In the Wall St. Journal (via delong):

Mr. Rajan, a professor at the University of Chicago's Booth Graduate School of Business, chose that moment to deliver a paper called “Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier?”

His answer: Yes.

He says he had planned to write about how financial developments during Mr. Greenspan's 18-year tenure made the world safer. But the more he looked, the less he believed that. In the end, with Mr. Greenspan watching from the audience, he argued that disaster might loom.

Incentives were horribly skewed in the financial sector, with workers reaping rich rewards for making money, but being only lightly penalized for losses, Mr. Rajan argued. That encouraged financial firms to invest in complex products with potentially big payoffs, which could on occasion fail spectacularly.

He pointed to “credit-default swaps,” which act as insurance against bond defaults. He said insurers and others were generating big returns selling these swaps with the appearance of taking on little risk, even though the pain could be immense if defaults actually occurred.

Mr. Rajan also argued that because banks were holding a portion of the credit securities they created on their books, if those securities ran into trouble, the banking system itself would be at risk. Banks would lose confidence in one another, he said: “The interbank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full-blown financial crisis.”

Two years later, that's essentially what happened.

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance:

The Boltzmann Brain paradox is an argument against the idea that the universe around us, with its incredibly low-entropy early conditions and consequential arrow of time, is simply a statistical fluctuation within some eternal system that spends most of its time in thermal equilibrium. You can get a universe like ours that way, but you’re overwhelmingly more likely to get just a single galaxy, or a single planet, or even just a single brain — so the statistical-fluctuation idea seems to be ruled out by experiment. (With potentially profound consequences.)

The first invocation of an argument along these lines, as far as I know, came from Sir Arthur Eddington in 1931. But it’s a fairly straightforward argument, once you grant the assumptions (although there remain critics). So I’m sure that any number of people have thought along similar lines, without making a big deal about it.

One of those people, I just noticed, was Richard Feynman. At the end of his chapter on entropy in the Feynman Lectures on Physics, he ponders how to get an arrow of time in a universe governed by time-symmetric underlying laws.

So far as we know, all the fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s equations, are reversible. Then were does irreversibility come from? It comes from order going to disorder, but we do not understand this until we know the origin of the order. Why is it that the situations we find ourselves in every day are always out of equilibrium?

Feynman, following the same logic as Boltzmann, contemplates the possibility that we’re all just a statistical fluctuation.

Juan Cole in Informed Comment:

Samuel Huntington died on Christmas Eve. Lee Siegel in the NYT:

It was not always so. In the classical age, when wars lasted for many years, even decades, and technology evolved at a snail’s pace, historians like Thucydides and Polybius took a longer view. To them, no single historical event mattered more than any other. All unfolded within endlessly recurring cycles dominated by the deep currents of human nature. This view might seem archaic — yet its lessons remain relevant. Bernard Madoff is accused of bilking an estimated $50 billion from investors by executing the same scheme Charles Ponzi used in 1921. Wall Street’s financial “instruments” have undergone a revolution in the last nine decades, but people are driven by the same appetites — envy, greed, fear.

It was in the modern era, with its belief in human progress, that thinkers began to interpret the world in a different way — not as a record of human folly but rather as an enactment of changing or evolving historical forces.

From The New York Times:

Most writers take years to become themselves, to transform their preoccupations and inherited mannerisms into a personal style. For Franz Kafka, who was an exception to so many rules of life and literature, it took a single night. On Sunday, Sept. 22, 1912, the day after Yom Kippur, the 29-year-old Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote “The Judgment,” his first masterpiece, in one all-night session. “Only in this way can writing be done,” he exulted, “only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.”

Everyone who reads Kafka reads “The Judgment” and the companion story he wrote less than two months later, “The Metamorphosis.” In those stories, we already find the qualities the world would come to know as “Kafkaesque”: the nonchalant intrusion of the bizarre and horrible into everyday life, the subjection of ordinary people to an inscrutable fate. But readers have never been quite as sure what to make of the third major work Kafka began writing in the fall of 1912 ­— the novel he referred to as “Der Verschollene,” “The Missing Person,” which was published in 1927, three years after his death, by his friend and executor Max Brod, under the title “Amerika.” The translator Michael Hofmann, whose English version of the book appeared in 1996, correctly called it “the least read, the least written about and the least ‘Kafka’ ” of his three novels. Now Schocken Books, which has been the main publisher of Kafka’s works since the 1930s, hopes to reintroduce his first novel to the world with a new translation, by Mark Harman. “If approached afresh,” Harman promises in his introduction, “this book could bear out the early claim by . . . Brod that ‘precisely this novel . . . will reveal a new way of understanding Kafka.’ ”

More here.

