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Should Law School Last Two Years? Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

Many readers address the question in rich detail:

I’m sure that many law students waste their third year of law school. But in my 3rd year, I took electives in “International Human Rights Law, Refugee Law, and Civil Liberties”; I interned part time at a local public defender’s office; and I wrote a law review article on free speech rights of high school students. Oh, and the previous year, knowing that I had plenty of time to take all the classes I needed for the bar exam, I got a couple of units for teaching a “Street Law” class at a local high school. In addition, because three years of law school means two summers, not just one, I was able to work at a small environmental law firm after my first year, and a more traditional firm (ie, one that might offer me a job) after my second year. Had law school been only two years, I might have been forced to eschew the former job.

Finally, having taught high school for many years (see, that Street Law gig paid off), I have learned that the most important things that an educational institution can offer a student are opportunities – opportunities to take nontraditional courses, to pursue various career and academic options, and to engage in intellectual inquiry. Yes, many students will waste those opportunities by playing Madden, as was the case with Elie Mystal. However, it is grossly inequitable to allow the fecklessness of a few – or even of a majority – to impoverish the education of those who desire more than the bare minimum – essentially vocational – education of a two-year law school program.

Another reader:

This post is quite timely, as my third year of law school started yesterday. We discussed the president’s comments in my class “Wealth, Democracy, and the Rule of Law”. This is something that I wrestle with because it would be great to graduate with less debt but this issue isn’t so simple. The third year of law school serves purposes beyond teaching you to “think like a lawyer.” Two things come to mind:

The first is that students would probably spend two years taking subjects that are on the bar and miss out on other classes. So besides your first-year required courses, second year would turn into another list of rote courses. There’s a virtue in giving students the opportunity to study things besides the general legal knowledge on the bar exam (like environmental law, intellectual property, poverty law) to give them an idea in the area they want to practice.

Without a third year, students couldn’t take a class like “Wealth, Democracy, and the Rule of Law” to talk about democratic legitimacy and the effect of money in a democratic system. This is a course that undergrads can take in political science, but studying it now through the lens of the law gives it something new. It can affect work as a lawyer to think about the financial inequalities in a system of laws.

Second, who will foot the bill for the transition from student to lawyer? I am lucky that my school offers clinical programs to start practicing lawyerly work, but the same instruction would cost a firm an enormous amount of money. A lawyer doesn’t start out being profitable, so hiring a two-year educated student could be a riskier investment than someone with a third-year clinic. This could make the legal employment problem even worse. More is needed than the president’s impromptu comments to bring down the costs of legal education.

Another:

While I am a strong supporter of Obama, I disagree with his thinking here. First, Obama has probably had one of the least typical post-law school legal experiences. He never practiced – whether in private practice or as part of a corporate/government legal department – for any notable period of time. He is highly familiar with the academic side of law school, but that is where his experience ends.

Where I believe law school falls short is on the practical training side. Obama’s answer is just to condense the academic side and then turn them loose on the theory that they won’t have to pay for the third year, which tends to be more of a practical application training year than an educational one. But, economics will kick in to make sure that tuition for any two-year program is sufficient to pay the professors, who likely will not easily agree to a 1/3 salary cut and other administrative costs.

Actually, if anything, the academic side could perhaps use some pruning. Constitutional law, for example, while an interesting area of tremendous importance in terms of the country’s legal framework, has practically no application to most attorneys’ daily practice. The training side of law school should start early. Not only writing and argument development – which is currently standard – but listening to and advising partners and clients. These latter qualities, while simple sounding, can be significantly more difficult and may take years to develop – even for the most academically successful student.

The benefit of the third year is learning how to apply the tools gathered from the intensive first two years. Doing this in an academic and supportive environment (or at least with mentors who are actually paid to mentor) rather than some of the cut-throat realities of the first year of private practice is likely of significantly greater value. I would also add that right now firms are generally very reluctant to hire new law grads because of their lack of any practical experience. (And I’m not talking about the rarified top firms, whose own brands sell their services and not their lawyers and who thus operate on a different business model in terms of associate recruitment than most of the legal world.) Reducing law school to solely the academic training would likely only exacerbate this problem in the short term, which would ultimately be of significantly less benefit to students from a career perspective than to pay for the third year.

