Dean Reynolds, self-important douche.

Five months ago, This American Life did a great episode explaining the mortgage crisis. This week's episode (iTunes, web) explains the bigger financial crisis; it's even better. Unless you work in finance or economics, I guarantee that you will be smarter after listening to it.

Norman Ornstein: "Two key words have been largely missing from the debate over our financial crisis: moral hazard."

Google: "Results 1-10 of about 13,400 over the past month for 'moral hazard' 'financial crisis.'"

Sorry, it's still going on: Here's a memorial song. Pretty. Here's a lovely memorial tattoo. Here's a report on the memorial service, beginning with Jonathan Franzen in tears.

The weirdest case in favor the bill came from Minority Leader John Boehner, who yesterday called the bill a "crap sandwich." "Nobody wants to vote for this," he yelled. "Nobody wants to be anywhere near it. ... You all know how awful it is. I didn't come here to vote for bills like this!" But, he went on, "I believe the risk in not acting is much higher. ... These are the votes that separate the men from the boys and the girls from the women. What's in the best interest of our country? Vote yes," he concluded and dashed away from the podium in tears.

"Maybe I say this because people keep using the word crisis all the time, but I was just thinking 'you know, it kinda feels like the United States is in the middle of a big crossover event right now.'"

Ty wanted me to post something about the ascendance of "double down" as a buzzword in the presidential campaign. I don't really have anything to say about the phrase "double down," but here's stats guru Nate Silver with a useful analysis of McCain's am-I-going-to-the-debate-or-not strategy that revolves around a mathematically precise use of the phrase. You're welcome, Ty!

A century of British history in service of selling bread:

Innumeracy: Karen Tumulty: "Are polls getting thrown off by the fact that so many young people use cell phones only--and, therefore, don't get polled? The answer: Possibly, though the effect is probably small."

Well, sure, if by "small" you mean "big enough to have changed the results in each of the last two presidential elections."

Speaking of numbers, you guys are all reading Nate Silver, right? Here he is on that totally trivial cellphone effect, which by the way means some national polls have a 3-point bias toward McCain. Silver's Todays Polling column [hits a slam dunk/kicks it out of the park/insert sports metaphor for triumphant scoring of your choice] every day, e.g.

Today's footnote: Wallace is hard to review, because the books are complicated, and because their self-consciousness tends to swallow attempts to conceive them. (There was a Don Martin cartoon that scared me as a child, in which for four panels a spider weaves a web between two branches, until in the final panel the camera pulls back and the branches are revealed to be the sticklike legs of a giant fly, licking his chops; Wallace's fiction is to criticism as the fly is to the spider.)

Wyatt Mason, writing about Oblivion in the LRB in 2004, maybe doesn't trap the fly, but at least he's weaving his web in the right place: he successfully articulates the difficulty of the late stories, and some of the functions and effects of that difficulty. (Helen Dewitt, whose The Last Samurai is recommended to DFW fans, doesn't find Oblivion difficult. Good for you, Helen!)

Your DFW footnotes of the day: A. O. Scott moves the canonization along:

“Infinite Jest” is a masterpiece that’s also a monster — nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric. The other big books published since by members of Mr. Wallace’s age cohort — “Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides; “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen; “The Fortress of Solitude,” by Jonathan Lethem; “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon — are more accessible, easier to connect with and to give prizes to. They are family chronicles, congenial hybrids of domestic melodrama, immigrant chronicle, magic realism as well as the more traditional kind. Not easy books, necessarily, but not aggressively difficult, either.
In their different ways, though, these novels and their authors — along with other itchy late- and post-boomer white guys like Richard Powers, Rick Moody and Dave Eggers — stand in Mr. Wallace’s shadow. Not because his version of their generational crisis was better or truer than theirs, but rather because it was purer and more rigorous.

Fascinating personal reminiscence of the day:

We bonded over our depression. We shared war stories, the way patients on psych wards do. “I’ve eaten tapioca pudding on the fifth floor, too,” he told me. It wasn’t something you would know about him. Though when you read him, you knew that he thought about things in the way that gets you to that fifth floor. We were both taking Nardil; we bonded over this, too. It is one of the MAOI class of anti-depressants that went out of favor long ago, after the new SSRIs came to the scene. But he and I had no luck with other drugs; Nardil was the only thing that did it for us.

