¶ In my building, as I’m sure in others, when somebody boards with a handful of packages or groceries or whatnot, somebody else will ask “What floor?” offering to relieve the incommoded passenger of pressing a button. I make this offer all the time. But I rarely accept it. That’s because I find it distressing to watch people try to find the correct button. You’d think there wouldn’t be anything to it, but it stumps everyone. Everyone has to aim a hovering, uncertain finger, and almost everyone takes three or four seconds to find the button. An unnecessary challenge! And obviously one that no one expects. I thought that it was just the poor design of our building’s elevator panels, so imagine my surprise when I came across this the other day.

The Floor Effect: Impoverished Spatial Memory for Elevator Buttons

People typically remember objects to which they have frequently been exposed, suggesting thatmemory is a byproduct of perception. However, prior research has shown that people have exceptionally poor memory for the features of some objects (e.g., coins) to which they have been exposed over the course of many years. Here we examined how people remember the spatial layout of the buttons on a frequently-used elevator panel, to determine if physical interaction (rather than simple exposure) would ensure the incidental encoding of spatial information. Participants who worked in an eight-story office building displayed very poor recall for the elevator panel, but above-chance performance on a recognition test. Performance was related to how often and how recently the person had used the elevator. In contrast to their poor memory for the spatial layout of the elevator buttons, most people readily recalled small distinctivegraffiti on the elevator wall. In a more implicit test, the majority were able to locate their office floor and eighth floor buttons when asked to point toward these buttons when in the actual elevator, with the button labels covered. However, identification was very poor for other floors (including the first floor), suggesting that even frequent interaction with information does not always lead to accurate spatial memory. The findings have implications for understanding the complex relationships among attention, expertise and memory.

¶ How publishing slush piles “work”: two New Yorker stories, retitled and reattributed for experimental purposes — and universally rejected. (The Review Review; via ArtsJournal)

¶ Anagrams > Earworms. (Slashdot; via ArtsJournal)

¶ James Atlas writes about a Harvard classmate, Richard Hyland, who managed, in his own view, not to get an undergraduate education, even though he went on to become a professor of law at Rutgeers (that’s the scary part). His college years were preoccupied by the American War in Vietnam. So, now, he’s taking a poetry class at Rutgers. All better!

Atlas thinks that this a great story of self-renewal. I think it’s proof that even the greatest universities in the land — perhaps the greatest more egregiously — have been failing to teach for about forty years.

¶ Michael Winerip writes about not having it all.

Ms. Slaughter of Princeton offers several suggestions to make companies more parent-friendly besides working at home: lots of teleconferencing; no Saturday meetings; less travel; leaving the office by 6:30; a school day that matches the work day.

But these same benefits that lift you also hold you back. Foreign correspondents can’t cover a war and travel less. A reporter’s interview is going to be better if it’s done in person instead of teleconferencing. News is as likely to break out on Saturday morning as Wednesday at noon when the kids are in school.

The workplace, I believe, can be made more parent-friendly, but it’s not going to be all that friendly, which is why they call it work.

The core problem isn’t the workplace, it’s work.

Those jobs that refuse to be friendly are often the hardest, most time-consuming, most unpredictable, require the most personal sacrifice and, to me, deserve the best compensation and most corporate status.

Which does not mean that these are the people whom I admire most or want to spend my time with. When I see a man who has reached the top of a company only by making work his entire life, I think, what about the kids, what about the wife? And it’s no different when it’s a woman.

If you ask me, Anne-Marie Slaughter still has it right about work.

By a stroke of great editorship, The Nation features reviews, this week, of new books about Greece and Turkey, two countries that heartily wish the other didn’t exist yet are too self-absorbed at the moment to squabble. ¶ Mark Mazower goes over a long list of new books about the mess in Greece that are all, you’ll be happy to hear, in Greek, so you probably couldn’t read them even if you thought you ought to. We might just order copies, anyway, of books by Christoforos Kasdaglis, whose essays collected in Anonymous Bankrupts sound mordant and interesting, and Christos Ikonomu, author of a prize-winning short story collection called Something Will Happen, You’ll See. ¶ Holly Case, of Cornell University, writes very lucidly about the relation between the awful old Armenian genocide problem and the awful current Kurdish separatist question, the subject of a new book by exiled scholar Taner Akçam. More clearly than any commentator we’ve come across, Case points out, right at the start, what’s unusual about Turkey:

Turkey is a country with two right wings. One is nationalist and secular, built on the oversized legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the nation’s first president. The other is nationalist as well, but rooted in Islam and a renewed interest in the legacy of the Ottoman Empire. For all their differences, the two sides share some crucial features: besides being nationalist, they are also anti-imperialist, see Turkey as having a unique role to play in the region, and are not inclined to consider themselves as being on the right.

