by Dave Munger

Whenever I call my stepbrother Mark, one of his persistent complaints is how prices are going up. “Everything costs more,” he tells me. Yet for the past two years, he's received no increase in his Social Security Disability check. His money, which never went very far, now barely seems to be enough to get by. But when I read about inflation in the media, a very different picture emerges. Kevin Drum says inflation is the lowest ever. Paul Krugman says that worries about inflation are misplaced. What's wrong with this picture? Could Mark have a mistaken impression of what things really cost?

I decided to take a closer look at how inflation figures are actually derived, to see if the numbers are painting a misleading picture of what real people pay for the goods they need to survive. Inflation in the US is tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which has a very informative web site explaining exactly how they arrive at their figures. Prices are tracked by looking at a typical “basket” of goods and services people buy, currently set at a value of $100 in 1983 dollars. This is the Consumer Price Index, or CPI, which is used, among other things, to determine the annual increase in Social Security payments. The most recent BLS figures put the CPI at about 220. So the stuff that cost $100 to buy in 1983 now runs you $220. That's the basic idea, anyways.

In practice, my purchases, like those of most people, are a lot different from what they were in 1983. I'm not buying a lot of vinyl LPs any more, and my budget for skinny pink ties has significantly diminished. In 1983, I didn't have a cell phone or internet service bill, and instead of buying iPad apps, I was pumping quarters into Donkey Kong and Q-Bert. How does the BLS account for all that?

Read more »

by Tom Jacobs

All the time there is this split in the American art and art-consciousness. On the top it is as nice as pie, goody-goody and lovey-dovey. […] You must look through the surface of American art, and see the inner diabolism of the symbolic meaning. Otherwise it is all mere childishness. That blue-eyed darling Nathaniel knows disagreeable things in his inner soul. He was careful to send them out in disguise.

Always the same. The deliberate consciousness of Americans so fair and smooth-spoken, and the under-consciousness so devilish. Destroy! Destroy! Destroy! Hums the under-consciousness. Love and Produce! Cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and-Produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of destruction underneath. Until such time as it will have to hear.

–D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923)

One of the most upsetting scenes in Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” (1994)—a film full of upsetting scenes—is what one would probably have to call the “rape scene.” It’s the scene where Bruce Willis’s character (Butch Coolidge) returns to save Ving Rhames’s character (Marsellus Wallace), from an already-in-progress rape and, presumably from a subsequent certain death. All of this takes place in the basement of an already disturbingly creepy pawnshop run by a coupla good old boys. This, in and of itself, is not funny. It’s hard to imagine how or why it might become funny. But it does, oddly, become funny. This is intriguing: how does it comes to pass that we laugh not so much at suffering, but rather at violence, even if it’s fictional.

Susan Sontag, the prophet of how we consume suffering, says this: “Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.” She also says this: “For the photography of atrocity people want the weight of witnessing without the taint of artistry, which is equated with insincerity or mere contrivance.” Imagination and contrivance, it seems, are the problems that plague us. She is right, of course. We don’t understand images of suffering either because we can’t completely empathize because we see these images everyday, or else because they seem too contrived, too beautiful (and one might check the front page of the NY Times…it invariably presents us with an image of beauty and death). We don’t imagine ourselves, not really, in the sufferer’s shoes, and the representations of their lives seem distant and abstract. This is a problem. It is all so far away, so distant and remote, and I asked for a grande not a venti, type of thing.

Read more »

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

The making of cocktails often falls unhappily into one of two extremes. If you have previously been subjected to the sickly sweet frozen neon drinks, so beloved of chain restaurants and a certain kind of tourist, you probably think of cocktail making as a base practice that strikes terror into the heart of anyone remotely fond of alcohol. On the other hand, with the modern cocktail revival, it seems easy to be forced up against a bewildering variety of obscure ingredients and cacophonous combinations, surrounded by a subculture presided over by self-important bartenders. The making of cocktails is an art, true, but it is quite easy to make good cocktails at home, cocktails that are faithful to alcohol (rather than trying to disguise it) and that at the same time are simple to make and do not require the memorization of entire recipe books.