Part 2: Top conservative thinkers have finally found a way to blame the collapse of the U.S. economy on political correctness! I assume they get some kind of prize:

I always listen to Mark Levin while making Friday night dinner. Tonight he is giving the most serious, intelligent, cogent explanation of the current economic crisis I have heard or read anywhere.... Funnily enough, he has explained just what it is community organizers do. Advocating, for instance, for affordable housing for the poor — the poor who traditionally rent, because they are bad loan risks. The day that reasoning by banks was junked as "racist," was the day this crisis became a possibility.

It must be sad to know that your movement is undergoing total intellectual collapse. [Via Andrew Sullivan.]

Random bashing of traditional targets as respite from DFW grief part 1: Mary -Jo Foley reports that Steve Ballmer's going to stay at Microsoft longer than he once claimed: "According to scuttelbutt [sic] from Microsoft’s annual employee meeting, which was held in Seattle on September 18, Ballmer told attendees that he is going to stay on at Microsoft until Microsoft’s search share exceeds Google’s." Why not just say until hell freezes over?

More footnotes:

• An incredible letter, apparently from DFW, describing his own experience at an addiction recovery house much like Ennet House.
  
• James Wood corrects the record (more here, scroll down): "An untruthful reviewer of my book, How Fiction Works, claimed that David Foster Wallace was its 'aesthetic villain.' That is not true."
• In, say, twenty years, John Ziegler's career as a radio talk-show host will be over. In thirty years, no one who never met Ziegler personally will remember him. But for years after that, people will still know his name, thanks to DFW's "Host," collected in Consider the Lobster. Maybe that's why he wrote this, or maybe he's just an asshole.
• "Just to satisfy some people’s curiosity about Dave the player – who once underrated himself as a 3.0, an intermediate in tennis terms – he had a complete game, the kind that comes from years of obsessing over stroke technique and ball location. If there was one sign that he was more than an above-par recreational player, it was the fact that he would employ a relatively advanced tactic, what tennis geeks call “taking the ball off the rise.” It requires sharp reflexes and timing. He did it repeatedly that summer afternoon in 2005."

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

From Infinite Jest

Footnotes: Salon's Laura Miller: "He was my favorite living writer, and I know I have plenty of company in that." New York's Sam Anderson: "He was my favorite living writer, and the contest wasn't particularly close." It's interesting that people talk about DFW in terms of personal affection, rather than "greatness": I haven't seen anyone yet call him the greatest of his generation, although next to him the accomplishments of most of his peers look a little thin.

Personal remembrances are collected on the McSweeney's site. Zadie Smith, as usual, gets straight to the point:

He was my favourite. I didn't feel he had an equal amongst living writers.... In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let's at least only say true things. The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It's what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential.

KCRW's awesome Bookworm had a discussion today, which I haven't heard yet; you can listen to that and to the show's archive of excellent Wallace interviews here. Harper's compiles Wallace's writing for the magazine, some of it uncollected. Another uncollected piece, the Roger Federer profile from the NYT's Play magazine, is here; it makes a fine partner for the Michael Joyce piece from Supposedly Fun Thing, which piece might be my favorite of his nonfiction.

Christopher Beam was wondering the same thing I was regarding what Wallace thought of the 2008-model John McCain. After he posted, someone apparently pointed him to this WSJ interview, in which Wallace says:

McCain himself has obviously changed; his flipperoos and weaselings on Roe v. Wade, campaign finance, the toxicity of lobbyists, Iraq timetables, etc. are just some of what make him a less interesting, more depressing political figure now—for me, at least. It's all understandable, of course—he's the GOP nominee now, not an insurgent maverick. Understandable, but depressing.

Neighborhoodies has already commoditized our grief with these handsome Enfield Tennis Academy T-shirts.

David Foster Wallace, 1962-2008

It seemed worthwhile to write something about David Foster Wallace, but it also seemed difficult, since everyone else would be writing something about David Foster Wallace. Then it occurred to me that this is the kind of problem -- genuinely thinking about something that has already been densely and unproductively mediated -- that Wallace excelled at.

Large chunks of my brain are devoted to Wallace's thoughts about addiction, tennis, luxury, and a dozen other topics, but something similar is true of any writer one loves. There's another chunk, though, that contains a (limited and impoverished) version of Wallace himself in miniature, one that I've reverse-engineered from his writing and can now set to work on a certain class of problems that trouble me. It (the miniature David Foster Wallace in my head) is morally unflinching and intolerant of ethical or intellectual half-assery, but also sympathetic and devoid of cruelty. Of all the different kinds of conscience, it's a pretty good one to carry around with you.

