Month: November 2009

Betsy Phillips has a beef:

The conventional wisdom is that we're living in the era of the death of the book. This is, of course, ridiculous. We live at a time of unprecedented literacy. People love to read. They read all the time. You are, right now, in the middle of reading this.

But I have to say, after seeing the [above] "book trailer," I'm starting to feel like the death of the publishing industry is long overdue. If, for some reason, you can't watch this, it goes like this:

A novelist establishes that he lives in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, and that he is a douche who French-kisses his dog. He has a grandma and thus decided to write a book about meat, which is not really about meat; it's about family. The video literally starts out, "Oh, hello," like we've all for some reason decided to go to Jonathan Safran Foer's house and startle him in his study. It is a trailer that will make you want to immediately go to the bookstore and punch his book, on principle.

The million-dollar question is, will innovative marketing like Mr. Safran Foer's video help save Big Publishing?

Thanks to the Internet, anyone can write AND publish a book (through mechanisms such as lulu.com or other self-publishing ventures). You only need someone who will give you an ISBN and some CIP data, and your book looks as legitimate as a John Grisham novel to customers at Amazon.com. And with the rise of print-on-demand technology, you don't even have to have inventory.

So the question facing authors starts to be the same as the question facing musicians–do you really need the corporation, or can you do it yourself?

More here. I'm hosting a discussion of Jonathans book, Eating Animals, at the Historic Synagogue at 16th and I Street NW Washington DC this coming Tuesday at 7 pm.

Callistei, Second Life, 11.20 pm

Andrew Halcro's final take-down of Going Rogue can be read in full here. Once again, it reveals the endless omissions of salient fact and concoctions of pure fantasy that mark this disgrace of an un-fact-checked, unedited celebrity-vehicle published solely for money and political insurance. Palin revels in the cowardice of a bully:

There is no personal growth in the entire book, from the beginning where she blames the old boy network (Ruedrich, Allen, Stevens, Murkowski) to the final chapter of blaming the new boy network (Schmidt, Bitney, Wallace et al.) she exhibits no personal growth as a person, a candidate or in her role as an elected official.

In every capacity she is always the aggrieved party, even when she is in charge and has the power to change the circumstances. But more importantly, her tale of woe proves one thing; Sarah Palin is no Barracuda, she's more like a spineless jelly fish…

And of course my favorite part she left out was the truthful nature of our very limited and brief discussions prior to the 2006 campaign. 

She left out how we were brought together to meet by Andre McLeod and in fact we only talked twice…twice, about our thoughts regarding the upcoming gubernatorial campaign; once at Cafe Del Mundo in December of 2004 and again in June of 2005 in Palin's living room.

Why did she exaggerate our discussions? Because the third time we met we were both well on the campaign trail and that was the infamous April 19, 2006 meeting at the Hotel Captain Cook when she looked across the table and said: "Andrew, I watch you at these debates with no notes, no papers and yet when asked questions you spout off facts, figures and policies and I'm amazed. But then I look out into the audience and I ask myself, does any of this really matter."

In the end, the self-serving smears of others and fantastic lies about herself will be much more widely understood and known. We have plenty of time.

Kottke highlights the following passage from Matt Zoller Seitz's "Feast":

Cooking, perhaps more than any activity, lets an actor exude absolute physical and intellectual mastery without seeming domineering or smug. Why is that? It's probably because, while cooking is a creative talent that has a certain egotistical component (what good cook isn't proud of his or her skills?), there's something inherently humbling about preparing food for other people. It doesn't matter whether you're a workaday gangster footsoldier giving lessons on how to cook for 20 guys, like Richard Castellano's Clemenza in The Godfather, or a hyper-articulate, super-fussy kitchen philosopher like Tony Shalhoub in Big Night, ("To eat good food is to be close to God…"), when you're cooking, it's ultimately not about you; it's about the people at the table. Their approval and pleasure is the end game.

Read the rest of the essay and watch more sumptuous scenes here.