¶ Who better than Mr Wrong to address the problem of cloning. And popes. (The Awl)

¶ Someone was asking about Dawn Powell the other day, and I recommended A Time to Be Born. Jade Marin writes it up nicely at The Rumpus.

¶ Stupid & Dangerous, @ kottke.org.

¶ Food for thought: Stress? (Brain Pickings)

¶ Historiann on the phenomenon of Jonah Lehrer:

Anyone who has any actual expertise in anything knows that honest reporting and original writing takes a hell of a lot more time than Lehrer has ever put in, with perhaps the exception of plagiarism and auto-recycling.  Maybe this means that big-time editors and publishers in fact have no expertise, and so have no hard-won internal bull$hit detector?  Maybe this means that they were selling the wunderkind fantasy as much as his (not-very-interesting “Gee Whiz”) books and articles, as well as fooling themselves? Maybe the fact that most of them are white, male, and middle-aged made many of them believe that Lehrer reminded them of themselves back when they were his age?

¶ The announced termination of Google Reader is a(n unintended) wake-up call, suggests Barbara Fisher at Inside Higher Ed (via ArtsJournal)

¶ We’ve been the future so long that we can’t see it anymore. Emily Badger in The Atlantic:

More often, when we do picture the future, it looks either like a reproduced version of the present or like some apocalyptic landscape. But this exercise requires a lot more imagination: What will be the next carriage without a horse? The next car without an engine?

(via The Morning News)

¶ Food for thought about the “merchant caste” and its faltering grip on power: James Priestland in Chron Higher Ed: “For if the merchant refuses to share power, he becomes vulnerable to the politics of the warrior.” (via The Browser)

¶ Department of Why Men?: In Kira Cochrane’s interesting-enough piece about the long-term impact of Virago Press, the big bite comes out of the butts of sissy-men who can’t be seen reading “women’s” books.

Let’s look at their names: Hilary, Pat and AS. These are names a man can read on the train and you don’t necessarily immediately know that they’re reading [a book by] a woman.

(Our Daily Read)

¶ Felix Salmon: “[F]or all that it’s incredibly valuable, Twitter is also incredibly noisy.” But it might have “stopped Vietnam.” (Media Matters; via The Awl)

¶ You say you want a (paper) revolution? (Thanks, Fossil Darling!)

¶ Helen DeWitt googles Michael Lewis from the MacDowell Colony and is rejoiced. “But if there is one thing lovelier than sheer unadulterated British wrongheaded woollymindedness, it is seeing this through the eye of the young Michael Lewis.”

¶ Christopher Leinberger talkes to Infrastructurist about the future of suburbs. Mostly good — but the change will be slow, and painful for many. Interestingly, Washington, DC, metro area turns out to be more “walkable” than New York City’s — most of which is actually suburban (only 8% of the metropolitan population lives in Manhattan).

¶ Steerforth discovers the music of Austrian composer Franz Schmidt (1874-1939) the hard way. (The Age of Uncertainty)

¶ Is there anything interesting to be said about zombies? Yes! Sara Davis makes an interesting connection between zombies the still lives and memento mori pictures of Dutch Golden Age. (The Smart Set)

¶ Google Reader will be “retired” at the end of June. But you knew that!

¶ On 3 March, John Allen posted an informative profile of the man who is now Francis I. (National Catholic Reporter; thanks, Ms NOLA!)

¶ Chris Gayomali, at TheWeek, believes that “sincerely” is the best of all closings for an email. Really? We have never been able to use this term without shuddering. That’s probably because we’re so complicated that sincerity is not a possibility. We’ll stick with “Best,” “Thanks!” and, now and then, “Cheers.” ¶ At TMN, Graham Beck winsomely dismisses all possible openings. “‘Dear:’ means we should cut to the chase: Freelancing is not the same as unemployment, Mom.

