Though I'm late to the conversation, I've been meaning to weigh in on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, the controversy surrounding her nomination, and especially her remark, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her
experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a
white male who hasn't lived that life." I should make clear that I don't find her comment disqualifying given its context, and that I hardly care whether she is confirmed or not. My ideal judge is a federalism loving, commerce clause limiting civil libertarian who safeguards the rights of criminal defendants and limits executive overreach when the president oversteps his constitutional boundaries. In other words, no matter the president, I'm not going to get a Supreme Court justice I like.
But I think "the context" of Judge Sotomayor's "wise Latina" remark has yet to be sufficiently explored, and that the controversy speaks volumes about the different ways Americans are socialized on matters of race.
The first full day of the Aspen Ideas Festival kicked off with a
session on the criminal justice system. The panelists: retired
associate justice of the Supreme Court Sandra Day O'Connor, Harvard Law
Professor Charles Ogletree (an expert on race and law), and Bishop TD
Jakes, who runs a 30,000-member church in Texas. I had to leave before
the Q-and-As, but there were some highlights from the panel portion,
which was moderated by NPR's Linda Wertheimer. Some quick bullets:
On mandatory minimum sentences: O'Connor suggested it was time
for Congress to revisit mandatory minimums, which stipulate certain
minimum sentences for certain crimes, often drug offenses. The result
of mandatory minimums has been to limit judicial discretion in
sentencing and to overcrowd the prisons with criminals who may have
gotten 20 years for a first-time drug offense. "I don't advocate making
drug use legal, but I do advocate examining the mandatory minimum"
regime, she said. She also said that recidivism is so high because
there's "a shocking lack of rehab efforts within prisons."
On the jury system: Some talk about how jury service is changing
due to technology. The problem with juries, said Ogletree, "is not race
or gender or class. It's the tweeting, blogging, texting jurors who
want to find out more about the case [so they go online after hours] to
see what this guy is really about." Judges already tell jurors they
can't read newspapers or talk about the case with their neighbors.
They need to extend those remarks, said Ogletree. "There's a flaw in
the system that has to be addressed, and I think it's in the jury
instructions: You can't tweet, you can't blog." O'Connor, who was a
local trial judge at one point in her career, implied that good judges
should be able to control their juries, regardless of the technology at
issue.
On more women in prisons: "We think women can do all kinds of things," O'Connor said. "And I guess they can commit crimes, too."
David Frum visits a nuclear reprocessing facility in France:
Nuclear waste conjures up images of ultra-toxic green sludge, one
spill away from poisoning the planet. In fact, all energy production
generates waste, including some very dangerous wastes: not only carbon
dioxide, but sulphur dioxide and coal slag. The waste from fossil fuels
typically evanesces invisibly into the atmosphere, but that
disappearance from view does not render it harmless. If anything, the
very invisibility of fossil waste enhances its harm, by deluding us
into imagining that what has vanished from sight has vanished from
existence.
The Atlantic has published various stories on the harms of nuclear energy -- and why it is essential to humankind's progress.
Democrats learned never to go to war against the combined forces of
corporate America. Today, whether it is on the stimulus, on health care
or any other issue, the Obama administration and the Congressional
leadership go out of their way to court corporate interests, to win
corporate support and to at least divide corporate opposition.
...what if the GOP fumbles around for a
while, fails to develop a coherent message, continues to shout
"Reagan!" in place of proposing policy, fails to find fresh political
talent, and loses a series of elections, to the point where many begin
to predict permanent minority status?
Meanwhile, the Democrats spend
the next decade or so getting used to power in Washington. A lot of
their agenda involves finding new ways to regulate various industries.
As this happens, industry, looking for influence, naturally begins to
fund Democrats and Democratic lobbyists more heavily (corporate
donations are already shifting away from the GOP),
and rent-seeking becomes even more prevalent on the Hill. It won't be
long before Democrats, regulators, and the lobbying world have a very
cozy relationship.
This opens up the opportunity for the
right to exploit the anti-corporate outrage in middle America -- outrage
we can already see boiling up in the crusades against earmarks
(handouts to donors and corporate interests), against CEO
pay, against hedge fund tax rates and oil company profits. But instead
of running the traditional anti-corporate campaigns, which mainly focus
on taxing and regulating big-business, the right runs against the way
liberal politicians have gotten into bed with corporations. It's
against the Washington favor-racket, against back-room politics,
against collusion between business and government. This pleases
libertarians somewhat and, if done properly, keeps low-taxers in the
fold.
The Los Angeles Times now counts 565 editorial staffers, less
than half its peak newsroom workforce. Cue the usual laments about all
the news that won't be gathered, the beats that won't be covered --
journalists frequently air these concerns, only to be ignored by most
everyone else.
Can you blame the average citizen for her skepticism? The Los Angeles Times
did a poor job covering local news even at the high water mark of
newsroom staffing. Its employees, like all professionals, sometimes
overestimate the relative importance of their work. But the
death of the California section, and the erosion of the editorial
staff, poses daunting problems for local governance in Southern
California, or so I hope to convince you by offering a very specific
example of what happens when their isn't any beat reporter around. Read More
In The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Lowe cheats on her husband and ends her marriage (it is interesting to read that essay alongside this one). Ross Douthat opines on reckless romance in The New York Times -- America's meritocratic elite needs more of it, he asserts. Dana Goldstein isn't buying his argument.
(Parts one, two,three, and four of my interview with James Poulos.)
Q. You've written for a long time at a blog called Postmodern
Conservative, a project that I've always thought of as part politics,
part philosophy. Recently, however, the blog got picked up by First
Things, the "journal of religion, culture and public life." What is a
Postmodern conservative, anyway? And what do they -- or at least, what
do you -- have to say about religion in America?
People have asked "what's a pomocon" almost as long as I've been blogging at Postmodern Conservative.
And the truth is, my wife bought me the URL for my birthday when we
first moved to DC. In seriousness, all the intuitions that led me to
blog as a self-styled pomocon also led me firmly away from the kind of Ideas For Dummies
approach that seems to me one of the lamer things we mean to criticize
when we criticize 'modernity'. We want to know how to be or do anything
in only ten easy steps; my whole approach to philosophical reflection
and political engagement resists this. But I was the kid who thought
that instruction manuals were for those too mentally flat-footed or
underinspired to figure out how to do it themselves as they went. Dive
in first, impose order later. Chances are there's already a latent
order present which reveals itself only upon unrehearsed and
unquantifiable reflection. So at Postmodern Conservative I've
appreciated the varying interpretations of pomocon brought to the table
by our various bloggers.
That said, I think there are some noteworthy overlaps. Read More
"The intellectual power, honesty,
lucidity, courage, and disinterested love of the truth of the most gifted
thinkers of the eighteenth century remain to this day without parallel. Their
age is one of the best and most hopeful episodes in the life of mankind." -- Isaiah Berlin
A study by Diana Mutz
of the University of Pennsylvania found that when people saw tight
television shots of blowhards with whom they disagreed, they felt that
the other side was even less legitimate than before.
Okay, here's a puzzle for you: I'm going to put some television shows into Group A and others into Group B. See if you can figure out what metric I used to split them into their respective groups.
GROUP A: Friends, Gossip Girl, The OC, House, Desperate Housewives, 30 Rock, Grey's Anatomy, Entourage, The Gilmore Girls, CSI: Miami.
GROUP B: All in the Family, Good Times, Sanford and Son, Three's Company, Family Ties, I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show, The Flintstones, Roseanne. Read More
Writing
in Foreign Policy, Reihan Salam joins those anointing this downturn a
great "he-cession" (more links below) -- in which "the great shift of
power from males to females is likely to be dramatically accelerated"
across Europe and the United States.
Citing heavily disproportionate job losses among men, Salam notes
that, by inflating a housing bubble and attendant blue-collar
industries like construction, Wall Street's macho risk-taking may
simply have masked longer-term declines in male economic power brought
on by globalization.
Now, he writes, the world must figure how to handle a different
macho problem: masses of "surly, lonely and hard-drinking men" without
jobs, wives or much education, and more prone to mental illness.
If the premise is that women who wear the burqa are being robbed of
their agency and dignity--and that even those who protest that they wish
to wear it are victims false consciousness--how is the ban supposed to
be enforced? By fining or detaining or otherwise harassing the very
women who, on this theory, are the most oppressed? By barring them
access to public places, government buildings, maybe even courts and
police stations? I suppose you could direct the penalties toward their
male relations, but that hardly seems like a good way to reinforce the
concept of the equal agency of women. The only way this seems to
actually work--and by "work" I mean "severely hamper religious freedom
without still further harmful consequences"--is if it's like smoking
bans, where you see rapid norm changes and widespread compliance with
very limited need for actual sanctions. Except there's very little
historical reason to expect it to go that way.
Malcolm Gladwell doesn't buy the argument asserted in the new book by Chris Anderson, Free:
There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim
(digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim
(consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to
make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the
technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of
money). The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he
sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to
admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, "has so far failed to
make any money for Google."
Why is that? Because of the very
principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you
let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of
them will take you up on the offer. That's the magic of Free
psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up
by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that
the cost of serving up each video is "close enough to free to round
down," "close enough to free" multiplied by seventy-five billion is
still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates
that YouTube's bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty
million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological
Free and psychological Free work against each other.
So how does
YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements
alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by
psychological Free--pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of
user-generated content--are not the sort of thing that advertisers want
to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to
buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television
shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009
at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube
illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic
judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that "crap is in the eye of
the beholder.") But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged
to pay for programs that aren't crap. To recap: YouTube is a
great example of Free, except that Free technology ends up not being
Free because of the way consumers respond to Free, fatally compromising
YouTube's ability to make money around Free, and forcing it to retreat
from the "abundance thinking" that lies at the heart of Free. Credit
Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars
this year. If it were a bank, it would be eligible for TARP funds.
Today, the Google-Facebook rivalry isn't just going strong, it has
evolved into a full-blown battle over the future of the Internet--its
structure, design, and utility. For the last decade or so, the Web has
been defined by Google's algorithms--rigorous and efficient equations
that parse practically every byte of online activity to build a
dispassionate atlas of the online world. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg
envisions a more personalized, humanized Web, where our network of
friends, colleagues, peers, and family is our primary source of
information, just as it is offline. In Zuckerberg's vision, users will
query this "social graph" to find a doctor, the best camera, or someone
to hire--rather than tapping the cold mathematics of a Google search. It
is a complete rethinking of how we navigate the online world, one that
places Facebook right at the center. In other words, right where Google
is now.
I've addressed political discourse before here, here and here. Each time I directed my comments at media figures whose rhetoric I find flawed. Talk radio host Mark Levin stood in as my most frequent example.
Here I want to take a look at the effect talk radio has on some of its listeners. It's useful to begin by referencing a May 28, 2009 segment on Mr. Levin's show:
MR. LEVIN: Mary, Westport, Connecticut, WABC, you're an independent. You don't like when I yell, do you Mary?
MARY:
No, no I don't. The point is this. I truly appreciate what you're
doing. You have a clear mind, you present your arguments very clearly,
you have background. But I want you every so often to step back.
Because we need new people to listen to you. And if new people tune you
in screaming, they're going to turn you off.
MR. LEVIN: Let me
tell you something, Mary. Let me tell you, you're a very sweet Lady.
But it takes all kinds. And the fact of the matter is, there are hosts
out there that are NPR types. And they're out there. If you want to
listen to them, listen to them. I'm very passionate about my views, and
so I express them in a passionate way. I'm a regular guy. I'm a regular
guy. (lowers voice) Regular guys don't always talk like this.(raises
voice) Regular guys aren't cerebral 100 percent of the time. Regular
guys are human beings. Get what I'm saying?
MARY: Yes, I do.
MR. LEVIN: All right, Mary, God bless you, my friend.
Of course, on matters related to political discourse, Mr. Levin is anything but a regular guy. The average American male doesn't reach a nationwide radio audience, nor does he lose his temper and begin to yell angrily when confronted with people whose politics differ from his own.
Unfortunately, some Mark Levin listeners imagine that his behavior is a model, and take it upon themselves to mimic the rhetorical style and attitude of the talk radio host in real life. One hardly needs to read between the lines to see that they aren't well served by doing so. Take the caller who conversed with Mr. Levin on his June 1, 2009 program. A fan of Los Angeles area talk radio host Larry Elder, he began the call by describing Mr. Levin as "Larry Elder with a bite, with a hard bite, and that's what I like about you."
The caller continued (emphasis added):
I'd just like to ask one more question. I'm not invited to a lot of
parties anymore, because I hammer people and I try to get my point
across, and I read your book, and I try to make people understand
what's going on. But like you said they're drones, or they just don't
care, they could care less where we're going. But my question is what
the hell sacrifice has Obama made-- when the media is swooning over a
$24,000 date he went on the other night with his wife, are we kidding?
This guy is eating caviar on the back of the American worker, and he
talks about sacrifice? It's sickening, we've got to figure out how to
stop this guy, and I'd like to know from you, how do we stop him, or
why do these people who've lost so much money already, why can't we
stop him, and how do we do it?
A responsible host might have said something like, "Look, if your attitude when you attend parties is to 'hammer people' with your politics -- and assume they're drones if they're unreceptive -- you're taking the wrong approach. Don't compromise your views, but try to communicate them respectfully, and do your best to understand where they're coming from so you can better convince them." But Mr. Levin can hardly preach the opposite of what he practices.
