I read the first couple pages of the Gladwell article and will finish it when the hard copy arrives. Sure would be cool to get in on that supergenius inventors' club. I think I would qualify. Take my plan to end foreign-oil dependence by burning unread copies of the Oprah Book Club edition of Anna Karenina. That totally would have worked.
[Doug: 5/14/08 15:50]
The Lazy Inventor
Furthering bolstering you argument, Doug, is this New Yorker article. Gladwell reviews evidence that inventions very often turn up nearly simultaneously. Innovative ideas appear to be rather common.
[Ben H.: 5/14/08 08:56]
Mr. Mojo Risin, Mr. Mojo Risin, Mr. MOJO RISIN, MR. MOJO RISIN, GOTTA KEEP ON RISIN', RISIN' RISIN', RISIN' RISIN', RISIN' RISIN' !!!
[Doug: 5/14/08 06:58]
Laziness Vindicated (Finally)
Ben H will recall (because he recalls everything) that when we came to NYC for Christmas, I was talking about starting a small business for the wine retail trade. Specifically, the idea was to lease to wine retailers (or to supermarkets selling wine) a touch-screen device into which customers could place a bottle picked from a shelf to learn all about it, including previous buyers' comments; customers could also post their own comments via the internet. I got as far as downloading a business plan template and writing a few hundred of my own words in it. I then gave up the idea because (1) I wanted keep working on my math project and (2) I figured somebody else had been prototyping the idea already. Yesterday at a supermarket I saw essentially the device I was describing, minus the internet comment part, but that part can't be all that difficult to add on. This goes approximately one sixtieth of the way toward consoling my regret for previous bouts of laziness, like giving up the rhodium idea in 2004.
[Doug: 5/11/08 14:07]
Harvard bureaucrats mastered techniques for responding to critics by waiting them out. Students leave after four years. Politicians rotate on a similar cycle. Harvard endures. The problem arises when the criticism takes on a life apart from the original critics. That seems to be happening with respect to complaints about low endowment payouts. It's not just Chuck Grassley whining anymore. The Mass legislature is considering a bill that would impose a 2.5% tax on college endowments over $1bio. That's almost as much as Harvard's payout! What's the big H going to say? Doesn't its faculty, with one voice (ok, one voice minus Harvey Mansfield) proclaim the progressive creed that "the wealthiest among us" need to pay more taxes? Who's wealthier than the Harvard endowment?
[Ben H.: 5/9/08 07:27]
Being Cheap is Hazardous to Your (Friends') Health
It had been at least five years since we last scavanged furniture off the street, but a rejected bookcase (an Ikea "Billy," most likely) proved irresistible. Unfortunately, while Deb and I wrestled it into the foyer of our building, the stairs defeated us. And while we are cheap enough to swoop vulture-like on abandoned $89 furniture, we lack the effrontery to invite male friends over explicitly for the purpose of moving furniture.
For about a week, it stood just inside out doorway, and I returned nightly to the depressing realization that I would need to slither past a bookcase. It took an out-of-town visitor to end the agony. Thanks Ben H!
[Ben A.: 5/9/08 01:10]
Filet Of Nemo
We were in/around Nice last weekend with some friends and their adorable daughter, pictured, who also happens to be a member of the CHAO*. One of the highlights was a trip to the aquarium of Monaco. Let me tell you, there is a lot of crazy shit going on under the sea. Sawfish, moray eels, bizarre egg sacs, you name it. After our visit I asked their daughter which creature she liked best. No hesitation: "Nemo!" Apparently there was a tank of those orange-and-white-striped fish that Disney made famous. Tonight for dinner, not having any better idea what to do with the snapper filets in the freezer, I covered them with two non-overlapping spice rubs, one of paprika, one of turmeric and coriander in equal measure (both mixed with some salt). The latter was more yellow than white but I tried to deploy the spices so as to evoke Nemo's markings. Once broiled, the dish was pretty good, but it would need some lime mayonnaise or something to be served to guests. Maybe I'll try serving it to our friends but I'm not sure whether their daughter would be excited or horrified.
