Wikpedia says: “What is now the orthodox view of the piece [the Parthenon Frieze], however, namely that it depicts the Greater Panathenaic procession from Eleusis to Athens …”

But is that right? The Panathenaic procession ran … 20-some kilometers?

From Jon Mikalson, Ancient Greek Religion: “[participants in the Panathenaic procession] would go in a large procession from there [the city gate] one kilometer along the Panathenaic Way, through the Agora, and up to the Acropolis to Athena’s Great Altar. The priestess of Athena and the priest of Poseidon-Erechtheus would no doubt lead the way. They would be followed by others who served Athena’s cult, and then by a host of religious and government officials.”

Just curious if anyone knows if there was some marathon Panathenaic parade all the way from Eleusis to Athens. There was, I think, a procession from Athens to Eleusis for initiates into the Mysteries, so it’s not like Greeks weren’t prepared for a good trudge in a good cause.

I always thought of the University of Oregon (UO) as one of great gems of our public university system. It’s got a terrific political science department (with Hobbes scholar Deborah Baumgold in theory and wonderful APD folks like Joe Lowndes and Gerald Berk in American Politics). It’s in Eugene, a lovely little city of hot tubs and hippies. And since last year, it’s had a faculty union. Who wouldn’t love it?

Apparently, the UO administration, that’s who.

The administration is currently locked into a battle with the faculty, who are trying to negotiate their first contract. Rather than seize the moment to establish good relations with the union and improve the university, the administration is intent on doing the reverse. Not simply with the usual patter of bottom-line administrators—no big raises, say (though even here the administration has gone the extra mile by refusing to guarantee the fulltime faculty a living wage)—but with proposals that would astonish even the most jaded observer of administrative ways and means.

I first caught wind of the UO’s aspirations this past week, when Inside Higher Ed reported that the administration was trying to undermine the speech rights of the faculty by inserting a so-called “civility” clause in the contract. [click to continue…]

Catherine Hill, President of Vassar, at the Washington Post explaining the rapid increase in tuition at elite colleges:

Increased access to higher education would help moderate the expansion in income inequality over time. Yet the increasing inequality itself presents obstacles to achieving this goal.

Real income growth that skews toward higher-income families creates challenges for higher education. The highest-income families are able and willing to pay the full sticker price. Schools compete for these students, supplying the services that they desire, which pushes up costs. Restraining tuition and spending in the face of this demand is difficult. These students will go to the schools that meet their demands.

Hence the proliferation of climbing walls and luxury dorms at selective and highly selective colleges (one college president told me that the climbing wall is a highlight of the college tour at both the private colleges he has led). Highly selective education is a positional good, and wealthy families have become enormously wealthier over the past 30 years and have been having fewer children: what are they going to do with all that money? Compete with each other to get their children into the best possible position, thus bidding up the price of highly elite colleges, making it unaffordable for others. In fact, elite colleges respond by using some of the revenues from those who cheerfully pay full price to subsidize students whose families cannot:

At the same time, many schools are committed to recruiting and educating a socioeconomically diverse student body. At private, nonprofit institutions, this commitment has been supported through financial aid policies.

Telling elite schools to keep down tuition doesn’t help:

Ironically, some of the proposed “solutions” to make higher-education finances sustainable would exacerbate future income inequality rather than address the trends that are creating financial challenges for institutions.

For example, in his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama called on colleges to slow down tuition increases and threatened to reduce public support. “If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down,” he said. But slow tuition growth not tied to offsetting expenditure savings can result in reductions to financial aid. This is playing out in the private, nonprofit sector. Lower tuition combined with lower financial aid benefits higher-income students and hurts lower-income students.

Of course, public institutions, which are the main resort for lower income families, are different. They are the main resort partly because they have traditionally had a low-tuition, low-aid, model, and I cannot tell you how many students I have talked to who were deterred from applying to more selective private schools by the sticker price, applied only to Madison because it had low tuition, but who, I know, would be in much less debt than they are if they had applied to and attended the more selective, elite, private schools that they spurned because of the sticker price (which they would not have had to pay). Anyway, well worth reading the whole piece.

