Month: December 2014

by Will Wilkinson

The “Intellectual Situation” column in the latest edition of N+1 contains a stimulating meditation on the sense that the pace of life is perpetually quickening, leaving us with ever less unharried time.

The centrality of this feeling to our age, and to the ages that preceded it, has received its most comprehensive treatment in the recent work of German theorist Hartmut Rosa and his concept of an “acceleration society.” For Rosa, the sense of speedup created by labor-saving is one of the major paradoxes of modernity, and one of the exemplary versions of this paradox is that “the dramatic rise in feelings of stress and lack of time” in our epoch has been “accompanied by an equally significant increase in free time.”

The paradox, in a nutshell, is that economic growth and technological progress actually does free up time, but also produces a profusion of diversions clamoring for limited attention. “The feeling comes about because the variety of social experiences available is ceaselessly proliferating: the number of things you might be able to do becomes impossibly large, and expands every day with implacable speed,” say the N+1 editors.

I certainly know the feeling. But I would suggest that this doesn’t really amount to real problem for people who have no aspiration to live on the bleeding edge, or to, to say the same thing, to live in reaction against the bleeding edge. The N+1 editors may not encounter many placidly unhurried folks in Brooklyn, where “artisanal” slow-living presents itself as one among many enticing lifestyle choices, attractive precisely due to the sort of depletion they describe.

Here in Chattanooga, though, I cannot say that I see people breathless from the proliferating options of modern life.

Chattanoogans do have smart phones, but are oddly disinclined to make use of their mapping functions. When, new to town, we purchased a patio furniture set at the Home Depot, the clerk responsible for setting up delivery asked us for detailed directions to our house, which she wrote down on a pad of paper. “Don’t the drivers have GPS?” I asked. The question was met with a quizzical look, perhaps because, unbeknownst to me at the time, GPS in Chattanooga refers to Girls Preparatory School. “Can’t they just get directions on their phone?” She conceded that this might be possible, but would not let the matter rest until she had affirmed, by means of an exceedingly drawn-out exchange, that we indeed lived off the “S-curve” on Hixson Pike, as she had suspected. We may have been a little annoyed by the imposition on our very precious time, but that’s because we were the odd ones, the outsiders, the people who live, for no good reason, in a hurry.

Since moving to the South, I have had I don’t know how many leisurely conversations about the breed of my dog or the age and weight of my baby, as if I had appeared in the supermarket parking lot, or headed up my street in unsociable headphones, specifically to burn my minutes in vacuous neighborly chit chat. I try not to look like I’m itching to get away because, really, what’s the hurry? Anyway, people here go to work, where they do not hurry, go home to their kids and maybe watch a little TV, maybe “like” a few baby pictures on Facebook, on Sundays go to a lot of church, and it’s all slower than it was when I was a kid up in Iowa, sedate Iowa. (The Chamber of Commerce would have you know, however, that Chattanooga has the fastest broadband in the United States.) I may make myself frantic trawling the infinite internet, reading “year’s best” lists full of things I will never ever have time to get around to. I may sit in front of my Roku’s menu screen feeling stymied by the profusion of choices. But I could just relax and live like a regular person.

I’d meant to comment on the N+1 editors’ extraordinary ability to connect the putative problem of feeling like we have no time, like all putative problems, to “neoliberalism.”  (“An era of social acceleration has its political consequences too, in which neoliberalism, the pensée unique, monopolizes the language of inevitability, obligation, fidelity to the one best way.”) But, really, who has the time? Pensée unique? I’ll say. Get another idea.

(Photo from a reader: “Walden, TN overlooking Chattanooga, 7.20 am”)

by Chas Danner

A reader is thinking Central America:

Only a guess, but I went to Guatemala years ago and it was one of the most beautiful places I’d ever been. This has the same feel.

Another argues that “palm trees and high mountains suggest an equatorial highland location such as Bogotá, Colombia, where the McDonald’s (near right edge) would not be out of place”. Then again, maybe it’s Bosnia:

Some of the architecture looks like old Soviet-style buildings … there are some fir trees … city has a vague Eastern European feel to it … and there is a mosque on the far right of the picture …the multi-variate correlation that fits is Sarajevo. Here’s to hoping I’m right.  BTW, these contests alone are worth the $20 subscription.

