Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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April 20, 2007
Everyone up for a little Friday-afternoon scolding? Good. I thought so.
The Economist has published a little style and usage guide online, surely not the magazine's entire style guide but a taste of English discrimination, so to speak.
I happen to be a great grammar and usage afficionado. I'm a great fan of Bryan Garner's near-definitive and highly prescriptive reference work "Garner's Modern American Usage," which dismisses the language's "needless variants" and gives examples of errors by major publications in just about every entry. How to win friends.
I also hooted with jollity at Louis Menand's cruel review of Lynne Truss's "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" (not online), in which he nailed her on numerous grammatical mistakes: ""Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation?"
The Economist says, among other things, that "Alternate, as an adjective, means every other," which puts the kibosh on feeling as if one is in "an alternate reality." Alternative's what you mean, says the English authority.
Some of the guidelines (or shall we say rules?) are pretty fuddy-duddy, but I'm very pleased with this one, as en ex-philosophy major:
Beg the question means neither raise the question, invite the question nor evade the answer. To beg the question is to adopt an argument whose conclusion depends upon assuming the truth of the very conclusion the argument is designed to produce.
Q.E.D.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 05:03 PM
April 20, 2007
I particularly enjoyed two stories in the Globe's Weekend section today.
Pop music critic Joan Anderman wrote about Fanny, the first all-female rock act that could actually play its instruments, now all but forgotten.
David Bowie says they were "colossal and wonderful" -- but don't take his word for it. Check out this great audio slideshow by the Globe's Lane Turner and Susan Vermazen. (Susan, nice joke with the last photo.) Tonight, Fanny will reunite to perform together for the first time in more than 30 years at Berklee College of Music, where the band will receive the ROCKRGRL Women of Valor Award.
Mark Feeney's story about "Picture Show," an exhibit of moving-image devices both historical and fantastical at BU's Photographic Resource Center, is just a pleasure to read. Those of you who mistakenly thought my "Philosophywatch" feature opposed all references to thinkers and writers in the pages of mainstream periodicals may be confused to hear that I was delighted with this conceit of Feeney's in particular:
In "Always, Just Beyond Reach, " a set of outstretched hands can never quite reach a set of pretty flowers. Futility has rarely been so sweetly appointed. It's as if Laura Ashley were hosting a garden party in honor of Tantalus and Zeno.
Great stuff.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:56 PM
April 20, 2007
As a post on the Economist blog Free Exchange says, it's a truism of parenting and cultural commentary today that kids are endangered by certain media-driven trends. The primary worries among many seem to be, says the blogger:
1. Girl's [sic] clothing is far too sexualised, especially for the under-13 set.
2. Boys play too many video games.
3. They all watch too much television.
What to do? As Free Exchange points out, parents of a certain kind find themselves presented with a dilemma, like Laura McKenna at 11D:
Before Christmas, Steve and I went through major soul searching about whether or not we should get the boys the big video game systems. We relented and picked up one of the cheaper models, a Game Cube. We decided that it wasn't worth turning our kids into a social lepers, because of our high minded, intellectual beliefs. Well, the Game Cube isn't enough, because the boys all have the deluxe models and the portable games, too. Do we buy more video games, so that Jonah gains some hand in the social dance of elementary school?
The social dance of elementary school!
The parallel debate a couple decades ago was whether intellectual parents should cave and let the children watch TV at will. Stakes seem higher now that video games tend to feature pimps killing prostitutes as much as Super Marios saving the day.
Lauren Mechling had a kind of counterargument in her recent piece in Ideas. She notices that children's libraries are now stocked with Xbox video game systems and rap albums, but also observes that libraries have been able to slip a little medicine in with the candy: kids come to the library for cheap thrills and actually end up reading. A solution of a kind to pup-culture saturation: combine, combine, combine.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:52 PM
April 20, 2007
Josh's post below reminds me of the days when I read 2600 magazine, a quarterly devoted to all things hacking. It was way over my head at times; some articles reproduced an entire page or two of code (that you could use to, say, hack into a customer-service computer on the floor of Circuit City).
But boy did it appeal to my countercultural urges, not to mention the urge to save a few bucks. 2600 is so named because that is the frequency of the tone necessary to hack a payphone. When you pop a quarter into one, as you may or may not remember now, you hear a little audio tone, actually two alternating notes in a short burst. Someone enterprising somehow figured out (difficult to imagine how) that if you used a little whistle found in the bottom of some boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal, you could reproduce the sound, which tricked the phone into thinking it had a new quarter on board. I'm dead serious. Sticking it to the Man, 21st-century style.
