All Intensive Purposes

2011-01-22T22:15:00.000-08:00

Photo by Stuck in Customs / Creative Commons license.

Tracking space garbage.
Dan Savage has advice for Silvio Berlusconi.
The long, slow failure of 3D.
The unusual trajectory of Philip Weiss.
Stuart Holden.
Twenty years of development in Shanghai.
Mobistar punked.

2011-01-19T22:50:00.001-08:00

Photo by Captain Chickenpants / Creative Commons license.

Changing education paradigms.
Polly Esther speaks.
Lyndon Johnson buys pants.
Who will investigate the anti-regulators?
Arranging books by colour.
Long-distance surfing.
How to become a mushroom farmer.
Armistead Maupin in autumn.

2011-01-14T22:40:00.000-08:00

Photo by darkmatter / Creative Commons license.

Confessions of a Peruvian bullfighter.

2011-01-13T23:59:00.000-08:00

Photo by no_typographic_man / Creative Commons license.

Lake Urmia is also full of water.
Even if hoarding gold works, you're a jerk.
Avenues of the District.
Bill Murray on Sofia Coppola.
Algorithmic trading and market-structure tail risk.
Why successful college football players can't make it in the NFL (and why college football looks more fun).
What was Morgan Tsvangerai thinking? What did he say?.
The small plane non-menace.

2011-01-12T22:32:00.000-08:00

Photo by zeynep'arkok / Creative Commons license.

Obama in Tucson.
Ten Things I learned working with Jim Cramer.
A Commerce Clause non-development.
The Broad Street Bullies and the Soviet Red Army.
Why read David Foster Wallace.
Egyptian surrealism.

2011-01-11T20:23:00.000-08:00

Photo by studioapril. 1982 / Creative Commons license.

Refund!?1?
Bounty hunters.
The false rush to "balance."
Introspective Taibbi.
Water sculpture.
Fewer cars in Georgetown.

2011-01-10T22:19:00.000-08:00

Photo by Brandon Christopher Warren / Creative Commons license

Five myths and a menace.
Our political conversation is too dumb.
Where is Michael Chabon from?
Exposing the fraud over vaccines and autism.
Holding Giffords’s Hand.

2011-01-09T22:16:00.000-08:00

Photo by Wendell / Creative Commons license

Facebook in Japan.
Mary Beard's day in Cairo.

2011-01-08T22:02:00.000-08:00

Photo by Per Ola Wiberg / Creative Commons license

Chris Bertram collects links on unknown street photographer Vivian Maier.
Cooking with dragon.
Early signs are good.
Everyone has a Michael Caine impression.

2011-01-07T22:25:00.000-08:00

Photo by Daniela Hartman / Creative Commons license.

The banks are screwed if this precedent holds.

2011-01-06T23:58:00.000-08:00

Photo by Éole / Creative Commons license

The way out of Afghanistan.
Royston Drenthe and Hércules.
Dwight Garner did not care for Annie Proulx's new book.
Ikea's war on the lightbulb.

2011-01-05T20:37:00.000-08:00

Photo by looseends / Creative Commons license.

Tilt-shifting Van Gogh.
Julius Genachowski took a dive.
The one-sentence solution to procrastination.
For older people, walking speed predicts life expectancy.
Does Justice Thomas agree with Korematsu?

2011-01-04T20:27:00.000-08:00

Photo by Juan Rubiano / Creative Commons license.

Alexis Madrigal likes Instagram.
Sara Mayeux on the reviews of George W. Bush's new book.
John Scalzi and Lauren Beukes.
Sanitizing Huck Finn.
The incredible, true story of the collar-bomb heist.
What passes for beauty: A death in Texas.
Chuck Klosterman profiles Jonathan Franzen.

2011-01-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

Photo by Natalie Maguire / Creative Commons license.

The fall of Baghdad and the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein.
Keith Humphreys has comic book collection paralysis.
James Fallows on Jack Wheeler.
The GOP's Michelle Bachman problem.
Donte Green sees the future.
Strange items for sale at Amazon.com.

2011-01-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

Photo by Karen Horton / Creative Commons license.

Topsy's Story and why crows are black today, part of Animating Jukurrpa.
How stocks trade now.
Wrapping up a year in reading at The Millions.
How to eat well in Mexico.

2011-01-01T20:05:00.000-08:00

Photo by R.I. Pienaar / Creative Commons license.

John Holbo worries about page numbers.
Amy Knight explains Russia's security state.

2011-01-01T20:00:00.000-08:00

Version 2.0 arriving shortly.

Greil Marcus.

2010-02-03T19:04:00.000-08:00

Robert Loss, "Risk and Equilibrium: The Impact of Greil Marcus."

Golaso!

2009-05-13T20:10:00.001-07:00

Whitehead on Bellow -- or, er, Woods.

2009-01-30T11:02:00.000-08:00

The bookstores are too full today of writers who have nothing to say. If there is nothing at stake for the characters, then nothing can be at stake for the reader. The writer of fiction must embrace a moral vision, or else he is little more than a cheap Fleet Street haberdasher. I decided early on that the work of Saul Bellow was an exemplar of this aesthetic imperative. You will recall the famous opening sentence of good old Augie:

I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted.
There it is in all its Bellovian glory, the bluster and bombast! Can you smell it? The musk of a virile sentence drawing blood into itself? It is about to spread the labia of mediocrity and rut with the ineffable. We could all do worse than to write like Saul Bellow. And when I say write like Saul Bellow, I mean be Saul Bellow. And when I say be Saul Bellow, I mean unzip the skin from his body and wear it as a sort of Saul Bellow suit so that we can get cozy in it and truly inhabit it and understand the Old Macher. Except he is dead. And he was quite short, so your ankles and wrists would poke out of the flesh suit as if you were some ruddy-cheeked schoolboy who has outgrown his uniform, grimly trudging home from the elementary school and dreaming that one day you will write and be free from all these dullards and their cruel jibes—

Where was I?