There are general principles underlying many mixed drinks, and understanding them makes making and drinking them a lot more fun. Like those underlying any good explanation, these principles are both structural and historical and, of course, structures are historical entities as much as history unfolds within structural confines. All this is to say that this is one possible means of making sense of mixed drinks, but one that hopes to cut reality at some set of natural-seeming joints.

Historically, the cocktail was a combination of liquor, sugar and bitters (and was preceded by a sling, which was a combination of liquor and sugar) and, while the modern cocktail is generally more complex than this, this formulation already gives us structural insight. The Old-Fashioned is a straight-forward instantiation of this principle: take rye or bourbon, a little sugar or simple syrup and a few dashes of bitters and mix them together. Why? At the very least, mixed drinks add a new discursive dimension to alcohol and, like with sex or politics, talking about drinking is almost as much fun as drinking. But there’s much more. Even this simple combination tastes surprisingly good. The sugar, as long as it isn’t enough to overpower, rounds out and softens the alcohol, and the bitters give a herbal complexity and depth. This is admittedly vague and, if you haven’t tried this before, you should compare a rye and sugar drink against an Old-Fashioned and you’ll see what I mean. Even if you have, if the ingredients are available, make one up and sip it while you read this.

Read more »

by Vivek Menezes

Look, the fact is that cricket barely qualifies as an international sport.

There are a billion and a half subcontinentals who’ve been fed cricket, cricket and more cricket for decades – the very definition of a captive audience – so there’s steady interest here. But look beyond, and we’re talking a very steep, genuinely precipitous, drop-off to England, Australia, South Africa and the West Indies, where “our” sport runs a distant third or fourth to the popularity of football, rugby, basketball, athletics, swimming, etc. And after England and its overseas spawn, you may as well stop counting, because you’re done with all the legitimate cricketing sides in the world. Pretty pathetic, isn’t it?

Indians don’t like to consider this truth, but it’s become quite apparent that most other countries only continue with cricket because India is obsessed with it – they play to keep us company, to humiliate us when the chance presents itself, and, especially, to pick up generous paychecks which would be entirely unforthcoming if India grew up, and concentrated its efforts on real sports, played by a majority of nations, the kind of sports that show up at the Olympics.

But you see, that precise sticking point is the crux of why Indians are obsessed with cricket – it’s another plain fact that we’re really, really horrible at sports where the rest of the world competes, and we hate the Olympics, beacause we get ritually creamed each year (at Beijing, India’s best Olympics ever, little tiny countries like Mongolia out-ranked us. Yes, Mongolia.)

Read more »

by Misha Lepetic

“Any energy not recycled becomes some form of pollution” – Andy Lipkis

Much as the 20^th century taught us that central planning failed our nations, the 21^st century will teach us that central planning will fail our cities.

It is commonly known that sometime in the last few years, we have passed the milestone, with half of the world’s population now residing in cities. Somewhat less known is the projection that 60% of all people will do so by 2030 – that is a rate of almost 180,000 persons moving into cities every day. This is a trend of such immensity that it is basically irreversible, and yet city governments (as well as their state-level counterparts) are ill-equipped to handle it from just about any point of view. Specifically, urban growth will mostly occur within the context of peripheral, unplanned environments, where physical, social and legal infrastructure is present in only the most arbitrary, self-organizing fashion. When coupled with the increasing frequency of extreme weather events that is the true consequence of climate change, the resilience of cities themselves is called into question.

As an example of such events, consider the catastrophic monsoon that visited Mumbai beginning July 26. In the course of the first 24 hours of rainfall, nearly a meter of water descended on the city, almost double the previous 1974 record. More importantly, the sewage system at that time was only capable of handling a flow of 25mm of water per hour. Over a thousand lives were lost, and the city was brought to a complete standstill for days. The costs exacted from an outdated infrastructure, ineffective bureaucracy and massive growth in population density were high indeed.

