ducksanddrakes

Before I was born my father was a paleontologist at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. We had all kinds of stuff around the house that he “borrowed” while he was on surveys and never gave back — flashlights, tents, sleeping bags, instruments. Also, he still had friends at the Museum, so whenever we visited I got to go in the side entrance, meet scientists, see store-rooms, and check out the laboratories where they remove rock from fossilized dinosaurs using small drills and dental equipment.

Jealous?

During one of these visits, I heard about – but never saw – the famous “bug room.” See, whenever an exotic animal dies at the zoo or wherever, the museum is supposed to preserve its bones for study. Staff carefully dismember the carcass. Then they put the bits and pieces into a pitch-dark room full of thousands of skin beetles and other carnivorous bugs and wait a few days until the pieces were picked clean. Despite all our technology, it seems, nobody has ever come up with a gentler or more efficient way to free a gibbon from its ligaments or liberate a tiger from its meat.

Of course, that’s the kind of story that eleven year-old kids go bonkers over. So maybe it was a lie. I never saw the room. Still: it’s the of kind idea that haunts you.

Anyway, one time I went to visit the museum with my dad and my aunt. She had a job as an archivist at a huge bank. I went to work with her once or twice and she showed me photographs of remote prairie villages in the 1930′s. I also got to see the vault, which is dug right into the bedrock underneath Bay Street. My aunt had a Master’s degree in art. Her apartment was all hardcover books and color-blocked canvases. She and my dad hated each other’s guts, but while I was a kid I still got to go and stay with her from time to time. She’d take me to the big city mall, to book fairs, to jazz clubs. She took me on my first ride on a subway.

At the museum, we saw the collection of Chinese artifacts. The museum has a world-class collection from the Yuan dynasty. Rumor has it that a lot of it was illegally smuggled out of China in the 1930’s by an Anglican bishop who stuffed artifacts into the baggage of traveling missionaries. My dad’s friends told stories of their predecessors lifting whole trainloads of priceless ancient relics from warlords with no immediate use for their own national patrimony. It’s a great collection, see it some time.

Anyway, after our visit, we met up with my dad and were confronted by a group of homeless people asking for money. It was one after the other down the block, asking for change, for food, anything. All kinds of people – men, women, old and young. Panhandlers hang out around the Museum because the tourists flock there in the summer; Toronto didn’t really have a whole lot of attractions back then.

My dad grew up in India, so he knew a thing or two about panhandlers. He’s a gently guy, but he still called them “beggars,” muttering something about how they’re all lazy sons-of-bitches and just trying to get drunk. This bothered me. He enjoyed saying it too much. That made him seem weak. It’s not fitting to demean other people like that, to delight in judging them.

My aunt gave a look and stopped, deciding to exploit this teachable moment, perhaps because she never had any children of her own. She pointed to the oldest of the homeless people as if he were suddenly under glass. She explained that what made us different from that guy was exactly nothing. There but for the grace of God. The guy looked at me with a little bit of pity. Or maybe he had a severe untreated mental illness, like many homeless people. Or maybe this happened to him a hundred times a day. Or maybe he was trying to figure out how to turn the situation to his advantage. That’s what I’d do.

We walked on, giving nothing, taking nothing. There was no harm done, apparently. Both my aunt and my dad thought they’d triumphed, but the truth is they were both just being cheap, in different ways.

Everybody’s a plunderer.

Years later, I learned that my Aunt was an anti-Semite. She believed that Jews, homosexuals and the French were working together to take over the world. What a compendium of paranoia! I felt ripped-off.

“I began the work by visiting a rubber plant in India and an iceberg lettuce farm in Arizona. Then I designed a telekinetic machine.” Video artist Mika Rottenberg on her recent work, Squeeze.

The New York Times has discontinued it’s humor blog, “a function of the reality of limited resources in a medium where any number of worthy experiments are possible, but all can’t be sustained.” Check out this sign-off, with an old bit from Laurel & Hardy — a little light humor for ongoing tough times.

Evgeny Morozov can really unpack the rhetoric of Internet enthusiasm. His review of Clay Shirky’s new Cognitive Surplus: “Shirky’s digital populism not only blinds him, McLuhan-style, to inconvenient facts, it blinds him to the immense complexities and competing values inherent in democratic societies. He says he is writing about Western democracies, but they are unrecognizable in his book, for they appear to have been sterilized completely of social conflict …”

Ever wonder which dystopian novel is expresses who you are as a person — Player Piano, Snow Crash, The Handmaid’s Tale? There’s a quiz for everything.

Have you read Gene Weingarten’s piece on the lost art of the headline? It’s terrific: “Early this year, the print edition of The Post had this great headline on a story about Conan O’Brien’s decision to quit rather than accept a later time slot: ‘Better never than late.’ Online, it was changed to ‘Conan O’Brien won’t give up “Tonight Show” time slot to make room for Jay Leno.’”

“In a house with two young boys, two young cats, and two aging dogs, odd repetitive noises can only mean trouble:”  Writer Oronte Churm has been disturbing old dust and is now beset by coincidences involving boy scout merit badges and pink dolphins.

Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind is causing a stir. Read D.G. Myers’ review: “With gentle logic and a zinging prose, Robinson shows that the modern enemies of mind, those who engage in ‘a hermeneutics of condescension,’ claim the authority of science without practicing ‘the self-discipline or self-criticism for which science is distinguished.’ In the end, thought without mind is self-refuting.”

“What would you do with a souvenir threat? Carry it in your wallet like a talisman and brandish it at surly cashiers?” At TNR Ruth Franklin attends a reading of threats by Amelia Gray, and wonders why it is that women poets nowadays are so reticent to express red-blooded anger.

I’ve been doing some reading about the life of Pythagoras. According to one legend, the ancient philosopher once miraculously overcame the bite of a poisonous snake. Know how? He bit it right back. I love that story.

When I heard about Mel Gibson’s new bigoted rant, it got me thinking about his old bigoted rants, and pretty soon I was thinking about rants in general, which finally made me think of Shakespeare.

