Crooked Timber

I’ve made you some free X-Mas cards and gift tags!

Printables!

Just like the ones your kids alway waste the good paper on! So there’s never any when you need it! But before I give you the download links, I have some explaining to do.

The world is filthy with X-Mas cards, says you. Well, I think mine are rather special and nice. They are based on visual elements extracted from Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904). A very famous and beautiful work. Wikicommons has some lovely pictures. You know what I like best about that cover? (Thanks for asking, and feel free to click for larger.)

I like the fact that ‘Leipzig und Wien’ is in a sans serif font. Somehow that makes it perfect.

Two great new blogs by academics who I admire but have never met. First, Lane Kenworthy, author of many articles and a few books on the comparative politics of inequality, is now blogging at Consider the Evidence. This post, for example, does a nice job of bringing together some of the data on economic risk (on which more soon), and looks at how the incipient credit crunch and the high number of families that already have two parents in the workforce means that lower income households simply don’t have much margin to cope any more with unexpected financial emergencies.

households now appear to be more sensitive to serious short-run financial strains — job loss, a medical problem that results in significant cost (due to lack of health insurance or inadequate coverage), a hike in rent, a rise in mortgage payments (as a low-interest-rate adjustable mortgage rolls over). A generation ago a household could adjust to this type of event by having the second adult take a temporary job to provide extra income. During the economic boom of the late 1990s they might have been able to switch jobs in order to get a pay increase. In the past ten years they could run up credit card debt or take out a home equity loan. For many households with moderate or low incomes, these strategies are now foreclosed.

Second, Eric Rauchway at UC Davis is blogging together with Ari Kelman at The Edge of the American West. One of his posts gets stuck into the recent outbreak of the liberal bias in the academy thing in the Washington Post op-ed pages, and generates an interesting conversation in the comments section about where you can find intelligent and intellectually honest conservatives in the US. I’d add Steve Bainbridge to the people listed in the comments section; also Clive Crook and Clive Davis (who I don’t follow as much as I should now that he’s at the Spectator and doesn’t have his own RSS feed any more). Both of the latter are Brits, of course. Does anyone have other nominations for interesting conservatives in the blogosphere or elsewhere? Please: no need to list obvious suspects at high profile blogs like Orin Kerr, nor to state that there ain’t any such thing as an interesting honest conservative. I know that this latter view has some adherents among CT readers, but its restatement in response to questions of this sort is kinda like telling people who are troubleshooting their PCs that the obvious solution is to buy a Mac.

That attack ad is pretty compelling. But it simplifies – some would say over-simplifies – aspects of Kant’s philosophy. I thought a technical defense of Kant’s ethics might be in order.

In the thread to Harry’s post on academies and Oxbridge, some of us got into a little exchange about “widening participation” and spotting “academic potential” (sorry for the scare quotes, Stuart). Now in the Telegraph there’s the story of Barry Cox, the world’s only Scouse Cantopop star . Having left school with a bunch of poor to mediocre GCSEs and finding himself in a succession of unrewarding jobs, Cox decided, somewhat idiosyncratically, that the road to self-improvement lay via learning Cantonese with the proprietors of his local chippie. He managed in two years and is now a successful singer in Macau. Richard Spencer, author of the Telegraph article asks:

someone, somewhere in Liverpool, particularly in Barry’s old school, should be asking themselves some questions about his achievement. How come a kid can master a truly difficult language, enough to forge a career in a highly competitive place like Hong Kong/Macau, but come out of the school as a “no brainbox, me” holder of five GCSEs just a couple of years before?

Good question. Lots of us have been signed up at some time in our lives to the idea that most people have a lot of unactualized potential and that the social structure of our societies (and institutional components like the education system) hold them back, undermine their sense of the possibilities, depress their confidence, tell them what is for “the likes of them” and so on. But then, when we sit as selectors for university places, we switch into a mind-set where only a few have a mysterious intrinsic quality called “academic potential” that it is our job to discern and then to develop. As for the rest, they must do as they do.

