This copyright notice, from Journalista, has been a long time coming:
Panels from the first page of the original Superman story that appeared in Action Comics #1, ©1938 Detective Comics, Inc. and the Estate of Jerome Siegel. Hot damn, that was fun to type! Let’s do it again: ©1938 Detective Comics, Inc. and the Estate of Jerome Siegel. God bless America.
Return of the return of crazy Wikipedia stuff: "The conflicts, in which vendors raided one another's vans and fired shotguns into one another's windscreens, were more violent than might be expected of turf wars among ice-cream vendors."
Happy birthday, Chuck Taylor!
WaPo: "It is not an angry shoe. It was never that kind of rebellion. It's the shoe of slacker ambivalence, indecision."
Jezebel: "This is getting indulgent, even for me, which I guess explains my reluctance to discuss Chuck Taylors, a three-year-old pair of which I happened to be wearing a minute ago before I realized I was wearing shoes while blogging. And that I would be more comfortable without them on. This thought does not occur to me nearly enough; the night before last I passed out still wearing them. Not that they are particularly comfortable. They are just not uncomfortable."
Yes, I can see how that would work: "By distributing fliers — '10 Reasons to Wait' — outside of a freshman safe-sex seminar, he instantly gained 'a public image' for abstinence, he said, which has helped him to remain chaste ever since." [NYT Mag]
Batman is having doubts about Robin. At 13, Robin is small and weak, and he wears a bright red vest that makes him an easy target. So Batman sends Robin away to military academy and starts recruiting a new partner. He’s thinking a black guy would be good, like in the movies – the white guy and his quiet, dignified black sidekick. He tries out a couple of black guys, but they don’t have Robin’s blind devotion and disregard for his own life. He pulls Robin out of school and the Dynamic Duo is reunited.
A priceless jewel-encrusted bird statue is to be exhibited at the Gotham Museum. Everyone expects the Penguin to try to steal it, and the museum directors are counting on Batman to foil his plans. Batman realizes that he’s created a situation of moral hazard. “Let the Penguin steal the fucking thing,” Batman says. “If they insist on exhibiting these fucking bird statues all the time, it’s their problem.”
A liberal city council member runs for mayor of Gotham City, advocating a “harm reduction” policy for drug offenses. Batman’s not about to let this wimp go soft on crime in his town. Fortunately, Wayne Enterprises has a very profitable line in voting-machine software.
Batman is intrigued by the idea of S&M roleplaying, and spends an hour looking at websites that feature photos of men tied up and abused by women in elaborate leather costumes. He’s careful to clear the browser cache and history when he’s finished.
Wayne Enterprises takes a big hit in the telecommunications collapse of 2001. Batman, in his secret identity of Bruce Wayne, lays off thousands of employees. He also fires much of his senior management team, including Lucius Fox. “You’re dead weight, old man,” Batman says.
Batman’s Justice League teammates get sick of him barking orders through their telepathic link. “I’m sick of that maniac yelling in my brain,” says Green Lantern to Superman. “I have a power ring that manifests my will in physical form, and you’re invulnerable, and he’s just an asshole in a costume. Why do we let him talk to us like that?”
“Shhh! Shhh!” Superman says. “He’ll hear you!”
As of today, Batman hasn’t cried for his parents in 9,211 days.
_____
Previously: 13 story ideas featuring Green Lantern.
Paul Graham has provided a primer on types of disagreement, from name-calling through ad hominem to refutation. This is helpful, because I disagree with something he wrote recently, and I want to do it properly.
(Interjection for non-initiates: Paul Graham is a computer programmer who sold a startup to Yahoo in 1998. Now he's an investor with Y Combinator, which provides seed funding for startups. I recommend his essays on programming to curious laypeople; here are three good ones.)
I'm certainly not qualified to disagree with Graham on the subjects of computers, programming languages, or startup companies. (Graham would accuse me of directing an ad hominem attack against myself: "Saying that an author lacks the authority to write about a topic is a variant of ad hominem—and a particularly useless sort, because good ideas often come from outsiders." But this case points to one of the legitimate uses of ad hominem judgments: as a timesaving filter. The number of possible criticisms of anything is infinite, and we need quick ways to weed some of them out. One good way to do that is to ignore arguments from people who are patently unqualified to speak on a subject. This is how physics professors avoid wasting their lives refuting specious arguments from cranks. Using ad hominem judgments this way doesn't really count as disagreeing, though.)
I'm going to disagree with an essay on a more general topic: "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss."
"The most powerful form of disagreement is to refute someone's central point," Graham tells us. "And that means one has to commit explicitly to what the central point is." The central point of "You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss" is, "It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck," because "humans weren't meant to work in such large groups."
How does Graham back up this contention? With direct observation, and with an argument from evolution.
Direct observation first: Graham saw some big-company programmers in a café, and they looked less alive than the startup founders he works with. (He doesn't directly say they look less alive; he says it indirectly: "Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive [than lions in a zoo]. And seeing those guys on their scavenger hunt was like seeing lions in a zoo after spending several years watching them in the wild.")
One problem with direct observation is that it's hard to get a representative sample. It can be done, but you have to make it a deliberate project and put some time and thought into it, rather than just stumbling on a bunch of programmers in a café. And an unrepresentative sample is prone to distortion. There's no way to tell what's signal and what's noise. The programmers Graham saw in Palo Alto might all have a boss who's an asshole. They might be working on a particularly boring project. Maybe the correct conclusion to draw from them is "People who work for an asshole look less alive," or "People who work on boring projects look less alive."
Another problem with direct observation is that humans have a tendency to see their biases confirmed everywhere they look. (That's the definition of a bias: something that keeps you from seeing straight.) Graham is a startup founder and an advocate for the founding of startups. He goes to a café, and he sees some non-founders, and he thinks they look less alive than the founders he knows. The fact that this observation confirms his preexisting belief in the worthiness of startups makes it less credible than if the same observation were made by someone who had no particular interest in startups.
(This is a case where an ad hominem argument is relevant and valid. When a writer uses his own observations as evidence, it's legitimate to question his observational ability. It's the equivalent of me saying, "This elephant only weighs 20lb," and you saying, "The scale you're using to weigh it is broken.")
Besdies his experience in the café, Graham cites unnamed written sources and unspecified personal experiences, which he uses to bring evolution into his argument: "what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy." It's notable how thin this citation is. But let's stipulate that his reading is correct, and that our forebears did their hunting and gathering in groups of eight or so.
