The Daily Blague

Eric endeavors to take a scientific view of jealousy (not a current affliction, thank goodness), but does not quite succeed.

I thought of my own experiences with jealousy. I had been extremely jealous in my first relationship. I was constantly suspecting my boyfriend of infidelity and constructing heartbreaking scenarios in my mind. In later relationships, the level of jealousy declined dramatically and precipitously.

Could this be because my body senses that, by now, a sufficient amount of genetic material must have found its way into the creation of some new entities that will be able to carry on my genetic legacy?

I had assumed that it could be explained by how, in my first relationship, I felt like I had found something that I had been waiting for for my entire life. It was so special and so wonderful, I was terrified to lose it. So the idea of anything threatening to take my boyfriend away from me sent me into a hysterical state. Since our relationship had begun with a kiss, a kiss with another seemed like it might be the beginning of my end.

Now, many years later and with plenty of experience with heartache, I know that I will probably be able to rebuild myself after being brutally demolished, and I am also a better judge of what constitutes a true threat to the relationship. So, consequently, I am less jealous.

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Matins

¶ Only yesterday, we heard for the first time of Mike Rose, whose books about intelligence and education (and the disconnect between them) promise to appear in our reading pile PDQ; now, today, we encounter a blog about apparel manufactoring in particular and the “sustainable factory floor” in particular, Kathleen Fasanella’s Fashion-Incubator. Adverted to this Web log for designer entrepreneurs by the tirely Tyler Cowen, we fastened with great interest on this discussion of the alarming and fundamentally bogus split between “knowledge workers” and worker workers. Complete with references to Mike Rose!

Lauds

¶ Nige responds to the news that Kazuo Ishiguro’s best-known novel, The Remains of the Day, is being adapted for the musical theatre. We are in complete accord with his dismay.

Prime

¶ In a wittily-titled entry, “Legends of the Fall,” Joshua Brown deconstructs the swarm of financial pieces that presume to posit seasonal doom based on historical indicators &c. Eyewash, cries Mr Brown. What he says for investors goes for us onlookers as well.

Tierce

¶ Here’s a story to chill if not kill the idea that natural ills can be vanquished with genuine once-and-for-all finality. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the cessation of smallpox vaccination 20 years ago opened the door to monkeypox — a not unforeseen development. If you want to see what monkeypox looks like, click here. (Not Exactly Rocket Science)

Sext

¶ New boy in town, “sleight of mind” artist Matthew Michael Cooper makes a big boo-boo mistake (from which he is not shielded by interviewer or editor, and in response to a question out of left field), but he responds well to correction in the comments. New York makes people better people!

Nones

¶ Once upon a time, colonial powers would have dreamed of doing what China is doing, in the way of running railroads into Southeast Asia. China, which still calls itself the Central Nation, is probably untroubled by Western-style pricks of conscience. (China Post; via Real Clear Nation)

Vespers

¶ Lizzie Skurnick does a bang-up job of highlighting the comical parallels — sure to be savored no more richly than by the author himself — between the media hoo-ha already surrounding Freedom, the Jonathan Franzen book that came out, officially, only yesterday, and the awkward scrutiny that’s brought to bear on the novel’s characters, all of them “frequently undone by how poorly their public selves match their private desires.”

Compline

¶ George Packer marks the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the mission that has achieved nothing in over seven years. (Interesting Times)

Have A Look

¶ Josh Barkey’s modest proposal for green high school students. Guys, that is. (Good)

¶ Jane Fonda, Juliette Lewis plug Scissor Sisters. (Joe.My.God.)

¶ Boring Conference 2010: Save the date! 11 December, “somewhere in London.”

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At Big Questions Online, Alan Jacobs writes about an experience that thousands of thoughtful people have had on the Internet in these early days: becoming too angry to type. There is always only one immediate cure.

The author and commenters bristled at my critique. I bristled right back. The argument escalated. At one point, I said to myself, “All right, you want to play hardball, we’ll play hardball” — and I would have cut loose and said exactly what I wanted to say, except that at that moment my hands were shaking too violently for me to type accurately. I looked at my trembling fingers for a moment. Then I closed that browser tab and spent a few minutes removing all Anglican-related blogs from my bookmarks and my RSS reader. I stopped reading those blogs and have never looked at them again to this day. I don’t think I’ve ever made a better decision.