Here's the result of the 2008 election: McCain governs, Obama McGoverns. You know it, I know it, all of God's children know it. And yet billions of man-hours will be spent pretending that things might be otherwise -- listening to debates, reading election coverage, watching campaign events, writing blog posts like this one. Imagine what might be done with all those man-hours! I'm a fan of ziggurats and it pains me to think how big a ziggurat will fail to be built in the Nevada desert because of this misspent energy. A kilometer high? Two? Argh.
[Doug: 5/8/08 15:06]
The real question is capitalization post-emoticon. I say every third letter. There should really be a "Braydon & Nevaeh's Guide to Style" to replace Strunk & White.
[Ben A.: 5/8/08 07:23]
I was taught a simple rule for capitalization after a colon: when the post-colon verbiage is a direct quote or consists of more than one sentence, you ought to use a capital letter. And, yet, there exists an ambiguity: some say you must capitalize when the sentence before the colon is merely introductory and the post-colon verbiage expresses a rule (which would suggest that in my first sentence, I committed an error).
Frankly, in this era of sms-impoverished orthography, the thought that a couple of guys under the age of 40 are spending time thinking about niceties of punctuation is kind of touching.
[Ben H.: 5/7/08 16:56]
Serious Question
What do you guys think: W(?)hat rule should determine capitalization of the first letter following a colon? I think I remember reading somewhere that if what follows the colon is a complete sentence, then you capitalize, and otherwise you don't. But more and more, all capitalized non-proper words after colons are looking wrong to me.
[Doug: 5/7/08 11:21]
Bloomberg reports this morning that homes prices in the Hamptons fell during the first quarter. Median price dropped by 7.1% and the number of sales fell by 29%. It's pretty much all fun and games (or at least numbers on a spreadsheet) until Wall Streeters' summer homes get hit. Spin that one, Barbara Corcoran!
[Ben H.: 4/30/08 07:27]
It occurs to me that those famous cubical cakes from La Grande Epicerie of Le Bon Marché look a lot like the Kaaba. They could probably sell a lot of Kaaba Cakes to the folks who stay at the George V. Or, alternatively, get themselves a very unfriendly fatwa.
(Note -- I couldn't find a picture of the smooth, classic version of the cake on the web, which has a more striking resemblance. Maybe I will have to buy one and photograph it ... darn ...)
[Doug: 4/28/08 14:56]
Where's The Love?
No pro-Tibet demonstrations on the North Korea leg of the torch tour? Where's the love, guys?
[Doug: 4/28/08 07:47]
Kalb Comparing the Ideal of the Gentleman and the Ideal of Cool
Coolness is more about style. A clumsy attempt to be--not appear to be but be--a gentleman is admirable, because the ideal of the gentleman has moral content. A clumsy attempt to be cool is ridiculous.
He is correct. This observation also explains why, paradoxically, the ideal of the gentleman is more egalitarian than the ideal of coolness. More here[Ben A.: 4/26/08 18:45]
That's awesome Doug.
As a McCain supporter, I have been cheered by the number of transparently bogus suggestions from his camp. My fear has always been that McCain's relative* inability to pander would prove his undoing. Then came the absolutely godawful "gas tax holiday" suggestion. Now that is a sop to middle-class white voters! He's in it to win it!
*This is a key qualification. McCain's successful deployment of the "Straight Talk" brand has infuriated observers (and other politicians) who delight in pointing our examples of his pandering and crooked talk. That's of course fair, but I feel that honesty, in professional politics, is more like a batting average than being left handed. Everyone will pander, everyone will shade the truth. The question is how often relative to the norm.
[Ben A.: 4/25/08 07:42]
McCain Blames Bush For Hurricane Katrina Debacle
He himself is a different kind of conservative -- how shall we say? -- a compassionate conservative. Uh ...
[Doug: 4/25/08 02:34]
When I agreed to join my friends in the pro-Tibet protest the other day, I was acutely aware of its small chances of accomplishing anything. What made me participate anyway was the knowledge that every once in a while, directly or indirectly, this kind of direct display of outrage does accomplish something. Witness the spontaneous protests against 77 tons of Chinese munitions that, without the protests, would soon be raining down on Zimbabwe's political opposition. The linked article says the arms are likely to head back to China.
(P.S. the pro-Tibet protests here did accomplish something: anti-French backlash in China, targeting such companies as Carrefour!)
