Electrode

2010-02-18T14:45:00.000-08:00

Manboy Womanthing Blackwhite Moonwalk

2009-06-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

It's a steamy 75 in New York City today, and the Escalade stereos are writing obituaries. Ipods are dialing; mp3s are spooling; the city is an audio dictation, re-writing the first draft of a biography. It's a thriller night this afternoon, but easy as A-B-C. This is what we'll say about a creature called Michael Jackson.

Surely there is now a university course to be held on mutable gender and identity in pop circa 1970-1990, with David Bowie, Michael Jackson and Madonna as primary texts. I was 10 years old when "Thriller" busted out; maybe MJ was the first to make me realize the dance floor as an area of ludic expression. You could skulk and surprise like a werewolf; moonwalk off into deniability as Billie Jean's not-lover; strut cocksure into an arch flirtation with "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'."

But, y'know, the song I'm most hearing as I'm walking down Third Avenue isn't any of these – it's "Don't Stop ('Til You Get Enough)," the debut single from 1979's "Off the Wall." Its very sound makes a spectacular argument for itself as the musical bridge from '70s disco to '80s pop. Just listen to this brilliant confabulation of sound-ideas (embedding disabled). You've got the swirl of strings opening it: the ideal musical notation of spinning around in a roller-disco. Then the horns – opening wide like the curtains on a proscenium stage, presenting: quite possibly the most danceable rhythm arrangement the world had yet seen. Slap guitar and bass from '70s funk, a bit of cowbell or woodblock like an errant elbow – honestly, I've been listening to this song for the past twenty minutes, and I can't parse the insane layering of sounds and time signatures in the rhythm: it's like your elbow joints, neck vertebrae, wrists, abdominal muscles, pelvis, knees and ankles are all having a conversation with each other as you're walking down the street.

But the coolest thing in this song, I think, is the way it blends the easy lushness of the white '70s with the do-right funk of black '70s and then adds something that's truly off the wall: a way for a white man to enter into a black-man sexual persona. Listen to "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" really closely: there's a high-note spike of the strings that's then echoed and given organic oomph by Jacko's high-pitched squeal, which still – 30 years later – has no word to describe it accurately.

Picture it this way: you're walking down the street (joints talking to themselves as mentioned above), or skating at the roller disco, or doing your white-man overbite thing on the dance floor, feeling louche and loose, and then suddenly EEOOH! My crotch is saying something. It wants to be heard. It says FUCK! yeah no goback got to keep it cool, got to keep it real, got to keep it together, EEOOH! DAYum, I want some –

Don't stop 'til you get enough.

It's pretty hard to keep that matrix of ease and tension together in one persona. It's a high-wire act. Thanks for the thriller night that we call a weird and singular life.

Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir," with stunning animation

2009-06-11T12:08:00.000-07:00

kashmir from Steve Scott on Vimeo.

Stephen Fry wrote a letter to himself when he was 16. He replies to himself, 35 years later.

2009-05-01T06:58:00.001-07:00

"I am perhaps happier now than I have ever been and yet I cannot but recognise that I would trade all that I am to be you, the eternally unhappy, nervous, wild, wondering and despairing 16-year-old Stephen: angry, angst-ridden and awkward but alive. Because you know how to feel, and knowing how to feel is more important than how you feel. Deadness of soul is the only unpardonable crime, and if there is one thing happiness can do it is mask deadness of soul."

Read more.

"Lessons Learned" by Matt & Kim

2009-05-01T06:37:00.000-07:00

I'm going to propose this video as a thing of true greatness. And if you don't agree with me, at least you get to see Kim's ass, which is pretty hot.

...a technician or two.

2009-04-10T14:38:00.000-07:00

Enter, stage left: two technicians, MACOLM and JOSÉ.

MALCOLM: Damn, man, your ride be all busted up!

––I know. And to think I paid all that rent for a prime space in a guarded executive parking garage in the Financial District. How was I to know a bunch of traders hung out in here, drinking Pátron, bashing away with baseball bats?

JOSÉ: I hear they stole 'em from the skyboxes at Yankee Stadium.

MALCOLM (laughing): You kill me, man. You really do. A jalopy with a hood ornament from a Rolls. What are you frontin', man?

Attacked by police, 47-year-old newspaper salesman drops dead at G-20 Protests

2009-04-07T15:53:00.000-07:00

The Guardian has the video. He's balding, potbellied and Caucasian, shambling home after a day's work with his hands in his pockets. The cop battalion follows from behind, with dogs virtually on the back of his shins. One cop tolchuks him in the leg with a nightstick, he goes down. They wrastle him to sitting, he's disoriented. They let him go; he has a heart attack very shortly thereafter.

As bad and frightening as this is, there's something in me that understands the deranged actions of the police. They thought he was an agitator. They read his body language as shifty, anti-social (in that Orwellian phrase applied liberally by the British government these days). Hands in pockets – with what? knife? pistols? – keeping his head down, trying to remain unnoticed.

But the police reading was dead wrong in every part. There's something extremely vicious in this; and the British people are not going to have any of it any more. If he were brown-skinned, oh sure, remain calm and stiff upper lip. But when the white British Evening Standard-, Daily Mail- and Sun-reading, conservative working class gets fucked, you can be sure there'll be some national soul-searching.

Royksopp's "Happy Up Here"

2009-03-03T08:51:00.000-08:00

Total pop electronic goodness, and a grooving video with Space Invaders. This is going to be huge.

Happy Up Here from Röyksopp on Vimeo.

Alpha

2009-01-18T09:09:00.001-08:00

It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought,
laying down her brush in extreme fatigue,
I have had my vision.
- Virginia Woolf

Is this the end? No, just the beginning.

The Theatre

2009-01-17T04:05:00.000-08:00

The Blogger's Lament,
a Tragicomedic Promotion in One Act
by David Schneider

DRAMATIS PERSONAE:
FASCINATED READER (FR): i.e., you
@: The Author, such as he is
Little Marketing Devil (LMD): a miniature, conniving n'er-do-well
EDUCATION (Eddy, for short): A beautiful, seductive woman
POP-UP AD: The most annoying fucking thing the Web ever gave misbegotten birth to

The curtain rises. There’s a tall, Googly FASCINATED READER with a wonderfearful look in his eyes and tattered clothes, looking like he’s just climbed up Mt. Fuji, which, in a sense, he has. @ is dressed in a head-to-toe opaque black bodystocking.

FASCINATED READER: Hey, hey, wait a minute.

@: Ex-cuuUSE me, I was in the middle of a thought here, and it was a really important one too, like really important.

FR: You said there were all of these amazing free webapps. I want one!

@: Seriously now, e-excuse me. Would you excuse me for a moment? I’ll be right back. Exit stage left.

LITTLE MARKETING DEVIL enters stage right, a midget dressed as a cocky sonofabitch.

LMD, unctuously: Howwwww can I be of serrrrrvice?

FR: Those amazing free webapps. I want ‘em. Where are they? Gimme gimme gimme, I’m going pro, I’m going solo, and I need these tools. I mean, they never taught me in school how to invest or anything. And I don’t know anything about social marketing… None of my friends are really into this stuff.

LMD: Well-- wish I could help you, laddie, but they’re not paying me to advertise for them, and I’m broke. I’ve been giving away free advice all over the place and getting pennies for it. If you want the play, you’ve got to pay.

From offstage, the thin, echoing voice of @: Hey, and what happens to my credibility as a writer?

LMD hissing from the corner of his mouth, in stage whisper: Psst! Buttinsky! You already like the product, remember? I’m trying to be Monty Fucking Hall here, and you’re throwing the classical ethics book at me?! I can’t even fucking read Greek.

LMD stomps to Stage Left, pulls @ from the flies, smacks him about the face a few times and facepalms him, all while shouting: Why. do. you. have. to. think. so far intothefutchaar?? Looks at him with heroin-crazed eyes: I need money NOW, goddamnit!

@ whimpers and crumples down LMD’s leg and fastens himself there.

@ whimpers pathetically: But thinking into the future is what I do!

LMD starts dragging @ to and fro across the stage, shouting: OFF! OFF! General mayhem gradually crescendos –

FR: I’m waiting…
I said I’m waiting…

EDUCATION, coming onstage, singing sweetly: Basecamp… Basecamp…

FR (to EDUCATION): Ugh, no. Are you kidding me? It’s old, it’s ugly, it’s complicated, it looks like work, it just looks like you’re going into the drab office in the Chemical Brothers’ video for “Golden Path”… Just, no. I don’t need any more headaches AND THESE TWO ARE GIVING ME ONE ARRGH!

FR (to EDUCATION): Have you even used Basecamp?

EDUCATION, putting her head down to her hands and sobbing: No! We don’t even have decent computers at my school! (sniff. She buckles. FR comes over and embraces her.)

All this while, LMD has been dragging @ around the stage, with the occasional bark of: OFF! OFF! “Yakety Sax” starts playing as the mayhem speeds up, and as FR commiserates with EDUCATION on the state of the nation’s school system, and LMD is dragging @ about the floor, punctuated with OFF! OFF!, “Don’t leave me!” and bawling and sniffling.

POP-UP AD in Monty Python voice: And now, since Oscar was off having his portrait done, and we needed a bit of wildness, here’s a completely gratuitous video of Kim Wilde:

Immediately after video ends, illumination back on actors, frozen in place from point of video commence. A pause of incomprehensibility.

LMD: Well that was…

@: Gratuitous. And I’m not even sure all that good.

FR: Waiting…. waiting…

LMD: Dude, she’s hot. I’d do her.

@: You like the ‘80s big-hair girls, don’t you? You would, wouldn’t you.

FR: Waiting, waiting…

EDUCATION: Like for Godot?

LMD: Okay, so what kind of chicks are you into?

@: Godot is dead.

FR: Waiting, waiting…

EDUCATION: Nietzsche!

LMD: God bless you.

@: Mr. Rosewater.

FR: Waiting, waiting…

EDUCATION: Like in “Casablanca”?

@: I like the classic type, like Ingrid Bergman.

FR: Waiting, waiting…

LMD: She’s dead. Unless you’re into that sort of thing (looks him up and down) No, you’re really not, are you – Isabella Rossellini’s your next best.

FR: Waiting, waiting…

EDUCATION (triumphantly): LIKE WINDOWS!!

FR, LMD, @, and EDUCATION in unison: YES!

They all clasp arms in sudden deep sympathy. They break apart, noticeably more relaxed.

LMD, looking wistful: Yeah, Isabella’s pretty hot. Even at her age.

FR (clearly warming to the subject): She was awesome in “Blue Velvet,” right? When she lies on the sofa, so lush, so dirty, and says, so pitifully, “Beat me… Beat me…”

LMD and @ in unison: Dude.

LMD: Too much information, capish? Tee Em Eye, dude, Tee Em Eye.

Meanwhile we see EDUCATION sitting over to the side, rubbing her legs together slowly, smoking a cigarette and biting half a lip.

FR (snapping out of S&M fantasy, voice curdling with acid): I asked you a question, you bastard. Not giving me the answer in a pleasant and obsequious tone designed to invite me into your community is, you know, just bad Netiquette.

@: And I told you at the beginning of this conversation, I was working on something! I’m sick of this, I tell you! just sick of it.

LMD: Must be a touch of the viral marketing. I hear there’s a lot of it going round.

Beat. The light dawns.

FR, LMD, and @ are standing in a triangle formation. There’s a pause – then all three whip out pistols from their holsters and hold them, both hands, at each others’ cheeks.

LMD: Easy now, fellas. No reason to get excited –

EDUCATION, walking over: …said the Joker to the Thief. Yeah, yeah, we’re all Cylons, get over it. C-can I just interject something here?

LMD: Not unless it’s my dick between your sweet cheeks, LibraryThing.

FR, shaking with rage: It’s a GOD-DAMNED Mexican standoff in here--

EDUCATION, tousling FR’s hair and speaking to him in a wubby bubby voice: That’s not very politically correct, now, is it, Face? No it’s not, no it’s no-ot!

FR (a sheet of ice about to crack): So what is the, ahem, “politically” “correct” term here, my sweet, my darling, my own?

EDUCATION (blushing): Oh, well, um, y’see I’m not really sure, you know? And (she yanks her thumb hitchhikingly) – I got some slang dictionaries lying around, you know. I-I can ch-check, you know, but it’s like, in the other room – or, um, page, or – what is this thing, anyway? I was sure I put a Book Mark here somewhere, (starts rummaging through files, eyeglasses on top of head) – oh, I just knew it was here somewhere…

FR: Hit the road, Eddy.

EDUCATION: Wh-whaddya mean, Face?

Fascinated Reader stands silently.

LMD: Look, lady, lemme gather up your sibylline leaves for you. Lemme set it straight. If a man really, really loves you – I mean really loves you – he might mooch your carpet. But no self-respecting man is going to mooch on your books if he don’t think you got it together. All this dust around you, you be starting to look like Pig-Pen! And let’s face it, you got some weight to carry around. And that expensive gym membership too. Let’s face it, sweetheart, there are a hundred more just like you, and they’re cheaper dates, too.

EDDY: Face! Oh, Face, how can you do this to me? I would have done anything for you. I would have let you discipline me – I’m so unruly, so untidy, so useless, I can’t pay rent – make me into the woman you desire. Spank me, beat me, tell me I’m a shitty whore with painted features concealing the Pox and the Consumption. Cum on my face, make me gag on your cock, make me suck dicks, mash my face into another poor cunt’s... Do it, Face, do it. Make me your bitch. I’ll do anything for money but – no! – fuck them! (she sobs) Fuck them. Fuck them and their whispers, Face – they whisper that I’m lousy at intercourse, make a middling display at dinner parties, and they talk openly that I’m the cause of the fall of the entire city.

@: I’m so disappointed in you, Eddy.