Then you have the cultural "hackers," who don't know much about computin', but know how to jam the gears of the mainstream machine. Among the heroes here are Adbusters magazine and Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping. (Sorry, Rev. Billy's site launches audio automatically. Isn't that always annoying?)
I remember one "culturejamming" stunt in New York. Picture a giant banner in midtown advertising a coming retail outlet of favorite liberal bugaboo DeBeers, which has an impressive/disgusting control on the dangerous international diamond market, often peopled on the supply end by gun-wielding gangs, many of them based in Sierra Leone. An elegant, bejeweled black model is pictured shilling with looks alone for the South African company, whose famous slogan you already know: "Diamonds are forever." In the middle of the night, a team of pranksters replaced the banner with one that looked more or less the same, except an African tribesman was pictured at right and the slogan on the left read "The Bushmen aren't forever." Lo and behold, I found the replacement simulated online.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:35 AM
April 20, 2007
Spotted on Vassar Street in Cambridge, in front of MIT's Stata Center, yesterday, by Ezra of the RealFake blog.
Apparently, the sign had been cycling a message about the closing of the Mass. Ave bridge on Sunday -- you know, because they're shooting the Kevin Spacey movie about the Las Vegas card-counters from MIT.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:02 AM
April 19, 2007
In the ongoing category of things you've thought about but never thought of putting online, another entry. Someone's put up a Web site that publishes advertising photos of fast food -- the Platonic form of, say, the Big Mac, in a manner of speaking -- side by side with Le Big Mac itself, or any similar product. The results aren't so pretty.
Maybe these guys have also seen a disturbing question in burgernomics -- to wit, how can McD's offer a cheeseburger for 99 cents and a double cheeseburger for $1?
As for the comparison of fast-food photos, the site aims for a certain scientific rigor: they don't alter the real products in any way, just take 'em home and put 'em in front of a digital camera. "This," the publishers say, "is an ongoing Pulitzer-caliber project."
A commenter on boing boing, which pointed out the link, chips in with this:
I worked (briefly) in the photogoraphy studio of one of the biggest ad agencies in NYC. They paid a professional "food stylist" around $2000 a day to make the food look like that. Every golden sesame seed or drop of crystaline dew was hand placed. That maoynaise isn't mayo, it's hair gel and that chicken looks so good because aparently everything looks yummier when it's been sprayed with laquer. A lot of that "food" isn't food at all and the stuff that is food has been treated with more chemicals and "tricks of the trade" than most super models.
Good to know. Or is it?
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:22 PM
April 19, 2007
Evan, I had to break from hunting down story ideas to echo what you said about coverage of the Va. Tech shooter. I heard Howard Kurtz, the estimable Washington Post media critic, on the radio yesterday. Asked whether the (fully understandable) press frenzy this week played into the hands of people who want to go out in a blaze of "glory," he was irritably dismissive, responding with something like: "That sounds a lot like blaming the press." Of course, he said, we have to cover this as the major event that it is.
Well, yes. But the choice isn't coverage or non-coverage. Cho wanted to go down as an action hero. So he took hyper-macho photos of himself posing in the manner of a bad-ass assassin in a video game (or, as some accounts suggest, as a character from a Korean action movie).
What if the "respectable" press collectively decided that, no, we aren't going to assist in a murderer's posthumous advertising campaign. We'll print your name, and your mug shot, and that's it.
Or, in an even stronger signal to would-be copycats, papers and TV shows could decline to report the killer's name at all. The info would leak out somewhere, of course, but there'd be a tinge of shame attached with purveying or viewing it.
On second thought, my second idea would hamper any investigations that continue. Nevertheless, given our fame-at-all costs culture, we could do worse than think hard about ways to cut the direct connection between mass murder and instant media celebrity.
Not putting the killer's self-memorializing photos on the front page might be a start; an unmarked grave might be another step.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:41 AM
April 19, 2007
I've flogged this before, but I must emphasize my love for the comics at xkcd.com. The mind behind them, Randall Munroe, is, according to the site,
just this guy, you know? I'm a CNU graduate with a degree in physics. I live in Virginia, where I until recently worked on robots at the NASA Langley Research Center (which is in Southeastern VA, not Langley). In my spare time I climb things, open strange doors, and go to goth clubs dressed as a frat guy so I can stand around and look terribly uncomfortable. At frat parties I do the same thing, but the other way around.
Today Munroe takes a look at snopes.com, the fact-checker of urban legends. This site has been around for years and occasionally blips on the national radar with a particularly difficult debunking successfully executed. Sometimes snopes.com confirms widespread rumors, but mostly they find out they're false.
Anyway, here's here's the newest comic, both paranoid and a spoof of paranoia:
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:56 AM
April 19, 2007
In May 2004, I interviewed Will Brooker, the author of "Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture," who argued that despite our current image of the "Alice" author as a proto-pedophile obsessed with taking cheesecake photos of young girls, Charles Dodgson was most likely "a wonderful man who liked children because they appreciated his sense of humor and games. And images of naked children were everywhere in Victorian culture -- they represented innocence."
Decide for yourself: Yesterday, the blog babyart, which is devoted to Goth-like, unsettling (though not, as far as I've seen, overtly sexual) art depicting children, posted over a dozen of Dodgson's photos.
Before you decide, consider Brooker's point: "Today we rightly celebrate Lewis Carroll's books as children's classics, but at the same time titillate ourselves by saying that we wouldn't let Dodgson babysit our own kids. We often think of the Victorian era as a time of moral hypocrisy, but aren't we the real hypocrites?"
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:33 AM
April 19, 2007
Seeing an image of the Virginia Tech shooter on the front page of papers this morning left me a little ill, and a blog search reveals that I'm not the only one. NBC's receipt of Seung-Hui Cho's package of goodbye materials -- including 23 pages of rambling text and 28 video clips -- presented the network with an obvious dilemma.
This was newsworthy material, but doesn't publishing it to an international audience grant Cho the infamy he so clearly wanted? Video of Daniel Pearl's beheading created a similar moral quandary, but no serious new organization showed its key moments. There we had an issue of graphic violence, but are the questions so different here? We know what decision NBC made, although they broadcast only portions of what they had.
From the blog Voices of Hope, devoted to "all things media and pop-culture with a socio-political point of view":
by broadcasting the words and images of a killer under the auspices of 'understanding' we give the power back to the violator and minimize the stories of the people (victims) most affected by this horrible turn of events. This violent student killer's (I don't even want to memorialize his name) story takes away the power of the victim's stories and sensationalizes the problem, making him appear as a hero-villain.
From Chris Shaw, on the Guardian Web site:
This is exactly the kind of instant notoriety sought by the disturbed spree killers, from Dunblane through to Columbine and now Virginia Tech. Fears of copy-cat killings seeking instant cyber celebrity are not unfounded in my opinion.
It seems possible to me, too, that to the truly desperate, lonely, and suicidal, international notoriety, even in death, might be preferable to the misery they face in silence.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:32 AM
April 18, 2007
Amis coverage is at flood tide. No sooner did I decide to blog about the Atlantic's take [subscriber only] on the new elephantine bio of the late British novelist, then the heads-up copy of Sunday's Times Magazine hits my email box, with another big essay on Amis -- and Evan, too, beat me to the punch, I see.
Anyone who read Martin Amis's memoir "Experience" knows his father's decline was a grim, dipsomaniacal affair; Martin judges "alcoholism" to be a vulgar, American-style concept, but, still, that word does conjure up the relevant set of images in Kingsley's case.
In the Atlantic, Hitchens's tidy assumption that Amis needed his alcohol in order to create art -- needed, in fact, to be destroyed by it in the end -- sounds remarkably obtuse, a strange case of stock-response and cliche-embrace from a usually clear-eyed writer:
It is sad to find that his muse of alcohol -- the gift of Bacchus -- was what got him in the end, but there are several novels, beginning with One Fat Englishman, in which he quite clear-sightedly sees this coming, and one might in valediction remember what Winston Churchill said about brandy, which was that in life's eternal wager, he had gotten more out of it than it had taken out of him. Indeed, you couldn't have one Kingsley without the other ... [my emph.]
Bollocks. Who knows about the glory days? But at the end, less booze would have meant better work, and more happiness -- for all involved.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:22 PM
April 18, 2007
In the new issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik has a long piece occasioned by the publication of Zachary Leader's "The Life of Kingsley Amis." It's not so much a review, as was Clive James's piece in the Times Literary Supplement [search here and then pay if you wish], because after all it's Gopnik, who likes pushing the bounds of book criticism around.
