Ezra Klein's take on the Kindle. I'll say this. I love gadgets and I like books and I don't really like carrying books around or go in for nostalgic reveries about the scent of paper on my fingertips. So basically, I'd like a Kindle. But at $399 it seems a bit pricey. Or, rather, at $399 the books should be cheaper. After all, distributing a digital text is way, way, way cheaper than than manufacturing, storing, and shipping a hardcover book.
But Amazon's selling a physical copy of Great American Hypocrites for $16.47 so you're only saving six bucks by buying the Kindle version. But at its best, the transition to digital media is all about volume -- subscription services like emusic (and of course illegal downloads) are what makes the iPod good.
I just took my first-ever ride in a meter-equipped DC cab. It wound up costing almost precisely what it would have cost under the old zone system. But if I'd want to travel a bit further, it would have cost marginally more. Similarly, if I'd wanted to take a slightly shorter trip, it would have cost slightly less money. Crazy idea.
Well, just for the record, it turns out that last year the library was transferred into the federal system and a new director, Tim Naftali of the University of Virginia, was named director. The old private foundation still controls a couple of buildings, but basically it's now a nonpartisan institution under federal control. Naftali told me that they're busily updating the displays and that Nixon's presidential papers, kept in Washington until now, will be shipped to California as soon as a new archive building is constructed. It is, one might say, the New Nixon Library.
If you read, say, this you'll get a sense of where Tim's coming from politically.
It's the biggest hack trick in the book, but my cab driver remarked as we cruised toward LAX that there'd been less congestion in Orange County recently. He attributed this to the high price of gasoline, and said that people were car pooling more on the way to work, having one friend pick up another en route to socializing rather than everyone taking separate vehicles, and even taking the bus (though he limited this option to "poor Latinos") in order to save money.
They say you should remember that "data" is not the plural of "anecdotes" but in journalism school you learn that there's a cab driver exception to this rule. This is especially the case when cab-based anecdotes fit the writer's preconceived political views. Ergo, people actually have somewhat more flexibility in terms of how much they drive than is often realized. So let's hear it for higher gas taxes, and for Orange County to spend money building bike lanes and providing more frequent bus service.
I keep realizing I haven't mentioned the horrifying tragedy in Burma and then realizing I'm not sure what I could possibly say about the horrifying tragedy in Burma. But I suppose one thing to say is that, as is usually the case in these situation, you've got a natural disaster which is then compounded by bad, unaccountable government (sort of like Katrina amped-up by a few orders of magnitude) of the sort that really only an autocracy can bring you. It's a reminder that we should be fairly confident that, over the long haul, democratically governed nations can survive and prosper in ways that it's very difficult for dictatorships to do.
Just one more reminder about tonight's Nixon Library event for Heads in the Sand. I realize there are a lot of folks in L.A. proper for whom the time/location's no good but this is all I've got in terms of travel to the area (the terms of the trip are that I can't use the Nixon Library dime to come out west and then do events at other places) so try to come if you can.
Seriously, though, charter schools are great. Parents ought to have some diversity of options when considering where to send their kids to school, but the public money shouldn't be spent without a measure of public accountability and the charter school framework is a good way in which to accomplish that.
A reminder that tomorrow at 7:30 PM Pacific time, I'll be doing a Heads in the Sandevent at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda. Please come out if you can, since I can't coerce random friends into filling the room.
More on the District's unrelenting war on my house. Don't these guys know we were featured in the NYT Style section? We could have important taste-makers crush them like bugs.
It seems unfair for the city to refuse to pick up our garbage for several weeks and then to send an inspector around threatening to fine us for having too much garbage sitting outside the house. We live in the house and don't want the garbage to be there either.
Washington Postwrites up Color of Change and other activism-oriented African-American blogs. Much as with white activist bloggers, some of the dramatic rhetoric and transformational aspirations seems overblown, but I think the impact is very real and fundamentally positive.
David Sirota has a nice post up on book-related anxiety as a publication date becomes imminent. The good news, as I've discovered, is that either my book is universally beloved (unlikely, but if true perhaps not reassuring to other authors) or else that in general people who don't like one's book are too polite to say so (reassuring).
