If a President Has a Fear of Flying

Though Mitt Romney was obviously being funny (perhaps unsuccessfully) with his airplane windows line, James Fallows is convinced that he's still something of an uneasy flyer. One of Fallows' readers points out that this is no small issue when you're POTUS:

Part of the job of President is to spend a LOT of time on aircraft, both airplanes and helicopters. There's no way to avoid doing so, and the rigors of the job mean that you need to able to use the time productively for sleep and getting work done. You often talk to the press while onboard or immediately after landing. And you need to look, well, "Presidential" the moment you walk off an aircraft, often to immediately engage in a highly visible public event.

Clearly flying is not such big issue that it significantly impairs Romney, but if flying knocks you down even a little, or just gives you an unhappy day, that's not a small thing for a U.S. President.

Reminds me of the minor debate surrounding Michele Bachmann's migraine problem. No one seemed to be at all concerned about the fact that the biggest concern about migraine-prone Bachmann in the White House isn't the fact that she might have migraines sometimes. I can't say I know why people were so concerned about that.

The Hypocrisy of Hate Speech Laws

William Saletan points out the double standard required to ban hate speech against Jews while allowing, even defending, mockery of Muslims. He begins by saying that the most frequently advanced generalisations — in his words, that Jews have too much influence over U.S. foreign policy, that gay men are too promiscuous, that Muslims commit too much terrorism, and that blacks commit too much crime — are poorly stated (and, I would add, in most cases based on a false premise), but each in their own way addressing a real concern. And, he points out, each of these statements violates laws against hate speech. "In much of what we call the free world, for writing that paragraph, I could be jailed."

On Tuesday, Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, speaking for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, told the Human Rights Council:

We are all aware of the fact that laws exist in Europe and other countries which impose curbs, for instance, on anti-Semitic speech, Holocaust denial, or racial slurs. We need to acknowledge, once and for all, that Islamophobia in particular and discrimination on the basis of religion and belief are contemporary forms of racism and must be dealt with as such. Not to do so would be a clear example of double standards. Islamophobia has to be treated in law and practice equal to the treatment given to anti-Semitism.

Of course, he's right. And in a democratic society, as Saletan put it, "Either you censor both, or you censor neither." I'll take neither.

Apple Mapocalypse and the Anger of the Internet

As part of what you might describe as an ongoing separation between Google and Apple (who were once, if you can remember it, pretty good friends), Apple has replaced Google's excellent maps app with one they built themselves. And while, by most standards, it's pretty good, it doesn't work quite as it should:

People living outside the US seem to have been hit hardest, suffering problems such as one of Tokyo’s largest railway stations disappearing, large towns such as Antwerp in Belgium relocating, and Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace, even disappearing altogether. Many people have also reported problems with directions given by the app, such as their offering a route to the wrong place.

Apple has promised to make things better, and has even gone so far as to suggest that users might like to download competitors apps in the meantime. But as Rebecca Greenfield notes, Apple will never really be able to catch up:

Apple has a people problem. On top of all the technology stuff, there is a team of human beings behind all maps, who iron out the kinks and turn the data into a whole product the works well together. (Right now Apple's human are "under lockdown ... working to fix it," says Apple.) Compared to Google, Apple's team is a joke in Dobson's book. Not only does Google have 7,000 people already working on mapping, but, the smaller contigent at Apple was not as involved in the map-making process. As Alexis Madrigal's piece made clear, people make a huge difference when it comes to map quality. "The sheer amount of human effort that goes into Google's maps is just mind-boggling. Every road that you see slightly askew in the top image has been hand-massaged by a human," he wrote.

David Talbott nails it:

It’s nuts that a service that used to work well (when it was Google Maps) suddenly become not only ineffective—but actually counterproductive, even dangerous.

(Image via Observatory)

If Samuel Beckett Marked Papers

Matt Bell constructed a marking schedule entirely out of Samuel Beckett quotes. This one, for an E:

Your mind, never active at anytime, is now even less than ever so. All I heard was a kind of rattle, unintelligible even to me who knew what was intended. I can’t go on, I’ll go on: You invent nothing, you think you are inventing, you think you are escaping, and all you do is stammer out your lesson. To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.

The 'F' one begins with a quote from Waiting for Godot's Estragon, I think. "Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes. It’s awful."

Brooklyn's Rise to Cool

New York magazine helpfully provides a chronological, sociopolitical summary of the history (by the way, I'm really not sure what the point of the rest of the article is):

Why Do Americans Believe in Muslim Rage?

Sometimes attempts at balance yield only to pointless vagueness.

Required Listening

"Yet Again," by Grizzly Bear. From their new album, Shields. Music archive here.

