How do I introduce my Roomba to my parents?

Make sure your parents are sitting down. Tell them you know this sounds unusual, but Roomba, despite what they think, is a really special robot and gets along great with the kids. If your father starts saying, “No daughter of mine is going to …,” tell him he's being a narrow-minded technophobe.

What happens when I leave my Roomba home alone?

Roomba may or may not go through your things, sample your perfume, and call your ex-husband, pretending to be you.

What do I do if I get a higher than usual monthly cable bill with several adult pay-per-view titles charged to my account?

Calmly ask Roomba if you can have a word with it. Tell it you understand it's curious—it's only natural—but that the pay-per-views have to stop.

more from McSweeney's here.

Naomi Wolf in Project Syndicate:

In one week, Michelle Obama sat for a formal White House portrait, dressed in somber, tailored clothes; posed for a snazzy People magazine cover, dressed in a slightly down-market, hot-pink lace outfit that showed plenty of skin; let the national media know that the First Family would be getting its new puppy from a rescue shelter; and had her press office mention casually that “secretaries and policy makers” had been invited for popcorn and movies at the White House.

That same week, in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the 1930’s, a national poll found that support for President Barack Obama was remarkably high, with respondents consistently saying that he “cares about people like me.”

These two phenomena are closely related. Almost from her first appearance in the public eye, Michelle Obama has used clothing, etiquette, and such cues as where she shops and entertains to send out a subtle but radical message to American voters and to the world. For the first time since the days of Andrew Jackson, the White House is aggressively “democratizing” the highest office in the land, and symbolically inviting in the common man – and now the common woman.

In other words, Mrs. Obama is managing to set herself up, unprecedentedly, as the “people’s First Lady.” She has carefully studied not only Jackie Kennedy – a comparison obvious from her sheath dresses, boat collars, and page-boy haircut – but also the triumphs and failures of that other glamorous but underestimated stealth radical, Princess Diana.

Princess Di’s legacy in generating iconography that opened the way to tremendous social change is grossly underappreciated.

Eleanor Burnhill in the Edniburgh Review:

And there are other, less highly organised individuals, storytellers, musicians, dancers, ‘local characters’ etc, who are occasionally called upon to give performances. All such people act effectively as curators or custodians of the culture on behalf of the wider ethnic group.1

As those studying tourism marketing note, most research shows fear and insecurity are major barriers to travel.

For years Northern Ireland, and its capital Belfast, was a tourism wilderness filled with ‘anxiety and journalists’ but, like weeds and wild flowers growing out of cracks in a pavement, a tentative tourism industry that recognised the ‘curiosity’ factor of the Troubles began to grow in the early 1990s. Much of this was led by local community groups in areas most affected by the conflict. Perhaps uniquely in a European city, taxi drivers adapted their businesses to take tourists on political tours.

Nowadays, however, a much wider tourism industry in Belfast is thriving, despite years of underfunding, and visitor numbers have returned to a level not experienced since the late 1960s. Ten years after the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which signalled a period of tentative peace for Northern Ireland, and in the two months before the March 7th elections for a new Legislative Assembly, I interviewed representatives from each of the four main political parties: the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), who traditionally represent unionists, and the main nationalist parties Sinn Fein and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). I also interviewed those involved in community tourism and taxi drivers themselves, to find out what role they thought political tourism should have into the future.

Most agreed that the Troubles do have a role in Belfast’s tourism product, but unsurprisingly for a state so divided by political tensions, there are divergent opinions about how this should be presented and marketed as a draw for visitors.

The Immanent Frame has interesting discussion on Nicholas Wolsterstorff’s Justice: Rights and Wrongs. David Johnston:

Martha C. Nussbaum in Boston Review:

As it became clear that Pakistani Muslims perpetrated the horrendous terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November, many feared a wave of violence against India’s own Muslim community. The community, which represents 13.4 percent of Hindu–majority India, suffers from poverty and systemic discrimination, as the government’s recent Sachar Commission report documents. It has also been targeted by the Hindu right, which, in 2002, murdered as many as 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, in the state of Gujarat.

