Paul Newman was blessed with abnormally good looks and abnormally good scripts, but also something more: that magical quiddity that makes you celebrate someone for his strokes of good fortune. On the evidence of dozens of performances, he possessed no inclination to self-celebration, and so inspired no inclination to resentment. My two favorite stars, after the untouchable Cary Grant, are Newman and Nicholson. But if it’s Jack’s world and we just live in it, Newman always seemed happy to live in ours. He was inclined to “ordinary happiness,” as a professor of mine once beautifully put it, or the prerogative of the celebrity to freely choose the parameters of normal human satisfaction. His channel to godliness paved by good looks, charisma, and infallible instinct in front of a camera, he nonetheless married long, loved well, and did good works. (If there is more to this story—aside from racing cars—then I don’t want to know.) Who could begrudge him that twinkle? It was always on our behalf, never his.
We rarely editorialize here, but I had to note that Sarah Palin’s performance in this interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, an interview chock full-o-surreal softballs, perhaps inspires even less confidence than her performance during the Couric interview. Over at Townhall:
HH: Governor, your candidacy has ignited extreme hostility, even some hatred on the left and in some parts of the media. Are you surprised? And what do you attribute this reaction to?
SP: Oh, I think they’re just not used to someone coming in from the outside saying you know what? It’s time that normal Joe six-pack American is finally represented in the position of vice presidency, and I think that that’s kind of taken some people off guard, and they’re out of sorts, and they’re ticked off about it, but it’s motivation for John McCain and I to work that much harder to make sure that our ticket is victorious, and we put government back on the side of the people of Joe six-pack like me, and we start doing those things that are expected of our government, and we get rid of corruption, and we commit to the reform that is not only desired, but is deserved by Americans.
HH: Now Governor, the Gibson and the Couric interview struck many as sort of pop quizzes designed to embarrass you as opposed to interviews. Do you share that opinion?
SP: Well, I have a degree in journalism also, so it surprises me that so much has changed since I received my education in journalistic ethics all those years ago. But I’m not going to pick a fight with those who buy ink by the barrelful. I’m going to take those shots and those pop quizzes and just say that’s okay, those are good testing grounds. And they can continue on in that mode. That’s good. That makes somebody work even harder. It makes somebody be even clearer and more articulate in their positions. So really I don’t fight it. I invite it.
HH: Have you followed the attacks on you, say, via Drudge or the blogs? Some of them are just made up and out of left field, others are just mocking. Do you follow those?
SP: No, I sure don’t, and thank God I don’t have time to follow those. You know, I think that those shots, too, though, no matter what we’re taking and receiving, it’s nothing compared to what real shots are against Americans in this world.
Via DeLong, listen to the discussion over at On Your Call:
[H]ow is the current crisis changing the way you understand the basic structure of our economy? On the next Your Call, we’ll have a conversation about economic crisis in the US and its long-term effect on capitalist economies. The current financial meltdown has sparked a debate on whether capitalism is the ideal methodology for wealth creation. What do you think? Is this the end of global capitalism, as we know it?
Andrew Mellon, the American billionaire and Treasury Secretary, was not unduly disturbed by the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. “It will purge the rottenness out of the system,” he explained to President Hoover a few weeks later. “High costs of living will come down. People will work harder, live a moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” Among those less competent people, it transpired, was Mellon. In February 1932, by which time the financial turmoil had evolved into the worst global depression of the century, he was relieved of his duties, and the new Roosevelt administration began an intensive investigation into his income tax returns. When he died in 1937 the investigation was still going on; so too, unfortunately, was the Depression.
At a time when commentators are divided between gloom at the meltdown of the markets and glee at the promise of a return to austerity, the story of Andrew Mellon seems disturbingly familiar. The Wall Street Crash has become the paradigmatic case of boom turning into bust, and few people have not heard the stories of ticker-machines running out of control, brokers hurling themselves from high windows, savings disappearing up in smoke, and the cocktail parties of the Roaring Twenties suddenly turning into the dole queues of the Hungry Thirties. Given the events of the past few weeks, Selwyn Parker’s sprightly new history could hardly be better timed.
If nothing else, Parker’s account of the Crash of 1929 bears out Mark Twain’s famous remark that if history does not repeat itself, it certainly rhymes.