Another shares a vivid memory:

I remember standing on the parapet of Chapultepec Castle on a remarkably clear day in Mexico, DF and seeing the spectacular view of the mountains Iztaccihuatl (Sleeping Woman) and Popocatepetl (Smoking Man). This was in the ’90s and the air was rarely clear enough to afford such an opportunity.  I asked a gentlemen in my poor Spanish how often you could see the mountains and he replied maybe two days a year.  It’s a much more frequent sight now, but only the Mexican calendar artists can give you this [seen above].

The most popular incorrect guess ended up being Rio, with other readers throwing their darts at Tehran, Lima, Scottsdale, Bogota, Taipei, Barcelona, Jakarta and Yavin IV (again). And this reader has hobbits on the brain:

This is clearly taken from the Galadriel Suite (Room 407) of the Sheraton Minas Ithil and Suites (formerly the Trump Morgul). That modernist geometrical building is the Osgiliath Convention Centre, designed by Daniel Liebeskind. The post-war (of the Ring) Gondor official plan called for low density housing and parkland in much of the Anduin Valley lands, but a succession of Wardens of the White Tower allowed for the condominium developments that now dominate the view of most Minas Tirith residents (small mountain at rear on left).

Either that or Santiago, Chile.

Another explains:

At first I thought this might be an untypical view of Rio – that iconic mountain from some other angle. But with my limited ability to manipulate Google Earth, I couldn’t make it work. And what really bothered me were what appeared to be Italian cypress trees. They grow in a Mediterranean climate, of which there are several outside the Mediterranean itself. (I went down the Sicily path for a while, but to no avail.) I know from my environmental scientist sister that Brazil does not have a Mediterranean climate, but Chile does. AND it has the Andes! So on that flimsy evidence, I’m going with Santiago de Chile. With my luck, this is really in Southeast Asia …

Southwest Asia, actually, where this reader arrives, nailing the right country:

There is no useful Street View in Ankara, Turkey but I’m pretty convinced that’s where we’re looking. I’d love to spend more time on it, but I’m at a conference with terrible WiFi. Hope I’m not a hemisphere off!

Another sets the city straight:

I see you threw in some Rio-esque mountains in the background just to trick us. I started my search with pyramid buildings in Rio — there actually is one! But it’s nothing like this one. So I moved on to searching for pyramid buildings around the world, and spent about 5 minutes before finding one that looked a hell of a lot like this one. Antalya, Turkey! A beautiful place I’d never heard of … I’ll put it on my “places to go some day” list. Then I just lined up the view with objects from Google Maps satellite view.. the pool… the green structure … the gazebo. It’s gotta be the Falez Hotel. But I can’t find any matching balcony photos or anything like that — the railing and the overhang don’t seem to look like anything I can find. So I’m just saying the 6th floor to say something.

I wouldn’t recommend staying in this hotel. All the pics submitted to TripAdvisor are of broken things, dirty things, and a Russian woman with her hands on her hips.

The pyramid was of course the key breadcrumb for most correct guessers this week:

Pretty easy one after last week’s stumper.  I’m sure the ratio of mud brick houses to glass pyramids (not in Paris or Las Vegas) is a million to one or better.

Lots of readers flagged the right building but named the wrong hotel (the Ozkaymak Falez), and this former winner explains why:

Much easier this week.  The contest picture contained so many clues that Turkey’s southern coast became the only place to search.  Antalya, Turkey popped up right away with this beautiful image.  Once in Antalya, the position of the beach, the McDonald’s and the hills of the Beydağları Coastal National Park to Antalya’s west led to a particular hotel.  Google Maps incorrectly identifies the hotel as the Ozkaymak Falez Hotel, a rundown establishment popular with both male and female Russian tourists and garners scathing reviews on TripAdvisor.  Luckily for the person that submitted the contest picture, he or she stated next door to the Falez Hotel at the Rixos Downtown Antalya (a former Sheraton).

