Stuff White People Like

From The Atlantic Monthly:

Book_3 In January, Christian Lander — a 29-year-old Toronto-raised, McGill-educated Ph.D. dropout who worked as a corporate communications manager in Los Angeles — started a blog called Stuff White People Like. By February, the site was a runaway hit, garnering 30,000 hits daily. By March, it was getting 300,000. SWPL — which catalogs the tastes, prejudices, and consumption habits of well-off, well-educated, youngish, self-described progressives — was refreshing because it’s everything a blog, almost by definition, is not. Rather than serving up unedited, impromptu, self-important ruminations on random events and topics, the tightly focused, stylishly written, precisely observed entries eschew the genre’s characteristic I (though Lander in fact writes nearly all of them) and adopt a cool, never snarky though sometimes biting, pseudo-anthropological tone.

Lander’s White People aren’t always white, and the vast majority of whites aren’t White People (he doesn’t even capitalize the term). But although Lander’s designation is peculiar, he’s hardly the first to dissect this elite and its immediate predecessors (see for instance Mark E. Kann’s Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class, and David Brooks’s Bobos in Paradise — Brooks calls these people variously “bourgeois bohemians,” the “educated elite,” and the “cosmopolitan class”). Lander, like many of these writers, traces this group’s values to the 1960s, and there’s clearly a connection between a politics based on “self-cultivation” (to quote the Students for a Democratic Society’s gaseous manifesto, the Port Huron Statement) and what Lander defines as White People’s ethos: “their number-one concern is about the best way to make themselves happy.” That concern progresses naturally into consumer narcissism and a fixation on health and “well-being”: Lander’s most entertaining and spot-on entries dissect White People’s elaborate sumptuary codes, their dogged pursuit of their own care and feeding, and their efforts to define themselves and their values through their all-but-uniform taste and accessories (Sedaris/Eggers/The Daily Show/the right indie music/Obama bumper stickers/uh, The New Yorker).

So why call this group “White People”? Lander is almost certainly being mischievous.

More here.

Cricket, Lovely Cricket?

From The Independent:

Book Nick Hornby’s 1992 debut Fever Pitch, itself indebted to Frederick Exley’s 1968 meditation A Fan’s Notes, made the intelligent fan’s memoir a sort of sub-genre. Ever since, it has been difficult to write about one’s passion for a sport without inviting some comparison to Fever Pitch. Ask me: I’ve been there myself with my memoir, You Must Like Cricket?.

My hunch is that this occurred to Lawrence Booth, one of England’s funniest and most engaging cricket writers, when he was planning his own book. So he presents his memoir of an English cricket fan not as such, but as an addict’s guide to the game, with chapters on the teams, the umpires, the media and so on. He need not have bothered. First, because it’s no bad thing to be compared to Hornby. Secondly, because Cricket, Lovely Cricket? is a wry, self-deprecating and amusing look as much at the “world’s most exasperating game” of the subtitle as at the most exasperating experience of following it – especially if you happen to be an England fan. And I love that question mark, which encapsulates the dualities that underscore the life of a cricket fan – why, as Booth explains, the sport matters so much and yet not at all.

The anecdotes – and there are many of them – are excellent. Graham Gooch said that the only reason he liked to see Phil Tufnell bowling was because it meant Tuffers wasn’t fielding. The gags are funny: England fans stick by their side, Booth tells us, “through thin and thinner”; and “revenge is a dish best served at the temperature of Australian lager”. And Booth wages a delightful war against the clichés that disfigure daily cricket writing. Why, he asks, “are young fast bowlers ‘raw’ when the truth is they are just not very good?”

More here.

How the Religious Right Is Trying to Ruin Sex for Everyone

Dagmar Herzog in AlterNet:

Evangelical sexual conservatives took up some of the main concerns of the feminist women’s movement of the 1970s-1980s. An interest in intensifying women’s sexual pleasure has been a central focus of evangelical sex advice from the start. Many women’s frustration at male fascination with pornography and emotional non-presence during sex — another feminist theme — and the need to help men get comfortable with physical and emotional mutuality, have also been taken up. So too have the classic women’s movement themes of concern about domestic violence, child sexual abuse, and sexual exploitation of women. More recently, evangelicals have moved to adapt both feminist and mainstream advice about body image, in addition to generating a vast Christian dieting and addiction recovery industry. There is also an antiauthoritarian evangelical youth counterculture.