Much as commentators in the United States have done following the experience of New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, it is easy to consider symptomatic solutions: if city planning agencies were funded better, they could deploy more powerful infrastructure that would have effectively prevented levee failure. However, weather events several standard deviations beyond what is anticipated only compromise the implicitly conservative planning process. These processes use probabilities generated from past experience, hence the terms ‘100-year flood’ (ie, a 1% chance of such a flood happening any given year), which nevertheless seem to be coming along every few years. The estimated cost of centrally planning for and upgrading an urban infrastructure for a putative ‘1000-year’ flood is so prohibitive and seemingly distant that our psychological biases pull us – and our policymakers – toward such magical thinking as “We’ll just have to take our chances” or “Well, probably not in my lifetime.” And yet, Hurricane Katrina followed almost exactly a month after the Mumbai floods.

This is not to say there is causality, or even correlation, between these two black-swan weather events. Geography, size, density and economic wealth clearly show New Orleans and Mumbai to be radically different cities. What is relevant is the common failure of centrally planned urban infrastructure, from both the policy and technological perspectives.

Read more »

By Namit Arora

I often think of the good life I have. By most common measures—say, type of work, income, health, leisure, and social status—I’m doing well. Despite the adage, ‘call no man happy until he is dead’, I wonder no less often: How much of my good life do I really deserve? Why me and not so many others?

The dominant narrative has it that I was a bright student, worked harder than most, and competed fairly to gain admission to an Indian Institute of Technology, where my promise was recognized with financial aid from a U.S. university. When I took a chance after graduate school and came to Silicon Valley, I was justly rewarded for my knowledge and labor with a measure of financial security and social status. While many happily accept this narrative, my problem is that I don’t buy it. I believe that much of my socioeconomic station in life was not realized by my own doing, but was accidental or due to my being in the right place at the right time.

A pivotal question in market-based societies is ‘What do we deserve?’ In other words, for our learning, natural talents, and labor, what rewards and entitlements are just? How much of what we bring home is fair or unfair, and why? To chase these questions is to be drawn into the thickets of political philosophy and theories of justice. In this short essay, inspired by American political philosopher Michael Sandel’s Justice, I have tried to synthesize a few thoughts on the matter by reviewing three major approaches to distributive economic justice: libertarian, meritocratic, and egalitarian, undermining en route the dominant narrative on my own well-being.

Read more »

by Haider Shahbaz

The first was happy to observe. The second wanted to create. The third was always mimicking. The first one, Mike, tall and thin with bushy Jewish hair was wrapped in a blanket that reminded you of your last LSD trip: colourful, torn and full of bunnies. The second, Dario, with his round face, generous smile and serious eyes was in a tweed coat. Of course, he was in a tweed coat. The third, Danyal, singing and smoking, creating rap songs from conversations, was wearing sandals and a huge shawl. He liked to show that he was ethnic. They were walking – walking on roads that led nowhere. That led from night to day and day to night.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this. I still have to finish the essay that was due last week.”

“Calm down. You’re always panicking about work. It’s your American blood. Do you still have some of Tony’s stuff left?”

“Yeah I brought it with me. We’ll smoke it when we get up there.”

Danyal, in the background, was rapping. He knew Mike too well. He always complains. He makes a resolution every morning, only to meet Tony that night, or a bottle of cheap rum. And then, ends up with ugly chicks. Just like that girl last week who he met in a party when he was horny and drunk and admittedly insecure. She was ugly; he knew it. Damn it, he knew it.

“Will you stop that?”

Dario didn’t like rapping. He only liked Rilke. And sometimes, Dadaists and Mayakovsky too, when he had to pretend he wasn’t attached to the canon and Harold Bloom as much as he was. But nothing got him more excited than talk of modernity and post-modernity and other such dangerous passions.

“Okay Okay. Chill. So what’s our plan?”

“We’re going up that small hill. It should take us about an hour. We’ll watch the sunrise and then come back and sleep.”

