Joshua Glenn is a Boston-based writer, editor, and multimedia
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July 13, 2007
The National Review is no fan of European welfare states, or of the American labor movement, and that's putting it mildly. Yet the East coast heat wave must be getting to the economist Kevin A. Hassett, a frequent contributor. In the mag's July 9 issue, he waxes positively envious [subscribers only] about European vacation policies -- not to mention the European ability to forget about their jobs when they aren't at them. At cocktail parties in the nations that conservatives were so recently deriding as "Old Europe," Hassett writes, "No one talks about work." (Hassett even has a few nice words to say about European "potables," the subject of boycotts not so long ago.)
Hassett presents the now-familiar chart showing just how stingy American vacation policies are: We get 13 or so vacation days annually, while the French are closing in on 40 -- a figure the Italians have already surpassed. Okay, they're Italians. But those hard-working Japanese? Surely they work harder than us? Nope: A full thirty vacation days a year.
Worse, Hassett writes, according to a recent survey by Expedia.com (not a red-check source, perhaps), Americans fail to take an average of three of the vacation days they are granted annually -- a phenomenon unheard of in other countries.
"Even though Americans have the fewest vacation days, they leave the most on the table," Hassett writes. He stops short of challenging corporate policies that limit American workers' time off -- what were you expecting? -- but implies that rock-ribbed conservatives and liberals alike can get behind the idea that you should take full advantage of the few vacation days that you have.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 05:45 PM
July 12, 2007
Every few years, journalists write that the study of Ayn Rand's philosophy is making a comeback at mainstream universities. (I'm guilty!) It's perpetually sort of true. But the fuller truth remains that while she has fierce adherents, often in campus libertarian groups or on the fringes of philosophy departments, most academics look down their noses at her. The novels, professors say, are ludicrously didactic and Rand's radical-free-market cheerleading morally noxious.
But the Chronicle of Higher Education this month offers evidence [subscribers only] that cash from a group called the Anthem Foundation for Objectivist Scholarship may finally be making a difference. (Would Rand complain that lucre, and not the force of her ideas, caused the shift in attitudes? Hard to say...) The Anthem Foundation was created in 2001 by a former Silicon Valley executive named John McCaskey: He and some friends found it shocking, given how much Rand's philosophy had shaped their own worldviews, that she was so rarely taught.
Since 2001, the group has given roughly $400,000 a year to colleges and universities to support studies of Rand and her philosophy, which she called Objectivism. (The BB&T Charitable Foundation, based in North Carolina, is another backer of things Randian in academia.)
Anthem's biggest grants have gone to Allan Gotthelf, a visiting professor of the history of science at the University of Pittsburgh ($435,000 in 2003), who studied with Rand in the '60s, and to Tara Smith, a philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin, and her graduate students ($300,000 in 2001). Some colleges, however -- even ones you might think of as cash-hungry -- are leery of the grants. In April, the Chronicle reports, the philosophers at Texas State University at San Marcos turned down the chance for a grant to support a long-term visiting professorship. They saw it as an attempt to buy legitimacy for the foundation's favorite philosopher and to shape interpretations of her work -- and therefore as a violation of academic principles.
Posted by Christopher Shea at 04:27 PM
July 12, 2007
Wave goodbye to "just deserts": In today's entry on his Oxford University Press blog, Ben Zimmer reports that the upstart "just desserts" -- the version that confuses dessert, the after-dinner treat, with desert, something you deserve -- is beating the standard idiom by 58 percent to 42 percent.
Zimmer used the Oxford English Corpus -- a database of "more than 1.5 billion words pulled from newspapers, blogs, magazines, scientific papers, journals, books, websites, transcripts," and other sources, according to the OUP -- to check on the condition of some beleaguered familiar phrases.
There is some good news for traditionalists. The standard sleight of hand, fazed by, and home in on are trouncing the challengers (slight of hand, phased by, hone in on) by 2 to 1 or better.
But vocal chords is neck and neck with the standard vocal cords, and strait-laced scores a pitiful 34 percent against straight-laced. "Poetic innovation or descent into linguistic anarchy?" asks Zimmer. The strait-laced will have one answer, I suppose; the rest will have desserts.
Posted by Jan Freeman at 03:49 PM
July 12, 2007
I am old enough to remember the days -- 30 years ago -- when one had to dodge traffic in Boston's Downtown Crossing. Before the Mass. Dept. of Education's Bureau of Equal Educational Opportunity moved to Quincy, my father's office was near the Common, and once in a while I'd spend the day there, and we'd have lunch in the area. This was in the mid-'70s, when the concept of the Ladder District would have struck Bostonians as pure science fiction. A Boston.com photo gallery supporting a Globe story today about the "revitalization" of the area takes me back.
Downtown Crossing goes pedestrian in 1979
A description of Downtown Crossing in today's Globe story -- "an unkempt, unsafe shopping district lined with discount stores, fast-food restaurants, and vacant storefronts" -- makes it sound like a terrible place. But when I was in high school, I spent quite a bit of time in that part of the city, working as a courier and also shopping for sneakers -- in the mid-'80s, if you followed hip hop fashion and absolutely had to have particular editions of Adidas and Nike kicks, you could not find a better selection anywhere else in Greater Boston. It was unkempt and unsafe, maybe, but I liked it.
