Recently in Social customs Category
Last year at Thanksgiving we bought a turkey from a local farm and it cost $58. I couldn't help noticing, around the same time, that our local supermarkets were offering a comparably-sized bird for $8. The local turkey tasted quite good, but I've enjoyed many a Thanksgiving with the store-bought variety, and it seemed to me not just painful but profligate to spend all that additional money in this way. So this year we're going to buy the supermarket turkey and find a soup kitchen or homeless shelter to which we can donate $50. In fact I suppose we can donate $65 or $70 if we take account of the tax deduction.
I recognize the benefits we derive from supporting local farms, and believe me, we spend plenty on the stuff they produce, mainly because it tastes so much better. But I'm having a hard time justifying the egregious additional turkey spending in the face of greater human needs, especially on the occasion of Thanksgiving. I'm grateful we have a choice in the matter, and I will use it to help feed the poor.
(Photo: xybermatthew/Flickr)
(Photo: xybermatthew/Flickr)
From today's Wall Street Journal:
In 1967, 50% of American men had been arrested. Since then, arrests made in connection with domestic violence and illegal drugs have pushed the number to 60%, estimates Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University. The annual number of arrests for possession of marijuana more than tripled to 1.8 million from 1980 to 2007, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
These numbers are remarkable. Having never been arrested, I will confess to feeling a little left out.
Also, look at the increase in marijuana arrests. Nearly two million annually! What a ridiculous waste of resources, and what a needless infringement on individual rights.
Bedbugs are getting more and more attention lately, which makes me wonder if anyone is ever going to test my pet theory about this -- that the growth of the problem is related to the ability of the Internet to bring together buyers and sellers of used stuff. Craigslist would seem to offer the ideal natural experiment. Some enterprising economics grad students needs to look at the dates on which Craigslist established itself in various locales, and then see if there is any correlation with the rise of bedbugs in those cities. (For those who aren't aware of it, Craigslist is hugely popular for buying and selling used furniture, including beds, futons etc.)
But why stop at bedbugs? Craigslist is also commonly used for sexual hook-ups. I wonder if there is any city-by-city correlation with STDs? More mundanely, Craigslist is draining the lifeblood of newspapers by grabbing their classified ads, which on Craigslist are free. Is there a correlation between the arrival of Clist in a city and the decline of the local paper?
This bedbug business threatens to short-circuit what seemed an economical and environmentally sound trend: buying all kinds of things (furniture and clothes especially) second-hand on Craigslist, eBay or at garage sales. We've done a lot of this at our house, but I suspect a moratorium is about to descend.
(Photo: Wiki Commons)
Journalists love anniversaries, but I'm surprised that hardly anyone has noticed a significant one: this month is the centennial of Freud's first and only visit to America.
Sigmund Freud hated America. He couldn't stand being called "Sigmund" by his informal hosts. He believed that Americans had channeled their sexuality into an unhealthy obsession with money. And he seethed at his own need for the dollars that we had in such unseemly abundance. "Is it not sad," he wrote to a German friend after World War I, "that we are materially dependent on these savages, who are not a better class of human beings?"
But while Freud loathed all things American (except its currency), the feeling was anything but mutual. "No nation outside of Germany and Austria was more hospitable to psychoanalysis than America," notes Mark Edmundson in "The Death of Sigmund Freud" (2007). Freud may even have anticipated the eagerness with which Americans would embrace his theories. "We are bringing them the plague," he reportedly told colleagues when disembarking in New York. "And they don't even know it."
Read the rest here.
The NY Times reports that New York's city council has approved the addition of Muslim holidays to the city's school calendar. The NYC schools have for years closed on some Jewish holidays, as do the public schools in my small town 100 miles from the city (where the number of Jewish pupils is negligible). And of course there are the usual Christian/national holidays.
In my day the NYC schools had a large proportion of Jewish students in addition to what seemed to be a largely Jewish teaching corps. And closing the schools for religious holidays was a bad idea even then! It's still a bad idea, and I don't care whose religion is involved. I can't even understand why any religious leader would advocate less education for all in the parochial cause of a religious event. Instead of adding the Muslims--and thereby opening the door to the Confucians, the Zoroastrians and everyone else--the city council ought to admit that the current policy (holiday closings for some religions but not others) is untenable and just do away with the lot of them. (Individuals could of course stay home for a religious observance as needed.) Bad enough we have religion all around us; let's at least get it out of the schools. They need all the instructional days they can get, God knows.
In my day the NYC schools had a large proportion of Jewish students in addition to what seemed to be a largely Jewish teaching corps. And closing the schools for religious holidays was a bad idea even then! It's still a bad idea, and I don't care whose religion is involved. I can't even understand why any religious leader would advocate less education for all in the parochial cause of a religious event. Instead of adding the Muslims--and thereby opening the door to the Confucians, the Zoroastrians and everyone else--the city council ought to admit that the current policy (holiday closings for some religions but not others) is untenable and just do away with the lot of them. (Individuals could of course stay home for a religious observance as needed.) Bad enough we have religion all around us; let's at least get it out of the schools. They need all the instructional days they can get, God knows.
Identification. Not with Al Qaeda or the Unabomber. All it takes is a means of identification, like a driver's license. I have been riding Amtrak lately and visiting with editors in various high rises, and everywhere I go I am asked for a photo ID. Like most people, I show my license. I guess non-driving terrorists might momentarily be thwarted by this measure, but it's hard to imagine what else is accomplished aside from slowing down normal comings and goings.
I am reminded by these episodes of Bruce Schneier's comment about "security theater." While it's true that security used to be absurdly lax--I was once served with a subpoena in the middle of the LA Times newsroom--I have to wonder if we are doing much good now with all the passes and other measures employed in Manhattan office towers. I suppose if nothing else we are giving comfort to the lawyers.
I am reminded by these episodes of Bruce Schneier's comment about "security theater." While it's true that security used to be absurdly lax--I was once served with a subpoena in the middle of the LA Times newsroom--I have to wonder if we are doing much good now with all the passes and other measures employed in Manhattan office towers. I suppose if nothing else we are giving comfort to the lawyers.
The New York Times reports on a great new designer who's trying to get man wearing "classics with a twist." The twist evidently is that you have to be certifiably insane to buy them. His cut-off shorts, for example, cost around $600.
PS--I would like to hear from someone who buys this stuff. There's got to be someone; maybe just one person is all it takes, at these prices, to sustain a business.
He is, at least, open about his prices. "It's crazy," he said. "I can't even afford my clothes." A dress shirt from his line can cost $425; pants, $550; a sport coat, $1,150.I am wondering what he charged before the recession.
PS--I would like to hear from someone who buys this stuff. There's got to be someone; maybe just one person is all it takes, at these prices, to sustain a business.
First Obama, now Bill Clinton on the cover of the NYT Magazine. How did this whole faux-aristocrat thing get started? Is it only Democrats? And why would they, at this particular time especially, want to look like old money? Baby blue, shimmering pink, with those big fist-like Windsor knots that take us back to the Reagan years--you have to wear them with an extra wide spread collar too, evidently, as if Prince Charles ordered up the whole outfit. There was a vogue for pink polos among the boys at my kids' school a couple years ago, and that was a little precious too, like the boys all spent too much time playing tennis. On the other hand I do miss pink button-downs--whatever happened to those?--which look good on us swarthy guys.
Yesterday was a momentous day--the day my sons started shaving. This was of course a rare opportunity for Dad to impart some ancient tribal wisdom, now that we no longer need to practice bringing down a mastodon with a spear. It was striking how utterly mysterious the whole process was to them. More striking still is how much easier shaving is today than when I got going, back before the invention of soap.
In my day, I said in my best fatherly baritone, men all over the world began each morning by shedding their own blood. Shaving almost always meant cutting yourself. Guys sometimes came to work with bits of toilet paper stuck to their faces. There were styptic pencils.
All that's changed. Electric razors appear to be just as useless as they always were, but the improvement in razors and blades is astounding. I can go weeks without the slightest nick, and those pivot-headed multi-blade systems (so easy to mock in theory) are actually completely wonderful.
There is probably ample fodder here for a disquisition on evolving technologies, social customs, the difficulties of making hedonic adjustments in the measure of inflation etc. I leave that to others; i just want to focus for a minute on how much better the world is in so many ways that we hardly even think about.