Wrestling the Troll, Ctd

Leo Traynor gives another story of confronting online nastiness:

It started in July 2009. I'd been on Twitter for over two years at that point, having joined in May 2007, and I'd never had a problem. My account was followed by a fairly innocuous looking one which I followed back and within 10 minutes I had received a direct message (DM) calling me a "Dirty fucking Jewish scumbag". I blocked the account and reported it as spam. The following week it happened again in an identical manner. A new follower, I followed back, received a string of abusive DMs, blocked and reported for spam. Two or three times a week. Sometimes two or three times a day. An almost daily cycle of blocking and reporting and intense verbal abuse. 

It gets worse. Previously on the topic.

Reasons to Give a Damn

I don't know if you've been following this website. It's published by McSweeney's, and in response to the general lack of enthusiasm on the Left for Obama gives one reason each day to "restart the fire" and re-elect the president. Today's reason was from David Lynch; others have included Roger Ebert and Jesse Eisenberg. Though I don't think, of course, that this will be enough to rekindle the fire of 2008, it might go some way to actually convincing people that this election is really important. 

At the moment it's as though an electorate needs to have spent eight years in hell in order to appreciate the gravity of a decision like this. Have ordinary Democrats forgotten what Bush-Cheney was like already?

Sometimes Sensibility is Refreshing

Like when Mark Lilla wrote this:

Whenever conservatives talk to me about Barack Obama, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. But what exactly? The anger, the suspicion, the freestyle fantasizing have no perceptible object in the space-time continuum that centrist Democrats like me inhabit. What are we missing? Seen from our perspective, the country elected a moderate and cautious straight shooter committed to getting things right and giving the United States its self-­respect back after the Bush-Cheney years. Unlike the crybabies at MSNBC and Harper’s Magazine, we never bought into the campaign’s hollow “hope and change” rhetoric, so aren’t crushed that, well, life got in the way. At most we hoped for a sensible health care program to end the scandal of America’s uninsured, and were relieved that Obama proposed no other grand schemes of Nixonian scale. We liked him for his political liberalism and instinctual conservatism. And we still like him.

The Tyranny of Algorithms

Computerized decision-making poses the threat of a world such as that of Vonnegut's "Player Piano." For most, such an outcome is naturally rather undesirable:

As we think through the role that algorithms should play in our lives—and the various feats of automation that they enable—two questions are particularly important. First, is a given instance of automation feasible? Second, is it desirable? Computer scientists have been asking both questions for decades in the context of artificial intelligence.

Many early pioneers reached gloomy conclusions. In the mid-1970s, Joseph Weizenbaum of MIT railed against depriving humans of their capacity to choose, even if computers could decide everything for us. For Weizenbaum, choosing and deciding were different activities—and no algorithm should be allowed to blur the difference. A decade later, Stanford's Terry Winograd attacked the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, arguing that everyday human behavior was too complex and too spontaneous to be captured in rules. The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus said as much in the 1960s, when he compared artificial intelligence to alchemy. But Mr. Winograd's critique, coming from a respected computer scientist, was particularly devastating.

Caught Getting Creative

Until Jonah Lehrer was found by his publishers to be doing it, nobody really knew that it was possible to plagiarise yourself. Repurposing earlier work for new material would have been bad enough on its own, but it was his fabrication of Bob Dylan quotes really put a stop to his fledgling career. Amy Wallace finds Lehrer's behaviour puzzling:

Lehrer must have known he’d likely be found out. Making up Dylan quotes is the journalistic equivalent of poking a stick into a hive of angry bees. When plotting a deception of this sort, wouldn’t it have been prudent to quote someone completely obscure? Or someone with logorrhea, whose words are nearly impossible to track because of their sheer volume? Choosing an icon who rarely gives interviews, each of them the subject of worshipful study by his fans, seems pathologically self-destructive. It reminds me of a remark an LAPD officer made about how, if criminals were true masterminds, they probably wouldn’t be resorting to lawbreaking in the first place. His colleagues’ term for this knack people have for making such revealing and incriminating mistakes? “Felony stupid.”

The newest development on the story is that the disgraced boy wonder might be looking to get a book deal out of the scandal.

Sheldon Adelson's Billion Dollar Buy

Mike Allen's written a profile of the casino magnate, in which he attempts to summarise Adelson's motives for becoming Romney's sugar daddy. Among other things, he loathes Obama:

For all his wealth and worldliness (models of each of his personal airplanes hang from his office ceiling), Adelson is driven in part by the concerns of everyday conservatives. He recently read “The Amateur,” the anti-Obama bestseller by Edward Klein. And Adelson complained about Obama’s “czars,” a conservative preoccupation early in Obama’s term. Adelson said he worries about “any man that sets up a shadow government, not accountable to anybody. … What are the czars, if they’re not a substitute for the secretaries of Commerce, of State, of Interior? They’re not under any rules, they’re just consultants to him in his office. And then he’ll come along and say, ‘Well, Bush did it.’ But that’s not the way the government is supposed to be run.”

