Culture ArchivesJuly 31, 2008Celebrity SkinI see I'm not the only one who thought John McCain's "Celebrity" ad would be a good opportunity for a Hole reference, as Michael Crowley goes there too opining: P.S. Terrible video but this album actually had its moments. I agree that Hole gets a bad rap, but really Live Through This has the vast majority of the listenable material. Did you know that Melissa auf der Mar has a blog? July 29, 2008Faster Than a Speeding Myth
Ross Douthat recommends some anti-Dark Knight musings from A.O. Scott: I don't want to start any fights with devout fans or besotted critics. I'm willing to grant that "The Dark Knight" is as good as a movie of its kind can be. But that may be damning with faint praise. There is no doubt that Batman, a staple of American popular culture for nearly 70 years, provided Mr. Nolan (and his brother and screenwriting partner Jonathan), with a platform for his artistic ambitions. You can't set out to make a psychological thriller, or even an urban crime melodrama, and expect to command anything like the $185 million budget Mr. Nolan had at his disposal in "The Dark Knight." And that money, in addition to paying for some dazzling set pieces and action sequences, allowed Mr. Nolan and his team to create a seamless and evocative visual atmosphere, a Gotham nightscape often experienced from the air. Thence comes the thesis that a movie about a superhero just can't, on some level, be a great film. I think The Dark Knight has enough specific problems, especially in terms of the quality of the dialogue and some odd plot holes, that one is well-justified in cautioning that audience enthusiasm for this film shouldn't be allowed to go overboard. But I think moving toward a generic point about inherent limits of movies about Batman is pretty off-base. What is Homer writing about if not superheroes? And at the same time, some of this winds up letting the artists off the hook. If a story's quality has been compromised in order to set up the next edition of the franchise, that's a storyteller compromising his story for money. Inevitable, perhaps, and thus not the most condemnation-worthy thing in the universe but still a real compromise that deserves to be criticized on the merits and not just waved off as an inevitable consequence of superhero-dom. Meanwhile, not to be too much of a super hero apologist, I should say that over the weekend I went to see Werner Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the Earth and at the end of the day Herzog's made a much better film. July 26, 2008DC PrepTrailer: Sadly, reliable sources inform me that this is not a trailer for an actual show just an aspiring director trying to get noticed. But as a Gossip Girl fan now transplanted to DC, I kind of want to see it. One problem here, however, is that DC Prep is the name of a real school, a public charter school in Northeast mostly serving low-income families. And, by most accounts, doing a damn fine job of it getting good results for disadvantaged kids who would otherwise be wasting away in the distinctly subpar DCPS system. They're trying to steadily scale up the size of their operation both to help more students but also to try to prove that they have a concept that can work at larger scales and be a model for systematic changes. July 25, 2008Bush and BatmanVia Isaac Chotiner, Andrew Klavan writes in The Wall Street Journal that Bush is Batman: There seems to me no question that the Batman film "The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past. As I said yesterday, I think that's definitely a viable interpretation of the film. But mostly what it highlights is that the right-wing doesn't understand al-Qaeda and the modern world -- Osama bin Laden isn't actually like the joker and tactics appropriate to fighting a comic book villain aren't appropriate for the real world. Meanwhile, I liked John's liberal internationalist reading that stitched Dark Knight together with Batman Begins and sees the Joker as a kind of blowback phenomenon. July 24, 2008Dark Knight Politics
Eric Alterman says: p.s. I saw The Dark Knight yesterday afternoon, and I think it pulled off the neat trick of being both libertarian and fascistic, which is to say it is damn confused ... not bad, but not consistent either. I'm not entirely sure that's right for reasons I'll go into in the spoiler-filled section of the post left below the fold. But for starters let me say that I think that a well-made film that, rather than being topical as such, instead chooses to deal with topical themes often doesn't really have a political "point of view." Instead, it makes everybody think about the present political situation but we'll probably reach different conclusions about it just as we reach different conclusions about the real world. July 21, 2008In Defense of Christian Bale
I thought this was a very odd criticism from David Denby: It’s a workable dramatic conflict, but only half the team can act it. Christian Bale has been effective in some films, but he’s a placid Bruce Wayne, a swank gent in Armani suits, with every hair in place. He’s more urgent as Batman, but he delivers all his lines in a hoarse voice, with an unvarying inflection. Bale's performance in the film isn't as interesting as Heath Ledger's or Aaron Eckhardt's but he's "a placid Bruce Wayne" because Bruce Wayne is a placid guy, a character invented to disguise the identity of Batman. Similarly, Batman delivers all his lines in a hoarse voice, with an unvarying inflection, because he's trying to make his voice unrecognizable as Bruce Wayne's voice. Yes, it's weird to listen to. But why shouldn't it be weird to listen to a vigilante dressed in bat armor? The trouble with some of Batman's conversations is that, especially near the end of the film, he's speaking badly written dialogue -- nobody does ponderous exposition well. The other thing I wanted to say was that while the praise Ledger has gotten is very much deserved, I'd appreciate some more acknowledgment that one reason he's able to do such an extraordinary job is that the Joker is one of the great pop characters. He, Batman, and Two Face, with the various different takes on them presented over the years, are great American myths, which is why their stories can be told and re-told over and over again in different ways to great effect. The Nolan/Ledger version of the Joker seems based on the Joker of The Killing Joke and A Death in the Family rather than springing ex nihilo from the filmmakers. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's worth acknowledging. July 20, 2008RatingsI intent to write something substantive about The Dark Knight at some point, but let me just note this point from Chris Orr's excellent review: "This is not a film for children, and the MPAA should be ashamed of its PG-13 acquiescence." That's very true. I'm not sure the whole ratings system is a great idea in the first place, but as-applied it leads to absurd results like this one. If Christian Bale had stubbed his toe and said "fuck" a bunch of times, I guess this would have been an R movie. But without naughty words or naughty body parts, an incredibly dark, violent movie that deals entirely with genuinely mature themes (rather than euphemism "mature" ones) gets a pass. It totally defies common sense. And it does so in a context where guidance is actually necessary. Most of the time I feel like parents probably don't need ratings to have a good idea of what is and isn't appropriate for their kids. But one can easily imagine a parent of a young child who watches Batman cartoons not giving the subject much thought and then drawing false confidence from the PG-13 rating and suddenly he's watching people get set on fire, key characters be brutally murdered, people getting tortured, cold-blooded executions, etc., etc. July 15, 2008I Think You Mean "Shipping"If I ruled the internet, there would be a strict rule against writing that one was "moving to Boston". Instead, the right move is shipping up to Boston to facilitate the posting of Dropkick Murphys videos: Also, while I've said bad things about Boston in the future and will doubtless say them again in the past, after my most recent visited I wanted to congratulate the MBTA on demonstrating good humor in coming up with the CharlieCard name. July 11, 2008Friday Garbage BloggingIn honor of Taylor Momsen: All I want is you.... July 10, 2008Gymnastics super fit / Muscle in the gun clipI've wondered from time to time if anyone take's M.I.A.'s third world revolutionary lyrics seriously. The answer appears to be yes as Leighton Meester tells Vanity Fair "I like fun music, too, like M.I.A. She has good things to say." Also, I consider myself a huge Garbage apologist, but Taylor Momsem strains credulity when she says "Garbage is my all-time favorite band." Meanwhile, it's a bit shocking to learn that there now exist famous people who were two years old when "Stupid Girl" was released. July 9, 2008Fear of CrimeTa-Nehisi Coates had a very interesting post the other day on the difficult subject of race and crime. I wanted to flag a bit of a side theme, though, both in his post and in some of the comments which is about fear of crime. He talks about how even when he lived in DC years ago and the crime rate was much higher, he wasn't frightened: July 8, 2008Hancock's TriumphExcellent. It seems that Will Smith's unfairly maligned genre-busting super hero film Hancock made a shitload of money. Any wealthy movie stars / directors / producers involved with the film who want to pay me vast sums to beat the drums of praise for their movie should get in touch at myglesias at gmail dot com. I'm not that principled! July 6, 2008HancockThis afternoon, I went to see Wall-E and Hancock. The former is every bit as good as everyone says. The latter, while not as good as the former, is way better than everyone says. Hancock getting a 42 on Metacritic or a 37 percent (!) on RottenTomatoes is absurd. The film has some serious flaws, but also some very real virtues. David Denby, one of the few critics who liked it, goes overboard by calling it "by far the most enjoyable big movie of the summer" (that's Iron Man) but it is good. I would analogize Hancock to Starship Troopers -- an innovative and actually pretty arty film miscast as a genre summer blockbuster that will be a critical and commercial failure but later come to be appreciated. July 5, 2008Starbucks's Second Wave
I saw this album on sale at Starbucks yesterday and damn if I wasn't tempted to buy it. At the end of the day, the inherent ickiness of buying an album at Starbucks wasn't even the tipping point -- I just haven't bought a physical CD in years and it seems too late in history to start doing it again. In particular, buying a physical compilation CD just doesn't really make sense -- I have a lot of these songs already and could assemble the playlist easily enough by just buying a few additional tracks. Ackerman, lost in his archives, remarked that "the Germans must have a word for the heartbreak you experience when you see that some of your favorite music is on sale at Starbucks." What Have I Done?Via Robert Farley and Tbogg, it seems Roger Simon didn't really understand The Bridge on the River Kwai. Either that or Simon really is dissing John McCain's military service in a much more profound way than I've ever seen any Democrat do. July 4, 2008Mixed FeelingsMy sense every July 4 is that I could get more jazzed up about independence if it were more plausible for Americans to work ourselves up into a fury of anti-British sentiment. In the real world, however, America's two closest allies are the former colonial power and the segments of British North America that didn't join in our rebellion. Ultimately, I think the United States is a pretty awesome country but it very plausibly would have been even awesomer had English and American political leaders in the late 18th century been farsighted enough to find compromises that would have held the empire together. Nevertheless, we live in the world that is. Happy birthday, America! These lines from the Declaration of Independence still ring out as incredible wisdom hundreds of years later: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Fireworks! July 3, 2008A Bridge Too FarVia Justin Logan, John McCain on patriotism: "Patriotism is deeper than its symbolic expressions, than sentiments about place and kinship that move us to hold our hands over our hearts during the national anthem. It is putting the country first, before party or personal ambition, before anything." Like Justin, I'm going to have to cop to not being so patriotic that there's literally nothing I would put above my country. Indeed, I believe that most Americans, whether secular or religious, put stock in some kind of universal ethical obligations that extend beyond national boundaries. Star Wars In OrderI was watching Star Wars IV: A New Hope last night on television, and somehow it occurred to me for the first time that a new generation who watches the six movie cycle starting with The Phantom Menace is going to wind up with a very different perception of the story than the original audience got. This is true in terms of a few big plot points, like that whole thing about Darth Vader being Luke's father, but also in terms of some broader atmospheric points. The beginning A New Hope is cloaked in a sense of mystery. For all we know old Ben Kenobi really is just a crazy old man and Han Solo's skepticism about "hokey religions" is justified. The audience rides along with Luke throughout the film, learning to trust in the power of the Force. New audiences won't have that experience, they'll already know much much more than Luke does about the Jedi, the Empire, the Skywalker clan, etc. July 2, 2008AlineaI have no real ability to write about food, so I wasn't going to say anything about it but Ezra wants to know how I liked my dinner at Alinea the other day. Long story short, it was really good. It was the best I'd ever had by a substantial margin. Not only did it taste great, but the inventiveness level was off the charts -- the food is very abstract in a way that makes the flavors all the more mind-blowing. Also, apparently it's possible to combine chocolate and duck to good effect. Sara and I went because Restaurant magazine told us it was the 21st best restaurant in the world and I've never been to any of the other contenders on their top fifty list so I'm in no position to judge it relative to the relevant competition. At the moment, though, I'm full of regret that I'm not nearly rich enough to go off and tour the even higher-rated options. July 1, 2008Panels I Did Not AttendMy Apen schedule includes the following event: Religion and the Modern World Wouldn't it be weird if the correct answer turned out to be that American Jews speak for Islam? Meanwhile, as a secular person myself I find myself very sympathetic to Irshad Manji's point of view but it's kind of odd to have only one practicing Muslim on the panel. Mogahed's work on Muslim public opinion is extremely useful factual information on a subject that tends to attract a lot of hot air. June 25, 2008Obama's TunesBarack Obama reveals what's on his iPod. Relative to the musical information he was prepared to release in spring 2007 he seems to have evolved in a more hip-hop direction. UPDATE: Friend and reader JT reminds me that Obama's awesomely named body man Reggie Love is responsible for the hip-hopificiation of Obama's playlist. I want him to download some Girl Talk and think about the intellectual property law ramifications. Grand New Party
I feel it's likely that very few of the people reading this blog are conservative movement leaders looking for ways to orient their movement in a more humane direction that would give it a better shot at winning votes without resorting to terrible flim-flam and massive dishonesty. But in case you are out there, or maybe if you're just interested in American politics, I hope you'll read Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream by my colleagues Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam. The book is, in essence, a call for conservatives to get real about acknowledging some of the economic problems facing the country and an attempt to develop meaningful solutions to these problems. I'm not sure how well some of these solutions will qualify as conservative, and others I don't really agree with, but on the hole I think the kind of things they're putting on the table would be a huge step in the right direction. I'm a bit skeptical that this is a realistic vision for what the Republican Party might be like, but on some level I think it makes more sense to let conservative reformers have their shot at winning their internal battles than for liberals sitting on the sidelines to just sort of speculate about the possibilities. June 24, 2008Glass CeilingsAnn Dunwoody poised to become the Army's first four star general, heading up Army Material Command. DC for Obama Located
Intrepid commenter Alex on this very site cracked the code that revealed the DC for Obama t-shirt that DCist had previously reported did not exist. Now they say "The shirt still isn't included on the main state shirt page of the Obama online store, however. Should we have been able to figure out that it was hidden there all along? Perhaps. Should we have had to? At the very least, it's sloppy web design." So be that as it may, my friends, that's still not change you can believe in [hideous scowl]. John McCain could design a better page and he doesn't even know how to use a computer. Stealth MinoritiesVia Brendan Nyhan, some puzzling remarks from a leader of the white supremacist community: "I haven't seen this much anger in a long, long time," said Billy Roper, a 36-year-old who runs a group called White Revolution in Russellville, Ark. "Nothing has awakened normally complacent white Americans more than the prospect of America having an overtly nonwhite president." Have we had a covertly nonwhite president? Warren Harding, perhaps? The Internet is Sending Me MessagesIn my Twitter feed -- "the new Girl Talk record is a necessity for modern living"; "the new Girl Talk record is aware of all internet traditions" -- it's downloading as we speak and available for sale on a "pay what you want" basis here. I've been enjoying the newish Ladytron for the past week or so. June 23, 2008George CarlinA comedy icon passes at the end of a long and successful life. June 22, 2008Slavery By Another Name
I mentioned Douglas Blackmon's excellent book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II once before and I'm glad to learn that Bill Moyers featured it on his show recently. Here's a bit of the transcript: DOUGLAS BLACKMON: Vagrancy. So, vagrancy was a law that essentially, it simply, you were breaking the law if you couldn't prove at any given moment that you were employed. Well, in a world in which there were no pay stubs, it was impossible to prove you were employed. The only way you could prove employment was if some man who owned land would vouch for you and say, he works for me. And of course, none of these laws said it only applies to black people. But overwhelmingly, they were only enforced against black people. And many times, thousands of times I believe, you had young black men who attempted to do that. They ended up being arrested and returned to the original farmer where they worked in chains, not even a free worker, but as a slave. It's a fascinating book, and does a lot to put contemporary issues in an important but essentially forgotten context. See more here. The Wrath of KhanMongol, a Russian-directed Mongolian-language film about the early life of Genghis Khan that I saw Friday night is kinda weird but also kinda awesome. In the "weird" drawer, it's a very long movie and yet ends with the unification of Mongolia -- all the serious conquering is left for a sequel. But it's awesome enough that I'd definitely go see a sequel. It also made me a bit interested in the actual history of the period. Are there books on the subject that people would recommend? June 19, 2008Grandma Take Me HomeI was a bit surprised to see a few Nirvana haters popping up in the "Glycerin" thread the day before yesterday. Thinking it over, though, I'm actually glad they showed up because it inspired me to listen to some Nirvana, which is always a worthwhile experience: In general, for a much-praised and undoubtedly influential band, Nirvana strikes me as shockingly little listened-to in practice. Perhaps that's because the band actually sucks and people don't like them, but in my experience people are almost always surprised by how good Nirvana actually is when their stuff comes on. In short, they're not just a band that people say was great -- they're actually great. June 18, 2008By Request: MusicLive asks: "Since you've got that post up about Bush, I'm going to repeat my earlier question as to whether you (Matt) have any interest in any other kind of music. I'm not (just) snarking -- alt-rock is well and good, but it seems like someone of your intelligence, interests, background, and inquisitiveness would be attracted to other kinds of music as well." Eh, not so much. I mean, I like mainstream commercial hip-hop pretty well though I don't follow it all that closely. And I like Shostakovich. But the overwhelming majority of what I listen to fits into a broad "rock of the past thirties years" category. I'm afraid I'm just not very interesting. June 17, 2008Your Reductio is My Dystopia
My mother's name was "Margaret Joskow" when she was born and so it remained throughout her life. Thus, I've always taken the traditional family values line and believed that people should hold on to their own names. So I agree with Kay Steiger: Furthermore, I never really understood, if it's such an important issue for families to all have the same names (because how would you know you belong to one another otherwise?) why it has to be the woman that changes her name. Why can't the man? I've yet to hear a good response to that one. Changing names to become a "unit" is silly. What if you were asked to change your name each time you changed jobs or professions? People would say that's silly, but for me it's no more silly than changing your name each time you change partners. Fortunately, we don't just need to contemplate how silly it would be to change your name every time you change jobs. Instead, we can read Max Barry's amusing sci-fi satire Jennifer Government, set in a hyper-capitalist future in which individuals use the name of the conglomerate that employs them (Nike, McDonald's, etc.), with "Jennifer Government" thus named because she works for the government. Back to the topic at hand, isn't the inconvenience of changing your email address reason enough to stick with your original name? Brain ScanVia Andrew Sullivan new research on the neurobiology of sexual orientation: The scans reveal that in gay people, key structures of the brain governing emotion, mood, anxiety and aggressiveness resemble those in straight people of the opposite sex. The differences are likely to have been forged in the womb or in early infancy, says Ivanka Savic, who conducted the study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. "This is the most robust measure so far of cerebral differences between homosexual and heterosexual subjects," she says. Liberals tend to believe that sexual orientation is determined by genetics but that gender-difference in behavior is not, whereas conservatives tend to believe the reverse. But, of course, as we see here these are related issues. June 16, 2008Remembering the HemmingsesDana Goldstein, inspired by the story of the McCain organizer involved in keeping the Jefferson family all-white, offers us a bit of background on the increasingly cut-and-dry case that Thomas Jefferson is the father of Sally Hemmings' children: Conclusive DNA evidence linking Jefferson or one of his brothers to the black Hemings line has existed since 1998. In 2000, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation concluded it was likely that Jefferson himself fathered all six of his slave Sally Hemings' children. The dates of their births correspond quite neatly to nine months after the rare times Jefferson and Hemings were simultaneously at the estate. And historical documents indicate, the foundation found, that "several people close to Thomas Jefferson or the Monticello community believed that he was the father of Sally Hemings' children." I'm not really a Jefferson admirer (though Monticello is definitely worth visiting) so I'm not sure I sympathize all that much with the desire to secure acknowledgment as an official descendant. But the desire to deny such acknowledgment is substantially more baffling. June 15, 2008Father's DayOne is accustomed to Barack Obama giving good speeches, and his father's day address is no different. This one will, I expect, be a pretty big hit politically, too, since it has certain conservativish resonances about the centrality of family conditions to our social problems. The New York Times remarks that "Obama laid out his case in stark terms that would be difficult for a white candidate to make" which is doubtless true. Nevertheless, it's worth pointing out that while the level of single-parent households is lower in white families than in black ones, the trend is toward increase and has been for some time. The sorts of problems stereotypically associated with black families, in short, are becoming more and more common across the demographic spectrum. Vacation Spots to AvoidI like traveling to unusual places. Even a spot that's unpleasant, in a conventional sense, can be fun to visit just to see what it's like, amass the relevant anecdotes, etc. But I think I'll be staying far away from Yakutsk. Politics Without IdeologyThere's been a bit of a discussion going on between Ross Douthat, Tyler Cowen, Ross again, John Holbo, and Brad DeLong about defining conservative ideology. At the same time, Richard Just did a piece recently arguing that Jim Webb may agree with liberals about a lot of policy issues but really he's a conservative. To me, thinking about all this mostly reminds us