From Erving Goffman to Jim Henley and his commenters.
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Kieran Healy
Sean Carroll is “moving to Caltech”:http://cosmicvariance.com/2006/04/06/going-to-california/ as a Senior Research Associate. Congratulations to him. I was out at Caltech a couple of years ago. I gave a talk on weak first order deconfinement transitions in (2+1)-dimensional SU(5) Yang-Mills theory. No of course I didn’t. I was in Pasadena because my significantly smarter other was at a conference, and I wandered over there. Looking to get oriented, I found a map of the campus. The buildings were numbered and there were two keys: an alphabetical index and a functional index. Obviously the engineers are in charge here, I thought.
For some reason someone thought this clip from _Rachel’s Holiday_ by Marian Keyes was something Henry and I should read. I can’t imagine why.
And although we didn’t want to … we traipsed over behind him. Where we had to do the Irish person meets other Irish person abroad thing. Which involved first of all pretending that we hadn’t realized the other was Irish. Then we had to discover that we had been brought up two minutes’ walk from each other, or that we’d gone to the same school, or that we’d met on our summer holidays in Tramore when we were eleven, or that our mothers were each other’s bridesmaids, or that his older brother had gone our with my older sister, or that when our dog got lost his family found it and brought it back.
I’m sorry to say this sort of thing happens all the time. For some reason — possibly due to the combination of a small base population, large extended families, general nosiness, and the propensity to talk the leg off a donkey — Irish people are appallingly good at uncovering the normally invisible web of latent network connections that surround us. Out at Langley, teams of NSA analysts are using the most sophisticated computing technology to dredge through terabytes of data using fast homomorphic reductions, Markov graph regressions and Galois lattices in an effort to do what your typical Irish Mammy accomplishes by asking you two or three questions, taking a sip of tea and saying something like “Oh are you related to [your Aunt or Uncle’s name here] then?”
David Bernstein has been “taking a few pot-shots”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_04_02-2006_04_08.shtml#1144185824 at Oliver Wendell Holmes, suggesting that his reputation has declined. (This is part of David’s role as a footsoldier in the battle to rehabilitate “Lochner vs New York”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochner_v._New_York as one of the Great Supreme Court Decisions.) I have no view one way or the other about Holmes, though I’m surprised that David didn’t throw in the fact that one of Holmes’ last clerks was “Alger Hiss”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alger_Hiss. Anyway, I bring this up because I use Holmes as an example in my undergraduate social theory class, thanks to a comment made to me ages ago by “Mark Kleiman”:http://www.markarkleiman.com/. The goal is to convey to my students that the modern world has come into being in an astonishingly brief period of time. But they think of the 1980s as essentially equivalent to the Paleolithic, so I need a something corresponding to the inverse of Douglas Adams’ line that “You may think it’s a long way down the street to the Chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” Holmes provides it. He died in 1935, and so there are still many people alive today who knew him, or at least shook hands with him. Holmes was born in 1841, and as a boy he met “John Quincy Adams”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams, who was born in 1767. So (I tell my students — maybe I should chew on a pipe when I say this, for added effect) you are just three handshakes away from a man born before the French Revolution, the American War of Independence, and arguably before the Industrial Revolution, as well. There must be many other examples. How far might we go back today with three or four handshakes?
_Update_: Post edited for elementary arithmetic.
The “New York Times'”:http://www.nytimes.com/ website just got a new design, and at first glance passes the test of being better-designed than “my homepage”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~kjhealy. (It had been failing this test for the past five years or so.) As I write this, the new look is set off by a “photograph of Bill Frist”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/03/us/03frist.html apparently demonstrating the best technique for strangling cats you have “rescued”, but I presume this will not be a permanent feature. My first reaction is that the page is pretty large — it looks like it’s a full 1024 pixels wide, and there’s a lot of stuff squished onto it, too. Too much, really. They could have cut out that right-hand quarter (with all the market/investor garbage) and just stopped the front page at the big six thematic blocks (Arts/World/etc). I’m sure the likes of “John Gruber”:http://daringfireball.net/ or “Cameron Moll”:http://www.cameronmoll.com/ will have more informed things to say.
Lurking in one corner is an ad for “that awful contest”:http://www.nytimes.com/marketing/winatrip/ to Win a Trip with Nick Kristof. I haven’t seen too much comment about this since it launched a few weeks ago, but I know I can’t be the only one to have winced. At present, my favorite candidate to accompany Kristof is Tom Friedman, with Anna Nicole Smith a close second and Christopher Hitchens (belligerently drunk version) trailing in third.