[Doug: 4/22/08 10:34]
Barbarism Of The Day
From the NYT: Age is likely to play a particularly strong role in the Democratic primary Tuesday in Pennsylvania. The outmigration of young people has left the state with the second-highest proportion of people over 65 in the country, after Florida.
Me: Uncle R, can I take your kippah?
Uncle R: I refuse to relinquish my yarmulke
Me: Do you cling to it?
Uncle R: Yes, yes I do.
[Ben A.: 4/20/08 01:34]
My parents took me to an extreme dining establishment last night, and I think I saw pig-brain mist on the menu. You know, foam is so last year. This year, it's all about mist!
[Ben H.: 4/18/08 13:45]
One thing I've developed slowly over a number of years are what I call "meta-mathematical skills", in a sense that has nothing to do with Gödel's theorems. I mean instead skills that let you make progress on a problem that's likely too hard for you, while remaining sane. Example: when you're frustrated that you're stuck on some complicated issue, and you half-glimpse a way to solve it, your decision on whether to examine this way in more detail must be based on what time it is. Because if it's too late, you risk realizing that your intuition is totally wrong, and then you'll be too frustrated to sleep. Better to kid yourself into thinking that your gut feeling has "all but resolved" the issue and go to bed in that warm glow.
[Doug: 4/17/08 03:08]
L'Air Du Temps
Ben H, I regret I can't be of more assistance in picking the best places to dine in Paris. The only culinary temple we've visited recently is Le Cinq (on my uncle's generous dime) in the Georges V hotel. You can't beat it if opulence is your measure. The food is unimpeachable -- I remember a crab/morel concoction and a sublime "tomme crayeuse" cheese. What made an even more vivid impression were the large gilded inscriptions in the magnificent lobby -- inscriptions in Arabic. It doesn't pay to harbor illusions about who can be blandished into spending four-figure sums on rooms and meals these days! I didn't bother asking the concierge what they meant -- I figured he'd say something about koranic hospitality verses even if, as is more likely, they said "Dial 9 for the blonde-only hooker service".
[Doug: 4/16/08 11:56]
Your lips to God's ears, my friends. Concern for Jinxing aside, I think McCain trounces Obama and loses to Hillary!; the polls don't show this now but that's my judgment of the ultimate disposition of NJ, OH, and PA.
[Ben A.: 4/15/08 18:25]
The guy knows less than nothing about economics. That he is entirely ignorant, however, does not lessen his certitude (or at least his rhetorical certitude). I agree, Doug, with your assessment that he'll win. The Democratic Party will crack at its social faultline. And next election, you and I will have to register with FEC to commit such thoughts to the blogosphere!
[Ben H.: 4/15/08 18:09]
Road Trip!
McCain calls for a suppression of the gasoline tax. "Catastrophic climate change?" "Billions more petrodollars for Allah-addled sheiks?" Sorry, doesn't ring a bell. This squares with the picture of McCain I've been assembling from the media -- valor up the yin-yang, staggeringly off the mark when it comes to proposing new directions for the country. Of course I maintain my prediction that he will win.
[Doug: 4/15/08 12:24]
Contemporary French Literature
Every cultured American will eventually pose this question: Given that France has one of the richest literary traditions anywhere, and that it continues to pride itself on its general level of culture, shouldn't I be reading more contemporary French novels? The answer is no. The reason for this answer is known, but not very widely known, so I thought I'd repeat it here.
First, you've got to make the usual genre fiction vs. Literature-with-a-capital-L distinction. Genre fiction has its devotees here and I gather that French crime novels can be top-notch (Simenon was French, or at least Belgian); in other genres -- sci-fi/fantasy, romans de gare in general -- the French books are like French mass-market movies, slightly inferior versions of the American products.
The fate of Literature-with-a-capital-L has been more dire here. But it's not totally different from its fate in America, so it's worth comparing. In any country the risk is that literature becomes too self-consciously intellectual, too involuted in the sense of writers-writing-for-other-writers, too far removed from the basic business of telling a story and of conveying something true and hopeful about humanity. American literature hasn't totally avoided this risk. We've got our cult of the luminous novel, our writerly prose, and the MFA programs that perpetuate them. "A world where nothing is dry that might be sere" -- that's my stock snark on Michael Chabon's work and I expect it applies more broadly. The overall impression I get of American fiction is that of enormously competent craftsmen putting together ever more elaborate constructions. If this sometimes becomes outright fussiness, you can't help but acknowledge the skill with which they fit all the plot pieces and multiple viewpoints together. And there are plenty of cases where some vital energy still seems to be pulsing beneath. This was my impression, for instance, of Egger's "Heartbreaking Genius" book -- it was widely criticized for being annoyingly self-conscious, but I thought the manic energy propelling the self-consciousness redeemed it. And more broadly speaking, there doesn't seem to be an abyss separating the literature of the NYT Book Review and the broader culture.
