Jon Liu in the Harvard Independent:

For more Indy coverage, see KaavyaGate.

On Monday evening, the Crimson reported another twist in the Kaavya Viswanathan ’08 plagiarism scandal: bloggers at DesiJournal and elsewhere discovered new suspicious similarities, this time to works by Meg Cabot and Salman Rushdie, in Viswanathan’s novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. Hours later, the New York Times reported more passages possibly lifted from yet another author, Sophie Kinsella.

Even before the new round of allegations surfaced, the high-priced college-counseling firm whose CEO and founder, Katherine Cohen, introduced Viswanathan to the publishing world, was already subtly distancing itself from its most famous client. Apparently in response to articles published by the Independent and others, IvyWise made several changes to its flashy graphics- and music-enhanced web site over the weekend. The changes included adding statements categorically disavowing marketing or “packaging” college applicants, but media stories the company continues to prominently feature on the same site paint a more complex picture.

More here.  [Thanks to Jonathan Kramnick.]

The U.S. and the U.K. may be on the verge of finding a non-military way to end the conflict in Darfur and reverse ethnic cleansing. If they do, then Bush and Blair should be given credit for doing so.

U.S. diplomats tried on Wednesday to extract concessions from the government of Sudan that could persuade rebels from the Darfur region to sign up to a draft peace agreement designed to end three years of war.

The government has accepted the deal on security, power-sharing and wealth-sharing proposed by African Union (AU) mediators, but three Darfur rebel factions refuse to sign, citing objections on a wide range of issues.

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick held a second round of talks with the government delegation on Wednesday. Zoellick arrived on Tuesday in the Nigerian capital Abuja, venue of the talks, as Washington increased pressure for a deal.

“It all comes down to a power play between Washington and Khartoum, and whether the Americans can wrangle enough out of the Sudanese so that they can then go to the rebels and say ‘here’s what we’ve got for you’,” said a Western diplomat who is closely involved in the talks.

In case you missed it John Ikenberry has a two–part, lengthy post on the endemic security problems that stem from an inversion of the Westphalian order.

Bush foreign policy is failing – but it is important to come to grips with why it is failing. To be sure, it is failing because Bush stumbled into an epic disaster in Iraq. But the problems are not just about policy incompetence, ideological blindness, or high risk policy choices gone bad. I would argue that Bush foreign policy is failing – in the large sense – because it is inconsistent with the realities of a transforming international system that shapes and limits the way the United States can effectively exercise power and – more importantly — assert its authority.

Because of this, the Bush administration has run into trouble, or as I would put it, it has gotten America caught in a “security trap.” It is a security trap in the sense that as the Bush administration tries to solve the nation’s security problems by exercising its power or using force, it tends to produce resistance and backlash that leaves the country more isolated, bereft of authority, and, ultimately, insecure.

The problem is that when liberals take over the reins of foreign policy, they too will fall into this trap unless they understand the problem and devise a grand strategy that works with rather than against these evolving global realities.

Robert Reich argues in favor of letting Wal-Mart enter the banking sector, in The American Prospect.

Most Wal-Mart watchers (including the entire U.S. financial industry) don’t believe Wal-Mart. They see this move as the Wal-Mart camel’s nose under the tent of commercial banking. First come credit-card services on Wal-Mart sales, then discounted credit-card services on other sales, then commercial deposits and loans. Presto. Before you know it, Wal-Mart is a full-service commercial bank.

I say, let Wal-Mart under the tent. Commercial banking is now one of the stodgiest and least-competitive parts of the American economy. Fees and prices are way too high. Service is lousy. The industry needs a shakeup. Have you ever had a bank give itself an interest-free “float” on your money while you waited two weeks for a check to clear? Have you ever filled out twenty-five forms to get a simple bank loan? Have you ever collected anything close to fair interest on money you keep in your checking account?

I guarantee you Wal-Mart’s low-price business model will force complacent bankers to do better.

Also bear in mind many Wal-Mart customers don’t have much money. They need cut-rate banking services. Many of these folks are excluded from mainstream banking. They don’t even have bank accounts. Wal-Mart could help them.

Christopher Hayes profiles John Tanton, a conservationist and “progressive” who helped to create the comtemporary anti-immigration movement, in In These Times.