Or consider a Mark Levin listener named Cindi who I encountered in the comments section of a post on the blog Riehl World View. I'd criticized Mr. Levin for indulging a mean spirited sense of humor. In a followup comment, she began by saying that she too is a mean spirited person, and went on to say, "My humor, sarcasm is beyond the grasp of the
liberal majority. This has cost me, have a few family members as well
as friends who choose to cut me off. So be it."
I am hardly alone in observing that some people are entirely unpleasant if you get into a political conversation with them. Perhaps you knew someone in college like that? Or you have an uncle who ends up shouting about politics every Thanksgiving? These folks aren't all talk radio listeners, of course, but I do think that the rhetorical style employed by Mr. Levin and others with similar styles encourages listeners to imagine that political discourse is inherently adversarial, that politeness is a mark of insufficient conviction, and that bombast persuades better that pleasantly articulated arguments.
Common sense, electoral politics and personal experience lead me to the contrary conclusion that a conciliatory approach is more persuasive when addressing anyone who isn't already predisposed to accepting your conclusions.
To put it bluntly, the fiscal policy of the United States is
unsustainable. Debt is growing faster than gross domestic product.
Under the CBO's most realistic scenario, the publicly held debt of the
U.S. government will reach 82 percent of GDP by 2019 -- roughly double
what it was in 2008. By 2026, spiraling interest payments would push
the debt above its all-time peak (set just after World War II) of 113
percent of GDP. It would reach 200 percent of GDP in 2038.
This huge mass of debt, which would stifle economic growth and
reduce the American standard of living, can be avoided only through
spending cuts, tax increases or some combination of the two. And the
longer government waits to get its financial house in order, the more
it will cost to do so, the CBO says
(Parts one, two and three of my interview with James Poulos.)
Q. In your writing on foreign policy, you've been quite convicted about
two things -- that the United States cannot afford to have Russia as an
enemy, and that a better world depends in part on a more muscular
France. Neither nation is likely to top a list of countries that
concern the average American. What is it that makes them so crucially
important?
There's a real elephant in the room when it comes to our awkward and crucial relationship with Russia. Freddie DeBoer of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen,
turning a nice phrase, once suggested we call the acknowledgment of
problems like these 'giving the elephant a peanut'. So here's my
peanut: bad relations with Russia make us feel so uncomfortable because
they challenge and undermine our most cherished narratives about the
moral and social progress of the global white community. I know even
suggesting that we think analytically in terms of an 'international
white race' sets off alarms, but it's obvious that Russian disinterest
in, or outright hostility to, liberal political norms is noteworthy
primarily because virtually every other majority-white country in the
world has embraced and institutionalized them. We (small-l) liberals
recoil at the very idea that any white person could seriously
appreciate or even live under a regime like Russia's, because this is a
reminder that white people are not the charmed winners of Earth's
civilizational marathon -- contestants who can rest easy now that
they've completed the course and won the race Read More
The New York Timesinvestigates flaws in the process for doling out cancer research money:
...it has become lore among cancer researchers that some game-changing
discoveries involved projects deemed too unlikely to succeed and were
therefore denied federal grants, forcing researchers to struggle
mightily to continue.
Take one transformative drug, for breast cancer. It was based on a discovery by Dr. Dennis Slamon of the University of California,
Los Angeles, that very aggressive breast cancers often have multiple
copies of a particular protein, HER-2. That led to the development of
herceptin, which blocks HER-2.
Now women with excess HER-2
proteins, who once had the worst breast cancer prognoses, have
prognoses that are among the best. But when Dr. Slamon wanted to start
this research, his grant was turned down. He succeeded only after the
grateful wife of a patient helped him get money from Revlon, the
cosmetics company.
"I
said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone
has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way
of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I
decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught." -- Georgia O'Keefe
The estimable John Schwenkler offers a useful coinage: prefab
conservatives. In construction, a prefabricated house is produced in a
factory, shipped out to building sites, and assembled by folks
unequipped to design anything better.
The prefab conservative, or prefab-con, brings the same attitude to
political discourse: rather than using reason and critical thinking to
craft arguments that fit the real world, he trots out prefabricated
memes, arguments and conclusions that are passably functional at best.
All too often, they are even worse: the typical prefabcon lives in an
intellectual house of ugly, wobbly walls that collapse on themselves in
slight gusts. Undaunted, he throws up another structure on the same
spot, though that wolf named reality is standing right there, ready to
huff and puff again.
The best example of prefab conservatism occurred during the 2008 presidential race, when prefabcon Kevin James went on Hardball with Chris Matthews to discuss whether Barack Obama's campaign pledge to engage hostile countries in diplomacy amounted to appeasement.
Why are there 60 minutes in an hour? In a roundabout way, it's because some people discovered that they could easily count to twelve... on their fingers. Here's how.
We have an opening for a part-time personal introduction assistant, aka a "wingwoman."
You must be classy and dress well.
Beyond that you must be able to do 4 things: 1) start conversations
with beautiful women; 2) after that, remain totally silent, unless
spoken directly to, but smile and look friendly while the man you are
"winging" orchestrates the social situation; 3) socialize and block any
man or woman attempting to interfere with the man you are winging and
any woman he is chatting with; and 4) end any conversation you are
having instantly at the direction of the man you are winging. These
requirements are essential, not for everyone, and difficult to do well.
Now, this is a job (that's why you get paid), but it's very fun,
and you may even make new friends, or even meet someone special, if it
doesn't interfere with your primary employment purpose.
This job is not for you if you are uptight, frumpy, grumpy, shy, a
man-hater, a debbie downer, a critic, a control freak, a pouter, a
therapist, researching, writing an article, with the press, a
prostitute, an escort, a relationship counselor, or a feminist with a
bone to pick. Gack.
You must be 18, usually 21 for the events we attend. All work is in
public at cocktail parties, charity benefits, museum openings, and the
like. You will be added to any list in advance, and any fees for the
event will be paid. You are responsible for transportion. Subways are
$2. Although many events have free food and drink, this isn't dating,
so don't ask to be bought anything. If you do ask, by mistake, don't be
grumpy and bring the mood down when the answer is a polite no, or you
will be paid for the time you have spent and politely sent packing.
This job is definitely for you if you are easygoing, classy, dress
extremely well, and enjoy many, varied, and sometimes challenging
social situations.
Our roster of full-time wingwomen is full, but we do have a
part-time opening. Yes we are serious. Yes we are real. You might even
have the time of your life.
This seems like a better idea for a screenplay than for meeting a woman. It almost writes itself. The opening scene where the guy utterly strikes out while pathetically trying to pick up on women at a bar. A Chandler Bing like friend who jokingly suggests that he needs a wing woman. The employment ad. The interview process. The terrible candidates. The woman who gets the job. Their quarrels. His crush. Her disinterest. The beautiful girl she successfully wings him into dating. Their seemingly sweet romance and engagement. The wing woman's implausible second thoughts. And the inevitable coming together of man and wing woman in the end.
Man that would be a terrible movie. You could totally sell the screen play and sucker me into watching it on a flight where I'd planned to get work done. Casting suggestions, anyone?
Noah Kazis at The City Fix responds to my idea for ending traffic in Los Angeles:
I don't think it would be successful at all. There are a few
logistical issues--like that the cost of installing the GPS and payment
devices amounts to a fairly significant fee to join the program and
that as currently imagined it could only be used by a very tech-savvy
demographic--that would need to be, but could be, overcome. No, the
problem is that Conor completely misunderstands what people want out of
transportation.
More than anything else, a traveler, especially the commuters Conor
begins his post by describing, wants reliability. Almost anyone would
prefer to spend an hour getting to work than have a high chance of not
punching in before his shift starts or missing an important meeting.
This service doesn't provide reliability, or rather won't until it has
already become a mass phenomenon. No commuter would want to rely on a
service that might not pan out on any given morning or that might not
get her home in the evening. So that narrows the customer base down to
the second kind of driver that Conor mentions, the person wanting to
casually go down to the beach for the afternoon. In other words, it
doesn't eliminate traffic at the periods when there is traffic: the
weekday rush hours. In fact, that's even how they measure that L.A. is the most congested city - they compare the time distances take at peak hours vs. off-peak hours.
So by all means, Conor should set up his system. It could take on
Zipcar and in particular I think would very much outcompete with taxis.
I'd definitely consider using it for a trip to the beach. But I don't
think that you'd see enough of a critical mass for this proposal fast
enough that I'd ever take it to work. And if no one takes it to work,
you don't hit traffic where it hurts.
This may be exactly right! On the other hand, I remain convinced that were the system set up it would generate some pretty rich information about where and when people needed to get places. The question is whether private shuttle services would be able to capitalize on that information to provide useful, scheduled rush hour transportation to far more areas than are now served.
The short answer: their idea people were French. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Here's the buildup, ably written by Mike Steinberger in Slate:
In the battle for France, Jose Bové, the protester who vandalized a
McDonald's in 1999 and was then running for president, proved to be no
match for Le Big Mac. The first round of the presidential election was
held on April 22, and Bové finished an embarrassing tenth, garnering
barely 1 percent of the total vote. By then, McDonald's had eleven
hundred restaurants in France, three hundred more than it had had when
Bové gave new meaning to the term "drive-through." The company was
pulling in over a million people per day in France, and annual turnover
was growing at twice the rate it was in the United States. Arresting as
those numbers were, there was an even more astonishing data point: By
2007, France had become the second-most profitable market in the world
for McDonald's, surpassed only by the land that gave the world fast
food. Against McDonald's, Bové had lost in a landslide.
As reprehensible as Bové's tactics were, it was difficult for a food-loving Francophile not to feel a little
solidarity with him. If you believed that McDonald's was a blight on
the American landscape, seeing it on French soil was like finding a
peep show at the Vatican, and in a contest between Roquefort and
Chicken McNuggets, I knew which side I was on. But implicit in this
attitude was a belief that McDonald's had somehow been foisted on the
French; that slick American marketing had lured them away from the
bistro and into the arms of Ronald McDonald. However, that just wasn't
true. The French came to McDonald's and la malbouffe (or
fast-food) willingly, and in vast and steadily rising numbers. Indeed,
the quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some
fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside
job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin' it--the architects of McDonald's strategy in France were French.
As many readers know, The Atlantic's ideas issue is now online and on newsstands. Here's Jamais Cascio on how humans attained the capacity for complex thinking.
Seventy-four thousand years ago,
humanity nearly went extinct. A super-volcano at what's now Lake Toba,
in Sumatra, erupted with a strength more than a thousand times that of
Mount St. Helens in 1980. Some 800 cubic kilometers of ash filled the
skies of the Northern Hemisphere, lowering global temperatures and
pushing a climate already on the verge of an ice age over the edge.
Some scientists speculate that as the Earth went into a deep freeze,
the population of Homo sapiens may have dropped to as low as a few thousand families.
The Mount Toba incident, although unprecedented in magnitude, was
part of a broad pattern. For a period of 2 million years, ending with
the last ice age around 10,000 B.C.,
the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This
rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent
patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even
which predators might be waiting around the corner.
How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neurophysiologist
William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human
cognition--including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan
ahead--evolved in response to the demands of this long age of
turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our
brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to
target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for
foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed
syntax and formal structure from our simple language
It's interesting to think of how we so often benefit from the utter catastrophes suffered by our distant ancestors.
IDEA: Every time a news event turns into a 24/7 media circus, certain outlets should declare that they'll not cover the story. I would have sought refuge in such places during the OJ Simpson trial. If your moment of need is now, you can count on this ideas blog to ignore every angle of today's biggest story.
(Parts one and two of my interview with James Poulos.)
Q. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask about my favorite phrase you've coined --
"The Pink Police State." To what are you referring? And why should it
worry us?
The Pink Police State is a more extreme version of a regime I use to
taunt my libertarian friends in my essay on 'The Sex Vote' that's just been published in Doublethink. I worry, and I think we should all
worry, about the way cultural libertarianism is snowballing while the
snowball of political libertarianism rolls deeper into hell. I'm aghast
at the shrug with which many self-styled libertarians greet massive
government, so long as it's run by people with 'enlightened' attitudes
about pleasure-seeking. It's not death to the state these libertarians
want, it's the state as cool parent, with a stripper pole in every pot.
I've actually had one good libertarian friend argue straight-faced that
the solution to the drug problem is a monopoly partnership between
Washington and Walmart. Well, with solutions like that, who needs
problems? And of course you get that kind of institutionalized approach
from fans of legal prostitution. It's almost as if libertarians are
willing to let the state regulate everything so long as everything's
decriminalized. Read More
"The books which help you most are those which make you think the most.
The hardest way of learning is by easy reading: but a great book that
comes from a great thinker -- it is a ship of thought, deep freighted
with truth and with beauty." -- Theodore Parker
From a review of Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford:
In his book Crawford argues for a fresh view of skilled labor,
especially that of the traditional trades. Go ahead, he's saying: Get
your hands dirty. Own your work.
His book mixes descriptions of the pleasures and challenges of
diagnosing faulty oil seals and rebuilding engines with philosophical
views of work -- he draws upon Aristotle, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah
Arendt, among others -- and economic analyses for the decline of skilled
labor. He laments in particular the recent demise of high-school shop
classes, which gave many young men their first manual skills. (Crawford
points out that his arguments apply equally to women and says he hopes
one day to work on a 1960 Volkswagen bug with his two young daughters.)