EDDY, stricken and defeated: Oh. There’s this thing I remembered – "all the world’s a stage," umm… "When we shuffle off this mortal coil…" "time upon the boards…" Oh, fuckinafuckanin...

(Gathering herself.) Right. I'm gonna do what any self-respecting girl would have done a long time ago. I'm gonna take me a nice hot bath, put on my sexiest Little Black Dress, go to a shitty nightclub where they play Ace of Base, get completely drunk, take home a hot stud with three books in his bookshelf, two of which are The Idiot's Guide to Marketing and Dog Care: A Primer, and fuck the shit out of him. Reverse Cowgirl, like Jenna teaches you in How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. (Spins on her heels.) That'll show all of you that I'm NOT to be trifled with. Exit, stage left.

FR: Bitch.
@: Bitch.
LMD, after a long pause: Bitch. Pause. Hey, fellas, um, what say we put down these phallic substitutes before someone gets deleted? Besides, I, um, need to go to the bathroom.

EDDY, from afar: Singin' in the BATHtub, yah-dah-dee-doo...

They withdraw their guns. In unison: Okay, fine, whatever.

They sit down at the kitchen table in a huff. Distribute cigs all around.

LMD: Certainly doesn't look like we can talk about that thing of yours, @, at least not here, after all that's happened. Too many people watching. Wouldn't look good.

@: Not a chance.

FR (to @): So, any offers?

@, glumly: No.

FR: Any leads?

@: Not really. Found anything interesting to read?

FR: Yeah, kinda, but nothing nearly as interesting as what you write.

EDDY, from afar, singing: I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair...

LMD pricks his ears, interest piqued, and slooowly gets up, and meanderingly wanders in the direction of the music.

@: Thanks, but if I don't have any money, I can't eat. And if I can't eat, I can't write. And if I'm working, I can't write like this. I just don't know what I'm going to do.

FR: Leave New York.

@: But then I won't be able to hang out with you guys. And you're the most interesting people I know.

EDDY, from afar, sings:

LMD goes over to stage left and begins masturbating furiously. @ and FR continue talking, sotto voce, about their dilemma. About five seconds later,

LMD: Uhh, urr, urghgh.

LMD agitatedly zips up and walks back over to the kitchen table.

@, disgustedly: So, did you get your precious release from that marketing urge?

LMD: Um, uh, kinda. Bitch was too easy. Anybody got a Kleenex? (with acid) Did you get your precious release from your writerly urge?

@: Um, not really.

FR: So, what are you guys doing for the rest of the afternoon?

@: I'm going to eat dog food. And not throw up.

LMD: I'm gonna eat dog food.

FR: I'm gonna eat dog food.

We hear a plug being popped and water gurgling. EDDY is circling the drain. Ayee, ayee, ayee, round and around and around we go, where the world's headed, nobody knows.

LMD, FR and @ sing in unison: Ball of confusion, that's what the world is today, hey-hey.

EDDY walks onstage, naked and dripping wet.

EDDY: Well, I'm still a girl with pluck. If you can't beat your opponent, and the money's waved in your face, you do what the boxers do – you take a dive. (She rolls on some hooker fishnets and laces up a pair of fuck-me boots.) Seeya around, boys.

EDDY swan-dives off the stage.

The lights dim and the remaining ensemble sits motionless while the following song is played:

@: So, see you guys at the pub tonight?

Oooowip! An AIM message is received on the computer in the corner.

LMD: Yeah, see you there. LMD and @ stand up and put on their coats.

@ (at FR): You taking off?

FR: Yeah, in a minute. Let me just check this IM.

@ exits stage left, LMD exits stage right, FR stands up and walks over to the computer. Lights fade to black.

Mephistopheles, Marketing Devil: Call for Appointments. Leave a Message.

2009-01-17T01:30:00.000-08:00

Good, good. Welcome. Have a (hot) seat. Now, did you get a good look at that biographical sketch we have hanging in the outer office? That's a lot of tasty information on the author's father. These are the things you can tell just by looking at him.

But because by nature I'm a contrarian, an antinomian, because my political stance – Infernal – is so different from that of his, I've spent much of my time on those electron rails working on what different generations think, and it continually informs my understanding of marketing. We have to dig deeper than those ticky-tacky boxes

you checkmark all over the Web; those are merely symbols. My job is to interpret those symbols, not just to see what people want, but what they will want. Yes, my pretties, I conjure desire from thin air: magic!

The Infinite

2009-01-16T23:57:00.000-08:00

No, he's not really infinite. I know, I know, God controls all, and in His infinite generosity gives Hell to Satan as his own private fiefdom, but in our feudal system, your boss is your boss, not your boss's boss. So I've got to be a brown-noser. Let me tell you, Satan's ass stinks something Godawful, but if you burrow in there really deep, you worm around in his intestines, mess them up, and get vomited out his mouth.

We'll be singing, when we're winning.

TV Dinners

2009-01-16T20:07:00.000-08:00

But then again, isn't it possible that TV has made a dinner of us?

Epigraphs

2009-01-16T18:29:00.000-08:00

He do the police in different voices.

– original title of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

•••

All trials are trials for one's life, just as all sentences are sentences of death; and three times have I been tried. The first time I left the box to be arrested, the second time to be led back to the house of detention, the third time to pass into a prison for two years. Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

– Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

•••

Many an ambitious, long-nurtured growth strategy will be abandoned during this rapidly worsening downturn. Bravely sticking to their original plans may ultimately make heroes of a few bosses, but in most boardrooms caution is the watchword as new schemes are abandoned in favour of defending what is already profitable.

– The Economist, November 25, 2008

•••

Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where's the street-wise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night I toss and turn and dream
of what I need

I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the end of the night
He's gotta be strong
And he's gotta be fast
And he's gotta be fresh from the fight
I need a hero
I'm holding out for a hero 'til the morning light
He's gotta be sure
And it's gotta be soon
And he's gotta be larger than life

– Bonnie Tyler

•••

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' said Alice. 'Oh, you can't help that,' said the cat. 'We're all mad here.'

– Lewis Carroll

The Visualization of All Nouns in the English Language

2009-01-15T18:14:00.001-08:00

A couple of years ago, they said it was going to happen. Now it's here.

Second Life proposes, Real Life Disposes

2009-01-15T17:47:00.001-08:00

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

Smart Power

2009-01-13T12:21:00.001-08:00

WASHINGTON – Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that she intends to revitalize the mission of diplomacy in American foreign policy, calling for a "smart power" strategy in the Middle East and implicitly criticizing the Bush administration for having downgraded the role of arms control.

From the Files of No Duh

2009-01-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Pentagon said on Tuesday that 61 former detainees from its military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, appear to have returned to terrorism since their release from custody.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said 18 former detainees are confirmed and 43 suspected of "returning to the fight."

He said the figures, updated at the end of December, showed a higher rate of recidivism than seen in a previous report showing 37 former detainees as active militants.

He provided no details about the detainees or their countries of origin.

"The overall known terrorist re-engagement rate has increased to 11 percent" from about 7 percent, Morrell said.

The numbers were generated by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency based on fingerprints, photographs and intelligence reports, he said.

President-elect Barack Obama, who takes office on Tuesday, is expected to issue an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, possibly within his first week in office.

About 255 men are still held at the U.S.-run naval base in Cuba, a symbol of aggressive interrogation methods that exposed the United States to allegations of torture.

Washington has cleared 50 of the detainees for release but cannot return them to their home countries because of the risk they would be tortured or persecuted there.

Around 500 others have been freed or transferred to other governments since 2002.

Pentagon officials say scores of detainees still in custody should never be released because of the potential danger they pose to U.S. interests.

You reap what you sow. No duh.

Yahoo!

2009-01-13T11:53:00.001-08:00

Yahoo to name Bartz as new CEO: report

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Yahoo Inc plans to name longtime Silicon Valley executive Carol Bartz as its next chief executive, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the situation.

Bartz, the former chief executive of software company Autodesk Inc, would be a stabilizing influence on the troubled Internet company, analysts said. But Yahoo shares fell 2 percent as investors seemed disappointed by the choice.

"I think the market may be a little bit disappointed that Yahoo's not going with someone who isn't a little bit more savvy when it comes to technology and media," said Todd Greenwald, an analyst at Signal Hill.

A Yahoo spokesman declined to comment.

Bartz, 60, was chief executive of Autodesk until 2006. She also has held executive positions at Sun Microsystems Inc and is on the boards of giant technology companies Cisco Systems Inc and Intel Corp.

The offer would end Yahoo's two-month search for a chief executive to succeed co-founder Jerry Yang, who agreed in November to step down as CEO as soon as a replacement could be found.

Evolution

2009-01-13T11:16:00.000-08:00

Super-Predators: Humans Force Rapid Evolution of Animals

Robert Roy Britt
Editorial Director
LiveScience.com robert Roy Britt
editorial Director
livescience.com – Mon Jan 12, 5:17 pm ET

Acting as super-predators, humans are forcing changes to body size and reproductive abilities in some species 300 percent faster than would occur naturally, a new study finds.

Hunting and fishing by individual sportsmen as well as large-scale commercial fishing are also outpacing other human influences, such as pollution, in effects on the animal kingdom. The changes are dramatic and may put the survival of some species in question.

In a review of 34 studies that tracked 29 species across 40 different geographic systems, harvested and hunted populations are on average 20 percent smaller in body size than previous generations, and the age at which they first reproduce is on average 25 percent earlier.

"Harvested organisms are the fastest-changing organisms of their kind in the wild, likely because we take such high proportions of a population and target the largest," said lead researcher Chris Darimont of the University of California, Santa Cruz. "It's an ideal recipe for rapid trait change."

Darimont told LiveScience that while he considers the changes to be evolutionary, some biologists consider them phenotypic and, without evidence of genetic shifts, would not call them evolution.

The study found dramatic change in several fish species and creatures as small as snails and as large as bighorn sheep and caribou.

Dominant force

The results, published online today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, are similar to a host of other scientific conclusions dating back nearly two decades.

In 1990, Douglas Chadwick wrote in National Geographic magazine how trophy hunting - the practice of selecting only the largest beasts to kill -"has caused a decline in the average size of Kodiak Bears [in Alaska] over the years."

By harvesting vast numbers and targeting large, reproductively mature individuals, human predation is quickly reshaping wild populations, leaving smaller individuals to reproduce at ever-earlier ages, Darimont explained.

"The pace of changes we're seeing supercedes by a long shot what we've observed in natural systems, and even in systems that have been rapidly modified by humans in other ways," Darimont said. The study found the changes outpace by 50 percent those brought on by pollution and human introduction of alien species.

"As predators, humans are a dominant evolutionary force, he said.

Others agree the problem is serious. Columbia University biologist Don Melnick recently said trophy hunting is akin to selective breeding and is "highly likely to result in the end of a species."

Surprising ability to change

One surprise: The capacity of creatures to change.

"These changes occur well within our lifetimes," Darimont said. "Commercial hunting and fishing has awoken the latent ability of organisms to change rapidly."

Changes occur in two ways. One is sheer genetics:

Evolution can favor smaller fish able to pass through the mesh of gill nets and survive to reproduce, thereby passing on genes for smaller offspring.

Another change process is called plasticity. Shifts to earlier reproduction, for example, can occur because there is a lot of food and fewer fish to dine on it. The fish eat more and reach maturity sooner.

"Whatever the underlying process, shifts to earlier breeding spell trouble for populations," Darimont said. "Earlier breeders often produce far fewer offspring. If we take so much and reduce their ability to reproduce successfully, we reduce their resilience and ability to recover."

One specific example: the overfished Atlantic cod on the eastern coast of Canada. Less than two decades ago, they began mating at age 6. Now they start at age 5.

Government problem

In some cases, as other studies have found, the problem results from decades of big-game hunting and, more recently, poaching. Some populations of African elephants, for example, have unnatural percentages of tusk-free animals among them now, because hunters and poachers favor the ivory.

But some government rules contribute to the problem.

"Fishing regulations often prescribe the taking of larger fish, and the same often applies to hunting regulations," Darimont said. "Hunters are instructed not to take smaller animals or those with smaller horns. This is counter to patterns of natural predation, and now we're seeing the consequences of this management."

Darimont thinks new policies are in order.

"While wolves might prey on 20 animals, humans prey on hundreds of thousands of species," he points out. "We should be mimicking natural predators, which take far less and target smaller individuals."

Policy shifts may or may not save a species, however.

"It's unknown how quickly the traits can change back, or if they will," Darimont said.

The World's First Global Con (not counting the Iraq War, of course)

2008-12-19T22:47:00.000-08:00

Initially, he tapped local money pulled in from country clubs and charity dinners, where investors sought him out to casually plead with him to manage their savings so they could start reaping the steady, solid returns their envied friends were getting.
Then, he and his promoters set sights on Europe, again framing the investments as memberships in a select club. A Swiss hedge fund manager, Michel Dominicé, still remembers the pitch he got a few years ago from a salesman in Geneva. “He told me the fund was closed, that it was something I couldn’t buy,” Mr. Dominicé said. “But he told me he might have a way to get me in. It was weird.”
Mr. Madoff’s agents next cut a cash-gathering swath through the Persian Gulf, then Southeast Asia. Finally, they were hurtling with undignified speed toward China, with invitations to invest that were more desperate, less exclusive. One Beijing businessman who was approached said it seemed the Madoff funds were being pitched “to anyone who would listen.”
The juggernaut began to sputter this fall as investors, rattled by the financial crisis and reaching for cash, started taking money out faster than Mr. Madoff could bring fresh cash in the door. He was arrested on Dec. 11 at his Manhattan apartment and charged with securities fraud, turned in the night before by his sons after he told them his entire business was “a giant Ponzi scheme.”

