Scrumshus/Wikimedia Commons
Here's an example of a moment with which every classical music lover is familiar: There comes a point in virtually every concerto from the classical period when the orchestra comes to a sudden halt and the soloist takes flight with a couple of minutes of difficult (or at least difficult-sounding) passage-work interspersed with fragments of melody derived from what's been previously heard. This music usually culminates in an extended trill, after which the orchestra re-enters, bringing the movement to a speedy conclusion, more often than not without any further participation from the soloist. So what's going on?...More
John Sargent is the CEO of Macmillan, the U.S. companies of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a venerable enterprise based in Stuttgart, Germany. The American imprints include Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Henry Holt, and St. Martin's Press, among others. Sargent is what in another age might be called a scion of a publishing family. His father ran Doubleday and Company in the 1960s and 1970s, its glory days. What makes Sargent notable now is that he has taken a firm position on behalf of Macmillan with Amazon about who would control the price of e-books, and the Internet...More
"I never tried to cut her throat," Scott Lee Cohen protested, defending himself against one of several allegations of abuse during his 15 minutes as Democratic candidate for lieutenant governor of Illinois. Apparently, not trying to slaughter your girlfriend is insufficient qualification for public office, even in Illinois, and even at a time when Sarah Palin is considered a serious presidential contender. Under fire from desperate Democrats, Cohen stepped down, having been mistaken in his belief that he was "not an embarrassment to the party." But the mistake was understandable; he may have been no less qualified to serve than...More
Some cadenzas are very good, some are ridiculous, most are in between, but in the classical era they are fundamentally, as the fermata above the six-four chord suggests, a hiatus in the progress of the musical argument.
Former NYC mayor (1978-89), film buff
02/08/10 2:43 PM
'Eyes Wide Open': Religion and Sexuality Collide
For several weeks the selection of films has been very meager, but the drought appears to have ended. I read favorable reviews of a half-dozen pictures that opened over the weekend. Although I often disagree with the comments of many reviewers, believing they are too soft and too accepting of movies, I concurred with A. O. Scott's Times review of "Eyes Wide Open." He wrote: "The three principal actors are remarkably adept at signaling nuances of longing, tenderness and uncertainty without betraying the fundamental reticence of their characters, who can barely speak about what is happening to them." He...More
Frozen is a tour de force, not because of exceptional performances by the actors, but rather the outstanding directing of Adam Green, who also wrote the script. The script gave Green a limited area within which to work, and he carried it off superbly. Three friends who appear to be in their 20s or early 30s--Parker (Emma Bell), Joe (Shawn Ashmore), and Dan (Kevin Zegers)--go skiing for a weekend at a New England resort. When the slope is about to close due to inclement weather, they convince the chair-lift operator to allow them to take one more ride. He agrees,...More
President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have no one but themselves to blame for the mess that's become of the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) trial. They waited too long between the November announcement that he would be tried in federal civilian court in Lower Manhattan and any concrete action taken toward that end. The continuing and still-unexplained delay--no indictment, no initial hearing, no nothing in public--precluded veteran judges and prosecutors from the opportunity to reassure the nation that a KSM proceeding near Ground Zero would not in fact be a zoo. And it allowed time for the trial's detractors to...More
Author and federal appeals court judge
02/08/10 7:00 AM
Is Paul Krugman a Realist or a Dreamer? Toward Refocusing on Economic Growth
Paul Krugman advocates an additional stimulus program, along the lines of the $787 billion stimulus program enacted last February. He has not, to my knowledge, indicated how large a program he wants, but presumably it would be very large, perhaps equal in size to last year's program. He realizes that the nation cannot continue running up its debt without serious long-run consequences, but believes that now is not the time to reduce deficits by higher taxes or lower government spending; that we should wait for the economy to recover, and then address our debt through economizing measures, primarily in health...More
If democracy is more about process--how decisions are made and who makes them--than about the policies that result, the United States Senate has become not merely dysfunctional, but an actual threat to the functioning of America's system of government.That threat is exemplified by two features of the Senate's rules: the filibuster and the "hold." While both procedures can serve legitimate and valuable ends, and each has a proper place in the legislative arsenal, neither is constitutionally mandated; if abuses of those extraordinary procedures impinge on the proper functioning of government, the Senate has an obligation to reconsider the means by...More