What emerges from the piece aside from brief (positive) words of assessment is instead a portrait of his own of Amis, father of Martin Amis and author of, among other books, "Lucky Jim," with which, Gopnik says, "he more or less invented the modern English comic novel -- the small-scale satiric inspection, flavored with sexual malice, that dominates English fiction from Lodge and Bradbury to Tom Sharpe and beyond." Gopnik's Amis is a prickly, misogynistic, and generally unkind person, but an object of fascination and reluctant admiration. Gopnik chronicles Amis's rather appalling attitude to women, particularly desirable women:
"The only reason I like girls," Amis wrote in a letter to [the poet Philip] Larkin in 1953, “is that I want to [bleep] them, which is adolescent, cheap, irresponsible, not worth doing, a waste of time, not much fun anyway really, a needless distraction from my real vocation, destructive of any real power of understanding women which as a novelist HOOHOO should be important to me.... All I have to do now is stop wanting to [bleep] girls and I shall have the thing licked."
In this and other passages, Gopnik doesn't shy away from stiff hits, but he gives Amis's work a prominence he clearly finds deserved:
Like Waugh, Amis was emotionally crippled and weird; he was also able to dramatize, sporadically but with remarkable fullness, what had crippled him and all the ways he had been crippled. In the Stephen Frears movie "The Queen," the Royal Family is represented by the single stag, at bay and soon to be brought down, and we are meant to understand that, though insufferably pigheaded and emotionally stunted, still the old-style screwed-up English folks are possessed of a kind of cultural authenticity and dignity that the happily Americanized Blair family can only aspire to. A better-adjusted culture can also seem like a dully anesthetized one.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:22 PM
April 18, 2007
Dissent magazine carries a forum devoted to a very germane question about the war in Iraq, and one that will be asked more and more as we achieve some historical perspective: "Whatever you think of the Bush administration's motives, what is to be learned from the Iraq experience about the export -- and import -- of democracy?"
I was most interested to see Paul Berman among the respondents. Berman, in his book "Terror and Liberalism" and a series of high-profile magazine articles, was one of the left's early and firm supporters of the war on terror. What does he think now about the project of democratizing Iraq and the Middle East? In short, that the Bush administration irredeemably bungled it -- but that it wasn't obviously a bad idea.
Not too surprising, I suppose, and not so different from George Packer's own response. Both must feel betrayed. But Berman doesn't disavow what now seems to have been the principal rationale for the war:
I do not believe that, just because the Bush administration has bungled the promoting of democracy, we should abandon the very idea of democracy promotion. The United States is too powerful to be a neutral entity -- a giant Switzerland with no influence on anybody else. If we in the United States are not promoting democracy, we will end up willy-nilly promoting something nondemocratic, which will either have to be dictatorship (the policy of the previous sixty years) or chaos (the result that we have actually achieved).
What grabbed me in particular about Berman's piece was his point that both left and right have moved away from directly supporting democratization "over there" for different but in a deeper sense similar reasons.
The intellectuals and the liberal left should defend and promote the liberals and freethinkers of the Arab and Muslim world, the outright liberals and not just the people who are described, not always accurately, as "moderates." We should do this in the same fashion that some of us used to do during the cold war, when it was common for intellectuals in the West to defend the dissidents of the East bloc. This, too, doesn't happen much today.
Why not? A main reason is that, in the West, an amazing number of people remain biased in one fashion or another against Muslims and especially against Arabs -- remain attached to the notion that Arabs cannot reach a level of civilization that is capable of producing democracy. There is a right-wing way of expressing this particular bias, but also a left-wing way, having to do with multiculturalism, which leads people to conclude that if the Arab world is awash in paranoid doctrines and grotesque dictatorships, we mustn't judge anyone harshly, and who are we to say that liberalism and prosperity are superior to tyranny and poverty....
Berman is not, needless to say, sympathetic to that dodge.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:12 PM
April 18, 2007
Crooked Timber seems to be having a week devoted to blogging about comics, which Josh might appreciate more fully than some of us. But I was entertained to read a post -- called "Hey Kids! Epistemology!" -- by John Holbo, a philosopher by trade.
Holbo's been teaching Descartes for a while now, and he's grown tired of teaching the brain-in-a-vat conundrum, it seems. (In short, how do we know that we aren't merely brains in a vat, our sensory experience a kind of mirage created by an evil demon orchestrating the whole affair? (Matrix, anyone?) The idea is to provoke radical doubt in our experience of the world outside our minds.)
