Markmaking

Born in 1976

• Notorious: Jayson Blair, Lillo Brancato, Anand Jon 
• Babes: Reese Witherspoon, Keri Russell, Alicia Silverstone, Candace Cameron, Emily Deschanel
• Child Stars: Danny Pintauro, Fred Savage, Josh Saviano, Wiley Wiggins
• Hunks: J. C. Chasez, Colin Farrell, Adrian Grenier, Domenick Lombardozzi, Ja Rule
• Tennis: Jennifer Capriati, Lindsay Davenport
• Athletes: Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, Peyton Manning, Vladimir Guerrero, Miguel Tejada, Chad Pennington, Ronaldo, Chauncey Billups, Torsten Frings
• Nerds: Orkut Buyukkokten, Jaleel White
• Musicians: Feist, Jenny Lewis, Ben Gibbard, Martha Wainwright
• Femmes: Virginie Ledoyen, Audrey Tautou 
• Martyrs: Matthew Shepard, Pat Tillman
• Pundits: Chris Cillizza, Jon Finer, Jennifer 8. Lee, Joshua Kurlantzick

Born in 1934

• Lee Friedlander, Giovanni Anselmo, and John McCracken
• Freddie King, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, Jackie Wilson, Little Milton
• Pat Boone, Van Cliburn, Leonard Cohen, Brian Epstein 
• Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor
• Sparky Anderson, Jerry Buss, John Madden, Bobby Unser, Roger Maris 
• R. W. Apple, Peter Arnett, Sam Donaldson, David Halberstam, Charles Kuralt, Jim Lehrer, Bill Moyers
• Garry Wills, Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, Ved Mehta, Vincent Bugliosi
• Fredric Jameson, Stephan Thernstrom, Amiri Baraka, John Keegan, Vartan Gregorian
• Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Ralph Nader, Orrin Hatch, Willie Brown,  Cuahtemoc Cardenas, Jean Chretien, Bettino Crazi, Edith Cresson
• Daniel Kahneman, Carl Sagan, Jane Goodall,  Alvin Poussaint
• Yuri Gagarin
• Wole Soyinka 
• Gordon Getty
• Charles Manson
• Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Shirley MacLaine, Judi Dench, Rue McClanahan
• Alan Arkin, Wilford Brimley, Dominic Chianese, Jackie Mason, Willard Scott

How Fiction Works

How Fiction Works, by James Wood: a list of reviews and comment.

• Sir Frank Kermode, "The Art of Noticing," New Republic/Powell's
• Leon Neyfakh, "The Wood Workshop: How Critic Became A One-Man School," New York Observer
• Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Los Angeles Times 
• Daniel Green, "Life on the Page," Open Letters  
• Giles Harvey, "James Wood Ain't Afraid of Lit's Favorite Sons," Village Voice  
• Denis Donoghue, "Flaubert's Overcoat," New York Sun
• Morgan Meis, "The 'Truth' Hurts," The Smart Set  
• Paul Dean, "The Art of Reality," The New Criterion  
• Sydney Blair, "Notes from an Uncommon Reader," VQR/Powells 
• Daniel Torday, "James Wood and the Pitfalls of Writing on Writing," Kenyon Review 
• William Deresiewicz, "How Wood Works: The Riches and Limits of James Wood," The Nation 
• Daniel Green, "Beyond the Literary," The Reading Experience 
• John Banville, "The Prime of James Wood," New York Review  

Also:

Peter Conrad (Observer), Christopher Tayler (Guardian), DJ Taylor (Independent), Louis Bayard (Salon), Walter Kirn (NYT), Matt Shaer (CSM), David Gates (Newsweek), Peter Kemp (Times), Sophie Ratcliffe (TLS), Thomas Jones (Telegraph), Judith Shulevitz (Slate), Delia Falconer (Australian), Luke Slattery (Australian)

And:

Rohan Maitzen (The Valve), Keith Phipps (AV Club), Melinda Harvey (SMH), Pradeep Sebastian (The Hindu), Lev Grossman (Time), James Ley (The Age), Charles Matthews (SFGate), Nathan Whitlock (The Star), Jonathan Derbyshire (New Statesman), Christopher Tilghman (Washington Post), John Freeman (Times)

Questions for a Critic of Israel

Recently the Israeli armed forces attacked the institutions of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, causing over 200 casualties. This assault met with a chorus of criticism, much of which has a familiar ring.

