Stephen Laniel’s Unspecified Bunker

(Attention conservation notice: 2,000 words on another of the books that Richard Posner, widely respected judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, publishes “every half hour”. There’s so much about Posner to make you mad, but then so much that’s brilliant or at least deftly written. Like the rest of his books, I would recommend reading Public Intellectuals, even if it also drives me nuts. Even if Posner is your enemy, he’s more intelligent than any other enemy you will ever have. If he’s being an ass, he surely knows it.)

I’ve read enough of Judge Posner’s work by now — The Economics of Justice, The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law, How Judges Think, Frontiers of Legal Theory, and now Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline — to have picked up a pattern: the man will drive you absolutely insane. But he’s really very, very smart, and is right enough at the level of principle that you would need to spend a lot of time rebutting all the individual mistakes in his books; you couldn’t dispense with the whole work in one lump. Which is why I often think that Posner is a decoy for liberals to aim at. He draws so much fire that you’re left with little ammunition for anyone else.

Characterizing him as a conservative agent provocateur is unfair to Posner, though. Above all else, I want to be fair to him in this review, because he is deeply unfair to his enemies, often gratuitously so. As I’ve mentioned, one of the major premises of Public Intellectuals is that this type of scholar is unfair to opposing viewpoints. Posner clearly knows that he’s treading on risky terrain here. As he writes in the introduction,

[A]re not people often particularly acute at spotting their own weaknesses (of which they are unaware) observed in other people?

All true. I am aware that the arrows I shoot may curve in flight and hit the archer. The reader shall judge.

First, naturally, Posner is obliged to sketch what “public intellectual” means. If instead of “intellectual” we use “academic” — as in, “someone employed by a university” — we get at Posner’s main gripe. His favorite non-academic — “unaffiliated,” in his usage — intellectual is George Orwell, which narrows in on the type that he’s thinking about. An intellectual is someone who thinks more broadly than the case before his eyes, let’s say; he’s concerned with Big Ideas. A “public intellectual” takes those Big Ideas and presents them to a broader audience. He’s quite often interested in suggesting changes in government, in economic organization, etc. A biologist who explains natural selection to a non-specialist audience may be an intellectual, but he’s not necessarily a public intellectual. A public intellectual is most often advocating something. Public-intellectual work, in other words, is more than mere popularization.

Because today’s intellectuals are largely in universities, says Posner, they’re highly specialized, and are therefore mostly not in a position to weigh in on the complicated social issues of the day. Because they’re ensconced in universities, they have a job even if their public-intellectual work is shoddy (as, Posner says, it often is); an academic, to Posner, is a “safe specialist.” This safety means that public intellectuals can say whatever they want with little fear.

Within their chosen field, academics are hemmed in by disciplinary constraints: editors, peers, and tenure committees mean that they have to hedge every extreme assertion and back it with evidence. There are no such constraints for the public intellectual. In fact, Posner asserts that public-intellectual output is meant more for entertainment and solidarity than it is for actual information: we read public intellectuals who agree with us so that we can feel better about what we believe. And public-intellectual work is a classic “credence” good: like a used car, we can’t judge the value of public-intellectual work. The public responds by largely ignoring it as a source of information, says Posner.

All of these assertions about how we read public intellectuals, it seems to me, need to be hedged. Maybe we can’t always judge the details of, say, the economics that Paul Krugman teaches us, but we can judge it at the level of argument: do the pieces fit together like they should? Certainly the Internet has changed substantially how we consume arguments: I recall a big section in The Wealth of Networks where Yochai Benkler examines how often different cliques (liberal or conservative blogs, say) interact with one another, and finds that they actually do so quite often — pace Cass Sunstein’s assertion in Republic.com that the balkanization of American political discourse is accelerating in the age of the Internet.

As for the public’s ignoring public intellectuals, it’s not entirely clear that that’s important. As far as their impact on society goes, is it important that the public read them, or that policymakers do? Posner does a modicum of statistical analysis, comparing public intellectuals’ media citation counts to their scholarly reputation, but doesn’t bother to analyze, say, how many public intellectuals go on to get careers in government. The fact that Henry Kissinger is the number-one public intellectual, as measured by media citations, makes this omission surprising.

Then there’s the “Decline” part of Posner’s subtitle. We’re supposed to infer that public intellectuals used to be less academic, hence less specialized and more engaged with the broader population, but Posner presents no evidence in this direction. This might partly be a relic of which data are easiest to collect: counting citations is easier, and only academics have citation counts, and Posner asserts that today’s public intellectuals are much more academic than they were previously.

To fix ideas on whom we’re compassing under the term “public intellectual”: Bertrand Russell was one. So was George Orwell. So was Charles Dickens: his literature was meant to make a point about the living conditions of London’s poor, push for reform of the poor houses, and so forth. Stephen Jay Gould was half public intellectual, half popularizer. His most famous public-intellectual work was The Mismeasure of Man. Here is where my rage nearly made it impossible to continue: Posner gets The Mismeasure of Man alarmingly, spectacularly wrong. I want to go into a bit of detail about Gould and Posner, because I think Posner’s failings here are especially illustrative.

Mismeasure, if you’re not aware, covers the history of IQ from the 1800s to now. Gould explains that IQ measurement was initially intended to help those who might need some extra help, but that it quickly developed into a tool for locking races into preassigned castes: Asians on top, white people one step down, black people at the bottom. To establish that these castes are permanent and unalterable, it was necessary along the way to reinterpret IQ as a measure of what Gould calls a “thing in the head” rather than just a number: those with low IQ “really are,” in some sense, dumber than those with a higher IQ.

One must go further, of course, if one is going to assert that I and my children and my children’s children will be stuck forever in our benighted caste. One must assert the genetic basis of IQ. But one must go further than that — substantially further, in fact: one must assert that no human intervention can correct this. As Gould himself put it, I believe: no one doubts for an instant that poor eyesight is completely due to “nature” rather than “nurture,” yet a $10 pair of eyeglasses can completely correct it.

To sum up, then: to make anything interesting out of IQ, one must assert a) that it measures something real in the head, b) that it has a genetic basis, and c) that human intervention can do little to correct a low IQ. Gould attacks each one in turn. First, IQ is an outcome of principal components analysis — a statistical process that is often useful, but doesn’t represent any underlying reality. Indeed, Gould shows that the particular number arising from a principal-components analysis is largely arbitrary. Gould notes that, in discussing principal-components analysis, he’s one of the first writers to criticize the actual statistical basis of IQ.

Now, one of Posner’s biggest gripes about public intellectuals is that they too often venture outside of their areas of competence. Here he rails on Gould for having no business writing about IQ. But as Gould himself says in Mismeasure, he spends his professional career as a biologist performing statistical analysis, including principal-components analysis, on large datasets. He understands the statistics very well. One might gripe that Gould is in no position to discuss the history of IQ, either, not being a historian, but Posner doesn’t go there.

Still Posner descends to calling Gould, along with many other intellectuals, “false prophets.” That is, Gould is supposedly one who claims to know what the future will bring; in Gould’s case, Posner is pretty sure that Mismeasure is on the wrong side of the IQ debate. Posner claims that The Bell Curve had got the better of the fight with Gould, which I don’t understand: the evidence against Herrstein & Murray’s book had been overwhelming for years by the time Posner wrote. Public Intellectuals came out in 2001, whereas Intelligence, Genes, and Success: Scientists Respond to The Bell Curve — tearing H&M’s book to shreds from a number of angles — had come out in 1997. The Bell Curve was a public-intellectual work, not a work of scholarship; it was fairly obvious at the time that Herrstein and Murray wrote it to undergird their libertarian beliefs, among which was the uselessness of social spending. You’d think that Posner would count H&M as false prophets. In fact, you’d think that Posner would at the very least accuse H&M of the same sin for which he attacks so many public intellectuals: letting their ideologies guide them in public, even while they admit the true complexity of an issue in their scholarly work.