As for the window, massive hotels are always difficult.  The window is on the hotel’s west side on a fairly low floor.  Because the tennis court lights are visible but the trees block us from seeing the courts’ surface, I’ll guess the 5th floor.  The hotel contains a few curves on its west side.  Because the hanging lattice shows the building curves right where the contest window is positioned and because the balcony railing goes only a short distance before curving away to the north, I’m guessing that the contest window is in a room right at the southernmost curve on the hotel’s west side.  My window guess is highlighted:

Another veteran took a different route:

A tricky contest. The clue that eventually gives the country away could also get you bogged down. The mosque at the right end of the picture tells you that this is (probably) an Islamic country; but another photo of that same mosque is nowhere to be found. After a fruitless (and very boring) search, you give up and begin simply looking for a city at the foot of a mountain range; since those minarets have their closest counterparts in Turkey, this is the country to start with (well, actually I started with Indonesia and Malaysia: all those palms got me a little off track). And in fact, this week’s picture was taken from the Rixos Downtown Hotel (Sakıp Sabancı Boulevard, Konyaaltı Beach) in Antalya, Turkey. As for the mysterious mosque, it belongs to the Faculty of Theology of the nearby Akdeniz University. There are not many photos of the mosque because it isn’t there yet — at least not entirely — it’s still in construction:

For you new players out there, this is how it’s done:

Good thing there was a McDonalds in the picture.  That was the big giveaway.

 

My first thought was “Great. Deciduous, conifer AND palm trees.”  But the tall, dark, narrow conifers appeared to be Mediterranean Cypress, so that narrowed the search area. Then there was the mosque in the far right background.  That narrowed it further. Of course, it was the “Cam Piramit”, that determined the correct city. This picture shows another view of the Can Pirimit with that uniquely shaped hill behind it:

Flying video tour of the Cam Piramit here, complete with resounding music:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPRXvg1rRsU]

The picture you posted was taken from what is now the Rixos Downtown Antalya but used to be the Sheraton Voyager Hotel. Here is another picture from that hotel, but one taken from before the trees grew up to mask the tennis courts of the “Antalya Tenis İhtisas ve Spor Kulübü” next door. The picture also clearly shows the yellow ball topped sculpture:

OK.  So correct building.  What about the window? It is on an inside curve, so my best guess as to which window is this one.  At least I’m closer that I was last week in Morocco:

Another reader laments the changes the city has undergone:

I am not going to look for the exact hotel room, because this gets depressing. Many of your readers share wonderful memories of those hotels from where the picture comes. I have not been to the hotel, but the contest does bring up memories of the location. Growing up as an expat in Istanbul, I have been on vacation on those beaches west of Antalya in the late seventies. There was a little country road running parallel to the beach, towards Kemer, and there were a few primitive campgrounds tucked away under the pine trees, where you’d set up the tent in the sand (or you didn’t, because it wouldn’t rain anyway), and a crazy guy called Arap Mustafa would cook wonderful village food for dinner, on a gas stove set up on a concrete slab under a makeshift roof. Sandy beach, crystal-clear clean water, pine trees. Nothing else.

Seeing how today the entire stretch of beach between old Antalya and the mountains, a good 10 km, is occupied by urban sprawl, unregulated industry, freeways, ugly cheap hotels, and ugly expensive hotels, I want to cry. Or puke. There are many places in Turkey I want to go back to. But Antalya I am not going to visit before the next massive earthquake or tsunami.

It is one of the most egregious instances, where one of the most beautiful regions of one of the most beautiful countries in the world has been mindlessly sacrificed to global tourism. And, of course, the push to open the next pristine beaches or nature preserves for tourism development continues full throttle, so that the buddies of the Erdoğan administration can make more money.

Apologies to the reader who is probably enjoying their vacation there. I hope you had a great time. But to me, it was a reminder how deeply ambivalent modern tourism is in third- and second-world countries.

Another master class:

I was pleased to see minarets on the left side of the photograph as they are among my favorite architectural elements. The style was reminiscent of those in Istanbul and other major cities of Turkey and the vegetation was also consistent with landscaped sections of these cities. None, however, had the distinct and dramatic mountains of the contest photograph. Eventually I found them in a photograph of Antalya. Once there, the hotel, its ample grounds, the tennis courts, swimming pool, and the glass pyramid in the contest view were fairly obvious.

The photograph was taken from a balcony where a major turn occurs in the hotel’s curving exterior. This change in angle is clear in the railing and sun shade alignments in the foreground of the contest photograph. The line-of-sight along the balcony railing appears to extend along this entire section of the hotel’s façade, including railings for five or six rooms, until the railing turns out-of-sight around the next bend. This is the only location I could find that explains these bends while also avoiding views of other sections of the hotel’s façade (see illustration). The floor chosen was based roughly on the height of the trees seen in the contest photograph and their relative heights in photographs of the grounds.

