Elatia Harris

Earlier this year, Affinity Konar, a former 3 Quarks Daily blogger, published her first novel, The Illustrated Version of Things (Fiction Collective Two, April 2009.) One of the very few 3QD columnists to post short fiction, her pieces were received in a way that suggests the form has a future here. Her novel, too, has been greeted with excitement – and read hungrily by me, among others.

In a bookstore, one might find The Illustrated Version of Things shelved under coming-of-age fiction. From time to time while reading it, I spared a thought for some classics of the genre – one in which growing up usually does a young protagonist a bittersweet bit of good. Less usually, a bleak childhood will be seen as a lost paradise by a narrator who has crossed over — if only he’d known. Whatever happens, poignant is the watchword. If to have that note sounded is why you would read about kids, then this is probably not the book for you. Sam Lipsyte has a word for the experience of reading it: “singular.” Ben Marcus, a phrase: “the far limits of sorrow and isolation.” I don’t disagree, but it’s worth adding that it’s also a very funny book.

Affinity and I exchanged emails over 10 days as she and her family prepared to move from Virginia to California, where she grew up. They’re all on the road as I write, headed west.

Elatia Harris: Though the brother and sister in the novel are extreme cases, I got an uncanny sense as I read of how provisional every childhood is. That it's kind of amazing that any of us makes it through — assuming adulthood is the point. A children's advocate I know says that adulthood is not really the point, only the result of childhood.

Affinity Konar: I see it as provisional as well, and have always been tempted to view individuals who surface from horrific childhoods—not only intact, but functional beyond all understanding–as unusually talented people. It’s as if they have an extra muscle in their bodies, or a passport that allows travel between worlds with disparate laws of maturity and justice.

EH: Do those laws bind fictional characters? The brother and sister in your novel?

AK: I’d hoped that the brother character would dilute the notion that their childhood experiences were solely responsible for the narrator’s failures. Her language and perspective were the more pressing issues to me, and I’m still unsettled as to whether or not she’s actually interested in making her life livable.

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by Shiban Ganju

One formula to cut the cost of health care: stay healthy until you die. Unfortunately for the payers of health care, disease intervenes between health and death. That costs money. And the more chronic the disease, the more money it gobbles up.

Prevention and management of chronic disease are two important planks of cost-saving in the Obama health plan. But will it reduce the expenditure? Only if staying healthy generates more profits for all compared to profits generated by caring for the sick. And that needs a strong political will for financial reengineering of the system.

A health care system aims to fulfill a need of a society but often falls short of its aspiration. The devil lurks in its delivery. In a simplistic form, a health system aims to achieve the following:

1. Prevent the preventable.
2. Cure the curable.
3. Research the unknown.
4. Palliate the incurable.
5. Rehabilitate the disabled.
6. Minimize suffering when death is inevitable.

We derive maximum value for the money spent on the top three ventures on the list. But we spend disproportional amounts of available money in ‘sick’ care and in trying to cure the incurable. And we spend less in ‘health’ care to keep the population healthy. In the USA, only 2 to 3 percent of health expenditure goes for prevention. The medical industrial complex, which profits by treating the ‘disease’, has little incentive to invest in ‘prevention’, which does not yield high return on investment.

So the often asked question: does prevention decrease the cost of health care? The question has thee dimensions. First: is the question relevant? Second: How does one measure cost? Third: what can we prevent?

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A conversation about the upcoming French Open between three tennis fans: Sydneysider Lucy Perkins, New Yorker Asad Raza, and Ecuadorian-North Carolinian Juan José Vallejo.

Asad Raza: Hey guys, thanks for coming aboard the 3quarksdaily raft. So here we are at Roland Garros time, again, where for the last several years Rafa Nadal has been the bear that eats Roger Federer. J.J., you have the best account of the state of their rivalry I've heard. Care to run through it?

Juan José: I'm currently toasted, but I promise I'll send my run-through tomorrow. Hope you're all doing well!

Lucy: JJ! If I had thought one of us was gonna delay writing on account of being under the influence, you would have been my THIRD choice. I'll check back in after Fed's straight-set drubbing of Rafa in his HOME MASTERS FINAL. Oh yes. (Ed. Note: this message written eight hours before Roger Federer's May 17th straight-sets defeat of Rafael Nadal in the Madrid final.)

