Steve Reads

Has anyone read William T. Vollmann’s Rising up and Rising Down? Is it worth the time?

Excellent book review by Jeffrey Toobin (he of The Nine fame). Via Hendrik Hertzberg, whose blog you really want to be reading. Everything he writes there is gold.

Toobin’s review is included below.

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Color me skeptical, but I have my doubts that a new contract extending the MBTA’s “worst purchase ever” will in fact “result[] in fewer delays.” I’d like to see the numbers on what connection delays have with the number of seats on tracks at any given moment. In fact today my red line train from Downtown Crossing was stuck for a few minutes in the little passageway between Downtown Crossing and Park Street. I presume we were sitting behind another train. In this case, having fewer trains on the tracks would have sped things up.

Once again, I’d like to call on journalists not to take official pronouncements at face value.

I was showing my man Adam Gerard around Boston this weekend, so I had to come embarrassingly face-to-face again with how dysfunctional it is. I laugh a lot of the time at how poorly the city runs, but talking with Adam this weekend I realized that I don’t often explain what that’s about. So let me clarify: I really really wish the city worked better. Laughing at it is the only way I can cope with it. Two examples of pretty common Boston incomprehensibilities:

1. Positioning T employees or police officers at crucial intersections because of construction. But it’s not construction itself that’s the problem: it’s that the construction has been done in such a way that signs are invisible, or because walkways have been laid out illogically. The employees are necessary because other parts of the process aren’t working. For a real live example of this happening right now in your very neighborhood, go to Harvard Square and try to get from the T to the Harvard Coop.

2. More rules that only make sense if you’re a Bostonian and can fill in the context that the rules themselves do not provide. I took the T to North Station today to grab the train to Exeter, and momentarily sighed when the conductor said that, because of track work, the orange line’s last stop would be Haymarket. There would be shuttle-bus service between Haymarket and Oak Grove. A later announcement said that the shuttle bus would hit Community College, Sullivan Square, and the rest. It took me a few seconds to realize what was missing: North Station. How could the bus miss such an important stop? Turns out that Haymarket was “the last stop,” and yet the train was actually continuing on to North Station. And indeed, the T conductor mentioned these two contradictory statements back to back a few seconds later. At best he made a number of people like me confused and anxious that we’d miss our trains. At worst, people got off at Haymarket and assumed that the bus would take them to North Station. I’m not sure, but I think the bus might actually skip North Station.

Then there are the littler things. When you get on at most T stations nowadays, they beep approvingly when you use a valid card to get through the turnstiles; they give a more menacing beep if your card fails to work. The beeps are loud enough that everyone in the station can hear them. We don’t need to know how many people got through or didn’t; they could quiet the beeps down. At their worst, as happened yesterday, the menacing beep continues … and continues … and continues … until a valid card goes through. Yesterday this continued for a good minute.

Or the T radio “experiment” that failed so miserably … which the T is planning to replace with television.

Or the failed attempts to replace human announcers with prerecorded voices. In some ways this is my favorite. On many red line trains, there’s a nice voice telling you “The next stop is … Charles/MGH.” But then, for whatever reason, those voices sometimes get the next stop wrong; maybe the GPS gets flipped around. So then a train conductor with a thick Boston accent comes on and says incomprehensibly — if you’re not from the area — that in fact the next stop is Kendall/MIT or whatever. They end up needing their announcers to speak anyway. Meanwhile if you’re a tourist on the train, you’re turning to the people next to you to ask, with some anxiety, which stop is in fact next. I can only imagine the levers that need to be wiggled and buttons that need to be pushed at the front of the car to fix the GPS when it breaks.

Or the buskers. How much do I have to pay them not to sing?

In T stations, rather than on the cars, they’ve replaced human voices with automated ones for certain messages. I’m not sure, but I have a very plausible story about how these work and why they were deployed. First off, I should note that they sound like the robot from “Fitter Happier”; everything is a little strange, like when the voice says “shuttle BUS serv…iss.” I assume they feed the machine a text version of whatever message they want, such as the one announcing shuttle-bus service between Haymarket and Oak Grove. But I’m sure they have to hand-train the machine how to pronounce certain words: “MBTA” is pronounced “emm-bee-tee-ay,” not “emb-tuh.” I’d love to see the numbers on how much work they had to put into that system, rather than just hiring the same guy who does the voices for the red line. Someone up there is looking for technological fixes when the answer might involve making better use of humans.