Most comments on the Toyota crisis focus on the company's reputation for superior, reliable vehicles and its nemesis in sudden acceleration incidents in many models, and in regenerative braking problems of the Prius.Looking more carefully on the glowing press the company received until very recently, it turns out that the quality and safety of the product wasn't what intrigued many business writers. It was the system of improving the process, of which reducing defects was only a part. Two paragraphs from a typical feature, in Fast Company (2006), show how even admirers acknowledged the weaknesses of the Toyota system: Lean...More
When Republicans controlled Congress in the 1990s, liberals fought hard to block a series of constitutional amendments demanded by conservatives, including provisions allowing official school prayer and prohibiting flag burning that would have effectively repealed core First Amendment freedoms. These days, with Democrats at least nominally in control, some prominent liberals are on the other side, fighting to repeal the First Amendment--in the wake of the Citizens United decision. Advocacy groups (like MoveOn and People for the American Way) and prominent Democrats (including Senators John Kerry and Chris Dodd) have announced their support for a constitutional amendment depriving corporations of...More
It's terrific to see unemployment rate dip below the 10 percent mark. But, unemployment in the Great Reset remains quite a bit deeper than in previous ones, as the NYT's Catherine Rampell shows. The overall U-6 measure of unemployment - which includes discouraged workers - stands at 16.5 percent. A close look at the numbers finds some groups are doing far better than others. Men continue to fare substantially worse than women: The unemployment rate for adult men remains 10 percent, while the rate for women is now 7.9 percent. The effects of the economic crisis continue to be extremely...More
Attn: New Yorkers!A last-minute announcement for the world debut of Dave Tompkin's upcoming vocoder opus:Hello I'll be doing a vocoder talk for my book How To Wreck A Nice Beach at the Goethe Institute as part of the Unsound Festival. Goethe is located at 5 E. 3rd at Broadway in the Wyoming Building. It takes place at 5:00, this Saturday, February 6, (also known, in the blizzard immediate, as tomorrow). I apologize for the last minute notice. We've been finishing! I will be showing images from the book and playing vocoder audio clips from the 1930s and The Future, including the...More
Legal analyst and commentator
02/05/10 9:30 AM
The Brooks Brothers Find Trouble-- And Harness Racing Holds Its Breath
The rubble of body-armor manufacturer David H. Brooks' once formidable empire continues to claim its victims. First it was investors in his body-armor company, DHB Industries, whom he and a co-defendant allegedly defrauded out of approximately $190 million. Now it's an entire industry, the sport of harness racing in North America, which has been left dazed and reeling over the possibility that its biggest and most controversial owners may soon be out of the business....More
An op-ed piece in The New York Times today chastised the NFL medical professionals for acting as if the evidence that concussions and repeated blows to the head can cause long-term brain injury were new. The piece cites research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1928 that came to that very conclusion, from a study of former boxers who had been rendered, as the saying goes, "punch drunk." How is it, says Deborah Blum, the piece's author, that we are still discussing this problem as new and perhaps unproven, 80 years after the fact? It's simple. As Upton...More
I strongly recommend this week's New York magazine cover story by Jennifer Senior about the foolishness of allowing intelligence tests to determine the educational fates of four year-old children. It's a very human story. But I especially enjoy how Senior brings the science to life. Here's my favorite moment:I wrote to [University of Iowa psychologist David] Lohman and asked what percentage of 4-year-olds who scored 130 or above would do so again as 17-year-olds. He answered with a careful regression analysis: about 25 percent.The implications of this number are pretty startling. They mean that three quarters of the seniors in a gifted program...More
Years ago, the Congress assigned to the President the task of submitting each year a proposed federal budget. It has no force of law--deciding national priorities and spending levels remains strictly a congressional prerogative--but, like the President's State of the Union speech, which is also an assignment he is required (by the Constitution) to meet, it gives a pretty good snapshot of what the government's chief operating officer is thinking. This one may raise an eyebrow or two (it certainly raised both of mine). Noticing that the country (actually, it's the government, not the country) is in a deep,...More