_Update_: On the design, “this scaled-down screenshot”:http://www.subtraction.com/archives/2006/0403_the_awesome_.php (scroll down) of the whole front page confirms that the people who will love this the most are designers with 30-inch monitors (rotated 90 degrees). It’s too wide for my laptop (a current-model iBook). “Gruber likes it”:http://daringfireball.net/linked/2006/april#mon-03-nytimes_design a lot. He thinks it’s “much less crowded than before,” though he also thinks “there’s just way too much there” — so remember, if you are talking to a designer, that word “crowded” doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Commenting on a story about “female pilots”:http://www.dawn.com/2006/03/31/top1.htm in the Pakistani Air Force, “Lindsay Beyerstein”:http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2006/04/first_female_pi.html asks “Are American servicewomen allowed to fly planes in combat?”
The answer is yes. Lt. Col. “Martha McSally”:http://www.ctie.monash.edu.au/hargrave/mcsally.html was one of the first seven female jet pilots in the USAF, and I think in 1995 was the first woman to fly a combat sortie, while she was on a tour of duty in Kuwait. In 2004 she became the “first woman to command a fighter squadron”:http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/relatedarticles/30666.php. She “recently returned”:http://www.azstarnet.com/dailystar/115123.php from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, where she led her squadron of “A-10 warthogs”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-10_Thunderbolt_II. In December of 2001 McSally “sued the Pentagon”:http://www.rutherford.org/about/cases.asp because a regulation forced her (and all other women in the military) to wear a Muslim abaya (covering her from head-to-toe) while she was stationed in Saudi Arabia, and also forbade her from leaving the base without a male chaperone. Amongst other objections, McSally pointed out that servicemen were actually prohibited from wearing Muslim garb. She won her case.
Commenters with more knowledge of the U.S. Air Force than I are free to correct me, but I think it’s no surprise that McSally (who, like most women pioneers of her type, is by all accounts outstandingly qualified) should fly an A-10. It’s pretty much the lowest-status fighter combat aircraft in service. (One joke is that its airspeed indicator is a calendar.) Which isn’t to say I would want to see one bearing down on me with “one of these fuckers”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAU-8_Avenger blazing away. One of the reasons I know any of this, incidentally, is that McSally’s squadron is based at “Davis-Monthan AFB”:http://www.dm.af.mil/ here in Tucson. A-10s (and other jets) fly sorties out from Davis-Monthan to the “Barry M. Goldwater Bombing Range”:http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/goldwater.htm (no, really) a couple of times a day, and the flight path runs over my office. You understand the meaning of the phrase “air superiority” when you see a couple of those things go overhead.
bq. The NOT A CIVIL WAR OH NO marked by Shiite death squad attacks on Sunnis, some of whom are surely guilty of guerrilla activity and some of whom are surely not, is really Insurgency Plus.
This reminds me of something I meant to say the other week. In much the same way as we’re not supposed to call Iraq a quagmire, we’re also not supposed to say it’s on the brink of — or already stuck in to — civil war. It’s worth bearing in mind that just as there are different “kinds of quagmires”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/09/01/kinds-of-quagmires/ there are also varieties of civil war. An example familiar to me — with the usual caveats that this just meant as an illustrative comparison, not a strong correspondence — is the “Irish Civil War”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Civil_War of 1922–23. It was a conflict between Free State forces (the government, who supported the “Anglo-Irish Treaty”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_Treaty that ended the “War of Independence”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Irish_War), and the opponents of the treaty, including a majority of the old IRA.
For present purposes, what’s worth noting is that while the conflict was relatively short it was also vicious, especially towards the end, and especially amongst the elites. There was a cycle of execution, retaliation and retribution both in the field and against prisoners. A relatively large proportion of the political class was killed. What did _not_ happen, however, was something like the American Civil War, where large armies repeatedly confronted one another on the battlefield. Moreover, life, as always, went on. The Irish Civil War was largely confined to active combatants, and casualties were heavily concentrated in the leadership. For instance (I’m open to correction here), the Free State army was of course targeted but its unarmed police force was generally not subject to attacks. It’s also worth noting that a very large majority of people did not support the Anti-Treaty side, but that didn’t stop the conflict from happening.
Less than eight years after the war ended the government peacefully handed over power to the party directly descended from the Anti-Treaty forces. For years afterwards many of those in Parliament looked across the aisle at the murderers of their fathers, uncles or brothers. Iraq is very different — much more complex — in all kinds of ways, not least because of its strategic importance, its oil reserves and the continued presence of an occupying army. So the Irish case offers little real direction. Optimistically, maybe, it reminds us that it is in fact possible for severe civil conflict to resolve itself into something like peaceful coexistence. But it also shows that you don’t need to wait for an Antietam or a Gettysburg to say that a country is in the middle of a bitter civil war.
