For reading Archive

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For the reading

By
Ben Nolan
– April 20, 2012

Meant to post this about a week ago, but what’r ya gonna do? The piece we were all waiting for narrating the creative and charismatic tension between Jay and Kanye through the Watch the Throne tour as a redemption story for the Jackass. Read it (you too, Tom!).

The Up series should be in the core 9th-grade humanities curriculum. Even if it meant bumping, like, Lord of the Flies (which I loved), I’d still think so. It’s fucking LIFE, man! Wish I’d seen it at 14. (For the uninitiated, it’s a documentary series that has been revisiting the same cross-class group of individuals from age 7, every 7 years, and ongoing– the next one’s 56-Up — testing the “give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man” iea). Here’s an interview with one of the subjects (the one who kindof jumped class to became a scientists at UW@Madison) (ty, Kottke!). Teaser:

While committed to the project, he says confessing all in front of the camera has never been easy. “It’s always very disturbing. It’s the fact that they don’t show you the way you want to be shown – but that’s not the main thing. They ask you some really disturbing questions. They stick a camera under your nose and ask – ‘Why did you choose your wife?’ – and then it’s shown to gazillions of people. I’ve learnt that the stupider the thing I say, the more likely it is to get in. You’re asked to discuss every intimate part of your life. You feel like you’re just a specimen pinned on the board. It’s totally dehumanising.”

This excerpt from a speech to J-Street by former Palestinian politician and non-violent activist Mustafa Barghouti about nails the problem of the West Bank for Israel:

What is apartheid? Apartheid is a system where you have two laws, two different laws, for two people living in the same area. If you don’t like the word apartheid, give me an alternative to a situation where a Palestinian citizen is allowed to use no more than 50 cubic meters of water per capital year, while an Israeli illegal settler from the West Bank is allowed to use 2400. How would you classify a situation where the Israeli gdp per capita is about $30,000 while a Palestinian’s gdp per capita is less than $1400?

Yet we are obliged to pay the same prices for products as Israelis do. More than that: We are obliged to pay double the price for electricity and water that Israelis do though they make 30 times more than we do.

Segregation of roads is another issue. This is the last place on earth, actually the first place on earth where people have been segregated with roads. I’m talking about roads in the West Bank, major roads are exclusive to Israeli settlers or army or Israeli citizens.

I cannot describe to you to the level of violation of human rights.. we’ve left to see Israeli army using dogs against our nonviolent settlers in the most vicious way. Which reminds us of what happened during the Segregation system here in the United States.

So the problem is very clear. Of course it is either two states or one state. But the reality is, What we are witnessing today with the passage of time is that people will be [left] with one or two alternatives. Either it’s a segregation apartheid system, or one democratic state system,. This is the choice we will all face unless some kind of a miracle happens and I don’t know what that miracle is.

Psychology may be about to debase its credibility as a scientific discipline. Some dude at the University of Virginia’s about to try to replicate every study published in three major psychology journals back in 2008. The popcorn’s in the microwave. Opening salvo:

“Ultimately it’s a waste of everyone’s time if I can’t replicate the effects,” he says. “Otherwise, what are we working on?

I feel like everyone’s been <3ing this TNC post on the opposition to racism as a rhetorical pose versus as an actual value (DeLong, Sullivan, LG&M among others), and it’s for good reason. Read it. And at least watch James Baldwin’s section of the video that kicks it off (starts at about 13 minutes in, and runs about 20, if I remember). Right now it seems to me to be the most powerful speech I’ve ever heard.

This NYT piece about the real-time socio-cultural dynamics resulting from the commodification of African tribal practices is provocative in what’s probably a good way. Even if not, it’s interesting and the writing is vivid. Teaser:

In the West we have a particular definition of authenticity and a mania for it as a standard for art, especially art that we envision as elemental, unmodern, unspoiled. We gauge genuineness in terms of age, rarity, uniqueness, history of use, motives for creation. But in Africa, as often as not, authentic is simply what works, socially and spiritually: for example, the way each Dogon tourist dance keeps a larger dance, and Dogon identity, alive.

