Month: April 2012

I think it's fair to say – for both critics and admirers of Peter Beinart's new book – that its central focus is the occupation of the West Bank and how this imperils both a Jewish and a democratic state in Palestine. So go read Jonathan Rosen's review and try to find one mention of the settlements. They remain for Rosen, as they do for the American Jewish Establishment, invisible.

A case study in how the value of resources can change:

During the early 1800s aluminum was considered the most valuable metal in the world. This is why the capstone to the Washington Monument is made from aluminum, and also why Napoléon III himself threw a banquet for the king of Siam where the honored guests were given aluminum utensils, while the others had to make do with gold.

The price was high because aluminum was abundant but difficult to isolate. In 1886, two chemists figured out how to do it on the cheap: 

Suddenly everyone on the planet had access to ridiculous amounts of cheap, light, pliable metal. Today aluminum is cheap, ubiquitous, and used with a throwaway mind-set. The point is this: when seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible.

(Image by Flickr user pasukaru76)

Marina Adshade reviews new research on real estate agents:

Being attractive, for both listing and selling agents, is associated with higher final sale price for a house, with the effect on house prices of having an attractive listing agent is about twice as large as that of an attractive selling agent. 

Two theories as to why:

Either attractive agents use their physical beauty to compensate for low productivity (i.e., they don’t actually work that hard to sell the house because their attractiveness helps get a higher price). Or they use their beauty to attract better listings that command higher prices but are no better (or worse) at selling them than other agents. The authors of this paper side with the second explanation – that agents don’t actually use their beauty to sell properties more successfully, but rather are better at attracting listings that they can sell for higher prices.

William Langewiesche examines the state of the Camorra, Italy's crime clans:

The Camorra is not an organization like the Mafia that can be separated from society, disciplined in court, or even quite defined. It is an amorphous grouping in Naples and its hinterlands of more than 100 autonomous clans and perhaps 10,000 immediate associates, along with a much larger population of dependents, clients, and friends. It is an understanding, a way of justice, a means of creating wealth and spreading it around.

It has been a part of life in Naples for centuries—far longer than the fragile construct called Italy has even existed. At its strongest it has grown in recent years into a complete parallel world and, in many people’s minds, an alternative to the Italian government, whatever that term may mean. Neapolitans call it "the system" with resignation and pride. The Camorra offers them work, lends them money, protects them from the government, and even suppresses street crime. The problem is that periodically the Camorra also tries to tear itself apart, and when that happens, ordinary Neapolitans need to duck.

Kevin Hartnett opts for writing by hand:

When I write by hand I use shorter, simpler words. In the last year I’ve typed essays that have included the words “garrulous,” “neophyte,” and “bivouacked.” When I’m walking and thinking I never use those words. Instead of “garrulous” I think “talkative” or “annoying sonofabitch.” Instead of “neophyte” I think “inexperienced.” My word choice tends to be simpler; my sentences also tend to be shorter. Because I hold a complete thought in my head before I write it down, my complete thoughts are briefer.

Photographer Richard Ross sheds light on the juvenile justice system:

The U.S. locks up children at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations. The over 60,000 average daily juvenile lockups, a figure estimated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), are also disproportionately young people of color. With an average cost of $80,000 per year to lock up a child, the U.S. spends more than $5 billion annually on youth detention. On top of the cost, in its recent report No Place for Kids, the AECF presents evidence to show that youth incarceration does not reduce recidivism rates, does not benefit public safety and exposes those imprisoned to further abuse and violence.

(Photo: "A 12-year-old in his cell at the Harrison County Juvenile Detention Center in Biloxi, Mississippi. The window has been boarded up from the outside. The facility is operated by Mississippi Security Police, a private company." Courtesy of Richard Ross.)

Signs point to no:

In 2008, Jesse Rissman from Stanford University showed that fMRI scans can reveal if volunteers thought they had seen a face before, but not if they had actually done so. If people are convinced of their lies, or if they have simply forgotten crucial information, the scans will not pick that up.

Update from a reader:

It's important to remember that lying requires intent.  If one believes something that is factually incorrect and then communicates that falsehood, that isn't lying.  Lie detectors may actually be very sensitive to actual lying while completely failing to detect "unintentional falsehood".

Francine du Plessix Gray, who stuttered as a child, reflects on the affliction:

Many stutterers, such as Henry James and the late New York Times critic John Russell, have only been plagued in their native tongues; both men, who spoke excellent French, often switched to that language to calm their impediment. Others are exempted from their defect by attending to specific tasks, or by talking to particular audiences. Stammerers, for instance, speak fluently to animals and small children. They can read aloud to themselves without a stumble. They do not stutter when uttering profanities.

A reader writes:

I'm 58 years old, so it hardly matters anymore. Or so I usually tell myself. But it was extremely painful in my twenties and thirties. My disability is completely hidden in normal circumstances, and would be completely and essentially exposed during sexual intimacy. I was born with my bladder outside my body, no bone where a pubic bone should be, and other slight misplacements in that general area. After several corrective and cosmetic surgeries, my body still neither looks nor functions normally. And I leak urine. The thought of a man seeing my naked body or touching me there makes my entire being shrivel.

I was a very attractive young woman – pretty face, beautiful blue eyes, nice figure. I'm smart, can be charming and funny and interesting. But if a man seems attracted to me, I freeze, shut down, run away.

Because what he cannot know, but I know too well, is that sexual relations would be so complicated, so embarrassing, so fraught, that not only can I not bear to consider a relationship, I can scarcely bear the thought of a date. Because I came of age in the seventies, when dating had one goal – sex. Maybe I could get away with nothing more than a kiss (which I could enjoy) on a first date, but after that, how do I keep his hands from roaming? Beyond the question of when to make the big revelation (the third date?) was always, how do I talk about it? It is so private, so peculiar, so unpleasant. What words do I use, the crude or the clinical?

So in my twenties I was routinely told I was the most "uptight" person they'd ever met; with the two men I really made an effort with, to whom I did reveal my secret, I was ridiculed for my awkwardness and unease (the first time the ridicule made me tell him, but the second guy actually did it after, as a way to say he didn't want to see me again).

I tried to think that my pretty face, my lovely breasts, my nice legs were enough; that my sense of humor would help; that the most important sexual organ is the mind; that the "right" man would see beyond the outward ugliness to the beauty within. But I was either unlucky, or too cowardly, or too proud, or a lethal combination of all of the above. I am a virgin, a spinster; I have never been loved.

I could write a book – I'm trying to write a book – about my 40-year failure at love and romance, an attempt to figure out why I was never able to make the leap to intimacy when others with seemingly worse disabilities could. This is my first anonymous step.

More stories from readers here, here and here.

by Zoë Pollock

Clay Shirky wonders:

I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!” It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high.

Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.”

Nicholas Carr nods:

The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it's pain we're happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That's dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom's spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.

(Image by ICY and SOT in Iran via Street Art Utopia)