¶ What about “Callixtus”? At The Economist, a graphic of papal nomenclature. If O’Malley wins, he should definitely take “Adrian.”

¶ At Vanity Fair William Cohan provides pithy background on the Ackman Herbalife short position, interesting even if you’re not interested because the arrogance is so wonderfully ancien régime.

¶ Choire Sicha — guess what! — Choire Sicha has a poor opinion of the new Oz movie (if that’s what it is). James Franco is “like the gap in the cat’s cradle.” Choire likes the bad witches, though. (The Awl)

¶ Via Sarducci? Never mind. Joe Jervis passes on a report about Vatican ownership share of an apartment block containing Europe’s largest “gay sauna.” Body of Christ!

¶ My good friend Susan Babcock experiences joy unbounded, thanks to Find My iPhone. I wonder if GPS would help me find things in this apartment…. (OmDePlume)

¶ The ever-valiant Epicurean Dealmaker makes bankers sound smart! Only to assert, however, that, in the end, they don’t need to be. “The only rule for Managing Directors is to bring in the simoleons.” That’s better.

¶ Jeremy Denk becomes one of “the Nation’s cultural artifact.” (Congratulations!) In what key does he laugh? (Think Denk)

¶ Over the weekend, there were two interesting pieces in the Times about women and work — or, rather, about Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer and the complaisance demonstrated by these executives toward Business As Usual. There was Anne-Marie Slaughter’s review of the Facebook COO’s new book, Lean In. And Jennifer Glass blasted Ms Mayer’s telecommuting ban at Yahoo. One can safely infer, from Ms Sandberg’s advice as well as from Ms Mayer’s edict, that women who excel in the executive suite do things the way the big boys like them to be done. It’s hard to say that they bring anything XX-specific to the job. Even when, as in the case of these ladies, they’re moms!

In an email last week, someone was complaining last week about a bad manager. Was this true for you, too? I expect so. Managers are usually pretty awful, because they’re moody, unpredictable, biased, bored, and ambitious — human beings, in other words, who would rather being doing their own work than paying attention to you. Here’s my idea: some steady worker out there ought to buy a copy of Project Management for Dummies and reduce its contents to an app. That way, we can all manage ourselves. The real boss, or the customer — someone who cares — can input all the variables, while we select our preferences, and then our smartphones will cut out our work for us and plan a viable schedule for the project. Our smartphones will coordinate with team-members’ smartphones. There will be no hiding and no bluffing, but also no humiliation or disappointment. Good work will be recognized! It won’t take long for the app to discover our weaknesses, being super-connected, it will manage remedial procedures without embarrassment.

There would really have to be, though, a “playing to the app” discount.

¶ The Daily Mail does it again. Great headline/headshot combo! (via The Morning News)

¶ I wasn’t sure about recommending Valibation, a short film by Todd Strauss-Schulson that is definitely NSFW, but its unforgettable moments are intriguing rather than gross, and it tells a fable for our time with such trickster virtuosity that it’s bound to help put “technology” in perspective. (via MetaFilter)

¶ The payoff on this short film about the evolution of the human face is the last-minute swelling of the cranium. We looked human before we had (m)any brains. (@ kottke.org)

¶ In The New York Review of Books (LX.5), Elizabeth Drew takes a look at the Republican Party, at the intransigence of Congressional Republicans, and concludes that real political action has regressed to the states, which control electoral districts and a number of other levers of federal power. “People in despair over politics in Washington would be well advised to start paying more attention to who gets elected to their state capitals.”

Drew also explains the Republican Party’s essential problem.

As the Republicans search for a new and more electable identity they have a fundamental problem. Ever since they took their major right turn in 1964, they have made a series of bargains in order to strengthen their ranks: the Southern strategy, which validated racism; the Christian right; the Sagebrush Rebellion, which represented big ranching and farming interests as well as the mining industry; and the Club for Growth, a highly conservative anti-tax, anti-spending group that can pour money into primaries to knock off incumbents who don’t vote according to their views. However successful momentarily, this series of deals ultimately cost the Republicans broad national appeal and flexibility.