Only humans and a handful of other primates will attempt to make peace between warring third parties. But now there is a new diplomat on the block: the cleaner wrasse. Cleaner wrasse (Labroides dimidiatus) feed on the parasites that attach themselves to the outsides of other fish, and even throw in a calming massage with their pectoral fins. In return for the services, client fish don’t attack their cleaners and return regularly to their territories to supply them with more food.
The cleaner-fish scenario is a textbook example of mutualism, in which each species benefits, but ecologist Karen Cheney at the University of Queensland, Australia, suspected that there was more to it. Cheney had seen little evidence of aggression between reef-fish clients at cleaning stations and few instances of predation. Fish also often stayed inside cleaner territories long after the cleaning was over, suggesting that the territories could be functioning as a safe haven.
5. The Democrats say they are not going to give the administration a blank check, but there’s a lot of pressure to do something. What sort of conditions should be attached to a bailout?
The Democrats have a strong hand. The voters weren’t born yesterday; they understand that it’s a Republican administration in power. Some of the problems are difficult to solve. Executive compensation is clearly a legitimate concern; it’s incredible that Lehman Brothers set aside a $2.5 billion bonus pool as it was going into bankruptcy. On the other hand, what do you do about it? If you tell these people they have to work for $400,000 a year–that’s a lot of money to you and me, but a lot of them are going to say, “See you on the ski slopes, pal.” But what Congress can do is make sure the companies have to turn over any information that the Treasury wants from the companies, including the computer code. If the government is going to buy assets of dubious value, it needs to know that the companies aren’t selling it the worst of the worst, just as you have the right to inspect a used car before buying it.
6. How long is it going to take to fix the situation? And what about the bigger financial crisis?
There’s nothing that can put this right in six months. No bailout can achieve that, but the difference between three years and ten years is important. The Treasury is going to end up with a large portfolio of properties. The government needs to set up the equivalent of draft boards in communities to make a review of properties and see how to keep people in their homes: offering them sustainable payments or converting mortgages into rental contracts, or simply demolishing homes that have been wrecked or that have fallen into irreparable disrepair.
Many are concerned with the fiscal implications of this bill, so let me turn to that question. Despite the common use of language, the capital cost of this bill does not involve “taxpayer dollars.” It authorizes a financial transaction, exchanging good debt (U.S. Treasury bills and bonds) for bad debt (the “troubled assets”). Many of those troubled assets will continue to earn income for some time, perhaps a long time. The U.S. Treasury commits itself to paying the interest on the debts it issues. The net fiscal cost — which is also the net fiscal stimulus — of this bill is the difference between those two revenue streams. Given the very low rate of interest presently prevailing on Treasury bills, this is likely to be somewhere between $20 billion per year and zero from the beginning, even if the Treasury were to issue all $700 billion in new debt at once. It is a mistake, in short, to count the capital cost as a “cost to the taxpayer.” This is not the war in Iraq. In the longer run, of course the Treasury will incur capital losses on the assets it acquires. The entire purpose of the bill is to overpay for bad assets, so as to give financial institutions a chance to recapitalize themselves.
Disturbing a sleeping box of old cassettes the other day, my hand brushed an album by Chab Hasni, and memories rushed in, fluent as music, of the Algerians I’d known in Paris in the early 1990s – particularly my friends Qader and Kamel.
In Algeria these two had been hittistes. That’s a real Algerian word: a French ending tacked onto the Arabic hayit, meaning wall. The hittistes were the youths who spent their time leaning against walls, bored, angry and stoned. They had no jobs and no housing – those who were employed often slept in their workplaces. Otherwise, they spent their time dodging the fearsome police force.
Life as clandestin illegal immigrants in France was not much easier. There too they had to negotiate checkpoints. I remember Kamel spending a fortnight in prison for being stopped “without papers”. When at liberty, they peddled hashish in Pigalle and sold the cassettes they stole from shops. (Still, there was honour among thieves. Qader once knocked down a fellow Algerian for stealing from an old man on the metro. “So what if he’s French?” he growled. “He could be your grandfather!”)
