Alan H. Fleischmann in The New Republic:
There’s actually every indication that young people will flock to the polls. But the pundits still have it all wrong. If high school seniors, college kids, and twenty-somethings flood the electorate this season, it will have a lot to do with Barack Obama for sure. Of course, he’s inspiring them. But there is another man who is as important in their development as citizens and has significantly less faith in the power of idealism and hope: I’m speaking of Simon Cowell.
Cowell is that acerbic Englishman who serves on the panel that judges “American Idol,” the hit singing competition on Fox. For nearly the entirety of the Bush administration, “Idol” has dominated the Nielsens and occupied far too large a space in the collective mind of the nation. The reasons for “Idol’s” appeal are readily apparent: It is about young people performing under enormous pressure and being subjected to Cowell’s acidic wit. But the show also owes its success to its interactivity. That is, the public gets to dial 1-800 numbers and text message the votes that determine which contestants succeed (or fail). The success of “Idol” has spawned a raft of other reality shows where the public votes to determine the outcome.
There are important differences between “American Idol” and our constitutional American system. “Idol” is a direct democracy, for one. (And, like in Chicago of yore, “Idol” watchers can vote as often as they desire.) But, at the end of the day, they are both about voting. And as much as some might scoff at the deleterious effects of “Idol” on our culture, it has created a culture of voting among our young people.
More here.
From the New York Review of Books:
For an election in which so much is at stake, we asked some of our contributors for their views.
—The Editors
All here.
more from FiveThirtyEight here.
Epic Games is a privately owned company and does not disclose its earnings. But on a Monday morning in late April, while standing in Epic’s parking lot, at Crossroads Corporate Park, in Cary, North Carolina, awaiting the arrival of Cliff Bleszinski, the company’s thirty-three-year-old design director, I realized that my surroundings were their own sort of Nasdaq. Ten feet away was a red Hummer H3. Nearby was a Lotus Elise, and next to it a pumpkin-orange Porsche. Many of the cars had personalized plates: “PS3CODER” (a reference to Sony’s PlayStation3), “EPICBOY,” “GRSOFWAR.”
The last is shorthand for Gears of War, a shooter game, which Epic released in November, 2006, for play on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 console. Gears of War was quickly recognized as the first game to provide the sensually overwhelming experience for which the console, launched a year earlier, had been designed. Gears won virtually every available industry award, and was the 360’s best-selling game for nearly a year; it has now sold five million copies. On November 7th, a sequel, Gears of War 2, will be released; its development, long rumored, was not confirmed until this past February, when, at the Game Developers’ Conference, in San Francisco, Bleszinski made the announcement after bursting through an onstage partition wielding a replica of one of Gears of War’s signature weapons—an assault rifle mounted with a chainsaw bayonet.
more from our pal Tom Bissell in The New Yorker here.
In 1938, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss drove a mule train up a derelict telegraph line, which wound its way across the scrublands of Mato Grosso state in Brazil. He headed an ethnographic team conducting fieldwork among the semi-nomadic Nambikwara who roamed the plains through the dry season. Photographs from the journey look dated even for their era. Men in pith helmets mingling with virtually naked tribesmen, mules heaving crates of equipment through the wilderness, laden-down canoes and jungle campsites – it all has the feel of some grand nineteenth-century scientific expedition. Yet, after the Second World War, Lévi-Strauss would add a modern twist to anthropology with the development of a completely new way of thinking about ethnographic data.
more from the TLS here.
///
Poetry
Saadi Youssef
Who broke these mirrors
and tossed them
shard
by shard
among the branches?
And now…
shall we ask L’Akhdar to come and see?
Colors are all muddled up
and the image is entangled
with the thing
and the eyes burn.
L’Akhdar must gather these mirrors
on his palm
and match the pieces together
any way he likes
and preserve
the memory of the branch.
from Without an Alphabet, Without a Face;
(Graywolf Press, 2002) Translated from the
Arabic by Khaled Mattawa
L’Akhdar
///
George F. Will in the Washington Post:
One excellent result of this election cycle is that public financing of presidential campaigns now seems sillier than ever. The public has always disliked it: Voluntary and cost-free participation, using the check-off on the income tax form, peaked at 28.7 percent in 1980 and has sagged to 9.2 percent. The Post, which is melancholy about the system’s parlous condition, says there were three reasons for creating public financing: to free candidates from the demands of fundraising, to level the playing field and “to limit the amount of money pouring into presidential campaigns.” The first reason is decreasingly persuasive because fundraising is increasingly easy because of new technologies such as the Internet. The second reason is, the Supreme Court says, constitutionally impermissible. Government may not mandate equality of resources among political competitors who earn different levels of voluntary support. As for the third reason — “huge amounts” (McCain) of money “pouring into” (The Post) presidential politics — well:
The Center for Responsive Politics calculates that, by Election Day, $2.4 billion will have been spent on presidential campaigns in the two-year election cycle that began in January 2007, and an additional $2.9 billion will have been spent on 435 House and 35 Senate contests. This $5.3 billion is a billion less than Americans will spend this year on potato chips.
