On the Small Screen

Peter Aspden tried downloading a movie onto his iPhone. He wasn't impressed:

It is one of the most famous one-liners in the history of cinema, which also turned out to be an inadvertent prophecy. “I am big,” says the slighted Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). “It’s the pictures that got small.”

She had no idea. The past half-century has seen the pictures get smaller and smaller, to the point that we wonder if they can ever be big again. From television screen, to laptop, to smartphone, the ever-shrinking movies reach a greater part of the world than ever before. But what have we lost along the way? On a recent flight, I downloaded the relatively well-received Marvel spin-off The Avengers to watch on my iPhone. It was, of course, a ridiculous venture, this squeezing of monumental themes on to a miniaturist canvas, lacking in textural detail, atmosphere, communality of experience. But it was easily accessible, convenient and cheap. Is the trade-off worth it? And how does it affect us and the art form?

"Interesting"

Rebecca Ariel Porte reviews Our Aesthetic Categories:

“Interesting” is an aesthetic judgment so mild and so commonplace that it barely seems to qualify as a judgment at all. But that’s part of Ngai’s point. If interesting is, on some level, an aesthetic judgment, then its ubiquity (especially in critical contexts) stresses the “ambiguous status of aesthetic judgments in criticism,” as they “mediat[e] feelings and concepts.” “Interesting” is our gambit, Ngai contends, when we feel something but we’re not yet sure what to think. When we say something is interesting, we are inviting conversation. We want to be asked to explain ourselves.

Apologies, Etc.

I'm taking a break from blogging until next weekend, as I'm sitting exams next week. It's not ideal to be absent during this important moment of the election season, so I just hope that in the next week or so I don't miss anything too important.

See you next week.

The Week in Review

Tuesday on the Report, we explored the question of whether or not the debates actually matter. I agreed that they mean more for Romney. I applauded California's ban on gay conversion therapy for teenagers, and we found a way to make New York women nod in unison. Kingsley Amis's legacy is all too often dominated by talk of his various eccentricities, and even being indie rock royalty doesn't pay that well. Smoking segregation is an ongoing battle and there are more invisible things than you think. The critics of reason return; so do the critics of American air travel. Soldiers in modern warfare need less muscle and more brains, so why do we continue to recruit eighteen year-old males? The recruiters have it all wrong.

On Wednesday, we found that ditching helmet rules encourages people to cycle, especially in cities like London, where the city sponsors "Boris" bikes for public use, and that the housewives of Japan are giving their husbands less pocket money. Pastors all across America protested an amendment that some on the Right have called a "muzzle on religion" by giving explicitly partisan sermons, a liberal found an unlikely pen pal in a conservative blogger named Esther, and a presidential candidate failed to start a chant. The unbearable debate about grammar rules continued, and we agreed that maybe we should give up on the rules about "whom" and "who." We looked at the Kael answer to the question of why we enjoy movies, and whether or not it matters that we enjoy them.

David Rothkopf called the election for Obama, perhaps prematurely, whose daughter is expected to show good judgement in music and like Motown. No, correlation may not imply causation, but this is no way to deflect a possibly legitimate point. We continued to ask why Americans believed in Muslim Rage, and concluded that the issue was neither political nor religious. Speaking of beliefs, how malleable are your political ones? It turns out that website pagination is evil, and male decline may not be strictly true. Counter to the prevailing logic, it just might be that the best way to help Iran in their efforts to build a nuclear bomb would be to bomb them. The specifics surrounding Paul Ryan's tax plan remain opaque, as does the reasoning behind bans on books like Alice Walker's The Colour Purple (did you know there was such a thing as Banned Books Week?). Finally, let's remind ourselves that this is not the most important election we've ever seen.

Thursday was the day of the first debate. Liveblog here. Reaction round-ups here and here. The verdict? "There was a singular commanding force on stage tonight (or this afternoon, if you're here) and it was Mitt Romney. Obama was tired, lethargic, and even appeared indifferent to the proceedings. And where Romney engaged in the fight, Obama merely endured it." Also that day, are presidential debates too civil, and has another ritual, the TED Talk, lost its spark? The mind of the libertarian is a cold and unfeeling place. Book blogs, however, are brilliant.

The Worst President Ever

The historian H.W. Brands takes a sympathetic view of Ulysses S. Grant, typically the leading contender for the title:

The standard rap on Grant is that he was a drunk who surrounded himself with spoilsmen who stole the country blind. In an era of scandals—the Crédit Mobilier’s siphoning of millions in the construction of the transcontinental railroad, the Tweed Ring’s bilking of New York in awarding city contracts, the Whiskey Ring’s dodging of the tax on booze—Grant was said to turn a blind (or drunken) eye to all manner of wrongdoing. Beyond that, the simple soldier was over his head in the White House. At a time of rapid economic change, he hadn’t a clue how to manage an increasingly sophisticated economy.

Considering the current state of the American economy, this last charge might now be the most damning, if true. But it’s not true. And Grant’s surprisingly sophisticated handling of economics, especially in the wake of the Panic of 1873, suggests that he deserves better from the historians than he has been getting.

Ruth Graham is less kind:

When the Panic of 1873 hit -- one major Philadelphia financial firm crumbled, pulling down other top firms and dozens of banks, and prompting mass layoffs by factories and railroads -- there was no reason to think that President Grant, a Civil War hero and a failed businessman, would be equipped to handle the first country’s first national depression. Brands admits it’s hard to know how much Grant’s decisions had to do with the country’s eventual recovery, but in his agonized decision to veto a bill that would have pumped quick cash into the economy to boost inflation, he sees evidence of “a more subtle thinker than he was deemed by contemporaries and most historians since.”

Issues Obama and Romney Avoid

Noam Chomsky can think of a couple.

Romney's Sick Joke

Paul Krugman is pissed about dishonest claims by Mitt Romney about what is and isn't covered under his healthcare plan:

What Mr. Romney did in the debate, in other words, was, at best, to play a word game with voters, pretending to offer something substantive for the uninsured while actually offering nothing. For all practical purposes, he simply lied about what his policy proposals would do.

Marxism Lite

Benjamin Kunkel reviews Slavoj Žižek's strange critique of capitalism.

American Democracy for Sale

Lewis Lapham, learned and eloquent as always, takes on everything that's wrong with American democracy and America itself ("a republic," as Benjamin Franklin said, "if you can keep it"). Money quote:

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hold each other responsible for stirring up class warfare between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent; each of them can be counted upon to mourn the passing of America's once-upon-a-time egalitarian state of grace. They deliver the message to fund-raising dinners that charge up to $40,000 for the poached salmon, but the only thing worth noting in the ballroom or the hospitality tent is the absence among the invited bank accounts (prospective donor, showcase celebrity, attending journalist) of anybody intimately acquainted with - seriously angry about, other than rhetorically interested in - the fact of being poor.

For obvious reasons, Sheldon Adelson comes to mind a lot while reading such essays.

The Blog as Gravestone

Consider it:

Culture, as Clifford Geertz said, is the web on which we human animals live, and increasingly that web is, for many of us, also the Web. One of the things culture does is to mediate, through ritual and mystification, those parts of life that are too potent or terrible to face directly, particularly sex and death. Sex, or something having to do with sex, has already certainly made its presence felt on the Internet. Commemoration of the dead is just beginning, in turn, to take place online. Though I have said already that it is most foolhardy to make predictions of this sort, I anticipate that soon the Internet will become the primary site of such commemoration, that pixels will replace marble in conferring whatever bit of immortality there is to be had.