Relatedly (via Loren King) there’s a Scientific American article about how damaging it is when parents push a model of achievement according to which you’ve either got “it” or you haven’t. On this view some (how many?) kids acquire a belief about whether they are, or are not, (in Cox’s parlance) “brainboxes”. Children (and other people) with the theory that being a “brainbox” is an instrinsic property react to failure by drawing the conclusion that further study is not for them and that things are hopeless. Fortunately for him, it looks as if Barry Cox didn’t have that damaging mind-set, despite his “no brainbox” comment.

[Thanks to Blood and Treasure , where there’s more on Cox’s idiosyncratic choice of language/dialect.]

Gary Farber has been scraping by for a while on your previous generous donations, CT readers, but he’s in a world of hurt at the moment, so show some love.

In perhaps related news, some people just don’t know anything about being broke:

“The risk is that you could be modifying loans for people who don’t need it,” said Sharon Greenberg, director of mortgage strategy at Barclay’s. “There’s only so much you can do without talking to the borrower. You’re spending $60 a month on cable TV; can you get by with less? You’re spending $200 a month on food for two people, but food costs in your area show that you should be able to get by with $100 a month. These are the kinds of conversations that loan-servicing companies have to have with borrowers.”

Food costs in your area show that when there are no crawdads, you should be able to eat sand. No refinancing for you, Mr. Moneypants McRichington!!

This is awesome.

For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers” set up a secret workshop and lounge in a cavity under the building’s famous dome. Under the supervision of group member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a professional clockmaker, they pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s. Only when their clandestine revamp of the elaborate timepiece had been completed did they reveal themselves. “When we had finished the repairs, we had a big debate on whether we should let the Panthéon’s officials know or not,” said Lazar Klausmann, a spokesperson for the Untergunther. “We decided to tell them in the end so that they would know to wind the clock up so it would still work.

“The Panthéon’s administrator thought it was a hoax at first, but when we showed him the clock, and then took him up to our workshop, he had to take a deep breath and sit down.”

Ross Douthat on the great Reagan race-baiting debate. Douthat’s take: “Yes, that part was shameful, but that’s not the complete picture.” The ‘complete picture’ is more like: the great Goldwater-to-Reagan Republican realignment is “a story of liberal misgovernment on an epic scale, in which race played an important but ultimately subsidiary role.” Continue reading ““A story of liberal misgovernment on an epic scale””

The most entertaining cape-and-tights comic of the past several years might be Grant Morrison’s Seven Soldiers of Victory[amazon]. It’s getting to be a bit of a cliché, admittedly: toss a bunch of mismatched B-list heroes in the pot and mix it for has-been, coulda-been, struggling actor-syndrome support-group ‘well, how did I get here?’ irony. But the Klarion the Witch Boy [read the first four pages here] and Newsboy Army subplots are just so damn brilliant. Belle wants a Klarion T-shirt or, possibly, coffee mug for Thanksgiving. (Seasonally speaking, he is a Halloween-to-Thanksgiving sort of Goth-pilgrim hero.) I think it should say either "Mother, this is no time for hysteria," or, possibly, "I’ll send a monster made of 250 children to your aid."

Of course, knowing me, I’m reading vol. 1[amazon] of the Golden Age, original Seven Soldiers of Victory.The original seven were: the Vigilante; Green Arrow and Speedy (the only ones who hit the big-time); The Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy (unusual duo, the adult is the sidekick); The Crimson Avenger and Wing (a ‘thank you velly much’ sidekick); and the Shining Knight and his flying horse, Winged Victory. There are six soldiers on the cover and either five (counting sidekicks out) or eight in the book (if you count them in, excepting horses); nine if you include the horse. In fact, the answer is: Winged Victory doesn’t count because he’s a horse, and Wing doesn’t count because he’s Chinese. (I’m not kidding. He never gets to attend any meetings either.) So there are Seven Soldiers of Victory. Their ‘slogan’: "Woe to all workers of evil!"

Why read this sort of thing? [Moves pipe to other corner of mouth.] Because in every one of these Golden Age collections, the quintessentially Young Visiteerish quality of plot and dialogue …

Josh Glenn has a great little slideshow for you, in the Boston Globe. His worthy theme: Winsor McCay’s classic early comic strip, “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend” [1904-1913]. (McCay is more famous for Little Nemo. You’ve certainly heard of that one.) The occasion: a lavish new edition, The Complete Dream of the Rarebit Fiend, all the strips reprinted for the first time at full size; edited and annotated by some fanatic by the name of Ullrich Merkl. Here’s the book page. You can download substantial samples (PDF). Looks nice, though pricey. (Older editions [amazon] are in print as well.)