“Scott McLemee”:http://www.mclemee.com/id4.html is a superb critic, and one of the things that makes him good is that he is generous. He can get something interesting out of not very interesting books, and he doesn’t go out of his way to be snarky. But when he feels like filleting something, “his knife is very sharp”:http://www.mclemee.com/id165.html.
THE MAN ON WHOM NOTHING WAS LOST: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill, by Molly Worthen. Houghton Mifflin, 354 pp.
… Charles Hill — a former Foreign Service officer who served in important positions under Henry Kissinger and George Schultz – has for a few years now taught a class at Yale University called Grand Strategy. Young aspirants to the diplomatic corps flock to it. … Molly Worthen, a recent Yale graduate, was one of Hill’s junior illuminati, and her book The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost is an authorized biography of the great man. … The result is not a book so much as it is an alumni-magazine profile gone horribly, horribly wrong. … Hill comes across as a single-minded careerist who did not notice his wife’s alcoholism until she mentioned it during the final days of their marriage. If not for the element of hero worship pervading the book, one might suspect an element of sarcasm in Worthen’s title … something is missing from Worthen’s gale-force proclamations of wonder … There is nothing resembling a substantial idea in the entire book. Worthen presents Hill as a neoconservative guru. But her portrait is that of a mind bearing less resemblance to the political philosopher Leo Strauss than a walking edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. … the author never forgets herself entirely. Or at all, really. … She also indulges in a considerable amount of “my generation” babble: “We sit in coffee shops and complain about the doldrums of ‘real jobs,’ the stress of having to commit to a career that won’t ever let out for the summer,” etc.
This is not a biography, but a study in self-absorption by proxy. The publisher ought to be ashamed. The manuscript should have been left in a drawer, where it might embarrass the author 10 years from now, and in private.
Ouch.
Here’s “an apposite comment”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/03/cloning_as_solace.php from P.Z. Myers about someone who has had some cells from his late pet dog, Tito, cultured and frozen:
This is a personal decision, and I wouldn’t argue one way or the other about what Hank should do; it sounds like he’s wrestled over the issues already. All I can say is what I would do if I were in his sorrowful position.
I wouldn’t even try cloning.
… the essence of Tito isn’t reducible to a few million cells or a few billion nucleotides. While the genome is an influence and a constraint — a kind of broadly defined bottle to hold the essence of a dog — the stuff we care about, that makes an animal unique and special, is a product of its history. It’s the accumulation of events and experience and memory that generates the essentials of a personality and makes each of us unique.
Even if cloning were reliable and cheap, I wouldn’t go for it. It would produce an animal that looks like Tito, and would be good and worthy as an individual in its own right, but it wouldn’t _be_ Tito.
I’ve half-joked before that, purely because of this basic point, sociologists should welcome _human_ cloning with open arms. Technically achieving the sort of things many people imagine they could do with cloning — recreate a lost child or relative, produce a new version of themselves — would in fact have just the opposite effect. It would show just how important social structure, local environment and historical contingencies are to forming people. And that’s without even getting in to the metaphysical questions of what’s essential about people’s identity. Some people are going to be really upset when they realize that the genome is not some kind of magic essence of self. I hope public understanding catches up with the reality before actual cloned people are subject to the resentment of their creators.
The NYT has a piece about a new Nickelodeon show called Wonder Pets, which follows the adventures of guinea pig, a turtle and a duckling, three schoolroom pets. The show’s main innovation is its music. The program is “a series of operettas.”
“We wanted to find a way to have the music drive the show,” Mr. Selig said … “we found that kids responded well to having music at the center of everything,” with characters singing rather than simply speaking their parts.
Brown Johnson, Nickelodeon’s executive creative director for preschool television, said she believes operetta is an art form particularly suited to children. … The “Wonder Pets” music does not feature the tinny, saccharine melodies that often infect children’s television shows. Rather, each episode uses an original score recorded by a live orchestra overseen by Jeffrey Lesser, the Grammy-winning record producer … Which is not to say that the music is not repetitive. Like many operettas, “The Wonder Pets” is full of hummable recitatives that linger in the minds of both children and adults long after the performance ends.