Skilled manual labor is far more cognitive than people realize,
Crawford argues, and deserves more respect. That is especially true
during tough economic times, when an independent tradesperson can make
a decent and dignified living, and -- this is important -- can't be
outsourced. (You can't get your car fixed in China.) "The question of
what a good job looks like -- of what sort of work is both secure and
worthy of being honored -- is more open now than it has been for a long
time," he writes.
Crawford believes that Americans, in their frenzy to send every kid
to college in pursuit of information-age job skills, have lost
something valuable. "My sense is that some kids are getting hustled off
to college when they'd rather be learning to build things or fix
things, and that includes kids who are very smart," he says in an
interview.
Via Chris Orr, I see that Rush Limbaugh is implying that part of the blame for Mark Sanford's affair -- oh, why even bother saying it, you know who he's going to blame.
[Obama's] trying to kill spirit. All this 'hope' and
'change'--he's trying to kill it. You know how many frustrated
Americans there are out there at what's happening?
This Sanford
business: I've got to tell you, one of the first thoughts that crossed
my mind.... What he did defies logic.... He up and leaves for five
days, doesn't leave anyone in charge of the state in case there's an
emergency. This is almost like, 'I don't give a damn, the country's
going to hell
in a handbasket. I just want out of here.' He had just
tried to fight the stimulus money coming to South Carolina. He didn't
want any part of it. He lost the battle. He said, 'What the hell. I
mean, I'm -- the federal government's taking over -- what the hell, I
want to enjoy life.'...
I'm not [kidding]. My first thought was
he said, 'To hell with this. The Democrats are destroying the country.
We can't do anything to stop it. I gave everything I had to stop it
here in South Carolina.' ... Folks, there are a lot of people looking
at life and saying, 'screw it.' They're saying, 'screw it.' Before
Obama takes away their money, before Obama takes away their house, or
the economy takes away their house, there are people who are saying,
"To hell with all this.... I'm just going to try to enjoy it as much as
I can.'
Looking at your life and saying screw it = bad idea! Telling millions of people that attitude kinda makes sense? Even worse.
Q. Another aspect of your work I've noticed is a
fondness for Tocqueville, who I think you cite to good effect. This
despite a conviction -- I almost said sense -- among some magazine editors that he is overused. Most famously, Michael Kinsley is said to have prohibited any mention of America's favorite Frenchman in Slate. Do we lean too heavily on his work? Can you give a specific account of why he is relevant today?
You're right that the animus or weariness associated with yet another invocation of the brilliant sociologist of democracy is more the result of a 'senseof
diminishing returns' than a conviction about what's the matter with
Tocqueville. This is because Tocqueville really is an undiminished
resource -- an almost unparalleled resource -- for understanding the
present and future of America, and even the
world; but Tocqueville suffers from a malady related in a superficial
way to what we might call 'the Reagan problem'. Just as it's easy for
Republicans to invoke Ronald Reagan as a substitute for thinking, never mind 'fresh thinking', Tocqueville's analysis is oftentimes too penetrating and too lyrical for our own good. The timeless or enduring character of Tocqueville's insight lends itself to 'trendification': we wind up with a Tocqueville for every occasion, and feel sort of like the niece or nephew who gets a Chia Pet on birthdays and on Christmas. Read More
I'm serious. Can I patent this just by saying so? If so, I say so!
The inspiration for this idea came as I talked to a friend of mine about Casual Carpool, a phenomenon in the San Francisco Bay Area. These are basically "informal car pools
that form when drivers and passengers meet - without
specific prior arrangement - at designated locations." White collar workers line up in their shirtsleeves each morning, and get picked up by motorists headed across the Bay Bridge into the city. Both parties benefit from avoiding the tolls and using the car pool lane.
Several factors allow this arrangement to work. There's a financial incentive to pick up strangers, a time incentive to pick up strangers, the relative security of dealing with professionals during daylight hours, and concentrated population centers such that meeting spots are well-trafficked enough to function.
The same thing could hardly work in Los Angeles.
But I think that technology suggests and enables an alternative system that is built in the same spirit -- something along the lines of Casual Carpool meets Couch Surfing.
HOW IT WORKS
You're sitting in your apartment near Sunset Boulevard and Fairfax. It's a Saturday afternoon. You want to go to the beach in Santa Monica, but you haven't got a car. No worries! You go online, or on your iPhone, open up a software program, enter the address where you're located and the address you'd like to go. You click enter.
Elsewhere, 15 motorists are notified about a potential match. At the beginning of their trip, they entered their start address and their destination address. Their cars are also equipped with a GPS device. What being notified means is that there is a person without a vehicle who 1) wants a ride; 2) is easily picked up; 3) is headed to basically the same destination. Among the 15 motorists who are pinged, 3 are interested. One of them confirms fastest. The match is locked into the system.
Soon after the motorist arrives to pick up the passenger. Read More
We have Faster News and Faster Politics
and Faster Scandal. It seems likely that in the course of about
48 intriguing hours those who follow the news have basically learned
everything important they need to know about the Sanford mess. He was
in Buenos Aires. He cheated on his wife. He really seems to have been
in love with this Argentinian. He's out of the 2012 presidential race.
Things that ten years ago would have dribbled and drabbed out over the
course of days or weeks now hit the Web within minutes. What's left?
There are some obvious implications to Faster Scandals. For one
thing, they lead to Faster Comebacks. (Though that won't happen if,
like John Edwards, you successfully prolong the suspense, leaving key
details--like paternity--hanging for months and even years.) But there
are also unanswered questions! Most importantly, what does Faster Scandal mean to Jerry Skurnik's "second electorate"--the one that doesn't follow the news and won't find out about the Sanford scandal until either a) they see it briefly on the nightly news or the front page of their MSM paper tomorrow, or b)
Sanford runs for national office years from now, if he runs, in which
case a significant segment of voters may suddenly discover that he's an
adulterer (the way they discovered that Giuliani was an adulterer at an
absurdly late date, namely the GOP primaries of 2008).
A Manhattan Project to develop the sexual disinterest pill for men
(call it the anti-Viagra) should have bipartisan support, because it's
not obvious in advance who would benefit most from the end of these
implosions. For every John Edwards or Eliot Spitzer, there's a John
Ensign or Mark Sanford.
I know the drugmakers feel like they've already done their civic
duty this week, what with coughing up $80 billion over 10 years to help
pay for health reform. But health costs will only kill us in the long
run. Rush research on a pill that zaps the male sex drive while leaving
the other seemingly testosterone-related aspects of a man's charms
intact is now an urgent national priority. Since it's obviously too
late to revive any sense of discretion, the only hope for American
public life not becoming an endlessly embarrassing comic opera now lies
with Big Pharma.
Travis Kavulla offers an intriguing long form piece on AIDS in Africa that focuses on the cultural reasons the disease persists:
HIV is a mysterious virus, and even Western scientists consider
there to be a fair degree of randomness in its behavior. A person may
be infected with HIV, but never become ill with AIDS, while still
infecting others along the way. People's chances in contracting HIV
during intercourse depend on whether they are men or women, circumcised
or not, and other factors. Even condoms have a failure rate, so that
over time even a "cautious" sexually active African's exposure to
infection is almost inevitable, just as a gambler shooting craps will
eventually roll snake eyes. This is all to say that it appears to many
Africans that who is stricken and who is spared is not simply governed
by obvious physiological factors: always present is the matter we might
call "chance."
It is natural for anyone facing a terminal disease to ask, Why me? This is an exasperated, unanswerable cri de coeur
in the rational West--one of the steps of the grieving process, we are
told, that we all just need to get through. But many Africans have
their own kind of answer to that question.
African tribes are not
a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, but the vast majority
traditionally held in common a worldview of causation very different
from our own. With reference to illness, it is called the personalistic
theory of disease. Even today, most Africans believe that any major
occurrence, good or bad, has two causes. The first might be called
physical: for instance, that a retrovirus causes AIDS by destroying the
cells of the immune system. The second is a spiritual, less tangible
cause, but is perceived to be no less real. Edward Evans-Pritchard,
whose ethnography of the Nuer people of Sudan is a foundational work of
anthropology, put Africans' cosmological outlook this way: One might
understand that a house collapsed because termites damaged it. But the
more important question is, Who sent the termites?
This view isn't so different that prevailing wisdom in the recent history of the West, he goes on to say. The whole fascinating piece is worth a read. Kudos to The New Atlantis for publishing it.
Eminent layers and educators who have been seeking for some method of simplifying the study of law and its administration met at the Bar Association yesterday afternoon and took the first important steps toward the organization of the American Academy of Jurisprudence. For more than three years the project has been discussed...
Late last night ex-Judge Alton B. Parker talked with reporters...He was asked if the plan was not to prepare some condensed code like the Code Napoleon. He replied that such a code prepared for use in this country would very comfortably fit into a man's pocket. Then he was asked if the idea was not to print between the covers of certain books the laws of all the States relating to any particular subject so that long and laborious search would not be necessary to find the law on the matter in any State. To this question he replied that the whole matter could be summed up by saying that the aim was to promote the science of jurisprudence and the improvement of the law and its administration...
Chairman James De Witt Andrews... asserted that the natural tendency of the law was toward confusion, contradiction, and uncertainty, and that the practical function of jurisprudence was to give simplicity and harmony to the body of laws.
Now that Mark Sanford has admitted adultery, the one thing everyone agrees about is that any chance he had to be elected president is gone -- a political judgment that is likely true, but that is pretty weird when you think about it, given that we're a country that elected the obviously philandering Bill Clinton, re-elected him after he got oral sex from an intern under his desk, and gave the GOP nomination to John McCain, even though he cheated on his first wife, instead of Rudy Giuliani, who also cheated on at least one of his wives. These men are all guilty of shameful behavior, all were viable presidential candidates, and at least some of them were guilty of behavior far more egregious than Gov. Sanford, though the South Carolina governor is himself guilty of egregious behavior. Nor does this account for the presidents who've engaged in extra-marital affairs throughout history. Should we have disqualified JFK? Maybe. But Thomas Jefferson? It seems that Gov. Sanford is disqualified largely due to bad timing.
Once I'd have said that an indiscretion like this would cost Mark Sanford my future vote, but no more. Though I am hardly invested in his candidacy, were it the case that he proved the best steward for the federal government in matters domestic and foreign, I'd vote for him even if he cheated again. I'd be appalled by the repeated infidelity, especially given the fact that he has young children. But if I ask myself how many GDP points or lives lost in a foreign war it is worth to have a president who is morally upstanding in his personal life--and no, I am not intending to reference any recent presidents--the answer doesn't amount to much. We need not conceive of the president as the nation's moral leader. Nor is there any guarantee that a candidate who hasn't been caught cheating isn't just better at hiding it.
Should I be lucky enough to marry, I'll stay faithful. I'll counsel friends to do the same. Should I be blessed with children, fidelity is a value I'll impart. Should my child get sick, and require a surgeon, I'll find the most skilled, talented, tested, highly evaluated professional, even if he is a thrice divorced polygamist cheating on both wives with a Chinatown mother and daughter unaware of one another's involvement. Am I wrong? Why should politicians be different? All else being equal, I'll vote for the faithful husband or wife. But all else is never equal, and usually it isn't even close. The politician's propensity for adultery is strange, but so is our collective fantasy that it is wise and natural to hold up folks in that profession as moral exemplars, and dismiss them when they fail. The exercise is bound to degrade more than it elevates. Better that every elected official be judged on his or her official duties, and that any unrelated moral leadership they offer is suspect. Even without Charles Barkley, we've got enough role models that government needn't provided another.
From what I am to understand in the past people in power were allowed
to project a public persona which was at some variance with their
private life. This disjunction has been melting away over the past
generation. If you are going to extol bourgeois probity, it seems
likely that you're going to have to walk the talk. Various sexual
scandals involving politicians have indicated to some that their power
allows them to satisfy their sexual appetites in a manner which would
otherwise not be possible, but in an age of radical transparency this
temptation and fringe benefit might be sharply diminished. Or perhaps
public norms will shift in terms of what is demanded of their political
leaders? The transparent society will effect public figures first, but
we'll all have to deal with it sooner or later.
I am guessing that public norms will shift. The trick is doing so in a way that casts immoral behavior as irrelevant to certain tasks, not okay and to be expected.
UPDATE 2: James Joyner rightly points out that "While Clinton's escapades with Lewinsky started in 1995, the affair
wasn't reported until well after his reelection. Drudge broke the news
January 17, 1998."
Party planners know that scrunching a bunch of people into a small space will result in plenty of mingling and discourse.
A new study suggests this was as true for our ancestors as it is for us
today, and that ancient social networking led to a renaissance of new
ideas that helped make us human.
The research, which is published in the June 5 issue of the journal Science,
suggests that tens of thousands of years ago, as human population
density increased so did the transmission of ideas and skills. The
result: the emergence of more and more clever innovations.
A bemused reader from Kansas requests a post that captures "the idea of New York City hipsters." As a California philosopher-surfer at heart, this is perhaps not the best task for me -- and frankly I am loathe to give the ubiquitous-in-media hipster phenomenon more attention -- but I aim to please, so below the fold I have placed an original photograph titled, "Aftermath of a hipster dinner."