If you're going to use a gun in a crime, try to stay away from custom-made Belgian guns. The question becomes, how does this impact the Indiana primary? Is a custom-made Belgian gun beer-track because it's a gun, or wine-track because it's Belgian?
And, yes, I'm trying to avoid talking about the Wizards game.
One of the odder aspects of American punditry is what a bunch of shrinking violets a lot of my colleagues are -- it's an endlessly polite business and when some bloggers come on the scene with their name-calling everyone freaks out ("he said 'wanker!' I'm shocked"). Meanwhile, in the UK Martin O'Neil describes London's new Mayor:
As well as being a famous liar, Johnson has skirted the borders of criminality when it has suited his interests or those of his foul, larcenous and over-privileged friends. [...] Boris Johnson is not only shady, dishonest and incompetent. He is also a particularly offensive kind of clown, as is evidenced by his absurd litany of gaffes and insults. [...] Worst of all is Johnson’s casual racism, although it is perhaps not wholly surprising from someone of his class and background. [...] In any sane society, Boris Johnson would not be a plausible candidate for Mayor, even within the Conservative party.
I'm going to be doing a reading / talk / Q&A on Thursday, May 7 at the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California at 7:30PM. My grasp of southern California geography is a little shaky, so I'm not really sure who that's convenient for and who it doesn't work for, but I'm not doing any other events in the area at this time so if you can make it please do. I think the folks who came out to Borders last night had a good time (maybe they'll chime in in comments and tell me I'm wrong).
UPDATE: Nixon library? Yeah, it does seem a bit weird. And yet, they asked me to come and so off I go.
Less annoying book-blogging in the future, but I do think it makes sense to remind folks that I'll be at the Borders at 18th and L in DC tonight at 6PM for some reading, talking, and signing.
Ilan Goldenberg, policy director at the National Security Network, has a very kind writeup of Heads in the Sand that expresses many of the book's core ideas and helps apply them to the current moment. I thought I also might link to Spencer Ackerman's two part live-blog (one, two) of Friday's CAP event and once again to the page for the FDL book salon where I've now added some new remarks.
If you don't bike at all for years and years, and then go buy a bike and ride 10+ miles a day for two days in a row, you wind up with very sore legs. I suppose if I'd thought this through I could have switched off the arc trainer in the gym and used the stationary bike instead to get prepared, but I'm not really big on thinking things through. So for now -- ouch!
I can tell from my Google Analytics that I actually have readers in the DC area who aren't people I know. Sometimes, I even meet one or two of you out at bars. So if you really do exist out there, reading this blog, you're probably eager to come to the first Heads in the Sand book debate this Friday at noon at the Center for American Progress. Beyond yours truly, some of the key leaders of the most influential new institutions thinking about the future of progressive national security policy -- namely CAP's Brian Katulis, National Security Network's Rand Beers, and the Center for a New American Security's Kurt Campbell -- are going to be on hand to explain why I'm wrong, so it should be a great event.
It's a showdown of epic proportions as Mayor Adrian Fenty is threatening to levy $1,000 fines on any DC cabs that don't shift to charging people via a meter, but with less than two weeks to go few drivers have installed meters. One friend of mine says he's seen a meter in a cab, but I haven't and nobody else I know seems to have seen one.
Looks like someone on John McCain's staff decided to rip off some Food Network recipes and assert on the campaign website that they were Cindy McCain's family favorites. This is a bit of an odd thing to have happen. Most people, I take it, do in fact have some favorite recipes. Surely Mrs. McCain would have been willing to divulge hers. And if she doesn't have any favorite recipes, it's not as if failing to include a "Cindy's recipes" section on the website was likely to prove a devastating liability in the election.
In other news, Spike from Top Chef is opening a burger joint in DC even though his previous work has primarily been in the Vietnamese genre. That's really too bad, because you know what we could use here in DC? A Vietnamese restaurant! The city's extreme weakness in this category is made all the more galling by the presence of large numbers of Vietnamese people and delicious Vietnamese restaurants right near by in Seven Corners in Fairfax County, VA. I'm pretty sure one of the restaurants from the Eden Center could move to DC, double its prices, and do well for itself. Or Spike could open a Vietnamese restaurant. But someone's got to do something.
