A colleague has just forwarded to me a report from Secrecy News about the latest policy of the Congressional Research Service towards the media:

The Director of the Congressional Research Service last week issued a revised agency policy on “Interacting with the Media” that warns CRS analysts about the “very real risks” associated with news media contacts and imposes new restrictions on speaking to the press.

Among other things, they must file “detailed notes on the matters discussed or to be discussed.” The new rules of engagement are spelled out here.
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I was going to do a review of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road last year, but then got stuck into an email dialogue with China Mieville about it. I then started to write a revised review, but abandoned it; my views on the book had changed as a result of what China said, and it didn’t feel honest to write without some reference to the conversation. So here, in lieu of a review, is a lightly edited version of the conversation (I’ve lost the first email in which I said, as best as I remember, that I thought The Road was great, but since that was the only critical judgement that the email had on the book, I don’t think that posterity is missing out on much). CM denotes China’s bits, and HF mine. NB that this is a personal email conversation (albeit one that’s posted with China’s permission) so the tone is more conversational than it would be in a book review. NB also that spoilers abound. The rest below the fold. [click to continue…]

It’s snowing. Here, in downtown Tucson, Arizona. Just wanted to let you all know.

Spotted off Wisconsin Avenue yesterday

Castro. Sir Humphrey.

Jonathan Chait connects the dots between dishonest conservative (fn1) claims about income inequality (coming in this case from Alan Reynolds) to similar arguments made about evolution and global warming. As he says, to construct an alternate reality in which income inequality is not increasing, global warming is not happening and the world is near the end of its 6000 years anyway, there’s no need to prove a case – just cast enough doubt on the facts and ideology or faith will do the rest. This is happening across the board. The Republican War on Science is so broad-based that there is now no academic discipline whose conclusions can be considered acceptable to orthodox Republicans.

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Becks at Unfogged and Scott Lemieux “both”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_01_14.html#006126 “wonder”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2007/01/and-when-third-suv-conks-out-you-have.html why the hell the _New York Times_ publishes articles like “this”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/realestate/greathomes/19appliance.html?ex=157680000&en=297a9072f68ae297&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.

FOR some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,” Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

The _Financial Times_ (which has its biases, but is still in my opinion the best newspaper out there), has an entire bloody weekend supplement devoted to this kind of stuff, with the classy title “How To Spend It”:http://www.ft.com/howtospendit. While a fair number of its readers are presumably City types who can afford the pieds-a-terres and fancy toys lovingly detailed in its pages, I would imagine that most of its readers aren’t. Someone who I was chatting to about this recently suggested that it’s an aspirational thing; while most of its readers can’t afford this stuff, they’d like to be able to, and are more likely to buy a newspaper that allows them at least to daydream about it. Or perhaps the marketing types think that readers would prefer to be addressed _as if_ they were in a position to “Spend It” even when they aren’t. Any other plausible explanations?

This “column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9b065d92-7666-11db-8284-0000779e2340.html by Gideon Rachman in the FT is pretty interesting; he argues that what’s wrong in right wing foreign policy discussion in the US is that there are too many journalists and former journalists.

An editor of The Economist in the 1950s once advised his journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. This formula is almost second nature for newspaper columnists and can make for excellent reading. But it is a lousy guide to the making of foreign policy. … the journalists are a vital part of a neo-con network that formulated and sold the ideas that took the US to war in Iraq and that is now pressing for confrontation with Iran. The links between journalists, think-tanks and decision-makers in the neo-con world are tight and there is plenty of movement from one area to the other … You get the same combination of overstatement and ancestor-worship in Mr Stelzer’s introduction to The Neocon Reader, when he writes of the “formidable intellectual firepower behind neo-conservative foreign policy”, which “has probably not been seen since George Kennan led a team that formulated America’s response to the threat of Soviet expansionism.” The comparison with Kennan is instructive but not in the way Mr Stelzer intends. The main difference is that Kennan had a profound knowledge of the part of the world he was writing about. … Neo-conservative columnists have tended to follow the trial lawyers’ approach to expertise. First, decide what you want to argue then find an expert who agrees with you. … The current debacle in Iraq is what you get when you turn op-ed columns into foreign policy.

To which I’d add that right-wing house-organs such as _Commentary_ have also shaped these commentators’ style, by creating a culture in which you get ahead by smearing your opponents (to illustrate this, it’s worthwhile to read through, say, a selection of Norman Podhoretz’s old columns, or Charles Krauthammer’s more recent attempts in _The National Interest_ to claim that Francis Fukuyama is an anti-Semite). This isn’t to say that things are much better among the centrist and Democratic divisions of the foreign policy commentariat; they also have their own exaggerated simplifications. Here, the tendency seems to be to argue over grand and abstract paradigms for foreign policy making, without any real attempt to account for the actual human costs that this or that paradigm will have, if implemented. This seems to me to be the more fundamental problem that lies behind recent complaints that commenters who got the Iraq war wrong have done quite well out of it; that there’s a fundamental disconnection between the DC-centric arena of foreign policy debates, and the world in which the results of these debates play out. This intellectual disconnect isn’t only a sin of journalists; it’s a sin that academics are often guilty of too (I suspect that the problem with Henry Kissinger’s behavior as Secretary of State wasn’t exactly that he was a Metternichean realist, but that he was an academic _trying_ to be a Metternichian realist). But it’s a pretty fundamental sin, and a pretty fundamental problem.

Exhibit A, Yale freshman Jian Li. He filed a civil rights complaint against Princeton for “rejecting his early application”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2006/11/13/news/16544.shtml, alleging bias against Asians in Princeton’s admissions process. Exhibit B, an “Op-Ed”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2007/01/17/opinion/17109.shtml by “Lian Ji” in the _Daily Princetonian_’s joke issue. An excerpt:

bq. Hi Princeton! Remember me? I so good at math and science. Perfect 2400 SAT score. Ring bells? … What is wrong with you no color people? Yellow people make the world go round. We cook greasy food, wash your clothes and let you copy our homework. Brown people are catching up, too but not before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Plus, two Princeton professors showed that racial preferences for black people and Hispanics hurt admission opportunities for me. I mean, Asians in general. The Great Wall Street Journal support my case. What more you want? … Princeton claims that it increase diversity by rejecting an Asian-American. You make joke?

I think that penultimate sentence should read, “Princeton claim it increase diversity,” not “claims that.” If you’re going to write Chinglish, at least make an effort.

What I like about these cases is the Kabuki-like quality of it all … here come the angry protests, there are the inevitable anti-PC people, here is the Dean late at night with a stiff drink, here’s the Asian guy who says he thinks it’s just hilarious and what’s the big deal, and so on. Let the fun begin.

I wrote a column for the _Daily Princetonian_ for a while in grad school, and as I recall (from the hate mail I got), the kids weren’t nearly so easily amused if you “made fun”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/columns/clones.html of their “beloved traditions”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/columns/bicker.html, “odd religious movements”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/columns/crusade.html or “high grades”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/1998/03/09/Edits/column.html. Some things are sacred, you know. Oh, and I once wrote a piece in “broken English”:http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/Content/1998/02/03/Edits/edits1.html as well, so I know whereof I speak.

Many thanks to everyone who chipped in with comments on my reading list; I enclose the final (assuming that I can track down a scannable copy of the DiMaggio JITE reading for Week 1) version beneath the fold. Also, the syllabus that I linked to for Jonathan Zeitlin’s course on institutions at UW Madison last week was apparently incomplete; the full version is “here”:http://wage.wisc.edu/uploads/Courses-Fall06/soc%20915%20syllabus%20(5).pdf.

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David Leonhardt has a nice piece in the New York Times on the opportunity cost of the trillion dollar Iraq war. Leonhardt does a good job of getting the concept across without actually using the economic jargon. Coincidentally, I have a piece in tomorrow’s (Thursday’s) Australian Financial Review, making the same point, not for the first time, along with a reference to the work Kahneman and Renshon on psychological biases to hawkishness.

When you make a bad prediction, you need to be sure that you don’t lose your nerve. The best thing to do is to assess your new information, pluck up your courage, and make a brand new prediction about something else …

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Blogger Gary Farber is unfortunately going through another really rough patch, and I encourage generous CT readers to help him out. Non US-readers particularly are invited to marvel at the lack of a social safety net in our otherwise kick-ass nation.

LOL, best headline so far this year. The story describes two related but not identical issues. First that the Home Office statistics function is doing a piss-poor job of managing the ‘data’ it uses to back up its policies, namely the unreliablility of data-sets used to report on ASBOs, and other crime, prisons and immigration data. Secondly, the story brings in some more recent HO blunders on tracking crimes committed by Britons abroad, which would seem to have more to do with international data-sharing on criminal records than the HO’s statistical function.

There is a related but unmentioned issue; recent and long overdue moves to make the UK’s Office for National Statistics an autonomous agency that is completely independent of government. Now, as far as I understand it, the NSO does not have responsibility for statistics related to criminal justice, and perhaps it never will. But the current shambolic state of affairs at the HO shows that the only policy numbers worth having are those prepared independently of the advocates of that policy. As we all know, the incentive to cook the books or ignore data that doesn’t support the minister’s/civil servants’ desired policy is just too strong.