Obama: No Apologies

The more one actually listens to Obama and his administration on matters of foreign policy, the harder it becomes to believe that the Romney campaign could ever advance the absurd view that he has made a habit of "apologising for America." Today, he certainly made no such apology:

Americans have fought and died around the globe to protect the right of all people to express their views, even views that we profoundly disagree with. We do not do so because we support hateful speech, but because our founders understood that without such protections, the capacity of each individual to express their own views and practice their own faith may be threatened. We do so because in a diverse society, efforts to restrict speech can quickly become a tool to silence critics and oppress minorities.

We do so because given the power of faith in our lives, and the passion that religious differences can inflame, the strongest weapon against hateful speech is not repression; it is more speech -- the voices of tolerance that rally against bigotry and blasphemy, and lift up the values of understanding and mutual respect.

And, most importantly:

Now, I know that not all countries in this body share this particular understanding of the protection of free speech. We recognize that. But in 2012, at a time when anyone with a cell phone can spread offensive views around the world with the click of a button, the notion that we can control the flow of information is obsolete. The question, then, is how do we respond? And on this we must agree: There is no speech that justifies mindless violence. There are no words that excuse the killing of innocents. There’s no video that justifies an attack on an embassy. There’s no slander that provides an excuse for people to burn a restaurant in Lebanon, or destroy a school in Tunis, or cause death and destruction in Pakistan.

This is not what I call apologising. He made it clear at the beginning of his comment on the violence that the film in question was a senseless, offensive, vitriolic attack. He said that the film was not only an insult to Muslims, but to Americans as well. However, when he said "I know there are some who ask why we don’t just ban such a video" and then said that it's because of the First Amendment, I was reminded of the White House's request to have the video removed from YouTube. That's not really something they've any right to ask for. That was the only thing I found remotely off-putting about the speech. But apart from that, it was quite suitable. I'm a free speech absolutist, and the Constitution is a document that adheres to similar absolutism.

The only other strange part — the part that tended towards incoherence within the wider context of the speech — was what he said about Iran's nuclear program:

We respect the right of nations to access peaceful nuclear power, but one of the purposes of the United Nations is to see that we harness that power for peace. Make no mistake: a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained. It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy. It risks triggering a nuclear-arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the non-proliferation treaty.

Andrew Sullivan makes a point of the incoherence:

This is Why You Hate Cyclists

In part, because some of them are annoying. But it's mostly because of us, the drivers, and a fundamental flaw in the way we perceive and remember our experiences:

If you are a city driver, you have undoubtedly been scared half to death by some maniac cutting across traffic like Frogger on a fixie. Such emotionally charged events stand out in our associative memory far more than mundane events, like a cyclist riding peacefully alongside your vehicle. The affect heuristic is compounded by the idea of negativity dominance—bad events stand out more than good ones. This causes you to overestimate both the amount and the severity of upsetting events, like almost getting some dirty hipster’s blood on your windshield.

I know deep down that most cyclists are perfectly rational, reasonable people who are willing to share the road, who won't swerve out in front of me, or do something dangerous that will put me in the position of having to cope with the death of a stupid stranger, thus putting me through a lot of guilt and a very tedious legal process. I know they're not like that at all. But then nobody can be quite that rational. To be honest, they scare the living crap out of me. I'm just like everyone else who isn't a cyclist when it comes to cyclists (even though I know plenty). My view is that they're idiots.

And there's a perfectly good reason for this kind of irrationality:

[Ask] yourself, what causes more deaths: strokes or all accidents combined? Tornadoes or asthma? Most people say accidents and tornadoes, and most people are wrong. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman asks the reader these same questions before revealing, "strokes cause almost twice as many deaths as all accidents combined, but 80 percent of respondents judged accidental death to be likely. Tornadoes were seen as more frequent killers than asthma, although the latter caused 20 times more deaths." Kids careening on bikes are our urban tornadoes—somewhat rare, upsetting events that stick in our craw longer than they should, and seem like bigger problems than they really are. 

Related article here, titled, "How to Not Kill a Cyclist."

Mugglemarch

Ian Parker, on the release of J.K. Rowling's new adult novel, "The Casual Vacancy":

“The Casual Vacancy” will certainly sell, and it may also be liked. There are many nice touches, including Rowling’s portrait of the social worker’s gutless boyfriend, who relishes how, in an argument with a lover, you can “obscure an emotional issue by appearing to seek precision.” The book’s political philosophy is generous, even if its analysis of class antagonisms is perhaps no more elaborate than that of “Caddyshack.” And, as the novel turns darker, toward a kind of Thomas Hardy finale, it hurtles along impressively. But whereas Rowling’s shepherding of readers was, in the Harry Potter series, an essential asset, in “The Casual Vacancy” her firm hand can feel constraining. She leaves little space for the peripheral or the ambiguous; hidden secrets are labelled as hidden secrets, and events are easy to predict. We seem to watch people move around Pagford as if they were on Harry’s magical parchment map of Hogwarts.