In 1969, Tanton started and chaired the population committee of his local Sierra Club chapter, and when Ehrlich and like-minded environmentalists founded the advocacy group Zero Population Growth (ZPG), he became one of its most active members, rising to its presidency in 1975. By then, the birthrate for Americans had declined below the replacement rate, but the American population was projected to keep growing. Tanton settled on the culprit: immigration.

The number of immigrants was still small by today’s standards but had started to creep upwards, thanks in part to a 1965 immigration bill that instituted family reunification policies and did away with 40 years of quotas that heavily favored northern Europeans. Since immigrants had higher birthrates, reducing their numbers would allow the United States to achieve the zero population growth that had seemed a pipe dream only a few years earlier.

Tanton pushed for the Sierra Club to take a strong stand to reduce immigration, but the organization balked. He didn’t have much more success with his fellow travelers at ZPG. Tanton chalks it up to fear of tackling a taboo subject, but it seems just as likely that they couldn’t see why it mattered on which side of the Rio Grande someone was born. Today, ZPG, since renamed Population Connection, takes what its current president, John Seager, calls a “global approach,” supporting female literacy, access to birth control and family-planning services in the developing world. If Tanton’s concern is the health of the planet, why doesn’t he subscribe to this view? He explains that reducing immigration will force countries like Mexico to confront their own population growth rates. “Each country,” he says, “ought to try to match its population to its resource base.”

From Lens Culture:

In headlong leaps toward capitalism, during the past 25 years, the lifestyles and landscapes of China have been changing beyond recognition with blinding speed. To officially signal the change to the world, in 1992, Deng Xiao Ping proclaimed, “To be rich is to be glorious!” Yet the mad rush to embrace Western ideals has — and is — creating profound consequences for the people of China and for the rest of the world

Canadian photogapher Edward Burtynsky worked through diplomatic channels to gain access to photograph many sites undergoing enormous change. With his large format camera, over the course of three years, Burtysnky has captured the vast scale and minute details of monumental transformations of a society. He documents today’s “factories for the world”; the dumping grounds for the hand-recycling of the world’s e-waste; the unprecedented migrations of millions of humans toward brand new urban environments; and the ecological footprint of Three Gorges Dam, the largest dam on the planet that forced the relocation and threatened the livelihoods of more than 1.13 million people.

More here.

From Science:

Give a mouse more room and a few toys, and good things happen. New neurons sprout in the hippocampus, while spatial memory improves and anxiety eases. As tempting as it might be to tie the new neurons to the behavioral changes, a new study finds no link between them. The results contradict a popular assumption among scientists that new neurons in the hippocampus contribute to the cognitive boost that comes with a more stimulating environment.

The notion that two parts of the brain–the hippocampus and olfactory bulb–continue to produce new neurons into adulthood has been widely accepted since the late 1990s. But just what role those new cells play in cognitive function remains a mystery. Recent studies have found that animals housed in larger cages with opportunities for exercise and social interaction generate more new neurons in the hippocampus than do animals in more cramped quarters with no playmates. Scientists in the lab of Columbia University neurobiologist René Hen hoped to find the link between hippocampal neurogenesis and certain behaviors such as learning and memory that involve the hippocampus.

More here.

Jacob Heilbrunn in Washington Monthly:

To prove your conservative bona fides these days, you have to begin by denouncing conservatism. To the delight of many liberals, a flurry of conservative writers and think-tankers at places like the Cato Institute and the Nixon Center are doing just that, condemning George W. Bush for being, among other things, a “redistribution Republican” (George F. Will), a “socialist” (Andrew Sullivan), and an “impostor” (Bruce Bartlett). Now add Jeffrey Hart to the list of aggrieved accusers.

Hart, a professor of English at Dartmouth College and former speechwriter for Richard Nixon, has unimpeachable conservative credentials. He has been a regular contributor to National Review since the 1960s. His son Ben Hart was an editor at The Dartmouth Review and a leader of what the Heritage Foundation billed as a “Third Generation” of new conservatives in the early 1980s. A Burkean conservative, Jeffrey Hart has weighed in primarily on cultural issues, lamenting what he sees as the corruption of American arts and letters. But like NR founder William F. Buckley Jr. (“insurrectionists in Iraq can’t be defeated by any means that we would consent to use”), he is also a critic of the Iraq war. In a March 11, 2005, letter to The Dartmouth Review, for example, Hart took aim at Bush’s selling of the war: “You do not have to get eyesore burrowing in the archives to find astonishing patterns of deception.”