Juan José: Eh…oops. Wrong choice of words there!

What happened was that yesterday ended up being way more exhausting than I expected. It all started at 7:40 in the morning, when I woke up to fish for an internet stream so I could watch my Manchester United clinch the English Premier League title. Which they did, and I was very happy. Shortly after the celebrations ended, Nadal and Djokovic were on.

Now, I had already written off the match as a straight sets defeat for Djokovic, since he was playing on his third straight week, and Nadal even had a walkover in his “home” tournament. But then the match started, Nadal looked terrible and Djokovic looked good. When Djokovic served out the first set, I thought he had a great chance to win this, if Nadal didn't improve dramatically. Djokovic was playing his game, not even going for anything spectacular, and it seemed that staying the course would be enough to win the match. Then, at 1-2 in the second, Nadal calls for the trainer, and he gets his knee taped. I thought, hey, now there's an enormous chance. Djokovic adjusted on the fly, making Nadal hit loads of backhands, since the taped knee was his right one, which he pushes off when he hits off his backhand side. That was a nice adjustment to see. So I thought, man, this is really going to happen! Even if it was similar to last year's Nadal-Ferrero match in Rome, who cares, it was a clay win over Nadal. And Nadal didn't look good. He wasn't moving well. He looked like he was about to retire.

But of course, that didn't happen. What happened instead was that he stopped missing. Welcome to Nadal hell. However, Djokovic was still playing well, so even when he lost that second set tiebreaker, I thought he had a big chance in the third. So it was no surprise to see him go up a break. But then cramps hit, he gets broken, and the real match started.

I'll echo Djokovic in saying that there is very little to say about what followed. All the evidence you need to see was there in those last games of the third set. It was unbelievable, it was ridiculous, it was crushing, and it was heartbreaking, in a strange way. The worst way to endure a defeat is if your sporting entity choked, and that was not the case. But it also hurts when your sporting entity plays as well as he can possibly play, and still lose. As an Agassi fan, I've been through that before. It's a special kind of heartbreak.

So the only influence I was under all day was from a pint of Guiness I had stored in our refrigerator here for extreme emergencies. It had been sitting there for about 9 months. So that and videos of Manchester United celebrating made me happy again.

Anyway, we're missing the Madrid final here because of Amy's birthday brunch. I'll talk about the Federer-Nadal thing when I get back.

Asad: Actually, I think it's quite appropriate that we ended up talking about Djokovic, who has been pushing Rafa on clay more than anyone else–Federer may have won the Madrid final, he might owe Novak part of that check–it was the match with Novak that took the starch out of Rafa. Or did Federer make a true breakthrough just when none of us expected him to beat Nadal on clay again, Luce?

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Part 1 of “My Life as a Crime Fighter: The Case of the Predator Psychiatrist” can be found HERE.

[Note: Some names and details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals, especially the victims.]

Wearing a Wire

I offered to go see the psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph R. Dorsey, and try to get him to make incriminating statements about having sex with his patient, Gertrude (Gerti) Kossik. Gerti's husband, Nathan, and her (now former) lover, Janice Wines, were surprised that I would offer to play cloak and dagger. It never occurred to them, but they felt it could help their complaint with the New York State Department of Education concerning Dorsey's medical license, as well as their civil case. Their attorneys, Willard Marino and Robert Cohen, thought it was a great idea. I agreed to wear a wire, a concealed tape recorder, to gather the evidence. It wouldn't be a problem getting access to Dorsey because we knew each other from varied professional events in the mid-Hudson Valley. Also, I consulted with him about IBM employees who were having adjustment problems at work. I was at his office once or twice, so there shouldn't be a problem making an appointment to see him under the pretense of discussing matters about a couple of employees.