Any other requests for posts? E-mail Thinkingbig@theatlantic.com Read More
Kashmir Hill notices that Lancaster, PA has installed security cameras that cover almost all of its streets to monitor its 55,000 residents -- and unlike other Orwellian initiatives of this kind, there's a twist: its your neighbors rather than police who are mostly doing the monitoring. Check out her worthwhile post here.
In a recent post,
I talked about Ord, Nebraska as an example of a town in the Midwest
trying to attract young professionals. Is that realistic? I pressed
Caleb T. Pollard, the man in charge of the project, for answers.
My question:
One of your goals in Ord is to convince young professionals that life
can be better in a small town miles from the Interstate than in a big
city dense with business and people. Why do you think that is so?
Bacon has owned
the "food of the moment" title for a while. The latest recessionary
sales slogan should go something like: Make Money At Home While Still
In Your Pajamas, Start a Bacon Blog! Cupcakes have also been glorified.
And naturally, bacon cupcakes have developed a fanatical following.
Now hot dogs, or should I say haut dogs, are threatening to
take away the glory. Fancypants chefs, French and otherwise, in pursuit
of their own American hot dog dreams can't leave well enough alone. By
nature, fancypants chefs are obsessive, compulsive tinkerers and
lily-gilders. So now they're going about the business of reinventing
the hot dog.
Hmmm. Gourmet hot dogs? Why not just seek out the superior bratwurst or kielbasa instead? Excellent varieties can be ordered by mail here.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown flags a new trend among 20-somethings -- the Folkster movement:
Folkster attributes: farm-ier hipster clothes. Flannel. Beekeeping.
Brewing ginger beer or mead. Rooftop gardening. Music like Bonnie
Prince Billy or William Elliot Whitmore or Welcome Wagon or Woods.
Returning to pre-industrial production methods. Localism. More urban
and tech-savvy than your typical hippie, less likely to irrationally hate Starbucks.
Knowing at least one person who has, since the beginning of the
economic turmoil, packed it up from the city and moved to a
farm/mountain town/California. Arthur magazine.
James Poulos is a writer, editor, and PhD candidate at Georgetown currently at work on a dissertation about individuality after Napoleon. His blog, Postmodern Conservative, is currently hosted at First Things.
Q. You've lately waged a quiet war in your writing against the phrase "senseof...." What's your objection?
It really is astounding, once you become aware of it, how incapable we
are of talking about what matters to us without repeated recourse to
the phrase 'sense of'. It's a verbal and written tic of huge
proportions, hiding in plain sight. That in and of itself suggests we
might want to think about why we talk this way. It's a tic that appears
in common language and educated language alike -- on the local news
("Give us a sense of what's going on out there in that hurricane, Bob")
and in the scholarly work of our most respected academics (Charles
Taylor, in his monumental, Templeton-prize-winning A Secular Age,
can hardly write a sentence without the phrase). Even critics of our
contemporary life urge us to recover 'senses of' whatever our current
corruption has purportedly taken away from us. Christopher Lasch, as
long ago as the late '70s, fell into this trap. For a sense of a thing,
obviously, is not the thing itself; critics of contemporary life merely
beg the question when they call for us to replace, say, our lost community with a new 'sense of community'.
Hopefully you can see right there where I'm headed: Read More
Anyone who's ever read Down with Big Business, the famous Robert Bartley editorial, should also read Tim Carney's piece today on the tobacco legislation that President Obama just signed, and the misleading rhetoric surrounding it: Read More
bunker mentality. noun. An attitude of extreme defensiveness and
self-justification based on an often exaggerated sense of being under
persistent attack from others.
In previous posts on how we talk to one another about politics, I've used arguments offered by Mark Levin (see this post too), Andy McCarthy and Amanda Marcotte to show why it is unwise to assume ill motives on the part of ideological opponents.
When you make an argument about hidden motivations that (a) lacks
external evidence and (b) conveniently coincides with your existing
biases, then it is more likely that the argument and your conclusions
are attractive to you because they confirm your biases than that the
argument is correct. This has less to do with the specifics of the
cases quoted and more to do with a general rule about examining one's
own motivations.
A related problem, present on both sides of the ideological divide, is prominent spokespeople who cultivate a bunker mentality among their core audience. This is a phenomena I initially observed on the left, when folks like Al Sharpton started using even fabricated instances of racism to advance a narrative of black victimization. There isn't any doubt that some black people are victimized due partly to their race everyday in this country. However, asserting a fabricated instance of racism does real harm.
The point is perhaps best made by thinking about the Duke Lacrosse rape case, wherein a rogue prosecutor ignored exculpatory evidence and charged numerous white players with the rape of a black stripper. The prosecutor obviously victimized the innocent players, as we all know, but less remarked upon is how he victimized other black students on the Duke campus. They walked around for weeks imagining that more privileged white kids were maliciously preying on black women than was in fact the case. The world is a frightening enough place without folks who deceptively propagate false horror stories for their own aggrandizement.
On the right, a less harmful but still troubling form of bunker mentality plays a prominent role on talk radio. Read More
SOUTH CAROLINA'S newspaper the State, which has never suffered from too-kind coverage of Mark Sanford, the state's Republican governor, trumpeted the news yesterday:
the governor had disappeared. His staff had not heard from him in four
days, his phones had been turned off, and his security detail seemed
confused. Within minutes it became a national story. Mr Sanford, perhaps the most prominent opponent of Mr Obama's economic plans, became a laughingstock. At the end of the day Politico's Ben Smith said the episode "may be eccentric enough to disqualify him from national office."
Okay,
serious question: Why? The life of a governor is not that of a
president, who spends 24 hours a day in a media fishbowl. The life of
South Carolina's governor can actually be pretty low-key, because the
state constitution devolved so many powers away from him and over to
the state legislature and independent boards. (It was like this, a
relic of the post-Civil War era, before Mr Sanford took over.)
Moreover, the legislative session had ended.
Where was the governor? He was hiking. The governor's wife said he wanted to "clear his head",
so the scandal here seems to be that he failed to tell everyone before
he left. That's a disqualification from national office? Tell that to
the reporters who had to follow George Bush to the middle of Texas and
report on his yardwork.
Thank God I don't watch cable news -- I can just imagine the speculative banter about his whereabouts.
Someone ought to use polls to pull us away from the evil of polls.
We
need a series of questions that can help unpack how flexible voters are
on issues, and how certain issues relate to other issues with voters.
If you ask the right questions and use the right metrics, it's
theoretically feasible to put together a sort of voter flexibility
matrix, and something that's powerful enough to counteract these silly
black/white polls that offer absolutely no nuance.
You could further the policy debate massively with a tool like
this, and you'd remove the tendency to use polls for political cover or
bludgeoning tactics.
A voter flexibility matrix could help thaw
or shed light on some of our biggest issues. Gay marriage, abortion,
the Iraq war, Iran, Israel/Palestine, stem-cell research, whatever.
Rather than knowing what % of voters are pro-choice/pro-life, or
pro-nuclear/anti-nuclear, we would be able to delve into how meaningful
each of the biggest issues of the day are, and to what extent someone
inhabits the shades of gray on any given issue.
Hell, maybe I'll email Nate Silver. If anyone can tease out something like this he can.
In the November, 1947 issue of The Atlantic, Albert Einstein fretted about nuclear weapons -- quite reasonably, I might add -- before arguing for this dubious solution:
I should wish to see all the nations forming the supranational state pool all
their military forces, keeping for themselves only local police. Then I should
like to see these forces commingled and distributed as were the regiments of
the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. There it was appreciated that the men and
officers of one region would serve the purposes of empire better by not being
stationed exclusively in their own provinces, subject to local and racial
pulls.
I should like to see the authority of the supranational regime restricted
altogether to the field of security. Whether this would be possible I am not
sure. Experience may point to the desirability of adding some authority over
economic matters, since under modern conditions these are capable of causing
national upsets that have in them the seeds of violent conflict. But I should
prefer to see the function of the organization altogether limited to the tasks
of security. I also should like to see this regime established through the
strengthening of the United Nations, so as not to sacrifice continuity in the
search for peace.
I do not hide from myself the great difficulties of establishing a world
government, either a beginning without Russia or one with Russia. I am aware of
the risks. Since I should not wish it to be permissible for any country that
has joined the supranational organization to secede, one of these risks is
possible civil war. But I also believe that world government is certain to come
in time, and that the question is how much it is to be permitted to cost. It
will come, I believe, even if there is another world war, though after such a
war, if it is won, it would be world government established by the victor,
resting on the victor's military power, and thus to be maintained permanently
only through the permanent militarization of the human race.
Yikes. On the other hand, our present inattention to loose nuclear materials, and the gradual proliferation of nuclear weapons, is just as insane.
Anyone keen on my writing a post about any particular topic that falls under the "Ideas Blog" rubric? E-mail ThinkingBig@theatlantic.com -- I can't promise to honor all requests, but I'll give it a shot.
I was walking through a bohemian part of town and ran across this
place called a "bookstore". I thought, "Hmm, that's interesting. I've
always gotten my books electronically on my kindle, but this could be
an interesting idea." So I stepped inside. What I saw was an unfamiliar
way of experiencing books: on hundreds of of sheets of paper, bound up
on one side with glue and wrapped in a hard cardboard cover. They even
smell a little musty, at least the old ones.
At first I was excited; but then I began to think, well how would I
do a text search in such a book? Supposing it was a reference book, or
I wanted to find a quote that was particularly memorable? Also, I can
resell it if I don't want it, but I can't take notes in the book
without ruining its value. Plus, where am I going to keep these books
if I buy a whole bunch of them? They're really heavy! And it uses a lot
of paper - especially newspapers! What if it's dark and I need a bigger
font? What if I'm on the train to work and decide I want to buy the
paper version of the Times that day? Can't get it!! Not only that, but
they wanted to charge me MORE for these clunky, static, physical, books
than the normal electronic price! Honestly, with all these limitations
and disadvantages, they should be giving them away for free. I decided
I'm never going to pay a single red cent for a paper book until these
issues are addressed. No way.
When you make an argument about hidden motivations that (a) lacks
external evidence and (b) conveniently coincides with your existing
biases, then it is more likely that the argument and your conclusions
are attractive to you because they confirm your biases than that the
argument is correct. This has less to do with the specifics of the
cases quoted and more to do with a general rule about examining one's
own motivations.
It has been far too long in coming but, yesterday, the Federal Prison Rape Elimination commission released its report on elimination and prevention efforts regarding the biggest social problem nobody wants to talk about: prison rape.
Anyone who looks at the problem can't react with anything
other than horror. According to the Bureau of Justice Statics, over
60,000 prisoners -- the great bulk of them male -- fall victim to sexual
abuse in prison each year. A fair number of these men are "punks" who
are subject to frequent, even daily, male-on-male rape for years on
end.
The federal report's conclusions -- a zero-tolerance policy,
more direct monitoring, and the like -- almost are all common sense.
State, local, and federal governments should take immediate legislative
and administrative action to implement nearly everything in the report.
(Most of the practices are already commonplace in the federal and
better-run state systems.) Although giving trial lawyers more business
rarely makes sense, Congress may also want to reconsider laws that make
it very difficult for prisoners to sue prison authorities absent
concrete evidence of physical harm. It's quite possible that many
legitimate prison-rape claims get thrown out of court under current
laws. And prison rape needs to stop.
But the nation's prison-rape problems can't go away overnight
for at least two major reasons. To begin with, the racial supremacist
gangs that control many prisons use rape as a tool for keeping other
prisoners in line and, in some cases, prison officials may turn a blind
eye towards sexual abuse when it keeps prison populations more orderly.
Second, the understandable widespread social distaste for people in
prison has lead to a widespread attitude that's frankly inhumane. It is
one thing to say that prison shouldn't be fun and quite another to say
that detainees "deserve" rape. Nobody does. But, somehow, prison rape
remains a perfectly acceptable topic for sitcoms, widely trafficked
websites, and late-night comedians.
Read the whole thing -- Mr. Lehrer is absolutely right that prison rape is one of the biggest problems that no one in America wants to talk about. Lots more cameras in jails would help.
I've been on the trail of this historical nugget for a few years now. Until recently, the earliest known appearance of Ms. was nearly half a century later, from 1949. In The Story of Language,
Mario Pei wrote: "Feminists, who object to the distinction between Mrs.
and Miss and its concomitant revelatory features, have often proposed
that the two present-day titles be merged into a single one, 'Miss' (to
be written 'Ms.')." Pei states that Ms. had been "often proposed," but where were the proposals? The closest precursor that had been found was a 1932 letter to the New York Times where the title M's is suggested, not quite the same as Ms.
Some have theorized that Ms. has roots long before the 20th
century. One piece of evidence that has been put forth is the tombstone
of Sarah Spooner, who died in 1767 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. As you
can see from this image, what appears on the headstone is M with a superscript s. As Dennis Baron writes in his excellent book Grammar and Gender (1987), "it is certainly an abbreviation of Miss or Mistress, and not an example of colonial langurage reform or a slip of the chisel, as some have suggested."
The New York Times "Idea of the Day" blog features this argument today:
"The immigration process is the single most important determinant of
American foreign policy," wrote Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan in
1974. And much the same is true today, writes Scott McConnell in the journal World Affairs.
He foresees immigrants again shaping America's profile in the world
as they did in the First World War, when they long prevented President
Woodrow Wilson from taking sides. It's an era "whose contours are only
just now emerging," McConnell writes.
