Race in PA

So, this will surely bring out the comments, or the peanut gallery, or you know, the two people I have reading this who post a lot when I talk about things like this (you know who you are):

Sixteen percent of white voters said race mattered in deciding who they voted for, and just 54 percent of those voters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election; 27 percent of them said they would vote for Mr. McCain if Mr. Obama was the Democratic nominee, and 16 percent said they would not vote at all.

Just fantastic. Right before I read this, I had been thinking the obviously stereotypical although still partly true thought: "doesn't success among white working class voters in rural areas probably mean success among the more racist sections of our society?"

According to these exit polls quoted in the Times, the answer to my question is essentially yes. And I'm not the only one who thinks so. Here's my favorite person ever, Nora Ephron, on the subject:

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men. How ironic is this? After all this time, after all these stupid articles about how powerless white men are and how they can't even get into college because of overachieving women and affirmative action and mean lady teachers who expected them to sit still in the third grade even though they were all suffering from terminal attention deficit disorder -- after all this, they turn out (surprise!) to have all the power. (As they always did, by the way; I hope you didn't believe any of those articles.) To put it bluntly, the next president will be elected by them: the outcome of Tuesday's primary will depend on whether they go for Hillary or Obama, and the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them.

I had to add that last quip at the end because Nora's acerbity when it comes to men just warms my cold heart.

(Before you say it, yes, I know that like 90% of black voters vote for Obama. So I get that this is a two way street. But I reserve the right to be indignant about this kind of example of enduring racism in this country.)

(Two more posts on the subject here and here.)

The College Admissions Machine

The irony of Keith Gessen, Harvard grad and founder of elite(ist?) litmag N+1, writing an essay about how hard it is for kids to get into top colleges and more importantly the machine of college admissions (including cliche bullshit application essays) and calling out authors of books about that subject on they're members of the "so-called American meritocracy", is not lost on me.

And yet, somehow, the meritocracy keeps chugging along. Both Jager-Hyman and Samuels — along with just about everyone else — agree that things have gone too far with the college admissions game. “Destructive and anti-democratic,” Nicholas Lemann called it in “The Big Test,” his superb social history of the SAT: “It warps the sensibilities and distorts the education of the millions of people whose lives it touches.” I would go further: in a post-ideological age, the admissions frenzy has become its own ideology. My Russian parents, for example, while too sophisticated to disapprove of drinking or smoking, were not above suggesting that “Harvard” might not like it. Harvard might be mortified; Harvard might take it amiss. Harvard is coming to dinner — please tuck in your shirt.

Even worse than the temporary psychological distortion is, as Lemann argued in “The Big Test,” the permanent sense of entitlement the admissions game provides. Winners can plausibly claim they participated in a brutal competition (even if many potential competitors were never told about it). So we owe no one anything. Many of the people I went to school with became doctors, public advocates, television writers who bring laughter to the American people. But most of them became, like my friend who believed that getting into Harvard was the hardest thing in life, investment bankers. We meritocrats have not, generally speaking, used our fantastic test-taking abilities to build a more equitable world. In fact, buoyed by a sense of the fairness of the process, we may have done the reverse.

But he has a point. (I am sure Gawker has torn up this essay and it is mildly ridiculous, but it does speak to a lot of the issues involved with attending a top university. Entitlement is a real problem, and one I think about a lot.)

Beer Can House

Just wow:

From 1968 until his death 20 years later, Mr. Milkovisch, an upholsterer for the Southern Pacific Railroad, not only emptied 50,000 cans or more of his favorite beverage but also put the containers to good use, cladding his house and workshop with thousands of maintenance-free flattened beer cans (Falstaff was a favorite) and shading the sun with garlands of tinkling beer can tops and tabs.

Box offices over time

This chart of movie box office sales over time is pretty cool... I can't remember where I found it but it's a fun visualization (visualization seeming to be the theme of the afternoon). It definitely re-emphasizes the big hits in an interesting way, and highlights a few that you wouldn't have thought would have made much of an impression. Also it really highlights those summer blockbuster periods and Academy Award cram sessions.

