¶ Quite aside from its political implications, the “surprise” defeat of Eric Cantor in a Virginia primary provides a measure of the fall-off in journalistic competence. In the Times this morning, David Carr is scathing.

Plenty of reporters are imprisoned in cubes in Washington, but stretched news organizations aren’t eager to spend money on planes, rental cars and hotel rooms so that employees can bring back reports from the hustings. While the Internet has been a boon to modern reporting — All Known Thought One Click Away — it tends to pin journalists at their desks. I was on a panel with Gay Talese some time ago, and he said, “We are outside people,” meaning that we are supposed to leave our offices and hit the streets. But the always-on data stream is hypnotic, giving us the illusion of omniscience.

Data-driven news sites are all the rage, but what happens when newspapers no longer have the money to commission comprehensive, legitimate polls? The quants took a beating on this one, partly because journalists are left to read the same partisan surveys and spotty local reporting as Mr. Cantor’s campaign staff, whose own polling had him up by more than 30 points.

Hordes of blogs and news sites continue to chase the latest incremental scoop that will draw followers on Twitter, but a whole other channel of information is out there, including talk radio. Politico called it “Brat’s secret weapon,” to which, we might ask, secret to whom? About 50 million people in America listen to talk radio, much of it from conservative commentators like Mark Levin, Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham.

¶ At Vanity Fair, Evgenia Peretz considers the critical controversy occasioned by Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch — is it art, or just a good read? Our own view is that the question is radically premature, and that no one alive today will ever know the answer. Such questions take at least a century, or the passage of several sifting generations, to settle. For the time being, the fracas is merely “provocative.” Which is reason enough to read her piece.

In all the commentary that Peretz surveyed, one inanity stands out. We tremble at our disrespect, because it was Loren Stein, editor of The Paris Review, who uttered it.

Similarly, Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way. “What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”

Who the dickens — or even the Dickens — gives a damn about “people who read only one or two books a year”? They may shore up the publishers’ balances, but they have no place in discussions of literature.

¶ Feedly is down today (egad!), so we had to make do, and a link by a friend (thanks, Eric!) came in very handy.

We didn’t read Adam Gopnik’s “Bigger Than Phil,” in one of last winter’s New Yorkers, or, if we did, we forgot it. But reading David Hart Bentley’s complaint about the piece left us no happier with him.

The tiny, thwarted blastema of a thought that seems to be lurking in Gopnik’s words is the notion that we have only lately discovered that God cannot be found as a discrete physical object or force within the manifold of nature, and that this is somehow a staggering blow to “that hypothesis”— though, curiously enough, Augustine or Philo or Ramanuja (and so on) could have told him as much: God is not a natural phenomenon. Is it really so difficult to grasp that the classical concept of God has always occupied a logical space that cannot be approached from the necessarily limited perspective of natural science?

Whether or not Bentley is right to attribute such thinking to Gopnik, we have our own two cents to put it. The question of God has been mooted by a rupture in the connection or relation between divinity and the cosmos. No one is interested in a God who is “out there” — not at least along the lines shaped by gods of the past. The God of Adam, certainly, has withdrawn to His proper place in the universe, which is within the hearts and minds of those who believe in Him. While He may be of great importance in the intimate connections of human beings, He no longer has a place in the world. We defy His believers to upstage it.

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Charlie Huenemann offers a spirited defense of “armchair speculation”— and of philosophers generally. We must have missed that they were under attack. Or perhaps we’re right to wonder just why Huenemann puts philosophers in those armchairs.  It has always been our understanding that “armchair speculation” is the lazy pursuit of “just-so” stories that explain matters about which the speculator is at best only partially informed. For Huenemann, the armchair is a great place for “just thinking hard,” and we’re all for that!

The problem is, how do you know when you’re well-enough informed enough to think about something? It’s a problem, because you never really do know. In the end, the test of your competence must be a piece of writing, or remarks that someone else transcribes, so that other people can assess your thought.