Another recommends reducing the number of undergrad years instead:

Cutting law school to two years is a bad idea. What I think is a good idea: more combined BA/JD programs that let you get out of school in five or six years. It’s ridiculous that the US is the only country that requires a full baccalaureate degree before going to law school. And our baccalaureates are four years, while in Europe, they’re three.

I don’t think we need many 21-year-old lawyers on the streets, at least not without a formal paid apprenticeship or preceptorship, but the average law school graduate has completed seven years of higher education – eight if they did law school at night. That’s a lot of loans. I was in law school during the last period of time when it was possible to take out a maximum Stafford loan, pay tuition and books, and live on the rest. I was also fortunate that I paid off my college student debt during the five years I worked between college and law school. A dozen years later, I still owe $75k in student loans. I’m making headway, and I’ll eventually pay them off, but that kind of debt limits your employment (no making $35k a year working for a small nonprofit!) and makes the prospect of unemployment absolutely terrifying.

One more reader:

FYI, at least one law school I know of – Brooklyn Law School – now offers a two-year program (there are probably more – I just happen to know of Brooklyn’s because I’m an alum). However, this two-year program costs the same as a three-year program; it just fits the same amount of classes into a shorter timespan by cutting out the summer and winter breaks. Most law school students work as law clerks or summer interns (or “summer associates” at big firms) in the summers, so this essentially just moves that early working experience from the middle to the end of the process.

I don’t think I would have been well-served by this setup, but I’m sure it’ll be useful for some people. They just have to reconcile themselves to opting out of the usual big firm recruitment model (which, truthfully, a lot of people are doing anyway just by going to BLS).

I’ve heard grumbling that this is a gimmick and since the tuition is the same, there’s no real innovation or change here, but I don’t entirely agree. I left law school with a massive amount of debt and only some of that was from tuition. Another huge portion was from living expenses – which, in New York City, are no joke. Cutting that by a third could be a huge benefit to some people, particularly if they are trying to pay tuition with loans while living on a spouse’s income.

What I’d really like to see is true innovation in how we train lawyers by getting away from a “one size fits all” model. I’d like to see a model in which different specialties carry different licenses based on passing different exams – kind of how teachers have different credentials for math, science, English, etc. Some stuff would be common to all. For example, everyone calling themselves a lawyer should have a basic grasp of constitutional principles and probably all of the other core first-year subjects as well (contracts, torts, crim law, property). Beyond that, let students mix-and-match as suits them and their goals.

Obama Wants A Little War

by Patrick Appel

Fisher outlines what appears to be the administration’s Syria plan:

[W]hat the Obama administration appears to want is a limited, finite series of strikes that will be carefully calibrated to send a message and cause the just-right amount of pain. It wants to set Assad back but it doesn’t want to cause death and mayhem. So the most likely option is probably to destroy a bunch of government or military infrastructure – much of which will probably be empty.

Drum labels this course of action “useless”:

All the evidence suggests that Obama is considering the worst possible option in Syria: a very limited air campaign with no real goal and no real chance of influencing the course of the war. You can make a defensible argument for staying out of the fight entirely, and you can make a defensible argument for a large-scale action that actually accomplishes something (wiping out Assad’s air force, for example), but what’s the argument for the middle course? I simply don’t see one.

Franklin Spinney argues that this plan relies on the “marriage of two fatally-flawed ideas”:

1. Coercive diplomacy assumes that carefully calibrated doses of punishment will persuade any adversary, whether an individual terrorist or a national government, to act in a way that we would define as acceptable.

2. Limited precision bombardment assumes we can administer those doses precisely on selected “high-value” targets using guided weapons, fired from a safe distance, with no friendly casualties, and little unintended damage.

This marriage of pop psychology and bombing lionizes war on the cheap, and it increases our country’s addiction to strategically counterproductive drive-by shootings with cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs.

Fallows seconds Spinney:

For 20 years now we have seen this pattern:

1. Something terrible happens somewhere — and what is happening in Syria is not just terrible but atrocious in the literal meaning of that term.

