Month: July 2013

Literary art has been unkind to capitalists, according to the Weekly Standard‘s Stephen Miller, who senses a partisan divide:

There are sympathetic portraits of businessmen in novels by Abraham Cahan, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis; yet after World War II, most American literary writers painted the business world in dark colors. In 1978, John Gardner complained that most contemporary American writers preached “a whining hatred of American business.” …

Puzzled by the literary world’s dark view of commerce, the business world occasionally fights back. In May 2011, the chairman of a major bank holding company said he would give grants of as much as $2 million to colleges if they agreed to make Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged required reading in a course on capitalism. This idea has undoubtedly been resisted by most academics, who rightly object to donors’ prescribing what should be taught. Moreover, Ayn Rand’s second-rate novels are tedious and humorless paeans to selfishness.

Wallace Stevens, the poet who was an executive for an insurance company, wished “we could … get rid of … the caricatures of the businessman.” But it is unlikely that Stevens’s wish will ever be fulfilled, for most American literary writers will continue to dislike commerce, especially corporate commerce, and most will continue to regard profit-making with suspicion, which is why most American writers are liberals. Three years ago, the essayist Daniel Menaker put it nicely: “Republican literary writers are in my experience as rare as ski bums in the Sahel.”

David Banks, a self-proclaimed profanity enthusiast, spies two societal trends that he thinks could expand our pool of expletives:

The first is economic stagnation. … [T]he social taboo against swearing has everything to do with keeping your status. The very poor and the very rich (two classes that continue to grow in our present economic situation) have always been comfortable and blatant in their swearing. Swearing bears no risk if you don’t have anything to lose or are so well-heeled that there is no one else in the room that you need to impress. Only the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie are afraid of swearing. One could say that the socioeconomic climate is primed for swearing experimentation.

The second trend is the decentralization of media. Podcasts, YouTube videos, blog, and even Netflix and Hulu exclusive content are all subject to far less regulation than radio or television. The words you cannot say on television are still the same, but there are plenty of other venues to test out new swear words. It’s strange then, that given all the Internet-inspired new words that have made it into dictionaries over the past decade (e.g. tweet, defriend, uplink), none of them are swears or curses.

“Headfuck” and “knobhead” don’t count?  Regarding the NSFW video seen above:

A tipster forwarded us the following expletive and CAPS-ridden email tirade, sent to the entire [Delta Gamma] sorority chapter [at the University of Maryland] by one of its executive board members, that will go down in history as one of the most passionate denunciations of FUCKING AWKWARD AND BORING-ness ever committed to words.

Previous Dish on cursing here and here.

@googlereader THIS IS THE WORST NEWS EVER. WHY?!?!?!?!?!??! I am TOTALLY heartbroken. WHY WHY WHY?!!?!?

— Josh Hofer (@josh_hofer) March 13, 2013

I wonder which Google Reader clone Google will end up acquiring first.

— Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) July 1, 2013

That great engine of blog consumption is officially dead. But you won’t find Ezra Klein consulting Slate‘s handy flowchart for a replacement; he realizes that Reader reinforced his “filter bubble“:

I’m going back to bookmarks — and other people’s curation. I’m bookmarking a few of my favorite blogs, and then bookmarking a few news outlets and magazines, and a few socially curated sites (like Digg and Reddit), and a few more idiosyncratically curated sites (like LongReads.com and Byliner). My hope is to combine enough different forms of curation that I break out of my habits and regularly see content I wouldn’t have known to look for. … Google Reader, you’ve been great. I’ve loved our time together. But maybe this is for the best.

Glenn Reynolds won’t miss Reader either. Matt Buchanan is betting on Digg to deliver:

Everybody consumes the Web differently, so it’s hard to imagine a single reading service that works for every person. But it seems reasonable to think that one combining a person’s deep and abiding interests with the serendipity of social media could work for most. Digg may well be in the best position to accomplish this. It has a Web site, which surfaces new material from the around the Web, and the Reader, which provides a comprehensive view of a user’s favorite Web sites. In addition, Betaworks, its parent company, recently purchased the “read later” service Instapaper, which allows users to save Web articles they come across to access later on their mobile devices. And Digg is just one of a number of companies striving to figure out a better answer to, “What should I read now?” Google Reader may be gone, but there’s never been a better time to read on the Web.

The Dish, for its part, will rely upon a combination of NewsBlur, Tiny Tiny RSS, Fever, and that great RSS reader that is the Dish in-tray.

That’s how the Washington Post described the Guardian. Funny because both papers have a staff of just under 600, and then there’s this:

The Guardian’s global monthly unique visitors: 23.2 million

The Washington Post’s monthly unique visitors: 17.2 million

Do you think the WaPo even has the faintest clue how irrelevant it is?

Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan’s piece on GOP donors who support immigration reform calls such donors “political pragmatists” and claims that the donors are “trying to move the party forward — and more toward the ideological center.” Douthat contrasts the article with others on GOP donors:

It’s absurdly credulous about how the rich and powerful inside the G.O.P. tent are supporting comprehensive immigration reform for purely selfless reasons, because it’s the only way to save the party from the yahoos, and displays little of the “follow the money” skepticism that you would normally expect from the press when there’s a united corporate front on one side of a given debate.

This isn’t to say that what I’ve termed the “donorist” perspective on the Republican Party’s situation is actually purely cynical, or deserves to be covered that way. The pro-business, pro-immigration socially liberal perspective of the party’s elite donors is as sincerely held as any other perspective in our politics. But as is so often the case with people who spend heavily on elections, whether they’re Wall Street conservatives or Hollywood liberals, that worldview does happen to coincide pretty neatly with the economic interests of the people who hold it. And the fact that many journalists are more sympathetic to immigration reform than they are to other causes back by the Kochs and Adelsons of the world is not a good reason to write about the immigration debate as though those interests don’t exist.

Jane Mayer, on the other hand, follows the money when looking at how the Koch brothers have worked to prevent congressional action on climate change:

Climate-change policy directly affects Koch Industries’s bottom line. Koch Industries, according to Environmental Protection Agency statistics cited in the study, is a major source of carbon-dioxide emissions, the kind of pollution that most scientists believe causes global warming. In 2011, according to the E.P.A.’s greenhouse-gas-reporting database, the company, which has oil refineries in three states, emitted over twenty-four million tons of carbon dioxide, as much as is typically emitted by five million cars.

Neil Irwin rails against the rise of restaurants that only serve small plates:

With a conventional entrée, the chef enters into an implicit agreement with the customer. You, Mr. or Ms. Customer, will order an entrée. I, the chef, will provide you with a properly sized portion of food for an adult human. It will be reasonably balanced nutritionally, with a mix of protein, starch and vegetables. It will be appropriately seasoned so that you might eat the whole thing. And the dish will arrive at the same time as your dining companions’ dinners. Small-plates restaurants take each of those obligations and put them on the shoulders of the diner!

Yglesias fires back:

[T]he case for small plates seems obvious to me: You get to try more stuff. And because you get to try more stuff you get to be more venturesome in your eating. If you’re going to order and eat just one thing then you have to be conservative in what you order; you have to be sure you’ll like it. If you’re sharing a series of small plates with friends, then you have the opportunity to sample things that you’re not sure you’ll like.

Cowen and Ezra follow-up by comparing small plates to TV packages.