Month: September 2009

This apocryphal tale made me chuckle:

"I remember back in the late 1990s, when Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, came to deliver a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.

The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics.

Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.

"With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving replied. 'It subverts meritocracy.' "

Tim Kreider has a very funny and deeply moving account of arrested adolescence. Here is one of the more serious bits:

The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the pardox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.

The crowd is seen during the Techno Parade on September 19, 2009 in Paris, France. By Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images.

Steven Berlin Johnson edited an anthology in which my "Why I Blog" essay and Nick Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid" article appear. Johnson's draws a connection between the two:

No doubt the intensity and immediacy of the feedback has its own disruptive force, making it harder for the blogger to enter the contemplative state that his forebears in the print magazine era might have enjoyed more easily. Sullivan’s description could in fact easily be marshaled in defense of Carr’s dumbing-down argument–except that where Carr sees chaos and distraction, Sullivan sees a new kind of engagement between the author and the audience. Sullivan would be the first to admit that this new kind of engagement is noisier, more offensive, and often more idiotic than any traditional interaction between author and editor. But there is so much useful signal in that noise that most of us who have sampled it find it hard to imagine going back. After all, the countryside was more polite, too. But in the end, most of us chose the city, despite all the chaos and distractions. I think we've made a similar choice with the Web today.

I haven't changed my mind, but I have no idea where this experiment is headed. The Dish is now unrecognizable in many ways from the white-on-navy scroll screen I began on. It has become both a blog and a daily magazine and a news hub and a community of sorts. But that's the fun: it's pure luck to be in a generation that gets to invent a whole new medium. And the invention – and reinvention – is still in its infancy.

Joe Klein highlights this bit from Ahmed Rashid's article on Afghanistan:

US officials told me in April 2008 that President Bush had been warned by his military commanders that Afghanistan was going from bad to worse. More troops and money were needed; reconstruction was at a standstill; pressure had to be put on Pakistan; the elections in April 2009 should be indefinitely postponed. Bush ignored all the advice except for asking the Afghans to postpone the elections until August.

He left everything else to his successor to sort out.

Like everything else: torture, Iraq, the debt, the recession, healthcare. What's staggering to me right now is how some people are still incapable of giving the new guy a break.

Carl Zimmer explores the neuroscience of sex:

Using fMRI, scientists have pinpointed a number of regions of the brain that kick in when people feel sexual desire. As expected, several of them are in the temporal lobe. One of those regions, the amygdala, orchestrates powerful emotions. Another, the hippocampus, manages our memories. It may become active as we associate sights and smells with past sexual experiences. But despite what Freud thought, sexual experiences are not just a matter of primal emotions and associations. The parts of the brain that light up in the fMRI scans include regions that are associated with some of our most sophisticated forms of thought. The anterior insula, for instance, is what we use to reflect on the state of our own bodies (to be aware of the sensation of butterflies in the stomach, say, or of lightness in the head). Brain regions that are associated with understanding the thoughts and intentions of other people also seem linked with sexual feelings.

(Hat tip: Mind Hacks)

Oktoberfest starts today! You might want to keep your flip-flops at home:

Steve Hanke looks at Iran's shattered economy:

Fiscal order, transparency and control are nowhere to be found in Iran. Government expenditures are estimated to have increased – in line with President Ahmadinejad's populist proclivities – by 55% during the fiscal 2007-08 through 2008-09 period. Price controls are widespread. These result in implicit subsidies equal to about 25% of GDP. Explicit subsidies are equal to another 5% of GDP, or about 16% of the central government's expenditures.

Banks are mandated to extend credit to certain favored sectors of the economy. The specific sectors and levels of credit are laid out in Iran's five year development plan. Even things like privatization are perverted in Iran. For example, when state-owned enterprises are privatized, the majority of the shares are often purchased by other state-owned entities, such as pension funds.

Iran's economic policies have put it in a death spiral whose speed is governed, in large part, by the price of oil.

Daniel Menaker takes on the publishing industry:

It's my strong impression that most of the really profitable books for most publishers still come from the mid-list — "surprise" big hits with small or medium advances, such as that memoir by a self-described racial "mutt" of a junior senator from Chicago. Somehow, by luck or word of mouth, these books navigate around the rocks and reefs upon which most of their fleet — even sturdy vessels — founder. This is an old story but one that media giants have not yet heard, or at least not heeded, or so it seems.

Mark Frauenfelder finds a fascinating, informative and truly gross mini-doc of one woman's experience.