that American politics isn't especially ideological and hasn't historically ever been especially ideological. Tradition and institutional structure have given us a robust two-party system. Geography and immigration have given us an enormous, extremely diverse country. Typical democracies have many fewer people and substantially more political parties. Consequently, practical politics in the United States revolves around a competition between two political coalitions that are, of necessity, pretty slapdash and unwieldy. The primary fact about an American's political allegiance, under the circumstances, is his attitude toward those coalitions not his or her abstract ideas about how things ought to be. A "conservative" in this sense just is someone who supports the Republican coalition versus the Democratic one and who in internal debates tends to support the institutionalized conservative movement's "three pillars" approach against various reformist tendencies. This is in a lot of respects disappointing for a writer, since it involves people who are interested in ideas spending a lot of our time doing "gotcha" stuff about how the other team is desperately in hoc to malign interests. But I think that if you look at our history overall, you'll see that America has benefitted from having a political system that's relatively comfortable acknowledging the essentially grubby and transactional nature of real-world democratic politics rather than one dominated by a lot of aspirations to purism and total victory. June 14, 2008The Incredible HulkChris Orr is very right about this utterly okay film: In any case, at the screening I attended, the loudest cheers of the night by far were for an end-of-the-film cameo by Robert Downey, Jr., as Tony Stark that closely parallels the post-credit Nick Fury scene in Iron Man. (Again, the purpose is twofold: To begin knitting Marvel's comic universe together, and to build buzz for The Avengers.) It was an odd moment, at once elating and deflating. For fans of the superhero genre--and of special-effect action movies in general--The Incredible Hulk is a perfectly solid addition to the canon. But its primary aftertaste is eager anticipation for Iron Man 2. That said, I do think it's neat that as part of the Marvel Studios venture they seem eager to stitch together a semi-coherent Marvel Studios continuity to sit along side the "regular" and "ultimate" continuities of the books. It's always struck me as a weakness of the various DC or Marvel based films that they rip their characters out of the broader universes in which they've been embedded in their "native" medium. Citi FieldI went to the Mets game last night with my dad and brother, and for the first time it was brought home to me that Shea Stadium's replacement is being called "Citi Field" as in the giant financial services firm, rather than "City Field" as in the English language phrase. The very possibility of the confusion seems to me to indicate that the Mets are pretty lucky in the sponsor they got. How annoying a sponsorship deal is always strikes me as having something to do with how annoying the name of the sponsoring corporation is. A straightforward one-word brand name like' "Staples Center" isn't nearly as bad as "TD Banknorth Garden" so it seems to me that companies with relatively inoffensive names should get a discount. Of course the other thing is that pure longevity can dignify any kind of name. It almost feels as if the gum is named after Wrigley Field rather than the other way around, whereas when something happens like mergers in the telecom industry force the MCI Center to become the Verizon Center, you're really getting your nose rubbed into the seediness of it all. June 13, 2008Signs of the ApocalypseCongress to start Twittering. The Internet Destroyed My Mind.I'm an unabashed internet fan and internet booster, but I do think there's a lot to the concern Nicholas Carr voices in our current issue. Certainly I share this experience: When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?" All things considered, I think digital media is unquestionably a boon, but this is an issue. I should say, though, that since my dad bought be a Kindle for my birthday, I've been going back to reading books more. Somehow, taking the book and replicating some of the computer user experience has re-engaged me. And in an odd sense, the fact that it's hard to flip through a Kindle book has also been useful in this regard -- I'm going through Brothers Karamazov one page after another in an patient, orderly manner that I wouldn't have thought possible three months ago. The Wrong AirportI'm not sure I really share his broader concerns, but Hendrick Hertzberg really is right about JFK Airport: I’m less happy about John F. Kennedy Airport, partly because its old name, Idlewild, was so beautiful and romantic. J.F.K. obviously deserves a New York memorial of some sort—a statue in some prominent place, such as Grand Army Plaza, the square at the southeast corner of Central Park, would do nicely—and he certainly deserves an airport. But the right airport would have been Boston’s Logan, currently named for a Boston statehouse pol who died in 1939 and on whom the statute of limitations has surely run out. Right. Kennedy's a Boston guy from a Massachusetts family, his airport should be there. On the other hand, I sort of like it when well-known things end up named after obscure politicians -- it leads to better trivia. Who was the Shea of Shea Stadium? That sort of thing. Photo of Boston Logan Airport by Flickr user Beige Inside used under a Creative Commons license June 12, 2008Narrow Stairs
Maybe I'm just out of touch or something, but I haven't heard much of anything about Death Cab for Cutie's newish album Narrow Stairs that they released last month. Indeed, I didn't even realize it had been released at all until about a week ago when a friend offered me a ticket to their show earlier this week at Merriweather. Well, I got the album, I went to the show, and it all makes you recall that Death Cab is a really band! Pitchfork, in full-on hater mode, gives it a 6.0 and makes remarks worthy of ninth grade like "surely Death Cab's awkward position as one of the few indie rock groups with a platinum record would be enough to drive anyone to drink" but it's a good record. I promise! One doubts anything here will convert non-fans, but decent folk will like it fine. "Bixby Canyon Bridge" is the best, the extended intro to "I Will Possess Your Heart" was annoying to watch live but, to me, works on the album. June 10, 2008Feminism and FocusLinda Hirschman had a somewhat puzzling op-ed calling on feminism to "focus" more and, I guess, abandon efforts by the movement to be open to more diverse people and concerns. Less intersectionality, more single-minded focus on middle-class white women trying to climb the corporate ladder. Mostly, I agree with Jill Filipovich's take on this but I thought I might also say that the alleged lack of progress to which Hirschman's recipe of "focus" is supposed to be the solution doesn't actually seem to me to have been happening. If you think of the long trajectory of Western society, you have women being totally excluded from the main positions of economic and political power for hundreds of years. You also have a situation where since most people are women, you can't achieve equality by simply opening the doors of existing institutions to a new group of people. Institutions actually need to be rethought, reconfigured, and in some instances remade. That's, you know, hard to do. So I don't think anyone should consider it a shocking sign of things gone wrong that thirty or forty years hasn't proven to be enough time to eradicate every problem. Nor do I think the fact that many problems remain should make people think that progress isn't being made. On the elite issues dear to Hirschman's heart, we saw our first woman to anchor the nightly broadcast news starting in 2006. We saw the first woman to be Speaker of the House of Representatives sworn in in 2007. Things keep changing, which is as it should be. It's okay for people to be impatient with the pace of change, but not so impatient that they develop a false sense of crisis and decide that throwing people of color under the bus is the way to move forward. June 9, 2008Guerilla SouthIn the course of critiquing a Richard Cohen column, Publius says: In April 1865, [Robert E.] Lee had a fateful choice. Sure, the war couldn’t be won in the traditional sense. But Lee could have turned his battle-hardened army into a guerrilla outfit that could have harassed federal armies for decades. To his eternal credit, he declined to do so. Choosing guerrilla war would have made post-war North/South tensions even more poisonous than they were (with longer lasting effects). I'm not sure that reflects a correct understanding of the strategic conflict during the Civil War. It's true that in a conventional war of national liberation, this kind of guerilla strategy would be the expected line for the Confederacy to take. But the rebels had a very specific goal in mind -- they seceded from the Union after Lincoln's electoral victory because they wanted to preserve slavery. It's very hard to see, however, how a guerilla strategy could have been consistent with the goal of maintaining slavery or the plantation economy. The strategy Southern elites did pursue, of seeking to re-establish first white control over southern state and local governments (including in the states and counties where blacks were a majority) and then total exclusion of blacks from the political process, was, by contrast, a good way of hanging on to half a loaf. Meanwhile, though the Confederate military didn't pursue guerilla war against the Union Army, it should be remembered that southern whites did launch a large-scale, years-long campaign of terrorist violence against their African-American neighbors. June 6, 2008Conspiracy TheoriesAm I the only one who thinks Lisa's made it to the Top Chef finale not despite the fact that she's an inferior cook to several of the people who've gone down in recent weeks but precisely because the producers like the idea of building up a villain. A Richard-Antonia-Stephanie finale would be all good people and talented chefs -- who wants that? But with Lisa in the mix, we can root for her downfall. By Another Name
Yesterday, I picked up Douglas Blackmon's book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II. It's fantastic so far. But what's really striking about the subject is that despite how central the story of racial conflict is to the story of America, and despite how well-known certain key episodes in that history are, the shocking story that Blackmon has to tell here is virtually unknown. I assume that this kind of thing forms part of the basis of black-white gaps in perception in the United States. The white version of American history certainly admits to the existence of racial oppression, but it's a very optimistic "up from slavery" story where the key figures are the heroes and the key episodes are the ones in which the good guys lost. But for fifty-five or sixty years following the collapse of the Confederacy, the cause of racial equality suffered nothing but setbacks. African-Americans are no doubt largely ignorant of these obscure episodes in a formal sense, but since it's literally part of their family background the history of backsliding and abandonment is going to color the black community's perception of progress made thus far. It's one thing to recognize that America once tolerated great injustices and then put a stop to them. It's another thing entirely to recognize that the injustices came back and the whole period in which they did so has been expurgated from our official narrative. June 3, 2008Bad MoviesI feel like these candidates for a list of 101 movies to avoid watching before you die doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of cinematic badness. I can't really speak to bad movies from before my time (I like to check out a highly-touted classic from before I was born, but I'm not going to seek out old clunkers) but of the films I've seen Congo and Absolute Power are the pits. Either way, it's a good discussion for a thread. As groundrules, I would say that we're looking for bad movies that are legitimate Hollywood studio releases -- no direct to video stuff. June 2, 2008Recommended ReadingThe New York Times asks sundry intellectuals to offer book recommendations to the presidential contenders. Daniel Drezner offers his own recommendations as does Ezra Klein. Sadly, nobody mentions Heads in the Sand. But if I were president, I think I'd really be trying hard to stay away from books about politics and public policy -- you get that all day! Plus I'd say one good thing about being president is that if you ever want some writer/thinker/analyst to explain his ideas and their implications for you, you can easily get him to stop by your office for a chat. I'd say the president should focus his reading energies on big, long nineteenth century novels. War and Peace, Moby Dick, Crime and Punishment -- those are some good books! And with any luck, they'll remind you that there are crucial elements -- probably the most crucial elements -- of human life that transcend the domain of the political. Against the WWII Memorial
It's true, the newish World War II memorial in Washington really is a stinker. It's a bit hard to illustrate the badness because part of its terrible-osity is that it's been designed at a scale where it's almost impossible to take the whole thing in and offer anyone a decent photo to illustrate what it looks like. But the aesthetics are bad and vaguely un-American, the efforts at symbolism are simultaneously over-literal and incomprehensible. All-in-all it's something that comes closer to belonging in a third-rate Soviet city than on the National Mall. Here's a lengthy complaint. I'll only note in the WWII memorial's defense that the Korean War memorial also sucks and nobody seems to mind. June 1, 2008Relativism and TimeWill Wilkinson rails against relativistic defense of Thomas Jefferson's slaveholding that posit that it was somehow okay to be a slaveholder in the late eighteenth century because a lot of other people were doing it too: Now it seems to me that you actually do want to incorporate a slightly relativistic approach to evaluating people. If you compare a dictator like Francisco Franco to a dictator like Charles V, I think it's got to be relevant that in Franco's time there was a viable and well-known alternative to dictatorship. As soon as Franco passed from the scene, a morally responsible leader like King Juan Carlos was able to shift the country to democracy rather than simply try to rule as a good dictator. But to blame the sixteenth century heir to a multinational empire for not embracing fundamental liberal political reforms seems silly as such reforms just weren't part of the consciousness of the time -- it wasn't within the realm of the possible. Somewhat similarly, when you look back at the record of Abraham Lincoln he said and believed a lot of stuff that would count as unforgivably racist were you to say or believe it today. But he lived in the middle of the nineteenth century and his views were clearly progressive ones relative to the times in which he lived as reflected in the fact that his policies were a boon to African-Americans even though the underlying sentiments didn't always reach the standards of contemporary egalitarianism. But this, to me, is really where Jefferson starts to look terrible. The idea that chattel slavery was morally wrong was in wide circulation in Jefferson's time. Outside of the southern states, it was conventional wisdom that this was a bad institution. And Jefferson was not only aware of the view that slavery was bad, he appears to have found the evidence convincing. But he was too selfish, personally, to make the sacrifices that would have been involved in freeing his slaves and he was unwilling to take any meaningful political risks on behalf of the anti-slavery cause. Dystopia is the BestIt's always fun when you see elements of dystopian visions of the future coming true. Arnold Schwarzennegger is a successful politician just like in Demolitiion Man and now in what seemed like the most horrifying aspect of Minority Report come to life some entrepreneurs are "equipping billboards with tiny cameras that gather details about passers-by — their gender, approximate age and how long they looked at the billboard." May 31, 2008Fast Food NationIt turns out that Hardee's, where I'd never eaten before, serves a much better fast food burger than what you get at a McDonald's. They're also the subject of this fascinating/horrifying Portfolio story about the company's efforts to make itself even more unhealthy than the competition, but I stuck to their normal-sized burger, eschewing items like the 1,400 calorie Monster Thickburger. Tights Are Not Pants
I'm not sure if any of you have been around college undergraduates recently, but those of us who have (The Atlantic's offices are right by the GWU campus) have noticed a somewhat distressing trend toward young women wearing tights as pants. Under the circumstances, I thought I might take the opportunity to plug the work of the good people at TightsAreNotPants.com who are trying to point out that tights are, in fact, not pants. This comes to me via Nylon magazine which it seems also has a print feature on this in their May issue. May 30, 2008"How Sex and the City are we right now? I'm Samantha, you're Charlotte and you're the lady at home who watches it."[Alyssa] I am just as horrified as anyone by the idea that someone would pay $19,000 for a ticket to the Sex and the City premiere and "experience" in New York. Sex and the City was a very good show, and I watched a lot of it during one post-breakup summer with one of my best girlfriends (who I'm going to see the movie with tomorrow morning), but it is not the Bible. On the other end of the spectrum, though, lies an equally annoying person: the critic who doesn't understand that most Sex and the City fans understand that the show is not the Bible. I'm not going to see the movie to get life cues from Carrie Bradshaw any more than I went to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to learn about South American archeology from Indiana Jones or the Star Wars movies for helpful hints on how to run a political movement (though not setting up your base of operations in an ice cave is probably a good idea). The movie is a big, dumb summer fantasy. And while actually not accumulating savings because you buy too many designer shoes and running the risk of losing your apartment would be a very bad thing in real life, I think most women are not going to actually make that kind of mistake. I guess I don't really understand why wanting a lightsaber makes someone a harmless geek but wanting a closetful of Jimmy Choos makes someone riddled with avarice. Getting either one is really equally unrealistic for most people. It's just wishful thinking. In my fantasy life, I'd take one of each. Update: Hey, to defend my geek cred, I never said that the Hoth fortress wasn't awesome. Awesome, however, is not the same as practical. I'm pretty sure that making the place warm enough for humans to live in, lubricant not to freeze in X-wings, etc. would leave a huge, detectable heat signature. Also, building your fortress of material that's prone to cave-ins, etc., especially when your military equipment presumably isn't terribly easy to replace (it's not like they can waltz into the Coruscant shipyards and order up a new fleet of planes stat) doesn't seem like a very good idea, at least to me. May 29, 2008Beverly Hills--That's Where I Want to Be[Isaac] First Lethal Weapon. Then Die Hard. Then Indiana Jones. And now... One advantage to starting a series when your star is 23-years-old, however, is that you can make a sequel a quarter of a century later and he will still be mobile. Still, with Brett Ratner directing, my expectations for this are not high. May 28, 2008MethodologyPolling English people on the question of which British actor does the worst American accent on television seems a bit bizarre. Shouldn't Americans decide who's doing an American accent well? Meanwhile, any list along these lines that features Ian McShane's depiction of Al Swearengen as a bad American accent has some serious problems. The character's just supposed to have been born abroad -- it's not an American accent at all! Oh well. Question of the DayJessica Valenti asks "what is the first concert you ever went to?" I believe the answer in my case is They Might Be Giants: I'll stand behind that choice, I've seen TMBG more often over the years than any other band and they do a great show. May 27, 2008Indiana Jones and the Really Terrible CGI[Isaac] If you were unfortunate enough to have dropped ten bucks on Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull over the holiday weekend, the last thing you should feel is alone: The movie has made over $150million in just five days. And the reviews have been okay, too: According to Rotten Tomatoes, the movie garnered a not-unimpressive score of 79%. Still, you might be one of those (brilliant and thoughtful) people who thought the movie was nothing short of dreadful. If so, you are probably asking yourself, How on Earth could this film have been well received by critics? A friend suggested one theory to me, which is that reviewers were scared to dump on a beloved franchise. This seemed plausible, although weren't the three most recent Star Wars films rightfully trashed? Well, sort of: Although not as well reviewed as Indiana Jones 4, none of the moves in George Lucas’ second trilogy received the drubbing it deserved. Anyway, this is a long-winded way of broaching my real problem with the film, which was its awful, awful CGI. David Denby, in an otherwise sensible review, actually seemed to enjoy some of the action scenes, including the big one near the end that looked to my eyes almost completely fake. Denby writes: "In a sequence like that, with wild improbabilities linked by speed and rhythm, Spielberg re-creates the spirit of Buster Keaton’s most elaborately synchronized gags, but on a much grander scale." This could be said of many Spielberg action scenes, to be sure, but not the one in question. In fact, the special effects are so bad that they make the scene the most ridiculous and ponderous in the entire film. Critics who are so concerned about the dreck Hollywood produces every summer should be focusing more time and expending more ink on the CGI that is ruining action movies. If there was one series that should be have been immune to this kind of nonsense, it was Indiana Jones. But alas... May 26, 2008MarsI keep seeing headlines about the NASA landing on Mars and my thoughts immediately shift to Placebo's "Mars Landing Party": That's not safe for work if your colleagues understand French. Question of the DayI was reading GQ yesterday and they were advertorializing on behalf of a $795 sweater. Does anyone really walk around wearing an $800 sweater? I've had the opportunity in my life to meet a healthy number of rich people, and still I'm blown away by the price tags on the clothing I see in magazines whenever I break out of the sad political magazine ghetto. May 24, 2008The Trouble With BooksOne thing I'm not sure most people realize is that unlike magazine articles, books don't go through any kind of formal fact-checking process whatsoever. An author worried about inadvertent errors sneaking into his work (i.e., me) can hire someone out of pocket to check things, but there's nothing stopping an unscrupulous writer from just passing off fabrications as true. Ben Mezrich's Bringing Down the House (the basis for 21), for example "is not a work of "nonfiction" in any meaningful sense of the word." So it's no surprise to see that Mezrich's proposal for a tell-all book about the true story behind Facebook seems to have some questionable sourcing. But some of this stuff is just sloppy -- Mezrich talks a bunch, for example, about a Facebook predecessor that he thinks was called "FaceSmash" but was in fact called "FaceMash." They have a campus newspaper and everything that covered this when it happened. SpinoffsEW reports: "90210 spinoff casts Tristan Wilds of The Wire". This is all wrong. What they ought to do is make a Wire spinoff that's also an update of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in which Wilds, as Michael, moves in with rich Southern California relatives. In fact, I would pay good money just to watch David Simon's facial expression upon hearing that pitch. May 23, 2008Shocking the MonkeyWho says we need copyright? As Reihan Salam amply demonstrates modern information technology lets individuals create bizarre and exciting -- well, bizarre and mildly amusing -- new content with ease using nothing more than a laptop. "Pork and Beans"What's that now? Weezer is still releasing music? Not bad! The Truth Hurts