"On the basis of what is visible thus far," he says, "today's and
tomorrow's Mexican-, Asian-, and Arab-Americans will more resemble the
Swedes, Germans, and Irish of a century ago than the Poles, Balts, and
Cubans of the cold war era." That is, new immigrants are more likely to
oppose intervention abroad, or be ambivalent about it, than lobby for
it as many did during the cold war.
Paradoxically, then, if isolationist conservatives lose their battle
to control immigration, they will end up winners of "an important
consolation prize: the foreign policy of what remains of their
cherished republic."
I am skeptical of this argument for two reasons.
1) We ultimately did take sides in World War I -- and although I hardly think it's a causal relationship, the United States has become a more interventionist country in the post-World War II era as it's gotten more diverse, not the opposite.
2) High levels of immigration are a significant factor in the ability of the Armed Forces to get new recruits. This makes interventionism abroad easier. Or to put it another way, America would have to be a lot more careful about where it deployed resources abroad if it was finding it increasingly hard to get new recruits.
The Atlantic's Graeme Wood says a book with a famous title is exceptionally relevant to the American mission in Iraq:
FALLUJAH -- Every Marine officer who sees me reading The Ugly American (another MWR library treasure)
nods in recognition and asks me what I think of it. At first I thought
the Marine Corps had recruited an unusually bookwormish class of junior
officers. Later, a lieutenant told me it was on the Marines' required reading list. I can think of few better texts for their curriculum.
The Ugly American (written by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer
in 1958) relates a series of episodes in US efforts to reach out to
Sarkhan, a fictional Southeast Asian country. The novel's title has
come to mean an American style of boorishness, with English spoken in
loud voices and an inability to understand foreign currency. (I think
of the Simpsons episode in which Homer goes to Brazil and
walks around with a t-shirt depicting Uncle Sam taking a bite of a
globe, with big letters underneath, "TRY AND STOP US.") The characters in the actual Ugly American
are, by and large, exactly the opposite of this stereotype. They speak
Sarkhanese. They live among Sarkhanese, and they come up with ideas and
schemes sensitive to Sarkhanese culture. The ugly American himself,
Homer Atkins, is not a lout and boor, just a physically hideous man.
The book's relevance to the Marine mission turns out to be substantial, and growing.
In his long lifetime, James von Brunn--the 88-year-old who earlier this month
allegedly shot and killed United States Holocaust Memorial Museum guard
Stephen Johns--managed to embody every cliché about the
Holocaust-denying anti-Semite: seething with hatred toward Jews,
convinced that somehow they rig the money system, certain that there
are multiple world-wide conspiracies afoot. And if we stopped to think
harder about it, we might have to admit that there's something
comforting about how perfectly von Brunn fulfills our preconception of
the Holocaust denier. It is pleasantly convenient to imagine that all
Holocaust deniers belong to one coherent movement--as if all of our
enemies could be found, and could fit, in the same contained, albeit
ghoulish, landscape.
In reality, however, that caricature grossly misunderstands this
anti-Semitic Holocaust skepticism, which is not a unified movement but
a loose confederation of people who often have very little in common.
As the piece proceeds, he introduces two leading Holocaust deniers who are feuding with one another.
...to meet these two men late in their careers in anti-Semitism, and to
get to know them as they tangled with each other, helped illuminate
what kind of man might choose to cross the borders of respectable
opinion, and what inner needs might keep him exiled from his fellow man.
In total 165 cars have been set on fire in Berlin since the start of
the year, police say, far higher than the total for all of last year.
And the number of arson attacks has hit record levels since the start
of June. Left-wing militants are suspected to be behind the haphazard
nocturnal trail of destruction, which includes torched cars, stones and
paint bomb attacks on banks and job centers. There are many police
investigations but rarely do they detain suspects -- largely because
there are rarely witnesses. Most crimes are registered in the
Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg neighborhood, long fertile ground for
counter-culture. But the attacks on cars are now spreading across the
city, to districts previously unaffected.
I visited Berlin once in 2005. Shortly afterward I jotted down some impressions, which I've pasted below the fold. Read More
"If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher
minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and
intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that
it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the
part of men to believe that a new idea can have value." -- Mark Twain
Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, is one of the Internet's most popular and prolific bloggers--and one of its most impressively productive people, full stop. A Professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, he is the author of An Army of Davids (a book I've purchased, read, and enjoyed). And he hosts InstaVision on PJTV, the Web video project of Pajamas Media.
Q. Are blogs making people better informed, or allowing them to cocoon?
Well, both. Though Cass Sunstein famously worried about cocooning,
research -- and my own experience -- suggests that people don't just
read things they agree with. For one thing, you have to read people
you disagree with in order to call them "asshats," which is a key
aspect to the Internet experience . . .
More seriously, I find that there are a <i>lot</i> of
very interesting and well-informed people on the Internet, but that
they tend to be drowned out by the obnoxious trolls. That breakdown in
civility -- or even in serious debate, since trolls never really
debate, they just shout -- is a more serious threat than "cocooning."
With cocooning you avoid people who disagree with you; with trolling
you notice them but write them off as unserious. The latter, I think,
is more dangerous to democracy.
Q. In the past, you've offered your readers valuable advice about disaster
preparedness, advocated for paying more attention to tracking
asteroids, and otherwise drawn attention to issues that weren't getting
enough. What issue is currently off the political and/or media radar...
and ought to be on it?
The biggest under-appreciated looming crisis right now is the impending
public pension collapse. That's tracked at a blog called
Pensiontsunami.com (which also tracks the bad, but not nearly as-bad,
private pension debacle). Between payroll bloat, underfunding, and the
stock market decline, many cities and states won't be able to meet
their pension obligations. That's likely to make the housing
bubble-burst look minor by comparison, but most politicians are just
trying to ignore the problem.
(Yes, it's a short second part. But if you're craving more Glenn Reynolds you're in luck -- he somehow finds time to do an astonishing amount of freelance writing given his blogging output and professorial duties. Check out his law review articles and journalistic work here.)
On the subject of how we talk to one another about politics -- discussed before here and here -- I'd like to posit a perverse symmetry between this post by Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, and this post by Andy McCarthy at The Corner. Though they differ in important respects, both posts serve as a caution to ideologically alligned bloggers: if you assume, without clear evidence, that your political or ideological opponents are motivated by extraordinarily dark motives, you're probably going to end up gravely misjudging reality.
Let's take a closer look at the posts in question. Read More
The Atlantic's Bob Cohn and Michael Hirschorn discuss why even as newsweeklies like Time, Newsweek and US News and World Report decline, The Economist is thriving. Video is below the fold.
James Joyner ably explains why it's an awful idea for the FTC to regulate monitor blogs. Yes, you read that right. If you think your RSS feed is overflowing...
What an awful drag on a wonderful means of communication.
There's a certain kind of "spam" that seems acceptable -- for example, a guy is looking for a new apartment, and e-mails his grad school list-serv to see if anyone has a room opening up between terms.
But what about the worst kind of spam -- the completely unsolicited junk sent by folks who haven't any connection to you, and aren't even selling anything you'd remotely dream of buying? Check your spam folder now. See what I mean? Sending it out must be profitable, or else it wouldn't happen. But I've never even considered purchasing anything solicited in that manner, nor has anyone I know.
So who is it that's buying the stuff advertised in spam e-mail? Anyone out there? You can comment anonymously.
It isn't the same everywhere -- from a small town newspaper in Iowa:
Bellvue Woman Sets AARP Magazine Straight
A local medical technologist recently spotted an error in AARP
magazine, and decided to take it upon herself to fix it. She sent a
letter to the publication, noting the mistake, and the magazine
recently published it.
"They mixed up the good and bad cholesterol on one of their charts," said Mary Jo Bonifas, of Bellevue, Iowa.
Bonifas has been a medical technologist, certified by the American Society of Clinical Pathology, for more than 35 years.
She is currently the manager of Laboratory Services at United Clinical Labs in Dubuque and Dyersville.
The
AARP chart incorrectly said low-density lipoprotein (LDL) is the "good"
type of cholesterol, and high-density lipoprotein (HDL) is the "bad"
type of cholesterol. It should be reversed.
"It helps to
remember you want your HDL to be high, and your LDL to be low, like the
first letter in each acronym," Bonifas said.
That's an elegant way to remember it. My high school health teacher told us to think of HDLs like rabbits and LDLs like turtles. Somehow it's always stuck with me. I have no idea what it means.
"The
dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The
occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the
occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew." -- Abraham Lincoln
Admit it, you want a baby polar bear. Or perhaps a baby snow seal. A lion cub? A miniature elephant? An infant grizzly? Though I cannot know your particular fancy -- this blog prides itself on its diverse audience -- my guess is that my average reader wouldn't hesitate to take on a wild animal pet, if only it would stay a baby.
Of course, the fact is that all those animals will grow up into wild beasts, unfit for the urban apartment or suburban backyard. Once mature, they aren't even much fun for cuddling (though I admit there are exceptions).
But here's a prediction. Within our lifetimes, genetic engineering will bring us wild animals that stay babies, in body if not in mind. In fact, I expect that sometime before I die, I'll click onto YouTube or its equivalent, search "pet polar bear," and see the inevitable baby polar bear given a Coca Cola bottle by its Cola Wars generation owner.
Is there a consumer desire for this sort of thing? Informal market research suggests this phenomenon tests quite well in the influential "intelligent, attractive, charismatic woman who likes to roll around the floor with pets" demographic. So the perfect spokesperson stands ready. All that remains is the science (and the objections from PETA, the Vatican, and sundry others). Would you take a perma-baby animal as pet? If so, what animal?
Skeptics are also welcome to comment. Would perma-baby animals be a bad/unnatural/catastrophic development? Why?
Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit, is one of the Internet's most popular and prolific bloggers--and one of its most impressively productive people, full stop. A Professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law, he is the author of An Army of Davids (a book I've purchased, read, and enjoyed). And he hosts InstaVision on PJTV, the Web video project of Pajamas Media. He's also been quite generous to a lot of talented journalists over the years--I started reading Megan McArdle after she guest blogged on Glenn's site, and I've hit Michael Totten's tip jar after discovering his foreign reporting the same way.
My interview with Prof. Reynolds includes this post and another part that runs tomorrow.
Part I
Q. How do events in Iran fit into the thesis you advance in An Army of Davids.
As I write this, we'll have to see how it works out. But we have an awful lot of self-organization via the blogosphere, Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, SMS -- enough so that the mullahs are investing substantial effort into trying to block those sorts of communications, producing a distributed response from people around the world who are trying to help. Not much is clear about what's going on in Iran, but it does seem clear that this is in large part a self-organizing movement. What I'd like to know, and don't, is how much "horizontal" communication is going on among protesters, Revolutionary Guard members, and members of the military.
There's a pretty extensive scholarly literature on "riot, tumult, and revolution" -- my University of Tennessee colleague John Bohstedt, who also knocked down a crazed shooter at a church last year, is one of the experts -- but the way in which modern communications technology is changing the traditional pattern is still unclear, in part because it keeps changing. However, it's much easier to form a "flash mob" or a "flash political movement" nowadays.
One interesting sideline is that -- as Megan McArdle noted here at The Atlantic recently -- much of the reporting we're seeing is firsthand stuff from citizens and participants, because Big Media outfits have slashed their news gathering budgets. That's a trend I pointed out in An Army of Davids, and it's one that has, alas, accelerated. I'm a huge believer in citizen journalism, of course, but that doesn't mean I'm happy to see traditional reporting in decline. But at least ordinary people are now in a position to pick up some of the slack.
Q. How has the blogosphere changed over the years you've been a part of it? Read More
I've been reading blogs since 2001, but I can still remember when the word sounded anachronistic, like the first time I heard about fish tacos, another innovation that enriches my life. These days, the medium is present within the most renowned newspapers and magazines in the country, features freelance blog pros who've built reputations and livelihoods around their sites, and still welcomes amateurs who enjoy low barriers to entry in a worldwide conversation that never ends.
Here I want to survey some of the bloggers I've most enjoyed over the years (three at a time), and comment on how their talents and innovations have shaped a medium. My survey is incomplete by necessity. But I owe a personal debt to all these folks -- they've taught me how to do this -- and my feeling is that every blogger owes them thanks.
I'll proceed in the order that I discovered them -- here's Part I, featuring Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and Mickey Kaus. Read More
Will Wilkinson is asking the question. It is prompted by William Easterly's exchange with Amnesty International:
Who is depriving the poor of their right to an adequate income? There
are many theories of poverty, but few of them lead to a clear
identification of the Violator of this right. Moreover, human rights
are a clear dichotomy -- someone violates your rights or they do not.
But the line between poor and not-poor is arbitrary -- it is different
in different countries, and on a global scale, many still argue what is
the right dividing line that constitutes poverty. So calling poverty a
"human rights violation" does not point to any concrete actions that
the "violator" must stop in order to restore rights to the "violated."
After offering an even longer excerpt, Mr. Wilkinson notes that he is as yet unsatisfied with his own thoughts on the subject, but that the act of writing about them helped him flesh out his ideas. That tidbit alone is worthy of mention on this blog. A lengthy piece of writing does force its author to flesh out his thoughts, assess their validity, and organize them logically. Do Twitter, Facebook feeds and text messages decrease the incidence of such writing? Without taking a definite position, let me say how glad I am for a blog post length reckoning on this subject, especially by so talented a thinker.
It is here. Let's call it the ideas blog post of the day. It's one of those messy, thinking-things-through exercises that don't lend themselves to excerpts. That's okay. Watching how Will thinks things through is part of the fun.