The Democrats' Reagan

I wouldn't say that calling someone anyone's Reagan is a compliment, but Andrew Sullivan thinks there's a definite link between Obama and the GOP hero:

I could be dreaming, I know. No doubt, my hope will be mocked as another dewy-eyed, liberal big-media fantasy. But I wore a Reagan ’80 button in high school for the same reason I wore an Obama T-shirt in ’08—not because their politics were the same, but because they were both right about the different challenges each faced, and both dreamed bigger than their rivals in times of real crisis.

The hope many Obama supporters felt four years ago was not a phony hope. We didn’t expect miracles, but a long, brutal grind against the forces and interests that brought the U.S. to its 2009 economic and moral nadir. I’ve watched this president face those forces and interests with cunning and pragmatism, but also platinum-strength persistence. Obama never promised a mistake-free presidency, or a left-liberal presidency, or an easy path ahead. He always insisted that he could not do for Americans what Americans needed to do for themselves. In his dark and sober Inaugural Address he warned that “the challenges we face are real, they are serious, and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time.”

Sullivan's vision for a sane Republican Party does have a couple of problems, though.

"Terrible ideas do not disappear if you ban them"

You remember that the White House petitioned YouTube and its parent company, Google, to have the reprehensible "Innocence of Muslims" film removed from their website. In Bill Keller's recent op-ed piece, he quoted, Salman Rushdie, who would have liked a more robust defence of the right to free speech that made the video's emergence possible in the first place. He said, "It’s not for the American government to regret what American citizens do. They should just say, ‘This is not our affair and the [violent] response is completely inappropriate.’" Keller agrees, mostly:

I would cut the diplomats a little more slack when they are trying to defuse an explosive situation. But I agree that the administration pushed up against the line that separates prudence from weakness. And the White House request that Google consider taking down the anti-Muslim video, however gentle the nudge, was a mistake.

We've been talking about these issues a lot recently. NB post here.

"You're Watching it Wrong"

Matt Zoller Seitz was disappointed with a recent audience's inability to appreciate From Russia With Love because of its age:

It’s up to the individual viewer to decide to connect or not connect with a creative work. By "connect,” I mean connect emotionally and imaginatively—giving yourself to the movie for as long as you can, and trying to see the world through its eyes and feel things on its wavelength.

That wasn’t happening here.

I heard constant tittering and guffawing, all with the same message: “Can you believe people once thought this film was daring? It’s so old-fashioned.” The arch double-entendres; the bloodless violence, long takes, and longer scenes; the alpha male attitudes toward women and sex; John Barry’s jazzy, brassy, borderline-hysterical score: all these things elicited gentle mockery. They laughed at Sean Connery’s hairy chest. They laughed at some obvious stunt-double work. When Bond flirted with the secretary Moneypenny and put his face close to hers, a guy a couple of rows in front of me stage-whispered to his friend, “Sexual harassment!”

I have seen every James Bond film (and can say, albeit with some degree of shame, that I own on DVD every Eon adaptation of Fleming's novels). But whenever people watch the older Bond films, particularly, they seem to have a dismaying propensity to behave in a dismissive manner. One might consider this a consequence of the genre: an action film, though of course requiring suspension of disbelief, capitalises on the best technology available at the time of production to create illusions. Eventually those tricks don't work so well. Audiences become savvier. And as technology becomes better, we simply expect more.

But that doesn't disqualify the older films. As Seitz put it so well, "From Russia With Love isn't unsophisticated. You are."

Are Schools Neglecting Gifted Students?

Chester Finn thinks that the system fails to provide for promising students, and says the neglect comes in three forms:

First, we’re weak at identifying “gifted and talented” children early, particularly if they’re poor or members of minority groups or don’t have savvy, pushy parents. Second, at the primary and middle-school levels, we don’t have enough gifted-education classrooms (with suitable teachers and curriculums) to serve even the existing demand. Congress has “zero-funded” the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program, Washington’s sole effort to encourage such education. Faced with budget crunches and federal pressure to turn around awful schools, many districts are cutting their advanced classes as well as art and music. Third, many high schools have just a smattering of honors or Advanced Placement classes, sometimes populated by kids who are bright but not truly prepared to succeed in them.