¶ If, like me, you’re Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic — WEIRD — you’ll find it useful to know why that particular description fits. Ethan Waters talks with Joe Henrich and his colleagues, who have found that most of the psychometric/cogitive testing that social students have been amassing since heaven knows when is valid for only about 12% of the world’s population. In the rest of the world, it doesn’t matter which way the arrowhead tips; the lines are obviously equal in length. (Pacific Standard)

¶ In “You Are What You Click,” David Auerbach demonstrates that safeguards of Internet privacy are no match for “reidentification”: the cobbling together of named profiles from various “anonymous” databases. Not fun reading! But we need a new legal context in which to assess the rights and wrongs of monetizing customer information. (The Nation)

In today’s Times, a handful of related pieces by Somini Sengupta, Nick Bilton, and Quentin Hardy.

¶ Who can resist a story that begins:

On  March 27, 1954, Barton Kestle, first curator of modern art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, boarded a train for Washington, D.C., and was never seen again.

His office, walled up for decades after a rush renovation job, was discovered a few years ago. Now it’s a Mark Dion installation. (ARTNews; via ArtsJournal)

¶ The inimitable C G P Grey tells you “How to Become a Pope.” I never wanted to be a pope, but for about a year in my early teens I thought it would be cool to be a cardinal. I should have cut such a fine figure in the days of capes and corridors!

¶ A fierce curriculum proposed by W S Auden at the University of Michigan. Somehow, though, the title of the course, “Fate and the Individual in European literature,” sounds gaseous, because you know that all it means is men having issues. (NY Daily News; via Conversational Reading)

¶ Ed Smith argues that George Orwell doesn’t actually prove his argument about the inherent virtue of clear and simple writing. Why, you might almost say that Orwell was being”Gladwellian”! (New Statesman; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ The passionate bureaucrat in William Gerhardie and Anthony Powell, revisited by Levi Stahl. (Ivebeenreadinglately) From Gerhardie’s The Polyglots:

Sir Hugo had, of course, made enquiries. he established a chain of responsibility, and it seemed that each link had done its duty: yet the chain had failed. But Sir Hugo would not give in. He had accumulated a pile of unshapely correspondence on the subject of the prodigal report and had collected the papers in a file named “The Lost Report of Sir Hugo Culpit,” and when he collected a scrap of evidence on the subject he would scribble it down on a buff slip and then send it in to me (whom he had now entrusted to keep the file), with the words: “Please attach this slip, by a pin, to confidential file, entitled “The Lost Report of Sir Hugo Culpit.” And in a humorous vein I had written on the slip in imitation of Sir Hugo’s manner:

Please state what pin:

1 (a) An ordinary pin; (b) a safety-pin; (c) a drawing-pin; (d) a hair-pin; (e) a linch-pin.
2. What make and size

and sent the slip back to Sir Hugo.

¶ Missed Connections, American style. (via everywhere)

The playlist that I’m listening to at the moment begins and ends with recordings of Vivaldi’s Le Quattro Stagioni. In the middle of the sandwich is something billed as Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi: The Four Seasons. I came across the Richter via a Facebook link about a month ago, and downloaded it from iTunes even as I ordered the CD from Amazon — I had to have it right away.

Back in 1961, The Four Seasons was the composition that allowed me to pursue a native interest in large-format orchestral (“classical”) music without feeling bored or weird. I was thirteen, and it was obvious that Vivaldi’s precocious tone poem was unbelievably cool. It has survived being “cool” for fifty years now, and every now and then somebody tackles it in a way that makes it fresh again, as Fabio Biondi and Europa Galante did a couple of years ago. Nevertheless, the music is really too familiar, after all this time, to have what Charles de Gaulle called force de frappe. Restoring that requires something more radical, and, whatever the sheerly musical virtues of Max Richter’s arrangement might be (it seems incredibly foolish to me to call it a “recomposition” — as if Richter thought that he was doing something new in Western music), radical it is. Richter has preserved the dark Venetian baroque, the sense (so well captured in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now) of being lost in a maze of courtly façades, that marks the minor-mode passages of this quartet of violin concertos as “dramatic” and “thrilling.” But Richter has shifted things around, relaid emphases, and contracted some of Vivaldi’s ideas to atoms while allowing others free play. Consider the adagio from Autumn: it’s impossible not to think of Liliana Cavani’s really superior adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley’s Game, in which Ripley’s French wife has been turned into an Italian harpsichordist who inhabits Palladian vastnesses. All that Richter does here is highlight the cembalo, preserving the score but giving it a sparkling, dripping lugubriousness. The following movement, however — unquestionably my favorite in the original — is transformed beyond recognition, its cheerful bouncing innocence thrown altogether overboard.