As talk resurfaces of a male birth control pill, Dana Goldstein asks " men out there: Would you take birth control pills if you knew they were safe and their effects were reversible? Would you trust yourself to remember to take them at the very same time every day?"
I say sure, why not, though it seems to me that most women are skeptical of the idea of offloading the responsibility to someone else, since a man can't promise to become pregnant if he screws up. But for me (and probably for most people) it would all come down to whether or not there are some terrible pill-related side effects.
I don't come into the office every day, but perhaps I should, for if I hadn't come in today I wouldn't have been turned on to the obscene URLs concept. Basically, some organizations have names that, while totally vanilla and inoffensive, don't translate well to the space-free domain of the URL. Consider, for example, Pen Island "the best pens on the internet" and available at penisland.net which if you, like me, have the emotional age of a twelve year-old will find hilarious.
Like Atrios, I recently concluded that while the professional blogger lifestyle affords many benefits, I was also driving myself crazy hunting for wifi networks I could hop on. The better alternative was to sign up for a Verizon wireless broadband account and get a nifty USB modem. The per month cost strikes me as more than would be worth paying for most people, but if Verizon wants to give me a corporate sponsorship and pick up the tab for mine I'm happy to revise my opinion on that and recommend that folks who don't blog for a living sign up as well.
It is a doomed office. No President and Vice President have trusted each other since Jackson and Van Buren. Mistrust is inherent in the relationship. The Vice President has only one serious thing to do: that is, to wait around for the President to die. This is hardly the basis for cordial and enduring friendships. Presidents see Vice Presidents as death's-heads at the feast, intolerable reminders of their own mortality. Vice Presidents, when they are men of ambition, suffer, consciously or unconsciously, the obverse emotion. Elbridge Gerry spoke with concern in the Constitutional Convention of the "close intimacy that must subsist between the President & vice-president." Gouverneur Morris commented acidly, "The vice president then will be the first heir apparent that ever loved his father."
It's interesting to me how conceptions of the Vice Presidency have changed over time. As we saw on John Adams last week, the first Vice President was not deeply involved in the counsels of George Washington's administration. He did, however, succeed Washington and become the second president. Then Jefferson and his party took power, and for a while succession ran to the Secretary of State with Madison succeeding Jefferson, Monroe succeeding Madison, and John Quincy Adams succeeding Monroe. This makes a certain kind of sense, since the SecState needed to be someone in whose abilities the president had a lot of confidence whereas the Vice President could be an expendable ticket-balancer.
But then in the second-half of the twentieth century we wound up with a lot of Vice Presidents who either became President or at least secured their party's presidential nomination -- Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Gerald Ford, Walter Mondale, George H.W. Bush, Al Gore -- which creates demand to try to pick a plausible president, and in the case of both Gore and Dick Cheney saw the Vice President emerge as an important member of the administration. But of course everyone hates Cheney now, so maybe we'll see a move back away from that. Certainly, I think most indications are that John Kerry picked John Edwards for VP despite a lack of personal rapport betweent hem.
Via Kathy G., Beverly Gage reminds us that Warren G. Harding was widely rumored to have had some black ancestry, thus -- if true -- making him the "first black president" by one drop rule standards. Of course, as Anthony Appiah has pointing out if we were to seriously try to apply this rule, we'd get some pretty odd results:
While most Americans understand this to mean that some African Americans will "look white," they mostly suppose that this phenomenon is rare in relation to the African American population as a whole. But in fact, it seems that very many -- perhaps even a majority -- of the Americans who are descended from African slaves "look white," are treated as white, and identify as such. To put the matter as paradoxically as possible: many people who are African American by the one-drop rule are, are regarded as, and regard themselves as, white.
The crux of the matter is that we have have a lot of ancestors once you start going four or five generations back. Under the circumstances, relatively small levels of interracial child-births generate a huge number of people with at least some black ancestry. And conversely, most black Americans have some white ancestors.
I have to say that I found this article about the stresses of being a full-time blogger a bit bizarre. Yes, it's true that I sometimes feel run a bit ragged by my job (and I've gone a few years without ever having a post-less day), but basically everyone feels that way about their job sometimes. And to me the most draining times are really those times when I've undertaken substantial work on top of the blog.
