Two interesting perspectives on the James Frey affair.

First, “Scott McLemee”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/02/01/mclemee (who is celebrating his one year anniversary as a columnist at _Inside Higher Ed_ today).

bq. Why the furor over Frey? “I think the vilification he has been subject to in the media is extreme,” writes Farr, “and probably stems from some larger discomfort about dishonesty from sources who are (and ought to be ) culturally more responsible to the ‘ascertainable facts.’” There may be something to that. And yet it begs any number of questions. The man has made a small fortune off of fabricating a life and selling it — while loudly talking, in the very same book, about the personally transformative power of “the truth.” Oprah Winfrey endorsed it, and (at first anyway) insisted that mere factual details were subordinate to a larger truth… A personal truth….A truth that, it seems, is accountable to nothing and nobody. Suppose this becomes an acceptable aspect of public life – so that it seems naive to be surprised or angered by it. Then in what sense can we expect there to be institutions that, in Farr’s words, “are (and ought to be ) culturally more responsible to the ‘ascertainable facts’”?

Second, “Patrick Nielsen Hayden”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007215.html#007215 at _Making Light_.

bq. Echoing Maureen Dowd, Arianna Huffington is exercised over the fact that James Frey’s memoir A Million Little Pieces, now comprehensively exposed as fraudulent baloney, is still listed by the New York Times on their nonfiction paperback bestseller list. … This is a silly argument because calling a book “nonfiction” has never meant any kind of certification that its contents are true. Edgar Cayce books are “nonfiction.” Immanuel Velikovsky is “nonfiction.” Self-published tracts about how bees from Venus are attacking Your Child’s Brain are “nonfiction.” All of these are packs of lies. They’re also not fiction, which is to say, narratives put forth under the rubric of “I’m now going to tell you a story which I made up.” Yes, there are books which fall into a gray area. (Into which category would you put Avram Davidson’s _Adventures in Unhistory?_ You have five minutes. Show your work.) A Million Little Pieces isn’t one of those books, any more than “this”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000C4SV2I/qid=1138715421/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-3450522-9649706?s=books&v=glance&n=283155 particular pack of lies. What’s more, as an editor devoted to the value of good fiction, I wouldn’t want the Times, or anyone else, to start using “fiction” as a dumping-ground for works of nonfiction which have proved to be full of lies. There’s a good discussion to be had of whether respectable book publishers should make a greater effort to ensure the basic truthfulness, or at least truthful intention, of work published as “nonfiction.” But using “fiction” as a synonym for “lying” isn’t the way to go.

As always in _Making Light_, there’s more meat in the comments (including the utterly wonderful news that Avram Davidson’s _Adventures in Unhistory_ is being re-released by Tor in December).

Catching up with the talk about the State of the Union address, I noticed the President’s complaints about “human-animal hybrids” have “attracted”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_02/008128.php “some”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/president_panders_to_antimanim.php “commentary”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2006_01_29_atrios_archive.html#113880272560367200. P.Z. Myers “pointed out”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/president_panders_to_antimanim.php that scientists are working toward producing a model system for Down Syndrome (i.e. a genetically-engineered mouse with human genes), and that this might further understanding of the condition in people — a worthwhile goal. But we should bear in mind that there’s _already_ a real, live human-animal hybrid creature in widespread use today. Its job is to slave away producing a substance that millions of people use routinely. That substance is “insulin”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin. Virtually the entire commercial supply these days is produced by “genetically modified e-coli bacteria that contain human DNA”:http://www.littletree.com.au/dna.htm, live in a fungal substrate and secrete human insulin. I take it that the President isn’t planning to put every Type I Diabetic in America into hypoglycemic shock. I don’t think it would be a popular policy plank.

The best prediction that I saw regarding the content of Bush’s SOTU address came from Charlie Cook in yesterday’s “Financial Times”:http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/topstories.aspx?ID=BD4A147181 yesterday.

bq. “The president faces a unique challenge,” says Charlie Cook, editor of the Cook Political Report. “There is little new or different he can do about Iraq or energy costs. Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and health-care costs are blowing the lid off the budget. Beyond looking for policy initiatives that cost little or no money, the president has to figure out how to tread water while making it look like he is doing the butterfly.”

While we’re on the subject of religion, I happened (via Charles Dodgson at Through the Looking Glass) to discover that George Bush rarely goes to church (behind paywall, but the intro gives you the basics).

NTTAWWT – I’m sure he goes more often than I do. But it struck me as a blogworthy factoid.

