Month: December 2012

At the Project Neon blog and free iPhone app, Kirsten Hively photographs and maps New York's best neon signs. From an interview with Hively:

Neon gas is red, but neon signs use other gases, too. Different noble gases produce different colors. Argon, which can make a bright blue or light lavender color, is the most common. Xenon, krypton, and helium are also used but less often. You can also put a gas in a tube colored with a phosphorescent powder coating. So if you put neon in a yellow tube, you get an orangish color.

One amazing relic of the golden age of neon are the suitcases carried by neon salesmen. They contained every color they could make. The suitcases are so beautiful. You open them up, and there’s a little switch for each tube. If you turn them all on—which you’re not really supposed to do—you just get this incredible rainbow radiating out of the suitcase. It must have been so magical when a salesman walked into a little shop and opened up his suitcase, especially when neon signs were first starting to catch on.

Documenting the signs today can help save them:

If even one person goes into a store, besides me, and says, "I love your sign," then it’s more likely the owner’s going to keep their sign, take care of it, and be proud about it. But neon is in a hard period of history, when it’s no longer new enough to be cool or high-tech, but it’s not old enough to fall under the protection of historic preservation. That’s a difficult period of history to try to preserve anything, but I don’t think neon’s going to disappear. It has enough of an appeal that it’s at least going to thrive as a niche market.

(Vintage neon-salesman suitcase photographed by Marna Anderson)

In response to Douthat's concerns about the fertility rate, Ann Friedman assesses the cost of having a kid:

[T]he decadent thing is having children, not remaining kid-free. Last year, the Department of Agriculture estimated a middle-income couple spent $12,290 to $14,320 a year per child. More recently, the Times' Nadia Taha published her calculations of how much it would cost her and her husband to have a child: A safer apartment. A better health-insurance plan. Lost wages. College. Total lifetime tab? $1.8 million.

Nancy Folbre examines the role government has played:

[M]any programs of the so-called welfare state, often derogated by conservatives as undermining family life, have rather proved a substantial – if not always successful – source of support for child-rearing. Unfortunately, we have socialized the benefits of child-rearing more thoroughly than we have socialized the costs, taxing the working-age population to provide benefits to the elderly through Social Security and Medicare but providing uneven and somewhat unpredictable public support to parents. Single mothers in particular remain far more susceptible to poverty in the United States than in similarly affluent countries.

Recent Dish discussion, sparked by Taha's piece, here.

Today on the Dish, Andrew anticipated the first papal tweet, responded to Dan Savage’s debunking of the idea of “normal” sex, went another round rejecting the possible use of torture as a plot device in Zero Dark Thirty (which he’ll be seeing later this week), and asked readers to help us decide what we should ask the wonderful David Kuo.

In political coverage, Mitch Daniels defended Washington and Colorado’s federalism, Bruce Bartlett summed up the latest GAO debt report, Michael C. Moynihan highlighted some libertarian insights regarding climate change, Masket and Drum offered a rosier assessment of Democrats’ 2014 chances, and Glenn Beck earned an Yglesias nod for wanting to keep government out of marriage. We also aired some pushback from Larison and Greg Scoblete on Beinart’s assertion that Obama is deliberately “standing back” on the mess in Israel, examined voters’ anxieties over the secrecy of their ballots, again explored Obama’s drug policy dilemma(s), and posted some reader rejections to Andrew’s connection of gay marriage to legal weed. Our thread of letters from millennial readers continued as well, this time weighing in on the costs of higher education. In international coverage, Nathan Brown and Ellis Goldberg debated the importance of Egypt’s constitution, Dan Trombly doubted the efficacy of Assad’s chemical weapons in preserving his rule, and Kevin Hartnett celebrated the addition of deaf camera-watchers to a Mexican police force.