In its activism around issues of sexuality, the Religious Right has found ways as well to incorporate the insights of the New Age men’s movement in its own program to transform an Internet-ogling insecure bumbler into a virile he-man who is competent at male-male friendship and rivalry as well as hot heterosexual romance. The movement has been wildly successful in part because of its extraordinary ability to present its own program as therapeutic. None of this, however, should distract from the fact that right-wing evangelicals have also been sadistic and punitive, eager to play to the most base human desires to feel superior to others who fail to live up to the expected norms.

While the roots of the Religious Right lie in anti-black racism (a history that has now been largely overcome but still goes woefully underacknowledged), it got its start in American national politics by organizing against abortion and homosexuality.

Rushdie and Eugenides on The Enchantress of Florence

The video and audio of the conversation can be found over here at the NYPL.

With storytelling that mixes political intrigue and high drama, romance and magic, Jeffrey Eugenides and Salman Rushdie discuss the ways in which the novel is a reflection on war and politics, gender and society, fantasy and rumor, individuality and public life, and how the brutal past still influences our present world.

On the ‘Bosnian Model’ for Georgia

David Chandler argues against the Bosnia model for Georgia:

[T]he internationalisation of South Ossetia and Abkhazia is a real possibility. It appears that, as I have previously argued on spiked, Russia’s recognition of the republics was an attempt not to strengthen control over these territories but to distance the Kremlin from annexationist claims (see Russia’s first ‘Western-style’ war, by David Chandler). The act of recognition seems to have been motivated by the desire to distance Moscow from the consequences of military intervention and the destabilising assumption that Russia would militarily threaten the annexation of other territories with separatist Russian claims.

Internationalising the question of the sovereign status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia would enable Russia to put responsibility in the hands of international institutions, and thereby pass the buck for maintaining the divide between North and South Ossetia and for undermining Georgia’s territorial claims, while, of course, still being a decisive influence in the region. It is possible, therefore, that we may see some movement towards the ‘Bosnian model’ in the Caucasus, with the EU and international institutions being drawn into the Georgia-Russia stand off.

[H/t: Alex Cooley]

 

Michael Reiss Steps Down from the Royal Society

More on the creationism controversy:

Britain’s national academy of science parted company with its director of education yesterday after a furore over the teaching of creationism in schools.

Michael Reiss, a professor of education at the Institute of Education in London and an ordained Church of England clergyman, agreed to step down from his position at the Royal Society, which claimed he had unintentionally caused damage to the organisation’s reputation.

Reiss was widely reported to be in favour of teaching creationism in school science lessons after a speech he gave in Liverpool last week, but the following day he issued a clarification arguing his comments had been misinterpreted.

The Royal Society announced Reiss’s resignation in a statement yesterday. It said: “Some of Professor Michael Reiss’s recent comments, on the issue of creationism in schools, while speaking as the Royal Society’s director of education, were open to misinterpretation. While it was not his intention, this has led to damage to the society’s reputation. As a result, Professor Reiss and the Royal Society have agreed that, in the best interests of the society, he will step down immediately as director of education.”

In his speech, Reiss said that while creationism had no scientific basis, science teachers risked alienating pupils who believed in the idea by dismissing it out of hand. “They should take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis,” he said.

Ahmadinejad… the blogger

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To read or to write, that is the question!‎ In the Name of Almighty God-the All-Knowing, the Most Lovingly ‎Compassionate

Since my last post on the blog, a few months have passed. But this doesn’t ‎mean that I have not been keeping my promise of spending fifteen minutes per week ‎on it. As a matter of fact, I have spent more than the allocated time on the blog. The ‎magnitude of the reception and acclamation from the viewers was beyond ‎expectations. So I had to decide how to spend the limited time that I have allocated ‎for the blog; should I write new notes or respect those viewers who kindly and ‎generously have shared their thoughts and opinions with me and sent messages and read ‎their numerous received messages. ‎

