May 2007

Thanks (if that’s the right word) to Dan Hardie for sending me to this dispiriting item on a new City Academy in Peterborough:

Britain’s most expensive state school is being built without a playground because those running it believe that pupils should be treated like company employees and do not need unstructured play time.
The authorities at the £46.4m Thomas Deacon city academy in Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, due to open this autumn, also believe that the absence of a playground will avoid the risk of “uncontrollable” numbers of children running around in breaks at the 2,200-pupil school.

If you think children don’t need unstructured playtime you need to get out of the business of schooling. If your school is so big that the numbers of children would be uncontrollable when they are in unstructured play then your school is too big! (Long promised post on school size in works, honest).

However:

[Pupils] will be able to hydrate during the learning experience

What a relief.

Americans: don’t gloat, it’s happening here too.

Gentlemen, in the 1960’s, representations of octopi in comics often bordered on the faintly ridiculous.

Having lately received my handsome copy of The Octopi and the Ocean [click through for preview], I am happy to report that the contemporary situation is much improved.

“One day, two monogamously dedicated archaeological octopi recovered an ancient artifact from the timeless ocean floor. The artifact was the power of true marriages. When activated by an inseparable pair, the two would be endowed with a certain unstoppable positive energy.” In the event, a small boy is called upon to etc. etc.

Here’s an interview with the author: “It’s actually the fastest thing I’ve ever done, other than some stuff I did faster.”

If PZ Myers doesn’t have a copy, he really should order one.

Jeff Weintraub says this is not a parody.

And the nominations for ‘best performance as a concern troll of the week’ go to – aw, hell with it. I clicked a link, taking me to this Michael Medved column. Don’t get me started. But then I did actually go to find the Rasmussen results he was citing. They are here:

Democrats in America are evenly divided on the question of whether George W. Bush knew about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in advance. Thirty-five percent (35%) of Democrats believe he did know, 39% say he did not know, and 26% are not sure.

Republicans reject that view and, by a 7-to-1 margin, say the President did not know in advance about the attacks. Among those not affiliated with either major party, 18% believe the President knew and 57% take the opposite view.

Back to Medved: he is wringing his hands about the Dem numbers. But it is actually quite astonishing that 1 in 8 Republicans are, by implication, supporters of an organization that they believe significantly sponsors terrorism, since it sponsors Bush. (Knowing in advance and doing nothing would be aiding and abetting, at best, I take it.) By contrast, presumably the 35% of Dems who think Bush was in the know at least disapprove of the 9/11 attacks?

The meta point here is that I never post about numbers stuff because I have no expertise. It seems to me it is always the case that at least 20% of respondents have very strange views, or must have failed to understand the question, or – perhaps most likely of all – were taking the occasion of being asked the question to vent angrily.

What do you make of these poll numbers?

UPDATE: It seems like a significant problem with the question that ‘incompetently failed to act on warnings about the possibility of’ could be construed as ‘knew about in advance’.

Erik Olin Wright has a nice short piece on his website forthcoming in the UK left-of-centre magazine Soundings, called Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias. It is a very useful outline and discussion of the rules we ought to observe when trying to come up with better institutional alternatives to the status quo, viz:

1. Evaluate alternatives in terms of three criteria: desirability, viability, achievability.
2. Do not let the problem of achievability dictate the discussion of viability.
3. Clarify the problem of winners and losers in structural transformation.
4. Identify normative trade-offs in institutional designs and the transition costs in their creation.
5. Analyze alternatives in terms of waystations and intermediary forms as well as destinations. Pay particular attention to the potential of waystations to open up virtuous cycles of transformation.

Although any of our readers will find it interesting, I especially recommend it to, and request comment from, the political philosophers and theorists who think of themselves as doing, or interested in, non-ideal theory.

This is a very simple summer dessert from Katie Stewart’s Times Cookery Book. My mother made it twice in the seventies, and the memory lingered till she finally donated one of her two copies of Katie Stewart to me a couple of years ago. It’s as good as I remembered it being.

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Via “Andrew Gelman,”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/05/references_and.html a “post by Aaron Haspel”:http://www.godofthemachine.com/archives/00000608.html about the evils of poorly-done endnotes, and endnotes in general. This is something “John has written about”:http://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2006/11/27/the-end-for-endnotes/ before, too. Endnotes really are a problem in scholarly books. In general, footnotes are better. Both are better than author-in-text citations (Healy 2006).

Haspel also arues that

2. Each endnote page should be headed by the page numbers of the notes it contains, to facilitate easy flipping. … 3. Notes should not be numbered. Numbers tax the reader needlessly, especially when they reach three figures. They should be marked by a symbol in the text … It would be especially helpful to use two symbols, to distinguish substantive comments from simple citations … 4. The notes must be indexed. … 5. The text should contain as little scholarly detritus as possible.

I agree with 2, disagree with 3 and also endorse 4 and 5. I used endnotes my own book, but did some work to keep the system friendly, especially for backreferences to works cited earlier in the text. The insane scholastic and legal conventions of _ibid_, _idem_ and _loc._ and _op. cit_ are especially to be avoided. I used a system where any work cited within a chapter was given a full reference in the notes, and then an abbreviated reference for any subsequent citations in that chapter (e.g., Quiggin, _I Hate Endnotes_).

I also did my bit to revive an older tradition, the analytic table of contents. Each chapter has a little paragraph summary on the Contents page, so that a casual reader can get a sense of the entire argument right away. Some libraries — like the Library of Congress — record tables of contents in their catalogs, so someone doing a search “can get that information”:http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip062/2005030538.html as well. I’d like to see more of this in other books.