And I love it all. Listening to it, I have that marvelous feeling, so frequent in one’s youth but not so much later on, of being in a spy movie. Richter’s Vivaldi is all checkpoints, all “papers, please.” The music is a flattering trenchcoat, hauntingly lighted, in a suggestive setting, and, wearing it, I become the linchpin lieutenant, Dirk Bogarde then, Ralph Fiennes now. It is vital that I make contact with the right agent, but also that I not say a word. The rain and the mist magnify the light of hooded lamps, increasing the danger of being recognized. How will I know?

It’s nice that, when the music is over, I am still alive and well, and sitting right here. Papers, indeed. And Fabio Biondi sounds quite a bit more radical than before.

¶ Mallory Ortberg reconceives Pride and Prejudice as texts. This really ought to be in The New Yorker. (The Hairpin)

did you mean MARY? 
did I mean what?
when you were talking about Mary earlier 
were you talking about MARY Mary?
which Mary did you think I was talking about?

¶ Also very funny is Mr Wrong’s Oscar Picks. (Joe McLeod at The Awl) If you’re going to sin, sin big.

Best Supporting Actress: I’m giving to Sally Field because she is old and the whole Hollywood wants to see her say “You like me” again before she croaks. I like this pick so much it’s my Holy Wed-lock of the Year. I didn’t see any of these movies, although I heard with Lincoln, every scene looks like a painting, so I wanna see that one.

If Joe’s right, and Argo wins, then you’ll want to have read Jacqueline West’s Clothes on Film interview. You’ll want to read it anyway.

I emailed Tony Mendez early on after reading his book, Master of Disguise. He called me and we talked forever. Tony sent me the actual clothes he wore during the exfiltration. It was a real moment for Tony. Of course, he never got the credit for it at the time but he knew he had pulled off something important. The jacket was herringbone tweed Brooks Brothers. Ben fought the jacket a little, at first, because he thought it would strobe on screen, but I showed him the one that Robert Redford wore in Three Days of the Condor. I said “I think it would be really important for you to feel like Tony.” He then went for it immediately. Bless their hearts, Brooks Brothers had all their patterns from the 1970s and they made all those jackets and suits for Ben. Tony Mendez was kind of a rogue CIA man. He wasn’t your run of the mill, in a great suit, but once in a while for a meeting he would wear one. Brooks Brothers made all the suits based on my conversations with Tony.

¶ Felix Salmon wraps up his Maria Popova coverage — he took a keen interest in her earnings — with an apology about gratuitous anti-sexism. In retrospect, I can see how it all happened; a smarty-pants myself, I’ve been there (not online, I hope).

¶ Why Andrew O’Hagan ought to be a household name in the United States — at least among those who know Woods and Mendelsohn. (Stevie Howell at The Rumpus)

In “The American Dream of Lee Harvey Oswald,” O’Hagan revisits the scene of the JFK assassination. At museums and historic sites, he is overcome by America’s ability to turn tragedy into identity—to make narrative out of senseless events. You could say this holds an appeal for him—after all, the narrative impulse is part of a writer’s synaptic structure. He is, however, repulsed at the triviality of people selling JFK trinkets along the grassy knoll—and perhaps this speaks to his guilt, as writers are thieves, somewhat, or at the very least opportunists. He warns more than once about the danger of permitting a writer into your home.

¶ Yves Smith reminds us that, Yes, Virginia, it’s the employment, stupid. (The Naked Capitalist)

Look at that chart closely. People are draining their retirement accounts, neglecting medical care, and relying on food stamps to get by. Yet we read much more about how the economy (read the bottom lines of public companies) is getting better, while the desperate state of the un and underemployed shows up in anecdotes decorating the occasional story on those topics alone, and is underplayed when the media ventures out to see how the remnants of the middle class are doing.