Here are the thoughts that I can remember having about Wallace during the week before he died:

• I wonder if he's sad or just kind of resigned about what's happening with John McCain.
• The introduction he wrote for Best American Essays 2007 feels apposite right now, especially the part about a three-alarm cultural emergency, but suffers from a reflexive urge to force a rhetorical parallel from the blinkered worldviews of the U.S. political right- and left-wings, thus setting up a false moral equivalence. But is it possible to describe that three-alarm emergency without either (a) setting up a false moral equivalence, or (b) contributing to the conditions that you're trying to describe? Because I can't think of a way to do it.
• Wouldn't it be great if my novel had a MacGuffin like the videotape in Infinite Jest? But then maybe it does? Or no.
• It is odd that, of late, Infinite Jest has dropped off my mental or conversational lists of my favorite contemporary novels. This omission has the flavor of an oversight rather than a waning of affection; I think it's precipitated by the fact that Infinite Jest is worthless as a source of helpful guidance in writing your own novel.

Here are a couple of thoughts I have had in the past couple of hours:

• Wallace's biography was always peripheral to the way his work was received: he wasn't a famous recluse like Pynchon or a famous prodigy like Safran Foer or a famous stud like Philip Roth. He was just a famous writer. Now he'll be a famous suicide. This will not be good for the books, and I feel slightly sorry for anyone who hasn't read IJ yet, not that you should let that stop you.
• The passage in IJ about Kate Gompert's depression is probably the only piece of writing on the subject that's made me think, Yup. There's an analogy I'd like to quote, but I'm away from my copy right now. The gist is that a suicide is like a person who jumps from the top floor of a burning building: eventually the fear of the flames overtakes the fear of falling, but the flames haven't made the jump any less terrifying, i.e. the fear of falling is a constant.
• Besides IJ, which I'm guessing will be read 50 years from now, his most lasting work will probably be the essays. (Kakutani agrees, although she closes her piece with a tautology that Wallace would have made fun of.)
  
• Wallace's prose's tics and mannerisms probably distracted attention from how good he was, or at least limited it to an in-group of fans. If you haven't read IJ then all you know about it is that it's huge, it's set in the near-future, and it inspires cultlike devotion. If that was all I knew about it, I would think it was Not For Me. I have not yet found a way to communicate its massive, throbbing heart. I will say this, though: I have never read a writer who loves his characters more or better than David Foster Wallace did in that book, and I expect that I never will. And maybe love everyone as much and as well as you can is in fact helpful guidance for writing your own novel, and for much else besides.
  

Well it's about fucking time.

What passes for analysis: WaPo's Dan Balz writes:

McCain and Palin have been silent on the lipstick controversy, preferring to let their advisers and surrogates do the work for them. It would be valuable to hear their assessment of it. If they're not prepared to associate themselves directly with the tactics of their campaign, voters should know it.

Of course, if they think we should have a special tax on haircuts, voters should know that too. But until McCain or Palin speaks out on this issue, we all assume that they're not in favor of a haircut tax. If we assume that, can we also assume that they're fine with the bullshit being spouted by their campaign? Or are we going to keep suggesting that John McCain is actually a sensible and honorable adult who's keeping silent, for some mysterious reason of his own, as travesties are perpetrated in his name?

National stereotype blogging: I'm writing this from a Quality Inn in Woodstock, Ontario. As is often the case with motels, we had to sign a special form saying that we'd be liable for damage caused by our dog. (We sign with confidence, since our dog would never in a million years damage anything, because she is perfect.) Among the pet policies listed on the sheet: "Barking is discouraged after 11 p.m."

Ah, Canada -- where (a) they wouldn't presume to tell your dog what to do before 11 p.m., and (b) even after 11 p.m., they won't go further than discouragement.

So according to the NYT's David Sanger, "a fierce struggle has been under way for the foreign policy heart of John McCain." Sanger is referring to the debate between the neocon and the realist wings of the Republican Party, although for some reason he doesn't use those words. His portrait of McCain's foreign-policy thinking would be very interesting if it weren't so completely deceptive.

Look at who McCain's top foreign-policy advisor is. Look at his reflexively bellicose response to the Russa/Georgia flare-up. Look at his unwavering support for the Iraq War and his grandiose definition of victory there. Look at his disdain for the idea of negotiation with Iran, Syria, North Korea -- countries with whom even the Bush administration has opened lines of communication.

Now name one foreign-policy situation -- just one -- since Sept. 11, 2001 on which John McCain has taken the realist position. (An anonymous McCain adviser cites the senator's laudable role in the normalization of relations with Vietnam -- an effort that peaked in January, 1993.)