Gawker has the goods on blog readers and the blogger-authors -- and worse, editors who have contracts to blogger-authors -- they wind up disappointing. May 22, 2008Mirror, MirrorI heard a rumor that Keith Gessen's novel All The Sad Young Literary Men contains a pseudo-autobiographical character named "Keith" who's a liberal political blogger who graduates from Harvard and publishes a 2008 book about foreign policy. A quick glance through Google's "search inside" function seems to confirm this: [Page 29] Everything I wrote then had a kind of glow -- from a spark that I had hoped but did not know was in me -- and it returned to me in print, or online (I had so many ideas that I started a blog at one of the liberal magazines), with an alienated majesty. [...] [Page 234] In Brooklyn I quickly finished my book about the Bush administration's foreign policy (The Damage Done, I called it -- it was an angry book) and found an agent, a fancy agent, and she took me to lunch at the Museum of Modern Art. Sounds like a great guy. At any rate, my understanding is that the world has now entered an n + 1 backlash phase (it strikes me as odd that there can even be a backlash against a small-circulation quarterly) but I still like it. May 19, 2008Prince CaspianI can't remember the plot of the Prince Caspian book at all, but according to Ross the film version departed significantly from the book. So I can't say whether or not this objection applies to the book as well, but when I walked out of the theater I found myself badly disappointed by Aslan's proposed response to conflict between the Telmurines and the Old Narnians. Offering to transport Telmurines back to the island their ancestors came from in the distant past would make about as much sense as rectifying the unjust dispossession of the Native Americans by suggesting that present-day Americans all go back to the countries our ancestors immigrated from. It doesn't make sense on a practical level (the Telmarines new neighbors aren't going to be happy with it at all) and it doesn't make sense on a moral level -- as best I can tell, your typical modern-day Telmarine (as opposed to the king and a small circle of high officials) hasn't done anything wrong. Putting this proposal in context of Prince Caspian riding to power at the head of an army of mythological creatures is just going to turn the Prince into a Quisling figure in the eyes of the human population. Hana-bi
Tyler Cowen considers his favorite Japanese gangster movie: "Should I go with Sonatine? I don't know them all." I don't know them all either, but in this category I prefer a different Takeshi Kitano movie, Fireworks -- or Hana-bi in Japanese -- that came out a few years later. There's a small movie theater next door to the building I grew up in that, back when I was in high school showed tons and tons of gangster and martials arts movies from Japan and Hong Kong so I became surprisingly well-versed in these sub-genres. May 18, 2008The Uncanny ValleyI had never heard of the uncanny valley until I read Tyler Cowen and Jason Kottke blog it today. The basic idea is that when you get quasi-human images -- cartoon people, talking animals, etc. -- they get more appealing to audiences as they become more human like. More appealing, that is, until they become too human while still not quite looking right, at which point they become repugnant. So animators who know they can't perfectly replicate human appearance actually go out of their way to avoid getting too realistic. The Economics of AmateurismInteresting paper from Dan Hunter and John Quiggin: In the economy of the 21st century, economic and technical innovation is increasingly based on developments that don't rely on economic incentive or public provision. Unlike 20th century innovation, the most important developments in innovation have been driven not by research funded by governments or developed by corporations but by the collaborative interactions of individuals. In most cases, this modality of innovation has not been motivated by economic concerns or the prospect of profit. This raises the possibility of a world in which some of the sectors of the economy particularly the ones dealing with innovation and creativity are driven by social interactions of various kinds, rather than by profit-oriented investment. This Article examines the development of this amateur modality of creative production, and explains how it came to exist. It then deals with why this modality is different from and potentially inconsistent with the typical modalities of production that are at the heart of modern views of innovation policy. It provides a number of policy prescriptions that should be used by governments to recognize the significance of amateur innovation, and to further the development of amateur productivity. One often-underlooked element of the intellectual property debate is the ability of the IP regime to effect the balance. Some things are done on a commercial basis and some are done on an amateur basis. Strong IP makes it more difficult for commercial and non-commercial actors alike to be able to innovate. It compensates for erecting this financial hurdle by creating unique financial incentives toward innovation -- incentives that only help a commercial actor. In a world with weaker IP, more and more work should come from hobbyists, amateurs, and non-profit organizations. May 16, 2008Iron Man and ImperialismSpencer Ackerman lays it out. Last DC HITS EvenSunday, 5PM, at Politics & Prose. It's also my birthday, so you should come and sing. May 15, 2008Our Buddhist Future?David Brooks says cutting edge neuroscience will pose a new kind of challenge to the traditionally religious: "The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism." You can see Ross, who thinks this is more like a kind of pantheism, for a theological take on this but here's another kind of thought -- if India and China (and other smaller Asian countries) keep growing, we're going to see much more cultural prestige and geopolitical importance attached to non-monotheistic societies. Fareed Zakaria goes so far in The Post-American World to describe India and China as places where people just don't have religions. I wouldn't put it that way (he's basically defining Christianity and Islam as the only "real" religions) but there is a real difference between Christianity and Islam on the one hand, and all these other practices that try to meet spiritual needs by focusing on specific and personal religious obligations -- obligations to caste or to ancestors or to the Jewish community -- plus some somewhat separate ideas about universal ethics and personal spirituality. Obama KicksI like these better than my Gil Zeros. Math You Can't UseUnlike Tim Lee, I haven't read Ben Clemens' book Math You Can't Use. Indeed, I just now heard of it for the first time. But good title! And it's a good subject for a book -- the case against software patents. This is not an issue that's on most people's radar screens, but the growth of software patents is a wholly unjustified trend that threatens to put a perpetual drag on the global economy. Maybe I'll buy the book. Tour de FraneVia Lee Sigelman, the ultimate techopop cycling anthem: Tomorrow is National Bike to Work Day. Remembering Richard RortyIf you're the sort of person who knows who Richard Rorty is, you'll want to check out Raymond Geuss' reminiscences of the man. I've had a lot of opportunity in my life to meet famous philosophers, but not the one whose work I like the best. May 13, 2008Other People Write Books, TooRoss Douthat and Rick Perlstein talk about Nixonland in the latest Atlantic podcast. May 12, 2008"Again & Again"Neat video for "Again & Again" by The Bird and the Bee: GFR wisely asks "Viral Mac marketing campaign or sincere music video effort?" Of course why choose -- in context, the best way to make the marketing effort succeed would be to sincerely try to make a good video. Bad MoviesWhile flying back and forth from LAX last week, I had the opportunity -- as one does on long plane flights -- to sample some seriously sub-par films. 27 Dresses turns out to be substantially better than Jumper and when you control for the fact that I'm in the Jumper demographic group rather than the 27 Dresses one you can figure that Dresses must actually be much, much, much better. That's too bad, because even though Jumper looked bad and got bad reviews, I like all of Doug Liman's other movies, even Go and Mr. and Mrs. Smith that nobody else seems to have enjoyed. PrecociousToday's my dad's birthday, which seems like as good a time as any to link to this 1972 Time review of his first novel, Hide Fox, and All After: It is not often that a writer sees his main character as clearly and directly as Rafael Yglesias sees Raul, the precocious 14-year-old who bombs out of private school in this brief and crystalline first novel. The author avoids displays of virtuosity, the pleasures of romantic posturing, and all other possible uses of fiction except this one: to watch with great care a being who fascinates him. The steadiness and detachment of his view would be remarkable in any case, but are truly astonishing for a writer who was exactly 15 years old when he wrote the novel. He had, however, reached the advanced age of 17 by the time the book actually came out. These days, though, he's an old man -- happy birthday! May 11, 2008Pete'sI went to Pete's New Haven Style Apizza yesterday for lunch (it's on the southeast corner of 14th and Irving) and had a pretty decent white clam slice. I've had better, but for by-the-slice pizza it's quite good. I think the "Yalie" at Comet Ping Pong is a better entrant in the DC clam genre, but that's not a very convenient location. May 10, 2008Recommended ReadingBrad DeLong and Kathy G. both recommend Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog. I concur, but at the same time would also recommend his great piece on Bill Cosby in the current Atlantic. May 8, 2008Good TitleI have no idea whether or not S.V. Date's analysis of whether or not Barack Obama can get Florida Jews to vote for him is correct (makes for an interesting read, though) but I was interested to see that according to his byline he wrote a book called Jeb: America's Next Bush. Isn't that a great title? I wish I'd thought of that. May 5, 2008More MapHere's another effort at a schematic diagram of the NYC subway system, that I think looks a bit better than the Vignelli one I linked to yesterday. Zakaria Book ClubYou're probably all too busy reading the only book that matters to have time for Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World but I'm participating in his TPM Cafe Book Club this week and would post something there about his first contribution to the forum, but I agree with it too much. Outback Strikes Back
Ezra Klein's right to bemoan the sneering condescension in this NYT piece on suburban chain restaurants. For me, this is made all the worse by the knowledge that the attitude of contempt is almost certainly fake. I was actually born and raised in Manhattan by fancy-pants parents who wouldn't dream of darkening the door of an Outback Steakhouse. Indeed, to the best of my knowledge by father has never tasted the joys of Chili's (those two are my favorites). All of which has mostly made me aware of how rare this is. Most of New York City's elitists grew up in very conventional middle class suburbs and then moved to the city sometime after college. They may look like -- indeed, be -- Greenpoint hipsters now, but they come from the same places as all the other college educated white people in this country. Moreover, one suspects that the exotic locales visited by the Times' intrepid correspondents -- such places as Westchester and northern New Jersey -- are just where many Times readers live and dare I venture to guess that perhaps a few of the Times's writers and editors even commute in from the suburbs. Indeed, their section on the Olive Garden might have mentioned that there are three Olive Gardens in New York City one of which is about five blocks from the NYT building. Monday Rancid Lyrics BloggingSo, you're doubtless wondering to yourself, what's the deal with Rancid's "Olympia, WA" off 1995's ... And Out Come The Wolves. Okay, you're probably not wondering, but Spencer and I were talking about the issue last night. He clued me in to the fact that the reason he wishes he were going back to Olympia is that he's carrying a torch for Tobi Vail, while on tour in New York City. With that context in place, "hanging on the corner of 52nd and Broadway" suddenly snapped into place for me -- they're playing at Roseland not just hanging out in midtown. But what's on sixth street? Visiting the old Curry Row? May 4, 2008Ask, and Ye Shall...I was in New York last weekend and remarked to a few people that I thought the city would benefit from a more strictly schematic subway map. Well, low and behold what's Men's Vogue done but get Massimo Vignelli to do a more strictly schematic map of the New York subway system. May 2, 2008The Future is Bright
Well comic book fans, I went to see Iron Man and I'm pleased to report that it lived up to expectation -- funny stuff, good action, vital critique of the military-industrial complex, only one or two plot points that made no sense, etc. Among other things, Iron Man stands out from many other comic book characters in having a costume that doesn't look ridiculous in a live-action context -- no spandex, etc. In particular, Jeff Bridges, in particular, stands out for an excellent performance in probably the role that demands the most in terms of silly comic book dialogue. But beyond that, I saw new previews for The Dark Knight and The Hulk, both of which looked, if anything, better than the previously seen previews. All in all it seems to me that we can look forward to a summer of excellent comic book adaptations to make up for last year when we had to put up with clunkers like Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer. I am, however, still a little upset that the Hulk preview doesn't feature anyone saying "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry." Doesn't that seem like a no-brainer? The Future is Bright
Well comic book fans, I went to see Iron Man and I'm pleased to report that it lived up to expectation -- funny stuff, good action, vital critique of the military-industrial complex, only one or two plot points that made no sense, etc. Among other things, Iron Man stands out from many other comic book characters in having a costume that doesn't look ridiculous in a live-action context -- no spandex, etc. In particular, Jeff Bridges, in particular, stands out for an excellent performance in probably the role that demands the most in terms of silly comic book dialogue. But beyond that, I saw new previews for The Dark Knight and The Hulk, both of which looked, if anything, better than the previously seen previews. All in all it seems to me that we can look forward to a summer of excellent comic book adaptations to make up for last year when we had to put up with clunkers like Fantastic Four: The Rise of the Silver Surfer. I am, however, still a little upset that the Hulk preview doesn't feature anyone saying "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry." Doesn't that seem like a no-brainer? April 30, 2008Rise of the HumanzeesIt's not something I focus on as much as the robot threat, but via Ronald Bailey comes Jenny Hawthorne's report for the Scotsman on the possibilities of human-chimp hybrids: "A leading scientist has warned a new species of 'humanzee,' created from breeding apes with humans, could become a reality unless the government acts to stop scientists experimenting." Interestingly, I believe it was the Scotsman that also broke the story of Joseph Stalin's efforts to breed a humanzee super-soldier so they've clearly marked themselves out as your go-to source for coverage of this vital issue. Does anyone else remember the State of the Union address when Bush called for a ban on human-animal hybrids? Did such a ban pass? April 29, 2008Down She GoesCirculation declines at most American newspapers. Clearly, technology and changing habits have a lot to do with this story. Still, to me it's always striking that when journalists talk about the slow-motion death of most of the nation's major newspapers the issue of quality rarely comes into it. And yet the decline is by no means uniform: National newspapers like USA Today and the Journal have tended to hold their ground better, as have smaller-market dailies where competition from other media like the Internet isn't usually as intense. I think you see here that the issues of quality and competition from the internet are really interlinked. I've heard people worry to me about what will happen to local coverage in an internet-dominated world, and these people are correctly identifying a comparative weakness of current new media, but the answer is that the papers that specialize in covering local news seem to actually be doing okay. The newspaper, as an institution, is an odd one -- an enormous bundle of disparate kinds of content whose rationale for existing has to do with the economics of printing and distributing cheap paper and ink on a daily basis. In an online world, the economics are different and argue in favor of specialization and niches. And this is also almost certainly better for editorial quality. It would be extremely odd for one person to be well-qualified to supervise coverage of all the different things The New York Times tries to cover. Why not get political news from a political news outlet, movie reviews from a place that specializes in movies, and local news from an organization that's really passionate about covering its community rather than viewing it as a JV form of journalism to be endured before moving on to something bigger? And in the future, we will. April 28, 2008Prince's "Creep"Prince covers Radiohead's "Creep" at Coachella: I got that link via Petey so it's possible that the video embeds subliminal "vote for Hillary" messages or something. April 27, 2008Blast from the PastDC real estate classified ads segregated by race from an August 1950 issue of The Washington Times Herald. Everyone knows that much of America, Washington included, was formally segregated not so long ago, but artifacts like these are still incredibly striking. April 26, 2008BoltBusAs we speak, I'm blogging from the new BoltBus from DC to New York (they also serve Boston and Philadelphia) which features electrical outlets and WiFi. Naturally, it's quite a bit slower than the Acela, but given that it's a fraction of the price of even the slower Regional train, it seems to me that Amtrak really needs to step up its game in terms of internet access. April 25, 2008Is It The Water?
Mario Batali tells Wired that the reason you can't replicate New York pizza is the water: "Water," Batali says. "Water is huge. It's probably one of California's biggest problems with pizza." Water binds the dough's few ingredients. Nearly every chemical reaction that produces flavor occurs in water, says Chris Loss, a food scientist with the Culinary Institute of America. "So, naturally, the minerals and chemicals in it will affect every aspect of the way something tastes." I've heard this water theory, as applied to both pizza and bagels, from a variety of sources for years. To me, it doesn't add up. Here's why -- if you leave the city and head to a suburban community in Long Island or Connecticut or New Jersey featuring many ex-NYC Jews, you'll find bagels that are similar to the ones in the city. Similarly, where ex-NYC Italian-American communities exist in the suburbs, they make similar pizza. But even though these suburbs are close to the city, their water actually comes from radically different sources. I think the economics just don't translate out of the social context of the traditional northeast areas of Italian-American settlement. When you go someplace that doesn't have that pizza tradition and go build a restaurant where people are going to sit at tables and order brick oven pizza by the pie from a server, you wind up going for a more upscale ambience than you see at, say, John's on Bleeker Street. That flows naturally into a more upscale conception of the ingredients and next thing you know you have something like DC's Matchbox, which I like a lot, but is really quite different from the old-school New York experience. Photo by Flickr user Tangysd used under a Creative Commons license April 24, 2008The Book ClubWe've got a TPMCafe book club going on Heads in the Sand this week, you can check all the posts from the various contributors out here. LasersIt seems the Japanese have decided that armingrobots with lasers is a good idea: If I were president, I'd be promoting General Petraeus to a new cabinet-level position in charge of coping with the robot threat. Mmm...EggsI've suffered from a deepening obsession with Denmark in general and Copenhagen in particular for months. More recently, Passover reminded me that hard boiled eggs are a delicious snack. And now, The New York Times brings it all together: Everything is red inside bordello-like Bo-Bi Bar (Klareboderne 14; 45-33-12-55-43): the faded Baroque-style wallpaper, the threadbare curtains, the smoke-soaked lampshades — and especially the swollen, grinning faces of the numerous regulars. Few bars in Copenhagen draw such a diverse crowd, which on a recent night included 20-something cool kids, 30-something intellectuals and some thin ageless barflies with names like Ole and Jonas. Founded in 1917, this city-center institution remains resolutely old school. Cellphones may not be used inside, digital cameras can be used only with permission, and the marquee attraction on the three-item food menu is hard-boiled eggs. (“They’re a good food when you’re drunk,” says the bartender Nanna Sarauw. “They get people straight.”) These days, though, I assume that buying a beer at a bar in Copenhagen is prohibitively expensive for those of us holding U.S. currency. April 23, 2008The Bukharin Factor
Brian Morton's Dissent article on bloggers says nice things about me, so I hate to criticize it, but in addition to what Kevin Drum says about age and Kay Steiger says about gender, I have to take issue with one of Morton's assertions about "Old Bolshevik" intellectual Nikolai Bukharin: By saying they're ambitious, I mean that most of these writers share a politics that is interested in deep-going social reform—you could say it's a social-democratic politics, although few of them would use that term. (As far as I can tell, they have absolutely no interest in socialist thought, which, in my opinion, is a good thing. At any rate, I can't see that any of them has been hobbled intellectually because of a lack of opinions about Bukharin.) I have opinions about Bukharin! Back in college, I wrote a term paper on him for a slightly weird seminar that Robert Nozick co-taught with a scholar of the Russian Revolution from the History Department. My take was that Bukharin's right deviationism (and other efforts at "reform Communism") was ultimately a mirage. The hard-liners were correct to think in Bukharin's day, just as they were when they crushed the Prague Spring and when they tried to stage a coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, that Communist Party political control couldn't survive substantial liberalization of the economy. Beyond that, I'll admit to not having much interest in socialist thought. I will say that I'm pretty much a believer in Marx-style base/superstructure theory to an extent that most of my friends and colleagues seem to find somewhat appalling. I don't, for example, believe that William F. Buckley, Jr. exercised any substantial real causal influence on American history not through any fault of his own but simply because I don't think intellectuals really impact the course of events. This is, needless to say, not a popular opinion among writers. April 22, 2008Tuesday Metaphysics BloggingThere's an interesting comments thread at Edge of the American West about the status of counterfactual questions in history. Historians are, by and large, loathe to deal with counterfactual issues, viewing the whole question as un-historical and un-professional. This is an interesting contrast with the world of philosophy, where it's very common to analyze counterfactual claims as inextricably bound up with claims about causation. To say that "Bush carried Florida because flawed ballot design in Palm Beach County caused many Gore supporters to inadvertently mark their ballots for Pat Buchanan" is to say that "if the Palm Beach County ballot had been designed differently, then Gore would have carried Florida." Bigger questions, like what would have happened if Gore had become president, are, of course, not amenable to straightforward conclusions or definitive answers. But from where I sit, thinking about them is just a different way of thinking about how we've gotten to where we are today. For instance, Jason Zengerle plausibly posits that had Joe Lieberman become Vice President in 2000, he never would have taken his current turn to the cranky right. That's probably correct. By the same token, Gore seems to have been pushed left by his own misfortunes. Indeed, the whole trajectory of U.S. politics would have taken a rather different turn, with most Democrats (and certainly the Gore-Lieberman administration) hewing to the centrist trend of the second Clinton administration rather than to the now-prevailing populism. I think we can assume that by 2004, the constituency for something like a Ralph Nader left-wing third party would have grown and either Gore would have been a successful president who decisively seized the center of the U.S. political spectrum to establish the Democrats as a dominant force, or else Gore might have been a failure who bled support from both the right (from people looking, for example, for action against Iraq or Iran) and the left (from opponents of the quagmire in Afghanistan and of neoliberal economic policy) paving the way for Jeb Bush to seize the White House. April 20, 2008Forgetting Sarah MarshallI believe we can proclaim this one the "best film directed by the brother of a major blogger." Blogs aside, it's damn funny on its own right. As we now expect from Apatow-circle movies, the gender politics here are kind of problematic, but it certainly didn't stop me from laughting. April 19, 2008The Malthus CoincidencePaul Krugman reiterates: "Malthus was right for the whole of human history until his own time." Now here's my question -- is it a coincidence that Malthus' work appeared just at the time when his conclusions were, for the first time ever, no longer true? Or is the origin of Malthus' level of understanding of the economic system inextricably linked to the fact that the Malthusian era was ending. Welcome to AmericaThe John Adams miniseries got me interested in the early history of these United States, so I asked for some book recommendations. Having gone through Barnard Baillyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Gordon Wood's The Creation of the American Republic, and Don Cook's The Long Fuse I can now happily report that I understand this country perfectly. All are recommended for those interested in the subject, but obviously