You probably know that Gibson starred in Franco Zeffirelli’s Hamlet back in 1990. To promote the film Gibson also made a video entitled Mel Gibson Goes Back to School, in which he toured high schools doing play readings with students. In the video, Gibson says that his favorite passage from Hamlet is a soliloquy from Act 1, Scene 2. The monologue starts like this:

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

What a tantrum! In this unweeded garden of verbiage there are eight exclamation points and just one full stop. T.S. Eliot famously argued that Hamlet’s problem is that he seems to lack an “objective correlative” for his emotions. Sure, Hamlet is furious about his mother’s decision to marry his uncle just a month after his father’s death, but nothing has actually happened on stage yet to turn that brooding into a wish for the canonization of oblivion. In other words, it’s the hissiness that’s baffling. Eliot:

The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse.

Does Gibson? Let’s compare diatribes. His tirade against girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva starts out as a complaint about whether or not she lied to him about having breast implants, which strikes me as an infinitely trivial objective correlative for what ensues.

Gibson: So you’re not lying to me about fake tits?

Grigorieva: I never have.

Gibson: Yes yes you did. You said they weren’t, you fucking lied to me.

Grigorieva: I didn’t. I never said anything of the kind. You never asked me I never told you. Or maybe you asked me but I never lied about this.

Gibson: [Sighs] I’m a liar, who cares. They look ridiculous, get rid of them why don’t you. Anyway …

Grigorieva: That’s none of your fucking business.
Gibson: It is, it is I’m just telling you, it’s just an appraisal. Keep em if you want. Look stupid. See if I give a fuck. But they’re too big and they look stupid.

“Appraisal?” Yuck. What is it with Mel Gibson and breasts — remember when he called that LAPD officer “sugar tits?” Onward:

Gibson:  They look like a Vegas bitch, like a Vegas whore. And you go around sashaying in your tight clothes and stuff. I won’t stand for that anymore …

Grigorieva: I don’t walk around in tight clothes, I stay at home for most of the time.

Gibson: … You go out in public and it’s a fucking embarrassment to me. You look like a fucking bitch in heat. And if you get raped by a pack of ni**ers it will be your fault. Alright? You are provocatively dressed all the time with your fake boobs that you feel you have to show off in tight outfits and tight pants and you see your pussy from behind and that GREEN thing today was enough. THAT’s provocative, okay?  I’m telling you, I’m just telling you the truth. I don’t like it. I don’t want that woman. I don’t want you. I don’t BELIEVE you anymore. I don’t TRUST you. I don’t LOVE you. I don’t WANT you.

The racial slur is just one reason why Gibson comes across as such a jackwagon. Also, like Hamlet, his intensity is out of all proportion to the situation. In fact, his rage is so excessive that it even undermines his stated position. Gibson clearly does want her, hence the fireworks.

But what is it about her that he wants? That’s hard to ascertain. Gibson starts out like a parent chastising a teenage daughter for wearing a short skirt to church, but by the end of the rant his tone sounds more like a teenager himself, bitching about being grounded, stomping around his room until his hormones subside. I’m surprised he doesn’t threaten to run away from home. Maybe Mel didn’t quite make it back to school, but he seems to have made it back to the schoolyard.

Which brings me back to the soliloquy, and it’s second obvious feature — Hamlet’s obsession with his mother’s sex life, which is just as involved as Gibson’s. Here is the second half of the monologue, in which Hamlet describes the suspicious brevity of Gertrude’s mourning before she up and married Claudius:

Let me not think on’t–Frailty, thy name is woman!–
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears:–why she, even she–
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer–married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

Whatever else he intends to express with all the galled eyes, dexterous events and incestuous sheets, it’s pretty clear that Hamlet gets self-righteous satisfaction from judging the sexuality of women, particularly his mother. Sure, he’s  tormented by his mother’s degradation, but the fine detail in his imagination suggests that he also gets a kind of enjoyment out of the torment. So does Gibson. That’s part of what’s so revealing about the rape comment. My theory is that Gibson relishes imagining this scenario with the provocative dress — you can picture him sitting around thinking about it, turning it over in his mind, coming back to it when he gets distracted by something else. That’s the kind of guy that he is, and it fits in with his racism and paranoid anti-semitism. His misogyny and bigotry are but manifestations of a deeper poverty of character that is the propensity for seething, childish, obsessive fixation.

That’s what makes him scary. He’s the kind of person that you don’t want to think about you in moments when he is all alone with his thoughts.

For me, Hamlet‘s ultimately about just this spiritual illness. Sure, there are plenty of problems with the play, but what isn’t a problem is the way that Shakespeare gradually unravels his hero’s weary, stale, flat and unprofitable propensity for morbid fixation, orchestrating accidents that tease from Hamlet the appropriate level of action needed to bring equilibrium to the world of the play. No other character is really like that in Shakespeare’s fiction. That’s why Hamlet’s rants — as gross, misogynistic and immoderate as they are — always come across as more reflective than rude.

So while Mel Gibson’s career may be finished, I’m surprised to discover that I still hold out hope for his immortal soul. At least he’s got an appreciation for the very literary parable that is best able to draw him out of his infantile egomania.

In romance, do opposites really attract? Nah. Journalist David McRaney has been reading the research.

Not only are you more likely to be attracted to and marry people of the same culture, religion and status, but you’ll probably stick by them in the long run. Why? Well,

People who are more like you are more fun to be around, easier to talk to and more likely to like the same movies and TV shows you do. They’ve read the same books and loved them as much as you did. If they have yet to read those books, you can look forward to introducing them to your favorites.

When you discover new things, you respond to them in a similar way. You say, “That’s awesome!” They say, “Yeah, that’s really cool.”

When you find someone who matches up with your personality, they validate your beliefs and world-view, they confirm your outlook.

McRaney’s overall reading of the research rings true, but the reasoning in his post could be spruced up.

First, “likeness” is not clearly defined. One study focuses on religion, another focuses on sense of humor, another on appearance, while yet more compare several criteria. McRaney’s argument conceptualizes all of these forms of “similarity” as relatively interchangeable. To me, sharing religion is one thing, having the same favorite episode of Lost is something else, and genetic homology is a different thing. Lumping them all together seems counterintuitive.

Defining terms is important for any argument, but the problem is especially acute here because the nature of similarity is part of the mythology of romance. When I teach Pride and Prejudice, I ask my students to consider how Austen encourages us to assess the characters relative to one another at various junctures in the novel. Students instinctively grade characters according to class status. Using that criterion, it’s easy to see how unlikely the pairing of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy really is. But what if we consider the characters based on who comes off as the “coolest?” Whatever separates them, Elizabeth and Darcy seem far cooler than virtually anyone else in the novel, and if the capacity to intrigue us and invite speculative admiration is the basis for assessment, then the marriage seems inevitable. Which of these two criteria should we follow – class, cool, neither? McRaney’s conclusions ought to give us some equipment to know when to discard one criterion or another.