Reading Jonathan Chait on the netroots and (belatedly) Off Center by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson,* it strikes me that the real political news of the last six months is the fact that the US now has a standard two-party system, arguably for the first time in its history. From Reconstruction until the final success of Nixon’s Southern strategy in the late 20th century, the fact that the Democratic Party represented the white establishment in the South made such a thing impossible. Under the primary system the two “parties” were little more than state-sanctioned institutional structures to ensure that voters (outside the South) got a choice of exactly two candidates.

From the 1970s onwards, though, this structure was obsolete. Having absorbed (and to some extent having been absorbed by) the white Southern establishment, the Republicans were clearly a party of the right, and started to act like one, requiring ideological unity and party discipline from its members, establishing a supporting apparatus of thinktanks and friendly media outlets and so on. As both Off Center and Chait observe in different ways, attempts by groups like the Democratic Leadership Council and the centrist media establishment to continue playing by the old rules simply ensured that the Republicans could win even when, on the issues, they were clearly pushing a minority position.

The netroots phenomenon is one reaction to this. But even more striking is the fact that the Democrats in Congress now match the kind of party discipline shown by the Republicans. After the 2006 elections, most commentary assumed that the party could not possibly hold together with its slender majorities in both houses, but they have clearly learned the basic dictum of party politics “We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”

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So a former student invited me to give a talk on Plato at the Junior College where he now teaches: The Republic, in an hour and a half. So I’m busy condensing my notes and I’ve got this chunk about craft analogies: ship’s pilots and farmers and shoemakers and all that Platonic palaver. Bah. Shoemaking. Not relevant to today’s modern world (I don’t really know what I was thinking.) Then I went out to catch a cab to go give my talk and – I kid you not – the bottom of my shoe fell off. Well, not quite all the way off. But, like, halfway off.

We had an interesting discussion the other day after Harry’s “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/04/25/roots/ about Show of Hands and their song “Roots”. That argument was partly about the possible recuperation of song by the radical right despite the inclusivist politics of the songwriter. Yesterday’s Guardian had “an interesting piece”:http://music.guardian.co.uk/folk/story/0,,2071468,00.html attacking the the politics at the origin of folksong as a distinct genre, and especially the politics of the folksong collectors Sharpe and Lomax. Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor argue that the search for authenticity and the untainted roots of distinct national tradition as embodied in besmocked peasants (and so on) is imbued with ghastly racist assumptions of various kinds and that we should simply reject the idea of a distinction between folk and popular song.

The NYT has an article about Bruce Sperling, who apparently publishes a series of rankings of U.S. cities, with separate rankings for Singles, Young Couples, Families with Children, Empty Nesters and Retirees. Through the magic of weighted averages (of data on economy and jobs; cost of living; climate; crime; transportation; arts and culture; etc) we get a string of Top-10 lists and more. Like many such ranking systems, Sperling is free to put his thumb on the scales if he feels that people are caring more about variable _x_ these days.

In the Top 10 for Singles are the fun, densely-populated places you might expect: New York, L.A., Washington, San Francisco, Chicago, etc. For Young Couples, we have cool hangouts like Portland, Austin, and Boulder. Empty Nesters get to kick back in Bellingham, Santa Fe, Tahoe and Berkeley.

But what does my demographic, Families with Children, get? Number 1 in the nation: Louisville CO. It’s followed closely by Gaithersburg MD. Roswell GA, Lakeville MN, and Flower Mound TX round out the top five. Now, I don’t want to offend the many fine people of Gaithersburg, MD or Noblesville IN, but Roll on the Empty Nest, I say.

_Update:_ Sorry, but I am going to resist sundry efforts in the comments and elsewhere to stretch this small joke to fit the Procrustean bed of “Elitist Liberals Hate Regular Folks and All-American Suburbs.” Dan Drezner thinks I display “shock” and “distress” at these family-friendly places and that part of me “shudders with dread about the exemplary suburban locale.” I don’t think so. New York … San Francisco … Gaithersburg. That is a set-up and punchline. It could be the opening montage of any number of comedies about family life. By the way, child-free urban hipsters in restaurants or shops can bite me, too.

This month’s issue of _Contemporary Sociology_ contains the following erratum notice:

bq. In the January issue … in the review written by Elizabeth Gorman of _The Work and Family Handbook: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives and Approaches_, edited by Marcie Pitt-Catsouphes, Ellen Ernst Kossek, and Stephen Sweet, the contributors’ last names should have been spelled “Karen Gareis” instead of “Karen Agrees,” “Laura Beavais” instead of “Laura Beavers,” and “Gerstel and Sarkisian,” not “Gretel and Sardinian.” We regret the errors.

Several days late and dollars short, my response to Jonathan Chait’s “essay”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?pt=xQrNb9zsY1hUSr5ditd9qS%3D%3D on the Netroots. It’s taken me a while to write something, because his underlying thesis is expressed a little circuitously, and I’ve wanted to be sure that I understood exactly what he was saying. Short version – there’s a serious argument in there. But it’s wrong, or at the least badly exaggerated. [click to continue…]

I teach my last class of the semester tomorrow, and what a semester it’s been. In the four months since I gave up full-time, long-form solo blogging, I have put my extra time to good use: freed from the demands of daily blog posting and comment-section maintenance, I found time to work out every day for 90 minutes, meditate for an hour, cook dinner nightly, and brush up on my French. As a result, I am fit and sane and centered, enjoying a balanced diet and the consolations of the <i>passé simple</i>.

Actually, that’s not true. And Bourdieu didn’t really appear in <i>Slap Shot</i>, either. This semester, neither did I: my Nittany Hockey League teams had 28 games scheduled this semester. I made it to <i>ten</i> of those. I worked out once, maybe twice a week. I last meditated in 1999. I last cooked in 1994. (Janet and I have taken to asking each other, “whom shall we dial tonight?”) And my French is just as abysmal as it ever was.

So what happened to all that time?

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