you won't have time to read any of them because you'll be busy with Heads in the Sand. Guard Your First Born!I've forgotten to wish everyone a happy Passover. And also, of course, a happy first day of the NBA playoffs. Good thing there are no Jewish players I guess. UPDATE: Forgot about Jordan Farmar! April 17, 2008Dirt off Your ShoulderThis business is pretty cool. Somewhere between a dog whistle to the kids and a reverse Sister Souljah. Check out Obama at 2:20: And now Jay-Z: Good stuff, thought I guess rap scold Douthat wouldn't approve. April 16, 2008Original WingmanBen Mathis-Lilly brings us the crucial point that contra Spike TV's current marketing, Chewbacca was not, in fact, the original wingman. Chewie was Han Solo's co-pilot, Wedge Antilles was Luke's wingman. Adaptation"Wildly Popular Iron Man Trailer To Be Adapted Into Full-Length Film." Sounds like a risky concept. April 15, 2008New HulkJust five years after the Ang Lee Hulk, Hollywood is giving us a new version. Not a sequel, it seems, just another Hulk movie. Considering that the first movie sucked, it's not a bad plan: I like the cast a lot, but I'm missing my "you wouldn't like me when I'm angry." Strange IndeedCommenting on John Yoo's tenure at Berkeley, Mark Kleiman remarks: "So, strange as it seems, I’m inclined to think that John Yoo belongs in prison (along with his client) but not to think that in the absence of a conviction he ought to be stripped of tenure." That strikes me as a little too strange. Either Yoo's legal advice to President George W. Bush -- i.e. that he has under the constitution an unlimited right to, for example, order his subordinates to "crush the testicles of a child" -- falls in that category of things reasonable people can agree to disagree about, or else it amounts to participating in the war crimes of the Bush administration. If the former, then he clearly doesn't belong in prison. But if the latter, then how can he teach law students? The proposition, after all, isn't that Yoo is a guy who knows something about the law and then also commits serious crimes. Rather, the proposition at hand is that what Yoo purports to have been legal advice was, as such, a crime. This seems about on a par with keeping Jack the Ripper on your medical faculty teaching people surgical techniques. April 14, 2008Ride the TrainThe idea that people are scolding this woman for letting her nine year-old ride the subway home alone when that's what he wanted to do is absurd. Manhattan is a very safe place and he was taking a route he knew and understood. The city was a substantially more dangerous place back in 1990 when I was nine, so I think I was older by the time I was allowed to roam the streets. Still, this is one of the major advantages of raising children in a city -- your kids can get places on their own! A teenager driving a car is way more likely to get hurt than a nine-year old riding the subway. April 13, 2008No Dance For YouIt seems they're now arresting people for dancing around midnight at the Jefferson Memorial. Offhand, one might think the legal issue here is that the Memorial is supposed to be closed to the public at that hour, but that's not the case, instead it's a vague disorderly conduct charge. April 12, 2008Obama and LincolnGarry Wills has a fascinating essay in The New York Review of Books comparing Barack Obama's race speech to Abraham Lincoln's Cooper Union address. Wills makes the case that though the situation today is of lesser magnitude than the occurrences of 1860, that Obama and Lincoln faced structurally similar challenges of needing to stay true to their promise of change while offering reassurance that they weren't closet radicals. Of course it should be said that for all Lincoln's greatness, he only got 40 percent of the vote in the 1860 general election, so arguably wasn't all that successful in reassuring people about his views. April 9, 2008The Harding DebateD. offers some dissent from recent pro-Harding revisionism in the blogosphere, arguing that there's less than meets the eye about Harding's progressive record on race. I wouldn't, however, quite be so dismissive of Harding's efforts to rollback the Wilson-era crackdown on civil liberties: Most of all, Harding's administration could afford to be less demagogic because (a) the Great War was over, and thus the rationale for anti-civil libertarian wartime measures was reduced; and (b) its support for restrictive immigration laws allowed the party in control of the government to claim that it was taking action to prevent "alien radicals" from entering the country in the first place (and thus making emergency deportations unnecessary). The implication here that Presidents are typically loathe to aggregate power to themselves and their appointees, making the relevant variable whether or not they can "afford to be less demagogic" seems backward to me. Their Next StepAndrew traces another step in the machines' inevitable rise to world domination: A computer capable of telling which women are the attractive ones. In conjunction with their three-dimensional printers, the machines will be able to use this technology to create the sexy spies who ultimately lead to our downfall. April 7, 2008Pow!Via Peter Suderman, an excellent new Dark Knight trailer: Just watch to see someone call a copyright foul. Absolut Counterfactual
It seems Absolut Vodka got in a bit of hot water over this ad, which they ran in Mexico in days when the combination of the information superhighway and worry about immigration to the USA makes it a sensitive subject. Absolut is apologizing when, as Ross says, they really should have just gone bigger and given every country a fantasy map of its own. I'd like to see a United States of North America in which one of our various efforts to conquer Canada succeeded and the stars and stripes now fly all the way to the Arctic Circle. Or Absolut Habsburb in which Charles V's empire stays together. Worst President EverIn a History News Network poll, 61 percent of historians say that George W. Bush has been the worst president ever. It's very hard to know what to make of these kind of questions. How can you possibly try to evaluate someone like, say, Andrew Jackson in contemporary terms? At any rate, it will surprise no one to learn that I think Bush has been a very bad president. More interestingly, I also take the view that Bush is probably correct to think that history will remember him kindly. American presidents associated with big dramatic events tend to wind up with good reputations whether they deserve them or not. One possible Bush analogy would be to Woodrow Wilson, who did all kinds of things with regard to civil liberties that look indefensible today and whose foreign policy ended as a giant failure, but who was associated with both big events and with big ideas that were influential down the road. Someday, I bet there will be democracies in the Middle East and some future Republican president will figure out a way to put meat on the bones of "compassionate conservatism" and Bush will be looked upon as a far-sighted figure who made some mistakes in a difficult period of time. Will he deserve a good reputation? No. Will he get one? I'd say yes. April 6, 2008Charlton HestonCharlton Heston, not a very good actor but in his way a great one, has died. To me, Planet of the Apes is vital, though your mileage may vary. His political trajectory was a little silly, but also in a very fitting way utterly typical of the larger trajectory of American history. His death, we hope, comes at a time when the great backlash of which he was a part is finally receding. Rest in peace. April 5, 2008The Colbert BumpLooks like there's a statistically significant increase in campaign donations associated with a Democratic member of congress appearing on The Colbert Report. Republicans, however, don't accomplish anything by going on the show. No Dementia for MeVia Jacob Levy, I learn that "Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests." Excellent. I drink a lot of coffee. April 4, 2008MLK's RadicalismKai Wright has an excellent piece on the forgotten radicalism of Martin Luther King, Jr. -- always a point worth making in a day and age when conservatives would like you to think they would have been standing right beside King when he marched on Washington. That said, to some extent I think the creation of the King Myth and the displacement of the more authentic radical King is a good thing. A country doesn't get official national hero types without mythologizing and sanitizing them to a large extent, and it's a good thing, at the end of the day, that King has moved into national hero status. That said, check out King preaching on Vietnam: That's some strong medicine. April 3, 2008Heritage
It seems that April is Confederate Heritage month. Why one would want to celebrate a heritage of violent rebellion against a democratically elected government in order to perpetuate a system of chattel slavery is a bit hard for me to say. When I was growing up in New York City, for example, I don't remember any mass campaigns to celebrate the 1863 draft riots as the city's finest hour. The states of the Old Confederacy are hardly unique in that elements of their historical heritage involve discreditable treatment of African-Americans. But they do seem unusual in their insistence on celebrating these historical episodes and in insisting that portraying them in a positive light is integral to a proper understanding of their local identity. Even odder, as best I can tell these days (it was different in the past) most of the folks who like to wave the Confederate flag are perfectly genuine when they get offended that others see them as waving a banner of violent white supremacist ideology. But if that's not the ideology you mean to associate with, then why not drop the flag and adopt some less provocative emblem of Southern folkways? The Revolution Will Not Be TelevisedBut it seems that the Second Coming will be: In order to prepare for the imminent Second Coming—which Robertson believes will occur on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem according to biblical prophecy—he acquired METV (Middle East Television), a station then based in southern Lebanon that could broadcast into Israel. Straub was given marching orders to be ready to televise Christ’s return. CBN executives drew up a detailed plan to broadcast the event to every nation and in all languages. Straub wrote: “We even discussed how Jesus’ radiance might be too bright for the cameras and how we would have to make adjustments for that problem. Can you imagine telling Jesus, ‘Hey, Lord, please tone down your luminosity; we’re having a problem with contrast. You’re causing the picture to flare.’” Good thing that as long as the Republicans are in charge we don't need to worry about any nutty pastors getting political influence. April 2, 2008Small SegaHornets (and, yes, they're for real) center Tyson Chandler talks about, among other things, his disappointment in the Wire finale. He also says that his "Sega was too big to put in a bag" which doesn't jibe at all with my recollection of Sega size. March 30, 2008Musical InterludeI was listening to "Oxford Comma" by Vampire Weekend and I thought of Hillary Clinton's adventures in Tuzla: "Why would you lie about how much coal you have? / Why would you lie about something dumb like that?" Oh well. March 29, 2008Living in SinI'm going to a wedding in Chicago this afternoon -- my first-ever wedding-of-a-friend, in fact. But nevertheless it's good to learn that old fashioned cohabitation isn't problematic after all. March 28, 2008The Thor FactorThis video makes a very important point about American public policy: It would be a mistake to let undue concern about the robot threat blind us to the problem of Norse Gods and other unconventional superheroes. Feminism and Body ImageVia Kay Steiger, "The influence of feminist ascription on judgements of women's physical attractiveness" by Viren Swamia, Natalie Salemb, Adrian Furnhamb and Martin J. Tovéec: The present study examined the effect of feminist ascription on perceptions of the physical attractiveness of women ranging in body mass index (BMI). One-hundred and twenty-nine women who self-identified as feminists and 132 who self-identified as non-feminists rated a series of 10 images of women that varied in BMI from emaciated to obese. Results showed no significant differences between feminist and non-feminists in the figure they considered to be maximally attractive. However, feminists were more likely to positively perceive a wider range of body sizes than non-feminists. These results are discussed in relation to possible protective factors against the internalisation of the thin ideal and body objectification. I suppose that's about what I would have expected -- ideological commitment has a real, but circumscribed, impact on perception. March 27, 2008Knut TroubleMore hilariously over-the-top commentary on Knut the baby polar bear: "Knut the polar bear has turned from a cuddly cub into a publicity-addicted psycho, one of his keepers claimed yesterday . . . Mr Roebke added: 'The trouble is that he identifies himself as a human and not as a polar bear.'" Personally, I strictly identify as a polar bear. The Real ThreatBen Mathis-Lilley warns that recent potboiler novels about the security threat posed by China obscure the real threat from robots. I'm growing increasingly concerned about the nation's complacency on this point. March 26, 2008Operation IvyI was listening to a bit of Energy earlier today and decided I needed to look something up on the Operation Ivy Wikipedia page. What did I discover but this other Operation Ivy Wikipedia page. Apparently the band is named after an actual operation, "the eighth series of American nuclear tests, coming after Tumbler-Snapper and before Upshot-Knothole" taking place in the Pacific Proving Grounds on the Marshall Islands. Two bombs were tested, Mike and King, with Mike holding the distinction of being the world's first hydrogen bomb. And now you know. Hey -- People Put Out New Albums!Inspired by liking Lust, Lust, Lust I'm now listening to other new albums people are recommending. For example, The Kills' Midnight Boom? Good! Yeasayer's All Hour Cymbals? Also good! March 25, 2008Adams's AccentsKirk Ellis, one of John Adams's writers is jumping into TNR's exchange on the series, and provides some insight into the provenance of the accents on display in the series: Steve, you also inquire as to origins of the "hybrid accents" we use in the series. From the beginning, we wanted to emphasize that independence was a battle between British Americans and their brethren in England, not, as so often depicted, a conflict that pitted Crown officers with plumy Oxonian accents against patriots with full-blown American dialects. All our research pointed to the fact that, in written and spoken speech, America was much closer to the mother country than had been acknowledged in past dramatizations. He says they provided capsule biographies of the different characters to the series' dialogue coach to help them come up with something appropriate, sometimes based on the insight "that one's residence in America frequently depended on one's point of origin in England. Virginia, for instance, was largely settled by residents of East Anglia--in terms of dialect and accent a very distinctive region." Ellis' participation in this, along with some other similar examples, does raise some questions about the changing nature of the critical enterprise in the internet era. My sense is that, traditionally, creators have tended to shy away from direct intervention into critical debates about their work. But something about the seemingly informal nature of internet commentary seems to have subverted that rule, so you're seeing much more of this kind of intervention. It has, I think, the potential for a distorting impact on our understanding of things since, at the end of the day, it's really not the creator's role to offer authoritative accounts of what a given work "really" was or is. Lust, Lust, Lust
About a year ago a process that I believe is technically called "getting old and uncool" began to take hold and I fell hopelessly behind the curve on music matters. I kept listening to music but it was, you know, the same music I'd heard before. But for whatever reason I was inspired to download the Raveonettes' Lust, Lust, Lust and it's good. So good, in fact, that perhaps I'll be awakened from my dogmatic slumbers and start paying attention again to what the cool kids are listening to. Because everyone knows the cool kids are always right. March 21, 2008Opportunity CostSpencer Ackerman critiques Top Chef "Bravo is getting way too predictable with the foreshadowing. Ever notice how whenever you see a contestant working out, s/he's like two episodes at most from elimination? Think about it. Cynthia (though she quit). Betty. Tre. Sandee. The only exception I can think of is Elia. You never saw Hung, Harold or Ilan work out." But maybe the best chefs just don't waste time working out. Maybe they're in a constant meditative state running through possible future challenges and what brilliant dishes they'll bang out in response. Chinese Food Trivia
Catherine Andrews asks: Did you know that one of the world’s best Chinese restaurants can be found in Dubai? That General Tso’s chicken was probably invented in New York City? Or that the Chinese characters outside the Hooters in DC’s Chinatown translate to “Owl Restaurant”? I actually knew all of those things, but the online chat with Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, that she's introducing with those teasers has even more interesting stuff. For example, "Also amazingly good and unique food (though the Chinese food there is a bit of an acquired taste): Mauritius, island country off the coast of Madagascar, which has a history that produced a cuisine that is a blend of French, Indian, Chinese and island (Curried octopus on French rolls, or adding cheese to the lo mein)." Meanwhile, did you know that the szechuan peppercorn isn't really pepper? Photo by Flickr user Stu Spivack used under a Creative Commons license March 20, 2008Based OnI watched John Adams OnDemand yesterday and it was pretty good stuff, but it raised a question in my mind as to in what sense the series is based on David McCullough's book? McCullough didn't acquire ownership over historical facts (defended the perpetrators of the Boston Massacre! delegate to the constitutional convention!) when he wrote his book, and it's not as if he did stunning new original reporting. March 19, 2008Our Only HopeCommenter low-tech cyclist reminds us that in this brave new world of robotic dogs, we may need to rely on Yoshimi: I'm still under the weather and have been taking my vitamins as well. March 16, 2008The Surge
Whatever you think of the initial decision to form the band, the success of The Surge last night was undeniable and those who can't see it desperately need to remove their ideological blinders. March 15, 2008The SurgeTonight at the Velvet Lounge, Spencer Ackerman's new band The Surge will be offering their debut performance. Doors open at 9:30 PM. Also: 23 Rainy Days, Stalking Horses, and The City Veins. March 14, 2008Must-ReadsEzra Klein wonders what the must-read magazines are. I think this is an unduly touchy subject for someone who works in the magazine industry to take on. I'll just say that excluding publications that anyone I know works for, I like Dwell, Monocle, N+1, and (yes!) ESPN the best. March 13, 2008Rocco SpeaksAs per the post below, I think Rocco would have been open to a chef just making a real pizza: Now, no offense directed at the lovely people of Chicago, but their pizza leaves a lot to be desired. It’s neither thin crust nor thick crust (what we call Sicilian here in NYC), it’s usually comprised of some random combo of ingredients, and it’s heavy as lead. The beautiful, defining characteristic of pizza is that it’s light, crispy, and a foil for wonderful toppings like cheese, sausage, basil, and anchovies. Deep-dish pizza leaves no room on the palate for much else but crust. It sort of pains me to admit it, but I actually think the best pizza may be in New Haven rather than New York, Thursday Pizza Blogging
When there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire; and in a similar vein with no further episodes of The Wire you have to blog about Top Chef 4 which debuted last night. Scrutiny tends to focus on the elimination challenges due to the high stakes involved, but let me just say that as a New Yorker I found it painful to watch multiple NYC-based chefs whose names suggested Italian-American origin cooking . . . Chicago-style deep dish pizza. I was hoping that one of them would show some pride and cook, you know, an actual pizza. But they all chose the path of appeasement. And then the judge turned out to be none other than Rocco diSpirito, himself an Italian-American from New York City who ought to know the difference between a pizza (pictured above) and a gooey mess. Photo by Flickr user Skinnydiver used under a Creative Commons license March 12, 2008Awake on My AirplaneSpencer Ackerman takes note of a DOD press release that includes the fact that former Filter bass player Sgt. Frank Cavanagh is an Army reservist scheduled to deploy. "For reasons of patriotism," writes Spencer, "Filter no longer officially blows." I say Filter never blew. Spencer wants to make them out to be nothing more than "Hey Man Nice Shot" but there's also "Take a Picture": I think that's at least "okay" though the video is annoying. March 11, 2008Wire WomenThe weakness of The Wire's portrayal of woman characters, driven most likely by a lack of women on the writing staff, has been widely noted but it's worth being clear on how this gives a distorted view of the entire ghetto. It was a particular failing, I think, in season four which was all about putting the cops-and-robbers stuff in a broader sociological context but also seemed to rely heavily on Demon Mothers rather than real people to drive the plot. March 10, 2008Endless Wire CommentaryIn a special "culture" edition of The Table (also a special Yglesias-free edition), Ross Douthat, Mark Bowden, and Jeffrey Goldberg talk about Season Five of The Wire: A chance to mock someone else's physical appearance for a change. Rapture ReadyI had only managed to read a few pages of my advance copy of Daniel Radosh's Rapture Ready!: Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture before it turned out that my girlfriend, the lovely and talented Sara Mead, had snagged it for myself. Fair enough, I thought, she can have it, but only if she agrees to write a review for my blog! The nefarious plot worked: March 9, 2008Wire FinaleWow. The newspaper plot was still hokie, but in essence all is forgiven and season five delivered in the end. Best show ever. March 8, 2008My MistakeI couldn't tell you why, but at some point years ago I developed the opinion that Kill the Moonlight was overrated and not really an album I liked. In fact, it is an excellent album. That is all. March 7, 2008More Wire StuffI also wrote a Current on the Wire's end. I also understand that the final episode has leaked on the web so some folks have seen it. I haven't. No spoilers, please. UPDATE: Also, I agree with Ross about this: "The Wire's greatest story was the rise and fall of Stringer Bell, and nothing's matched it since." I almost wish the great stuff with the kids had just been part of a separate, excellent television series rather than an additional narrative arc of The Wire. WireTAP 3I discuss Season Five of The Wire with the American Prospect expanded universe. March 5, 2008Fictions and FalshoodsI'm reading Ross talking about another first-person non-fiction narrative that turns out to be B.S. and it's making me think of how a lot of old-school novels involve this pretense to accuracy. Often they'll begin with a narrator telling the "true" story of how he heard the story that makes up the heart of the plot. Or else the manuscript will be discovered somewhere. For reasons that I'm sure are well known to people who were paying more attention in lecture, early audiences seem to have been incapable of digesting something like "this is a story I made up because I thought you would get something out of reading it -- enjoy!" Instead, prose had to be true. Meanwhile, contemporary fiction is pretty sharply bifurcated between crappy "genre" fiction and literary fiction that often seems very artsy-fartsy. For a well-crafted but basically straightforward story of people doing things and interacting with each other in a moderately realistic way, you need to turn to narrative non-fiction. You can tell people you've just been reading Bill Buford's Heat and hold your head high in sophisticated circles, it's not like copping to owning Tom Clancy's Op-Center: State of Siege. But if you sold the story as fiction, I think it would be deemed inadequately literary. And yet the facticity of the narrative has nothing to do with anything. Do I actually care if Buford really sliced his finger dicing carrots that one time? Or if Dario the butcher really yelled at some restaurant owner in some other Tuscan town? To me it seems basically irrelevant. The verisimilitude of a lot of the mise en scène really is integral to the book's appeal, but the same could be said about Moby Dick and any number of other straightforwardly fictional works. The literal accuracy of the whole thing, by contrast, contributes very little to the actual work. What it does instead is alter the marketing possibilities and likely critical approaches, opening up space for a certain kind of narrative to be taken seriously. Which isn't to say that people should lie in their memoirs, but maybe there's something to be learned from the fact that there's such an appetite for made-up stories of a certain kind. March 2, 2008Clause of the DayJonathan Kulick, "The National Review of hardcore zines, Maximum Rock’n’Roll, ... ." Brilliant. March 1, 2008The NinetiesI saw the amusing Definitely, Maybe last night and was eager to proclaim it our world's first nineties period film. Obviously, we have a lot of movies set in the nineties, but I thought this was the first movie made in a distinctly post-nineties time about the nineties. This morning, though, I'm remembering Primary Colors as an earlier example. Are there others? Any that don't involve Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign? I can't remember if the film version of About a Boy follow the book in using Kurt Cobain's death as a plot point? February 29, 2008The Dated John Rawls