When you break it down, Graham's argument from evolution goes like this: our ancestors worked in groups of eight or so, therefore humans evolved to work in groups of eight or so, therefore contemporary humans will be more alive and fulfilled working in groups of eight or so.
In a general sense, this is the logical fallacy known as the "appeal to nature" -- the idea that what's natural is ipso facto good or right. There is no reason to believe this: plenty of natural things are neither good nor right.
More specifically, it's a popular contemporary version of the appeal to nature: the idea that living in ways that fit with our evolutionary design will make us happy. (Graham describes startup founders and wild lions as "both more worried and happier at the same time.") This is a superficially convincing notion, but there's no reason to think it's true. Evolution has no particular interest in our happiness. A creature that's perpetually dissatisfied, always striving for advantage, wins out over a creature that's happy. (This is why Buddhist monks, who try to eliminate striving and attain happiness, spend decades performing meditations that to most people seem unbearably tedious and effortful: they're trying to override their brains' natural tendencies to striving and unhappiness, and that takes a lot of work.) There's no reason to think that primitive hunter-gatherers were any happier than we are, and even less reason to imagine we'll be happier if we imitate their management practices.
But rather than pointing out fallacies, a better way to refute Graham's evolutionary argument is by reductio ad absurdum. His argument goes like this: our ancestors worked in groups of eight or so, therefore humans evolved to work in groups of eight or so, therefore contemporary humans will be more alive and fulfilled working in groups of eight or so. What else follows from that argument?
Well, our ancestors worked in hunting and gathering. They didn't work as computer programmers. Therefore humans evolved to work as hunter-gatherers; therefore contemporary humans are more alive when they're foraging for food than when they're programming computers. (Suggested title for Graham's next essay: "You Weren't Meant to Have a Chair.") Our ancestors lived in a world that was shrouded in darkness half the day, therefore we would be happier without electric lights.
One difficulty with disagreeing with people is that you have to present their argument and your argument, and so your essay ends up being longer than theirs.
Earnest? Really? "Much the way Hollywood people have shuttled between Los Angeles and Manhattan for decades, or academics commute on the Acela between Morningside Heights and Cambridge, Mass., there is a young, earnest population that is beating a path between artsy, gentrifying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and their counterparts in the Bay Area." [NYT]
Hillary Clinton, today: "We need a president who is ready on day one to be Commander-in-Chief of our economy."
Does anyone else think it's weird to refer to the U.S. economy as a command structure with a single executive at the top? We need a president who will be a capable manager of the federal government in its role as largest economic actor, certainly. Obviously it's less punchy when you put it like that. But isn't Clinton's formulation both a distortion of reality and creepily militaristic?
Jim Henley reports from a parallel universe:
So many publications have expressed such overwhelming interest in the perspectives of those of us who opposed the Iraq War when it had a chance of doing good that I have had to permit mutliple publication of this article in most of the nation’s elite media venues - collecting, I am almost embarrassed to admit, a separate fee from each. Everyone recognizes that the opinions of those of us who were right about Iraq then are crucial to formulating sane, just policy now.
Stanley Fish on what's wrong with the campaign:
This denouncing and renouncing game is simply not serious. It is a media-staged theater, produced not in response to genuine concerns – no one thinks that Obama is unpatriotic or that Clinton is a racist or that McCain is a right-wing bigot – but in response to the needs of a news cycle. First you do the outrage (did you see what X said?), then you put the question to the candidate (do you hereby denounce and renounce?), then you have a debate on the answer (Did he go far enough? Has she shut her husband up?), and then you do endless polls that quickly become the basis of a new round.
Meanwhile, the things the candidates themselves are saying about really important matters – war, the economy, health care, the environment – are put on the back-burner until the side show is over, though the odds are that a new one will start up immediately.
Jack Shafer's debunking of a Malcolm Gladwell riff demonstrates only that Gladwell is a talented bullshit artist and Shafer is a scold, both of which we already knew. (An obvious point Shafer misses: when a guy tells a funny story about sneaking humorous fabrications into a newspaper, doesn't the story itself hint that the guy is not to be trusted?)
Gladwell has apparently told the "new and troubling questions" story at dinner parties for ten years. My guess is that it has gotten funnier, and less strictly veridical, over that time. Anyone who heard him tell it at a dinner party would identify it immediately as a hybrid of fact and fiction, just like any other successful dinner-party anecdote. And then it gets played on This American Life, and Shafer spends 3,000 words pointing out that it doesn't stand up to fact-checking.
Why don't we just have a category called "anecdote," to accommodate stories rooted in autobiography but containing exaggerations and emendations for comic or dramatic effect? The ones in magazines like the New Yorker would typically be humorous, but Reader's Digest could use the rubric for those moralistic little fables that illustrate how Jesus is always there when you're not expecting him. Let's stipulate that an anecdote must be relatively short (when it reaches book length, it's a novel), and that it's bad form to use anecdotal license for self-glamorization, just as it would be at a dinner party (Margaret Jones, throw your hands in the air). And then let's stick the word "anecdote" at the top of the page where it used to say "personal history," and Rodney Rothman can write for the New Yorker again, and David Sedaris won't get special treatment, and Shafer can stop stating the obvious.
This post's title notwithstanding, the anecdote -- the tale told around a fire, presented as true but not entirely verifiable -- has a much longer history than the clearly labelled fiction or the thoroughly researched news story. (Homer: [stands up, clears throat] "This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles....") It's no wonder that it keeps returning even when we don't make room for it.
Pedantic writing thing: Responding to Obama's speech, everyone's-favorite-smart-conservative Ross Douthat writes:
[B]y using the Wright controversy as an opportunity to play up their candidate's strengths - as an orator, but more importantly as the rare politician who can deliver a thoughtful, nuanced speech and make you feel like he means it - the Obama campaign made some sweet-tasting lemonade out of some bitter-tasting lemons.This is both a very good point, and also, in its final clause, one of the most irritating writerly tics in existence. To avoid the cliche of saying that Obama made lemonade out of lemons, Douthat says that the lemonade was sweet-tasting and the lemons were bitter-tasting. But of course the lemonade was sweet-tasting and the lemons were bitter-tasting! That's the whole point of the lemonade-out-of-lemons cliche! Making the meaning of the cliche explicit is designed to fool people into thinking you've somehow gone beyond the cliche, when you haven't.