Sanger writes that McCain "defies easy categorization. His threat to throw Russia out of the Group of Eight industrial nations went far beyond anything Mr. Bush has said, and he has often sounded more hard line than Mr. Bush about doing whatever it takes to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon." This is like saying that Jesse Helms "defied easy categorization" because he opposed school integration, the Civil Rights Act, and Martin Luther King Day. McCain's foreign policy, in fact, invites easy characterization, and only the shreds of his reputation as a "maverick" could lead any journalist to think otherwise.

Link rodeo

• I'd always kind of wondered what "vetting" really entails. Clinton-era labor secretary Robert Reich explains.
• Disappointment of the day: Seth Schiesel is down on Spore's gameplay.
• Yglesias on "energy independence": "What you’re hearing here is a bit of political opportunism from progressives coming back to blow up in our faces."
• "Low self-esteem, creative, not hard working, not gentle": What your musical taste says about your personality. (It seems to me that if they didn't correct for demographics, this study is basically worthless.)
• Un-frackin'-believable experiment on the neurology of memory.
• This is kind of fun! Maybe I should start a tumblr!
  
• My last tumblr lasted exactly one week, but it may have been too narrow in focus to sustain my interest.
  

Brilliant. [via]

Haven't tried Google's new browser because, you know, Mac blah blah. Scott McCloud's comic is good, though. Smartest comment so far: Siracusa.

How long until we hear the suggestion (probably from David Brooks) that John McCain didn't really want to pick Palin but those other Republicans, the nasty ones, made him?

How is it possible that there is no heavy metal band named after this phenomenon?

Every now and again, Matt Yglesias just blows my mind. As with this reflection on Martin Luther King.

Good move, Democrats! Every one of the convention speakers talked about how John McCain is both a war hero and a close personal friend. Now everyone at the Republican convention will feel obliged to mention the great esteem in which they hold Barack Obama, and will limit their criticisms to his policy positions!

The Democrats' inability to mount successful personal attacks on their opponents would be funny if, you know, something less than the fate of the world were at stake. How much do you think Robert Greenwald spent to make a film attacking John McCain for, um, owning a valuable parking lot? This is a guy who can't keep the names of foreign countries straight, even as he threatens to make war on them, and you're going after him for owning a parking lot? Can you imagine how loud they're laughing over at McCain HQ? Update: see comments.

Why we love xkcd: This. It seems like it's going to be a sex joke, but then it turns out to be a math joke. And then, while you think about it, it turns back into a sex joke, but one that's sophisticated and kind of wise rather than crude.

Awesome-sounding puzzle/platformer game, currently Xbox only but coming out soon for PC. Plus: two weeks till Spore!

Copy-editing the world: Is it kind of funny that Gavin Newsom and PG&E, trying to appear down with "Generation Obama," can't even get the name of the headlining band right? Update: It's fixed now. When I originally posted this, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! was referred to as "Clap Your Hands and Say Yeah!"

Department of OMG: Did you know that Stephen "Freakonomics" Dubner used to be in a band with Superchunk's Jon Wurster, one of my all-time top-five drummers? Did everybody except me know that?

'NATO enlargement has become the crack cocaine of White House politics': Daniel Benjamin maps the connection between the Bush administration's foreign policy and Russia's invasion of Georgia.

So John McCain recently named Dancing Queen by ABBA as his favorite song ever. When Walter Isaacson (who probably couldn't name an ABBA song but knows you're supposed to not like them) challenged him on this, McCain said:

“Now look, everybody says, ‘I hate ABBA. Oh ABBA, how terrible! Blah blah blah. How come everybody goes to ‘Mamma Mia?’ Huh? I mean really, seriously, huh? ‘I hate ABBA, they’re no good, you know.’ Well, everybody goes. They’ve been selling out for years.”

I'm not that surprised that John McCain would name an ABBA song as his favorite song, but I am surprised, frankly, by his full-throated, unequivocal, and refreshingly cogent defense of the Swedish pop quartet.

OK, I admit it's a bit weird to not post anything for like 6 months and then all of a sudden post something, and it's something positive about John McCain. But there you go.

Here's why that Obama New Yorker cover totally fails as satire.

Wow. Really, Wall Street Journal? Really? (This and just about all other content ever: via DF.)

Why the British newspaper industry, and indeed English culture as a whole, is so awesome: Guardian restaurant critic Giles Coren excoriates the paper's subeditors (British for copy-editors); the subs respond. Can you imagine any U.S. newspaper hosting an exchange like this one on its website?