I learned yesterday via a local newspaper report of the existence of the “Vatican Observatory”:http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/VO.html which, surprising as it may seem, is exactly what it sounds like: the astrophysics research division of the Catholic Church. While its “headquarters”:http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/Headq.html are at Castel Gandolfo (the Pope’s Summer home) in Italy, it’s based here in Arizona at the “Mount Graham Observatory”:http://mgpc3.as.arizona.edu/. There, a bunch of Jesuits operate the “VATT”:http://clavius.as.arizona.edu/vo/R1024/vatt-observer.html, the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope. I think that’s just fantastic — like something out of Phillip Pullman. Is it too much to hope for the Vatican Superconducting Supercollider, which would once and for all resolve the question of how many angels would be killed if a stream of particles were smashed into the head of a pin?

I missed this over the weekend, but here’s Garrison Keillor tearing a strip off of Bernard-Henri Lévy and his book about America. (The San Francisco Chronicle “liked it a bit better”:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/29/RVGHUGQ7341.DTL&type=books, but only a bit.) Based on Keillor’s review, it sounds like BHL has a case of the disease that Bruce McCall brilliantly parodied in his travelogue “In the New Canada, Living is a Way of Life.” That article (which I’ve “talked about before”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/01/13/how-peculiar/) is written in the prose characteristic of the cultural tourist/feature writer touring around Russia, c.1982 for _Readers Digest_: serious, curious, with an outsider’s eye for paradox and an uncanny ability to miss the point altogether.

_Update_: I should add that I’m not taking Keillor’s review as gospel here. I’m a big fan of cross-national comparative work, but it’s hard to do it right. Keillor is pretty snide, and the substance of his criticism (that people over here are just ordinary, decent, straight-talking folks, working hard and doing the best they can, etc, etc) is itself a typically American trope. There’s a sub-Tocquevillean comparison to be made here, if we stretch things a bit. Lévy is a French writer and minor philosopher who behaves in the flamboyant manner of a major American media celebrity, while Keillor is a minor American media celebrity who would prefer to be taken seriously for his writing and down-home philosophy. So naturally they hate each other.

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been catching up on my Terry Pratchett in the wee hours and came across a passage in _Going Postal_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/partner/29956/s?kw=terry%20pratchett%20going%20postal , “Amazon”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0060502932%2Fsr%3D1-1%2Fqid%3D1138645666%2Fref%3Dsr_1_1%3F%255Fencoding%3DUTF8 ) which has some bearing on the perennial debate over whether or not “Pratchett”:http://www.nataliesolent.blogspot.com/2003_10_12_nataliesolent_archive.html#106651083158570151 “is”:http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/004798.html “a”:http://www.theadvocates.org/celebrities/terry-pratchett.html “libertarian”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarian_Futurist_Society. The villain of the book, an unscrupulous pirate of finance capital who has dubbed himself Reacher Gilt, is defending himself before the autarchical ruler of Ankh-Morpork, Lord Vetinari.

bq. “Don’t patronize me, my lord,” said Gilt. “We own the Trunk. It is our _property_. You understand that? Property is the foundation of freedom. Oh, customers complain about the service and the cost, but customers always complain about such things. We have no shortage of customers at whatever cost. Before the semaphore, news from Genua took months to get here, now it takes less than a day. It is affordable magic. We are answerable to our shareholders, my lord. Not, with respect, to you. It is not your business. It is our business and we will run it according to the market.”

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Any society that can make _both_ John Tyler Bonner’s “The Ideas of Biology”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486424197/kieranhealysw-20/ and “The Evolution of Complexity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0691084947/kieranhealysw-20/ available to me for two dollars each on sale has to have something going for it. On the other hand, Kevin Trudeau’s “Natural Cures ‘They’ don’t want you to now about”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0975599518/kieranhealysw-20/ still cost eighteen bucks, and rather more copies of it were available.