Tragedy's Decline and Fall

In tragic Greek theatre, the thing every protagonist has in common is social status. Since the genre depends on the notion of a fall, it's typically better that this fall occurs from a great height. It was one of the requirements Aristotle specified for tragic drama, "that its suffering subject be a person of worldly importance." Like many, Jenny Diski sees a connection between tragic drama and postmodern celebrity:

Maybe with gossip we have settled for Schadenfreude in place of catharsis: thank heavens the pointlessly fortunate Kim [Kardashian] has cellulite, and that we can watch her more-than-human status crumble on her thighs. Yet, on the other hand, there is a case to be made for such domestically scaled disasters – as being a commonplace version of tragedy writ small, and more suitable for the home-based intimacy of television, newspapers, magazines and internet-linked iPads on the breakfast table, rather than the grander scale of the Theatre of Dionysus. The loss of youth and beauty, from whichever social stratum you view it, is a universal experience, pointing to entropy and our common end. Just being young and becoming old was not tragic enough in itself for the Greeks, but death was, and in observing the decaying body that is what we must at some level become aware of. In present, less reverential times, when we can look at the great and the good and imagine ourselves more directly, perhaps we understand better the power and implications of apparently smaller sadnesses more generally suffered. 

Why We'll Never Stop Talking About Steve Jobs

One year on from Steve Jobs's death, Mat Honan examines his enduring significance in how we talk about technology:

We are actually in the early cycles of Talking About Steve. The next phase is analyzing how things have changed since he died. We’ll trot out his corpse and ask it if it would have released iOS 6 or approved of the iPad Mini, or why Messages keeps sending chats to my phone when I want them on my desktop. That’s already happening, but it is going to accelerate as we get further and further away from his leadership, and with every misstep that Apple makes. It is a lazy and inevitable argument that’s going to be made again and again. The contrarian takes won’t stop, either — the Steve Jobs-wasn’t-so-great stories, every word of which, and every ad sold on every page carrying that message, will reinforce the fact that, yes, he was. Otherwise, why are you still jabbering on about him?

The Atlantic collects tributes to Jobs, including the video published to Apple's homepage yesterday. Here's the post I wrote a year ago on this blog.

(Image: Simon Lutrin, via Wired)

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? Ctd

John Dickerson, like most of us, has something on his mind. And it's about Mitt Romney. Should he win in November, which Romney will show up on the first day in the Oval Office? Will it be Moderate Mitt from Massachusetts, or the heartless conservative? Willard has multiple ideological personality disorder, so it's kind of hard to tell:

"Unbelievable"

President Obama was, as you know, given some much-needed assistance, thanks to an encouraging jobs report showing that 114,000 jobs were created by American employers in September. The headline number: 7.8 percent unemployment. The numbers clearly support the positive recovery narrative the Obama campaign is presenting, and helps reassure Americans that, indeed, the Obama-led economy is heading in the right direction. But since this doesn't conform with the Republican narrative, the new number represents something of an inconvenient truth. And nowhere was conservative incredulity more evident than in the newborn "Unemployment-Rate Truther" movement, spearheaded by former GE CEO Jack Welch, who tweeted, "Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers."

Others joined in, too — even Allen West (not that anyone's particularly surprised about that). Joe Scarborough was a little bit confused on Morning Joe, but Ed Morrissey says he was merely 'expressing scepticism'. Eliot Spitzer says people like Welch are just in the first stage of grief: denial. Ezra Klein tries to knock some sense into the truthers.

Flip the Bird

Michele Malkin finds her rationale for supporting PBS subsidy cuts in the familiar realm of the liberal conspiracy:

Under the Obama administration, Elmo has lobbied for the FCC’s national broadband plan and the first lady’s Big Nanny nutrition bill. Investigative journalist James O’Keefe caught former NPR exec Ron Schiller on tape trashing the Tea Party as “racist” and “Islamophobic.” And the official PBS Twitter account sent a special shout-out to radical leftist group Move On last year for leading the government media rescue charge. Moreover, as I’ve previously reported, NPR and PBS have no problem raising money from corporations and left-wing philanthropists, including billionaire George Soros, whose Open Society Institute gave $1.8 million to pay for at least 100 journalists at NPR member radio stations in all 50 states over the next three years.

She also cites the "roughly 10 Solyndras" the government could save over the next ten years. Those who claim to be supporting this idea under the guise of fiscal responsibility really ought to consider that there are places where cuts should be made first. But that's not going to happen, though. Because this isn't about being fiscally responsible; this is about ideology.

More Boy Scout Problems

The organisation's long history of deplorable gay rights abuses is added to yet again:

The "Poshlost" of Instagram

Teju Cole, whose points are pretentious but embarrassingly true, takes on everything most people find offensive about popular photography:

[T]he problem with the new social photography isn’t merely about post-processing: after all, photographers have always manipulated their images in the darkroom. The filters that Hipstamatic and Instagram provide, the argument goes, are simply modern day alternatives to the dodging and burning that have always been integral to making photographs. This argument is in part true. But the rise of social photography means that we are now seeing images all the time, millions of them, billions, many of which are manipulated with the same easy algorithms, the same tiresome vignetting, the same dank green wash. So the problem is not that images are being altered—I remember the thrill I felt the first few times I saw Hipstamatic images, and I shot a few myself buoyed by that thrill—it’s that they’re all being altered in the same way: high contrasts, dewy focus, over-saturation, a skewing of the RGB curve in fairly predictable ways. Correspondingly, the range of subjects is also peculiarly narrow: pets, pretty girlfriends, sunsets, lunch. In other words, the photographic function, which should properly be the domain of the eye and the mind, is being outsourced to the camera and to an algorithm.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? Ctd

Steve Kornacki isn't buying the "moderate Mitt" idea. According to him, not much has changed:

Romney has long been aware that he can’t actually run on the ideas that his party has generated these past few years, but he’s been further constrained by the right’s deep suspicion of his own ideological credentials. Thus, Romney has spent most of the general election campaign awkwardly switching between vague, broad-stroke pronouncements aimed at swing voters and gestures that mesh with the radicalized, Obama-phobic spirit of today’s GOP base.

What’s changed in the last week or so is the balance: Romney is now primarily pitching his message at non-GOP base voters – people who are likely to recoil at the implications of the policy ideas that the national Republican Party has embraced – and skipping the red meat.

And, because it amuses me, the New Yorker's take on the debate, in the form of a cover.

Facebook Is Like a Chair

Yes, a chair. When I posted this video on Facebook, along with "a chair on which a billion people now sit," one of the wittier people among my 'friends' (in the FB parlance) commented, "More of a settee then?" I was amused. But in all seriousness, a billion people:

The social network hit the one-billion mark on Sept. 14, the company said. But the news was not released until an orchestrated announcement Thursday morning, when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, appeared in interviews with “The Today Show” on NBC and with Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. Mr. Zuckerberg also posted a brief announcement on Facebook.

“Helping a billion people connect is amazing, humbling and by far the thing I am most proud of in my life,” it read. “I am committed to working every day to make Facebook better for you, and hopefully together one day we will be able to connect the rest of the world too.”

But reaction to new advertising features is mixed, as Josh Constine writes of Promoted Posts:

Facebook is becoming a critical one-to-many communication medium for people. Often we’re just sharing fun things that we don’t desperately need eyeballs on, but other times a better news feed position could really help. If I’m trying to sell all my possessions before moving to Thailand, Promoted Posts could be a cost-effective way of making sure more friends know about my garage sale. Raising money for charity or looking for bone marrow donors are some other clearly positive applications.

On the ad above, David Haglund thinks it's disingenuous, and the vague analogies only serve to amplify the message that Facebook is the furniture of your life:

Is Mapping the Mind of a Worm Worth It?

The headline caught my eye, but that was about all I understood. See if you can do better.