Now, in The Making of the American Conservative Mind, Hart chronicles the emergence of the right and National Review‘s role in shaping it. His story begins in the 1950s and ends with the current Bush administration. By turns dyspeptic, melancholy, and ruminative, Hart casts a surprisingly detached eye on his subject. This is a book about a path not taken. It is also one of the most important and idiosyncratic meditations in recent memory about the conservative movement.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

In March, six men entered a London hospital to receive an experimental drug. The men were volunteers, and the drug–a potential treatment for arthritis and leukemia–appeared from animal tests to be safe. But within minutes of the first round of doses, there was trouble. The men complained of headaches, of intolerable heat and cold. The drug made one man’s limbs turned blue, while another’s head swelled like balloons. Doctors gave them steroids to counteract the side-effect, and managed to save their lives. But several ended up on life support for a time, and they all may suffer lifelong disruptions to their immune systems.

How could such a devastating disaster come from a trial that followed all the rules, including tests on both mice and monkeys? According to a paper published today, the drug developers might have thought twice if they had known more about our evolutionary history.

Humans suffer from a number of immune disorders that don’t bother other primates. HIV evolved from a virus that infects chimpanzees, but when chimpanzees get infected, their immune system doesn’t collapse the way ours does. Chimpanzees don’t get serious inflammation of the liver after hepatitis infecitons, and don’t seem to suffer from lupus or bronchial asthma. All of these disorders are associated with an overreaction by a group of white blood cells known as T cells. This puzzling pattern led scientists at the University of California at San Diego Medical School to see if T cells behave different in humans than in chimpanzees, and if so, why.

More here.

David Sedaris in the New Yorker:

For the past ten years or so, I’ve made it a habit to carry a small notebook in my front pocket. The model I favor is called the Europa, and I pull it out an average of ten times a day, jotting down grocery lists, observations, and little thoughts on how to make money, or torment people. The last page is always reserved for phone numbers, and the second to last I use for gift ideas. These are not things I might give to other people, but things that they might give to me: a shoehorn, for instance—always wanted one. The same goes for a pencil case, which, on the low end, probably costs no more than a doughnut.

I’ve also got ideas in the five-hundred-to-two-thousand-dollar range, though those tend to be more specific. This nineteenth-century portrait of a dog, for example. I’m not what you’d call a dog person, far from it, but this particular one—a whippet, I think—had alarmingly big nipples, huge, like bolts screwed halfway into her belly. More interesting was that she seemed aware of it. You could see it in her eyes as she turned to face the painter. “Oh, not now,” she appeared to be saying. “Have you no decency?”

More here.

Mark Rose in Archaeology:

The world’s oldest and largest pyramid found in Bosnia? It sounds incredible. The story has swept the media, from the Associated Press and the BBC, from papers and websites in the U.S. to those in India and Australia. Too bad that it is not a credible story at all. In fact, it is impossible. Who is the “archaeologist” who has taken the media for a ride? Why did the media not check the story more carefully? ARCHAEOLOGY will address these questions in depth in our next issue, July/August, but for now let’s at least put the lie to the claims emanating from Visoko, the town 20 miles northwest of Sarajevo where the “Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun” is located.

Semir (Sam) Osmanagic, a Houston-based Bosnian-American contractor first saw the hills he believes to be pyramids last spring. He is now digging the largest of them and plans to continue the work through November, promoting it as the largest archaeological project underway in Europe. (His call for volunteers even slipped into the Archaeological Institute of America’s online listing of excavation opportunities briefly before being yanked.) He claims it is one of five pyramids in the area (along with what he calls the pyramids of the Moon, Earth, and Dragon, plus another that hasn’t been named in any account I’ve seen). These, he says, resemble the 1,800-year-old pyramids at Teotihuacan, just north of Mexico City. Osmanagic maintains that the largest is bigger than the pyramid of Khufu at Giza, and that the Bosnian pyramids date to 12,000 B.C.