2. Americans naturally feel we must “do something.”

3. The easiest something to do involves bombers, drones, and cruise missiles, all of which are promised to be precise and to keep our forces and people at a safe remove from the battle zone.

4. In the absence of a draft, with no threat that taxes will go up to cover war costs, and with the reality that modern presidents are hamstrung in domestic policy but have enormous latitude in national security, the normal democratic checks on waging war don’t work.

5. We “do something,” with bombs and drones, and then deal with blowback and consequences “no one could have foreseen.”

Larison suspects that a bombing campaign will quickly escalate:

Since almost everyone concedes that the planned strikes are virtually useless, it is hard to believe that the administration won’t feel compelled to launch additional attacks on the Syrian government when the first strikes fail to change regime behavior. There will presumably be increasing domestic and international pressure for an escalation of U.S. involvement once the U.S. begins attacking Syria, and once Obama has agreed to take direct military action of one kind he will have greater difficulty resisting the pressure for even more. There is also always a possibility that Assad and his patrons could retaliate against U.S. forces or clients, in which case the pressure to escalate U.S. involvement will become much harder to resist.

And Gregory Djerejian, who is conflicted over whether or not to intervene in Syria, argues that we “should not simply bomb for 36 hours, and then go away again”:

This would likely prove worse than doing nothing. We need to re-engage in a holistic Syria policy that squarely grapples with broader regional dynamics and that ultimately leads to a negotiated solution, a task we’d shirked, but where Assad’s use of [chemical weapons (CW)] appears to have forced a reluctant President to more forcefully engage. So if we are going in, we’re going in for more than a few Tomahawks so everyone can get a late August pat on the back that ‘something was done’. It’s not quite Colin Powell’s old so-called Pottery Barn rule: ‘you break it, you own it’. It’s perhaps more here, ‘you bomb it, the breakage is yours too’. Are we up to this? Our national security team? The strategic follow-through? The countless hours of spade-work with allies and, yes, foes? I just don’t know.

I am straddling the fence and unsure, but it is one man ultimately who will decide. My thoughts are with him, this may be a more momentous decision than he may wholly realize. I would not begrudge him standing aside, if he feels the ‘roll-in the cavalry’ noises to date have caused Assad to blink already creating a sufficient enough deterrent impact (though this is dubious). He must also ask himself, when he thinks honestly taking his private counsel, whether he believes he and his team really have the appetite and abilities once embarking on this course to actually succeed in it. These are not easy questions. Yet they demand answers and realistic appraisal. As part of that analysis, one must honestly reckon too with the emerging school of thought that we can bifurcate a military action aimed purely to deter on CW, but without enmeshing ourselves in the conflict and attempting to influence broader outcomes. One doubts it could play out so neatly, and such assumptions should be amply stress-tested.

(Photo: A Syrian man reacts while standing on the rubble of his house while others look for survivors and bodies in the Tariq al-Bab district of the northern city of Aleppo on February 23, 2013. Three surface-to-surface missiles fired by Syrian regime forces in Aleppo’s Tariq al-Bab district left 58 people dead, among them 36 children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on February 24. By Pablo Tosco/AFP/Getty Images)

Adopting An Embryo, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader strongly considered donating:

My wife and I went through the process of in vitro. (And when I say “we”, I mean she endured all the work and physical suffering while I became an expert masturbator. Little known fact: if you have not donated sperm for fertility procedures, you are still a novice. Yes, this means you should keep up your practice.)

The second implantation was a success. We started discussing using the final three embryos for another child when she became pregnant the old fashioned way. Positive we don’t want to implant any more of the remaining embryos, my wife and I face the decision of what to do with them. I struggle with the idea of donating them to another set of parents, mostly because I know how fragile I am at 38 and believe some part of it sprouts from my genetic code. And my family and I are experts in dealing with our brand of crazy. I know my two-year-old needs me, and I guess I just don’t trust anyone else with that responsibility. It is a mix of selfishness and insecurity (and an odd dose of self-righteousness) that makes me believe donation to medical research is the right alternative.

I thought we had made the decision, but the paperwork sits on our kitchen counter and the cryogenic freezer bills still show up every quarter. With all the effort and mental anguish over 3+ years, whatever we decide, it seems like something I will think deeply about for the rest of my life.