Fifty billion dollars. I've often said that the United States – once, a land of Inventors – has become a nation of salesmen. Well, Madoff has just sold the world's largest lemon. People are sour-suckin' all over this sphere here. How the world's going to change, I'm not quite sure yet – but it will change, and change because of him. He sold a lot of Jewish investors down the road. Was he campaigning for Hitler-hood? Because, sheesh, there are a few things we Jews get pissed off about. Exterminating us, yah, that'd be #1. Taking our land, that's a big #2. Because it's a tiny little plot. When you ain't got much, you're pretty determined to keep what'cha got. But damn, man – even if it is only #3, even if it gets the Bronze Medal in What Jews Don't Like – stealing our money, and fucking our investments –

It just ain't kosher.

No comedic ending for this merchant of Venice. No, not this time. But no pound of flesh. Olivier's scream was waaaaay too pathetic for us to get into that shit any more. First, I'd like public stockades in Times Square. We should have a security cordon around it so Madoff doesn't actually get shot, but provides for free-range pelting with tomatoes and bricks. Then all of Madoff's investors should take all of Madoff's money, all of his property – his home in the Hamptons, his home in France, and that pile on 64th St. – and form a real estate trust, with a board of directors, among them. They shall have this stipulation: for the first year, rooms in these properties are available at the rate of $50 a night. You can only stay at these "hotels" if you have recently been laid off. After that, they can rent these apartments to anyone who is not, nor ever was, nor ever will be, a member of the financial services industry.

We need poets to guide our justice, for, sooth, they are the unacknowledged legislators of humankind. Absolutement.

A succinct analysis of the financial crisis.

2008-12-19T22:40:00.000-08:00

I'm not saying that thievery is cool...

2008-12-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

I'm just saying: couldn't have happened to a better person.

Essential Reading: The Katrina Lynchings

2008-12-19T09:24:00.000-08:00

In Algiers Point, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, whites formed a heavily-armed militia and shot black people. Read it and get really angry, now.

Musical Arguments

2008-12-14T14:47:00.000-08:00

In this first clip, Sid Caesar's variety show takes on Beethoven's Fifth as a marital spat. Comedy unlimited.

Next, an update: a single performer acts out Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie having it out on a rendition of "Leap Frog."

Billy Ripken's Fuck Face

2008-12-13T08:38:00.000-08:00

If you're a sports nut, you probably already know about this infamous baseball trading card. I am not a sports nut, and this audacious surprise has me ROTFLing all over the god-damned place.

Twenty years after the grand gaffe, Ripken has revealed to a CNBC reporter what the fuck-face happened:

"I got a dozen bats in front of my locker during the 1988 season. I pulled the bats out, model R161, and noticed--because of the grain patterns--that they were too heavy. But I decided I'd use one of them, at the very least, for my batting practice bat."

"Now I had to write something on the bat. At Memorial Stadium, the bat room was not too close to the clubhouse, so I wanted to write something that I could find immediately if I looked up and it was 4:44 and I had to get out there on the field a minute later and not be late. There were five big grocery carts full of bats in there and if I wrote my number 3, it could be too confusing. So I wrote 'F--k' Face on it."

"After the season was over, in early January, I got a call from our PR guy Rick Vaughn. He said, 'Billy, we have a problem.' And he told me what was written on the bat and I couldn't believe it. I went to a store and saw the card and it all came back to me. We were in Fenway Park and I had just taken my first round of BP. I threw my bat to the third base side and strolled around the bases. When I was coming back, right before I got up to hit again, I remember a guy tapping me on the shoulder asking if he could take my picture. Never once did I think about it. I posed for the shot and he took it."

The full story is here.

DJ Bedlam jams on this Friday night

2008-12-12T15:42:00.001-08:00

iGoogle You: The Torch Song Goes Digital

2008-12-12T15:22:00.000-08:00

sung by Amanda Palmer at NYC's SpiegelTent:

Private Eyes (clap, clap!) They're watching you!

2008-12-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

Eyes are the windows to the soul – the poets tell us – so it's essential that we operate as soullessly as possible, day after day, as we make our way to our soul-sucking jobs on public transport. WOE BETIDE he or she who would DARE gaze into the forlorn orbs of a wage slave on the subway. This fantastic flash game is an exceptional primer to etiquette on the Stockholm Metro. Using the Up-Down-Left-Right keys, pivot your gaze and gain points by scoping out the pattern of your fellow-traveler's tie, or the make of his cellphone, or the cool-factor of his MP3 player, learning as much as you can about your friends, the strangers, before they return your stare in a flash of red-faced embarrassment and rage.

Van Gogh's Counter Strike

2008-12-11T10:12:00.000-08:00

The convergence approaches. Soon we'll understand art as the totalizing vision of the world as apprehended by an individual, highly attuned consciousness. And we'll all participate.

This is MY RADIO

2008-12-10T10:24:00.001-08:00

How to Talk to Girls

2008-12-02T17:30:00.000-08:00

Well smack me soundly and call me Shirley. A nine-year-old boy, a fourth-grader from Castle Rock, Colorado, has written a dating guide: How to Talk to Girls. And, you know, it's pretty good from what I've been reading in The New York Post:

Stop showing off. Don't compliment too much so you don't look desperate. Avoid girls that go to excessive lengths to look pretty. I gotta give the kid credit – two decades of abject dating misery would have been out the frickin' window for me, and I would have gotten an awful lot more pint-sized play before meeting the woman of my dreams.

But to be honest, I'm not nearly as impressed with his pre-teen guidance as I am with his business strategy. He first sold the book as a $3 pamphlet at his school book fair. Three dollars is nothing, but that's the point: there's hardly a reason not to buy it. What with materials, cover design, distribution and marketing costs, a new hardcover at Barnes & Noble does not retail for less than $25. Amazon's slightly cheaper, of course, but the costs alone frequently prevent me from trying out a book I'd otherwise buy. I stand in stores angst-ridden and paranoid, parsing back blurbs and first chapters with dread, weighing and debating whether or not my investment will pay off.

Kid's got class and savvy. I hope his fame won't cause him to violate his girl-getting principles.

Heartbroken

2008-12-02T16:20:00.000-08:00

Love Saves the Day is closing in January.

Of all the businesses failed or falling in Gotham, of all the changes wrought by gentrification modernization and rent-escalation, this is the one that hurts the most for me. It's one of the places that I truly embrace, that is the essence of what New York means to me. Founded in 1966, it moved in 1983 to the corner of 2nd Avenue and E. 7th Street in the East Village, just in time to serve as a location in "Desperately Seeking Susan" – it's where Madonna sells her jacket and buys her shoes, as I can recall. And its awning, with LOVE SAVES THE DAY in day-glo '60s bubble-letters beaming out, makes me happy, gives me hope, even in the most downcast of winter nights and the brutal psychic tolchuks that Manhattan can inflict upon you day after day. In wanderings, I frequently sidetrack my way over to 2nd Avenue just so I can walk down, break the borderland of 14th Street, and have New York tell me that no matter what's going wrong

LOVE SAVES THE DAY.

There is no genre for this store. It is sui-generis and when it is gone, nothing will precisely replace it. Future historians will label it "bric-a-brac" or "novelty" or "nostalgia" but it is all of this and more. I nursed a secret desire to be their stockboy so I could ledger in the pop plastic figurines collected from kids of three generations – all the characters of The Simpsons, Star Wars, Barbie, My Little Pony – the hats and masks and vintage jackets and flannel shirts and crenoline '50s ballgowns and Garbage Pail Kids trading cards and comic books. They have the big plastic X-Wing Fighter I had as a kid, as well as the smaller die-cast Millennium Falcon and TIE Fighter and dozens of the hottest Hot Wheels. On a circular table they display at least two Playboy magazines from every year from 1966 to 1988. It is an epic time capsule of American pop culture, a living, bartering, retail museum that will be dispersed into fragments and no one will ever again walk into a store and see, at one crazy pell-mell glance, the kaleidoscopic colors of American pop-culture history.

It is a store that exhilarated me, enlightened me, and gave me, through what I bought, parts of myself that I had lost to the greyness of adulthood. I am heartbroken, heartbroken, and I would do whatever I could to save the love, but it looks as though I can't.

George Carlin on Education and Businesses

2008-12-02T12:32:00.000-08:00

This is a famous rant. You've probably seen it. And today we know, through the financial crisis, that it's all true –

– with one exception. Carlin did not anticipate the rise of Net 2.0 – and the breakdown, the complete and utter breakdown of the large machines as people learned how to research and educate themselves. We are living through the greatest reorganization of ideas since the 1960s. It will be slow to reveal itself, but the individual will gain as the large corporation loses power. Remember who won the planet when the dinosaurs died. Oh, yes: they were warm-blooded creatures who suckled their young. We won over the lizards, those with the reptilian brains. And we will again.

It will Flame Out, like Shining from Shook Foil; Like Ooze of Oil Crushed

2008-11-29T11:48:00.000-08:00

I cannot think of a better symbol of the Bush years than a Wal-Mart worker being trampled by a crazed mob trying to buy Christmas presents. His name is Jdi Mytai D'Amour, 34, of Queens, and let us remember him. Perhaps in a century's time we can honor him with a National Memorial Day – honoring the sacrifice he made in the name of a more civil, less rapacious United States of America.

Rock on!

2008-11-29T10:12:00.000-08:00

Marnie Stern. Never heard of her until three minutes ago.

Smart Commentary on the Mumbai Terrorism

2008-11-28T17:56:00.000-08:00

In England, if you're politically liberal, you tend to consume the London Telegraph with boredom, repressed frustration and a few grains of salt. The paper's stance is starchly conservative, occasionally bordering on reactionary. You read it mainly to understand the mind of the opposition, but then come to understand that the mind of the opposition, being conservative, doesn't like to change very much; its take is very predictable.

That's why I was so astonished to find this remarkably astute analysis of the terrorism in India by Charles Moore. It expands upon some of the themes I tried to address in previous posts, but more directly and keenly. Moore understands symbolism. Symbolism is very important to the conflict we face, and Americans (the government, the media and the people) are not very good at interpreting it. The problem stems, in part, from our lack of history – i.e, in the grand scope of the world's nations – and the lack of a polyvalent, narrative mythology.

The English have these in droves. And they also are far enough removed from their colonial empire – fostered and preserved by a deep cultural and national mythology – to interrogate it, by deep study of their own written words. That's the study of literature, and the English are very, very good at it.

The first thing Moore does is to wield a cynical media trope openly. "In the newsrooms of our national papers," he writes, "there is a phrase about a story whose interest for the readers needs to be clearer. 'Put a Union Jack on it,' we say: people are more likely to read it if it has a British angle."

Not a lot of writers have the balls to do this. The event has given Moore absolute license. But then he surprises us still further. "The media did indeed seek out British victims. But at a deeper level, they have failed to put the 'Union Jack' on the story. They do not consider how these horrors relate to the British past, and the British future."

All of this is a truly fascinating maneuver, because the Union Jack has always been a particularly equivocal symbol for the British. The racist British National Party widely adopted it as a symbol, and as a result you will not see it flying from the eves of houses on Guy Fawkes' Day. For the British liberal, the flag is often a symbol of white royalist imperial hegemony: to "put the Union Jack on it" – the very phrase – covers the identity and reality of the thing-to-be-seen with the colors of empire.

But this is a wholly different kind of event. It is not just a story about India, it's a story about Britons in India. And that means it's about the intertwined histories of Britain and India.

I think Moore came to this idea, and this article, by way of an incident he interestingly buries in a paragraph about halfway down the piece:

On Friday, I spoke to a friend lying on the floor 100 yards from Nariman House, where the rabbi and his wife were being held. He said he thought it was wrong to say the attackers were targeting foreigners alone: they were targeting all connections between foreigners and Indians.

This, I think, led him to the remarkable, so-obvious-it's-forgotten observation that

Perhaps out of political correctness, most media outlets call the city in question Mumbai. It was renamed thus in the 1990s by Hindu nationalists anxious to efface British links. But a great many Indians including, I notice, the army chief interviewed on Thursday, still call it Bombay.

The railway station where the attacks began is called Victoria Terminal. The Gateway to India, outside the Taj, was built by George V. The Taj itself was created as a palatial rebuke to the racist English luxury hotel, The Apollo. Moore writes:

One must assume that attacking where they did, the terrorists knew what they were doing. They were striking at a place that symbolises former British power and new Indian pride. It most vividly represents the link, made chiefly by trade, between India and the world.

It's really as simple as this:

Islamists believe that India is a Muslim land, which was stolen from them. If they had their way, the world's largest democracy would come under the rule of Sharia. The Gateway to India would clang shut.

Read Moore's analysis, then read Anne Applebaum's in Slate. Applebaum spends 700 words or so flapping around, asking "Who are these guys? What's their agenda?" Oh, Anne, branch out a little. You can't see the forest.

Now THAT's what I call being creative with credit.

2008-11-28T16:48:00.000-08:00

A hundred artists were commissioned by Visa and a Japanese bank to create designs for credit cards. This is what they came up with. Not only is the art fantastic; the entire website is ingeniously and beautifully designed. We will rise, we will rise, we will rise with art.

Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post

2008-11-27T12:02:00.000-08:00

As we celebrate Thanksgiving and enter the holiday season, it feels as if our nation is at a cusp, a brink, a verge. It's true that if things get much more "interesting," we might have a collective nervous breakdown. But along with the anxiety, there's also a sense of rare opportunity -- a chance to emerge better than we were economically, politically and socially.

Star Trek versus Star Wars

2008-11-27T11:55:00.000-08:00

Running time 5m 36s of a magnificent dramatic arc. The match-up you were always waiting for.

More on the Mumbai Terror Attacks

2008-11-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

After witnessing our own massive terror attack, and the long tragic history of our government and media over the last eight years, and our extrication from the clutches of our own misguided propaganda (as proven by Obama's election), it is fascinating and instructive to critique this new event – from halfway around the world – just as most of the world looked upon the United States in the wake of 9/11.