What accounts for the more ambiguous outcomes of decriminalizing prostitution versus the unambiguously positive outcomes of decriminalizing drugs? In the case of prostitution, the legitimated commodity can suddenly demand expensive rights, supported by the power of the state, driving up the price of doing business compared to the still illegitimate competing commodities trafficked in illegally from abroad. At the same time, if you can decouple the sale from the identifiable-as-legit-or-not body of the prostitute (using the Internet), you’re a lot safer as a trafficker in the decriminalized jurisdiction — police investigators are disempowered as they need to procure some substantive reason that a given operation isn’t legit in an information void. This makes the decriminalized market an attractive hub for illegal traffickers with whose wears the legit, empowered, and fairly-paid prostitutes have to compete and often can’t. Here’s an NYT discussion of the topic.

Still, I think it’s a progressive step in a system in flux. Thoughts?

That’s all I got for now.

Happy friday, everyone!

Here’s another comic from the archives you may not find funny:

PS – Maybe the Red Sox just aren’t very good? (H-t Matt Eckel)

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For reading

By
Tom OHare
– April 3, 2012

Elizabeth Kolbert has an interesting piece up at the New Yorker about the morality of child-rearing, in which she reviews three different books on the subject. While I personally find procreation abhorrent, insofar as it promotes the Baby Name Book industry, the How To Not Ruin Your Child Book industry, and the Here Is What Idiot Babies Are Like Book industry, I do think I’d like to father a child at one point (assuming a woman will ever have me). The tl;dr is that a utilitarian makes a stupid argument, some other dude argues that living a life of blowjobs and gourmet meals is worse than never being alive if you ever stub your toe when you’re unfortunate enough to be alive you big fat jerk (seriously), and the last dude is a libertarian who, of course, suggests that you should have all sorts of babies as much as you want just like God intended because Ron Paul.

Hamilton Nolan went to a KKK meeting in Arkansas or some other stupid state and wrote about it over at Gawker. The tl;dr for that is that the Klan now hands out Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea at their powwows to mock Trayvon Martin, who was a child who was killed by a racist recently. Yay! Oh, and who could forget? Jews!

Finally, here’s a simple explanation of why Canada is awesome and why pennies suck. Eat it, pennies!

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For reading!

By
Ben Nolan
– March 30, 2012

Hilzoy makes an appearance, talking analytic philosophical critiques of the neuroscientific way of talking about free will. It’s a bit dry, but <3 Hilzoy, and as usual, she’s pretty much got it right.

TIL China apparently maintains “an orphanage for the offspring of murderers.” (Article is about this propaganda-department-stamped Chinese reality show in which a cute young woman interviews people who are on death row for unambiguously awful crimes.)

Apparently Rachel Maddow’s new book is pretty good.

Emily Bazelon has an interesting take on Bully (the documentary recently involved in a ratings controversy with the MPAA). Teaser:

I asked Hirsch why he didn’t mention Tyler’s diagnoses ["Tyler, who died when he was a junior, was diagnosed with ADHD, bipolar disorder, and Asperger’s (autism with a normal to high IQ) in sixth grade."] “I really felt that by not disclosing it, we wouldn’t allow the audience to prejudge,” he said. “It was a decision we thought about a lot. Ultimately, we thought the film would be more powerful without it.”

To Ann Haas, a senior project specialist for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, this was a serious error. When I played Bully for Haas, she recoiled in horror, and I don’t use the word lightly. “To leave Tyler’s mental health problems out of the film is an egregious omission,” she said. “It is really misinformation. The filmmakers’ had the opportunity to present bullying as a trigger, as one factor that played a role in a young person’s suicide. But to draw a direct line without referencing anything else—I’m appalled, honestly. That is hugely, hugely unfortunate.”