Let me explain now in more detail why we are now back to the risk of a total systemic financial meltdown…
It is no surprise as financial institutions in the US and around advanced economies are going bust: in the US the latest victims were WaMu (the largest US S&L) and today Wachovia (the sixth largest US bank); in the UK after Northern Rock and the acquisition of HBOS by Lloyds TSB you now have the bust and rescue of B&B; in Belgium you had Fortis going bust and being rescued over the weekend; in German HRE, a major financial institution is also near bust and in need of a government rescue. So this is not just a US financial crisis; it is a global financial crisis hitting institutions in the US, UK, Eurozone and other advanced economies (Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, Canada etc.).
And the strains in financial markets – especially short term interbank markets – are becoming more severe in spite of the Fed and other central banks having literally injected about $300 billion of liquidity in the financial system last week alone including massive liquidity lending to Morgan and Goldman. In a solvency crisis and credit crisis that goes well beyond illiquidity no one is lending to counterparties as no one trusts any counterparty (even the safest ones) and everyone is hoarding the liquidity that is injected by central banks. And since this liquidity goes only to banks and major broker dealers the rest of the shadow banking system has not access to this liquidity as the credit transmission mechanisms is blocked.
NEARLY 3,000 YEARS after the death of the Greek poet Homer, his epic tales of the war for Troy and its aftermath remain deeply woven into the fabric of our culture. These stories of pride and rage, massacre and homecoming have been translated and republished over millennia. Even people who have never read a word of “The Iliad” or “The Odyssey” know the phrases they have bequeathed to us – the Trojan horse, the Achilles heel, the face that launched a thousand ships.
Today we still turn to Homer’s epics not only as sources of ancient wisdom and wrenchingly powerful poetry, but also as genuinely popular entertainments. Recent translations of “The Iliad” and “Odyssey” have shared the best-seller lists with Grisham and King. “The Odyssey” has inspired works from James Joyce’s “Ulysses” to a George Clooney movie, and an adaptation of “The Iliad” recently earned more than $100 million in the form of Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” – a summer blockbuster starring Brad Pitt as an improbable Achilles.
The ancient Greeks, however, believed that Homer’s epics were something more than fiction: They thought the poems chronicled a real war, and reflected the authentic struggles of their ancestors.
Neuroscientists have shown that the way our eyes constantly make tiny movements is responsible for the way concentric circles in Isia Leviant’s painting ‘Enigma’ (see image, right) seem to flow before onlookers’ eyes.
Susana Martinez-Conde and her team from the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, tested whether the effect was down to tiny, involuntary jerks of the eyes, known as microsaccades. Their purpose is not fully understood, but the rate of these movements is known to vary naturally.
In the team’s experiment, while three subjects viewed Enigma, cameras recorded their eye movements 500 times every second. The subjects were asked to press a button when the speed of the optical “trickle” of the illusion appeared to slow down or stop, and release it when the trickle seemed faster.
Accounting for the reaction time required to press the button, the results showed that the illusion became more pronounced when microsaccades were happening at a faster rate. When the rate slowed to a stop, the illusion vanished.
Those results go against earlier findings that suggested eye movements were not responsible for the effect.
There are some people who might just benefit from the current turmoil in the financial markets. One probably won’t surprise: lawyers. The other might: sex workers.
In the late 1990s, New York and other large American cities witnessed the rise of a so-called indoor sex-work trade. Women either left the streets for strip clubs and escort services, or they started their own businesses by advertising on the Internet or cruising hotels and corporate centers to find clients. You may recall “Kristen” (aka Ashley Dupré), the young woman whose tryst with Eliot Spitzer helped bring down the New York governor. “Kristens” might earn $1,000 per evening, which places them toward the higher end of the indoor sex market.
I came across these women when I began studying New York’s sex industry at the end of the 1990s. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, in an effort to clean up Manhattan’s neighborhoods, forced sex off the streets of Times Square and other Midtown neighborhoods. In the process, his administration created a new economic sector. I’ve been following the lives of more than 300 sex workers—in New York and Chicago, in high and low ends of the income spectrum since 1999.
Romantic science? Did not William Blake fulminate against ‘Bacon and Newton sheathed in dismal steel, their terrors hanging like iron scourges over Albion’? Didn’t John Keats say that Newtonian optics had unwoven the magic of the rainbow? Isn’t the great Romantic-Gothic novel, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, an indictment of science’s hubristic capacity to destroy us all, a prophecy of the time we are now nearing, when a human clone fashioned in the laboratory will turn against its creator?