Chini reminds us:

It’s been two years since we last visited this country in VFYWC #126, a contest which I remember only because it was the same weekend Hurricane Sandy arrived. This one takes place under far less hellish circumstances and, given the wealth of clues, I suspect someone is gonna have to nail the right room number to win their VFYW book.

This week’s view comes from the Rixos Downtown Hotel in Antalya, Turkey. The picture was taken on roughly the fourth floor (room #443, perhaps?) and looks west-south-west along a heading of 257.85 degrees.

Wow that’s a close guess, as this week’s photographer explains:

It is from the Rixos Hotel, Room 445, Sakip Sabanci Bulvari, Konyaalti Sahili, in Antalya,  Turkey.  We had a great time there.  There was a film festival happening when we were there at the pyramid-shaped building seen in the photo.

This week’s winner got pretty close too:

I must say, I thought this week’s contest was going to be hard, but all the clues, as Chini says are right there: Mountains, palm trees, sports (tennis anyone or swimming?), minarets in the background, etc all point to Turkey. The pyramid building was the big fat clue and that place, the Sabanci Congress and Exhibition Center just puts everything into place.

The shot was from the Sheraton Voyager Otel hotel. Now the room, without a map, and a good photo, I’m going to guess that it’s on the 4th floor, and room 455.

In perusing the various websites (Tripadvisor, Hotels, etc.) I can’t believe how cheap the resort hotels are in Antalya are. I also found out that Antalya is ranked third behind London and Paris for international arrivals. There’s Greek, Ottoman, Byzantine and Turkish history all over this town with ruins, clock towers, etc. As of the 2010 census there are over a million people living there. Another interesting place in the world!

Well, I know I’ll lose to a better room finder than I, but just in case this week’s contest is too damn hard and I won’t enter – I want to wish everyone at the Dish a Happy Holidays – you guys often make my day. Here’s to a great 2015!

Same to you, though be advised our final contest for 2014 arrives this Saturday. Until then, here are some more of the images you submitted this week:

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

by Dish Staff

James Antle III quips that “Elizabeth Warren may be the last liberal in America who doesn’t want Elizabeth Warren to run for president”:

Warren was interviewed by National Public Radio Monday and was asked the standard question several times. “I’m not running for president,” she said. What is she telling liberal independent groups? “I told them, ‘I’m not running for president.’” Never ever? “I am not running for president,” she replied. “You want me to put an exclamation point at the end?”

Sounds pretty definitive, right? Except the Washington Post responded to the interview with a piece titled, “Why Elizabeth Warren is smart to not totally rule out running for president.” The political press clearly wants Warren to run.

Sargent doesn’t believe Warren “has any intention to run.” So why are progressive groups still talking her up?

Anything that boosts Warren’s visibility might also boost the potential power and influence that Warren may be able to exert within Congress — and over the Democratic Party in general — as their chosen vehicle for progressive policy ideas. That might boost the groups’ own influence over the debate.

Tomasky calls Warren the most powerful Democrat in the country:

But she does have this problem:

The media will always peg her as “left,” a word that in modern American media usage is clearly a pejorative. And if she just gets stuck there, her influence, however great among the Democratic base, will never grow outside of it. More centrist Democrats will make a few gestures in the Warren direction, but nothing more.

So Warren’s great challenge is to counter that dismissal by showing that her ideas do indeed have appeal outside the hard-shell Democratic Party base. They do, potentially—a number of polls have shown that Americans, including many in the center and even some on the right, have negative views of Wall Street and would back tighter regulation. She can speak to goo-goo eyed crowds in Boston and New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, and while she’ll wow the already converted and rake in the money, she won’t be changing anything. But if she can take her message to Des Moines and Louisville and Columbus and Jacksonville and demonstrate that audiences are receptive there, then she’ll break out of the box the media wants to assign her. And if she can do that, she’ll become a figure of un-ignorable influence, and she’ll start making the likes of Clinton really pay attention.

Beinart rejects a comparison bandied about:

The better analogy is not between Elizabeth Warren and Ted Cruz. It’s been Warren and Rand Paul. Warren’s crusade against Wall Street may appeal to young blue collar Republicans in the same way Paul’s crusade against the national-security state appeals to young liberal Democrats. Both Warren and Paul are exploiting a divide in the other party. Democratic elites are more hawkish on foreign policy than their party’s rank and file; Republicans elites are more pro-Wall Street than theirs.