My point is that when it comes to romance, some similarities and oppositions are invariably more prominent than others. Good novelists manipulate that discrepancy, but good social researchers should control for it.

My second criticism has to do with the nature of the argument. I wish that McRaney did not merely expose the falsehood of the “opposites attract” idea, but also asked what that falsehood itself might mean. Dispelling myths is super, but I want to know where those myths come from, what values underlie them, and what forces perpetuate them. In many instances, a myth is less interesting than its stubborn persistence.

McRaney does point us in exactly the right direction. Here are some of the conclusions he draws from the literature:

Most people want a partner with whom they share a lot in common, not who challenges their every notion of how the world works.So, what about choosing someone who looks like you. Does it go that far? Are you really that much like Narcissus pining away at his reflection?

Maybe.

[...]

It seems as though you are looking for someone with a great outlook on life and a wonderful sense of humor, and the rubric, the standard by which you judge potential mates, is you.

The allusion to Narcissus is smart, but not in the way that McRaney thinks. A mirrored reflection is not a likeness of the self. Instead, a mirror shows us the reverse of ourselves, so Narcissus was attracted to his precise opposite. Perhaps a similar effect obtains in real life: the more similar our lover is, the less similar he or she appears to be. While we love people who reaffirm our world-view, we love them best when they appear not to. And so there is a relationship between the delusion of our preferences and our actual preferences. Deep down, we may want somebody just like ourselves, but in order to find that person in the mirror of the outer world, we have no choice but to seek that which our senses will identify as our reverse.

This lines right up with the Narcissus fable. According to Ovid, Narcissus eventually did realize that it was only his own reflection before his eyes. Only after attaining this awareness and continuing to abide in the illusion did Narcissus pine away. Here’s what Narcissus says in the moment of realization:

Alas! I am myself the boy I see. I know it: my own reflection does not decieve me. I am on fire with love for my own self. It is I who kindle the flames which I must endure. What should I do? Woo or be wooed? But what then shall I seek by my wooing? What I desire I have. My very plenty makes me poor. How I wish I could separate myself from my body!

Dang. Nobody needs that kind of metaphysical anxiety. Moral of the story? Sure, the belief that opposites attract is a deception, but perhaps it’s one better left undisturbed.

There’s an upcoming show at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Alexander Calder’s influence on sculpture (inset: Nathan Carter, Traveling Language Machine with #3 Frequency Disruptor and Disinformation Numbers Station, 2007). Did you know that Calder once designed costumes for radio plays? Yes, I said costumes.

Conjurer James Randi has spent 1 hour and 44 minutes in a submerged steel coffin. How did he do it? “It’s a matter of using some common sense to start with. You don’t want to use up a lot of oxygen …”

Here’s a mischievous new initiative: in the U.K. poets are eavesdropping on strangers and turning the phrases they overhear into poetry. The idea is to “bring writers out of their sweaty garrets and into the streets and coffee houses.” Who will be most embarrassed by this, I wonder.

Screw the new iPhone. If you want to really bring the action to life, check out these vintage VCR advertisements.

What is a museum? “A place for a secular ritual,” says Tino Sehgal, “where categories that constitute the basis of our society are enacted and exercised.” After what he pulled at the Guggenheim, he should know.

Stephen Burt surmises that social networking isn’t an addiction, but … “Anyone who regrets time spent online, anyone who spends hours clicking on photos and links and then asks where his morning has gone, has experienced at least a bit of the feeling that addicts know: the sense that our brains’ pleasure centres, our immediate impulses, have led us astray.” Want to read more? Go ahead, click the link. You know you want to. No one’s watching.

And, finally: ever wonder what makes the red pen the mightiest of all? An expert reflects.

This blog is shutting down for a few weeks. It’s about time that I took a hike.

Yesterday I caught an interesting NPR interview in which Neil Conan interviewed journalist Kathryn Schulz about her new book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. Isn’t that a cracking good subtitle? I think so too.

Schulz focuses in part on the curious phenomenon that many of the truths we adhere to most passionately — the Big Bang Theory, tide patterns in the ocean, global warming — are things we have never really bothered to study directly. Schulz:

But this is actually, I think, a really wonderful thing about human beings. We’re able to take advantage of one another’s minds and of one another’s expertise. And that’s important.

We wouldn’t be able to understand or enjoy, you know, most of the world around us if other people weren’t experts in things that we’re not. But it does mean that we’re inevitably relying on someone else, and quite often, when we say that we’re right, what we really mean is, well, I believe that this other person is right.

I don’t mean to be curmudgeonly, but I worry about this. Is it fitting to invest one’s passion in a belief when you haven’t done the homework? One of the maddening things about public discourse nowadays is that there is no real relation between the fervor we have for beliefs and the time we took to bone up on the evidence behind them. So a pundit can express limitless disgust over a bill without having read it, or accuse someone of failing to do something that they have done, and even a subsequent admission of ignorance does not undermine the disgust. Beliefs immunize themselves from the ignominy of error not through abundant proof, but abundant zeal.

It’s as if a student who didn’t do any of the reading has every right to dispute the textual interpretations of the kid who memorized every syllable. That’s pretty crummy.

I’m not arguing that the public sphere sucks any worse than it ever did. Actually, I’m worried that the truth is more insidious: perhaps this situation is an effect of knowledge itself — maybe it’s inherently easier to believe in the expertise of another person because they’re someone else. When the onus is actually on you to do the digging, all of a sudden you appreciate levels of ambiguity in the field of knowledge at hand, and that appreciation can diminish your ability to utter unqualified support. In other words, the less you know the truth the more you can believe the truth.

Another interesting exchange in the interview occurs here, when a health care worker calls in:

DAVID (Caller): Hello, great show, great topic. I used to work in the intensive care units, and often with patients on life support. And there was a lot of pressure to always have the answer. You know, why is this patient’s – his health is declining. We’ve got to keep him alive. What’s going on? There was a lot of pressure to be right all the time and especially the physicians that I worked with.

And now that I’m in a – I find that I’m in a clerical support – or a clinical support role, where I’m more computer-based, and (technical difficulties) it’s just liberating to be able to say, you know what? I don’t know. I don’t have the answer. So I don’t have this pressure to be right all the time, and it’s absolutely liberating to be able to say, you know what? I don’t know.