Construction of massive pyramids in Bosnia at that period is not believable. Curtis Runnels, a specialist in the prehistory of Greece and the Balkans at Boston University, notes that “Between 27,000 and 12,000 years ago, the Balkans were locked in the last Glacial maximum, a period of very cold and dry climate with glaciers in some of the mountain ranges. The only occupants were Upper Paleolithic hunters and gatherers who left behind open-air camp sites and traces of occupation in caves. These remains consist of simple stone tools, hearths, and remains of animals and plants that were consumed for food. These people did not have the tools or skills to engage in the construction of monumental architecture.”

More here.

Elizabeth Bumiller in the New York Times:

India has made headlines as an emerging superpower, a land of high-tech multimillionaires and a vast new market for American goods. But there is another India too, and it is not just the one of villages and ox carts that has always been best known in the West.

This is the disturbing India of the Hindu widow, a woman traditionally shunned as bad luck and forced to live in destitution on the edge of society. Her husband’s death is considered her fault, and she has to shave her head, shun hot food and sweets and never remarry. In the pre-independence India of the 1930’s, the tradition applied even to child brides of 5 or 6 who had been betrothed for the future by their families but had never laid eyes on their husbands.

Into this milieu now comes the director Deepa Mehta with “Water,” a lush new film that opened on Friday, about Chuyia, an 8-year-old widow in the India of 1938. She has barely met her husband but is banished by her parents to a decrepit widows’ house on the edge of the Ganges. Chuyia is left there sobbing, in one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film, but she insists her parents will soon return for her.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

SAVING THE WORLD: A Novel by Julia Alvarez. Julia Alvarez isn’t afraid to ask hard questions. Saving the World , as the title suggests, confronts one that’s troubled every great religion: how to deal with social inequity. How can a person of sensitivity and conscience justify being one of “the lucky ones,” as Alvarez puts it, when so many people elsewhere in the world haven’t got the means to live, let alone “to be a human being”? Who can be saved, and how?

Alma Rodriguez Huebner, the heroine of this novel, is a writer without a story. Drowning in midlife depression, she’s years behind on a book she’s unable to write, and she’s struggling to meet the demands of increasingly dependent but distant parents. The bonds of friendship and marriage seem more tenuous to her by the day. Readers’ own politics will probably determine whether Alma sounds like a troubled person of principle or a whiny bore; she seems to feel that guilt is a sine qua non of American citizenship, but she’s articulate about it. She realizes how much of her persona has been formed by meeting or rejecting others’ expectations. But self-knowledge is not enough to make life meaningful for her.

More here.

From Nature:

Middle-aged Americans are in much worse health than their English counterparts, suggests a trans-Atlantic comparison, and scientists are at a loss to explain why. The new study, which compared the health of white, 55 to 64-year-olds in the two countries, found that diabetes is twice as common in the United States compared with England, cancer 70% more prevalent and heart disease more than 50% more widespread. People in the healthiest, high-income and education bracket in the United States have comparable rates of heart disease and diabetes as those in the sickest, low-income group in England, the study shows.

The differences were so great that at first “it seemed implausible”, says James Smith of the RAND corporation in Santa Monica, California, and senior author of the Journal of the American Medical Association study. “We did not expect to find this.” The explanation doesn’t seem to be down to the facts that Americans are fatter or that the British drink more alcohol, the researchers say. When they ran their health data through a model to make both groups have equivalent levels of obesity, smoking and drinking, the health differences only lessened slightly. Instead, the difference could stem from poor childhood health or adult stress, they say. And that could serve as a caution to other countries that are increasingly adopting the eating and lifestyle patterns of the United States. “It may be a warning signal,” Smith says.

More here.

In the Guardian, Terry Eagleton reviews Patrick Parrinder’s Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day.

In the 18th century, as Nation and Novel shows, the rise of the novel is bound up with the forging of a new kind of Protestant national identity, as Britain consolidates its commercial and imperial power after the revolutionary upheavals of the civil war era and the Restoration. It’s no accident that Defoe writes a scabrous poem entitled “The True-Born Englishman”, as well as producing what Parrinder sees as a study in national character in the figure of the robustly individualist Robinson Crusoe. Henry Fielding wrote the original lyrics for “The Roast Beef of Old England”, while Samuel Richardson’s novels can be read among other things as Whiggish political allegories.

It took an outsider, Sir Walter Scott, to launch some of the most searching reflections on nationhood and national character. The art of Dickens, an author Parrinder reads as both an instinctive republican and a Little Englander, was praised by George Gissing as embodying the spirit of the English race. Trollope’s The Way We Live Now, which portrays an English nation at the mercy of (probably Jewish) foreign crooks and speculators, is one instance of that spirit at its most sourly xenophobic.

As the Victorian age passed into a world of mass migrations, new nation-states and the collapse of empires, national identity became an increasingly self-conscious literary topic. As Parrinder points out, the very idea of national identity, as opposed to national character, reflects a certain anxiety. National character, supposedly, is an objective set of features (in the case of the English, common sense, moderation, idiosyncrasy, philistinism, emotional reserve and so on), while identity is usually what you are still in search of. “What are we?” is a less unsettling question for a nation to ask itself than “Who are we?”

3QD readers may have noticed that some of us have a fixation on mirror neurons. Here is an archive of papers and discussions on mirror neurons moderated by Gloria Origgi and Dan Sperber.

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of macaques and their implications for human brain evolution is one of the most important findings of neuroscience in the last decade. Mirror neurons are active when the monkeys perform certain tasks, but they also fire when the monkeys watch someone else perform the same specific task. There is evidence that a similar observation/action matching system exists in humans. The mirror system is sometimes considered to represent a primitive version, or possibly a precursor in phylogeny, of a simulation heuristic that might underlie mindreading.

Today, mirror neurons play a major explanatory role in the understanding of a number of human features, from imitation to empathy, mindreading and language learning. It has also been claimed that damages in these cerebral structures can be responsible for mental deficits such as autism. The virtual workshop will address the theoretical implications of the discovery of mirror neurons. The discussion will try to set the explanatory scope of the phenomenon, and evaluate to what extent it can provide a new empirical ground for a variety of human mental abilities.

From the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, a talk by Philip Jenkins, author of Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America.

[S]o much of what I am saying is a reasonably familiar story, the idea of the rise of a Religious Right. But I would like to look at this in a slightly different way— I think a slightly unusual way.

In 1979 or 1980, anyone looking at the landscape of American politics could not fail to see the role of religion as a conservative force; not just religion, but traditional, orthodox religion. I would also suggest to you that exactly the same is true on a global scale. We might say this happens in the United States due to particularly American conditions. But the same American conditions do not cause similar changes—mutatis mutandis—in other societies and other religions.

Let’s just take the year 1977 as a focus.What happens in the year 1977? Look around the world. In Israel, for example, we have the Likud government, with an unprecedented mobilization of orthodox and traditional-minded Jews. In India, we have the defeat of the Congress Party by the Janata Party, which is the first successful mobilization of traditionally minded orthodox Hindus, and a party which would later become the BJP, the fundamentalist party there.

Above all, the classic example of Islam. In 1975, organized political Islam in most of the Arab world or the Islamic world is not a force. By 1979, it is very definitely a force. There is a dramatic change in just that four-year period.

What has happened? In 1979, for example, look at what is happening in the Muslim world: In February, you have the success of the Iranian Revolution, which sends reverberations around the Islamic world. You have the unsuccessful coup attempt by fundamentalists in Mecca—a remarkable event, which the Saudis try to deal with by making the devil’s bargain, by basically telling the fundamentalists that there’s a whole world out there just anxious to receive their message, and, “We’ll be very happy to give you the money. Just go and do it somewhere else.”

From BBC News:

Happiness researchers have been monitoring people’s life satisfaction for decades. Yet despite all the massive increase in our wealth in the last 50 years our levels of happiness have not increased. “Standard of living has increased dramatically and happiness has increased not at all, and in some cases has diminished slightly,” said Professor Daniel Kahneman of the University of Princeton. “There is a lot of evidence that being richer… isn’t making us happier”

The research suggests that richer countries do tend to be happier than poor ones, but once you have a home, food and clothes, then extra money does not seem to make people much happier. It seems that that level is after average incomes in a country top about £10,000 a year. Scientists think they know the reason why we do not feel happier despite all the extra money and material things we can buy. First, it is thought we adapt to pleasure. We go for things which give us short bursts of pleasure whether it is a chocolate bar or buying a new car. Second, its thought that we tend to see our life as judged against other people. We compare our lot against others. Richer people do get happier when they compare themselves against poorer people, but poorer people are less happy if they compare up. The good news is that we can choose how much and who we compare ourselves with and about what, and researchers suggest we adapt less quickly to more meaningful things such as friendship and life goals.

More here.

From Science:

With crushing heat and humidity, you’d think life would move sluggishly in tropical rainforests. But according to a new study, at least one thing proceeds more like the hare than the tortoise: molecular evolution. Faster evolution in the tropics than more temperate zones could help explain why rainforests are such hotbeds of diversity and have implications for how scientists calculate when one species diverged from another.

Scientists have uncovered hints that evolution progresses faster in regions closer to the equator than in those closer to the poles. But this consensus was never backed up with a solid explanation. “Nobody’s tested it properly,” says evolutionary ecologist Len Gillman of the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand. One theory is that the tropics’ smaller population sizes make it easier for random genetic changes to accumulate and increase the genetic differences between populations. Another is that the faster metabolism of tropical species, spurred by hotter temperatures and more sunlight, offers more opportunities for cell division to go awry. This could lead to potentially useful DNA mutations.

More here.

Much of the work of a new restaurant resides in coming up with new inflections of old dishes, or familiarizing anchors for new dishes, in order to produce the right combination of novelty and intelligibility.  Depending on its target clientele, a restaurant chooses what to serve within a determinate field: a restaurant serving people who consider themselves Modern and International can serve foams in the confidence that they will be understood as a nod to Spain’s Ferran Adria.  A East Village diner can serve vegan hot dogs just as confidently.  The price of a dish itself is a reassurance of various things: this is expensive enough that I can trust it, this is cheap enough that I am not being ripped off like an Upper East Sider, the reasonable price of their grass-fed ribs demonstrates such an admirable commitment to the neighborhood!, etc.  More to the point, in New York, with its lack of a generally elaborated culinary canon, an established item must usually be reinvented in some way.  Our foie gras comes with pineapple jelly; ours with Venezuelan chocolate. 

Conversely, new concoctions must be tied to the gastronomic memory of diners.  Shrimp with grits and pork belly gets a poached egg on top, giving the dish a reassuring breakfast-for-dinner feel.  In lamb roasted with Armagnac and Thai chilies, the trusty liquor, with its aroma of French authenticity, balances the – whoa! – Thai chilies, the name of which is more the point than the actual flavor – bourgeois New Yorkers have timid, oversweet palates.  Wild mint lemonade: the drink is a short tone poem of buzzwords, foraging-tasty-comfortable.  Hopeless cases are the dishes that achieved a vogue long ago, but not long enough that they are ready to be resurrected.  Just as scenesters exhume styles from about twenty years ago (in the nineties, platforms and bells, nowadays, skinny ties and prom dresses), so food items are ready for reclamation only after proper aging.  The fried chicken and collards that James Beard brought back as part of his interest in American regional foodways are good again; pasta primavera and chicken florentine, no sir.  Go ahead and ask for tiramisu somewhere.  (Interestingly, there does seem to be a relation between a food’s perceived ‘ethnicity’ and its likelihood of return; just as people forget the Tagores and remember the Yeats’, they seem to forget the vindaloos and remember the quenelles of pike.)

What emerges when one surveys New York’s food culture is a sense that certain dishes have ethnographic weight, or thickness, while others are believed to be inorganic impositions.  A New York Times (the absolute gold standard for food ideology) article about fried chicken depends on the M&G Diner up on 125th Street as the case for fried chicken’s indigenous connection to New York’s ‘soul.’  (That said, I love M&G’s fried chicken on Wonderbread very, very much.)  The vogues for gumbo, or ramps, however, will be harder to sustain that way.  At the top end, the foods that are granted permanent menu residence are not American regional at all: they are French.  The idea is of a taxonomized, fully articulated cuisine existing elsewhere, that must be strived for but can never be reached.  The scenes in Haneke’s Caché in which the ubër-bourgeois couple eats plain spaghetti or cheese and salami, however, are much more accurate as an index of modern Paris.  Without one partner living at home, not a lot of people are eating sauces gribiches or gigot d’agneau a la maison over there either.  There’s no going home again to your Provençal maman; French cuisine is curated and articulated in restaurants too.