But Ed Kilgore is unsure how popular her politics would be:

To most Democrats most of the time, Warren is raising important and legitimate concerns about Wall Street that must be addressed, not just dismissed as “class warfare.” To some Democrats some of the time, she represents a decisive break with the Clinton and Obama traditions that is morally necessary.

But let’s don’t pretend there’s a slam-dunk “electability” case for this kind of politics. Yes, the “median voter theorem” of politics that dictates a perpetual “move to the center” by general election candidates has lost a lot of its power just in the last few years. But the countervailing “hidden majority” argument for more ideological politicians of the left and the right is hardly self-evident, and has in the past often been fool’s gold.

Sarah Mimms hears from Republicans who “see Warren as a way to paint the Democratic Party as increasingly beholden to its liberal wing and removed from moderates”:

Warren is hardly the only Dodd-Frank champion among congressional Democrats. And she’s far from alone in opposing the changes pushed by Republicans this week. …

But other members of the Democratic Conference in the Senate aren’t seen as rising stars the way Warren is. Few are considered potential presidential candidates. And none serves as well in the role of liberal specter over the next two years as Warren will, particularly now that she is a member of leadership. “The more exposure she gets, the better for us,” [RNC spokesman Sean] Spicer said. Warren could easily become a poster-woman for the Democratic Party over the next two years, he argued, serving the same purpose as Pelosi and Reid have in Republican advertising and strategy.

Dreher, for one, hopes Warren “will run for president in 2016 to force a national conversation on the Washington-Wall Street power nexus”:

A populist who talks like Elizabeth Warren and really means it is a Democrat a conservative like me would consider voting for, despite her social liberalism. As Phyllis Schlafly said back in 1964, in defending Goldwater against the Establishment Republican Nelson Rockefeller, a contest between Warren and Clinton, and a contest between Warren and just about any Republican would give the country a choice, not an echo. She almost certainly couldn’t beat Hillary for the 2016 nomination, but a Warren candidacy would get her name and her issues out there.

Andrew Prokop doubts it will happen:

[I]f Hillary doesn’t run, or her standing in the polls begins to plummet — it seems conceivable that Warren could heed the calls of various activists and jump into the race. But if Warren thought a presidential bid looked like a promising and appealing prospect under current conditions, she’d be floating the possibility of a run now, like Jeb Bush is. For the moment, it’s best to take her at her word that she’s focused on the Senate.

Larison thinks “it would probably be a better use of Warren’s time to concentrate on her role in the Senate”:

Warren hasn’t even finished her first term in office, and she is just now starting to have some real influence. That role may not be entirely incompatible with running a presidential campaign over the next year or so, but challenging Clinton will inevitably take her away from the job she was elected to do. It is there that she might stand a chance of achieving something. Running around Iowa and New Hampshire might provide the occasion for some interesting primary debates, but it isn’t going to have much of an effect.

(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

by Chris Bodenner

Looking back at 2014, Felix Salmon runs through all the high revenue and venture capital numbers of new media companies like Buzzfeed, Vice, and Vox:

The small but self-sustaining bloggy site is a thing of the past: if you’re not getting 20-30 million unique visitors every month, and don’t aspire to such heights, then you’re basically an economic irrelevance. Advertisers won’t touch you, you won’t make any money, and your remaining visitors will inexorably leach away as they move from their desktops to their phones.

But if you’re like the Dish and rely on subscribers rather than advertisers, you don’t need to be so dependent on huge traffic numbers. And even if you can get those numbers and their corresponding ad dollars, advertisers are fickle, as Gawker recently saw when it lost “seven figures” in ad revenue from their controversial coverage of Gamergate. (Can you imagine the ad backlash over Dish controversies like Scrotumgate or all the graphic photos of dead children in war zones?) Speaking of Gawker, Michael Wolff absorbs a recent staff memo from founder Nick Denton, who outlined a big management shakeup and a refocus on generating scoops over Facebook-friendly fodder. Here’s Wolff:

Gawker, or the Gawker identity, Denton seemed to acknowledge in his memo, is a casualty in the race for traffic: Gawker succeeded because it was a carefully molded product (a small band of young people overseen by Denton — with Denton constantly hiring and firing his editors). But then it morphed into a business with a much larger number of ever-younger people having to produce more and more, and working with less and less editorial vision or leadership. Gawker began to focus on an open area of parallel writing (i.e. free writing) designed to enhance its traffic base — but, too, with the natural effect of diluting quality and confusing purpose. … [A]t somewhat cross purposes to his desire to better compete with BuzzFeed (or admitting that this is impossible), Denton urged his company back to its blogging roots.