A now-famous cartoon on the xkcd “webcomics” site shows a stick figure typing away at his computer keyboard as a voice from outside the frame says, “Are you coming to bed?” The figure replies: “I can’t. This is important. . . . Someone is wrong on the Internet.” I have thought a lot about why people get so hostile online, and I have come to believe it is primarily because we live in a society with a hypertrophied sense of justice and an atrophied sense of humility and charity, to put the matter in terms of the classic virtues.

(via MetaFilter)

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Matins

¶ Much as we liked James Surowiecki’s column in this week’s New Yorker, “Are You Being Served?,” we wish that it were a tad more penetrating. 

It seems pretty clear to us that “most companies have a split personality when it comes to” human beings. And this is only natural: the modern company, boosted by the extraordinary leaps in productivity that were realized by the Industrial Revolution, has always sought to employ as few human beings as possible. It is for the machines to do the work; in an ideal world, machines can run the factory as well. And who were the customers of large companies? Other companies. It is difficult to imagine, but until the Second World War, the different kinds of mass produced goods intended for the general public could all be sold through a few catalogues and some not-very-large stores.

“The Consumer Society” has been, by and large, a nighmare for the modern company. And, in the everlasting fashion of modern companies, it has simply passed on the headache of that nightmare (the cost of doing business) to customers and employees alike.

Lauds

¶ Anisse Gross begins her interview with the incredible kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson with what might be the stickiest question that one could ask: what distinguishes Ganson’s constructions from amusing toys? Be sure sure to click through to The Rumpus and enjoy the YouTube clips of Ganson’s art.

Prime

¶ At Baseline Scenario, guest Ilya Podolyako outlines the improvidence of relying, as the Dodd-Frank Act does, upon clearing houses to stabilize the market in derivatives. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Tierce

¶ In case you’re bothered this evening by a grouch who believes that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket &c, you might consider passing on this bit of news: archeologists working in Turkey have discovered evidence of “successful” brain surgery (ie, it didn’t kill the patient) among reamins of a Bronze Age settlement. No evidence of Bronze Age anesthetics is mentioned. (New Scientist)

Sext

¶ Having mistaken Elif Batuman, author of the wildly popular lit crit romp, The Possessed, to be a person of the masculine gender, Ujala Sehgal, our favorite Millions intern, attempts to make amends. As penance, the author suggests that she buy the book.

Nones

¶ Was anybody else surprised by the absence, from Steve Coll’s Pakistan piece in this week’s Talk of the Town, of the word “feudal“? It’s true that we’ve felt a bit wild throwing “feudal” around in our discussions of the broken rump of the Raj — or did, that is, until we read Sabrina Tavernise’s story in Saturday’s Times, “Upstarts Chip Away at Power of Pakistani Elite.”

Vespers

¶ At Good, Mark Peters laments the perverse misusage of the term “Orwellian” — “It’s as if we called criminal scum “Batmanistic” because Batman is so effective in beating them senseless” — but acknowledges that the pigs are out of the barn.

Compline

¶ It goes without saying that we had to read anything with a title as wrong-headed as this: “Urban Legends: Why suburbs, not cities, are the answer.” The further we got in Joel Kotkin’s piece, however, the righter it all seemed, provided that we understood it to be about the deleterious impact of unnecessarily large business organizations, not that of population densities. Cities don’t produce poverty. Mr Kotkin reverses his cause and its effect. (Foreign Policy: via Real Clear World)

Have A Look

¶ Ted Wilson, housesitting, kills the neighbors’ dog. (The Rumpus)

¶ Ask for directions and save thousands. (Good)

¶ Linda “Lovelace” declines to provide an autograph, but sort of does so, anyway. Good for her. (Letters of Note)

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Double Dangler: “Days from death, Fla. wildlife officials free plastic jar that was stuck on bear cub’s head.” At Language Log, Geoffrey Pullum pretends to scratch his head:

Who was just days from death? Well, this is a headline, so we have no prior context, so we don’t initially know. But we see that someone is days from death, and the comma tells us that this is an adjunct introducing a clause that is almost certainly going to tell us, so we read on, and we hit the main clause subject: Florida wildlife officials. We are all mortal, and some day every Florida wildlife official must prepare to meet the Creator of all wildlife, so it is the most natural thing in the world to take them as the target of predication that we need, and we fill it in: we understand (for a split second) that some Florida wildlife officials were just days from death. So now, what did they do?