You won't find the results or analysis in the MSM which is why we have Jim Fallows at the Atlantic. If you did not read his brilliant dismemberment of lazy MSM reporting during the Asian tour, you can reprise the best
Item Two:

Item Three:

Mohammad Khiabani pursues the practice:

The cellphone has become the ultimate arbiter of social class in Iran, replacing the car. A majority of Iranians do not own a car, but a majority of Iranians do own a personal cellphone, which makes the all important pursuit of conspicuous consumption in the Islamic Republic much easier than before. As much as Iranians complain about their perceived backwardness, the entry of cheap East Asian cellphones into the Iran market over the last few years has put them on the vanguard of new forms of social communication — one of which is probably not seen too much in the West. I am referring here to the phenomenon of Bluetooth "sexting." (If you are an easily offended diaspora Iranian pining in nostalgia for the homeland, please click away now.)

I had heard that Bluetooth was being used to send sexually related matter from phone to phone in the Tehran metro. This seems a highly innovative thing to do, since the metro is crowded with hundreds of people in peak hours, and males and females are mostly separated into separate train cars. Therefore sex messaging is as anonymous as one wants it to be. Given that everyone on the metro is constantly poking at their cellphones, one could never know who was the source of an erotic "sext." Solely in the name of science, one day I decided to turn on my Bluetooth and see what happened on my daily metro trip.

I don't think I had even given my phone a "male" name before I was solicited to "receive data" from a certain Maryam. I agreed, and downloaded a picture of a sparkly neon letter "M." Cute, I thought. Maybe this sexting talk was just another tall tale of ribald and Bacchanalian Tehrani youth. A few minutes later, though, some other solicitor asked permission to send a package. This time, it was a photoshopped picture of a buxom Iranian woman's face, in the passenger seat of an SUV, with her hejab still on, pouting her lips at the camera and superimposed text exclamating that I should call her for a good time. I do not think the number on the picture was the number of the phone that sent me the message; it was more likely the Iranian equivalent of the bathroom stall limerick above your ex-girlfriend's number scrawled with a pen knife.

Origami money hats via The Daily What.

Reihan contrasts the two:

When I compare the headlong rush to transform the U.S. health system to the invasion of Iraq, my left-of-center friends react with horror. Though I think of the Iraq invasion as a noble effort plagued by profound conceptual problems, they tend to think of it as the product of a deceptive conspiracy perpetrated by war profiteers and their pseudo-intellectual henchmen.

Suffice it to say, I definitely don't think that the health reform effort is a conspiracy cooked up by health profiteers, though it's easy to see how private health insurers and the pharmaceutical industry and other powerful incumbents benefit. I think of the health reformers as very similar to me when I was at my most fervently hawkish: sincere and mostly pragmatic idealists who are letting their highest hopes become expectations.

I'm sure some of that is in play and Reihan is right to warn of potential mess. But unlike the Iraq war, health insurance reform was a signature issue in the previous campaign debates – both primary and general – and  a clear Obama campaign pledge from the get-go. Unlike the Iraq war, the proposal's long term costs have been inspected closely by the CBO. I know no one who believes that the total final costs over ten years could go from $50 billion to, by some estimates, between $2 trillion and $3 trillion and counting. And I know of no one who thinks the end result will wreck America's international standing.

But yes, more debate and scrutiny. If you really think three decades of failures, a year of campaign debate and a year of legislative wrangling really hasn't aired the issues sufficiently.

A reader writes:

The National Geographic clip on twins was fascinating, not least for the language it used. At eight weeks, the clip says, the brain of a fetus with a Y chromosome is bathed in testosterone. "Not enough, " it hypothesizes, and the brain isn't sexualized to be attracted to women. The clip doesn't say if a fetus without the Y would receives 'too much' testosterone or 'not enough' estrogen at eight weeks to develop a same-sex attraction.

Later, the clip speaks of switches in the brain causing disease, and it flashes back to the gay twins as it emphasizes the word 'disease,' visually implying the gay twin is diseased, the straight twin isn't, because of the way the switches in their genes were activated. In both instances, the underlying tone is a tone of "being gay is wrong, a genetic disease." This tone, it feels to me, forgoes any question of potential gain for same-sex attraction, re-enforcing negative social bias.

I also thought it amazing that the research suggests attraction to men is the norm, attraction to women must be activated with a testosterone bath. I would have assumed the opposite, that attraction to men must be activated. (I am a heterosexual woman.)

Describing natural phenomena that are not of the norm, without describing them as somehow defective or diseased, is difficult given our cultural inheritance. I don't think all of it can be called bigotry as such; most of it is simply driven by majoritarian default assumptions. Freud saw homosexuality as not normal. But he didn't draw any "disease" assumption from that and saw heterosexuality as equally worthy of explanation.