Witness: a substantial attack upon the world's largest democracy – and another former British colony – in its commercial capital. Witness also the vast range of correspondences noted regarding the significance of September 11 as a date. (Additionally I just learned, after consulting Wikipedia, that on September 11, 1609, Henry Hudson discovered Manhattan island; on September 11, 1891, the Jewish Colonization Association was established by Baron Maurice de Hirsch; the first Jewish settlement was founded in Israel in 1921; the British Mandate of Palestine begins in the next year; and in 1941, ground is broken for the construction of the Pentagon – all on the same fateful date.)

Is it merely a coincidence that the Constitution of India was adopted on September 26, 1949?

I watched most of the Mumbai crisis last night via live streaming feed from New Delhi TV (NDTV) 24x7 Live channel. Very CNN-like intros with an Indian sitar-flanged "news-beat"; the anchor was continually trying to reassure the public, stating (erroneously) three times over that the fires and the violence and the crisis in the Taj were concluded. He was instantly rebuffed, on each of the three occasions, by the reporter on the scene.

Since India adores American culture, and often tries to emulate it with its own Sub-Continental inflection, I wanted to see how India's media would portray this event. I was disturbed. Because I'd seen it before. This morning, the news "packaging" had begun – the bite-sized narrative construction from the raw copy of the night. An orchestral score suddenly surrounded the video clips and narration, with patriotic musical swells in the emotional spectrum exactly halfway between Brian Williams' NBC News and the martial tones of FOX. The dead police officers are currently in the process of media canonization.

Despite the apparent accuracy of my earlier speculations – the terrorists seem to have arrived at Mumbai on a boat from Karachi, Pakistan – the question of "Al-Qaeda involvement" is being argued back and forth, and each argument has a political and geopolitical subtext. This very interesting analysis in the New York Times notes that

with relations long strained between India and Pakistan, particularly over the disputed territory of Kashmir, suspicions turned toward Al Qauda, or Pakistani militant backing. The Indian security official said the attackers likely had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. On Thursday, the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India also blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in December 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.

India's Prime Minister had previously suspected "external linkages." The RAND analyst quoted by the Times, however, insists that the economic disadvantages of Indian Muslims have led them to become radicalized. I consider her views on South Asian religious and ethnic politics rather skeptically when she blindly adopts the phrase "You cannot put lipstick on this pig." The charges that Obama meant to insult Palin with this phrase were outrageous political hokery; but when you use an animal proscribed by Muslims to describe Muslims, you're committing an act of verbal violence that underscores your lack of sensitivity and understanding of the region and its peoples.

Personally, I think the debate between "Al-Qaeda influenced" and "homegrown terrorism" is unsophisticated and unhelpful. In the most recent strategic analyses, Al-Qaeda is described as having lost market share. The brand name is anathema; dispersed from their manufacturing centers, they've acquired feeble-minded salesmen in Iraq, and consequently they've killed off too many of their potential customers. Their public-relations wing is hopelessly misguided, as the Huffington Post points out: Ayman al-Zawahiri is now complaining that the international press is unfairly pro-Obama, that it "confused" the meaning of al-Zawahiri's description of Obama as a "house Negro." As Richard Clarke says, within the same article,

By returning to American values the world admires, Obama sets al Qaeda back enormously in the battle of ideas, the ideological struggle which determines whether al Qaeda will continue to have significant support in the Islamic world."

So just as America returns to its own myths and ideals on Thanksgiving, Islamic terrorists return to the founding philosophy that once made them "great," attacking the soft targets of economic players and symbols of Western democratic capitalism. Al-Qaeda is in receivership; these fucktards in Mumbai have outsourced a start-up.

On the Mumbai Terror Attacks

2008-11-26T14:39:00.000-08:00

The Washington Post comments:

Television news footage from the scene of the one of Wednesday's attacks showed gunmen opening fire on a crowd from a passing police van that they had apparently commandeered. The incident suggested that the attacks were part of a well-planned operation that involved tactics not previously seen in India.

A quick look at Google will confirm that the "Deccan Mujihadeen" simply didn't exist, at least to anyone's available knowledge, before today. Looking at all the carnage, the synchronicity and the scale, and its targets – British and American – leads to a single primary conclusion. Al Qaeda has indeed advanced pretty thoroughly into the Pakistani underground, and this attack bears all the hallmarks of Al Qaeda strategic planning. The U.S. has attacked within Pakistan (and on this I have no opinion), so this appears to be the natural retaliatory strike.

Update 6:34pm: The Times of London reports that Western intelligence services had been anticipating an Al Qaeda spectacular in the "interregnum" period before Obama takes office:

The multiple attacks on Westerners in Bombay tonight showed all the signs of an al-Qaeda strategy — picking on vulnerable Western “soft targets” but not in a country where there would be maximum security. The bombing of Western targets in Bali in 2002 when al-Qaeda-linked terrorists planted bombs in tourist-favoured restaurants and nightclubs was another example where the terror group switched its resources to achieve maximum impact.

P.S. Thanks to Metafilter, which was one of the first sources (I read) to clue in to the Mumbai Twitter feed as being a primary source of information way out in front of the press.

Europe's cultural heritage: online (almost)

2008-11-21T15:10:00.000-08:00

You know, failure has its rewards. We in the U.S. might never had known of Europeana, but for this New York Times article on its failure – due to overwhelming European demand.

Associated with the European Union, Europeana's website is a digital archive of over two million artworks and documents constituting prize artifacts of Europe's cultural heritage. Manuscripts of Don Quixote or Ulysses? Much of the holdings of Europe's art museums? Yep, it's all there.

Do you know what this means?

It means we're all rich.

Mars. Has. Glaciers.

2008-11-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

You read that right. Mars has glaciers. At the equator, buried under about 30 feet of rock. The poor scientists in this article are yammering on about being able to confirm climatic history from core samples. I think that misses the point. You bring a crew with a drill rig out there, send a hole 30 feet down, and suddenly you have an unlimited supply of WATER. ON. MARS.

The Kids are Alright

2008-11-19T05:10:00.000-08:00

A phone call, a star-fall, it joins all – synchronicity. Here's a bit of heroism in the escape from the prison of society. A must-watch. Just remember, if your mouth's open too long, that's when the flies get in.

He's The Man

2008-11-13T20:32:00.000-08:00

See, I'm just not sure how to feel about this next clip. I'm not too keen on giving Wall Street much credit these days – hell, they certainly aren't giving me any. But let us step back from these troubled times, and travel back to the halcyon days of 2003, when Wall Street was still in shock and awe from 9/11, and an army of pinstriped soldiers had come to finance our wars and leverage us to victory. There, along the narrow crooked streets of Lower Manhattan, in the shadow of no towers, a powerful race trained to become übermenschen, Supermen, Masters of the Universe. Could they do it? Could they truly finance two wars while lowering taxes and enriching themselves to Croësian levels? The question spun in the air, like a basketball on the fingertip of a GlobeTrotter, until one man stepped forth and said Yes We Can.

That man was John Rogers, founder and CEO of Ariel Mutual Investments, who beat Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one.

Yes, really. This ain't no camera trickery or CGI, folks.

Mr. Rogers, my hat off to you. (Could you put some change in it?) Your investments are down over 25% for the year, but seriously, props dude. It's five years later. You still that spry? I think Obama can deliver that smackdown.

Just in case you missed that lesson about Chaos Theory.

2008-11-13T11:12:00.000-08:00

Essentially, Chaos is what happens when you extrapolate randomness (i.e., an uncalculable number of variables) from an initial equation. It results in organic growth and self-similar constructs: think of a tree branching from its trunk, smoke spiraling from a cigarette tip, and all aspects of fluid dynamics. And then there's this:

Mark Miller, a doctoral student at Brandeis University, is researching how particular types of neurons in the brain are connected to one another. By staining thin slices of a mouse's brain, he can identify the connections visually. The image on the left shows three neuron cells on the left (two red and one yellow) and their connections.

An international group of astrophysicists used a computer simulation last year to recreate how the universe grew and evolved. The simulation image (right) is a snapshot of the present universe that features a large cluster of galaxies (bright yellow) surrounded by thousands of stars, galaxies and dark matter (web).

One is only micrometers wide. The other is billions of light-years across.

You might want to read more. I recommend Chaos: Making a New Science by Stephen Gleick.

Hitler's Downfall Hits Home(s)

2008-11-13T10:41:00.000-08:00

One of the great adventures in parody art in our time has been the "Downfall" meme, in which brilliantly comedic subtitles are inserted into the classic climactic scene in Der Führer's bunker. Today, I can announce that the pranksters have doubled down. Here's the Downfall of the housing bubble:

I have a feeling some viewers might be a little disturbed by a flash of recognition. (Thanks, Wreck & Salvage.)

Return to Art

2008-11-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

Everybody knows that the American airline industry is in terrible shape. The security procedures alone put me off flying – that moment of terror, when I'm unsure if I've put my house keys back in my pocket after running them through the metal detector, is enough to keep me at home looking at the world through a two-dimensional window.

Enter the new art. That which creates illusion. Suspends disbelief. Alters perspectives and transforms perceptions.

Businesses die when they've lost their artistry. United Airlines wants to live. Watch Sea Orchestra, which is luring me back to United Airlines even after that terrible day when they delayed my flight for six hours before cancelling it. Then watch the making of Sea Orchestra. (Thanks, Kottke.)

A Brief Note by Norman Mailer on America

2008-10-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

You see, Eiichi, the difficulty is that the working class in America is utterly without a revolutionary consciousness and the source of whatever rebellion there is in this country comes, not from people who function within the economy, but from the growing number of young people who feel profoundly alienated from their country and its history. It is possible that something may come of all this in the next ten years, for the spirit of rebellion is genuine. It is just that none of us has the intellectual stature to conceive of the problem in a radical new way. In America it is not that surplus value is extorted from us so much as that we are spiritually exploited and denied the opportunity to find our true growth. This is no doubt the highest stage of capitalism.

-- Norman Mailer

2008-10-03T09:25:00.000-07:00

A Brief Note by Pynchon on the Current State of Affairs

2008-10-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

"...His father Emil Rathenau had founded AEG, the German General Electric Company, but young Walter was more than another industrial heir--he was a philosopher with a vision of the postwar State. He saw the war in progress as a world revolution, out of which would rise neither Red communism nor an unhindered Right, but a rational structure in which business would be the true, the rightful authority--a structure based, not surprisingly, on the one he'd engineered in Germany for fighting the World War.

Thus the official version. Grandiose enough."

-- Gravity's Rainbow, p. 192 Bantam ed.

Believe in the Renaissance

2008-10-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

I've seen it – among the artists and filmmakers and musicians and scientists and advertising executives I know here in New York. It's a new, young generation of hyper- and multi-talented artisans. They're creating new information networks, new structures of meaning. New arts blending the technological and the organic.

I saw the change beginning around 2006. Livecoders programming real-time DJ mixes. Cognitive computing. A revived interest, and a revised perspective, on 17th-century attempts at alchemy. Digital kaleidoscopes created from whale songs. Animal sculptures from discarded shopping carts. A new bohemian Warsaw.

And more recently: a more nuanced understanding of Romanticism. Considerations toward more adaptable forms of morality. Even an amazing video remix of some cute little toddler's baby sounds:

In early 2007, I wrote:

The principles of American democracy taught to Generations X, Y, and the Millennials have morphed thus into untenable national myth, and thence into untenable national religion – an ideology untethered to the cultural contexts and ethical systems from which it came.

We exist, today, in a state of extreme instability: the very condition in which NEW ARTS, and NEW IDEAS, can arise – must arise – so that we may comprehend ourselves anew, stand again with confidence, and seize our inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. This is now beginning to happen...

It is time for us to time-travel, to go Back to the Future, to capture and bring back our forgotten art-appreciating selves – the self-in-the-world, before arts appreciation became arts criticism, and criticism became a degreed discipline, and the exclusionary discipline severed equal love and attention to both arts and sciences into the Two Cultures, and the cultures became professionalized; before the profession became an industry, and the industry became theorized, and the theory became popularized, and popular culture became commercialized, and the commodity ungrew to adolescence, and adolescents became a suburbanized average, and that average became commercialized, and the commercial was celebrated, and the celebration was for us as we are, not as we might yet be.

And this past weekend, in the New York Times, we receive word of a book. It's called RenGen: The Rise of the Cultural Consumer and What it Means to Your Business by Patricia Martin. It was published on June 28, 2007, just months after I wrote the above paragraphs. The NYT has a Q&A with the author:

Q. Let’s start with the basics. Your book is called “RenGen,” which is short for renaissance generation. Define it for us.
A. The sociological definition of a generation is a 30-year swath of individuals living contemporaneously. The conditions we are facing today are what it looks like right before a renaissance.
Two things are going on simultaneously, and they live in creative tension. One is that we are ending one civilization and we are creating a new one. Witness what is happening on Wall Street. The second is the outpouring of creativity facilitated by the Internet. There is a generation that will lead us into what will literally be a second renaissance.
Q. So what does this RenGen person look like?
A. The RenGen is a psychographic more than a demographic, but when you look at census figures alone you have this large group of boomers who in their youth idealistically wanted to change the world, got frustrated and cashed out. You also have this even larger, rising segment of young people every bit as idealistic as boomers once were. If you look at a census table, it looks like a book-ended generation with these two groups on either end.
As for their characteristics — they are eco-conscious; they take their cues from nature so they are willing to accept products that are flawed but authentic rather than slickly produced and inauthentic. Dove figured this out with the real-women campaign. They want to make a difference. They want to live many lives. They don’t want to be told, “You can’t be an architect and a poet.” They are sensualists. Because they are both idealistic and cynical at the same time, they have learned to trust what they experience rather than what experts tell them. That is why design and aesthetics are so elevated right now.