Haas feels strongly about this for a few reasons. First, research shows a strong link between Asperger’s and suicide and a link between bipolar disorder and suicide as well. This means these facts about Tyler are important to understanding his decision to take his life. There’s more, too. From Haas’ point of view, by presenting such an incomplete version of the facts, Hirsch has created a real risk of suicide contagion—the documented phenomenon of people mimicking suicidal behavior in light of media representations. “I worry terribly about the contagion effect,” Haas said. “One message of this move is: ‘Bullying kills’—as if it’s a normal response to kill yourself, when of course most people who are bullied don’t do that. Young people who feel bullied could harken back to the movie, and it could be a powerful draw to suicide for them. If Tyler had been accurately portrayed as a kid with mental health challenges that were very hard for him to manage, he wouldn’t seem so attractive. We might feel sympathy for him, but he wouldn’t have the emotional pull of a character who is being romanticized. When you turn a real person, who had a very painful, distressing life, into a kind of fairytale character, that’s something young people are much more likely to identify with. And identification is at the heart of contagion.”

Also rationalizes the demonization of the bullies, which, as Bazelon’s earlier and amazing reporting on the Phoebe Prince bullying-suicide case demonstrated, has much more to do with satisfying an entertainment-news consuming public than with reflecting the truth of the situation, and can have horribly destructive and unjust consequences.

John Lanchester celebrates Marx’ 193rd. It’s interesting, but should be taken with a pinch of salt. E.g.:

…can it be true that capitalism consistently and reliably immiserates? Can it be true that the system is destructive, if people who live under it quite simply live longer? Take the Millennium Development goals, announced at the turn of the new century, and setting targets to reduce infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-quarters by 2015 from a starting point of 1990 (the books slightly cooked by setting the starting point ten years in the past), halving the number of people who live in absolute poverty, doubling the percentage of children getting at least a primary education. Can an achievement on that scale be ignored? If a system does that, can you say that it produces nothing but immiseration? Marx himself said that there were moments when the capitalist mode of production could transcend itself, as in the invention of the joint stock company. Further evidence of this possibility for self-transcendence would have exerted great pressure on his intellectual models.

Didn’t realize anyone was claiming the Millennium Development goals had actually been achieved, which isn’t to say there haven’t been achievements. But the achievements of the past 20 years have been driven largely by the emergence of China and India’s massive peasant populations from an essentially feudal way of life (made even more miserable than the old feudalism by the dominance of political power by capitalist priorities), and their integration into the capitalist system. Marx’ critique of capitalism was never based in any kind of nostalgic idealization of feudalism. It was rooted in the destabilizing contradictions built into capitalism itself — the exploitation and alienation that are structurally necessary to the functioning of its mode of self-reproduction, and so impossible to overcome while that mode of reproduction is maintained.

Has there really been a decline in exploitation and alienation in the world? Or even in China or India? I don’t think so. (Gonna take this opportunity to plug Jia Zhanke again, whose movies about the radical changes to life in China are some of the most vivid representations of the extreme alienating character of the current wildly productive system of labour exploitation.) And how wonderful is it to sit atop the global capitalist system? This wonderful, says David Foster Wallace:

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home – you haven’t had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job – and so now, after work, you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the workday, and the traffic’s very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store’s hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can’t just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough checkout lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn’t fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.

Not so wonderful. Rings true. Not that it hasn’t had its odd and uncomfortable-making perks…

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For reading….

By
Ben Nolan
– February 16, 2012

This one on how the safety net shapes the lives of middle class Americans comes via Alix, who particularly recommends the videos.

Wired article on the problems plaguing the green-tech industry. Between this and that hazards of statistical correlation-driven research in the biotech sector piece, Wired’s got me impressed.

William Howard Taft was a socialist communist pinko literally Hitler.

Between the lines of this one: Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. cannot fill the post-mass-manufacturing void in First World labour demand. The Information Economy makes for a techno-feudalistic society.  Chart:

fivetechcompanies-red.jpg

The Coming Insurrection — 2007 treatise by an anonymous committee of French anarchists that my friend Joan recommended I check out. Its ranty and pretty over-the-top, but also fun and provocative to read. Teaser:

Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”! If “society” hadn’t become such a definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the existential crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependencies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity. The handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow. It’s not without foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they be granted a “subsistence income.”

