April 2013 – Page 27

The Underground Economy

[E]ven though the percentage of Americans officially working has dropped dramatically, and even though household income is still well below what it was in 2007, personal consumption is higher than it was before the recession, and retail sales have been growing briskly (despite a dip in March). Bernard Baumohl, an economist at the Economic Outlook Group, estimates that, based on historical patterns, current retail sales are actually what you’d expect if the unemployment rate were around five or six per cent, rather than the 7.6 per cent we’re stuck with. The difference, he argues, probably reflects workers migrating into the shadow economy. “It’s typical that during recessions people work on the side while collecting unemployment,” Baumohl told me. “But the severity of the recession and the profound weakness of this recovery may mean that a lot more people have entered the underground economy, and have had to stay there longer.”

The Dish’s Full Boston Bombings Coverage

[Re-posted from earlier today]

We’ve put up a page that contains our entire bloggery in both chronological and reverse chronological order. A reader writes:

I’d like to thank you for your coverage of what was going on in Boston so early on Friday morning – I was glued to my phone on an early-morning coach (bus) in middle-of-nowhere England, trying to contact friends and family in Cambridge (MA) and Watertown via Facebook and desperate searching for reliable news that could load onto my mobile before we left a pocket of precious O2 data coverage. At 7 AM BST (2 AM EDT), though, BBC and NYT aren’t updating, nor is Anderson Cooper tweeting away, and straight-up Google searches take too long given the quality of “reporting” too many media outlets provide. Yet there you were, middle of the night, aggregating news as it was coming in, liveblogging mobile-friendly and reasonably-accurate information to concerned readers around the world. So, to Chas, Chris, and all others who pulled Thursday’s Dish all-nighter: thank you.

You’re welcome. It’s what we do and have always done. One of many new subscribers writes:

I thought I would never pay for a website, but you won me over. I’ll admit that I had never read anything you had written until the day Margaret Thatcher died, but was familiar enough with your work that yours was the perspective that I decided was most worth tracking down. Then Friday morning, 3am, I happened to check in. Your team’s judicious choice of tweets was so good, I didn’t even think about following a live feed until about 5 in the morning. Today, I found I couldn’t hit that “Read On” button without feeling like a mooch. So count me in.

You can join her and others by subscribing [tinypass_offer text=”here”]. We’re a small team competing with huge organizations with far more resources. We have no corporate backing or advertizing – which means the only support we have is you if we hope to stay in business. If you’ve used up your ‘read-ons’, please consider taking the leap and subscribing. If all of you with maxed-out read-ons subscribed today, our readership would instantly climb 50 percent – and our future would be far more secure. [tinypass_offer text=”Subscribe!”]

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew pushed back against pundits downplaying the Tsaraev brothers’ religious radicalism, connecting it with a greater refusal to acknowledge the power of fanatic faith. He weighed in on the debate over Mirandizing the surviving suspect, lauded the decision to do so when it came—contrasting this case with justice under Bush—and cautiously tracked Francis’ first few moves as Pope, with an eye to the future.

In more Boston coverage, Rafia Zakaria accounted for the preeminence of American tragedies, we reviewed how news of the bombing is going down at the Kremlin, and we continued to ask whether Boston’s city-wide lockdown was really necessary. Dzokhar Tsarnaev himself supplied the Quote for the Day and Julia Ioffe unpacked the significance of the bombers’ crisis of assimilation in the US while Charles King placed less weight on their link to the Caucasus. Later we watched a remarkable video of marine amputees comforting victims of the Marathon bombing and posted a one-stop shop for last week’s coverage of the Boston bombings.

In political news and views, Beinart dismissed MoDo’s latest critique of Obama’s grit, we gathered some analysis on the Senate’s latest flop on gun legislation, and John Ismay updated Eisenhower’s “chance for peace” speech. Soldiers shared their experiences in our thread on the plight of US veterans, Rod Dreher defended the French against American conservatives, J. Bryan Lowder imagined the next logical step after the lifting of the Boys Scouts’ gay ban.

In miscellanea we learned that the news can be bad for your health and discovered the blowback of drug PSAs. Dean Starkman tracked the crash in WSJ’s longform writing as we read the journal of a professional killer and browsed album reviews by musicians themselves. Angela Watercutter excavated vintage Internet, we watched a grandmother experience virtual reality and Navneet Alang explained anomalous aesthetics.

Elsewhere, Andrew Johnston warned of the fragility of GPS, Kas Thomas deflated the antioxidant theory and Bill Wasik checked the phrase “viral.” Ben Marks studied the blood rust of vintage blades while we tucked our ball chairs away. Finally, we saw the bloody results of French homophobia in the Face of the Day, glanced at a view of Honolulu in the VFYW and chuckled at the less than literary output of celebrities on Twitter in the MHB.

–B.J.

