The Dish

Julian Sanchez mediates:

I think of Jay Leno as an irritating boil on the ass of comedy, on the rare occasions I think of him at all. I’m also not the audience for late-night talk shows. In some abstract sense, I guess I prefer to live in a world where viewers prefer high-middlebrow gag sketches and marginally smarter interviews with celebrities, but it doesn’t really matter, because I’m not going to watch the Tonight Show with Conan any more than I’m going to watch it with Leno.  Neither are like half the people sporting a #teamconan.

My feelings entirely. And yes, “hate” is too strong a term. Leno just bores and irritates.

Avatar's script has a deleted sex scene.

A reader writes:

Coakley wins, HCR passes, things continue to generally suck, Democrat's depressed mood deepens, tea party boils, GOP wins blow out in 2010.

Coakley loses, HCR goes down to defeat, Democrats rise in fury, tea party fails to offer credible alternative, a finally furious Obama is handed the best foil since Dewey didn't beat Truman, Democrats pick up three Senate seats in 2010, HCR passes with robust public option and Medicare buy-in, polar bears saved.

Sonya Chung has some advice for novelists who don't want Literary Review's Bad Sex In Fiction Award. Suggestion number three:

Avoid spiritual-religious metaphors – “salvation” (Palahniuk), “rapture” (Ayn Rand), “magical composite / weird totem” (Roth), “on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light” (Banville), “my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer” (Theroux) – or any language that gestures toward the grand or the epic: “weeping orifice” (Ann Allestree), “Imperial pint of semen” (Neal Stephenson), “Defile her” (Roth), “like a torero…trailing his cape in the dust before the baffled bull,” “gravid tremulousness of her breasts” (Banville).

John Cassidy interviews economist Gary Becker:

If this recession had got a lot worse, we would have seen two major changes: much more government intervention in the economy and a lot more concentration in economics in trying to understand what went wrong. Assuming I’m right and, fundamentally, the recession is over—a severe recession but maybe not much greater than the 1981 recession, or those in the nineteen-seventies—I think you are not going to see a huge increase in the role of government in the economy.

I’m more and more confident of that. And economists will be struggling to understand how this crisis happened and what you can do to head another one off in the future, but it will be nothing like the revolution in the role of government and in thinking that dominated the economics profession for decades after the Great Depression. The Great Depression was a great depression by any measure you want to take—unemployment, decline in output, and so on. This recession pales in comparison. As a result, I think we are not going to have anything like the reaction we had at that point.

Jonah Lehrer looks at various creative peaks:

While physics, math and poetry are dominated by brash youth, many other fields are more amenable to middle age. (Simonton's list includes domains such as "novel writing, history, philosophy, medicine".) He argues that these fields show a very different creative curve, with a "a leisurely rise giving way a comparatively late peak, in the late 40s or even 50s chronologically, with a minimal if not largely absent drop-off afterward."

(These differences are also cross-cultural: for instance, the age gap between the creative peaks for poets and novelists has been found in every major literary tradition across the world, with novelists getting wise and poets getting stale.) This suggests that the most efficient allocation of grants in these fields – at least if we want to fund innovation – is to fund medical researchers, philosophers and novelists in middle age, when they're tenured and deeply "encultured". Sometimes, innovation requires decades of education. That might not be romantic – it's amazing how many cliches of creativity come from 19th century British poets – but it's the demographic reality.

A reader writes:

I agree with this reader. When I was in college in the early 90's my friends and I did a lot of LSD. A lot of that was simple economics. At $5-8 per hit, it was entertainment until sunrise plus cheaper and easier to get than alcohol (us being under 21, and the Dead were still touring). It was so much more bang for your buck.

When I moved to London in the mid-late 90's, everyone was taking speed (amphetamine sulphate, not crystal meth). Again, one person could be high all night (even at inflated nightclub-dealers' prices) for less money than a round of drinks. Ecstasy was better and available, but more expensive. Coke was expensive. LSD was cheaper, but only on the rare occasion you could find it. But a night on speed was a cheap night out. When the price of E crashed, everyone started gobbling pills like M&Ms.

While I was in London, back in the US heroin was suddenly available cheaply (and fashionable thanks to grunge-rock). People started dabbling in that, because it cost as much as a movie-ticket and a couple of beers. I haven't been interested in drugs for years, but lately (in England) it seems all the young people in my office (in entry-level positions) are doing a lot of cocaine at the weekends and this is in no small part because the price has crashed (and the price per pint has risen). If you want to get out of your head for a night, it offers the most bang for your buck. I don't doubt that if crystal meth were as available and cheap as LSD that my college friends and I would have been a bunch of meth-heads instead of acid-freaks.

I'm very happy that the cheap-drug-of-choice in those days was one that wasn't habit-forming and mentally wore us out such that we could simply say "No, not this weekend. I'm too tired and have stuff to do tomorrow" without any twitching or withdrawal. If the DEA and other government bodies really wanted to get people off meth, they'd covertly flood the market with cheap LSD and ecstasy.

Or pot. No one goes on murder sprees or stays up for days on end when they smoke pot.

A real-life, and terrifying, version of Tigger.

A reader writes:

I'm trying to remain hopeful Martha Coakley will win the election next Tuesday, but that is difficult to do when listening to radio talk shows. I'm not talking about the right wing talk shows, I'm talking about the respected middle-of-the-road shows on WBZ-AM radio in Boston.

My god, there is so much anger out there.

Many people say they're voting for Scott Brown simply because he is someone different. They're saying screw Washington, screw the Democrats, screw political machines. They want change, and Scott Brown, they feel, represents their best shot at that. They do not care what Brown stands for, they do not care how the country got into the messes we're in, all they want is change. It's kind of a "throw the bums out mentality" — unthinking and purely emotional. Here in Massachusetts, the Democratic Party controls the Governor's office and both houses of the Commonwealth Legislature, so we see on the state level what is happening in Washington. Gridlock, gridlock, political gridlock, and the Democrats can't get their act together enough to solve it.

I want Martha to win, I desperately want her to win, for her victory represents the best chance the country has in moving health care and other needed change forward, but I'm scared shitless she'll lose by that proverbial one vote. God, I hope I'm wrong.