Another couple made a different decision:

My husband and I have twins via donor-egg IVF and we had 16 embryos left over. We assumed we’d donate them to science – after all, it was science that enabled us to have our twins in the first place. But after a few years of paying for the freezing fees – for our boys’ “potential siblings on ice,” as we called them – we were pushed to make a decision; the fee was going up and we realized we were sitting on a bounty. Why not give another family a chance at parenthood?

My husband was hesitant initially.

He was the one with the DNA connection to our boys’ frozen siblings. But he pretty quickly came around – no emotional toil! We both felt: Hey, wouldn’t it be cool for our boys to have siblings we didn’t have to potty train and send to college? I will admit that we wanted some level of “control” over who did get to raise our kids’ fro-bros. We are Jewish atheists (not an oxymoron, as you know), and we posted a Match.com-type ad on a website stating, essentially: Republicans and Christianists need not apply. Does the world need more children raised by the likes of Rick Santorum? We felt not.

We got seven takers and chose a non-religious, pro-Obama couple in another state. We drove three hours to meet them and had a lovely chat. We decided that we’d stay in touch and eventually would have our children meet each other.

Unfortunately, the wife miscarried twice with our embryos and blew through 13 of the 16 with no child to show for all the money and heartache. They then turned to the Czech Republic (much cheaper) for a fresh cycle (higher success rate than frozen) and now have a newborn daughter. We don’t know if they’ll try again with our three remaining embryos.

My motivation in this whole endeavor had nothing to do with the embryos or their “right” to life. All of the fertility treatments I’ve been through have only confirmed my belief that life does not begin at conception. Conception doesn’t mean shit. Neither does implantation. Walking out of a hospital with a newborn in a car seat – that’s life.

YouTube In The War Room

by Patrick Appel

Matt Steinglass thinks the “decisive factor” propelling America’s to intervene in Syria is “the rapid availability of mesmerisingly horrifying video imagery of the gas victims” (such as the video above):

In Iraq, video imagery of Saddam’s Kurdish gas victims ultimately came out, but it took years; there was no sense of urgency or an ongoing threat. Even so, the imagery of the massacres ultimately seeded a longstanding American sympathy for the Kurdish cause and remained the clearest indictment of Saddam as a mass murderer. The impact of such video images rests partly on the unique horror of poison gas in the Western imagination.

Waldman makes an important point about these images:

If you’ve watched the coverage of these events on television, you’ve no doubt heard the warnings from anchors: “The images we’re about to show you are disturbing.” And indeed they are, particularly the ones of children—a child being washed down in a dingy hospital while crying out in anguish, rows upon rows of dead children’s bodies, and so on. But it’s precisely because chemical weapons leave no visible injuries that these images can be shown. If the same number of children had been blown apart by bombs, you’d never see the pictures at all, because the editors would have considered them too gruesome to broadcast. And not having seen the images, we might be just a little less horrified.

Erik Voeten identifies one reason the taboo against chemical weapons exists:

Historically, chemical weapons have been heavily associated with poison; the quintessential weapon of the weak, which undermines proper battles for political power based on physical strength. This makes chemical weapons usage easy to associate with cowardice.

Earlier Dish on chemical weapons here.

Performances We Love To Hate

by Chas Danner

The fallout from Miley Cyrus’ hathos-intensive VMA performance has reached the Schraders:

Rich Juzwiak tries to put Cyrus’s performance in perspective:

Cyrus’ showing was essentially incorrect—physically, visually, politically. Her entire aesthetic was awkward. But that kind of awkwardness is something our hate-watching, mess-celebrating culture values. Something that Lady Gaga tried to unsuccessfully touch on with her own mess of a performance of “Applause,” which began with canned boos. But Cyrus outperformed Gaga on that front. I can’t remember the last time I saw a pop star throw herself around a stage like that. Watching Cyrus with a simultaneous sense of delight and horror, I thought of the sage words of Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge in the 1998 electronic-music documentary Modulations: “When in doubt make no sense. No sense is good. And nonsense is good.”