I was at the bloggers-meet-journalists lunch a few days ago which “Matt Stoller”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/1/28/1527/04347 and others have been talking about, and even tried to say something, but was shut down by the moderator, who thought that I was going to say something else altogether. What struck me (and what I was going to say) was that the journalists there didn’t seem to understand how the blogosphere worked at all. My half-assed explanation of why is as follows …

I can understand how the people at the _Post_ would get upset at hundreds of commenters from Atrios’ or Kos’s comments sections showing up to make their objections heard – while they’re nothing on, say, the denizens of the slimepit at LGF, their manner of criticism can be … robust. I’m willing to believe that there were some commenters who didn’t make it through the moderation system, and who got hateful (Howell suggested that there were some pretty nasty sexual epithets in there, and I believed her). But even so, the incomprehension with which journalists responded to bloggers seemed to me to point to something more fundamental. Journalism and blogging have different internal systems of authority. Newspaper articles aspire to presenting a comprehensive, neutral and _authoritative_ judgement regarding the facts at hand in a particular matter. Of course, they don’t always succeed in doing this at all – hence the need for ombudsmen, correction columns etc. But even if this standard is often more honoured in the breach than the observance, it still is the basis for the journalistic claim to authority, and status. Blogposts are quite different – they’re arguments in an ongoing debate. They don’t aspire to any sort of finality or authoritativeness (and indeed they’re often updated in response to new arguments or facts). They comment on, and respond to, what others are saying.

The point is that they have very different – and clashing – notions of where authority and responsibility come from. Each newspaper article has the form of a discrete statement, which is supposed to be as authoritative as possible on its own ground. Each blogpost has the form of an intervention in an ongoing conversation – the blogger’s authority rests in part on her willingness to respond to others and engage in argument with them. A blogger who doesn’t respond to good counter-arguments is being irresponsible (of course many bloggers are irresponsible in this way; there isn’t much in the way of formal policing of this norm). These forms of authority are difficult to reconcile with each other, because the latter in large part undermines the former. If journalists start systematically responding to their critics, and getting drawn into conversations about whether or not they were right when they made a particular claim, then they’re effectively admitting that the articles they have written aren’t all that authoritative in the first place. They’re subject to debate and to revision. Thus, in part, the tendency for journalists like Jack Shafer to dismiss criticism from bloggers and their commenters as “organized riots” and lynch mobs. It’s a fundamental threat to their notions of where journalistic authority comes from. Thus also, I suspect, Howell’s reluctance to respond directly to critics like Brad DeLong, when it would obviously (to a blogger) be in her best interests to do so.

Comments are welcome – as I say, these are thoughts in the process of being formed (an intervention in an ongoing conversation if you like).

Via “Orin Kerr”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_29-2006_02_04.shtml#1138553669, this Newsweek “story”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11079547/site/newsweek/ about Jack Goldsmith and his efforts to oppose the Bush administration’s claims to sweeping powers to authorize torture and to wiretap American citizens. It’s become more and more clear over the last few months that Goldsmith played a very honourable role behind the scenes – while he’s certainly a conservative, he appears to be one who’s prepared to stick to his principles when it’s politically difficult. When Goldsmith was appointed to Harvard Law School, some of his liberal colleagues “protested”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11079547/site/newsweek/, arguing that he might have been complicit in authorizing torture (others, more reasonably, were concerned about his theories of international law). At this stage, I believe that the former owe him a fulsome public apology.

I watched Peter Ackroyd’s BBC programme on the “Romantic poets”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/ yesterday and was rather taken with the account of John Clare. So I was googling around trying to find out more and, via the “Wikipedia entry”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Clare , happened upon the extraordinary fact that much of Clare’s work is subject to a copyright dispute. Since Clare died in 1864 I wondered how this could be so. There’s a page of links on the whole dispute at the “John Clare page”, but the in-a-nutshell version is in “a Guardian article by John Goodridge”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4042964,00.html :

bq. Under the 1842 Copyright Act which was in force at Clare’s death, in the case of published works copyright endured for 42 years after publication or seven years after the author’s death, whichever was later. Thus three of Clare’s published volumes came out of copyright in 1871, and the fourth in 1877. For unpublished works, however, copyright was a very different matter. Under common law, an author, or after his death his personal representative, retained perpetual control over his work as long as it remained unpublished. This is particularly important in Clare’s case, since his four published volumes contained only about 10% of his total output – some 300 poems out of more than 3,000 he wrote in his lifetime. This common law “perpetual” loophole for unpublished material was written into the Copyright Acts of 1911 and 1956, and finally replaced in the 1988 Act with a finite, 50-year term of protection (made potentially extendable by a further 25 years in a 1996 Act). In Clare’s case, this could extend the copyright claim well into the middle of this century ….

There’s more, including the tenuous chain by which the copyright was passed on and the more recent purchase of the rights for £1 by a US academic.

