The Dish

Friedersdorf interviews Kevin Drum about suburbia:

The problems with suburbia are also its greatest attraction: it's bland, safe, quiet, and sprawling. And, generally speaking, cheap. These are all big things that critics mock at their peril. When you hear people lament "cookie cutter stucco houses," for example, there's a condescension there that's really unseemly. The suburban middle class doesn't buy cookie cutter houses because they have no taste, they buy them because that's what they can afford. Hip, creative architecture is a lot of fun, but it's also expensive. A two thousand square foot ranch-style home built on the same plan as fifty other houses in the same neighborhood is pretty affordable.

Could suburbia be changed via policy? Sure. You can change anything via policy eventually. The question is: do suburbanites want change? And the answer, generally speaking, is that they don't: they like safe, quiet, sprawling, cheap, and kid-friendly. They may or may not like bland, but even if they don't they figure it's a small price to pay.

A reader suggests:

One mildly cynical theory: this + this = this. Getting a DADT repeal in place before Kagan's confirmation hearings goes a long way towards taking her ROTC ban off the table as a serious GOP sticking point.

Or maybe we complained loudly enough.

A salutary tale.

Jewish parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall, who is "deeply ambivalent about Israel," describes her difficulty discussing the Matzav with her young daughter:

I stumbled desperately through an explanation of why two peoples feel they have a legitimate claim to the same land. “But having land is like having a seat on a bus,” Josie replied. “You can’t just push someone out of their seat, and you can’t just leave your seat and then come back to it after a long time and just expect the person who is sitting there now to give it to you.” My panicked reaction to her words surprised me. I found myself trying to convince her that Israel did have that right. But that’s not what I believe. But I’m not sure what I believe.

I want my children to love Israel, but I don’t want them to identify with bullies. I was spinning in my own head like the desperate, overwhelmed woman in the Calgon commercial: J Street, take me away!

But Josie’s bus-bully analogy resonated. Baby-boomer Jews seem wedded to a sepia-toned image of Jews as victims—in the shtetl, in the Holocaust, in Israel’s early wars. But in real life, victims can turn into bullies. Perhaps being the parent to girls, rather than boys, helps me see this—in Mean Girl dynamics, the power shifts back and forth almost every day. We want a bright clear line, but heroes and villains in the real world are much fuzzier.

Elsewhere in Tablet, Marc Tracy asks Beinart what prompted his NYRB essay:

Having kids definitely played a role. I think it made me think about not just my Zionist identity, but what kind of Zionism was available to them. And the more I thought about that, the more I began to worry. I also think that we all operate at intellectual levels and emotional levels, and for me I just decided … There was this story in the New York Times about the Gaza War, about the house in Gaza where they found the children whose parents were dead. What you may find, if you do have kids one day, you are affected at an emotional level more strongly by certain things, in a way you may not be entirely prepared for. I think that’s a good thing, it’s primordial. I know people develop all kinds of shrewd and sophisticated and clever ways of explaining anything that happens, but when I read the story I just thought I was not in the mood to try in some clever way to explain it away. And the fact that I felt I was supposed to just sickened me a little bit.

BP's latest strategy to stanch the spill is known as "top kill," which involves pumping a heavy drilling fluid into the well lines before cementing it shut:

[BP executive Doug Suttles] said the biggest risk is the possibility that the drilling mud would be forced from the wellhead into the water instead of forcing the flow of oil and natural gas back down into the wellbore. If that occurs, Suttles said the company could then deploy what it calls the "junk shot," using tire shards, golf balls and other odd-sized debris to force it back. "That is one of the options we would have available," Suttles said. "If we saw the right conditions and felt like that would be the right next step." He said BP decided to use top kill prior to the junk shot for fear that the junk shot might clog the lines and eliminate the top kill option altogether.

If that fails, BP will try placing another containment device over the leak. Andrew Revkin thinks they shouldn't get to that point:

To my mind, if the “top kill” procedure being prepared for [Wednesday] fails, Obama must step forward far more forcefully and publicly engage an oil-well SWAT team drawing on the country’s leading lights in hydraulics, deep-ocean engineering and geology, from the Pentagon outward.

The Times, where my weekly column appears, tells Google to piss off:

[Times Online] will only show their homepages, not articles, to search engines. That means the sites – which are fine, focused products – could be passing up their greatest customer acquisition opportunity: their content itself. Non-members who reach a story page are greeted by a Times+ sign-up and login overlay, obscuring the article; there’s no taster, no excerpt and no way that anyone will find those articles via search sites.

Massie asks:

[H]ow many readers who've grown-up with "free" newspapers will sign-up? True, newspapers often spend far too much time and effort and money chasing the "youth" market and alienating their existing base as they hop aboard the latest faddish bandwagon but in this instance forgetting about the kids adds risk to an enterprise already loaded with hazard.

The disagreement between Avent and Friedersdorf narrows.

A blog devoted to butching up the magical symbol. Another Dish fave after the jump:

But not necessarily in the short term. Tyler Cowen posits:

I'm still an optimist about the much longer run, whether for utility or GDP.  In fact the greater the current labor market troubles, the greater the long-run "human capital dividend" from reallocating resources.  Sooner or later, we'll have another burst of important innovation, comparable to that of 1870-1940.  We just don't have it now.