That violence, like the violence of Hindu–right mobs against Christians in the eastern state of Orissa in 2008, surely deserves the name of “terrorism.” Yet, in India as elsewhere, the word “terrorism” is now frequently confined to the actions of Muslims, and Muslims are suspects almost by virtue of their religion alone. There was reason, then, to fear that mobs would take the Mumbai blasts as the occasion for a renewed assault on an already beleaguered minority.

This assault did not materialize—largely because India’s Muslim community strongly condemned the terrorist acts and immediately took steps to demonstrate its loyalty to the nation. Muslim cemeteries refused burial to the perpetrators. Muslims wore black armbands on Eid, showing solidarity with mourners of all religions and nationalities. The world saw a deeply nationalist community, one loyal to the liberal values of a nation that has yet to treat it justly.

It was not the first time India’s Muslims have demonstrated a peaceful embrace of the country’s founding values. The personal experience of Mushirul Hasan exemplifies the same commitment.

From The Guardian:

Aatish Taseer grew up in secular, pluralist India. His early influences included his mother's Sikhism, a Christian boarding school, and He-Man cartoons. Nagging behind this cultural abundance, however, was an absence: of his estranged father, the Pakistani politician Salmaan Taseer.

The best of Stranger to History is the son's journey of the subtitle: the movement towards – and away from – his father's world. Taseer describes the embarrassment, frustration and occasional joy of meeting his father and half-siblings, and of approaching a cultural and national identity which painfully excludes him. Alternating with this story is a more generalised journey into Islam, from the Leeds suburb that produced the 7/7 bombers, through Istanbul, Damascus and Mecca, to Iran and Pakistan. On the way Taseer observes the “cartoon riots”, is interrogated by Iranian security officials and watches the response in his father's Lahore home to Benazir Bhutto's assassination. The writing is elegant and fluent throughout, the characters skilfully drawn.

In Pakistan Taseer concentrates on particularities, and here his writing is particularly good. His descriptions of rural Sindh and the troubled feudal landowner he finds there are unforgettable. By depicting the homes deserted by the Hindu middle class and the crumbling shrines where Hindus and Muslims once prayed together, he makes his parents' separation an image of the rupture of partition, one of the two great ethnic cleansings of 1947 whose effects still plague us all. For Taseer, unified, diverse India becomes a father-sized absence.

More here.

James Traub in The New York Times:

SOWING CRISIS: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East

By Rashid Khalidi

Had the White House aides who scripted Barack Obama’s remarks to Al Arabiya television in January consulted Rashid Khalidi’s latest work beforehand, the president might not have so blithely vowed to restore the “respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” In “Sowing Crisis,” Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair of Arab studies at Columbia and is a major pro-Palestinian voice in American scholarship, argues that Washington’s drive for hegemonic control over the geostrategic and oil-rich axis of the Middle East stretches back three-quarters of a century, and has continued unabated to this day.

Khalidi’s central argument is that the Bush administration’s interventionist posture toward the Middle East is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign. Today’s enemy is terrorism; yesterday’s was Communism. And just as the threat of Communism was wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, so, these days, “the global war on terror is in practice an American war in the Middle East against a largely imaginary set of enemies.” ­Khalidi’s point is not that American policy toward the Middle East has been consistently hys­terical; rather, he says, it has been consis­tently cynical, exploiting an apocalyptic sense of threat in order to achieve the kind of dominance to which great powers, what­ever their rhetoric, aspire.

More here.

Jacopo Tintoretto’s timing was off. He was one of the most lavishly gifted painters of all time. But to make a name for himself, he had to struggle to get out from under the shadow of someone even better: Tiziano Vecellio, otherwise known as Titian. It didn’t help that Titian detested him. Worse, Tintoretto also had to compete against Paulo Veronese, Titian’s talented protégé and a man who knew how to turn on the charm. Was Tintoretto up to the challenge? If you doubt it for even a second, take a look at the self-portrait he made in his mid-to-late 20s. Tintoretto stares with bloodshot eyes through pink lids and long dark lashes, the muscles above his nose bunched in belligerent resolve. Turning to face the viewer, he has the look of someone who needs no more than a sliver of an excuse to draw his sword and apply its edge to your neck.

more from the Boston Globe here.