Yesterday, Tyler Cowen asked "Which 20th century classic of American conservative political thought has held up best?" Ezra Klein decided to turn it around on the liberals, noting that "Rawls would seem an obvious contender, as would Susan Moller Okin." As it happens, I finished Samuel Freedman's excellent newish book Rawls -- an extended explication of the man's body of work -- recently and among other things it served to me as a reminder of how dated A Theory of Justice seems some respects. Now don't get me wrong, I think it "holds up" perfectly well in the sense of continuing to be a vital work of political philosophy. But in another sense of "holding up" it has pretty little to say about our contemporary political debates. The main antagonist of Rawls' egalitarian liberalism is, in the book, some form of utilitarianism which just isn't at all the structure of our political arguments at all. That's not really a failing on Rawls' part as his project is his project, and not some other thing, but it is a noteworthy aspect of the situation. Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family by contrast seems to me to have a much more clear and direct relevance to things people argue about today. The premise that women and men deserve political and social equality is something few people would disagree with these days, but Okin shows that some surprisingly radical conclusions about the status quo can follow from that in a way that's relevant in some obvious ways to arguments that you see in the cut-and-thrust of contemporary practical political debates. Rawls has created something vastly more theoretically ambitious, but in part in virtue of that ambition it's much less clear what the actual implications are. Arguments about what sorts of policies do or do not maximize the well-being of the worst-off turn out to be extremely controversial in ways that make it extremely difficult to say what a Rawlsian take on this or that would be. Talking to David SimonThe Wire's creator was in DC earlier this week and did some press and events, prompting reports from Kay Steiger and Peter Bryce. At this point, I'm just eager to see how things end . . . I've found substantial elements of season five to be disappointing, but there are substantial elements of brilliance and it is quite possible that the end will wind up vindicating much of what I've thus far found unsatisfactory. February 28, 2008Something a Bit Different
It seems that the world's largest pliosaur fossil has been discovered off the coast of Norway. It's fifteen meters long, which is a full five meters longer than the previous record holder. The media sensationalists are calling it a "sea monster" but the classic mythical Scandinavian sea monster is squid- or octopus-like in nature and, indeed, the non-extinct giant squid seems more monstrous than this pliosaur who doesn't really deserve to be slandered. Heer on BuckleyJeet Heer has a kind and thoughtful appreciation of William F. Buckley's life and career that people should definitely check out. February 26, 2008Blame the BloggerI thought I might quote John Quiggin's witticism: "In the February edition of Prospect, William Skidelsky has a piece on the decline of book reviewing. As is standard for any adverse trend in the early 21st century, blogs get a fair bit of the blame." Indeed. In particular, in recent months I've noticed a tendency on the part of certain fogies to try to accuse me personally, or else bloggers more generally, for the structural decline of the newspaper and, in particular, of the uniquely American model of a professionalized objective press. This as if the newspaper business were in tip-top shape as of mid-2002 and really only went into sharp decline when the Great Orange Satan moved to his community-based format and started seeing skyrocketing traffic. In truth almost every trend that people seem inclined to blame on blogs was under way long before there were any blogs. The internet has, in many instances, provided the first glimmer of hope in decades that long-dwindling media forms may be replaced by something. February 24, 2008Oscars ThreadI don't really have anything of interest to say about the Academy Awards, though I guess it's somewhat unusual to see my favorite movie of the year -- There Will Be Blood -- so much as nominated, but consider this an oscars thread. February 20, 2008Postcards from the iTunes SocietyCampaign and Heads in the Sand-related business has left me about eleventeen decades behind the pop culture curve, but I was trying to catch up today by listening to some Vampire Weekend. Consequently, having obtained the tunes, I put "vampire" into the search box on iTunes and started listening. Suddenly, I'm thinking to myself "this one song sounds awfully derivative of the Arctic Monkeys." Then I clicked over to find myself listening to "Perhaps Vampires Is a Bit Strong But..." by, of course, the Arctic Monkeys. Long story short -- Vampire Weekend is pretty good (Arctic Monkeys, too). February 19, 2008Y: The Last Man
Reihan is absolute right, if a bit longwinded, to observe that you need to run out and get Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra. Comic book fans will love it, but I suspect non-fans will, too. Superheroes aren't involved. All men on earth (except this one guy) mysteriously and suddenly die and we get the story of the consequences. February 18, 2008Enemy of the StateI caught some of this movie on cable last night before The Wire and it's funny, I don't recall anyone watching it back in the day and saying "you know what, maybe the NSA should have totally unchecked surveillance power! That's be really useful, and by no means open to abuse!" Boats Against the CurrentI'll admit that literature's never really been my thing, but this entire article seems premised on a bizarre misreading of The Great Gatsby: She is inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” Jinzhao said. Insofar as Harvard is, as I can attest, actually not that great I suppose there's a sort of ironic aptness here. At any rate, others have gotten at the main issue here, but the part where it gets really weird is as some kids get that the book is a critique of the American dream but then don't evince any understanding of what the critique is: One of Will’s classmates, Ashley Waters, 16, who helps her father with his antique consignment business, agreed. “The American dream is possible, but it’s just really hard,” she said. “Everything is so expensive — the price of college, housing. Look at the price of gas. The economy is going down.” As if Fitzgerald were writing a DCCC press release or Hillary Clinton's stump speech. Oy. February 16, 2008For Love of Famous PeopleHollywood is a funny business. There's lots of money sloshing about, the big stars see huge paydays, and some movies make a tremendous amount of cash. But it always seems like an extraordinarily bad business to invest in -- tons of uncertainty without the level of reward that normally comes with accepting that level of risk. And yet, there's invariably some new wave of capital pouring in even though every previous wave has eventually walked away bitter and disappointed. The latest wave has come from hedge funds and The Los Angeles Times reports that their experience has been no better than anyone else's. At the end of the day what none of these hard-headed businessmen -- from the heads of Japanese conglomerates to the high-flying hedge funders to whomever else -- is that the attraction of the business isn't the business, but the fact that people like movies and know that owning a piece of a production or a studio will give them a chance to hang out with movie stars. Everyone, after all, likes hanging out with movie stars. And I suppose there's no reason very rich people shouldn't plow their savings into an enterprise like that, but oftentimes the people making these decisions aren't just playing with their own money, they're also managing assets for someone else. February 15, 2008The Re-UpThe second edition of The American Prospect's Wire dialogue is up. Against King of KongI absolutely loved The King of Kong, a documentary about high-stakes competitive arcade gaming, but via Ezra Klein it seems there's some concern that the film makes a number of material factual errors and omissions. Crystal SkullIt's hard to know for sure, but from the look of this preview, the forthcoming India Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull seems like a worthy edition to the franchise rather than something like Sylvester Stallone's cringe-inducing efforts to revisit his classic characters. Souled OutI mentioned E.J. Dionne's new book, Souled Out when I got my copy, but let me recommend the ongoing discussion of the book over at TPM Cafe. It's one of the most interesting "faith and politics" discussions I've seen. Read Alexia Kelley here and you'll see a side of the "religious left" that strikes me as a bit creepy and illiberal ("It is particularly tempting for people who are privileged to have a seat at important tables to forget that our task is nothing less than making God’s kingdom real") but also extraordinarily powerful in its vision. But you've also got your brass-tacks election analysis about the relevance of religion to people's voting patterns, and the need for any viable political coalition to engage with that aspect of people's lives. February 14, 2008How MLK Saved Star TrekVia Julian Sanchez, Nichelle Nichols explains how Martin Luther King convinced her to stay on Star Trek: It sounds bizarre at first glance, but as she lays the story out it makes perfect sense. February 11, 2008Captain Amnesty LyricsRead JB went the extra mile and wrote the lyrics to "Captain Amnesty" that I've been looking for. Here's the original lyrics for the sake of comparison. And here at the new ones (spelling "oi" as "oy" is deliberate): February 10, 2008The Economics of Military HistoryTyler Cowen comments on Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History which I've also been reading: The table of contents looks amazing, but my browsing indicated this book to be boring. Still, some of you should read it. It is full of factual substance, slotted into an economic framework. The book is, indeed, a disappointment mostly brought low by poor prose style. The analysis of the issues at hand is, however, often quite interesting. The chapter on mercenaries in Italy is an excellent take on the subject, and I'll have more to say later inspired by the book's account of the strategic bombing campaign in Germany. February 8, 2008Taxi to the Dark SideIt seems this film, which I saw a screening of a few months ago, is opening tonight in DC. I believe that means it's already been available in New York and LA, and may or may not be coming to a city near you. But if it is playing near you, you should definitely check it out. There've been a lot of dumb "war on terror"-related films released over the past couple of years; lame efforts to do fiction-as-polemic. This is different. It's a documentary, it's brilliantly well-executed, and it not only presents and argument but it does so in an emotionally searing way: It's about torture, so it's not exactly the most fun Friday plan you could imagine, but it's a great, important film and you should really check it out. Chain BookstoresI met Brooke Allen over the weekend, and yesterday thanks to Lee Siegelman I discovered her 2001 Atlantic article "Two—Make That Three—Cheers for the Chain Bookstores". I've always had slightly off-key opinions on this topic, because when I was a kid and there really were no chain bookstores, the independent book store where my family usually shopped was a place called Barnes & Noble. So mostly I've just been watching my local bookstore expand across the country, not watched local shops be stomped on by some giant. Still, by and large I've always come down on Allen's side of the argument despite some affection for independent stores. Now, though, I wonder if the rise of the internet isn't going to lead to a rebalancing. After all, the practical advantages offered by the big chains, though very real, are done even better by the online retailers. Allen writes: Wonderful though many of the independents were (and are), however, the fact is that most of the good ones were clustered in the big cities, leaving a sad gap in America's smaller cities and suburbs—the places, in fact, where most of the American population actually lives. Books-A-Million's 202 stores, for instance, are almost all located in the Southeast. Borders has from the beginning targeted another underserved market, the suburbs, and as a result the quality of life in American suburbia has radically changed over the past decade. This is a point that the urban intelligentsia, which loves to characterize the suburbs as a cultural wasteland, seems to have missed, or at least to have taken no interest in. Amazon, Powells, and BarnesAndNoble.com, however, are located everywhere. And their stock is very comprehensive. Even for browsing purposes, they've actually gotten pretty good. If you have some sense of what kind of book you might want to buy and you don't need the book immediately, the practical advantages to shopping online are just enormous. Thus, what the brick and mortar store has to offer is, increasingly, not practical advantage but a bookstore experience. And though I think the chains actually do deliver a decent experience, they don't really match the better independents and I'm not sure they ever can since part of the experience of a well-liked independent bookstore, from Politics and Prose to Blue Hill Books is precisely it's independent-ness. Now that the chains have primed large swathes of the country to think of "wandering around a bookstore looking for something to buy" as a possible activity, while online retailers have emerged offering to send you any book anywhere you want, could we be ready for a revenge of the independents? I see it as at least a distinct possibility. I've seen it argued recently and plausibly that Starbucks has done just as much to build the market for high-end coffee, and thus independent coffee shops, as it has to put existing independent shops out of business. February 6, 2008The Trouble With "Progressive"Commenter Freddie mentioned something yesterday that I'd like to endorse: You know, I really dislike the use of "progressive" in the place of "liberal". Among other things, it makes the Jonah Goldberg-style conflation of the Progressives of the 1920s with contemporary American liberalism that much easier. Quite so only one shouldn't even really blame Jonah Goldberg in this instance. The people who went about rebranding liberals as "progressives" were clearly and deliberately inviting this conflation. But while the historically Progressives did stand for some good things, and are a part of the backstory of contemporary American liberalism, they also stood for some very bad things. Certainly, whatever sins liberalism may have committed in the 1970s as it fell into disrepute were distinctly minor compared to the problems with the Progressives. "Liberal," by contrast, is an important term with a noble history and a contested legacy. I think the notion that something like contemporary American liberalism is, in fact, the correct instantiation of the historic liberal project for our times is a proposition that's worth fighting for. February 4, 2008Volume ThreeI think it's possible that, as a society, we've moved past recognizing that the Clipse is awesome and onward to a Clipse-backlash phase. But I still say they're awesome. And now you can stream We Got it for Cheap Volume Three up on their website. DeLong and the DevilDon't miss Brad DeLong's strident defense of The Devil Wears Prada. January 31, 2008All The Pretty Communists
One genre of journalism I'm always very suspicious of starts with the observation that there appears to be a trend toward such and such, tosses off maybe an anecdote or two, then leaps to a broad sociological explanation of the trend's existence. Missing is any effort to quantify the extent or reality of the trend itself. Case in point, Anne Applebaum's article about how capitalism causes hot Russian women. She starts by saying that in the 1990s, one started to see a lot of hot Russian women around whereas "Whatever you may say about the Soviet Union in the 1970s and '80s, it was not widely known for feminine pulchritude." I looked it up and someone who has "pulchritude" is, roughly speaking, an attractive person. Thus the time has come to answer a question posed by a male friend of Applebaum's "where were they all before?" Her answer: Though this is a fairly frivolous question (OK, extremely frivolous), I am convinced it has an interesting answer. To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics. This seems really, really dubious to me. Among other things, the contention that "there weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them" seems oddly gullible about Soviet claims to have created an egalitarian paradise. Surely there were high-ranking powerful party officials to seek out beautiful women and marry them. The idea that the Soviet entertainment industry was entirely insensitive to the basic principles of attracting an audience seems, likewise, bizarre. Zhanna Prokhorenko playing the love interest in Ballad of a Soldier certainly seems like an attractive woman to me. Here's a review essay for the Criterion Collection release of the film: Besides rejecting political rhetoric and monumental, classical cinematography, the films of the thaw also rejected the sexless, puritanical Soviet representation of love on the screen, reclaiming the body and a youthful, healthy sexuality––rather modest by today’s standards, but liberating for the times. After changing his mind on using the professional actors he had cast, Chukhrai picked two very young, unknown acting students, matching a prototypical, blond, open-faced, and handsome Russian everyman with a (Ukrainian-named) Slavic beauty; her luminous eyes, pouty lips, full figure and long glorious hair are often filmed with a halo effect. In one of the film’s most poignant scenes, Alyosha’s and Shura’s faces and her billowing hair are superimposed over the pure Russian birch forest the train is passing as they are finally able to exchange their unspoken expressions of love. Most likely, the change Applebaum is trying to explain is just something that hasn't actually changed. Instead, part of the Cold War dynamic was that most of the Russians a Westerner might see or interact with were government officials, who tended to be middle aged men rather than attractive young women. The idea that the Communist Party somehow managed to create a society in which "there was no market for female beauty" is pretty fantastical -- about on a par with the notion that the Party was going to create a New Soviet Man. January 29, 2008Jonah Goldberg, Punk'dHilarious. I may have to try one of these myself. January 28, 2008Welfare DependenceBenjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey have a fairly preposterous article in The Weekly Standard about how virtue is awesome and so is John McCain so obviously he'd make a really good president I think Will's a bit off-base here myself, but mostly where he goes astray is in treating Storey & Storey in The Weekly Standard as worth taking so seriously. Ross and Will and Julian are all smart people (albeit chock full 'o abhorrent ideas), as are many people on the broad right in America, but what they're missing is that the conservative movement is full of idiots and that's all we're seeing here. Now I'm not saying that people who usually vote Republican are, on average, dumber than are the people who usually vote for Democrats. And I bet an earlier iteration of the conservative movement -- the one that came up from nothing and took over the Republican Party and the country, the one that built all the institutions of movement conservatism -- was full of bright people. But what we have today is a decadent third generation living in a fairly cushy institutional framework built by their forefathers in which lots of totally unimpressive people with totally unimpressive ideas can nonetheless make nice little lives for themselves. They don't even need to be hardworking or good at fund-raising or particularly likable. There are smart people availing themselves of the odd dose of wingnut welfare, but the fact of its availability keeps lots of silly people hanging around and lots of bad magazines staying in print. The relatively more meager resources available for someone who wants to be a liberal professionally mean that a higher proportion of the people in that line of work are at least good at something. So Storey & Storey tell us, I think, much more about the authors and about The Weekly Standard than it does aboutd essence of the case for John McCain. If you took a politician I liked and then got a dumb person to explain what was good about him, he'd give you a dumb answer. Conversely a smart, sophisticated person can make a smart, sophisticated case for a bad politician. January 27, 2008Monday Philosopher Anecdote BloggingThe subject of modern philosophers who lived interesting lives came up in conversation the other day, and it's just really hard to beat this anecdote about A.J. Ayer: One of the last of the many legendary contests won by the British philosopher A. J. Ayer was his encounter with Mike Tyson in 1987. As related by Ben Rogers in ''A. J. Ayer: A Life,'' Ayer -- small, frail, slight as a sparrow and then 77 years old -- was entertaining a group of models at a New York party when a girl ran in screaming that her friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. The parties involved turned out to be Tyson and Naomi Campbell. ''Do you know who . . . I am?'' Tyson asked in disbelief when Ayer urged him to desist: ''I'm the heavyweight champion of the world.'' ''And I am the former Wykeham professor of logic,'' Ayer answered politely. ''We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.'' Meanwhile, I'm reading Samuel Freeman's Rawls which is excellent, but sorely lacking in that sort of thing. January 26, 2008The Dostoevsky / Tolstoy GapTake the top ten most popular books at each college according to Facebook, then look at the average SAT/ACT score for students at each college, and bam a list of which books are smart and which are dumb. Given the dubious methodology, there's not much here of interest, but I was intrigued by the gap between Crime and Punishment (super-smart) and Anna Karenina (kinda middlebrow) which would seem to me to appeal to more-or-less the same audience. January 25, 2008I Feel It AllNew Feist video: Every now and again I miss the Let It Die days when you didn't see Feist everywhere, but then I hear one of the songs and, well, they're very good. Headline of the Day"Knut is a psychopath and will never mate, say experts", The Independent. Knut is also a polar bear. What's more, the text of the article doesn't really seem to justify the psychopath claim. WireTAPSome have wondered where all the Wire blogging has gone. The answer is that it's gone over here and become a dialogue with some other worthy folks. Meanwhile, The Onion has the scoop on the biggest scandal in Wire commentary. January 24, 2008Thursday Political Equality Blogging
