11D

Spreadin' Love

How to compose good powerpoint presentations. (via Macaroni)

Archaeologists find the missing Persian army. 

Jeremy Teigen discusses voter turnout in New Jersey. I was surprised to learn that 10.4 percent of our population aren't citizens. 

My co-bloggers at Everyday Politics have begun to hit their stride. Michael Xenos writes about the youth vote in off-year elections. Scott Lemieux wonders whether Obama can be considered to be a Reconstruction President. Reconstruction Presidents, according to Stephen Skowronek, act as a battering ram to the old order; they shift party alliances and establish new policy preferences. My response to Lemieux? Skowronek also says that modern presidents can never truly reshape the political system, like Lincoln and FDR did, because of the huge growth of the bureaucracy, which limits change.

Garbage patches in the Pacific.

My Grandmother's War Stories. Great art!

As I spend days sorting through barely played games and toys, I would love to have a No-Gift Christmas.

No Cars Allowed

Redesigning Cities

I've been reading great stuff lately on the politics of redesigning urban areas, but mostly these have been case studies of New Orleans. I have a huge weakness for New Urbanism and their plans to redesign the city. Check out the recent article in the Atlantic about the homes going up in New Orleans. Good for Brad Pitt.

Detroit has a whole different set of problems. They are dealing with a large geographic area that is losing population. They are knocking down crumbling building and not building anything in its place.

This phenomenon prompted someone to coin the term “urban prairie” to capture the idea of vast tracts of formerly urbanized land returning to nature.

(Via Loren on Facebook)

And check out these designs for green buildings in NYC. (Via Ann P on Facebook)

How Dirty is Your House?

As part of my fall unemployment project, I'm trying to straighten out the house. We moved into a fixer-upper five years ago. We fixed some things, but most projects got put on hold. A tidy house was low priority.

Right now, I've got three guys from a window cleaning service marching through the house. Because we have old fashioned windows, it's a big job that involves ladders and the removal of storm windows and screens. I don't think the windows have been properly cleaned in this house for two decades. 

Assigning Blame

The blogosphere and on op-ed pages are full of thoughtful commentary on whether or not we should blame to Nidal Hasan for the Fort Hood incident, example Megan McArdle, David Brooks, and John Podhoretz.  Is he crazy, evil, or part of the mass insanity of radical Islamism? Is he Dylan Klebold or is he a suicide bomber?

The traditional Media and Politics textbooks describe three stages to media coverage of crises. The first stage is when everybody rushes to get the initial facts. The reporting tends to be quick, off the cuff, and not always correct. The second stage is when they sort out the facts, ie how many people died and who did it, and they get reactions from important officials. The third stage is the big lessons stage. Reporters and pundits seek to put a framework of meaning around the horror. They frame the incident in terms of gun control or insanity or world politics. Then they make policy recommendations.

The rise of new media has screwed up those neat stages and wrecked havoc with the media textbooks, which haven't yet been amended. Even before the media arrives at the scene of the disaster, eye-witnesses are posting pictures of events from the cell phones on Facebook or twittering events. It's stage 1/2. In order to compete with arm chair pundits, like myself, they run to stage three. There is a rush to find meaning even before the facts are in.

We've got to slow down.

Changing Behavior

The New York Times article on vodka consumption in Russia was great. I even loved this picture that accompanied the article. Check out that nurse. Something about her hair just screams fetish.

Some stats from the article:

• Russians consume roughly 4.75 gallons of pure alcohol a person annually. 
• Life expectancy for Russian men is now 60 years, in part because of alcoholism.
• alcohol was the cause of more than half of all deaths of people ages 15 to 54, often from accidents, violence or alcohol poisoning

Russia is trying to figure out ways to curb vodka consumption in their country, but has been unsuccessful, because of the cultural attachment to the clear liquor. Some think that they would have to substantially raise the price of vodka to lead to a change in behavior. This would be a great case study for a public policy class.

Ezra Klein discussed the difficulties in creating public policy that would change American eating habits. While policy was able to deal with smoking habits, he is pessimistic that policy can be created to get people to stop eating their Cocoa Krispies.

Basic steps could be put in place. For example, food manufacturers should be stopped from making false claims about their product. They were recently forced to stop claiming that their cereal would boost immunity and stop Swine Flu. How about warning labels on Pop Tarts?

Protecting the Pitbulls

Malcolm Gladwell wrote one of the best essays of the year in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago. In Offensive Play, Gladwell begins by describing the terrible brain injuries that linebackers get from repeatedly hitting each other. Their job is to use their heads as battering rams, and the repeated bangs in the head, sometimes as many as a hundred in a routine practice, add up and lead to dementia similar to those of people who suffer from Alzheimer's disease.