¶ In a related key, Frank Bruni sings the praises of solitude, especially for political figures who aren’t likely to enjoy much of it. Just what a politician is supposed to think about in rare quiet moments he doesn’t say; perhaps nothing special, nothing that any intelligent human being doesn’t have to think about. One thing is certain: public figures are going to have to learn, as a group, how to retract from the mindless focus of television.

¶ Here’s hoping that the Massachusetts legislature passes a bill that will severely narrow the enforceability of “non-compete” clauses in employment contracts — and, hopefully, restore some of the luster that Route 128 has lost to Silicon Valley. When we read on the front page of this morning’s Times about the difficulties that a nineteen year-old summer camp counselor was having finding another job, we almost went into a socialist fugue state. Here is what her former employer told reporter Steven Greenhouse:

Joe Kahn, Linx’s owner and founder, defended the noncompete that his company uses. “Our intellectual property is the training and fostering of our counselors, which makes for our unique environment,” he said. “It’s much like a tech firm with designers who developed chips: You don’t want those people walking out the door. It’s the same for us.” He called the restriction — no competing camps within 10 miles — very reasonable.

You can imagine how wickedly the editor’s wife, a long-time summer-camp counselor herself, snorted at this nonsense. Chips, indeed. She’d like to give his little canoe a nice paddle.

We recovered from our socialist fever, but not without a sharper sense that there is a difference between business operators and intellectual property, and that we ought not to be too eager to respect ownership claims by the former to the latter. Non-patented business practices (and such patents ought to be granted most grudgingly) are hardly more confidential or deserving of legal protection on behalf of alleged owners than published cookie recipes.

We’re all for capitalism, wherever it works. We’re very much against mere ownerism.

¶ At Naked Capitalism, Bill Black compares economic “austerity” to the quackery of bleeding the sick — a discredited practice that serves only to enrich bankers and the rentiers who hire them.

The NYT’s “Draghi as Physician” Simile

The most embarrassing of the five articles begins with this sentence.

“Mario Draghi might feel like a doctor trying to treat a chronically ill patient with unproven medicines.”

There are three vital things that are totally wrong about that sentence.  First, it was the ECB and its fellow troika members that forced the eurozone – as it was beginning to recover from the Great Recession – back into a gratuitous second recession and in several cases a Second Great Depression by inflicting austerity.  Second, the correct medical metaphor would be that Draghi is continuing to insist on “bleeding” the patient a century after we knew that the practice had no scientific basic and harmed the patient.  His practices were not “unproven” – they were known to be quackery.  Third, to the extent the focus is on low inflation, Draghi has been refusing to “treat” the “chronically ill patient” even though (A) the eurozone has repeatedly failed to meet the ECB’s stated inflation target and (B) there are proven fiscal means of curing the “patient” which Draghi fights to prevent from being used.

¶ A story on the front page of this morning’s Times begins badly. Beneath the headline, “In a First, Test of DNA Finds Root of Illness,” the report launches in lurid human-interest mode (a teenager is dying!). It’s hard to say which is worse, the headline or the text. At a minimum, the headline ought to have made it clear that the DNA in the case belonged to the pathogen, not to the patient. The first sentence of the story ought to have gone like this: “In a recent breakthrough, scientists have significantly shortened the time required to make a diagnosis, critical to dealing with life-threatening infections, by identifying pathogens by their DNA.”

¶ What’s your position on the Oxford comma? Ours is flexible, because, frankly, we believe human language is too complicated for human beings to be able to discern rules that will guarantee clear usage. We don’t even believe that clarity itself is always the most important thing: sometimes, a little ambiguity is the only way to make readers think. (See poetry.) But we think that you’ll enjoying weighing the pros and cons of the rule that prescribes placing a comma after every item in a list, even the penultimate one, the one that is followed by “and.” (Mental Floss; via The Millions)

Especially not to be missed is the final example, with Arika Okrent’s comment. Sometimes, you simply have to rewrite the sentence.