Green Lantern puts his power ring down somewhere and can’t remember where he put it. As luck would have it, all kinds of supernatural outer-space crap starts happening right then. Fortunately he finds his power ring and smashes them.
Green Lantern gets jealous of Superman for being more famous than he is and challenges him to a big fight. Superman declines. Green Lantern goes to find Superman to kick his ass, but right when he gets there some thieves are trying to rob a bank. Superman and Green Lantern team up to stop the robbery, and Green Lantern’s envy is mollified. But then the next day the newspaper says “Superman, Green Arrow foil bank robbery,” and Green Lantern is really mad.
Green Lantern’s girlfriend complains that he doesn’t do enough household chores. Green Lantern tries to use his power ring to do the chores, but he makes a terrible mess.
Green Lantern goes on vacation to the Carribean to forget about saving the world and stopping crime for a while. But while he’s there people keep coming up to him and asking him to help them solve their problems, and he returns to the United States even more tired and stressed than he was before.
Green Lantern messes up and aliens take over the world.
Green Lantern invites all the other superheroes to his birthday party, but they’re all busy.
Green Lantern’s brother calls and asks Green Lantern if he (the brother) can borrow some money. Green Lantern is in sort of a quandry, because he knows the brother lost all his money playing blackjack. He tells the brother he’ll give him the money if the brother demonstrates that he’s making an effort to address his gambling problem, e.g. by going to Gambler’s Anonymous meetings. The brother gets huffy and resentful and asks Green Lantern who he (Green Lantern) thinks he is to be telling the brother how to live his (the brother’s) life. “You’re not Dad, you know!” Green Lantern’s brother says. After that they don’t talk for a long time.
Some of the people who Green Lantern used to work with in his secret identity see pictures of him in his Green Lantern costume and recognize him. They call him up and take him out for a beer and tell him that his secret is safe with them. But one of them in particular has always been jealous of Green Lantern (even before he discovered that he was Green Lantern), and Green Lantern fears that this jealous ex-coworker is going to go to the newspapers with the information about Green Lantern’s secret identity. So Green Lantern has to deal with this somehow. Maybe he digs up some dirt on the guy and says, If you reveal my secret, I’ll reveal yours. Although that wouldn’t be very heroic.
Green Lantern starts taking piano lessons. It’s just something he’s always wanted to do.
Green Lantern realizes that he’s been doing things the hard way. He tells his power ring to figure out which are the most important situations that need to be addressed, and then just deal with them itself. The power ring turns out to be better at dealing with crime etc. than Green Lantern himself, and this makes Green Lantern depressed.
Green Lantern starts betting on sporting events, and he gets pretty deep into debt with a shady bookie. He wagers it all on one big sporting event, then uses his power ring to ensure victory for the team he bet on. It’s not clear how this one ends – if Green Lantern’s scheme is successful or not.
Green Lantern starts to think that, because he’s dependent on a power ring, he’s less of a man than Batman. So Green Lantern starts going out on patrol without his power ring, to see if he can succeed as a superhero with only his wits and his natural strength.
Green Lantern gets a high-speed Internet connection in his home for the first time. He becomes an avid reader of political blogs, and as a result his crimefighting suffers.
Anne Applebaum: "Tibet is to China what Algeria once was to France, what India once was to imperial Britain, what Poland was to czarist Russia: the most unreliable, the most intransigent, and at the same time the most symbolically significant province of the empire."
Fact-checking top music critics' assertions about digital audio file formats, second in a series: Sasha Frere-Jones writes:
I am using these posts to lead into a topic that I am going to beat senseless this year: the fidelity of digital files.... For instance, songs are burned onto traditional CDs in a format called AIFF.This, I'm afraid, is totally false. Songs are burned onto traditional CDs in a format called Red Book. When those songs are extracted, losslessly, onto Mac computers (or a few others, such as Silicon Graphics workstations), they may take the form of AIFF files. Sasha: perhaps you should study up a little before starting in with the senseless-beating.
Talented comics people seem to be dying off faster than sympathetic corner boys on The Wire. Now comes word that Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens has died of leukemia, aged 52. Stevens was a craftsman of a kind they don't make much anymore: in love with his own idealized physical world and beautifully drawn line. As a teenage boy I had this poster up on my wall, for obvious reasons.
Quick hit of nostalgia: David Plotz lists his thirteen favorite scenes from The Wire. My all-time fave is number 11, but I'm not going to quote it here because it's a spoiler for season three. In the next post, Jeffery Goldberg adds "Clay Davis' magnificent turn on the witness stand earlier this season," which was indeed awesome.
Stuff White People Like weighs in:
If you need to impress a white person, tell them you are from Baltimore. They will immediately ask you about The Wire and how accurate it is. You should confirm that it is “like a documentary of the streets,” the white person will then slowly shake their head and say “man” or “wow.”Entertainment Weekly has its own list of best moments. Slate links to recent radio interviews with cast members. And NYMag's Vulture blog has a shot-by-shot recap of the final montage.
Hendrik Hertzberg on how Obama should have responded to the Samantha Power "monstergate" flap:
Before people judge her I suggest they take a look at her book ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide. It deserved the prizes it won—the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Arthur Ross Prize for the best book in U.S. foreign policy. You can’t read her firsthand reports on the horrors in Darfur without realizing that this is a woman of great moral and physical courage. She may be quick to anger, but here’s a news flash: nobody’s perfect. Samantha’s skills and expertise are a potentially valuable resource not just for this campaign but for our country. I’m not about to cast her into the outer darkness because of a single naïve and stupid instance of bad judgment.
Samantha Power is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and a brilliant and original thinker and advocate for the intelligent deployment of American power in order to build a more just and humane world. But she's supporting Barack Obama, she made a gaffe, she promptly and rightly apologized, and then she resigned. And now this afternoon, the Clinton campaign has continued to push out Power-bashing material in order to prove, I guess, that there's nothing and nobody they won't try to destroy if they think that will provide them with some slender additional shot at getting themselves and their clique back in power.
I'm sure I'm not the first to make this point, but: Both of the campaign advisors who have caused trouble for Obama lately, Austan Goolsbee and Samantha Power, are young academics rather than seasoned political pros. I think it's great that Obama is bringing in new thinking on economics and foreign policy, and Goolsbee and Power are two of the smartest people alive. But can you imagine Robert Rubin or Madeleine Albright getting into one of these distracting messes?