My post on the prospect of billionaires like Sheldon Adelson deciding to really dig deep and spend on politics prompted a certain amount of silly partisan responses (yes, there are liberal billionaires, too, but a world in which politics is a contest between competing teams of billionaires is a depressing idea) but also some interesting discussion. In particular, Chicounsel's post: My question to Matt is "So what?" Are you saying that it should be illegal for him to spend his own money in what amounts to the exercise of his First Amendment rights of free speech, to peacably assemble and petition the government? Actually, no. One of the many things I don't like about John McCain is that I think his vision of how to fix the campaign finance system is off-base. My answer would be more like Matt Weiner's suggestion: One possible answer is that we should prevent such extreme concentrations of wealth. John Rawls thought extreme concentrations of wealth were bad precisely because that much money led to disproportionate political power (and meant that people without the money were shut out of political power in important ways). I think one should draw a distinction between the top-level and bottom-level issues here. It seems to me that the only way to prevent the super-duper-rich from having an unjustly large ability to influence the political process is simply to prevent such utterly massive concentrations of wealth to occur. On the flipside, things like Larry Bartels' finding that legislators are only affected by the views of the richest two-thirds of their constituents are where proposals for public financing of campaigns or especially ideas like "patriot dollars" could come into play. Photo by Flickr user Yomanumus used under a Creative Commons license January 22, 2008Strange DaysI'm not going to say that they're my four favorite films of the year, but the four best picture nominees I've seen are all good movies! What were they thinking? The only possibility is that Atonement is both terrible and destined to win. Libertarians and DemocracyTyler Cowen says he agrees that market operations will be flawed due to the irrationality of the participants, but "relative to social democrats, I tend to think that politicians are irrational actors trying to pander to irrational voters and that it can't be any other way. I am much less optimistic about democracy as an instrument for fine-tuning good policy or for that matter as a medium for enforcing progressive sentiments." This is similar to Bryan Caplan's argument for libertarianism in The Myth of the Rational Voter. Libertarians have always been against democracy (the rapprochement with democracy being one of the key steps in the transition from classical to modern liberalism) but this new vintage of arguments is a curious inversion of the traditional line of attack. The main problem used to be the fear that voters were too rational and that the unlimited prerogatives of property had to be protected through a lack of democracy. Now the fear is that the dire consequences of democracy can best be preserved through the unlimited prerogatives of property. Needless to say I think this is wrong along several dimensions. One point of dispute, though, is that to me the idea of state committed to neutral and effective administration of justice around laissez faire lines seems like an illusion. The alternative to reasonably effective democratic institutions and a viable left-wing political movement isn't free markets but the capture of the state by large economic interests as during the Gilded Age or, indeed, the Bush administration. January 19, 2008Tristan and the HispanicsAs Rea pointed out in yesterday's thread on tokenism, my ambiguous ethnic identity can be explored in fictional form in my grandfather's book Tristan and the Hispanics: In this sardonic tale of two cultures, New Yorker Tristan Granados; Yale undergrad, son of a Cuban-born screenwriter and WASP mother is dispatched to Tampa, Fla., to make funeral arrangements after the death of his paternal grandfather, a modestly successful leftist novelist. Cultural differences spark comic but more often inane folderol as Tristan, a patrician figure among the the dead writer's extended Cuban family, tries to arrange for a cremation. Although this symbol of rational Yankee officiousness is blasphemy to the Cubans, Tristan is treated with a pathetic deference that yields his endorsement of a raucous wake. In a biting twist, Tristan is won over to respect for his late grandfather when he discovers the old man's classy Volvo ("with Bengy box"), his Toshiba 3200 ("one up on Dad's 3100") and his collection of "Bruce CDs." Yglesias ( Home Again ) acidly skewers the pomposity of Anglo culture and the desperate assimilationist tendencies of the emigre Cuban community. This was written when I was a little kid, and the Tristan character's college age so it's not literally me. But part of the book involves Tristan reminiscing about old times with his grandfather and much of that material is ripped from the headlines. Also dad really did used to use Toshibas. January 18, 2008Post-PatriotismProposed new lyrics for the Spanish national anthem rejected on the theory that "long live Spain!" is objectionable because the words "had an authoritarian ring to them and one prominent left-wing leader said they 'stank' of the Franco era." Seems odd to complain about too much nationalism in a national anthem. State's Rights
I can't say I'm surprised to see that Mike Huckabee's a defender of the iconography of slavery and white supremacy but I hadn't known for sure previously: “You don’t like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag,” Mr. Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, told supporters in Myrtle Beach, according to The Associated Press. We'll recall George Wallace's pledge to get rid of "every freedom rider, sit in, and every other trouble-maker backed by the NAACP that meddles in our affairs." Robert Farley wonders how flag pole ramming fits into Huckabee's vision of bible-centric ethics. "What if it's done for fun, and not for punishment?" January 17, 2008Ledeen on GoldbergMichael Ledeen, who has some bizarre views about the Middle East but indisputably knows a lot about fascism, has a worthwhile pan of Liberal Fascism made all the more devastating by the fact that Ledeen's no liberal but is unfailingly polite to Goldberg. Highlights: The great masterpiece that drew the blood lines from Robespierre to modern mass movements and regimes, is Jacob Talmon’s “The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy,” now nearly half a century old. There’s no evidence that Jonah has read it. [...] It doesn’t seem that Jonah is aware of this literature. [...] What is missing from Jonah’s book—he mentions it in passing a few times, but never gives it the weight it deserves—is the specific historical context from which fascism was born [...] Jonah, instead, says (pg. 80) “Fascism, at its core, is the view that every nook and cranny of society should work together in spiritual union toward the same goals overseen by the state.” That is not fascism [...] Just a few lines later, he claims that “Woodrow Wilson was the twentieth century’s first fascist dictator,” and that’s just silly. [...] Jonah trivializes Nazi racism [...] The best that can be said about this is that it’s imaginative. But it’s what happens when you are bound and determined to put liberals, Socialists, Communists, fascists and Nazis into a common political home. It's not a very good book. January 16, 2008Cashmere MafiaYikes this show is bad. They'd really better settle this writer's strike some day soon and get some better stuff on the air. The Terminator show on Fox sucks, too. The Next CrazeCan "I drink your milkshake" be the "say hello to my little friend" of the new generation? January 14, 2008Telegraph Lines
The Wire has always been deliberately dancing on the edge of commercial and aesthetic viability. One of the things that makes the show so great -- it's uncompromising approach to storytelling -- has also tended to make it difficult to secure an audience. It's not intended to be watched "like a television show" where you just tune in on any given week when you happen to be bored. You need to watch one episode after another, in sequence, and pay attention. But people (myself included) tend to like the ability to dip in and out of things as schedule allows. Still, The Wire's approach has allowed the writers to craft a much more compelling product than what you normally see on television. But after the second episode of Season five, I'm coming to share the doubts expressed by Kay Steiger and Jesse Singal. It seems very strange to pick now -- when the show can't be renewed or cancelled no matter what happens to viewership -- to suddenly decide to incorporate way more exposition than we're accustomed to. But that seems to be what's happening. Everything in the Sun plot is being marked out like a runway. Do you think the Unscrupulous Journalist and the Douchebag Editor are going to conspire to cause the Fall of American Journalism? I think they just might! Maybe there's some cool double-reverse in the works and this is only being done in an apparently heavy-handed manner to throw us emotionally off track. Here's hoping.... January 12, 2008Mims: Now With Venn DiagramsCould yesterday's discussion of Mims and formal logic possibly get nerdier? Yes, it could! Just consider these Mims-related venn diagrams. Thinking About AbstractionsI liked Steven Pinker's New York Times Magazine article on the "moral sense" a great deal, though I to some extent share Will Wilkinson's concern that Pinker winds up trying to steal a base. I don't, however, think the objections raised at The American Scene by Peter Suderman, Matt Frost, and Jim Manzi quite hold up. I think if you want to properly understand what Pinker's up to, it's worth thinking about something else: Math. When we do math, we talk a lot about numbers. We don't talk about numerals, the concrete typographical signifiers of numbers. "V" is a numeral (a Roman numeral) as is "5" but they both stand for the number that you get when you add the number represented by the numeral "4" to the number represented by the numeral "1." In short, unlike numerals, number are abstract entities. From a certain point of view, this can make the whole enterprise of math come to seem very mysterious. If the numbers are abstract, how can we interact with them causally? And if we can't interact with them causally, how can know anything about them? One can easily stumble into the view that either all this math talk is just so much BS, or else that there is some heavenly Realm of the Numbers where they live and send us messages through the ether. January 11, 2008Is MIMS Affirming the Consequent?Brendan Nyhan accuses Mike Huckabee of a logical fallacy: Mr. Huckabee, for his part, responded with trademark humor. “The Air Force has a saying that says if you’re not catching flak, you’re not over the target,” he said. “I’m catching the flak; I must be over the target.” This is basically a form of affirming the consequent. If you're over the target, you'll catch flak and Huckabee is catching flak "therefore" he must be over the target. Nyhan says that MIMS makes the same error in "This is Why I'm Hot": In particular, he thinks "I'm hot 'cause I'm fly / You ain't [hot] 'cause you're not [fly]" is an example of the fallacy. I disagree. Nyhan's reading depends on construing MIMS as trying to make a logical inference with "'cause" as a material conditional but there's no need to do that. Interpretive charity suggest that we should understand MIMS to be making two logically independent causal claims: (1) he's hot because he's fly and (2) you're not hot because you're not fly. Perhaps MIMS believes that x is hot if and only if x is fly, or perhaps he doesn't. I don't, however, see a fallacy here. January 8, 2008The Comeback KidChilling words: "Chevy Chase is trying to make a comeback." My hope is for all the "notable alumni of the Dalton School" who are more notable than I to slip into obscurity. What's Claire Danes done lately? January 7, 2008The Candidates and TelevisionVia Robert Farley, I hadn't realized TV Guide had asked the leading candidates to name their favorite television show back in November: Hillary watches Grey’s Anatomy, Barack Obama likes The Wire (for the record, that’s the right answer), and John Edwards says his viewing guilty pleasure is "Fred Thompson on Law & Order." Of course it does give one pause. The press, myself included, loves The Wire but it's not something the mass public has ever embraced. Is America ready for a Wire-watching President? January 6, 2008The Origins of Liberal Fascism
From the Wikipedia page for RoboCop: The character of RoboCop itself was inspired by Judge Dredd[4] as well as the Marvel Comics superhero Iron Man (one of these comic books can be seen during the convenience store robbery). Iron Man was conceived by Stan Lee as the alter ego of Tony Stark, a billionaire industrialist working as a military contractor. During the original run of the comic, Iron Man was mostly occupied battling communism. In this light, RoboCop is seen as a subversive take on this classic Marvel character. Although both Neumeier and Verhoeven have declared themselves staunchly on the political left, Neumeier recalls on the audio commentary to Starship Troopers that many of his leftist friends wrongly perceived RoboCop as a fascist movie. However, on the 20th Anniversary DVD, producer Jon Davison referred to the film's message as "fascism for liberals" - a politically liberal film done in the most violent way possible. It's strange that Davison, as a liberal, is unaware that "fascism for liberals" is redundant. After all, liberalism just is fascism. How could a movie be fascism for fascists? The whole thing's puzzling. There Will Be BloodThis is totally awesome. Don't listen to the haters. I realized maybe fifteen minutes into the movie that a sort of had to pee and there were over two hours left and I didn't mind at all because the movie's so utterly great. Daniel Day-Lewis is great. He goes over the top, then picks the top up and puts it on a higher shelf somewhere. Or something. The use of the dissonant score is stunning. The other performances are good. Even the bizarre ending, in context, works for me. Best film of 2007, hands down, if it counts as a 2007 film. January 3, 2008David Simon's ViewNote that David Simon himself shows up in yesterday's thread about The Wire to disagree with me. It's an interesting discussion all around and I won't intervene further in it. But to answer Ogged's question here, I have no intention of leading an anti-Wire backlash -- assuming things don't go horribly awry in Season 5 it'll be the best television show anyone's ever made and its outlook, even if not one I totally agree with analytically, is integral to the drama. January 2, 2008David Simon and the Audacity of Despair
Reihan Salam critiques The Wire: "David Simon thinks he’s constructed a critique of capitalism, but in fact he’s prepared an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference." I think that's right. What's more, based on what I've heard David Simon say about politics, while he and I are clearly "on the same side" in some sense, I don't really agree with him about very much in detail. Fundamentally, I think his vision of the bleak urban dystopia and its roots is counterproductive to advancing the values we hold dear. That said, I think the show succeeds not in spite of these lacunae in Simon's political vision, but almost because of them. Trying to do a piece of extended drama that embodied the values of pragmatic progressive reformism would be impossible. The results, if serious and true to the spirit, would be deadly dull. Moderate optimism about human nature and the possibility for change is, if done in an entertaining way, the stuff of light romantic comedies, not big-time drama. And I think everyone recognizes that on some level. But part of what gives The Wire such great power is its creator's conviction, wrong though it is, that his tragic vision constitutes telling it like it is. While departing from both reality and realism in any number of ways, The Wire is resolutely committed to verisimilitude in a way that almost no other show is. The result is the creation of a world -- Simon's Baltimore -- that feels eminently real, but is imbued with all the artifice of Greek tragedy. In political terms it's a dark vision that, like Dostoevsky's, veers wildly between radical and reactionary and that exists, fundamentally, outside the lines of "normal" arguments about policy. Simon believes that we are doomed, and political progress requires us to believe that we are not. But aesthetically it's an extremely powerful conceit. And at the end of the day, it's a television show not a treatise on urban policy. If some viewers are taking it too literally as a statement of truth, that's on them much more than it is on Simon. Juno's Politics[This post contains spoilers] I keep thinking about Ross's post on the politics of Juno and his contention that: None of this means that movie is a brief for overturning Roe v. Wade; far from it. But like Knocked Up, it's decidedly a brief for not getting an abortion. I really don't know. I mean, consider alternatives. There's no way to make a movie about a single woman and her unplanned pregnancy if you make the unplanned pregnancy end with an early abortion the way most such pregnancies end. But it can't be that the mere act of telling the story of a non-abortion constitutes a "brief" for getting not getting an abortion. And much of the plot of Juno is consistent with everything going awry after Mark and Venessa break up. If things had gone awry, you would have wound up with a very different film in terms of this alleged anti-abortion message -- you'd have something about how even leaving aside the inconvenience, etc., adoption is no panacea. Instead, that all ends up happily and Juno even finds true love. But it's that -- the positive outcome rather than the portrayal of the decision itself -- that lends the film something of an anti-abortion quality. Like Knocked Up it's a film where a woman decides not to have an abortion under circumstances where an abortion seemed like a likely outcome, and then despite some difficulties it all winds up well in the end. But is this really a political message, or is it just Hollywood sentimentality? If it's the former, then it winds up being a pretty dumb message. It would be a message that posits that the whole phenomenon of abortion in the United States is a kind of giant analytical error on the part of American women -- tons and tons of them are getting pregnant and having abortions because they think carrying the pregnancy to term would have very bad consequences for their lives, but actually they're mistaken. You might think your unplanned pregnancy would hurt your career as an on-air television personality, but really it will advance your career! You might think your parents will be mad and your friends will ostracize you, but really they'll all be supportive! Best of all, sticking with your unplanned pregnancy is solid ticket to love and marriage! But at the end of the day, it's really just silly to suppose that any huge proportion of abortions are mistakes like that. The crux of the political problem for the anti-abortion movement is that pro-life activists think that a woman should be legally required to carry her pregnancy to term whether or not the consequences of doing so are likely to be negative. If making an effective "brief" for not having an abortion requires you to just posit that the non-abortion path will work out super-well, then you're simply not engaging the argument. Juno's family and friends are helpful and supportive and good for them and good for her. And Alison Scott's employers are enthusiastic about her pregnancy. But what about teenage girls whose parents aren't helpful and supportive? What about women whose careers really would be imperiled by a pregnancy? Those women are the real subjects of the abortion controversy and I don't think Juno or Knocked Up really has anything to say about them. Which doesn't harm them as light comedies, but does, I think, totally undermine efforts to construe them as having important political messages. Fascists in the American Legion?American Legion communications director John Raughter denies Jonah Goldberg's allegations that his outfit was "founded as an essentially fascist organization." Orexin AIt seems scientists have discovered that snorting a nasal spray including a hormone called Orexin A "reversed the effects of sleep deprivation in monkeys, allowing them to perform like well-rested monkeys on cognitive tests." One of the researcher describes the effects as "relatively benign," which seems a bit menacing to me. December 30, 2007Mass PikeI'd previously praised the Federal Highway Administration's list of songs about highways but looking more closely it doesn't even include "Mass Pike" by the Get-Up Kids so maybe big government doesn't work after all. December 28, 2007Predicting CW
A lot of people seem fascinated with things like the political predictions charts on Intrade. I, frankly, would very much like to be fascinated with them. But in reality, they're deadly boring. Take the betting on the Republican nomination, for example. It's clearly just a kind of lagging indicator of semi-informed conventional wisdom. The crowd didn't have a premonition of Mike Huckabee's rise and -- more damningly -- the crowd didn't have the foreknowledge to recognize that Huckabee's surge was going to lead to a backlash and heightened scrutiny. So he skyrockets up and then down he dips. On the Democratic side, meanwhile, Hillary is currently valued at 66.9 and I'm absolutely certain that if she loses in Iowa (of which there's certainly more than a 33 percent chance of happening) then she'll plunge. Not that any of that is wrong, but it's not especially interesting. You'd like to see some kind of noteworthy divergence between what the betting markets are saying and what people in DC speculate about around the water cooler. Instead, you get something that seems to be an equal blend of what people say around the water cooler with national polls. In formal terms, I guess the problem is that everyone is working off the same bits of inadequate information so nothing's really being aggregated. We all know what the latest polls say and that the outcomes in the early states matter more. Put all of us knowing the same thing together and what you get is dull, dull, dull. Mapping SlaveryVia Edge of the West this map showing the distribution of slaves in the antebellum United States is pretty neat as are the other maps on that page from the University of Chicago. While you're at Edge of the West, check out their historically informed take on Bruce Bartlett's odd thesis that a full and frank airing of the Democratic Party's history on race would reflect poorly on contemporary liberalism. Thank God for the StateI was vaguely contemplating the idea of making a playlist of songs I have that mention specific roads in them. Then I thought "Matt, you should really use Google before you do that" so I did. And what did I discover but an official Federal Highway Administration list of songs that mention specific roads. Take that, libertarians! These are the government services I need. December 27, 2007Today's Top TenMy ten favorite albums of 2007, again in no particular order:
For next year, I resolve to listen to more actual hip-hop albums instead of just downloading the odd single. December 26, 2007AVP: R
Alien Versus Predator: Requiem is by no means a good movie. But if Juno left an unduly upbeat & happy taste in your mouth, the old-fashioned bloodiness of this romp does help cleanse the palate. What's more, unlike the catastrophic Alien Versus Predator, the sequel really does deliver on the basic promise of lots and lots of fighting and killing. Exposition is kept to a bare minimum -- you're supposed to just know all the backstory, sit back, and watch a whole bunch of acid blood fly around while tons of people are killed. On the flipside, it's hardly worth pointing out the many, many, many levels on which this movie didn't really make sense. I will note, however, that it's a bit unfortunate to see them appear to screw around with the alien life cycle such that the time elapsed from when a facehugger grabs you to when a new alien pops out of your head appears to be greatly compressed. In a larger sense, it's really too bad that all these silly sequels now can't help but detract from the fact that Alien and Aliens are both legitimate good movies that don't really deserve to have been conscripted into this low-grade franchise. LCD SoundsystemClicking around the internet, it seemed to me that a curiously large number of people were putting LCD Soundsystem on various top ten lists. Metacritic confirms this -- the critics love LCD Soundsystem. On some level, this is just something I refuse to believe. I mean, I went to see LCD Soundsystem play at the 930 Club one time and I'll happily grant you that it was a totally awesome evening -- vodka + dancing = fun even in famously danceaphobic Washington, DC. But one of the best albums of the year? Really? The Guardian deemed Sound of Silver "dance rock for grownups," which I guess is right, but doesn't strike me as a particularly laudable achievement. Why do we need dance rock for grownups? Today's Top TenThe top ten tracks on Pitchfork's Top 100 Tracks of 2007 list:
That's in no particular order. I don't really believe in ordinal rankings and have no idea what it would mean to claim that "D.A.N.C.E." is 'better' than "A Postcard to Nina." December 25, 2007Christmas In FallujaAnnoyed by the incredibly horrible "Citizen Soldier" recruiting ad / song / music video that plays in many movie theaters these days? Well, never fear, Brian Beutler's identified the antidote: "The music's equally terrible (possibly worse?) but the message is deeply anti-war." Yep, that really sucks. December 23, 2007Charlie Wilson's WarSomehow, Mike Nichols and Aaron Sorkin managed to turn George Crile's grimly fascinating book about Rep. Charlie Wilson and his involvement in the clandestine funding of Afghan mujadedeen into a mildly amusing political satire. On one level, it's a pretty extraordinary achievement since nothing about the book really screamed out "this would make a good movie" to me. The really interesting part of the story, at the end of the day, is the totally-unfilmable micro-level detail about how, exactly, a backbench member of congress with a middling level of seniority gets the necessary legislating done. That's pretty much all telescoped out of the book in a way that's understandable, but winds up leaving the time frame murky and it's not really clear what the story's even about without it. You get some funny moments out of the whole thing, but it gives you no real sense of anything. Mostly, I hop it juices sales of the book, which is must-reading. The whole saga of this period in US policy toward Afghanistan is worth keeping in mind as we watch the Sunni awakening unfold. I think one can understand why people who happened upon a way to deliver relatively cheap body-blows to the Soviet Union were willing to do so without totally understanding who was getting the guns and what the ramifications of it all might be down the road. The Cold War was serious business and there were no cost-free options available. The current strategy in Iraq, by contrast, seems to have all of the pitfalls of what was done in Afghanistan but nothing even close to the same upside. It's pretty clear what the CIA and Rep. Wilson and others were trying to do in Afghanistan. They wanted to put weapons in the hands of people who were shooting at the Red Army -- a rival superpower. What's the comparable objective in Iraq? International Brigades