The entirety of this interview is CRITICAL to our understanding of the world. It continues:

Q. How will the rise of what you call RenGen affect the way we build our careers?
A. First of all, I predict that what we will see out of the younger RenGen is the largest class of entrepreneurs the United States has seen in a long time. Not only are they driven to do original work, but they are going to want to live that out in originally designed careers.
In order to do that, they’ll work hard to create their own enterprises because that is where they can realize their dreams. Boomers are noted workaholics and appreciate the pluck of the young RenGen. But Gen X, often characterized as Dilbert-style middle managers, will struggle to lead these spirited young workers.
Q. You write about the importance of collaboration in this new age. Tell us more.
A. Most especially for younger RenGen, their agenda is to collaborate, to connect and to create. They don’t respond to directive. They respond to teaming — where a boss puts a question or problem on the table and everyone can jump in. This isn’t easy. It can be frustrating to get things done this way.
But smart companies, such as Pixar for example, have created social norms for the workplace to help expedite collaboration because it’s vital to their product. In fact, in making hiring decisions at Pixar, good hand-drawing skills and sociability are the prized traits in candidates. Employees need to grasp that during creative brainstorming sessions it’s uncool to feel threatened if someone draws on top of your drawing. I think we are also going to see something evolve that’s less like a mentor-mentee model and more like a master-apprentice relationship, which is far more hands-on.
The young RenGen are eager to learn what it takes to make their mark. Boomers want to leave a legacy. Innovative companies will transform training and internships into apprenticeships that pass the torch.
Q. You talk about a new model for arts patronage in which an aspiring filmmaker can get a job making commercials for niche corporate clients. How is that work going to feel fulfilling to someone who thinks of himself as an artist?
A. This generation doesn’t have the same negative notions about commercial work. They are also incredibly savvy about when they are being marketed to, so you cannot lie to them.
Rather than waiting 30 years to see if MOMA finds their work worthy, they will shoot a 30-second spot for DDB Needham. Unlike their parents, who would have stayed at the agency, they will use that money to fund their independent documentary.

It's here. Wall Street, and the entire media industry, has relied upon the promotion of stupidity and simplicity, while concealing a dense network of complexity and fabrication. And it is falling. It is time to build the Renaissance through art that speaks smart, honest truths.

The Birth of Modern Science in the British Romantic Era

2008-10-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

As some of you might know, for many years I have been invested in the study of British Romanticism. The conventional view of the Romantics is that, as a group, they were inveterate enemies of the Enlightenment, scientific rationalism, and the Industrial Revolution. Keats freaked out in medical school; Blake directed caustic remarks toward Newton, Locke, and the "dark Satanic mills" – this last, a poetic critique aimed not only at the factories of industrial production, but also at the ancient universities where the accepted wisdom of a mechanistic universe churned out graduates unable to think beyond the strict logic of rationalism.

The Beats revived and extended this conventional view, as Allan Ginsberg tried to assume Blake's visionary mantle in his critiques of the modern technocracy. As the Beats fell or went mad, as the age went mad in a bad acid trip, and as the technocracy thoroughly subsumed our worldview, the reputation of the Romantics and the Beats alike suffered catastrophically. Theirs was a naïve and childish philosophy, the conventional wisdom held. For history is written by the victors.

As a student of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I knew better than to accept this simplistic dichotomy. You might know him only as the poet of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and "Kubla Khan." In fact, he was perhaps the greatest polymath of the 19th century. He completely composed two (short-lived) periodicals on contemporary politics, religion, and morality; in addition to full book-length studies of botany, astronomy, logic, critical theory, poetics, and physics.

Coleridge was a joker and a madman and he lived on the edge. He sat in a room with Humphrey Davy and became the first person ever to inhale nitrous oxide (laughing gas) for kicks. He was the very first person in history to coin the term "scientist" in order to differentiate from a "natural philosopher." Somewhere, deep in the recesses of his private notebooks, he anticipated the Second Law of Thermodynamics some 40 years before the law was experimentally confirmed. He opposed Hume's mechanistic conception of Time. And through his studies of natural phenomena and geometry, incessantly thinking about fluid dynamics and organic propagation, he thoroughly anticipated modern Chaos Theory – a subject considered throughout Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia.

So finally, FINALLY, the book has been written – a study of the collaborations between British Romantic poetic philosophies and scientific discovery – by the only person who could write such a book: Richard Holmes, author of the definitive two-volume literary biography of Coleridge.

It was The Age of Wonder.

Click on the preceding link, as well as on this review by Jonathan Bate, to take a look at the London Telegraph's extensive fascination with what appears to be one of the most important re-visions of the British Romantic period in recent memory.

Offensive Weapon

2008-10-02T05:46:00.000-07:00

Imagine the worst, most foul thing you have ever smelled. An overpowering mix of rotting meat, old socks that haven't been washed for weeks - topped off with the pungent waft of an open sewer.
Imagine being covered in the stuff as it is liberally sprayed from a water cannon.
Then imagine not being able to get rid of the stench for at least three days, no matter how often you try to scrub yourself clean.

Meet Skunk, the new nonlethal crowd control weapon from Israel. Better than rubber bullets, more effective than tear gas, less physically harmful than pepper spray. It's even organic – and apparently safe to drink – although the dude who confirmed that assessment ought to have his head checked. I do wonder what sort of psychological effect this will have against the Palestinians at the brunt of the noxicity. I mean, some of 'em are actually rioting against being treated like rotting garbage.

Pulling the Polling – and TECH INFO BONANZA!

2008-09-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

I should mention that while the previous post was ganked via Kottke, Kottke ganked it from the excellent new (at least new to me) COLLISION DETECTION, a blog on science, technology, and culture by Clive Thompson, a contributor to Wired, Fast Company, and the New York Times Magazine.

And he now reports, as a follow-up to the Amherst tech post, that young people who use landlines are more conservative than those who use cellphones.

So, to sum up:

• Young people use cellphones more than older people.

• Young people are more liberal than older people.

• Young people who use cellphones are more liberal than young people who use landlines.

• Polls neglect people who use cellphones and don't have landlines.

• Polls – and the politicians who use them – are not hearing the opinions of younger, more liberal people.

Cellphones and the Under-Polling of the Polling Under-Polling

2008-09-26T14:21:00.000-07:00

Not too long ago, we relayed a report that cellphone use might be contributing to polling inaccuracies. Telephone polls only utilize landlines, and an increasing number of cellphone users are dispensing with their landlines – many, for economic reasons; and most cellphone users sans landlines are young, and tend to vote Democratic.

If you found that intriguing, you're going to love this. An enterprising lad made a survey of the incoming Class of 2012 at Amherst College. Namely, he wanted to study IT usage.

Keep in mind, the incoming class at Amherst totals 438 students.

Percentage of first-year applicants who applied online in 2003: 33%.

Percentage of applicants who did last year: 89%.
By the end of August 2008 the total number of members and posts at the Amherst College Class of 2012 Facebook group: 432 members and 3,225 posts.

Students in the class of 2012 who registered computers, IPhones, game consoles, etc. on the campus network by the end of the day on August 24th, the day they moved into their dorm rooms: 370 students registered 443 devices.

Number of students in the class of 2012 who brought desktop computers to campus: 14.

Likelihood that a student with an iPhone/iTouch is in the class of 2012: approximately 1 in 2.

Total number of students on campus this year that have landline phone service: 5.

Well, this survey tells us a few things – among others, that iPhoneytouchy things are the essential tool for the next generation (calling all marketing researchers!)

The other thing it really tells us is that traditional methods of polling will soon be obsolete. If they aren't already.

(Thanks, Kottke!)

Neuroaesthetics: This is your brain on beauty

2008-09-26T13:53:00.000-07:00

Ten participants were shown 300 paintings and asked to classify each of them as beautiful, ugly, or neutral. Paintings rated as beautiful by some of the participants were rated as ugly by others, and vice versa. The participants were then shown the paintings again while lying in a scanner. "Beautiful" paintings elicited increased activity in the orbito-frontal cortex, which is involved in emotion and reward. Interestingly, the "uglier" a painting, the greater the motor cortex activity, as if the brain was preparing to escape. More recently, Zeki has started to collaborate with scholars from the arts and humanities under the guidance of a multidisciplinary advisory board that includes author A.S. Byatt and Jonathan Miller, a physician and opera producer.

(You wantses morrre? Yessssss, clicky clicky.) Ooh that's interrestin'.

Straight Talk on Taxes

2008-09-26T13:47:00.000-07:00

The site electiontaxes.com will give you a comparative model of what your taxes would look like under McCain's and Obama's proposed tax plans.

For example, the model indicates that a couple with two children earning $100,000 with $20,000 in itemized deductions would have a net tax bill for 2009 of $9,555 under McCain and $9,002 under Obama. That compares with a $9,505 tax bill for this couple under current law, the electiontaxes.com site says. In another example, a single taxpayer making $50,000 and using the standard deduction would pay $6,867 under McCain and $6,325 under Obama, compared with $6,827 under current law.

Now that's some news we can use.

Sometimes I just can't stand myself.

2008-09-26T12:19:00.000-07:00

I promised – I exhorted – I raised the rhetorical roof just now trying to focus on Obama plusses rather than McCain negatives. But the news continues to increase my frustration with McCain virtually by the minute.

Okay, okay: so we all have a fair amount of evidence now to conclude that McCain's "suspension of campaign" and little photo-op trip to Washington, under cover of immediate attention to grave crisis, were strategic electoral ploys. But for a moment – admit it – we all felt like, "Wow, suppose he is necessary, maybe he is acting seriously for once, since this grand charade of a campaign got going." And that little flibbertigibbet of doubt and hope and hopeful doubting disturbs my day, and muddies my mind, from concentrating solely on the Grand Mal Epileptic Seizure of Absolutely Everything. So I am even more aggravated that McCain's trick –

Well, he's an old dog. He can't learn new ones. From the LA Times:

McCain first used the tactic to spectacular effect way back in March 1999, when -- even though his White House run had been chugging along for five months -- he postponed the "official announcement" of his candidacy so that the nation could focus as one on the week-old war in Kosovo. "It's not appropriate at this time," the somber senator said then, "to launch a political campaign."

How did that play out? As McCain's sympathetic first biographer, Robert Timberg, wrote, "His decision amounted to a masterful political stroke."

Overnight, McCain became the go-to guest on cable news shows, rallying the bipartisan cause for military intervention, urging his Senate colleagues to put patriotism ahead of party and saying he'd rather lose an election than lose a war. "Professional politicians of both parties were wowed by McCain's beaugeste," the Washington Post's Mary McGrory wrote at the time (as noted by Timberg). "[McCain] is getting yards of publicity for a non-event."

With all that free media -- including separate appearances in a single day on Fox News, CNN, PBS, CNBC and MSNBC -- the Arizona senator's poll numbers shot up from the statistically insignificant to the respectable double digits. McCain enthusiast David Brooks, writing in these pages in February 2000, identified Kosovo as the metaphorical jumper cables on the Straight Talk Express. "Suddenly," Brooks wrote, "McCain was being quoted all over. He emerged as the most prominent GOP voice on foreign affairs. As the Carnegie Endowment's Robert Kagan noted, Kosovo was the first primary and McCain won it."

The next time anyone makes a parade of "country first," ask him: "Well, mister, that's some mighty fine patriotism you got growin' there. How much you sellin' it for?"

Thinking about (Not) Thinking about Obama

2008-09-26T07:04:00.000-07:00

We're all fools. You, me, and everyone you know.

We think we can see through the lies. We are outraged at the sins of St. John. We remain bewildered at the polls that are so intractably even. We are gripped by fears of our finances.

And we are blind marionettes.

I had tears of joy in my eyes at the conclusion of Barack Obama's acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention. We all shared that elation – a rousing belief in Obama's forceful, impassioned argument that an American enlightenment is at hand. Point by point, issue by issue, he argued for common sense and against demagoguery. For an intellectually responsible approach to foreign policy, and for a shared sense of responsibility in domestic policy.

Yet why am I vague on these matters? Why can I not state my pro-Obamaism with the same specificity as my anti-McCainism?

Because me, you, and all the media we know were duped – duped, with malign ingenuity, by the preposterous selection of Sarah Palin that arrived in the next morning's webfeeds.

We would have been talking about Obama's codification of new Democratic values for the 21st century. And a firm, undeniable, Kennedy-like call for green technologies and American energy independence in ten years: the greatest call toward innovative collaboration between government and private industry in four decades. That's what his entire speech was really about. But suddenly...

Aerial wolf-hunting. Pitbulls with lipstick. Field-dressing a moose. Alaska's proximity to Russia as a foreign-policy credential. Funny family names. Pregnant teenage daughter. Troopergate. Snow machines. An evangelical Christian VPILF. Wasilla. Boldness. Weirdness. Executive experience. Executive executive executive. Is she ready? She's like us. We want better than us. She's not experienced enough. Image constructed, substance hidden, swiftly ushered into hiding for more coherent indoctrination, and better memorization of talking points.

Sexiest black hole I've ever seen. We fell straight into it. Enlightenment can't escape from its gravitational pull.

The Republican way of campaigning, for all its malicious hypocrisy, definitely has the diversionary tactic down cold. They know the better angels of our cognitive nature can't fly past the nets of a rambunctious argument about stupid things. In the stream of discourse, make an eddy. Spin us around. Make that eddy into a whirlpool. We are lost. In the line of reasoning, tie a knot. All the hands of the world will wrestle with the untying of it.

The Democratic National Convention was rebuilding that Bridge to the 21st Century – the one that, left in blueprint stage by a priapic Clinton, became the Republicans' Bridge to Nowhere – but the keystone, which is today always in the media's hands, was dropped when Palin's Diversionary Division was sighted on the unprotected flank.

Republicans, being political warriors, know that you can't build a fortress, a palace, a shining city upon a hill, when your lands are under attack. Obama had it almost right when he pleaded for a concentration of forces on enemy headquarters, rather than the Diversion, that Sexy Mother. But the attack was well-timed. Give our opponents respect for that, at least. The crown was upon the new Blue State monarch's head for a mere evening's repose before the sneak attack was sighted. The call to arms was heard before the Heralds of the Times could praise the Undeniable King. And so, oh, we know what we're fighting against; but we've neglected what we're fighting for, and that makes all the difference. The bridge crumbles without the keystone; the Promised Land across the river remains but sketchily mapped.

In 2002, I saw another knot being tied in our lines of reason, another whirlpool being stirred to swallow our consciousness. On September 11 of that year, we mourned the deaths of twelve months earlier; and we hesitated, with nervous optimism, on the success of our war in Afghanistan. On September 12, President Bush announced his intentions in Iraq. Out of nowhere it seemed to come, just like a Palin, and from the Afghan peaks our pundits tumbled down, to wrestle in the dust-storms of the Iraqi desert. Back then, I wrote:

The swiftness with which the government and the complicitous American mainstream media have exchanged one obsession for another should be studied by three-card-monty men. Card-sharps are masters of distraction; if you spy the sleight-of-hand and argue for your money back, an accomplice lifts your wallet. The very obviousness of the Administration’s illogic in slipping us Saddam Hussein for Osama bin Laden occupies the fullness of our attention...

There is yet method in this madness: the absence of reason forces floods of reasoning to spiral toward it. There is no periphery to an Iraq war now — it is an abyss echoing September 11 itself, when, in like silence, we thought, “Who? Why? How?”

This week, yet again, a disaster strikes us seemingly from nowhere, like an Act of God, and as our money spirals down the drain, our eyes, our minds, our consciousnesses spiral down after it. Its gravitational force is immense. And to think we feared a black hole from the Hadron Collider!

Resist.

Once upon a time, Sting sang out, "Let me build a bridge, for I cannot fill this chasm. Let me set the battlements on fire." That's the fortress around your heart, that is. Not as Democrats, nor as Republicans, but as Americans, we must undertake the work the mainstream media, in its magpie-mind, has neglected. And listen, really listen, to Obama. And think about what his values actually mean, and how they will be translated into policy. Watch the DNC acceptance speech again. Think about it. Write about it. Talk about it.

The Republicans have, until quite recently, expertly manipulated the febrile political mind of America. Precisely because Obama's stance defies the sound-bite, and the talking point; and because the slogan of Change is good but not adequate to express the totality of alteration necessary in American political consciousness, Republican strategists have executed an excellent one-two-three punch in negativity: first, whirlpool the controversy of Palin, vacuuming the DNC into the pitbull's lipsticky maw; second, select an Obama positive and burn it into a negative through sarcasm – Community Organizer! (here the populist turns snob: "I was a Mayor – and you're just a community organizer, eat my stilettos, little person"); and third, take the three people who could be considered a blot on Obama's white linens: Rezko, Ayers, and Wright, and brand him with those names.

REZKO.
AYERS.
WRIGHT.

REZKO. AYERS. WRIGHT. Oh, and what have we now? "The Democrat Senator from the Chicago Political Machine, BARACK OBAMA! Brought to you by Rezko, Ayers, and Wright." Just like your favorite t.v. show. (Hell, it's no wonder the trick doesn't work with McCain – if we said, "John McCain, sponsored by..." we'd blow way past prime time and cut into Letterman.)

McCain knows he is the feebly armed knight of the crumbling Empire, and Obama the superior swordsman in a duel. He sends the slings and arrows of outrageousness, and dashes behind the shields of crisis. Tonight, whether he tinkers in hiding, an ineffectual apprentice at the broken clockworks of finance, allowing Obama to complete the bridge; or whether the two meet on an equal field of battle, displaying his naked body for attack, the world will change tonight.

Thinking About "Thinking About McCain"

2008-09-26T05:13:00.000-07:00

David Brooks today writes a heartfelt political obituary for the man who might have been President. He correctly admits that McCain has not made a "grand narrative explaining how the United States is fundamentally unprepared for the 21st century and how McCain’s worldview is different" leading to the conclusion that "his proposals don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts."

He continues:

[McCain's] Senate training and the tendency to take issues on one at a time — in part, because of the foolish decision to run a traditional right-left campaign against Obama and, in part, because McCain has never really resolved the contradiction between the Barry Goldwater and Teddy Roosevelt sides of his worldview. One day he’s a small-government Western conservative; the next he’s a Bull Moose progressive. The two don’t add up — as we’ve seen in his uneven reaction to the financial crisis.

Yet he continues to insist – pleadingly, down on one knee like Paulson last night – that McCain is "is a good judge of character" (embracing George Bush, hiring the most cynical and dirty campaign managers imaginable, acquiring the content-free Sarah Palin). Wrapped up in the mind-boggling contradictions of McCain, Brooks' own column falls into mind-boggling contradiction when he insists upon McCain's worth saying "he is not an organized administrator, but he has become a practiced legislative craftsman."

In pleading for McCain to be taken seriously ("he is, above all — and this is completely impossible to convey in the midst of a campaign — a serious man prone to serious things") Brooks unwittingly makes the best argument imaginable against a McCain presidency: NAMELY, "HE IS NOT AN ORGANIZED ADMINISTRATOR" but "A PRACTICED LEGISLATIVE CRAFTSMAN." Seems to me Brooks is saying: "send this man back to the Senate, posthaste."

Above all, however, what I find so perplexing in Brooks' narrative is this: "I’ve come to accept that in this media-circus environment, you simply cannot run for president as a candid, normal person," he says. If that is true (and it is certainly largely true) it seems to me Brooks is abrogating McCain's personal responsibility: the quality of the decisions and choices throughout the campaign that he made. And isn't personal responsibility one of the fundamentals of the American Conservative philosophy? In one fell swoop, Brooks has effectively said society's to blame. The weak, simplified phrase that liberals in the '60s and '70s used to rationalize crime – and for which they became a laughing-stock.

I think that Brooks writes so movingly, so pleadingly, about McCain because Brooks sees himself in McCain: the intellectual dishonesty and contradictions that are shot through the conservative character of our era.

Washington Mutual sold to JPMorgan Chase in Largest Bank Failure in American History

2008-09-26T04:55:00.000-07:00

This comes as the government bailout plan was thrown into complete chaos last night – the entire story will make you want to throw up – but this bit is priceless:

...the smooth-talking House Republican leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, surprised many in the room by declaring that his caucus could not support the plan to allow the government to buy distressed mortgage assets from ailing financial companies.
Mr. Boehner pressed an alternative that involved a smaller role for the government, and Mr. McCain, whose support of the deal is critical if fellow Republicans are to sign on, declined to take a stand.
The talks broke up in angry recriminations, according to accounts provided by a participant and others who were briefed on the session, and were followed by dueling news conferences and interviews rife with partisan finger-pointing.

Meanwhile, over in the halls of WashingtonMutual/JPMorganChase, we learn the following:

But the seizure and the deal with JPMorgan came as a shock to Washington Mutual’s board, which was kept completely in the dark: the company’s new chief executive, Alan H. Fishman, was in midair, flying from New York to Seattle at the time the deal was finally brokered, according to people briefed on the situation. Mr. Fishman, who has been on the job for less than three weeks, is eligible for $11.6 million in cash severance and will get to keep his $7.5 million signing bonus, according to an analysis by James F. Reda and Associates. WaMu was not immediately available for comment.

It appears that while the government cannot put a price on failure, our banking executives most certainly can. And do.

The House that Defies Death

2008-09-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

Creative madness makes me happy.

From the New York Times:

In 45 years of working together as artists, poets and architects, [Arakawa and Gins] have developed an arcane philosophy of life and art, a theory they call reversible destiny. Essentially, they have made it their mission — in treatises, paintings, books and now built projects like this one — to outlaw aging and its consequences.
“It’s immoral that people have to die,” Ms. Gins explained.
The house on Long Island, which cost more than $2 million to build, is their first completed architectural work in the United States — and, as they see it, a turning point in their campaign to defeat mortality.
The house, which is still unoccupied, was commissioned in the late 1990s by a friend who sold the property to an anonymous group of investors after the project dragged on and costs mounted. But it is ready, Arakawa and Ms. Gins said, to begin rejuvenating whoever moves in.
In addition to the floor, which threatens to send the un-sure-footed hurtling into the sunken kitchen at the center of the house, the design features walls painted, somewhat disorientingly, in about 40 colors; multiple levels meant to induce the sensation of being in two spaces at once; windows at varying heights; oddly angled light switches and outlets; and an open flow of traffic, unhindered by interior doors or their adjunct, privacy.
All of it is meant to keep the occupants on guard. Comfort, the thinking goes, is a precursor to death; the house is meant to lead its users into a perpetually “tentative” relationship with their surroundings, and thereby keep them young. [More...]

Great Writing (#1: Film)

2008-09-25T12:15:00.000-07:00

At this particular moment, I am really freakin' tired of thinking about the Decline and Fall of practically everything. So I'm delighted, proud, and tremendously relieved to introduce a new occasional series on this here blog:

GREAT WRITING.

All I'm going to do is lay out examples of some of the best damn writers I can find these days, and see if you agree. Eventually, I may consolidate everything into one big Compendium of Contemporary Writerly Greatness. But without further ado, I present to you Anthony Lane, The New Yorker's film critic:

current cinema (June 30, 2008)
BIG KILLS
"Wanted" and "The Happening."
What is it like being Timur Bekmambetov? No artist should be confused too closely with his creations, but anybody who sits through “Wanted,” Bekmambetov’s new movie, will be tempted to wonder if the life style of the characters might not reflect or rub off on that of the director. How, for example, does he make a cup of coffee? My best guess, based on the evidence of the film, is that he tosses a handful of beans toward the ceiling, shoots them individually into a fine powder, leaves it hanging in the air, runs downstairs, breaks open a fire hydrant with his head, carefully directs the jet of water through the window of his apartment, sets fire to the building, then stands patiently with his mug amid the blazing ruins to collect the precious percolated drops. Don’t even think about a cappuccino.
The great thing about Bekmambetov is that... (clicky clicky)

Look Sharp

2008-09-25T11:46:00.000-07:00

Lawyers, Guns, and Money makes a really interesting point: this is going to be the first-ever Presidential debate broadcast in HDTV. Porn stars have already freaked out about their physical flaws getting the megapixel treatment; and now I'm beginning to understand why McCain's $5,000-a-job makeup artist brings in the big bucks. It probably won't be as severe a revelation as Nixon vs. Kennedy, but still...

The Land(line)less and the Landslide

2008-09-25T10:14:00.000-07:00

WASHINGTON – People with only cell phones may differ enough from those with landline telephones that excluding the growing population of cell-only users from public opinion polls may slightly skew the results, a study has concluded.

The finding, in a report this week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, may increase pressure on polling organizations to include people who use only cell phones in their surveys. While many major polls including The Associated Press-GfK Poll already interview cell phone users, some do not, largely because doing so is more expensive.

Earlier studies — including a joint Pew-AP report two years ago — concluded that cell and landline users had similar enough views that not calling cell users had no major impact on poll findings. The new report concludes that "this assumption is increasingly questionable," especially for young people, who use cells heavily.

Combining polls it conducted in August and September, Pew found that of people under age 30 with only cell phones, 62 percent were Democrats and 28 percent Republicans. Among landline users the same age that gap was narrower: 54 percent Democrats, 36 percent GOP.

Similarly, young cell users preferred Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama over Republican nominee John McCain by 35 percentage points. For young landline users, it was a smaller 13-point Obama edge.

Two years ago, I had a landline. Now don't. Most people I know making under $40,000 a year don't have a landline either. They're all Democrats.

You call "Time Out"; we say "Game Over."

2008-09-25T07:11:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal, for all its faults, thankfully hasn't abandoned all reasonable discourse. Today it argues persuasively that John McCain shouldn't be "suspending his campaign" and postponing the debate. Critics of the Wall Street Journal might claim its opinionating a bit too prolix; in our Twittering age we might more effectively respond to McCain's weird maneuvers with

What-EHVarrrrrrrr!

or, even better:

PWNED!

The New York Post knows the score; its front page blasts in skyscraper letters:

DOUBLE DARE
McCain and Obama play electoral chicken on debate

What saddens us, across the electoral spectrum from the crumbling towers of Wall Street and the populist pages of the Post to the rest of that liberal, mealy-mouthed MSM, is the consolidated impression we've now received from the McCain camp that the entire hullabaloo of a Presidential election is nothing but a game.

Witness the Republican strategy from the moment the Bushy hacks, Schmidt and Davis, stepped on to the field in July: the political equivalent of the pick-and-roll. In basketball, a player stops short to block his opponent's movement (the "pick" or "screen") while a teammate runs across the opened space to accept a third teammate's pass (the "roll"). Schmidt and Davis, who are far slicker than Willy in their ball-handling, co-opted the media (the refs, or at least they ought to be) to be both the picker and the passer. First they set up a pick – a blatantly false attack ad or a lipsticky pig – which occupies the media, allowing them to give a pass on McCain for his own incoherent wafflings.

Well, it's the second half, ladies and gentlemen, and the skies have darkened above this basketball court, and McCain's pick-and-roll is failing. So Red Team calls for a TO, because the rain is falling, the lightning is flashing, and there's a big fat sinkhole in the middle of the court that threatens to swallow the contending teams, the stadium crowds, and the stadium itself. "Let's collect donations from the crowd," the NBA President suggests (forgetting that the crowd has already paid exorbitant prices just to see the game in the first place: ticket fees that went toward the construction of the luxury skyboxes rather than tend to the maintenance of the court). "We'll patch up the court so that a ball can bounce on it for the rest of the game."