As far nonsensibility is concerned, no one even came close to touching Cyrus. Sexual coming out is a grand tradition in pop, and I’ve never, ever seen it done like this before. This is one of those awards-show performances that only the Video Music Awards seems to be able to spawn—like Britney’s “Gimme More,” or the Madonna-Britney kiss, or Prince in assless pants. We’ll still be talking about what the fuck was going on with Miley Cyrus last night for decades to come.

Kevin Fallon thinks America relishes the chance to overanalyze events like this:

[S]ometimes a VMA performance is just a VMA performance. We may be a nation clutching our pearls, collectively raising one eyebrow, and asking in hushed whispers over our cubicle walls, “Did you see Miley last night?” but all that means is that we got exactly what we wanted from the VMAs. We want unpredictability. We want provocation. We want Miley Cyrus to stick her face into a large woman’s butt crack because we want to be talking about it the next morning. That’s why we engage in heated debates over whether Miley Cyrus is racist based purely on a overly busy, tacky VMA performance. We look forward to overthinking it. We look forward to feigning outrage.

Why Are College And Healthcare So Costly?

by Patrick Appel

Ezra Klein thinks it’s because, unlike other purchases, you can’t say “no” to either:

You might want a television, but you don’t actually need one. That gives you the upper hand. When push comes to shove, producers need to meet the demands of consumers.

But you can’t walk out on medical care for your spouse or education for your child. In the case of medical care, your spouse might die. In the case of college, you’re just throwing away your kid’s future (or so goes the conventional wisdom). Consequently, medical care and higher education are the two purchases that families will mortgage everything to make. They need to find a way to say “yes.” In these markets, when push comes to shove, consumers meet the demands of producers.

The result, in both cases, is similar: skyrocketing costs for a product of uncertain quality.

McArdle provides a different answer:

[H]ow do we explain health care and college cost inflation? Well, health care economist David Cutler once offered me the following observation: In health care, as in education, the output is very important, and impossible to measure accurately. Two 65-year-olds check into two hospitals with pneumonia; one lives, one dies. Was the difference in the medical care, or their constitutions, or the bacteria that infected them? There is a correct answer to that question, but it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what it was.

Similarly, two students go to different colleges; one flunks out, while the other gets a Rhodes Scholarship. Is one school better, or is one student? You can’t even answer these questions by aggregating data; better schools may attract better students. Even when you control for income and parental education, you’re left with what researchers call “omitted variable bias” — a better school may attract more motivated and education-oriented parents to enroll their kids there.

So on the one hand, we have two inelastic goods with a high perceived need; and on the other hand, you have no way to measure quality of output. The result is that we keep increasing the inputs: the expensive professors and doctors and research and facilities.

Can Bystanders Be Criminals?

by Chris Bodenner

Legal scholar Sarah Swan considers the argument that spectators should be held responsible for certain types of crimes:

One interesting student note [pdf] I encountered while researching this article [pdf] identifies a category of “audience-oriented crimes,” in which the presence of the audience profoundly affects the wrong, and thus participation through spectating may attract criminal liability or other penalties. For these audience-oriented wrongs, the “presence and reaction of the spectators” is a “motivating factor” that encourages the underlying activity. The author argues that drag racing and dog-fighting already fall into this category, and that gang rape or group sexual assaults should be included as well.

One Canadian province is taking the principle one step further – to the Internet, in the form of cyberbullying:

In the province of Alberta, new legislation [pdf] dictates that students must “refrain from, report, and not tolerate bullying or bullying behavior directed towards others in the school, whether or not it occurs within the school building, during the school day or by electronic means.” Failure to perform these obligations may result in penalties like suspension or expulsion. Currently, the “duty to report” piece of this legislation has received much critical attention, as has the fact that the legislation clearly extends to things that happen off school grounds and outside of school hours. But the duty to “not tolerate bullying” is pretty remarkable, too. Arguably, spectating is a form of tolerating, meaning that in addition to a duty to report, the legislation may also target the wrong of watching the bullying.