In Denton’s words:

[Blogging is] the only truly new media in the age of the web.

It is ours. Blogging is the essential act of journalism in an interactive and conversational age. Our bloggers surface buried information, whether it’s in an orphaned paragraph in a newspaper article, or in the government archives. And we can give the story further energy by tapping readers for information, for the next instalment of the story, and the next round of debate. The natural form of online media is the exchange, not the blast. [New executive editor Tommy Cragg’s] ethos gives us the best chance of recapturing the honesty of blogs, before their spirit was sapped by the tastes of the Facebook masses.

Denton is even jumping back into the blog saddle himself, something he hasn’t done regularly since 2008. Responding to Wolff and Salmon, Mathew Ingram pushes back on the perception that bigger is better when it comes to new media:

[They both] seem to see media success as being composed of just one thing: namely, huge amounts of traffic gained by reaching a massive audience of millennials and then selling them to advertisers for tens of millions of dollars. That’s what Salmon seems to mean by talking about how the “table stakes” for starting a digital media company have never been higher, and small sites are a thing of the past.

But this is demonstrably not true. The cost of starting a digital-media entity, even a potentially successful one, has never been lower. Ask Jessica Lessin, who left the Wall Street Journal to start The Information, or Lara Setrakian of News Deeply, or Andrew Sullivan of The Daily Dish, who is now making close to $1 million a year from his readers — or blogger Ben Thompson, who went from being a relative unknown to running his own self-financed blog company. As Thompson put it in a recent post on his site Stratechery:

“The thing about Internet scale is it doesn’t just have to mean you strive to serve the most possible people at the lowest possible price; individuals and focused publications or companies can go the other way and charge relatively high prices but with far better products or services than were possible previously.”

… It may not make you a billionaire, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible. The New Republic’s problem isn’t that it somehow needs to transform itself into a massive mega-media entity like BuzzFeed, it just needs to do a better job of identifying a market need or an audience that is passionate about its content, and then giving them a way of helping to support that mission.

That’s precisely the insight that venture capitalist Roger McNamee shared when discussing the Dish to Charlie Rose shortly after we went independent two years ago, and it’s an insight even more relevant today as sponsored content and click-bait are consuming the new media landscape.

by Will Wilkinson

There’s a solid leader in this week’s issue of The Economist on the need for reform in American law enforcement. The Economist endorses rolling back police militarization, more fastidious record-keeping about police killings, and the deployment of body cameras. There’s also this, under the heading of accountability:

[I]t must be easier to sack bad cops. Many of America’s 12,500 local police departments are tiny and internal disciplinary panels may consist of three fellow officers, one of whom is named by the officer under investigation. If an officer is accused of a crime, the decision as to whether to indict him may rest with a local prosecutor who works closely with the local police, attends barbecues with them and depends on the support of the police union if he or she wants to be re-elected. Or it may rest with a local “grand jury” of civilians, who hear only what the prosecutor wants them to hear. To improve accountability, complaints should be heard by independent arbiters, brought in from outside.

I agree with every bit of this, but none of it’s going to happen as long as police unions are allowed to exist. Just as teachers’ unions block almost every conceivable democratic reform to the public school system, police unions continually stymie attempts to resist the corrupt, praetorian tendencies of American law enforcement. Nationwide, police unions fight tooth-and-nail to keep even the most abusive cops on the streets. So good luck “sacking bad cops” with police unions in the way.

Other reforms face similar resistance. In Miami, the police union has opposed, and continues to oppose, a popular initiative to equip the police with body cameras. Or how about the ex-cop private investigators, working for a law firm representing more than 120 California police-officers’ unions, who tried to frame a Costa Mesa city councilman for drunk driving. Why? Because he tried to mess with police pensions. Steven Greenhut of the San Diego Union-Tribune asks:

This raises an important question: How widespread is this kind of behavior? At a Costa Mesa press conference last year, elected officials from other cities made allegations of police using disturbing tactics to achieve their political goals.

“What kind of world do we live in when the people we give guns and badges to hire private investigators to surveil public officials?” asked Righeimer. Calling it “unseemly,” OC prosecutor Robert Mestman said this case is significant because the victims “are democratically elected city council members.” Mensinger said it seemed Orwellian: “Public officials should not be extorted over public benefits.”