He was a foreigner with a camera, a young artist newly arrived on the streets of Manhattan from the Old World, muttering over and again, “What a town, what a town . . .” Robert Frank came from Switzerland in 1947, and he was in America to stay, eager to apply his ideas about art and photography and new ways of seeing. In a letter to his parents that first year, the photographer marveled: “Only the moment counts, nobody seems to care about what he’ll do tomorrow. . . . Whether you’ve been here for eight days or eight years, you are always treated like an American! There is only one thing you should never do, criticize anything.”

more from the LA Times here.

McWhorter is more interested in, as the subtitle puts it, “the untold history of English.” He points out that English has what he calls “kinks” in its grammar, qualities that are not shared by any of its relatives in the Germanic family of languages, but which do exist in a number of the Celtic ones, and questions why it is that these Celtic influences on English have gone unnoticed. I am frequently of the opinion that “untold histories” have remained untold for a very good reason, and it is testament to McWhorter’s persuasiveness that I took umbrage on behalf of Welsh and Cornish. McWhorter states that he has two lessons that he intends to get across. “First, there is nothing unique about English’s ‘openness’ to words from other languages.” And “second, there is no logical conception of ‘proper’ grammar as distinct from ‘bad’ grammar that people lapse into out of ignorance or laziness.” (“Grim little rules” like the one against using “they” as a ­gender-neutral singular pronoun, he writes, make no sense — hey, Shakespeare did it — but laymen cling to it “like Linus to his blanket.”)

more from the NY Times here.

An Otter
Billy Ramsell

Christmas day, 4 o’ clock,
Stumps of cloud, like yellowing tower blocks,
Lean over
The failing glimmer of Christmas lights
And the quays, that are utterly empty,

Except

For one dark otter, slick with river slime,

A shape

Made of dark Lee water,
Of thick fluid,
Of rippling muscle,

Swaggering, like any pedestrian,
Up the steps from the dry riverbed,
Across the silent street,
Past dim shop displays, shuttered windows,

Toward a car parked skew on the footpath,
Its engine idling, its front door open,
Its headlights ploughing the gloom,

And a girl, its solo driver,
Standing alone on the pavement.

She is innocent, beautiful.
She leans over the otter.
Her long hair hangs down

As a second slinks up the steps from the riverbed,
Like a hand sliding slowly
From a hip to a breast.

Speaking of democracy, satire and dissent and its limits…the perceptive Alessandra Stanley in the NYT points out the limits of an irony in the Stewart-Cramer exchange:

Mr. Stewart treated his guest like a C.E.O. subpoenaed to testify before Congress — his point was not to hear Mr. Cramer out, but to act out a cathartic ritual of indignation and castigation.

“Listen, you knew what the banks were doing, yet were touting it for months and months, the entire network was,” the Democratic Senator from Comedy Central said. “For now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that nobody could have seen coming is disingenuous at best and criminal at worst.”

Congress has — belatedly and showily — gone after the leaders of banks, auto companies and insurance companies for their complicity in the financial meltdown. Mr. Stewart has always had a messianic streak to his political satire, as when he ripped into Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala on “Crossfire” for “hurting America.” He is now focusing on business news cable networks like CNBC, which not only failed to foresee the credit crisis, but, in his view, sided with the bankers and helped inflate the bubble.

And while it’s never much fun to watch a comedian lose his sense of humor, in an economic crisis, it’s even sadder to see supposed financial clairvoyants acting like clowns.

Mr. Stewart made his feelings clear. “I understand you want to make finance entertaining,” he told Mr. Cramer. “But it’s not a game,” he said, using an additional adjective that was bleeped out. “When I watch that I can’t tell you how angry that makes me.”

