My (longish) review of Roberto Saviano’s _Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System_ is “now out”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071210/farrell in _The Nation_. I liked the book quite a lot – as I say in the review it’s a little like Ryszard Kapuscinkski’s melanges of fiction and journalism, but it’s far starker, more direct, and angrier in its conclusions. One of the things I found most interesting about the book (although I don’t think his argument ultimately works), is Saviano’s efforts to connect together the Camorra and global capitalism. This is something that the “NYT reviewer”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/14/books/14grim.html didn’t get – he complains that the first chapter of the book (on Chinese smugglers) doesn’t say anything about the Camorra at all. As I read the book, that was rather the point that Saviano was trying to make – that the fundamental problem lies not so much in the florid stories about the Camorra clans as in the underbelly of globalization; the myriads of clandestine and informal markets and of relationships between the legal and illegal economies that help sustain global capitalism. The book is at least as much about markets as about crime – two extended quotes after the jump give some of the flavor. [click to continue…]

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.”

Deadline Hollywood says a deal may be struck. Writers strike may be settled by X-Mas! If not, let them write graphic novels! (Guardian article about "film-makers themselves branching out into graphic novels, incorporating that art form as an alternative storytelling tool rather than simply an adjunct or cash-in." Eh. Sort of interesting.)

But what if you want to combine your love of graphic novels with support for artists on strike? [click to continue…]

Via Matt Yglesias, a headline and subhead from a Newsweek profile of Giuliani:

bq. Growing Up Giuliani: Rudy Giuliani was raised to understand that fine, blurry line between saint and sinner. The making of his moral code.

It seems to me that a line can be fine, or it can be blurry. I’m having a hard time visualizing a fine, blurry line.

Dan Hardie just emailed me with some news about the Iraqi employees campaign. God help us all, but the compromise asylum arrangements have been so poorly publicised that several Iraqi employees have been left searching the internet for information and ended up at Dan’s blog.

I have, with permission, reproduced the whole of his post below the fold, but in summary we’re basically making another call on your good nature. The last set of emails and letters to British MPs worked, in as much as they pretty directly led to the Milliband statement and the announcement of asylum and resettlement packages. However, it’s clear that we need to keep making the point (politely) that the British blog reading public has not forgotten about this one, and to insist that the policy is generously and efficiently implemented. So basically, we need people to send emails and letters to their MPs. Crooked Timber readers have done us proud in the campaign so far and I hope we can rely on your support once more.

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Since it looks as though “Andrew Gelman”:http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007/11/a_political_sci.html has already announced it, I figure that I’m now allowed to publicize a new political science blog, “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/. It’s written by three of my colleagues at GWU, David Park, John Sides, and Lee Sigelman (who’s received previous mention at CT for his groundbreaking collaborative research on “Supreme Court Justice betting pools”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/10/29/dirty-pool/). One “interesting post”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/2007/11/the_longterm_economic_cost_of_1.html#more on the costs of wars:

Recent days have brought a shower of media attention to the long-term economic cost of the war in Iraq. … According to Clayton, the pattern of long-term costs associated with American wars indicates that “the bulk of the money is spent long after the fighting stops” — and when Clayton said “long after,” he meant it. The primary reason: veterans benefits, which for the Civil War, World Wars I and II, and the Korean War averaged 1.8 times the original cost of the wars themselves.

It would be interesting to know whether this is likely to hold for the Iraq war. Will veterans’ benefits be as costly for an all-volunteer army? Has the ratio of technology costs to manpower costs changed substantially since the earlier wars discussed? I know next to nothing about the minutiae of military budgets – any CT readers have leads??

Like several other contributors at Crooked Timber, I have little patience for evolutionary psychological explanations of the Sunday colour supplement variety. A couple of commenters suggested a couple of weeks ago that this was inconsistent with my “suggestion”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/11/10/engineers-of-jihad/ that Diego Gambetta’s paper on suicide terrorism and engineering was ‘fascinating.’ The intimation, as I understood it, was that I was prepared to give a free pass to dubious explanations that fit my ideological priors while giving a hard time to equally (or perhaps less) dubious explanations that didn’t. As it happens, when checking out Gambetta’s website again (I’m trying to engage his arguments about the Sicilian mafia extensively in the book that I’m finishing), I came across an interesting link that draws out the actual contrasts between Gambetta’s work and the preponderance of the popular ev-psych literature.