As Holbo notes, this philosophical problem always has a certain audience appeal, because much like the Matrix movies, it somehow rings true that the world as we live it is somehow unreal. As Adam Gopnik wrote about the Keanu Reeves brain-benders, "[This] doesn't just strike us as plausibly weird. It strikes us as weirdly plausible." Back to Holbo:
sometimes it seems like you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting yourself giving a lecture about how maybe there's an Deceiving Demon messing with you to a considerable extent.
Problem here is that the students like it, but might have trouble imagining just what we're talking about here. But behold! A comic that illustrates just about everything you need to know. I guess.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 10:04 AM
April 18, 2007
According to the British press, former Roxy music frontman Bryan Ferry has "apologised unreservedly" for expressing admiration for Nazi iconography and spectacle. Ferry was about to begin a British tour to promote his new album when he told a reporter from the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag that he refers to his West London studios as the Fürherbunker, and revealed his admiration for "Leni Riefenstahl films and Albert Speer's buildings and the mass rallies and the flags," adding that they were "simply fantastic. Really lovely."
Bryan Ferry
Speaking of Sonntag Sontag, in her 1975 New York Review of Books essay "Fascinating Fascism," Susan Sontag praised a book of Riefenstahl's photos as "certainly the most ravishing book of photographs published anywhere in recent years," before going on to dismantle, in exacting detail, what she described as the "purification of Leni Riefenstahl's reputation of its Nazi dross." Sontag also provided a description of what she called "fascist aesthetics":
Fascist aesthetics ... flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force....
One could imagine why a pop star -- particularly the frontman of of one of the first rock acts to create a look/style that rigidly embraced everything from album covers to stage presentation -- would be attracted to fascist aesthetics, no?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:01 AM
April 18, 2007
Last month, I mentioned the dystopian sci-fi, Old Testament-inspired comic book "Testament," written by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff.
Now an item on Rushkoff's blog has directed me to the fascinating website of A. David Lewis, doctoral candidate at Boston University's Division of Religious and Theological Studies, pop-culture scholar and comic-book author, and founder of the Allston-based comics studio/imprint Caption Box. Lewis, who's written scholarly papers with titles like "To Be Made in His Image: On Thor's 40 Years of Valor" and "The Nightmare and the Dream: A Literary Survey of Watchmen and Sandman," recently wrote one on "Another Abraham: The Exegesis of Douglas Rushkoff’s Testament."
Sample:
In his other critical works, Rushkoff discusses the need for flexible, malleable media where innovative, non-traditional storytelling can take place. "Traditional linear stories tend to express themselves in duality. A cause leads to an effect... Nonlinear stories tend to express themselves differently" (Rushkoff Playing 66). For Rushkoff, comics are one of those "alternative forums [that] give media activist low-cost, highly resilient, and provocatively interactive viral shells for the memes they wish to disseminate" (Media 180). His "meme" is a new engagement with an Old Testament, a freed one.
You can read the whole essay as a PDF here.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:20 AM
April 17, 2007
Over at Marginal Revolution, blogger Alex Tabarrok, of George Mason's weirdly blogospherical faculty, notes that Scott Althaus has paired some observations with an intriguing question.
Tabarrok reports an Althaus observation:
The public's opinion of past wars improves as a new war approaches. Thus, after Vietnam most people thought the war was a mistake and this held true for decades until the beginning of the Iraq war when the opinion of war in Vietnam suddenly improved!
Perhaps that's only an extension of the psychological fact that we convince ourselves to believe what we are either prepared to believe or, even more often, what we already do. But it's interesting. The same happened with WWII and WWI, says Althaus.
A commenter on the Marginal Revolution posits a certain combative logic that might be in play:
Perhaps, when war approaches, the marginal value of debate declines in comparison to the marginal value of pugnacity.
Which approach would you most fear in your enemy?
That's one way of saying that nations draw together in times of threat -- and that such a trend is not entirely irrational. Another commenter gets a little fresh:
"What checks on democracy are required to deal with the irrationality of public opinion about war?"
You could abolish the state. I'm sure that checks a lot state action problems at once.
As the increasing power of the EU presages, that just might be the direction we're going in.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:29 PM
April 17, 2007
Explore the forbidden byways of Greater Boston from the comfort of your cubicle, via Urban Exploration Boston.
UEB is part of the vanshnookenraggen photoblog, which is dedicated to urban exploration, defined broadly as
the exploration of all things unseen, forgotten, disused, abandoned, and off-limits in the urban environment. This means, but is not limited to, subways (and their abandoned stations and tunnels), abandoned buildings of all types, rail roads, utility tunnels, bridges, construction sites, etc. ... everything in the urban environment, from architecture to graffiti to human interaction and relations with the city.