The criticism is understandably motivated by the sight of civilian victims suffering. It's understandable to want to bring to a stop any violent activity that causes so much suffering....

African-American teen murder rate exceeds white teen rate by factor of ten

Today's news gives us a chance to observe the silent and unremarked operations of liberal mental self-censorship at work. In the New York Times, Erik Eckholm reports: 

Murders by Black Teenagers Rise, Bucking a Trend

The news peg is the increase in the murder rate among black juveniles aged 14 to 17. It's gone up rapidly, presumably due to poverty, gangs and drugs. Lara Jakes of the Associated Press has a similar story in the Washington Post...

M.I.A., "Paper Planes"

Is M.I.A. 2008's top rapper of Tamil descent?

From Wikipedia:

"Paper Planes" is an alternative hip hop dance song written and produced by M.I.A., Diplo and Switch for M.I.A.'s second studio album Kala (2007). Its main riff is sampled from the song "Straight to Hell" by The Clash.[1] The lyrics to "Paper Planes" are a satire on immigrant stereotypes.

New York City to promote Connecticut economy

In its continuing effort to promote the Connecticut economy at the expense of its own, the New York City Council decided to pass a $1.2 billion property tax increase. Clearly, someone has to pay for the 40,000+ new city employees added during Mayor Bloomberg's term, and it might as well be city's the property owners. 

Property is already so cheap in New York City - why not make it even less affordable?

Money and schools: A cautionary tale from St. Louis

Unreconstructed liberals, of whom the field of education attracts a disproportionate number, perhaps on account of its Rousseauian tendencies, like to imagine that funding disparities, and not dysfunctional urban underclass institutions, are at the bottom of differences in school quality and performance. 

Is this true?  The school system in St. Louis offers a test case. Today we read David A. Lieb's story in the Associated Press that the Missouri Supreme Court has completely rejected a lawsuit by the St. Louis city board of education to undo the district's takeover by the state.  The state took over the district because it was completely failing to do its job. Link: Missouri Supreme Court upholds takeover of St. Louis schools

If one were to base one's views on the sappy fairy tales told by mainstream entertainment and news media, one might expect this to be mainly a story of scrappy minority city kids battling against a heartless white suburban establishment.

Anri Sala interview

Anri Sala talks about "Purchase Not By Moonlight" at Vernissage.tv: "The show features seven films from the late 1990s to the present including a new film, Answer Me, along with photographs and sculptures."

Dave Hickey Goes to the Frieze Art Fair

Dave Hickey's indispensable account of the upper crust of the late bubble era:

I am about to say something nice when a plunging bimbo with an orange buzz cut, in her rush to kiss the whip, nearly tips me in the pool. I retreat. Luckily, at dinner, I’m seated at a table with Barbara Gladstone—the Larry Bird of art-world trash talkers. We talk about Barbara’s new gallery in Brussels and then we talk trash. We are still talking trash, standing by the table waiting for dessert, when a handsome young man comes up and gives Barbara a hug. Barbara says, “Oh, Dave, this is [room noise] Chapman,” so I know it’s one of the famous Chapman brothers but I don’t know if it’s Jake or the other one. Also, I am in my lighthearted, talking-trash-with-Barbara mode, so I stick out my hand and say, “Great to meet you! Didn’t you used to play with Oasis?” I regard this as a gentle, laddish sort of tease and expect the same in return. Instead, Jake (or maybe the other one) turns on his heel and stalks away. Now I’ll never get my 20 signed.

(via AHN)

The Genius of Singapore math

Using the "Primary Mathematics" textbooks, mathematicians and forward-thinking educators try to follow Singapore's lead and rescue math education from the mathematically incompetent.

Efforts in Los Angeles:

Singapore’s textbooks build deep understanding of mathematical concepts through multi-step problems and concrete illustrations that demonstrate how abstract mathematical concepts are used to solve problems from different perspectives.”

By contrast, the study said, “traditional U.S. textbooks rarely get beyond definitions and formulas, developing only students’ mechanical ability to apply mathematical concepts.”

Many eminent mathematicians agree. In fact, it is difficult to find a mathematician who likes the standard American texts or dislikes Singapore’s...