Customer service: ARWWC'JG' emails to request yet more Billy Joel commentary. Perhaps she doesn't realize that the last word on Billy Joel has already been written, by the NYT's excellent Dan Barry, two weeks ago:

SOMEONE must sing a proper song of farewell for Shea Stadium, the nice try of a coliseum in Queens, as its dismantling draws near and a new ballpark rises just yards away. But that someone must be able to convey emotions specific to the place, emotions beyond the sadness of many lost Mets summers and the euphoria of two World Series championships. There is so much more.

The romantic idealism and the yeah-right realism. The quickness to mock and to take offense. The need to prove oneself better than any Upper East Side twit and the guilt from having conceived such a hollow ambition. The restlessness, angst and ache of the striver. The Long Island of it all.

Copy-editing the election: Jonathan Chait writes:

Republican campaigns to impugn the character of Democratic presidential nominees have two major themes. The primary one is slipperiness or flip-flopping.... The secondary theme is to portray the Democrat as effete, intellectual and un-manly. ("Effete" is a common epithet used against Democratic presidential hopefuls of the last two decades, along with "Harvard Boutique," "Blow-dried," "drag queen," and "Breck Girl.")

What's interesting is that effete doesn't have anything to do with gender. It originally meant "no longer fertile" (it's related to fetus); more broadly it means "tapped out, sapped of strength, past its prime, exhausted." But it sounds a bit like effeminate, so Republicans can use it to mean "unmanly" and everyone will get the point.

Thing we just realized and got sad: Superchunk hasn't released an album of new material in seven years.

Department of impossibly awesome: Samuel Beckett pitching gag ideas to Ernie Bushmiller.

I think the problem you're having, Sam, is the same problem any literary man might have. You're not setting up the gags visually and you're rushing to the snapper. It seems to me you've got the zingers right there at the beginning, in panel No. 1, and although I have to admit you got Nancy and Sluggo in some crackerjack predicaments, I don't see how they got there.

For instance, putting Nancy and Sluggo in the garbage cans is a good gag, but in my opinion, you can't have them in there for all three panels. How did they get there? Same thing when you had them buried in the sand. I like to do beach gags, but I don't think that having Nancy buried up to her waist in the first two panels and then up to her neck in the third one is adequately explained, and I've been at this game for a while now.

What is the single most annoying way to return from a medium-length blog hiatus? You might imagine that it's the classic apology-for-the-lack-of-posts post -- and indeed, that was the conventional wisdom until today, when I happened upon a brand new and measurably more annoying way: the rare I-keep-stumbling-into-money post.

On Saturday I went to the track for the first time. (On the train I said, 'We are, quite literally, off to the races!' which is something you would only do if you had never been to the races before.) I put $20 on the special MetroCard-of-gambling thing they have, made some small bets, lost some, won a couple, watched my stake dwindle. And then I hit the exacta in the ninth (one of the best parts of going to the races was saying things like 'Who do you like in the ninth?') and walked away with $75.

Then today I took a bunch of old clothes to the hipster used-clothing store, expecting them to laugh at me, and instead they gave me $81.

And then the mail arrives and there's a tax-rebate check, plus a check from a class-action settlement. Time to fire up the blog again!
___

There's going to be more blogging in the next little while. It might be a little different from the RoBros blogging you're used to: I'm not going to link much, because I'm trying to regain some of my short-term-memory/power-of-concentration/general-mental-mojo by not spending as much time on the internet. Maybe it'll be a return to the classic here's-what-I-think-about-Apple/Billy Joel/superhero comics era. Maybe you'll be able to watch my thinking skills return, in real time! Dunno.

In a way my return to the blogodrome is overdetermined: there is, after all, a contretemps going on that involves Barack Obama, The New Yorker, and cartooning. Much of the commentary on Barry Blitt's cover has been along the lines of this, from Time's Michael Scherer. Scherer quotes 270 words from William Rehnquist to make the point that "Despite their sometimes caustic nature ... graphic depictions and satirical cartoons have played a prominent role in public and political debate."

Rehnquist was asserting that cartoons count as protected speech under the First Amendment. Scherer, on the other hand, is arguing with a straw man. Jack Shafer does something similar: "Has the public's taste for barbed drawings waned since the Paul Conrad, Herblock, Pat Oliphant, and Bill Mauldin heydays, or have the voices of the would-be bowdlerizers gotten stronger? Shall we don blinders and erect barriers so nobody is offended or misled? Only weak thinkers fear strong images."