The New Republic has a piece by Paul Thacker pointing out that Fox News science columnist Steven Milloy is a shill for, among other corporations, Philip Morris and ExxonMobil. It’s behind a paywall but that scarcely matters, because the relevant facts have been on the public record for years. As usual, Tim Lambert has the most detailed coverage, but a search of Crooked Timber will produce plenty more, and most of the info has been in Milloy’s Wikipedia entry for some time. In this context, the claim by Fox News, reported by TNR, that they were unaware of Milloy’s corporate payoffs speaks volumes for their capacity as a news organisation. I guess when you can just make it up, you don’t need to use Google.

What seems to be happening here, as with the Abramoff scandal is that facts that have been in plain view for ages can now be fitted into a media narrative – Republican sleaze in general and pundits for hire in particular. Whereas evidence of these kinds of links has been ignored or brushed aside in the past, they can now be seen as part of a systematic pattern of corruption.

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* Do you suppose that Jonah Goldberg has been asked to supplement his upcoming book, The Hitlery Cut ‘n’ Paste Funtime Reader with a chapter explaining how the Nazis were ferociously opposed to domestic wiretapping?

* I was reading the back pages of Kung Fu Monkey when I came across this, in response to Rove’s old speech that accused liberals of treason:

Did you know that the definition of treason is quite specifically defined in the Consititution? Did you know it’s the only crime actually spelled out in the Constitution? DO. YOU. KNOW. WHY?

No. Of course you don’t. Nobody ever bothers to read the goddam thing.

Because the Founding Fathers had seen the charge of treason used too many times against the political opponents of the British Government. They knew, when the government gets nervous and breaks out the Big Evil Golf Bag of Shutting Up Questions, the first club out is the Treason Charge. They knew the first guy to yell treason was the bastard.

* I’m all for liberals making a fuss about unfair and inaccurate news. I agree that it distorts the news when media organizations get a tempest of feedback when they offend the right without a similar level of feedback when they offend the left. In other words, ditto. And this warms my heart.

But, let’s be realistic about what we’re doing. I can’t remember where I saw it, but one line sticks in my mind: “Conservatives get upset when the media do their jobs, while liberals get upset when the media don’t do their jobs.” Come on, guys. I like honest partisan pushback, and I’d like to see more of it, but it’s simply not the same thing as apolitical media criticism. If there is such thing as apolitical media criticism.

* What bothers me most about Mickey Kaus’s crusade against Brokeback Mountain is not the dumb-ass argument that people go to the movies simply to ogle the opposite-sex actors (hence the pathetic failure of Reservoir Dogs with male audiences), nor the implication that he just isn’t crazy about watching gay intimacy. A lot of people aren’t. What bothers me is his overriding resentment (or, given his professional persona, his faux-resentment) that imaginary liberals would fail to to treat his discomfort with respectful silence.

* Do you ever think that A** C****** will turn back into a mummy if thirty days pass without her name in the press? It would explain a lot.

Here we go again … this story has been making the news recently, about some types at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. They have got some data from a site that tracks dollar bills and used it to make a statistical model of human travel, which will apparently save us all from bird flu.

I saw the news story in the Guardian and thought “I wonder if they will discover that the phenomenon they are studying is described by a power law?” … and the answer is yes they do.

I then thought “I wonder if they will more or less entirely ignore the existing literature on epidemics?” … and as far as I can see the answer is yes they do.

And finally I thought “It would be presumably too much to hope that there is a serious attempt made to test the power law model against alternative distributional assumptions” … and the answer is yes, it would be too much to hope.

They’re also quite naive about banknotes. At one point in the paper, they seem to believe that bank notes “exit the money-tracking system for a long time, for instance in banks”. Of course, banks don’t contain large piles of banknotes sitting around for months on end; the only bank notes you will find in a bank are the ones being stored in the ATMs and the tills, and these obviously turn over pretty rapidly. Furthermore, I would guess that the average human being makes fewer journeys to a banknote sorting centre than the average banknote (I suspect that several of the odd statistical properties that they found relate to the locations of sorting centres in the US). Humph.

People have been laughing at physicists for this sort of thing for quite a while now but with no noticeable effect. It’s all very laudable that they’re taking a bit of interest, but we still clearly haven’t conquered the hard-science arrogance problem yet …

Edit: Actually thinking about it, this is not an entirely worthless paper. If they are correct to claim that epidemic models use a diffusion process to model travelling humans (and there is nothing in the paper to make me think they have done an exhaustive literature search) then epidemic models are being silly and should stop. Human beings don’t diffuse – they go from one specific place to another. Otoh I seem to remember a lot of quite detailed modelling of SARS which certainly did take airline routes into account so I suspect that the diffusion assumption is really only found in toy models in basic-level textbooks.