In assorted coverage, we marveled at a new gravity-powered light, a kind of innovation Andrew found very promising, though readers later wrote in to let us know it wasn’t exactly gravity that made the light run. Also, readers suggested micropayments as an alternative to journalism paywalls/meters, Alastair Bland worried about our over-reliance on GPS devices, Pareene appreciated the parent-friendly boozing of cruise-ship vacations, Louis C.K. was a magazine-interview anti-hero, Ian Crouch considered how difficult it was to adapt a novel into a film, and Clay Risen explained the history of the anti-Santa Claus (an “evil, goat-horned spirit” named Krampus).We had a lot of fun going through readers’ answers to this week’s VFYW contest, heard about the development of high-tech, practically invisible condoms, listened to some landscape architects’ complaints about 9/11’s effect on the National Mall, and we continued our Roid Age thread with some feminist perspectives from readers. Nicola Twilley reported on what it’s like to work in refrigerated warehouses, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky tried to avoid worshipping the myth of Sylvia Plath, biographer Jonathan Bate was intimidated by the letters of John Keats, Rachel Sagner Buurma shared the history of epigraphs, William Hudson helped us get more meat in our burrito bowls at Chipotle, and David Thomson reviewed a new film that documents a woman’s death that somehow no one noticed for three whole years. Lastly, Snoop Dogg Lion battled Santa Claus in our MHB, we checked in on Michigan’s Right-To-Work fight in our FOTD, and we visited Scotland in the VFYW.

– C.D.

(Photo: Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) walks to the House chamber to speak on the pending ‘fiscal cliff’ negotiations December 11, 2012 in Washington, DC. By Win McNamee/Getty Images)

David Thomson reviews a disturbing documentary, Dreams of a Life, out on DVD this week:

In January 2006, reports broke in London newspapers that Joyce Carol Vincent had been found dead in her bedsit flat in Wood Green, a northern suburb of the city. She was in her late thirties. She had been tall, vivacious and always smartly dressed—she reminded some people of Whitney Houston. She had had an Indian mother and a West Indian father; they were dead now, but Joyce had sisters. No cause of death could be ascertained because she had been dead for nearly three years. The sketch of a corpse was there on the sofa, a window was slightly open, and the television was still playing.

Many people were stopped in their tracks by the story. Was it possible in London, in a building of flats, for a person, an attractive woman, to fade into oblivion, so that no one thought to ask, "Where’s Joyce?" For nearly three years? So many people live alone in a big city, and some are old, less vivid, and without next of kin. They may be missing before they’re gone. But Joyce Vincent did not seem to fit that description. A tremor of anxiety, a fear of societal malfunction, went through London. It seemed like a warning, a measure of the times.

Update from a reader:

The same event happened in New York City a few years ago: "Neighbors Reflect on a Death No One Noticed". The similarities with the case in London are interesting. I share the article with my undergrad classes in psychology because I find it useful for encouraging discussion on a few issues in social psychology.

Another:

I didn't have the wherewithal to go and read Thomson's article about the lady found dead after three years. It wasn't because of the morbid and arresting nature of the story: that's actually quite enthralling. But I find it bewildering and depressing that a large part of the story has to do with the apparent "worth" of the woman due to her being vivacious, well-dressed and good looking, as opposed to some plain Jane.

Another:

I am a long-time Dish reader and technology entrepreneur. You might be interested to know about Plan Alerts. I designed this service primarily for people into risky sports and outdoor activities. You describe your plans, set a check-in deadline, and list contacts. If you don't reset the timer, it notifies your friends of your plans, check in, and location history. You can check in via web, text or phone (even land lines – you can record a message). You can also use it as a persistent check-in tool, so if you go AWOL for more than a day or so, it'll ping your designated contacts. The service is currently in testing and will be available for general use soon.

It's basically a version of a dead man's switch.

Reviewing a new compendium of epigraphs, Rachel Sagner Buurma traces the origins of these flourishes that begin many great books:

[E]pigraphs, as their rich history shows, are not just quotations, and in relegating this book to the Bartlett’s bucket we risk losing a sense of the epigraph’s distinctiveness. Epigraphs (or "mottos" as they were often called) first became popular in Europe during the early eighteenth century, accompanying the growing phenomenon of middle-class reading. Before this moment, to be literate was to be well-versed in the classical tradition. If you could read English, you were likely also familiar with the work of authors like Ovid, Horace, and Virgil. Writers didn’t need the obviousness of an epigraph to tether themselves to previous writers. Their work was shot through with their reading, and their readers almost effortlessly tracked their implicit references to the literary tradition.

But as the middle-class reading public materialized in the middle of the eighteenth century, almost no self-respecting publication could do without an epigraph.