And at that point we learn that they freed a plastic jar. Even though they were dying. The story is getting stranger and stranger. Next we learn that the jar was freed from the embarrassing predicament of being stuck on a young bear’s head. Still not a lot of sense to any of it. But we read on, and finally we encounter the explanatory sentence: “Biologists say the cub was days away from death because the jar made it impossible to eat or drink.” OK, puzzlement over. The cub was just days from death, the jar was on the cub’s head, the wildlife officials are fine, they freed the cub from its jar-imprisonment by freeing the jar from its bear-attachment, everything is now clear.

(via Felix Salmon)

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Matins

¶ What’s this? Golf courses promote biodiversity? In England, it appears, a study that looked at over two hundred links found that a large majority were as ecologically beneficial as parks and preserves. The bottom line is, as usual, that we didn’t know as much as we thought we did. (via The Awl)

Lauds

¶ Although we’re still enthusiastic about going to the movies, we agree with Bob Lefsetz, writing at The Rumpus, that “If you truly want to succeed in the entertainment industry today, if you want to have a long career, you’ve got to think small.”

Prime

¶ At Weakonomics, Philip offers one of those contrarian, too-good-to-be-true solutions to an everyday problem — pet animal overpopulation, in this case — that really ought to be put to the test right away.

Tierce

¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about that most Proustian of science topics, time and memory. Why does time seem to slow down in a crisis? (The Frontal Cortex)

Sext

¶ From a site that we’ve begun following: I Like Boring Things. What to do when a conference called “Interesting” is canceled? There’s something almost daring about hosting a deliberately Boring Conference — considering all the inadvertent ones. 

Nones

¶ William James week at The Second Pass — last week marked the centenary of the philosopher’s death — has been extended a bit, to accommodate a guest post by James biographer Robert Richardson, who writes about James’s interest in finding a “moral equivalent of war.”

Vespers

¶ Sonya Chung is re-reading The Great Gatsby — she’s going to be teaching it. Among the thoughts that a third reading has occasioned, the most intriguing, if somewhat irrelevant is that in Heath Ledger we lost an actor who might truly have realized the strange Mr Gatz. Her more classroom-appropriate observations are, even so, fresh and astute. (The Millions)

Compline

¶ In an interview with Salon‘s Alex Jung, labor lawyer Thomas Geoghegan makes some interesting points about the difficulty of comparing productivity in the US and in Germany. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Have A Look

¶ Garland Grey’s bullet-pointed Bildungsroman. (The Bygone Bureau)

¶ Truffle hunting in Northern Italy has claimed seventeen lives this season. (Independent; via reddit)

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From Research Digest Blog:

As the dirt and germs are wiped away, we’re left feeling not just bodily but also morally cleansed – a kind of metaphorical virtuosity that leads us to judge others more harshly. That’s according to Chen-Bo Zhong‘s team, who invited 58 undergrads to a lab filled with spotless new equipment. Half the students were asked to clean their hands with an antiseptic wipe so as not to soil the shiny surfaces. Afterwards all the students rated the morality of six societal issues including pornography and littering. Those who’d wiped their hands made far harsher judgments than those who didn’t.

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The Editor dropped everything over the weekend in order to read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, a copy of which he had obtained just a teeny bit early. Here’s a snip from his preliminary report, which is really just another plug for what he still finds to be the stickiest Franzen novel, Strong Motion.

Is it as good as The Corrections? Yes, it is as good as The Corrections. It is as least that good — so fear not. The question is a dumb one, although I’d find it a lot more interesting if people asked, instead, “Is it as good as Strong Motion?” Strong Motion is Mr Franzen’s second novel. I’ve read it twice, and loved it twice. It is as good as The Corrections and Freedom and, just possibly, better: it is not in the least little bit satirical. There are no laughs in Strong Motion, except for the kind of laughs that Dostoevsky so unwittingly prompts. Ha ha.