“American textbooks are handicapped by many things,” said Hung-Hsi Wu, who has taught math at UC Berkeley for 42 years, “the most important of which is to regard mathematics as a collection of factoids to be memorized.”..

...most American elementary school teachers – reflecting a generally math-phobic society – lack a strong foundation in the subject to begin with.

And in Philadelphia:

Deborah Wei, who still serves as principal of the K-8 school, liked that the texts were spare, with few bells and whistles, and that students rely not on tricks (carrying the one, or cross-multiplication) but on deep understanding of how to solve problems...

"This curriculum demands a lot of the teacher," Davidson said. "If you want to punch in at 8:20 and leave at 3, this will never be taught well."

China: Charta 2008

Three hundred Chinese citizens signed Charta 2008, "in conscious admiration of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia":

The ruling elite continues to cling to its authoritarian power and fights off any move toward political change.

The stultifying results are endemic official corruption, an undermining of the rule of law, weak human rights, decay in public ethics, crony capitalism, growing inequality between the wealthy and the poor, pillage of the natural environment as well as of the human and historical environments, and the exacerbation of a long list of social conflicts, especially, in recent times, a sharpening animosity between officials and ordinary people.

As these conflicts and crises grow ever more intense, and as the ruling elite continues with impunity to crush and to strip away the rights of citizens to freedom, to property, and to the pursuit of happiness, we see the powerless in our society—the vulnerable groups, the people who have been suppressed and monitored, who have suffered cruelty and even torture, and who have had no adequate avenues for their protests, no courts to hear their pleas—becoming more militant and raising the possibility of a violent conflict of disastrous proportions. The decline of the current system has reached the point where change is no longer optional.

Ross Douthat: Abortion Politics Didn't Doom the GOP

Contra the easy answers, Ross Douthat argues that pro-life "abortion foes" don't deserve all the blame for the Republican rout:

In theory, there are many middle grounds imaginable in America’s abortion wars, from bans that make exceptions for rape and fetal deformities to legal systems modeled on the French system, in which abortion is available but discouraged in the first 10 weeks and sharply restricted thereafter.

The public is amenable to compromise: majorities support keeping abortion legal in some cases, but polling by CBS News and The Times during the presidential campaign showed that more Americans supported new restrictions on abortion than said it should be available on demand. And while some pro-lifers would reject any bargain, many more would be delighted to strike a deal that extends legal protection to more of the unborn, even if it stopped short of achieving the movement’s ultimate goals.

But no such compromise is possible so long as Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey remain on the books. These decisions are monuments to pro-choice absolutism, and for pro-lifers to accept them means accepting that no serious legal restrictions on abortion will ever be possible — no matter what the polls say, and no matter how many hearts and minds pro-lifers change.

Are Better Schools and Economic Growth "Pro-Life"?

Calling Planned Parenthood "pro-life" sneakily switches the terms of the debate such that almost any good public policy is "pro-life," argues Ross Douthat at The Atlantic:

Now I'm obviously happy to have broad debates about public policy, and I certainly think that pro-lifers should be interested in crafting a broadly pro-family politics in addition to seeking a more pro-life legal regime. But the pro-life cause is primarily about issues of law, morality and justice, and if pro-lifers treat the broader pursuit of socioeconomic progress as a substitute for, rather than a complement to, the pursuit of legal protections for the unborn, then they've given up on their movement's raison d'etre to no good effect. Pro-lifers can and should be willing to compromise within the debate about how the law should treat unborn human life, by agreeing to legal regimes that stop short of their ultimate goal. But a "compromise" that involves giving up on that debate entirely in favor of arguments over which domestic-policy interventions will reduce the abortion rate on the demand side is no compromise at all

Boston College vs. Northwestern for BCS Championship

At the New America Foundation, the top football teams are Boston College and Northwestern.

Kinsey on Lovell on Copley

From a review of Art in a Season of Revolution:

In the case of several portraits by John Singleton Copley that depict different women in identical poses and gowns, for example, Lovell convincingly demonstrates that the striking visual similarities in these paintings were hardly the simple result of the painter's use of stock models and costumes, nor were their analogies the result of expedient short cuts that relied on the sitters' ignorance of the other, nearly identical images for acceptance. Instead Lovell offers painstaking evidence ranging from aesthetic theories and practices of the time and familial relationships of the sitters to the intricacies of dressmaking in the period, that demonstrates not only that the sitters knew each other well, but also that they were fully aware and even desirous that their portraits would resemble one another. The visual analogies ultimately were a conscious emulation designed to strengthen bonds among those portrayed and reinforce social and class hierarchies in a very visible way.