The trial attorney, Bob Cohen, gave me a legal briefing on the secret recording of telephone and personal conversations. By this time, I was sure Bob had been a yeshiva student, if not a trained rabbi, in an earlier life. Not only did he look and sound like a biblical scholar, but he would raise his right hand, index finger extended and pointing toward heaven, to emphasize the authority of his points of analysis and conclusions, “Now if you consider the intent, and the fact that it will be a matter for both a civil and administrative trial, …”. Later I told him he presented himself like a biblical scholar. He smiled at me and said, “Thanks. That's a great compliment.” I asked why he was called a 'trial attorney'. “Don't all attorneys participate in trials?”, I asked. He smiled again and said, “Asking me that question is good news for you.” “How's that?”, I replied. He straightened up a bit and said, “It means you've been fortunate, to this point in your life, not to have been involved in matters that required interactions with lawyers.” He went on to explain the distinction between solicitor and barrister in the U.K. While we don't have the same formal classification in the U.S., there is an informal and practical alignment that results from personal preferences and experiences among attorneys. My status as a legal ingénue would come to an end in a couple of years.

For New York State, the law concerning the secret recording of a conversation is as clear as it is simple. Anyone can can record any telephone conversation, or personal conversation, to which one is a party. There is no requirement to inform the other person in advance of, during, or following the conversation. Permission from the other party, or parties, is not required. The laws in other states will vary. For example, Linda Tripp was violating the laws of the State of Virginia when she secretly recorded her conversations with Monica Lewinsky.

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Justin E. H. Smith

I would like to lead my life, with Spinoza, sub specie aeternitatis. I truly would. But every now and then my fellow men show themselves to be so brutish that I have no choice but to come back down to earthly reality and cry shame. Such a moment was the Israeli siege on Gaza that began at the end of last year, which prompted me to try to do what I could, with the low-grade weaponry of rhetoric, to convince the unconvinced that this was a thing to be harshly denounced. What did I do? Well, I wrote up my case, and I made it known through various low-voltage electronic media. Why did I not do more, like Jeff Halper? As I've said, I am hardly a philosophe engagé. I confess to doing as little as possible.

In any case, my minor foray into activism was also a learning experience. What did I learn? Among other things, I learned that, as one might fear, criticism of Israel really does draw the creeps out of the woodwork: there are indeed many out there who are far too eager to see in Israel's aggression the confirmation of their own fantastical, alternative accounts of the secret forces guiding world history. I also learned that there are many out there who take the opinions of these alienated, ill-informed bigots far too seriously, and who mistakenly suppose that any and all criticism of Israel must come from, or lead to, that same dark place.

Should one then refrain from criticizing Israel altogether? This is a privilege no one would dream of granting to any other state in the world, and one I certainly don't grant to my native country or to my adoptive one. Or should one instead insist that such delicacy around the question, such special treatment, is itself a manifestation of the same sort of unhistorical, unscientific Sonderweg-thinking that, under other circumstances, has been used not to hold Israel above all criticism, but rather to blame Jews for whatever goes wrong with the world? I know which of these two approaches I choose, and I insist that to say this is also a choice to stoke antisemitism is not only a fallacy, but also a smear.

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By Namit Arora

Various societies at different times have dazzled with their bursts of creative and intellectual energy. Historians have a penchant for dubbing them Golden Ages. Examples include the Athens of Herodotus, the Baghdad of Haroun al-Rashid, and the India of the Buddha. But though India has long been famous for its “ancient wisdom”, the few historical sources that survive shed woefully inadequate light on the Buddha's society. By contrast, far better portraits of classical Greece and Abbasid Baghdad are available to us.

Still, evidence at hand suggests that around 600-500 BCE, in parts of the Indo-Gangetic plain of north India, people were asking some very bold and original questions: What is the nature of thought and perception? What is the source of consciousness? Are virtue and vice absolute or mere social conventions? Old traditions were under attack, new trades and lifestyles were emerging, and urban life was in a churn, reducing the power of uptight Brahmins.

Philosophical schools flourished in a marketplace of ideas, and included chronic fatalists, radical materialists, self-mortifying ascetics, die-hard skeptics, cautious pragmatists, saintly mystics, and the ubiquitous miracle mongers. “Rivalries and debates were rife. Audiences gathered around the new philosophers in the kutuhala-shalas—literally, the place for creating curiosity—the parks and groves on the outskirts of the towns…. The presence of multiple, competing ideologies was a feature of urban living.”[1] It was also an age of nascent democratic republics, which, like Athens later, did not ultimately survive the march of monarchy and empire.[2]