Fun fact I learned from Goolsbee's Wikipedia page: he and Slate's Dahlia Lithwick were debate partners at Yale, and were national runners-up in 1990.
Parodies of David Foster Wallace are usually unsuccessful. Here is an exception. Scroll down to the bottom of the first page. [via Gawker]
Today's best point about the fact that this primary campaign is going to go on forever comes from Matthew Yglesias:
Yesterday Josh Marshall had a complaint: "Let's note that Sen. McCain has decided to hang tough with his embrace of anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic Pastor John Hagee. And the major papers and cable news outlets have decided to give him a pass."In fact, of course, the primary campaign is not endless; it just feels that way.
I've been Hagee-bashing since before it was cool, so this pisses me off, too. But realistically it's not the press and the cable networks that gave McCain a pass, it was Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They gave him a pass because, of course, they were arguing with each other. For a little while during the Wisconsin-Texas interregnum, Obama did pivot in the direction of McCain and it gave Clinton the opportunity to smack him over the head with a frying pan. I assume neither campaign is going to make that mistake again until this thing is actually wrapped up. But that means that there'll be nobody effectively pressing the media with anti-McCain talking points. It also means that Clinton will continue re-enforcing whatever good lines of attack McCain comes up with against Obama, and if McCain starts delivering good anti-Clinton lines, Obama will probably start re-enforcing those, too.
Gary Gygax, the cocreator of Dungeons and Dragons, is dead. The obituaries seem to be identifying the game genre he invented as "a bridge between the noninteractive world of books and films and the exploding interactive video game industry," as the NYT put it, and that may be right from a historical perspective, but I don't think it captures the man's achievement.
For non-initiates it's hard to see past the sword-and-sorcery surface, but at its core D&D and the other role-playing games that followed are vehicles for imaginative play. Kids make up stories together all the time. Thanks to Gygax, my friends and I did it into our teens. I miss it.
TNR's Noam Scheiber, citing former Texas congressman Martin Frost, makes two points that suggest Texas is looking better for Obama than polls suggest. The first is this:1.) Don't overlook early voting, which has been significant here. (More than one million people voted early in Texas, versus only 800,000 who voted here overall in 2004.) Unlike the February 5 states, the demographics of early voting seem to favor Obama. That means a chunk of his now-vanished lead in the polls has been locked in.
The same argument was made about Clinton before some of the earlier primaries, and it's based on a misunderstanding of how polls work. Pollsters take account of early voting by asking, "Who are you planning to vote for on Tuesday or, if you've already voted, who did you vote for?" So early voting doesn't change the math, and the later polls are more reliable predictors than earlier ones.
Scheiber's second point is a bit more cheering.
Is Philip Roth having cybersex? Surely that's the implication of these remarks, from an interview with Der Spiegel:
SPIEGEL: You have email and don't use it?
Roth: I use it with one person, one person only, because I don't... I don't want to be bothered.
SPIEGEL: May we ask who the one person is?
Roth: One person. I have to have some fun.
More strange new respect for Bill Buckley, this time from James Kirchick at the Plank. Kirchick cites Buckley's famous riposte to Gore Vidal -- "Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered” -- in order, rather oddly, to praise Buckley for refraining from personal insults except in that one uncharacteristic instance.
I leave it to the reader to measure the distance between "you queer ... I'll sock you in your goddam face" and the remark I quoted yesterday: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"
I'm sure Buckley was nice to black people too, even as he wrote things like this, in 1957:
The central question that emerges ... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.Buckley later said he regretted opposing civil rights legislation, and supported the establishment of a national holiday on the birthday of Martin Luther King. He changed his mind, in other words, after the battle had been fought, with him on the wrong side, just in time to be in the right on a matter of pure symbolism. He was by all accounts a charming and generous man, and he propagated a worldview that consisted largely of sympathy for the overdog. He was certainly more amusing and less odious than Sean Hannity or Dick Cheney, but that's a judgment that leaves a lot of room for odium. Now he's dead, and his decency and fairness are gone with him. What survives is the movement he built, which reflects not his personal manner but the actions he took and the positions he chose, and which stands athwart America, shouting Fuck you, you queers and blacks and poors! in language that Buckley used only in occasional slips but that expresses his meaning more than adequately.
Various liberals (Hendrik Hertzberg, Joe Klein, James K. Galbraith) have nice things to say about the late William F. Buckley, Jr. Buckley was evidently generous, eloquent, cultivated, intellectually honest, and ecumenical in his friendships. In that spirit, let's take a moment to recall Buckley's comments on antiwar demonstrators in 1965: "I wonder how these self-conscious boulevardiers of protest would have fared if a platoon of American soldiers who have seen gore in South Vietnam had parachuted down into their mincing ranks?"
Hertzberg writes that "he could not have been happy with the vulgarity of the movement he did so much to spawn." Maybe so. Perhaps Buckley disliked hearing Ann Coulter call John Edwards a faggot. But one suspects he opposed the syntax more than the sentiment.
Massive balls award: So this guy writes and draws a webcomic called A Rusty Life for six years, and no one really reads it, because it's not very good. So he posts on Reddit, with the heading "Dear Reddit: What is it about my webcomic that no one likes!? I've been drawing it religiously for 6 years and I can't manage more then 100 hits." And then everyone on Reddit tells him what sucks about his strip. I doubt that this will enable him to make the strip any better, but you've got to admire the effort.
Obvs I'm in a full-on swoon over Obama, and I'm sorry to inflict that on you, the loyal readers of RoBros. But take a look at this speech he gave to a bunch of Cleveland Jews on Saturday, and the Q&A that followed. Is it not a model of direct, reasonable, adult discourse? Is this not the sound of a man who thinks of his listeners as thoughtful, mature humans, rather than as some constituency to be assuaged? Is it not incredibly weird to hear this kind of talk coming from someone who is at this moment the front-running candidate for president of the United States?
Interesting poll numbers from the NYT. Apparently Bill Clinton's little meltdown around the South Carolina primary did some real damage:
According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll, only 22 percent of respondents said they were more likely to vote for Mrs. Clinton because of him, while an equal number said they were less likely to support her because of him. In December, 44 percent said they were more likely to vote for her because of him, while only 7 percent said they were less likely.
Y'know who rules? Brown University president Ruth Simmons. Back in 1992, when we were taking over buildings for need-blind admssions, then-president Vartan Gregorian was like, "We don't have the money," and we were all like, "It's a question of priorities!" and he was like "People give money for specific shit, like buildings with their names on them, and nobody wants to give money to let poor people in! You can't stick someone's name on the poor people!"