New Yorkers stick to French, however, as part of a powerful cultural formation in which the worship of celebrity chefs often overwhelms all else.  Ask a New York food snob where their most memorable meals were, and you’ll hear the names Keller and Vongerichten and Boulud much more than you’ll hear ‘at a roadside roti shack in Flatbush,’ or ‘a bodega on Avenue A,’ or the obscurities you might expect from a modern-day A. J. Liebling with more self-respect than desire to genuflect.  There’s all too much faith in the real, actual superiority of these figures, despite the fact that you can go to, say, Babbo, and have the famous beef cheeks and find them oversauced and undersalted, because Mario’s in Sardinia or Las Vegas.  The use of taste as a form of distinction becomes very clear when you consider the reversal of fortunes of various meats over the last thirty years.  Where the tenderness and fatty evenness of beef tenderloin formerly held sway, the stringy, braise-requiring toughness of ‘peasant’ cuts like shanks and cheeks does today.  Those filet mignon and lobster tail eaters are now hopelessly déclassé, whereas the lover of sweetbreads or hanger steak announces herself as gastronomically up to date.

One food, however, that hasn’t seemed to need a resurrection at all, and that I believe stands in the middle of many of these opposing trends: the hamburger.  Unlike, say, penne alla arrabiata, a burger can be dressed up and down, served at the greasiest of spoons or to the most silvery palates.  Yeah, I know, Daniel makes one out of short ribs stuffed with foie gras for four thousand dollars.  I also know that you can get a perfectly passable one with decent fries for six bucks at Reservoir, or a million other places.  There are the neo-burger chains like Blue 9, or Better Burger, for your lover of Whole Foods-style marketing, just as fifteen years ago Paul’s on Second Avenue and the English muffin burger at Florent were the newest wave.  There are your supercool places, like Pop Burger and Burger Joint, the knowingly humble place hidden in the upscale Parker Meridien hotel.  There are the classics, Corner Bistro and Old Town and Union Square Café and Peter Luger, where the burger is made from porterhouse off-cuts and tastes like aged beef, which is weird.  Savoy has a grass-fed burger with mediocre house-made ketchup – sometimes the industrial choice is best.  There are the Williamsburg three, Diner and Relish and Dumont, which are all excellent – though Dumont’s burgers are slipping since they introduced their spinoff, Dumont Burger.  When I’m over at my friend Tricia’s, I often make late-night visits to White Castle – got a problem with that?  And there are thousands of other hamburgers in the city, at lunch counters (are any eating establishments, in New New York, as endangered and as beautiful as lunch counters?) and temples of cuisine and everything in between.

A hamburger is almost always the best value on a menu, calorie-wise and fillingness-wise, which makes no sense in pure economic terms.  With the high price of beef today, the ingredients in a half-pound, house-ground cheeseburger are far more expensive than a few ounces of penne, some tomatoes and a garlic clove.  Yet the pasta dish is always more, for solely sociological reasons.  People expect a burger to be affordable (unless the principle is being knowingly contravened, a la Café Boulud), and the very fact that a burger is a sandwich makes a category distinction that classes it with working lunches and food you eat with your hands.  Hamburgers reverse the very civilizing process of Western society, away from forks and the other distancing implements with which the physical body has been repressed.  (I refer here to Norbert Elias on how and where Europeans used to eat, blow their nose, spit, and vomit.)  The bun, the American addition to the German Hamburg-er, returns us to the prehistory of the plate, when food was served on bread that one tore chunks off of at will.  Accounts of burger eating so often focus on the necessity that a good burger’s juices drip down chin and fingers: part of the inner meaning of the burger is its revocation of the European taboo against soiling one’s hands with food.  In this to eat hamburgers is to indulge in a populist desire to part company with gastronomy altogether, with the notion of an elaborated cuisine.  And for this reason the hamburger is the American food that doesn’t wax and wane, that New Yorkers can have anywhere and everywhere, and that’s always a good deal.  I eat a lot of them.

See All Dispatches.