Seed Bank

This is old news now, but the Times did a slideshow of the Global Seed Bank last week. It's very strange and Golden Compass/Svalbard-like. Not to mention the whole idea is sort of reminiscent of sci-fi plots where they send an ark-like spaceship into the void in the chance that all human life on earth will be destroyed. Ok, so maybe it's like the Ark, but the point is that it's still sort of surreal to think of thousands of seeds being stored yards under the Arctic ice. You can check out some of the slideshow here, read the accompanying article here, or better yet read the long piece from The New Yorker a few months back about the rationale for the Seed Bank. It's one of the better New Yorker items I've read in the past sixth months, and definitely worth a look.

Politics of the day

Finally got around to reading the New York Times endorsements for the Presidential primaries. I won't comment much on the Democratic endorsement (it makes some fair points), but I have something to say about the Republican one:

Why, as a New York-based paper, are we not backing Rudolph Giuliani? Why not choose the man we endorsed for re-election in 1997 after a first term in which he showed that a dirty, dangerous, supposedly ungovernable city could become clean, safe and orderly? What about the man who stood fast on Sept. 11, when others, including President Bush, went AWOL?

That man is not running for president.

The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.

Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking. When he claims fiscal prudence, we remember how he ran through surpluses without a thought to the inevitable downturn and bequeathed huge deficits to his successor. He fired Police Commissioner William Bratton, the architect of the drop in crime, because he couldn’t share the limelight. He later gave the job to Bernard Kerik, who has now been indicted on fraud and corruption charges.

The Rudolph Giuliani of 2008 first shamelessly turned the horror of 9/11 into a lucrative business, with a secret client list, then exploited his city’s and the country’s nightmare to promote his presidential campaign.

Oh, SNAP, New York Times. Seriously. What a fantastic, sharp takedown.

Minimalizing meat consumption

Interesting article by Mark Bittman (the "minimalist") about meat consumption in the Times yesterday. I don't think I'm anywhere near the level of meat consumption as the average American -- generally speaking I only have meat in one of my meals a day (excluding dairy and eggs), but I was glad that at lunch today, immediately before reading this article, I only ate half of my salmon.

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

I've been thinking recently about what I can do to be healthier and to be gentler on our environment. I of course knew that meat consumption was especially bad, in a variety of ways, but this was another reminder. It's not like I need to add another item to my list of New Year's resolutions, but as part of my "greener" and healthier 2008, I've thought that perhaps I should adapt more natural food habits. Meaning something akin to Michael Pollan's 12 Commandments for Serious Eaters. There are definitely some arguments to be made about the wording or general-ness of some of his commandments, but I'm thinking especially hard about the ones in bold, below:

1. "Don't eat anything your grandmother wouldn't recognize as food."

2. "Avoid foods containing ingredients you can't pronounce."

3. "Don't eat anything that won't eventually rot."

4. "Avoid food products that carry health claims."

5. "Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle."

6. "Better yet, buy food somewhere else: the farmers' market or CSA."

7. "Pay more, eat less."

8. "Eat a wide variety of species."

9. "Eat food from animals that eat grass."

10. "Cook, and if you can, grow some of your own food."

11. "Eat meals and eat them only at tables."

12. "Eat deliberately, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure."

I had a moment last week when, for dinner, I ate a bowl of ramen. Not the kind that comes in the baggie, but one of those Simply Thai noodle bowls. I did it because I wanted hot soupy things (and I'm in pho withdrawal at the moment). But I almost threw it out instead of eating it, because I feel like I should just be eating natural, unprocessed foods, even if it ends up being, like my dinner yesterday, less of an organized meal and more of a weird combination of things. (Yesterday I ate a sweet potato, green beans, and tomato soup, since that's all I had. But it's healthy, right?) So perhaps I will go with that. Any advice on how to do that in my runaround, single eater world is very welcome!

Gloria on Hillary

This blog has taken on a Hillary slant today, hasn't it?! Just got around to reading Gloria Steinem's op-ed in the Times today and it's quite the rallying cry. All I'm saying is, sometimes I wonder.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

(thanks to Justin for pushing me to read it earlier than I otherwise would)

Short and sweet

We call this kind of entry "cleaning out all the Mozilla Firefox tabs that have been open too long and are slowing down my browser."

-Alright, I find it ridiculous that The Tales of Beedle the Bard sold for almost $4 million. Actually, that's understandable, because the ridiculous thing is that JK Rowling has this crazy franchise with millions of fans and she handwrote only 6 books of an apocryphal nature that none of her fans will ever see, unless it's somehow scanned and uploaded to a torrent site somewhere (God willing), and will just resent her for. Yes, I know it's for charity. But you took Harry Potter away and then spent all your time giving us useless information about Dumbledore's sexual orientation, and then hand wrote only 6 copies of another Harry Potter related book for your special favorite fans, and left the rest of us feeling grumpy and deprived.