And then Ruth comes in and does need-blind admissions her first year as president. And does she stop there? The fact that you even ask that question demonstrates that you don't know Ruth Simmons very well. Now she's eliminated tuition for families making less than $60K.
What does she have to say about this? “Since 2001, Brown has made financial aid for our students one of our highest priorities."
Ruth Simmons, you totally rule.
From the Politico: "The Republican National Committee has commissioned polling and focus groups to determine the boundaries of attacking a minority or female candidate, according to people involved."
Y'know who got robbed at the Oscars? Skip Lievsay, the sound editor and mixer on No Country for Old Men.
Is it just me, or is it a little weird for the New Yorker to run a review of an NYU bar/restaurant that essentially says it's a crappy college bar/restaurant?
Your reading for today: This NYMag piece on media coverage of the Democratic primary candidates contains many smart points that I haven't seen elsewhere. Elsewhere on the site: nude LiLo pix! Holy buckets!
Straight Talk Express: From WaPo's damning new McCain piece:
"We understood that he [McCain] did not speak directly with him [Paxson]. Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?" Bennett said.
The finger-pointing has already begun: she spent too much money on fancy hotel rooms, her husband made too many blunders, she never settled on a theme, and so on ad infinitum. But all that may be beside the point—the point being that Barack Obama is a phenomenon that comes along once in a lifetime. Unfortunately for Hillary, it’s her lifetime; fortunately for the rest of us, it’s ours.
I would not have imagined that I could be surprised and disappointed at the critical standards prevailing at Maxim, but somehow I am.
AP quote of the day: "'Holy buckets!' exclaimed Audra Ostergard of Nebraska. 'Michelle Obama and I are playing phone tag.'"
Hillary acknowledges that she's going to fight to have the Florida and Michigan delegates seated, using her strongest language yet. However this plays out it's going to be ugly.
Remember the typography wars of 2004, when Bush-Cheney signage used those big italic capital letters and Kerry-Edwards had that prissy New England serif face and as a result everyone voted for the wrong guys and we got the Iraq War?
Well, 2008's gonna be different. Obama is using Hoefler and Frere-Jones's righteous Gotham typeface, all-caps, whose early-'60s-style vernacular neomodernism matches his message of positive change and Kennedy-style thin lapels perfectly. Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones discuss Obama's use of Gotham on their company blog, then go negative on the Clinton and McCain campaigns' inferior typography.
David Simon defends season five of The Wire:
We legalized drugs in West Baltimore in season three and did so in full view of half the police department, if not the community itself. Certainly, on that basis it required as much a leap of faith as anything conjured in this season.
Dumb musicological thing: The Guided By Voices song “My Valuable Hunting Knife” is in one very specific way the exact opposite of “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd.
The hook from “Comfortably Numb” depends on a colloquial mispronunciation. The title phrase gets exactly four notes, sung on even triplets, which requires Roger Waters to sing it with the t before the r: “cumf-terb-lee,” as opposed to “cum-fer-tub-lee.” (I know no one pronounces comfortable correctly, but you can bet that if Cole Porter wanted to use it in a lyric, he’d give it four notes.)
“My Valuable Hunting Knife” does exactly the opposite: valuable gets four notes all to itself (“val-yoo-uh-bull”). Robert Pollard emphasizes the unnaturally elongated pronunciation by (a) setting those four syllables to an up-and-down pattern of pitches that can’t be elided or slurred, and (b) singing a three-note melisma on my right before it: “mah-ah-aye val-yoo-uh-bull.”
Thinking about this has made me think once more about the ubiquity of the pronunciation “cumf-terb-ull,” which is something I’ve probably thought about on twenty separate occasions in my life. Of course, the main reason it has achieved such hegemony is that it’s easier to say. But is it possible that its adoption was encouraged by the way the first two syllables of comf-terb-ull rhyme with disturb – that the mind unconsciously recognizes comf-terb as an antonym for disturb and perturb?
At this point we all know the rap on Barack Obama: he's inspiring, he gives good speeches, he's bigger on rhetoric than policy specifics. What somehow doesn't get mentioned much is that he's the most photogenic person in the world. Every time he wins something they show a photo of him, and I always think, Huh, why are they using a stock photo provided by the campaign? and it always turns out to have been taken fifteen minutes earlier. If this blog had enough readers to take advantage of many-to-many crowdsourcing web2.0 you-are-Time's-Person-of-the-Year dynamics, I would start a contest for people to send in the worst photo of Barack Obama they can find. I bet the winning shot would still make him look like a young god.
Wait, has he been studying? "Mr. Bush called for Cuba to release political prisoners and to begin building “institutions necessary for democracy that eventually will lead to free and fair elections.” [NYT]
On working from home, from an interview between Shawn Blanc and John Gruber:
SHAWN: Additionally, my wife wants to know (a) what you eat for breakfast, and (b) if you like to hug your wife?
JOHN: I’m on an oatmeal kick this week, but usually just a banana. The big thing, though, is coffee, always coffee. And who doesn’t like to hug their wife? Is there an anti-hugging contingent out there I’m not aware of?
SHAWN: No. My wife just likes to know how other wives are treated by their work-from-the-home-office husbands.
I have this kind of self-important rule about not seeing movies of books I really like. (When T and her dad went to see Atonement over Christmas I saw Juno instead, which, incidentally? Schmaltz for hipsters.) But I will make an exception for the Coen brothers.
Steve Gerber, creator of Howard the Duck and Omega the Unknown and writer of some awesome and weird Defenders comics, died on Sunday. Gerber is one of those figures who seem to have occurred at the wrong moment: in the fifties he could have worked with Harvey Kurtzman at EC and seen his stories illustrated by Bill Elder; in the eighties he could have helped draft the Creator's Bill of Rights with Scott McCloud and Dave Sim and published Howard the Duck with Eclipse or Aardvark-Vanaheim. Instead he was a 1970s fan-turned-pro, like Roy Thomas and John Byrne, and he worked for Marvel, and he probably had very little chance at happiness in that situation, but fortunately for us all he was too ornery to turn into a bitter old drunk and instead he fought. If he hadn't appeared, no one would have filled his strangely shaped spot, and comics today would be different and worse. Tom Spurgeon has a lovely obituary.
What would Wittgenstein have said about that weird "too many men on the field" penalty they called on the Giants the other night? Joe Buck and Troy Aikman discuss.