Read more »

By Fred Zackel

Didja hear that Senator John Ensign, the two-term Nevada Republican caught up in a sex and ethics inquiry, won’t run again?

As Carl Hulse of The New York Times reported it, “As I have learned through the mistake that I made, there are consequences to sin,” Mr. Ensign, 52, said at a news conference in Las Vegas as his wife, Darlene, stood at his side.

Hulse continued, saying:

“Once considered a future presidential contender, Mr. Ensign has seen his political fortunes plummet since he admitted in 2009 to an affair with a former campaign staffer who was also the wife of a top aide. A Senate Ethics Committee investigation, still under way, began after disclosures that Mr. Ensign’s parents paid $96,000 to the aide, Douglas Hampton, who also said the senator had helped him line up lobbying clients after Mr. Hampton left his Senate job.”

Like a lot of folks, I love reading noir. Watching interesting people make one dumb decision after another. Like watching them falling down a staircase, going faster and faster until they go splat.

Noir is Inexorable and doom is Inevitable.

Read more »

“You can see a lot just by looking.” –Yogi Berra

by George Wilkinson

The formation of a large body fossil is a complicated process involving rapid burial of the remains and chemical and physical interaction of the body with the forming rock bed. The final, discovered, fossil contains an amalgamation of chemical signatures of the original creature and of the bedrock in which it is embedded. Recent application of imaging methods derived from analytical chemistry has accentuated the composite nature of these fossil objects. If the fossilization process preserves the analyte in question, these methods can reveal structures that are not apparent in visible light, show the distribution of trace metals or biogenic compounds– and of course, a positive result reflects on the fossilization process itself. These palaeometric methods further allow the team to map fossils non-destructively, which means they can take a fresh look at even precious or fragile specimens.

Ultraviolet light has been used for analysis of organic compounds and microscopic fossils for some time. Fossils from some rock beds will fluoresce under UV illumination, yielding a much greater contrast with the surrounding rock compared to visible wavelengths. Improvements in the ultraviolet illumination and in fluorescence detection have allowed the use of UV light to detect otherwise hidden features of fossils, including traces of soft tissues. In the example at the link, ultraviolet light imaging of a feathered non-avian dinosaur fossil was able to show preserved attachments between flight like feathers and the legs, raising the possibility that this creature glided using all four limbs. A great profile of Helmut Tischlinger, the scientist behind many ultraviolet spectrum images, is here.

Another of my favorite recent examples used synchrotron generated X-ray imaging to confirm that the fossilized impression of Archeopteryx feathers contains chemical residue of the feathers themselves. The outlines of the feathers were previously simply conceived of as deformations of the rock matrix, but these areas in fact have residual chemical signatures consistent with known composition of modern bird feathers. The shafts of the feathers show readily detectable phosphorous and iron signatures.

Finally, infrared imaging can reveal the presence of amides and thiols, remnants of proteins, within well preserved samples. Fossilized reptilian skin, but not fossilized leaves from the same rock bed, shows characteristic infrared absorption peaks—as does skin from modern amphibians.

Read more »

by Mara Jebsen

” I deface the classroom walls and abuse french verse”

There's a shadowy black-and-white room crammed with schoolboys in Francois Truffaut's film 400 Blows. You've got to keep your eye on the boy who is not the principle character; the boy who is squinch-faced and clench-knuckled; the irrepressibly clumsy one whose inkpen just exploded. He rips out page after page of inky, sloppy copy and hides them beneath his desk. But all around, hypnotized, elbows crooked at identical angles, the other boys’ pens move in steady waves, drawn forward by the pull of the schoolmaster's voice.

At some point I'm about thirty and standing in a tweed skirt in front of a classroom in New York with a poem in my hands. “Stop all the clocks/Cut off the telephone” I say. W.H. Auden first penned these lines in England at least 40 years ago. Now, fifteen hands move in unison, following my voice and Auden's beautiful, long-dead mind.