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Figurehead
Jim Culleny

Sometimes a poet will sail
the line of a poem
like Leonardo DiCaprio:
a figurehead on Titanic,
arms spread, embracing the wind,
the air, the fabulous future,
poised before the next word,
only to find it isn’t there:
the right word,
the one that says it all,
the one that pulls the rabbit out of the hat of the poem,
that drops scales from blind eyes,
that gives ears their plum and brain its due
and (without the need to be said)
ends its longing for what the heart
already knew

by Aditya Dev Sood

This is Delhi in its glory. Hotter, even, than when I knew it as a child, the temperatures these days scratching past the 45 degrees Celsius that were their absolute threshold then. Every day the earth baking, every night the atmosphere billowing in response, plumes of invisible heat unsettling the skies, a sudden imbalance and extreme of the natural order, corrected by crazy dust storms in the late afternoon, whose special, threatening light, one knows, will never break to rain. The dust is everywhere. On window sills and on the floors of my home, on doorknobs and banisters, and even hidden atop curtain rods and high shelves. The body is always tormented by the heat, always seeking respite, coolness, moisture, a wet towel, ginger-lemonade, the direct draft of an air-conditioner.

In the center of the two-storied house is a kind of small atrium, or large shaft, which stretches from plinth to roof. My neighbor has one just like it — it is mandated by local zoning. The idea was, in those pre-aircon-days of the Raj and early Indian post-coloniality, that air would circulate through the house, gathering heat from the groins and armpits of its wilting inhabitants, before entering the atrium and rising up as hot air must, but also following Bernoulli's principle, that fluids will accelerate as they pass through a narrower channel. The logic of air-conditioning, sadly, runs so directly counter to this ecological understanding of architecture, as a coordination of air flows from outside the building, in through its interiors, all the way out its top.

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New Thing
Jim Culleny

I opened a Twitter acccount out of curiosity.

I admit it, I was born into a far simpler techno world —pre-TV, prime-time radio, number-please phones on party lines, straight-6 engines with carburetors, 78 records with needles the size of ten-penny spikes —an antiquated world. And although it’s a little murky to me now, we are each what we were to a great extent. So when I finally grasped the concept “Twitter” my first response was WTF?

The idea that an up-to-the-minute account of my thoughts and actions, no matter how brief, would have any value, or would be worth the bother to anyone, seemed pretty absurd. But it wouldn’t be the first absurdity to take-off like the Enola Gay.

I first became aware of Twitter listening to political debates and interviews. It seemed interviewers and the world suddenly wanted to know which well-placed twits Twitter, and how many follower-twits they’d accrued. Who knew that something as edgy as Twitter would appeal to dinosaurs in dark suits & red ties, or pant suits with PC dos?

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Douglas Henry Daniels, One O’clock Jump: The Unforgettable History of the Oklahoma City Blue Devils (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006, 274 pp.)

Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix, Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop—A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005, xi + 274 pp.)

by Todd Bryant Weeks

[Part one can be found here.]

Frank Driggs, the widely known collector and historian, and Chuck Haddix, a disc jockey, archivist, and director of the Marr Sound Archives at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, have combined their respective talents to give us a new, thorough history of Kansas City jazz in its heyday, the 1920s and 1930s. As one would expect, the authors give particular attention to the bands of Walter Page, Bennie Moten, George Lee, Andy Kirk, Jay McShann, and Count Basie. Also discussed in detail are the early careers of Mary Lou Williams, Eddie Durham, Pete Johnson, Big Joe Turner, and Charlie Parker.

Driggs, whose immense collection of photographs has allowed him to make a good living while keeping the history of the music alive, has had a 60-year love affair with Kansas City jazz. An early colleague of Marshall Stearns, Driggs began interviewing musicians from the Southwest when few historians were interested and little was known about the development and dissemination of the Kansas City sound. His research is the backbone of this work, while Chuck Haddix, a Kansas City native, brings extensive knowledge at the local level. Haddix has spent several years collecting his own stories and rubbing elbows with local experts, most notably Milton Morris, original owner of the Hey Hay Club. One gripe that has dogged Driggs in the past is the lack of solid documentation for his writing; this proves of little consequence here, as Haddix, through exhaustive newspaper research, has corroborated many of the stories Driggs dredged from myriad anecdotal sources. This text sets a new standard for histories on the subject.