The Atlantic's December 2004 issue features a story by Mark Bowden about the young Iranian men who seized the United States embassy and took hostage the entire American diplomatic mission.
His description of Iran is fascinating given current events -- the whole piece is worth a read -- and particularly striking is an excerpt about the hostage-takers, or gerogan-girha.
The gerogan-girha live in the ruins of their dream. As
they've grown gray-haired and plump, the fame and admiration they once
enjoyed have faded like the graffiti at the Den of Spies. Those who
despise the current regime now regret their role in bringing a small
circle of wealthy, authoritarian clerics to power. And more than
anything they blame the hostage crisis for a litany of problems and
setbacks that have befallen their country in the past quarter of a
century. Iran's loss of ties to the United States after the embassy
seizure prompted Saddam Hussein to invade in 1980 (when the hostages
were still being held). In the ensuing war Iran lost more than half a
million young men. Iran's status as an outlaw nation has had a stifling
effect on its chances for an economic turnaround.
Some of the gerogan-girha have gone into exile and taken up
arms against the religious rulers; others have been harassed,
denounced, beaten, or imprisoned for advocating democratic changes. In
some cases they have been persecuted by their former colleagues. "None
of us in the revolution believed Iran would ever have an autocratic
regime again," Mohsen Mirdamadi, a leader of the gerogan-girha who is today a controversial reform politician, told a Knight Ridder correspondent earlier this year. "Yet here we are."
"Nearly every man who develops an idea works it up to the point where
it looks impossible, and then he gets discouraged. That's not the place
to become discouraged." -- Thomas Edison
"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples
then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea
and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will
have two ideas." -- George Bernard Shaw
In August 1991, Witold Rybczynski lamented the way that Americans spend their Saturdays and Sundays. Society took a long time to offer its members two days off, he wrote, but "what we choose to do looks increasingly like work, and idleness has
acquired a bad name."
My favorite part of the piece is as follows: Read More
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaieties, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it. - F. Scott Fitzgerald
If all the cars in the United States were placed end to end, it would probably be Labor Day Weekend. - Doug Larson
Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on the weekend. - Woody Allen
Keep Holy the Sabbath. -- God
Weekends are a bit like rainbows; they look good from a distance but disappear when you get up close to them. -- John Shirley
Your hair may be brushed, but your mind's untidy. You've had about seven hours of sleep since Friday. No wonder you feel that lost sensation. You're sunk from a riot of relaxation. -- Ogden Nash
My life ain't heaven/but it sure ain't hell./I'm not on top/but I call it swell/if I'm able to work/and get paid right/and have the luck to be Black/on a Saturday night. - Maya Angelou
Weekend planning is a prime time to apply the Deathbed Priority Test: On your deathbed, will you wish you'd spent more prime weekend hours grocery shopping or walking in the woods with your kids? -- Louise Lague
Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath. -- Lyndon B. Johnson
Sunday clears away the rust of the whole week. -- Joseph Addison
Give a man a fish and he has food for a day; teach him how to fish and you can get rid of him for the entire weekend. -- Zenna Scha
There is little chance that meteorologists can solve the mysteries of weather until they gain an understanding of the mutual attraction of rain and weekends. -- Arnot Sheppard
I hate weekends because there is no stock market. -- Rene Rivkin
The feeling of Sunday is the same everywhere, heavy, melancholy, standing still. -- Jean Rhys
Always strive to excel, but only on weekends. -- Richard Rorty
Middle age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you. -- Ogden Nash
Living up to ideals is like doing everyday work with your Sunday clothes on. -- Ed Howe
The always sharp Julian Sanchez offers thoughts on Washington DC's sex offender database (emphasis added):
Based on a cursory scan, most of the people in the database seem to
have committed truly vile acts--rape or sexual assault or child
molestation. But there are a significant minority who--reading between
the lines, using the rather vague wording of the offenses and the
relevant ages of perpetrator and victim--basically seem to fall in the
category of "young 20-something who had some kind of sexual contact,
possibly consensual, with a 15-year-old." Now, I have no problem with
the state deterring and punishing that conduct, but I do wonder whether
it's wise to permanently and publicly group those people with violent
rapists. A college student dating a high school girl may be displaying
questionable judgment, but I'm not sure he's therefore a danger to
anyone else's children 20 years later. Of course, the concerned parent can
just pull up the rap sheet and see who's guilty of what, but some
states employ particularly confusing terminology: Florida's legal
system apparently classes age-inappropriate sexual contact as
"lascivious battery."
Many other cases are similarly unclear. I don't know about you, but
in my mind, the words "misdemeanor" and "sexual abuse" do not belong
together--certainly not in a case involving a man in his 50s and a
victim of 13. Yet there they are juxtaposed on my neighbor's rap sheet.
I think there is good reason to limit these sorts of databases to the most serious offenses. Otherwise the powerful stigma against "sexual abuse" and "sex offenders" is going to marginally diminish -- how could it be otherwise when 14-year-old New Jersey girls are threatened with sex offender status for posting naked pictures to a MySpace account, as are folks cited for public urination?
If the stigma a sexual offender registry carries is to be maintained, the transgressions that land one on it must comport with our idea of sexual abuse.
Does anyone know how people represented ideas visually prior to the invention of the light bulb? Also, does the new CFL spiral variety mean that the ideas of cartoon characters are 40 percent more efficient than before? Watch out Road Runner!
Okay readers, let me confess that I've been holding back - I've got an idea that could revolutionize the birthday celebration: the chocolate candle. There isn't any shame in admitting that the wax candles you use for even the most momentous birthdays drizzle hot viscous paraffin all over your icing. It isn't pretty, but we've all been there.
What if hot viscous chocolate melted down onto that cake top instead? Too decadent? Please. Life is short, as the birthday milestone ought to remind you. And these chocolate fire sticks are so much more civilized than mom cleaning up after the child who took too long to blow out 20th Century candles by picking wax from the frosting with fingernails that sometimes fall off as readily as they pressed on. Would you rather have a fake fingernail atop your slice or a Ghirardelli complement?
I know what you're now thinking. That you'd expect to pay $40, $50 or even $60 dollars for candles like that. That a recession is no time for coco luxuries. But what if I told you that assuming a cut rate chemist, physical properties amenable to what I've described, a bit of venture capital and a whole lot of string, I could bring you these candles for less than half that. Would it sweeten the deal if I threw in a novelty lighter?
Wax is for surfers and creepy celebrity museums. Chocolate candles are the future.
Radley Balko has laid out his views on the criminal justice system in parts one, two, three and four of our interview.
All that remains is part five.
Q. Having run through a fair number of problems, let's turn our attention
to solutions. What are your top 5 ideas for reforming the criminal
justice system? What are the most significant obstacles preventing them?
1. Changing the federal government's role in the criminal justice system.
The
federal government has a legitimate function in investigating and
prosecuting some crimes, such as crimes related to national security.
But we've federalized far too many crimes, and federal crimes like
racketeering, conspiracy, and money laundering have been interpreted
far too broadly. The Constitution lays out three federal crimes. We now
have thousands. Federal crime-fighting grants like the Byrne Grant
also distort the priorities of local police departments, incentivizing
them to expend more resources on consensual drug crimes than violent
crime. Since the late 1980s, the feds have also been giving local
police departments surplus military equipment, which has reinforced the
problem of creeping militarization.
On the other hand, the Department of Justice needs to get more involved
in enforcing civil rights and investigating corruption and abuse in the
criminal justice system at the state and local level.
2. Ensure that scientific evidence in the courtroom is actually scientific.
The
forensic science community needs more peer review. Crime lab
technicians and forensic scientists should be independent of the
prosecutors who hire them, to prevent unintentional bias--they should
report to someone other than a DA or state attorney general. Ideally,
forensic analysis would be sent to multiple private labs. Occasionally,
evidence would be sent to multiple labs for double-checking. Right now,
there's too much pressure--subtle and overt--on state crime labs to
produce results favorable to prosecutors. Using several private labs
would put the incentive back on accuracy. Technicians would be rewarded
for getting things right and for catching other labs' mistakes, not
necessarily for confirming or bolstering the state's case.
Farleigh Dickinson University economist Roger Koppl has some other innovative suggestions (PDF) on how we can improve the quality of the science used in the courtroom.
3. Community policing.
Community policing is a broad
term generally meaning an approach to law enforcement that's proactive
instead of reactive. Read More
In an ongoing Q&A, libertarian writer Radley Balko is setting forth
his ideas about what is wrong with the American criminal justice
system. One lament concerns the rise of SWAT teams. "We're dressing
police officers in military attire, giving them military-grade
weaponry, training them in military tactics, then sending them into
American cities and neighborhoods and telling them they're fighting a
war," he wrote. "That's not a healthy development for a free society."
Tim Harper explored the rise of SWAT tactics in an October 2000 Atlantic article
that showed how the Columbine high school massacre transformed our
idea of local police departments, especially how officers ought to
react during hostage situations.
"Put the argument into a concrete shape, into an image, some hard
phrase, round and solid as a ball, which they can see and handle and
carry home with them, and the cause is half won." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
As the right focuses on Twitter, the left is increasing its sizable advantage in a different communication medium: the blog post + graphic. Anyone who follows blogs on both sides of the ideological divide knows what I am talking about. Take Matt Yglesias. Map. Bar graph. Figure. Those are consecutive posts!
Ezra Klein takes time to praise a graphic here. He slips one into a post here. Scared of the Chinese? Relax! He reassures us that the national debt is as American as these pie charts.
And Conor Clarke? He got this baby linked all over the Internet.
Strange, isn't it? The right has empiricists -- Jim Manzi and Heather MacDonald are examples of folks who offer evidence based arguments grounded in quantitative analysis and/or thorough reporting. But even they almost always have their say in words. Is it the left's affinity for arguments from wonkery that's driving this trend? Its association with academia? Its cultural preference for Macs rather than PCs? Its appeal to visual learners? Is there a graphics competition on the Journo-List?
Thinking Big has questions, but as yet, no answers. Have a theory? Write Thinkingbig@theatlantic.com
Fans of literary nonfiction -- or if you prefer, long form non-fiction or new journalism -- know that upon entering most bookstores, it can be very difficult to find what you seek. Fiction is arranged alphabetically by author, so if I know I am an Ernest Hemingway fan, I can easily find more of his work.
But what if I am a huge John McPhee fan? He's written on topics from oranges to the Swiss army to the Alaskan wilderness. In a store where non-fiction is arranged by subject, where do I find his stuff?
The great non-fiction writer Lawrence Weschler, a onetime professor of mine, proposes a rather drastic step that would serve as a solution.
I want to get rid of the distinction between fiction and nonfiction.
The class I teach at NYU is called "The Fiction of Nonfiction", and it
is less a class about reporting methods than it is about the fictional
methods that can be applied to nonfictional writing. It presupposes
that the writer will try to be fair, but also acknowledges that there
is no such thing as objectivity, and revels in that fact. Then we get
down to business and talk about all the stuff that's interesting: form,
freedom, irony, voice, tone, structure. We are looking at masters--Ian
Frazier, Jane Kramer, John McPhee, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell--and
if you look at their books, absolutely they are works of literature.
What drives me crazy is that my books are spread all over the
bookstore. My Boggs is in Economics, my A Miracle, A Universe is in
Latin America. This book here (holds up a copy of Vermeer in Bosnia),
who the hell knows where they're gonna put this. I was in a Barnes
& Noble somewhere and looked for Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonders and found it in New Age Psychedelics. And it's not just me; the same is true of Ian Frazier and Jane Kramer and so forth. The point is that
they should be in alphabetical order, in Literature. It's not just that
my books have a super-plenitude of meanings, but that they are designed
to illuminate each other. Boggs and Mr. Wilson, for example, even have
the same type face, the same trim size. They're meant to be read
side-by-side, but no one ever knows that.
Kudos are owed to Kramer Books in Washington DC for being the rare shop that has a section for the sort of nonfiction discussed above. Good idea!
I'd be negligent as an ideas blogger if I didn't point you toward a This American Lifeepisode wherein Ira Glass interviews the head of a company that makes mousetraps to hear about the various unsolicited proposals from product improvements it gets.
In a prior post about the way political ideas spread, I argued that conservative talk radio hosts like Mark Levin aren't merely doing damage to public discourse -- they are ill-serving their most loyal listeners, and by extension conservatism itself. This is so for several reasons, I said, promising to cite specific examples to back up my assertions. The post linked above includes a monologue wherein Mr. Levin provides negligent, demonstrably wrongheaded analysis to his audience. The segment is a waste of time at best. More likely, it persuaded some listeners, leading them astray from reality and inhibiting their ability to participate in reality based arguments. In this way, they are marginalized.
Insofar as I've seen, responses to my post offer no defense of Mr. Levin's analysis. It is telling that even my least forgiving critics are reduced to attacking me for writing in a pretentious style. This series of posts is written more formally than is my habit. I am making an effort to bring more light than heat to a subject where the opposite is more often true. Were I being outrageously pretension in tone, however, it would hardly refute the substance of my argument.
Friedersdorf, like most journalists, doesn't really understand talk radio. Talk show hosts aren't employed to run on-air education and
organizing efforts; they are paid to attract and hold the largest
possible audience. Showmanship plays a big part in achieving that
objective. Talk pioneer Willis Duff once said that talk radio is like
bullfighting. People appreciate the cape work -- but they come to see
the bull get killed. And no one kills the bull like Mark Levin.
