February 18th, 2009 § 9
Encounters at the End of the World gratifies on three levels: it is apocalyptic, it has cute penguins, and it stars a man with a German accent berating us because we are inadequate.
My attention span is such that I am unable to sit through a 7-hour vestigial taste-making ritual, but this A.S. Hamrah Oscar column is so entertaining I wish it were twice as long.
February 12th, 2009 § 1
From the Proceedings of the National Congress on Medical Quackery, held October 6-7, 1961, sponsored by the Food and Drug Administration and the American Medical Association:
“The Keys to Quackery”
William H. Gordon, M.D.
Luncheon speaker—
There is an abiding belief among “con men” that the easiest “mark” is one who believes himself to be “hep.” They demonstrate the soundness of this premise countless times each day. Most people living in the United States believe themselves to be “hep.”
…
Our…scene takes place in a girl’s bedroom, one that could be found in many homes throughout this land. Our star is a girl in her early teens. Invading her privacy, which had been insured by securely locked doors and tightly drawn curtains, one encounters a scene, which if it were not filled with such bright dreams and destined to end with bitter tears of chagin and dissapointment, would be highly ludicrous.
Our player, unattractively clad only in a pair of panties draped over winged hip bones, has knobby knees, spindly legs, and a thin little body with all the curves and contours of a match. She is standing in front of her dresser, looking not in the mirror, but down at two little nubbins on her chest that for all the world have the appearance of two fried eggs. With the magic lotion that arrived only today she is carefully massaging these tiny protuberances, and as she does, her glance falls upon the printed label, “Bust-O-Fill,” price $3.95. What a fitting title! What a reasonable price!
….
The third scene takes place in a second floor back bedroom in a third or fourth rate hotel. Our player, a man no longer young but refusing to accept this obvious fact, has devoted his life exclusively to horses and women. Things have been going rather badly of late. He had cashed in on a lucky pick in the third at Narragansett, but who could remember when he had cashed in on a dame.
While these sobering thoughts were flashing through his mind, he was standing in front of a cracked mirror attached to a knobless dreser. He touched some gret showing through at the temples, removed frayed threads from his cuffs, and casually brushed the toes of one shoe on the back of the other leg.
Our player thoughtfully thumbed through a men’s magazine to something that last night had caught his eye. He read it again: “Men! Why Grown Old? Regain Your Youth. Youth is Yours if You Act Now.”
Into an addressed enveloped went two well handled ten’s and a coupon with a return address. His key was desperation — cold, soul chilling desperation.
February 10th, 2009 § 3
Leslie Chang’s Factory Girls is the best bit of migration-related reportage I’ve read in years. A snippet:
Height was a universal Chinese obsession. In a country that had experience malnutrition and even famine in living memory, heigh signaled fortune, and it functioned as a proxy for class: On any construction sight, the armies of peasant workers were a head shorter than the city people whose homes they were building. For women, height requirements were attached to the more glamorous trades. “If I were only ten centimeters taller,” a young woman who worked in a hair salon told me once, “I could sell cars.”
February 10th, 2009 § 16
I can’t say that I really understand “Octuplet Outrage.” Are we outraged at the $300,000 in medical bills? Or the fact that Nadya Suleman is single and lives with her parents? The desire to produce litters of children does not seem to me a widespread phenomena, and I’m not really worried about an epidemic of aspiring Jon-and-Kates bankrupting the country. I’m more concerned about this impulse, courtesy of Time:
Nadya Suleman said that she wanted lots of children because she had grown up an only child in a dysfunctional family.
How could doctors let her bring so many babies to term?
If there is a problem here, I’m pretty sure it is not that doctors are insufficiently judgmental in matters of female reproduction. Fertility specialists are medical service providers, not religious counselors, not ethicists. I would no more ask a GP whether it is ethical to bring 8 babies to term than I would ask her to hold forth on the existence of souls. Language matters in unequal power relationships, which is why it’s best not to talk of doctors “letting” women terminate pregnancies, “letting” women use hormonal birth control, or “letting” women give birth to whatever it is they want to give birth to. Women are paying for these services; they’re customers, not infants begging for another piece of cake.