Before he moved to New York, UEB explored Charlestown, downtown Boston (inc., the Big Dig), the disused Haymarket Station, an empty box factory in Somerville, Port Norfolk in Dorchester, part of the commuter rail's Needham Line, the Watertown branch line, and an abandoned rail line in Somerville.
NB: This is not breaking news, I know. But I just discovered this website, so it's news to me. If anyone is currently doing a website like this, please tell me about it.
Via Lost in Boston
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 12:56 PM
April 17, 2007
The Institute for the Future of the Book is engaged in yet more interesting projects exploring the convergence of print and other media, many of which are worthy of notice. But one:
MacKenzie Wark, author of "A Hacker Manifesto," has written a book -- published under a Creative Commons license and thus more widely available for quotation and reuse -- called "Gamer Theory." The book posits that we're all now living in "gamespace": "It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times."
In gamespace, you get to play around with all the media at your disposal. Makes sense, then, that Wark is set to publish a second version of the book, inevitably called "Gamer Theory 2.0," which makes use of the comments of readers who participated in this "networked book" experiment. Also makes sense that he and the Institute have created a contest in which readers are invited to "visualize" the book with animation, graphics, video, and whatever else they want to throw into the mix.
The deadline has passed, alas, but keep your eye on the Institute Web site to see who wins -- and what they create.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:23 PM
April 17, 2007
Chris's post about the effects of publicizing "social norms," especially when it comes to bad behavior, brought to mind some observations I had in England and Germany this past month. Just as messages like this one discourage binge drinking at Rutgers...
... so, too, the acceptability of binge drinking and smoking in the UK and Continental Europe appeared to hold a powerful social force. In the UK, my seventysomething cousin smokes, her fiftysomething children smoke or did recently, and one of those fiftysomethings has teenage daughters who smoke... in their parents' house. There just isn't the same stigma over there, and the power of conformity therefore seems to work in the opposite direction that it does here.
What is more, you don't have to sneak outside into the rain or cold. Pubs are dens of smoky sin -- not to mention dens of six-pints-in-a-sitting.
Indoor smoking in places other than private homes comes to an end in England on July 1, and it will be very interesting to see the social effect. There are reports that when such a ban went into effect in New York in 2003, many people quit. Some weren't sold on the new regime: "'There's one word for this: Ridiculous. Stalinesque. Brutal,' interrupted Elliot Kovner, 48, as he added a few choice vulgarities." (Isn't that three? Never mind.) Others began to come around even as the ban began:
Back at the Orange Bear in the Tribeca section of Manhattan, Cynthia Candiotti's face was obscured behind a cloud of smoke.
"Smoking and boys have sort of always gone together,” she said, considering her cigarette. "Smoking, I'll probably quit."
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:53 AM
April 17, 2007
I wrote about the Hipster PDA and DIY Planner for Ideas in the fall of 2005, and remain intrigued by low-tech, customizable planning systems. (I still don't own a PDA.)
If you feel the same way, perhaps you'll be excited about the Start Here line of notebooks created by New York-based design studio Little Fury, whose motto is: "No Design for the Sake of Design." Start Here notebooks are entirely un-fussy, they have undesigned (read: blank) covers, and they can be linked together for maximum convenience. Check 'em out:
Via Cool Hunting
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 11:33 AM
April 17, 2007
An NYU psychiatrist, knocking down some misconceptions about the dynamic that turns loners simmering with impotent rage and frustration into mass murderers:
"They don't 'snap,' as you so often hear people say. It's more like a hinge swings open, and all this anger comes out."
Hmmm.
(To be fair, a reporter calls you up and asks you to explain the inexplicable -- the near-unspeakable. What are you supposed to say?)
Posted by Christopher Shea at 11:06 AM
April 16, 2007
Many colleges use peer pressure, counterintuitively, as a tool to reduce alcohol abuse. The idea is that heavy-drinking students overestimate how much their classmates drink, and they'd cut back if they really understood where their own behavior falls on the bell curve.*
Environmentalists also hope to make increasing use of such "social norms" messages. By publicizing how much electricity the average homeowner uses in a month, for example, energy wastrels can be prodded to turn off some lights.
An article in the latest Psychological Science -- nicely summarized here -- points out one problem with social-norms campaigns: After learning how they compare with others, people who drink less than the average, or use less electricity than their neighbors, are often inspired to change their behavior, too -- for the worse.