Quote of the Day

"f I come to you and I say we have this terrible national debt and here's my opening gambit. First thing I want to do is increase it by $5 trillion over a decade by doing another round of tax cuts that mostly benefit the people we benefited in the last decade, even thought it didn't produce jobs. Now we're in a really deep hole, much bigger than this clock I just showed you. Now let me tell you how we're going to get out of it. Well, what about the details? See me about that after the election.

"So I wanted to try to explain that in very simple terms. No one else would do that; no one . Unless you were being driven by ideology instead of by evidence. This is a practical country. We have ideals. We have philosophies. But the problem with any ideology is that it gives the answer before you look at the evidence," — Bill Clinton, in conversation with Jon Stewart.

In Praise of Surgery for Obesity

The evidence is promising:

How to Save Romney's Campaign

Peggy Noonan puts things honestly. He needs to do something, and fast:

It is true that a good debate, especially a good first one, can invigorate a candidate and lead to increased confidence, which can prompt good decisions and sensible statements. There is more than a month between the first debate and the voting: That's enough time for a healthy spiral to begin.

But: The Romney campaign has to get turned around. This week I called it incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant "rolling calamity."

Can Political Theology Save Secularism?

David Sessions thinks secularism in the US is in a deficit crisis of personal meaning. He says books like Alain de Botton's Religion for Atheists are emblematic of the current secularist ideology:

What is dismaying about Religion for Atheists is how deeply it embodies the ideology of the present—how it can describe so well the anxiety, isolation, and disappointment of secular life and yet still fail to identify their source. Botton’s central obsession is the insane ways bourgeois postmoderns try to live, namely in a perpetual upward swing of ambition and achievement, where failure indicates character deficiency despite an almost total lack of social infrastructure to help us navigate careers, relationships, parenting, and death. But he seems uninterested in how those structures were destroyed or what it might take to rebuild them, other than a few novelties like a restaurant where patrons are guided into intimate confessions with strangers, or temples without gods. Botton wants to keep bourgeois secularism and add a few new quasi-religious social routines. Quasi-religious social routines may indeed be a part of the solution, as we shall see, but they cannot be simply flung atop a regime as indifferent to human values as liberal capitalism.

I've been dismissive of de Botton's thinking on religion because, much like the title of his book on philosophy, subtitled as a "Guide to Happiness," it is based on a false premise. More here.

The Week in Review

Tuesday on the Report, we kicked off the new template design with Niall Ferguson's explanation of why Obama is winning. We had a look at some of the press surrounding the release of Salman Rushdie's memoir Joseph Ashton and made one of many links between the Satanic Verses affair and the recent violence over an anti-Islamic film. Shock for the sake of shock is no longer enough in the art world, nor was it ever, and there's a blog for everything, including unhelpful self-help. Paul Ryan really wants you to know he's fit. Love in the time of YouTube is a strange thing, with viral video proposals and all. We had a first instalment of the response to Mitt Romney's notorious comment about the so-called 47 percent. In short, "From someone wanting to be president, this is unbe-fucking-lievable." Also, Mitt Romney is himself a member of that half, and George Romney was on welfare, thus in his son's eyes a freeloader operating in an entitlement society.

Later that day, we delivered a quick examination of Michael Lewis' wonderful VF profile of Obama, considered the problems associated with a meritocratic society, and asked if a robot could be algorithmically moral. A liberal took up the challenge to survive on only Fox-like conservative news outlets. David Byrne has some thoughts on how our brains process music. A conservative blogger concedes that Mitt Romney needs to do something drastic. Christopher Buckley and wife Carol Blue wrote about the publication of Mortality and its author, Christopher Hitchens. The Occupy movement turned a year old; I renewed my former pessimism and considered myself and others vindicated. The Catholic Confessional really could help solve the dishonesty of the banking industry. Do America's corporations really care about how much people earn? Not really.

Wednesday began with a rebuke of Mitt Romney's political philosophy. We found out that one of the ways in which you get people to actually turn out on election day is to make them think that voting is somehow cool; voter ID laws, in a related post, fix a non-existent problem. We thanked our lucky stars that science fiction writers are generally incorrect. We looked further at who, exactly, comprises the 47 percent, and decided that Amy Davidson gets it. We also parsed the second release of Romneytape, a comment on the supposed lack of any desire among Palestinians, in Romney's view, to make peace. I defended Maureen Dowd, who was accused of making anti-semitic allusions in a recent column, and said that terms like anti-Semite and Islamophobe can be abused, employed as a shield to deflect legitimate criticism. Clint Eastwood says of his recent appearance at the RNC that the organisers should have known what was coming. The rise of e-books continues, and rap is poetry. New evidence suggests Jesus may have had a wife. Filmmakers have pet typefaces. Randy Newman has a new satirical song out. The market continues to be awash with pseudo-scientific books.