In my day, I said in my best fatherly baritone, men all over the world began each morning by shedding their own blood. Shaving almost always meant cutting yourself. Guys sometimes came to work with bits of toilet paper stuck to their faces. There were styptic pencils.
All that's changed. Electric razors appear to be just as useless as they always were, but the improvement in razors and blades is astounding. I can go weeks without the slightest nick, and those pivot-headed multi-blade systems (so easy to mock in theory) are actually completely wonderful.
There is probably ample fodder here for a disquisition on evolving technologies, social customs, the difficulties of making hedonic adjustments in the measure of inflation etc. I leave that to others; i just want to focus for a minute on how much better the world is in so many ways that we hardly even think about.
For some reason I never got around to reading George Gissing's marvelous New Grub Street until now. If you make your living with your keyboard or only hope to do so (the second category is unfortunately much larger than the first), this is a must-read. Dialogue in this 1891 novel could have been taken from my very own kitchen, and then (as now) there was a revolution of sorts underway in the market for the literary arts. In those days universal literacy, faster/cheaper printing, a rising urban middle class and the lack of entertaining alternatives created an appetite for what people nowadays call middlebrow reading material--and a class of people called "writers." Despite the growing demand, these scribes were no less threadbare than they are today, when another revolution has vastly expanded outlets for writing. The catch is there's less and less prospect of getting paid.
These thoughts are prompted this morning by the report from Borders of its first-quarter results. It was a great report. Sure they lost money, and yes, revenue was sharply lower. But under the circumstances--a savage recession, a culture in which books are declining in significance, the challenge of the Internet, Amazon, Costco etc--the failure of Borders to a) lose way more or b) go out of business is well-nigh miraculous. The stock accordingly went up.
But what can be the prospects for such a business over the long run? It's hard to believe Barnes & Noble can survive the digital revolution, never mind Borders. It seems clear that any cultural product--music, movies, news, books--which can be delivered and consumed digitally will be. What will prevent bookstores (and possibly traditional publishers as well) from following record stores into the sunset? It's difficult for me to say--and I am not one of those who attack companies like Borders for having the temerity to bring a large selection of reading material to suburbia. I wish them every success, I really do.
Nor am i pessimistic about the future of reading, or even of book-length works. There will be digital books, as well as the welcome prospect that we'll be spared a lot of needlessly long works (so much nonfiction unfortunately falls into this category) because digital delivery and consumption will revive the monograph, a length that falls between a magazine article and a full-blown book and is therefore unmarketable the way the business is structured today. But I think of Warren Buffet's recent comment about newspaper companies (not worthy buying at any price) and wonder why this should not apply to many of the players in the book business. Enlightening suggestions are of course welcome.
These thoughts are prompted this morning by the report from Borders of its first-quarter results. It was a great report. Sure they lost money, and yes, revenue was sharply lower. But under the circumstances--a savage recession, a culture in which books are declining in significance, the challenge of the Internet, Amazon, Costco etc--the failure of Borders to a) lose way more or b) go out of business is well-nigh miraculous. The stock accordingly went up.
But what can be the prospects for such a business over the long run? It's hard to believe Barnes & Noble can survive the digital revolution, never mind Borders. It seems clear that any cultural product--music, movies, news, books--which can be delivered and consumed digitally will be. What will prevent bookstores (and possibly traditional publishers as well) from following record stores into the sunset? It's difficult for me to say--and I am not one of those who attack companies like Borders for having the temerity to bring a large selection of reading material to suburbia. I wish them every success, I really do.
Nor am i pessimistic about the future of reading, or even of book-length works. There will be digital books, as well as the welcome prospect that we'll be spared a lot of needlessly long works (so much nonfiction unfortunately falls into this category) because digital delivery and consumption will revive the monograph, a length that falls between a magazine article and a full-blown book and is therefore unmarketable the way the business is structured today. But I think of Warren Buffet's recent comment about newspaper companies (not worthy buying at any price) and wonder why this should not apply to many of the players in the book business. Enlightening suggestions are of course welcome.
Daniel Akst