Questbridge Claus

Free scholarship to Yale via QuestBridge:

Simmons was home alone when the call came last week to tell her the good news. She started jumping up and down and crying. Her mom, Carrie Allen, joined in the celebration when she came home from her job as a librarian. Her dad, Peter Simmons, a waiter at Avellino's in Fairfield, baked the Yale admissions director a "thank-you" cake that his daughter presented to the admission's office last Thursday.

"I had to do something," the future Yalie said. "It's the least I could do."

The Times on Avery Dulles

From the obituary of the most WASPy Cardinal ever:

“I was irresistibly prompted to go out into the open air . . . . The slush of melting snow formed a deep mud along the banks of the River Charles, which I followed down toward Boston . . . . As I wandered aimlessly, something impelled me to look contemplatively at a young tree. On its frail, supple branches were young buds . . . . While my eye rested on them, the thought came to me suddenly, with all the strength and novelty of a revelation, that these little buds in their innocence and meekness followed a rule, a law of which I as yet knew nothing . . . . That night, for the first time in years, I prayed.”

Sam Mangwana secouer

Neuroanthropology pays tribute to Sam Mangwana:

One of the leaders of the Soukous genre, derived from the French “secouer” (to shake) and once known as the African rumba. That means it’s fun! I also find it fascinating how it mixes African and Latin rhythms and sound together.

Picasso's Harlequins in Rome

La Repubblica reviews Picasso's Harlequins in Rome: Il genio che brillò tutta una vita

A spiegare il perché è il curatore Yve-Alain Bois: "Arlecchino può essere qualsiasi cosa desideri e Picasso, che era all'apice della sua produttività e poteva adottare contemporaneamente gli stilemi del cubismo, del neoclassicismo, del surrealismo e dell'espressionismo, aveva diverse affinità con questa maschera leggendaria". [...]

Fino al 1917, che, come avvisa Bois, segna una definitiva inversione di tendenza: "Picasso smette di sostituire una data maniera con un'altra e non scarta più nulla, inventando stili nuovi senza mai eliminare quelli precedenti. Negli anni, anzi, si costruisce un incredibile arsenale di forme e approcci al quale attinge liberamente ogni volta che ne ha voglia".

Protean.

Cesar Chavez, Minuteman

Race vs. class in California - Steve Sailer on the tension between unionized farmworkers and the illegal-immigrant labor imported by growers in order to break strikes

The supply of migrant workers dropped to about 200,000, most of them American citizens, making unionization and better contracts feasible—as long as what Marx called “the reserve army of the unemployed” could be bottled up south of the border. The next year, Chavez began his storied organizing campaign.

Growers fought back by busing the reserve army up from Mexico. In 1979, Chavez bitterly testified to Congress:

… when the farm workers strike and their strike is successful, the employers go to Mexico and have unlimited, unrestricted use of illegal alien strikebreakers to break the strike. And, for over 30 years, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has looked the other way and assisted in the strikebreaking. I do not remember one single instance in 30 years where the Immigration service has removed strikebreakers. … The employers use professional smugglers to recruit and transport human contraband across the Mexican border for the specific act of strikebreaking…

In 1969, Chavez led a march to the Mexican border to protest illegal immigration. Joining him were Sen. Walter Mondale and Martin Luther King’s successor as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Ralph Abernathy.

The UFW picketed INS offices to demand closure of the border.

LRB - Zimbabwe - response to Mahmood Mamdani

In the LRB, R W Johnson responds to Mahmood Mamdani's whitewash of the Mugabe era

Mamdani’s article is a compendium of errors. He should know that the reason for the suspension of British aid for land reform was that the land was going to Mugabe’s cronies, not to the poor....

Mamdani writes of the ‘war vets’ as if they all wanted to be farmers: those who worked with them say that wasn’t so...

Mamdani describes the trade unions as if they were an Anglo-American creation and represented mainly Ndebeles. This is nonsense: ...

 Mamdani talks as if ‘land reform’ was a popular revolution, which is rather like writing a history of Cambodia in which Pol Pot’s genocidal re-ruralisation was carried out by popular demand...