CONAN: Another phrase a lot of people, you write, Kathryn, have difficulty saying.

Ms. SCHULZ: Absolutely. A lot of us are really uncomfortable with not knowing, with that state of doubt or uncertainty. But David, I think you’re exactly right. I think the capacity to say I don’t know really can be very liberating, and it can open us up to learning and to hearing other people’s opinions and ideas and resolving a situation collaboratively.

I also think the point you make that – you know, you were in a situation of really critical stakes. These are people who are very, very sick, and, of course, everyone wants to know the answer and they want to be able to solve the situation.

And I think that really speaks to the heart of why we hate being wrong, which is that we don’t – we’re terrified of feeling out of control. We’re terrified of not having the answers, and we would sometimes rather assert an incorrect answer than make our peace with the fact that we really don’t know.

This makes me think that the emotions that Schulz describes have less to do with being “right” or “wrong,” and more to do with being certain. As a matter of fact, rightness and wrongness are usually out of our hands. In theory, any belief is liable to debunking. But how much time can we spend in a state of anxiety over that liability? Perhaps our belief in our own correctness is not a fault, but a sophisticated defense mechanism against the more profound anxiety of uncertainty. Thus, the categories of “truth” and “falsehood” are a calculus intended to impose control over a range of levels of certainty that are much more unstable, shifting and relativistic.

According to this view, we declare ourselves convinced less because we are convinced and more because we need to be convinced of something, anything. The truths that we hold to be self-evident are mere bulwarks against the sneaking suspicion that there are no self-evident truths. Being right or wrong is always better than being unsure, and that only comes to light as beliefs pass the diaphanous boundary from truth into error.

Small wonder why we we react childishly when it turns out we’re dead wrong about a model of the universe, a diagnosis or a seemingly clear memory. Our declarations of certainty were pretty childish to begin with.

The other day in The New York Times, Pew Research Center president Andrew Kohut observed that Americans tend to have unreasonable ideas about technological fixes. In the 1990′s, for instance, more folks expected a cure for cancer than a terrorist attack. “Americans have a lot of faith that over the long run technology will solve everything,” Kohut explains, “a sense that somehow we’re going to find a way to fix it.”

At The Chronicle of Higher Ed, blogger Laurie Fendrich responds to this phenomenon. Sure, we invent snazzy laptops and great shampoos, she concedes, “but where’s the evidence that we like and know how to fix things?”

Where indeed. Fendrich takes us back a generation or two ago, to a simpler time …

Most of the women fixed things by sewing and darning. Men, however, often spent hours tinkering away in basements and garages, spending their spare time fiddling around with old vacuum cleaners, broken lamps, toasters, and television sets, or trying to fix a toy train that wouldn’t stop derailing. They’d casually fix the noisy potty by deftly cleaning out the fill valve. Or they’d  climb up on the roof to adjust the antenna until the reception finally stopped crackling. Fix-it types frequently started out working with their fathers, in construction or plumbing or electrical work. A lot of them started out as scrawny high-school kids who’d get hold of, say, a clunker Chevy with a leaky carburetor which they then would patiently take apart, carefully laying out the pieces on an old blanket on the garage floor.

I wonder what it was like to grow up in a Norman Rockwell painting. Sure, the sentimentality is disarming, but I’m not sure that Fendrich’s rose-colored glasses are more trustworthy than the set she is currently critiquing. The antidote for worship of a utopian future is probably not worship the mythical past. At any rate, this is not the kind of “evidence” mentioned in her initial question, so the beguiling passage above is not contributing to the well-being of this argument.

Fendrich proceeds, contrasting the past with the present,

Nowadays, handy men—and handymen—are an increasingly rare breed. When a toaster or a vacuum cleaner dies, forget it. Who knows a handyman? Without a second thought, we ship our broken stuff off to the dump. As for cars, mechanics are as likely as not to run a computer analysis to figure out what’s wrong, and then order a new (computer) part accordingly. The husbands and teenage boys who used to tinker? They’ve taken to hanging out on the computer.

What’s wrong with hanging out on the computer? Those handy with HTML are the successors of those handy with a torque wrench, which makes sense since we spend more time interacting with computers than any other piece of technology. If the industrial age necessitated a little acquaintance with a grease-gun, it’s only natural that the information age requires a grasp of code, and it’s a little fussy to draw a bright line between those tinkering with hardware and those tinkering with software.

Still, one or two factors do separate the guy who can explain bit torrents from the guy who maintains the building. And Fendrich has her finger on one of them:

The only remaining people with real, practical, tinkering knowledge—electricians, plumbers, carpenters, construction workers, and yes, oil riggers—are a separate “class.” Yet they’re often the ones who really know the most about how something works, but are listened to the least. The power is “upstairs,” with the people on the computers.

White middle-class men and women may undertake repairs as a hobby — we live, after all, in the heyday of “do-it-yourself” — but practical knowledge as Fendrich conceives it belongs largely to working-class immigrants. In my neighborhood handymen have last names in Vietnamese, Polish or Spanish. I’m convinced that this is a good thing. Knowledge of rudimentary electronics, car repair or plumbing can give displaced peoples an advantage in labor markets where their educational credentials are not readily recognized and language skills may be imperfect. The importance of valuing this labor is a moral point on which I scrupulously agree with Fendrich, and you should too.

The post concludes this way:

While we may still shout, “Fix it!” when things go wrong, what we really mean is, “Make the problem go away.” We show little evidence in our society that we value practical knowlege—the hunch-filled, hands-on, tinkering approach necessary to fix things. Too bad for us we can’t just walk away from the leaking Gulf well, or better yet, toss it onto a landfill.

I’d actually extend this point: perhaps our relative lack of experience in tinkering is the source of our great faith in technological fixes. During the Rogers Commission investigation into the Challenger disaster, physicist Richard Feynman discovered that NASA engineers expected a failure rate of about one in 100 for Shuttle missions, while NASA managers expected a failure rate of one in 100,000. Many people cite this discrepancy to show that engineering advice is foolishly ignored, but the mismatch of expectations also captures something else — the capacity for utopian projection that can only be generated at a distant remove from the machinery that it describes. Technical problems tend to seem more complex the more you think about them, and since we don’t do that thinking, we erroneously consider them to be readily resolved by somebody else.

Ironically, tossing vacuum cleaners into landfills make us suspect that they are easier to fix, not harder.