That bit of reporting was interesting on its own, but Gladwell subtly adds another layer to the article. Using Michael Vick as a bridge, he turns to the topic of dog fighting. He discusses anthropological research about dog fighting. The dogs are bred to keep attacking over and over despite terrible injury. Due to their intense desire to please their owner, they fight with broken bones and blood gushing from their neck.

He makes clear comparisons to the football. Is football just as cruel and blood thirsty as dogfighting? Are we destroying these athletes? And are football fans just as diabolical as those who sit around the dog fight rings and put money on the fighting dogs? How different are my son and my husband who watched the football from a friend's sofa last night from Michael Vick who did jail time for cheering on the pitbulls?

He ends the essay with a discussion of the current situation for Vick's pit bulls. Instead of being euthanized, they were sent to an expensive and intensive rehabilitation center to learn how to trust humans again. Most of those dogs will never be the family dog in a suburban home. They have been too thoroughly ruined, but Gladwell said that we still feel that their expensive care is morally justified, because we have an obligation to care for dogs that heroicly fought for the love of their owners.

Perhaps we have a moral obligation to care for dementia-ridden linebackers who also heroic fought for their owners without regard to their personal safety.

I haven't been a huge fan of Gladwell's books, but this essay is a triumph. I love the gradual and layered transitions. Fine writing.

In Harvard Magazine, Louis Menand writes about the PhD problem. Students, especially those in the humanities, spend a decade getting a PhD that doesn't prepare them for teaching or for gainful employment. The system results in homogeneous, over-prepared teaching staff; it uses ABDs as cheap labor. Like Gladwell, he questions the cruelty of the system that destroys hard-working, young people. Instead of using their heads to slam against the opposing team, they slam their heads against the books, dissertations, fickle advisors, and an impossible job market. They face repeated assaults from nasty peer review letters and snide discussants at conferences.

One pressure on universities to reduce radically the time-to-degree is simple humanitarianism. Lives are warped because of the length and uncertainty of the doctoral education process. Many people drop in and drop out and then drop in again; a large proportion of students never finish; and some people have to retool at relatively advanced ages. Put in less personal terms, there is a huge social inefficiency in taking people of high intelligence and devoting resources to training them in programs that half will never complete and for jobs that most will not get. Unfortunately, there is an institutional efficiency, which is that graduate students constitute a cheap labor force.

One of the commenters said that after getting a Harvard PhD, he/she has been unable to find work and was on the brink of homelessness. Certainly the system has an obligation to help these individuals who gamely fought the losing battle of graduate school.

The Old Armadillo

Question of the Day -- Weekend Plans

It's a crisp fall day in New Jersey. There are still some leaves lingering on the trees, and the sun is shining. The weekend is packed with events - two soccer games, one birthday party, a bridal shower, a hike, CCD, and an invite to my brother's for meatballs.

Question of the Day - What are you doing this weekend?

Morning at Home

This morning, Jonah finally recovered from the three-day, school trip and stopped talking in the Peewee Herman voice that he picked up from the ADHD kid in his cabin, which is a good thing, because I was hoarse from yelling at him to knock it off. And I'm not guilty about it at all.

Three Links on Academia

The Chronicle of Higher Ed linked to our post about the salaries of college presidents in relation to the salary of adjuncts. I'm reading Louis Menand on the PhD problem. And Michael Berube discusses the truly dreadful job market.

How the Internet Changes Everything

Check out Stefana Broadbent talking about how the Internet fosters intimacy.

Really interested in Ken Auletta's new book on Google . Great interview with him on NPR yesterday.

The Kids Are Home

The kids are home. Again. In New Jersey, the teachers have off for the union's annual conference, which few actually attend. I'm using the two days to catch up on mountains of laundry, sort out old toys, put away Halloween crap, dump the candy, and drag the kids around to various errands. We've already done a trip to the Orthodontist who is trying to close the gap between Jonah's front teeth. Jonah proudly told the assistant that he can put a straw between his teeth and drink his milk without opening his mouth.

What's not going to happen today? Video games. Because they've already lost computers privileges for wrestling with each other and not listening when I told them to knock it off. Jonah returned from a three day field trip to the woods. Every school in New Jersey has to do this damn field trip now. They walk across a rope ladder and learn about cooperation and team work. They also get really hyper and often come home with bedbugs. Another goal for the trip is to have the kids make new friends. Jonah spent the whole trip with the insane kid who sticks French fries up his nose. So, he's out of his mind right now and needs to calm down. No video games.