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by Daniel Rourke

A bomb won't go off here… (Click to enlarge)

Y: I like the use of the past tense. Saying “weeks before” sets up the seen* as a narrative.

X: Oh yeah.

Y: It’s almost like the story’s not ended, like we now are still part of the story.

X: And that there’s people there all the time.

Y: That they are always on this street.

X: Yeah, in that little square. And they’ve always all got long, blondish hair. Shopping.

Y: Does it mean that a bomb might go off somewhere else?

X: That’s exactly what it means. It means that a bomb’s not going to go off here, but it is going to go off somewhere else.

Y: Somewhere where people aren’t more suspicious?

X: Not people: shoppers.

Y: Somewhere where shoppers aren’t more suspicious.

X: There’s no such thing as people – there’s just shoppers.

Y: By reporting someone studying the CCTV cameras to the police the shopper didn’t become anything of greater value than a shopper. They managed to stay as a shopper and yet still act in a way which protected the rights of all shoppers everywhere.

X: That is the best thing you can be for society. A citizen is secondary to a shopper. For the good of the country there is nothing better than a shopper who reports suspicious looking un-shoppers. If you’re an un-shopper, and you are in a shopping precinct, then you’re not there for the good of the country.

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All things were together.
Then the mind came and arranged them.
—Anaxagoras

Deep Ecology
—from boy to man to boy
Jim Culleny

At first I thought that trunk and limbs
and leaves were one which they called
tree.
But then I learned that tree was
cleaved in thirds with blades of brain
and set apart in boxes stacked linguistically.

Parsing parts from root to crown
I learned to group them categorically.
But then I noticed they were bound
like arteries and veins and heart
which would die if pulled apart
and must be one if they’re to be.

Now I see that trunk and limbs
and leaves are one which we call
tree–
and though it’s true it may be
cleaved in thirds with blades of brain
and set apart like arteries and hearts and veins
we should admit before we start we can’t do it
with impunity.

by Jeff Strabone

In the twelve years that the George Bushes occupied the White House, I can think of only one outstanding instance when their odd cocktail of nepotism, ineptitude, and lackadaisy went down easy and yielded a savoury, enduring aftertaste. It happened in 1990 when Bush père outsourced his first Supreme Court appointment to his trusty chief of staff John H. Sununu, the self-appointed Smartest Man in the World. Bush clearly had no idea who David Souter was, but what could possibly go wrong? He was cut from the granite of New Hampshire and Sununu said he was cool, so there you go.

Gordon Silverstein, my professor at Dartmouth in the 1990's, recently called Justice Souter 'the only true conservative' on the Court in the New Republic for May 1, 2009. Souter, Silverstein reminds us, has been conservative in his judicial temperament. It's the precedents that he conservatively upheld that happened to be liberal:

Judicial conservatives generally have great respect for the law, and for legal decisions that have been made. This is the essence of what is called stare decisis—let the decision stand. Upholding precedent staunches the forces of change—and typically, that generates conservative results. But when the precedent you are upholding is precedent set by the Warren Court, holding back the forces of change means enforcing liberal decisions against radical demands for change from movement conservatives.

That was not the kind of conservatism that Bush had intended.

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by David Schneider

Last Saturday night, over dinner and drinks, the President of the United States was overheard saying:

Michael Steele is in the house tonight. Or as he would say, 'In the heezy.'

Wazzup!

For the last time, Michael, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a 'troubled asset.

That's right. At the White House Correspondents' Dinner, Obama killed. American humor in the commercial media, over the last decade, has largely trended toward the coarse and snarky, so Obama's delivery – mature, intelligent, and martini-dry with a hip-hop twist – was thoroughly (in a word laden with meaning) disarming. (Even as he reaffirmed Michelle's right to bear arms.)

Disarming, because journalists and Big Media – in a crisis for survival – are now reckoning with their role in the great failures of the Bush Administration, in the failures of the economy, and the failures of their own profession. All are connected. And as Obama was happy to take the heat, as well as dish it (“Sasha and Malia are not here tonight. They're grounded. You can't just take a joyride to Manhattan.”) – because he took responsibility – he opened the possibility for the press corps to say to one another, like Hardy berating Laurel (though with a sheepish grin), “Well, that's another fine mess you've gotten us into.”