Anyway, it’s not our naive faith in technology that worries me, or even our diminishing value for practical knowledge. It’s the erroneous belief that big problems can vanish, rather than linger, transform and fester, which is what usually happens. Even if we could toss the Gulf well into a landfill it wouldn’t really go away, because when you get down to it there is no “away.” You can reshape big problems and manage them, but you can’t “fix” them in the same way you can repair a busted Chevy.

Fendrich believes that we misconceive our solutions, but I suspect that it’s the problems that we fail to grasp maturely. Technology can mitigate some things and aggravate others, but the most intractable naivete of all is the belief that good permanent resolutions even exist in the first place.

I’m obsessed with the live feed of the BP oil spill 5,000 feet below the surface in the Gulf of Mexico, where no human can swim and no unmediated eye can see. It’s not weirdly beautiful, like the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, but it’s way more compelling as a visual experience. A highly inaccessible environment has become visually available to the online public in realtime, and you don’t have to be a media theorist to wonder what that might mean.

In my profession, it is a commonplace to posit that the visual field is extraordinarily malleable, a plenum that is always being shaped by technological developments, aesthetic agendas and other forces of history — especially crises. Thanks to the media, adjustments are always being made to the list of things we imagine ourselves able to see, just as there are always new protocols to help us attach meaning to objects that appear. In the spirit of this hypothesis, here are a few notions that I’ve been kicking around about the BP video feed.

For one thing, not only is this leak something that can be seen, it is also something that must be seen. We watch it to “hold them accountable,” which is a screwy way of thinking about watching a webstream circulated by a congressional subcommittee. Actually, if I worked for BP, I would have made the feed available from the getgo. Why? Because to see the spill is to participate in the belief that we have power over it. Sure, the first time I saw the feed it was scary. But the longer I watch, the less alarm I feel, thanks in part to the calm of the aqueous environment and the sheer abstractness of digital moving imagery. A robotic arm enters the shot, grasping a stray hose; data points are superimposed across the screen; hulking green machinery looms heavily in the distance; clouds of material ripple hypnotically. Such imagery is exactly the opposite of the clips of oil-soaked waterfowl topside. In the anesthetic world of the digital seabed, the victims of the plume are invisible, and the whole situation feels like an exciting hypothetical problem. Considering what’s at stake, that’s pretty evil.

But there is something boring about the image, too. I keep wishing that the shot would pan or drift to explore more of the seabed, the plume, the bottom-life. I keep expecting a stupendous accidental discovery — a colony of fluorescent crabs, a shipwreck, a sea-witch mugging for the camera. According to Siegfried Kracauer, many early photographers emphasized the ability of photography to “stress the fortuitous” — to capture unplanned subject matter. That was part of the thrill, the sense that the world before the lens is partly out of control and that the camera was astute, perceptive, curious. The BP camera lacks this charisma. The camera seems unaware that that it is in the midst of a great adventure in an uncharted world, and there is something disappointing about that disrespect for serendipity.

Finally, while I’m sure that there have been deep water feeds before, this one is noteworthy for its promiscuity — you can watch it on thousands of websites, mobile platforms, on your television. Millions are. The feed gushes out in all directions with the same riotous abandon as the oil that it depicts, and that aggressiveness of presence amplifies the nature of what we see. If the oil is a monster rising from the unconscious depths to punish us for our crappy husbandry of the earth, the images of that process reiterate and extend the attack. Thanks to visual aggrandizement, disaster becomes allegory. That’s one reason that the image is so compelling. Oil rushes up to the Gulf coast wetlands while oleaginous images simultaneously splash on iPads and splitscreens in New York, Norway and Nepal, which makes the event seem less like an engineering accident and more like the fulfillment of some ancient geological vendetta.

So the live feed has effortlessly turned mere leaking oil into a sea monster with a grudge, ascending from the abyss to kill us. What else can it do? Whose side are these pictures on, anyway? Traitors.

Below, a page from Antonin Artaud’s notebook, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic. “The drawings constitute a countervailing centripetal force: their outlines, pointed up by cross-hatching and striation, double back upon themselves; the marks thicken, darken, take on a coal-like quality from the pencil lead being crushed into the paper; rubbings-out proliferate …”

“Our affinities with ancestors may be unconscious but are less attenuated than we imagine:” Patrick Kurp on cutting hay, the poetry of Charles Tomlinson, and the origin of the word “henge.”

Marina Abramovic’s current performance at MoMA is causing a stir — the artist sits in a chair and you sit across from her. Philosopher Arthur C. Danto took his turn: “The question was how long to sit. On the one hand, I thought I could sit there interminably. For a wild moment I thought my physical ailments would fade away, as if I were at Lourdes. I don’t really believe in miracles, but I do believe in courtesy …”

Sure, political compromises get things done. But can the middle course become a fetish? Consider Henry Clay’s 1850 Compromise, which both ended and protected slavery …

Does free will exist? Nah. But according to recent neuroscience, there might be such a thing as a free won’t – “The time gap between observing an internal urge and then taking action on that urge, is long enough to be able to thwart the original urge.” We might not shape our own choices, but we can resist them.

Finally, at the south pole there is a brand-new research station, where the “polies” have a basketball court, a greenhouse, and the chef serves grilled salmon in spicy-sweet chili sauce. “Though the chef is mainly into his cooking, he and everybody else at the Pole are actually part of a giant geopolitical chess game …”

Norm Geras points us to an article in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald by Raj Patel about what’s wrong with America these days, which turns out to be the same thing that’s always been wrong with it — America.

Confused? According to Patel, it all began long ago …

The rot has been there since the beginning, and has been papered over for more than 200 years. The problem stems from this contradiction: Uncle Sam’s freedom has long been bestowed on his richest nephews but the unequal sharing has always been accompanied by generous songs of inclusion and, above all, democracy. Freedom for the rich today is premised on a promise for everyone else for tomorrow.

The comedian George Carlin observed that: ”It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” The Depression-era poet Langston Hughes put it like this in Let America Be America Again: ”all the dreams we’ve dreamed/And all the songs we’ve sung/And all the hopes we’ve held/And all the flags we’ve hung,/The millions who have nothing for our pay -/Except the dream that’s almost dead today.”

Wildly tracing historical equivalencies and over-citing Tocqueville, Patel presents every atrocious event you can think of — from the extermination of native Americans to the 1980′s savings-and-loan scandal — as a single homogeneous mass of perfidy descended from a common point.

