece astounds me not so much for its racism as its stupidity."
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:58 PM
January 23, 2007
In an interesting little episode, Vikram Chandra's publisher, HarperCollins, made hay out of a brutal review "Sacred Games" received from Jonathan Yardley, the Washington Post's Pulitzer-winning book critic.
Challenging Yardley on his own turf, HarperCollins purchased an ad in the Post a few days ago that contrasted Yardley's pan ("massive deadweight of a novel... written in a droning monotone") with emphatic praise from the owners of one of Washington, DC's most influential independent bookstores, Politics & Prose ("vastly entertaining ... Tolstoyan"). The ad concludes, "Decide for yourself."
It's a battle of the arbiters. Yardley wrote that it is "almost inconceivable to me that American readers will rush to buy this novel." However, Politics and Prose reports that "Sacred Games" is their second-best selling new work of fiction, an impressive performance given its Brobdingnagian proportions.
(Read more about the episode here and here. Disclosures: My wife is an editor at the Post's Book World, and I've spoken with Yardley several times. I bought a book at Politics & Prose two days ago, for $16.95. It's a lovely place, but the clerks are a touch haughty. Maybe you would be, too, if your bosses were such players in the literary world.)
Chandra, who was at the Harvard Book Store last Thursday, reads at Politics & Prose tonight.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:28 PM
January 23, 2007
Speaking of the future of the book, as I did a couple of weeks ago and again last week, The Times of London has an article, somewhat oddly, on an event at the New York Public Library called Unbound, the topic of which was "a strange, complex and frequently obscure war that is being fought over the digitisation of the great libraries of the world." Google executives in the Google Book Search department (formerly Google Print) were in attendance, opining that "the majority of information lies outside the Internet."
That is an arresting and debatable but probably accurate point. Libraries are still great repositories of knowledge untapped by the Internet (though the Encyclopedia brings a lot of raw knowledge online). As the Times notes, "intellectual property rights and the internet are uneasy bedfellows. Google’s stated mission is 'to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful'. The words 'universally accessible' carry the implicit threat that nobody can actually own or earn revenue from any information since it will all be just out there." I don't read the mission statement quote that way, since accessible does not mean free and obviously Google hopes to make money.
But it is interesting that Google has not backed down from its clash with publishers: "American publishers are not happy. Before its 2004 announcement, Google had been doing deals with individual publishers to scan their books. But digitising the libraries would seem to render these deals defunct." The battle over intellectual property in the information age continues.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:10 PM
January 22, 2007
In a post at the Guardian's opinion weblog, Comment Is Free, Brian Whitaker argues that the English-language press is subverting accuracy and promoting divisiveness by its overuse of the word "Allah":
There is no logical reason for this. Why use an Arabic word in English-language news reports when there is a perfectly good English word that means exactly the same thing?
Various Arabic words -- jihad and sheikh, for example -- have crept into everyday usage because no precise equivalent exists in English, but "Allah" is not of that type. It is simply the normal word that Arabic speakers use for "God" -- whether they are Muslims or not. Arab Christians worship "Allah" too, and the first verse of the Arabic Bible informs us that "In the beginning Allah created heaven and earth."
I've never heard a style directive on the God-Allah question, and in practice it seems to be up to individual reporters and editors. Some accounts of Saddam Hussein's hanging, for instance, translate his last words as "there is no god but God"; others quote it as "there is no god but Allah."
For Whitaker, the indiscriminate use of "Allah" is "yet another example of the subtle ways that news organisations can influence people's attitudes, perhaps unintentionally."
By opting for "Allah" they are aligning themselves, in effect, with those who view international politics in terms of a clash of civilizations.
Some of the many commenters on the blog beg strenuously to disagree, on political or theological grounds or both. Still, it's hard to deny that "There is no god but Allah" sounds like a very different sentiment if you translate it as "There is no deity but God."
Posted by Jan Freeman at 07:04 PM
January 22, 2007
Over at The Valve, which I must endorse again, an Ideas piece, the essay by Sven Birkerts about the task of reviewing Vikram Chandra's hyped 900-page new novel, comes into play. While ribbing Birkerts for not having quite read the book, the Valve writer, Amardeep Singh, author of "Literary Secularism: Religion and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Fiction," has praise for Birkerts. He is annoyed, however, by a review in/on MSNBC/Newsweek by Malcolm Jones, in which the critic in essence admits he's "lazy" and would rather be watching TV if a novel isn't holding him.
This bit of the essay, quoted by Singh, resembles Jonathan Franzen's point, made several places, that fiction has to compete with a lot of artistic entertainments, so why make it hard-going? Boy, did that notion draw the ire of experimental novelist Ben Marcus, in Harper's. (The piece isn't available online but is discussed here.)
Nevertheless, Singh gives a little credence to Jones' point that reading such a brick of a novel because it's your job has the effect of skewing a reviewer's reaction one way or the other. You either resent it or you have invested so much time that you feel bound to praise it: "Can’t just say, oh, it was OK." I'm not sure he's right about that. I once wrote 4,500 words about a 500-plus page novel I found important but, um, OK. (That might have been a mistake.) In any case, I give Jones even more credit for the humor value, and for acknowledging his lack of virtue as a critic.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:49 PM
January 22, 2007
Via Scott McLemee on Crooked Timber, I see that the Director of the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan body that reports to Congress, has written a memo spelling out new restrictions for its employees on speaking to the news media, which presents, he says, "very real dangers." Notwithstanding the fact that the CRS must maintain an objective stance and reputation and that its job is to report to Congress rather than the people, this is a somewhat odd stance. Journalists generally turn to CRS because, like, for instance, the Congressional Budget Office, it is designed to have no ax to grind and to present the hard numbers, without regard to politics. The reporters just want the facts, to do with them what they wish.