Colson Whitehead, "Wow, fiction works!", in Harper's Magazine.

Apres-moi, le deluge.

2009-01-26T16:47:00.000-08:00

This land is your land.

2009-01-19T06:39:00.001-08:00

A very European hero.

2008-12-28T10:51:00.001-08:00

The Economist on Tintin.

A late night at the Indianapolis airport.

2008-12-24T07:15:00.000-08:00

It is late on Tuesday, May 7, 1968, and Bobby Kennedy has just beaten Eugene McCarthy in the Indiana primary:

By midnight Kennedy was ready to leave and eat some dinner, so he and his party drove out to the airport restaurant. Walking through the empty airport lobby, Kennedy saw his white whale again: two crestfallen McCarthy student volunteers, a boy with two McCarthy buttons in his jacket and a pretty girl with red hair and a straw McCarthy campaign hat on her head. They were sitting on their luggage.

And Robert Kennedy, who wanted the delegates but needed the students, went to dinner with Taylor Branch of the University of North Carolina, and Pat Sylvester of the University of Massachusetts.

"You had such cruddy canvassers, and you still won," the girl said.

"Well, you can't blame all that on me."

"I felt we were much better."

"How does everyone feel about tonight?" Kennedy asked.

"We're going to stay with McCarthy," the girl said firmly.

"I don't know what happened," the boy said. "I canvassed Negro neighborhoods, and they wouldn't listen to me for five seconds."

"That's not your fault," Kennedy said. "Why wasn't McCarthy effective for you in those areas?"

"But you're a Kennedy," the girl came back. "It sounds like a newspaper rehash, but it's still right. You have the name."

"Look, I agree I have a tremendous advantage with my last name. But let me ask you, why can't McCarthy go into a ghetto? Why can't he go into a poor neighborhood? Can you tell me that he's been involved in those areas? Why did he vote against the minimum wage for farm workers? Why did he vote against a large proportion of people from the Minimum Wage Act? Kennedy said all this quietly, puffing on a small cigar.

For a long while, the two students were silent. At the end, they were still for McCarthy, and Kennedy's white whale was still free to haunt him. It was after 2 a.m. and the winner told the losers, "You're dedicated to what you believe, and I think that's terrific." And then he told them he would drive them back to the city and find them a hotel room, so they wouldn't have to sit up all night in the airport, waiting for their early-morning flight.

Jack Newfield, Robert Kennedy: A Memoir 264-65 (Plume, 1988).

The UNC student is better known now as this Taylor Branch.

An imperial palimpsest.

2008-12-21T12:41:00.001-08:00

The once and future Poland.

Bruce Lee plays ping pong with a nunchuk.

2008-12-02T20:31:00.000-08:00

The first Thanksgiving.

2008-11-26T06:09:00.000-08:00

We do not know the exact date of the celebration we now call the First Thanksgiving, but it was probably in late September or early October, soon after their crop of corn, squash, beans, barley, and peas had been harvested. It was also a time during which Plymouth Harbor played host to a tremendous number of migrating birds, particularly ducks and geese, and Bradford ordered four men to go out "fowling." It took only a few hours for Plymouth's hunters to kill enough ducks and geese to feed the settlement for a week. Now that they had "gathered the fruit of our labors," Bradford declared it time to "rejoice together . . . after a more special manner."

The term Thanksgiving, first applied in the nineteenth century, was not used by the Pilgrims themselves. For the Pilgrims a thanksgiving was a time of spiritual devotion. Since just about everything the Pilgrims did had religious overtones, there was certainly much about the gathering in the fall of 1621 that would have made it a proper Puritan thanksgiving. But as Winslow's description makes clear, there was also much about the gathering that was similar to a traditional English harvest festival -- a secular celebration that dated back to the Middle Ages in which villagers ate, drank, and played games.

Countless Victorian-era engravings not withstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other's hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement with five freshly killed deer. Even if all the Pilgrims' furniture was brought out into the sunshine, most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages -- stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown -- simmered invitingly.

In addition to ducks and deer, there was, according to Bradford, a "good store of wild turkeys" in the fall of 1621. Turkeys were by no means a novelty to the Pilgrims. When the conquistadors arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth century, they discovered that the Indians of Central America possessed domesticated turkeys as well as gold. The birds were imported to Spain as early as the 1520s, and by the 1540s they had reached England. By 1575, the domesticated Central American turkey had become a fixture at English Christmases. The wild turkeys of New England were bigger and much faster than the birds the Pilgrims had known in Europe and were often pursued in winter when they could be tracked in the snow.

The Pilgrims may have also added fish to their meal of birds and deer. In fall, striped bass, bluefish, and cod were abundant. Perhaps more important to the Pilgrims was that with a recently harvested barley crop, it was now possible to brew beer. Alas, the Pilgrims were without pumpkin pies or cranberry sauce. There were also no forks, which did not appear at Plymouth until the last decades of the seventeenth century. The Pilgrims ate with their fingers and their knives.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower 117-18 (Penguin, 2006).

Everyone wants to run red lights, but bikers do it better.