January 25th, 2009 § 4
Does anyone in Iowa read this blog? Tomorrow night I’ll be giving a short lecture on migration. The talk is sponsored by Iowa Advocates for Liberty and is part of the university’s Human Rights Week. Assuming that someone other than Will shows up, I expect there will be a contentious discussion afterward. Here’s the info:
“Migration and Human Rights: How Global Apartheid Keeps the Developing World Poor”
Monday, January 26th at 7 pm
1505 Seamans Center, University of Iowa
January 25th, 2009 § 3
This is exciting:
Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.
The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.
It seems hard to believe, but all studies that reveal stereotype threat seem hard to believe, and yet there they are. This kind of thing is why I get so frustrated with social niceties like “I won’t vote for Hillary just because she is a woman” or “I would never vote for a man because of the color of his skin.” Well, why not? “Serious” voters focus on policy and ignore symbolism. But assuming the findings are valid, what educational policy works this well?
January 24th, 2009 § 3
Here I am opining about the week’s news on the penultimate edition of Weekend America. The show is a victim of global economic implosion, and I am sad to see it go. I guess my friend Reihan and I will have to find new ways to embarrass ourselves on the national stage.
Well, there’s always bloggingheads! And here I am chatting with our greatest living essayist, Richard Rodriguez.
January 21st, 2009 § 4
The American obsession with homeownership–as a status marker, as a rite of passage, as a means of ensuring social stability–is surely some small part of the mess we’re in, so it seems worth revisiting this 2002 Claude Fischer paper.
Sociologists and public intellectuals alike often assert that Americans’ increasing residential mobility is a major contributor to the social and emotional difficulties that American families faced at the close of the twentieth century. But this assertion is founded on a false assumption. American residential mobility, commonplaces about “modern rootlessness” notwithstanding, has not increased. (Also, it is not clear that typical mobility does cause problems.) Mobility has decreased, both in long run, since the mid-nineteenth century, and in the short run, since the mid-twentieth century. This is not a startling new discovery. It is well-known to social historians and demographers (I have reported it a few times in print myself), but seems unknown to the general public and to many scholars.
Why are so few people aware of this? Fischer thinks the idea of increasing rootlessness accomodates a “grand narrative of modernization” latent in various academic disciplines. Mobility is assumed to be a feature of modern life, and realities of modern life are to be lamented. What would we call “stability” if morose social commentators were aware of Fischer’s data? I think we’d call it “inertia.”
January 20th, 2009 § 4
Pro-O agitprop like this makes me want to move to Canada and wait for Matt Labash to write an article about me. This would be a better country if the new administrator of our public goods jurisdiction were ushered into office with all the fanfare of a shift change at Target.
That said, I’d like to appoint Chris Rock Official Enumerator of the President’s Responsibilities:
CNN: What are you hoping Barack Obama does for this country? What do you think is his most important task?
Rock: You know, if you’re the president you only have two jobs: peace and money. That’s it. I mean, it’s like, what did Clinton do? We were at peace and we had a budget surplus. That’s it. That’s the gig. The closer you get us to those two goals, you know, that’s pretty much the gig. Is that too much to ask for?
January 16th, 2009 § 11
When Will and I received our visas at the Myanmar embassy in Bangkok, I was taken aside and instructed to “avoid confusion,” and “take care to understand our Myanmar culture,” along with other various other euphemisms for not trying to contact any political prisoners or conduct any journalistic activities. I had assumed there to be a 50 percent possibility that we would not get any visas at all; perhaps an official had seen one of my Myanmar-related pieces in the LA Times or Reason, or perhaps something I had done during my last months living in Burma had led to my blacklisting. But we got our visas, and our warning, and booked our flight to Yangon.