To Name a Storm

This week, without any consultation with anyone else in the meteorological community, the Weather Channel announced that it would be naming winter storms and hurricanes on its own accord. Now a small battle has ensued over who has the right to name storms and what they should be named in the first place.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up? Ctd

Dave Weigel invites us to meet the new-and-improved liberal Mitt Romney:

Same Love

This is a tiny bit saccharine, but I think you'll agree that Macklemore/Ryan Lewis's new marriage equality video is very endearing:



Alyssa Rosenberg certainly thought it endearing:

Part of what’s fascinating and politically effective about the video is that the images are much more subtle than the lyrics themselves, which are a blunt call for equality. The couple in the film confront implied homophobia from their teenaged peers, from a couple on the street, but they also get to experience normal milestones, from teenaged fights with their parents, to public kisses, to introducing each other to their families, to an anxious proposal, to a joyous wedding. Homophobia, both internalized and external, is a factor in their relationship, but it’s far from the sum of it, and it doesn’t consume them and end in a cliche spasm of violence, as was the case for Murs’ “Animal Style” video. They just get to live, and love, and we can focus on the beauty and tremulousness and steadfastness of their relationship, above all else.

The End of Baathism

Paul Berman pens an obituary for the ideology, the last bastion of which is Damascus:

The political and cultural landscape of the Middle East, post-Baath, will be pockmarked by blighted zones that might otherwise have been a prosperous Iraq and Syria, if only the Baathist doctrine had not destroyed those countries. A cloud of intellectual bafflement and paranoia will hover overhead, consisting of the confused thoughts of everyone across the region who, in the past, talked themselves into supposing that Baathism was a good idea.

Why Do America's Rich Feel Victimised by Obama?

On the idea of higher taxes for the rich:

Nick Hanauer is a Seattle entrepreneur and venture capitalist who was one of the first investors in Amazon. In a book published this year, he argues that since the Reagan era American capitalists have enjoyed a uniquely supportive set of ideological, political, and economic conditions. Their personal enrichment came to be seen as a precondition for the enrichment of everyone else. Lower taxes for them were a social good, rather than a selfish perk. “If you are a job creator, your fifteen-per-cent tax rate is righteous. If you aren’t, it is a con job,” Hanauer told me. “The idea that the rich deserve to be rich is a very comforting idea if you are rich.” Referring to Obama’s “You didn’t build that” remark, at a rally in Virginia in July, which became a flashpoint with the right, Hanauer said that “the notion that you built it yourself is what you need to believe to feel comfortable with yourself and your desire not to pay too much in taxes.”

Unlike the moneyed gentry of earlier generations, these are people who have been raised in a society that believes itself to be truly meritocratic. It's through the arrogance of believing that you — and you alone — are in the driving seat and that only you can determine the extent of your success and failure that this kind of silliness arises. The rich feel victimised by Obama for reasons other than his policy. His policy has actually been very kind to the super-rich, as the article notes. They see his questioning of their apparently unquestionable right to claim sole responsibility for success as an affront to the idea of success itself.

Long Lectures Are Ineffective

The digital education impresario Salman Khan says students simply don't have the attentions span:

[A 1976 study] detailed the ebbs and flows of students’ focus during a typical class period. Breaking the session down minute-by-minute, the study’s authors determined that students needed a three- to five-minute period of settling down, which would be followed by 10 to 18 minutes of optimal focus. Then — no matter how good the teacher or how compelling the subject matter — there would come a lapse. In the vernacular, the students would “lose it.”

New York's Fading Allure

Fran Lebowitz in conversation with The Awl. She was asked, "If you were a teenage kid right now looking for some place to move, do you think it would still be New York City?" Her response:

Romney Loves Big Bird, Hates Paying for Him

Romney said at the debate last night, "I'm sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS, I love Big Bird. Actually like you, too. But I'm not going to—I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for. That’s number one."

Mary Elizabeth Williams thinks Romney is missing the point:

What Romney, in his adorably out-of-touch way, failed to grasp with that statement is that practically every American under the age of 50 has a powerful childhood association with that goofy oversize lug. An entire generation can trace its first understanding of death to the moment that Big Bird let it sink in that “Mr. Hooper’s not coming back.” And another generation learned about loss and community and resilience after 9/11 when “Sesame Street” had Big Bird’s own nest destroyed in a storm. (The show aired Big Bird’s odyssey again after Katrina.) And I defy even a robotic millionaire to get through Big Bird’s choked-up rendition of “It’s Not Easy Being Green” at Jim Henson’s memorial service and not completely lose it when he says, “Thank you, Kermit.”

Republicans in Congress have tried to cut PBS funding before. They found it wasn't popular:

A 2011 poll found 69 percent of voters opposed to defunding PBS. People like Big Bird. And that's even though another 2011 poll found that PBS gets more of the federal budget than it does. Much more: 30 percent of people thought PBS gets 5 percent or more of the federal budget, and another 40 percent believed it gets between 1 percent and 5 percent.

Besides, cutting off PBS wouldn't make much difference in cutting the deficit anyway, as it only accounts for 0.00014% of the budget. This isn't about fiscal responsibility. This is about ideological preconceptions about the role of government. As Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets, "Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive."

Chances Obama Missed

Amy Davidson gives a rundown. One of seven:

Where was Warren Buffet’s secretary? Where were Romney’s tax returns, or his tax rates? Tax fairness came up, but they didn’t (nor did Bain), and Obama did not really control that line of argument. Nor did he draw a connection between Romney’s secret budget plan and his unseen tax returns. As it was, Obama was strongest on the bad math. But Romney got away with a tautological rebuttal—“So there’s no economist can say Mitt Romney’s tax plan adds five trillion if I say I will not add to the deficit with my tax plan”—that, when you parse it, just doesn’t make sense.

Meanwhile, John Dickerson accurately characterises last night's debate as Mitt Romney's best moment so far, and wonders if he can sustain the momentum; Politico's Martin and Harris say that although he's managed to chase away the "aroma of terminal illness," it's up to him now to keep it away.

China Bashing

Kissinger thinks it's deplorable. (Especially from people like Donald Trump, who, you'll recall, got a mention last night. He's not totally irrelevant to the national dialogue after all!)

Why We Enjoy Movies, Ctd

David Thomson examines the numbing power of the big screen:

At first, the magic was overwhelming: in 1895, the first audiences for the Lumière brothers' films feared that an approaching steam engine was going to come out of the screen and hit them. That gullibility passed off like morning mist, though observing the shower in Psycho (1960) we still seem to feel the impact of the knife. That scene is very frightening, but we know we're not supposed to get up and rescue Janet Leigh. In a similar way, we can watch the surreal imagery of the devastation at Fukushima, or wherever, and whisper to ourselves that it's terrible and tragic, but not happening to us.

How large a step is it from that denial of our full selfhood to the wry passivity with which we observe global warming, economic collapse and a new freelance nuclear age as portents of an end to a world that is beyond us? Pioneers of film, such as D W Griffith, Chaplin and Abel Gance, hoped that the movie would make a single population in the world angry or moved enough to share liberty and opportunity and end war and intolerance. But perhaps it has made for a society of voyeurs who associate their own hiding in the dark with the safe futility of dealing with the screen's frenzy. So the world is chaotic and nearing ruin, but not for us – not yet. And so we talk of democracy still in a scheme that is intent on us purchasing anything and overlooking everything else.

Quote of the Day

"I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn't of been Mitt Romney because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year, promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow on stage last night said he didn't know anything about that. The real Mitt Romney said we don't need any more teachers in our classrooms....But the fellow on stage last night, he loves teachers; can't get enough of them.

"The Mitt Romney we all know invested in companies that were called "pioneers of outsourcing jobs to other countries." But the guy on stage last night, he said that he doesn't even know that there are such laws that encourage outsourcing....So you see the man on stage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney's decisions and what he's been saying for the last year. And that's because he knows full well that we don't want what he's been selling for the last year," — Barack Obama, speaking in Denver.