Speaking of the shift from print cartooning to film, Winsor McCay, if you don’t know, is pretty much the God-Grandfather of the animated cartoon. He was one of the very first (the very first?), and hand-drew every damn frame, apparently. (With an occasional assistant.) And he did these vaudeville tours in which he lectured and interacted with the films. Obviously the joke is to synchronize your patter with the film itself. YouTube has it all: “Little Nemo” (1911) (but you have to wait until, like, 8:30 minutes in for the actual animation to start.) “Gertie the Dinosaur” (1914); and “Gertie on Tour” (1921); “How a Mosquito Operates” (1912); and some other stuff, too. Gertie the Dinosaur has the distinction of being the first made-for-animation character, I believe.

Last but not least, Josh Glenn himself has a fun new book out: Taking Things Seriously [amazon] – I’ll get around to reviewing that one. Basically, he invited people to submit their objects. And so they did.

I went and downloaded that Nature Neuroscience [subscribers only – sorry] paper that’s been written up and linked around: “Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism”. Continue reading “The Conservative Brain and the Laws of Motion”

I’ve just realised that as well as the new academic year for PhD programs, it’s also graduate intake season in the world of proper jobs, and thus a new generation of CT readers will be entering the workforce. And thus, my “Advice to a Young Person”. I only actually have one tip.

Basically it’s this. If you are a young man or woman of fair-to-middling ability, or even a borderline dullard, but you want to get a reputation as an uncommonly bright and perspicacious thinker, it’s really not that hard to do. The secret weapon is this: take an interest in what happens in other countries.

It’s really quite unusual to find an important issue on which international comparisons aren’t worth knowing about. Even in situations which look purely domestic, you can often get an entirely new perspective on things by looking at your fundamental assumptions in the light of what happens overseas. There are few sights sweeter than the look on someone’s face after they’ve confidently proclaimed something to be impossible, only to be informed that they’ve been doing things that way in Australia for the last twenty years.

It’s also a great way to generate ideas; it’s both easier than coming up with something yourself, and more likely to succeed, to plagiarise something that’s already worked well in a different time zone. So few people bother to keep up with the international news that one doesn’t even need to be an expert in these things; simply reading the relevant pages of your daily newspaper will probably do, whereas reading the superficially more “relevant” domestic or business pages will usually just tell you a load of crap you know already, and tell it wrong.

So my advice to a young businessperson is to save ten minutes a day by not reading the domestic news, and spend them on reading the international news properly. Within six months of the graduate program you’ll see I’m right, not least because at least once or twice you’ll quite likely be asked to prepared an analysis of international comparisons by a senior executive who got where he is by following my method.

PS: another great tip is never put question marks on your Powerpoint slides, it always looks really weak.

I saw Tom Russell last night, for the third time in the last two years, and he was simply marvellous. Funny, crotchety, gritty, and (this hadn’t struck me so much before) with a wonderfully strong and clear voice. He played some new material, together with stuff from recent albums and some of his songs that others have covered on an album he’s reluctant to call a “tribute”: Wounded Heart of America. Like the old stuff, the new featured the usual cast of characters: cowboys, Mexicans, Welsh sailors etc, all superbly observed and changed to suit audience and place. And there were the usual anecdotes about Bukowski, Rambling Jack Elliot, etc., together with some reminiscences I hadn’t heard before (on his experiences in Nigeria during the Biafran war).

(Sometimes when going along to hear an act with others, I feel slightly unsure of their reaction: I like this but maybe they won’t, and I can see why and I might feel the urge to explain or say that X was better last time. No such worries with Russell: if someone doesn’t like him then there’s something wrong with them .)

Russell is on tour in the UK at the moment, and you can catch him in Newcastle tonight, in Edinburgh on Saturday and in London next Monday (along with a bunch of other places in between and afterwards).