So the first place I found a subject I knew something about in Public Intellectuals, I saw that Posner was being viciously unfair. It’s hard for me not to think that this was deliberate, and rooted in Posner’s conservatism: Gould freely admits that his politics are liberal, and that he doesn’t want to see his disabled child consigned to a low caste in Herrstein and Murray’s world. In fact Posner takes the absolutely egregious step of suggesting that Gould and Eldredge came up with punctuated equilibrium because “Marxism celebrates revolution.”

To his credit, Posner does get around to spearing conservatives, as well. He takes down Robert Bork and Gertrude Himmelfarb in a chapter about the public-intellectual genre known as the “Jeremiad.” Jeremiahs fit into the “false prophets” category, specifically the brand of prophecy that asserts that the sky is falling, and that the only way to put it back up is to follow the author’s recipe for repentance. In Bork’s case the disease is cultural collapse, and the cure is a dose of old-time religion (which Bork himself doesn’t follow).

Public Intellectuals is, as you might have noticed, a purely destructive work, and I should say right away that I don’t count this as a deficit: destroying bad ideas is just as useful as, and maybe more so than, affirming good ones. When Public Intellectuals isn’t attacking academics for being safe specialists committed to principle, who scorn politicians for being stupid and who have no idea about the sort of compromises necessary to live in the real world (”They tend to be unworldly. They are, most of them anyway, the people who have never left school. Their milieu is postadolescent.”), it’s attacking the idea of measuring literature by its conformance to our current ethical standards. Literature isn’t there to teach us anything; it is there to be beautiful. If it’s trying to be didactic about an issue of contemporary concern, it will quickly sound dated — as, Posner notes, Dickens does if you read him ethically rather than aesthetically.

A lot of Posner’s arguments about, say, the misuse of literature sound right to me. But I know, from the little part of Public Intellectuals that touches on areas where I have experience, that Posner is hideously unfair. That colors the rest of his book for me. That said, you have to admire the breadth of intellect that would be able to touch on so many subjects, however shallowly. I’m not sure that’s how Posner would like Public Intellectuals to be remembered.

I understand that politics is a complicated business, and that getting actual votes in your pocket involves making compromises that might piss off people on all sides. So I’m not quite as ready as a lot of my friends are to write off the Obama administration just yet.

At the same time, I think there’s a tendency to read strategic brilliance into every one of Rahm Emanuel’s utterances, even if it’s not at all clear what he means. Take this phrase, which a few articles have quoted:

It is not an accident that Emanuel, on a range of issues, tells aides: “The only nonnegotiable principle here is success. Everything else is negotiable.”

(See it quoted also in “Taking The Hill”.)

What does that even mean? How do you define success if you’re not measuring it relative to some goal? In the case of universal health care, would Emanuel count it as a success if they got the votes to expand coverage to only a million more people, when at least 40 million are uninsured? It seems clear to me that Emanuel is just being clever; yet journalists seem to be taking it as a profound oracular pronouncement.

Something very peculiar happened at the turn of the 15th century: Italians started viewing the Roman Empire in a much different light than their ancestors had. Dante, you’ll remember, stuck Caesar’s assassins — Cassius and Brutus — alongside Judas Iscariot at the very deepest circle of hell, each stuffed into one of Satan’s mouths and being eternally digested. A modern reader of Dante might wonder what all the fuss was about: sure, killing Caesar was a bad thing, but was it really that bad?

Hans Baron explains: much of medieval theology, more or less ending with Dante, saw Caesar’s creation of the Roman Empire as God’s plan for human salvation. Just as Christ would claim dominion over all of mankind, so the Romans would create a universal kingdom with Caesar at the helm.

As the 15th century turned, this started to change. It began with a slow movement away from the monastic ideal that had dominated centuries of Christian thought. The new view said that the active, engaged citizen should be a society’s ideal — that it should celebrate the active life rather than the contemplative life. With this change came a new view of Caesar: he was no longer the benevolent dictator heralding Christ’s eternal reign on earth; instead he destroyed the government that had given the Roman people their vital energy.

Why this change? Baron believes — and argues with great care — that Florentines accelerated their changing view of society under the threat of invasion from Milan. A Milanese tyrant named Giangaleazzo Visconti had taken over nearly all of northern and central Italy, leaving Florence alone to defend the cause of liberty in the middle of the country. When all hope appeared to be lost, and even Florence itself seemed like it would fall under Giangaleazzo’s control, the man died in one of Europe’s periodic disease epidemics. His sudden death led to the collapse of all his conquests. For at least a century thereafter, Florentines defined themselves as the solitary defenders of liberty, even in the face of Italian cowardice.

Baron makes a convincing case that the Giangaleazzo episode was central to much Florentine political thought that came after. Writers before Baron had apparently left unexplained why several prominent Florentine writers suddenly changed their tunes around 1400, switching from a defense of tyranny to a rousing defense of political liberty. Some Florentine books switch from pro-tyranny to pro-liberty mid-stream; Baron’s close reading explains this mystery by establishing that the book must have started before Giangaleazzo’s death and ended after. When it looked like Florence’s collapse in the face of the Visconti menace was divinely ordained, Florentine writers understood Visconti through the same lens that Dante had; after Visconti’s death, they gained the breathing room to consider Florence’s heroic defense of liberty.

The Visconti episode might have passed into obscurity had it not reappeared in other guises time and again for the next century. Over and over, Florence found itself alone within Italy as one tyrant or another ran roughshod over the country. Over and over, it defended liberty when no one else did. Even these repeated battles would seem an obscure thing to study, if Baron didn’t argue for their cumulative effect: that Florentines built a new way of understanding the world, which he calls “civic humanism.” Civic humanists of the 14th century began to see the story of Florence within a broader arc that started in Rome or possibly in Athens. They began to map out the decaying effects of tyranny and the proper construction of a state. Their pinnacle lies with Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, considered by many (though I don’t exactly understand why) as the founding document of modern republican (small-r) government.

There’s always the danger that a book like this will be a fusty exercise in over-analysis. I myself was afraid on a few occasions that it would veer in that direction. Remarkably enough, given that it’s a deep dive into the precise dating of early-15th-century Renaissance documents, Baron’s book is utterly captivating. You feel like you’re following a detective in a mystery novel — except that this detective is chasing authors and philosophies rather than criminals.

Baron started an entire line of historical thinking with this book. The concept of civic humanism informs a great many other historical works, like Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment, Gordon Wood’s Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, Bailyn’s Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, and Elkins and McKitrick’s Age of Federalism. All of them helped to overthrow a persistent myth about the American Revolution: that it sprang fully formed from the brow of John Locke. The roots of American republicanism go back much further, and owe a lot to the Framers having read their Roman history. The tradition of which Baron is a part has vastly deepened and enriched the study of American history.

There already are many books about the financial collapse of 2008, and there will be many more. Plunder and Blunder, for breadth, brevity, and readability alone, should be one of the few on your shelf if you care to understand how it all happened.

Baker chases down the causes of the boom to a number of places and a number of people: the Clinton White House’s decision to maintain a cheap dollar in the ’90s, Joe Lieberman’s fight to have stock options not count as expenses under FASB rules, and the conflicts of interest — bond-rating agencies getting paid by the companies whose instruments they rated, property-value assessors getting paid by homeowners, auditors paid by the companies they audit, corporate boards existing at the whim of their CEOs — with which we’ve become so familiar in the past few years. His solution to these conflicts of interest is what you’d expect: enforce independence. A bond-rating agency would be chosen at random for a given bond issue, a home-price appraisal would be randomly assigned to a homeowner, and so forth.

Other solutions are maybe more controversial. Baker revisits the idea of a tax on stock-market transactions, proposed in 1989 (at the latest) by no less a personage than Larry Summers as a way to reduce speculation. Sometimes this seems like a good idea, sometimes not.

Plunder and Blunder is worth reading if only for two sections: a two-page sketch of how to identify stock-market bubbles in the future (using price-to-earnings ratios), and another on how to spot home-price bubbles. Home prices, says Baker, had not risen in real terms in one hundred years; the main allures of homeownership come through forced saving and some tax benefits. So any increase in home prices that exceeds inflation is immediately suspect.

Here would have been the place, by the way, for Baker to push for an end to the mortgage-interest deduction, which artificially increases demand for homes, artifically increases demand for larger homes, and benefits the wealthy substantially more than it benefits the poor. Baker didn’t take the bait, and it’s not clear to me why he didn’t.

It’s a quick, meaty read, and is a must-own.

It’s worth declaring up front that nothing much happens in Sag Harbor. Nothing much really could happen: it’s a story about teenagers left alone for a summer at their families’ beach houses on Long Island. Teenagers at a beach house aren’t going to stop a cabal of evildoers intent on destroying the world; they’re not going to uncover secret biblical signs hidden in Renaissance paintings. At best they’re going to work at an ice-cream shop and discover the hidden mysteries of the waffle-cone maker. And so they do.

Which isn’t to say, by any stretch of the imagination, that Sag Harbor is boring. Quite to the contrary. Every paragraph carries one of Colson Whitehead’s flights of stylistic fancy, or another charming and spot-on exploration of the teenage mind. Sag Harbor is written from the perspective of an older man — late 30s, early 40s — looking back on his teens, trying to get into his younger brain and understand its motivations and its misconceptions.

This is a crucial summer in the life of teenage boys: at its start, they channel their teenage desire to be top dog into acts of violence: getting into inconsequential fistfights with one another or destroying things with BB guns. By the end, it’s all about girls. If someone questions something you say in front of a girl you fancy, not only your knowledge but your very manhood is on trial. Hence this hilariously accurate sketch of what happens when one of the narrator’s friends thinks he’s quoting “sacadiliac” (he means “sacroiliac”) from a rap song:

We all laughed except for NP, who said, “Saca-what?”

“My nut sack,” he said, gesturing at me for backup.

I said, “I read a book about Sagaponac by Honoré de Ballsack,” but that only confused things more so Bobby explained about the big brown nuts and the rest. “Look it up.”

“In what?” NP asked. He was right — no one had a dictionary out there. Maybe an old Scrabble dictionary, missing half its pages and frothing with silverfish, but that was it. “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars you’re wrong,” he said. From time to time, this competition emerged between NP and Bobby over who was the alpha dog in this double date, complicated by the fact that Bobby had the car keys. …

Bobby couldn’t back down. His girl was watching. His girl’s cousin was watching. … The money was in the bag — if you can’t trust a nerd with a big word, who can you trust?

Even adult drama loses some amplitude on Sag Harbor:

The bridge to North Haven was a long white frown before us. From time to time, suicidal painters and playwrights (few artists from other disciplines partook for some reason) flung themself from its concrete heights, but the water wasn’t very deep, and they usually ended up being dragged by a gaffer’s hook onto a passing motorboat, or wading out dejectedly, pissed that they’d lost their wallet.

Whitehead’s style here cracks me up. No one can take Sag Harbor very seriously — least of all the reader, who’s too busy laughing at that wallet.

The narrator, known to his chagrin as “Benji,” is looking back with a smirk on how foolish a little kid he was. At the same time, he realizes just how foolish he still is, and even his younger self can’t resist a look back — as when a girl reminds teenage Benji that he was her first kiss, many years before:

It seemed impossible not to remember something like that. The first time a girl put her lips on yours. What kind of chump forgot being a five-year-old mack?

You’re going to laugh from start to finish while reading Sag Harbor, because Colson Whitehead is a brilliant prose stylist. Take it to the beach with you; smile warmly at the teenage boys roaming the boardwalk, as they try to impress their girlfriends and take this consequence-free summer so seriously.

I’m spending the first part of the day reading Posner’s Public Intellectuals: A Study Of Decline. This is just a fascinatingly unfair book. Unfairness is par for the course for Posner, but this is really above and beyond.

What’s fascinating is that Posner is clearly engaging in the unfairness for which he attacks public intellectuals. The book’s premise is that when academic intellectuals step out of their academic specialty — where they’re hemmed in by journals’ editorial constraints and other disciplinary checks — they tend to be ideological, unfair, one-sided, and sloppy with evidence.

Now, clearly Posner realizes a couple things: first, that he is a public intellectual; second, that he is stepping outside of his own disciplinary bounds in writing such a book. So clearly he must be aware that the reader will judge him by the standard that he’s laying out.

It’s hard, then, not to think that Posner’s deep, ugly unfairness in Public Intellectuals is deliberate. How could it be otherwise? A man who doesn’t want to foist himself by his own petards would have been exceedingly scrupulous in writing a book like Public Intellectuals.

I see two possibilities, then: either Public Intellectuals is an extended joke, or it is an embarrassment. As I read the remainder of the book, I’ll try to figure out which it is.

This is a book that we all ought to be reading right now. Today, investment banks’ primary mode of self-defense is to argue that capitalism needs them. Brandeis argues vigorously to the contrary, and it’s not at all hard to carry his arguments from the nineteen-teens directly to now.

When we tip our hat to bankers, we typically honor their role as intermediaries: they direct money from depositors to valuable investment opportunities. Most depositors cannot be expected to evaluate the claims of businessmen, so bankers function as a vehicle for judging risk and establishing reputations. Hence the now-famous dialogue between J.P. Morgan and Samuel Untermyer:

Untermyer: “Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?”

Morgan: “No sir. The first thing is character.”

Untermyer: “Before money or property?”

Morgan: “Before money or property or anything else. Money cannot buy it…because a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom.”

You will presumably find few people today who view bankers as this sort of lantern-jaw-held-steady, coldly-responsible übermenschen.

On the other side of the risk-judging coin, bankers are supposed to finance the little guy. The entrepreneur just starting out who needs a few dollars at the right moment — this man is capitalism’s hero, and he’s the one to whom bankers are supposed to direct money. As the entrepreneurs’ hero, the banker is supposed to be our hero as well.

Think again, says Brandeis; bankers only give money to enterprises which have proven that they hold no risk whatsoever. In an absolutely devastating chapter entitled “Big Men And Little Business” (search ahead in that link for “Chapter VII”), Brandeis gives example upon example of how America’s rise to industrial might owed nothing to the bankers. In fact, J.P. Morgan’s main job was to combine pre-existing businesses — on which inventors had toiled thanklessly for years — into monopolies (the famous “trusts”). It was news to me that the House of Morgan was responsible for the behemoth known as General Electric. And I was floored by Brandeis’s description of Morgan’s role in forming AT&T; I include that description, which is actually a long quote from Herbert N. Casson’s History of the Telephone, below the fold.

So we don’t need “the great banks” to keep capitalism churning. It gets worse, says Brandeis: the “great banks,” in their mania to form monopolies, destroy businesses along the way. A lot of Brandeis’s anger in Other People's Money comes from his fight against the Morgan acquisition of the New Haven railroad, which larded the New Haven up with debt that it couldn’t support, and eventually led to its collapse — reminiscent, today’s reader will note, of the 1980s’ leveraged-buyout craze. “Was there ever a more be-bankered railroad than the New Haven?” asks Brandeis, along the way probably using “be-bankered” for the only time in the history of the English language.

The banks’ failure might not be quite so offensive, were they not doing all their work with “other people’s money.” The banks’ main chore is to take $1 from depositors and turn it, through loans, into whatever the government allows them to turn it into — $10, say. The people have granted banks that right under the expectation that they’ll guard those deposits carefully. The banks have manifestly failed to do so. Brandeis’s disgust is palpable on every page.

The solution, he says, is to sidestep the banks altogether. Form depositor-owned co-ops. If the railroads want to raise money, they don’t need banks; they have (or had, at least) thousands of stations from which they can solicit capital from their riders. We’ve been deceived into thinking that we need banks, when what we need is capital to fuel innovation.

Other People's Money is a devastating book, written with eloquence, force, and passion. This befits Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice and one of history’s greatest Americans. As it turns out, he wrote a book that applies just as well in the early 21st century as it did in the early 20th.

Perhaps the best part, for my busy readers, is that Other People's Money is only 100 pages long. You can polish it off in one sitting. I suspect you’ll be as floored as I was by how effortlessly Brandeis’s arguments carry over to today.

(more…)

This is a fun, breezy little jaunt through the two cities named in the title, with periodic excursions into Hinduism and oral sex. In Venice we’re hanging out with Jeff, a burned-out journalist author of little puff pieces about celebrities or works of art; in Varanasi it’s an unnamed narrator who stays so long in his hotel that he may as well be part of the furniture. Jeff is on assignment in Venice to cover the Biennale, which — in his telling — sounds like an excuse to drink bellinis, jump from one party to another, gossip about one another, discourse on self-indulgent art as though it were a serious object of veneration, and generally have a ball on your employer’s dime. Thousands of journalists eye each other to make sure no one else is being invited to a classier gala. There is cocaine aplenty.

Varanasi is rather different. The main industry appears to be cremation. The Ganges’ job is to purify bodies before they’re sent on to the next world; our narrator’s job is to watch death pass before him. He starts like the rest of us Westerners, rather horrified that people are swimming and bathing in the same filthy water that carries the ashes of other humans. In time his beard grows bushy and profound, he wastes away to virtually nothing, he comes to understand the oneness of all things, and he abandons all his worldly possessions — including his friendships.

Yet I hope I don’t give you the impression that it’s morose or moralizing or anything like that. Our narrator’s gradual disappearance is depicted with the utmost levity, and what’s happening in his head is just very fun. He invents his own Hindu god. He may well be stoned during a lot of this time. It’s a real joy.

Meanwhile, back in Venice … well, actually, it’s hard to name the connection between these two stories. During the Biennale, Jeff and a beautiful American girl have fallen for one another; they spend a lot of time having mutually and simultaneously gratifying sex, which Geoff Dyer depicts in pleasing detail. (This is the first time I have ever read a book describe a particular sexual position — named after two numerals, the one an upside-down version of the other — so graphically. Probably the first time I’ve read that position described at all, as a matter of fact.) Eventually their time together in Venice must end. Like high-school students signing each other’s yearbooks, they promise they’ll stay in touch; unlike high-schoolers, neither Jeff nor his lover really believes it.

As it happens, Jeff’s lover is heading next to Varanasi. Since we spend our time in Venice first, Dyer naturally leads us to think that Jeff will follow her there. Maybe he has; we never learn the narrator’s name in Varanasi. It seems doubtful, though, that Jeff and the narrator are the same person. The lover says she’ll be in Varanasi, and someone in Varanasi notes that Venice may be its mirror image, but otherwise the connection seems tenuous.

If anything, Dyer has probably set the cities alongside one another for contrast: Venice, the hedonistic, bellini-filled town of tourists; and Varanasi, joyously basking in death and poverty. Connected or otherwise, Dyer’s storytelling works splendidly: the journalists and the death-worshippers take to their jobs lightly and with good spirits, as does Dyer, as does the reader.

This, from Talking Points Memo:

WaPo: Key Lawmakers Reveal Investments In Health Industry

The Washington Post reports that nearly 30 key lawmakers helping to draft health-care legislation have financial holdings in the industry, totaling nearly $11 million. This includes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), with at least $50,000; Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), with between $254,000 and $560,000; and Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), with at least $3.2 million.

inspires me to ask: if Supreme Court justices are required (de facto if not de jure) to recuse themselves from cases in which they have a financial interest, why aren’t Congressmen and Congresswomen?

If you carry an iPhone, you’ll pretty soon want some way to sync your mobile device with the rest of your computers (laptop, work desktop, etc.). To some extent you can get around this by using purely web-based applications, like Google Calendar and Gmail. But then you won’t be able to use the iPhone’s built-in calendar application, which is really quite nice (somewhat limited — you can’t send invitations — but still nice); instead you’ll have to visit Google Calendar on the web every time you want to add an event. If you happen to be offline when you want to access your calendar, tough luck.

A lot of people will use MobileMe here, MobileMe being Apple’s data-in-the-cloud service. As Apple puts it,

MobileMe is a service that pushes new email, contacts, and calendar events over the air to all your devices. So your iPhone, Mac, and PC stay in perfect sync.

I think most people will find that they don’t need their email synced; if they’re using Gmail, IMAP, or Exchange, all their email is already out on the Internet. If you happen to be offline, the iPhone will have already cached the most recent 50 emails locally; MobileMe won’t add anything to that offline capability.

Which means MobileMe’s main virtue is that it lets you sync contacts and calendar events, all for $100 a year. But why pay $100 when you can get the same thing from Google for free?

Hence Google Sync, the new love of my life. It gets better than just syncing my own calendar; using Sync, my girlfriend and I share our calendars, like so:

1. I sync my cell to my calendar using Sync for the iPhone. I can now access all my iPhone events from my Google account, and vice versa.
2. She does all her calendaring through Outlook, so she installs Sync for Outlook. She can now access all her Outlook events from her Google account, and vice versa.
3. She sets the permissions on her Google Calendar, and I set them on mine, so that our Google accounts can talk to one another.
4. I tell Google Sync on my phone that it should download Stephanie’s events as well as my own.

Voilà: my phone now displays her appointments in a different color. If I change an event on the phone, it gets synced to Google Calendar (you see the “busy sending stuff over the network” icon whir for a moment). The reverse — events changed in Google appear on the phone — happens, too, though you need to tell the phone how often to poll; for that, go into Settings → Fetch New Data, turn Push on, and set the polling interval. Note that this will suck up some battery life; as an iPhone owner, you should already be used to running quickly out of juice. (I keep mine plugged in whenever I’m near a source of power.)

The contact syncing is worth a lot more than you might think. If you already have a Gmail account, a phone, and one or more IMAP accounts, you’re used to duplicating your contacts in multiple places. Google Sync lets you do it in one place and never think about it again. The convenience is nice. It’s especially nice to know that you will never again need to email all your friends, “I lost my phone. Can you send me all your contact info?”

There are only a couple downsides to Google Sync:

1. Behind the scenes, Sync is just a Google-licensed version of Microsoft ActiveSync. I’m pretty sure Google had to do it this way so that they could get a toe into the iPhone market; the 3G iPhone has built-in support for Microsoft Exchange, so this was the logical way to go. In effect, that is, Google Sync is a Microsoft Exchange account on your iPhone. Since the iPhone only supports one Exchange account at a time (probably for obscure licensing reasons), this means that you’ll need to ditch any existing Exchange accounts on your phone in order to use Sync. I’d imagine it galls Google to dump money into the Microsoft empire; maybe someday they’ll figure out how to squeeze around this roadblock.

2. I find that sometimes Sync doesn’t let me store more than one email address in a contact. Actually, I can’t say whether this is Sync’s fault or the iPhone’s, but in any case sometimes I can only get one address in there. (And I’m pretty sure it’s Sync’s fault. Pre-Google, I don’t think my iPhone had any trouble storing many email addresses.) It doesn’t always happen, but it often does. This may somehow be related to one of Sync’s known limitations:

   * Limited Contact Information

   The iPhone can synchronize up to 3 email address. Phone number synchronization is limited to 2 Home numbers, 1 Home Fax, 1 Mobile, 1 Pager, 3 Work (one will be labeled ‘Company Main’) and one Work Fax number.

3. This doesn’t count as a problem in Google Sync, but I should note it anyway: if you receive Lotus Notes invites, Notes inserts its own fields into the iCal email attachment that carries the invite. Where I work, the invite’s location is often a conference room that behaves like a Notes user (so that its time can be scheduled like any other user’s); it might say “9/Knuth” or “7/Perlis,” for instance. This is apparently encoded in such a way that Sync doesn’t understand it as a location, so Sync silently drops it. All of which is to say: certain Notes invites lose their location fields by the time they appear in Google. This may be something that Google can fix in the future. (And one of the virtues of software that sits out on the web is that it can be updated from moment to moment, as opposed to much desktop software.)

Other than those, Sync is a pure win. And it’s free!

Longtime readers know, and are often confused by, my affection for Ann Patchett’s earlier novel Bel Canto. Reaction to Bel Canto falls into two categories: either that the book is a universe unto itself, an absolutely magical, strangely modern fairy tale (a love story inside of a hostage drama) with an ending that slams the wind out of your lungs; or you don’t get what the big deal is. Needless to say, I’m in the its-own-universe camp: the characters in Bel Canto forget what’s happening right outside their doors and forget that their lovers happen also to be their captors. The reader forgets, too, even though Patchett reminds us time and again that the romance cannot last. She pulls off the miraculous trick of putting both her characters and her readers in the same carefree mindset, until she brutally yanks the rug out from under them. Bel Canto is a masterpiece of the storyteller’s art.

Which is why I’m quite sad to report that Patchett’s novel Run is a paint-by-numbers exercise. Actually, labeling it “paint-by-numbers” is an insult to the majesty and variety of the integers. Run is some kind of morality tale? Maybe? About the possibility of interracial harmony? But not really. What it is, really, is a boring story punctuated by a few moments of intensity here and there. As one of the characters himself puts it on page 255:

Tip had been hit by a car … there was a child and she was lovely but oh, the mother and the child had gone away again. He didn’t think the entire story could possibly take more than ten minutes start to finish, and yet to live it, to actually be a part of its playing out, was an excruciating investment of time.

“Excruciating” indeed. Patchett was contractually obligated, one assumes, to fill up a certain amount of book; she’s consequently required to fill up pages with pointless detail about her characters — details that tell us little about the characters (the young girl likes peanut-butter toast but won’t come out and say it? Joyous!) and don’t advance the story. I was reminded of Umberto Eco’s essay “How To Recognize A Porn Movie.” Porn, says Eco, isn’t just wall-to-wall intercourse; much as people might like to think that’s why they want, such a film would be unendurable. So between the fleshy parts, porn directors are required to insert pointless filler. The filler, he says, is the true mark of a porno:

Pornographic movies are full of people who climb into cars and drive for miles and miles, couples who waste incredible amounts of time signing in at hotel desks, gentlemen who spend many minutes in elevators before reaching their rooms, girls who sip various drinks and who fiddle interminably with laces and blouses before confessing to each other that they prefer Sappho to Don Juan. To put it simply, crudely, in porn movies, before you can see a healthy screw you have to put up with a documentary that could be sponsored by the Traffic Bureau.

By this measure, Run is porn. Though the filler comes between small tragedies: a car accident, a slip on the ice. Small-urban-catastrophe porn, we might call it.

The urban area in question is Boston. Again, those who have read this blog for a while know that my heart is entirely given over to Boston and Cambridge, so you’d think that I’d be pre-weakened to love Patchett’s book. It’s just not so. She describes Boston’s bus routes, the walking path one would take from Union Park to Back Bay station (down Tremont, right on Dartmouth, keep aiming at the Hancock Tower — you can thank me later), and the persistent misery of a Boston winter; what she doesn’t get to is the city’s heart. As near as I can tell, she placed Run in Boston so that she could make some cross-racial, cross-class tension happen, without actually engaging with the city’s painful interracial history. Placing it in Boston also allowed her to pose for the smarmy jacket photo, included at right.

You’d think, at the start of Run, that you were going to get dive deeply into the city’s history. Doyle, the ex-mayor of Boston, has dragooned his college-aged kids — Tip and Teddy — into seeing Jesse Jackson speak at the JFK School of Government. Here we have the very center of Boston Brahminhood — Harvard University — face-to-face with an icon of the civil-rights movement. Neither kid is interested in politics, even Jackson’s brand, despite their father’s endless attempts to sway them. Yet still they keep coming, out of filial obedience. That obedience reaches its end on the night we meet Tip and Teddy. After the Jackson speech, Doyle tries to convince the kids to come along to just one more event: a reception for Jackson at a fellow pol’s house. Tip has reached his limit; he won’t be coming, and that’s final. He’s addressing his brother and father, laying down the law, walking backwards right out onto JFK Street. A woman slams him from behind, he collapses to the snowy ground, the world is a blur, and we realize that someone has just saved Tip’s life. The woman who saved it, named Tennessee (”like the state”), meanwhile, has intersected the business end of an SUV.

Almost everyone you will meet in Run is there at that moment: Tennessee, her daughter, plus Doyle and his two kids. Among the missing is Doyle’s late wife, Bernadette. Bernadette’s ancestry contains a MacGuffin — a statue of the Virgin Mary — that opens the book, but which plays practically no role in the rest of the story. As for the book’s title, it’s hard to say what that’s about, either. Tennessee’s daughter, Kenya, runs quite well. The grace of a gazelle is second nature to her. You can expect that Patchett will make something important out of this; perhaps Kenya’s speed will be The Thing Which Pulls Her Out Of The Ghetto.

Say what? Kenya is black? You have just been zapped with the Patchett Narrative Taser. Behold its force.

Throughout the book, you will get little realizations like this. A mystery novel it is not, however; the realizations amount to a bit of punctuation in a very long, very boring sentence. You’ll amble from the scene of the accident, to Doyle’s house, to the hospital where Tennessee lays sedated, to the track in Allston where Kenya, to no one’s surprise, Shows The World What A Poor Black Girl Has Kept Hidden.

I’ll stop. You’ll periodically meet a book that is not good enough to hold your interest, but not terrible enough to hurl across the room (or hurl onto eBay). This is one such book.

I should note, on the bright side, that Bel Canto is such a joy that I still, even after reading Run, intend to pick up Patchett’s earlier Sorcerer's Apprentice (pre-Bel Canto) and her nonfiction ode to her friend Lucy Grealy, entitled Truth & Beauty. This is in keeping with a reading habit that I’ve remarked upon before: if the first book I read by a given author is good enough, I can power through four or five poor ones before losing steam. Let’s hope the rest of Patchett’s writings are more like Bel Canto and less like Run.

P.S.: The late John Updike, whose novels I’ve always found soporific but whose essay on the occasion of Ted Williams’s last game, entitled “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” is immortal, reviewed Run in 2007. I agree with nearly everything he wrote there.

A fact that I still can’t entirely wrap my head around, after reading this book, is that the Atari 2600 had only a few hundred bytes of RAM. It had little enough RAM that the programmer had to very carefully time his graphics operations so that characters got drawn to the screen before the monitor’s electron gun arrived. Unlike other game systems, the 2600 wasn’t “frame-buffered”: you couldn’t draw an entire screen’s worth of data, then push it to the screen all at once when the display refreshed.

This design limitation led to all manner of digital hacking, which somehow, miraculously, allowed the game industry — and Atari in particular — to flourish. Montfort and Bogost do a decent job explaining the technology, at a level somewhat above what most computer users can be expected to have; if you don’t grok the concept of a CPU register, a good bit of Racing the Beam will be tough going for you.

Their larger project is to view the whole world of gaming — from the code up to the artwork, to actually playing the game, to the social world around game consoles — with an understanding of how the technology limits and frees all the layers above it. What significance is it, from the game player’s perspective, that the Atari had special registers to render sprites? In what way did this free game designers? In what ways did it constrain them? The authors view videogames the way that many view art generally: as the act of overcoming the limitations of a medium. They believe that the lowest level of a game’s design has largely been left out of discussions of the larger game story.

They manage to bring all the layers of gaming together reasonably well, but the book didn’t wow me: I’d be unlikely to pursue any future books in the “Platform Series,” of which Racing the Beam is the first.

There’s a genre of tech writing that might legitimately be known as “fanboy fetish porn.” Steven Levy — in books like Crypto and Hackers — always skirts around the edge of the genre. In Insanely Great, he wades into the genre up to his hips.

This is the story of the Mac’s creation, and the story of Steve Jobs’s sticking his nose into everyone’s business. Levy seems a little unsure of Jobs: is he a jerk and an opportunist, who only attaches himself to a project when it might bring Jobs himself more power and glory? Does he force his limited design and technical powers on those beneath him? Is he trying to compensate for his non-Wozniak engineering skills?

Levy may believe all these things, but at the same time he can’t deny that Jobs is a major force for good within Apple. Like the mythical Shaker furniture builders, Jobs won’t let any piece of the Mac go out unless it’s perfect and beautiful. The Shakers wouldn’t build a dresser with a plywood face against a wall, even if no one else would ever see that side; God would see it. Likewise, says Levy, every square inch of the Mac was an aesthetic pleasure.

I may have been too young at the time to have really appreciated the Mac. I certainly appreciate the spur it provided to Windows. Only when Mac OS X came around did I see what all the fuss was about. OS X is the first bit of Mac software that I’ve enjoyed. OS 9 and before felt cartoonish to me. Bomb icons — indicating that some rogue application had taken down the entire computer, which you had no choice at that moment but to reboot — appeared with alarming frequency.

At an architectural level, cooperative multitasking may have been to blame for a lot of the Mac’s instabilities. You will never read anything at that level in Levy’s book. Levy is an English major imported into the world of computers, and I think he’s more interested in the people than he is in the technology. There’s a lot for journalists to sink their teeth into in the world of computers: the 16-hour days, the sleeping under desks, the seat-of-the-pants demos finished mere moments before the curtain comes up. Levy enjoys himself in this realm. He’s less able or willing to explain the technical details of why, exactly, the Mac was repeatedly delayed. The fact of the delay, and the excitement of cigar-chomping executives breathing down frantic hackers’ necks, is more his speed.

Insanely Great has some funny moments, again from the excited-visionary perspective rather than from the awesome-technology one. There’s Steve Jobs, explaining to one of his hardware developers that shaving two seconds off the Mac’s startup time, if millions of people reboot multiple times per day, will save 50 human lives every goddamned day. There are moments, like these, when I understood part of the Mac cult’s allure.

The rest of the book, though, was not convincing. The bomb icons were far too vivid in my memory. Plus I was a DOS 1-2-3 devotee as a child.

What I find funny is that I’ve only just joined the Cult of Apple, in the form of its iPhone. Unlike the Mac, the whole world realizes that the iPhone does its job better than any of its competitors. People are flocking to Apple in droves, giving the phone a market share and platform lead that other device manufacturers only dream about. The iPhone really is Insanely Great. Steve Jobs must be pleased.

In brief:

• My friend Mike (known to this blog as “mrz”) and I hit up Rendezvous in Central Square the other night. Highly recommended for drinks, much less so for food. (The food has the appearance of high class, without the taste.) Rendezvous features bartenders known citywide for their artisanship, and their skill at reconstructing classic cocktails. I believe they’re among the bars that use special ice machines to construct extremely pure, precisely geometric ice cubes. May seem like overkill; but with drinks that good, you won’t complain.

  Mike had the Nehru: “Saffron Gin. Lemon. Cardamom. Ice.” It accomplished a clever little trick, according to Mike: at the last possible moment, just before the taste vanishes from your mouth, you get a whiff of honey. This may be a pattern (n=2) within Rendezvous: my drink, which I can’t find on the menu, did the same thing. Mine featured some bitters called, if memory serves, “cigar bitters”, because the local fellow who makes them actually infuses them with smoke. Sounds gross, but isn’t, and is done so subtly that you don’t notice the smoke until — again — the very end. I’ve had a great many cocktails that I would call “tasty,” but few that I would call “brilliant.” These were brilliant.

• Adam Rosi-Kessel, Rachele Rosi-Kessel, their adorable children and I checked out Mike & Patty’s in Bay Village for breakfast today. Our friend Jamie Forrest, who lives in Brooklyn, pointed Adam and Rachele, who live in Roslindale, to a Serious Eats review of Mike & Patty’s — Serious Eats being a New York-based food blog.

  It is tiny. Let’s get that out in the open right away. The entire seating area is maybe 50 square feet. There is one long table (or maybe it’s three tiny adjoined tables) inside, with space for seven people if you squeeze in (and if two of those seven are adorable children). So you really have no choice but to chat with your neighbors; they will, after all, be practically sitting in your lap if you choose to dine in. (I gather a lot of people get takeout.) This makes Mike & Patty’s communal by default. There are very few places in Boston that allow you to meet people, so I suggest embracing this.

  The food is divine. The menu is mostly meat dishes, with cool twists on Cuban food, but there were enough fabulous vegetarian dishes that all of us could eat veg and enjoy ourselves. Mine, the Green Madame (”an open-faced croque with gruyere, sautéed collard greens and dijon crème fraîche, broiled. on pain de mie. topped with a fried egg. and served with a small green salad”) was heavenly.

  The whole Bay Village neighborhood is a diamond on the edge of the rough. From your table — the table — at Mike & Patty’s, you can see essentially the entire Bay Village triangle. It abuts the Theater District on one side, Back Bay proper on another, and a great deal of Shawmut Ave ugliness on the third. You’re in a little oasis that looks like the South End, Beacon Hill, and the North End rolled together. The perimeter is peppered with parks. So while the inside of the restaurant may not be terribly kid-friendly (your kids might have to walk under the table to get out), the rest of the idyll is a fun playground.

  Finally, I should note that — like most of Boston — Mike & Patty’s is eminently accessible by foot or mass transit. From my place in Cambridge’s Central Square to Mike & Patty’s was maybe 35 minutes, including a rather sizable wait for the red line. Shoot down to Park Street, get out on the south (Boylston station) end, and follow Tremont. You’ll come to an intersection that confusingly reads “Tremont Street” on both legs of a ninety-degree angle — confusingly, that is, until you realize that this is Boston, and even the illogic makes obscure sense. At that intesection, take a right to continue on Tremont. Follow Tremont through one or two more twists, then turn onto Church Street. The smell of bacon from Mike & Patty’s will both greet you before you make that final turn, and invite you in.

  I highly recommend both the neighborhood and the restaurant.

Bernie Sanders got it right a while ago:

For years now, they’ve told us that we can’t afford—that the government providing healthcare to all people is just unimaginable; it can’t be done. We don’t have the money to rebuild our infrastructure. We don’t have the money to wipe out poverty. We can’t do it. But all of a sudden, yeah, we do have $700 billion for a bailout of Wall Street.

Sanders appears eerily prescient, then: here comes the Washington Post, telling us that we must be gradual, incremental … very complex issues … tread lightly, you understand.

These titans of gradualism … where were they, pray tell, when the Bush administration was telling us to go fight in Iraq nownownow? Ah yes: on the front line, channeling the call to war through a megaphone.

Elite American opinion: always make time for war; never make time for the poor.

It’s reached the point where I almost can’t write about this country’s prosecution of the “war on terror” without getting physically sick to my stomach. But I feel like I have to ask one question: why shouldn’t suspected terrorists be treated like any other criminals?

That really is the heart of the entire dispute in this country. Well, not the heart of it. I think the heart of it probably has a lot more to do with fear of brown-skinned people, but let’s set that aside. Maybe the clearest way to say what I mean is like so: the set of proposed responses to terrorism seems to divide fairly cleanly between those who believe that the military should handle it, and those who believe that the criminal-justice system is perfectly competent to handle it.

I fall quite squarely in the criminal-justice camp, in large part because we’ve made such a profound mess by trying to handle this in a military way. Suspected terrorists have been housed at Guantánamo more or less explicitly because it’s beyond the reach of the law. Likewise with the air base at Bagram, in Afghanistan. Having been placed in a legal black hole, the U.S. government has felt entitled to do unspeakable things to them that have destroyed our reputation. (It’s not clear to me that the U.S. had a stellar reputation, human-rights-wise, even before the Bush administration. But let’s set that to one side. It is, in any case, clear that the Bush administration did nearly irreparable harm to whatever reputation we had.)

So it seems to me that swinging the pendulum back to the other side, where we treat suspected terrorists as ordinary criminals, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do after eight years of inhumanity.

And still, in any case: no one has explained to me why the criminal-justice system is not competent to handle all these cases. It handled the Unabomber and the original bombers of the World Trade Center; these, and others, are now housed in a supermax prison, from which they will never escape. If we’re actually afraid that they’ll escape, then doesn’t that say that we should fix the prisons rather than cast the suspected terrorists out into legal no-man’s-land?

Let’s add a word on terminology here: calling those housed at Guantánamo “terrorists” assumes that we’ve worked through enough procedure to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they’ve done what they’re accused of doing. It is extremely dangerous to allow ourselves to think that way. A criminal trial before a jury of our peers, with the evidentiary protections afforded by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, and with “beyond a reasonable doubt” ringing in our ears, is the gold standard in assigning guilt. We harm our own self-interest, and we weaken our system of justice, if we accept that the military knows best. So in my book, they’re “suspected terrorists” until an ordinary court has done its job.

If these people are actually guilty, shouldn’t we trust our criminal-justice system to prosecute them? If we don’t trust it to prosecute them and competently label guilt or innocence, then why do we trust it to assign guilt or innocence to run-of-the-mill murderers or rapists? Why did we trust it to competently try Tim McVeigh?

The answer seems fairly clear to me: we tried Tim McVeigh in a U.S. court because we had to: he was an American citizen captured within the United States, and was therefore subject to all the protections afforded to American citizens. Those housed at Guantánamo were captured abroad, and are therefore not subject to the same protections.

Of course, this makes life easier for the government: it’s a nice coincidence that what they want to do — torture some people — fits with what they’re allowed to do.

But we’re the United States. We don’t just do what we want to do. We abide by the rule of law even when we don’t have to. We don’t hold people in indefinite detention, even if we can. We don’t torture them, even if we can. We’re confident that our court system can correctly assign guilt or innocence, and that it will put convicted murderers to death or lock them up in solitary confinement for the remainder of their nightmarish days.

We’re a great nation because we don’t act as disgustingly as we’re allowed to. We tie our own hands because it’s the right thing to do. And because acting justly is in our own self-interest.

If you’ve read Murakami’s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, you know you’re in the presence of a genius who just needs to get himself under control sometimes. He can juggle a million interesting objects at once — hammers, torches, scarves, chainsaws, other jugglers — but sometimes he just gets bored, and while the audience is staring up, jaws agape, he lets all those colorful objects drop and walks off to have a sandwich. That’s Wind-Up Bird in a nutshell. Yet I still think most people would really enjoy it, despite its suffering from attention deficit disorder.

After Dark isn’t like that, in no small part because it spans a single night; I like to think of this as a Murakami setting for himself what the economists call a precommitment strategy: he knows that he can run off the rails if he’s not careful, so he sets up a story to keep himself in check.

And what a fun story it is. We meet a charming musician named Takahashi as he ambles into a Denny’s, late one night, and intrudes on a quiet, studious girl named Mari Asai who’s poring over her books. As it turns out, Takahashi knows Mari’s sister Eri, who is at least some kind of astonishing looker and probably something more like a model. She’s the kind of girl whom Takahashi would go out of his way to talk to, if she would only give him the time of day. When Mari veers into his orbit, and Takahashi realizes who she is, he has no choice but to ask about her gorgeous sister.

What we, the readers, know about Eri is that she is asleep in the alternate chapters. We jump back and forth between the Takahashi-and-Mari thread and the camera-focused-on-a-sleeping-Eri thread. And I say “camera” literally: we’re watching her through a television, the camera end of which is inside Eri’s bedroom. Only, not really her bedroom; more like Eri on a bed in an otherwise empty room. Is it a jail cell? What is this strange room with the camera?

While she sleeps, craziness ensues in Mari’s world. Takahashi spends long enough with Mari to know a) that she speaks Chinese, and b) that she’ll be studying in that Denny’s all night. He steps out to practice with his band, and while he’s out he runs into a friend of his who runs a pay-by-the-hour hotel frequented by prostitutes and their johns — a “love hotel,” as they call it. Turns out there’s — surprise surprise — a Chinese prostitute in there, badly beaten and scared, and no one knows how to talk to her. Takahashi knows just the translator. He sends the hotel’s manager into Denny’s to pick up Mari, who gladly comes along to help. She was bored in the diner anyway.

In one world we have the beautiful sister, asleep in a strange room. In the other we have the bookish sister translating for a bruised prostitute. The story has one toe in a beautiful world, one toe in the filth. At times those worlds collide, or at least pass each other on the street with a curt nod. Laying on the seam between the two worlds is a cell phone that literally passes messages between them; it’s a very clever trick that can only make the reader smile. (This reader, anyway.)

At just over 200 fairly-large-print pages, with rapid-fire dialogue between charming or menacing characters, you’ll finish After Dark within a couple hours. Murakami sometimes writes candy, but it’s intensely nourishing candy. (In this I liken it to early Beatles albums.) It may be tempting to avoid Murakami, but it’s even more tempting to read him.

