The Depression – If Only Things Were That Good – NYTimes.com
Posted: October 9, 2011 Filed under: Politics Leave a comment »But the country has not developed any major new industries that employ large and growing numbers of workers.
There is no contemporary version of the 1870s railroads, the 1920s auto industry or even the 1990s Internet sector. Total economic output over the last decade, as measured by the gross domestic product, has grown more slowly than in any 10-year period during the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s or ’90s.
Perhaps the most important reason, beyond the financial crisis, is the overall skill level of the work force. The United States is the only rich country in the world that has not substantially increased the share of young adults with the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree over the past three decades. Some less technical measures of human capital, like the percentage of children living with two parents, have deteriorated. The country has also chosen not to welcome many scientists and entrepreneurs who would like to move here.
The relationship between skills and economic success is not an exact one, yet it is certainly strong enough to notice, and not just in the reams of peer-reviewed studies on the subject. Australia, New Zealand, Canada and much of Northern Europe have made considerable educational progress since the 1980s, for instance. Their unemployment rates, which were once higher than ours, are now lower. Within this country, the 50 most educated metropolitan areas have an average jobless rate of 7.3 percent, according to Moody’s Analytics; in the 50 least educated, the average rate is 11.4 percent.
Despite the media’s focus on those college graduates who are struggling, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that people with a four-year degree — who have an unemployment rate of just 4.3 percent — are barely experiencing an economic downturn.
via The Depression – If Only Things Were That Good – NYTimes.com.
Are we going to blame this on Wall Street?
Rob Walker: Pictures of the Familiar: Observers Room: Design Observer
Posted: October 4, 2011 Filed under: Life Leave a comment »The camera is a device that “makes real what one is experiencing,” Susan Sontag argued, whether for “cosmopolitans accumulating photograph-trophies of their boat trip up the Albert Nile,” or “lower-middle-class vacationers taking snapshots of the Eiffel Tower or Niagara falls.” Moreover: the “alliance … between photography and tourism” is at the heart of what she called “the predatory side of photography.” We’re still hunter-gatherers, under this theory, bagging images like sustenance.More recently, I was randomly reminded of a passage from White Noise that seems relevant. It’s a somewhat famous bit about “The Most Photographed Barn In America,” and conveniently, a site called Check In Architecture has plucked that very excerpt and posted it right here. Basically the barn is known for being photographed, and as a result, people show up to photograph it. “Every photograph reinforces the aura,” one of DeLillo’s characters observes. The suggestion here is that we take pictures of much-photographed things precisely because they are much-photographed. “GPS and The End of the Road,” an essay by Ari N. Schulman, in the Spring 2011 edition of The New Atlantis, adds another wrinkle. The piece cites a number of other writers, most notably Walker Percy, complaining about the problem of pre-familiarity, whether via imagery or guidebook, with a place you’re supposed to see; the example of the Grand Canyon is offered. Schulman argues that GPS, in effect, exacerbates the underying problem: “In travel facilitated by ‘location awareness,’ we begin to encounter places not by attending to what they present to us, but by bringing our expectations to them, and demanding that they perform for us as advertised.”
via Rob Walker: Pictures of the Familiar: Observers Room: Design Observer.
The 9/11 Decade – Falling in Love With Death – NYTimes.com
Posted: September 11, 2011 Filed under: Life Leave a comment »At vast cost in human capital, we carved 9/11 into the history of loss in other places, the enmities of a decade rising from the horrors of the day. But the majesty of that day does not belong to the chronicles of war. It lives in truths the size of atoms, nearly invisible and — one hopes — indestructible.
That morning, Raffaele Cava, age 80, was working on the 90th floor of the north tower. After the plane hit, no one could open the exits, so he went to another office and sat with Dianne DeFontes and Tirsa Moya. The hall floors were melting. Suddenly, two men in the stairwell pried open the door, walked in and ordered everyone to go. They were Frank De Martini and Pablo Ortiz, Port Authority employees who worked one flight down, and who took it on themselves to climb up and down 14 floors, getting scores of people out. They never left.
Tirsa Moya walked Raffaele Cava down all 90 floors.
You could ask no more of human beings.
via The 9/11 Decade – Falling in Love With Death – NYTimes.com.
“A City So Big You Gotta’ Say It Twice”: A Reflection by Wajahat Ali and Ishmael Reed « GOATMILK: An intellectual playground edited by Wajahat Ali
Posted: September 11, 2011 Filed under: Literature Leave a comment »Kindergarden in Seattle
Posted: September 10, 2011 Filed under: Movies Leave a comment »I think this stage in my life can most accurately be compared to kindergarden. Starting over completely, from scratch.