It is this story of the opposition between the Romantic poets and the science of their time that Richard Holmes sets out to undo. No one could be better qualified for the task than the biographer of the two Romantics who showed most interest in science, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Building on a generation of revisionist scholarship that has been barely visible beyond the groves of academe, Holmes triumphantly shows that the Romantic age was one of symbiosis rather than opposition, in which scientists such as Sir Humphry Davy were also poets and poets such as Coleridge had a shaping influence on scientists – we discover indeed that it was Coleridge who was responsible for the early 19th-century invention of the term ‘scientist’ as an alternative to the older nomenclature ‘natural philosopher’.
Whether you are trying to make sense of the latest health news or you have a diagnosis of a serious illness, the basic rules of health research are the same. From interviews with doctors and patients, here are the most important steps to take in a search for medical answers.
Determine your information personality.
Information gives some people a sense of control. For others, it’s overwhelming. An acquaintance of this reporter, a New York father coping with his infant son’s heart problem, knew he would be paralyzed with indecision if his research led to too many choices. So he focused on finding the area’s best pediatric cardiologist and left the decisions to the experts. Others, like Amy Haberland, 50, a breast cancer patient in Arlington, Mass., pore through medical journals, looking not just for answers but also for better questions to ask their doctors. “Knowledge is power,” Ms. Haberland said. “I think knowing the reality of the risks of my cancer makes me more comfortable undergoing my treatment.”
The goal is to find an M.D., not become one.
Often patients begin a medical search hoping to discover a breakthrough medical study or a cure buried on the Internet. But even the best medical searches don’t always give you the answers. Instead, they lead you to doctors who can provide you with even more information.
Couric asked her a smart question about the proposed $700 billion bailout of the American financial sector. It was designed to see if Palin understood that the problem in this crisis is that credit and liquidity in the financial system has dried up, and that that’s why, in the estimation of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, the government needs to step in to buy up Wall Street’s most toxic liabilities. Here’s the entire exchange:
COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries; allow them to spend more and put more money into the economy instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?
PALIN: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, were ill about this position that we have been put in where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health-care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy, helping the–it’s got to be all about job creation, too, shoring up our economy and putting it back on the right track. So health-care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions and tax relief for Americans. And trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, scary thing. But one in five jobs being created in the trade sector today, we’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.
This is nonsense–a vapid emptying out of every catchphrase about economics that came into her head. Some commentators, like CNN’s Campbell Brown, have argued that it’s sexist to keep Sarah Palin under wraps, as if she were a delicate flower who might wilt under the bright lights of the modern media. But the more Palin talks, the more we see that it may not be sexism but common sense that’s causing the McCain campaign to treat her like a time bomb.
More here. [Thanks to Tasnim Raza.] I thought the Tina Fey parody of Sarah Palin on Saturday Night Live was unbelievably brilliantly performed and written. What I didn’t realize was that the writers didn’t really do much, and most of the parody was just actual transcripts of Palin’s interview with Katie Couric! It is truly astounding. Check out the SNL skit if you haven’t seen it yet:
And here’s part of the real interview with Couric:
At a meeting in Oslo in August, Incentives for Global Health, a nonprofit organization directed by Aidan Hollis, professor of economics at the University of Calgary, and Thomas Pogge, professor of philosophy and international affairs at Yale, launched a radical new proposal to change the incentives under which corporations are rewarded for developing new medicines. They suggest that governments contribute to a Health Impact Fund that would pay pharmaceutical companies in proportion to the extent to which their products reduce the global burden of disease.
The fund would not replace existing patent laws, but would offer an alternative to them. Pharmaceutical companies could continue to patent and sell their products as they do now. Alternatively, they could register a new drug with the Heath Impact Fund, which would set a low price based on the drug’s manufacturing cost.
Instead of profiting from sales at high prices, the corporation would become eligible for a share of all payments made by the fund over the next ten years. The size of the share would be calculated by assessing the contribution the drug has made to reducing death and disability.
The beauty of the scheme is that it gives economic support to the idea that all human lives are of equal value. For products that drug companies register with the Health Impact Fund, corporations would get the same reward for saving the lives of Africans living in extreme poverty as they would get for saving the lives of wealthy citizens of affluent nations.