The Shutting Down Of Boston, Ctd

Thoreau notes how Tsarnaev was caught:

The authorities announced that people could again go outside, and then a sharp-eyed citizen noticed something. He escaped from the cops the night before, and was caught thanks to a sharp-eyed citizen once the authorities let people go outside and go about their business.

Marc Tracy adds:

There is no way to definitively play out the what-ifs. Authorities might not have coaxed a lockdown, people might have walked around Watertown, and somebody might have gotten hurt. Conversely, authorities might have kept the lockdown longer than they did, and Tsarnaev, who was taken to a hospital for urgent treatment, might have sat in the boat even longer, undiscovered, and bled to death. We don’t know.

The problem with the lockdown, as a matter of principle, isn’t that it could have prevented us from capturing Tsarnaev alive. Rather, the way Tsarnaev was captured alive is further suggestion that life in America is a Constitutionally codified experiment, and that the worst time to suspend experiments is when you don’t have all the answers.

Ross Anderson believes the shut-down was disproportionate:

In the London bombings, four idiots killed themselves in the first incident with a few dozen bystanders, but the second four failed and ran for it when their bombs didn’t go off. It didn’t occur to anyone to lock down London. They were eventually tracked down and arrested, together with their support team. Digital forensics played a big role; the last bomber to be caught left the country and changed his SIM, but not his IMEI. It’s next to impossible for anyone to escape nowadays if the authorities try hard.

Meanwhile, Alex Seitz-Wald examines the impact of Boston’s shutdown last Friday on workers:

“Most low wage workers can’t afford to lose a day’s pay, and there’s no doubt this lockdown will adversely impact the city’s working poor,” said Jessica Kutch, a labor activist who co-founded the organizing site coworker.org, in an email to Salon. “I’d really like to see employers state on the record that their hourly workers will be paid for the time they were scheduled to work today — but I suspect that most employers will place the burden of this shutdown squarely on the backs of people who can least afford it.”

Previous Dish on the Boston shutdown here, here and here.

(Photo: Investigators work around the boat where Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev was found hiding after a massive manhunt, in the backyard of a Franklin Street home, in an aerial view April 20, 2013 in Watertown, Massachusetts. By Darren McCollester/Getty Images)

Are Musicians The New Critics?

Watch out, Pitchfork:

Musicians think and talk about music all day, so they have lots of practice discussing it. They hear lots of new stuff and find out about it before most people. They certainly know how the sausage is made. And guess what: a lot of them can write really well. … Writers don’t write like critics — instead, they show us how a musician hears music. It’s organic, relatively free from marketing initiatives, because the writers choose what they want to write about. And, like most music fans today, musicians have broad, often surprising tastes: you don’t have to like They Might Be Giants to be amused by Parquet Courts’ bassist Sean Yeaton’s delirious take on that band; plenty of people will be curious to hear what Laurie Anderson has to say about the latest Animal Collective album; what on earth does Andrew W.K. have to say about the new album from Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices? And Zac Pennington of the art-rock band Parenthetical Girls has an enthusiastic and trenchant take on… Taylor Swift?

Michael Azerrad helped found Talkhouse, a website where musicians write about music. From a review of Bowie’s new album by Jonathan Meiburg, singer for the band Shearwater:

Singers’ voices tend to age in interesting ways, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not.

Joni Mitchell’s, burnt (with grim purpose, one suspects) to a dry husk by cigarettes, is an extreme example, as is Robert Plant’s, whose much-abused high register has deserted him, though he seems to delight in combing through its damaged remains. Dylan, of course, went through a phase in which his voice seemed to give up on the very idea of singing (though I have an affection for the weird Jim Nabors-like “country” voice of Self Portrait and Nashville Skyline).

Closer to the present, Michael Stipe’s voice, originally grave and gritty, turned dark and husky, then brightened, cheered up, and became strangely weightless; Bill Callahan’s voice opened, dived, and doesn’t yet seem to have found the bottom; Gil Scott-Heron’s oratory ripened into a splendid growl; Lou Reed’s went kind of warbly, lost its once-unassailable authority and eerie tenderness, and hasn’t been able (or perhaps doesn’t want) to find it again.

There are exceptions, naturally — Jimmy Scott kept his high notes up to the very end, though with a slight wobble; Morrisey’s voice lost its fun but carried on otherwise, Neil Young’s voice seems to have emerged from the egg more or less in its present state, Patti Smith’s grew into the age it once affected, and Mick Jagger’s cartoony honk is a sort of museum piece, a dogged re-creation of a funny voice he stumbled into as a teenager and milked for half a century.