The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After

Richard Beck echoes Elizabeth Kantor, who made the link between Austen and the self-help genre:

Austen doesn’t do much out-and-out moralising—certainly not as much as Dickens or Eliot. Her irony leaves a lot of room for argument about a particular character’s habits and actions. But the necessity of making the judgements, of thinking and talking them through, could not be more explicit, nor more timely. Our cultural climate is dominated, in part, by two forms of entertainment which only make sense in the context of constant social judgement. One is the self-help book, which asks readers to judge themselves. The other is reality television, where the viewing pleasure comes from judging the people on screen. Jane Austen could not be a better fit.

Will the Real Mitt Romney Please Stand Up?

Jonathan Chait heralds the return of Massachusetts Mitt, the moderate:

Tonight’s debate saw the return of the Mitt Romney who ran for office in Massachusetts in 1994 and 2002. He was obsessive about portraying himself as a moderate, using every possible opening or ambiguity — and, when necessary, making them up — to shove his way to the center. Why he did not attempt to restore this pose earlier, I cannot say. Maybe he can only do it in debates. Or maybe conservatives had to reach a point of absolute desperation over his prospects before they would give him the ideological space. In any case, he dodged almost every point in the right wing canon in a way that seemed to catch Obama off guard.

Ezra Klein, like Chait, saw Mitt Romney the Moderate at last night's debate:

Early in the campaign, Team Obama made a crucial decision: They weren’t going to run against “multiple-choice Mitt.” Rather, of the various Romneys on offer to them — the Massachusetts moderate, the tea party conservative — they were simply going to choose one and stick with it. 

According to Yglesias, "The problem with all of this is exactly what you'd expect the problem to be with an Etch a Sketch move—it's inconsistent with things he's committed himself to previously." Take Romney's comments about Simpson-Bowles. In the universe the rest of us inhabit, Obama proposed a "grand bargain", but Paul Ryan vetoed it and made sure it never got a congressional vote; in fact, Ryan advised GOP leaders not to work with Obama to reduce the deficit because it would be better for his re-election prospects. Then Romney makes Obama's delay and unwillingness to embrace the plan on his own the lede of his argument. Because he was operating in the itinerant Moderate Romney universe, was able to say that Obama and Pelosi and everyone else had little capacity for bipartisan cooperation. In the real world, however, the history of obstructionism within the GOP is well documented.

Romney has his nod to the GOP base in Paul Ryan. Now he's prepared to play a different game, or at least change the rules to suit himself. Did you hear the Etch-A-Sketch shaking?

(Image via Daily News)

Obama's Worst Moment

This was a pretty awful night for the President. And the reason his performance came of as being so disgracefully bad was because he didn't seem the slightest bit presidential. There was a singular commanding force on stage tonight (or this afternoon, if you're here) and it was Mitt Romney. Obama was tired, lethargic, and even appeared indifferent to the proceedings. And where Romney engaged in the fight, Obama merely endured it. He presented none of his major arguments, made no obvious effort to combat the obvious distortions of the other side, and allowed his opponent to walk right over him. I have no idea who said it (someone on Twitter, if I recall correctly), but this made me think that Obama really does have a teleprompter dependency. What happened?

I don't expect Obama to simply tear into Romney, or to engage in verbal assault, or become argumentative — that's not his style. But one would expect him to correct, even capitalise on, Romney's attempt to construct an alternative reality and have us seeing through his lens. The problem was that tonight, because of the president's weakness in debate, Romney succeeded. He got away with it. And he shouldn't have.

Tonight we saw a smart Mitt Romney, but a deceptive one. The Etch-A-Sketch on full display. In the true style of a talented politician, and a true orator, he persuaded the viewer to believe in his version of the truth. He governed the stage, and appeared in control. He was in control even over the Lehrer, whose moderation was completely lame, and whose insight was far from penetrating. It was as though he just sat back and asked them rather wetly what they thought was different about the other guy. (If PBS's funding gets cut, we'll blame Lehrer. At least it's not Big Bird's fault.) Romney didn't look down for the entire time, and wasn't compromised by the split screen format of the debate's broadcast; he appeared in control, and in a crucial move for the challenger made a sitting president look weak.

He was able to get away with elementary factual distortions. He turned around tonight and became a moderate from Massachusetts. Drop everything, find a new persona. Nobody saw it coming.

Especially not Obama.

The First Debate: Reaction Round-Up II

A less dramatic view of events:

Well, I don't know that this debate was quite as bad for Obama as the general consensus. He did get some core points across: that Romney's tax math doesn't add up, and that he's hiding the ball with regard to deductions; that a balanced approach, i.e. with new taxes, is a better approach to deficit reduction than cuts only; that Romneycare and Obamacare are structurally almost identical, and that Romney has no plan to cover the uninsured; that Romney proposes to voucherize Medicare.

Will Wilkinson:

Romney won decisively. Obama clearly approached the debate with a mainly defensive strategy, hoping to come away without having done anything to rock his very comfortable boat. But the boat did rock. Obama was flummoxed by Romney's superior preparation, intensity, and execution, and tonight's truly dismal performance from the president has put the sustainability of his lead in question, if not actually in peril.

James Joyner:

I say this as someone who thought Al Gore and John Kerry easily won all the debates in 2000 and 2004–and certainly thought Obama beat McCain in 2008. I don’t think it’s likely to radically change the dynamics of the race in the key battleground states. But Romney was cogent and prepared while Obama seemed as if he had been up all night and then told he had a surprise debate.

James Fallows watched the body language and facial expressions:

If you had the sound turned off, Romney looked calm and affable through more of the debate than Obama did, and the incumbent president more often looked peeved. Romney's default expression, whether genuine or forced, was a kind of smile; Obama's, a kind of scowl. I can understand why Obama would feel exasperated by these claims and arguments. Every president is exasperated by what he considers facile claims about what he knows to be impossibly knotty problems. But he let it show.

Alex Massie:

Will it shift the dynamics of the election? Perhaps not. The best Obama’s supporters could say last night is that the President avoided the kind of blunder that might hand Romney an obvious advantage. Maybe so but that kind of defensive mindset seemed somehow to have seeped into Obama last night. He seemed sluggish, even lethargic, hesitant, distracted and oddly unable to land any heavy punches on Romney. Much of the time he was pictured on the split-screen with his head down. Doubtless he was scribbling notes but it had the effect of making him look weary and disheartened. Defeated or despondent, even.

Josh Marshall:

I remember noting one thing about the 2004 debates, especially the first one. George Bush seemed not to like being criticized by a guy up there on the stage with him. President’s just don’t have that happen. They get criticized but not often to their face. Bush showed that in spades. And I feel like I’ve seen some of that from Obama tonight. A lot of grimacing.

The First Debate: Reaction Round-Up

That wasn't a debate so much as Mitt Romney just took Obama for a cross country drive strapped to the roof of his car.
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) October 4, 2012

Bill Kristol gives his take:

President Obama was right in his closing statement: “This was a terrific debate.” So it was. For Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney stood and delivered the best debate performance by a Republican presidential candidate in more than two decades. Romney spoke crisply about the next four years as well as the last four years, was detailed in clarifying the choice of paths ahead, and seemed more comfortable, more energetic—and even more presidential—than the incumbent.

Jonathan Tobin puts it in perspective:

It should be stipulated that one debate doesn’t decide an election. Obama’s advantages with the media and his historic status as the first African-American president are still crucial. And it’s likely he’ll do better in subsequent debates. But a time when many were counting Romney out, he didn’t just win the debate but may have also debunked the notion that he couldn’t win the election. We’ll have to see how much of a bounce the Republican gets in the polls this week. It will also be interesting to see whether on the heels of this terrible night, the next monthly jobs report has a bigger impact on public opinion on the race than the September report. But no matter what lies ahead, Romney has energized his base, discouraged Democrats and showed for the first time in months that Barack Obama has feet of clay. This election is up for grabs.

