Month: March 2012

An age-old dilemma gets its anthem:

Surowiecki expects household formation to pick up as the recovery gains steam:

[I]t’s easy, during a crisis, to mistake a cyclical change for a permanent one, and surveys show no evidence that young Americans are more interested in living with their parents now. [Economist Gary Painter's] study of past recessions shows that, in the past forty years, household formation has slowed notably during downturns but has rebounded as the unemployment rate fell. It seems much more likely that the same will happen this time around than that American aspirations and social norms changed overnight in 2007.

A reader writes:

I think the apparent lack of original rom-coms isn't actually a real lack thereof, but rather a "No true Scotsman" fallacy – i.e. anything that pushes the boundaries of romantic comedy is suddenly not allowed to be called a "rom-com" anymore. Romantic comedies aren't original because one of the unwritten definitions of romantic comedy is its adherence to formula.  If you open up the idea to any comedy themed around romantic relationships, suddenly you're adding Sideways, Up in the Air, High Fidelity, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, last year's Young Adult, and a ton of other movies that would never be labeled by Hollywood marketing departments as "romantic comedies".

Another writes:

I want to thank you for posting the link to O'Hehir's review of Friends With Kids, if for no other reason than that I will never take him seriously as a film critic – and I haven't even seen Friends With Kids. First of all, Bridesmaids is not a romantic comedy. There's a romance, but it's a subplot. It's a buddy comedy. I don't like comparisons of Bridesmaids and The Hangover, but the former is no more of a romantic comedy than the latter. 

Second, what does he mean that there is some Nora Ephron formula for romantic comedies?

The key difference between "classic" romantic comedies and those of today seems to be that characters do not have to be chaste. This has nothing to do with Ephron. Characters act that way in movies today because real human beings act that way today. "The banter is snappy and frank." And how is this different from dialogue in virtually every other form of entertainment? 

The most basic element of the romantic comedy formula has never changed, and will never change. It's very, very simple: There has to be some obstacle that prevents them from getting together. He's a bank robber, she's a U.S. Marshal (Out of Sight). She's a rich and famous movie star, he's a schlub who owns a travel book shop in Notting Hill. Her father hates him. Their families hate each other. He can't commit. She can't commit. They like each other, but not quite enough to be madly in love.

That last one sounds like a formula for a wishy-washy, amorphous blob of a movie. But I've found myself in that situation more than once. That's a formula for romantic comedies today because that's how lots of people feel today. Wasn't that how Jerry and Elaine related to each other on Seinfeld?

(Also, for the record, Jennifer Westfeldt and Jon Hamm are not married. On their respective IMDB pages, they describe themselves as simply being in a relationship with the other. If you're going to write a review about a romantic comedy, it's probably a good idea to get the details of the relationships of the people involved with making it right.)

(Video: A subtitled final scene from Chasing Amy. The male-female romantic ending here.)

Yesterday, the Encyclopedia Britannica announced the shuttering of its print edition. Bob Wright mourns the loss but sees the logic:

Whereas books–novels, biographies–will live on for a long time in electronic form, I don't think the traditional encyclopedia will, even if for now Britannica will survive as a website. The whole idea of a top-down, orchestrated, unified compendium of knowledge makes less and less sense in a world where fact and analysis can arise in a bottom-up way and be organized by technological tools for your edification. (I'm not talking just about Wikipedia, which actually has its top-down elements, but about the whole internet.)

Deven Desai, with an eye towards the $1,395 price tag of the print edition, is happy Britannica has gone all-digital:

Will folks pay for the online version at $70 per year? I would guess not. Nonetheless [Britannica President Jorge] Cauz claims that people interested in expert opinions will turn to Britannica: “Google’s algorithm doesn’t know what’s fact or what’s fiction,” Cauz concedes. “So Wikipedia is often the No. 1 or No. 2 result on search. But I’d bet a lot of money that most people would rather use Britannica than Wikipedia.” So far the evidence seems to be to the contrary.

I agree with Ross Douthat that Yuval Levin's review of Charles Murray's new book is among the most perceptive so far. It helps unpack the argument, while pointing out its weaknesses. To wit:

At the very least, he does not clearly show whether or how the trends at the top are driving those at the bottom.