“By train, plane and sedan chair, Peter Ustinov retraces a journey made by Mark Twain a century ago. The highlights of his global tour include encounters with Nelson Mandela, an 800-year-old demigod and a dildo collector.”

Languagehat dug this gem out of a comment thread on the serial comma. It’s from a TV listing in The Times. It supports the use of the Oxford comma, but only because it keeps Mandela from being a dildo collector. However, even the Oxford comma can’t keep him from being an 800-year-old demigod. There’s only so much a comma can do.

¶ Ms NOLA sent us the link to Laura Miller’s quick interview with Marie Luise Knott, the German author of a book, Unlearning With Hannah Arendt, that has just come out in English. In one chapter, Knott writes about Arendt’s use of irony as an expressive tool (not its opposite) in Eichmann in Jerusalem. We’ve lost no time ordering the book.

Some have argued that the subject of the Holocaust is too terrible to ever admit anything like humor. Obviously, Arendt was not laughing off atrocities, but she was attacked for some statements she made ironically — such as noting that Eichmann resembled a “Zionist” for suggesting that Bohemian and Moravian Jews be resettled in a specific area — and for the implied laughter in what she wrote about Eichmann. Why do you think that bothered people so much?

Of course Hannah Arendt knew that Eichmann was an anti-Semite, an SS officer and the organizer of the murder of millions of Jews. What unsettled and shocked her was to hear this anti-Semite dressing up his testimony with whatever came to mind, even going so far as to call himself a philo-Zionist.

But what worried Arendt most fundamentally was the “totality of the moral collapse the Nazis caused … not only among the persecutors but also among the victims.” She also worried about the consequences of this collapse, the model and possible future heralded by the Nazi policy of extermination. The fact that she saw the collapse among the persecutors but also among the victims was not due to any desire to offend.

Arendt insisted on defending the existence of a common, shared world. As a Jew she had experienced the triumph of the Nazis and the way their ideology had permeated, step by step, every aspect of life and language in Germany. The collapse she discerns is the collapse of the fabric holding human beings together in this world, the fabric of laws and traditions and ideas that had in the past kept the world from falling apart, the idea of solidarity and of humans negotiating the present and the future together. “The totality of the moral collapse” meant for her that the Nazi perpetrators could perversely twist the Christian precept “Thou shalt not kill” into the command “Thou shalt kill.” It meant moreover that parts of mankind (first the mentally ill, then the Jews, then …) had been declared superfluous and step-by-step conditioned to fit the Nazis’ image of them, to be and behave like victims. They found themselves in a situation of total lawlessness and total powerlessness and were thrown out of the human world, i.e., murdered.

 

¶ What a concept! Imagine a business organization in which employs “retire,” with lower salaries, into managerial positions? What if just doing your job well was the only task on your desk. The work might change, but it would never involve managing other workers until your later years. In other words, the whole concept of “promotion” would be stood on its head.

Sounds pie-in-the-sky, right? But that’s what Felix Salmon is advocating, more or less, in a post at Medium. (Click through.)

The alternative is far better: pay people according to the value their job provides to the company. If they can provide more value to another company, then let them leave: at a stroke you get rid of the syndrome whereby people can only get paid more by looking for a job elsewhere and threatening to leave unless they get a raise.

Recognize, too, that while managers do indeed add value to a company, there’s no particular reason to believe that they add more value to a company than the people who report to them.

In this new configuration, the manager is more like a coach, someone who helps the team achieve its objectives. (The “retirement” angle was really our idea.)

The result: an organization where fairly-compensated people work together as a team, rather than trying to work out the best way to make money for themselves at the expense of their colleagues. If you do away with the slippery pole, and do away with the idea that if you get promoted into a managerial role then you’ll get paid a lot more money, then your organization will be a much happier place to work.

¶ We sat up this morning when we reached Joshua Shank’s Op-Ed piece about the fund that pays for the maintenance of Federal highways. According to Shank, the highway fund is about to run out of money, because revenues from the gas tax haven’t kept up with costs, and Congress has rejected rate hikes.