Some pushback on the legislation:

“It’s essentially saying that as adults, we’ve left the playground, and that it’s up to kids to police bullies on behalf of the school and parents,” says Peter Jon Mitchell [of the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada], the report’s author. “Certainly there might be room for bystanders’ (involvement), but I hope we’re not passing the buck to kids and saying, ‘Solve your own problems.'” …

Brenda Morrison, associate professor of criminology at Simon Fraser University, says the misstep with the new legislation is that it threatens students into reporting bullying rather than empowering them to do so – a strategy she believes exacerbates the problem. “These heavy sanctions actually create more of a culture of fear in schools,” says Morrison, a bullying expert. “We want kids to voluntarily step up for all the right reasons, because they’re good citizens.”

War With Syria Is Massively Unpopular

by Patrick Appel

Reuters found that only 9 percent of Americans support using force against Syria. Nate Cohn claims that “it’s far too early to draw conclusions about public opinion on a hypothetical strike on Syria”:

The public isn’t fully informed about Syria’s behavior, and the administration and its senate allies haven’t made the case for strikes. Given that well-regarded polls have shown that the use of chemical weapons could sway public opinion, it wouldn’t be wise to discount the possibility that a plurality or majority of Americans might ultimately support some sort of military operation.

But support for striking Syria compares badly to previous wars. Joshua Keating digs up polling on past conflicts:

47 percent of Americans supported the U.S. intervention in Libya in 2011, which Talking Points Memo noted at the time was the “lowest level of support for an American military campaign in at least 30 years.” Seventy-six percent of American initially supported the Iraq War, and 90 percent supported U.S. action in Afghanistan in 2001.

On the eve of NATO military action in Kosovo in 1999, Gallup described public support as “tepid” at 46 percent. By contrast, 81 percent of Americans thought that George H.W. Bush was “doing the right thing” prior to the beginning of Operation Restore Hope in Somalia. Fifty-three percent initially supported in the invasion of Grenada. Even at their worst points, support for the wars in Iraq and Vietnam hovered around 30 percent.

I recognize there’s always a Rally ‘Round the Flag Effect and the level of support for action in Syria could change once the cruise missiles start flying and Americans feel the need to support the military action out of patriotism, but the baseline here is still pretty dismal.

Even if support spikes after America launches its missiles, that support is unlikely to be particularly solid. Support for intervention in Libya fell from 47 percent at the beginning of the conflict to 39 percent a few months later. And that was before the Benghazi attack.

The View From Your Window Contest: Winner #168

by Chris Bodenner

A reader writes:

What do we have to go on? Boxy architecture, A/C units, and radio towers as far as the eye can see. So it’s a warm climate that’s not very affluent, but still forward enough that people can afford air conditioning. I’m going to go out on a limb and guess a suburb of Jakarta. (I’m probably completely wrong and this is Venezuela or some other Central or South American country, which was my other instinctual reaction.)

Another:

Post-Soviet concrete, plus lots of antennae and cisterns – and an abundance of balcony foliage and reckless power lines. I’d put this somewhere in Anatolia, Turkey. And since Syria might be getting some more public attention this week, I’ll say it’s Gaziantep.

Another:

This has to be Japan, and somewhere reasonably north, judging by the winter sky and vegetation. There’s no other clues to its location other than the large number of masts in the background. It looks like Tokyo, and there’s a US communications station in Fuchu, so I’m going to guess there.

Another:

Isn’t it the dream city at the end of Inception? I think the buildings are about to fall …

Another:

I have no idea what city this week’s VFYW shows, but I am just glad I don’t live there.

Another:

A tough one with not much to go on. I can’t wait to find out what city it is and if anyone can guess the actual window. I’m guessing Barcelona, Spain. And since I’m guessing, and it’s a big city, I’m going with the Ciutat Vella neighbourhood. The only things I had to go on: 1) I thought the city had a vaguely European or possibly South American feel – based on the flower boxes and some architectural clues. 2) It obviously has weather extremes, as there are lots of chimneys and A/C units. 3) It appears to have water issues, as there are several water tanks visible. With that little bit of information I deduced Barcelona, but for the life of me couldn’t find the right view. I found a few that were close but missing the cell phone tower (and a map of cell phone towers for Barcelona didn’t help, as there are well over 100).

Another reader:

Arrgh!