2008-11-21T08:57:00.001-08:00

The myth of the scofflaw cyclist.

Consequences.

2008-11-21T07:24:00.000-08:00

Via Sullivan.

When Hitler got all medieval on France.

2008-11-20T17:23:00.000-08:00

The collapse of France seemed to mean not only the collapse of the bourgeoisie, it also seemed to signify the end of the entire era of bourgeois capitalism -- of liberalism, of parliamentarism, of constitutionalism, of capitalism, of the preponderance of Western Europe, of the Age of Reason. In June 1940 it seemed that the German triumph in the West meant a return, politically speaking, to the days of the Holy German-Roman Empire, a Europe dominated by Germans, North Italians, and Spaniards, with England excluded from Europe, France divided or reduced to her shape of the late Middle Ages, and the Netherlands, Artois, Flanders, and perhaps even a reconstituted Burgundy incorporated into the Reich. And there was more to this than political geography. In 1940 certain aspects of the Middle Ages had an appeal to millions of people, and not only to the triumphant Germans. Du Moulin de Laberthète, a sensitive observer of the early Vichy period, recorded in his memoirs "this kind of return to the Middle Ages, this 'instinctive medievalization,' something that Berdyaev has not foreseen." A Europe pullulating with Landsknechten, with mercenary soldiery in the service of an imperial ideology, this German-Spanish Europe with Jews restricted, Freemasonry disappearing, capitalism replaced by a new social order, corporations and guilds and the tribe exalted anew -- it was reminiscent of a Europe around 1500, before the Modern Age began.

John Lukacs, The Last European War: September 1939 - December 1941 512-13 (Yale University Press, 2001).

"CODPIECE!"

2008-11-18T18:15:00.000-08:00

Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck.

Listening to Obama's acceptance speech on November 4, on a transistor radio.

2008-11-08T14:19:00.001-08:00

Last night.

2008-11-04T21:10:00.001-08:00

Obama does funny.

2008-10-18T17:55:00.001-07:00

Innoculation.

2008-10-11T20:56:00.000-07:00

The genius Cruyff.

2008-10-07T19:52:00.001-07:00

The ongoing crisis.

2008-10-01T18:49:00.000-07:00

Underwriting to undertaking.

2008-09-22T14:25:00.000-07:00

James Surowiecki suggests that the downfall of Lehmann Brothers and the other (former-) investment banks was hastened (at the least) by their decisions a few years back to go public:

[F]or Wall Street firms, going public was a deal with the devil, because it meant exposing themselves to what was, in effect, a minute-by-minute referendum, in the form of the stock price, on the health of their operations. This was fine as long as things were going well—the higher the stock price, the richer everyone got—but, once things started to go bad, that market referendum started to look like a vote of no confidence. And that made the problems that the companies were already facing much, much worse. . . .

This doesn’t mean that stock prices don’t reflect reality—Lehman’s business really was in bad shape—or that Lehman would have survived had it been private. But being publicly traded makes it harder to take the long view and survive market storms. It’s possible that a year or two from now many of the toxic assets that financial firms have written off will turn out to have considerable value. (That, one assumes, is why the private-equity firm Lone Star Funds spent almost seven billion dollars, in July, to buy such assets from Merrill Lynch, at a steep discount.) However, public companies, in order to satisfy ratings agencies and convince shareholders that they were cleaning up the mess they’d made, had little choice but to dump those assets.

R.I.P.

2008-09-22T11:13:00.001-07:00

Via Scott Esposito, here is a terrific interview of David Foster Wallace by Larry McCaffery.

P.O.W.

2008-09-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

George Packer:

[H]ere’s how the Republican Convention looked: John McCain became a P.O.W. this week, at the hands of his own Party. It was Sarah Palin’s Convention, not McCain’s. His speech last night was so out of sync with the vituperative tone and stale, hard-right cultural populism of the Convention’s other headliners—above all, Palin—that he sounded less like a Presidential nominee than one of those token speakers given a spot on the program just to prove that the Party welcomes diversity. McCain stood before an arena full of stoked conventioneers, who seemed bored or turned-off as often as they seemed pleased by his remarks, and acquitted himself with the decency and honor that he summoned during the ordeal that defines his life.

Oil barrels.

2008-09-04T20:04:00.000-07:00

Image by Chris_J used under a Creative Commons license.

“Though the dog barks, the procession moves on!”

2008-08-29T12:28:00.000-07:00

Via Kottke, a collection of North Korean propaganda posters.

Muppets in the house.

2008-08-28T17:49:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of A.

Landlocked.

2008-08-28T08:23:00.001-07:00

The Guardian has the skinny on Bolivia's navy, which dreams of a coastline to protect and open seas to sail. Only Chile stands in the way.

No sign.

2008-08-05T10:04:00.000-07:00

At The Wilson Quarterly, Tom Vanderbilt writes about Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman:

As I drove with Monderman through the northern Dutch province of Friesland several years ago, he repeatedly pointed out offending traffic signs. “Do you really think that no one would perceive there is a bridge over there?” he might ask, about a sign warning that a bridge was ahead. “Why explain it?” He would follow with a characteristic maxim: “When you treat people like idiots, they’ll behave like idiots.” Eventually he drove me to Makkinga, a small village at whose entrance stood a single sign. It welcomed visitors, noted a 30 kilometer-per-hour speed limit, then added: “Free of Traffic Signs.” This was Monderman humor at its finest: a traffic sign announcing the absence of traffic signs.