And the madness continues:

Today the freedom to vote for one’s leaders is merely a licence to select from a limited range of venal and base people, the liberty to choose between Coke and Pepsi politics. This is not a democracy so much as a complainocracy – where one bunch of bastards can be whined out of office to be replaced by another set, every two to four years.

Yet the promise of freedom amid its grinding absence is also what has generated some of the most inspirational politics of the past century. The organising heydays of the 1930s and 1960s spawned waves of feminism, environmentalism, civil rights consciousness and social justice in the US and around the world.

As Geras notes, it’s weird that Patel’s drippy enthusiasm for the promise of America does not prompt him to reconsider his litany of complaint. After all, according to Patel’s own narrative, the American “rot” nourishes a veritable activist’s utopia. Geras:

Yet this does not give the writer pause; pause to consider whether the picture – of a shitheap – he’s just sketched may not be (how shall I put it?) well, a travesty; pause to give what’s right with America its due, and especially in a comparative light, since something the hell is right with that great country once you stop to think about those waves, and about a number of its other traditions, including, oh, the rule of law, the cultural vibrancy, the unbroken continuity of a democratic tradition, its contribution to the defeat of fascism, to say nothing of the fact that so many people want to go there.

Norm spares one last curiosity of the argument, but I won’t. Check out Patel’s conclusion:

The struggle for change has always been the most democratic, most awake, most realisable part of the American dream. Langston Hughes, towards the end of his indictment, put it wisely: ”O, yes, I say it plain,/America never was America to me,/And yet I swear this oath -/ America will be!”

So. Is what’s wrong with Australia so very different from what’s wrong with America?

I recognize that this is an Australian newspaper, and the author has a right to this cheap hook. That said, the narrative loses so much force if it can be applied to another nation. If Australia’s problems also stem from a pernicious contradiction present at its creation, is the same true for Poland, Laos, Botswana, Denmark? Is the nature of the problem the same, or is its origin point the same? I’m losing track of what we’re actually talking about.

But maybe that’s a good thing. Actually, the last sentence reveals a truth underlying Patel’s reasoning: his complaints have less to do with the American condition per se and more to do with the human condition. That’s one consequence of borrowing a goofy post-lapsarian argot to characterize American history. The rhetoric suggests that the issue isn’t unique to America at all. The issue is the mismatch between aspiration and reality, and America is just a framework that helps us think through that game of promise and cheat. Ironically, this series of complaints about America merely reaffirms it’s status as the exemplar of all human tendencies, be they righteous or wicked.

That just makes things worse. The problem of “the problem of America” is that the nation is too many things to too many people, and this surfeit makes it tantalizingly easy to point out stark hypocrisies and contradictions. But that ease of perception is not the waking insight that Patel rightly seeks; actually it’s the opposite.

Check out the photography of Montreal artist Adad Hannah. Inset: All is Vanity, 2009.

Does intellectual life at Princeton suck? One student wonders. “We do not demand satisfactory defenses from the people that we disagree with, and we do not challenge them, for fear of offending them. We do not take risks …” (h/t Margaret Soltan).

“Anything that looks like a means of evasion or concealment, any attempt by the weaker to overthrow the stronger, inevitably leads toward a more naked and ugly acknowledgment of what cannot be evaded:” Geoffrey O’Brien reviews Alan Rickman’s production of August Strindberg’s Creditors, a play for three characters and two chairs …

I enjoyed this poem by Tanya Olson, who has just won a Joan Leiman Jacobson Poetry Prize. A taste:

When inside the whale, it is best to be
inside the whale. Do what you are inside
the whale to do. Of course, you may use
only what was with you when thrown overboard.
No one packs to go inside the whale.
However, you should not try
to agitate the whale. It doesn’t help
if the whale ejects you too far from shore.
Unfortunately, you have forgotten about shore
and think there is only inside the whale.

Like thousand-year art projects? Good. Check out Jeff Sypeck’s consideration of an Albanian version of a sacred Serbian epic about of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. In the Balkans, as everywhere, the past is not past.

At Big Think, legendary entomologist E. O. Wilson confesses that during the Vietnam War he was part of a secret military project to devise a “sniffer scope” to enable soldiers to detect the smell of the Viet Cong hiding in the jungle. No kidding. “They actually chemically identified more than 100 elements of the human odor …”

Middlesex University has one of the best philosophy departments in the United Kingdom. Naturally, they’ve decided to close it. Want to give the leadership a piece of your mind? Do so here.

And finally: happy 100th birthday (!) to my friend Norman Corwin, the boldest American broadcaster, and the greatest living student of the unadorned voice.

The Journal of Neuroscience has published a Cambridge study in which an MRI was used to scan the brains of gamblers as they played. Some details:

During the experiment, volunteers used an onscreen slot machine with two spinning wheels of icons. When the two icons matched, the volunteer won about 75 cents, and the brain’s reward pathways became active. An icon mismatch was a loss. However, when the wheels stopped within one icon of a match, the outcome was considered a near miss. [Prof. Luke] Clark and his team found that near misses activated the same brain pathways that wins did, even though no reward was given.

Of course, it’s facile to think that human behavior is always about the maximization of reward, since we seldom have enough information about the world or ourselves to make this calculus definitive. But the “near miss” phenomenon does explain why our enjoyment of gambling differs from, say, our enjoyment of food. A gambler gets equal thrill from both winning and almost winning the hand, whereas a diner will never feel true enjoyment from “almost” liking the monkfish.

In gameplay there is no bright line between the optimal and the suboptimal, because actual reward and the possibility of reward are equal but conceptually separated affective states.

This reminds me of a fascinating scene in the script for The Lost Weekend (1945), which director Billy Wilder wrote with Charles Brackett. Don is an alcoholic about to fall off the wagon. Nat is a bartender who knows better than to serve him.

Nat pours the drink, then returns to squeezing lemons, Don picks up the glass, is suddenly acutely aware of the people at the table, of Nat’s eyes. The glass freezes halfway to his mouth. He puts it down and starts playing the nonchalant, casual drinker – the man who can take it or leave it. He fingers the glass, turning it round and round. He takes a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shakes one out, lights it. As he puts the match in the ashtray, his eyes fall on that jigger of whiskey. It’s hard to resist it any longer. He takes a handkerchief from his pocket, wipes his forehead, then his parched mouth. The time has come now. He puts the handkerchief back in his pocket, liftes the glass and drains it in one gulp. Actually, Don doesn’t like the taste of liquor, actively hates it indeed, as a one-legged man might hate the sight of his crutches but need them in order to walk.