‎***‎

As you know, the purpose of running this blog is to have a direct and mutual ‎contact and communication with the viewers and even though I have received many ‎messages from the viewers to update the blog and write new notes, I preferred to write ‎less and spend more time on reading the viewers’ messages – and not let this ‎communication tool become just a one-way medium.‎

more here.

disraeli

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Mr. Kirsch is the not the first to take Disraeli’s Jewish mythmaking seriously, and to explore what it did for him. Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin, both outsiders to English political culture, wrote in a similar vein decades earlier. But Mr. Kirsch is the first to explore at length how these ideas functioned not only imaginatively but also politically, suggesting concrete ways in which Disraeli’s mythmaking informed his conduct of politics, especially his relations with the Tory notables whom he led in Parliament. This is the most speculative part of his book, but also the most original. Historians of British politics may balk, but Mr. Kirsch’s Disraeli is a more human, more complex, and more sympathetic figure than the one they conventionally present.

more from the NY Sun here.

new russian history

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In a long introduction to the discussion that ensued, Putin complained that there was “mishmash” (kasha) in the heads of teachers of history and social sciences, and that this dire situation in the teaching of Russian history needed to be corrected by the introduction of “common standards. ” (Four days later, a new law, introduced in the Duma and passed with record speed in eleven days, authorized the ministry of education and science to determine which textbooks be “recommended” for school use and to determine which publishers would print them.) There followed some instructive exchanges:

“A conference participant: In 1990-1991 we disarmed ideologically. [We adopted] a very uncertain, abstract ideology of all-human values…. It is as if we were back in school, or even kindergarten. We were told [by the West]: you have rejected communism and are building democracy, and we will judge when and how you have done…. In exchange for our disarming ideologically we have received this abstract recipe: you become democrats and capitalists and we will control you.

Putin: Your remark about someone who assumes the posture of teacher and begins to lecture us is of course absolutely correct. But I would like to add that this, undoubtedly, is also an instrument of influencing our country. This is a tried and true trick. If someone from the outside is getting ready to grade us, this means that he arrogates the right to manage [us] and is keen to continue to do so.

more from TNR here.

Wednesday Poem

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Playing With Big Numbers

Ajmer Rode

The human mind
is essentially qualitative.
As you know,
we are easily excited by
pinks and purples,
triangles and circles
and we endlessly argue
over true and false,
right and wrong.

But quantitative analyses
rarely touch our souls.

Numbers were invented mainly
by men to trick each other.
I am almost certain women had
nothing to do with them. They
had more vital tasks, survival, for example,
at hand.

But playing with big numbers
could be interesting.
In fact it could be really fun. Say
if I were to sit on a gravel pit and
count one billion pebbles non-stop
it will take me some 14 years;
or if I were to count what Africa
owes to rich
foreigners – some 200 billion
dollars,
it is impossible. I will have to
be born 40 times and do nothing
but keep counting 24 hours.

Although things could be simpler on a
smaller scale. Suppose as a result
of the debt, five million children die
every year , as in fact they do,
and each dying child cries
a minimum of 100 times a day
there would be a trillion cries
floating around
in the atmosphere just over a
period of five years.
Remember a sound wave once
generated never ceases to exist
in one form or the other,
and never escapes the atmosphere.

Now one fine morning, even if
one of these cries suddenly hits
you, it will shatter your soul into
a billion pieces. It will take
14 years to gather
the pieces and put them back
into one piece.

On the other hand, maybe all the
trillion cries could hit your soul
and nothing would happen.………………………………
……………………………….

Translation: 1990, Ajmer Rode
From: Poems At My Doorstep
Publisher: Caitlin Press, Vancouver, 1990

more big numbers

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American Roots

From The Washington Post:

Book Thomas Jefferson’s contradictions have long baffled historians. His clarion assertion of human equality in the Declaration of Independence became the battle cry of the abolitionist movement. Yet he lived on the fruits of slave labor and never risked political capital (or his own comfort) to oppose the institution of slavery. He regarded blacks as odorous, intellectually inferior and incapable of creating art. Yet, as Annette Gordon-Reed convincingly argues in this monumental and original book, he cohabited for more than 30 years with an African American woman with whom he conceived seven children.