If you can watch this all the way to the end without getting even a little choked up, I don't think I can be friends with you.
If Microsoft gets its paws on Yahoo, it'll be a disaster for both companies. The reason Microsoft hasn't managed to build a decent online presence in, what, twelve years is not that there are no smart people there. It's that Microsoft is constrained by the need to protect its shrinkwrap software business. Windows and Office bring in maybe $50 billion a year (revenues), at absurd profit margins. Google wants to replace those megabucks with the (much smaller) ad revenues from cloud-computing services like Google Docs. Microsoft's efforts at competing are half-assed and hamstrung, because MS doesn't want successful network services. (This is also why MS uses its crappy web browser's huge market share, gained by exploiting a monopoly, to retard the development of web standards: they want the web to suck.)
If the deal goes through, Microsoft's interests become Yahoo's interests, and one of the first great web companies will be conscripted into a rearguard action against the web itself.
Copy-editing the primaries: In the wake of John Edwards's departure from the Democratic race, Obama and Clinton both released sucking-up statements aimed at securing an endorsement from the cheery populist.
Talking Points Memo, Real Clear Politics, and Politico all include this sentence in Obama's statement: "John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this -- that two Americans can become one, and that our country can rally around this common purpose." (Emphasis added.)
Of course, Obama meant to say that two Americas can become one -- an attempt to connect Edwards's "two Americas" theme with Obama's own message of unity. (Indeed, that's how Obama's website has it.) But someone -- a sleep-deprived Obama staffer, perhaps? -- added an extra n, and now it looks as though Obama was paying some kind of weird tribute to the Edwardses' marriage.
Your linguistic update for the day: I have always opposed the colloquial use of deconstruct as a fancy synonym for thoroughly analyze. It makes me think of the Village Voice's arts section, and not in a good way. Deconstruction properly refers to a specific and rather abstruse school of critical reading in which texts are examined not for their meanings or methods but for their internal contradictions and lacunae. As a rule of thumb, if a person hasn't gone to graduate school in the humanities, he or she probably isn't deconstructing anything.
But when a usage is employed by Joan Didion, that usage has, by definition, become acceptable and probably admirable. So as of now we can all go to town, deconstructionwise.
Indianapolis, why don't you sing? I am reading This Is Your Brain on Music, which is fascinating but also tantalizingly inconclusive. I suspect that reflects the current state of neuroscience -- we know just enough about the brain's mechanics to have our interest triggered, but not enough to satisfy our curiosity. I'm still waiting to learn why perhaps the most thrilling of all neuromusical experiences is hearing a song you love successfully transposed into a different genre. E.g. this, via Emily Gould.
Maybe you were thinking that a fitting way to end your week would be to watch Lou Reed and Pavarotti, backed by a full orchestra, singing "Perfect Day". If so, you're in luck.
Copy-editing the election: First, the unwelcome return of a familiar error. Joe Klein, writing in Time:
With the terrorist threat diminished, is it worth spending $9 billion a month to referee the eternal Mesopotamian ethnic differences?Klein is talking about the struggle between the Sunni and the Shi'a, and about the Kurds' fight for control of Kirkuk. Only one of these is an ethnic difference. (The incursions of Persian terrorists from Iran have an ethnic dimension, but Klein has already dismissed these as a contributor to the turmoil in Iraq.)
Mrs. Clinton followed up with her strange references to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Lyndon Johnson — and no matter how many times she tried to reframe the quote, the feeling hung in the air that she was denigrating America’s most revered black leader.There is nothing technically wrong with this. The word denigrate simply means to criticize unfairly. But am I alone in thinking that its usage in this context leaves a bad taste? Washington mayoral aide David Howard got in trouble for using the word niggardly, which unlike denigrate is etymologically innocent of any connection to blackness.
The estimable Ty Alper explains the lethal-injection controversy, now under consideration by the Supreme Court:
If executions do resume, and the courts do not force states to reconsider the three-drug protocol that they all employ, inmates will continue to be paralyzed before they are killed. (The first drug in the protocol is supposed to anesthetize, the second one paralyzes, and the third one kills.) Many people do not know about this aspect of lethal injection. They hear witnesses describe lethal injection as “peaceful,” but don’t realize that such executions have literally been staged to look that way.
According to John Marcotte, "'One More Day' isn’t the stupidest Spider-Man plot Marvel has unleashed on the public. In fact, it’s not even in the top five."
The Spider-Mobile: Try to wrap your mind around the sheer number of ways that a car driving on the side of buildings violates the laws of physics — even the relaxed type of physics one encounters in comic-books. How would it get from the ground to the wall in the first place? How can it move from one building to the next? What happens if a two-ton car is being supported by a one-inch plate-glass window? I don’t know the answers to these questions and I suspect that Gerry Conway and Ross Andru don’t either.
Oh and in case you forgot, Spider-Man has the coolest mode of transportation ever invented: web-swinging. Putting Spider-Man inside a car is like putting Aquaman inside a plane.
Timothy Noah on the Hillary "experience" meme:
Clinton's claim to superior experience isn't merely dishonest. It's also potentially dangerous should she become the nominee. If Clinton continues to build her campaign on the dubious foundation of government experience, it shouldn't be very difficult for her GOP opponent to pull that edifice down.
Check out this segment from Hardball (via TPM), and savor the sound of the Reagan coalition coming unglued.
This is just sad....Hillary is now reduced to making jokes about having had sex with John McCain in a desperate bid to show voters she's a human being.
Yes, I'm back!
"One of the more extraordinary stories of the Obama campaign has been playing out behind the scenes over the past week as the candidate has been working on a daily basis to try to calm things down in his father's homeland and his grandmother's home, Kenya, where a contested election has led to riots."
The Alternative-Science Respectability Checklist:
Believe me, I sympathize. You are in possession of a truly incredible breakthrough that offers the prospect of changing the very face of science as we know it, if not more. The only problem is, you’re coming at things from an unorthodox perspective. Maybe your findings don’t fit comfortably with people’s preconceived notions, or maybe you don’t have the elaborate academic credentials that established scientists take for granted....
Happily, we are here to help. It would be a shame if the correct theory to explain away dark matter or account for the origin of life were developed by someone without a conventional academic position, who didn’t really take a lot of science classes in college and didn’t have a great math background but was always interested in the big questions, only for that theory to be neglected because of some churlish prejudice. So we would like to present a simple checklist of things that alternative scientists should do in order to get taken seriously by the Man. And the good news is, it’s only three items!