Moreover, Congress in a sense stands for the people, and it makes little sense to keep the proceedings of this organization a national secret. Besides, as McLemee says, journalists often get their hands on CBS reports, which are often posted online, and which they will use with or without accompanying quotes from the authors. This could have the reverse effect of making the agency appear slanted when it is not, depending on the context in a given article.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:24 PM
January 22, 2007
I'm not disputing Evan's contention that n+1's website is getting McSweeneyish. He could be right; it's been a long time since I checked in on the n+1 website, so I have no idea. But I would like to make two quick points about the interview with the individual described as a "commercial semiotician." (At the moment, the interview is accessible here.)
1) Evan doesn't make note of this, but the so-called commercial semiotician -- I'm pretty sure he refers to himself as a "semiotic brand analyst" -- is none other than A.S. Hamrah, the writer whom I compared to Roland Barthes in a Brainiac post a month ago. Barthes, of course, helped spring semiotics loose from linguistics departments; like Barthes, Hamrah employs the tools of semiotics to crack cultural codes. Just because he sometimes does so at the behest of the manufacturers of shampoo and soda pop doesn't mean he's not terrific at it. (Full disclosure: Hamrah and I have, in the not too distant past, collaborated on semiotic brand analysis projects paid for by the manufacturers of, like I said, shampoo and soda pop.) So let's not scoff.
In an Ideas column I once asked Slavoj Zizek about his decision to write copy for an edition of Abercrombie & Fitch's softcore magalog. "If I were asked to choose between doing things like this to earn money and becoming fully employed as an American academic, kissing [EXPLETIVE] to get a tenured post," he told me, "I would with pleasure choose writing for such journals!" I can relate.
2) I thought that everything Hamrah said in the interview was funny and interesting. But I didn't like the interview -- Hamrah's interlocutor, though no doubt a very intelligent person, insisted on sharing her less-informed opinions about branding, and that didn't work for me. That did make it seem kinda McSweeneyish.
Roland Barthes
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 01:25 PM
January 22, 2007
I checked in with n+1 today online. It's a fine magazine, and I look forward to the print edition every six months-ish. Their Web site is fleeter afoot but also usually quite serious and exceedingly well-written. Recently they published an excellent letter exchange involving Walter Benn Michaels, author of "The Trouble with Diversity."
But a quick read of a couple pieces today sends up a red flag or two. The cover article at the moment is an interview with a "commercial semiotician" about the new logo of Payless Shoe Source. Right. Not that it's not clever:
n+1: Maybe by making the “Payless” sort of ghostly and rounded and inconsequential, “Payless” becomes just another one of those words that doesn’t mean anything.
ASH: Exactly. This is about unmeaning.
Another recent, more lengthy item was a roundup of various writers' "eulogies for winter." As in, it's gone forever. Get it? This is starting to smell like McSweeeney's.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:08 PM
January 19, 2007
We're all familiar by now, or anyone reading this is, with Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written and edited entirely by its end users. But "wiki" is about more than encyclopedia-building. It describes a kind of online project, in which users are collectively responsible for modifying and improving the product, whatever that product may be. Corporations like Google and even intelligence analysts in the US government are now using wikis internally, as a way to aggregate all the company's knowledge and news on a given topic in one place.
I now notice that there is a wiki devoted to "how to" guides. If you want to know how to remove a splinter (I actually used that one the other day) or make a weather barometer with a balloon or make a model of the Starship Enterprise out of a floppy disk (um, okaaay...), then here's your place.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 06:33 PM
January 19, 2007
The Globe has published several multimedia features over the past several days that I think Brainiac readers might find interesting. Ideas photo editor Susan Vermazen helped create all three of them.
The first is an audio slideshow supporting a profile -- by the Globe's still-new classical music critic, Jeremy Eichler of the Boston-based avant-garde rock/classical composer Lee Hyla. Great photos, supplied by Hyla, of his rock years in the 1970s.
Lee Hyla, on keyboards
The second is a video in which the great cinematographer Gordon Willis (the "Godfather" movies, Woody Allen's "Manhattan," etc.) talks about some of the best scenes he's shot. The interview was conducted by Mark Feeney, and Mark also provided the complete transcript.
And here's a sneak preview of an audio slideshow that won't be officially published till Sunday. In it, the legendary set designer Eugene Lee ("Saturday Night Live," "Sweeney Todd," "Wicked") discusses some of his all-time favorite sets.
Eugene Lee
Have a good weekend!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:06 PM
January 19, 2007
I confess I can't always keep straight which Romantic poet died of consumption, which perished fighting for Greek Independence, and which, if any, offed himself through some dramatic means.
Keats, it turns out, falls into the "consumption" camp -- or so it's usually thought. In an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, however, a literature professor at Syracuse points out that, two months before he succumbed to "drowsy numbness," Keats told a friend he believed he'd been poisoned.
Was he right? Or paranoid? Are those two answers mutually exclusive? The author, Amy Leal, doesn't quite resolve the mystery (which includes a deliciously tantalizing, partly obliterated letter), but the piece fascinatingly sketches Keats's strained relationships with various friends, rivals, and lovers.