Here's an automotive echo of Rebecca Solnit (trains) and Robert Fulton (steamboats):

In several years of research for a book on traffic, I interviewed any number of engineers, but none, save Monderman, referred to Marcel Proust. In Remembrance of Things Past (1913–27), Proust famously waxes lyrical on the ways the automobile changed our conception of time and space. When a driver says it will take only 35 minutes to travel by car from Quetteholme to La Raspelière, the narrator is moved to reflect: “Distances are only the relation of space to time and vary with it. We express the difficulty that we have in getting to a place in a system of miles or kilometers which becomes false as soon as that difficulty decreases. Art is modified by it also, since a village which seemed to be in a different world from some other village becomes its neighbor in a landscape whose dimensions are altered.”

As they say, read the whole thing.

How disenfranchised?

2008-07-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

The District of Columbia is so bad off that it can't even get shown on these haut geek charts of the degree of representation of American citizens in various components of the federal government. No senators, and no representatives, but it has three electors.

21st-century downtown.

2008-07-28T07:17:00.000-07:00

In downtown Charlotte, a luxury condominium is scheduled for construction this year that will allow residents to drive their cars into a garage elevator, ride up to the floor they live on, and park right next to their front door. I have a hard time figuring out whether that is a triumph for urbanism or a defeat.

Alan Ehrenhalt, writing about changing cities in TNR.

This I knew as a young child.

2008-07-27T18:59:00.000-07:00

Matt Bowman says Tintin is an aesthetic prototype for the 20th century. My first was Flight 714.

Human mirror.

2008-07-20T18:35:00.001-07:00

L'Enfant's city.

2008-07-20T08:30:00.000-07:00

In European Affairs, Ken Ringle's review of a new biography of Pierre L'Enfant talks about how his original plan for the capital city has been realized.

In the end, stung by interference from the dollar-hungry commissioners and landowners, L’Enfant walked away from the building of Washington. He felt particularly betrayed when, after numerous delays in providing a version of his plan suitable for engraving, the authorities went forward with land sales on the basis of a bastardized version of his plan engraved with another surveyor’s name. He ended his days a sad, hermitlike guest of indulgent Virginia estate-owners, forever petitioning Congress for compensation.
Washington, D.C. would stumble along as a glorified sheep-walk augmented by a few grand federal buildings until the Civil War, when the city experienced an explosion of population largely related to a 19th-century military-industrial complex centered on the nation’s capital. The city’s sewers were piped, its streets paved in the 1870s. But it was not until 1900 when L’Enfant’s name and vision were resurrected by architect Frederick Law Olmstead, the leading landscape architect of the post-Civil War period. He revived the idea of making Washington a place of beauty. His attention gave impetus to L’Enfant’s notion of a national Mall – the great central place in Washington that remains today the world’s largest planned urban open space, symbolizing the American psyche and destiny of perpetual becoming. This concept, contrasting with the European tradition of monuments celebrating past triumphs, has become increasingly blurred in recent decades as this tabula rasa has been encroached on with modern “memorials” of questionable aesthetic merit. (Even the acclaimed Vietnam Memorial, a starkly harrowing trench, had to be dumbed down with literalistic figures representing the four armed services.)

Photographing Borges.

2008-07-07T19:37:00.000-07:00

Richard Avedon . . . wanted to photograph Borges ('I photograph what I'm most afraid of, and Borges was blind') and, in 1975, he flew to Buenos Aires to do exactly that. En route, Avedon learned that Borges's mother -- with whom the writer had lived almost his entire life -- had just died that very day. Avedon assumed the session would be cancelled but the great writer received him as arranged, at four o'clock, sitting on a sofa in 'gray light'. Borges told Avedon that he admired Kipling and gave him precise instructions as to where a particular volume of his verse was to be found on the shelves. Avedon read a poem aloud and then Borges recited an Anglo-Saxon elegy. All the while the dead mother lay in an adjoining room. Later Avedon took some photographs. He was 'overwhelmed with feeling' but the photographs turned out to be 'emptier' than he had hoped. 'I thought I had somehow been so overwhelmed that I brought nothing of myself to the portrait'.

Four years later Avedon read an account by Paul Theroux of an identical visit -- the dim lighting, Kipling, the Anglo-Saxon elegy -- and saw his failure in a new light: Borges's 'performance permitted no interchange. He had taken his own portrait long before, and I could only photograph that.' Is it an exaggeration to say that the photographer was left with nothing to see, that he was, effectively, blinded by the writer?

This is not the end of the story, however, for Avedon photographed Borges again the following year, in New York. As in almost all of Avedon's portraits the subject is framed by a sheer expanse of white. This one shows an old man in a pin-stripe suit with messed-up eyes and white eyebrows looking, in Adam Gopnik's unforgiving phrase, 'not sage but vaguely comical in his complacent blindness'. The key word here is 'vaguely'; not a word one associates with Avedon who is normally the most exacting of photographers. Unusually for an Avedon picture it lacks psychological focus, as if Borges's blindness impairs the reciprocity of intention on which the photographer depends. Or perhaps the opposite is true: it brings sharply into focus a shortcoming in the photographer, suggesting that there was a potential for complacency not just in Borges but in Avedon's unyielding adherence to his own method.

Geoff Dyer, The Ongoing Moment 43-44 (Pantheon, 2005).

San Francisco.

2008-07-06T16:32:00.000-07:00

Tom Killion, The City From Grizzly Peak

Too much mud too close too home.

2008-06-17T21:49:00.000-07:00

Here are some remarkable photographs of a man-made disaster in Indonesia, a volcano of hot mud caused by a drilling accident. Amazing stuff.