Most of all, to me having flexibility in my schedule is a great blessing compared to the conditions most people have to work under. In the grand scheme of things, it's a pretty good job and I consider myself pretty lucky.
Somewhat ironically, what I believe to be the first Heads in the Sand review is a James Kirchick piece in the City Journal. Not surprisingly, he's unconvinced by my arguments! I don't think it would make sense to respond in great detail, but one issue he raises does point to an issue worth elucidating:
He echoes Osama bin Laden when he argues that Islamist anger against the West is a justified response to foreign powers that “occupy Muslim land.” This is a bold assertion, and yet Yglesias doesn’t care to explore why Iran and Syria—countries where foreign soldiers haven’t set foot for decades—continue to be the two most active state sponsors of international terrorism.
I'm not quite sure why he's playing dumb here, but the crux of the disagreement is that I think the appropriate response to 9/11 is for the United States to engage the various instruments of American power against al-Qaeda. Iran and Syria have their own reasons of state for providing support to Hezbollah, thus earning the designation "the two most active state sponsors of international terrorism." But in terms of al-Qaeda this is all neither here nor there -- both Syria and Iran have, at various times, indicated an interest in collaborating with the United States against al-Qaeda.
Kirchick, following the prevailing conventional wisdom on the right, thinks we should eschew a narrow, focused, and efficacious assault on al-Qaeda in favor of a vaguely defined "war on terror" that includes sundry Muslims Behaving Badly including Saddam Hussein, the Assads, the Iranian, Hamas, Hezbollah, and whoever else you like. Which is fine if you think the past several years worth of blundering around have been a good idea and you're eager to see the United States follow John McCain's lead and start thrashing harder. But I don't think this constitutes a reasonable response to 9/11 or a sensible means of dealing with al-Qaeda. What's more, I think most of the hawks know that it doesn't make sense to most people, which is why they insist on using a lot of terminological funny business to obscure the move away from al-Qaeda and toward a wide variety of not-really-related other adversaries.
If you happen to be in Morgantown, West Virginia tonight (and why wouldn't you be?), you should come check out the star-studded panel discussion I'll be appearing on tonight -- Matt Yglesias! Ross Douthat! Terry Samuel! Abbi Taton! Ana Marie Cox! Philip de Velis! Mike Tomasky! It'll be a not-to-be-missed discussion of new media and the election.
I had written something very long and nonsensical about all this, but what I have to say boils down to this -- life is full of attachments and affections that aren't strictly rationally defensible and there's nothing wrong with that. Indeed, life would be terribly dull without such attachments. But what distinguishes the liberal's approach to his patriotism from, well, the wrong approach is that a liberal will recognize the contingency of it. Most people love the country where they were born and raised and think it's the finest in the world. Intelligent people don't lose that love, but they do recognize that, in fact, they love their country because they were born and raised there and not because it is, in fact, the finest in the world. That doesn't mean you stop loving your country, but it does mean that you open yourself up to other kinds of affections both bigger and smaller than "the nation" and also recognize that there's a circumscribed relevance to this sort of thing.
But a cosmopolitan in the real world doesn't become one by purging himself of particularist affections, rather he multiplies them and recognizes that others have affections of their own and that these sentiments are all owed a certain amount of respect and consideration.
Lurking behind really dogmatic professions of universalism, especially in the political arena, tends to be an especially rancid form of nationalistic hubris -- think of George W. Bush proclaiming that American interests and American ideals are one and the same and also completely congruent with the demands of the universal human yearning for freedom.
Via Paul Krugman, reports of a financial speculator attack on Iceland. You've got to figure that Iceland is almost uniquely vulnerable to this kind of thing. It's a rich country, but with a tiny population of only around 300,000 people that still left it with a 2006 PPP-adjusted GDP of just $12 billion. Under the circumstances, lots of individual people and institutions are rich enough to make huge waves in the Icelandic economy if they're so inclined.
Photo of Reykjavík by me, available under a Creative Commons license
I haven't really known what to say about this, but my maternal grandmother, Helen Yglesias, died early Friday morning. It's a sad thing to have happen, but she was an old woman (born in 1915), had been ailing, and went peacefully and comfortably after a full and successful life. Like my father and his father, she was a writer and published several novels after an unusually late debut in her fifties. Previously, she worked at literary editor at The Nation so you can see that the family is slowly moving right and selling out over time.