More here.
Andy Isaacson in Slate:
The day before, in Kisumu, I was talking about Obama to a boatman on Lake Victoria when a nearby car radio blared the following judgment: “God has already chosen Obama on Nov. 4! Who are you to say no?” Nowhere in Kenya—perhaps nowhere in the world outside of blue-state America—is there more optimism about an Obama victory as in Kisumu, a predominantly Luo city on Kenya ‘s western border with Uganda, which still bears the scars of last winter’s election violence. Indeed, the widely held fear that vote-rigging on Nov. 4 could snatch the election from Obama reflects the lingering sentiment among Luos here that Kenya’s tainted presidential election—in which Odinga officially lost to Mwai Kibaki—was stolen from them. I’ve been asked several times, “Do you think John McCain can steal the votes?”
Obama’s likeness appears on watch faces, key chains, posters, T-shirts, calendars, and women’s shoes. Hawkers offer CDs of Obama-inspired reggae and Luo songs in the open-air bus depot. Mockups of $1,000 bills with Obama’s portrait filling the oval are plastered on public minivans. (“I just asked the designer to pimp the van, and it came back like this,” the driver told me.) A generation of newborns named “Obama” are entering the world. A schoolteacher in a local village says her students sing Obama songs: “He is a genius/ He is a hero/ He comes all the way from Africa/ To go compete in the land of the whites/ He makes us proud/ For at least he’s made Africa known to the world.” The campaign 8,000 miles away has been closely observed. When I arrived in town, my tuk-tuk driver offered punditry of the third debate: “For the first 20 minutes, it was competitive and McCain was good, but then Obama was much smarter.”
More here. And here is a bonus video [thanks to commenter pirano]:
Kenge Kenge: Obama For Change
Airport security in America is a sham—“security theater” designed to make travelers feel better and catch stupid terrorists. Smart ones can get through security with fake boarding passes and all manner of prohibited items—as our correspondent did with ease.
Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic:
During one secondary inspection, at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, I was wearing under my shirt a spectacular, only-in-America device called a “Beerbelly,” a neoprene sling that holds a polyurethane bladder and drinking tube. The Beerbelly, designed originally to sneak alcohol—up to 80 ounces—into football games, can quite obviously be used to sneak up to 80 ounces of liquid through airport security. (The company that manufactures the Beerbelly also makes something called a “Winerack,” a bra that holds up to 25 ounces of booze and is recommended, according to the company’s Web site, for PTA meetings.) My Beerbelly, which fit comfortably over my beer belly, contained two cans’ worth of Bud Light at the time of the inspection. It went undetected. The eight-ounce bottle of water in my carry-on bag, however, was seized by the federal government.
More here.
Dan Bilefsky in the New York Times:
Life appears to be imitating art in a drama convulsing the Czech Republic: an accusation that Milan Kundera, one of Eastern Europe’s most celebrated writers, denounced a Western intelligence agent to Czechoslovakia’s Communist police when he was a 21-year-old student. The agent, Miroslav Dvoracek, served 14 years in jail, including hard labor in a uranium mine.
In Mr. Kundera’s first novel, “The Joke,” a mordant satire of Stalinist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, the protagonist, Ludvik Jahn, is expelled from the Communist Party and forced out of a university after being denounced by his friend Pavel. For the unlikely crime of possessing a sense of humor, Ludvik is sent to work in the mines.
Few here have failed to notice the parallel, which has added a fitting literary tint — along with the sort of denunciation and betrayal that haunt Mr. Kundera’s books — to an episode that has spurred a complex bout of national soul-searching. The accusation was published Monday by the Czech political weekly magazine Respekt and immediately denied by Mr. Kundera.
More here.
From The Guardian:
If you’d predicted that economics was going to be the big new thing in books five years ago you’d probably have been laughed out of the room. But thanks to the success of books like Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt’s Freakonomics, Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Tim Harford’s The Undercover Economist, a new genre has been spawned. And despite the collapse of western capitalism it’s still going strong, with football due the Freakonomics treatment in the new year.
But the question that’s being asked is why aren’t any of these books by women? Julia Cheiffetz, blogging at publishing website HarperStudio, dubs the genre “big think” books – making serious non-fiction subjects accessible and popular. “The point is, all of them promise access to a club whose sole activity is the exchange of ideas; all of them promise, however covertly, to make us feel smarter. And all of them are written by men,” she writes, also singling out The World is Flat by Thomas L Friedman, The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki and Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. “It is hard to know whether women are better at telling stories than propagating ideas (I’m thinking of Susan Orlean, Mary Roach, Karen Abbott), or whether the intellectual audacity required to sell our hypotheses about the world simply isn’t in our genetic makeup.”
Over at Galley Cat, they’re not quite convinced, and shoehorn Susan Faludi and Naomi Klein into the “explain-it-all” category. “But we did find Cheiffetz’s distinction between ‘storytellers’ and ‘big thinkers’, and the suggestion that these two types of writing might play out along gender lines at least as far as what sells, intriguing,” they add.
More here.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
I was hanging out with Morgan last night, and we were lamenting the absence of conservative giants like Joseph Schumpeter or Michael Oakeshott on the intellectual scene, whatever the problems of conservatism as a philosophical orientation. Now the Michael Oakeshott Association has made a 1948 BBC radio broadcast on the philosophy of history available on the web.
In 1948 Michael Oakeshott made a radio broadcast about the philosophy of history on the BBC’s University Program. Leslie Marsh obtained permission from the BBC to play the broadcast at the MO Association’s inaugural conference in 2001 and to make it available on our web site.
Hence, available once again for you to download are the transcript of the broadcast and the following audio files.
Their case:
Sen. Obama’s pledged stance on science resonates with us. He has vowed to restore integrity to the role of science advisor by reestablishing the senior status of the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, and more broadly, by surrounding himself with individuals with exemplary scientific credentials; his selection of Dr. Harold Varmus as the campaign’s science advisor was a very promising and laudable step in that direction. Sen. Obama understands that basic research is fundamental to how scientific advances are made. He sees the importance of expanding funding for “high-risk, high-return” work, strengthening tax policy to spur R&D, and encouraging the careers of young scientists who pursue innovative lines of thinking. He has offered a comprehensive plan to reinvigorate math and science education, and he recognizes the vital importance of re-architecting nationwide science literacy for these times. His positions on topics ranging from agriculture, alternative energy, and medical research to internet policy, patent law, and space are more robust and ultimately more in line with scientific consensus than those of Sen. McCain. These are important policy positions, and they reflect Sen. Obama’s appreciation of the need to invest in science and science education as a precondition for growth and prosperity in the 21st century. We recognize, however, that these are not the issues that most voters will be thinking about when they cast their ballot.
Far more important is this: Science is a way of governing, not just something to be governed. Science offers a methodology and philosophy rooted in evidence, kept in check by persistent inquiry, and bounded by the constraints of a self-critical and rigorous method. Science is a lens through which we can and should visualize and solve complex problems, organize government and multilateral bodies, establish international alliances, inspire national pride, restore positive feelings about America around the globe, embolden democracy, and ultimately, lead the world. More than anything, what this lens offers the next administration is a limitless capacity to handle all that comes its way, no matter how complex or unanticipated.
Sen. Obama’s embrace of transparency and evidence-based decision-making, his intelligence and curiosity echo this new way of looking at the world.
For the technically minded, in the October 2008 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, there’s an interesting symposium on forecasting the election, and at you can find an associated video of a panel with many of the scholars. From Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Charles Tien ‘s piece:
Our Jobs Model forecasts that the Republicans, now incumbent in the White House, will experience a shattering defeat, indeed the greatest incumbent popular vote loss on record from 1948, garnering just 43.4% of the two-par ty popular vote. How accurate is this forecast? Consider simple statistical error. The standard error of estimate is 1.4; but adding even three times that amount to the point forecast would still predict a clear Republican loss ~at 47.7%!. Put another way, if Obama receives less than 50% of the popular vote, the Jobs Model would have registered an error of over 6.6 points. That would be the largest out-of-sample error in the data-set. It implies that there is less than a 1 in 14 chance that the model is wrong in forecasting an Obama victory.