The obvious solution, raising the gas tax, is a political nonstarter. And even if it could pass, Congress would be tempted to direct some or all of that revenue to other purposes, like deficit reduction — it did just that in 1990 and 1993.

In any case, raising the gas tax wouldn’t help in the long run. When America planned the Interstate System in the 1950s, only half the country was urbanized and the number of cars was growing rapidly. Now more than 80 percent of Americans live in metropolitan regions, and total driving has stagnated. Even if we could raise the tax, it would only reinforce an outdated program.

Shank believes that funds ought to come from general revenues — the income tax. That’s not what captures our attention. It’s willingness to keep the fund solvent, in an ongoing way and not as a matter of quick fixes, that we’ll be watching for. We’ll be surprised to see it.

¶ What we want to know is what Tante Hannah would have said about Manhattanhenge. Or rather: whether she’d have found a use for it among her favorite metaphors. (“Thinking in alignment,” say.)

The straight story at Gothamist; fun at The Awl.

By the way, it’s pretty cloudy out there right now.

¶ Regular readers know what a staple dish spaghetti alla carbonara is in our household. We introduce the non-traditional note of parsley, and we use only the yolk, not the whole egg. But: no cream! And pancetta, not bacon. Is there a better way? We’re working up the courage to try the version updated by Riccardo De Pra, the chef at a restaurant in the northern Veneto. The inspiration, it turns out, is Japanese. At The Smart Set, Jason Wilson claims that this was a dish worth being stranded for — as he was by that Icelandic volcano a couple of years ago.

Carbonara is known as a classic dish of Rome, and so I wanted to know why a chef from the northern Veneto had perfected it. His answer was even more surprising. “The story actually starts in Japan,” he told me. As a young chef, De Pra had worked in Japan, which is extremely rare for an Italian chef, and he learned some decidedly non-Italian kitchen techniques. “I came back from Japan after a year, and brought my new ideas with me. And when I put them on the menu at my father’s restaurant, I immediately lost 80 percent of his customers,” he said, with a laugh.

¶ At The New Statesman, John Gray sketches an interesting history of the Little Red Book. Even more interesting is his review of a new book of academic essays about it. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

All of the relevant disciplines are represented – history, area studies, literature, political science and sociology – and although ten of the 13 contributors teach in the US, the collection is representative of the range of views of China that you will find in universities in much of the world. However, the fact that it reflects the present state of academic opinion is also the book’s most important limitation.

Reading the essays brought together here, you would hardly realise that Mao was responsible for one of the biggest human catastrophes in recorded history.

¶ Robert Kaplan’s thoughts about Cardinal Richelieu are interesting, if only because Kaplan’s usual subject is more contemporary, but in one passing sentence he captures, without realizing it apparently, the contradictory impulses of the modern age.

What emerged from the horror of the Thirty Years’ War was a yearning for international law on one hand and a Europe of coherent states on the other — some form of territorial organization which would replace the hundreds of small political units, overlaid by various degrees of imperial power, that had made the Continent so prone to cataclysm.

How curiously the European Union has attempted to solve this problem by micromanaging from the top while leaving force in the hands of national politics.

¶ At the LRB blog, Jeremy Harding compares Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage, leaders of the right wing parties, in France and Britain respectively, that garnered big chunks of the latest European Parliament vote. Observing that “Britain doesn’t look like France as you track further right,” Harding excoriates the laddishness of Farage’s UKIP, which is just what you’d expect. What’s odd is his respect for Le Pen’s reformed ideology.

She has turned her party around from the days of her father’s brief flirtation with market-liberal theology to formulate a kind of national socialist programme as coherent as Ukip’s is vague and contradictory. The only antipathies they have in common are for immigrants and European union as it stands. Neither looks like a serious programme for the future but hers has one conspicuous advantage over Ukip’s: consistency. A party that argues against the free movement of money, jobs, goods and services is well placed to make a case against freedom of movement for human beings, whether it hides its racism – as the FN tries to do – or proclaims it from the rooftops.