Wages.

2008-06-08T18:41:00.000-07:00

Via The Big Picture.

Protecting shoppers from Chechen snipers.

2008-06-08T12:05:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, thank your Mall Ninjas for all they do.

Still there.

2008-05-26T19:40:00.000-07:00

Image by dogseat used under a Creative Commons license.

Florentian Roofseeing with a Twist.

2008-05-26T19:37:00.000-07:00

Image by Seb Przd used under a Creative Commons license.

Their great chickenbone and moonshine empire will rise again.

2008-05-22T18:54:00.000-07:00

Before plastic.

2008-05-17T18:43:00.000-07:00

Here is a history of Suck.com, the first great website. Alas, I miss it still. Thank God for the archives.

Looks like a rift in the time-space equilibrium.

2008-05-11T19:51:00.000-07:00

Holes in space and time.

Simla.

2008-05-11T12:24:00.001-07:00

Image by swamysk used under a Creative Commons license.

What is visceral realism?

2008-05-09T13:49:00.000-07:00

Scott Esposito has written an essay on the Roberto Bolaño phenomenom.

Wear-a-sombrero day.

2008-05-08T13:39:00.001-07:00

Three days late now, but Teofilo explains Cinco de Mayo:

Cinco de Mayo occupies an ambiguous place in the cultural landscape of New Mexico. Despite a common misapprehension among Anglos, it is not Mexican Independence Day. That’s September 16, or Dieciséis de Septiembre, which is a major holiday in Mexico but is virtually unheard of in the US except among Mexican immigrants themselves. Cinco de Mayo instead commemorates the battle of Puebla in 1862, a major victory for Mexican forces over an invading French army sent to collect debts owed to France by Mexico. It is not even a federal holiday in Mexico, and it is celebrated primarily in the state of Puebla. Its observance in the US originated in California shortly after the battle, when the Hispanic population, only recently conquered by the US and still having substantial connections to Mexico, began to commemorate the victory as a sign of solidarity with the Mexican people. In recent decades it has become such a major celebration in California that it has spread to other parts of the country, especially those with large Mexican immigrant populations, and it has even begun to occupy a role for Mexican-Americans such as St. Patrick’s Day occupies for Irish-Americans and Columbus Day occupies for Italian-Americans, and like those earlier immigrant holidays it is steadily becoming an excuse to party and drink even for those with no connection to the ethnicity in question. Much tequila is consumed, and underpaid employees at fancy grocery stores wear sombreros.

Ffffound.

2008-05-06T22:06:00.000-07:00

A pressing need.

2008-04-25T09:58:00.000-07:00

Nancy Nall found some butt-kicking Lebanese olive oil.

Everywhere in chains.

2008-04-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

In the eighteenth century, the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued, without any empirical evidence, that state government arose historically through a voluntary social contract: people foresaw the benefits of state government, and they freely agreed with each other to subordinate their own individual rights to those of the state, in order to obtain the hoped-for benefits. Through the writings of Western travellers who have observed states arising de novo in various parts of the world during the past six hundred years, and through the deductions of archeologists, we now have abundant empirical evidence that Rousseau was completely wrong. No people has ever freely organized itself into a state in the absence of external pressure, and people have always been understandably reluctant to cede power over themselves to some other entity.

Instead, anthropologists, historians, and archeologists tell us that state governments have arisen independently under one of two sets of circumstances. Sometimes pressure from an encroaching state has placed a people under such duress that it ceded individual rights to a government of its own that would be capable of offering effective resistance. For instance, about two centuries ago, the formerly separate Cherokee chiefdoms gradually formed a unified Cherokee government in a desperate attempt to resist pressure from whites. More frequently, chronic competition among warring non-state entities has ended when one gained a military advantage over the others by developing proto-state institutions: one example is the formation of the Zulu state by a particularly talented chief named Dingiswayo, in the early nineteenth century, out of an assortment of chiefdoms fighting each other.

Jared Diamond, "Vengeance is Ours," The New Yorker 84-85 (April 21, 2008).

Jonathan Franzen does not like golf.

2008-04-22T20:37:00.000-07:00

My difficulty with golf is that, although I play it once or twice a year to be sociable, I dislike almost everything about it. The point of the game seems to be the methodical euthanizing of workday-sized chunks of time by well-off white men. Golf eats land, drinks water, displaces wildlife, fosters sprawl. I dislike the self-congratulations of its etiquette, the self-important hush of its television analysts. Most of all, I dislike how badly I play the game.

Jonathan Franzen, "The Way of the Puffin," The New Yorker 90 (April 21, 2008).

Clocking in.

2008-04-21T19:55:00.000-07:00

Michael Chabon makes me want to read Richard Price.

The angel and the port-a-potties.

2008-04-20T11:25:00.000-07:00

Image by intimaj used under a Creative Commons license.

"The apex of pure awesomeness."

2008-04-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

Via Daniel Strohl, the German NK-101 Minenraumer rolling mine exploder. Strohl has more.

Another small victory for the interwebs.

2008-04-20T07:07:00.000-07:00

"All that is thanks to the Internet, [Ham] said. 'If it wasn't for the Internet,' he said, 'I wouldn't have started this business, and there would not be a testicle industry.'"

Tree Self-Rescue for Paraglider Pilots.