Having new friends in my new city of Seattle and new neighborhood of Capitol Hill, I decided to catch a movie tonight. About five or six blocks away, I found the Harvard Exit Theatre, the cutest and comfiest random theater I’ve walked into.
Caught “The Guard,” which was solid.
iMovie ’11: Sharing Requires More Memory To Be Available
Posted: August 27, 2011 Filed under: Technology Leave a comment »Just posting this on the internet so that some other poor soul doesn’t need to go through the stress of figuring out how to work with the buggy piece of software that is iMovie ’11…
I spent a good 12+ hours putting together movie footage my mom took between 1959 and 1969, which is the first footage of my grandparents (who I never knew) I had ever seen. We distilled 75 minutes of footage into 40 minutes, using only a single iMovie “event,” which seems to have been our first mistake, and adding music, titles, and transitions.
My mom had scheduled a big family dinner for the purpose of watching the video, and as iMovie had become frustratingly slower and slower the longer the movie became, I was still putting the final touches on the video as the evening rolled around. I finally finished, only to find that iMovie refused to export my movie into a watchable format. “Sharing requires more memory to be available,” it told me, along with instructions to quit and relaunch the application.
I did so and tried to export again, but got the same message. Then I tried moving the movie to a computer with more RAM (4GB as opposed to 2GB), but it too required more memory to be available. Neither computer was capable of rendering the movie in real-time at this point.
So anyway, the solution is simple, but not listed on the internet anywhere as far as I could find. It certainly is not in any of the iMovie documentation. First, you do need to relaunch iMovie. Second, rather than opening the movie you want to export, you right-click on it and select export in the Project Gallery. This obviates the need for iMovie to load your project into memory, and allows it to commit all of the computer’s memory to the rendering task.
What a stupid, stupid program. Blegh.
Marbury: the age of hyper-imitation
Posted: August 10, 2011 Filed under: Politics Leave a comment »We may be seeing a new strain of mass behaviour, one that results from the meeting of two factors, one social and the other technological. On the one hand, large numbers of people who are floating free from wider communities and who are thus both less bound by their norms and more vulnerable to influence from people with whom they have no enduring relationship. On the other, technologies that instantly transmit information to participants about what others are doing, supercharging the feedback loops and obliterating their sense of individual responsibility.
When you’re not part of a community you are more likely to join the herd.
via Marbury: the age of hyper-imitation.
The Void and the Self
Posted: August 3, 2011 Filed under: Literature, Movies 1 Comment »“There’s no atheist in a foxhole,” the old saying goes. Death forces anyone to acknowledge their mortality, and any beliefs about an afterlife, but does that saying hold water today? What happens when we’re confronted with death?
The expression conjures up an image of the soldier with hands pressed together and eyes clenched shut, huddled in the foxhole. The expression seems to imply that everyone close to death makes their peace with God. That everyone confronts the reality that is God.
Certainly a century ago, the guilt of missing too many masses or dying without having confessed would be unbearable for a wounded soldier on the battlefield. But the church no longer has such a firm grip on our subconscious and metaphysical beliefs. Prayer as a reflex to death probably doesn’t happen for many 21st century Americans.
Yet there may still be something to that phrase, even if the soldier remains steadfastly atheist.
The nature of war is random, taking life from civilians and soldiers who are mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers. No one can dodge a bullet. But if you are a soldier and you are to survive, survival depends on you, and on your realization of this fact. I mean, if God were in the business of saving, God would not want you to be sitting on your ass praying for the shell to miss with your eyes closed. You better be ready to jump out of the foxhole.
Human phobias and pathos are part of what make us human. Violence, fear, and trauma can be crippling. But even as hands shake and legs quiver, another part of us know what needs to be done – to call an ambulance, to pull out the rusty nail, to look away from the cliff, to keep running, to soldier on.
Sometimes we feel very intense things – horror, terror, pain, extreme boredom – that make us want to do nothing more than curl into a fetal ball, but in the same moment another part of us coldly and rationally knows what must be done. And we have the ability to choose to do the latter.
This all brings me to Joe Simpson’s Touching the Void1, an amazing story of survival under the most unlikely circumstances. Survival after Simpson believed death to be an inevitability.
Big-ass Crevasse
The movie, with narration provided by the actual climbers and reenactments by actors, tells one of the most powerful stories I have ever heard. Simpson and his friend Simon Yates, with a friend waiting in base camp, are attempting to become the first climbers to scale the west face of Siula Grande in the Andes. They make it to the summit, but at the beginning of the descent, Simpson falls and suffers a severe break of his right leg, with the knee joint entirely destroyed and tibia coming up into the thigh.