-I somehow came into ownership of a One Laptop Per Child, and Dan and Ace and I have been playing with it a bit (ok, more Dan and Ace than me). The OLPC is a pretty inspiring project, even if I don't understand the laptop at all (I actually think I'm too old for it). But it's a great design, it's got a ton of functions, and it's pretty amazing to think of kids in impoverished countries getting these laptops to play with and learn on. You can read more about it here on the OLPC wiki, and there are a few pictures of kids in Uruguay with the laptop here. And of course you can get one give one here. (Related: Google is partnering with OLPC and Unicef to get stories from around the world, in particular from kids using the OLPC.)

-This is the best Christmas movie ever. Screw you, A Christmas Story.

-I'm becoming sadder and sadder I didn't go see Daft Punk in July with Dan and Justin.



-It's wrong that I want this cape, right? But only a little wrong that I want these shoes?

-This Saturday I think I'm going to have a life changing experience. I will report back afterwards... but I want to keep it a bit of a surprise for now.

-Thinking about this. Don't you think it would be good for me?

-Wondering if I fit into any of these categories:

Some researchers divide perfectionists into three types, based on answers to standardized questionnaires: Self-oriented strivers who struggle to live up to their high standards and appear to be at risk of self-critical depression; outwardly focused zealots who expect perfection from others, often ruining relationships; and those desperate to live up to an ideal they’re convinced others expect of them, a risk factor for suicidal thinking and eating disorders.

I know I'm not the second, and I am pretty sure I'm not the third. But lately I am feeling like I'm not living up to my own expectations. Guess I should figure that out. It's times like these I really realize how much of a product of American culture I am.

-I love all of these little figurines... I can't help it. I really want a credenza in a big house where I can put all these little whimsies out, at different times of year. I think I like "Lucky" the best.

-I feel obligated to post about this, for some reason... my ex boyfriend got the Marshall scholarship. I know he really cared about it, so that's good. And I won't say anything more than that.

On Dumbledore & Homosexuality

It's articles like this one that make me want to be a critic and a PhD student at the same time, and yet simultaneously feel like I couldn't really be either. It's a pretty good read, and I agree with most of it (I think it's weird to see JK Rowling spouting random apocrypha about the books - it's not really necessary, the books are self-contained, and it just ends up feeling like a DVD extra or, worse, like when I used to write stories and spent more time elaborately charting my characters' minutia than I spent writing stories). What impresses me most is this:

In her outing of Dumbledore, Ms. Rowling seemed to be confirming the smarmy kiss-and-tell insinuations of her gossip-mongering character Rita Skeeter, whose lurid biography of the apparently saintly headmaster — titled “The Life and Lies of Albus Dumbledore” — is described in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.”

“Coming next week,” a newspaper article on Skeeter promises, “the shocking story of the flawed genius considered by many to be the greatest wizard of his generation.” Skeeter drops teasing hints about Dumbledore’s “murky past,” about his not being “exactly broad-minded” and suggests that in his mentoring of Harry there is an “unnatural interest,” something “unhealthy, even sinister.” As for the idea that Ms. Rowling suggested — that as a teenage prodigy, Dumbledore had a homoerotic infatuation with another prodigious young wizard, Grindelwald (who later went over to what in “Star Wars” is called the Dark Side) — Skeeter hints at this in coded allusions.

She proposes that when the two friends had a falling out in a dramatic duel, Grindelwald did not fight but “conjured a white handkerchief from the end of his wand and” — the passage then gives way to an obvious (in retrospect) sexual double entendre.

Such homoerotic imagery, at any rate, suggests a strong mischievous streak, not just among these dueling wizards but in Ms. Rowling herself, their contemporary chronicler in the world of Muggles (which is, of course, how the wizards refer to those of us lacking wands or the magic to use them).

What a read, huh? It makes me vaguely proud of JK Rowling for hinting without saying (usually not her strongest suit), and it reminds me of when I failed to realize that Billy Budd was an allegory for Christ. My analytical skills as an English major, are, I fear, lacking. Or were.

American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”

...

“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between,” he says. Working energy, like physical energy, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he says.

And those respites look an awful lot like wasting time.