Remember those excruciatingly boring posts I wrote a couple months ago about keyboard shortcuts? I'm bored just thinking about them! But so now Gruber has clarified his stance on keyboard shortcuts, and makes a point that, in the context of this incredibly dull discussion, almost qualifies as interesting. God, Barack Obama just won in Iowa and I'm writing about keyboard shortcuts again. What the fuck?
(or, how the current issue of Spider-Man makes explicit the dark bargain at the heart of comics fandom)
Briefly, for nonfans: Twenty years ago, Spider-Man married his longtime girlfriend Mary Jane Watson. Now Marvel Comics editor-in-chief Joe Quesada has decided Spider-Man works better as a single guy than as a married guy. This being comics, any narrative event can be reversed by some incoherent gimmick. So: Peter Parker's beloved Aunt May is badly wounded by a bullet meant for our hero. The Devil appears to Spider-Man and offers him a choice: he can save his aunt's life, but he has to give up his marriage. This being comics, "give up his marriage" doesn't mean "get a divorce," it means that history is altered, and everyone's memory is wiped, and Peter Parker and Mary Jane never got married in the first place. And so Pete and MJ weep and kiss and remember the good times in a special two-page spread that's like a parody of a love montage in a movie. (There's an image of the two of them riding a tandem bike, for god's sake.) And then Peter wakes up, and Aunt May is downstairs making pancakes, and I threw up in my mouth a little.
Of course, there's the obvious evolutionary backwardness of the whole thing: to choose an octogenarian aunt over a loving and healthy and presumably fertile marriage is to prefer death to life. But there's an aspect of this that's more specific to comics culture. One More Day states the dark side of the geek bargain more explicitly than anyone really wants: Everything can be the way it was before, when you were a kid. All you have to give up is girls, and marriage, and procreation, and the possibility of a healthy adult relationship. That's been the deal between fandom and the comics industry for decades. There's plenty of fans who've made the same choice Peter Parker did, and who now sit alone in their apartments, surrounded by comics and DVDs and collectible figurines. But there's something really unpleasant about having it said out loud, or presented as heroic.
The New Yorker doesn't usually run straight-up takedowns of political figures, but Elizabeth Kolbert apparently just hates Rudy Giuliani. In the absence of any big new revelations (did you know the NYFD was using an outdated radio system on 9/11? Me too!), the best parts are where she just quotes the stupid shit Giuliani says on the campaign trail as though it consisted of meaningful English sentences rather than words strung together at random:
“The goals that we have, they’re big goals,” he said. “They’re very difficult things to do. They’re very difficult things to accomplish. And they’re things, quite frankly, that America in the past hasn’t been able to accomplish.“There are some people who believe that this country is declining,” he went on. “There are some people who believe that we’re going in the wrong direction. Well, you know something? They’re wrong! And we can make them wrong, by making the right choices. By making the right choices about our leadership. Because this is about leadership.”
"The great George Herriman rarely passed up an opportunity to draw smoke coming from a chimney. He seemed to place smoke in a picture the way a hat designer would place a feather in a lady's chapeau." Complete with beautiful examples.
Tim O'Reilly draws an interesting analogy between financial markets and internet services:
One of the real wake-up calls was the way that Wall Street firms moved from being brokers to being active players "trading for their own account." ... Bill Janeway [points] out that ... "now, the direct investment activities of a firm like Goldman Sachs dwarf their activities on behalf of outside customers."Update: Y'know, on reflection this is one of those analogies that make less sense the more you think about them. Like, Wikipedia isn't Google's customer. It's not Google's competitor, either. As O'Reilly himself says, it's a supplier. A better analogy would be when a car company decides to stop getting a certain part from a subcontractor and starts making it in-house. Which, when you look at it that way, big whoop for everyone but the subcontractor.
And sure enough, there is lots of evidence that this process is already far advanced [in web services]. These sites, once devoted to distributing attention to others, are increasingly focused on consuming as much of the user attention as possible. What else do you make of Google's recent sally against Wikipedia, the so-called knol....
As Google's growth slows, as inevitably it will, it will need to consume more and more of the web ecosystem, trading against its former suppliers, rather than distributing attention to them.
AOL is finally shooting the Netscape browser in the head. Former Netscape developer Asa Dotzler says good riddance.
Maybe three years ago, during a random clicking-around session, I found myself reading a blog that I'm not going to name. It was written by a young schoolteacher who'd moved to a town where she didn't know many people. She wrote about the difficulties of teaching, and how much she missed her friends, and the ways she filled her time. She was a good writer and more specifically a good blog-writer, funny and harsh and immediately trustworthy, and she wrote as though she were talking to a small group of close friends, which for the most part she probably was. But she was also talking to me.
I checked this blog regularly, and I learned more about this person than one usually learns about a non-famous stranger. Once, writing about (I think) babysitting her neice, she wrote that, at times, it made her glad that her womb was a rocky place where seed can find no purchase. I thought about her sometimes. I was rooting for her.
It's a strange relationship that we can now have, over the internet, with people who don't know we exist. Choreographed self-revelation is a particular and very specific skill. It has nothing to do with what I'm trying to do on this blog, really, although I guess there was an element of it in my restaurant reviews. Emily Gould can do it while writing a media-gossip blog, and glenn mcdonald could do it while reviewing records, but this person I'm talking about did it uncut.
Then she wrote something about how the kids she taught had discovered her blog, and purged everything related to sex/drinking/drugs, which was probably between 40 and 60 percent of the content. A little while later, the site went dead. A while after that, the URL turned into linkspam.
It troubled me that I wasn't going to find out what was happening with her. It was like having an old friend, someone you don't see much, go into the witness protection program: they're still out there, but now you don't know where. I don't think I ever knew her last name.
I was thinking about her this afternoon for some reason, and I got curious, so I Googled the name of the website, and I found the blogs of a bunch of people who seemed to know her. (She has a very bloggy social circle.) And I poked around on their blogs for a while, and I discovered this, which is clearly hers. It's less than two weeks old.
It's about her students, rather than her. It's a bit too kids-say-the-darndest-things for my taste, not that anyone involved has any reason to care about my taste. It doesn't tell me much about how she's doing, except that she's still alive and still teaching and keeping her sense of humor in the face of everything. But that's better than nothing.
Update: See the comments.