Why we had to fly to Myanmar to find out that I was blacklisted is still something of a mystery. As we were being processed in Yangon, an immigration official typed my passport number into a very, very old computer. Something popped up on her screen. Without a word to me, she called someone over, who summoned someone else, and I watched my passport bounce from hand to hand to hand. There was much furious flipping of the passport pages, much high-pitched Burmese chatter. We were waiting for some still-higher official to call the airport. Will was granted admission and an entry stamp without a problem. When the call came, someone stamped “void” over the still-wet ink on his passport. And we were flown straight back to Bangkok.
I had known that in writing about Myanmar from time to time I was risking being banned from the place–my favorite place–for the rest of my life. But in truth I’d always considered myself too unimportant to garner notice. Does the dictatorship really read the Saturday LA Times? It’s not hard to Google potential visitors, but given the backwardness and incompetence I’d witnessed during my years in Burma, I had doubted that the immigration authorities were familiar with the concept of a search engine. The people I know who are banned are generally quite high up in some organization the junta considers threatening. Lowly freelance journalists slip through all the time, so long as they’re bright enough not to write “freelance journalist” on their visa applications.
Academics and journalists dealing with restrictive governments are used to dealing with this sort of thing. The Far Eastern Economic Review (I think) had a piece a while back about the timidity of Western academics in writing about China; your typical professor of Chinese studies doesn’t want to risk being denied entry to her country of expertise.
There is a tendency among those of us who value freedom of speech to believe that the virtuous thing to do is to speak out, access be damned. I don’t know that that is always the right impulse. I don’t know that I did the right thing in trading access to people trapped in Burma for a few opinion pieces critiquing vapid Western media coverage of the country. The world does not need another American reporter declaring the junta barbaric and incompetent, a position for which there is almost no opposition in the United States. Indeed, those intent on raising awareness have done harm by encouraging both economic sanctions and hardliners within the junta. I have never understood how American “awareness” of the Myanmar situation was supposed to help the Burmese trishaw driver surviving on two meals a day.
There is one young woman in Myanmar who continues to write me from time to time, thanking me for the time I spent coaching her toward competent journalism. I spent months teaching her how to structure a piece, a skill that does not come at all naturally to people raised in countries without an independent journalistic tradition. Surely helping her shape a single article was more important than any Burma-related op-ed I’ve written. And yet I’ve traded the right to go back–to have influence over individual lives–for the right to spill some ink. I am a journalist by nature, and it’s possible that I would do it all over again. But there is at least an argument to be made for playing by the rules of a paranoid military dictatorship to maintain access to the lives inside.
I hope anyone reading this, and considering a trip to Southeast Asia in the future, will drop in on Myanmar for a week or so. Most people will have no problem getting a visa in DC, New York, or Bangkok. Stay at a small, privately owned hotel, drop some cash on restaurants and lacquerware, spend a couple of days marveling over Bagan. The country is more than its government.
December 21st, 2008 § 5
On Weekend America, NPR’s Luke Burbank, the New Yorker’s Bob Mankoff and I discuss shoe-throwing, the auto bailout, and why David Lynch movies are good for your love life. Burbank, as usual, is terrific.
Will and I are (finally!) headed to Myanmar for a couple of weeks, so blogging will be…. difficult. It has been exactly four years since I left Yangon for DC, but I expect it will look much as I left it. We’ll subject you to a photo tour when we return… if we return.
Happy Holidays!
December 14th, 2008 § 5
“In this economy, what we have at home is good enough. In this economy, all bets are off. In this economy, how can you tell what’s for real? In this economy,$3000 is a lot of money. In this economy, NFL blackout rules must change. In this economy, consumers have seen the power of a coupon. In this economy, the social network will be even more necessary. In this economy, everyone has a story. In this economy, The Greater Greensboro Merchants Association says your money is better spent in your own community. How crazy is it in this economy today that people are using up resources at work to watch puppies lounge around? In this economy, we are letting down our guard.”