Which brings us, I guess by way of “Dancing in the Streets,” to Bowie, and his voice (or voices) on The Next Day. The choice of “Where Are We Now” as the first single from the record was canny, as it presents a new Bowie voice: plain, vulnerable, a little weary, and — it must be said — old, its glassy surface showing more hairline cracks than when we last heard it a decade ago. But it’s bravely, even defiantly old, and it dares you to do the one thing we’re not accustomed to doing with an artist who has so fully and publicly embraced method acting: to take him at face value.

Earlier Dish on Bowie’s new album here.

By Faith Alone

That’s what the AP is now reporting about the motives of the Boston bombers. I should caution that this doesn’t preclude some kind of interaction by Tamerlan with terrrorist elements when he visited Russia – and the evidence searches continue. But faith – especially fundamentalist, violent strains of Islam – is by itself a sufficient explanation. Many don’t understand this. But, as anyone with familiarity with strong religious faith will tell you, there are few things more powerful.

The Chechen Connection

Charles King downplays its significance:

[T]here is no direct information linking the North Caucasus to the attack in Boston; armed groups in the region, including the Dagestani branch of the so-called Caucasus Emirate — the jihadist network in the North Caucasus headed by Chechen warlord Doku Umarov — issued a formal statement denying any connection to the Tsarnaev brothers. The jihadists claimed instead that the brothers were pawns in an elaborate attempt by Russian security services to turn American opinion against the North Caucasus underground and against Muslims more generally. That might be far-fetched, but it would hardly be the line of argument the Emirate would pursue if it were suddenly using American operatives to expand attacks outside of Russia. The logical thing would have been for the Emirate to claim responsibility.

Instead, he argues that the bombing might have more implications for the ongoing violence in Syria:

There are somewhere “between 600 and 6,000” Chechens from the North Caucasus fighting in Syria, said Kotliar in a recent interview with Russian media, “and from what happened in Boston, perhaps Americans will finally draw the lesson that there are no good terrorists and bad terrorists, no ‘ours’ and ‘yours.’” Keep arming the Syrian rebels, the argument goes, and sooner or later you will have to face the consequences of a Syria overtaken by Islamist radicals.

Larison isn’t buying it:

Considering how strongly opposed Russia already was to Western intervention and to any Western support for the Syrian opposition, I don’t know that their opposition can be “hardened” much more than it is. American public opinion was already heavily against greater U.S. involvement in Syria before the bombings, and the Syria policy debate among politicians and pundits will likely remain more or less unchanged.

Beautiful Mistakes

Navneet Alang unscrambles glitch art:

[Artist Phillip] Stearns’ Year of the Glitch blog is full of examples of images he and others have either deliberately distorted or simply discovered. It all seems a bit discombobulating at first, but spend enough time gazing at the images, and even something like a looped glitch in Psy’s “Gangnam Style” takes on significance. It’s almost uncanny in the way Freud meant the term: lingering just under the surface is the repressed thing, sinister and threatening.

Why it resonates:

What we often want from art is imprecision. Maybe this is why there has been some skepticism about the digital. It can feel like the binary system of computer language would never give us the space and ambiguity we so desire. But glitch art feels like the poetry of technology. … And in a world in which many would use digital tech to try to make everything “perfect”—from Photoshopped faces to fastidiously tracked diets—celebrating the electronic error might be a fittingly human response.

When Following The News Is Bad News

Novelist Rolf Dobelli claims that “news is bad for your health, very bad for your mental faculties, and bad for your emotional state.” Madeleine Bunting elaborates:

The web may have unleashed infinite possibilities of information and speed, but it still has to be absorbed, assimilated and considered by our clunky old brains if we are to develop any insight or understanding. It’s these last two which are now scarce, and crucially, what both require is concentration. The ability to focus, to persist with complexity and to consider ambiguity or uncertainty: these are the mental abilities we put at risk by flitting from one story to another.

Dreher pleads guilty:

What’s important to keep in mind here is that he is not saying that ignorance is bliss, but rather that the massive consumption of information harms us and our ability to thrive in a number of ways. I went into this article ready to make fun of it, and then saw myself reflected back to me in a way that I recognized, and wasn’t quite prepared for.

The Web That Was

Angela Watercutter digs into the addictive site Internet Archaeology, which houses various images and websites from the early days of the Information Superhighway:

Political junkies looking to relive the Clinton years might want to scoot over to the Dole/Kemp ’96 site and its GIF of a steaming cup of coffee next to a link marked “News Room.” Science fans can visit Venus – the site for a CERN project aimed at simulating the Large Hadron Collider in virtual reality long before it actually existed. Venus was terminated in 1996, but its site lives on – along with a peculiar note advising “some icons were mangled using Pixelsight.” News junkies can stumble upon the site for Heaven’s Gate, the religious group built on a belief in UFOs that lost 39 members in a mass suicide in 1997; and fans of irony will be happy to know that GhostTowns.com is a site for, yes, ghost towns that (as of this writing) had only been visited 406 times since March 1998.