14. Use the active voice.

Notice how aloof the passive voice is.

Your balls are to be slurped the most by cum-starved nymphos!!!!!

Hardly persuasive. The five exclamation points feel tacked on, an attempt by an inexperienced writer to breathe life into a desiccated construction. The active voice, however, allows you to write with verve and straightforwardness.

Cum-starved nymphos will slurp your balls the most!!!!!

16. Use definite, specific, concrete language.

Generalities enervate your writing; strong details invigorate it.

In short order, you'll notice enhanced length and girth.

What is meant by “short order”? A week? A month? The imprecision is suspicious. Further, avoid bankrupt modifiers such as enhanced. Rewrite with exactness.

more from McSweeney's here.

In The Know: Do You Remember Life Before The Segway?

The word “domesticity” gives me the vapors. Just the sight of a ball of yarn and knitting needles makes me have to lie down and fan myself for a while. A deeply neurotic part of my brain appears to equate learning how to sew a button with giving up my career, marrying a dentist, and moving to the suburbs to tend to little Basil and sweet Paprika. I am not afraid of spiders — I am afraid of needle and thread. It is a fear of turning into the type of woman that Christina Stead’s fictional Letty Fox described as “cave wives”: dull, stay-at-home types whose only topics of conversation are their new knitting projects, their children, or the interesting things their husbands said. I know that these women are mostly fictional stereotypes created by my own subconscious. Yet the fear still exists, and it is powerful.

more from The Smart Set here.

///
Autumn Unreadiness
Jim Crenner

Fifty swallows flocked along the wires
twitter frantically about the impending
journey south. On the lawn below,

a scattering of robins, glassy-eyed
from the summer's regimen of sex
and parenting, stagger about uncertainly,

heads cocked as if to keep one eye
on the sky and the other ear to the ground,
for that extra earthworm that could mean

the difference between making it across
the Rio Grande or not. Woolly-bear
caterpillars hump along doggedly,

wasps burrow into the earth, squirrels
hustle from larder to larder to larder—
everything in nature gripped by the urge

to make ready for the massive seasonal
die-off drawing near. Everything, that is,
but me. If ever found, the fieldnotes

of my Observer from Deneb will read
somewhat as follows: “The creature, now
concluding his sixty-ninth orbit of the star

he calls the Sun, evinces no awareness
that the coming winter prefigures his own
end. Today, as usual, he sits and stares

at either nothing, or the sheer passing
of this blue (quite lovely, I must say)
September afternoon on earth. He shows
…..
no inclination to put his life in order, as if
he has no clue that he will soon cease to be.
Or maybe knows it only too well.”

//

William Langewiesche in Vanity Fair:

There were so many opportunities for the accident not to happen—the collision between a Legacy 600 private jet and a Boeing 737 carrying 154 people. But on September 29, 2006, high above the Amazon, a long, thin thread of acts and omissions brought the two airplanes together. From the vantage point of the pilots, the Brazilian air-traffic controllers, and the Caiapó Indians, whose rain forest became a charnel house, the author reconstructs a fatal intersection between high-performance technology and human fallibility.

More here.

Pamela Constable in The Washington Post:

For the past week, caravans of cars have raced triumphantly around the Afghan capital, trailing huge green and red banners. Overpasses are draped with black cloth, and loudspeakers blare hypnotic religious chants punctuated with the slow rhythm of clanking chains.

This is Muharram, the 10-day period of ritual mourning — including emotional bouts of chest-beating and self-flagellation — observed by Shiites throughout the world in remembrance of Imam Hussein and other Shiite martyrs who died defending their faith in the 7th century.

But in Afghanistan, a Sunni-dominated country where Shiites have been a despised and oppressed minority during many periods of history, this Muharram is being observed with new boldness and political acceptance. It is a dramatic sign of the rapid emergence of Shiism under democratic rule in the seven years since the overthrow of the ultraconservative Sunni Taliban.