Plus, I learned the quintessentially frail, hypersensitive artist was, in his youth, famous as a... boxer.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 03:44 PM
January 19, 2007
A reader writes in perturbed by my admission that I am among the throng who view fiction as growing comparatively small in stature in the years since Sep. 11, 2001. Her view is wroth airing and considering. She writes:
Perhaps the problem is American fiction or British and American fiction. Since 9/11 wasn't that long ago, and I don't think great novels come along that often, I don't expect the yearly product from fill-in-the-blank novelist is going to be good.... Perhaps the moment for fiction has simply moved away from the (declining) world powers to more remote regions, where people are more inclined to exist in the slower time that fiction requires. The best novels I have read in recent times are Italian, Spanish, and so forth... and if I were more adventurous, I'm sure I would find comparable ones in Africa and Japan....
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:50 AM
January 19, 2007
I've been doing some concert-going, of the classical variety, in New York, and I thought I'd share some thoughts, some of it helpful for the Boston enthusiast. First order of business is to let you know that the young piano phenom Lang Lang comes to Boston for one concert only, Sun. Jan. 28, in recital as part of the Bank of America Celebrity Series. I saw Lang Lang perform with the wonderful Bavarian Radio Symphony at Carnegie Hall in November. I felt that his physical movement on stage was no more distracting than other intense performers such as Yo-Yo Ma or Joshua Bell. (This has been a consistent criticism of Lang Lang.) Very knowledgeable listeners didn't care for his playing -- "I don't know what that was, but it wasn't Beethoven" -- but I, who have musical experience, too, was transfixed.
For Boston exiles in New York, the BSO comes to Carnegie Feb. 12 to play a program of only the giant piece "La Damnation de Faust," by Berlioz.
I don't see that the violinist Christian Tetzlaff or the young cellist Alisa Weilerstein are coming to Boston this season, but when they do, go see them.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:18 AM
January 18, 2007
According to several news reports, most recently in the Financial Times, major industrial manufacturers are reaping windfalls from a particular kind of emissions-trading credit offered at high rates of return. According to the environmental blog Terrapass, "a small investment in process changes in aging factories can easily destroy" HFC-23, "a refrigerant with very powerful effects on global warming -- it’s almost 12,000 times as bad as carbon dioxide."
What's wrong with that? The problem is that HFC restriction projects by 17 companies are expected to account for 31 percent of all Kyoto credits, even though "the gas makes up a small fraction of industrial greenhouse gas emissions." In other words, HFC is worse pound for pound, but an emissions lightweight. Developing countries are glad to buy the credits from these manufacturers so they can legally let methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Mitchell Feierstein, who works at an investment management firm, tells the FT, "We believe a proportional amount of investment should be focused on technologies...to curb emissions.” But he's hardly in a position to insure that that's the case.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:48 PM
January 18, 2007
Last week I wrote here about the Institute for the Future of the Book, which has embarked on an ambitious project to create a user-annotatable and -annotated version of the Iraq Study Group Report. Now the folks who blog for the Institute are inspired by a computer science presentation available online involving multi-point touch screens.
Doesn't sound that exciting, but have a look at the video embedded in their post. It's a long demonstration, but at several points it has members of the audience going clear beyond the "ooh" stage into fits of laughter at how cool this toy is. (The guy doing the demonstrating also slays the geeks with a boast that they should have one of these screens in the Google lobby.)
The bloggers see this as a gateway application to changing the nature of the way we publish and read the printed word:
And that brings me around to the real reason the touchscreen zooming interface is the key to the next generation of 'books.' It allows users to move into 3D networked space easily and fluently and it gets us beyond the linearity that is the hallmark and the limitation of the paper book. To come into its own, the networked book is going to require three-dimensional visualizations for both content and navigation.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:55 AM
January 18, 2007
In The Guardian (UK), Zadie Smith, who rarely produces an essay but always produces a good one, has published a piece about literary failure that is in fact more about all that it takes for literature to succeed. When the novelist, particularly a young one, sets out to write a book, she sees an image of perfection in her head that makes her giddy, drives her forward.
What emerges on the other end invariably falls short -- though often it is only the writer herself who knows just how distorted and misshapen is the final image. Often, Smith says, critics, who concern themselves with craft more than with art, don't notice. Smith is perceptive about the difference, in a way that makes her aesthetic pleasingly old-fashioned. She also can write:
A skilled cabinet-maker will make good cabinets, and a skilled cobbler will mend your shoes, but skilled writers very rarely write good books and almost never write great ones. There is a rogue element somewhere -- for convenience's sake we'll call it the self, although, in less metaphysically challenged times, the "soul" would have done just as well. In our public literary conversations we are squeamish about the connection between selves and novels. We are repelled by the idea that writing fiction might be, among other things, a question of character. We like to think of fiction as the playground of language, independent of its originator. That's why, in the public imagination, the confession "I did not tell the truth" signifies failure when James Frey says it, and means nothing at all if John Updike says it. I think that fiction writers know different. Though we rarely say it publicly, we know that our fictions are not as disconnected from our selves as you like to imagine and we like to pretend. It is this intimate side of literary failure that is so interesting; the ways in which writers fail on their own terms: private, difficult to express, easy to ridicule, completely unsuited for either the regulatory atmosphere of reviews or the objective interrogation of seminars, and yet, despite all this, true.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:10 AM
January 17, 2007
In Sunday's Times of London, under the Comment heading, there appeared a piece by Rod Liddle that combined "Why is it that..." observation with a kind of jeremiad against contemporary fiction. This is an issue I've thought about a lot since I worked at two magazines that take books and novels seriously (The New Leader and The New York Review of Books). It has become commonplace to talk about the decline of fiction not as a skill (though Liddle throws that in) but as an increasingly irrelevant from of communication, particularly since Sep. 11.