PS – I was going through the pictures in my “pictures from the internet” folder, and stumbled onto this old beaut

*chuckle*

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For reading…

By
Ben Nolan
– January 9, 2012

Scott Horton on Ted H. Miller on Hobbes on America.

Pay attention to Egypt! (NYRB)

An old but interesting interview with Foucault that turned up. Topic is “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations.”

Ongoing discussion trying to get to the bottom of Nietzsche’s sexism – kicking off from the question: “Could Nietzsche’s overman be a woman?”

Been obsessed with the song below this week. To stick with the “things to read” theme, here’s its Rap Genius page. Mos Def’s verse is awesome, but there’s something sublime about Slick Rick (the Patch)’s.

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For reading…

By
Ben Nolan
– January 4, 2012

No more blood diamonds?

Aron Weingarten brings the yellow diamond up to the stainless steel jeweler’s loupe he holds against his eye. We are in Antwerp, Belgium, in Weingarten’s marbled and gilded living room on the edge of the city’s gem district, the center of the diamond universe. Nearly 80 percent of the world’s rough and polished diamonds move through the hands of Belgian gem traders like Weingarten, a dealer who wears the thick beard and black suit of the Hasidim.

“This is very rare stone,” he says, almost to himself, in thickly accented English. “Yellow diamonds of this color are very hard to find. It is probably worth 10, maybe 15 thousand dollars.”

“I have two more exactly like it in my pocket,” I tell him.

He puts the diamond down and looks at me seriously for the first time. I place the other two stones on the table. They are all the same color and size. To find three nearly identical yellow diamonds is like flipping a coin 10,000 times and never seeing tails.

“These are cubic zirconium?” Weingarten says without much hope.

“No, they’re real,” I tell him. “But they were made by a machine in Florida for less than a hundred dollars.”

Weingarten shifts uncomfortably in his chair and stares at the glittering gems on his dining room table. “Unless they can be detected,” he says, “these stones will bankrupt the industry.”

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For reading

By
Ben Nolan
– December 20, 2011

Wired on how many of the (especially medical) scientific stories coming out of the research community are “shadowed by all sorts of mental shortcuts.” Teaser:

The reliance on correlations has entered an age of diminishing returns. At least two major factors contribute to this trend. First, all of the easy causes have been found, which means that scientists are now forced to search for ever-subtler correlations, mining that mountain of facts for the tiniest of associations. Is that a new cause? Or just a statistical mistake? The line is getting finer; science is getting harder. Second—and this is the biggy—searching for correlations is a terrible way of dealing with the primary subject of much modern research: those complex networks at the center of life. While correlations help us track the relationship between independent measurements, such as the link between smoking and cancer, they are much less effective at making sense of systems in which the variables cannot be isolated. Such situations require that we understand every interaction before we can reliably understand any of them. Given the byzantine nature of biology, this can often be a daunting hurdle, requiring that researchers map not only the complete cholesterol pathway but also the ways in which it is plugged into other pathways. (The neglect of these secondary and even tertiary interactions begins to explain the failure of torcetrapib, which had unintended effects on blood pressure. It also helps explain the success of Lipitor, which seems to have a secondary effect of reducing inflammation.) Unfortunately, we often shrug off this dizzying intricacy, searching instead for the simplest of correlations. It’s the cognitive equivalent of bringing a knife to a gunfight.

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Hot Links

By
Tom OHare
– July 14, 2011

We appreciate the great cool down today, Mother Nature. Here’s some links as a polite merci (the French shows our culture):

Hot links? Hot Rats.

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Assorted Links, For The Discerning Internet User

By
Tom OHare
– June 8, 2011

I worked all day. Sorry! Here are some things that are worth reading.

I would love to tell you that this website will work, that we’ll entertain you five days a week and blend sports and pop culture successfully. The truth is, I don’t know for sure. This site will keep changing over the next few months just like Jimmy’s show kept changing in 2003, hopefully for the right reasons and not the wrong ones. We are still hiring people. We are still finding writers. We will eventually have a sports blog and a pop culture blog (launching next month), user comments (later this summer), a podcast network (ditto), a quarterly publication we’re doing with McSweeney’s (four a year, starting this winter), and who knows what else. You figure out what works, you figure out what doesn’t work, you keep moving. That’s the next nine months for us. Eventually, we will evolve into what we are. Whatever the hell that is.