Matt Bai makes a really good point about trying to predict how a Republican governor will act in the White House:
We in the media have historically embraced the story of the Republican governor who, it turns out, isn’t as much of a crazy conservative as you might think. Hey, look, the Tin Man has a heart! George W. Bush was a “compassionate conservative” who worked amiably across the aisle with Democrats. Mitt Romney passed a landmark, bipartisan bill to provide healthcare. Even Ronald Reagan enacted a huge tax increase while governor of California. And so on.There’s just one problem with this formulation, which is worth remembering if Huckabee pulls off a remarkable win on primary night in Iowa: it is a serious misreading of conservative doctrine and a lousy predictor of what’s to come.
Here’s why: ... Under the doctrine of federalism, the government in Washington is supposed to remain meek and disengaged in domestic affairs, leaving policy and funding decisions primarily to the states.... That’s the whole point of the conservative exercise—to make state government set priorities and scale back waste and unnecessary commitments. You’d be hard pressed to find a Republican governor ... who hasn’t had to raise some tax or fight for a worthy social program. That’s just what governors do—especially since almost all of them are bound by law to balance their budgets.
When these governors get to Washington, though, that’s a different story—and there’s nothing inconsistent about it. Then their job, as they see it, isn’t really to govern anymore, but to whack at the hopelessly gnarled federal bureaucracy and push the burden for domestic programs back to the states, where it belongs. So while Bush may have been a pleasant enough conciliator and dealmaker in Texas, he never for a minute confused the demands of that job with the one he had taken on at the White House. And neither, one can presume, would Mike Huckabee. He may have been a reasonably centrist governor, but he’d be a starkly conservative president.
Microsoft's PlaysForSure brand -- the logo that identifies whether a particular non-iTunes online music service will work with a particular non-iPod mp3 player -- has now been renamed Certified for Windows Vista. Even though it has nothing to do with Windows Vista. I guess they wanted to capitalize on all that successful Vista branding. Oh, wait.
As Ars Technica puts it:
Microsoft's PlaysForSure has always been a model of how to run a DRM ecosystem: launch a new scheme with logo, convince device makers to sign up, launch your own online music store that uses said ecosystem, drop your music store, launch your own device which uses incompatible DRM, launch new music store with same incompatible DRM, then change branding of ecosystem logo. On second thought, perhaps there's room for improvement here.Gotta love the private sector -- it's so efficient and market-driven.
Remember the (very minor) point I made about Nancy Franklin last night? Well, that very same day, Joshua Clover made essentially the exact same point about Franklin's review of Gossip Girl:
Franklin does seem intimately familiar with the zip code in which the show purports to reside.... At the same time, she seems surpassingly oblivious to the culture-consuming world beyond 10028, and what's happening out there. She mentions the show's "primary purpose of marketing pop songs, which are heard throughout." Actually, we're pretty sure that an untested show on the CW isn't marketing "What Goes Around" by a non-New Yorker named Justin Timberlake, and the like. Mr. Timberlake, who comes from a land down under 72nd Street (it's called "Tennessee") may in fact, along with his staff and servants and holding company, be receiving a certain fee for his participation. We are just guessing.This pattern (two examples is so a pattern) suggests that, to Franklin, whatever's on TV is by definition the white-hot center of the media universe, and everything else (some website, some pop song) is desperate to bask in its reflected glory.
Via DF, a 1996 interview with David Foster Wallace on Infinite Jest:
Part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we're really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we're creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because -- you know, the nice thing about fascists is they'll tell you what to think, they'll tell you what to do, they'll tell you what's important. And we as a culture aren't doing that for ourselves yet.
New Yorker TV critic Nancy Franklin is often pretty good (she totally gets Friday Night Lights, for instance), but her column this week reveals an amusing old-person misconception. Near the end of the piece, Franklin writes that "the CNN/YouTube debates were a great promotional device for YouTube."
According to Internet World Stats there are 1.25 billion people using the Internet. According to Alexa, 17.25 percent of them look at YouTube sometimes. That means there's a total of 216 million people watching YouTube. Meanwhile, the Republican debate was watched by 4.4 million people. If anything, the debates were a great promotional device for the American democratic process; YouTube certainly doesn't need the help.
You have probably been wondering, "What is fringe Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul's favorite superhero?"
The answer, predictably enough, is Berlin Batman -- the alternate-universe Batman of Weimar Germany, who prevented the work of protolibertarian economist Ludwig von Mises from falling into the hands of the Nazis in Batman Chronicles 11.
Why I love New York: So some folks get on the Q train, and some other people say "Merry Christmas!" and the first group of people, who it turns out are Jewish, reply "Happy Hanukkah!" So the first group of people attack them and beat them up.
But! Another passenger -- a "good Samaritan," if you will -- intervenes and helps the Jews fight off the Christians. And he turns out to be a Muslim! And the Jews and the Muslim fight off the Christians together! And then the police come and arrest the Christians, and the Jews invite the Muslim over to celebrate Hanukkah the next night, and everyone is happy, except for the Christians, who are facing assault charges. The end.
It turns out that, if necessary, you can say "Batman is not just a river in Turkey." If it ever comes up.
Weirdly long and poetic article from the Washington Post on how Apple Stores are getting more crowded:
The question so recently was: What is the Apple Store doing to us, as a people?Now the question is: What are we doing to it ?
Can you smother a store to death?
Radar has a good summary of the recent Joe Klein FISA bill controversy, for those who don't have time to read 50,000 words by Glenn Greenwald.
Friendblogging redux: Jake, with John C. Reilly, on Fresh Air, talking about Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which by the way is fucking hilarious.
Amazing NYT front-pager yesterday: For 20 years, the World Bank and the western countries that give aid to Africa have been demanding that recipient countries not provide subsidies to farmers. Instead, the western donors have advocated a "free-market" paradigm in which poor countries grow cash crops instead of food, then buy food from rich countries (which massively subsidize their own farmers). Without subsidies, African farmers can't afford to buy fertilizer, which means they can't afford to grow food.
Two years ago, after a poor harvest led to a devastating famine, Malawi's president, as the Times puts it, "decided to follow what the West practiced, not what it preached," and reinstated fertilizer subsidies. Now Malawi is selling surplus corn to Zimbabwe, and UNICEF is sending the powdered milk it has stockpiled in Malawi to Uganda instead.
It's an incredible indictment of western aid policy and the failures of free-market dogma. Those who read to the end will be rewarded with a scene in which a village chief performs "a silly pantomime."