It's hard to know, as far as my personal experience goes, whether I was reacting to this line of argument or simply coming to the same conclusion when I worked at these magazines, but it seemed so much less vital to engage with the hot new novelists. (I'm aware this is something of a risky confession.) Are novels still bringing "the news that stays news," in Ezra Pound's phrasing? Of course. An entire generation hasn't forgotten how to write. But it seems we're still coming to grips with how to handle, in art, the confusion that assails us in the new world of threats real and imagined.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:17 PM
January 17, 2007
Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, has written in to correct me on two points in my appreciation of the old, Anne Fadiman-edited American Scholar. The first is that Brian Doyle has in fact written for the AS since Wilson took over, which I'm very glad to hear, and the second is that Doyle's first appearance in the magazine preceded Fadiman's tenure. May he be a contributor now and forever.
Wilson also said that the personal essay still has a place in his magazine, while also adding a defense of his decision to depart from Fadiman's consistent focus on that genre. Part of what he wrote is a window into the editor in chief's task and it's worth quoting at length:
I don't think devoting a magazine to a particular literary form is a very ambitious thing to do. One thing I did while applying for the job was to read Emerson's thrilling speech called "The American Scholar," delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College in 1837. In that speech, which clearly inspired the founders of the magazine, Emerson encourages the educated person of his day (he calls that person the American scholar), to complete his education by venturing out into the world. My sense is that Anne's magazine, for all its many strengths, was very much, too much, about the individual sensibility. We live in a time when we ought to think more about "we" and less about "I."
....
At the moment, newspapers are reprinting parts of an extraordinary essay in the current issue by a boyhood friend of Scooter Libby, an English professor at U. Mass. who does not share Libby's politics but who wants very much to understand how he should think about his friend. The piece is personal, yes, but it also reflects seriously on the problem with our politics today, with how we can try to begin to understand each other better. A story that begins with "I" but ends with "we."
....
The current issue, which I would gladly send you, has a package that in recounting the magazine's history, shows I think that its role has to be bigger than the role it had under Anne.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:14 AM
January 17, 2007
I wrote recently about a civil-rights complaint filed against Princeton University by an Asian-American applicant, Jian Li, who had been rejected. With nearly perfect grades and test scores, he charged that the university was effectively capping Asian-American enrollment. (He got into Yale, prompting more than a few jokes that he wasn't the most deprived victim in the world.) At 13 percent or so, Princeton's Asian-American enrollment is significantly below that of its peers.
Well, here's the Daily Princetonian's response to the episode, in what is some sort of joke issue. There's something in the issue to offend quite a few people, as you might expect (however, I did expect more wit). But this essay has campus-incident/protest/statement-from-the-president written all over it.
Let's just say the editorial, under Jian Li's "Lian Ji's" byline, starts with: "Hi Princeton! Remember me? I so good at math and science." And includes such lines of Wildean wit as, "Yellow people make the world go round. We cook greasy food, wash your clothes and let you copy our homework."
Amazing. (Shirley Tilghman: You may want to clear your schedule for the next couple of days.)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:03 AM
January 16, 2007
In another environmental story, the authors of the Stern Report have released a Postscript (follow the link here) to the report they prepared for the British government on the economic costs of global warming. In it they vigorously defend their conclusions against several separate leading objections that have surfaced since the report was made public.
They also briefly address the criticism I've written about here -- that the report treats all future costs as being of the same value of present ones. The argument in the postscript bears a similarity to the one surprisingly advanced by the (mostly) libertarian economist Jane Galt, that discounting future costs is a matter of ethics, and one that requires serious questioning, even if it threatens our worldview and other of our political principles. The Stern excerpt is almost moving in its plea:
Choosing a high rate of pure time preference to analyse a long-term issue that affects the global environment is to make a profound ethical choice with, in this case, irreversible effects on future generations. It is as though a grandparent is saying to a their [sic] grandchild, because you live your life 50 years after mine, I place far less value on your well-being....
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:33 PM
January 16, 2007
In an unusual and noteworthy move, the oil and energy giant ExxonMobil has officially accepted the contested but widely acknowledged principle that carbon emissions are contributing to global warming. The company has cut ties to organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which favors limiting climate regulation, and other bodies skeptical of the human contribution to climate change.
The blogger at Can't See the Forest doesn't get too excited, noting that the world's largest public company (really?) is "still in the business of selling oil" (obviously) and that "Ceres, a group of investors and environmentalists which has functioned as something of a watchdog on corporate environmental policy, gave Exxon a score of 35 on its performance in dealing with the problem of global warming in 2006. British Petroleum, by comparison, had scored a 90." The writer thinks it's an image move on ExxonMobil's part, perhaps akin to the "beyond petroleum" ad campaign of BP. That may be so, but environmentalists can't greet this move with anything but relief.
In related news, reported on the Globe's front page, banks are now getting in on the responsibility act, with the prodding of organizations like Ceres: "The groups say they have won commitments from more than a dozen banks in the last few weeks to turn away from supporting coal-fired electric plants."