It has taken me years to make tentative peace with my stops and starts during work. Every morning I vow to become a morning person, starting full speed out of the gate. And every morning I daydream, shuffle papers, read e-mail messages and visit blogs, and somehow it is time for lunch. Then, at about 2 p.m., a sense of urgency kicks in, and I write steadily, until about 5 or 6, when I revert to the little-of-this, some-of-that style of the morning.

Amen, sista.

I know this is sort of lame and belated and it's not my job to play Time magazine and analyze what is happening to childhood or whatever, but:

Michelle Dale, a second-grade teacher in Brooklyn who works with the youngest of the tweens, said she is “always blown away” by all the things her students know about. “The movies that these little second graders have come in and watched,” she said, “I’m like, ‘Oh, my goodness.’ ”

Second graders are considered tweens? When I was in second grade, I was 6, and then 7. Ignoring the fact that I was young for my year: SEVEN! How exactly is seven years old "tween" anything? I hate everyone.

(From the NYTimes article about little girls reading gossip magazines.)

Holy shit.

I love this part:

Before we discuss the findings, though, we need to clear up a little matter. It’s come to my attention that some people believe martinis are made with vodka. I hate to get snobbish about it, but a martini should be made with gin or it’s not a martini. Call it a vodkatini if you must, but not a martini. Gin and vodka have as much in common hierarchically as a president and a vice president. Vodka can fill in for gin from time to time and might even be given certain ceremonial duties of its own, but at important moments you need the real thing. Vodka generally makes a poor substitute for gin in a martini or any other gin cocktail.

The panel found common ground here. Each of us is partial to the classic martini made with gin, although Audrey was sensitive to the desires of her clientele.

“You have to revisit which generation is drinking the martini,” she said. “We might be classicists, but is the newer generation?”

Still, after perhaps 8 or 10 martinis, Audrey fessed up, referring at one point to “a generation lobotomized by vodka.”

That's my generation!

(Thanks to Pablo, who introduced me, not to the martini but to the gin & tonic.)

Boiling marbles

This article may be one of the weirdest I've ever skimmed (I don't read things that are this useless to my life, I skim them). It is filled with statements like this:

But tourists do come — especially the Japanese.

It features medieval and erotic ice sculptures, popular with tourists, particularly the Japanese.

Like the Japanese are not the most famous tourists anyway (besides annoying American ones).

Then periodically it descends into weird pseudo-racist infantilization of said tourists, like here:

“We taught them how to make s'mores last year, over the campfire. They loved that. I saw them the next morning with chocolate and marshmallow dripped all down their jackets, because they were trying to eat them while looking up.”

But what is more intriguing is:

Debbie Eberhardt, the proprietor of A Taste of Alaska Lodge, a few miles north of town, called the rumors about Japanese fertility beliefs “a crock” and said, “The Japanese come to Fairbanks in the winter because they love the extreme cold, not to make babies.

“They do things like throw boiling water in the air and watch it freeze like marbles before it hits the ground. They blow soap bubbles, which freeze solid and roll around on the ground like Christmas ornaments. They put bananas outside to freeze and then use them as hammers to pound nails into two-by-fours.”

Ok, that sounds awesome. Seriously.

But overall the article rambles from tourist information to talking about Japanese beliefs about conceiving babies under Northern Lights to talking about random other crap. Still. Thought it was sort of worth posting.

This article gives me just a little bit of hope that in five years, I won't feel so guilty about not writing an honors thesis.

Kivetz also interviewed 69 students from Columbia University who had returned one week previously from winter break and found that as a group they were split in roughly equal numbers between regret and contentment for having worked or partied. But when Kivetz talked to alumni who graduated 40 years earlier, the picture was much more lopsided: those who hadn’t partied were bitter with regret, while those who had were now thrilled with their choice. “In the long run,” Kivetz says, “we inevitably regret being virtuous and wish we’d been bigger hedonists.”

This behavior, Kivetz theorizes, is due to the nature of guilt. This emotion is “hot” — it burns brightly but briefly. “Guilt is quick to rise,” he notes, “and quick to fall.”

This is a really cool article in the NYTimes magazine (the magazine is filled with something like 80 cool articles right now about weird sciencey things, or at least I think so, but can't be sure, given that I only read it online in the first place).

Ugh, I admit, I'm intrigued. FitSugar, I grovel just a little bit.