Liberating the woman known to Jefferson’s smirking enemies as “dusky Sally” from the lumber room of scandal and legend, Gordon-Reed leads her into the daylight of a country where slaves and masters met on intimate terms. In so doing, Gordon-Reed also shines an uncompromisingly fresh but not unsympathetic light on the most elusive of the Founding Fathers.

In Sally Hemings’s day, Gordon-Reed writes, she was “the most well-known enslaved person in America.” Her connection to Jefferson was brutally exposed and mocked by his political opponents during his first presidency, while black churchmen in the early republic preached sermons on her “family situation.” The publicity was sufficiently embarrassing that Jefferson’s partisans and descendants crafted a sanitized and sexless version of life at Monticello that continued until our own day. Although controversy persists, recent DNA research has caused most historians to accept Jefferson’s paternity of Hemings’s children.

More here.

The World in His Hands

From The Root:

It may be a tight race in America, but the globe is tilting toward Obama.

Obama In the BBC poll, when respondents were asked whether the election of Obama, as an African-American man, would “fundamentally change” their perception of the United States, 46 percent said it would, compared to 27 percent who said it wouldn’t.

We all know that the mind starts to play tricks once the impossible starts to seem possible. You start to have expectations. Once dreams are suddenly within reach, it’s common to forget what the previous reality was like. In these last several weeks of the election season, as the stakes seem to grow unimaginably high, it is worth pausing to remember how far we’ve already come during this election cycle. The political and cultural landscapes have already been permanently changed for the better, regardless of who the victor is on November 4.

More here.

Poetry workshop: After Kubla Khan

From The Guardian:

In reading these poems I tried to work out who the speaker might be and what tone governed their approach to the charge of finishing Kubla Khan (KK). An invented persona who fronts the poet’s work posits the idea of a speaker other than the poet as a liberating ideal in the re-envisioning process necessary for this workshop. The workshop task seems a fruitful coalition of lyric, narrative and dramatic poetry.

Kublai_2 Unseen by Lee Stannard

A week is no river to learn what
flows two centuries guarded
by some knowing incomplete,
out of fashion for a change
like intentional clichés.
My face in the river, I see
my own face in the river to me,
yet progress talks here of a habit
making me seem somewhere else.

Less than a week – no time to finish
what I began five days before I imagine
I imagine my reluctance to submit
after a dream I remember being
somewhere in an army I was
and inside a party room of odd numbers,
which next day became a chemist.

A poem is time enough to leave
unfinished, fragmented as it was
or even as it could be.
So with the adding of a reading
followed by my writing beside other words,
I walk away from another river
and reflect upon a vision I cannot see.

More here.

The Subprime Solution

J8714 Chapter 1 of Robert J. Shiller’s book, over at Princeton University Press:

The subprime crisis is the name for what is a historic turning point in our economy and our culture. It is, at its core, the result of a speculative bubble in the housing market that began to burst in the United States in 2006 and has now caused ruptures across many other countries in the form of financial failures and a global credit crunch. Th e forces unleashed by the subprime crisis will probably run rampant for years, threatening more and more collateral damage. The disruption in our credit markets is already of historic proportions and will have important economic impacts. More importantly, this crisis has set in motion fundamental societal changes—changes that affect our consumer habits, our values, our relatedness to each other. fRom now on we will all be conducting our lives and doing business with each other a little bit differently.

Allowing these destructive changes to proceed unimpeded could cause damage not only to the economy but to the social fabric—the trust and optimism people feel for each other and for their shared institutions and ways of life—for decades to come. The social fabric itself is so hard to measure that it is easily overlooked in favor of smaller, more discrete, elements and details. But the social fabric is indeed at risk and should be central to our attention as we respond to the subprime crisis.

History proves the importance of economic policies for preserving the social fabric. Europe after World War I was seriously damaged by one peculiar economic arrangement: the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty, which ended the war, imposed on Germany punitive reparations far beyond its ability to pay. John Maynard Keynes resigned in protest from the British delegation at Versailles and, in 1919, wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which predicted that the treaty would result in disaster. Keynes was largely ignored, the treaty remained in force, and indeed Germany never was able to pay the penalties imposed. The intense resentment caused by the treaty was one of the factors that led, a generation later, to World War II.

A comparable disaster—albeit one not of quite the same magnitude—is brewing today, as similar concerns are hammering at our psyches.