The argument against Blitt's drawing is not that cartooning is worthless, or that there's no place for satirical illustration. The argument is that this specific cartoon is a failure of imagination, and that depicting a calumny is not the same thing as satirizing that calumny. Scherer's attempt to defend cartooning is in fact weirdly patronizing to cartoonists everywhere: if cartoons constitute a form of political expression, if they have any meaning at all, then they can legitimately inspire disdain. The First Amendment protects the right of the speaker to speak, but it also protects the right of the listener to boo.

I'll bet you Blitt's illustration appears, unmodified, on merchandise for sale at the Republican convention.

Happy belated independence day

If there's a genetic component to homosexuality, why wouldn't it die out? Obviously homosexuals are at a reproductive disadvantage. Will Saletan reports on an explanation that, like so many good bits of evolutionary logic, seems obvious once you've read it. By the way, if you are gay, your sister is probably easy.

Things I did not know until just now: In addition to starring in amusing silent films in which he hung from the hands of giant clocks, Harold Lloyd was also an erotic photographer.

Check out Gary Hart's very public application for a job in the Obama administration.

The Obama campaign is selling state-specific campaign T-shirts. Yglesias points out that D.C. gets jacked yet again. The weird thing, though, happens when you sort the shirts by "most popular": in the lead are Tennessee, Delaware, Kentucky, and Montana, in that order. It's hard to believe the electoral map is really that favorable.

This week's Vows column is kind of a doozy.

Does the blame for the conservative era belong with Ronald Reagan (and his John-the-Baptist, Barry Goldwater), as the wingers always claim, or with Richard Nixon, as Rick Perlstein's new book argues? TNR's Barron YoungSmith gives a well-reasoned answer.

It's been a while. Couple of links:

• If you would like to listen to some nice songs, try Faded Paper Figures.
• If you want to read a good column on Hillary Clinton, Joe Klein can oblige.

That is all for now.

The Dieline: Cool blog devoted to excellence in consumer packaging.

Don't miss David Bianculli's great interview with Jack Kirby biographer Mark Evanier (web, iTunes).

Cool LAT piece on Inara George's new record with Van Dyke Parks. Beyond the article's inherent interest, it also reveals how bad the LAT website's contextual referral software is. Inara says, with regard to her many side projects, "I think you just make sure you say yes to the things that you really want to do and no to the things that feel they're extra fat," so the website offers a link to "How to build six-pack abs: For that ripped, lean look, you need strength training -- and very little body fat in targeted areas." And producer Mike Andrews charmingly compares Inara's music to "beachfront real estate on an island that no one's ever visited," which prompts the suggestion, "America's best beaches: Dr. Beach ranks the country's top 10 beaches." Someone build a metaphor-recognition algorithm in there, quick!

Obama's latest riposte to McCain is pretty great:

Here's the truth: the Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear weapons, and Iran doesn't have a single one. But when the world was on the brink of nuclear holocaust, Kennedy talked to Khrushchev and he got those missiles out of Cuba. Why shouldn't we have the same courage and the confidence to talk to our enemies? That's what strong countries do, that's what strong presidents do, that's what I'll do when I'm president of the United States of America.

Just one suggestion: Why not, "Reagan talked to Gorbachev and they ended the Cold War"?

Stupid metaphors, second in a series: From Slate's Dana Stevens:

Noise bites off much more than it can chew—an indigestible wad of broad social satire and sincere political commentary, with one too many Hegel references for even this former grad student to endure. But it masticates that wad with admirable vigor.

To masticate is to chew. If the film can masticate the wad -- with vigor, yet -- then it has not, by definition, bitten off more than it can chew.

Former Microsoftie Joel Spolsky on "Windows Live Mesh" (that's the real name of the service; it's just so stupid that I had to apply scare quotes as a prophylactic):

I shouldn't really care. What Microsoft's shareholders want to waste their money building, instead of earning nice dividends from two or three fabulous monopolies, is no business of mine. I'm not a shareholder. It sort of bothers me, intellectually, that there are these people running around acting like they're building the next great thing who keep serving us the same exact TV dinner that I didn't want in Sunday night, and I didn't want it when you tried to serve it again Monday night, and you crunched it up and mixed in some cheese and I didn't eat that Tuesday night, and here it is Wednesday and you've rebuilt the whole goddamn TV dinner industry from the ground up and you're giving me 1955 salisbury steak that I just DON'T WANT.

Interpreting censorship as damage part two: Perhaps you would like to read Michael Chabon's original screenplay for Spider-Man 2, which differs significantly from the one that was filmed. Perhaps you were disappointed to find that it's no longer available at McSweeneys.net. Perhaps you are interested to know that you can download the whole thing here.

Jeff Lester's revisionist take on the famously botched conclusion of Kirby's New Gods saga. A must.