More at The Daily Blague /reader.

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Matins

¶ With a manner only slightly less facetious than that of Gail Collins, Claire Berlinski holds Turkey’s Iran policy up to something like ridicule. The only way that she can explain it is by analogy to the Turkish preference for emotion over logic. Not safe for the politically correct! But good fun withal. (World Affairs; via Real Clear World)

Lauds

¶ Writing about the extent of classical-music ignorance in Britain, Lynsey Hanley makes an eloquent plea for “a common culture, the riches of which are shared, rather than hoarded.” (Guardian)

Prime

¶ At The Awl, “Carl Hegelman” directs our attention to two goodly solutions to our economic disarray: Robert Reich’s proposal to turn defense contractors into infrastucturists, and Milton Friedman’s negative income tax. (If that isn’t one from Column A and one from Column B, we don’t know what is.)

Tierce

¶ E O Wilson, once an early proponent of kin selection theory — an attempt to square the selfishness of natural selection with manifestations of altruism — now spearheads what he thinks is a better idea, which Brendan Keim, writing at Wired Science, never quite calls “colonial selection,” although that’s what it sounds like to us.

Sext

¶ Daniel Adler approaches comfort food from the vantage of a road warrior, and attempts to make bánh mì in his hotel bathroom. It’s all about process. (The Bygone Bureau)

Nones

¶ We continue to believe that the instability of Pakistan, brought to some sort of tipping point by dreadful flooding that has brought about a devastation that the government seems unable or unwilling to redress, is the most alarming crisis on the planet today. Of all the pieces to which we’ve linked in recent months, none has displayed the scope of Ahmen Rashid’s “The Anarchic Republic of Pakistan,” at The National Interest. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Vespers

¶ Michelle Dean unpacks the “Franzenfreude,” and shakes out the possibility that Jonathan Franzen is highly regarded by critics because he’s the best writer to cover what is uncritically understood to be the American Scene. She notes that Mr Franzen himself is not as deluded on this point as his admirers seem to be. (The Awl)

Reading Freedom with the greatest relish, the Editor wishes that more readers would bracket Jennifer Egan with Jonathan Franzen as a smart, generous, comprehensive American writer with a first-class prose style. Ms Egan happens to be white, but even if you can’t have everything you can have a more inclusive pantheon.  

Compline

¶ Hats off Andrew Price, for asking “Does Anyone Know What the Point of Prison Is, Anyway?” It’s a very practical question, because only a clear and distinct idea of the point of incarceration will fix our bloated, if not entirely broken, prison system. (Good)

Have A Look

¶ Flat Plans. (The Best Part)

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Nige gets wet, and aren’t we jealous..

Getting off the homeward train last night, I stepped straight into torrential, monsoon-style rain, coming down in sheets. As I strode away from the station, I found I’d been joined under my large umbrella by a cheery young lady of Chinese origin who happened to be going my way. She was visiting from Oxford, where she was studying for a PhD in mathematics. She already had a Masters, and her employers (in the City) were subsidising her PhD. Clearly a bright spark then – and she was a violinist, on her way to see a musician friend. The time passed agreeably enough under my umbrella (cue Hollies song). At the high street, our ways parted and she skipped off into the rain. By the time I got home I was soaked to the skin, the wake from a passing car having thoroughly finished the job. This morning there was a large garden snail asleep on the front door. On the inside.

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Matins

¶ GOP panjandrum Kenneth Mehlman has come out as a gay man. (Atlantic) We share Joe’s exasperation.

Lauds

¶ It’s a commonplace — at least among serious readers — that even the greatest novels change over time: the Emma that you read at sixteen is not the Emma that you’ll read at forty, even though not a single word in Jane Austen’s text has been changed. We do the changing. At The Online Photographer, Michael Johnston reports on an interesting variant of that phenomenon: you can never really go back to using equipment that you used to rely on every day.

Prime

¶ So, it has come to this, the current debate about unemployment: “Strucs vs Cycs.” Will “business cycles” restore jobs? Or is there a mismatch between jobs and workers that the market will not solve (in anyone’s lifetime, that is)? We agree (as usual) with Felix Salmon’s refinement on the structuralist position.