More here.

Daniel Hahn in The Guardian:

It's hard not to like a book that devotes several pages to the consistency of the inner core of a walrus tusk (“a rice-pudding pattern”, resembling cucumber seeds, since you ask). The passage in question appears in a long chapter digressing on the identity of the “khutu”, which might be a fish, a bull or a giant eastern bird-god, whose horn/beak/forehead is useful in the cutlery trade, and which is not to be confused with the karkadann, which is similar, but different.

The myth of the unicorn is filled with similar-but-different and unlikely (but often true) species, with plenty of misidentifications, misleading or mendacious sources and lies that turn out to be truths. It's a testimony to Chris Lavers's skilful deployment of his arguments that his dissection of this myth is neither baffling nor stiflingly crammed with technical supporting evidence to dull the reading; on the contrary, it is lively, compelling, full of anecdote, wry scepticism and an honest humility about the things it is simply impossible for us to know for certain. (How can we be sure that a cave-painting animal has only one horn and not two, when depicted in profile?)

The book, like its subject, is not quite one thing nor another, but a fascinating hybrid. For a start, this “natural history” is just that – a study that is attentive to the natural sciences, a scientific quest into the origins of a species with real, living relatives. Our imaginary, iconic, mythological beast has a lineage linking it to the real world, many times over.

More here.

From The Telegraph:

The smoke billowing over Gaza serves, among much else, as a bitter warning for Barack Obama. As Israel's onslaught on Hamas strongholds enters its second week, with key leaders of the radical Islamist movement now singled out as targets, the Holy Land is locked in a new spiral of conflict. Sewage from shattered mains runs in the streets of Gaza City, while tanks and infantry mass at the borders, preparing for a possible invasion. And the world's leaders are turning to the one man who they believe could break the cycle of retaliation and push Israel and the Palestinians into achieving a comprehensive peace agreement – President-Elect Obama.

With their love of acronyms, European diplomats pepper their documents with references to the “MEPP” – the Middle East Peace Process. They, and others, want the new president to place it first on his to-do list, to make this quest the number-one priority of his foreign policy. But look at the situation from Obama's point of view. The agony of Gaza, and of Israeli towns under attack from Palestinian rockets, drives home an uncomfortable truth: a viable peace agreement is almost certainly impossible, at least in the medium term. Safe in the knowledge that they will bear no responsibility for failure, European leaders can afford to urge Obama to pursue the “MEPP”. But why should the world's most powerful man waste effort on an enterprise that cannot succeed? Why should he risk almost certain failure?

Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the British Ambassador to Washington, provided a more realistic forecast of Obama's likely approach in a detailed assessment of the next president, leaked to The Daily Telegraph last year. “The MEPP is unlikely to be a top priority for Obama,” wrote Sir Nigel. “But he would pursue it reasonably vigorously.” As he ponders the issues, Obama will doubtless reflect on the searing experience of the last Democrat in the White House. Bill Clinton made the quest for a Middle East settlement a central theme of his presidency. Yet after eight years of diplomatic effort, he was driven to a rare confession of powerlessness.

More here.

Chris Hedges in Truthdig:

Editor’s note: In light of the recent fighting in Gaza, Truthdig asked Chris Hedges, who covered the Mideast for The New York Times for seven years, to update a previous column on Gaza.

Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on Gaza—the buildings blown to rubble, the children killed on their way to school, the long rows of mutilated corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the crowds of terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, the hospitals so overburdened and out of supplies they cannot treat the wounded, and our studied, callous indifference to this widespread human suffering—wonder why we are hated?

Our self-righteous celebration of ourselves and our supposed virtue is as false as that of Israel. We have become monsters, militarized bullies, heartless and savage. We are a party to human slaughter, a flagrant war crime, and do nothing. We forget that the innocents who suffer and die in Gaza are a reflection of ourselves, of how we might have been should fate and time and geography have made the circumstances of our birth different. We forget that we are all absurd and vulnerable creatures. We all have the capacity to fear and hate and love. “Expose thyself to what wretches feel,” King Lear said, entering the mud and straw hovel of Poor Tom, “and show the heavens more just.”

More here.