The American press might have been on “suicide watch,” as Frank Rich wrote yesterday, since Stephen Colbert's monologue three years ago (surely a critical event in media history). But the news industry had been in a severe depression long before Wall Street laid its latest egg.

Print newswriting methods are like the internal-combustion engine: their basic mechanics and operating principles have been little altered for a hundred years. For pistons, gears, sparkplugs and the carburetor, journalists have the lede, the quote, the counter-quote, vocabulary set and wordcount. They're all housed in an engine-block called the inverted pyramid, a structure whose wide use in American journalism dates back to the mid-19th century. This structure has its essential uses, but I think it also has, over the long-term, determined the way we receive, process, and use information, with negative aspects.

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I am not usually one to feel nostalgic. It is not my nature. But there is something about the idea of an ancient academy or a very old university that makes me long for the past. Perhaps I have been deceived by the romantic image of Demosthenes running on the beach with pebbles in his mouth, speaking beautifully over the roar of the Mediterranean waves. Or maybe the seal of the University of Heidelberg has fooled me into actually believing that a typical seminar in 1386 was conducted by a man wearing academic regalia seated in front of an ornate chancel. Whoever this important man was, he probably spoke with eloquence. At least I hope he did. I have come to imagine the classical university as being a prototypical T.E.D. conference, a place where the power of an idea was carried not only by its intellectual content, but also by the theatricality of its presentation.

Fast forward to the present in Santa Barbara, California, where I am a graduate student. Are people filled with a spirit of learning at the university? The answer is yes only if by the word, “spirit,” one really and cynically means, “weariness.”

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by Evert Cilliers

A few weeks ago I closed my account at Bank of America and opened an account at a credit union instead.

I cut my ties with one of the banks responsible for our economic crisis — one of the banks whose actions have caused countless Americans to lose their jobs and their homes, and caused many children in the third world to go hungry.

I felt clean. Moral. New.

Now I have a dream. What if millions of Americans disassociated themselves from the banks that have brought us grief?

The four biggest US commercial banks — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America and Wells Fargo — possess 64% of the assets of US commercial banks.

These are the banks that are said to be too big to fail.

But what if millions of Americans moved their accounts from these big banks, and put their money into smaller local banks or credit unions instead?

Wouldn't these big banks then become small enough to fail? Isn't this the punishment they deserve for causing all of us so much grief?

I urge you, I implore you, I beg you to move your account from a big bank to a small bank. It is the quickest, simplest way to solve our entire financial crisis. Instead of getting a bail-out, the banks can then be allowed to fail. These banks caused us grief; let's kill them.

Vote with your money. Take it away from them. Why should you leave a single cent of your money in their greedy hands?

This is the best and most practical solution, because it is a democratic solution, executed by the citizenry themselves. It'll work way better than waving a pitchfork or a teabag.

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by Gerald Dworkin

What we do is never understood, but only praised and blamed.

–Nietzsche

It is easy enough to look back to the beginning of the century and see many ethical views that we now believe to be profoundly mistaken. Views about the rights of women, about who should vote, about separate but equal, about the rights of children to work in oppressive conditions, about the rights of patients in medical experimentation. To take only the latter, in 1963 researchers injected live cancer cells into nursing home residents, some of whom were Holocaust survivors, to determine whether the immune systems of sick individuals could identify and eliminate foreign cancer tissue as those of healthy people. Although the researchers were correct in thinking that no harm could come to their patients from the injection the fact remains that no consent was asked for.

It is much harder to look at out contemporary views and try to predict which of them will seem as mistaken 100 years from now as those above. Possible candidates include– eating meat, thinking of homosexuality as in some ways sinful or immoral, allowing the extremes of inequality of income and wealth that exist in contemporary America, allowing receipt of medical care to depend on income.

When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the defending the rights of women, a contemporary , Thomas Taylor, mocked her by writing A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (animals). The idea being that the logical implication of granting rights to women is that they be granted to animals and since the latter is absurd so is the former. So one persons drawing the logical conclusion is another person's refutation of one of the premises.