Nevertheless, the Jobs Model is not a “shoo-in” for Obama, once ballot box racism is taken into account. By various estimates, Obama will lose a chunk of votes because he is Black, rather than White. This seems unavoidable. In the foregoing, we evaluated four possible correction values: 0.77, 0.87, 0.90, and 0.93. Which is closer to the truth? In order to avoid appearing arbitrary, we simply take the median of these four values ~0.885! as the proportion of voters who will not take race itself into account. By that reckoning, Obama would win in a close contest ~i.e., a 0.885 correction to the Jobs Model predicts an Obama two-party popular vote forecast of 50.1%!. 3 But if the correction number is lower, by even a small amount, he could well lose. In any event, we expect the competition to be much closer than what is implied by our original, uncorrected Jobs Model.
Ezra Klein over at his blog has a mainstream defense of Khalidi, who’s been offensively maligned in this election:
[Seth Colter Walls] A 1998 tax filing for the McCain-led group shows a $448,873 grant to Khalidi’s Center for Palestine Research and Studies for work in the West Bank. (See grant number 5180, “West Bank: CPRS” on page 14 of this PDF.)
The relationship extends back as far as 1993, when John McCain joined IRI as chairman in January. Foreign Affairs noted in September of that year that IRI had helped fund several extensive studies in Palestine run by Khalidi’s group, including over 30 public opinion polls and a study of “sociopolitical attitudes.”
Of course, there’s seemingly nothing objectionable with McCain’s organization helping a Palestinian group conduct research in the West Bank or Gaza. But it does suggest that McCain could have some of his own explaining to do as he tries to make hay out of Khalidi’s ties to Obama.
Oops. This, of course, just goes to show how absurd it is to suggest that Khalidi is some sort of radical polemicist. The guy is such a credentialed and respected scholar that even right-leaning organizations have funded his work, simply because it’s good work. They may not agree with his personal conclusions, but Khalidi’s scholarship gets taken seriously.
As his work should.
The novelist explains his rage at what the Bush presidency has done to the world – and the world we should be living in.
Alison Flood in The Guardian:
If there is something getting Auster’s goat, it’s American politics. It was his disgust at the outcome of the 2000 US elections that sparked the story-within-a-story at the heart of Man in the Dark, about a counterfactual US where civil war reigns and New York leads a movement to form the Independent States of America.
“It’s a war of bullets and bombs, whereas the divisions in the US now are similar to a civil war, but we’re fighting it with words and ideas,” he says.
He can pinpoint the idea for his latest story to his “frustration and disgust after the 2000 elections … Gore won, Gore was elected president, and it was taken away from him by political and legal manoeuvering, and ever since then I’ve had this eerie feeling of being in some parallel world, some world we didn’t ask for but we nevertheless got. In the other world Al Gore is finishing his second term now, we never invaded Iraq, maybe 9/11 never happened, because they were getting close to figuring it out, the Clinton people, and then the Bush people ignored all the warnings, so I think that’s the origin of it.”
More here.
Sean Carroll over at CV:
Time is running out! October is careening its way toward Halloween, at which point the month devoted to the Donors Choose Blogger Challenge will be over. As of this typing, we’ve received $6,110 worth of donations, which, I must admit, is extremely awesome. Even better, out of 23 proposals we chose for support, 13 have been fully funded! Still, it falls a bit short of our $10,000 goal…
And what is more galling, despite this groundswell of support, Uncertain Principles has pulled ahead! And he’s only one blogger (plus a dog). Are you going to stand for that?
It’s a great program, and you feel great after you donate. It’s the swank $200 donations that get all the glory (and we’re very grateful for them, don’t get me wrong), but — following the lead of the Obama campaign — we’re running a people-powered donation drive here. For the starving students out there, consider throwing in $10. Contributions that size would really add up if everyone chipped in. A small price to make the world a better place.
So consider helping out.
From my observation perch in Stanford, California, an English European turned 24/7-cablenews-Webcast junkie, I notice that many Americans still suffer from a touching delusion that this is their election. How curious. Don’t they understand? This is our election. The world’s election. Our future depends on it, and we live it as intensely as Americans do. All we lack is the vote.
The world may not have a vote, but it has a candidate. A BBC World Service poll, conducted across twenty-two countries this summer, found Barack Obama was preferred to John McCain by a margin of four to one. Nearly half those asked said an Obama victory would “fundamentally change” their perception of the United States. And it certainly needs changing. Over the two terms of President George W. Bush, the Pew Global Attitudes Project, a series of worldwide public opinion surveys, has documented what anyone who travels around the world knows: a substantial fall in the standing, credibility, attractiveness, and therefore power of the United States.
more from NYRB commentators on the election here.