2008-04-19T12:06:00.000-07:00

This article describes equipment and techniques for self-rescue after a tree landing. Two scenarios are described, the first in which the tree is within reach and offers branches to grab or stand on, and the second in which you are hanging free and can't secure yourself to the tree. With these techniques you can escape from a tree with no assistance. If you decide to follow these instructions, practice them in a safe setting first.

H/t G.

Fish graffiti.

2008-04-18T06:44:00.000-07:00

Image by a.h used under a Creative Commons license.

Hey Eugene.

2008-04-10T17:40:00.001-07:00

NPR discovers that Cookie Monster will not eat sardine ice cream.

2008-04-09T10:46:00.000-07:00

Via The Edge of the American West.

"There will be no unhappy history here."

2008-04-09T08:45:00.000-07:00

I am often asked what I think of the National Museum of the American Indian. That I have nothing to say surprises the people who ask the question because usually they know that I worked for the museum for the first four years of its existence. The fact is, I have never visited the National Museum of the American Indian and declined the invitation to attend the opening. In her "Why I Cannot Read Wallace Stegner" (1996), an essay in a collection by the same name, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn expresses her rejection of Stegner’s autobiography . . . and his Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. . . . Cook-Lynn protests the colonial privilege and ideology that inspired Stegner’s romanticized view of the American West, with its tragically vanished American Indian. Such works have aided the disappearance of Native people from history. My inability to visit the National Museum of the American Indian stems from a similar sense about its mission and its exhibits. To me, the museum represents a lost opportunity to integrate American Indians into the national consciousness.

* * * * *

The dominant presence of male Native artists in the early museum years has left a lasting stamp on the museum’s work environment and on its exhibitions. Art and material culture were the preferred media for transferring knowledge about Native America to an unknowing audience. Why art and culture? For many artists, Native creative expression is a presumed window on Native inner life and culture. The exhibit teams have thus relied on art and material culture, the ultimate expressions of Native inner life, as a vehicle for teaching unfamiliar visitors about Indianness. But such thinking represented precisely the problem with the museum: it had become an elite enclave, divorced from the reality of most Native people, where explaining Indians to museum visitors assumed primacy. Moreover, the museum early on made the decision that it would eschew the historical context from which modern Native America has sprung. This meant, astonishingly, no treatment of the history of genocide and colonialism, then and now, or even of the basis of tribal sovereignty.

Jolene Rickard, an NMAI contractor, is quoted as saying, "There are other places where you can learn the exact dates of the Trail of Tears. It’s less important to me that someone leave this museum knowing all about Wounded Knee than that they leave knowing what it takes to survive that kind of tragedy." As much as I admire Jolene Rickard for her artistic achievements, I wince at her easy dismissal of historical context as an essential prerequisite for understanding "what it takes to survive that kind of tragedy." Rickard’s statement reflects the "group think" of the NMAI as conceived by the director—what I call, "There will be no unhappy history here."

Rickard’s statement also suggests that the museum’s senior and curatorial staff imagine that destruction and colonialism have ended. Just as nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists froze authentic Native people in exhibitions while Indians starved on reservations, the museum’s staff has created a modern hermetically sealed Native "community" that has "survived" something long passed. This distancing, forgetting, and desire to divert the public’s gaze from the past simply perpetuates the on-going erasure of authentic Native histories.
* * * * *

For me, the National Museum of the American Indian represents a broken promise, no less consequential than the many broken treaty promises made by the United States to Native people. It represents a betrayal of our trust that this museum would be the Natives’ museum. In place of the stories of the Native past, it focuses on arts, culture, and commerce—the stuff of commodification. To paraphrase the historian Paul Kramer, cultural recognition and power do not connect. Sitting there in close proximity to the Capitol, one might think that the Indians were finally within reach of social justice, political power, and economic change. Not yet. Cultural recognition will not create a working arena where Native America might engage the United States government on something resembling level ground. Rather, cultural recognition is a distraction for Native people, a painless amusement for non-Natives, and a way for U.S. government politicians and bureaucrats to avoid the hard questions raised by the history of U.S. internal colonialism.

Jacki Thompson Rand, "Why I Can’t Visit the National Museum of the American Indian," 7:4 Common-Place (July, 2007).

The town dump.

2008-04-09T07:36:00.000-07:00

We hunted old bottles in the dump, bottles caked with dirt and filth, half buried, full of cobwebs, and we washed them out at the horse trough by the elevator, putting in a handful of shot along with the water to knock the dirt loose; and when we had shaken them until our arms were tired, we hauled them off in somebody's coaster wagon and turned them in at Bill Anderson's pool hall, where the smell of lemon pop was so sweet on the dark pool-hall air that I am sometimes awakened by it in the night, even yet.

Smashed wheels of wagons and buggies, tangles of rusty barbed wire, the collapsed perambulator that the French wife of one of the town's doctors had once pushed proudly up the planked sidewalks and along the ditchbank paths. A welter of foul-smelling feathers and coyote-scattered carrion which was all that remained of somebody's dream of a chicken ranch. The chickens had all got some mysterious pip at the same time, and died as one, and the dream lay out there with the rest of the town's history to rustle to the empty sky on the border of the hills.

There was melted glass in curious forms, and the half-melted office safe left from the burning of Bill Day's Hotel. On very lucky days we might find a piece of the lead casing that had enclosed the wires of the town's first telephone system. The casing was just the right size for rings, and so soft that it could be whittled with a jackknife. It was a material that might have made artists of us. If we had been Indians of fifty years before, that bright soft metal would have enlisted our maximum patience and craft and come out as ring and metal and amulet inscribed with the symbols of our observed world. Perhaps there were too many ready-made alternatives in the local drug, hardware, and general stores; perhaps our feeble artistic response was a measure of the insufficiency of the challenge we felt. In any case I do not remember that we did any more with the metal than to shape it into crude seal rings with our initials or pierced hearts carved in them; and these, though they served a purpose in juvenile courtship, stopped something short of art.