I’ve been enjoying this Great Language Game and wanted to recommend it to others. You listen to a clip in one of 80 languages and are given choices to decide which one it represents. At first you choose between two, but as you advance in the game, you are given an increasing number of choices making your job of picking the right one potentially harder. I say potentially, because if you’re certain of the language then it won’t make a difference, but if you are not then the guessing definitely gets much harder especially depending on the options. For example, I can certainly tell the difference between Cantonese and Japanese, but I cannot between Cantonese and Mandarin. Obviously, your personal experiences will help in various ways. I’m unlikely to be confused by languages I speak or have studied even for a little while (in my case a healthy variety: Hungarian, German, Russian, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish), but have not the first clue about how to identify languages such as Bangla, Dinka, Tagalog or Tongan, just to name a few on the list that are completely foreign to me. Some others fall in between in my experience (like Slavic and Germanic languages) where I’ve done a reasonably good job guessing even if I couldn’t have been sure.

The game’s author has shared some interesting stats about how people have been doing. I got a 750 my first round and wish I could say I have only improved since, but in fact I have not been able to maintain that throughout my attempts. I’ve found the experience interesting for thinking about what features of languages I look for in trying to identify them.

According to Calvin, at least, the same as to be a bat. But for the rest of us, it seems obvious that there is likely to be a qualitative difference between the subjective experience (if any) of a bug, and that of a bat. And, if true bugs don’t work for you in this example, there’s always the colloquial “bugs” such as bacteria and viruses, which presumably don’t have any experience at all.

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Or tea, as the case may be.

Really, it couldn’t be happening to a nicer guy. Also, this.

‘The revolution will eat its children’. But it’s interesting to think why autosarcophagarchy – that is, rule by self-cannibals – should be such a typical form of revolutionary decline. (Do you like my new word? I think I’ll teach it to my daughter.)

There’s shouldn’t be a problem in principle with being an idealist – i.e. having some vision of what an ideal state would be like that is radically at odds with actually existing reality. Whether it be True Communism or True Conservatism or what have you. Practicing revolutionaries should be able to talk the 1st best talk while walking the 2nd best walk. But there is, I suppose, something inherently maddening about that position, both to the one who assumes it and for spectators. The distance between real and ideal is so great that the practical negotiation of it can never look like an expression of what you have been talking about it, hence can’t look like prudent trimming. So it can’t help looking like rank hypocrisy to enemies and vile betrayal to friends.

This is accentuated by the rhetoric of naturalness that goes with utopianism. ‘Man is born free but everywhere he is in chains.’ Or in Obamacare, as the case may be. If the desirable state of affairs is so natural, and the actual state of affairs so horrible, it really seems the rickety structure ought to fall over if you push it. So therefore you ought to do so.

Of course, the case is a bit more complicated when the Robespierres in question were only ever recreational Robespierres to begin with. Napoleons of Notting Hill, not Napoleons. But the dynamic is much the same. (But you are bored with me quoting G. K. Chesterton, so I’ll cut it out.)

Just a quick post to point to some good technology writing that I’ve come across in the last few days. Ann Friedman’s “piece”:https://www.thebaffler.com/past/all_linkedin_with_nowhere_to_go on LinkedIn at _The Baffler_ is excellent. The closing line of this paragraph is beautiful and damning.

bq. This frenetic networking-by-vague-association has bred a mordant skepticism among some users of the site. Scott Monty, head of social media for the Ford Motor Company, includes a disclaimer in the first line of his LinkedIn bio that, in any other context, would be a hilarious redundancy: “Note: I make connections only with people whom I have met.” It’s an Escher staircase masquerading as a career ladder.

Also good is “Susan Faludi’s article”:http://thebaffler.com/past/facebook_feminism_like_it_or_not on Facebook and feminism, and Jacob Silverman’s piece (not online) on the corporate humping social scene at SXSW. For a different but complementary view of Facebook, that builds on personal experience of what it’s like to be a woman in Silicon Valley that Faludi doesn’t have, “Melissa Gira Grant’s piece”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/girl-geeks-and-boy-kings at _Dissent_ is pretty awesome. Further nominations welcome in comments …

I’ve always been envious of John Holbo’s discovery of the two-step of terrific triviality, a manoeuvre we’d all seen, but never properly identified. I’d like to solicit names for a manoeuvre I run into all the time in debates over climate policy which goes along the following lines

A: The planet is doomed unless we abandon industrial civilization/adopt my WWII-scale emergency program

B (me): On the contrary,we could cut emissions by 50 per cent quickly and with minimal effects on living standards.[^1]

A: What about cars, methane from ag production, air travel etc?

B: (me) We could cut vehicle emissions in half just by switching to the most fuel-efficient cars now on the market, methane by eating chicken instead of beef, air travel by videoconferencing and taking one long holiday in place of two short ones. The same for most other sources of emissions.[^2]

A: That’s absurd. No one would ever stand for that.

So, does anyone have a name for this manoeuvre, or, alternatively, a defense of this kind of argumentation

[^1]: Actually, we need a 90 per cent reduction by 2050. That would be a bit harder, but once you accept the idea that we could greatly reduce emissions without harming living standards, we’re down to arguing about parameter values in economic models. All economic models yield the conclusion that we could decarbonize the economy over 40 years while still improving living standards greatly.
[^2]: I’ll leave aside the question of whether it’s better to bring this about using prices (eg a carbon tax) or direct controls. My preferred answer is a bit of both, but either will work for the purposes of this example.

Political theorist Marshall Berman, who was my colleague at the CUNY Graduate Center, died yesterday morning.

When I heard the news last night, my first thought was the date: 9/11. There’s no good day to die, but to die on a day so associated with death—whether the murder of nearly 3000 people on 9/11/2001, most of them in his beloved New York, or the 9/11/1973 coup in Chile that brought down Allende and installed Pinochet—seems, in Marshall’s case, like an especially cruel offense against the universe.

For as anyone who knew or read him knows, Marshall was a man of irrepressible and teeming life. The life of the street, which he immortalized in his classic All That’s Solid Melts Into Air; the life of sex and liberation, which he talked about in The Politics of Authenticity (read the section on Montesquieu’s Persian Letters; you’ll never read that book the same way again); the life of high art and popular culture, whether it was the Sex Pistols or hip-hop. [click to continue…]

“Advice”:http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2013/09/so-you-want-a-job-in-policy.html on succeeding as a policy intern in Washington DC. Doubtless, this is entirely well meant. Very likely, it is _good advice._ But precisely to the extent it is good advice, it speaks volumes …

The number one thing that ensures a “way in” to this town/field is an internship- which are typically unpaid and last about 6 months. … While internships aren’t exactly paid in cash, they are paid in networks, and those networks are worth more than money.) … So there is a lot of competition about “who’s smarter than who” or “who produces more.” A little secret: one of the ways to get ahead is to take some of that energy and just be kind and helpful. Cleaning coffee mugs with a good attitude gets you noticed. Then people realize you are smart and read your stuff. … recognize that your 40-hours-a-week is simply the cost of entry. If you really want to leverage your internship, expect to work a lot more (though no one will tell you that, because I’m pretty sure that legally they can’t) … I was fortunate enough that I could incur the cost of not earning an income for 6 months; some of my fellow interns ended up doing all of that and then waiting tables until 2am…crazy, I know! Just think of it as if you’re Andrea Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, except hopefully your boss is much nicer (mine certainly was!) and your shoes probably shouldn’t cost as much (though if you are in the market, here’s some worth investing in if you are going to be running around this city and want to look uber professional: http://www.zappos.com/cole-haan-chelsea-low-pump-black-patent?zfcTest=fcl%3A0)