Emerging readers knew the English but not necessarily the classical tradition; they needed a path, a map of literary culture. Epigraphs stuck like burrs to the title pages of books of history, travel, and poetry, and even graced reference works such as Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary. (Johnson’s epigraph from Horace’s Epistles nervously invoked the classical tradition to authorize neologism: New words he’ll use if sanction’d they shall be/ By custom—parent of all novelty.) In this way, epigraphs allowed an author to rightly place (and justify) their work as a piece of the ever-growing literary conversation.

While attending a symposium on Sylvia Plath at Indiana University, which houses many of the poet's artifacts, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky succumbed to an impulse common to "Plath people":

Plath, like no other poet, has been idolized and appropriated and taken ownership of, cast and recast by acolytes as a "suicide doll," as her daughter, Frieda Hughes, once said. For the many years I’ve spent studying Plath, I’ve worried that I might be behaving this way, too, that even my disdain for what I see as the wrong kind of Plath groupies is proprietary in a way I have no right to be. Now, here I was about to perpetrate some suspiciously cultish behavior and check out a relic of this saint, an act that looked a lot like worshipping the myth and forgetting the person and the poet.

The box the hair came in was baby blue and tied with a piece of white cloth ribbon. I hesitated before opening it. The lock was not the weird, scant clipping I was expecting, but a long, sand-colored ponytail, also bound with white ribbon. It had slid towards a corner of the box, strangely imperfect and human. I’d expected my moment with the hair to be one of camp, or self-hate, or of not feeling much of anything. Instead, when I put my hair next to hers to compare, it was hard not to cry.

Union members from around the country rally at the Michigan State Capitol to protest a vote on Right-to-Work legislation on December 11, 2012 in Lansing. Republicans control the Michigan House of Representatives, and Governor Rick Snyder has said he will sign the bill if it is passed. The new law would make requiring financial support of a union as a condition of employment illegal. By Bill Pugliano/Getty Images.

The bill passed, prompting Hoffa to predict a "civil war" in Michigan. Update from a reader: "Ironic that behind the screaming union member are … police exempted from the new law, no?"

Nicola Twilley, who recently covered the "fresh-squeezed" OJ industry, details the experiences of the refrigerated workforce:

When you spend a lot of time in refrigerated spaces, you slow down. In a lot of the frozen food warehouses, workers are not allowed to work alone. You don’t even realize that you are slowing down, and eventually you stop moving. We have these buildings that we maintain at extraordinary expense that we, physically, are not optimized for all. We are not optimized for spaces that slow down decay, to preserve "freshness" — whatever that means — in our fruits, vegetables and meats. On the temporal level, what refrigeration does is so weird. It is an extension that slows everything down.

A reader quotes another:

I’m a female in my late twenties, and maybe the “roid-age” look has affected me. Anything from a swimmer’s build to an Alistair Overeem turns me on. I told my boyfriend of four years at that time I was leaving if he couldn’t drop the gut. (He already had strike one against him since he is a decade older, but you can’t have everything you want. He succeeded and two years later we’re engaged.)

Can you IMAGINE if a male reader wrote in and said, “I told my girlfriend of four years that I was leaving if she didn’t improve her physical appearance in the following, specific bodily way.” Good lord. Your inbox would light up with outraged readers. That the reader in question then goes on to talk about female empowerment and being equal in all ways … geesh. Equal in all ways except for the double standard of it being socially acceptable for women to make conditional demands on their loved ones based on physical appearance, but such behavior would get a man (RIGHTLY) shouted down.

Another writes:

One of your female readers wrote that she “think[s] it’s more female empowerment than the media that drives men to try and look hotter.” I would argue that it’s precisely the reverse. Feminists have for decades (rightly) criticised the objectification of women. What we’re now seeing, and have been seeing for at least the past decade if not longer, is the increasing objectification of men.

In the same way that women are expected to be thin and have big breasts, men are generally expected to have a six-pack, a big chest and no visible body hair. It is entirely possible for members of both sexes to be viewed as sex objects. This should be no cause for feminist celebration, nor is it in any sense evidence for female empowerment.

I wonder what extent this trend is being driven by the increasingly mainstream place of gay culture. The male norm you’re describing is very much one taken from, as you yourself recognise, one particular gay ideal of physical attractiveness (albeit not the only one).

You can read through our entire Roid Age thread here.