I had sort of guessed that this "war on Christmas" business was one of those only in America things, but according to Polly Toynbee you've got the same BS over in the UK, where the Rev Jules Gomes explains that: Here is the good chaplain's Christmas message: "More Christians have been martyred for their faith in the last century than in any other period of church history. Yesterday's Herod is today's Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee, seeking the total extermination of all forms of Christianity. The great irony is that the greatest opposition to Christ comes from so-called broad-minded people who seek to ban Christmas so that people of other faiths are not offended." As I've said, I'm not a huge fan of Dawkins' work in this field but the difference between writing mean books and killing people is pretty clear. And, of course, nobody's seeking to ban Christmas! It's weird how so many people want to use this holiday to work themselves and their constituents into fits of anger over nothing. Hardly seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the event. Photo by Flickr user laffy4k used under a Creative Commons license December 22, 2007Missing the PointRihanna's "Umbrella" is, it seems to me, a very sweet -- almost treacly -- song: "When the sun shines / We'll shine together / Told you I'll be here forever / Said I'll always be your friend / Took an oath / I'mma stick it out 'till the end." The video, not so much: Just saying. December 21, 2007Most Be a Gene Transplantation IssueAP: "Toddlers rescued from orphanages and placed in good foster homes score dramatically higher on IQ tests years later than children who were left behind, concludes a one-of-a-kind project in Romania that has profound implications for child welfare around the globe." It's stunning that the foster parents were able to actually use retroviruses to recode the orphan children's DNA, thus reprogramming them to the new, high-IQ level. Hard to believe that such technology could be so widespread, but several prominent phrenologists assure me that there's no other explanation. Australia Bleg
I'm just about done with Thomas Keneally's A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia and it was pretty fascinating. Americans are accustomed to hearing the tales of derring do from the early European settlement of our own continent, and precisely because the Australian situation was so similar in so many ways -- so familiar -- the differences loom larger in a fascinating way. That said, I'll admit that I picked up the book basically because Jews love Thomas Keneally and it had a cool title rather than out of any systematic effort to explore the history of Australia. That said, now that I read the book, I'm interested, so it's time to go a blegging: Any worthwhile recommendations? I'd be looking for a basic introductory text, probably a bit more scholarly than Keneally's book. I really don't know anything about the subject beyond what I've now read about the first few years of settlement and a hazy sense that Australia's politics feature more America-style rightwingery than you have in other countries. December 19, 2007Art FactoriesYou may not be checking Jim Fallows' low-quantity/high-quality blog all that regularly, so don't miss this post on "art factories" in China -- and especially the accompanying photos. This leads me to a probably crazy thought. The phenomenon of artsy types moving to somewhat sketchy neighborhoods in search of affordable rent is well-known. But do you know what's a lot cheaper than Brooklyn? China. Then we could start reading breathless reports from the US-China Commission about China's menacing efforts to corner the world's hipster reserves. Top Ten ListsI'm seeing more-and-more blog posts wherein people post their ten favorite albums / songs / movies / whatever of the year, but the year's not done yet. This blog will be full of lists from December 26-31 but nothing until then. But Did They Get RoyaltiesTorture is no laughing matter, but I just noted this amusing phrasing from Newsweek: In addition to waterboarding, Zubaydah was subjected to sleep deprivation and bombarded with blaring rock music by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. One agent was so offended he threatened to arrest the CIA interrogators, according to two former government officials directly familiar with the dispute. Yes, they went beyond sleep deprivation and drowning to deploy . . . the Chili Peppers: On a semi-serious note, I have to think you'd feel just terrible if you learned that your music was being used as part of a regime of torture. Who Would Jesus Torture?Harold Meyerson asks the question that's on every secular liberal's mind: How is it that the political mobilization of Christianity in the United States seems to have gotten us so much torture, aggressive warfare, and xenophobia? Where's the humane, universalistic ethic of the Gospels go? BBC Versus the PoguesIt seems someone at BBC Radio 1 got the bright idea of bowdlerizing the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York" so as to remove the "cheap lousy faggot" line. Fortunately, good sense eventually prevailed and the original version will go forward. I'm always puzzled by this sort of thing. The word clearly appears in the text because the character who says it is trying to direct an offensive insult at the other character. What's the basis for the objection? December 18, 2007Question of the Day
One wag, employed in a position too reputable to make such jokes under his own byline, emails in: "doesn't Jenna Bush qualify as the ultimate liberal fascist?" She is a teacher, after all. And female! Your Kids Will Meditate in SchoolJonah Goldberg calls Liberal Fascism a very serious argument that's never been made before in such detail or with such care, but it seems to me that the Dead Kennedys covered this ground decades ago: One has to wonder what it is about Jerry Brown's secret allegiance to fascism that's allowed him to mount his improbable return to statewide political office. No AnalogyBrendan Nyhan thinks he's got Jonah Goldberg nailed as some kind of hypocrite, citing such past Goldbergisms as "the use and abuse of Nazi analogies has been a major peeve of mine for quite some time" and "Suffice it to say that the Nazis weren't simply generically bad, they were uniquely and monumentally evil, not just in their hearts but also in literally billions of intentional, well-planned, and bureaucratized decisions they made every day". As I understand it, though, the difference here is that in Liberal Fascism Goldberg isn't drawing an analogy. He's saying that "the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood" just are the "modern heirs" to the American tradition of fascism "an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries." Contemporary American liberalism, in short, doesn't resemble Nazism. Rather, according to Goldberg it's a variety of fascism, albeit a "friendly" one. December 17, 2007Quintessential Fascism
O frabjous day! Over at Sadly, No they have screen captures of Liberal Fascism. I've reproduced s bigger version the most awesome part of the book jacket. With Friends Like TheseDamon Linker has a great essay in The New Republic on the so-called "new atheism" and the ways in which it undermines the vision of a secular politics that it purports to defend: Still, the rise of the new atheists is cause for concern--not among the targets of their anger, who can rest secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the religious will, here in America, dwarf the ranks of atheists for the foreseeable future; but rather among those for whom the defense of secular liberalism is a high political priority. Of course, many of these secular liberals are probably the same people who propelled Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens onto the best-seller lists by purchasing their books en masse--people who are worried about the dual threats to secular politics posed by militant Islam and the American religious right. These people are correct to be nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders. The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism. Yes indeed. In a raw power struggle between people who, like Harris, want public schools "announce the death of God" and those who want them to indoctrinate us all in the Gospel, the numbers aren't on the side of the non-believers and the outcome is unlikely to be a happy one for anyone. The liberal consensus, by contrast, has served the country well and undermining it from the point of view of ideological atheism is really no better than undermining it from any other direction. Question of the DayDoes the somewhat unorthodox interpretation of the joker on display here look totally awesome, or terrible? I'm not in love with it on first blush, but given how much I loved Batman Begins (best comic book movie out there, in my view) and the quality of the talent involved in The Dark Knight I'm optimistic despite my surface skepticism. The Atheismism of ResentmentDJW makes a good observation on the issues about secularism we discussed yesterday: Many commenters feel compelled to point out that atheists of all sorts are often not afforded the respect and tolerance that Linker wants atheists to extend to theists. This is factually correct, but as a defense of the likes of Hitchens and Dawkins, it's nothing but a tu quoque. Moreover, even if returning the disrespect in kind had some sort of strategic value, which I can't really see, Hitchens and Dawkins attack illiberal and intolerant believers and ecumenical, pluralist believers with the same broad brush. Right. The level of intolerance that's directed at atheists in the United States is, in my view, disgusting. From Mitt Romney's speech to the polls showing that tens of millions of my fellow citizens wouldn't vote for a non-believer, our culture is full of horrible stuff. But directing equal and opposite illiberal bile at the direction of religious people in a way that draws no distinction between liberal and illiberal strains of religiosity isn't a solution to anything. Going WebbyInteresting LA Times story striking writers looking to launch web-startups to bypass the studios who are so unwilling to share web revenues. It's an intriguing development. The TV and movie studios business models are fundamentally all about controlling the channels of distribution -- the very thing the rise of the internet disrupts. But they still have a massive leg-up in the new medium simply because of all the embedded human capital in the form of relationships with the talent. They seem to have decided, however, that the dawning of the digital age is mostly a good time to try to claw back compensation from their workforce rather than a time when good relations with their workforce are becoming more important than ever in a world where control of the distribution channels is becoming less and less important. December 16, 2007Sunday Analogy BloggingVia Andrew, Jonathan Franzen on the kindle: "Yes, in theory, words are words. But literature isn't data. The difference between Shakespeare on a BlackBerry and Shakespeare in the Arden Edition is like the difference between vows taken in a shoe store and vows taken in cathedral." I feel like Franzen's reading this analogy backwards. if the love is real and deeply felt and the vows sincerely undertaken, then what sort of person would hold it against the newlyweds that their ceremony was performed in shabby surroundings? A shallow person, I think. Similarly, it seems to me that one would have to have a poor appreciation of Shakespeare to seriously believe that the power of his work can't come through on a computer screen. I read Notes from Underground for the first time in a crumbling 30 year-old flimsy paperback edition -- it's still a great novel, and I'm sure it'd be great on a computer screen as well. Does that mean the market for handsome editions you can display proudly on your shelf -- or even just things that feel comfortable to hold in the hand -- will just vanish overnight? Of course not. There's more to the reading (and book-owning) experience than the text itself. But that "more" is precisely what's more than literature about it, it's not the literature itself. Movie RecommendationsIn this past week, I've gone to see both I Am Legend and Margot at the Wedding and enjoyed both greatly. They're rather different movies, though. Margot struck me as a bit worse than The Squid and the Whale since Jack Black slightly took me out of things by hamming it up, but it's otherwise really good. Just a couple of days before I went to see it, I caught the lamentable Invasion on a plane flight but Margot completely redeemed my views of Nicole Kidman. Legend, as I understand it, departs massively and systematically from the book, so if you're a fan of the book and expecting an adaptation: Don't. But its vision of post-apocalyptic New York is brilliantly executed and I don't want to say too much about it since I don't want to ruin the suspense. Naturally, when you look back there are some plot holes, but that's kind of what you get with this genre. December 14, 2007Knocked Up RevisitedLike a lot of people, I found Knocked Up to be both funny, and somewhat disquieting in its apparent message. These issues got discussed a bit and then the whole thing was forgotten in our fast-paced internet-age culture. But Jessica Valenti points out a really good new Meghan O'Rourke essay on the film inspired by Katherine Heigl's recent remark that the movie was "a little sexist." December 9, 2007Defending KantIn response to yesterday's anti-Kant attack ad, John Holbo suggests the following defense of Kant's ethics: I'd say, though, that this little ditty recapitulates one of the oft-criticized flaws in Kant's thinking, namely the surface non-equivalance of different formulations of the key moral principle. December 5, 2007The Only Show That Matters
Season four of The Wire is now available on DVD and it's the perfect gift for any decent person out there. Of course, you won't want to run out and buy season four unless you've seen seasons one, two, and three, so keep that in mind. But if you've never seen the show, you have to see the show. You have to stop reading this post right now, open up your Netflix queue, and sign yourself for disc one of season one and then come back. Okay, back? It's the best show on television. The best show in the history of television. And with season five ready to start airing in about a month, it's by far the best show that's currently still on. So you need to watch it. Okay? Okay. Lukewarm on RadioheadWhen I outlined my lukewarm-at-best feelings about Radiohead, I did so with some trepidation, afraid that their legions of cult-like fans (or, really, just Catherine) would rip me to shreds, but since Carrie Brownstein seems to agree, I'll just consider myself in good company. November 30, 2007Nathaniel WeylJeet Heer suggests apropos of the latest flareups of the "are blacks inferior?" debate is that "One way to address this tiresome topic from an unexplored angle is to look at a now largely forgotten figure who is cited as an authority in The Bell Curve, Nathaniel Weyl (1910-2005)" and here it goes: The flavor of Weyl’s thought can be captured in an article he wrote in 1967 for the journal Intelligence, arguing for the superiority of white Rhodesians with evidence from his own visit to Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia [i.e., Zimbabwe when it was under white supremacist rule]. “Thus, white Rhodesians are an elite element within the English-speaking world in terms of psychometric intelligence,” Weyl argued. “This finding is reinforced by visual impressions. Salisbury whites appear larger, healthier, more vigorous, alert and bright than London whites. Beatniks, transvestites and obvious homosexuals are conspicuously absent.” [...] And no doubt back then there were people condemning Weyl as a racist, and others hailing him as a brave hero eager to speak the truth no matter how politically incorrect it may have been. Meanwhile, I'm shocked to find racists associated with race science! Or racists associated with the origins of the conservative movement! I don't know where liberals get these crazy ideas. Trantor's Population DensityContinuing with yesterday's post on population density in The Caves of Steel, consider the description of Trantor provided by the Encyclopedia Galactica excerpt that opens section three of "The Psychohistorians", where we learn that "Its urbanizattion, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All the land surface of Trantorm, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions." Say well in excess of forty billion means 45 billion. 45 billion people spread over 75 million square miles is only 600 people per square mile:
That'd put the population density of Trantor at a bit less than what you see in the present-day United Kingdom. The UK is, to be sure, a densely populated country. But as you can see above, it's hardly a single giant city stretching from sea to sea. And yet Jerril explains to Gaal Dornick that not only is the entire surface (save 100 square miles reserved for the imperial palace) incorporated into a city that's so dense Trantorians go years without stepping outside, but a long elevator ride only took them 500 feet into the air. How? Most of the time it was just getting up to ground level. Trantor is tunneled over a mile down. It's like an iceberg. Nine-tenths of it is out of sight. It even works itself out a few miles into the sub-ocean soil at the shorelines. For reference, the Empire State Building is less than 0.30 miles tall, so the total square footage you could get from a mile-deep tunnel covering 75,000,000 square miles of surface area would be mind-boggling and you could fit way, way, way more than 45 billion people there. Alternatively, you could fit the 45 billion into a relatively small proportion of the planet and use some of the surface area for agriculture, thus reducing the capital's strategic vulnerability to attacks on its supply fleet. Photo by Flickr user Catherine Trigg used under a Creative Commons license November 29, 2007Asimov and Population Density
For today's nerd break, let's consider Isaac Asimov's The Caves of Steel, an excellent sci-fi novel sadly undermined by a failure to really grasp population density. The setting for the novel is a future version of earth in which the existence of advanced technology has failed to stem a decline in living standards (on the planet Earth, that is, the Spacers are better off than we are). The trouble is that the proposed population of Earth -- 8 billion -- is way to low to produce the effects Asimov is concerned with. Humanity, in this vision of the future, lives in giant, mostly underground mega-cities the better to leave the surface of the planet available for the exploitation of natural resources. As Wikipedia explains: The eponymous "caves of steel" are vast city complexes covered by huge metal domes, capable of supporting tens of millions each. The New York City of that era, for example, encompasses present-day New York State, as well as large tracts of New Jersey. But here's the thing. Present-day New York State encompasses 54,520 square miles and present-day New York City contains 27,000 people per square mile, so you'd be talking about 1.47 billion people in New York alone. And that's ignoring the "large tracts of New Jersey." What's more, that's Asimov's NYC has the same population density as present-day NYC. If instead you assume it contains Manhattan's 66,940 people per square mile, you could fit 3.652 billion people in New York State (again, we're ignoring the New Jersey Sectors). But Asimov suggests that the population density of his NYC should be even higher than that: To be sure, something had existed in the same geographic area before then that had been called New York City. That primitive gathering of population had existed for three thousand years, not three hundred, but it hadn't been a City. People live in some pretty small apartments in Manhattan, but they haven't adopted collective kitchens. Nevertheless, even sticking with the Manhattan assumption, the single City contains over 1/6th of the world's population and it's not even the biggest City. Under the circumstances, it's very hard to imagine what could have compelled people to adopt the City revolution with hyper-density measures like collective kitchens. If the entire United States had the population density of an inner-ring suburb like Westchester County you could fit almost 8 billion within our borders. Why Such FlopsSudhir Muralidhar proposes a striking new theory of the failure of the recent crop of anti-war films to bring in the bucks at the box office: The movies are no good. November 25, 2007Live Through ThisLast night, I decided I should finally come to terms with the reality that 85 percent of the people I know in NYC live in Brooklyn at this point so off I went to a bar where, at least at a somewhat unfashionably early hour, they decided that playing Hole's Live Through This in its entirety would be a good idea: At any rate, while this was going on it occurred to me that too much time spent in the mid-1990s listening to modern rock radio and watching MTV had utterly burned "Violet" and "Doll Parts" deep, deep, deep into my brain, that the rest of the album was totally unfamiliar. The non-single tracks have a less-produced, more riot grrl-y flavor. All of which seems like as good a time as any to link to the Melissa Auf der Maur blog. November 20, 2007Tuesday Ellipses in Song Title BloggingAs part of my continuing commitment to bringing you, the blog-reading public, the very best in Canadian indie rock video, here's "Backed Out on The..." off Spirit If by what we're apparently supposed to call Broken Social Scene Presents Kevin Drew. Joules Scott Key from Metric plays drums. November 17, 2007No Country for Old MenI saw this movie last weekend, loved it enough to go buy the book and read it immediately, loved that to, and have spend the time since then feeling unequal to the task of writing anything about it. But via Ross here's a very interesting essay on the film by Matt Zoller Seitz. November 12, 2007Jens Lekman
For a couple of years now, I'd been engaged in some kind of obscurely-motivated obstinate refusal to listen to Jens Lekman. But yesterday faced with the imminent expiration of some Emusic downloads, I got Oh, You're So Silent Lens and, um, just like everyone says it's awesome. And, indeed, When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog is awesome, too. And I'm pretty sure that if he has other albums, they'll be awesome as well. The moral of the story, in short, is that I've got to spend more time paying attention to the conventional wisdom. Similarly, when you find everyone touting the Nordic model (here too, but you need a subscription) of economics as well as indie pop, then maybe it's time to just embrace it. November 11, 2007AnalogiesYou can't win "respect" as a concession in a collective bargaining agreement, but I know it's something a lot of screenwriters crave, so I thought I'd pass along Jonathan Last's analogy: Actors are quarterbacks, directors are running backs, and writers are offensive linemen. That's about how they contribute to the product, and how they're paid. And just like it was a welcome change when left tackles finally started being compensated more closely to their value a few years back, I think we should be happy to see writers moved a tiny bit closer to their real value. Well said. People don't usually have lists of favorite writers the way they do actors or directors, but it should be obvious that without good story and good dialogue, you don't have a good movie. November 9, 2007Cover Flow
I upgraded one of my machines to Leopard last night, and while it doesn't look like it's about to change my life it does have some cool features. And an annoying weird one. Namely, Apple has taken its somewhat weird and annoying "cover flow" feature from iTunes and brought it over to the Finder so now you can browse through your files and folders in the awkward, inefficient, can't-really-see-where-anything-is way. But why? Cover flow definitely does look cool on a television ad, but the crux of the matter is that actually using a computer is very different from sitting back and watching a scene unfold. Cover flow doesn't seem to me to work at all as a way to actually use your computer. November 8, 2007Slightly Outdated Movie CommentaryI think Ross is basically right about Michael Clayton and basically right about Into the Wild but I wouldn't join him in lumping the two together as films I liked "more than [they] deserved." The problems with Into the Wild are of an ethical or philosophical nature. Jon Krakauer's book versionbook version of the story is already far too kind to Christopher McCandless and his antics and the film erred even further in that direction. But if you believe -- as Sean Penn seems to -- that McCandless' recklessness and cruelty toward his immediate family were, in fact, a noble spiritual journey worthy of celebration, then Penn's done a brilliant job of transforming the story into a film that sees what Penn sees. I feel like that's a bit of an irresponsible thing to do, but it's good filmmaking; a very good movie, just one promoting a weird and wrongheaded point of view. Clayton, by contrast, I was super-enthusiastic about while watching and immediately after leaving the theater, but thinking back the preposterousness of the underlying plot seems like a big problem. It didn't bother me at the time, but I have a hard time believing it wouldn't bother me if I watched it again. November 7, 2007Much MoreJacob Levy has a more in-depth discussion of Ron Paul, Guy Fawkes, and V for Vendetta than I would ever dare attempt. November 5, 2007Gangster's ParadiseI went to see the good-but-not-great American Gangster on Friday, and yesterday spent some time reading Marc Jacobson's 2000 New York profile of Frank Lucas (on which the film is based) and his more recent piece where he puts Lucas together with Nicky Barnes for a chit-chat. This all made me think of Oscar Wilde's remark upon witnessing the scene at Jesse James' house following his death: "The Americans certainly are great hero worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal element." There seems to be something to that. But is it really different elsewhere? I'm not all that familiar with the popular culture of any other countries. November 2, 2007What I've Seen With Your Eyes