Andrew Sullivan:

Obama looked tired, even bored; he kept looking down; he had no crisp statements of passion or argument; he wasn’t there. He was entirely defensive, which may have been the strategy. But it was the wrong strategy. At the wrong moment. The person with authority on that stage was Romney – offered it by one of the lamest moderators ever, and seized with relish. This was Romney the salesman. And my gut tells me he sold a few voters on a change tonight. It’s beyond depressing. But it’s true.

Instapundit:

When you've lost Andrew Sullivan...

Joe Klein:

Did the President send out his body double tonight? Because if that was the actual Barack Obama out there, I’m not sure he can communicate well enough to be an effective President in a time of trouble, to say nothing of winning a second term.

Kevin Drum:

All the talk on CNN seems to be about how Obama "looked like he didn't want to be there." I didn't really see that myself. Obama certainly wasn't crisp, which I find a little inexplicable, but that's about the worst I saw.

Did Romney come armed with "loads of details"? Not even close. He certainly made an endless number of points, but there weren't really many facts and figures there. Just a flurry of words. And that old Romney weirdness made a few appearances too. For example, this bit about what he'd cut from the budget: "I’m sorry, Jim, I’m going to stop the subsidy to PBS. I’m going to stop other things. I like PBS. I love Big Bird. Actually I like you, too."

John Hinderaker:

I’ve been watching presidential debates for quite a few years, but I have never seen one like this. It wasn’t a TKO, it was a knockout. Mitt Romney was in control from the beginning. He was the alpha male, while Barack Obama was weak, hesitant, stuttering, often apologetic. The visuals were great for Romney and awful for Obama. Obama looked small, tired, defeated after four years of failure, out of ammo. One small point among many: Obama doesn’t even know how to stand at a podium, as he continually lifted up one leg. He would be below average as a high school debater.

Taegan Goddard:

Mitt Romney did considerably better and was more aggressive but never really landed a big punch. He hit Obama regularly but the president played rope-a-dope and just waited for the bell to ring. Romney's major misstep in this debate -- and in this campaign -- was being factually untrue about his plans and denying his own record. But Obama didn't push back very hard at all.

More coming...

The Kerry-fication of Mitt Romney

While David Carr thinks the Romney campaign's protestations about the perceived liberal bias within the mainstream media are a waste of time, John Cook takes the other side, and says he's getting a hard time, and that the press is doing to him was done to John Kerry:

When Romney tried to get a crowd at a rally in Ohio add his running mate's name to a chant they had started—"Romney! Ryan!" instead of "Romney! Romney!"—even nominal Republican Joe Scarborough stubbornly misinterpreted it as a hamfisted attempt to change the chant from Ryan's name to his own. This is not because Joe Scarborough supports the candidacy of Barack Obama. It is because he supports the primacy of the Romney-is-a-Loser narrative, and wanted to hold up another shining example of that loser-dom for the rest of the political press to giggle at. Which they did, even though it was obviously based on a falsehood to anyone who took time to listen to the audio.

The video in question here.

Liveblogging the First Presidential Debate

10:31 pm — "I'm concerned about America," says Romney the Moderate. Perhaps what he failed to mention was the 47 percent of it he wrote off in a statement that Obama has sensibly decided not to mention, but in any case, it's a nice sentiment. Romney's making a direct appeal to the camera in what seems to me, sitting at home in New Zealand, like a desperate attempt simply to seem like a human being. He's just making this up as he goes along. The Etch-A-Sketch is back, ladies and gentlemen. Back in force.

10:27 pm — Obama is kind of calling Romney out on the bipartisan thing. And he needs to, because that was really awful. Time for closing statements. "My faith and confidence in the American future is undiminished...and the reason is because of its people." Romney has this awful, insidious little smirk on his face the entire time. Obama is picking things up right now, during his closing statement. I was beginning to think that he had lost it. He has stopped stuttering, and that's something. "I have kept that promise, and if you vote for me, then I promise that I'll fight just as hard in a second term."

10:22 pm — God! Lehrer is dreadful at controlling this thing. He's basically handed control over to Romney. Tweet of the night on the subject:

I don't know, I think Lehrer has a real shot of winning this thing.
— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) October 4, 2012

10:17 pm — The first mention of religious freedom. And the military. God and guns, please. That's what freedom looks like.

10:13 pm — "Do you believe there is a fundamental between the two of you as to how you view the mission of the federal government." According to Obama, the first rule is to keep the American people safe. "As Lincoln understood, there are some things we do better together." Even on this topic, which he knows so well, and he understands so acutely, he is lacking the fluency of his earlier arguments. Obama is an excellent orator, but it isn't coming through here. Invoking Lincoln was a good idea. Obama has said earlier that Lincoln is, in fact, his favourite president.

10:10 pm — And the non-specificity card gets played.

10:02 pm — It's awfully funny to hear Romney talk about an Obama/Democratic unwillingness to come together and be bipartisan. You can't blame Obama for Republican obstructionism. The GOP, from the very beginning, was determined to oppose Obama at every turn. Obama should be able to walk all over this, and yet he's stumbling and staggering. I simply cannot believe for a moment that the lack of bipartisan cooperation is Obama's fault, or that Romney is in any way a better team player.

9:59 pm — I'm not a rabid Democrat, and I know it's not his style, but I really want Obama to tear into Romney at the moment. I just can't knock the feeling that he's letting this slip. As Frum observes, "Romney consistently looks at Obama when Obama speaks. Obama looks down when ROmney speaks. Not alpha dog behaviour."

9:57 pm — Obama's taking on the regulation point at the moment, but he's doing a terrible job. Romney is coming off as the moderate here! Incredibly. His Dodd-Frank rhetoric is actually making sense and coming across as reasonable. Obama: "Is there anyone out there who thinks we have too much oversight and regulation on Wall Street? If so, Romney is your candidate." Lehrer says we've achieved a clear difference. Not really.

9:54 pm — "Regulation can become excessive." And apparently you have to have regulation. I don't think Romney's conservative friends are going to buy this, or at least not the current Republican Party. On the other hand, it's nice to know that Romney's kind of restricted regulation is there to guard us from the panoply of garage banks that would undoubtedly appear in its absence.

9:51 pm — I'm feeling for Jim Lehrer at the moment.

9:46 pm — This is a concerning episode for those of us who like Obama. The truth is that he's rambling. He's being dreadfully abstract, and needs to focus if he's going to count this one as a victory. That said, these debates don't really mean that much in determining the outcome of the election. They're just circuses for us to gawk at while we wait for November. That said, though, this is probably one of the most substantiative debates we've seen during this election cycle. We're getting into gritty specifics. You never saw this during the GOP debates. But Romney's clarity is really too good. Obama needs to lift it.

9:38 pm — Just tuned in on CNN. Hoping to provide updates throughout.

(Image via Politico)

For Want of a Better TED

A new ideas conference hopes to re-inject the spark TED has apparently lost. We've been very unkind to TED in the past, as you can see.

Inside the Cold Libertarian Mind

Matt Ridley gives a profile:

Perhaps more intriguingly, when libertarians reacted to moral dilemmas and in other tests, they displayed less emotion, less empathy and less disgust than either conservatives or liberals. They appeared to use "cold" calculation to reach utilitarian conclusions about whether (for instance) to save lives by sacrificing fewer lives. They reached correct, rather than intuitive, answers to math and logic problems, and they enjoyed "effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks" more than others do.

Elsewhere, Eric Michael Johnson posits that, contrary to the Randian view, human evolution favours altruists, not individualists.