Obviously I am not posting everything good being written about the nonsense that seems at the moment to be engulfing Barack Obama like a tide of nonsense. But I'm posting this, by Timothy Noah, about Peggy Noonan, because in a voice that is the very soul of reasonableness it breaks the nonsense down into little atoms and asks, What the fuck is up with this crap?

Last year a friend sent me a link to Dylan Hears a Who, a mysterious and wonderful collection of songs that set the words of Dr. Seuss to music in the style of vintage Bob Dylan. Then some lawyers for the estate of Dr. Seuss got involved, and the site was taken down. Dan Brekke summed up the affair in Salon.

It's a shame that, unless you downloaded them at the time, you can't listen to these awesome recordings anymore. Of course, you could acquire them via Bittorrent, using this torrent file. But that would be wrong.

The Lost writers room sounds a lot like conversations between the Roth brothers:

DL: We have one writer, Brian K. Vaughn, who writes comic books, and then another writer, Adam Horowitz, who's like a die-hard sports fan.
CC: Yankees fan. He used to sell hot dogs at Yankees Stadium.
DL: We'll ask Vaughn an easy sports question, like how many innings are there in a baseball game...
CC: Or what is the color of the Carolina Panthers or what sport do the Carolina Panthers play...
DL: And then we'll ask Horowitz to name two of the Avengers. And they will face off, and it's fun to watch them, you know, try to answer questions outside of their specific area of expertise.

I feel kind of lame linking to a Pitchfork review. But I also feel kind of psyched: look, they gave Let It Be a perfect 10! O ambivalence! Update, now that I've heard it: The remastered version sounds great, and Let It Be is still all-time. Let's hope these reissues prompt Sire to remaster Tim, the Mats' major-label debut and perhaps the worst-sounding great album I own.

RoBros gets results!

Abhay Khosla on the new Blue Beetle series:

Consider the likely goals of the creators at the outset of the series:

(1) Tell a single two-year meta-story that was comprised of smaller story arcs (what TV fans might call the "Buffy" model); (2) launch a new superhero character in a marketplace hostile to new superhero characters; (3) launch an ethnic character to an audience that never supports minority characters; (4) tie into the shitty, oppressive meta-story of the "DC Universe"; (5) remain independent enough of the shitty, oppressive meta-story of the “DC Universe" to convey the book’s own meta-story in a comprehensible way; (6) service a meta-arc while satisfying the demands of monthly fans-- e.g. having a superhero fight every issue; (7) tell a superhero origin story as well as telling a teen coming-of-age story; (8) juggle a superhero cast-- heroes, villains, mentors, etc.-- with a sizable supporting cast for the teen coming-of-age story; (9) place the brand new Blue Beetle character into some kind of larger context visa vi earlier iterations of the Blue Beetle brand name, without angering fans of previous iterations by suggesting those earlier versions were somehow less than the new version, while still allowing said fans to see the new characters as being a worthy inheritor of the brand name; and (10) present an all-ages book that's friendly to new fans looking for a new character to latch onto but also friendly to DCU otaku.

SPOILER WARNING: they fail.

A question for RoBros video technology advisor Mr. Perkins: Approximately how much do you think was spent to produce this? Just ballpark it for me.

There is something very funny about the headline "Pope Says Church Will Not Allow Pedophile Priests."

I don't know what it says about me that this site, which lists unintentionally funny internet addresses (for instance, an Italian power generating company whose site is powergenitalia.com) made me laugh harder than I've laughed in maybe like months. There are literally tears streaming down my face right now.

(Via Matt Yglesias, who shares my puerile sense of humor.)

Footloose: more relevant than ever! Apparently you can get arrested for dancing at the Jefferson Memorial.

The thesis of Dan Ariely's new book, Predictably Irrational, is that "people often make decisions that seem to defy logic--but they do so in very predictable, consistent ways." It sounds like a good book, and I'm looking forward to reading it. But one of his experiments, described in this MIT Tech Talk article, doesn't really make sense.

Ariely and his students went around and left six-packs of Coke in randomly selected dorm refrigerators all over campus. When he checked back in a few days, all of the Cokes were gone. But when he later placed plates of six loose dollar bills in those same refrigerators, not a single bill was missing when he checked back. Even though the value was comparable--and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent--people responded in opposite ways.

The problem is with the idea that "the value was comparable -- and thus the situations were supposed to be equivalent." The value is comparable in the sense that the price of a can of soda is around a dollar. But to a person standing thirstily in front of a refrigerator, the value of a can of soda is greater than a dollar. Try leaving a six-pack of Coke and six dollar bills on a municipal garbage can and see which one disappears first.