Is this analogy becoming increasingly flimsy? Yes? That's because this election isn't a game. Choosing our government isn't the national pastime. (That's why we have baseball: go Cubs! and let Armageddon begin. I wonder if they'll curse themselves, or bless themselves, by letting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse into the stands.)

If McCain were an economic wizard (he's confessed he's not), if McCain had taken part in the process thus far (Sen. Schumer says he has not), if McCain had floated remedies for this mess (rather than advocated laws implicated in the cause of the mess), if McCain's running mate wasn't trying to postpone her debate as well (which she is, in another jawdropping development), then McCain's calls to pull the entire election over to the sidelines would carry more water.

A presidential debate isn't a game, it isn't showboating – or it shouldn't be – and frankly, now that the entirety of Red Team is shown to be gaming the system, it is time to stop pretending that "you're really serious about being serious now, really really serious; this election was just a game before but now things are really serious" – no, Senator McCain, it's been deadly serious all along. You just don't get it.

American Exceptionalism

2008-09-25T05:43:00.000-07:00

Roger Cohen explains:

This is the idea, around since the founding fathers, and elaborated on by Alexis de Toqueville, that the United States is a nation unlike any other with a special mission to build the “city upon a hill” that will serve as liberty’s beacon for mankind.
But exceptionalism has taken an ugly twist of late. It’s become the angry refuge of the America that wants to deny the real state of the world.
The damn-the-world, God-chose-us rage of [Palin's followers'] America has sharpened as U.S. exceptionalism has become harder to square with the 21st-century world’s interconnectedness.
To persist with a philosophy grounded in America’s separateness, rather than its connectedness, would be devastating at a time when the country faces two wars, a financial collapse unseen since 1929, commodity inflation, a huge transfer of resources to the Middle East, and the imperative to develop new sources of energy.
Enough is enough.

For a further probing of this flawed concept of American exceptionalism – a view of this country that seeks to remove it from the normal forces of history – see my first post in this blog, which states in part:

This nation is very strange. It is a young nation whose institutions have proved so durable -- throughout the last 150 years of mechanized warfare -- that it is reluctant to acknowledge just how old it actually is. It has become old enough to lose its history. Twice. First via the creation of its foundational myths. And next, during the 1960s, when its foundational myths were penetrated, punctured, and deconstructed. This national mythology (which had sufficed as a successful history for decades) is now threatened by the truths of history. The truth – will it set you free? Or is truth a fatality? The "silent majority," who found its voice in the last decade, has woven its economic patriotism with a Judeo-Christian wool, and evidently chose – as per the parable in the Tree of Knowledge – the latter...

Cohen does a better job than me, because he makes it all very simple:

On the Democratic side you have a guy whose campaign has been based on the Internet, who believes America may have something to learn from other countries (like universal health care) and who’s unafraid in 2008 to say he’s a “proud citizen of the United States and a fellow citizen of the world.”
On the Republican side, you have a guy who, in 2008, is just discovering the Net and Google and whose No. 2 is a woman who got a passport last year and believes she understands Russia because Alaska is closer to Siberia than Alabama.
If I were Obama, I’d put it this way: “Senator McCain, the world you claim to understand is the world of yesterday. A new century demands new thinking. Our country cannot be made fundamentally secure by a man who thought our economy was fundamentally sound.”

On Writing, Critical Thinking, and Democracy

2008-09-25T04:35:00.000-07:00

From DailyKos diarist Janusdog:

I have taught graduate students, and let me tell you: I sincerely believe the problem with the media as we know it now (and I am not talking about bloggers here, even though I consider that media) is that people simply cannot write anymore. And I don't even mean that the language isn't beautiful or poetic. I mean they just cannot write. They can not put coherent thoughts together and make a coherent thesis, paper, or story. Forget putting together several- century-enduring literature like Common Sense.
I have had to teach graduate students how to use a library. I have taught them to write a topic sentence. I have also taught them to lay out a cogent argument and taught rudimentary logic. And it is exceedingly difficult. I am fought on it, every step. They think it is "boring" and "a waste of time." They want to just surf the Net and copy the information without vetting it first. And they definitely have a different idea of what constitutes plagarism than I do.

These are people in Masters' and doctoral programs. They write their theses in a barely coherent manner, but still pass, because the schools don't want to get sued. This is not only a failure of writing, but of critical thinking. Writing well and critical thinking are interrelated. Writing well teaches one to think critically, and when one thinks critically, one's writing improves.
The media will not improve until critical thinking is restored as a value, and this means teaching it to our children and students right now, even if they complain. Those in power have been able to manipulate the media because of a general lack of competency within it. I believe that some reporters' hearts are in the right place but they simply don't have the tools.
We must throw our effort into Education Reform. The disintegrating educational system has been working to the advantage of those who don't want people to be able to think critically -- because that means calling them on their stealing, thieving, and lying.

I cannot praise this essay highly enough, and I cannot stand by its recommendations more strongly. It has echoed both my sentiments and my personal experience.

An Acute Observation

2008-09-25T04:28:00.000-07:00

From Balloon Juice:

...Several pundits noted McCain’s polar swing from dissing economic concerns last Monday to hair-on-fire panic today. That sort of bipolar, crisis-to-crisis reactivity is normally taken as a sign that a person (or campaign) has no idea what is going on.

$700 Billion: Just a Number They Made Up

2008-09-25T04:05:00.000-07:00

From Forbes Magazine – the dot-com –

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."
•••
Dodd says that in speaking with his Senate colleagues, all are agreed on three issues: that a bailout bill include some oversight accountability for the Treasury, protection for taxpayers and that it address the continuing foreclosure problem.

He also points to one other concern: Paulson, the bill's chief architect, is scheduled to leave office in just four months.

"I'm not about to give a $700 billion appropriation to a secretary I don't know yet," says Dodd.

What Keynes Said, and What he Might Do

2008-09-25T03:52:00.000-07:00

As Keynes observed, "the actual, private object of the most skilled investment today is . . . to outwit the crowd, and to pass the bad, or depreciating, half-crown to the other fellow."
Keynes's biographer, Robert Skidelsky, makes clear that at every stage of Keynes's career, he tried to think broadly about the social and political consequences of economic policy. That was true in his famous denunciation of onerous German reparations payments after World War I, which he correctly warned would lead to a future war; it was true in the magnanimity of the post-World War II international financial system he helped create at Bretton Woods.

A truly Keynesian rescue plan should do more than bail out foolish investors. How might the pieces fit into a larger design? Well, if the taxpayers are going to acquire a stake in the nation's largest insurance company, perhaps that company can be the cornerstone of a new system of universal private health coverage. If the taxpayers are going to acquire $700 billion in real estate assets, perhaps the eventual profits can fund new investments in infrastructure or energy technology.

Millions of New Jobs through Green Technologies

2008-09-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

The UN says millions of new jobs will be created worldwide over the next few decades by the development of alternative energy technologies.

More than a million people already work in biofuels, but a UN report says that could rise by 12 million by 2030.

Alan Moore

2008-09-24T15:55:00.000-07:00

The Limits of Power

2008-09-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

From the New York Times books section:

Although they come from opposite sides of the political aisle (Mr. Scowcroft is a Republican, Mr. Brzezinski a Democrat), both are foreign policy realists who believe that the United States must constructively engage with a rapidly changing world, not react defensively to it. And while they disagree on aspects of the expansion of NATO and the timing of an American withdrawal from Iraq (Mr. Scowcroft says that “simply withdrawing is an impediment to a solution,” while Mr. Brzezinski contends that America’s continuing presence there is “part of the problem”), they agree on a remarkable number of basic strategic and diplomatic principles.
Unlike neoconservative ideologues in the current administration, the two former national security advisers say that talks with hostile parties can be a useful tool, and they argue that in the wake of 9/11, the Manichean language employed by President Bush has alienated allies and aggravated resentments in many parts of the world.
They point to the importance of alliances in an increasingly complicated and interconnected world. And they object to what Mr. Scowcroft refers to as the propagation of “an environment of fear” at home, which Mr. Brzezinski says has made Americans “more susceptible to demagogy” and to “a fearful paranoia that the outside world is conspiring through its massive terrorist forces to destroy us.”
What makes these discussions between Mr. Brzezinski and Mr. Scowcroft so bracing is their combination of common sense and an ability to place America’s relationship with a particular country in both a historical perspective and a regional context of competing interests and threats. Their book should be required reading not only for the next president elect but also for any voters concerned with the foreign policy issues that will be on the next administration’s plate.

Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike

2008-09-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”
In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.

On "On the Road"

2008-09-24T09:18:00.000-07:00

The real secret of the book was its discharge of youthful energy, the stupid, reckless energy that saves “On the Road” from being a dreadful novel. The delightful, moronic, unreflective fizz appears whenever the characters are happiest, when they are chasing girls or urinating from a swerving flatbed truck while going 70 miles an hour.
Those parts haven’t survived. They run afoul of the new gentility, the rules laid down by the health experts, childcare experts, guidance counselors, safety advisers, admissions officers, virtuecrats and employers to regulate the lives of the young. They seem dangerous, childish and embarrassing in the world of professionalized adolescence and professionalized intellect.
If Sal Paradise were alive today, he’d be a product of the new rules. He’d be a grad student with an interest in power yoga, on the road to the M.L.A. convention with a documentary about a politically engaged Manitoban dance troupe that he hopes will win a MacArthur grant. He’d be driving a Prius, going a conscientious 55, wearing a seat belt and calling Mom from the Comfort Inns.
The only thing we know for sure is that this ethos won’t last. Someday some hypermanic kid will produce a moronically maxed-out adventure odyssey that will spark the overdue rebellion among all the over-pressured SAT grinds, and us grumpy midlife critics will get to witness a new Kerouac, and the greatest pent-up young-life crisis in the history of the world.

It bears thinking about – David Brooks's statement (published October 2, 2007) regarding "the rules laid down by the health experts, childcare experts, guidance counselors, safety advisers, admissions officers, virtuecrats and employers to regulate the lives of the young" – with regard to our severely de-regulated economy now in catastrophic crisis.

How strange it is, that our culture has emphasized – congratulated, and celebrated even – a free-market "game" stripped to the barest of rules, even as we have bound the nation's youth to such severe structure. Can we achieve a balance? The future demands one.

More toxic chemicals, please!

2008-09-24T08:48:00.001-07:00

Political appointees at the Department of Labor are moving with unusual speed to push through in the final months of the Bush administration a rule making it tougher to regulate workers' on-the-job exposure to chemicals and toxins.

On Dancing, and Not Dancing

2008-09-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

"I think evolution selected music and dance as ways that people could come together and defuse any interpersonal tensions that arise from large groups," he said. "One suggestion is that music and dance helps humans to get along. We see that there is the release of soothing brain chemicals when people sing and dance together." So if we don't dance, we're that much closer to savagery.

What Happened to the Romantic Comedy?

2008-09-24T08:35:00.000-07:00

"We've lost something, and we don't know that we've quite lost it," Mr. Bowman says. But we sure do miss it, he adds. "That's what leads people to go back and try to remake [the old romantic comedies]," he says, citing "You've Got Mail" (1998) and "Sleepless in Seattle" as remakes of "The Shop Around the Corner" and "An Affair to Remember" (1957), respectively.

Many critics refer to the movies of the 1930s and 1940s as part of an elysian period of well-written works. "The characters in [earlier] movies do not talk realistically. They are much more witty and articulate and finally interesting than ordinary people are," says David Shumway, a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University and author of "Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis." "And that's what people in the '30s and '40s wanted -- highly crafted speech," he says. These older films offered witty retorts and double entendres, sexual inhibition and socioeconomic clashes -- but, for a variety of reasons, these attributes have faded.

The deterioration of dialogue may be a reflection, in part, of the evolution of the modern audience. Perhaps by trying to hold the hummingbird-like attention spans of 21st-century moviegoers, current films offer as many gag- and stunt-filled scenes as possible. According to Richard Schickel, a film critic for Time.com, "movies are more structured now than they're written; movies proceed more on beats now -- an action sequence, a sex sequence -- what gets lost in that are people to exchange witty dialogue."

How Buildings Learn

2008-09-24T08:31:00.000-07:00

In this excerpt from a fascinating BBC program called "How Buildings Learn," we are told the most wonderful anecdote about the old oak beams of New College, Oxford. Delightful, whimsical, and knowing, it reminds us about the knowledge of the generations. A must-see.

Zombies! And Politics!

2008-09-24T08:25:00.000-07:00

From Night of the Living Dead to Homecoming (in which dead Iraq war veterans return from the grave to vote against the war), the zombie movie has been among the most consistently political forms in American popular culture. The politics tend to lean left, but zombie entertainment approaches a level of discontent more elemental than mere anti-capitalism or shopping mall burlesque. Apocalyptic and piously disdainful of the carnal realities of human life, zombie cinema is a shocking, uproarious meditation on the nature of death—on what, if anything, we owe to the dead.

Know-Nothing Politics

2008-09-24T08:09:00.000-07:00

...know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”
Remember how the Iraq war was sold. The stuff about aluminum tubes and mushroom clouds was just window dressing. The main political argument was, “They attacked us, and we’re going to strike back” — and anyone who tried to point out that Saddam and Osama weren’t the same person was an effete snob who hated America, and probably looked French.
Let’s also not forget that for years President Bush was the center of a cult of personality that lionized him as a real-world Forrest Gump, a simple man who prevails through his gut instincts and moral superiority. “Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man,” declared Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal in 2004. “He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world.”

Paul Krugman thinks it through.