Now, as for French literature. French literature is completely involuted. The root cause for this is the strength of a certain nexus of ideals in French culture: seen-it-all world-weariness as the highest good, sitting in a cafe with a notebook as the noblest life, economically useful activity as sin against the holy spirit, the sublimation of ambition into attempts to out-IQ and out-shrug (rather than out-bank, out-sex, out-mansion-with-swimming-pool) one's peers. Not all French people, or even all Parisians, claim these ideals. But there are enough of them that, apparently, (and presumably with some measure of government subsidy), one can make a living writing books for just them.
The big distinction with America is this: whereas the desire to out-IQ one's peers has done some damage to our literature, the desire to out-shrug one's peers has pretty much finished off literature in France. There is just this tremendous laziness here. The ideals I listed above are compatible with using your imagination to conjure foreign lands and peoples, with inventing interesting characters and compelling plots. But they're more compatible with putting as little effort as possible into writing. And so what's occurred is the complete triumph of nombrilisme, navel-gazing. Sitting in your cafe, it's just much easier to write about your girlfriends/boyfriends, your parents, your childhood, than it is to imagine other people. And there's no external incentive for the extra effort -- no more people will purchase your book if it's interesting (although more might end up reading it), and you risk being blacklisted by your guild. "He's pandering to a mass audience" is what your peers will say behind your back, meaning "He's making us look bad".
A couple examples. A few years ago, seeing one Philippe Sollers cited everywhere as being the top guy on the literary totem pole, I bought and read his latest book, called "Une vie divine". I believe it is the worst book I have ever read. It fails on every level. The writing is flat. There is no plot. The characters are all lifeless and exist only to show by comparison how cultured and intelligent the narrator is -- the narrator who, as always in contemporary French literature, is a stand-in for the author. In case you don't get the idea that the narrator is really, really cultured and intellegent, he claims repeatedly that he is (literally) the reincarnation of Friedrich Nietzsche. About a third of the book is quotes from Nietzsche copied and pasted into the text in a totally ham-fisted manner. The only positive thing one could say about the book is that it shows off its author's enormous vocabulary.
Another exercise for literature majors -- see if you can deduce on which pages of this book espressos were brought to Soller's table. At times the writing gets more manic (though no less pointless) -- sentences get shorter. Verbs disappear. Action! Desire! The elemental flux of the Word! Then a few paragraphs later one detects the caffeine exiting via the basement pissoir and we're treated to more pages of Nietzsche. I expect the same analysis could be carried out on most contemporary French Literature.
(I am told by people in the know that Sollers' prominence is now due more to a mafia-boss-like status than to writing skills. A word from him can publish or bury your manuscript.)
More recently, I bought and read the book "Trois jours chez ma mère" by François Weyergans, which won the biggest literary prize here and was generally described as a breath of fresh air for French literature, and also sold really well. This book was fine. The prose is lively. There is a plot. On the other hand it hews so closely to other conventions of l'auto-fiction nombriliste that the phrase "breath of fresh air" seems wrong. The narrator is, as always, a stand-in for the author. There is much talk of writing and of cafes. The narrator's name is François Weyergraf. At some point the narrator starts writing a book called "Trois jours chez ma mère" with a narrator called François Graffenberg, and I think there are other iterations. If this were an American novel, maybe one would draw a chart of narrators and meta-narrators in the hope that some interesting narrative trick would emerge at the end. Here in France one knows that the multiplication of narrators is a consequence of laziness rather than of industry: the author, for lack of doing anything beyond wallowing in his Parisian literary world, has become incapable of separating real people from literary characters, and without some effort at intellectual cleanliness, they all get jumbled up.