Now that he has the drink in him, a kind of relieved grin comes back to Don’s face. He holds the empty Jigger in his hand. Nat has come up with the bar towel to wipe off the wet ring left by the glass.

Don: Don’t wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. The circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning …

It’s a scene with the jitters. Hands juggle lemons, cigarettes, handkerchiefs and towels in a show of kinetic energy that does not settle until the jigger is emptied — even then, the empty glass announces the next disquiet. And the scene overlays artifices, too. Ray Milland plays Don Birnam the alcoholic, who unconvincingly plays Don Birnam the casual drinker. Milland must successfully portray an unsuccessful portrayal. Then there is the heavy-handed dialogue, in which Don confesses his compulsions through geometry; the film unveils the inner truth of a character as if it had not been on exhibit all along. Melodrama has this frustrating propensity to self-explain — that’s what makes it so mystifying.

Despite these affectations, at the center of this scene lies a surprisingly clean and astute point about addiction:

Actually, Don doesn’t like the taste of liquor, actively hates it indeed, as a one-legged man might hate the sight of his crutches but need them in order to walk.

According to this scenario, we certainly have the sense of thrilling anticipation associated with near-misses, but it’s not paired with or outmatched by a potential win. Rather than lighting up pleasurable reward pathways, the alcoholic’s moment of near-satisfaction is concomitant with loathing. That’s what makes addiction seem like a perverse distribution of affective energies — the addict does not even have the possibility of full reward, but instead the guarantee of distress, and this cannot be rationalized into the pattern of risk vs. reward in which many of our quotidian ways of life are rooted.

In other words, Don is a gambler who is aware that the deck is stacked against him, yet he is still playing for those precious near-misses. That’s scary because it’s pathological in a way that should bug viewers who think of themselves as decision-makers that can trust their own instincts. Here we have a guy desperate for something he detests, and that calls into question the very framework of desire.

Do the neural pathways associated with desire cross those associated with loathing? I wouldn’t be surprised.

The good folks at the Illinois Humanities Council pass along this collection of the best author-vs-author insults in history. Below, I offer metacommentary.

Mark Twain on Jane Austen:

Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Yet the words “every time” suggest otherwise. Just how often do you read this book you claim to despise, Mr. Clemens?

Henry James on Edgar Allan Poe

An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Just as a reflection on James is the mark of a decidedly senile form of enthusiasm.

Gore Vidal on John Updike

I can’t stand him. Nobody will think to ask because I’m supposedly jealous; but I out-sell him.

And Stephenie Meyer outsells you, Vidal. Go suck an egg.

Noel Coward on Oscar Wilde:

Am reading more of Oscar Wilde. What a tiresome, affected sod.

Unlike Coward, whose writing is as exciting as a thrill-ride and as serious as a heart attack.

Roger Scruton on George Bernard Shaw:

Concerning no subject would he be deterred by the minor accident of complete ignorance from penning a definitive opinion.

That’s just a fancy way of saying he’s an Irishman.

Wyndham Lewis on Gertrude Stein:

Gertrude Stein’s prose-song is a cold black suet-pudding. We can represent it as a cold suet-roll of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same thing; the same heavy, sticky, opaque mass all through and all along.

Doesn’t this make you wonder about Lewis’ diet? Fun fact: Lewis spent his boyhood at a boarding school in Warwickshire where, centuries ago, they invented the game of rugby.

Anatole France on Emile Zola:

His work is evil, and he is one of those unhappy beings of whom one can say that it would be better had he never been born.

A wise man once said: “Stupidity is far more dangerous than evil, for evil takes a break from time to time, stupidity does not.”

The wise man? Anatole France, who is a little stupid sometimes.

William Faulkner on Mark Twain:

A hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven sure fire literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.

How do you “trick out” a skeleton? Maybe Twain knows, since he spends practically all his time fantasizing about Jane Austen’s bones.

Hemingway on Faulkner:

Have you ever heard of anyone who drank while he worked? You’re thinking of Faulkner. He does sometimes — and I can tell right in the middle of a page when he’s had his first one.

At which point the writing improves immensely. I don’t know what you’re complaining about.

Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire:

The king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.

I’m delighted to learn there is a French word for “nincompoop.” Also, there’s one in Urdu:

Vidal on Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

He is a bad novelist and a fool. The combination usually makes for great popularity in the US.

That explains why Vidal outsells Updike, I guess.

Dylan Thomas on Edith Sitwell:

Isn’t she a poisonous thing of a woman, lying, concealing, flipping, plagiarising, misquoting, and being as clever a crooked literary publicist as ever.

Whereas Thomas is all sweetness and gentility, as evidenced by the above showcase of lightness and tact.

Arnold Bennett on Henry James:

It took me years to ascertain that Henry James’s work was giving me little pleasure….In each case I asked myself: ‘What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it’s going to?’ Question unanswerable! I gave up.

Thus was born the What-the-Dickens school of literary criticism, whose ramifications continue to reverberate through literature departments at venerable institutions of higher learning the world over.

Norman Mailer on Tom Wolfe:

At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred pound woman. Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated. So you read and you grab and you even find delight in some of these mounds of material. Yet all the while you resist — how you resist! — letting three hundred pounds take you over.

Classy, Mailer. No wonder you command such great respect in a profession marked by vast mutual understanding and touching collegiality.

(cross posted at WFTC)

Here’s a question. Economist Bryan Caplan is in the midst of completing a book entitled Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. He’s trying to decide whether or not to cut a potentially controversial passage on cloning from the manuscript.

Here’s the paragraph:

I confess that I take anti-cloning arguments personally.  Not only do they insult the identical twin sons I already have; they insult a son I hope I live to meet.  Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son.  Seriously.  I want to experience the sublime bond I’m sure we’d share.  I’m confident that he’d be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me.  I’m not pushing others to clone themselves.  I’m not asking anyone else to pay for my dream.  I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone.  Is that too much to ask?

Caplan thinks the paragraph ought to stay. Here’s his thinking on why:

(a) it makes a good point, and (b) angry reactions would confirm my broader thesis that many people senselessly oppose assisted reproductive technology.  The downside, of course, is alienating otherwise sympathetic readers.  The upside of the downside is that controversy is excellent publicity.  Should my cloning confession make the final cut?