Henry Salt, in Animals' Rights, informs us that Thomas Taylor's “A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes…designed to, throwridicule on the theory of human rights…ironically lays down the proposition 'that God has made all things equal'” and “furnishesus with a notable instance of how the mockery of one generation may become the reality of the next.” (Henry Salt, Animals' Rights [1892], “Bibliography of the Rights of Animals”).

Bernard Williams advanced a thesis which might be called the relativism of distance; where distance here means is moral and conceptual rather than geographical. There had to be a possibility of a justification to those who lived with institutions which we, now, see as unjust, for them to be unjust. This is the relativism part. The fact that we see slavery now as the essence of an unjust institution does not mean that if we were transported in a time machine to 4th century Athens we could frame an argument for this position that would make sense to the slave-holders of the time. It's important to note that this is not simply a question of whether our arguments would persuade. People whose self-interest would be harmed may , for various reasons, not be persuaded they are wrong but that does not mean they are not wrong.

As Tom Nagel puts it, ” Williams believed that political theory, too, should be in a sense local, rather than universal, because it must be addressed to individuals in a particular place and time, and must offer them a justification for the exercise of political power that has persuasive force in the light of standards that are accessible to them. ”

Now one might take this in a stronger or a weaker sense. The weak sense is that those not persuaded are not to be held responsible for their support of unjust ( by our lights) institutions they are not be blamed for what they could not be expectedto see as wrong. The strong sense, which Williams seems to have held, is not just that they are not to be condemned but that the institutions are not unjust. It is not that they are just either. If one wanted to talk like Nietzsche one woulds say they are beyond justice or injustice.

But, and here comes the non-relative part, for Williams, none of this does has any implication that now, for us ( all of us), there is any doubt that slavery is unjust and that those who now support it, or condone it, are fully responsible for their mistaken views.

I believe that the issue of what might be called “moral anachronism” is a fruitful one to think more about. When do the concepts we employ in moral discourse, and the empirical situation we find ourselves in now, make it– and here the rightnotion to use is crucial– too difficult, too crazy, impossible, meaningless, pointless– for we and them to understand one another sufficiently for a certain kind of criticism and evaluation to be possible? When does the fact that our current understandings and commitments were not historically present in an earlier period get people off the hook for behavior that, today, would be universally viewed as outrageous?

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It was my fault. I’d been traveling abroad and didn’t want the real world invading my vacation bubble, so I was checking e-mail and world headlines superficially. Bea Arthur’s death and swine flu penetrated my consciousness to about the same depth. Sometime during those lazy days I followed a link or two and saw a stray headline reading “Arlen Specter to Leave Republican Party.” Amused, I logged off and continued blithely on with my day.

So silly of me. I’d assumed Specter—a centrist who not infrequently dissented from his party—was merely abandoning the Republicans, not defecting to the Democrats. I’d assumed he was primarily interested in taking a stand against the more outrageous elements of his cohort, and therefore would be loath to yoke himself to a different side with just as many disgraces in its ranks. I’d assumed he was breaking free to announce an allegiance to what’s been his de facto political philosophy for years, that of independents, and I’d assumed that as an independent Arlen Specter might be a real example of political valor So, so silly.

Perhaps we should be grateful for Specter’s candor—he split because his pollster gypsies spun his fortune and he knew he wouldn’t have survived a Republican primary challenge next season, when he’s up for re-election. Then again, he didn’t even try to conceal those motivations. But what crushed me and what made my jet-lag headache even worse when I returned home and read what was really happening was the lost opportunity Specter represented for independents.

Specter himself said switching parties will make little practical difference—he’ll continue to vote the same idiosyncratic way he always has. The newspaper graphics that listed the suddenly “realigned” Senate, with Specter’s “1” appearing in the tally of seats for donkeys and not elephants, means next to nothing, then, and odds are he’ll exasperate his new allies as much as he infuriated his old ones. (They’re already suspicious in fact.) There was zero news fiber in the whole affair, except for people who use politics to keep score.

If the name “Democrat” or “Republican” meant so little to Specter, why not ditch them? He could have made the same points he felt he needed to make about the GOP having lurched “far to the right since [he] joined it under Reagan’s big tent” in 1981. Leaving the party and remaining independent wouldn’t have had quite the emotional impact of joining the enemy, true, but walking away still would have done real damage to the ideologues in his old party.