Thursday, we asked if Romney's latest faux pas was a turning point, or just the scandal of the week, and at the same time looked at the nature of political coverage in the US. Rushdie has his own views on the 'Innocence of Muslims' controversy. David Carr profiled Neil Young.

On Friday, we had a look at the political novel, the idea that vocab shrinks with age, and how Fox News spins a gaffe.

[Note: I wasn't feeling well near the end of the week. Sorry for the lack of posts.]

How Fox News Spins a Gaffe

A surprising number of conservatives (I use the term lightly; the values these people hold their pet hero Reagan would have found disgraceful), like Ann Coulter, Hannity, and Limbaugh think that Romney's 47 percent gaffe wasn't a gaffe at all. In fact, they seem thrilled that their nominee is thinking the same way. Dave Weigel gives a summary of what the radically conservative pundits make of the whole thing:

“Any Republican running for president has to acknowledge we’re not going to get that 47 percent of the electorate,” said Ann Coulter, who’s promoting a new book this month. “We could probably tell 40 states it’s very expensive, you don’t really need to vote. We just need to have 10 states vote. They’re the only one who we’re not sure about.”

On his Tuesday night show—the first to mention the tape—Sean Hannity credited Romney with “one of his sharpest critiques yet of President Obama and the entitlement society that he enables” and insisted that “conservatives and fiscally conscious Americans are applauding Governor Romney's statements.” On his radio show, Rush Limbaugh called the video “a golden opportunity,” because “work is how you become independent,” and voters needed someone to tell them.

The big idea, on the right, is that as the ratio of “takers” to “makers” increases, America risks hitting a “tipping point” after which the takers will overwhelm the system. In 2009 and 2010, Tea Partiers bought bumper stickers and signs that read “Redistribute My Work Ethic, Not My Wealth,” and “Keep Working: Millions on Welfare Depend on You!” When conservatives tell Romney to come out and say this, they’re revealing what Julian Sanchez has called “epistemic closure.” They know this is true. Their trusted media sources tell them that it’s true.

The widespread conservative fiction that society can be split into two — the producers and the slobs — is a product of this political media establishment. The Coulter/Limbaugh/Fox triumvirate exists not to provide valid criticism or praise where it's due but to consistently reinforce old prejudices and new myths in favour of a pre-defined worldview. For them, as Obama himself so elegantly put it in his summary of the RNC this year, the message is simple: everything is bad and it's Obama's fault. (Oh, yes, and Romney is the only man who can fix it.) That's the only distorted view of the world worth projecting, they seem to think. Fact can wait; they've got a candidate to get elected.

But when I say that this is a 'conservative' view, I'm really quite wrong. I honestly can't believe that ordinary Republicans think this way. Or at least I hope not.

Does Vocabulary Shrink with Age?

Robert Birnbaum interviewed Martin Amis, who was once quoted as saying that your vocabulary shrinks as you get older. Asked to elaborate, he replied:

It’s just a fact. Ah, there are horrible statistics to show it. (Both laugh). But I have always been a great user of dictionaries, and thesauruses as well. People get the wrong idea about a novelist and the thesaurus. You are not looking for words like “sinecure.” What you are looking for, most of the time, is a synonym that scans differently. So you need a three-syllable synonym, or one that doesn’t end in “-ation.” It’s just for the euphony. Um, but the COD [Concise Oxford Dictionary] is all you need. You look up a word, maybe a word you know perfectly well, and you see what it’s origin was, and that word is now stamped. It’s your word. And every time I do it, if feels like a gray cell has been born in my head; instead of going out, it’s coming in.

Seeing Things As They Are

Robert Boyers considers the role of politics in the novelistic form:

Of course we do not require that novels dealing with politics refuse to make up their minds about anything. No one doubts that in Demons Dostoevsky mounts a savage attack on the political radicalism to which he himself had once subscribed. James’ portrait of Princess Casamassima in his 1885 novel is intended to reveal the false consciousness and posturing associated with radical chic, long before that term came into use nearly a century later. Even in Turgenev there is little question that the liberalism on offer, however gentle and humane, is ineffectual, hopeless, and that Bazarov’s nihilism is at most a compelling but half-baked idea, a mere rejectionist reflex with no prospect of altering society or mobilizing a mass movement. Novelists can see things as they are, even when they are consumed with ambivalence.

A Different Perspective

David Carr profiles Neil Young:

He decided to do it sober after talking with his doctor about a brain that had endured many youthful pharmaceutical adventures, in addition to epilepsy and an aneurysm. For someone who smoked pot the way others smoke cigarettes, the change has not been without its challenges, as he explains in his book: “The straighter I am, the more alert I am, the less I know myself and the harder it is to recognize myself. I need a little grounding in something and I am looking for it everywhere.”