But my argument isn't that Mark Levin is an unsuccessful radio host -- I grant that he measures success by the size of his audience, and that he has a sizable number of listeners who come for what he provides. What I contend is that the effect of Mr. Levin's least defensible tics -- whether or not they attract market share -- is to damage public discourse and ill-serve his listeners in the realm of politics. The Roman Coliseum packed in audience members. That didn't make the entertainment on offer good for the republic.
Finally, some readers wonder whether the monologue I quoted is representative of the analysis offered by Mr. Levin. In my judgment, it is -- many other monologues are flawed in the same ways. In fact, it is fair to say that Mr. Levin frequently questions the motives of his ideological adversaries as a substitute for rational discussion. Perhaps a couple brief illustrations will be instructive. Read More
The CEO of Safeway, Inc. has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that argues America can dramatically cut its health care costs by adopting a relatively simple free market solution that the company has tested out to good effect.
Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The
first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of
behavior. The second insight, which is well understood by the providers
of health care, is that 74% of all costs are confined to four chronic
conditions (cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity).
Furthermore, 80% of cardiovascular disease and diabetes is preventable,
60% of cancers are preventable, and more than 90% of obesity is
preventable.
How does the company translate these insights into cost savings?
Safeway's Healthy Measures program is completely voluntary and
currently covers 74% of the insured nonunion work force. Employees are
tested for the four measures cited above (tobacco usage, healthy weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels) and receive premium discounts
off a "base level" premium for each test they pass. Data is collected
by outside parties and not shared with company management. If they pass
all four tests, annual premiums are reduced $780 for individuals and
$1,560 for families. Should they fail any or all tests, they can be
tested again in 12 months. If they pass or have made appropriate
progress on something like obesity, the company provides a refund equal
to the premium differences established at the beginning of the plan
year.
...we are building a culture of health and fitness. The
numbers speak for themselves. Our obesity and smoking rates are roughly
70% of the national average and our health-care costs for four years
have been held constant. When surveyed, 78% of our employees rated our
plan good, very good or excellent. In addition, 76% asked for more
financial incentives to reward healthy behaviors. We have heard from
dozens of employees who lost weight, lowered their blood-pressure and
cholesterol levels, and are enjoying better health because of this
program. Many discovered for the first time that they have high blood
pressure, and others have been told by their doctor that they have
added years to their life.
I am hardly a health care wonk, but the argument sure seems compelling on first look. I'd be curious to see what Ezra Klein, one of the most knowledgeable and readable progressive bloggers on health care, would say about this. If seemingly fair risk pricing demonstrably brings down overall costs, isn't it preferable to a much more complicated and costly set of reforms?
Of course, one can see the downside to all this:
Today, we are constrained by current laws from increasing these
incentives. We reward plan members $312 per year for not using tobacco,
yet the annual cost of insuring a tobacco user is $1,400. Reform
legislation needs to raise the federal legal limits so that incentives
can better match the true incremental benefit of not engaging in these
unhealthy behaviors.
Smoking today. Alcohol, downhill skiing, and premarital sex tomorrow? Pricing unhealthy habits means testing for them in ways intrusive enough to reliably detect them. What are your vices? Do you want your employer or your government determining which vices cost you money?
As a Californian who moved to the East Coast for graduate school, I've long thought that the Red/Blue lens so often used to look at the United States elides significant differences between folks referred to under the common banner of "coastal elites." There is an undeniable tendency among those from one coast to move to the other, rather than settling in the places disparagingly referred to as "flyover country."
Our experience is, nevertheless, one of moving between cultures. This is hardly a new insight--The Great Gatsby's narrator, Nick Caraway, mused on The East as an outsider, as did Joan Didion. She is particularly insightful here: Read More
My interview with Radley Balko, who is meeting his fans in Denver tonight, began here. Part two is here. And part three is here. The next question:
Q. Perhaps the most significant story you've covered lately involved
prosecutors using the services of a bite mark expert, though evidence
suggests he is no expert at all. Can you briefly describe that case,
reflect more generally on the idea of expert witnesses in our criminal
justice system, and explain why you think the status quo is
problematic?
In the 1990s, a Mississippi dentist named Michael West became a popular expert witness
for prosecutors because he claimed to be a bite mark expert who could
find and identify tooth impressions in human skin that no other expert
could see. He was eventually exposed as a fraud by 60 Minutes
and other media outlets, though he continued to testify in Mississippi,
and there are still people in prison who were convicted primarily
because of his testimony. Read More
In a recent issue of The Atlantic, Robert Wright wrote about how over history "it is the prophets of tolerance and love that have prospered, along with the religions they represent." In the video below, he addresses the question of whether he personally believes in God. Read More
The Chinese government is creating a database of 8,000 characters
and requiring all parents to name their newborns by limiting themselves
to the characters in it. A population of 1.3 billion people limited to
8,000 characters? Mayhem. I work in an office where 3 out of 10 people
are named Wong, and the database didn't even pertain to their names.
The article
I first read about this in explained that the database was being
created to "rein in a trend of unusual names," which I'm sure is code
for "government authorities are having a tough time recording all these
strange names when writing people up for crimes, so we must create a
name database to more easily keep tabs on the population." Proponents
of the idea compare names to numbers and argue that in the name of
social development, like automobiles and mobile phones, names must be
standardized. No need for me to elaborate on how many things are wrong
with that school of thought, although I did rather like the response of
Xinmin Evening News journalist Tao Duanfang -- there are many different
kinds of restaurants, but no one has ever suggested a ban on home
cooking.
This -- like flying cars -- seems like a subject just waiting for a pearl of wisdom from James Fallows. Send your bad idea nominations to ThinkingBig@theatlantic.com
Google Inc. is revamping how it develops
and prioritizes new products, giving employees a pipeline to the
company's top brass amid worries about losing its best people and
promising ideas to start-ups.
The Mountain View, Calif., company famously lets its engineers spend
one day a week on projects that aren't part of their jobs. But Google
has lacked a formal process for senior executives to review those
efforts, and some ideas have languished. Others have slipped away when
employees left the company.
"We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed," said Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt ...
It's this attitude that makes them the obvious leader in Web based e-mail. Every so often they just add new features to Gmail that take it from being the best... to being even better.
Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed,--chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides, branching horns, or magnificent bole backbones... Through all the wonderful, eventful centuries since Christ's time--and long before that--God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods; but he cannot save them from fools,--only Uncle Sam can do that.
The excerpt is from "The American Forests," an 1897 essay by crusading naturalist John Muir. Although he wrote long after westward expansion fell and burned much of the country's woodlands, his advocacy helped spur President Theodore Roosevelt to launch a major conservation program, creating the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and preserving millions of acres of American wilderness.
An ode to trees bring to mind two things for me: the Ents that Tolkien renders so beautifully in The Lord or the Rings, and the closest I've found to an earthly equivalent, the giant Sequoia and redwood forests of California. It is impossible to walk among those forests without feeling awe at proximity to creatures so magnificent in scale and ancient in age. Read More
Thinking Big is pleased to announce its first blogger on blogger argument, and against a worthy adversary: The Atlantic's Conor Clarke. Let me assure you that he is an intelligent and friendly sort, even if he does want to rob school children of summer break. If he gets his way, I propose that the following example be added to SAT prep books: "Grinch is to Christmas as ______ is to summer vacation." It's an illustration that won't leave any child behind.
Mr. Clarke initially argued for year long school here. His position: All the reasons we initially adopted summer vacation don't apply any longer. American kids score lower on standardized tests than kids from countries where everyone attends school more days each year. Even within the United States, summer vacation exacerbates the inequitable outcomes between rich kinds and poor kids, because the former enjoy edifying summer experiences, while the latter do not. Thus, we should say goodbye to summer vacation.
In the name of countless children nationwide -- and adopting this as my theme song -- I attacked his anti-summer jeremiad here, and sent reinforcements at his flank here. My campaign employed several weapons as arguments: Read More
In the current issue of The Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh offers this advice: "avoid marriage--or you too may suffer the emotional pain, the
humiliation, and the logistical difficulty, not to mention the expense,
of breaking up a long-term union at midlife for something as
demonstrably fleeting as love."
She is speaking from personal experience:
Sadly, and to my horror, I am divorcing. This was a 20-year partnership. My husband
is a good man, though he did travel 20 weeks a year for work. I am a
47-year-old woman whose commitment to monogamy, at the very end, came
unglued. This turn of events was a surprise. I don't generally even
enjoy men; I had an entirely manageable life and planned to go to my
grave taking with me, as I do most nights to my bed, a glass of merlot
and a good book. Cataclysmically changed, I disclosed everything. We
cried, we rent our hair, we bewailed the fate of our children. And yet
at the end of the day--literally during a five o'clock counseling
appointment, as the golden late-afternoon sunlight spilled over the
wall of Balinese masks--when given the final choice by our longtime
family therapist, who stands in as our shaman, mother, or priest, I
realized ... no. Heart-shattering as this moment was--a gravestone sunk
down on two decades of history--I would not be able to replace the
romantic memory of my fellow transgressor with the more suitable image
of my husband, which is what it would take in modern-therapy terms to
knit our family's domestic construct back together. In women's-magazine
parlance, I did not have the strength to "work on" falling in love
again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, Good relationships take work.
The always sharp Kerry Howley dissents, though her rebuttal is hardly an endorsement of traditional marriage:
I was most struck by the fact that Tsing Loh has such high
expectations for the longevity of marriage; so high that her eventual
disavowal of the institution is almost inevitable. It's not like she
got hitched late one night in Vegas and regretted it the next morning.
She was with her husband for 20 years. They produced two
seemingly happy kids, and Tsing Loh has managed to build a
fantastically successful career while raising them. This is what
failure looks like? Why is this split treated as a lack of will--"a
gravestone sunk down on two decades of history"--rather than a natural,
peaceful end to a happy and productive union?
As Tsing Loh says, Americans marry and divorce, and divorce and
marry, and continue to attend endless engagement parties without
deeming the institution a waste of everyone's time. Tsing Loh thinks
we're deluded, but perhaps we've adapted to the fact that modern unions
can be both meaningful and temporary. Surely, given the reality of
serial marriage, we can come up with a better metric for determining a
successful partnership than "does/does not last forever"? Tsing Loh
asks "why we still believe in marriage," but I'd like to know why she
still believes that the only successful partnership is one you're in
when you die.
Ms. Howley is correct that 20 happy years and two well-loved children aren't adequately described by the word failure. I'd even go so far as to say that lots of marriages are both meaningful and end in divorce. I do not think, however, that soceity should rethink its norms such that marriage is entered into as a temporary arrangement--unions that end before death aren't merely failures, but they are rightly regarded as partial failures in most instances of marriage.
Reader Alex Waller, who blogs here, nominates the 401(k) debit card. "Because, you know, the hard-earned savings you've locked away for
retirement should be treated like an ATM...with a hefty interest rate
each time you withdraw," he says. "It blows my mind that people nowadays are saving so little, and
spending so much...but we need yet another way to tap our savings to
encourage spending."
He goes on to point out that in a sudden medical emergency, you can already take loans out of your 401(k), negating the need for a debit card and the associated interest rate. "When would this ever, ever be anything but a terrible idea?" he asks.
I'm tentatively convinced. Any readers with a good reason for debiting down their nest egg?
On a recent cross country road trip, I stopped in Ord, Nebraska, where I interviewed Caleb T. Pollard, a 29 year old man charged with bringing young professionals, businesses, and even tourists to a rural town hours from the Interstate. The goal is for Ord, population 2,269, to avoid the fate of certain other Midwestern communities: a dearth of young people, a steady population decline, a hollowing of downtown, a flight of the professional and creative classes to the big city.
One idea for achieving that goal: "Insourcing." Read More
In e-mails I've put out asking what folks would like to see invented, a surprising three people have expressed a desire for powdered beer. I'll quote one of them:
Liquid beer is obviously more convenient for everyday use. At the same time, liquid is heavy, and there are a lot of places where having beer on hand is pretty damn enhancing as far as the general experience. Take a camping trip that involves a long hike into the woods. A concentrated alcoholic powder could drastically increase the servings of beer it's feasible to bring along. Powder would also free us from the tyranny of sports stadium and concert beer prices. I realize that underage kids would use this innovation to smuggle beer onto college campuses, which is a feature or a big depending on your age and opinions, but that shouldn't prevent the rest of us from this society changing invention.
I am a skeptic. The thing about beer is that it's got to be cold to taste good. Nor are there many powders that turn into anything as tasty as even the cheaper, more watery beers currently on the market. If it's worse than Natural Light, who needs it?
Readers, I think we can do better when it comes to dreaming up inventions that we want. Shoot me an e-mail with yours: Thinkingbig@theatlantic.com
Joseph Stiglitz has an interesting piece up at Vanity Fair arguing that "when the current crisis is over, the reputation of American style capitalism will have taken a beating."
The fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, marked the end of Communism as a
viable idea. Yes, the problems with Communism had been manifest for
decades. But after 1989 it was hard for anyone to say a word in its
defense. For a while, it seemed that the defeat of Communism meant the
sure victory of capitalism, particularly in its American form. Francis
Fukuyama went as far as to proclaim "the end of history," defining
democratic market capitalism as the final stage of social development,
and declaring that all humanity was now heading in this direction. In
truth, historians will mark the 20 years since 1989 as the short period
of American triumphalism. With the collapse of great banks and
financial houses, and the ensuing economic turmoil and chaotic attempts
at rescue, that period is over. So, too, is the debate over "market
fundamentalism," the notion that unfettered markets, all by themselves,
can ensure economic prosperity and growth. Today only the deluded would
argue that markets are self-correcting or that we can rely on the
self-interested behavior of market participants to guarantee that
everything works honestly and properly.
It's always a fraught exercise to predict what idea historians are going to take away from a period that you're still living. Were I to hazard a guess, however, I'd say that looking back on this economic crisis, historians are going to conclude that it pales in importance to the rise of China and India as economic powers -- and that their rise is due to the fact that they've essentially grafted the core insights of American capitalism into their societies.
The basic point is that the recession of 2001 wasn't a typical postwar
slump, brought on when an inflation-fighting Fed raises interest rates
and easily ended by a snapback in housing and consumer spending when
the Fed brings rates back down again. This was a prewar-style
recession, a morning after brought on by irrational exuberance. To
fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs
soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And
to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to
create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
A worthy nominee for this competition! Send your own suggestions to Thinkingbig@theatlantic.com
(My interview with Radley Balko began here. Part two is here.)
Q. You mentioned no-knock raids -- can you explain what those are, and why you object to them so regularly on your blog?
No-knock raids are when police force entry into a home without knocking
or announcing themselves first. The Supreme Court has recognized that
requiring the state to knock and announce before entering a home is
part of the Fourth Amendment -- part of the "Castle Doctrine" that
extends back into English common law. The problem is that in the same
opinion (Wilson v. Arkansas), the Court carved out enough exceptions to overwhelm the rule.
Police can now enter your home unannounced if they believe that
knocking would endanger their safety, or if they believe it would give
you time to destroy evidence, which in most cases means the time you
would need to flush your drug stash down the toilet. Read More
Charles Homans of The Washington Monthly offers an inspired nomination: "the ketchup packet." As soon as I saw the words I concurred, but I followed up to make sure I knew exactly what he meant.
"Any non-obvious reasons for your pick?" I asked.
"The design flaws are pretty obvious," he wrote. "Difficulty of operation, wastefulness, insufficient quantities for any conceivable ketchup application. That's what makes its existence in present form--and the lack of design improvements over however many decades--so baffling. Mayonnaise packets were actually able to solve most of these problems. It suggests to me that there must be someone powerful with a vested interest in the ketchup packet as it stands."
Of course, there arepowerful people behind ketchup, and dedicated men havetried and failed to challenge its status quo before.
(Send your own "Worst Idea Ever" nominations to Thinkingbig@theatlantic.com)
In an earlier post, I promised to grapple with the way political ideas
spread. The medium that's interested me most lately is talk radio.
Though every host is different, I've spent some time listening to Rush
Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin. It is verboten to criticize any
of these men if you consider yourself to be on the right side of the
political spectrum, as I do. I'll press on anyway, not only because I
enjoy a lively argument, but because these men, though their talent as
broadcasters varies widely in the order I've listed them, do similar
violence to a healthy public discourse -- and do a particular
disservice to the conservatives and libertarians most loyal to them.
In
fact, I want to address this post to their listeners, for having grown
up in Orange County, California, the admiring grandson of grandparents
who are Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin fans respectively, I've met enough
talk radio aficionados to know that many are intelligent, devoted citizens
with kindly dispositions, and a far cry from the negative stereotypes
that prevail in some quarters. Those folks should note that this isn't
a thoughtless, knee-jerk condemnation of the programs that they enjoy,
nor is it a call to kick Messieurs Limbaugh, Hannity and Levin off the
radio. This is a carefully considered, honestly held, and pointed
argument: though I maybe unable to persuade these men to take stock of
specific shortcomings that do you a disservice, perhaps I can convince
you to demand better. The quality of our political ideas are at stake. Read More
In March 1881, The Atlantic published "The Story of a Great Monopoly," one of the earliest pieces of progressive muckraking to run in a national, well-respected magazine--and the first exposé of the Standard Oil Trust to be taken seriously. "The issue in which the article appeared sold out seven printings, and it helped bring antitrust legislation to the forefront of national debate," notes Sage Stossel, a longtime Atlantic editor who is one of the magazine's most knowledgeable and dedicated historians.
It is no wonder that the article augured the passage of the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 -- after laying out numerous specific complaints against the biggest corporations of the day, it concludes by offering as powerful an objection against the idea of monopoly power as has ever been written: Read More
(Part one of my interview with Radley Balko is here.)
You've criticized the militarization of law enforcement. It's a topic The Atlanticcovered
in the aftermath of the Columbine shooting, when police departments all
over America began encouraging a SWAT team mentality among regular
officers. Why is this war mentality a bad thing? Aren't there heavily
armed bad guys who are literally causing war-like casualties in urban
neighborhoods?
The military is trained to kill people and break things -- to
annihilate a foreign enemy. The police are charged with protecting our
rights while securing the peace. Those are two very different missions,
and it's dangerous to conflate them. But that seems to be what's
happening. Read More
Sam Jordison thinks so, assuming that the metric used is how many new words a genre contributes to the English language. His post is at its best when it delves into particular linguistic contributions. Read More
At the top of the ideas page, The Atlantic's Josh Green suggests that pundits be penalized for being woefully wrong.
You can blow the biggest questions of the day, time after time, and still claim to be a discerning seer. Well, there ought to be consequences. It's not as if blogs and propaganda outlets don't keep track
of this stuff. In Washington, regulation is back in fashion. If we can
regulate tricky things like credit-default swaps, surely we can
regulate pundits.
That pesky First Amendment prevents us from silencing them outright.
But couldn't the more reputable media outlets reach a gentleman's
agreement to stop inviting commentary from the very worst offenders, at
least for a respectable interlude? Pundits should have to explain their
bad calls (and grovel?) as a condition of return.
I've got a variation on his idea that's easier to implement: on certain matters, pundits ought to put their money where their mouth is.
Elsewhere I'm interviewing Radley Balko about his views on the criminal justice system. After checking in on his blog, I can't resist posting the video he describes as follows: "No, he wasn't faking... Cool footage of a Belgian soccer player who collapses of a heart attack
on the field, then jolts back to consciousness thanks to an internal
defibrillator he'd had installed due to a heart condition."
As a kid, I desperately wanted one of the hover boards featured in Back to the Future II. I wasn't alone. The devices seemed so compelling that Snopes had to debunk rumors of their existence that circulated in elementary schools including mine. Even in the films, however, hover boards were for kids and teenagers. The dream for the 16-and-up set was the flying DeLorean, perhaps the most iconic depiction of humanity's long running, ongoing quest for the flying car.
A staple of futuristic films and cartoons, it feels as though we've been promised the flying car as surely as a machine to teleport us from place to place -- and that we're destined to be disappointed for quite awhile longer. Though we lack teleportation technology, however, we possess the tools to fly and to drive. So why no flying car? What's the hold up? I've long thought the fundamental flaw in our approach is a focus on making cars fly, rather than making a plane that drives better.
And it seems my hunch is being vindicated. Read More
Sen. Tom Coburn flags the worst ideas in stimulus spending.
Atul Gawande reports from "McAllen, Texas, the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world," explaining what it is that they're doing wrong.
Returning to the NFL at age 40 after surgery and a season wherein you threw as many interceptions as touchdowns? Say it ain't so, Brett.
Radley Balko is a senior editor at Reason Magazine whose award-winning investigative work focuses on criminal justice and civil liberties. His blog, The Agitator, is one of the most carefully curated resources for stories on the same subject.
Q.In your work, you've frequently reported on police abuses and the appropriate role of law enforcement in a free society. Though you're often writing in regard to specific controversies, I wonder if you have any general criticisms of the American criminal justice system. What's wrong about where we're at? What are the most urgent improvements you would recommend? Read More
VIDEO OF THE DAY/June 16, 2009 -- This video helps explain why, contra my Atlantic colleague Conor Clarke, I do not think that summer school should become the norm for American children.
IDEA FROM THE ARCHIVES/June 16, 2009 -- Any history of influential articles published by The Atlantic
must include "Broken Windows," a 1982 cover story by James Q. Wilson
and George Kelling about the relationship between police and
neighborhood safety. The theory it proposed is credited by many (though not
all) with reversing the lengthy crime epidemic that plagued
New York City and other urban centers. Former NYPD
Commissioner James Bratton called Mr. Wilson "my intellectual mentor."
A head of the Justice Department's research arm once said
that the piece "has had a greater impact than any other article on
serious policing."
On re-reading it, I
am struck by the fact that although the "broken windows" part of its argument is conventional wisdom these days, an equally
prominent part of the article is all but forgotten. In fact, the forgotten part includes what strikes today's reader as its most radical--some would say reactionary--idea.
What's the best idea you've ever had? What's the worst? Is there anything big or small that you'd love for someone to invent? How did people illustrate the act of having an idea prior to the light bulb? Instead of flying cars, why not planes that drive better? Why do so many ideas occur in the shower?
These are the questions that occurred to me immediately after I found out I'd be writing a blog about ideas for The Atlantic Online. I jotted them down in a notebook. Naturally, it wasn't on hand the next afternoon when I found myself waiting for a friend at a Los Angeles café. What I discovered, once the waitress lent me a pen, is that necessity is the mother of writing on napkins. These I stuffed into my pockets, the fragile squares overflowing with frenetically scrawled brilliance I thrilled at sharing. Could a single blog contain them? Alas, we'll never know: into the wash went the pants and around they spun. Once in the dryer the napkins separated into pieces so small that picking them from the surrounding load took an hour. Ideas survive laundering about as well as insights from social science survive the legislative process.
One funny thing about ideas is how difficult they can be to recover once forgotten. Luckily each day is rife with new insights, and the ones you'll get here mostly wound up in that notebook after all. Repeat visitors to this blog will see several regular features -- "Idea in the News," a daily look at some notion pulled from the current events; a "Quote of the Day" and a "Video of the Day" on the subject of ideas, broadly construed; "Ideas in the Archives," a look back at some of the best think pieces ever to appear in The Atlantic; occasional Q&As wherein I press smart people on what's occupying their minds; and if my readers help out, a sample of your e-mails on any topic related to the life of the mind, and specifically about the worst ideas you've ever run across (more about that in a minute).
Beyond the recurring features, I'll engage whatever conversations are happening in the blogosphere, or at least the ones that dovetail with this project. One theme I hope to tackle repeatedly is the way that political and cultural ideas spread in a democracy. I make my living as a journalist partly because I believe that public discourse acts as a crucible for free people. It tests our notions, destroys the worst, and strengthens the best -- or it does so when it functions properly. Unfortunately, I think that America's national conversation is in a bad way. More on that later too.
I encourage readers to comment (civilly!), and to e-mail me often. As noted, one sort of e-mail I'd love to get is anything nominating a "Worst Idea Ever." Interpret that liberally. I'm eager to receive a paragraph or two on bad historical ideas, bad ideas you've had in your own life, bad ideas observed at the workplace or in your field, unfortunate trends in the culture, anecdotes about bad ideas -- silly and serious, short and long, whatever you've got send it my way. I can be reached at conor.friedersdorf@gmail.com
Finally, do bookmark this page or paste this in your RSS.
Tim O'Reilly talks to Bob Cohn about Twitter, transparency, and his delight in seeing "geeks playing with sensors, with robotics, with building things."...
Anti-drug activist Joseph A. Califano Jr. explains to Scott Stossel why America's substance-abuse problem is more potent--and pervasive--than ever before....
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan talks to Bob Cohn about national standards, the good parts of No Child Left Behind, and his roadtrip with Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton.
...
University President John Hennessy talks to Bob Cohn about green technology, Condi Rice's return to campus, and what it takes to get admitted to Stanford these days....
The federal judge who ruled that so-called intelligent design cannot be taught in public schools talks to Bob Cohn about why the debate over evolution will not end....
Curtis Sittenfeld, author of American Wife and Prep, talks to Scott Stossel about chick lit, George and Laura Bush, and those "disgusting sex scenes."...
Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin speaks to Megan McArdle about moving the Republican Party past the politics of personality and into the realm of new ideas....
Former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino talks to Bob Cohn about Obama's likability, the media's complacency, and whether she was wrong to turn the other cheek...
White House health care advisor Ezekiel Emanuel talks to Philips CEO Gerard Kleisterlee about the incentives that make medical technologies more and more expensive...
Jeffrey Goldberg asks Israeli Ambassador-Designate Michael Oren whether the Jewish State has failed in its mission to provide a secure haven for the Jewish people...
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan explains to Bob Schieffer why American schools have fallen behind, and how the Obama administration plans to regain ground...
James Bennet asks Susan Rice, American ambassador to the United Nations, whether the new U.S. outlook can be labeled as idealist or realist...
from THE MAGAZINE
The Atlantic's July/August issue is devoted to ideas that can change the world. Highlights:
energy
The Coming Green Economy Barack Obama is preaching the gospel of clean energy. Can he succeed where Jimmy Carter failed? by Joshua Green
technology
Get Smarter Humans have survived the centuries by evolving into quick-witted creatures. Now technology and pharmacology provide a new boost to intelligence. by Jamais Cascio
business
Dr. Doom Has Some Good News Nouriel Roubini is a famous—and famously prescient—economic pessimist. So why is he smiling? by James Fallows