[Updated 5:46 p.m.]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:33 PM
January 16, 2007
James Wolcott brings to my attention to a little debate has broken out in the blogs over the use of the serial comma -- the third comma in a construction like "I went to the store, the library, and the office."
Many newspapers, including the thousands that adhere to AP style, don't like the serial (unlike Mikey), perhaps on the grounds cited by Andrew Beaujon, who works "here at the copy desk" of the Washington City Paper. He says it's just plain ungrammatical, because if you dropped the first item from the series, you'd have "I went to the library, and the office" -- whose comma would be extraneous and therefore incorrect, I agree.
However, since there is a third item, I think special rules apply, because they aid clarity, which is the basis, really, of grammar. Here's an example of a sentence that would be unclear without the serial comma, an example provided by an online grammar guide: "The following positions are available: clerk, accountant, receptionist and statistical typist." So are there three jobs or four?
The Laughorist, for the record, agrees with me, as do many magazines, including The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, whose grammar authorities are quite insistent on the matter, I happen to know.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:03 AM
January 12, 2007
In the new issue of the Times Literary Supplement, there appears an interesting review-essay by John North on the topic of climate change. But wait, it's not what you think. This piece concerns the climate history that stretches back many thousands of years, a story that puts today's situation rather in perspective, if not in a cheery way.
Two things North gleans from the books under review: One is that the tale of the scientists and anthropologists who filled out the history of man on earth is a story of "the excitement of the chase for evidence." The other is that those researchers could tell us that the earth has proven itself alternately hospitable and inhospitable to human beings since long before we started affecting the weather. Discussing Chris Stringer's "Homo Britannicus," North writes:
Stringer, by aiming at as complete a history as possible, puts us well and truly in our place. Human absence is as important to his story as human presence. Climate change has meant that while there were tropical periods in which hippos swam in the Thames, there were other periods when the advancing ice left a terrain fit only for such hardy mammals as reindeer, mammoths and woolly rhinos. The underlying message is that our occupancy of these islands cannot be guaranteed for ever.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 04:41 PM
January 12, 2007
I'm a little behind on this, but I wanted to note that Maud Newton, who has good taste in books, has pointed out a novel that was among her favorites of 2006 but was left out of discussions of the year's best books. Calvin Baker's Dominion, which was passed over for review, it seems, in most major papers and magazines, tells the story of an African family trying to establish a foothold and even an estate in America in the century preceding the Revolutionary War, time of slavery of course.
The opening of the novel, quoted by Newton in her endorsement, caught my eye:
They ate the dead that first winter on the land, such was their possession by vile hunger, mean desperation, and who can say what else other than it was unnatural. Any decent history will vouch for the truth of that. And, according to lore, the majority of the graveless sacrificed were uneasy souls, who walked certain nights on top of the earth -- haunting not just the ground of their defilement but all the contiguous lands -- until they possessed the entire continent as surely as if they had been more fortunate in life.
Ould Lowe, one from that legion of unblessed, had prowled the wilderness since anyone could remember. Each Sunday he could be seen standing atop the hill on the southern side of the lake, ululating as any wild beast, or grief stricken man, from the first moments of Creation.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:33 PM
January 12, 2007
As noted by Daniel Drezner, two coups for the blogosphere today. (Are we stuck with that word forever? I still cringe at it, but how else to put it?) One is that Opinio Juris, a blog of international law and politics, will have as its featured guest blogger next week a sitting member of the Bush administration. Lee Bellinger is the State Department Legal Adviser and the former Senior Adviser to Condoleezza Rice, and will post six times over the course of the week. Reader comments on his posts will be permitted, though they will be moderated (extra carefully, I'm betting). Isn't it interesting, by the way, that a warning about comments here, which the Opinio Juris announcement contains, seems absolutely in order, whereas if Bellinger made an open speech at the 92nd Street Y in New York, we would pretty safely assume shame would prevent any outbursts? The mores of the Internet.
The other coup is that the 100 press seats to the Scooter Libby trial will be allocated not only to traditional media but also to two bloggers. Several bloggers will rotate in, including Rory O'Connor and James Joyner.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:29 AM
January 11, 2007
Jane Galt, a mostly libertarian economist who writes the blog Asymmetrical Information, has written a post on the very issue I discussed with regard to an Economist post about the Stern Report on the economic costs of climate change -- whether it is valid to value future people and problems at precisely the same weight that we value today's, as the Stern Report appears to do.
Galt's is a rather wide-ranging and perhaps undisciplined discussion; I'm not quite sure what her bottom line is. Surprisingly, she confesses that we need aggressive government action to halt global warming and lends her support to emissions taxing and caps. "(Yes, yes, I know: I'm not a real libertarian. You may have my card and my secret decoder ring back.)" And about Stern's decision to treat future people the same as we treat present ones, hers is a balanced take. She acknowledges that Stern's is a radical viewpoint, even if it doesn't seem so at first glance, that would require a reworking of many of today's policies and practices. Nevertheless, she's unwilling to treat it was a purely economic or practical problem, and this is what seems to me most interesting about her post:
It's a moral philosophy problem: are we, or are we not, entitled to privilege our own interests over the interests of those who are not yet born, but probably will be? Otherwise, the low social discount rate is just a pseudomathematical attempt to dress up your preferences as science....