There are a couple of brief biographies available online for those who are interested here and here though of course it's always slightly bizarre to read a "professional" account of someone like your own grandmother who you came to know and love at an early age when you didn't know anything about this sort of thing. Nevertheless, she led a fairly inspiring life when you get right down to it, always committed to her passions.
From a Wikipedia article on Haiti: "Buteur took charge of the Cannibal Army and promptly renamed it the National Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Haiti." That seems like a wise branding decision as it's hard to imagine a "Cannibal Army" having much appeal beyond its base.
Check out this last of America's largest urban areas ranked by weighted density. You'll see that Los Angeles, despite its reputation, is surprisingly dense. Conversely, transit-friendly Portland isn't especially dense (less so than Houston or Dallas or Las Vegas) which goes to show how much smart policy matters -- if all 23 denser-than-Portland cities on the list were as savvy as Portland about bikes, pedestrians, and transit we'd have a much better environmental situation in the country without constructing any new, denser urban areas.
Noah Feldman says it's awesome but his article seems deeply confused to me for roughly the reasons Noah Millman points out. Feldman's running a lot of different ideas together, and getting too cute by half.
So apparently Hillary Clinton was "sleep-deprived" when she forgot that she'd never dodged sniper fire while running from a plane in Tuzla. All "misspoke" theories of the case seem to me to founder on the fact that the version of the story that got her caught was only the most extreme version of a narrative of danger she's mentioned repeatedly throughout the campaign. But maybe we have an explanation of her war vote -- maybe she was sleep-deprived when she authorized the war? Maybe she's been staying up all night studying the classified National Intelligence Estimate trying to get to the bottom of things? Well, okay, she wasn't doing that, but maybe it was something. Presumably her plan is to be well-rested during her freaky 3AM phone calls.
Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations is taking suggestions about future episodes. See Spencer Ackerman's video proposal for a trip to sample the culinary delights of Iraqi Kurdistan (video's not strictly appropriate for children). I'd watch that.
Bloggingheadsing with David Frum, Jacob Weisberg explains that there's almost no content to George W. Bush's understanding of his Christian faith:
Of course one might note that there's little real content to Bush's understanding of anything, so it's no surprise that he has a vacuous take on faith as well.
There's absolutely nothing in the world I find more baffling than the right's continuing critique of liberal bias in Google logo choices. Do I need to recommend some reading on free markets?
Elisabeth Bumiller does us all the service of focusing some attention on McCain's flirtations with becoming a Democrat, first in 2001 when considering switching parties to flip control of the Senate, and then in 2004 when considering running as VP on John Kerry's ticket. McCain naturally decided to sweep all this under the rug when he decided to hug Bush and start positioning himself to run as a Republican in 2008 but his staff was taking this stuff seriously by most accounts.
I think it's pretty clear that McCain's been less-than-totally honest about this stuff, but beyond that, what's the point? I'm not really sure what the point is, myself. On the one hand, to some extent it highlights McCain's unseriousness about the bulk of domestic policy issues that he's drifted around so much on those topics and was willing to consider basically jettisoning his entire record. But at the end of the day, he didn't do it and (especially in 2001) domestic issues were presumably at the center of that. He really does have a conservative record and a conservative self-conception, and wanted to stick with that.
Here's wishing an enjoyable holiday to the Christians in the audience! I find Peeps sort of bizarre, but I'm hoping to find myself some chocolate in a bunny shape later today.
Several good points came up in comments on the Starbucks/Dunkin' Donuts thread, including the point that Starbucks isn't really much of a pointy-headed elitist choice (try an independent shop!) and the fact that Hillary Clinton's base among old women probably doesn't drink a ton of takeout coffee of any sort,
For quite some time now a very large parcel of land between 9th street, 11th street, New York Avenue, and H Street where the city's former convention center used to stand has stood essentially vacant as an open-air parking lot in the middle of the city. Naturally, I've more than once wondered what, if anything, is supposed to go there. And now we know. The project looks pretty cool, though it does seem that skybridges are a bad ideas.