The authors of the Psychological Science article found a way to head off that problem, in a research project that examined the effects of social-norms messages on energy consumption. When homeowners who consumed less electricity than the average were straightforwardly informed what the average per household was, their energy consumption climbed the next month -- as predicted. When, however, energy-frugal homeowners got a symbolic pat on the head along with the information -- a simple smiley-face on their bill -- they continued their praiseworthy behavior.
On the other hand, presenting energy hogs with a frowning face didn't cause them to cut back their energy usage to any greater degree than did simply presenting them with the facts about what their peers were doing. The information alone was a rebuke.
The study suggests that many anti-binge-drinking campaigns -- like the one above, from Rutgers -- may need to be tweaked. Putting up posters isn't enough.
*It's not just students who don't know how much their peers drink. FYI, 80 percent of American men consume six or fewer alcoholic drinks a week, according to the Alcohol Research Group, at UC-Berkeley.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 06:45 PM
April 16, 2007
Who'd have guessed that my 1922 quote from Emily Post in yesterday's column -- on the gaucheness of "Pleased to meet you" -- would be so timely? It was just such language, so the London press is saying, that scuttled the romance of Prince William and girlfriend Kate Middleton.
It was not Kate's own language, though -- contrary to the Reuters item in today's Globe -- that was deemed too rough. It was her mother, Carole, who was heard saying "Pleased to meet you" instead of "How do you do" and "Pardon" instead of "What?" And, worse, "using the word 'toilet' not 'lavatory,'" according to the Daily Telegraph.
Novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson, defending the Middletons in today's Daily Mail, reviewed some of those shibboleths: "If you say 'notepaper' rather than 'writing paper'; if you say 'spectacles' rather than 'glasses'; if you say 'serviette' for 'napkin,' you are almost certainly a member of the middle classes, rather than upper."
Or you may be an innocent foreigner. Last month, Lynne "Lynneguist" Murphy blogged about the trials of moving from the States to South Africa to England, each time having to learn the preferred way to ask for the bathroom, restroom, toilet, or loo.
Shopping for plumbing can be a puzzle too. My mom stopped into Home Depot not long ago and asked to look at lavatories, only to have a helpful fellow lead her to the towering wall of toilets. He thought she was being euphemistic, but no -- she was actually seeking a bathroom sink. At least her need wasn't urgent.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 06:41 PM
April 16, 2007
The 2007 Pulitzer Prizes were announced this afternoon. Cormac McCarthy won for "The Road," which James Parker wrote about for Ideas. And I'm pleased to report that the Globe's Charlie Savage won the prize for "a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs." From the Pulitzer announcement:
Awarded to Charlie Savage of The Boston Globe for his revelations that President Bush often used "signing statements" to assert his controversial right to bypass provisions of new laws.
One of Savage's stories on this topic, "Hail to the Chief," appeared in the Ideas section, on Nov. 26.
PS: The most recent Globe Pulitzer, according to this list, was the 2005 prize awarded to new Ideas deputy Gareth Cook for his explanatory reporting on the stem cell debate.
PPS: Rumors that the Globe's Alex Beam won a 1991 Nobel Prize for literature are false, and can be traced to a fine column in today's paper.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:23 PM
April 16, 2007
Ah, the signal clothing item of my youth. It went in and out of fashion with rather substantial changes of fortune but it lived on in certain circles -- and then re-exploded (not by mere chance) from Manhattan's East Village outward in the early '90s, as chronicled by Malcolm Gladwell.
The Chuck Taylor All-Star sneaker, aka the Chucky, named for an ironically clean-cut basketball player who adopted them early on. (We're talking World War I.)
Now, folks, a use of technology every kid young and otherwise can greet with joy. The Converse Web site allows you to design your own Chuckies. Complete with up to a word or two sewn on to the heel stripe, if you so desire. Your shoe can have up to nine different colors going on, by my count. Stitching, rubber, instep canvas, outer-foot canvas, interior lining, tongue, heel stripe, racing stripe, monogram thread. Did I miss anything?
[via Metafilter]
Posted by Evan Hughes at 03:26 PM
April 16, 2007
Very interesting new study released Saturday by the Pew Research Center. The survey-based study measures citizen knowledge of current affairs and politics, with predictably sobering results: about two-thirds can name the current US vice president (who might be the most powerful and prominent VP ever).
Many polls have tackled that subject in the past, and others have asked the public what media they consume, often revealing the aging audience and overall decline of, say, the network nightly news programs and daily papers. But this study did some interesting cross-referencing. It measured citizen knowledge broken down by the media they like to read or watch. The results are a little strange.