I went the other day to see the "final cut" of Blade Runner on the giant screen at the Uptown Theater the other day, and if you're a fan of the movie you should find a theater way it's playing. I'm too young, of course, to have seen it in theaters in 1982 but it occurs to me that that wouldn't have been the proper, voiceover-free version anyway and that since it wasn't especially popular on first release there are probably lots of people who've seen it on DVD or TV but never on a large screen. It makes a big difference to such a visually poetic film. Meanwhile, it's just so rich and textured, so you notice new things each time. My observations for this go-round, fittingly enough, have to do with the way the movie portrays the climate. I remembered, of course, that the story is set in Los Angeles and that it's raining constantly, but the striking thing to me on this reviewing is that the LA setting appears to play no other role in the plot. The striking cityscape doesn't even bare any real resemblance to LA. Meanwhile, not only is it pouring but nobody mentions this as if torrential downpours are a common phenomenon. Just a couple of years ago, I would have overlooked all of this (the LA setting just flashes briefly across the screen at the very beginning and the rain, in part, is just a kind of noir cliché) but in the contemporary context it obviously has a certain resonance and melds with the subtle suggestions (the book is very heavy-handed and clear on this point) that there have been massive die-offs in the animal population. UPDATE: Brian Beutler whines IRL that I failed to mention that he was present for this afternoon cinematic excursion. This, in turn, raises the question of whether it's really wise to admit to having been at the movies in the afternoon, but my official position is that since I'm blogging about it right now I was actually working. October 30, 2007"Silver Lining"I agree with Brad DeLong, this is a good song: A lot of Rilo Kiley fans I know seem to have been disappointed by the new album, Under the Black Light in general. Not me, I think it's pretty great and though it arguably lacks some of the pop triumphs of earlier albums, they do a better job of integrating their diverse stylistic interests into a consistent quality level. The Trouble With Terminator 2
I agree with Jonah Goldberg and his readers about the very important subject of Terminator 2, especially the correspondent who observes: I loved it initially, but the sad truth is that, while T2 was awesome when it came out, 90% of that awesomeness was the new digital effects. Now that those techniques are commonplace, the movie has to fall back on its characters and story, which were weak, annoying, and confused. It's worth, however, being clear that there's a very specific problem here: The sequel's tragic mishandling of the time travel paradox. The first film has this dead right — the machines' efforts to go back in time and change the past by assassinating Sarah Connor are not only doomed to fail, but indeed bring about the result they were intended to prevent, namely the conception of John Connor. This is a time-honored literary trope going back, in its way, to Oedipus Rex and is certainly the correct way to handle time travel plots. Terminator 2 casts all this to the wind with some vague talk about how the future is not yet written. And because T2 operates within the bad "you can change the future" paradigm, T3 winds up making little-to-know sense from the very beginning. October 28, 2007Where to Find Qualified WomenSurely you've heard dozens of times of the progressive — or even non-ideological — organization whose leadership professes to wish to have more women in high-level roles, but just can't seem to find qualified candidates for openings when they arise. Something to keep in mind next time you hear something like that would be GFR's take on how Hillary Clinton's campaign staff came to have so many women in senior positions: After all, it’s not like there was some huge population of female strategists out there the various campaigns were competing for and Clinton just happened to snap them all up. Clinton created, on her own, a cadre of female strategists to serve her political needs, by spotting talent in the women around her and promoting them up the political food chain. No other candidate can say, for example, that their campaign is being managed by their former female scheduler. It also might be worth noting in this regard that I think almost everyone would agree that Clinton's had the best-run campaign — free of mistakes, and seemingly drawing blood on those occasions when they've felt the need to attack. October 27, 2007Gone Baby GoneRobert Farley really nails my sentiments precisely. I'll just say it's too bad, because until the movie entered Plot Twist Land it was quite good if not quite as groundbreaking as it seemed to think it was. I think Ben Affleck may have more promise as a director than as an actor. He's just going to need to find himself a story that makes some sense on some level. Meanwhile, the film also features Michael Williams (i..e, Omar from The Wire) in a small part and I have to say that while I wish him well I think his career's going to be hurt by the fact that he has this giant scar on his face. For the Omar character, of course, that works great. But in his Gone Baby Gone role it implies some dramatic scar-creating backstory that the script doesn't cash out in any way. And why should it? After all, relatively few characters have a giant facial scar as part of their backstory. But it totally dominates his face October 21, 2007The Conscience of a Liberal
David Kennedy got the assignment to review Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal and he didn't like it very much. One argument he makes is, however, a good jumping-off point for further discussion: For this dismal state of affairs the Democratic Party is held to be blameless. Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security. As Krugman sees it, the modern Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. “There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship.” No two to tango for him. The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key. “Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican. ... End of story.” There are a number of ways one could respond to this, but I think the best thing to say is that Kennedy and Krugman are talking at cross-purposes here. Krugman's task isn't to explain why the Republican Party can win elections, it's too explain why a plutocratic political program can succeed. Back during the era of consensus politics, after all, the GOP won big electoral victories in 1952 and 1956 by nominating a popular general, by painting the Democrats as soft as defense, etc. And in 1960 they came very close to winning by arguing that Richard Nixon had the experience necessary to steer the ship of state in troubled times. What they didn't do, however, was advance an economic policy agenda focused on serving the interests of 5 percent of the country at the expense of the interests of 80 percent of the country. Or to put it another way, what makes America weird isn't that we have a conservative political party (they have 'em everywhere) or that the conservative political party succeeds at winning elections (happens in England, Canada, France, Italy, etc. all the time) but that the conservative political party is so unreconciled to the modern welfare state. That's what's weird. It isn't true of major political parties outside the United States, and for a while it wasn't true of the United States either. In other words, we could have a politics where the parties disagreed about a lot of stuff -- abortion, gay rights, tradeoffs between environmental protection and economic growth, foreign policy, crime control, paternalistic public health measures, etc. -- while operating from within a broad consensus about the need for a robust public sector commitment to universal social insurance programs and basic public services. Krugman believes that racial divisions explain that -- the absence of a generous welfare state, the ability of a major political party to remain so relentlessly focused on the interests of a small minority of the population. And if the flaw in Krugman's book is that he doesn't take the time to respectfully air popular alternative theses and rebut them (and he really doesn't), its virtue is precisely that the book deals with the big picture of American politics over the decades, focusing on broad macro trends in the economy and the political system rather than campaign tactics or the controversies of the day. He puts forth substantial empirical data showing a very tight link between race -- and racial attitudes -- and voting behavior, particularly the willingness of non-poor white southerners (but, crucially, not Dixie's worst-off white folks) to vote very conservatively. And of course it's easy to do a thought experiment in which blacks and latinos go from being about 10 percent of the electorate each to being about 20 percent each and ask yourself what would happen to the Republican Party. Well, it would lose all the elections. Unless, of course, it could broaden its popularity to minority voters. Such appeals would focus, naturally, on the large traditionalist segments of the black and latino populations. But right now, appeals of that sort largely fall on deaf appears. But perhaps a GOP that wasn't as relentlessly hostile to the economic interests of the non-elite would have much more success. Indeed, I'd say that's probably where we're going. George W. Bush's efforts to broaden Republican appeal to include minority voters and build an enduring Republican majority failed. He was able, however, to eke out majorities based on mobilizing white Christian identity sentiments (with national security issues playing a large role in helping him do so) combined with generous financial backing from corporate managers and so forth. But the initial analysis that this wouldn't be adequate over the long-run was, of course, correct -- the white Christian share of the electorate is shrinking -- and the post-9/11 boom in nationalist sentiment wasn't bound to last forever. And it turns out that traditionalism alone isn't good enough to make non-whites want to vote Republican. To succeed over the long run, they'll probably need to moderate their economic agenda. October 20, 2007Guest Post: Spencer AckermanMy roommate felt the following anecdote wasn't TPM-appropriate, so Josh Marshall's loss is The Atlantic's gain as I bring to you the following guest post on Kanye West's take on blogging: New milestones in internet celebrity: bloggers carry more cache with Kanye West than do label representatives or golddiggers. Proof came backstage at Power 99's marathon hip-hop showcase headlined by 'Ye (as his blogger friends can call him) at Philadelphia's Wachovia Center last night. After the show ended, a popped-collar fiftysomething herded 20 of his teenage daughter's closest friends to the artist's dressing room. But just as the girls were mid-squeal to whoever's in their Five that they're backstage RIGHT NOW, dad's juice ran dry: the tour assistant tactfully informed the unlucky fellow that Kanye was too tired to entertain visitors. But he wasn't too tired to parlay with Sommer Mathis, editrix of DCist, and myself. "I'll introduce you as two D.C. bloggers," said Toby, a friend of Sommer's who's directing the tour video. "Kanye is fascinated with the whole blogging thing." Sure enough, Toby led us into the dressing room, where Kanye, after a bravura performance, soothed his throat with a bottle of Vitamin Water. (It wasn't, for the record, Formula 50.) "'Ye," Toby said, "these are the D.C. bloggers I told you about." With admirable cheer despite palpable exhaustion, Kanye seemed taken aback. "Wow," he said. "You guys get paid to blog?" Sommer and I looked at each other: yes, our expression said, we're living the dream. "How much time a day do you spend blogging?" About twelve hours, I said, though Josh Marshall knows that's not typically true. Sommer nodded affirmatively, since that is in fact her typical workday. "That's crazy," said the man who came back from a near-fatal accident to beat-making and rapping. Outside, the would-be golddiggers slunk off in dissatisfaction, as blogging triumphed over more maculate ambitions. Postscript: In what I think was his first post-feud performance, 50 Cent showed up for a quick set, and he couldn't resist taking onstage potshots at his co-performers. 50, befitting his well-nourished sense of self, chided the audience for desiring the saccharine tones of Ne-Yo and the internet-phenomenon dance moves of Soulja Boy over his bullet-scarred ghetto authenticity, even pantomiming the first few steps of Crank Dat before demanding, "Am I still Number One?" The audience might have played along, but the fact remained that 50 was, technically, opening for Soulja Boy. What up, gangsta? The internet triumphs again. --Spencer Ackerman October 16, 2007Selling What OutI'd like to associate myself with Dana Goldstein's remarks on The Trap. What's more, I'm reminded by this debate of a column that I think I kept meaning to write for the college paper when I was in school and never got around to, namely that a lot of people heading into careers in investment banking or management consulting had a bizarre habit of appropriating the language of "selling out" even though it was far from clear that they had anything to sell. If you ruin your band's sound in an effort to write more radio-friendly songs, you're selling out. If you quit your job on the Hill to start shilling for health insurance companies, you're selling out. When you dumb Veronica Mars down after season two in a desperate bid to gain a bigger audience, you're selling out. But if you just decide at the age of 22 or 23 that there's nothing you're sufficiently passionate about to make you want to give up the stability and prosperity that comes with a corporate career, you're not selling anything out, you're just applying to law school. And there's really nothing wrong with that. But the nominal self-critique involved in dubbing such activity "selling out" is really a form of self-dramatization and self-praise, carrying with it the implication that of course you could have written the Great American Novel or turned around and inner-city school if only you hadn't been so damn selfish. Dexter
I've only seen two episodes, but I can tell you already that I'm loving Dexter and should have listened sooner to the people who were recommending it to me. I almost hesitate to describe the premise, since it's absurd, and hearing about other people describe it is what made me skeptical. But that said, what you have is a show about a sociopathic serial killer who also happens to be a forensic analyst for the Miami Police Department. But he's a sociopathic serial killer with a conscience (except not really -- he's a sociopath!) who only kills other killers. Woo! It's pretty ridiculous, but so far at least it's pulled off extremely well to generate an alternatively funny/creepy/gross story that also includes a reasonably compelling mystery (another serial killer seems to be toying with our friend Dexter) plot thread running throughout the season, and all-in-all it's pretty great -- I like it more than anything I see running currently on television. October 15, 2007The New PandemicMargaret Talbot's New Yorker article about David Simon and The Wire is must-reading for any Wire fan. The second page even lets us know what the politically relevant successor to WMD and pandemic will be. Mechanism Design Theory for DummiesIf you'd like to learn more about today's Nobel Prize winners in economics (except it's not a real Nobel Prize, right?) I'd recommend Alex Tabarrok's post here which at least gave me a taste of what "mechanism design" might be. October 14, 2007Gossip Girl and the JewsDeborah Solomon interviews Josh Schwartz and asks my question about the show: Why are the characters uniformly white, with old-money names like Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen that hark back to a time when high society was not integrated? Why are there no Jewish characters? It’s interesting, because on “The O.C.” I went out of my way to make those characters Jewish, not what you would expect to find in Orange County. But in New York, weirdly, I failed. I was working off of the source material. Fair enough, but if accurate this just seems like a serious flaw in the source material. Asking for Jewish characters in a depiction of rich people in New York City isn't a plea for diversity for diversity's sake, it's just that New York day schools are full of Jews. October 13, 2007Feist World Domination WatchIsn't it a bit ridiculous that Feist songs are being used in ads for both the iPod Nano and the LG Chocolate? Surely there's some other artist who can be used to sell gadgets. Edward HopperI went to see the National Gallery's Edward Hopper exhibit yesterday, and it turns out they have some pretty cool multimedia features available on the website. Other Hopper notes include the observation that he has a real knack for almost exclusively painting places I've been, and that despite earlier mixed feelings about the album, In Rainbows was an excellent soundtrack for walking around the gallery. Why So Few Utilitarians?Will Wilkinson, like me a fallen philosophy student, asserts inter alia: "surely Matt understands that the inability of utilitarianism to acknowledge principled constraints on the way people may use one another is the main reason why most moral philosophers believe utilitarianism to be false." Can't talk philosophy without distinguishing between reasons and causes! It's always seemed to me that part of the sociology of the philosophical profession is that a lot of the causation tends to run in the other direction. If you find yourself drawn to consequentialist views, you probably won't find yourself doing work in the field of normative ethics or political philosophy. Similarly, reductionist views about consciousness seem to imply, among other things, that one oughtn't spend a ton of time doing the philosophy of mind. The fields come to be dominated, numerically, by people who think there's interesting and important work to be done in the field. (I should say, I wouldn't really accept the utilitarian label as such and I don't think anything about a desire to curb economic inequality hinges fundamentally on whether or not one accepts utilitarianism) October 12, 2007Gossip GirlI'm glad to see a show that tries to dramatize the decadent weirdness of the Upper East Side private school world (and they even added in a doesn't-fit-in character with an aging hipster dad), but where have all the Jews gone? The New York City elite hasn't been that kind of WASP preserve for decades. . . . Cute BearsWe have a longstanding debate in my house on the subject of bears. Specifically, which bear is the cutest. I stand by the panda bear. Kriston Capps is a supporter of the koala bear, which isn't even a bear. Spackerman, however, is a polar bear loyalist and makes a strong case that this video supports his view. For some reason, he's not posting it to TPM Muckraker (surely there's an Alaska scandal here somewhere) but my voracious appetite for content will lead me to post just about anything. October 10, 2007In RainbowsSince I don't like Radiohead very much, I think we can pretty safely say that without the "name your own price" gimmick I wouldn't have bought In Rainbows. But given the gimmick I did buy it and I . . . still think they're "okay" at best. Which would be fine, except they have this legion of super-devoted fans who sometimes make me want to stake out bolder "Radiohead Sucks!" kind of claims. But that would be wrong, it's not Radiohead's fault that Radiohead's fan-base is too rabid, and we all owe them a debt for expanding the frontiers of digital music distribution. The Truth About Utility FunctionsJohn Quiggen explains. October 9, 2007FNL Season 2I'd somehow gotten it into my head that the season premiere of Friday Night Lights, the official Best Show on Network Television, was this Friday rather than last Friday. Fortunately, NBC streams the old episodes online so I was able to watch it from the comfort of my office earlier today. I'd been fully prepared to be massively disappointed by the second season, so I found the first episode to be a delightful -- and welcome -- surprise as the show seemed to hold together very nicely. Alan Sepinwall, however, notes that despite the general strength of the episode, it contained one scene that appears to lay the groundwork (spoilers!) for the series' ultimate destruction as quality television. Too bad. All in the GameWire promo: Not much there, but I'm really excited. Meanwhile, when was the last time computers actually looked like that? October 5, 2007The KingdomThis was, despite being terrible in certain predictable ways (like how all of a sudden an FBI evidence response team is able to conduct awesome commando operations in unfamiliar terrain against a numerically superior force) also definitely had its artfully-done-thriller qualities. But politically . . . wtf was happening? For the vast majority of the movie, it seemed as if at last conservatives had gotten the right-wing war on terror movie they've been craving -- the one where awesome go-getter, ass-kicking agents of American hard power need to take down some terrorists and, even worse, pansy bureaucrats and state department types. Then at the end it takes an ideological swerve so sharp only a professional driver on a closed course would dare attempt it all the way into the domain of outright moral equivalence. Baffling. October 3, 2007Top Chef ThreadEveryone watches Top Chef, right? Well, if you don't, you should. Tonight, though, is probably a bad time to start since it's the finale of the season. But let's consider this an open thread for those who do watch the show. I'm rooting for Hung who, admittedly, is kind of jerk but in an awesome way. October 2, 2007The FundamentalsEzra Klein spoke up the other day in defense of dating coaches. He notes that he pays for guitar lessons: I would like to learn to play guitar well. But it's nowhere near as central to my happiness as my lovelife. Yet I'm allowed -- even praised -- for seeking expert guidance there, but would be roundly shamed if I sought a dating coach. I think the issue here is a sense that if you're looking to expend time and money on you ought to be working on the fundamentals. Like maybe you should spend that cash on a gym membership or some better clothes or reading some interesting books or learning to cook (or play the guitar!) or whatever else it is that might make you a more appealing dating prospect. It's true, of course, that in the real world better marketing often does work even in the absence of better fundamentals, but as an announced plan of action it sounds a bit disreputable. UPDATE: I don't even need a dating coach to tell me I should link to Sara Mead's article on education in the 2008 race. October 1, 2007The Truth About DivorceJustin Wolfers sets the record straight. Basically the news is good, divorce rates are declining, and the institution of marriage is in good shape. September 30, 2007Fembots Everywhere
Via Ann Friedman, Alicia Rebensdorf considers the fembot phenomenon from a feminist perspective, with special attention to the Bionic Woman remake, the Heinecken fembot bots, and a new campaign for Svedka Vodka that I haven't actually seen. It's an interesting essay, but I think that in some ways it suffers from a failure to put fembots within the larger cultural category of representations of robots more generally. From the R.U.R., the robot has almost universally been a locus of fear and anxiety rather than fantasy . . . the male robot's strength and endurance is a threat, not wish-fulfillment. Typically, the crux of the matter is that the robots betray their masters and take over the world (The Matrix, The Terminator, etc.) and robot stories that don't follow this scheme are so intensely against the grain that you get things like the movie version of I, Robot where, unable to fit Asimov's actual stories into our archetypes, they turn it into yet another robot rebellion tale. I'm not sure if the right thing to say is that the fembot is a fantasy that serves as a counterpoint to the (presumptively male) robot, or else if consideration of the broader picture undermines the fembot-as-fantasy conceit, but I do think you need to consider the broader context. This is especially true insofar as these archetypes can coexist, as in the appearance of Priss, "a basic pleasure mode," in the midst of Blade Runner's tale of replicant rebellion. The DrossMcMegan explains that "The lone benefit of losing all my CD's in the move to Chicago, and then my MP3s in two separate hard drive crashes, is that I have no dross--no embarassing choices left over from my adolescence, no random songs downloaded while writing the annual GSB follies." That drossless collection comprises 2,406 tracks. I, having been well-backed-up for several years now, have managed to compile 8,609 songs not all of which are among my absolute favorites. It seems to me, though, that being in easy possession of a certain amount of random material is one of the great pleasures of the internet age. I wouldn't say that I ever really spend much time listening to The Advantage's rendition of the "Dr. Wiley Theme" from MegaMan 2, but it's sometimes amusing to play it for others during those moments when the conversation turns to memories of youth. And I prefer to think of Anti-Flag's "Captain Anarchy" as more a monument to a past era than an embarrassing choice left over from my adolescence. And who wouldn't want to own Avril Lavigne's live cover of Green Day's "Basket Case"? And the alphabet contains so many more letters. My only regret is that I don't have way more dross. September 29, 2007What Ails the Music Industry?Tyler Cowen recycles some insights from his highly recommended Good and Plenty: In the past most people didn't much like or listen to most of the music they bought, or in any case most of the value came from their very favorites. A relatively small percentage of our music purchases accounted for most of our listening pleasure. So if peopl |