In light of this, let me just come out and admit that my two-year-old is a slave to Gilbert and Sullivan. She seemed to like choral music whenever it was on the radio, and I remembered that a friend had told me a few years ago that his kids liked it a lot, too. So, like an idiot, I went and bought a CD of Gilbert and Sullivan favorites on the off chance one day. Now it’s all she listens to in the car. The other day in the supermarket she solemnly came out with “Stay close to your desks never go to sea … ha ha ha … and you all may be rulers of the Queen’s Navy.” It’s a mixed blessing. On the one hand, my daughter is perfectly happy. On the other hand, I now know all the words to “I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General.” Next stop, Götterdämmerung.
I am abusing my ability to post here rather than add a comment to “the ongoing thread”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/27/if-there’s-a-war-please-direct-me-to-the-battlefield/ discussing Steve Fuller’s response to Chris Mooney’s book. I think — sorry, P.Z. — that much of what Fuller says is more or less right. To be more precise, I think the first half of his response to Mooney is pretty good, and there are some good bits later on, too. However — sorry, Steve — I also think Fuller makes an error in the way he fuses his sociology of science with his policy recommendations about what to do about the Intelligent Design movement. Moreover, he himself does the groundwork that makes the basis of the error clear. I’ll try to explain below the fold.
The “Ben Domenech”:http://blog.washingtonpost.com/redamerica/ plagiarism trainwreck is summarized nicely by “hilzoy”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2006/03/plagiarism.html at Obsidian Wings. (The discovery of an “entire column ripped out of a PJ O’Rourke book”:http://yourlogohere.blogspot.com/2006/03/nail-meet-coffin.html is the icing on the cake.) The two most entertaining things written about it so far are, first, the “in-the-bunker”:http://redstate.org/print/2006/3/23/22434/5436 “defences”:http://redstate.org/story/2006/3/24/03958/4019 being rolled out at RedState, and second, “this comment”:http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002481.html#comment-130231 at “Sadly No!”:http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/002481.html
bq. No matter how brief Ben’s Post gig was, it’s still going to look good on his (Ctrl)C (Ctrl)V …
A “couple of years ago”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/05/08/copycats I wrote a post about kinds of plagiarism by college students:
Like hepatitis, plagiarism comes in several varieties.
# Google Plagiarism. Find a paper or discussion online. Pros: Copy. Paste. Done! Cons: Professor may also know about Google.
Sadly for Ben, the “may also know about Google” problem goes for thousands of bloggers as well. Never mind the joys of Amazon’s “Search Inside” feature, which allowed for the lift from O’Rourke to be confirmed.
Several good books dealing with the American penal system and its effects on other aspects of American society are slated to appear this year. The first of them has just been published. Locked Out, by “Jeff Manza”:http://www.cas.northwestern.edu/sociology/faculty/manza/home.html and “Chris Uggen”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/~uggen/ examines the consequences of felon disenfranchisement laws for political participation and electoral outcomes. As might be expected, the United States puts much stronger restrictions than most Western countries on the voting rights of those currently imprisoned, on parole or probation, as well as on those who have served their sentences. When coupled with the fact that the U.S. has a relatively enormous segment of its population in prison, such laws may have political effects in themselves, as well as reflecting some of the deep effects of mass incarceration in modern American society. Here’s a map (from “Chris’s website”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/%7Euggen/felon_disenfranchisement.htm) showing felon disenfranchisement laws by state (for 2004). (Click the map for a larger, more readable version.)
In the book, Manza and Uggen find that about 5.3 million people were affected by these laws as of the November 2004 election. Of these, two million were African-American. In several states, as many as one in four black men is ineligible to vote. An “earlier article”:http://www.soc.umn.edu/%7Euggen/Uggen_Manza_ASR_02.pdf by the authors estimate that felon disenfranchisement is large enough to affect national elections when they are close: felons make up about 2.5 percent of the U.S. voting-age population (a steady upward trend from just under one percent in 1976). But there’s not much political hay to be made about this — who wants to say “70 percent of felons vote Democratic”? The racial history of these laws is more important: they are largely the outcome of racial conflict during Reconstruction. Moreover, according to the authors public opinion polls suggest 80 percent of Americans are in favor of allowing convicted felons to vote once they have completed their sentences. (Only a third are in favor of allowing prisoners to vote.)
Chris Uggen also “has a good blog”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/, incidentally. Today, for instance, I “learned from him”:http://chrisuggen.blogspot.com/2006/03/federal-lawsuit-over-financial-aid-for.html that students convicted of rape (for example) remain eligible for federal financial aid, but students convicted of misdemeanor drug possession are automatically ineligible. Anyway, I recommend the book.
In this day and age, is there any good reason at all why, upon subscribing to a magazine, you should have to wait six to eight weeks for delivery of your first issue?