  • “It’s not every day I read an essay that provokes me to say of an anti-Semite and woman hater ‘this guy deserved better.’ Carnavale ‘accuses’ Dahl and his work of being macabre, unpleasant, and filled with unhealthy sexuality, which is a little like accusing Hemingway of being terse. Carnavale knows that this is the point of Roald Dahl, but can’t let anything get in the way of  his argument Or perhaps I should say, get in the way of his observations. The post is researched the way a junior high school student researches a report about the tides: the act is accumulation, not construction.” — I like this Freddie deBoer fellow who occasionally blogs at Balloon Juice. I am also of the opinion that Dahl wrote the best children’s literature of the 20th century.
  • Timothy Geithner is the reason that unemployment is at 9.1%. I’m beginning to think that this song may be The Seminal Protest Song of our generation.
  • Happy 10th Anniversary of Bush’s Tax Cuts Day!
  • Ctrl+F “Career-o-Matic” over at Slate, and type the name of a Hollywood actor into the little box. Voila! Critical reception of his or her career, in chart form, courtesy of the good people at Rotten Tomatoes. It’s like Google Ngrams for the Us Weekly set!
  • “In the space of three short years, then, drugs had become available to treat what at that time were regarded as the three major categories of mental illness—psychosis, anxiety, and depression—and the face of psychiatry was totally transformed. These drugs, however, had not initially been developed to treat mental illness. They had been derived from drugs meant to treat infections, and were found only serendipitously to alter the mental state. At first, no one had any idea how they worked. They simply blunted disturbing mental symptoms. But over the next decade, researchers found that these drugs, and the newer psychoactive drugs that quickly followed, affected the levels of certain chemicals in the brain.” The NYRB discusses the epidemic of mental illness.
  • I don’t quite understand this, but it’s beautiful.
  • Finally, here’s an excerpt from a particularly smart Redditor, on why biodiversity among trees is important.

When you have a tree farm, you wipe out probably >90% of all of the species that live in something like an old growth forest, and the repercussions are huge. You’re essentially saying that the majority of life on earth isn’t important, and that all we need is oxygen and lumber from our forests, and maybe some Christmas trees. However, what you really get is a tremendously sterilized environment, and the loss of the diversity that leads to constantly better scientific understanding in fields like genetics, chemistry, medicine, biology, biomimicry, evolutionary processes and possibilities, and so much more.

And it isn’t just the loss of those species. It’s the loss of what those species might become. The concept of species isn’t just a what, but a when. All species are transitional, between what they evolved from, and what they will one day evolve into. Some may not, because they are optimal, and every mutation is worse and dies off, but many – probably most – always have room for improvement, especially as things like climate and neighboring prey/predators change through evolution or migration.

Speaking of trees, my friends Will and Brian climb the shit out of them. Big ones. Crazy ones. Ones in foreign countries and stuff. Will once guided me up a hundred foot beech tree in our front yard. It was amazing, but let me tell you: climbing a tree is hard. It’s really hard. You pretty much thrust your way up it — like, you quite literally fuck the air on your way up the tree. That’s how you propel yourself. Anyway. Just thought I’d give their project a plug. It’s pretty damn cool.

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I’mma Let You Finish, But These Links Might Be the Hottest Links of All Time

By
Tom OHare
– June 2, 2011

You know what has probably never been joked about before on the Internet? Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift several years ago at some awards show no one cares about. You know what else? I’m gonna give you some links. Unlike last night I have nothing better to do tonight other than rage on the Internet, so I’ll likely be back later to, you know, rage and stuff — but here is something that will, at the very least, get the word “Weiner” off the top of the page. Hmm. Victim of the fallacy it seeks to correct, that last sentence there. Whoops.

A real shame, if you ask me.