Can one reject a compelling moral precept just because it's nearly impossible to live by? That's a question that devout Christians wrestle with every day. I am still thinking through this question. But my instinct to reject the precept simply because it would require me to overthrow half of my policy positions is not, at first glance, an admirable one.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:50 PM
January 11, 2007
The Institute for the Future of the Book is a kind of think tank and Web site devoted to analyzing and leading the way in the onrushing digital age of publishing. They're on to some pretty interesting thoughts and experiments.
Last month they published the Iraq Study Group Report in a format of their own devising -- known in-house, they say, as "Comment Press" -- as they explain here. (Also explained is that they are doing the same thing with last night's speech by the president.) This is a joint project with Lapham's Quarterly, a new magazine founded by the editor emeritus of Harper's Magazine, Lewis H. Lapham. The idea behind "Comment Press" is to give users a chance to annotate the document with their own comments, isolating a particular paragraph or page, or commenting on the whole document (though the last seems to defeat the purpose). It works beautifully, after a short learning curve. This could really open up some new doors, particularly if others try to compete and improve the model.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:02 PM
January 11, 2007
Sorry about the flu-related hiatus yesterday. Just a quick note that we now have a new instance of harnessing the collective judgment of online readers to shorten the path to publication, a phenomenon I wrote about in an article for Ideas and a follow-up post here.
Touchstone, a division of the venerable New York publishing house Simon & Schuster, has agreed to publish the winner of a fiction-writing contest held online at Gather.com, a social networking site similar to Friendster or MySpace. This is an even more risky and powerful endorsement of the collective judgment of Internet users than The Frontlist or the Zoetrope Virtual Studio, which only promise that someone in power might read the top writing; now Touchstone is stuck having to put the winner between covers no matter what they think.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:59 AM
January 11, 2007
I forgot to mention that the vinegar-beer taste tests took place at two pubs at MIT: The Thirsty Ear and the Muddy Charles. (Despite its popularity, the curious brew has not, as of yet, appeared on their regular menus.)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 09:29 AM
January 10, 2007
I'm a sucker for this kind of social-science study. The December Psychological Science has an article that demonstrates just how manipulable our judgments about taste are. (Literal taste, in this case, but the study is relevant to broader conceptions of taste, too.)
A Columbia business-school professor and two MIT business professors -- Shane Frederick and Dan Ariely -- tested how people react when you put a few drops of balsamic vinegar (Trader Joe's) in their beer (Sam Adams). Vinegar, the authors explain, is "a beer flavoring that most participants find conceptually offensive, but that does not, at this concentration, degrade the beer's flavor (in fact, it slightly improves it)."
Asked in the abstract what they think of the idea, some 80 percent of participants in one survey said, basically, Yuck. That's what you would expect.
But when the professors administered a blind taste test, 59 percent of the participants actually preferred the beer with vinegar to an unadulterated glass of Sam Adams. (During the test, the scholars dubbed the augmented drink "MIT brew.")
In another test, however, in which participants were told ahead of time which glass of beer had vinegar in it, the proportion preferring the vinegar beer dropped to 30 percent. Preconceptions shaped the subjects' taste judgments.
If you follow a different order, however -- 1. taste test, 2.explain which beer includes vinegar, 3. ask which beer participants prefer -- the preference only drops to 52 percent. That suggests that people's actual preference for the vinegar-beer is fairly strong.It can survive the shock of learning what it is they were drinking.
The authors link their findings to others from the psychological literature: For example, give the same ice cream two different labels, "low fat" and "regular fat," and people will say the high-fat product tastes better. And they'll eat more of it.
(Access to Psychological Science requires a subscription, but you can read an abstract here.)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:27 PM
January 10, 2007
Second-best Dig cover, ever
In response to my Brainiac post, last night, about Joe Keohane's departure from Boston's Weekly Dig, and my complaint that Keohane was the only good thing about that periodical, Dig founder and publisher Jeff Lawrence writes:
I'll never forget making Joe the offer [to edit the Dig], he said no twice over a pint at Foley’s, and I might have begged him in between, because I knew then what I had always known: if this paper was going to grow and thrive, having a genuine voice at the helm would be of the utmost importance, and Joe was clearly that voice. Without experience and a bucket full of fear, he transformed my fledgling little rag into something I honestly consider to be one of the best written publications of its kind.
HOWEVER, and I'm sure Joe has said as much to you but it's worth repeating, we do actually have a great editorial team here beyond him. How can I be so certain? It's one that Joe put together himself, so that when he finally did leave, we'd be better off than the day before. I hope you'll still pick [the Dig] up post-Keohane and enjoy our next prose.
Actually, Keohane has never said anything to me about the quality of the editorial staff at the Dig, but I do think he had more leeway to hire and fire than we do, for example, at the Globe. So chances are that he does, in fact, think the folks he's leaving behind are good at what they do.
So... I still don't think the Dig will be anywhere near as good as it was under Keohane. But like I wrote to Lawrence, what else am I supposed to read on my Wednesday morning train ride, the Phoenix?
Best Dig cover, ever
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:59 PM
January 9, 2007
Today on "Fresh Air," Terry Gross had a long interview with GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who's known for the kind of strategic relabeling that transformed the inheritance tax into a "death tax" and global warming into "climate change."
Luntz has just published "Words that Work," a book explaining how we can all communicate better by using his insights. In today's interview, he earnestly (though not convincingly) insisted that his only goal was to clarify the truth for the American people. It's worth a listen, if only to marvel that he can keep the radio equivalent of a straight face throughout.
