Month: October 2013

Timothy Noah questions why so few unemployed Americans are moving for work:

Nobody has a better reason to pick up and move than someone who can’t find a job—or at least so it would seem. But while unemployed people remain likelier to migrate than employed people, they are much less likely to migrate than in previous decades. In 1956, for example, 7.6 percent of unemployed males moved from one state to another during the previous year. Subsequently that rate fell to 7 percent (1966), 5.9 percent (1976), 5.3 percent (1986), 4.4 percent (1996), 4.3 percent (2006), and, finally, 2.7 percent (2012).

He concludes that the jobless would move to the jobs … if only they could afford to live there:

Since 2009, when the recession ended, the median price of a new house in the United States has risen 13 percent, even as median household income has fallen by about 4 percent. That doesn’t pose much of a problem for a migrating architect whose income is already well above the median, and who is likelier to have existing home equity that he can transfer to another state. But for construction workers, for example, it’s likely to be a big problem, and a reason why they can’t easily move to where the best-paying jobs are. A construction worker can generally make more money in San Francisco than in suburban Fresno. But it won’t likely be enough more to make up the difference in the relative cost of living. Indeed, few working-class people earn enough money to live anywhere near San Francisco anymore, to the point that there is now a severe shortage of construction workers in the Bay Area.

As Emily Badger notes, magazines have been ranking places to live for more than 80 years:

[C]onsider a three-part series by H.L. Mencken that ran in The American Mercury in 1931: It was succinctly headlined, “THE WORST AMERICAN STATE.” In the impressive tome, which covered some 47 pages across three issues of the magazine, Mencken and Charles Angoff methodically ranked the states (at the time, there were only 48 plus the District of Columbia) on everything from farm electrification to literacy rates to the salaries of teachers to the number of natives in Who’s Who in America. (*Blush*: They also included the local circulation per thousand people of The Atlantic Monthly). 

Matt Carmichael, editor of the website Livability.com, dug up this gem (“on microfiche!”) while working on a much more modern ranking of America’s 100 best small and mid-sized cities to live in, which he’s published today. … Mencken’s list, Carmichael notes, included some metrics we would never measure today, like the prevalence of lynchings (surprise leader: Wyoming) or death rates from typhoid fever (sorry again, Mississippi).

In preparing his own ranking, Carmichael became interested in how ideas about quality of life evolve, and not just with respect to rising living standards. “What would you have measured if you were doing a ‘best places to live’ list in 1965?” he asks. “Would it have been mall density? Or cul-de-sacs per capita?”

Meghan Neal outlines the latest controversy in the e-publishing world:

Kernel magazine published an exposé last week detailing the dark corner of Amazon’s Kindle store that features [self-published] adult novels about truly repulsive topics like incest rape, pedophilia, and sexual abuse. Understandably, an uproar ensued, and retailers scrambled to take down the offending titles. But some people are worried that retails are overreacting, or that the take-downs will set a dangerous precedent for squashing free speech. Yesterday, the British bookseller WH Smith went so far as to shut down its entire website in response to the article. The site is still down as of this writing – with a landing page and apology up in its place.

The exposé notes that Amazon already has “strict guidelines for amateur authors who wish to self-publish with the Kindle Direct Publishing service”:

“We don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts,” say the guidelines. “What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.” But the authors of these works are setting up fake publishing houses for themselves, which can be as simple as paying $200 for a set of ISBN prefixes, bypassing such restrictions.

PJ Vogt wishes Amazon had kept the smut on the digital shelves:

We outlaw snuff films, child porn and, increasingly, revenge porn, because actual people are harmed during their production.

Erotic fiction concerns fake characters who don’t exist in real life. You could argue that entertainment that caters to people’s darkest fantasies makes them more likely to enact them, but the science wouldn’t support you.

As for the idea that these books are just in bad taste, well, absolutely. They’re the worst. But you won’t find these books unless you’re looking for them. They don’t show up in Amazon search results, you have to go directly to their link. They’re hidden away in the digital equivalent of the video store’s curtain-covered backroom.

Meanwhile, Laura Hazard Owen wonders what a cleaner e-book marketplace would look like:

If e-book retailers truly want no porn to be sold through their sites, they’ll have to spend much more time and money than they do now implementing both automatic and human filters. They’ll also have to clarify exactly what they mean by porn, and in doing so they’ll risk alienating many authors and readers. The book industry reaped massive profits from the bestselling erotic trilogy. If that’s okay, but other porn isn’t – if, for instance, child rape porn is unacceptable – retailers will have to be much more explicit in publicly declaring what is and isn’t acceptable.