What Yuval argues is that the moral collapse at the bottom has its own rationale and its own challenges. Getting the elite to proselytize the virtues of later and more durable marriage or thrift is not likely to change much, except as a rhetorical tool to decry elites, which itself is an avoidance of a core cultural problem among the working poor. This is a piercing summary of our problem:

The left wants to re-create [mid-century post-war] America by re-creating the activist state and the powerful labor unions that characterized it, but this stands to make economic dynamism very difficult. The right wants to re-create it by re-creating the economic dynamism it achieved, but this stands to make social cohesion very difficult.

I suspect that Obama is less ambitious: and sees education reform as key. Ross, however, takes aim at the very institutions that once fostered family cohesion and individual responsibility among the poor: the institutional churches. His forthcoming book, Bad Religion, explains more fully the failure of modern Christianity in America to live up to its much more illustrious past. (It's a brilliant piece of work.) I think it takes some courage and intellectual integrity to put church, not state, at the core of our moral and social problems. And this is a courageously true statement:

So far as Murray’s argument is concerned, I think that religious institutions are both one of the areas of American life hit hardest by elite self-segregation (you can’t pastor a church in suburban Buffalo from a corner office in Washington D.C.) and one of the few areas where it’s plausible to imagine his call for elites to leave their cocoons and live among the people actually being answered. 

Institutions are only as strong as their personnel, and the major religious bodies in the United States have struggled mightily since the 1960s to attract large numbers of the best and brightest (and, indeed, large numbers period) to the ministry. This isn’t just a Catholic problem — the Protestant denominations, which allow clergy to marry and often ordain women, have had the same difficulties drawing in and keeping talent — and it’s a hard trend to reverse: In the scramble for money and status that we call meritocracy, a career in the clergy offers little of the former (save to megachurch-builders) and less of the latter than it used to.

But at the same time, religious belief offers one of the most few motivators that might be potent enough to persuade a high-achiever to choose a life outside the SuperZips. (Just ask Ignatius of Loyola, or Francis of Assisi, or …) And even in their weakened state, our religious institutions — with their flar-flung networks of parishes and ministries and schools in need of leadership — offer a more plausible mechanism than most other professions for seeding middle America with the talented and energetic.

No, not the fall campaign yet, but a giant, rare Sumatran corpse-flower, about to bloom at Cornell:

The first person to discover a titan arum took seeds to plant at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the U.K. In 1889, when the plant bloomed, Queen Victoria was ruling, but she sent a court reporter to observe the bloom. The reporter had a simple message for the queen, Niklas said. "Ma'am, don't come. It stinks," the reporter wrote.

So that visitors can smell the bloom for themselves, Cornell is opening its greenhouse to visitors from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. beginning today (March 13) until the bloom is complete.

The image is from the pollen area inside (UC Davis, California). Update from a reader:

As a Cornell alumnus, I couldn’t resist the chance to pass along this link to the corpse-flower live-cam.

It seems to me that one thing we are losing sight of is that in November, the GOP candidate, if he is Romney or Santorum, will be campaigning to launch a new war in the Middle East. It will be one of the starkest contrasts between Romney and Obama, unless Romney flip-flops. But it seems to me that the evangelical fervor for war against Iran and in defense of Israel will make it very hard for Romney to flip. And when the issue is reduced to war or diplomacy, Romney will have a problem. He could even be credibly portrayed as guaranteeing a massive increase in gas prices. And if the Democrats weren't so craven toward the Greater Israel lobby, they could make a strong case that an unnecessary attack could torpedo the recovery.

Now a new poll (pdf) reveals that the US public is saner about all this than their political elites:

Americans show substantial pessimism about Iran and its nuclear program. Six in ten believe that Iran has decided to try to produce nuclear weapons and is actively working to do so. Nine in ten believe that it is likely that Iran will eventually develop nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu is on weak ground with Americans if he decides to act unilaterally:

If Israel goes ahead with a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program and Iran retaliates (but not against American targets), only one in four favors the US providing military support for Israel and only 4 in 10 favor the US providing even diplomatic support. Few would support open opposition. The most popular position is for the US to take a neutral stance.

The chances of an Israeli action alone seem to have abated somewhat – but at the cost of a clear US commitment to do it for them if negotiations fail, as they probably will. But if it happens, the US should abstain in the Security Council.

A reader writes:

I've spent my whole adult life singing in Catholic church choirs, and, like your other readers, I would say most of my colleagues are gay. This is just as true, or more so, in the most traditional parishes, which tend to have more professionals in the music program. For several years I have mostly sung at traditional masses, where the music was plainchant and renaissance polyphony, at several different churches. Almost all of the men I've collaborated over this time have been gay, many of them married. They have had to sit through some sermons over the years that are uncharitably and downright ugly; in stark contrast to the liturgy being celebrated. Mostly they're used to it, I think.

Once when I was directing such a choir, a singer was called out of town when his partner had a medical emergency.

It was during Holy Week: a difficult time to find a substitute on short notice, and I regret that I repeatedly hid the truth from my boss as I scrambled to replace this singer, leaving the nature of the family emergency vague. I did this to avoid outing this person, but what a horrible thing it was that I could not even speak openly for fear of scandal. How cowardly of me! And how complicit in the illusion that same-sex relationships are not real or are "inherently disordered."

Gay organists and singers are a fact of life in the church, even in the most traditional enclaves. They devote their lives, along with their straight colleagues, to making sacred music which is one of the clearest paths to the grace and trancendent beauty of God. I don't know how this difficult situation will be resolved in this present institutional church, or even in this world. But I have known and learned from many gay church musicians, and the church is richer for their contribution, even if they refuse to admit it.

What a sad mess.

Sad and callous.

(Photo: Choir members sing during mass officiated by Roman Catholic Patriarch in Jerusalem Michel Sabbah (not in photo) at the Nativity Church grounds in the biblical West Bank city of Bethlehem on December 25, 2005. By Mus Al-Shaer/AFP/Getty Images)

A reader argues no:

The reason? Republican women voters in the collar counties around Chicago who will not support a rabidly-anti-choice candidate. This was proved in our last gubernatorial election, where the wishy-washy and unpopular Democrat who took over when Rod Blagojevich was indicted, Pat Quinn, beat strident anti-choice Republican Bill Brady (who had won a tight three-way Republican primary). At the same time, that rarest of beasts, moderate Republican Mark Kirk, beat Democrat Alexi Giannulias for Obama’s old Senate seat. Analysis showed that collar-county Republican women split their vote, for Kirk and against Brady, based largely on the choice issue. Downstate hard-core social conservatives (Copperhead country in the Civil War) do not have the numbers to overcome pro-choice women in the northeast of the state.

Meanwhile, Mickey wept.

Here's the Republican Jewish Coalition's rebuttal to Obama's AIPAC speech, featuring Democrats and even the MSM:

An earlier RJC ad here (money quote: "President Obama wants to weaken Israel's security just when it needs it the most"). Below is the Emergency Committee for Israel's version ("devastating," says Jennifer Rubin). You can't catch a bus in this city without a billboard from neo-fascist Michael Goldfarb staring you in the face: 

Before AIPAC, the Emergency Committee released this 30-minute documentary on the Obama administration's relationship with Israel (trailer here): 

Josh Rogin provides context: 

"He didn't quite have a full grasp of what the full region looks like," conservative journalist Lee Smith is shown saying in the video. "This is not how you treat an ally." The ad goes beyond the Israeli issue to suggest that the president is too solicitous of Muslim concerns. The end of the trailer shows Obama saying, "I want to make sure we end before the call to prayer," a clip from his town hall meeting with Turkish students in Istanbul in April 2009.

The video was produced by the group the Emergency Committee for Israel, which has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on its pre-AIPAC publicity campaign, including posters and billboards all over Washington that question Obama's commitment to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. "He says a nuclear Iran is unacceptable. Do you believe him?" the posters read. Then, next to a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini and President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, it says, "Do they?"

The DNC tries to set the record straight:

The Obama campaign issued its own defense a couple of months ago: