Excerpts

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“If Climate Change Is Not Only Inevitable But Already Underway, How Are We To Live With It?”

May 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I dreamt once of an Earth grown too hot, but is it just a dream? If the climate changes, then so does everything. From Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books:

“The facts, rehearsed so often, for so long and to so little effect, nonetheless bear repeating. The greenhouse effect was first hypothesised in 1824 by Joseph Fourier – though his analogy was the bell jar rather than the greenhouse – and proved experimentally by John Tyndall in 1859. In the 19th century it could be seen as unambiguously a good thing: if carbon dioxide and other trace gases didn’t trap heat in the atmosphere, the earth wouldn’t be warm enough to support life as we know it. But there is now far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been at any point in the last 800,000 years (we know this because researchers have analysed air bubbles trapped in the ice in Greenland and Antarctica: the deeper you go, the older the bubbles). The concentration has increased from nearly 320 parts per million (high, but not unprecedented) in 1960 to more than 390 ppm today, 30 per cent higher than any previous peak, largely as a result of human activity. Not even the most fervent climate change denier can argue with the fact that burning carbon produces carbon dioxide: before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were 280 ppm. Since 1850, more than 360 billion tonnes of fossil fuels have gone up in smoke. Average global temperatures have risen accordingly, for the last quarter century pretty much in line with the predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its first assessment report (1990). Almost every year since 1988, when the IPCC was established, has been the hottest ever recorded. The most optimistic projection, which governments are nominally committed to (that’s to say, the signatories of the Copenhagen Accord in 2009 agreed it would be nice), is that the average global temperature will rise no more than 2ºC by the end of the century. Sea level has risen 6 cm since 1990. The IPCC’s fourth assessment report (2007) projected that it would rise between 18 and 59 cm by 2100. According to a more recent study, it could be anything from 33 to 132 cm.

The question of how to prevent climate change – we’re way past that point now – has morphed into the question of how to slow it down. There’s no shortage of theoretical answers about the best way to pump fewer greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or suck more of them out, or lower the temperature by other means. (Another week, another book about climate change: the mood optative, the structure evangelical; threats of doom followed by promises of salvation, punctuated by warnings against false prophets.) And yet carbon emissions, temperatures, sea level and the frequency of extreme weather events just keep on going up. Which leads to another, perhaps even more urgent question: if climate change is not only inevitable but already underway, how are we to live with it?”

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“It’s Pretty Safe To Say This Is A Far-Out Premise”

May 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A couple of predictions about the urban future from Benjamin Plackett at the Connectivist:

“Future cities will be downloadable

The Internet can be a democratizing force. Social media gave a voice to the Arab spring protesters and made accessing information a consumer’s market. Alastair Parvin, an architect from the U.K., says the Web will do the same for the construction world. Thanks to the increasing capabilities of broadband, ‘we’re moving into a future where the factory is everywhere, and that means the design team is everyone,’ he says. Parvin co-founded a company called WikiHouse, which offers free CAD files to anyone with a 3D printer looking to build a home on a tight budget. The 3-D printer produces the home’s structural components, which Parvin says the user can then assemble ‘without formal construction skills or power tools.’

Future cities will live underwater

This is perhaps one of the more radical predictions for the future of the urban environment: a sea-scraper. Its designer, Sarly Adre Bin Sarkum, a Malaysian architect, won a special mention from eVolvo Magazine for its entry into the magazine’s annual skyscrapers competition. The design iIt’s essentially a floating, self-sufficient tower building, its top just peeking out above the water’s surface. Wave power would supposedly power the underwater city, while the rooftop would provide a place to farm food. It’s pretty safe to say this is a far-out premise, and there are no plans to build anything like the sea-scraper anytime soon, but it’s certainly set tongues a-wagging.”

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“That Breakdown Would Suggest That Americans Are Mostly Obsessed With Teenagers And Dystopias”

May 24, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I understand the value of marginalia, but I hate you very much if you write in books. It may be a moot point as paper morphs into pixels, and the printed books that remain will be too costly to deface. But the act of reader comments hasn’t ended in the e-book age, just morphed. Amazon keeps track of the most-highlighted Kindle phrases. The act of discovering an individual’s scratchings in used books has become a set of collective data.

The opening of Noreen Malone’s New Republic article which sifts through our favorite passages to find meaning:

“One of the great small pleasures of used books is the occasional marginalia of a previous owner. You learn a tiny bit about that anonymous soul by seeing the passages she underlined, or tidily double-underlined, or exclamation-pointed, or starred madly and messily. You begin to worry about the girl who found so much to mark in To The Lighthouse, or fall in love, a little bit, with the person who found all the funniest parts of Catch 22. (It is another type of intimacy entirely to borrow a book from someone you know, and to discover what he found worth picking up a pen for.) 

This experience would seem to be lost as reading becomes ever more digital—ebook sales rose more than 44 percent last year—but that’s not entirely the case. Amazon keeps track of which passages Kindle readers highlight most, which means the company can offer a new version of the old serendipitous experience. Only this one is data-driven: The company also keeps a running list of the most highlighted Kindle passages of all time. Instead of a cozy tete-a-tete with the idiosyncratic mind of a stranger, you get the reading equivalent of a giant rave, a warehouse pulsing with usually private emotions turned into shared public expressions. It’s a glimpse into our collective, most interior, and most embarrassing preoccupations. 

The most immediately noticeable thing about the list is how Hunger Games-heavy it is. Nineteen of the top 25 most-highlighted passages are written by Suzanne Collins, who is not exactly known for a glittering prose style. That breakdown would suggest that Americans are mostly obsessed with teenagers and dystopias, which, while not entirely untrue, is also useful reminder that this is a numbers game. Bestsellers will naturally have the greatest number of underlines, and there are certain kinds of bestsellers that are more likely to be read digitally. These include books aimed at teenagers that a massive number of adults have embraced (potentially embarrassing), books in the public domain (free), and self-help books (potentially embarrassing). Taken together, they suggest that your average Kindle reader is a creature caught in permanent adolescence, but yearning to improve. Oh, and he’s cheap.”

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“This Is This Week’s Sign That The 21st Century Is Upon Us”

May 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Sears, the retailer originally paired with Roebuck, existed initially in its own sort of cloud: the mail-order one. But it became encumbered by physical real estate, running until it was crushed by brick and mortar, by the era itself. Now it returns to the cloud in another form: data centers. The opening of a brief post at the Atlantic by Alex Madrigal:

“Sears! Once the catalog king, then an eminent brick-and-mortar retailer, and now, perhaps, a real-estate holding company that leases out space for computers that power the cloud.

Data Center Knowledge reported today that Sears had created a new unit — Ubiquity Critical Environments — to look into repurposing its shuttered stores as datacenters, starting with this one in Chicago.

Yes, this is this week’s sign that the 21st century is upon us.”

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“China’s Army Nonetheless Stages A Glorious Counterattack By Deploying Levitating Tanks”

May 24, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Fantasies tell us a lot about a person or a people, but there’s danger in taking them too literally. They’re fantasies not just because we can’t or aren’t allowed to live them, but often because we don’t actually want them realized. They do bear watching, however, since when the bad ones are put into action, horrors can occur.

The opening of a Foreign Policy article about a new wave of scary Chinese military fantasy novels:

“It is the year 2049. China’s economic development has so disturbed the world’s other major powers that the United States, Japan, and Russia form an alliance and invade China. Fierce battles break out on the plains of northeast China, where Japanese troops and U.S. fighter jets besiege Chinese infantry. Caught by surprise, China’s army nonetheless stages a glorious counterattack by deploying levitating tanks, and employing a strategy based on lessons learned from the Anti-Japanese War and the Resist America War (better known in the West as WWII and the Korean War, respectively). 

Such is the plot of The Last Counterattack, a serial novel published on Blood and Iron Reading, a Chinese military literature website. In one of the latest installments, published on May 2, U.S. government-sponsored hackers have infiltrated the Chinese military’s network and accidently launched a Chinese nuclear missile directed at the United States. The anonymous author’s online profile says he is a former colonel in the People’s Liberation Army and currently a staff officer in charge of operations and reconnaissance in the 12th Armored Division at China’s 21st Army Group. Going by the online pseudonym ‘the Old Staff Officer,’ he told FP in an interview conducted over the Chinese messaging service QQ that he ‘enjoys the feeling of letting [his] imagination fly.’ But Li, as I’ll call him, believes that what he’s writing may actually come to pass. In an April blog post, he explained his thinking for the book: [The world besieges China and attacks it from all sides. Is this possible? Yes!’

There are thousands of Chinese war fantasy novels on the Internet — too sensitive to be published in book form, they circulate on blogs, and websites like Blood and Iron Reading. Most languish, but the more popular ones get read millions of times. As a rising China struggles to define its military aspirations, and as the country’s vast propaganda apparatus encourages citizens to define their version of President Xi Jinping’s vague slogan ‘Chinese Dream,’ these military fantasy novels provide insight into what Chinese people’s war dreams look like.”

“In An Empty Universe, Would Time Exist?”

May 24, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Some scientific explanations are so beautiful that they just have to be true. Except maybe some of them are not. Confusing physics and poetry can be dangerous.

Time is an illusion we’ve always been told, but perhaps it isn’t so. From James Gleick’s New York Review of Books piece about Lee Smolin’s just-published book on the topic:

“In an empty universe, would time exist?

No, it would not. Time is the measure of change; if nothing changes, time has no meaning.

Would space exist, in the absence of any matter or energy? Newton would have said yes: space would be empty.

For Smolin, the key to salvaging time turns out to be eliminating space. Whereas time is a fundamental property of nature, space, he believes, is an emergent property. It is like temperature: apparent, measurable, but actually a consequence of something deeper and invisible—in the case of temperature, the microscopic motion of ensembles of molecules. Temperature is an average of their energy. It is always an approximation, and therefore, in a way, an illusion. So it is with space for Smolin: ‘Space, at the quantum-mechanical level, is not fundamental at all but emergent from a deeper order’—an order, as we will see, of connections, relationships. He also believes that quantum mechanics itself, with all its puzzles and paradoxes (“cats that are both alive and dead, an infinitude of simultaneously existing universes”), will turn out to be an approximation of a deeper theory.

For space, the deeper reality is a network of relationships. Things are related to other things; they are connected, and it is the relationships that define space rather than the other way around. This is a venerable notion: Smolin traces the idea of a relational world back to Newton’s great rival, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz: ‘Space is nothing else, but That Order or Relation; and is nothing at all without Bodies, but the Possibility of placing them.’ Nothing useful came of that, while Newton’s contrary view—that space exists independently of the objects it contains—made a revolution in the ability of science to predict and control the world. But the relational theory has some enduring appeal; some scientists and philosophers such as Smolin have been trying to revive it.

Nowadays, the Internet—like the telegraph a century before—is commonly said to ‘annihilate’ space. It does this by making neighbors of the most distant nodes in a network that transcends physical dimension. Instead of six degrees of separation, we have billions of degrees of connectedness. As Smolin puts it:

We live in a world in which technology has trumped the limitations inherent in living in a low-dimensional space…. From a cell-phone perspective, we live in 2.5-billion-dimensional space, in which very nearly all our fellow humans are our nearest neighbors.

The Internet, of course, has done the same thing. The space separating us has been dissolved by a network of connections.

So maybe it’s easier now for us to see how things really are. This is what Smolin believes: that time is fundamental but space an illusion; ‘that the real relationships that form the world are a dynamical network’; and that the network itself, along with everything on it, can and must evolve over time.”

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“What Is Good, And Bad, About America Is Better, And Worse, In Its Most Populous State”

May 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From James Fallows’ new Atlantic article about Gov. Jerry Brown 2.0, a passage about how California is America writ large, better and worse than ever:

“As for the problems Brown and his state are wrestling with, they are America’s problems—but worse. Here we leave the governor for a moment to consider the environment he is working in, which is both emblematic of and surprisingly different from America as a whole.

You can go too far with the idea that California shows how all of America will look a few years from now. The state’s population is already more heavily Hispanic than the U.S. population might ever be: Hispanics, at nearly 40 percent, are about to overtake California’s ‘non-Hispanic white’ percentage to become the largest ethnic group in the state. (Nationwide, Hispanics are about 17 percent of the population.) Relative to the country as a whole, Asians also make up a larger share of California’s population—­roughly 15 percent of the state, versus about 8 percent of the country—while blacks and whites represent smaller shares. (California is about 40 percent white and 6 percent black, versus 63 percent and 12 percent, respectively, for the United States.) Largely because of these demographic shifts, the Republican Party, which a generation ago relied on California as the largest element of its Sunbelt base, now barely bothers to mount statewide races except those self-financed by political-novice millionaires like Meg Whitman, who lost badly to Brown in 2010, and Carly Fiorina, who lost badly to Barbara Boxer for the U.S. Senate that same year. In 2012, Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney by 3 million votes in California—and by only 2 million more in the other 49 states combined. In both houses of the state legislature the Democrats have, for now, a two-thirds ‘supermajority’ that allows them to prevail even against California’s version of the filibuster. ‘The Republicans appear to have no power,’ Jerry Brown told me. ‘Some of them are nice people, but they aren’t needed for any votes [in the legislature], and they don’t participate.’

In other ways tangible and subjective, California is an outlier. Its median income is much higher than America’s—but so is its unemployment rate. Its prison system is large and fantastically expensive. Two of its sizable cities (Stockton and San Bernardino) have filed for bankruptcy. And it has myriad other problems. Still, California is usefully representative of the country in one very important way. What is good, and bad, about America is better, and worse, in its most populous state.”

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“American Consumers Will Sign Up In Droves, Regardless Of The Privacy Implications”

May 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the future, the expensive cars being abandoned will likely be driverless. Privacy concerns won’t slow down the software, because trying to control your information in this era is as futile as trying to control what comes out of a 3D printer. From Timothy B. Lee at the Washington Post:

“Self-driving cars will make it easier for the authorities to track you everywhere you go. But the benefits of self-driving cars are likely to be so enormous that American consumers will sign up in droves, regardless of the privacy implications.

We know this because American consumers have already enthusiastically adopted a technology that allows the government to track their every movement: the cellphone. To complete incoming calls, your cellphone company needs to know where you are at all times. A few brave souls have rejected the technology on privacy grounds, but most have signed up without giving it a second thought.

The story will be much the same for self-driving cars.”

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“Thousands Of The Finest Automobiles Ever Made Are Now Being Abandoned Every Year”

May 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution, a report from the unfortunately named Messy Nessy Chic about an unusual sign of the economic meltdown in Dubai–expensive ghost vehicles:

“If you’ve ever been to Dubai or anywhere in the United Arab Emirates, you will have noticed they have a serious car culture out there, with a particular preference for the latest and greatest in high-end super cars. But like the rest of the world, Dubai has fallen on hard times. Once the hub of the oil economy and the centre of a booming property market, foreigners, mostly British, invested in the red hot market. Newly wealthy ex-pats bought the lastest Italian and German sports cars to compliment their millionaire lifestyles– and then the global economic crisis came along and burst everybody’s bubble.

Thousands of the finest automobiles ever made are now being abandoned every year since Dubai’s financial meltdown, left by expatriates and locals alike who flee in a hurry because they face crippling debts. With big loans to repay to the banks (unpaid debt or even bouncing a cheque is a criminal offence in Dubai), the panicked car owners make their way to the airport at top speeds and leave their vehicles in the car park, hopping on the next flight out of there, never to return.”

“In The Genetic Supermarket Parents Are Free To Make Decisions About Which Genes To Select For Their Children”

May 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a post and podcast about human enhancement at Practical Ethics, a comment by Australian bioethicist Chris Gyngell about the world to come:

“In the near future parents may be able to directly alter the genetic make-up of their children using genetic engineering technologies (GETs). A popular model that has been proposed for regulating access to GETs is the ‘genetic supermarket.’ In the genetic supermarket parents are free to make decisions about which genes to select for their children with little state interference. One possible consequence of the genetic supermarket is that ‘collective action problems’ will arise. The combined result of individuals using the market to pursue self-interested gains may have a negative effect on society as a whole, and on future generations. n this paper Gyngell asks whether GETs targeting height, innate immunity, and certain cognitive traits would lead to collective action problems if available in the genetic supermarket. he argues that that the widespread availability of GETs targeting height are unlikely to lead to genuine collective action problems, but that those targeting innate immunity and aspects of our cognition, could.”

“Google Employees Gave More Than 97% Of Their Political Donations To Obama”

May 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve probably mentioned before that I love Steven Johnson’s book about Victorian Era epidemiology The Ghost Map. At Medium, the author pushes back against some points George Packer makes in his just-published New Yorker article (gated here) about Silicon Valley’s reach into politics. An excerpt:

“The first assumption, cited half a dozen times in the piece, is that the default political framework of the Valley is libertarian. When I was writing Future Perfect—which makes a cameo in Packer’s piece—I spent quite a few pages clarifying that while the new ‘peer progressive‘ worldview shared some superficial characteristics with Randian libertarianism, it was in actuality fundamentally different. Yes, people who work in the tech sector today (particularly around the web and social media) believe in the power of decentralized systems and less hierarchical forms of organization. But that does not mean they are greed-is-good market fundamentalists. For starters, almost all of them recognize that their industry itself arose out of government funding (see ARPANET), and some of the most celebrated achievements of the digital culture (open source software, Wikipedia) involve commons-based collaboration with no conventional definition of private property whatsoever. It’s precisely because we lack a new vocabulary to describe this worldview that we end up lumping the tech sector together in the libertarian camp.

You can see this confusion most clearly in a series of datapoints that go amazingly unmentioned in Packer’s piece: namely, the election returns from last fall’s presidential race. As Nate Silver observed in a detailed postmortem on Northern California votes, Obama won Santa Clara county by 42% — more than ten times his margin nationally, and more than twice his margin in the rest of liberal California. (While San Francisco and Oakland have long been hotbeds of progressivism, Reagan won Santa Clara by double digits in both of his successful campaigns.) You would think such a dramatic swing to the left would at least warrant a mention in Packer’s piece, but from reading it, an outsider might reasonably assume that the Valley was a Republican stronghold—a vast army of Koch brothers with hoodies.

The numbers are even more stark when you look at campaign finance. According to Silver’s analysis, Google employees gave more than 97% of their political donations to Obama, with comparable percentages at Apple and eBay as well. If libertarianism is so rampant in Silicon Valley, why are they voting for higher taxes and funding a big government liberal by such overwhelming numbers?” (Thanks Browser.)

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“It Seems That You Highlighted The ‘Recent’ Rise Of American Libertarianism And Juxtaposed It With True Anarchism”

May 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Videos | Permalink

Richard Linklater made Slacker, one of my favorite films, and spoke highly of George W. Bush, one of my least-favorite politicians. And until this very moment I forgot that I interviewed him years ago and he was a really forthright and honest subject. Linklater just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

In Slacker, it seems that you highlighted the “recent” rise of American Libertarianism and juxtaposed it with true anarchism (the Ron Paul ad and the old man being robbed). What side to you fall on, or were you trying to highlight the pros and cons of each philosophy?

Richard Linklater:

Glad you picked up on the nod to Ron Paul in Slacker. I’m with the Libertarian ideology on the freedom front… but I’m kind of a safety net guy, too — don’t like ideologies when they result in cruelty. There is a way in our world, given all of our resources, to have both.

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 Question:

What do you think about the “childization” of movies these days? It seems that Hollywood marketing has successfully turned us all into children. Do you think we are as dumb as the movies we watch, or are we playing dumb in order to enjoy what is commercially available to us?

Richard Linklater:

A good question. A real chicken or egg situation. But as long as people keep going, the films you seem to be alluding to will certainly keep coming. At any moment there are a lot of options available for those who want to look a little deeper into the cinematic landscape.

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Question:

Many of your films focus on time. Each film in the Before Trilogy takes place in the year you filmed it. Tape is all in real time. You have been filming Boyhood for over 10 years to properly age the main actors. What films influenced your unique cinematic perception of time?

Richard Linklater:

Hard to say what films. The ability to manipulate time is such a unique property to cinema. I spend more time thinking about how it affects narrative.

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Question:

What does Keanu Reeves smell like?

Richard Linklater:

I’m pretty sure he smells like Keanu Reeves, if you’re lucky enough to get that close!

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Question:

Have you ever had a lucid dream? Can you share the details?

Richard Linklater:

Yes. I’ve just realized I’m in one right now.•

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“He Proclaims Himself As The Messiah”

May 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

For whatever reason, the Vatican is commemorating the 41st anniversary of the attack on Michelangelo’s Pieta sculpture, which was vandalized by hammer-wielding madman Laszlo Toth, who believed he was Christ. From Reuters: 

The statue is so lifelike that a viewer can almost feel the curls of the dead Christ’s hair and the softness of the Madonna’s lips.

The veins in Christ’s muscular arms seem to be still holding blood. The folds in the Madonna’s veil seem made of muslin rather than marble.

When art historian Giorgio Vasari saw the statue in 1550 he wrote in his book about the lives of artists.

“It is a miracle that a rock, which before was without form, can take on such perfection that even nature sometimes struggles to create in the flesh.”

After the attack, some art historians and restorers wanted the statue to remain as it was damaged as a sign of the violent times. Others said it should be restored but with clear marks delineating the damaged parts as a historical testament.

The Vatican instead decided on what is known as an “integral restoration,” one that would not leave any traces of the intervention visible to the naked eye.

“With any other statue, leaving the wounds (of the attack) visible, however painful, could have been tolerated,” said Antonio Paolucci, director of the Vatican Museums.

“But not with the Pieta, not this miracle of art,” he said.•

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Fuzzy footage of the attack, and some of the restoration.

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“I Had To Borrow Money From My Accountant”

May 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mike Fleming Jr. has a really insightful interview with Steven Soderbergh at Deadline Hollywood. Among other things, the discussion covers the spiraling costs of launching a blockbuster film, which actually should have grown cheaper with so many new viral ways to reach audiences. I’ll guess the culprits are entrenched interests and insufficient data. An excerpt:

“Deadline Hollywood:

On global summer tentpoles, studios routinely use $125 million as the given in the mathematical theorem of what it costs to launch these films. Is there no way to bring down that massive number?  

Steven Soderbergh:

I know they’ve tried to figure this out because it’s killing them, but I haven’t seen a Nate Silver-like systemic analysis of what an ad dollar does, exactly.

Deadline Hollywood:

TV spends seem very inefficient for their high cost.

Steven Soderbergh:

Yeah, but nobody wants to be the first to challenge that, which is weird to me because it would be groundbreaking for somebody to be the one who goes, ‘I’m capping this at $15 million.’ They’re afraid, and yet they lose all the time, doing the thing they always do. It’s an extreme brand of loss aversion. It’s just frustrating because the trickle-down effect is, creatively, things are getting narrower. We did one bold thing on Magic Mike. I had this conversation with Danny Feldman at Warner Bros, when I asked things like, ‘On a $25 million spend, what does that last $8 million get you?” He says, ‘We don’t really know.’ But Danny said, and I’m sure people all over town who love this will be screaming, but Danny said, “I’ve never seen any evidence that outdoor does anything. How would you guys feel if we did no outdoor and took that $3 million and put it into more spots.” And we said, “Great.” We didn’t do any outdoor, at all.

Deadline Hollywood: 

It doesn’t seem to have hurt you at all. Didn’t you and Channing Tatum finance that movie by not taking your fees to become an investor like Todd Phillips did in The Hangover?

Steven Soderbergh:

I don’t know what Todd did exactly, but Channing and I split the negative 50-50. When he called me two years ago and said was I interested, I said there was only one way. You and I are going to pay for it, we’re not talking to anybody else, and we’re in preproduction tomorrow because we have to start shooting the day after Labor Day because that’s the slot that I’ve got and you’ve got. I flew to Cannes four weeks later and sold enough territories to cover us. Cash was coming out of our pocket, but at least on paper we were somewhat covered. That’s how we did it.

Deadline Hollywood:

Todd Phillips made one of the great director paydays on The Hangover. Is Magic Mike the most you’ve ever made on a film?

Steven Soderbergh: 

It will be, I think. It certainly ought to be.

Deadline Hollywood: 

What does that say about taking entrepreneurial risk when the business is shifting like it is?

Steven Soderbergh: 

It’s hard for me to use this as an example people should follow. I knew that as ideas go that this was Halley’s Comet. I just knew Channing in a stripper movie, that’s gold. I wouldn’t do that all the time. I had to borrow money from my accountant in the last month of post. To hold up my end, it took everything I had.”

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“Groups Can Participate In Elections, But Electioneering Must Not Be Their ‘Primary’ Mission”

May 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Politicians and organizations that tried to suppress the African-American vote during the 2012 election are angered that some of the targets of the IRS looking for tax-exempt infractions were Tea Party groups. Those who usually support racial profiling are angry that they, in a sense, were stopped and frisked. I’m against all of these investigations based on generalizations but also appalled by the hypocrisy. The opening of “Profiling Is Great…Except When You Do It to Me,” by Farhad Manjoo as Slate:

“Pretend you work at the Internal Revenue Service. Actually, let’s make this exercise even more terrible. Pretend you’re an underpaid, low-level clerk working in the understaffed IRS backwater of Cincinnati. Every day, a big stack of files lands on your desk. Every day, the stack gets a little bigger than the last. Each file represents a new application for a certain tax status—501(c)(4), a tax-exempt designation meant for ‘social welfare’ organizations. Nonprofits with this status aren’t required to disclose the identity of their donors and they’re allowed to lobby legislative officials. The catch is that they must limit their political campaign activity. According to IRS rules, 501(c)(4) groups can participate in elections, but electioneering must not be their ‘primary’ mission.

Got all that? Good—now let’s get to work. It’s your job to decide which 501(c)(4) applications represent legitimate social-welfare organizations, and which ones are from groups trying to hide their campaign activities. What’s more, you’ve got to sort the good from the bad very quickly, as you’re being inundated with applications. In 2010, your office received 1,735 applications for 501(c)(4) status. In 2011, the number jumped 30 percent, to 2,265, and in 2012 there was another 50 percent spike, this time to 3,357 applications.

So what do you do? You look for a shortcut. Someone at your office notices that a lot of the applications for 501(c)(4) status are from groups that claim to be part of the burgeoning Tea Party movement. Aha! When you’re looking for signs of political activity, wouldn’t it make sense to search for criteria related to the largest new political movement of our times? So that’s what you do: Without consulting senior managers, you and your colleagues set up a spreadsheet called ‘Be on the Lookout,’ or BOLO, which spells out specific criteria for flagging potentially politically active groups. The spreadsheet lists keywords like ‘Tea Party,’ ‘Patriots,’ and ‘9/12 Project.’ It also flags groups whose primary concerns are government spending, debt, and taxes, that criticize how the country is being run, or that advocate policies that seek to ‘make America a better place to live.'”

“He Sought Out Many ‘Cures’ For His Problems”

May 21, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

William S. Burroughs was more deeply involved in Scientology than we know according to a new book by David S. Wills. The writer just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit on the topic. A few passages follow.

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Question:

What initially brought Burroughs to the Scientologists? 

David S. Wills:

Well that’s the first half of the book right there… In a nutshell, he was a deeply disturbed man. He was abused as a child, troubled by his homosexuality, accidentally killed his wife, and was hooked on drugs for decades. He sought out many “cures” for his problems and despite being obviously intelligent in many ways, was incredibly gullible. Ultimately, he came to Scientology for a magic fix, and for a while, he actually believed he was getting it. In fact, as late as 1994 (3 yrs prior to his death) he was convinced of some of its merits.

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Question:

I heard many rumors that scientology cures you of being gay that many high profile celebrities join to get cured of gay. Any truth to that?

David S. Wills:

Long ago, L. Ron Hubbard listed homosexuals as among the lowest forms of human beings (this has subsequently been changed in his books). I have no idea about the rumors of other celebrities… but it is highly likely that Burroughs sought a “cure” for his homosexuality in Scientology. He went through periods of feeling it was a handicap and remarked on a number of occasions that Scientology (temporarily) cured him of various “handicaps”.

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Question:

What is a misconceptions that you had about Scientology that later changed?

David S. Wills:

I thought that the whole Xenu/space opera thing was of more importance. The tabloids and South Park really play it up, but it didn’t get incorporated until later, and even then it was for the high-level members. Really, for the average Scientologist, that wasn’t even a part of it.

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Question:

Did they try to convert you?

David S. Wills:

No. Most Scientologists and ex-Scientologists I talked to were pretty open but not pushy. They were willing to explain concepts but not force them upon me. Interestingly, I did speak to someone who had letters from a Scientologist who’d used Burroughs to convert young people in the 60s.

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“Socio-Political Changes Have Made The Country A More Tolerant, Inclusive Place”

May 21, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An excerpt from a blog post at the New Yorker in which George Packer, who just published The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America, writes of some of the things he likes about our contemporary nation:

“Recent additions to American life that I would fight to hang onto: marriage equality, Lipitor, a black President, Google searches, airbags, novelistic TV shows, the opportunity for women to be as singlemindedly driven as their male colleagues, good coffee, safer cities, cleaner air, photographs of the kids on my phone, anti-bullying, Daniel Day Lewis, cheap communications, smoke-free airplanes, wheelchair parking, and I could go on.

In general, the things in my list fall into two categories: technological advances that make life easier, tastier, more entertaining, healthier, longer; and socio-political changes that have made the country a more tolerant, inclusive place. Over the past generation, America has opened previously inaccessible avenues to previously excluded groups, although in some cases the obstacles remain formidable, and in others (immigrant farm laborers, for example) there has hardly been any change at all. More Americans than ever before are free to win elective office or gain admission to a good college or be hired by a good company or simply be themselves in public. And they have more freedom to choose among telephones, TV shows, toothpastes, reading matter, news outlets, and nearly every other consumer item you can think of.

The bottom line in all these improvements is freedom. In America, that’s half the game.

The other half is equality.”

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“Even A Novice Shooter Can Become An Elite Long-Range Marksman In Minutes”

May 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Software is your friend, but it doesn’t have to be. The latest proof that the anarchy of our thrilling Internet experiment is transitioning to the tactile world is a firearm that uses Wi-Fi to let anyone strike targets with accuracy from more than half a mile away. You don’t even have to decide when to pull the trigger. We’ve thought of everything. From Liat Clark at Wired UK:

“A Texas company has begun shipping a rifle equipped with ‘fighter jet-style lock-and-launch technology” that allows amateurs to hit targets up to one kilometre away, every time.

Any potential threats posed by Cody Wilson’s 3D-printed gun pale in comparison to TrackingPoint’s Precision-Guided Firearm (PGF), a series of three firarms that offer tracking ranges of 1,100m, 915m and 777m. ‘Even a novice shooter can become an elite long-range marksman in minutes, accurately and effectively engaging targets,’ boasts the company press release.

The recreational bolt-action rifle came about when founder John McHale grew frustrated when game-hunting in Tanzania in 2009. He found it impossible to calculate all the variables in time to accurately hit a Thomson’s gazelle, which can run at speeds of up to 94km/h. By 2010 he had an initial prototype. Its features are impressive — it has a laser rangefinder and environmental sensors to pick up things like pressure, wind speed and temperature. Meanwhile, the Linux-powered digital tracking scope has a display that features data including the rifle’s incline (inertial sensors are inbuilt) and a compass. Users can click a small tag button alongside the trigger to ‘mark’ it, then the device does its magic. Taking into account all the variables, from range to humidity, it uses image recognition to mark the target and shows the user where a bullet will realistically land. At this point the trigger is squeezed, which highlights the crosshairs in red and allows the user to align it with the desired mark — only when the two have been aligned will the gun actually go off. The inbuilt computer is deciding when to take the shot, not the marksman.”

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Edward Payson Weston, Ready For A Stroll (1909)

May 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Photography, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Though his child has long vanished from the sporting scene, Edward Payson Weston was known during his lifetime as the “Father of Modern Pedestrianism,” a pastime that rewarded those who could hoof great distances with surprising speed. I’ve blogged about the world-class walker before, when Brian Phillips of Grantland wrote a sparkling piece about the recent Weston biography, A Man in a Hurry. In this classic photograph, the legendary athlete, profiled at 70 years old, was far removed from his glory days of the 1860s-70s, but perhaps because of good health brought about from his peripatetic exploits, he was still twenty years from his death. Of course, it must be noted that his demise may have been hastened by an accident in 1927 in which he was struck by a NYC taxi, as the roads, which had become the domain of cars, had little room for a remnant of the 1800s who was so accursed by their encroachment. Weston could see the future and didn’t like it, though he was helpless, as we all are, to stop it.

In the same year that this image was taken, the native Rhode Islander wrote an article about one of his cross-country walks, a planned 100-day excursion from New York to San Francisco, for the July 16, 1909 New York Times. The article:

“San Francisco, Cal.–Having completed my walk from New York City to San Francisco last night, and enjoyed a restful sleep. I walked to the Post Office Building here this morning and delivered to Postmaster Fiske of San Francisco a letter which I carried in my walk from Postmaster Morgan of New York City. I received a cordial greeting from Postmaster Fisk and his subordinates. 

A pleasant incident of my arrival at Oakland last night was the hearty welcome and congratulations extended to me by officials and employees of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company. This company did so much for me that I fail to find words to express my appreciation. 

Regarding my feelings and condition, I would say that I feel like uttering bitter words, but do not feel inclined to make excuses.

I have received hundreds of letters and telegrams congratulating me on my wonderful achievement, and each one makes me wish I deserved it. Full of vigor and strength, I am disappointed that the elements were against me, and I frankly acknowledge that had it not been for the unbounded kindness of the officers and employees of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, I should not have dared to come further than Ogden, Utah. I practically had the right of way on the railroad, and every engineer tooted the whistle on his engine as it passed me.

I contend I walked a distance of upward of 4,000 miles in 104 days and 5 hours, and while it exceeds the distance between New York and San Francisco nearly 700 miles, and far excels any previous record, yet technically it is a failure, and I do not feel inclined to close my public career with a failure.

The expenses of this walk were upwards of $2,500. Some dozen prominent cities in the East have made offers to arrange for testimonial lectures on my return, not only to help liquidate my financial loss, but to show that my object lesson in the journey, in striving to elevate in popular esteem the exercise of walking, is appreciated. 

If in the next two weeks I shall receive assurances from a sufficient number of cities and towns between Omaha and New York that they will arrange for lectures and send such word to me in care of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company, San Francisco, then I will try to prove myself worthy of their confidence and esteem by showing how easy it is for any one to walk from San Francisco to New York by direct route within 100 secular days.

There are three very dear friends who oppose this extra walk, but when I convince them that it is my only salvation, and that it would still keep me young and healthy, I know they will fall in with my plans.

Meanwhile the only trouble I have is an awful appetite.”

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“We Should Make American Society More Robust So That It Can Absorb Shocks”

May 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “After Catastrophe,” a Scott Carlson article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the field of Resiliency, which holds that we shouldn’t try to eliminate risk at all costs but instead use resources to manage it better:

“Consider what has hit us hardest in recent years, how some of these disruptions came from or led to other woes: September 11, 2001; the 2003 Northeast blackout; the oil shock of 2008; the mortgage crisis and the Great Recession; Deepwater Horizon; the intense droughts; Hurricanes Katrina, Irene, and Sandy.

There are surely more disruptions to come. Stephen E. Flynn, a security expert and former military officer who is co-director of the George J. Kostas Research Institute for Homeland Security at Northeastern University, ticks off the most likely threats: a breakdown in the power grid; interruption of global supply chains, including those that provide our food; an accident at one of the many chemical factories in urban areas; or damage to the dams, locks, and waterways that shuttle agricultural products and other goods out to sea. The No. 1 threat, he says, is a terrorist attack that prompts lawmakers and a frightened public to shred the Bill of Rights or overreact in another way.

The tendency in government has been to focus intensely on these threats—or other problems, considering the wars on cancer, poverty, drugs, crime, and so on—and to try to eliminate them.

‘If you look at the post-World War II area,’ Flynn says, ‘there is almost an overarching focus on reducing risk and bringing risk down to zero,’ the idea that this could be done ‘if you brought enough science and enough resources and you applied enough muscle.’ Since 9/11, that policy has meant spending vast sums to go after terrorists out there, but perhaps we aren’t safer.

‘Why do we have all this money to go after man-made terrorist attacks, and then we let our bridges fall down?’ Flynn wonders.

He advocates a different approach. We should make American society more robust so that it can absorb shocks and carry on.”

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“I’m Very Excited By The Prospect Of Citizen Space”

May 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Mason Peck, Chief Technologist at NASA, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Do you agree with Stephen Hawking when he said this: 

“It will be difficult enough to avoid disaster in the next hundred years, let alone the next thousand or million,””Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward-looking on planet Earth, but to spread out into space.”

Do you think we are doing enough to secure our place in the universe?
Are we failing?

Mason Peck:

I make it a practice to never disagree with Stephen Hawking. I think our destiny lies among the planets of our solar system. It’ll take a combination of NASA, other governments of the world, and the participation of all of you to make this happen.

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Question:

In your opinion, what aspect of our current space technology (besides funding) is truly keeping us back from a trip to Mars? 

Mason Peck:

It comes down to survival of the crew. We need to create ways to help astronauts survive exposure to galactic cosmic rays and other hazards on the trip there and back. Getting there quicker would help. So that inspires the creation of advanced propulsion capabilities, but right now there’s nothing on the horizon to shorten the trip time enough so that we don’t have to worry about radiation.

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Question:

  1. What do you think is going to be the next “big thing” in space technology?
  2. Is there any technology currently being developed by NASA or any partners that you are excited about?

Mason Peck:

  1. I’m very excited by the prospect of citizen space, that is, individuals building their own space technology and launching it. Some incredible innovations come from the do-it-yourself or maker community, and I expect the renaissance in technology that makers represent will have a big impact on NASA’s future.
  2. NASA has many compelling technology projects underway. One of the more promising is inflatable aerodynamic decelerators, which will slow down spacecraft entering Mars atmosphere and will allow us to land twice as much mass as we are currently able.

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Question:

The trickle down of technology from NASA to the real world is well established. In your opinion what is the next big thing to coming down the line that will benefit society?

 Mason Peck:

It may be that someday we will explore the solar system and even settle it using hardware and supplies that we create from resources we gather from other planets. Advanced manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing may be the way that we will build all that hardware in space. What we learn from meeting that kind of challenge will have a big impact on manufacturing here on Earth.

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Question:

With companies like SpaceX wanting to put man on Mars in the foreseeable future, is there any competition at all between NASA and other space frontier companies to reach certain goals?

Mason Peck:

NASA is working with a number of commercial companies, including SpaceX, to bring about a future in which American industry will provide access to space for the sake of science or human exploration. In the past, NASA has entered into agreements known as data buys, where NASA agrees to procure the results of investigations – science data – instead of prescribing every step along the way. I believe this model can be very successful, and I hope we see more of it.

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“Check Out That Machine That Shakes You And Burns Calories”

May 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

With Facebook and so-called reality TV and comic-book blockbusters, we’ve extended adolescence to the boneyard, but how can we keep the look of youth to match our collective mindset? A passage from William Leith’s Financial Times report from the UK’s first anti-aging exposition:

“Back in the noisy marketplace, Paul Mracek, a stress coach, is giving a talk about the dangers of stress. He shows a picture of a youthful-looking Barack Obama, and another picture of the US president, looking much older and greyer, four years later. Mracek is a superb talker. He’s talking about how the modern world fills us with stress. He displays a slide saying: ‘Senseless Thoughts Repeated Endlessly Surrounding Self.’ STRESS. He raises his voice to compete with the rising babble – a voice on the tannoy, music, the rattle of the flab-reducing machines.

‘We’ve seen some things that are mind-boggling,’ says Louise, 45, who is here with her mum Sue, 63. She mentions the gold eye bag pouches. ‘It’s supposed to plump up your skin by infusing collagen. And check out that machine that shakes you and burns calories. Flabbo-loss, or something, it’s called.’

I talk to Ian, 49, whose partner Melanie, 54, is lying on another hospital bed while a woman pumps her lips with Restylane, a dermal filler designed to make older skin look plump, and lips more pouty. Pump, pump, pump. It looks severe and painful. There’s an air of tension. A crowd is gathering.

Ian slots his credit card into a machine. Money, to the tune of £198, is being pumped out of Ian’s account as the Restylane is pumped into Melanie. ‘I don’t like to watch,’ he says.

We talk about modern ageing. We agree it’s not what it was. ‘I’m 49, and I live like I did as a teenager, frankly,’ he says.

Melanie gets off the bed. She looks a bit shaky. I ask her how old she feels.

‘I would say early forties,’ she says.”

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“I’ve Got To Design So You Can Put It Together Out Of Garbage Cans”

May 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Centralized mass media, controlled by few hands, had its sense of order usurped by the anarchy and interaction of the Internet, and now that demon energy, with all its good and bad, is nearly ready to be brought to the literal world from the virtual one–a rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Will what is acceptable on a flat screen be so in 3D? Will all the many great things be undone by a few terrible ones? What is our direction and can we direct it?

A little bit about the idealistic and naive origins of the movement from Theodore Roszak’s 1985 essay, “From Satori to Silicon Valley“:

“Throughout the later seventies, many of the inventors and entrepreneurs-to-be of the rising personal computer industry were meeting along the San Francisco peninsula in funky town meetings where high-level technical problems and solutions could be swapped like backwoods lore over the cracker barrel of the general store. They adopted friendly, folksy names for their early efforts like the Itty Bitty Machine Company (an alternative IBM), or Kentucky Fried Computers, or the Homebrew Computer Club. Stephen Wozniak was one of the regulars at Homebrew, and when he looked around for a name to give his brainchild, he came up with a quaintly soft, organic identity that significantly changed the hard-edged image of high tech: the Apple. One story has it that the name was chosen by Steven Jobs in honor of the fruitarian diet he had brought back from his journey to the mystic East. The name also carried with it an echo of the Beatles spirit. And, in an effort to keep that spirit alive, Apple made the last heroic attempt to stage a big, outdoor rock gathering: the US Festivals of 1982 and 1983, on which Wozniak spent $20 million of his own money.

For the surviving remnants of the counter culture in the late seventies, it was digital data, rather than domes, arcologies, or space colonies, that would bring us to the postindustrial promised land. The personal computer would give the millions access to the databases of the world, which — so the argument went — was what they needed in order to become a self-reliant citizenry. The home computer terminal became the centerpiece of a sort of electronic populism. Computerized networks and bulletin boards would keep the tribes in touch, exchanging the vital data that the power elite was denying them. Clever hackers would penetrate the classified databanks that guarded corporate secrets and the mysteries of state. Who would have predicted it? By way of IBM’s video terminals, AT&T’s phone lines, Pentagon space shots, and Westinghouse communications satellites, a worldwide, underground community of computer-literate rebels would arise, armed with information and ready to overthrow the technocratic centers of authority. They might even outlast the total collapse of the high industrial system that had invented their technology. Surely one of the zaniest expressions of the guerrilla hacker worldview was that of Lee Felsenstein, a founder of the Homebrew Computer Club and of Community Memory, later the designer of the Osborne portable computer. Felsenstein’s technological style — emphasizing simplicity and resourceful recycling — arose from an apocalyptic vision of the industrial future that might have come straight out of A Canticle for Liebowitz. He worked from the view ‘that the industrial infrastructure might be snatched away at any time, and the people should be able to scrounge parts to keep their machines going in the rubble of the devastated society; ideally, the machine’s design would be clear enough to allow users to figure out where to put those parts.’ As Felsenstein once put it, ‘I’ve got to design so you can put it together out of garbage cans.’

It is important to appreciate the political idealism that underlay the home computer in its early days, and to recognize its link with tendencies that were part of the counter culture from the beginning. It is quite as important to recognize that the reversionary-technophiliac synthesis it symbolizes is as naive as it is idealistic. So much so that one feels the need of probing deeper to discover the secret of its strange cogency. For how could anyone believe something so unlikely?”

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“Dealing With Refusals Is A Huge Part Of This”

May 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Bill Gates has, unsurprisingly, taken a data-driven approach to disease eradication during his second and staggering act as a philanthropist of the highest rank. Aiming to eliminate polio in the near term from the entire world as it has been in India, he told Ezra Klein of the Washington Post how the intransigence of illness is often not virus nor bacteria but misinformation:

“Ezra Klein:

So what did we learn that made eradication possible in India?

Bill Gates:

The two things that were done super well were social mobilization and mapping where the houses were. When somebody would refuse to take the vaccine, they would mark it down and they would have either a political leader or religious leader come in and convince them. Dealing with refusals is a huge part of this. If your team goes in, maybe they don’t speak the dialect, they’re not the same caste, the family has heard a rumor that the vaccine is bad, there’s many reasons you get refusals, and so you need follow-up for refusals. Usually you’ll get 10 to 20 percent refusals. But if there’s been a rumor, you get much higher refusals.

Ezra Klein:

A rumor that, say, the vaccine is bad, or it makes you sick?

Bill Gates:

Yeah or that the U.S. government uses vaccination campaigns to sterilize Muslim women. Vaccination always has problems with rumors. The U.S. doesn’t achieve nearly as high a vaccination rate as many countries. Vietnam is 99 percent vaccination, the U.S. is about 95 percent. Because people just hear ‘Oh, what about autism or something.’ But it’s particularly bad in poor countries.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Everyone Loves A Morality Play”

May 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Maybe it’s the fairy tales we’re read as children or the guilt sometimes used to shape us into adults, but our economic policy in the aftermath of collapse is often guided by a false sense of morality. It’s dangerous and can make a bad situation worse, can land us in Hoovervilles. From Paul Krugman’s New York Review of Books piece about a slate of just-published volumes about financial austerity, a passage about the psychology that makes us feel good but is bad for us:

“Everyone loves a morality play. ‘For the wages of sin is death’ is a much more satisfying message than ‘Shit happens.’ We all want events to have meaning.

When applied to macroeconomics, this urge to find moral meaning creates in all of us a predisposition toward believing stories that attribute the pain of a slump to the excesses of the boom that precedes it—and, perhaps, also makes it natural to see the pain as necessary, part of an inevitable cleansing process. When Andrew Mellon told Herbert Hoover to let the Depression run its course, so as to ‘purge the rottenness’ from the system, he was offering advice that, however bad it was as economics, resonated psychologically with many people (and still does).

By contrast, Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn’t a morality play—that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared that ‘we have magneto trouble’—i.e., the economy’s troubles were like those of a car with a small but critical problem in its electrical system, and the job of the economist is to figure out how to repair that technical problem. Keynes’s masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, is noteworthy—and revolutionary—for saying almost nothing about what happens in economic booms. Pre-Keynesian business cycle theorists loved to dwell on the lurid excesses that take place in good times, while having relatively little to say about exactly why these give rise to bad times or what you should do when they do. Keynes reversed this priority; almost all his focus was on how economies stay depressed, and what can be done to make them less depressed.

I’d argue that Keynes was overwhelmingly right in his approach, but there’s no question that it’s an approach many people find deeply unsatisfying as an emotional matter. And so we shouldn’t find it surprising that many popular interpretations of our current troubles return, whether the authors know it or not, to the instinctive, pre-Keynesian style of dwelling on the excesses of the boom rather than on the failures of the slump.”

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