Are Presidential Debates Too Civil?

Amy Davidson, the clip above considered, thinks so:

Bush loses because he first tells her that the question is confusing, then is offended by the implication that a person of “means,” as he puts it—Romney, who would do well to watch the clip, would say “success”—would be any less on top of that sort of thing, (“But I don’t think it’s fair to say, you haven’t had cancer. Therefore, you don’t know what’s it like”), and then never really answers it. Bill Clinton does—first by quickly establishing empathy, but then by arguing that empathy isn’t enough, running through a series of statistics, and saying that the woman’s friends are hurting “because we are in the grip of a failed economic theory.” It is, in miniature, what we saw again at Clinton’s Democratic National Convention speech. He was able to connect; more importantly, he was willing to attack, and to do so with specifics.

This is not an argument for ugliness, but for taking a hard look at what our politicians are doing, and want to do. There is a lot lurking in this campaign, everything from birtherism to questions of class, but many of the worst imprecations are heard not from the candidates directly but in ads paid for by Super PACs, or in manufactured frenzies on Fox News. A little incivility at this juncture—some yelling at or by the candidates themselves—might help by at least making them accountable, if not ashamed.

In Defence of Book Bloggers

TLS editor and Man Booker Prize judge Sir Peter Stothard has said that while it's wonderful that people have an opinion on books, and there are so many websites and blogs devoted to the study of literature, but "not everyone's opinion is worth the same." John Self (Martin Amis protagonist name?) responds:

The greatest tool bloggers have at their disposal – to be exercised with caution – is space. Former fiction editor of the TLS, Lindsay Duguid, said that "in a short review, you can probably only get over three points". A blog can explore a book at a length that all but the most prominent literary critics would envy. Today, social networking sites encourage expression to be short and punchy, not balanced and thoughtful. The Man Booker prize this year removed the users' forum from its revamped site, and now limits reader responses to the books to Facebook comments and tweets. In such circumstances, the opportunity that blogs continue to offer for long-form engagement with literature should not be denigrated, but celebrated.

The critic James Wood discussed this briefly at the NYPL back in 2008. That's worth looking at.

Quote of the Day II

"I remember feeling, and understanding, the fear that drove some parents in the schools to wish to ban The Color Purple. I realized, given the sexism in our culture, that some of the complainers were probably people who had at some time sexually abused children. Or, they had been sexually abused themselves and could not bear thinking about it, as adults. There were also those who felt the language, or way of speaking, of their parents and grandparents would best be forgotten, since it was not “correct” standard English speech. I actually felt a lot of compassion for everyone," — Alice Walker, speaking with Guernica. This week is "Banned Books Week," apparently, which sounds fantastic. Who knew?

This Is (Not) the Most Important Election Ever

Even though everybody always seems to think so:

The most egregious example of Most Important Election of the current cycle is Newt Gingrich, who would frequently state, and even tweet, that the 2012 election is "the most important election since 1860." That's a pretty novel approach to the [X] in the equation, as customarily the amount of time since the last Important Election occurred ranges from "a generation" to "our lifetime" on up to "in history," but then again Gingrich cites historical dates like a kid with a new thesaurus drops big words. And Gingrich was not alone. Politicians and pundits including Bill O'Reilly, Nancy Pelosi, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Santorum (parroting Gingrich), Chuck Norris, Reince Priebus, Bobby Jindal, Ramesh Ponnuru and even Bob Grant (remember him?) have also jumped on the Most Important boat. If volume is the determining factor, we are picking importance out of our teeth already and Election Day and we haven't even had the first debate.

It's one of the clichés of every election cycle, and a tired phrase that is generously allowed innumerable reappearances each time. In a 2008 essay chronicling its history of abuse and overuse, Christopher Clausen asked if it was possible for the US to elect a president without invoking the phrase. He asked, "Has there ever been an election that some people didn't narcissistically proclaim the most important in their lifetimes? Perhaps, but such episodes are evidently so rare that they never get recorded."

From Ryan, No Explanation

Romney's running mate doesn't have the time to go into specifics:



On its Facebook page, the Democratic Party jumped:

Mitt Romney announced his economic plan 392 days ago—yet his running mate says it'd take too long to explain the math. It's time to admit they're dodging the question because the middle class won't like the answer.

And Jonathan Chait nails it:

Wallace asks the question seven times, and Ryan fills one minute and 48 seconds avoiding it. Finally, the final time Wallace asks Ryan to give him the math, Ryan asserts, “It would take me too long to go through all the math.” There was plenty of time if he hadn’t spent two minutes dodging the question! In any case, the math doesn’t take a long time to explain, but Ryan doesn’t want to explain it, because it would reveal unavoidable and unpopular trade-offs in the campaign’s tax plan that he’d rather conceal....Ryan is still an extremely skilled bullshitter — vastly better at it than Romney. But he’s actually seeing, for the first time, questions that attempt to pry information out of him, rather than the batting practice lobs to which he’s accustomed. He’s going to emerge from the race with his legend punctured. 

Paul Ryan is still the new-Gingrich philosopher king of the Republican Party, as this recent WaPo article portrays so well. Allen West, for one, has called Ryan the "intellectual epicentre" of the GOP. Which is really saying something, don't you think?

How to Help Iran Build a Bomb

Or, why attacking Iran's nuclear facilities is a terrible idea:

Those who warn against attacking Iran say that such a move would free officials in Tehran of many constraints. An attack, for instance, would all but certainly lead to the expulsion of international inspectors, which, in turn, would allow the government to undo hundreds of monitoring devices and safeguards, including seals on underground storage units. Further, an Iran permitted to present itself to the world as the victim of an attack would receive sympathy and perhaps vital imports from nations that once backed trade bans. The thinking also goes that a strike would allow Iran to further direct its economy to military ends.

Perhaps most notably, an attack could unite what is now a fractious state, these analysts say, and build an atmosphere of mobilizing rage. As the foreign ministers of Sweden and Finland wrote earlier this year, “It’s difficult to see a single action more likely to drive Iran into taking the final decision.”

Evil Website Pagination

Farhad Manjoo has written an excellent article in protest against one of the web's most odious practices: splitting articles into multiple pages for — in theory — increased pageviews and advertising revenue. In all seriousness, this shit needs to stop. Pageview juicing is not only annoying but time-consuming. Maybe the best indication of this is that whenever I visit a website, I tend to look for the 'single-page' button immediately. Worse yet, when I cannot find it I will even settle for a printable version of the page (speaking of which, the New York magazine website has an excellent printer-friendly view for its articles).

For a while, I've been looking for a solution to my own blog jump-link problem. I'd like to have the 'read more' link work so that the rest of the article appears on the homepage, rather than taking readers to the permalink page. But that's a different issue. In any case, pagination is a dreadful idea. Designers owe it to readers to do away with it.

Is the Male Decline a Myth?

Stephanie Coontz debunks what she sees as the illusion of female ascendancy, and says that the descent of men has been equally exaggerated:

Much has been made of the gender gap in educational achievement. Girls have long done better in school than boys, and women have now pulled ahead of men in completing college. Today women earn almost 60 percent of college degrees, up from one-third in 1960.

The largest educational gender gap is among families in the top 25 percent of the earnings distribution, where women lead men by 13 percent in graduation rates, compared to just a 2 percent advantage for women from the lowest income families. But at all income levels, women are still concentrated in traditionally female areas of study. Gender integration of college majors has stalled since the mid-1990s, and in some fields, women have even lost ground. Between 1970 and 1985, women’s share of computer and information sciences degrees rose from 14 percent to 37 percent. But by 2008 women had fallen back to 18 percent.