Here's a telling passage, page 119: "I just found a letter that I never finished. It dates from last year. I don't remember who I planned to send it to. Sometimes I start letters without knowing who will receive them ... ." Writing in France is no longer about conveying ideas to people. It's a way of life, stirring your coffee and moving your pen, and if eventually somebody pays you for what's come out of your pen, so much the better.
News reports have given me the impression that the college application game has become ever more high stress and competitive. My high school routinely sent kids to the Ivies, but none of us had college application consultants, none of us took test prep, and few us of (I think) engaged in transparently bogus extracurriculars. Now it seems these practices are general.
As a result I often wonder if the 17 year old I was would have a chance in the new world of college admissions. According to this site, the 2008 version of Ben A has a ~44% shot at Harvard. That's much better than I anticipated.
Tibet
Good for you Doug. I hope the Olympics serves as the occasion for much more protest and pressure on the Chinese regime.
[Ben A.: 4/11/08 22:55]
Sweet shades. Now, if I were to have told your 19 year-old self* that you would spend a day, 16 years hence, at a protest rally for Tibet, would you have for a second believed me?
*the one that wrote (very wittily, of course) about seeing HUCTW demonstrators in front of the Union, "nothing warms my heart like the sight of union picketers shivering in the cold."
[Ben H.: 4/8/08 18:51]
I'm happy to say I did my small part for this disruption in Paris today. I spent a few hours at various locations waving the Tibetan flag of my (much shorter) friends Glenn and Valerie. Mainly at the Hôtel de Ville, where a half-hour ceremony was planned. I think the presence of a few hundred demonstrators, the frankly pro-Tibet sympathies of the city government, and the serious disturbances earlier in the day, made the Chinese and the Olympic officials cancel the ceremony for fear of a serious embarrassment -- the flame did not show up there as planned. I don't expect that these demonstrations will actually accomplish anything for Tibet in the short or medium term. But I think if enough people send the message it will have some useful resonance somewhere, sometime. The most surprising thing to me about the demonstrations was how spontaneous they seemed. There didn't seem to be any formal organizations, and hardly any informal ones, coordinating them. Most people there seemed to be like me: encouraged by a friend and quickly convinced that it was worth showing up.
[Doug: 4/7/08 14:56]
A Mind Clouded by Partisanship?
Am I wrong to find this pretty funny?
If anyone asked about his family, he had a sarcastic joke at the ready. When a cluster of marines asked how they could help his father’s campaign, Lance Corporal McCain pretended to call him and then passed on a message: they could carry out the contracts the senator had taken out on his rivals’ lives.
In The Tradition Of Ben A's Underachieving-Ivy-League-Couple Dialogues
[Scene: I am holding our kid who's wearing a pink Polo tennis dress she got as a present]
Me: Both your parents went to Harvard so you'll have to take tennis lessons.
Dao: And violin lessons.
Me: Maybe she can save money and play tennis with the violin. Just make sure you use the flat side.
[Doug: 4/5/08 03:27]
Called It!
The first half of my scenario for Jerome Kerviel becomes reality: He is legally challenging SocGen for firing him (for losing 7 billion dollars). Now we simply wait for the legal system to side with him. This is such a reductio ad absurdum, in fact I think we're witnessing the birth of another logical notion, reductio ad gallium.
[Doug: 4/3/08 05:12]
"His work on the hill itself has an unusual amount of perfection."
Branch Rickey's initial scouting report on Don Drysdale.
Rickey is also the author of one of my favorite lines: "Luck is the residue of design."
[Ben A.: 4/2/08 23:40]
Okay, so I have no self-mastery whatsoever, and will indulge in another comment on the Harvard virgin article. My guess is that there a lot of kids at Harvard who would be better off chaste. I was not among them. Ben H will remember our house tutor, a certain D. Sull, with whom we had something of a contretemps, following my published suggestion that we kill and eat his children. Well, once that blew over, he later said to me that my problem was that I needed to get laid. Truer words were never spoken! But I wonder if the very zeal of official freshman-year sex proselytizers put me off sex. Ben H surely also remembers the sex chat they made us attend. In their list of safe (and implicitly condoned) behaviors (or maybe it was some other campus group's list, same difference) was "urinating on healthy flesh". Needless to say, this became our stock reply for the next four years to questions with no obvious real answer. "What are you doing this weekend?" --"Oh, I don't know, urinating on some healthy flesh."
[Doug: 4/2/08 17:05]