Unemployment continues to rise in U.S. metro regions, according to the December figures released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. "Unemployment rates were higher in December than a year earlier in 371 of the 372 metropolitan areas and lower in one area," according to the report. The Detroit metro continued to post the highest level of unemployment--14.9 percent But Las Vegas saw the largest increase in their jobless rate, which grew by 4.4 percentage points over the past year. The number of metros with unemployment rates of more than 10 percent more than doubled from 42 in December 2008...More
From a short essay of mine that appears in this month's Brown Alumni Magazine:More than ever, we need public intellectuals willing to bridge different worlds. As complexity threatens to overwhelm us, an increasingly distracted public needs to understand how genes really work, how markets can be both encouraged and reined in, how history teaches us about politics . . . . Whether we like it or not, we need more sound bites--and more creative metaphors and clever narratives. Intellectuals should spend as much time tuning their work for public consumption as they do composing for their own kind. To read...More
Author, physician, med school professor
02/03/10 1:16 PM
It's the Phenome and Not the Genome: Put Your Money on Mortal Flesh
Translation: use your eyes, take a good history, weight the patient and get a few simple blood tests, and you can predict risk far better than a panel of genetic tests. More
Toyota's safety woes appear to be contagious; not only are the brakes of some of Toyota's flagship Prius models occasionally leaving drivers in the lurch, there's now a recall of European cars that use the same accelerator pedal system as the suspect Toyotas.The controversy appears as a morality tale on the perils of overexpansion. Planned government investigations and legislative hearings may or may not confirm allegations that Toyota became complacent. But other factors are at work in the global automotive industry:1) Money-saving standardization of components across models, and even across companies.2) Global distribution of virtually the same models, used in...More
Legal analyst and commentator
02/03/10 8:48 AM
A Joke, Right? Congress Moves To End Startlingly Successful Federal Program
Senators like Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Joseph Lieberman (D-Ct.), and John McCain (R-Ariz.) are a big part of the reason why men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have not yet been tried before military commissions down at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Dozens and dozens of other short-sighted, stubborn, overzealous legislators also doomed President Bush's tribunal plans by repeatedly adopting and endorsing rules and laws they knew or should have known would be (and shortly thereafter were) repeatedly rejected by the Supreme Court. Now many of these men are back-- including the three due process stooges above. Years after injecting constitutional poison pills into detainee legislation, which helped give us the Gitmo mess to begin with, they...More
All across America this winter, there are news-gathering start-ups with an array of business models reflecting the energy of an industry in reinvention rather than the dying newspaper trade that has become--while worse-off than anyone would like--an exaggerated cliché. Nonetheless, my back of the envelope calculation of the total investment in this national transformation of the news business is still a fraction of the bonuses Wall Street is paying itself for surviving the government bail-out (and not a whole lot more than NBC paid Conan O'Brien to go away). So here's an argument for those with the money to...More
Author, pilot, and entrepreneur
02/02/10 9:06 AM
The Power of Example: Lee Archer, Gays and the Military
Lt. Col. Lee A. Archer died last week at the age of 90. Although his name is hardly a household word, he was notable as a Tuskeegee Airman and the the only black fighter pilot ace (an "ace" being a pilot who shoots down at least five enemy aircraft) to come out of World War II. In his later life, he became a vice president of General Foods and a venture capitalist. For anyone not familiar with who the Tuskeegee Airmen were: at the beginning of WWII, the military was segregated and blacks were not allowed to be pilots. Indeed, a...More
I was honored to be part of a discussion panel at The Franklin Institute this past weekend to kick off this year's EduCon conference. The conference is an offshoot of the Science Leadership Academy, an amazing new Philadelphia public high school, and its visionary founder Chris Lehmann. The open-ended question posed to the panel was: "What is Smart?" Here are my slightly-edited opening remarks:What is smart? This is a really exciting time to ask that question. For a century, we've been living under the oppressive yoke of innate-IQism, the idea championed by Francis Galton, Charles Spearman, and Lewis Terman, among others, that intelligence was...More
At the end of Edge of Darkness, one of my movie companions said, "This is one of the ten worst films I have ever sat through." I agreed with his conclusion. Surprisingly, the Daily News reviewer gave this picture three stars. The story is repetitious of earlier films like Silkwood. In that picture, a young woman working at a nuclear processing plant seeks to expose her employer for subjecting his employees to the unsafe handling of dangerous radioactive plutonium. In this picture, a Boston police detective, Tommy Craven (Mel Gibson), is visited by his daughter, Emma (Bojana Novakovic), an MIT...More