Laila al-Arian in The Nation:

“Humboldt’s Gift,” first published in 1975 and just re-issued (Penguin: 512 pp., $16), is both a crazy mess of a novel and an abiding testament to the vital exuberance of Saul Bellow’s genius. “The book of ballads published by Von Humboldt Fleisher in the Thirties was an immediate hit. Humboldt was just what everyone had been waiting for. Out in the Midwest I had certainly been waiting eagerly, I can tell you that,” the book begins. The narrator is Charlie Citrine, and his friend Humboldt has just died in a fleabag New York hotel. Citrine uses his relationship with the doomed poet as a springboard for meditations on the relationship between the artist and society in America, on women, on marriage, on contemporary life, on pretty much anything, in effect, that interests or obsesses his creator, Saul Bellow.

more from the LA Times here.

Soon after completing “The Quiet American,” Graham Greene confessed to Evelyn Waugh, his fellow Roman Catholic novelist,that “it’ll be a relief not to write about God for a change.” “Oh, I wouldn’t drop God if I were you,” Waugh retorted. “Not at this stage anyway. It would be like P. G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.” Waugh had a point. Born in 1904, Greene belonged to a lost British generation that had been too young either to fight in World War I or to reflect soberly on its calamitous effects. Until his conversion to Catholicism in 1926 (in order to marry a believer), Greene had known only the private neurosis of a privileged English youth. As a preternaturally bored schoolboy, he is said to have played Russian roulette; it could be argued that he never recovered from the ennui of the 1920s and the following even lower (and more dishonest) decade.

more from the NY Times here.

From The New York Times:

When Azar Nafisi was a professor of Western literature in Tehran in the 1980s and ’90s, she told her best stories anonymously, sometimes to visiting foreign journalists seeking guidance about Iran’s Islamic Republic. In 1997 she settled for good in the United States and discovered her public voice, turning the volume up high in her 2003 memoir, “Reading Lolita in Tehran.” That memoir wove her personal stories with those of her former students, using as a touchstone their two years of shared experiences in a reading group at her home focused on banned authors like Nabokov and Fitzgerald. “Reading Lolita” became an international best seller; Nafisi, who is a visiting fellow and lecturer at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, became famous.

Now she has written a second memoir, much more intimate than the first, a dissection of her often difficult family life, recounted against the dramatic sweep and turbulence of recent Iranian history. The idea for the book sprang from a list that she began compiling in her diary sometime after the 1979 Islamic revolution, entitled “Things I Have Been Silent About.” It draws on other sources as well, including diaries her father, a former mayor of Tehran, started when she was 4, and addressed to her; his sanitized published memoirs and his unvarnished unpublished version; and family photographs, some of which she said she tookfrom her mother and which appear in the book. Much of the time she relies on memory, a powerful tool that can distort as well as enlighten.

(Picture shows Azar Nafisi’s mother, Nezhat.)

More here.

///
What the Doctor Said
Raymond Carver

He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong
/

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Thirty years ago the literary critic and editor Malcolm Cowley brought out a memoir called The View from 80. It was, as you might guess, a slender volume about old age, much of it emphasizing the “grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be” approach to the advancing years. I had to assign the book for review and, after some thought, called up the distinguished and elderly scholar Douglas Bush, long a fixture of the English department at Harvard. I had every reason to expect Professor Bush to confirm an image of old age as a time of retirement and happy retrospection, of favorite volumes reread before the fireplace, of glasses of brandy shared with friends while reminiscing over the good times, a period, in other words, of serene pleasures and quiet satisfactions.

Wrong.

Bush's piece was an angry cry of rage at these familiar clichés. Old age was cruel and bitter, a time of ashes, not warming fires. He wrote that he could hardly read anymore, and when he could, even favorite books seemed stale and unprofitable. His doctors had cut out drink; his diet was restricted; his body gave him nothing but trouble and misery. A once formidable memory was going, and with it the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of a lifetime of scholarship. Those rosy images of a cultivated and leisurely Otium were all mirages. The so-called sunset years were at best tedious and at worst an ordeal.

Somewhere Towards the End, Diana Athill's account of growing old, lacks Bush's passion but does underscore that, on the whole, the later years are a time of making do with less of everything except aches and pain. Only writing — a talent that the now 91-year-old Athill discovered relatively late in life — affords some modest pleasure to this former editor for the English publisher André Deutsch. To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well.

More here.