His message is not new, though; what caught my ear was a hint of etymological reanalysis suggested by a particular pronunciation. As Luntz explained that environmentalism had given itself a bad name, he said, "A conservationist is seen as someone in the MAIN-stream. An environmentalist, more often, is seen as someone who is more EX-treme." An indifferent speller might well have thought he was contrasting two kinds of stream (or streme).
But of course there is no stream in extreme. The stream that flows into the river is a Germanic word, native to English from the beginning. Extreme, rooted in the Latin extremus -- "far out" -- doesn't come to English till circa 1500. The meanings contrast nicely, but the words aren't even kissing cousins.
Yeah, you know that, and I know that, and probably Frank Luntz knows that. But what about the people who generated the 400,000+ Google hits for exstream? All punsters, or victims of a new folk etymology?
Maybe our great-grandchildren will picture exstreamists as the losers who watch from the riverbank as the sensible people sail by on the mainstream. If "climate change" leaves any riverbanks behind, that is.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 11:43 PM
January 9, 2007
No political commentary intended here, but P. O'Neill, at the blog Best of Both Worlds, points out an amusing grammatical glitch in a Monday Wall Street Journal editorial:
[T]here are many serious people who believe success is still achievable in Iraq. They include retired four-star General Jack Keane and military historian Fred Kagan, who recently worked with some of the military's brightest officers to suggest a plan to secure Baghdad under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 10:24 PM
January 9, 2007
Back in October, I mentioned here in Brainiac how much I'd enjoyed having a beer with Joe Keohane, editor of Boston's Weekly Dig since 2003. Singlehandedly, he has transformed a once-lousy altweekly into a lousy altweekly with a brilliant editorial (by himself) and a handful of other great features (written pseudonymously, for the most part, I suspect, by himself) that spoke truth to power: City Hall, State House, and Boston Globe.
Since 2003, I have picked the Dig up every single Wednesday morning and read it, laughing aloud, on the train to work. So it was a blow to hear, today, that Keohane is quitting to become a freelance writer. Although his official announcement doesn't say so, one fears that he -- like most of the local writers I've admired -- will soon leave town for a city where a freelancer might actually make a living.
Joe Keohane
Not that Ideas hasn't done its part to keep Keohane in town. We've hired him to write about Sinclair Lewis's "It Can't Happen Here," and J.P. Donleavy's "The Ginger Man." Keohane is the kind of thinker and writer I was talking about in my Brainiac post about The American Scholar: He's an authentic public intellectual, conversant with the past and outraged about the present, immune to the allure of academe, funny and smart, eloquent and bloody-minded.
So... Joe, I applaud you, since quitting your job is a brave and creative act. But Boston will sorely miss your influence.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 07:37 PM
January 9, 2007
A couple of months ago, I blogged on multiple occasions about the hot debate surrounding the use of Microsoft's PowerPoint, an application designed to create slide presentations, as an intellectual tool for digesting and presenting information and opinions.
Now we have the strange and sad story of Capt. Travis Patriquin, who created a cartoonish PowerPoint slide set that depicted the path to victory in Anbar province, and, by extension, in Iraq as a whole. It made the unofficial rounds among the coalition ranks.
The presentation makes some glancing criticism of the military, for instance by saying that 80 pounds of battle gear actually make it very difficult to do battle, even if safety is greatly improved. But on the whole it's just one grunt's view of the right strategy, outlining both the frustrations of distinguishing good guys from bad, and the way to circumvent that problem -- mainly by approaching and recruiting the sheiks (rather than the politicians) for help. Capt. Patriquin writes, at the bottom of a slide, "The Sheik brings more Sheiks, more sheiks bring more men. [G.I.?] Joe realizes that if he'd done this three years ago, maybe his wife would be happier, and he'd have been home more."
Capt. Patriquin was killed on Dec. 13 in Anbar province by an improvised explosive device.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:42 PM
January 9, 2007
The Sunday before last, I wrote an article in Ideas about new online fiction writing sites, like The Frontlist and Zoetrope Virtual Studio, that offer not only a writers' workshop and a relief from loneliness but also a chance to circumvent the slush pile by rising to the top of the sites' rankings and getting noticed by agents and publishers.
Now the British literary agency Christopher Little, best known for representing the author of the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling -- talk about putting big bucks in the eyes of writers -- is sponsoring a 1,500-pound prize for fiction writers in the City University of London program. As with The Frontlist and Zoetrope, the real prize for the budding Rowling, I suspect, is the chance of publication -- specifically, that Christopher Little will go that last step and print the winning work. (Clearly they'll get the first crack at whatever comes out of this venture.) Too bad the contest is only for students at one school, but it's an interesting model for others to follow. I wonder if organizations like the NEA or the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts would consider a competition with publication as the treasure at the end of the rainbow.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 01:25 PM
January 9, 2007
Last Friday, I wrote about the 75th anniversary of the journal The American Scholar, and Evan and Chris responded in these pages.
I also received a friendly response from Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar. I'd made one criticism in my write-up, asking: "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."