I don’t think the MBTA’s employees realize just how important a functioning mass-transit system is to this city (or any city that deserves the title). At least some people get the importance of reducing commute time. I don’t know that T employees do. I don’t know that they realize, either, that every time the T gets a little worse, more people decide to bail on it and take cars to work instead. Every time the T is a joy to ride, on the other hand, a few more people decide to move close to a T stop. When they do, the neighborhoods around them become a little nicer: people are choosing to live there, rather than sticking around because they have no other options. The neighborhood becomes a community of choice rather than a community of desperation. Concentration is the lifeblood of a city. Every time I see my T not working, I get angry and sad that someone has decided — deliberately or otherwise — to kill my city by a thousand cuts.

I’ve said before that I think cheap burritos and reliable mass transit are two of the main indicators of a city’s quality. We’ve got the first one covered (as Adam, to my great joy, confirmed this weekend), but the second needs an awful lot of work.

Lots of people are frustrated. Is the T listening?

I like the first sentence in Amartya Sen‘s Collective Choice and Social Welfare :

There is something in common between singing romantic songs about an abstract motherland and doing optimization exercises with an arbitrary objective function for a society.

I dunno, I just like that.

(Book discovered on Crooked Timber.)

The book alternates between heavily mathematical chapters, and informal expositions of the same ideas. Sen sets himself up as a very charming writer elsewhere in the introduction:

The calm economic technician who states that imposing a tax on commodity α will be inoptimal provides a judgement on collective choice of one type. The angry crowd which, on July 14, 1789, responded to De Launay, the governor of Bastille, by shouting, “Down with the second drawbridge!” was involved in a collective choice of a somewhat different kind. The subject [of collective choice] is wide enough to cover both, but the approach to these problems must, of course, differ substantially.

(Internal citation omitted, but it’s a pointer to Georges Lefebvre’s The Coming of the French Revolution, which goes on the list.)

Econometrica had a nice review of Sen’s book which you can find on Jstor, and which I include below.

I think Collective Choice and Social Welfare will turn out to be too mathematical for me, but it’s worth a shot anyway.

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I picked up Seeing Like A State, I thought on Balkin‘s recommendation (or Tamanaha’s, or Lederman’s), but apparently not. Then, via Cosma Shalizi’s del.icio.us feed, I found Brad DeLong’s review of Seeing Like A State. Somewhere in there I believe I also found Henry Farrell’s passing mention (“the only academic work I’ve ever read that made me want to dash off a fan-letter to the author”). Three is the magic number, so off to the library I went.

Seeing Like A State, says the introduction, is about why centralized planning has failed. In particular, it’s about industrialized governments’ habit of wiping out (from its perspective) pathologies that don’t fit with the model it has made of the world, for the purposes of massive social re-engineering. DeLong faults Seeing Like A State for ignoring its own Hayekian heritage. I can’t really speak to that yet, except to note that Scott explicitly disclaims that heritage in the introduction and thanks Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, and Proudhon. The index says that Hayek is mentioned on three pages and within three footnotes.

What’s odd to me is that Popper is nowhere to be found in that index. Granted that I’ve only read the intro, but it seems to me that piecemeal social engineering is exactly what Scott is after.

He has good things to say about Jane Jacobs, which warms my heart. He celebrates organic, small-scale beauty, just like Jacobs did. Jacobs thought of cities themselves last. Think of sidewalks first, she said. Then think of parks. Think of storefronts somewhere in there. After a while you’ll have solved a lot of cities’ problems, and you’ll never once have had to think about what a city is. Our brains aren’t wired to understand that sort of complexity; better by far to focus on problems where we can tweak a variable and watch how things change in real time.

…which was exactly Popper’s point. So at an initial view, Popper, Jacobs and Scott have a lot in common.

That said, I can also see how you could get from here to the arch-capitalist critique in the time it takes to sneeze. I wonder how Scott manages to avoid that jump.

I bought at least one bottle of exceptional wine last night (I’ve not yet opened the second), which Adam, Rachele and I took care of. I always mean to keep track of which bottles I liked, so here’s where the list will go:

• Carema 2002
• Solatione Chianti
• Château Croizet Bages. I had a 1983 that was out of this world, but I doubt I’ll see that again.
• Buttonwood 2003 merlot
• Wild Horse pinot noir 2005
• Nozzole chianti 2003 (It’s a small list for now)

World War II interrogators speak out.

“During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” said George Frenkel, 87, of Kensington. “We extracted information in a battle of the wits. I’m proud to say I never compromised my humanity.”