(as we were)

…has anyone asked him, since 2001, whether he feels that we would have had a moral right to torture Tim McVeigh? That seems like the most obvious question to me, and yet I’ll be damned if I’ve seen anyone ask him that. Are we allowed to torture foreigners only because they’re foreigners? Does Cheney really rest the moral case for torture on that?

Of course, I can’t expect that Cheney or any other torture supporters would shed that many tears to see McVeigh tortured. I doubt many Americans would, generally, if they expected that it would save further American lives. Down that road lies the ticking-timebomb scenario, and the question whether we would, under any circumstances, allow ourselves to become the sort of people we hate.

While we’re down that road, I’m surprised no one has asked Cheney: when else is torture justified? At the height of the Cold War, should we have tortured captured spies? Should we have tortured the Rosenbergs? How about anarchists like Sacco and Vanzetti? Or how about now? What about mass murderers, if we think they have something to divulge?

How far, exactly, are we willing to take this? What sort of morals are we willing to absorb, so that we can prevent the physical destruction of the homeland?

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

…I feel required to make an arithmetic point in response to Dick Cheney:

What we did in the whole counter-terrorist area was extremely effective. And I think Obama needs to be careful because he appears to want to cancel out some of those most important policies. We were able to go nearly eight years without another major attack on the United States.

Under Clinton, we had one terror attack in 1993, a second about 26 months later, and then none for about 8.5 years, 5.75 of them while Clinton was sitting in the White House. So Clinton’s record of preventing terror is, depending upon when you stop the clock, better than Cheney’s. If you measure a president’s anti-terror prowess by the number of deaths on his watch, Clinton was about 17 times the president that Bush was. (If you add soldiers killed in Iraq, that ratio jumps to about 40.)

Before Clinton, had we ever had a terror attack? Depending upon how you define it, had we had any attack on the U.S. since Pearl Harbor? So then a long string of presidents, from Truman to George H.W. Bush, should have been loudly trumpeting their prowess at keeping the country safe. Cheney owes Jimmy Carter, among others, a debt of gratitude.

To put it more bluntly: Cheney, you’re boasting about the hypothetical deaths that didn’t happen, and the window when the country wasn’t attacked? How about the deaths that you did allow to happen? “We only let a few thousand New Yorkers and Washingtonians die” sounds like the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Yet another story describing derivatives as “complex”. Having now read a rather large amount in this area, I realize that we’ve been deceived: they’re not especially complex.

Take the term “sliced and diced,” for instance, which always gets applied to mortgage-backed securities. “Slicing and dicing,” I now realize, is a term used by people who don’t understand how mortgage-backed securities were packaged; it’s a substitute for actual thought. Much better to believe that mortgage-backed securities are beyond human comprehension, and that anyone who handled them was just fiddling with the levers on a machine he didn’t understand. I myself have used such terms on this here blog, and I freely admit that it was based on ignorance.

The best explanation of “slicing and dicing” that I’ve read is in “The Economics of Structured Finance”. The big question people seem to have is: how did subprime mortgages become AAA-rated securities? The answer is straightforward, and reasonable. In a word, it’s “tranching.” That is, no matter how bad a credit risk the mortgages are, you can assign them to securities that get hit first or last when a mortgage defaults. If I own a security in the lowest-rated tranche, I’ll get cleaned out more quickly than someone who owns a security from the highest-rated tranche. In a very real, non-mysterious sense, then, the lower tranche carries higher risk than the highest tranche. As such, the highest-rated tranche should carry a lower return than the lowest-rated one.

What is tricky is how to estimate these various risks, hence how to determine the returns they should carry. In turn, how risky a given mortgage is, and therefore how risky a given tranche is, depends on how correlated defaults are. If either all mortgages default, or none do, then the correlation is perfect and it doesn’t matter which tranche you’re in: you’re going to get cleaned out exactly when everyone else does. If they’re uncorrelated, then you can treat default risk like any other insurable risk. Finance has constructed some reasonable models over the last 40 years of what to do with correlations less than 1.

The trick is that you need data to estimate correlations. Since mortgage default was rare before this recent debacle, data for correlations was hard to come by. This is where we get the now-infamous Gaussian copula, which estimated correlations seemingly out of thin air. And as the “Structured Finance” paper explains, the risk that you’ll be cleaned out in a certain instrument (CDO-Squared) is highly sensitive to the correlation between mortgages.

The term “derivative” generally means “a security whose value changes when the value of an underlying asset changes”; the derivative derives its value from the other asset. A mortgage-backed security derives its value from an underlying mortgage. A security which gives you the right — but not the obligation — to buy a given security at a given time, is a derivative of that security, and is called an “option.” (An option that entitles you to buy is called a “call option.” An option which entitled you to sell is called a “put option.”)

There’s a set of results, by now classical, on how much you should be willing to pay right now in order to buy that security later on. How much, for instance, should you be willing to pay to buy a share of General Motors stock one hour from now at $100? Given that GM is, at this moment, trading for $1.59, your answer should be “not very much at all.” The reason is clear: GM stock is extraordinarily unlikely to reach $100 within an hour. Suppose you paid $1 for the right — but, crucially, not the obligation — to buy GM at $100 in an hour. You would not exercise that right, of course, because you’d be drastically overpaying. You are nearly certain to lose $1.

The lesson here is that the price you should pay for an option depends on how rapidly the stock price moves. If GM routinely swung between $150 and $1.50 in the course of a day, you might be more willing to pay for the right to buy at $100. So a lot depends, then, on knowing how much GM stock moves. What you want is the probability distribution of GM’s stock-price movements. A lot of the theory makes assumptions about the general shape of this probability distribution. It typically assumes that stock-price movements look like a bell curve, or “Gaussian distribution.” You can weaken this assumption in various ways. When all is said and done, though, you need to take some sort of guess about how rapidly the stock price will change between now and when the option is exercised.

But note in all of this that there’s nothing really complex happening. The pricing of options depends on various assumptions about stock-price movements which may or may not be true. The construction of a mortgage-backed security is not difficult, at least in outline: pool mortgage payments, then divide them into tranches that have lower or higher exposure to default risk. At least in hindsight, it turns out that assets were more correlated than people expected. That doesn’t make the securities “mysterious” or “complex”; it means people made mistakes. The worst that can be said is that they used the wrong models, which in turn means they made the wrong assumptions. Underlying all of this might be the assumption that home prices would rise forever. That’s it, so far as I can tell. A bad assumption leads to a bad model, which fails catastrophically in the real world. Therein lies your “complexity.”

I blame the use of this term on people who don’t understand a little bit of statistics. “Complex” is also one of those terms that allows people to avoid clarifying their thoughts. Ze Frank talked about this:

The cool thing is, anyone can do that. Just say, “Well, it’s a little more complicated than that,” and the amazing thing is, no matter what you’re talking about, you’re probably right!

You see it everywhere. Describing a food’s taste as “complex” gives you the appearance of erudition without your needing to actually say anything; most any food, except maybe pure sugar and pure vinegar, is complex, inasmuch as it’s not reducible to a single note. Describing your emotions in a particular situation as “complex” makes you sound like a deep person. (Stephen King somewhere describes an interaction with an undergraduate English major: she tells him that something “is, like, hard to put into words,” to which he replies that she “ought to, like, pick a different fucking major.”)

The point of any interesting discipline is to actually solve problems, not to stand in awe of their staggering complexity. That goes double when it’s something like the economy, whose functioning it is everyone’s job to understand, at least at some level. Treating economics and statistics as strange incantations from a rarefied priesthood is, we now know, a recipe for suicide.