I’ve gone from Albania to Romania to Moldova to Lebanon … I think I’m settling on Athens, Greece. I’ve been, but not long enough to have a solid memory of this kind of vantage point. It’s the only place I’ve found with windows that look right on buildings that are densely packed enough, along with the stair-shaped buildings. Pictures of Athens seem to feature more awnings over apartment balconies than I see in the contest picture, but I am drained. Athens! The window is a needle in a haystack, but if I had to guess I’d say somewhere in the Zografou area.

Another:

I know this is Beirut – it just has to be! There aren’t any discernible clues to my eyes in the photo – so it COULD be somewhere like Istanbul or even somewhere in Eastern Europe. And one has to consider, if you did Amman last week, why would you choose another neighboring city in the region like Beirut. But I know the city skyline in Beirut, and a considerable portion of it (especially in the suburbs) looks like that. The difficulty is pinpointing an area of the city. I’m going to guess Hamra Stree area in downtown Beirut just because some of the apartments in this photo look pretty nice and upscale – which is typical of this area. This is only the second VFYW that I have entered and I’m finding it a challenge!

Another gets in the right area:

I’m pretty sure this is São Paulo, Brazil because I live there. Looks like a decent neighborhood, but I don’t know more specifically.

Another nails the right country and city:

The photo shouted out Latin America, and closer inspection gives clues that this is Buenos Aires, Argentina (BA). Aside from the traditional and heavily built-up urban aesthetic, the barren vines on the lot-line wall on the left indicate this this is their comparatively mild winter. The balconies at the high-rise to the right are installed right up to the corner – a Latin-American speciality – while the location of several ACs in through-wall sleeves at the center-right building is a particularly New York City approach that harks back to the first buildings retrofitted with air-conditioners, something only likely in a city that was already highly urbanized in the ’50s. Finally, I recall from my youth reading National Geographic that BA is a city spiked with these funny sorts of television towers spaced at odd intervals, and recent photos confirm that this is still the case.

Now as soon as Google gets around to driving their Streetview vehicles around BA’s streets, uploads and stitch together all of the views and includes it in their maps, I’ll be able to tell you where exactly this is. Unfortunately, since my lovely wife isn’t patient enough to have me look through the thousands of user-submitted Google photos of BA (apparently this thing called “dinner” is calling), the best I can do today is look at the wide expanse of city in the background, observe the shadows from the sun in the north, and conclude the view is taken in the southern part of the city; I’m guessing the neighborhood of Constitucion.

Am I close?

Very close. Another guess:

The balconies full of plants make me think of Buenos Aires. I lived there for seven months and that is one of the strongest lasting visual impressions I have of the city: green in every balcony. The lack of Victorian-era architecture makes me think it’s the outskirts as opposed to the city center. The prevalence of air conditioners would put it at one of the richer suburbs. Shot in the dark: Ramos Mejia.

Another gets the right neighborhood:

I believe this is Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina. I know because I am here right now on vacation and it is sunny and cold, and this sort of all-floor apartment building architecture is very common.

Another:

I’m fairly certain this is Buenos Aires, though I suspect identifying the precise window will be fairly difficult even for your most skillful VFYW maniacs. The entire central part of the city has a skyline that looks very similar. I’m leaving from LA to Buenos Aires on Monday. When I arrive there Tuesday I’ll look for the exact location.

One of the earliest winners of the window contest – #9 from Sarajevo – nearly gets the exact location:

I haven’t entered one of these in a couple of years, but I wanted to write because I recognized it in about 5 seconds. This is a view from relatively high up in a building in the lower 1600 block of calle Montevideo in Recoleta, Buenos Aires between Guido and Quintana, looking North-East. (Unfortunately, Google Streetview has not made it to Argentina, so I can’t identify the exact number.)

Last November, my husband and I stayed at the Algodon Mansions, a couple of doors down the street, during our honeymoon. It was fabulous. Best memory is probably lingering over a sublime steak at a parrilla in San Telmo before stumbling on one of the local gay clubs on the way home and stopping by to demonstrate Gangnam Style to some rather befuddled locals, staying out to 6am – first time in about a decade!