But no video games means no time on the computer for me. I'll try to get back here later the afternoon, but you all are on your own until then.

Spreadin' Love

I'm too depressed to talk about last night's Gubernatorial race in New Jersey. Here's an interactive map, which shows the devastation.

David Brooks' column about technology killing romance and leading to a hook-up culture was classic, grouchy grandpa writing. I'm glad that Ezra Klein responded.

Dooce put in a community section into her blog. Guess it's bringing in a lot of people.

How to use an apostrophe.

I'm equally interested in the book reviews of Pioneer Woman's new cookbook and of the book of de Tocqueville letters. Quel weirdo.

God, I love this blog. Makes me weep that I live in the suburbs.

My! The Obamas' cook is a babe, isn't he?

Bodies in the Building

In the Wire, two psychopathic gangsters killed off anyone who threatened the power of their boss and hid the bodies in deserted buildings. It took a long time for the cops to discover the bodies because there are just so many deserted buildings in Baltimore and because the cops weren't all that interested in finding out what happened to small time crooks.

Real life is worse than fiction.

A psychopath in Cleveland has been probably sexually molesting and certainly killing women in Cleveland. He preyed on women with drug problems, who were living off the streets, because he knew that nobody would look for them. He was right.

He hid the bodies around his own house -- in the basement, in crawl spaces, in a bucket. He may have hidden more in deserted buildings nearby.

On one of the morning shows this morning, the family of one victim talks about how indifferent the police were to the disappearance of a female drug addict. Another neighbor told a similar story to the New York Times.

Pissed off.

Columny

Last week, Maureen Dowd had fun enraging the Archbishop of New York. Now, she's going after Rush. Them's low hanging fruit for me, so I'm not going to discuss the substance of her column. I did love the writing. An excerpt:

I went on to columny, as my pal Bill Safire called it, and Rush went on to calumny.

As he and Sarah Palin conduct their auto-da-fé of moderate Republicans — “Moderates by definition have no principles,” he told his radio audience on Monday — Limbaugh is more than ever the face of his party, as Rahm Emanuel said.

He’s also the mouth.

Limbaugh is right that Democrats tend to dither too much. They’re always wondering if they’re doing the right thing, indulging in on-the-one-hand, on-the-other paralysis by analysis, seeing, as James Carville put it, “six sides to the Pentagon.”

Good-Bye To All That

Susan Dominus has a nice essay in the New York Times about the demise of the writing industry. She refers to an essay by Joan Didion, "Good-bye To All That," a fun read that describes Didion's gradual weariness of the New York fabulous life. Dominus writes that all writers are going to have to say good-bye not only to the cocktail parties and phoniness, but also to earning a living at their trade.

She writes,

Autistic Categories

Experts are phasing out the term Asperger's Disorder. Traditionally, Asperger's kids are socially awkward, highly verbal, clumsy, and of normal to high intelligence. However, experts starting putting kids with poor verbal skills, but high intelligence into that category, because the other categories didn't deal with high intelligence and other unusual talents (such as hyperlexia and spacial or mathematical abilities). It's very difficult to make categories of types of autism. Each kid is entirely different.

More Exciting Than the World Series

What's more exciting than the World Series? Yes, there's the obvious. The women's long distance runners in the New York City marathon. Duh! But there's also the NJ governor's race.

According Mystery Pollster, the polls are showing a dead heat. He says 42% for Christie and 42% for Corzine. Why the hell is this so close? Christie, for God's sake, is from the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican party. He wanted to turn back the stimulus money from Washington. He'll slash social services.

The corruption scandal in New Jersey among Democrats really killed Corzine. Yes, the Democratic Party in New Jersey is super dirty. They've got my people, the goombas in Hudson County, taking care of their pals. But the Republican party in New Jersey isn't much better. New Jersey is one of the most corrupt states in the country, after Rhodes Island and Louisiana. Christie is part of this same dirty system.

Cough, Cold, Kid

My Facebook friends are all sick. I wonder if there is a wonk at Facebook graphing the rising trend of the status updates including the words "sick" and "ill" and "coughing a lung out."

In the comment section of the previous post, Western Dave writes, "Significant Other and I have been dealing with major stress with sick kids. It's been over a month since either of us spent a full week at work. Any chance of having an open thread or discussion on this?"

My kids are healthy right now (salt, wood, spit) and I don't have to be in the classroom, so I am not dealing with work pressures and vomit on the floor right now. But sick kids and work have been a huge issue for us in the past, example here and here.

So open thread. Vent. What reforms should be made?

UPDATE: Lack of Paid Sick Days May Worsen Flu Pandemic 

UPDATE2: Check out Jill at Feministe.