Sitting at Alice’s Restaurant on Skyline Boulevard near the end of the day, he elaborated: “I did it for 40 years,” he said. “Now I want to see what it’s like to not do it. It’s just a different perspective.”

(Image: Graeme Mitchell for NYT)

Salman Rushdie's Death Sentence, Ctd

David Remnick is impressed with Salman Rushdie's new memoir, Joseph Anton. His magazine published an excerpt from the book recently. In a post on the New Yorker's website, he says that the new book may be, in its own way, just as important as Rushdie's masterpiece Midnight's Children. Interestingly, Rushdie had something to say recently about the "Innocence of Muslims" controversy. I hope you'll agree that it's the best response yet expressed on the issue:

Rushdie was in London this week preparing for publication of “Joseph Anton” and, when asked about the film and the related outbursts in Cairo and Benghazi, he told a writer for the Telegraph, “I always said that what happened to me was a prologue and there will be many, many more episodes like it. This is one of those.” Rushdie certainly did not defend the movie, but he went on to say, “The correct response would be to say it is garbage and unimportant. Clearly, it’s a piece of crap, is very poorly done and is malevolent. To react to it with this kind of violence is just ludicrously inappropriate. People are being attacked who had nothing to do with it and that is not right.”

Pankaj Mishra, however, has fewer good things to say:

No text in our time has had contexts more various and illuminating than The Satanic Verses, or mixed politics and literature more inextricably, and with deeper consequences for so many. In Joseph Anton, however, Rushdie continues to reveal an unwillingness or inability to grasp them, or to abandon the conceit, useful in fiction but misleading outside it, that the personal is the geopolitical.

Just the Scandal of the Week, or a Turning Point?

The NYT's Room for Debate section poses the question, asking whether the press focuses too much on gaffes in presidential campaign coverage. Maria Popova wins in my opinion. She writes:

The real danger in how such newsiness is framed lies in conflating controversy with shock value – when we do that, controversy becomes the currency of sensationalism, not journalism. But controversy is really about context – about a newly surfaced data point that stands au contraire to a previously established fact or position. It creates a kind of cognitive dissonance between what we previously believed and what we're currently being presented with. A great story doesn't merely trigger this dissonance, it helps us resolve the tension. And that requires context, analysis and reflection.

She concludes:

Did Mitt Romney Just Lose the Election? Ctd

Another one:



David Corn captions the newest release, which concerns Mitt Romney's views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Romney says the Palestinians have no interest in establishing peace, among other things:

In public, Romney has not declared the peace process pointless or dismissed the two-state solution. In July, when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked Romney if he supports a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state, he replied, "I believe in a two-state solution which suggests there will be two states, including a Jewish state." Yet Romney’s remarks to these funders—this was one of his longest answers at the fundraiser—suggest he might be hiding his true beliefs regarding Israel and the peace process and that on this subject he is out of sync with the predominant view in foreign policy circles that has existed for decades.

Of course, this newest revelation is quite a departure from the two-state solution Romney has been advocating openly on the campaign trail, even though it was quite clear to outsiders that his emphasis on peace between the two sides was opposed to the view of his ardently Zionist sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson.

I think what most offends people about these leaks is that it reveals a fundamental dishonesty about the candidate. Though Obama's notorious "guns and religion" comment showed some degree of condescension toward a small portion of the population, Romney's comments on the '47 percent' only seek to confirm the notion that he totally lacks empathy with almost half the country, to whom, it is now clear, he cannot relate. Now, with the new release, we see another side to his already-opaque views on the subject of Israel. I suppose we can assume, given the blunt candor, that this is the real, unplugged Romney. But even then one can never be sure with Willard.

Separating the Pseudo From Science

 Michael Gordin examines the pseudoscientific phenomenon:

Shadows are also an inevitable consequence of light. Carl Sagan and other anti-Velikovskians believed that greater scientific literacy could "cure" the ill of pseudoscience. Don't get me wrong—scientific literacy is a wonderful thing, and I am committed to expanding it. But it won't eradicate the fringe, and it won't prevent the proliferation of doctrines the scientific community decries as pseudoscience. Nevertheless, something needs to be done.

Elsewhere, Steven Poole dismisses the work of writers like Malcolm Gladwell and the now-notorious Jonah Lehrer as pseudoscientific self-help books "dressed up in a lab coat." Money quote:

So, instead, here is a recipe for writing a hit popular brain book. You start each chapter with a pat anecdote about an individual’s professional or entrepreneurial success, or narrow escape from peril. You then mine the neuroscientific research for an apparently relevant specific result and narrate the experiment, perhaps interviewing the scientist involved and describing his hair. You then climax in a fit of premature extrapolation, inferring from the scientific result a calming bromide about what it is to function optimally as a modern human being. Voilà, a laboratory-sanctioned Big Idea in digestible narrative form. This is what the psychologist Christopher Chabris has named the “story-study-lesson” model, perhaps first perfected by one Malcolm Gladwell. A series of these threesomes may be packaged into a book, and then resold again and again as a stand-up act on the wonderfully lucrative corporate lecture circuit.