Advise me.

All right. But what do you want advice about? It’s one thing to ask whether or not the paragraph meets (a) and (b), but it’s a very different thing to ask whether (a) and (b) are things that should be met in the first place. Either you want me to check the prose against the metrics, or you want me to check the metrics.

I guess I’ll do both. However, I should admit I don’t think either question will arrive at the advice that Caplan actually needs. Editorial decisions are more complex than they appear, because they are always about something auditioning for the opportunity to be made flesh, something poised on the cusp of existence. At the end of this post I’ll suggest a different way to think about making decisions in such a situation.

First off, let’s see if Caplan’s paragraph meets his own test.

Does the paragraph make a good point? It’s hard to know, because it isn’t easy to isolate the sentence in which this main point occurs. Perhaps the point is that he wishes to clone himself, but that’s not an arguable statement, since nobody could debate Caplan over his own predilections — it would be like trying to tell somebody that their favorite flavor is not their favorite flavor. Perhaps his main point is that he would “love to be raised by himself.”  Again, not the type of point we normally encounter in propositional discourse, or anywhere outside of a Phillip K. Dick story. Maybe the point is in the second-to-last sentence: “I just want government to leave me and the cloning business alone.” If so, it loses points for predictability (coming from a member of the libertarian Cato Institute), and it’s certainly inferior to the “broader thesis” that “many people senselessly oppose assisted reproductive technology.” Actually, the latter is a fantastic point — it’s just not actually in the paragraph.

Speaking of that larger thesis: will the paragraph provoke reactions that confirm it? Maybe. On the other hand, people could oppose this paragraph for reasons that have nothing to do with reproductive technology. Many will react more negatively to the tone than the substance. The prose is narcissistic, flip, even a little strange – it makes you wonder more about Caplan than about cloning policy. Here’s an astute comment from Adam Ozimek, a respondent to Caplan’s post:

I won’t lie to you Bryan, [the paragraph] makes you sound a little crazy. I think you should keep it in because you have a valuable reputation as someone who is willing to say unpopular things you believe are true, and because it will generate controversy. But it really does make you seem like a nut. A critic might wonder if you’d also want to dance, ride a tandem bicycle, fall in love, and then marry your clone. I’m not suggesting this… I’m just saying a critic might.

Ozimek illustrates how the author becomes the issue, not the policy. That’s a problem — if critics will focus on Caplan’s psychodrama rather than his material, then this paragraph is provoking exactly the wrong controversy.

So how does Caplan’s paragraph do according to his own criteria? I’ll give it a “C” on the main point and a “B -” on its provocation. My advice would be to revise and resubmit.

Let’s move on to the deeper problem of Caplan’s criteria themselves. The first criterion is uncontroversial: if a paragraph has a good point, it should stay. But what about the second criterion? Let’s look at it again.

Angry reactions would confirm my broader thesis that many people senselessly oppose assisted reproductive technology.  The downside, of course, is alienating otherwise sympathetic readers.  The upside of the downside is that controversy is excellent publicity.  Should my cloning confession make the final cut?

Is this book a work of learning, or a stunt? The first sentence seems rooted in the belief that the purpose of publishing books is to provoke reactions that will lead to knowledge only afterward — the book is not a repository of truth, but a means of attaining a truth that is extraneous to itself, a delivery system for launching intellectual grenades, rather than a tome built to last. The other two sentences are evaluating controversy on the basis of how it will help the book sell — the more controversy the better. But what are the limits of that policy? Would it be prudent to make an even bolder proposal just for the sake of doing so? Perhaps Caplan might desire to not only raise a clone of himself, but to enslave it. That would sell more books and lure in more radio hosts.

Where should this book lie on the spectrum from learning to polemic, from G.W.F. Hegel to P.T. Barnum? Without knowing the answer to that question, it is impossible to decide whether or not Caplan’s process of self-evaluation is shrewd.

But there is one tool that will be of help regardless of the intended seriousness, genre or audience of Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. No matter what sort of book this becomes, I suggest, the author should dispose of any and all paragraphs or sentences that he really, really likes. A wise professor once told me that good editing is always about killing your “babies” – getting rid of everything to which you most preciously cling, everything that you guard out of nurturing attachment, any sentence or turn of phrase that you congratulate yourself for too much. Love is for people, not writing. Only after excising anything for which you feel overwhelming parental affection can you achieve the clarity of superior prose.

Consider Caplan’s sentence-fragment “Seriously.” That’s obviously an indulgence, and so it ought to be removed. If the remainder of the paragraph comes across as equally self-indulgent, it should suffer the same fate. That’s the real test we should be applying in editorial situations like this one, because it will produce the one thing that all books need regardless of their intellectual merits, importance or seriousness — good writing.

So here’s my advice on how to approach this editorial question, Prof. Caplan: when it comes to Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, consider infanticide.

Above, one of Jane Mount’s paintings from her “ideal bookshelves” series, which is intimate yet light.

Do you use Twitter? If so, congratulations. Your 140 characters are now part of the Library of Congress. That seems like less of an honor all of a sudden.

At TPM, Mike LaBossiere asks whether cruelty requires the capacity to suffer on the part of the victim. The answer involves footwear, Immanuel Kant, and an android that can cry without meaning it.

Did you know that Lego has “Certified Professionals” who make Lego sculptures full-time? At Smart Set, Morgan Meis reviews the work of Nathan Sawaya, who has solved the formal problem of making Lego art that laughs and cries. “The sculptures are, however, extremely stupid … ”

Have you read Geoffrey Stone’s critique of “originalist” legal philosophy? “[The Constitution] defines our most fundamental rights and protections in open-ended terms: ‘freedom of speech,’ for example, and ‘equal protection of the laws,’ ‘due process of law,’ ‘unreasonable searches and seizures,’ [...] These terms are not self-defining; they did not have clear meanings even to the people who drafted them …”

This list ranks all the authors who were cited more than 500 times in 2007, according to a survey of books and journals in the humanities. Foucault, Bourdieu and Derrida have stratospheric numbers; Lacan is slipping. Know what’s spooky? Only two of these authors (Judith Butler and Bruno Latour) were born after World War II.

Finally, the Vieuxtemps is more or less the best 18th century violin anybody’s ever had under their chin. To find out why, CT technicians at Northwestern Hospital put it through a CT scanner. But is it right to peak under the hood? Test results are currently being compiled, so stay … tuned.