¶ At Pandaemonium, Kenan Malik extracts basic ideas from his 2008 book, Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides Are Wrong in the Race Debate. The growth of bad ideas about “racial” distinctions is still an issue that few people grasp, but, in Malik’s hands, the complex interplay of historical trends and unintended consequences is not hard to follow. Herder, for example, was wrong to regard the Empire as the enemy of Kultur; it was its natural protector against rivals.

The echoes of Herder’s concept of volksgeist are unmistakeable. Herder, the great believer in emancipation and equality, the great scourge of racism and colonialism,  would have been horrified at the arguments of Morton, Nott and Gliddon. Yet, through the concept of type, Herder’s cultural essence took on biological garb, and in doing so became an argument not for a plurality of cultures but for a natural hierarchy within society.

¶ JRParis writes sagely about the European horsemeat scandal. “How can you be upset about poor quality when nobody could taste the difference, because processed food looks and tastes so artificial to begin with.” (A very rough translation.) (Mnémoglyphes)

It’s really quite irksome to find, just as I’m trying to reanimate this old blog, that nothing online is really very interesting these days. Perhaps it’s just me. I’m finding that, aside from the Times, which for all its many faults remains the news source of record, The New Yorker, and the two Reviews of Books, there isn’t much out there worth reading. And the sadness of that damps any inspiration that I might have to write anything here. I plow through acres of Google Reader feeds, day after day, but — to paraphrase Johnson, the man who is tired of the Internet is tired of something.

The current issue of the London Review of Books (35/4), in contrast, is a banquet of substantial fare. There’s the Hilary Mantel piece, “Royal Bodies,” that has elicited a fusillade from the conservative British press. Allergic to historical fiction, I haven’t read either of Mantel’s Tudor blockbusters, and I’m not surprised that their author prefers “doomed” Diana and Marie-Antoinette to the faultless Kate Middleton (whom I admire, precisely, because my word for “doomed” is “spoiled,” and she isn’t). However sentimental she might be about dead princesses, though, Mantel is no star-struck royalist. She describes attending an event at Buckingham Palace at which she “stared” at the Queen. “I am ashamed now to say it but I passed my eyes over her as a cannibal views his dinner, my gaze sharp enough to pick the meat off her bones.” It’s a good thing for Mantel and her publishers that the United Kingdom does not enforce Thailandish rules about lèse-majesté. Even stranger is Mantel’s account of an earlier event at Buck House.

I had expected to see people pushing themselves into the queen’s path, but the opposite was true. The queen walked through the reception areas at an even pace, hoping to meet someone, and you would see a set of guests, as if swept by the tide, parting before her or welling ahead of her into the next room. They acted as if they feared excruciating embarrassment should they be caught and obliged to converse.

(I must confess that my dread of such embarrassment would make it impossible for me to attend. I loathe having to make ceremonial contact with other people.) Then there’s David Runciman on the “Profumo” scandal, which I can remember, if only as a matter of names and naughtiness. (I was mystified that a man with an Italian name could be in the British cabinet, although, in fact, John Profumo wasn’t.) The review of Richard Davenport-Hines’s new book on the scandal, An English Affair, is so rich that I feel I must now read it, even if I agree with Runciman’s suggestion that the title is somewhat misleading, insofar as all democracies have their scandals, and the early Sixties was a particularly fertile period for them. Still, an anatomy of political scandal as probing as this one seems obviously worth the time it will take to read.

Britain in the early 1960s was a divided country, torn by conflicting impulses, toward the past and the future, tradition and experimentation, dignity and fun. But Davenport-Hines doesn’t see these oppositions as having created social divisions between the classes, or between the coming men and the old buffers. Instead, they were evident in everyone, from prime ministers to good-time girls, from property developers to law lords, bringing out the absolute worst in all of them.

An amazing insight that I’m just old enough to feel, or to remember, the truth of. Another must-read item in the LRB is Philip Noble’s piece on the new Henry Petrowski book, To Forgive Design. You’ll see why when you learn about the iron rings that Canadian engineers wear, to dampen any hubristic impulses.

In The New Yorker, Nick Paumgartner writes about the real-estate catastrophe in Spain, which is really so staggering that one almost misses Franco!

Today at the DBR: In order to fill up the ice chest, I must download a song from long ago.