The Costa Mesa story may be about pensions rather than the conduct of routine police work, but it is indicative of the gangsterish anti-democratic pressure police unions routinely exert within the political system. In New York City, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association is currently sending a not-so-subtle “nice place you got here” message to Mayor Bill de Blasio in response to his failure to signal complete obsequious deference to the union after a grand jury declined to indict the police officer who was filmed killing the unarmed and submissive Eric Garner with a chokehold. The union has asked its members to fill out a form requesting that the mayor stay away from his or her funeral should he or she be killed in the line of duty. “Due to Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito’s consistent refusal to show police officers the support and respect they deserve, I believe that their attendance at the funeral of a fallen New York City police officer is an insult to that officer’s memory and sacrifice,” the form reads.

Such drama! Such entitlement! All because the mayor publicly demonstrated some modest, measured sympathy for those protesting the crookedness of a system in which police are able to kill with impunity. Such disrespect for the uniform! The message the union is sending to the man duly elected to, among other things, oversee the city’s police is clear: fall in line or get out of the way.

I have long argued that government employees ought not be allowed to unionize. When public employees collectively bargain, who are they bargaining against? Their public employers, which is to say, the democratic public, which is to say, us. The point of a democratic government is to govern in a way that more or less tracks the public interest. The point of a government employee union is to organize against the public interest, to get in the way when the democratic public’s notions about its interests conflict with the interests of the union’s members. When a public-sector union is strong, government of the union’s domain is effectively ceded to the union itself. When that domain is the armed, business end of the law’s coercive authority, that’s a giant problem. It shouldn’t be allowed.

The political problem with abolishing police unions is obvious enough. Democrats reflexively defend unions, and Republican antipathy to public-sector unions disappears when it comes to cops and firefighters. Heroes, you know, every one. This rare bit of bipartisan concord leaves police unions spectacularly well-defended against reform. Until one party or the other begins to see the damage unions do, and becomes willing to fight it, anything more than superficial change is impossible.

by Michelle Dean

Those end of the year book lists are lumbering around the internet right now, coming soon to a friend’s Facebook wall near you. NPR’s list of 2014 Great Reads numbers 250; the New York Times Book Review offers the slightly more conservative 100 Notable Books of 2014. The hugeness of these lists betrays something: their uselessness. My eyes always cross at lists that number above, say, 25. It certainly doesn’t narrow down the Christmas shopping list much.

Plus, these lists get to be disquieting documents of the Way We Publish Now. I would love to believe that we live in a publishing environment where we were producing at least a hundred well-edited, well-considered books a year. Unfortunately, as Ursula K. Le Guin recently put it to the shocked horror of most at the National Book Awards ceremony, writers instead work in an industry controlled by “commodity profiteers [who] sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.” It’s not an amazing environment for the production of literature. Mostly, publishers are throwing all sorts of stuff at the wall to see what sticks. I find it overwhelming and kind of sad to receive as many bad galleys as I do, often bought by a publisher for a great deal of money, but landing on my doorstep with the undignified plop of thawed turkey.

Listing so many books as “notable,” given that context, smacks of desperation.

It’s certainly always been the case that publishers churn out tons of books a year that flame out and die in the remainder piles. But even the largest pinch of salt, 2014 has seemed particularly bad. Precisely three newly published books have managed to take up permanent residence in my head this year: Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, Jenny Offill’s Department of Speculation, and Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald. And while other people might compose their lists differently, or count in their own findings five, ten, or even fifteen notable books, listing a hundred or more just feels… careless. It feels like the work of marketers, not of people who care about identifying good books.

If you are looking for new book recommendations, you’ll find yourself much better off consulting The Millions’ Year in Reading columns. There recommendations do not have to meet some insane artificial round number. No one is constrained by what happens to be on the publishers’ lists. In fact if anything the books they recommend tend to skew old. Michael Schaub, for example, wants you to read some Galway Kinnell. Jayne Anne Phillips has been re-reading Stephen Crane. Tana French got around to Strangers on a Train.

If someone asked me, for example, I would have told them that Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, is the book that changed my life this year. I had to consult it for some book research and then never stopped quoting it. I’ve become quite annoying on the subject and am desperate for someone else to talk about it with. Isn’t that what you want to hear, anyway, from someone recommending a book to you, rather than two tossed-off lines of plot summary in a sea of 99 other books?