Some of you may remember an article entitled “Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature” by Miller and Kanazawa that got some attention in the right-blogosphere a few months ago. Among other dodginesses, this article completely misrepresents the work of the aforementioned Diego Gambetta.
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It can’t have been easy to pick finalists for the Atlanta Journal- Constitution‘s contest for World’s Worst Book Title — not with candidates such as Letting It Go: A History of American Incontinence and Everything You’ll Need to Remember About Alzheimer’s.

I’m not sure how the contest was run, or if it was fair. A lot of times with these things it’s all about who you know.

Still, the results are in, and AJC has announced that the winner is Cooking with Pooh. This title is for real. But I’m sure readers can come up with worse titles than that, just as real.

(hat tip: Michael Merschel)

Matthew Yglesias links to an interesting paper:

“I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls; if you don’t understand what that means you are just plain dumb.” These were the words of United States senator Theodore G. “The Man” Bilbo of Mississippi, as he addressed white supporters during his successful re-election campaign in June 1946. His inflammatory language ignited a firestorm, however, that prevented him from taking his Senate seat in January 1947 and ended the career of one of the nation’s most flamboyant politicians.

“The Man” fell because of the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, white elites outside the South—defined here as leading daily newspapers, weekly magazines, organizations, and political leaders—largely ignored Bilbo’s racist incitements. World War II, however, brought about a significant change in elite attitudes. Due to the ideological war against Nazism, America’s emergence as a superpower, and the unifying nature of the conflict, the kind of virulent public racism that was a trademark of Bilbo’s career was no longer tolerated outside of the South. Bilbo’s career, from his return to the governor’s mansion in 1928 through the Senate debate over his seating in 1947, parallels and illustrates the declining tolerance of overt racism and nativism in the United States.

Yglesias files this under ‘the past is another country.” That’s only the half of it. [click to continue…]

Not only has the Labor party won a crushing victory in Australia’s national election but conservative Prime Minister John Howard has, very probably, lost his own seat. Details here.

Given that the economy is going very well, and that the Iraq war, while unpopular, was not a central issue in the campaign, I think it’s reasonable to mark this down as the first national election in which climate change played a pivotal role. Howard, following Bush, refused to ratify Kyoto. This was highly unpopular, and served as a more general symbol of a government stuck in the past.

The other big losing issue for the government was the passage of a package of anti-union laws called Workchoices.

Thanks to Tina over at the new Scatterplot, I just found a fantastic blog: outside the (toy) box. Here is an excellent post about gender socialization through toys. Plus the author maintains a helpful list of anti-sexist/anti-consumerist children’s books. Additions to that list here or there are welcomed.

Until Brian’s posts about cloning, I hadn’t thought much about the various technologies available for choosing how children will turn out, and insofar as I had my instincts were conservative, but my assumptions libertarian. That is, my own reaction to such technologies was that they should not be used, but I didn’t have any real reasons for thinking that, so I assumed that some general presumption in favour of liberty decided in favour of permitting them. My views have changed, or perhaps just solidified, since then, to a point that I am comfortably perfectionist in Raz’s sense and conservative in Cohen’s sense, and by the time I read The Case Against Perfection (UK) I was already predisposed to agree with Michael Sandel’s skepticism. I’ve now used the book in a couple of classes, and it works brilliantly with students; Sandel can be a terrific writer, as he is here, and he covers a lot of ground accessibly. There’s even a chapter offering a theory of the value of sport which may or may not be correct but explains, to my satisfaction, why I find 20-20 so dreary. (This last thing is a bit difficult to explain to students without a 2-hour session explaining how cricket works, lucky things).

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This ad has been playing on various PC websites, such as CNET’s Windows Vista Overview page. It’s a very clever use of sidebars and ad banners.

Here’s some information for fans of “the capability approach”:http://www.capabilityapproach.com/Briefings.php: the “Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency”:http://www.mnp.nl/en/index.html released “a report”:http://www.mnp.nl/en/publications/2007/Sustainablequalityoflife.html that I co-wrote on how to conceptualise the quality of life for national policy purposes in affluent countries – we argue for a capability metric and are rather critical of the happiness metrics. I should add, though, that the proof is in the eating of the pudding, and we don’t have any funding to collect the necessary data that a capabilities-based index of the quality of life would require; our work remains at the conceptual level only. It may well turn out that we would need a very long questionnaire in order to collect all data, which in turn might jeopardize the viability of a capability-index of quality of life (since the non-response-rate would be higher). And there are more problems to solve before we would arrive at a capability index, certainly one as (relatively) easy to measure as either GDP per capita or happiness indicators. Anyway, if anyone has more money and more time and thinks this is a fun project to pursue, let me know what comes out of it.