Robert W. Nicholson surveys the long history of evangelical support for Zionism, insisting it “bears no resemblance to the portrait of cardboard-cutout Jesus freaks itching for the annihilation of the Jews and using them as pawns in their apocalyptic game”:

Part of God’s covenant with the Jewish people involved bringing them back from exile and setting them once again in their own land. Since the 16th century, and despite the sheer improbability of the idea, Protestant writers spoke of a Jewish ingathering and sometimes actively promoted it. When the Zionist movement proper began in the late 19th century, and especially after the Jewish state was founded in 1948, this unlikely prophecy seemed to many to be coming true before their very eyes. Although not all Christians embraced the new state, the vast majority of evangelicals became immediate supporters; one of them was President Harry Truman, a Baptist.

In brief, evangelicals love Israel because God loves Israel.

But there is also another way of putting it. For evangelicals, Israel’s mistakes are representative of their own mistakes as imperfect individuals in need of God’s grace. They are comforted by the fact that God remains faithful to Israel; it means that God remains faithful to them.

He notes that this alliance may not last forever, as sympathy for the Palestinians rises among younger and more progressive evangelicals. While reviewing two recent books about the Bible’s place in American political rhetoric, Robert E. Brown also tracks the decline of Israel as a potent symbol of our national aspirations. Why it was attractive in the first place:

[E]arly Americans — beginning with the Puritans — were accustomed to thinking of themselves as the new Israel, bound by covenant to honor God in their public life. This mindset helps to explain why the Exodus and other biblical events were so rhetorically compelling during the Revolution, why the patriots naturally identified with the Israelites struggling under the bondage and tyranny of the Egyptians.

That didn’t last:

[T]he controversy over slavery radically undermined the moral authority — and so the mythic power — of the Old Testament. Pro-slavery apologists repeatedly trumpeted that the Old Testament sanctioned slavery, and abolitionists responded by fashioning interpretive methods that privileged the moral vision of the New Testament at the expense of the Old. The mythology of an ideal Hebrew polity that could be held out for modern emulation was substantially eroded. The Civil War dealt a final, crushing blow to American self-identity as a renewed Israel.

But the resonances remain.

(Image via Temple Emanu-El)

Nathaniel Rich reviews the history of the Chelsea Hotel, which, before closing to guests in 2011, was a famous hangout for artists:

[I]n 1905 … the Chelsea was converted to a luxury hotel, which was visited regularly by guests such as Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and the painter John Sloan. After World War II, as the hotel declined and room prices fell, it attracted Jackson Pollock, James T. Farrell, Virgil Thomson, Larry Rivers, Kenneth Tynan, James Schuyler, and Dylan Thomas, whose death in 1953 further enhanced the hotel’s legend. (“I’ve had 18 straight whiskies,” said Thomas, after polishing off a bottle of Old Grandad on the last day of his life. “I think that’s the record.”) Arthur Miller moved into #614 after his divorce from Marilyn Monroe. Bob Dylan wrote “Sara” in #211 … Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy Spungen to death in #100. Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Chelsea, William Burroughs wrote The Third Mind, and Jack Kerouac had a one-night stand with Gore Vidal. In 1966 Andy Warhol shot parts of Chelsea Girls at the hotel. In 1992, Madonna, a former resident, returned to shoot photographs for her Sex book.

Excerpts from an oral history of the hotel:

MILOS FORMAN (Film director): Once I was going up in the elevator to my room on the eighth floor. On the fifth floor the door opened, and a totally naked girl, in a panic, ran into the elevator.

I was so taken aback that I just stared at her. Finally I asked what room she was in. But then the elevator stopped and she ran away. I never saw her again. And I remember in the floor above me there was a man who had in his room a small alligator, two monkeys, and a snake. …

R. CRUMB (Artist): A bunch of really crazy people hung around the Chelsea. You could tell that people were going there just because of its reputation—poseurs with artistic pretentions or European eccentrics with money. There’d be poseurs sitting around the lobby. The lobby was really annoying.

I only started staying there about 10 years ago. It was always when somebody else paid for it. I never could afford to stay there—even 10 years ago, it was too expensive. Except for the old residents who clung desperately to their rooms and by some law were not allowed to be kicked out, the guests there were all arty-farty pretentious people with money who wanted to stay there because Sid and Nancy lived there. That was my impression, anyway. The whole thing seemed extremely self-conscious to me.

For more, here’s Part One of a 1981 BBC documentary about the hotel:

The rest is here. Update from a reader:

I enjoy reading the Dish, but I feel compelled to write you about a minor outrage. Why is there an article about a BBC movie about the Chelsea Hotel, when local indie director Abel Ferrara has made his own documentary about it, also featuring Milos Forman among others?

The trailer for Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks: