Daily Office:
Monday, 12 July 2010
The complete version of this entry appears at The Daily Blague / reader. Click the link at the right, above.
Matins
¶ Frédéric Filloux has a blast with US v Defendants, the DOJ case against the Russian spies. Well, before having a blast he clearly had to do some homework (er, reading the whole thing) — so now, you don’t have to! “Free Spy Novel,” he calls it. We’re not so sure about the “spy” part. (Monday Note)
Lauds
¶ In one of those entries that makes us wonder if the site ought to be called 3 Quirks Daily, Ashley Mears compares supermodels to toxic assets. Behind that somewhat puzzling overstatement, however, lies an elegant insight: in financial bubbles, the players are tempted to forget that assets have intrinsic, objective values by the cascade of interest in a partcular asset, one that comes into such demand that its objective value is swamped. This is harmless in the choice of supermodels (Coco Rocha, in the case of Ms Mears’s essay), but disastrous in financial markets.
This point is well taken. Wall Street is no less susceptible to the allure of fashion than any other high-strung environment.
Prime
¶ Much of the material in Sarah Lyall’s Times piece on safety problems at BP (to which several other reporters made contributions) will be familiar to our readers, but we were grabbed by a passage describing the “achievement” of Tony Hawyard’s predecessor, John Browne.
Tom Kirchmaier, a lecturer in strategy at the Manchester Business School, said that Mr. Browne tried to run BP like a financial company, rotating managers into new jobs with tough profit targets and then moving them before they had to deal with the consequences. [emphasis supplied]
Tierce
¶ We’re linking to Joe Keohane’s Boston Globe piece, “How Facts Backfire,” only because we CANNOT BELIEVE that a reporter researching the subject of intellectual obstanacy would overlook Kathryn Schulz’s incredibly important book, Being Wrong. If Ms Schulz has not actually invented a cure for wrong-headedness, she has outlined the psychological and ethical nature of the problem.
Sext
¶ Imagine our delight, this morning, reading through the feeds, and coming across a sweet mention of Ms NOLA! (Slow Love Life)
Nones
¶ Here’s a grease-trap of a story that Graham Greene would have liked. It has got oil, drugs, two layers of colonialism, and a particularly obnoxious populist dictator. The only things missing is a babe. Simon Romero in the Times: “Curaçao Faces Friction With Chávez Over U.S. Planes.”
Vespers
¶ At The Millions, Edan Lepucki profiles Jennifer Egan, our very favorite author at the moment. Her lead-in paragraphs are particularly Egan-esque in content, although the author of A Visit From the Good Squad would probably render it in darker prose.
Compline
¶ Following the Carr-Shirky debate about modern media, Elizabeth Drescher found that she “couldn’t help but think about medieval manuscripts. Since the early 1990s, both medievalists and electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts in making complementary claims: medievalists to continuing cultural relevancy and electronic media theorists in continuity to literary tradition.” We immediately donned our anti-cuteness custard-filled armor; only then dared we to read further. (religion Dispataches; via Marginal Revolution)
Have a Look
¶ 3 Quarks Daily‘s Abbas Raza is spending the summer in Karachi, the city where he was born, and, in addition to some interesting thoughts that we’d like to follow up on, he shares a collection of interesting photographs.
¶ Jean Nouvel’s Serpentine Pavilion. (Gabion; via City of Sound)