December 12th, 2008 Comments Off
For people whose ears do not conform to Apple’s standards, and thus cannot use normal earbuds, I highly recommend this EarTunes hat. It’s like buying normal-sized ears that also keep your head warm. Sadly, mine lacks the butterfly pictured below.
December 12th, 2008 § 7
Trying to make sense of this Lauren Hall piece on Linda Hirshman is like trying to drown yourself in the Dead Sea. Publishing vicious attacks on a woman for a book she wrote years ago is just odd. Couching those attacks in a rich fluff of non-sequitur-filled vulgarized evo-psych is a humiliating public display of scientific illiteracy.
Apart from being self-satisfied and intellectually shallow, Hirshman’s arguments are undermined by two philosophical blindspots. The first involves her inability to see or acknowledge the real source of inequality between the sexes.
The major reason that the feminist movement fails to gain ground in the average woman’s life… is that the radical feminists ignore human nature. If how humans behave is socially constructed, we can, of course, construct away sex differences. Social constructionists ignore the past million or so years of human existence, evidence from most of the animal kingdom and almost all mammalian species, and the spoken and unspoken preferences from women themselves, from all cultures and time periods. Women aren’t taught to love babies, and the reaction of a mother on first cuddling her newborn is not the result of either social conditioning or rational calculations… It’s hormones, it’s biology, and, unfortunately for the feminists, for most women, it’s destiny. We want to have and hold children because that’s how our bodies are set up.
Check out Hall’s transparently selective acquiescence to nature. I assume she believes we should resist certain “natural” impulses–defecating in public, sleeping with people to whom are not pair-bonded, slaughtering outsiders. But in the event that various impulses reinforce Hall’s politically conservative assumptions, resistance is suddenly an outrageous defiance of the natural order. We must have lots of babies because “that’s how our bodies are set up,” civilization be damned. I look forward to Hall’s argument in favor of giving up in the face heroin addiction, as an addict’s brain is “set up” to demand more of the same. And I assume that were her students at the Rochester Institute of Technology to start a hot class-wide orgy on the classroom floor, Ms. Hall would throw up her hands and say “It’s hormones!” Carry on, nothing to be done about it, you can’t be happy if you resist nature. Culture, after all, is a myth perpetuated by women’s studies departments.
The fatal flaw in this poor man’s evo psych is its suspicious willingness to view any current social pattern as the inevitable, immutable outcome of evolutionary logic. Hall’s argument could have been given at any point in history to justify any particular racial or gender inequity. Actual evolutionary psychologists understand that social construction and human nature play off of one another, which is why some women can don burqas, others monokinis, without creating massive confusion in the scientific community.
This would all be bad enough without the random attacks on Hirshman and the mischaracterization of her views. I do not think, for instance, that Linda Hirshman believes women need to be “taught to love babies” and rationalize their way into enjoying a “newborn’s cuddle.” I suspect that while she understands the evolutionary drive to reproduce, she also believes that a meaningful life involves a careful weighing of the trade-offs among various goods. She argues (I think) that a full human life involves productive labor, that choice feminism is conceptually flawed, that equality in the workplace has not equalized the division of labor in the domestic sphere, and that financial independence is crucial to gender equality. All of that seems accurate to me, though I doubt Hirshman and I would agree on the policy implications of these beliefs.
Instead of trusting that education (or natural rationality) will have given women the analytic skills to take their own lives in hand, Linda Hirshman, a self-proclaimed “philosopher”, probable narcissist, and definite ideologue argues that the domestic life is a degraded life…Apart from being self-satisfied and intellectually shallow, Hirshman’s arguments are undermined by two philosophical blindspots….
I guess you could call Hirshman a “self-proclaimed ‘philosopher.’” She’s also a professor of philosophy at an elite institution and holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Illinois. And… probable narcissist? Keep in mind that this not a blog post; it’s an attempt at journalism published in the web magazine Culture11 and promoted on their front page.
Is this what happens when traditionalists decide to embrace their mammalian status? Because next to this stuff the explanatory powers of Kirk Cameron & co. look truly impressive.