The most potentially lucrative targets would become the diseases that kill the most people, because that is where a breakthrough drug would have the biggest impact on global health.
At issue here is the oldest unresolved dilemma in economics: are market economies “naturally” stable or do they need to be stabilized by policy? Keynes emphasized the flimsiness of the expectations on which economic activity in decentralized markets is based. The future is inherently uncertain, and therefore investor psychology is fickle.
“The practice of calmness, of immobility, of certainty and security, suddenly breaks down,” Keynes wrote. “New fears and hopes will, without warning, take charge of human conduct.” This is a classic description of the “herd behavior” that George Soros has identified as financial markets’ dominant feature. It is the government’s job to stabilize expectations.
The neo-classical revolution believed that markets were much more cyclically stable than Keynes believed, that the risks in all market transactions can be known in advance, and that prices will therefore always reflect objective probabilities.
Such market optimism led to de-regulation of financial markets in the 1980’s and 1990’s, and the subsequent explosion of financial innovation which made it “safe” to borrow larger and larger sums of money on the back of predictably rising assets. The just-collapsed credit bubble, fueled by so-called special investment vehicles, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, and phony triple-A ratings, was built on the illusions of mathematical modeling.
Liberal cycles, the historian Arthur Schlesinger thought, succumb to the corruption of power, conservative cycles to the corruption of money. Both have their characteristic benefits and costs.
But if we look at the historical record, the liberal regime of the 1950’s and 1960’s was more successful than the conservative regime that followed. Outside China and India, whose economic potential was unleashed by market economics, economic growth was faster and much more stable in the Keynesian golden age than in the age of Friedman; its fruits were more equitably distributed; social cohesion and moral habits better maintained. These are serious benefits to weigh against some business sluggishness.
Groeling’s work is one of the few studies to quantify partisan bias in the media, a subject notoriously difficult for social scientists to research and discuss. These scientists work with theories such as the socalled hostile media effect to predict that ardent supporters of a cause will view media as slanted for the other side, and they have conducted hundreds of studies that have revealed imbalances in the ways journalists frame news on topics ranging from AIDS to the war in Iraq. But there is not a cohesive literature on media bias. Maxwell McCombs of the University of Texas at Austin, who pioneered agenda-setting theory, one of the leading paradigms on news media, says that a researcher would need a few years to make sense of existing data and develop an approach to study media bias. Like many scholars, McCombs sees “bias” as a loaded term, preferring to speak of journalists’ “predilections.”
“Scholars hate the word ‘bias’ because they feel like they’re entering the ideological fray,” says S. Robert Lichter, head of the Center for Media and Public Affairs (CMPA) at George Mason University, who prefers the term “tone.” Despite his efforts, Lichter himself got sucked into that fray. His content analysis of the transcripts of TV news broadcasts at the statement level is a respected and widely adopted methodology. This past summer, just as the view that journalists were going softer on Barack Obama than on John McCain was becoming widely accepted, CMPA issued a report showing that 72 percent of the statements in TV news reports about Obama in late spring and early summer were negative, whereas 57 percent of the statements about McCain were negative. When Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly attacked Lichter’s method during a radio interview, saying it would embolden liberal bias, Lichter responded, “You can take all my studies or none of my studies”—an allusion to past uses of his work to support conservative views.
At their best, the late paintings can give a pure optical hit. There is a black on black work where the graduations of tone are so subtle that the eye, adjusting to the darkness, sees it deepen and fade inexplicably. But that painting, No 1, is scaled to the proportions of the human body, like the best of the earlier work. The bigger Rothko gets – and some of the murals are as big as billboards and pitched as high on the wall – the more diluted their strength.
People often speak of the turbulent emotion of the late works, associating their darkness with Rothko’s future suicide. But how can they possibly tell? Whatever emotion the paintings may have absorbed from his anguished inner life is subsumed in their gloomy permutations, one after another, narrow to wide, darker to lighter, vivid to blunt, just going through the weary motions.
Strength sapped, inspiration drained: that is the feeling that comes off the walls. Even in the paint itself, the cracks are beginning to show. Rothko drives on and on, prolific to the end, but compared to the riches of the previous decade, when the paintings could still sing, the interpenetration of colours remained mysterious, the stained and glazed and scumbled surfaces could still entrance the eye, these works are dispiritingly ordinary.