I should have written about Wayward Christian Soldiers a few days ago when I finished it, just to lock the thoughts down before they escaped.

Charles Marsh could be classified as a liberal Christian, which is a surprisingly rare breed. It’s odd that it’s so rare: the religion of a poor pacifist carpenter has been co-opted in the United States by a political party that believes in

excoriating immigrants, Catholics, “that communist Roosevelt,” Russian spies in the State Department, appeasers and other advocates of “better red than dead,” rootless cosmopolitans, advocates of “peaceful coexistence” and other graduates of Dean Acheson’s Cowardly College of Containment, uppity Negroes, Hollywood, liberal socialists who want to control your life, the nattering nabobs of negativism in the press, Mexicans, muslims, homosexuals, China, atheists.

Yet if you’re expecting Marsh to defend liberal policies on Christian grounds, Wayward Christian Soldiers is the wrong book for you. In large part Marsh wants to argue that Christianity will not be rescued until it dissociates itself from political power. As long as Christians sell their beliefs for a bit of access, they are in a state of sin. (Words like “sin” and “witness,” by the way, have specific meanings to Christians that I’m sure I’m misusing. I apologize for that.)

I do think that Marsh is walking a bit of tightrope. He seems to want Christianity to be apolitical, but of course that’s impossible and of course authentic Christian belief will mean siding with one party or another on given issues. Yet Marsh can’t very well propose that Christians should all be Democrats, much as he might believe that they’re more Christlike than the Republicans; that would defeat his whole goal of disconnecting Christians from politics altogether. So Marsh wants to be a political advocate, and indeed at times he is — as when he notes that American Christians are overwhelmingly in favor of the Iraq War, while every single Christian congregation outside of the United States opposes it. The best advice he can give is that Christians should follow their conscience, and shouldn’t trade their love of Christ for a bit of power here and there.

Marsh’s comparison throughout Wayward Christian Soldiers is to German Christians after World War II. How could the religion save itself after its complete ethical collapse in the face of the Nazis? Which brings up an issue that Marsh never seems to answer: what is it structurally about the Christian church that has made it so pliable so often throughout history? No institution, of course, escapes the glare of history unscathed (“Of course, unions are often corrupt and stifling; but this doesn’t exactly single them out from among governments, corporations, churches, schools, armies, political parties, social movements, think-tanks, bowling leagues, etc., as the most depraved and vicious of human institutions.”), but this does raise a question: why, exactly, should an outsider look fondly on Christians as against any other organization? What ethical command does Christianity hold over anyone? Corporations don’t claim (or shouldn’t) to be holding the ethical high ground; Christianity is, if nothing else, an ethical system — that is, a system for right living. If it has so often failed to respond ethically in the face of great evil, what exactly is left?

As with so many books that I’ve read by Christians (The Rise of Christianity and Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox leap to mind), Marsh is already committed to the view that Jesus was the son of God, rose from the dead and so forth. If you don’t accept those premises, the rest of Christianity — and hence the rest of those books — will be hard to stomach.

I can accept that the right way to live is to give up all your worldly possessions and tend to the least fortunate. It’s debatable, but I can at least accept it. I don’t understand, though, why I have to believe anything about Jesus in order to believe that this is the right way to live. And thus far the only explanations I’ve found of why I should believe in Him are question-begging or groundless.

Chris Young makes an extremely excellent point:

In a NYT piece about Mukasey, Scott Shane writes:

If Mr. Mukasey’s nomination reaches the Senate floor, moderate Democrats appear likely to join Republicans to produce a majority for confirmation.

Silly Mr. Shane! Democrats who vote to confirm nominees who lie to congress about torture aren’t moderates. They’re extremists who don’t care about whether the United States enforces its own laws and lives up to its international obligations. There’s nothing about reporting the news that obliges Mr. Shane to abuse the English language in this way.

Does anyone know how to make <!-- more --> links work in WordPress? Under Blosxom you just did it like so:

Text that above the fold

<!-- more -->

Text below the fold

It looks like that’s how it should work in WordPress too, and yet … it’s not working. If anyone knows the magic, do let me know.

P.S. (9 November 2007): Turns out that we just can’t have any spaces between the <-- and the more, or between the more and the -->. This is different than the behavior I’m used to from Blosxom. Alas.

I’m sorry; I enjoyed The Onion‘s article “Colorado Rockies: ‘What The Fuck Just Happened?’” just too much. It’s included below.

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