The Limits Of Statistics, Lessons in the Wake of the Subprime Crisis

Taleb201 Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Edge:

The current subprime crisis has been doing wonders for the reception of any ideas about probability-driven claims in science, particularly in social science, economics, and “econometrics” (quantitative economics).  Clearly, with current International Monetary Fund estimates of the costs of the 2007-2008 subprime crisis,  the banking system seems to have lost more on risk taking (from the failures of quantitative risk management) than every penny banks ever earned taking risks. But it was easy to see from the past that the pilot did not have the qualifications to fly the plane and was using the wrong navigation tools: The same happened in 1983 with money center banks losing cumulatively every penny ever made, and in 1991-1992 when the Savings and Loans industry became history.

It appears that financial institutions earn money on transactions (say fees on your mother-in-law’s checking account) and lose everything taking risks they don’t understand. I want this to stop, and stop now— the current patching by the banking establishment worldwide is akin to using the same doctor to cure the patient when the doctor has a track record of systematically killing them. And this is not limited to banking—I generalize to an entire class of random variables that do not have the structure we thing they have, in which we can be suckers.

And we are beyond suckers: not only, for socio-economic and other nonlinear, complicated variables, we are riding in a bus driven a blindfolded driver, but we refuse to acknowledge it in spite of the evidence, which to me is a pathological problem with academia. After 1998, when a “Nobel-crowned” collection of people (and the crème de la crème of the financial economics establishment) blew up Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund, because the “scientific” methods they used misestimated the role of the rare event, such methodologies and such claims on understanding risks of rare events should have been discredited. Yet the Fed helped their bailout and exposure to rare events (and model error) patently increased exponentially (as we can see from banks’ swelling portfolios of derivatives that we do not understand).

Are we using models of uncertainty to produce certainties?

david foster wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address

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(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I’d advise you to go ahead, because I’m sure going to. In fact I’m gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings [“parents”?] and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story [“thing”] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

more here (h/t Alan Koenig).

bernard the leftist

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IT IS, or was, fashionable to look down on Bernard-Henri Lévy, a French writer and intellectual. The left tends to despise him for questioning its idols. It doesn’t help that he is rich, talks intelligibly and has a beautiful wife. The right condescends to him for being vain, glib and writing too many books.

So it was satisfying for Mr Lévy to get a begging call from Nicolas Sarkozy last year when he was running for the French presidency. The two men knew each other from Mr Sarkozy’s former constituency, Neuilly, on the edge of Paris, where Mr Lévy lives and votes. As France’s star intello de gauche, could Mr Lévy write “a nice article” endorsing him? No, he couldn’t, Mr Lévy told him. The left was his family. “Your family?” Mr Sarkozy retorted, “These people who’ve spent 30 years telling you to go fuck yourself?” Mr Lévy held firm. Despite everything, he still belonged on the left.

more from The Economist here.

Tuesday Poem

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–Reality check

Our Revels Are Now Ended
William Shakespeare

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
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hitchens starting to like Obama as the war candidate

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Recent accounts of murderous violence in the capital cities of two of our allies, India and Afghanistan, make it appear overwhelmingly probable that the bombs were not the work of local or homegrown “insurgents” but were orchestrated by agents of the Pakistani ISI. This is a fantastically unacceptable state of affairs, which needs to be given its right name of state-sponsored terrorism. Meanwhile, and on Pakistani soil and under the very noses of its army and the ISI, the city of Quetta and the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas are becoming the incubating ground of a reorganized and protected al-Qaida. Sen. Barack Obama has, if anything, been the more militant of the two presidential candidates in stressing the danger here and the need to act without too much sentiment about our so-called Islamabad ally. He began using this rhetoric when it was much simpler to counterpose the “good” war in Afghanistan with the “bad” one in Iraq. Never mind that now; he is committed in advance to a serious projection of American power into the heartland of our deadliest enemy. And that, I think, is another reason why so many people are reluctant to employ truthful descriptions for the emerging Afghan-Pakistan confrontation: American liberals can’t quite face the fact that if their man does win in November, and if he has meant a single serious word he’s ever said, it means more war, and more bitter and protracted war at that—not less.

more from Slate here.