Wilson writes:
I think the magazine is full of the sort of person you mention from the excerpts. Ted Widmer himself is an Arthur Schlesinger Jr. type, having worked inside government as a speechwriter for Clinton. Garry Wills, to my mind our premier public intellectual, was in the Scholar three times in 2006. The two people in our banner for the Winter 2007 issue, Ethan Fishman and Nick Bromell, also qualify. See our piece by Brian Boyd in the Autumn 2006 issue. The editor of Arts and Letters Daily said it was the most requested piece he had last fall, and it's a very serious piece of work on a big subject. Others who have appeared on our cover: Adam Goodheart, Amitai Etzioni (twice), the new senator James Webb, William Deresiewicz, Ingrid D. Rowland, Donald Worster, Josiah Bunting, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Eugen Weber, Philip Alcabes, Emily Bernard. These names don't have the historical resonance of the names you mention, but it's worth remembering that some of those people began to establish their reputations in the Scholar.
I didn't really mean that the Scholar should publish more famous intellectuals (though what I wrote could easily be construed that way). I meant that TAS should publish up-and-coming thinkers and writers whom we will one day consider the great minds of the 2000s. Of course, this is far easier said than done, as those of us who have ever edited an intellectual journal, or newspaper section devoted to ideas, know all too well. Wilson proudly claims that he is doing just that, so it could be that I was unfair, and will have to publish yet another retraction.
First, though, I've got to re-read the essays he mentions. Good thing the newly redesigned American Scholar website is (as Chris pointed out) so easy to navigate. Here, for example, is Brian Boyd's Autumn 2006 essay on what proponents of Theory could learn from bioculture. I'll return to this topic in the near future...
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:41 PM
January 9, 2007
Some time ago, I blogged here about Arnold Schwarzenegger's hopes of addressing the problem of California's 6.5 million uninsured citizens -- actually uninsured people, since that count includes immigrants both legal and illegal. Now those hopes have taken a big step. We can call them plans now, and here they are.
As predicted, Arnold's proposals are likely to tick everyone off. He wants to spread the burden of insuring everyone in California between doctors, hospitals, individuals (who will be required by law to sign on), and employers large and small. The small employers, who are at present most likely to not offer insurance, are likely to put up the biggest stink. They or the doctors, who are used to charging more or less whatever they want and being reimbursed in full (except when billing Medicare or Medicaid or their state equivalents).
But progress means pain, you gotta crack some eggs to make an omelet, etc. It's hard not to admire the showbiz governator for giving this a whirl. As some have argued, Arnie is going beyond Massachusetts' model, which he ardently followed and supported, because he's gathering men, women, and children into the safety net. Will Mitt Romney look westward and respond, especially given his presidential hopes?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:32 PM
January 9, 2007
A very interesting and wide-ranging post at the Economist blog ties environmentalism and abortion. That's right. The blogger -- anonymous as ever, this being the Economist -- notes that the Stern Report, a document prepared for the British government on the economic costs of global warming, uses as an assumption the idea that future lives are worth just as much as present ones.
This approach has been disputed by William Nordhaus, a Yale economist, and he is right to argue that in ordinary intuitive logic this is a radical notion. How, then, to justify the legality of abortion, the Economist blogger and Nordhaus ask, if future lives are just as valued? Indeed, how to justify the idea that I am more valuable than a person yet to be conceived?
It's a question that has nagged ethical philosophers for ages. Strange that it's now entered the sphere of economics as a matter of debate. But we all have to wrestle with what a "fair" burden our grandchildren should bear for our current environmental state of affairs, not to mention other social problems we're sure to pass on.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:38 AM
January 8, 2007
Regarding Josh's appreciation of the new, Robert Wilson-edited American Scholar -- well, he's been in place two years -- I would take non-aggressive issue. Fadiman, a woman with a charming authorial voice, brought a great taste in prose to editing the magazine. Style reigned, and her fairly constant focus was on a certain kind of highbrow personal essay, with a hint of scholarship underlying most pieces. What was laudable about that is that no other magazine does it, really. Everyone seems to love the occasional personal essay in the New Yorker -- a family essay, a Sedaris bit, an essay on a wife's miscarriage (the last, by Daniel Raeburn, is well worth digging up). And yet no magazine really focuses on the genre, despite the recent success of memoir as a book-length project.
One of Fadiman's find was a young writer of extraordinary powers named Adam Goodheart. Another, apparently, was Brian Doyle -- not the Yankee second baseman of the '70s but a consistent American Scholar contributor who showed up elsewhere quite rarely. Where can I find him now? He seems to have parted ways with The AS, as nearly the entire staff did, in protest, when Fadiman was unseated.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:55 PM
January 8, 2007
Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to a paper by an all-star team of economists who have done a rigorous study of what the grades of first-year graduate school students actually predict at the nation's top economics programs. (Similar studies at undergraduate programs have found, to my knowledge, that freshman grades predict quite a bit, including final transcripts and job market success.)
One result: "Students who attended elite undergraduate universities and liberal arts colleges are more likely to be placed in top ranked academic jobs." This is not surprising and squares with the anecdotal experience of my friends and acquaintances in grad school. (They all seem to hate it, by the way, as Josh apparently did.) Another principal result, as Cowen highlights:
[W]e find that first-year Micro and Macro grades are statistically significant predictors of student job placement, even conditional on Ph.D. completion. Conditional on first-year grades, GRE scores, foreign citizenship, sex, and having a prior Masters degree do not predict job placement.
I'd call the second sentence of that the most interesting. A lot of factors there are overshadowed by first-year grades. That GRE scores say little is surprising to me. Maybe having a knack for graduate school is a more specialized skill.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:07 PM
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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