What's the deal with "basis points"? Like if the Fed lowers interest rates from 4.5% to 4.25% why is that called a cut of 25 "basis points" instead of percentage points?
I'm gonna be on Fox News at 5:20 PM Eastern tomorrow to talk about the Michigan/Florida delegations controversy and how its existence proves that Democrats are craven appeasers who want terrorists to devour your children.
Some further notes on the perennially controversial issue of pizza:
Whatever an NYC pizza lover may say in virtue of my hometown's best pies, there's also no denying that NYC has a staggering quantity of terrible by-the-slice outlets. Meanwhile, one should not overlook the fact that New York's Italian-American population has largely decamped to the suburbs at this point and brought a lot of good pizza with them (I would guess that Rhode Island, which is filled with the right kind of people, has good pizza, but I've never had the chance to test this theory out).
By the same token, while Ezra Klein is right to note that some good pizza is now available in DC, it tends to be a very different kettle of fish -- more "gourmet," less rooted kind of thing -- largely owing to the district's lack of Italian-American heritage.
Last, one shouldn't neglect the fact that the pizza in Italy seemed better to me than the pizza here; I was going to random places without any real insight or know-how and stumbling across tons of great pies. In general, there are better ingredients available in Europe, but cheaper labor available in the U.S. so we do well with really labor-intensive foods but pizza is much closer to the ingredients side of the scale.
Via Jonathan Kulick, The Mail On Sunday reports that "Finnish Minister admits sending 200 dirty texts to erotic dancer from taxpayer-funded phone". It looks, however, like the minister in question is going to be alright, since "Though some MPs have voiced their displeasure at the latest scandal, the chairman of Kanerva's National Coalition Party said merely that if the story was true, he hoped Kanerva would use more consideration in the future." Meanwhile:
Earlier this month Finland's prime minister, who accused his former lover of hurting his feelings by writing a steamy kiss-and-tell account of their relationship, lost a court case over the book but unexpectedly gained popularity. Matti Vanhanen, 52, prime minister since 2003, has been enjoying a wave of support since the disclosure that he likes to take a sauna before sex and enjoys his favourite meal of beef and baked potatoes afterward.
Do we think that's really as steamy as the book gets? Unfortunately, I assume there won't be an English translation.
That said, annual family income is a pretty crude metric of people's financial situation. The bottom end of the income distribution chart includes a lot of retired people, who aren't necessarily poor in any intuitive sense. Down there at the bottom you've also got a certain number of students and people in apprentice-like jobs (entry-level positions at political magazines) that they're expected to quickly transition out of. As a result, while $88,000 a year is good enough to put you in the top twenty percent, it's not nearly good enough to put you in the top twenty percent of real grownups (say, people over 25) who have full-time jobs. And of course wealth matters here as well. There's a difference between someone earning $88,000 a year and someone who's the beneficiary of a trust fund that pays out $88,000 a year. There's also a difference between earning $88,000 a year free and clear and earning $88,000 a year while trying to pay off college and law school debts.
The creative class strikes again on behalf of Barack Obama:
As I've said before, I think hip, with-it irony is a losing strategy and the Clinton campaign's avalanch of lameness is about where the median voter is.
Talk of bloggers who don't like to use the phone naturally brings to mind Jonathan Rauch's article on introverts, which is a perennial Atlantic web hit since there are so damn many introverts on the internet. Still, I don't really understand why being somewhat introverted would make me especially adverse to talking to people on the phone -- I think I'm really pretty outgoing face-to-face at this point.
I think it's obvious that if you look at the Clinton-Obama primary, race has been an important determinant of voting behavior. Working class blacks and working class whites have voted in such radically different ways that it's clear that both candidates are securing a substantial racial solidarity vote. Since there are more whites than blacks in most Democratic primaries, racial tensions are, on balance, an advantage for Clinton. But Orlando Patterson's suggestion that the Clinton campaign's 3 AM ad was part of a crypto-racist ploy seems beneath the dignity of an important scholar. This was run of the mill fearmongering, reflecting Clinton's ideas about the politics of foreign policy.