Tierce

¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about the crash in housing prices in terms of the cognitive bias known as “loss aversion.” Clearly, what’s needed is a positive rhetoric for freeing homeowners from albatross properties.

Sext

¶ 4chan, a site that the Guardian calls “the id of the Internet,” is about to be transformed, via initial public offering, into Canvas. Julian Dibbell writes about Christopher Poole’s venture at MIT Technology Review. (via kottke.org)

Nones

¶ Tyler Cowen on Eliza Griswold’s The Tenth Parallel: “This is the book which everyone is reading…” Our copy is on order!

Vespers

¶ Richard Greenwald writes perceptively about the quest for authenticity in today’s urban writing, which, although he doesn’t mention them, clearly betray “out-of-towner” anxieties. The work of Jonathan Lethem is a perfect foil for this discussion, because the writer grew up in a gentrifying household: Is he really Dean Street?

Compline

¶ One of the Editor’s most electric memories is the look on his adoptive mother’s face when he announced, at the age of ten or so, that he was going to change his name when he grew up — anything but the name that he’d been given would be better. 

In those days, the routine, common among immigrants, of changing names, especially from foreign, difficult ones into tony English ones, was just beginning to fade. Now, Sam Roberts reminds us in the Times, it has become quite unusual.

Have A Look

¶ A project that perfectly captures the mentality of Ayn Rand’s fans. (Brainiac)

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The Editor has begun to write about his (momentarily) favorite movie, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer. Also, he has come into possession of a copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

As Reading Notes go, this one is fairly incoherent, but it’s a start.

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From “Goodbye, Children,” the latest entry at Dominique Browning’s Slow Love Life:

My younger son Theo, returns to California for one more year of college. He has spent much of the summer with me, so once again, as I wrote about in my book, Slow Love, I’ve been able to be a Stay at Home Mom with an actual child at home. It took some adjustment. Granola disappeared as if locusts had visited. “You’ve forgotten the way 21 year olds eat, Mom.” The photograph here–which I did not set up, but instead, came home to one afternoon–shows what passed for putting up clothes. In the living room. “But they’re up off the floor, Mom.” My five-year-old friend Sophia came to visit, clapped her hand over her mouth in mock horror and burst into giggles at the sight of his room. She dubbed him Messy Theo. I tried explaining the virtues of an ordered environment. He tried explaining the irrelevance of chores that were done only to be undone within the same day. And we had great talks, walks, swims, meals, and enjoyed one another’s company. We watched rainbows dissolve, and I got to wish him goodnight for weeks, the same way I did every night through his and his brother’s childhoods, the way my mother did in mine: “Fais de beaux reves.”

By the time you are reading this, I’ll be driving him to Providence. And I can promise you, the moment he and his backpack hit the lobby of the train station, I’ll be sobbing.

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To read the complete text for any given hour, simply click on the time of day (Matins, Lauds, &c).

Matins

¶ In an Op-Ed piece in the Times, Christine Stansell reviews the rearguard — some would say shameful — history of Southern opposition to women’s suffrage, noting that Mississippi did not ratify the 19th Amendment until 1984. (Why’d they bother?) We have now come to take the view that the American Civil War ended in an armed truce, not a Union Victory.

Lauds

¶ At The House Next Door, Elise Nakhnikian argues concisely that Swing Time is the best of the Astaire-Rogers movies.

Prime

¶ Gee whiz, here’s a great idea: let’s turn a major chain of department stores into virtual warehouses and fulfillment centers for online shoppers! That way, they can buy what they want and pick it up at a nearby location, checking it out in the process. It’s certainly working for Nordstrom. Stephanie Clifford reports, in the Times.

Tierce

¶ Finally! An explanation of TED! What “TED” stands for. (“Technology. Entertainment. Design.”) Who started it and who runs it. (Richard Saul Wurman; Chris Anderson). Who pays for what? (Fast Company; via The Morning News)

Sext

¶ We hereby resolve to become better Netizens by following Slate‘s slayer of “bogus trend stories,” Jack Shafer. We like to think that we can smell an under-researched story, heavy on anecdotes contributed by the writer’s friends of friends, but doubtless Mr Shafer can teach us a thing or two. Here, he goes after a recent story in the Times that attributed a rising number of National Park Service searches and rescues to the misguided use of “technology.”