Farewell, Friday Night Lights
Posted: July 22, 2011 Filed under: Media, Sports Leave a comment »Reposted here, without permission, is my article from The Student Life at Pomona College. A few names redacted. The Season 5 finale of Friday Night Lights aired on NBC last Friday after being broadcasted a few months prior on DirecTV.
With its five seasons finally concluded after last week’s finale, it is safe to say that Friday Night Lights (“FNL”) is about much more than football. Case in point from the finale: as the quarterback launches a long, spiraling, slow-motion pass into the brisk Texas night, the camera cuts to all the characters in attendance, lingering on each of their faces in turn —first friends and families, then players and coaches. The outcome of the game hangs in the balance, but suddenly it doesn’t matter. It’s the people that matter: the residents of the fictional town of Dillon, Texas.
FNL paints a portrait of a contemporary American small town where football is king. The show revolves around Tami Taylor (Connie Britton), principal/guidance counselor, and her husband Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler). Both were nominated for Emmys in 2010. Their relationship has been consistently hailed as the “best portrayal of a marriage on TV,” and their conflicts make a perfect target for armchair feminist analysis. The pair shepherd two crops of high schoolers from adolescence to adulthood. Among the students are the strong, convention-breaking blond Tyra Colette (Adrianne Palicki), the stuttering, lovable replacement QB Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford), the Taylors’ sexually rebellious daughter, Julie (Aimee Teegarden), ex-juvie recruit Vince Howard (Michael B. Jordan, a talent from “The Wire”), and of course, the brooding heartbreaker Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch).
The show also features Esquire magazine’s 2010 Sexiest Woman Alive (Minka Kelly), a successful abortion (a rarity in TV), a Christian speed-metal band, a teenage girl football coach, and the best parent-teen sex talk you’ll ever see (record it and show it to your kids). There are a few gay characters, and a lot of half-time speeches and “Texas Forever” too. Enough of them for Slate magazine’s Meghan O’Rourke to call the show “singularly designed to make men cry.”
Derek Jeter's future wedding party?
Despite critical acclaim and a cult following, FNL never achieved widespread success, and it only survived past the second season because of a last second co-production agreement with DirecTV. FNL’s inability to make it mainstream may be a product of its lack of a core demographic audience—it was first marketed to men for the football and then to women for the drama. Yet I see this as more of an asset than a detriment: it’s masculine and feminine, teen and family, blue and red state.
Organics need help
Posted: July 22, 2011 Filed under: Food Leave a comment »What bothers me most, however, is that both sides of the organic debate spend millions in press and advertising to attack each other instead of looking for a resolution. Organic supporters tend to vilify new technologies, while conventional supporters insist that chemicals and massive production monocultures are the only way to go. This simply strikes me as absurd. Synthetic doesn’t necessarily mean bad for the environment. Just look at technological advances in creating biodegradable products; sometimes, we can use our knowledge and intelligence to create things that are both useful, cheap enough and ecologically responsible, as crazy as that idea may sound.
I also firmly believe that increasing the chemicals used in agriculture to support insanely over-harvested monocultures will never lead to ecological improvement. In my mind, the ideal future will merge conventional and organic methods, using GMOs and/or other new technologies to reduce pesticide use while increasing the bioavailability of soils, crop yield, nutritional quality and biodiversity in agricultural lands. New technology isn’t the enemy of organic farming; it should be its strongest ally.
As far as I’m concerned, Christie Wilcox’s Scientific American blog posting on the myths of organic agriculture is one of the more complete analyses of organic’s strengths and weaknesses I have seen in a mainstream publication in years1. But it misses the mark more than a few times. I read all the literature I could get my hands on for my senior thesis (“Policies to Improve Organic Agriculture: Prospects to Meet an Agrarian, Ecological, or Resource Vision” – yep, I ran out of creative juices for a title…) and found very few pieces that holistically and neutrally evaluated organic agriculture. Wilcox gets top marks for effort.
Many arguments for and against organics rest on just a handful of scholarly articles, in addition to a wealth of anecdotal accounts. Like her peers, Wilcox does not present a comprehensive review of the literature. However, she is right to question many of the “myths” surrounding organic agriculture, and her overall point about the black and white conversation around organics is spot on.
It’s refreshing that Wilcox critiques organics while sharing its goals. We need more of these kinds of conversations and a whole lot more scientific research of sustainable agriculture if we really are serious about an environmentally-sensitive agriculture for more than just the privileged few.