Update: Good lord! Ariely himself (the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT's Sloan School of Management) responds, both courteously and informatively, in the comments. The internet is amazing.

Name a newspaper columnist at any paper -- daily, weekly, mainstream, alternative -- as good as Dan Savage at his best. Just one.

Last night I dreamt that we were in China and our dog got sick, and it was hard to get good veterinary care in China, and I realized that, in an economy in which millions of people are living at subsistence level, veterinary care for non-productive animals must seem an absurd Western luxury. Which suggests that my unconscious can sometimes be more perceptive than my conscious mind, because I'm not sure it had ever occurred to me before.

First line of Gawker's Charlton Heston obit: "Well, you can have his gun now."

This country is nuts: Until recently, governors of Wisconsin could use their veto power to strike individual words from legislation, allowing them to create entirely new meanings. "Like when Gov. James E. Doyle, a Democrat, scratched out some 700 words from a section of the 2005 budget bill, leaving behind just 20 words that, when stitched back together, moved $427 million from the transportation fund to education." (It gets nuttier: until 1990, they could cross out letters to make new words.)

The A.P. reports on Ty Alper's lethal-injection study: "Nearly all lethal injection executions have occurred in states where veterinarians are not allowed to use the same method to euthanize animals."

Pants on (Sa)fire: Pedantic warmonger William Safire, guest-blogging for Oxford University Press, claims to have made up the verb "consense":

As a language columnist, I feel free to coin a neologism now and then; “consense” is a verb that can replace “form a consensus”. Not the opposite of “nonsense”.

Anyone who has spent even a little time around left-wing politics and activism has heard "consense" used in exactly this way a hundred times. Wiktionary has several citations, including one from 1970 -- a speech by pioneering gay activist Harry Hay. Looks like the queers beat you to that one, Bill!

The things old people do

Everyone knows it's hilarious when old people refer to a blog post as a "blog". As in, "I liked that blog you wrote about..." Even the founder of the site that may become the model for online news, being an old person, does this.

Also amusing, in an endearing way, is the tendency of Roth Brothers' mutual, aging, and much beloved mother to call a Facebook profile "a Facebook." As in: "Does Timberlake have a Facebook?"

But here's an even better one. Marty Peretz of The New Republic writes a blog called The Spine. In a post from the other day, he referred to an earlier post as "a Spine."

I hope you have enjoyed this Roth Brothers.

This McCain web ad appears to argue that he would be a good president because in high school he reported on students who broke the honor code, and would continue to do so in the White House.

Surely they could have come up with a more compelling argument than that!

Also, check out how in showing "our heroes", they have some real people (Thomas Edison, Teddy Roosevelt, Ted Williams) and then a generic headless dude with a guitar. It's like they knew they should have a "rock star" but they didn't feel comfortable singling out any actual existing "rock star" as a hero!

So money, baby: Wow, the new British coins are awesome. [via DF]

If you made it through my "Disagreeing with Paul Graham," you might like to know that there's a lively comments thread about it on Graham's social news site, Hacker News. Graham responds here; I respond to his response here. Also:

This reads like Mister Spock's review of a punk rock concert.

"I don't understand why the audience was asked if it was 'ready to rock', as they clearly did not have instruments. Also, it was illogical to ask them to 'fight the power', since power is an abstract physical quantity that cannot meaningfully be 'fought'."

Indie-rock smackdown! First Stephen Malkmus, in Spin, says:

For all the mistakes that were made marketing Pavement, it comes down to the song; and the song ["Cut Your Hair"] was pretty good, but it just wasn't the song of the time. The Offspring song ["Come Out and Play"], "Cannonball" by the Breeders -- those were bigger songs people could get behind.

Kim Deal's response, in Time Out New York, seems to me a bit of an overreaction:

I liked Pavement. But if he keeps fucking smacking his mouth off about me, I’m going to end up not being able to listen to any of their fucking records again. Anyway, I thought, God, man, “Cut Your Hair” isn’t as good of a song as “Cannonball,” so fuck you. How’s that? Your song was just a’ight, dawg.

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]

Seven story ideas about Batman

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.

Disagreeing with Paul Graham

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.

Call for a new literary category

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.

Not that there's anything wrong with the cliche in this case -- it's a pretty apt way of expressing the point. Just don't pretend you're not using a cliche when you are.

Just wanted to point that out. You'll hear from me again in another few months, probably.

Thirteen story ideas featuring Green Lantern

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.