The dump held very little wood, for in that country anything burnable got burned. But it had plenty of old iron, furniture, papers, mattresses that were the delight of field mice, and jugs and demijohns that were sometimes their bane, for they crawled into the necks and drowned in the rain water or redeye that was inside.

If the history of our town was not exactly written, it was at least hinted, in the dump. I think I had a pretty sound notion even at eight or nine of how significant was that first institution of our forming Canadian civilization. For rummaging through its foul purlieus I had several times been surprised and shocked to find relics of my own life tossed out there to rot or blow away.

Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (Penguin, 2000).

Horton hears a "boo!"

2008-04-08T12:08:00.000-07:00

Right on, Peter Sagal!

“Do they know about Martin Luther King?”

2008-04-07T18:37:00.001-07:00

A few days late, but watch and read this.

Ffound.

2008-04-06T20:17:00.000-07:00

A simpler way of dealing with scarcity.

2008-04-04T21:12:00.001-07:00

This is all very interesting and I'm not sure I disagree with any of it, but why doesn't David Chang raise his prices?

Operation chaos indeed.

2008-04-04T11:41:00.000-07:00

If Rush Limbaugh really is devoting himself to monkeywrenching Democratic primaries, that just tells me that conservatives really aren't excited about John McCain.

Pool tiles.

2008-04-04T09:32:00.000-07:00

Image by David!!!!!! used under a Creative Commons license.

I don't IM.

2008-04-03T20:01:00.001-07:00

And really, why bother when you can read A Prolific Squalor instead?

Double images.

2008-04-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

Here is a fascinating series of posts at The Rap Sheet on plagiarism and/or convergent evolution in the design of book covers. Start at the bottom and work your way to the more recent posts. This sort of thing (speaking of John Crowley) is more common than you would think:

Signposting.

2008-04-03T19:47:00.001-07:00

Scott Eric Kaufman shows how it's done. Lots of lulz.

Wall of plates.

2008-04-03T19:42:00.001-07:00

Image by Yukon White Light used under a Creative Commons license.

Two kinds of poems.

2008-04-02T13:58:00.001-07:00

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet’s company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of. It would be a monologue of sorts, the self-contemplation of a student on a summer afternoon who is reading Euphues. The poem itself would be a subtle series of euphuisms, translating the heat, the day, the student’s concerns, into symmetrical posies; translating even his contempt and boredom with that famously foolish book into a euphuism.

The poet nodded his big head in a sympathetic, rhythmic way as this was explained to him, then told him that there are two kinds of poems. There is the kind you write; there is the kind you talk about in bars. Both kinds have value and both are poems; but it’s fatal to confuse them.

John Crowley, “Novelty,” in Novelties & Souvenirs: Collected Short Fiction 41 (Perennial, 2004). (What is Euphues?)

Outside is overrated.

2008-04-02T06:35:00.000-07:00

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of "now what?"

In terms of the traditional target age content metrics, Outside is remarkably high in sex, violence and challenges to traditional values, despite the strong child-focussed marketing it receives. Many would go so far as to say that for a child to develop the ability to cope with Outside is essential, as long as the harm incurred is not too debilitating. Children injured playing Outside are usually comforted by parents, and soon encouraged to go Outside again; this leads to the conclusion that somehow Outside has escaped any and all of the usual moralizing that surrounds the videogaming industry. One might say that Outside gets a free pass from the Jack Thompsons of this world.

That aside, how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player's ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players' tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.

In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely "survive". What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.

Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.

Players are encouraged to focus on social interaction, which can be engaged in in a variety of ways. In fact it's extraordinarily difficult to solo anything whatsoever in Outside, apart from basic skill and knowledge accumulation quests. One of the major forms of social interaction in the game is based largely around the addition of new players to Outside, and is both complex and, in comparison to the storyline-driven romance quests of, say, Baldur's Gate or Mass Effect, they are immensely difficult. Dedicated players of Outside, however, report that the romance quests are among the most rewarding the game has to offer.

The game world is immense, perhaps unfeasibly so. The sheer amount of resources that went into development of the Outside environment is staggering to consider. Outside is a world of tremendous size, containing examples of every known real-world terrain type and inhabited by every known real-world animal. On the other hand it is somewhat lacking in the traditionally expected, more interesting, zones where the developers would be given the opportunity to show off their skills in varying the physics and graphics of the game. There are, for instance, no zones where gravity varies to any significant degree.

The respawn rate of objects and players is ridiculously slow. A dead player can expect to wait for years to respawn, and will be set back to zero assets and a tiny, nearly helpless form. Death is hardcore, and resurrection all but impossible. Outside is not a game for the QQers out there!

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game's social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

On the whole, Outside is overrated, and many gamers will find themselves forced by friends and family to play it against their will, but it still deserves a high rating. I give it 7/10, and look forward to improvements in future patches.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:19 PM on March 30 [286 favorites]

MetaFilter, via Atticus Grinch.

The lead paint on those nifty derivatives.