Frankly, I think a lot of the charges of racism against the Clinton campaign have been overstated. Where they've been guilty, I think, is that in their characterization of primary results they've tended to act as if black people just don't exist in the United States so Obama supporters are all highly-educated latte-sipping intellectuals or rich caucus-goers and states with too many black residents "don't count." Speaking merely even as a white person living in a majority black jurisdiction, this is an absurd and offensive way of looking at the world. But the ad's a pretty banal, if disreputable, attack on Obama's liberal approach to foreign policy and not really anything to do with race.
UPDATE: Anti-Clinton charges that I think are overstated, I should say, do not include charges that Geraldine Ferraro is being an ass and wrecking her reputation.
After my remarks on the evils of the telephone it started to seem that everyone who's anyone in the blogosphere hates phone calls. But now we learn the truth -- Ezra Klein loves talking on the phone. He, in short, is the person who keeps this horrible advice in business. If we could just kill him off, then we'd all live happily ever after with SMS-sending devices in our pockets. Maybe he's got Skype shares or something?
I picked up Transit Maps of the World yesterday and have been enjoying browsing through it. Basically, it's a book of transit maps from all around the world! The book goes city-by-city and covers both large and small systems and mixes maps with text which describes both the history of the system and the history of efforts to graphically depict the system.
Normally people will probably find this book extremely dull and weird, but it makes an ideal gift for the transit enthusiast in your life. Obviously, buying copies of Heads in the Sand for everyone you know should be a higher priority, but the right kind of person (i.e., me) will love Transit Maps.
Megan Hustan bemoans the decline of the phone call as a tool of business. Apparently she learned vital skills while eavesdropping and first made a mark for herself as a placer-of-phone-calls for her boss. Personally, I couldn't be more thrilled with the phone's decline. I used to be painfully shy as a person, and while I've largely gotten over that IRL I still find it incredibly stressful to talk to people on the phone.
Instead, I email. I SMS. I blog. I Twitter. I write on Facebook wall pages. I use IM and GChat constantly. Anything but the phone. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way, and in the years to come we phone-haters will inherit the earth. I call it progress.
StrangeMaps has a fantastic graphic by Stephanie Gray outlining the area codes in which Ludacris claims to have hoes in his 2001 hit "Area Codes." He's very popular in the northeast corridor and also select West Coast metropolises, plus a significant swathe of the south.
You can tell that I've officially jumped the shark, since there's an article in The New York Times Style section about how my roommates and I all have blogs and are friends with other political bloggers. The good news is that while I was afraid intrepid reporter Ashley Parker would try to compensate for the fact that we're not very interesting by being really mean, she seems to have resisted the temptation. Plus, I really like the photo Michael Temchine took that I stole above and they used with the article. Do people care about this stuff? Probably someone does, and whoever that is probably isn't you, the kind of person who's reading blogs on a Sunday. Instead, you, my readers, are going to make fun of me.
And that's fine. Mock all you like. But if you don't pre-order a copy of Heads in the Sand, I'll cry.
There are several gyms available for use by Harvard students. It seems that one of them is now a bit special:
Six times a week, Harvard kicks all the guys out of the Quadrangle Recreational Athletic Center at the request of the Harvard Islamic Society. This is to accommodate those female Muslim students whose faith won’t let them work out in front of men.
I'd need to think a bit more about it before I was sure whether or not this was a reasonable accommodation to make to the needs of Muslim students, but I'm positive I'd think a bit more about it before I went and wrote something like Andrew's post titled "Sharia at Harvard":
They would never do that kind of thing for any other religion. If a religion refuses to allow men and women to work out together in public, then its adherents need to work out at home. What's next? Removing all gay men from the locker-room? This is the West, guys. Get over yourselves.
Suppose I were to inform Andrew that Harvard, like all American institutions of higher education of which I'm aware, shuts down and creates a holiday in late December that just so happens to coincide with an important familial and religious observance for Christians whereas no such allowance is made for Passover visits. Christianism? Worse, it happens in public high schools and elementary schools all across the country, the very same country in which no mail can be delivered on Sunday! Meanwhile, when I was a student at Harvard there was a ban on having anything on fire in a dorm room and also a movement to create an exemption so that Jewish students could light Hanukkah candles. I don't recall whether or not the exemption was granted, but if it was that certainly wouldn't constitute the dawning of a new era of Jewish theocratic rule at the university. I know for a fact that they allow students to reschedule exams for religious reasons, like a Jewish or Muslim obligation to avoid taking an exam on a Saturday (no exams are scheduled on Sundays).