"I'm Dreaming of a White President"

Randy Newman, in an interview conducted by Slate, talks about his new song.

Filmmakers and the Typefaces They Love

Compiled here, from Hitchcock to Stanley Kubrick. I don't know why, but I really love the work of Saul Bass. Take a look at this.

Did Jesus Have a Wife?

According to a top religious scholar, Karen L. King, this 1,600 year-old papyrus fragment suggests that early Christians believed Jesus had a wife — possibly Mary Magdalene. Ariel Sabar explores the significance of such a discovery on the persistent theological idea of a celibate Christ:

What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother. The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, “Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?”

Voter ID Laws Fix a Non-Existent Problem

As Kevin Drum reminds us:

There are plenty of gray areas in the fight over voter access, which includes things like early voting hours, voter roll purging, and so forth. But on the specific subject of voter ID laws there are two clear facts: (a) the primary justification for the laws is in-person voter fraud, and (b) in-person voter fraud doesn't exist. Anyone writing about the subject is doing a disservice if they don't acknowledge this. 

Insult to Injury

Chances are you've seen this already, but then maybe not given all of the coverage around Romney's latest faux pas about the so-called 47 percent. Maybe, like what I'm guessing is a relatively small number of people, you have actually read Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Newsweek article, which was advertised on the cover under the inauspicious title, "Muslim Rage." Unsurprisingly, a group of liberals have taken to condemnation of Hirsi Ali and her publisher, prompting satirical tweets to surface and liberal blogs to brand the author, who renounced her Muslim faith in her thirties, as a peddler of the rare Islamophobic polemic.

Islamophobia? This is nothing of the sort.

You may know her as the Netherlands-based author and outspoken critic of Islam who in association with Theo van Gogh made a short film named Submission, which drew a direct link between the Quran and the plight of Muslim women. (You might recall that van Gogh was murdered by a 26 year-old Dutch-Moroccan, who punctuated eight gun shots by leaving two knives in his victim's body, to one of which was attached a note threatening the West, Jews, and Hirsi Ali herself.)

You might also recall that her criticisms are blunt. She characterises the meeting of western secularism and Islam as a "clash of civilisations," and believes that Muslims have a choice to make between the darkness of Islam and the light of secular enlightenment.

In her response to the "Innocence of Muslims" anger, she draws an apt comparison with the Satanic Verses affair of Valentines Day 1989. It's apt, mostly, because Salman Rushdie has just published a memoir about his years in hiding following the Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence for the crime of writing a novel deemed blasphemous by senior Islamic clerics. Hirsi Ali says she herself at the age of nineteen participated in a burning of the book, which, of course, she hadn't even read. Angry demonstrators, their rage buttressed by pontificating clerics who call for punishment of Americans by the US government for the crime of making a stupid film, as Hirsi Ali notes, are indifferent to whether or not the source of the supposed blasphemy is a work of literature or an insensitive, amateurish home movie. "All that matters is the intolerable nature of the insult."

Rap Is Poetry and Shit

My cynicism aside, there's now a convincing and serious canon of writing on the subject. In N+1, James Guida reviews books by rappers, including Jay-Z's Decoded:

To Jay-Z, rap doesn’t just happen to talk about hustling: the two roles naturally converge. Both emphasize adrenaline, language, liberty from societal constraints, and a high-stakes psychological education in sizing up people and situations. And of course there are the spoils. Few other emcees present selling drugs as such a high-flown adventure, worthy of endless, detailed elaboration. Given the ubiquity of the subject throughout the genre, this is saying something. It’s always been evident in his best lyrics: “Hope you don’t think users are the only abusers, niggas, getting high within the game/ if you do then how can you explain, I’m ten years removed and still the vibe is in my veins.” But Jay-Z is explicit about this in prose, examining his time dealing and everywhere linking it to the lines of his songs.

On rap as poetry:

People Don't Trust Self-Published Books

Rick Archbold rushes to the defence of self-publishing, saying that it can't simply be dismissed as an expression of vanity:

Self-publishing is at a stage analogous to the early days of Wikipedia, when users were reluctant to trust information contained in a communally written encyclopedia. It turns out that online democracy performs quite an effective self-regulating function. The more individuals who contributed to Wikipedia the more reliable it became. Now it is the first place most people turn to for information. Whether the increasingly virtual world of self-publishing will eventually learn to regulate itself is an open question. The appearance of various award programs for self-published books hints at the possibility.