The clear winner this week:

I’ve never submitted to a VFYW competition and I’m amazed by the investigative powers (and time commitment) of your readers who do. But I had to submit this time, because this picture is clearly Buenos Aires. I’m from New York, but I live in BA part-time for work. The architecture, strung cable lines from building to building, the nature of the sky – they all scream Buenos Aires. I also pretty quickly guessed Recoleta, given the architecture (I myself live in Palermo Soho, and it doesn’t look like this).

Having narrowed it down substantially, how does one go about getting an address and even perhaps a window location? There are not a lot of landmarks to go by – a couple of cell phone towers. I’ve been through the experience of living in temporary apartment rentals here, researching the apartments online. They often have shots out the window or from a terrace that I thought might help orient me against those landmarks. Scanning a Google images search on Recoleta apartment rentals, I somewhat quickly came across an airbnb apartment rental picture that I thought might have the same cell tower in the background. Clicking through to the actual ad on airbnb, I realized I got luckier than I thought:

A bit of scrolling through the pictures – the 11th photo specifically – revealed nearly the exact same view, although possibly one or two floors above the VFYW window. There isn’t the plant near the window of the airbnb ad, so I don’t think this is precisely the same apartment – but clearly in the same vertical line. The building is the Concord Callao, Avenida Callao, 1234. The view is western – toward Riobamba and away from Callao. The view is out the living room window. I would guess about the 10th floor.

That was fun!

From the submitter:

Evidence that I’m a hardcore Dishhead (or that I just don’t get out much): I was hugely gratified when I saw you’d used my photo! It’s evidence of the limitations of photography, as well, because the actual view out that window is much prettier than what you see here. I couldn’t get the lens to see what my eyes saw.

I’ll be surprised if people get this one, as it’s an internal/courtyard view. The apartment building is 1234 Callao, in the part of Buenos Aires where Recoleta meets Barrio Norte (not too far from Palermo, not too far from Once) but the apartment (1210) is on the back side of the building. I spent a wonderful month here, researching a new book project and eating too much bitter-chocolate ice cream. (Unfortunately, Buenos Aires’ three main ice cream chains, Persicco, Freddo, and Volta, all have outposts within a block of this building.)

(Archive)

To Unplug Or Not To Unplug?

by Tracy R. Walsh

Meghan Neal finds that “Facebook is officially the bad habit of internetting – that fixation you can’t seem to kick, feel really guilty about, but sneak it anyway at night while no one’s looking.” But now there’s a new system to shame users off social media:

[A] couple of PhD students at MIT—finding themselves too addicted [to Facebook] to do their actual research—developed a system that tracks your online activity and zaps you with a painful shock if it sees you’re spending too much time on Facebook. They’re calling it the Pavlov Poke, after 19th-century Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov …

However, after electrocuting themselves several times in the name of science, the pair decided the shocks were a bit too unpleasant, and decided to try a different approach: peer ridicule. They enlisted Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and paid strangers $1.40 to call them up and yell at them for wasting too much time Facebooking. The callers read from pre-written scripts: “Hey, stop using Facebook! What the hell is wrong with you? You lazy piece of garbage. You’re a dumb freaking idiot, you know that? Get it together!”

On the other hand, Janet Kornblum, after having spent several months off Facebook, delivers an impassioned defense of the site:

You know, unplugging. It’s all the rage. And it was. For a while. I felt like I was reminded of my real life, right here, right now: the dog wanting to go for a walk, me needing to go for a walk, talking on the phone with my mom, eating—all the real-life stuff.

Then I realized – I kind of missed it. I missed my friends telling me what they were doing. I missed one friend’s daily pictures of her baby. I missed a guy I hardly know who always posts beautiful pictures of his garden, which looks like Eden. I even missed the goofy advice postings like, “Life is a spiritual journey!” that I thought I hated. I do hate them. But I kind of missed them. Oh, irony. Facebook is real life, too. So I came back.

Facebook is a place where stuff happens. Hopefully it is stuff you care about, because it’s about and by your friends, people who are sometimes your Friends and sometimes just friends. In a way, Facebook is a place in the way that countries are places. It’s big and vast and maybe your neighborhood knows a little bit of what’s going on.