There's a range of things one can think about these policies. The preferential treatment granted by public institutions to Christmas rankles, but given the vast number of Christmas-celebrators in the country it's also inevitable and practical. The "no mail on Sundays" thing is poor public policy and obviously has religious origins of a sort, but it's hardly some intolerable burden on minorities, it's just bad public policy. Letting people reschedule exams for religious reasons, but not just because they happen to feel like taking them in some other order, seems like an eminently fair and practical way of dealing with the situation. New York City public schools make the Jewish High Holy Days a day off, due to the city's large Jewish population, most other jurisdictions don't do that but will look the other way if Jewish kids don't show up -- reasonable responses to the objective situation in both cases.
Finding a way to accommodate observant Muslims' concerns about co-ed workouts, in short, is hardly some per se outrageous violation of a strict U.S. tradition of secularism. Is the particular way they've done this unduly burdensome? I think to say whether or not it is you'd need to look at the situation and the available alternatives in some detail.
Overheard at a local coffee shop: "seventh street is the new eleventh street." I would have said that ninth street is the new fourteenth street, since eleventh is kind of nothing. Oh well.
I love that The Washington Post's editorial response to people being pissed that they ran an article about how women are stupid was to slightly tweak the online teaser to make it a piece about why women "act so dumb." Also, it's now a tongue in cheek piece of woman-bashing by a professional anti-feminist. "Tongue in cheek," it seems, is newspeak for "poorly reasoned."
Yesterday, Canadian television reported that Obama advisors were telling Canada's ambassador in Washington not to take the candidate's NAFTA rhetoric too seriously. Now what really seems to have happened is that Austan Goolsbee tried to get someone from the Canadian consulate in Chicago to be a bit less worried about Obama. Whatever the details, this kind of ambiguous messaging is likely to recur time and again.
I recall being at a meeting in Cambridge, MA around the time of the 2004 Democratic Convention where John Kerry's top economic and foreign policy advisors were essentially promising a group of assembled ambassadors that all of his anti-trade rhetoric was just empty rhetoric. This seemed like a typically Kerryish thing to have happen, but it would serve Obama may to try to avoid the same kind of thing repeating.
One occupational hazard of punditry and blogging is being accused of being "in the tank" for someone or other. Another, of course, is actually being in the tank in question. But where does that phrase come from? What kind of tank? Julian Sanchez explores.
It's the ultimate credit card infographic over at Foreign Policy magazine. South Korea's surge of credit card debt is intriguing, I'd like to know more about what the deal is with that.
Molly Young has a worthwhile essay on n + 1's website about her use of Adderral as a performance enhancing study drug in college. It's something I tried a few times, both as she describes and as a recreational drug, back in the day but I found its effects to be pretty mild. The big plus side is that if I tried to pull all nighters based on drinking coffee or Diet Coke, I would eventually get shaky and feel a bit ill, whereas on Adderral I could really keep plugging along. It's not, however, something I really ever had great occasion to use.
Some people, though, clearly experience great effects and it does raise some questions. Do we really want to create a situation where some students may feel that they have to abuse prescription drugs to stay competitive in school? Then again, if there's a pill out there that's safe to take and helps kids learn a bunch of stuff, doesn't it seem like we should be prescribing more of it? I'd want to know more about what the real medical affects of taking the stuff before I made any kind of judgment. I will say that I was a bit shocked to hear about some of the younger faculty using it to help get their work done, but even though at the moment Adderral seems to mainly be a vice of college students there's no particular reason it couldn't be useful (in good ways or bad) for a much wider range of people.
My old boss Mike Tomasky has an excellent review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism that does a good job of getting to the book's main salient qualities -- it's tediousness, it's habit of announcing widely-known facts as if they were shocking discoveries, and Goldberg's failure to argue from any identifiably coherent perspective ("Why isn't he an anarchist? And when you get to this point, what isn't fascist?"), etc.