Nones

¶ It is regrettably difficult to interest Americans in the problems of campaign financing and political contributions (not the same thing), and Jane Mayer’s exposé (in the current issue of The New Yorker) of the activities of Charles and David Koch, oilmen whose businesses have only to lose from enhanced environmental protection, is unlikely to rouse an angry citizenry.

Vespers

¶ Alexander Chee tops off an entry about being a published novelist who keeps a blog, and why he continues to keep a blog, with eight pieces of advice for anyone following a similar path. Especially if keeping a blog is the publicist’s idea. Mr Chee is on his second blog.

Compline

¶ A reader of Marginal Revolution asks Tyler Cowen what he thinks of the profession of diplomacy. Not much, is Mr Cowen’s unsurprising answer.

Have A Look

¶ Tastes like chicken. (Discoblog)

¶ Central Asian majesty. (3 Quarks Daily; from Boston Globe)

¶ Pillar of Fire. (Telegraph; via Bad Astronomy)

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From the de profundis of reddit:

Last night, my adult kids and I were sitting in the living room and I said to them, “I never want to live in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and fluids from a bottle. If that ever happens, just pull the plug.”

They got up, unplugged the computer, and threw out my wine.

They are such assholes.

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To read the complete text for any given hour, simply click on the time of day (Matins, Lauds, &c).

Matins

¶ We begin and end the day with pieces about the late Tony Judt. First, friend and colleague Timothy Garton Ash writes about the spectateur engagé at NYRBlog. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lauds

¶ At the Guardian, Stephen Emms makes a bold claim — but one with which we’re in complete agreement: the Pet Shop Boys’ “Being Boring,” twenty years old next month, is the best pop single of all time. (via  Joe.My.God)

Prime

¶ The Reformed Broker (Joshua Brown) foresees civil strife in America arising from contention about public-sector pension benefits and other entitlements.

Our response to this scenario (which seems realistic enough) is that the public/private sectors ought to be largely if not entirely merged, into a third sector that is neither private nor public: highly regulated not-for-profit business organizations. We don’t see a reason for tegarding housing as a private good, but teaching as a public one; all we see on this point is sentimental muddle.

And when we say “highly regulated,” we don’t mean “by the government.” Even the regulators ought to be not-for-profit organizations. (How nice it would be if the Securities and Exchange Commission could be one!)

Tierce

¶ At Wired Science, Duncan Geere writes about the first manned space ship that will be launched without the support of a government. Think on’t!

Sext

¶ Chris Lehmann’s Rich People Things is available for pre-ordering, if, like us, you’ve come to recognize in the Awl writer one of our more mordant social prophets. Today’s target is the vaguely-defined fear of a weak recovery and of “Obamanomics” that supposedly prevents firms from hiring.

Nones

¶ At The Wilson Quarterly, Daniel Akst writes about the friendship deficit in American life. We’re widely recognized as friendly people, but we’re not correspondingly committed.

Vespers

¶ In “Beauty, Youth, and Their Discontents,” Ujala Seghal ruminates on four beautiful protagonists who don’t end well, Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Eustacia Vye. (The Millions)

Compline

¶ At The Bygone Bureau, Darryl Campbell, who never met Tony Judt or even went to New York University, testifies to the impact that Judt’s engagement with the world had upon his intellectual (and professional) development.

Have A Look

¶ Bertrand Russell’s “Liberal Decalogue” — ten commandments for good wrongologists. (Common Sense Atheism)

¶ Quicksand: some people crave it! (via kottke.org) 

¶ Reddi-Bacon. (No, not a WIN)

¶ International Druthers List. (Let a Thousand Nations Bloom)

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From Philip Greenspun’s Weblog:
“Are you on the north or south side of the highway?” I asked the first clerk, a man.
“There is no north or south. We’re in the same shopping plaza as Bertucci’s,” was the reply.
“If Rt. 9 is oriented east and west, doesn’t that mean that there would have to be north and south sides of the road?” was my follow-up.
“I don’t know anything about north or south,” came the reply.
“Boston is to your east,” was my next attempt to orient the guy, “as is the Atlantic Ocean and Europe.”
“Now you’re being rude to me,” sulked the clerk.

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