I used to hate dictation. The first time someone tried to educate me that way it was in Lome, Togo, on the coast of West Africa, and in French, an impossible language I barely spoke. I was fourteen and I was introduced to the process not long after my American mother married a Togolese professor and we abandoned our apartment in Philadelphia to start life anew in Lome. The way I felt about French and dictation got mixed up in my mind with a conviction that something was horribly askew with all the grownups I met. Jokey, warm and tough, my new Togolese family seemed nevertheless to all have a headache. It was like they had had a headache since before I was born.

My teachers were similarly afflicted. I wish I could describe the expression of my French professor when she came upon my first page of dictation. She seemed offended right down in her gut by my panicky, phonetically interpretive loops! By the haphazard perversions of good french verse she’d so carefully delivered!

Read more »

by Kelly Amis

Twelve years ago, during the last days of a Washington, D.C. summer, I met a tiny boy who left a big impression.

I was volunteering at a day-in-the-country event for low-income D.C. kids; Malik was one of many who had climbed on a bus that morning to spend a day chasing ducks, dipping his feet in a pool and eating lunch on a vast green lawn.

Malik had just turned five. He was ridiculously cute, with a round little head and huge dark-brown eyes. We hit it off, and at the end of the day the event director asked if I would be interested in becoming Malik’s “big buddy.” A short time later, it was official. We were buddies.

For the next few years, I spent two or three Sundays a month taking Malik, and usually his two sisters, all over the city, to parks, movies, the occasional heavily-negotiated museum. I had been a teacher and tutor before becoming Malik’s “big buddy,” but this program was less about academics and more about getting kids out of their neighborhood to have some fun and new experiences.

I had never thought to visit Malik’s school or meet his teachers, and was angry with myself for not doing so when I learned that he was in a special education class at school. I only discovered this because he happened to show me his class photo: there were only five or six children in it (a regular class would have had 24 or more) and one of them had Down’s Syndrome.

I tried to hide my dismay from Malik. I knew the Washington, DC school district was notorious for over-identifying students—especially black boys—as “special ed” but it had never occurred to me that Malik might be one of them. Why was this perfectly intelligent and capable little boy in what appeared to be a special-education-only class?

Malik’s mother (who assumed the school was doing what was best for him) gave me permission to investigate and helped me set up a meeting with his teacher.

Read more »

by Jen Paton

One good thing could come from this horror: it could spell the end of the age of irony. For some 30 years–roughly as long as the Twin Towers were upright–the good folks in charge of America's intellectual life have insisted that nothing was to be believed in or taken seriously.

—Roger Rosenblatt, then-Editor in Chief of Time Magazine, 16 September 2001.

Rosenblatt’s partial definition of irony is telling: he misses the most dangerous part. The most insidious irony is not the swaggering and droll Alanis Morisette sense of the word. Rather, the most dangerous irony is the irony of distance. In 1979, Dahlgren and Chakrapani argued that the way foreign countries and foreign people are portrayed in Western news is ironic in the sense that the audience is “situated in a position of superior knowledge to the protagonist.” We think we know something that the people on the news – the flood victims, the terrorists, the freedom fighters – don’t know. The West is ordered, stable, developed, and modern. “The Rest” are disordered, underdeveloped, and primitive.

You find this distance playing out in surprising places. My oldest friend attends medical school in one of our most “liberal” cities. Recently, one of the “standardized patients” (actually actors who interact with the students for training) arrived wearing hijab. “She’s wearing a burka!” whispered a classmate to my friend. She corrected him and he was incredulous: how do you know this stuff?

Thirty five percent of Americans know a Muslim person – at the same time, “events and controversies related to Islam dominated U.S. press coverage of religion in 2010 -” beating out Catholic church scandal for the first time this decade. This makes how Islam is portrayed in the American media more important than ever. Unfortunately, the ironic detachment Dahlgren and Chakrapani described over three decades ago seems to persist in coverage even of in-country Islam. When forty percent of Americans say Islam is more likely than other religions “to encourage violence among its believers.”, one wonders where those ideas come from. Especially since, in 2002, only twenty-five percent of us thought so.

Read more »