The Burden of the Humanities

2008-09-24T08:00:00.000-07:00

The distinctive task of the humanities, unlike the natural sciences and social sciences, is to grasp human things in human terms, without converting or reducing them to something else: not to physical laws, mechanical systems, biological drives, psychological disorders, social structures, and so on. The humanities attempt to understand the human condition from the inside, as it were, treating the human person as subject as well as object, agent as well as acted-upon.

the humanities are distinctive, for they begin (and end) with a willingness to ground themselves in the world as we find it and experience it, the world as it appears to us—the thoughts, emotions, imaginings, and memories that make up our picture of reality. The genius of humanistic knowledge—and it is a form of knowledge—is its commensurability, even consanguinity, with the objects it helps us to know. Hence, the knowledge the humanities offer us is like no other, and cannot be replaced by scientific breakthroughs or superseded by advances in material knowledge. Science teaches us that the earth rotates on its axis while revolving around the sun. But in the domain of the humanities, the sun still also rises and sets, and still establishes in that diurnal rhythm one of the deepest and most universal expressive symbols of all the things that rise and fall, or live and die.
It utterly violates the spirit of literature, and robs it of its value, to reduce it to something else. Too often, there seems to be a presumption among scholars that the only interest in Dickens or Proust or Conrad derives from the extent to which they can be read to confirm the abstract propositions of Marx, Freud, Fanon, and the like—or Smith and Hayek and Rand, for that matter—and promote the right preordained political attitudes, or lend support to the identity politics du jour. Strange, that an era so pleased with its superficially freewheeling and antinomian qualities is actually so distrustful of the literary imagination, so intent upon making its productions conform to predetermined criteria.
One of the ways that the humanities can indeed save us—if they can recover their nerve—is by reminding us that the ancients knew things about humankind that modernity has failed to repeal, even if it has managed to forget them. One of the most powerful witnesses to that fact was Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World (1932) continues to grow in stature as our world comes increasingly to resemble the one depicted in its pages. In that world, as one character says, “everybody’s happy,” thanks to endless sex, endless consumer goods, endless youth, mood-altering drugs, and all-consuming entertainment. But the novel’s hero, who is named the Savage, stubbornly proclaims “the right to be unhappy,” and dares to believe that there might be more to life than pleasure: “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.” In the end, the Savage is put on display as if he were a rare zoo animal: the Nietzschean “Last Man.”

The Humanities and the Concept of Value

2008-09-24T07:51:00.000-07:00

In its long history as the premier form of academic knowledge, the humanities were frequently criticized for their subversive character. That some would now question whether the humanities have any impact at all merely reflects the crude and short-sighted way in which the value of academic knowledge is measured and judged today. Perhaps that befits creatures whose lives are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to recall Thomas Hobbes’ description of the state of nature. But it does a grave injustice to those of us who still aspire to full-fledged humanity.

Time to Revamp the Reading Lists

2008-09-24T07:43:00.000-07:00

"Butchering." That's what one of my former students, a young man who loves creative writing but rarely gets to do any at school, called English class. He was referring to the endless picking apart of linguistic details that loses teens in a haze of "So what?" The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes. The thesis-driven essay assignments that require students to write about a novel they can't muster any passion for ("The Scarlet Letter" is high on teens' list of most dreaded). I'll never forget what one parent, bemoaning his daughter's aversion to great books after she took AP English Literature, wrote to me: "What I've seen teachers do is take living, breathing works of art and transform them into dessicated lab specimens fit for dissection."
The lesson couldn't be clearer. Until we do a better job of introducing contemporary culture into our reading lists, matching books to readers and getting our students to buy in to the whole process, literature teachers will continue to fuel the reading crisis.

I'm not suggesting that every 11th-grade English teacher adopt "Catcher," drop Shakespeare or ride the multicultural bandwagon. But if we really want to recruit teen readers, we're going to have to be strenuous advocates for fresh and innovative reading incentives. If that means an end to business as usual -- abolishing dry-bones literature tests, cutting back on fact-based quizzes, adding works of science fiction or popular nonfiction to the reading list -- so be it. We can continue to alienate teen readers, or we can hear them, acknowledge their tastes, engage directly with their resistance to serious reading and move gradually, with sensitivity to what's age-appropriate, toward the realm of great literature.

David Foster Wallace on a Liberal Arts Education

2008-09-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

From David Foster Wallace's address to the graduating class of Kenyon College, May 21, 2005:

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

We note in passing that DFW hanged himself. This is not without significance. He knew his head was alive. I think he felt it was the rest of the world that was strangling him.

Post-9/11 fire codes cut into our profits, say developers

2008-09-24T07:17:00.000-07:00

In the wake of 9/11, the government instituted new building codes for all buildings being constructed over 40 stories, such as enhanced fireproofing and an additional emergency stairwell. Now, however:

"The Federal government's General Services Administration (GSA) wants to repeal those safety measures. Why repeal safety measures after the horror of the Twin Towers? Because the GSA says the measures will cut into the profit margins for real-estate developers.

They even want to repeal measures instituting glow-in-the-dark stairwell markers for when the lights go out. Those markers are credited with saving many lives during the 9/11 attacks." Rachel Maddow, MSNBC Video.

Creating a Criminal Underclass, One Surcharge at a Time

2008-09-24T07:14:00.000-07:00

Paying a debt to society now means more than doing time. In addition to prison sentences or alternatives to incarceration such as drug programs, fees and surcharges are being imposed on criminal offenders throughout the country. In some states, offender-based revenues start to accumulate upon arrest, without a wait for conviction. These charges are in addition to any fines and restitution they may be required to pay.
"It is fiscal gimmickry used to close budget gaps," says Brooklyn Assembly member Hakeem Jeffries. "No one thinks it's anything but a barrier to successful re-entry into society, because people with low or no income will owe significant amounts of money." Alan Rosenthal, director of justice strategies for the Center for Community Alternatives, adds, "It is not a public safety issue, and there are almost no proponents of these financial consequences for any reason other than the revenue streams."

Obama Preferred in World Poll

2008-09-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

Democrat Mr Obama was favoured by a four-to-one margin across the 22,500 people polled in 22 countries.
In 17 countries, the most common view was that US relations with the rest of the world would improve under Mr Obama.
If Republican Mr McCain were elected, the most common view was that relations would remain about the same.

RPI on the Holodeck

2008-09-24T07:02:00.000-07:00

Within its walls, the designers say, scientists can immerse themselves in data and fly through a breaking wave or inspect the kinks in a DNA molecule, artists can participate in virtual concerts with colleagues in different parts of the world or send spectators on trips through imaginary landscapes, and architects can ponder their creations from the inside before a single brick or two-by-four has been put in place.
It opens for business on Oct. 3 with a three-week gala of performances including classical music, virtual reality rides, symposiums and celebrations. Some scientists dream of eventually using the new center to create a version of the “Star Trek” holodeck where humans can interact with life-size “synthetic creatures” who live only in a computer.

Close Encounters of the Deep Marketing Kind

2008-09-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

The aliens' musical signal is heard intuitively, religiously, and mathematically. The intuitive see the shape -- the destination of Devil's Tower -- while the religious hear the music, and the scientists perceive the tonal frequencies as corresponding to latitude and longitude.

Why did the studio decide to license Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Hulu.com at this time? Why does any studio decide to license a film to an aggregator site? Because the long tail has spikes. If we read the zeitgeist and analogize it with cultural products of the past, you can beam messages that correspond to the latent needs and desires of the people. The commercial rides piggyback with the deeper sociological strain of desire, of the need, of the want, of the corresponding notes:

the languages are all a puzzle, each language communicates a piece of the puzzle. Interpreted: a synthesis of understanding, an experience of wonder, a transportation out of the world we know.

Doop. Deep. Doop. Duuur. Deeeeee.

Republican Liberty

2008-09-23T17:02:00.000-07:00

Ellen Meiksins Wood reviews Quentin Skinner's Hobbes and Republican Liberty in the LRB:

The Levellers not only contemplated a more democratic franchise. They also effected a revolution in political thought when they insisted that consent to government, on which freedom depends, must be given not only once in a single transfer of power but continuously, and by a multitude of individuals endowed with inalienable rights, the people outside Parliament, not by some corporate entity that claims to represent them. This was something very different even from the ideas of, say, Henry Parker, whom Skinner describes as ‘the most formidable proponent of the parliamentarian cause’ at the outset of the Long Parliament. For Parker, royal authority derived from the people, but the people were superior to the Crown only in their collective identity as embodied in Parliament; and, once having established a parliament to represent them, the people could not reclaim their original power. This certainly gave the advantage to Parliament in its relations with the Crown; but it is not at all self-evident that the distance between a strong parliamentarian like Henry Parker and an absolutist like Hobbes was greater than the gulf that divided Parker from the Levellers.
None of this, presumably, would come as news to Skinner. The question is why it matters so little to him. There is one overriding and systematic reason, which has to do with his characteristic approach to the study of political thought. Skinner and the so-called Cambridge School, of which he and J.G.A. Pocock are essentially the founding fathers, have been credited with a major breakthrough in historical scholarship for their contextualisation of political theory. And here precisely is the problem. Historical contexts, for them, are languages, utterances, words. It appears that only some words are worth listening to; but, more fundamentally, the social and material conditions in which words are deployed are deliberately excluded. In Skinner’s magisterial two-volume history of political ideas from 1300 to 1600, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, which deals with a period marked by major social and economic developments that loomed very large in political theory and practice, we learn little, if anything, about – for instance – relations between aristocracy and peasantry, about agriculture, land distribution and tenure, about urbanisation, trade, commerce and the burgher class, or about social protest and conflict.
This deliberate detachment of political theory from its social context may not be a purposeful political choice, but it has the effect of ruling out, sometimes even rendering invisible, a very wide range of social conflict and, indeed, political debate. It also means that, despite the Cambridge School’s insistence on the specificity of every historical moment, ‘traditions of discourse’, as linguistic constructs, occlude all kinds of historical specificity, the differences of meaning that words may have in different social contexts.

I encourage you to read the entire thing.

Why you're always right.

2008-09-23T09:32:00.000-07:00

Bill Bishop's post today in Slate's "The Big Sort" explains why political debate often fails – a superb bit of meta-political analysis. It's common and frustrating these days to enter into a political discussion with an opponent, only to exit with both sides bear-hugging their positions more strongly, as if clinging to a piece of driftwood in a lonely sea, for life.

This phenomenon is often not without a sense of boiling rage, lidded only momentarily until one can steam in secret, as the map below clearly shows (and check out Very Small Array for more examples of innovative map- and graph-making).Bill Bishop, however, performs an extraordinarily adept mental gymnastic maneuver by referring us back to economics, reminding us that politics is "the marketplace of ideas." He writes:

A restricted flow of information wasn't democracy's most serious threat... A bigger impediment to democratic debate was having too many citizens who had already decided how they would vote. Because..."we find that consumers of ideas, if they have made a decision on the issue, themselves erect high tariff walls against alien notions."

Read the whole post here. I guess this begs the philosophical question: to what extent can we have an equitable and open marketplace of ideas in a late-stage capitalist democracy such as this one? Just as corporations have responded to the increased competition of a global economy with consolidation into multinational conglomerates, so too have our political parties consolidated coalitions of specialized interests (note I refrain from using the charged term "special interests") straight into a 50-50 split.

How is our mental protectionism to come down? High tariffs don't succeed economically; as every Ferris Bueller cinephile knows, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act failed and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. To what extent do protectionist impulses succeed intellectually, politically, geo-politically – in the global information age?

This nation is very strange. It is a young nation whose institutions have proved so durable -- throughout the last 150 years of mechanized warfare -- that it is reluctant to acknowledge just how old it actually is. It has become old enough to lose its history. Twice. First via the creation of its foundational myths. And next, during the 1960s, when its foundational myths were penetrated, punctured, and deconstructed. This national mythology (which had sufficed as a successful history for decades) is now threatened by the truths of history. The truth – will it set you free? Or is truth a fatality? The "silent majority," who found its voice in the last decade, has woven its economic patriotism with a Judeo-Christian wool, and evidently chose – as per the parable in the Tree of Knowledge – the latter. This should now, at any rate, come as no surprise: the heroic, in war and in trade, those who constructed and adhered to this mythology -- (who become heroic by suppressing guilts which could render them, and the nation, mortal entities) -- grew outraged, and not without cause, at the attack made by Left-Wing radical thinkers upon the social, psychological, and political structures that underpinned their heroism. Because to them, they were the babies in the bathwater. These babies were not going to be tossed with the tub. Because to them, there is no differentiation between the baby, the tub, and the bathwater.

As David Foster Wallace said, two fish are swimming around.
The first says,
"Where'd all this water come from?"
and the second says
"What's water?"

By decrying the whole process of baby-bathing, while failing to come up with a coherent, successful idea of how to make the infant cleaner, the Left became fixated in the mind of the Right as "a culture of victimhood." Whence Phil Gramm's "a nation of whiners." A flooding into the national mind, a concentration, a popular concentration, of power held by a few, and powerlessness among many. And that is defined as un-American.

This Judeo-Christian matrix, at the heart of the American mythology, is the narrative of a rebellion justified by its success – the belief in a Chosen People who listened to their Father and received divine assistance to escape slavery, who then eventually followed the Correct Path – innocence, pride, suffering, belief, hope, providence, enlightenment, good works and heaven. The American capitalist defines his justice as the good grace, and the good fortune, to rise up from wage-slavery to entrepreneurship to success (by which we term: popularity of an idea as paid for in the marketplace) to the creation of a more personalized heaven on Earth. By which we term liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The United States' political philosophy was founded on the work of French and English Enlightenment thinkers. And religious refugees. Thus the nub of the problem – two freedoms opposed to one another. Freedom to think and live outside the established religious tradition, banging headlong into others' freedom to think and live inside one of many established religious traditions. Thus those inside always feel themselves to be embattled. They put up fortresses and outposts. And feeling threatened, invade. The rules apply throughout, in the achievement of the word greatness. Every man is a Roman Empire; every man battles the Goths, is invaded by Vandals and Huns.

I inaugurate this blog as a gallery of ideas. Mine and others I admire. I inaugurate this blog as a black market of ideas. Stuff you can't buy in a store. The tariffs are too high there.