Nadia Urbanati in Reset DOC:

Two pieces. First, Dani Rodrik:

And Willem Buiter:

The most influential New Classical and New Keynesian theorists all worked in what economists call a ‘complete markets paradigm’. In a world where there are markets for contingent claims trading that span all possible states of nature (all possible contingencies and outcomes), and in which intertemporal budget constraints are always satisfied by assumption, default, bankruptcy and insolvency are impossible. As a result, illiquidity – both funding illiquidity and market illiquidity – are also impossible, unless the guilt-ridden economic theorist imposes some unnatural (given the structure of the models he is working with), arbitrary friction(s), that made something called ‘money’ more liquid than everything else, but for no good reason. The irony of modelling liquidity by imposing money as a constraint on trade was lost on the profession.

Both the New Classical and New Keynesian complete markets macroeconomic theories not only did not allow questions about insolvency and illiquidity to be answered. They did not allow such questions to be asked.

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

#11, From Living in the Past
Philip Schultz

Everyone dickers with God. Everyone gets something:
Grandma gets one dead husband who does nothing
but read Torah and complain, the kitchen ceiling where
all her curses live rent-free, a lifetime of oy veis. … Uncle gets
his wieners, eight varieties of sauerkraut, five newspapers spread
over the kitchen table like a vast strategy, the Paramount screen
where he pulls curtains shut on Marlena D who shaves her legs
four times a day. Father gets free room and board, a coal-burner
to intimidate, all the blame. Mother gets the lower left half of
the icebox, where she hides bacon, popsicles, all her glee.
I get the best hiding places, Uncle's girlie books, the stained glass
attic window where the wind sings of inner and outer things,
as Martin Buber said, what are they but things—”O secrecy
without a secret! O accumulation of information!” I get faith
and intuition and 5763 years of longing and despair, a passion
for hearsay, boogieing, and epistemology …

From Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum:

Internationally acclaimed artist Shahzia Sikander will serve as the ninth guest curator of the “Selects” exhibition series in the Nancy and Edwin Marks Gallery, devoted to showing the museum’s permanent collection. Sikander will mine and interpret the museum’s collection and produce an installation of selected work. This exhibition will include a new work created by Sikander, inspired by Cooper-Hewitt’s collection. Trained as a miniaturist at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan, Sikander merges the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms and styles. Her work explores the relationship between the present and the past and the richness of multicultural identities.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Bronson Alcott is known today—if he is known at all—as the father of Louisa May, the author of Little Women and more than a dozen other books written mainly for girls. But for a large part of the nineteenth century, he was the more famous of the pair. Born into a poor farming family in 1799, he rose to become a Transcendentalist philosopher, a groundbreaking educational theorist, and an influential friend of a number of eminent New Englanders, including Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. He was also a grandiose dreamer and schemer whose unbending pursuit of his (at times bizarre) ideals led him to squander his meager savings, refuse most work, and nearly abandon his long-suffering wife, Abba.

Fans of Little Women and its sequels will remember that the four spirited March sisters were romantically impoverished: Amy struggled to scrounge up the spare coins for a treat of pickled limes, and Meg and Jo had to make do with old dresses and lemonade-stained gloves when they attended balls in the fancier parts of Concord. The four Alcott girls were not so lucky. Their father was fired from a series of teaching jobs because of his rigid insistence that children should not learn by rote, and the Alcott family was often indigent, forced to rely on charity from Bronson’s famous friends to help them through.

More here.

Things can’t be that bad when you pull up to New York’s Armory Show – the granddaddy of six art fairs in the city this week – in a sparkling customised golf buggy, driven by a bloke wearing a spacesuit, while gorging on a free chocolate doughnut. This wacky races-style transportation service, laid on by veteran New York artist Kenny Scharf, gave a welcome touch of levity to the start of an art fair taking place in pretty dire circumstances: the DOW plunged below 7,000 points this week for the first time since 1997, New York galleries are downsizing or disappearing, major dealers Matthew Marks and Lehmann Maupin are among many skipping this year’s fair, and who knows how many New York-based collectors – the Armory Show’s lifeblood – got stung in Bernie Madoff’s pyramid scheme. Regardless, the Armory Show – now in its 11th year, and named after the 1913 art fair that brought Marcel Duchamp and modern art to New York – is actually expanding rather than contracting.

more from The Guardian here.