Via Unfogged, “a key piece of empirical evidence”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19740787/ in the gun control debate. Faced with an intruder attempting to rob them at gunpoint, the homeowners responded successfully with wine and cheese. Merely brandishing the Camembert and bottle of Chateau Malescot St-Exupéry was not sufficient, though: they were discharged, but without injury to either party, or indeed the party itself.

A friend has asked about a story that may be the academic equivalent of an urban legend. I had never heard it. I asked some journalists who cover higher education, and they also say it does not ring a bell. But the thing sounds just plausible enough that it might really have happened. So at my friend’s request, here is a call for leads in case there is anything to it.

I will avoid naming the university in question, leave gender uspecified, and say only that the events in question are supposed to have happened within the past decade. Here is the the gist of it:

A doctoral candidate has finished a dissertation based on the archives of a village in Italy. It has been accepted, the defense has gone well, and all that remains is a little paperwork. A member of the committee (or possibly just someone who knows about the dissertation topic) happens to be on vacation in Italy and decides to visit the village. It’s not clear why — curiosity, time to kill, maybe to explore the archive? In any case, it turns out there is no village.

So there you have it. Does anyone know of a real case like this?

A few years ago, I read around in the literature on “contemporary legend” (the term now preferred by people who study them, rather than “urban legend”). Usually they amount to cautionary tales of some sort, in which some norm or rule is violated and punished. The tale of the faked archive seems to qualify, though I suppose it’s possible that it might be based on something that actually happened.

(crossposted to Cliopatria)

Under intense pressure from the rightwing commentariat (several members of which have been appointed to its board by the Howard government) the Australian Broadcasting Corporation presented a shortened version of Martin Durkin’s The Great Global Warming Swindle last night. Our local climate science delusionists looked forward to this event with keen anticipation, but they were in for a nasty shock.

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The cover story of the Washington City Paper this week is about Late Night Shots, “a very exclusive, invite-only social-networking Web site” enabling rich young white people from good prep schools to get drunk and have casual sex with others of the kind in the Washington, DC area who share their right-wing politics and their sense of entitlement (if that isn’t, in this case, verging on the redundant).

LNS claims to have something like 14,000 members. Many are, the article says, Episcopalian or Presbyterian. The whole things sounds like something produced by splicing together the work of John Updike and Bret Easton Ellis with a business plan cooked by a savvy venture capitalist.

Features in the City Paper are often dubiously reported and normally at least twice as long as the content merits, though this one seems competently edited. It might be worth a look for those of you concerned with networks, online and off — just as an example of something off the MySpace/Facebook binary, so to speak.
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David Denby didn’t like “Sicko” very much. In the New Yorker, he writes:

“Hauling off seriously ill people to a military base where they won’t receive treatment is a dumb prank.”

Okay – I’m not the biggest Michael Moore fan in the world, and I can see how this might rub some people the wrong way.

“Why not tell us what really happened on the trip – for instance, what part Cuban officials played in receiving the American patients?”

Actually, that might not be a bad idea.

“Moore winds up treating the audience the same way that, he says, powerful people treat the weak in America – as dopes easily satisfied with fairy tales and bland reassurances.”

Seems harsh – this is clearly supposed to be a piece of entertaining propaganda – but, again, I can see the point.

“A shift to the left, or, at least, to the center, has overtaken Michael Moore, yielding an irony more striking than any he turns up: the changes in political consciousness that Moore himself has helped produce have rendered his latest film almost superfluous.”

Er, how’s that again? In polls, a majority are in favor of universal health care, so there’s no need to build grass-roots pressure anymore? Same for getting out of Iraq, I suppose.

Sara Taylor is confused about the nature of legal-rational authority. Via “Matt.”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/my_oath_like_your_oath_is_to_u.php

My undergraduates get introduced to this issue via the question, “Why can I require that you write a term paper but not require that you wash my car?” It’s not hard. The problem, as Chick Perrow remarks somewhere, is that even in well-run bureaucracies there’s always a tendency for the person or people at the top to act as though they own — and sometimes really believe they own — the whole organization, even though this shouldn’t happen.

I am reduced to nicking stuff from “Harry Hutton”:http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com/2007/07/in-this-clip-michael-moore-is-yelling.html . Oh well. But I couldn’t resist the two quotes from Mark Steyn that he links to. The evils caused by socialized medicine have “limits”:http://www.nysun.com/article/58028 :

bq. Does government health care inevitably lead to homicidal doctors who can’t wait to leap into a flaming SUV and drive it through the check-in counter? No.

That’s a relief. But we shouldn’t get “complacent”:http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=Y2Q0OTg2NGUyOGJlNjMwYmZhNWU4ZmFlY2UxNmY5YzI :

bq. … the unloveliness of any British city after six in the evening – the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of “pavement pizza”, the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet – is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities.

Just look what it’s doing to otherwise sober economists:

What have you done, Henry?

1. “Read”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/07/11/trying-not-to-lose-face/ Henry’s post on Facebook. Signed up out of curiosity and masochistic desire to have smallness of social network confirmed.
2. Joined the University of Arizona network. Noodling around, saw the profile for Joe Grad Student from my department. Looked at his list of friends.
3. Noticed that one of Joe Grad Student’s friends looked familiar. Realized I knew him. He had been a year ahead of me in Secondary School in Ireland in the late 1980s. Jaysus.

Like, it seems, umpteen others, I set up a Facebook profile for myself a couple of weeks ago. When I did, I found that plenty of friends from widely scattered parts of my social network had done the same thing, mostly around the same time. This does seem to me to be a genuine tipping phenomenon. I’ve been feeling a little guilty about not knowing more about Facebook and MySpace, given that I teach classes on how the Internet is changing politics and society. But I didn’t feel ready to actually set myself up, partly because I wasn’t sure what the point was, and partly because I was worried that I’d end up without any friends, exposed to the scorn and pity of the multitude. As my sister Maria said (before joining up herself and finding that she had lots of friends), Facebook is an opportunity to play the social game again – and lose. If other people shared our apprehension, it’s perhaps not surprising that lots of them have decided to join at the same time, when everybody knew that there were enough other people who they knew doing the same thing that the risk of public embarrassment was relatively slight.

Via “Rebecca MacKinnon”:http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/2007/07/finally-joined-.html, this “post”:http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2007/07/facebook_risingsocial_media_ru.html by Mark Glaser has additional speculation on why so many lemmings plunged over the cliff at the same time, and why they plunged into Facebook in particular. I’d be interested to know why CT readers have or haven’t joined Facebook or other social networking type sites; I should also let people know that there is now a Crooked Timber group on Facebook (content currently consisting of a few photos of CTers mugging at the camera; more surely to follow).

Pejman Yousefzadeh isn’t taking the internet mockery of his anti-FDR agitation well.

Apparently–and this is the latest pronouncement from the Reality-Based Community–we are not supposed to study things that happened 74 years ago, or perhaps longer.

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For those in the Bay Area, I thought I’d mention that I’ll be giving a talk at Wiki Wednesday this evening at 6pm. The topic is digital media use by youth. Feel free to come by. Also, feel free to join the group at other times in the future, these meetings are held every month.

Writing about the LaRouche Youth Movement finally allowed me to use some of the research material piling up for a novel that’s never quite come together.

Maybe it was the anxiety of influence. Lyndon LaRouche always seemed like a character right out of Thomas Pynchon.
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The other day David Brooks “wrote a column”:http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/opinion/10brooks.html?_r=1&hp&oref=login which appeared to be a stock piece of standard conservative anxiety about what he called “hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fedup, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving” young women. “Matt Yglesias picks up on”:http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/07/why_i_read_david_brooks.php on the piece today, salvaging the key insight of Brooks’ piece from the muddled pop-culture framing. As Brooks says,

bq. Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.

Matt comments:

bq. The reality is that technological and economic change has raised the age at which people — particularly more upscale people — do things like get married and have children. But biology stays the same. Consequently, people in their teens and early twenties engage in a lot of courtship-related program activities that don’t really entail a good-faith search for a spouse.

This point is basically correct. And for the past two months, a book exploring just this issue has been sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read properly, instead of skimmed. It’s Michael Rosenfeld’s The Age of Independence: Interracial Unions, Same-Sex Unions, and the Changing American Family.
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