My department just moved into a new building, and, being in a new building, acquired a new set of cleaners. I got chatting to one of them the other day and asked her where she was from. “Chile,” she told me. She had come to the UK some time after the coup, when other family members had been imprisoned and life had become impossible. She had been given refugee status and had raised a family here. She had been back once, but Chile had become a foreign country to her, all her life was now in the UK where her children had grown up. Often, such is the fate of the refugee, permanently exiled, a whole life, with its plans, expectations and connections, very different from how it might have been. In the late 1970s and early 80s I was involved in Latin American solidarity work in Oxford and got to know quite a few Chileans. Many seemed to be happy and friendly people but others were scarred by the experiences they had been through before exile, and it showed. People fleeing conflict, persecution and the threat of torture or death are very vulnerable and often fragile. At least British governments of the 1970s and 80s recognised and put into practice their obligations towards such people. Things are different now.

Today is the fortieth anniversary of that other, bloodier, September 11th when General Augusto Pinochet seized power in Chile and overthrew a democratically-elected left-wing government, with thousands killed, “disappeared”, tortured or imprisoned. The Chilean coup hung over the leftists of my generation as a warning of what can and might happen, should capital ever be seriously worried about its entitlements and prerogatives. Such an atmosphere spawned novels such as Chris Mullin’s A Very British Coup, an imaginative recreation of what a British Chile could be like. We know that in the recesses of MI5 and the Tory right there were murmurings and proto-plans. Plans for eventualities in which the country proved “ungovernable”, where the far left become too strong, or where the miners “brought down” another government. (Of course, it was the electors who actually deposed Edward Heath.) We knew too of the likely hand-wringing reaction of supposedly democratic liberals and conservatives, should such an intervention prove “necessary” closer to home. That thought was present in Ralph Miliband’s well-known “The Coup in Chile”:
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I was working on a piece about how to respond to anti-vaccination beliefs, when it struck me that, in the absence of the germ theory of disease, vaccination looks a lot like homeopathy – you use a tiny amount of something that causes a mild version of the disease you want to prevent. I wondered whether the success of vaccination in the 18th century had any impact on the development of homeopathy. A very casual search suggests not, though there is something called homeopathic vaccination. Does anyone know more about this?

My older daughter is supposed to learn a new word a week. And tell the class. She has a good vocabulary, so I think some weeks she coasts on fancy words she already knew. But she likes new words! So I thought I would make a short list of cool words for 12-year olds, in case she ever needs a new one on short notice: asperity, vermiculation, sussurus. That sort of thing.

Then I thought of a good one: Custerdome! From the classic Steely Dan track, “Gaucho”. The Steely Dan lexicon defines it as “an archetype of a building that houses great corporations.” Alas, since this fictional synecdoche of a fictional archetype exists in the minds of Fagen and Becker, the term has languished on the badland borderlands of private language-hood. My daughter is not exactly a Dan fan, so probably that state of affairs will persist. “Try again tomorrow.” [click to continue…]

I have a new article (Web version, PDF) on technology intellectuals in the current issue of _Democracy._

Three addenda. First, the piece finishes by offering some (much deserved) praise to Tom Slee. It’s probably worth making clear that he has _absolutely no responsibility_ for anything I say in the article (I’m tolerably frank in my opinions about a few people – he likely disagrees with some of these criticisms). Neither he nor anyone else mentioned in the article has seen it before publication. Second, that there’s at least one major omission in the piece. I mention both Susan Crawford and Siva Vaidhyanathan as technology intellectuals who are skeptical about the positive role of business – I can’t think why I didn’t include Rebecca MacKinnon (whose excellent book, _Consent of the Networked_, takes this as a major theme) too. And I’m sure there are others. Finally, the piece may very possibly get some lively reaction, which I am unlikely to respond to at any length. When I describe myself as an amateur of these debates, I’m speaking the literal truth – my actual livelihood, which involves classes to be prepared, academic research to be finished up and sent off to journals, and comprehensive exams to be put together, is keeping me extremely busy at the moment. So take it as it stands …