2008-03-25T19:42:00.000-07:00

This is really depressing and important:

As TWN readers know, I have been on a lot of international travel lately—to Beijing, Mumbain, Tokyo, Berlin, London, Brussels, and Tel Aviv. In all of these places, I met angry and frustrated finance ministry bureaucrats, central bankers, retail bankers, investment bankers, and other fund managers. All of them had a single message that rang a bit like the US accusing China of shipping out poisoned pet food and lead-paint covered toys. They said American regulators failed. “You exported poisoned financial products.” Most Americans have no idea how low American prestige had fallen in the world before the financial crisis—but for the mother ship of modern day capitalism to fail so badly in managing the social contract between economic stakeholders and the finance industry is yet another enormous blow to America’s ability to compel other nations to do as we do, or as we want.

Steve Clemons, via Henry at Crooked Timber, who has more thoughts on this.

If Spain were a person.

2008-03-25T10:58:00.000-07:00

"If Spain were a person, she would be one of those types who rushes around the apartment madly cleaning, only to fall exhausted on the couch before jumping up to clean some more."

-- Francis Strand

I need more bookshelves.

2008-03-25T09:37:00.000-07:00

Luc Sante has lots of books:

I have a very large library by most normal standards, have seemingly arranged my life in order to acquire as many books as possible--I worked for three years right out of college in a large secondhand bookstore, then for a literary review where I raided the mailbag on a daily basis, and spent much of my free time in book barns and flea markets. Meanwhile I've moved around, often; only once did I live in a single place for as long as ten years (and it was possibly the rattiest of all my residences). I lived in New York City in that bygone era when as soon as you got a $20 raise you'd move to a slightly bigger apartment. My older friends probably still suffer joint aches from helping carry my hundred boxes up to sixth-floor walk-ups.

But after living in smallish apartments for decades I just spent seven years in a house with a full-size attic, and everything went to hell. Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Now that I have moved again--into a house that's not necessarily smaller but that I am determined to keep from being choked with books like kudzu--I have just weeded out no fewer than twenty-five (25) boxes worth: books I won't read and don't need, duplicates, pointless souvenirs. I discovered that I owned no fewer than five copies of André Breton's Nadja, not even all in different editions. I owned two copies of St. Clair McKelway's True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality, identical down to the mylar around the dust jacket. I had books in three languages I don't actually read. Etcetera. It was time to end the madness.

I still possess a great many books. But I'm not a book collector. Over the years I've gotten used to the inevitable questions. No, I haven't read all of them, nor do I intend to--in some cases that's not the point. No, I'm not a lawyer (a question usually asked by couriers, back in the days of couriers). I do have a few hundred books that I reread or refer to fairly regularly, and I have a lot of books pertaining to whatever current or future projects I have on the fire. I have a lot of books that I need for reference, especially now that I live forty minutes away from the nearest really solid library. Primarily, though, books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind--my brain isn't big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help.

Optically scanning the shelves wakes up dormant nodes in my memory. Picking up a copy of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller or George Ade's Fables in Slang or Chester Himes's Blind Man With a Pistol and leafing through it for five minutes helps restore my writing style when it has gone stale. Seeing that the Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant is fortuitously shelved right above The Ego and Its Own by Max Stirner might get something going in my subconscious (or it might not). Many books are screwy, a great many are dull, some are irredeemable, and there are way too many of them, probably, in the world. I hate all the fetishistic twaddle about books promoted by the chain stores and the book clubs. But I need the stupid things.

The paradox of Alice Springs.

2008-03-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

3C Review finds Bill Bryson on Alice Springs:

Because it is so bang in the middle of nowhere, Alice Springs ought to seem a miracle—an actual town with department stores and schools and streets with names—and for a long time it was sort of an antipodean Timbuktu, a place tantalizing in its inaccessibility. In 1954, when Alan Moorehead passed through, Alice’s only regular connection to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brough mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts, and whatever else couldn’t be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded.

In those days Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it’s a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors—350,000 of them a year—which is of course the whole problem.These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne to Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. It has not only become accessible, it’s become a destination. It’s so full of hotels, motels, conference centers, campgrounds, and desert resorts that you can’t pretend even for a moment that you have achieved something exceptional by getting yourself there. It’s crazy really. A community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands of visitors who come to see how remote it no longer is.

That's from In a Sunburned Country.

Out of Africa.

2008-03-20T13:30:00.000-07:00

This is the craziest thing I've seen all day: A Luftwaffe pilot just learned that he shot down his favorite author, Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 63 years ago.

Via Kottke.

That story also links to this news that the wreck of the HMAS Sydney has finally been found. For no particular reason, I was reading this page about the ship's disappearance just a few days ago. Strange world.

At this rate, I don't give the Washington Post three months.

2008-03-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

Robert Novak on today's op-ed page, discussing the Fed's intervention to save Bear Stearns:

The expense of such an intervention is not a problem because the Fed, unlike the president and Congress, can print money.

Unbelievable.

Eyes wide shut.

2008-03-19T12:29:00.000-07:00

"A campaign on the harsh terrain of a nation as large as California could be longer and more difficult than some predict."

- George W. Bush, five years ago today, as quoted in today's FT.

A subprime primer.

2008-03-18T11:10:00.000-07:00

Nothing subprime about this.

Funny Smells.

2008-03-18T07:30:00.000-07:00

Paul Anka:

Attn: Democratic Party elders.

2008-03-12T14:37:00.000-07:00

This stuff is awful. Someone tell Hillary to go away. To think that we could be hearing Obama attack McCain for wanting to gut Social Security instead.

The truth is, they need her in the worst way.

2008-03-05T15:07:00.000-08:00

Did Limbaugh conservatives put Hillary over the top in Texas?