Mamdani does not mention the fact that the land invasions were a massive attack on farm workers, whose numbers he gives as 300,000, though together with their families there were 2.4 million of them living on white farms...

Mamdani talks of the repression ‘in Ndebele areas in 1986’. Hasn’t he read the authoritative report Breaking the Silence, which shows how much wider than that the phenomenon was? 

Mamdani throughout underplays the huge role mass torture played in his supposed popular revolution..

Mamdani remarks ‘how little turmoil accompanied this massive social change’. The mass beatings, the torture, the killings have all been whited out.

Mahmood Mamdani never met a third-world dictator whose crimes he couldn't exculpate.

Mugabe's ruthlessness

How completely pathetic - Mugabe a past master of holding on to power

For a very literal example of Robert Mugabe's staying power, look no further than a recent crisis summit of southern African leaders designed to settle the political impasse that has seen the longtime Zimbabwean leader stubbornly cling to the presidency. 

The leaders wanted him to leave the room so they could deliberate in private. He refused. 

Between their misguided politeness and his famous capacity to intimidate, the presidents meekly backed down. Mugabe stayed.

No shortage of Third Worldists willing to make endless excuses for such monsters in the name of anti-imperialism.

Joseph Stiglitz for a prepackaged Detroit bankruptcy

Raging right-winger Joseph Stiglitz chimes in on the bailout question

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Chapter 11 is the right road for US carmakers.

The failure lies with the managers of US carmakers and America’s financial markets, which failed in their oversight and encouraged short-sighted behaviour. The “bridge loan to nowhere” – the down payment on what could be a sinkhole of enormous proportions – is another example of the short-sighted behaviour that got us into this mess.

Strange Bedfellows: Green on Deresiewicz on Wood

Unlikely allies, at The Reading Experience:

I'm astonished to be saying so, but William Deresiewicz's review of James Wood's How Fiction Works provokes me to come to Wood's defense. Although Deresiewicz correctly points out the narrowness of Wood's conception of realism, ultimately he is less concerned with Wood's near-dogmatism on this subject than with what he considers the narrowness of Wood's approach to criticism.

The complicated constellation of realism, formalism, politicalism...

The Yankee Cabinet

Marc Ambinder answers a reader's question:

James L. Jones, the incoming national security adviser, has sort of a southern Missouri drawl, but only Rep. Robert Gates, a native...Kansan, too, has anything resembling a Southern accent, although he probably picked it up when he served as President of Texas A & M.
But, aside from incoming White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, there ain't none, y'all.

And it's about time, too...

Post-Columbian population movements and the roots of world inequality

Louis Putterman and David N. Weil at VoxEU:

Post-Columbian population movements and the roots of world inequality

Why should we care about the apparently powerful influence that population origins exert on country and sub-national incomes levels?
First, if this influence is indeed as significant as our findings suggest it to be, then efforts to sort out the roles that geographic, institutional, and other factors play in explaining income levels and growth rates may produce misleading results unless we properly control for it.
Second, the influence of population origins suggests that there is something that human families and communities transmit from generation to generation -- perhaps a form of economic culture, a set of attitudes or beliefs, or informally transmitted capabilities -- that is of at least similar importance to economic success as are more widely recognized factors like quantities of physical capital and even human capital in the narrower sense of formal schooling. If we understand which culturally transmitted factors are important and what contributes to their emergence and propagation, we might be able to design policy interventions that could help less successful groups and countries to close their developmental gaps.

Sven Kalisch, German Muslim Gnostic

Spengler on the rather out-there idea that the Prophet didn't exist and early Islam was a "Gnosis"

Give Me Love: Songs of the Brokenhearted - Baghdad 1925-1929

Pitchfork reviews a collection of music from Jazz Age Baghdad:

What you will hear are impassioned performances, instrumental and vocal, from some of the most well-regarded performers in Baghdad of the era. Most of them are Jewish-- for various reasons, Iraq's religious minorities dominated the country's music prior to the 1950s, when the vast majority of Christians and essentially all the Jews fled. This exodus began during World War II after a pro-Nazi coup d'etat and subsequent pogrom.

It would be nice to hear a little more about that side of it.  I'm trying to think of another country with a disproportionately Jewish entertainment industry...