Downtown Crossing didn't have a lot of high-end retail, in those days, but so what? It was a fine place for a teenager to buy records and books, nearly as good as Harvard Square. (PS: Can anyone remember the name of the used record store in Downtown Crossing whose owner proudly displayed a picture of herself singing in front of the Museum of Science's T-Rex model? Please remind me!) I've never set foot in Macy's or Filene's, so it still strikes me as odd that the shuttering of these institutions should be so alarming to Bostonians.
I know, I know. Well-heeled adults, and not urban teens, are the customers we'd all like to attract to Downtown Crossing. But permit me to offer a crazy alternate vision: Now that Harvard Square is all chain stores and high-end retail, let Downtown Crossing become the new Harvard Square. Provide rent breaks for independent retail stores. Make it easy for small restaurants, cafes, and pubs to open up -- give them permission to serve beer on the sidewalk, while we're at it. Try to attract some of Boston's thousands of undergrads and graduate students, not to mention its population of "cultural creatives," instead of worrying that Financial District workers won't lunch there.
Who's with me?
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 09:28 AM
July 11, 2007
Here's that photo of Brainiac drinking ketchup that I promised:
It was shot by Boston.com senior multimedia producer Scott LaPierre. Make of it what you will.
PS: There are now 1,200 photos of Boston's 2007 fireworks at the URL I provided last Friday.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:19 PM
July 11, 2007
Joe Keohane is sick and tired of the Boston Pops's 4th of July show on the Esplanade. In his latest column for Boston Magazine (written before the 2007 event), the former Weekly Dig editor airs a litany of complaints:
In 2004 we got David Lee Roth. Bad enough, but okay. The next year featured country rapper Cowboy Troy, doing a song called "Our America," which nimbly incorporated parts of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and "The Star-Spangled Banner." The 2006 concert was the scariest yet, with Aerosmith's Steven Tyler and Joe Perry, hateful a cappella boy band Rockapella, the Vermont Air National Guard, American Idol loser Ayla Brown, a musical tribute to civil rights, and running commentary by one "Dr. Phil," which appeared to be some sort of eel.
Keohane's solution? "A [James] Levine-led Fourth of July Shostakovich spectacular." The BSO musical director's genius, Keohane argues,
is in challenging people to listen to unfamiliar things, and articulate what they like and what they don't like. He's not flashy or confrontational--he's thoughtful, and he programs the music in ways that help show the logical progression between the pieces, like his frequent retracing of how we got from tried-and-true Beethoven to scourge-of-blue-hairs Arnold Schoenberg.
In a Brahmin stronghold like Symphony Hall, which Keohane suggests can be seen as a microcosm of Boston, "a place unmatched in its inability to ever handle change rationally," getting people this engaged in new and unfamiliar music is nothing short of miraculous. And just the sort of thing we need on the Esplanade next July 4th. I'm all for it.
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:07 PM
July 9, 2007
I'm in the Berkshires for three weeks -- connecting to the Internet via dialup, which means you might not hear too much from me till I get back. And it's going to be difficult to upload images, or even do online research. So today, I will content myself with singing the praises of a few novels that I read over the weekend.
* "Lucky Jim" (1954), by Kingsley Amis. I didn't mean to read "Lucky Jim," since I've already read it half a dozen times. But the latest Penguin edition was on the bedside table here at the house I'm renting. I laughed out loud, like I do every time, at the description of the bus ride near the end; and at the hangover scene, when Jim discovers that he's accidentally burned the blankets and rug in his boss's guest room. First and still the best of the great British campus novels...
* "Cassandra at the Wedding" (1962), by Dorothy Baker. I have a shelf full of New York Review Books that I've treated as fetish objects -- they're so attractive, and NYRB does such a great job rediscovering lost classics, that I just enjoy looking at them. But this summer I decided to actually read a few, and I started with "Cassandra at the Wedding." Brilliant prose. I think it's one of the best books about the perils of growing up in an intellectual household since "Franny and Zooey," which was published just a few months earlier -- must have been a hot topic in the early '60s.
* "This Perfect Day" (1970), by Ira Levin. I'd never heard of this book till recently, when I was researching dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels for an Ideas essay about fictional climatic catastrophes. I've always thought of Levin as a Stephen King-style author -- not untalented, but not worth wasting your time on, either. So I was pleasantly surprised to discover that "This Perfect Day" is a fully realized, entertainingly written example of dystopian lit. Certainly better than "Logan's Run" (1967), from which Levin may have borrowed the theme of strict age limits as antidote to population explosion.
* "The Bushwhacked Piano" (1971), by Thomas McGuane. Globe columnist Sam Allis made me buy a copy of this, when I ran into him at Pazzo Books in Roslindale, several months ago. McGuane is a terrific stylist, he insisted. He's right! The plot of "Piano" is negligible, but there isn't a cliched phrase in the book, and every few paragraphs you discover a sentence that's nothing short of miraculous. Thanks, Sam!
Posted by Joshua Glenn at 10:36 AM
July 8, 2007
Commenting on today's substitute-Safire column, a lament about the short supply of grammatically acceptable single men, the irrepressible Mr. Verb sees an entrepreneurial opportunity:
Subject: Enhance your 6r@mm@r!
Isn't it time you did something about your problem? Finally the genuine stuff -- without money tricks! Want harder grammar? Want to make your sentences up to three clauses longer? . . .
"I love how rapidly your product worked on my boyfriend, he can't stop talking about how excited he is having such a big new vocabulary and firm command of syntax!"
And yes, of course there's more, much more!
Posted by Jan Freeman at 06:34 PM
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