 On the other hand, Hanna Rosin is unconvinced:

[Z]oom the graph back a few decades and you can see how far we’ve come—and that the lines all point one way: Men’s wages have been stagnating, and by some measures declining, as women’s economic fortunes continue to rise. The wage gap has been slowly closing for women, but the education gap has not been closing for men. We can focus only and eternally on the fact that those lines have not yet crossed or even converged in many professions. But isn’t that vantage point a bit narrow? Why does we’re-not-there-yet mean we’re not headed there?

The Death of "Whom"

As correct use of it turns into a badge for having gone to the right schools, the word's demise is imminent:

I think whom has a long life left in it, though, for non-grammatical reasons. Educated people prize language, and the mastery of Formal. Their status at the top of the social heap is an incentive to treat the proper use of whom as a sign of intelligence, not just the Formal register. They do most of the edited and published writing we consume. And so whom will live in print for a good long time, even as many of those same people ignore it when they're chatting at the proverbial water cooler.

Earlier this morning, I linked to an article on which grammatical rules to give up on. I think we can contentedly put this one in that category.

How Easily Can You Change Political Beliefs?

An experiment based on an old magic trick shows political convictions to be far more malleable than originally thought:

Quote of the Day

"We expect her to show some good judgment. She listens to my iPod and has gotten hip to stuff that was made well before she was born like Motown, jazz, classic rock. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that she’s picking up on. We actually share tastes in hip-hop and rap music but we don’t listen to it together, because some of the language in there would embarrass me—at least while I’m listening to it with her. Folks like Jay-Z, Nas, we both like them, but when it comes on and I’m sitting with her and Sasha, then I fast-forward because it would make me blush," — President Obama, when asked what kind of music her daughter likes to listen to.

"Correlation Doesn't Imply Causation"

Daniel Engber asks why the internet's favourite blowhard phrase (his words) has gained such popularity:

To say that correlation does not imply causation makes an important point about the limits of statistics, but there are other limits, too, and ones that scientists ignore with far more frequency. In The Cult of Statistical Significance, the economists Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak cite one of these and make an impassioned, book-length argument against the arbitrary cutoff that decides which experimental findings count and which ones don't. By convention, we call an effect "significant" if the chances of its deriving from a twist of fate—as opposed to some more genuine relationship—are less than 5 percent. But as McCloskey and Ziliak (and many others) point out, there's nothing special about that number and no reason to invest it with our faith. 

The Election Is Over

David Rothkopf calls it:

So now the swing-state polls suggest it is highly unlikely that the Republican candidate can orchestrate a victory. Behind by 9 percentage points in the latest Columbus Dispatch poll in the state he must win, Ohio, and trailing in eight of the nine Florida polls tracked by RealClearPolitics, Mitt has no clear path to 270 electoral votes. The media will spin this election up and down between now and Nov. 6 to try to create the illusion of drama, but stick a fork in it: The Romney goose is cooked.

Why We Enjoy Movies

Jana Prikryl dissects Pauline Kael's view on the matter:

“We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them,” she wrote in her brilliant 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” “and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art.”

Kael’s taste tended toward quick pacing and a down-to-earth story that could grab an audience and make it feel something. A movie didn’t have to be hysterically funny to win her over; she found it especially thrilling when a loose, jocular tone somehow eloped with otherwise straight-faced genres—hence her lifelong allegiance to Jean Renoir and Robert Altman and Jonathan Demme. Praising a movie by another one of her favorites, Jean-Luc Godard, Kael wrote that its “fusion of attitudes—seeing characters as charming and poetic and, at the same time, preposterous and absurd—is one of Godard’s contributions to modern film.” Her most withering scorn was reserved for movies that she took to deny the possibility of laughter or pretended they were above it—her blacklist included much of Bergman, most of Kubrick, and pretty much all of Hitchcock.

"Sweet Jesus"

You may have seen this already, as it's a little bit old, but here's the clip of Joe Scarborough reacting to Romney's failed attempt at crowd manipulation:

Which Grammar Rules Should You Flout?

The debate continues. If you can bear it, have a read.

Partisan Pen Pals

Josh Fischel, a liberal who made a hobby out of fact-checking conservative media outlets, found an unlikely pen pal in Esther, a conservative blogger. What he found was that it helped him better understand his own positions out of better understanding of others. For example, on gay marriage:

The question of marriage equality is simple and straightforward to me. To someone like Esther, it is extremely complicated, and that’s obvious in that she won’t divorce the notion of marriage equality from the welfare of children raised by gay parents. I gave her a scenario: would you rather have your kids raised by a straight family member who, with his spouse, had been largely unsuccessful in life — high school drop-out, an addict, abusive, unemployed, etc — or a gay family member who, with his spouse, had achieved far more? Esther replied, “I think that any time you have one type of household that remains stable, you’re going to have better outcomes than someone whose family is rocked by the trauma of breakup, regardless of whether your parents are gay or straight. But kids raised by gay parents will, by definition, lack one gender role model or the other as they mature.”

Reminds me of this deranged experiment.

Churches to Obama: Tax Us, We Dare You

As Amy Sullivan dutifully reports over at the New Republic, on this coming Sunday pastors around the United States will once again attempt to provoke the federal government to audit them by delivering explicitly partisan sermons against Obama, and/or endorsing Mitt Romney. Others, she writes, will tell their congregations that a good Christian could never consider voting for a candidate who supports abortion and gay marriage. The protest, now in its fifth year, rebels against an amendment introduced by then-senator Lyndon Johnson in 1954 that prohibits tax-exempt organisations from participating in partisan politicking. The idea is that by inviting an investigation by the IRS they can challenge the law in court.

They're calling it "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" and hope that an IRS intervention will help them fight back against what they see is a war on religion by Obama. Jim Garlow, a pastor from California, has described the Johnson Amendment as a "muzzle on churches." Glenn Beck, a vocal champion of the Pulpit Freedom protest, has said that there ought to be no limits on what churches can preach to their congregations, saying, "If priests can’t speak out on public issues, then what’s the Church good for?" Amy Sullivan points out that this argument doesn't really hold water:

Let’s consider this claim. In order to believe that churches are being censored by the government, you have to accept that religious organizations have not only the right to engage in partisan speech and activities but also the right to be exempt from federal taxes and the right to accept donations that are tax-deductible. There simply is no constitutional right that covers the latter. The tax-exempt status for churches is a monetary benefit given to them by the government, as is the rule allowing individuals to deduct their contributions to religious organizations.

It’s quite simple. If a church wants to endorse a candidate and engage in campaign activities, there are absolutely no restrictions preventing it from doing so. But it must pay federal taxes, and its donors cannot deduct their contributions. Additionally, a pastor can preach about same-sex marriage or immigration reform or abortion or economic justice. But he cannot tell parishioners that they must support a particular candidate because of their views on one of those issues. Thechurches involved in Pulpit Sunday want to have it both ways. They want to use tax-deductible donations to participate in campaigns, and no doubt there are plenty of political donors who would prefer to deduct their political contributions by sending them through religious organizations.

Religious figures and their hierarchies tend to be given a pretty large pit in which to wallow when it comes to what they can and cannot say while claiming tax-exempt status. I wouldn't go so far as to say I have no qualms with churches preaching on politics (how could they not, when everything is at some level political?), but I respect their right to do so within reason. We ought to have an issue though with the line blurring between a political organisation and a religious one, since we insist upon treating them differently under the tax code. Perhaps it would be easier if countries like the United States (and, of course, New Zealand) would wake up and realise that maybe there is no line at all.