To be crass, if Specter’s mostly interested in his own political prospects, refusing the Democrat label would have secured him far more power. He would have had both sides courting him; both sides would have had to come to him if he’d announced he wouldn’t pre-define himself and caucus with either side. It would also have signaled to both parties that snubbing or pummeling moderates might not be smart tactics. Instead, Specter heard the bad news about his polls, wet himself, and twelve or so hours later was holding up his jersey for a new team, flush with a huge signing bonus.

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From the indispensable psychology and neuroscience blog Mind Hacks, some information on Christian Nold and his “emotional cartography.” Writes Nold:

Nold goes on to ask, “How will our perceptions of our community and environment change when we become aware of our own and each others intimate body states?” That's more of a forecast than a description of his current work. He's predicting a technology that allows people to read the emotions of others in real-time. His current maps essentially measure only stress, and the results are published retrospectively and not in real time.

But it raises a number of interesting questions and possibilities. Before we go there, however, it's worth mention that, while Nold may be science's first “emotional cartographer,” literature's been there already. Take William Blake's London:

I wander through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every man,
In every infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper's cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.

Blake's cartography isn't only emotional, although it's intensely emotional. It's also economic, political, and psychological (the “mind-forged manacles” evoking everything from learned helplessness to crushing social convention.) The cagey old printer even manages to inject a little epidemiology into his mapmaking. The youthful harlot's curse sounds a lot like a venereal disease, one that condemns the unfaithful husband and his family to death. And the “marks” of “weakness and woe” that Blake inventories form the contours of his map. The wounded soldier's bloody sigh on the palace wall reduces to zero the geographical distance between the suffering of the battlefront and the comforts of the wealthy.

And all in sixteen lines.

So maybe Christian Nold hasn't caught up with the poet yet. But he's done something interesting, and there's more to come. The “emotional maps” aren't his only work, either. He's also created the Newham “Sensory Deprivation” Map, which is where the illustration above comes from. By switching up the senses people use to perceive the environment, he's helping map our geography in a new way. A very nice idea.

So what would happen if we could read the emotions of those around us in real-time? What if we could tell that the crowd around us at rush hour was overstressed, that the people at our bar band gig really liked the crazy rockabilly number we threw in, that our academic audience was becoming skeptical of our Blake-As-Cartographer thesis? Would people on the street feel more personal responsibility for the well-being of the throng around them? Would presenters and performers lose the willingness to challenge their audience? Would anybody even care?

Would politicians be even more eager to say anything the public wanted than ever before?

Nold's work can veer in any number of future directions. It could lead to new forms of psychological epidemiology, or to conceptual art works. Or to new ways of seeing the world around us, a breaker of mind-forged manacles. But he needs to be vigilant, to prevent his work from descending into an entertainment, a crowdsourced “mood ring” for the 21st Century, played with and then forgotten.

He can do it, if he gets the right support. And draws the right inspiration from cartographers like William Blake.

Michael Blim

The minutes of the night tick down as I write this column. Soon I will have my morning reward. My column will come out on 3QD, and I will hear the thud of the Boston Globe against the front door.

My column will come out, but with the Boston Globe?

Ask The New York Times Company, its owner. For the past month, they have been threatening to close the Globe unless its workers give back $20 million in wages and benefits by May 1. For the past two days, the Times company has extended the deadline by one day. As I write, the Times company has put several hours back on the clock at the same time it is waving its official plant closing notice as required by the state in the faces of its employees.

The Globe, once the Sulzberger flagship for its New England media armada, and a cash cow to boot, is now losing a million dollars a week. It is the last paper of record in Boston, and has garnered dozens of national awards, including seven Pulitzer prizes since 1995. The 2007 prize was won by reporter Charlie Savage’s exposure of President Bush’s abuse of so-called signing statements, pithy bits of prose attached to his approval of laws that skewed or set aside whole provisions of legislation he could not summon the courage to veto. The 2003 prize was won the Globe’s spotlight team for their uncovering of the sex abuse scandal in the local and national Catholic churches.

These were hardly prizes awarded for art criticism, however valuable those forms of recognition may be. They were what newspapers do that no other institution or platform in America can yet do, which is to generate facts about and attention to serious, yet undiscovered problems in everyday life.

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