Viewers of The Daily Show fared better at current affairs survey questions than did viewers of PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and National Public Radio (which NPR program not specified). The natural question here is whether the truth is that Jon Stewart is more informative than Jim Lehrer -- if so, that's an ouch for Lehrer -- or if Stewart attracts a crowd that's more educated (and affluent) to begin with. I strongly suspect it's the latter, since Stewart is basically the poster child for the northeastern secular liberal elite that the Rush Limbaughs out there love to hate. (Limbaugh's listeners scored a 51% on the survey, while Stewart's viewers scored a 54. Judging by the tightly grouped results and large sample size, that's a significant difference.)
However, if the informed audience of the Daily Show is just a function of whom it attracts, it's interesting and even encouraging that on average a less informed person turns to Lehrer's real news over Stewart's fake reports. Not that there's anything wrong with good parody.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:54 AM
April 16, 2007
Kyle Flaherty (Engage in PR): "Waking up to 30 mph winds and torrential rains is horrendous, particularly if we have not had power for more than 15 hours at this point. But imagine waking up in the same situation and getting ready to run the Boston Marathon? I can't help but think about these people as I type this in the comfort of my local independent coffee shop."
mdouglas (MyPunchblog): "Our office sits along the course of the Boston Marathon. If I stand up and turn around I can see Route 135 from the two windows behind me. Somehow this seems like a great place to enjoy the festivities today."
Running Chick (Running Chick with the Orange Hat): "At the same time I'm IMing with Jeff [who says it's 'misting heavily' in Boston], I get a phone call from Jeanne who reports apocalyptic conditions in Boston -- gusting winds, pouring rain and strong headwinds. Jeanne, who by the way, is reporting from the comfort of her friend’s apartment. So I got 'misty' from Mr. Fun and 'apocalyptic' from Ms. Stillinpajamas. Who to believe?"
Monado (Science Notes): "In a heroic application of physiology against physics, Boston Marathon participants are preparing to run 26+ miles in foul weather. A strong nor'easter is blowing up the U.S. east coast, taking in Boston. The runners will be fighting a headwind of over 60 km/h, temperatures only 8C above freezing, and 100 percent humidity. The ones who really suffer will be the back-of-the-pack runners who will be out for five hours or more, courting hypothermia."
Mark Rauterkus (Mark Rauterkus and Running Mates ponder current events): "If I was in charge of the Boston Marathon, I'd make a special rule in 2007.... All runners in today's Boston Marathon who finish the race within two hours of his or her entry time get a special entry into the Boston Marathon in years 2008, 2009 or 2010.... The main motivation is to encourage the completion of the race."
Brian Alvey (The Brian Alvey Weblog): "[I'm reminded of] a Seth Meyers Saturday Night Live rant during the 2001 World Series that was being played in November. He noted that the Yankees were struggling against Arizona because Red Sox fans were taking post-9/11 pity on the Yankees and rooting for them. He complained that 'everyone and everything Boston roots for loses. If Boston rooted for gravity, we'd all be floating three inches off the ground.' And now we've got [astronaut Suni Williams] running the Boston Marathon in zero gravity. Wicked."
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:40 AM
April 16, 2007
A while back, ten days after the passing of firebrand French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, I wrote here about the trend toward critical obituaries that follow by a period deemed respectable by someone the laurels granted in the immediate aftermath of a death. The occasion was a hit piece on Baudrillard in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Now, following the death last week of Kurt Vonnegut, the whacks on Vonnegut and his legacy have already begun. Witness a video obit for the left-wing novelist by Fox News, the only one aired by the network, as far as I can tell. (Click on the first link.)
Kurt Vonnegut probably wouldn't have wanted a classically structured obituary. His life's work... [including] left-wing screeds and random musings, was much too quirky, too filled with scatological humor... and self-admitted sci-fi mumbo jumbo for him to have enjoyed stately induction into the pantheon of great American writers.
...
By the late '70s, Vonnegut was rich and irrelevant.... But Vonnegut kept at it, and persisted in his unique brand of despondent leftism.
Posted by Evan Hughes at 09:59 AM
April 15, 2007
'Tiny Bubbles' Singer Don Ho Dies at 76, reports the Associated Press.
First Baudrillard, then Vonnegut, now Ho! This is sad news, indeed.
So here's to the golden moon
And here's to the silver sea
And mostly here's a toast
To you, Don Ho
***
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:18 AM
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