(Image: Getty)

Feeling the Pinch

The housewives of Japan are giving less pocket money to their husbands:

Unsurprisingly, the allowance peaked in 1990 at nearly 78,000 yen per month ($1,000 in today’s money) at almost exactly the moment Japan’s economic star began its slow descent. The figure has plummeted to half that sum this year, roughly back to what it was in 1981, according to Shinsei Bank, which compiles the annual white paper. That shrinking budget has forced a pruning of non-essentials: gone are golf games, eating out, boozing and the tipsy taxi-ride home. The average amount spent on the once ubiquitous drinking session has declined by more than half, to 2,860 yen ($37) in the decade to 2012—the lowest since the survey started in 1979.

To Encourage Cycling, Ditch the Helmets

The case is convincing:

“Pushing helmets really kills cycling and bike-sharing in particular because it promotes a sense of danger that just isn’t justified — in fact, cycling has many health benefits,” says Piet de Jong, a professor in the department of applied finance and actuarial studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He studied the issue with mathematical modeling, and concludes that the benefits may outweigh the risks by 20 to 1. He adds: “Statistically, if we wear helmets for cycling, maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath, because there are lots more injuries during those activities.” The European Cyclists’ Federation says that bicyclists in its domain have the same risk of serious injury as pedestrians per mile traveled.

And if cities really want their bike-sharing programmes to take off, ditching the helmet increasingly seems essential:

A Trans-Atlantic Trip Turns Kafkaesque

An open letter to American Airlines:

You, American Airlines, should no longer be flying across the Atlantic. You do not have the know-how. You do not have the equipment. And your employees have clearly lost interest in the endeavor. Like the country whose name graces the hulls of your flying ships, you are exhausted and shorn of purpose. You need to stop.

I concur. It's awful.

No Army for Young Men

Soldiers these days need less muscle and more maturity, says Rosa Brooks, so why do we still focus on recruiting 18-year-old males? The recruiters have got it all wrong:

The skills the military is most likely to need in the future are precisely the skills that American young people in general -- and young males in particular -- are most likely to lack. The U.S. military will need people with technical experience and scientific know-how. It will also need people with foreign language and regional expertise and an anthropological cast of mind -- people who can operate comfortably and effectively surrounded by foreigners. And in the 24-7 media environment -- the era of the strategic corporal -- the military will, above all, need people with maturity and good judgment.

Reason and Its Discontents

Critics of reason and its role in politics, from Michael Oakeshott to Jonathan Haidt, see reason as an inherently flawed instrument. Michael Lynch summarises the new view on the subject:

Understanding the Invisible

An animated, illustrated version of John Lloyd's excellent TED talk:

Smoking Segregation

Nate Berg draws the battlelines:

These olfactory politics create a separation between the smokers and non-smokers that’s both ideological and physical – a segregation that some researchers have gone as far as calling a “spatial apartheid.” And because of the invasive unavoidability of smell, the presence of cigarette smoke or its odor results in an inevitable “sensory appraisal” by others, according to Tan....The influence of smell, Tan argues, is perhaps one of the strongest determinants of how people interact with or avoid one another in the public sphere – whether it’s cigarette smoke, days without a shower or the undeniable stench of vagrancy. How exactly cigarette smells shape the use of public space is likely different from place to place. But this research argues that smell and personal habits can be a major force in shaping city life.

Rod Dreher can relate:

I have always been amazed by how little smokers seem to understand how strongly the smell of cigarette smoke clings to them and their clothes, and how unpleasant it is to many non-smokers. This is not a moral judgment, but an aesthetic one (I don’t have any strong moral views about smoking). I’ve always hated the smell of smoke, and have all my life had to fight off headaches because secondhand smoke. But I hadn’t realized how accustomed I’d become to it until laws banning smoking in bars and restaurants took effect. Now, with daily life being almost totally smoke-free, and many fewer people smoking now than did when I was younger, on the occasion when I am around smokers, it strikes me as even more unpleasant.

I've always been of the opposite view. I actually don't mind the smell of smoking and, at times, find it mildly pleasant. Though I could never actually take it up as a habit — like most people these days, I know too many people and am aware of too many cases — I can see the appeal. But in New Zealand, it's considered to be such a stridently anti-social activity, one could never really take it up. The social disadvantages are simply too great. And, yes, most people hate the smell.

To Be Indie-Rock Royalty

Even for a relatively successful band like Grizzly Bear (fab new track here), it still doesn't pay that well:

When the band tours, it can afford a bus, an extra keyboard player, and sound and lighting engineers. (That U2 tour had a wardrobe manager.) After covering expenses like recording, publicity, and all the other machinery of a successful act (“Agents, lawyers, tour managers, the merch girl, the venues take a merch cut; Ticketmaster takes their cut; the manager gets a percentage; publishers get a percentage”), Grizzly Bear’s members bring home … well, they’d rather not get into it. “I just think it’s inappropriate,” says Droste. “Obviously we’re surviving. Some of us have health insurance, some of us don’t, we basically all live in the same places, no one’s renting private jets. Come to your own conclusions.” Rock bands are generally obligated to express profound gratitude for any kind of success, and Grizzly Bear’s seems thoroughly genuine. They will also acknowledge that it’s “a weird life,” that it’s not always easy, that it requires a mix of sacrifice and raw compulsion and rigorous overhead-cutting, and that they sometimes wonder what they’d do if the band fell apart. 

Seriously, though, their new album is excellent.

Honest Advertising Alert

Caroline McCarthy captions:

How to make New York women nod in unison

Banning Gay Conversion

In what can only be described as an encouraging move, Jerry Brown has signed a bill banning homosexual reversal therapy for minors, making California the first state in the US to make the harmful practice illegal. Personally, I can think of few more sinister practices than this. Conversion therapy not only mischaracterises sexuality as modes of wellness or illness but presses upon people the notion that what they feel not only ought to be fixed, but can be fixed. The President of the HRC, among others, applauded the move, saying that LGBT youth "will now be protected from a practice that has not only been debunked as junk science, but has been proven to have drastically negative effects on their well-being."

One can only hope that other states will follow California's lead. And I think the sensible ones will. Sorry, Marcus Bachmann.

Kingsley Amis' Return

On the reissue of Amis' novels Lucky Jim and The Old Devils in the United States, Matthew Walther says that discussion of the novelist's noted eccentricities distracts from the quality of his literary output:

Amis’s loyalty to the Crown was absolute. He even claimed to have had wet dreams about Queen Elizabeth II, all of which consisted of him throwing an eager hand upon Her Majesty’s royal bosom and her responding, “No, Kingsley, we mustn’t.” He called Margaret Thatcher “one of the best looking women I had ever met” and compared seeing her in person to “looking at a science-fiction illustration of the beautiful girl who has become President of the Solar Federation in the year 2220.”

Amusing stuff, but it tends to distract from the truth: namely, that Amis wrote some of the best fiction of the last century, including at least three classics (the two present reissues and The Alteration) and a handful of novels (Take a Girl Like You; Girl, 20; and The Green Man) that I would recommend to anyone. Anyway, it’s likely that Amis cultivated his intransigent public persona in order to drum up publicity and get a laugh from friends like Robert Conquest. This becomes especially clear after reading his letters to Conquest and Philip Larkin, in which he seems almost obsessed with making chop steak out of as many progressive sacred cows as possible.

Do the Debates Actually Matter?

Seth Masket thinks they mean more for Romney:

My impression is that the debate is a higher-stakes event for Romney. He is trailing pretty significantly in the recent polls, and given how few people are still available to convert and that voting has already begun in some states, he doesn't have a lot of time to change things around. And if he's going to change things around, the first debate -- which will likely have the largest audience of any political event this fall -- is the time to do it. Obama, conversely, can win by not losing. So while both men are pretty careful and cautious debaters and not given to particularly rash outbursts, I'd guess that Romney will take a few chances on Wednesday and generally be the aggressor.

Miranda Green, on the other hand, would like to remind everyone that historically they've had little effect on the outcome of the election, and Jack Shafer thinks they're stupid political rituals.