Please allow me to introduce myself....

[posted by Dan Drezner]

Hello, my name is... well, it's in bold above this line, so you can figure it out. I normally blog at the wittily-named Daniel Drezner.

I'm honored to be one of Megan's guest-bloggers during her retreat from the internets. I'll try to fill her shoes as best as possible -- a daunting task, given that Megan's a foot taller than me and I'm at least fifty pounds heavier than her.

Real posting will commence tomorrow, as I'm still decompressing from attending the International Studies Association annual meeting. For me, the highlight of the meeting came in a cab. After the cab driver found out my lunch companion and I were international relations professors, he strongly encouraged us to fight government censorship and "lead the revolution." At this point I turned to my colleague and said,"could you imagine a country governed by the International Studies Association?" We laughed for the rest of the car ride.

Maybe you had to be there.

Comfort Inn: No Comfort, No Inn

Remember, LORD, against Edom
that day at Jerusalem.
They said: "Raze it, Raze it
down to its very foundations!"
Oh, Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens
You destroyer
Happy be he who repays you
The evil you have done us

I had what I think could be fairly termed a very bad day yesterday. Only the end of it, of course. Everything started to go wrong at the exact moment, around 3:00, when my editor and I decided that I should go to upstate New York for a few days in order to round out a story I'm working on.

By 5:30, I had an airline ticket for 8 PM and a rental car. By 7PM, I was at the airport bright eyed and bushytailed, ready to jet off to the exotic wilds of Western New York State. By 12:30, I expected to be there, ready to report on the quaint customs of the locals. It was one of those glamorous journalist moments you often dream about, but rarely experience. Rolly bag in one hand, wallet in the other, I stuck my credit card in the slot and printed out my boarding passes.

Now, I am not particularly good at math; a little light calculus is about my speed. Nonetheless, when I saw that my flight from New York City to Rochester was scheduled to depart at 10:55, while my flight from Washington to New York City was not scheduled to take off until 10:44, I suspected that there might be some flaw in the planning. I also noticed, apropos of nothing in particular, that the takeoff time for my flight was some two hours and forty-four minutes after Jet Blue's preternaturally perky website had told me I could expect to be upping wheels. I presented my bewilderment to the desk clerk.

"That flight's delayed," she said, unecessarily. I explained about the connection. "Yes," she said, "there's no way you're getting to Rochester tonight." Weather up and down the East Coast, you see, was playing havoc with schedules.

I do not mean to paint her as callous. In fact, she was incredibly nice and apologetic, and spent 20 minutes in a tag-team strategy session during which flight times were checked, hotel sites consulted, and desired wake-up hours considered. Expedia informed me that I could stay in New York City near JFK for $152 a night, plus applicable taxes and fees. After considering that my alternative was to take a $60 cab ride back from Dulles, and then do the entire thing all over again the next morning at 4 am, the hotel room looked positively cheap. To be sure, it was a Comfort Inn, and Comfort Inns do not, in my experience, always live up to their name. But how bad could it be, I asked jauntily, clicking "book it now" and then marching off to security.

Do not, my children, ever speak those words out loud. You are challenging the travel gods to do their worst, And in these days of cavity searches and theological arguments over whether my prescription face cream is, or is not, a banned substance, their worst can be very, very bad indeed.

I suppose you have already guessed that my plane did not, in fact, take off at 10:44. By the time I had gotten to the gate, its ETD had already changed to 11:30. Subsequently, it would change to "Whenever the plane gets here from wherever the hell it is," which, for future reference, turns out to be sometime around 12:15.

I hadn't realized Dulles was so cold at night. The coffee gave out around 10, whereupon I was reduced to wrapping myself in every piece of clothing I'd brought and trying to sleep. I suspect that if I hadn't tidily thrown away my much-used coffee cup, some kind stranger would have dropped a quarter in it as I lay swaddled in sweatpants and herringbone tweed suit jackets. At 12:15 they boarded us. At 12:25, we took off. At 1:00, I stumbled out into the terminal and hailed a cab.

Where is the Comfort Inn, Jamaica? Asked my driver.

It is, I proudly informed him, having already memorized the address in the interest of maxmizing my sleep time before the 9:25 am flight to Rochester, at 87-05 Van Wyck.

Where is that? Asked my cab driver. I will note, in passing, for those who have not enjoyed the many benefits of residence in New York City, that the Van Wyck is the road to JFK. From the airport, it is about as hard to find as your own feet. Nonetheless, he called for directions.

I should have known. I should have known when, before they would give him directions, they asked him who he was.

You know what happened, don't you? You do. But you can't quite believe it. You've heard the urban legends, about hotels who give away the rooms of travelers on delayed flights, because someone else is willing to pay more money for them. But come on, you're thinking. They didn't really

At least, that's what you're thinking if you're anything like me. Indeed, the same thought kept running through my head as I listened numbly to the hotel clerk explain that she had had to cancel my reservation because she had been unable to charge my credit card, and had therefore thought that I was not coming.

You deadbeat, her voice said.

Let us dissect this a little. My Visa card, a worn but proud little piece of plastic with my alma matter's crest right on it (that in itself is a long story), is nowhere near its limits, because I'm one of those anti-debt freaks. Moreover, the credit card had already been authorised by Expedia, through which I booked the room. At 8 PM. What were the odds, really, that I had booked a (nonrefundable) room at 8PM and then decided not to come by 10PM?

Furthermore, the clerk had had a good four hours or so before I got on the plane in which to discover that the card was unchargeable and call me. This had not happened. When I pointed this out, the details of whom, exactly, she had tried to call became extraordinarily fuzzy. Maybe she hadn't tried to call me; maybe she'd just gotten bored waiting on hold to Expedia and hung up, and sold my room. But on one point she was crystal clear. She had tried to charge my credit card--twice!--and been unable to do so.

Over the next three minutes, I went through more emotions than a small-town amateur dramatics society doing Hamlet: the Musical. I wept. I cajoled. I threatened. I raged. I pleaded. All of which was no avail; she had no rooms. And the reason for her insistence that she couldn't charge my card became abruptly clear: since they hadn't charged the card, she said, they had no obligation to find me another one.

I a gesture of great munificence, she did finally give me the number of several other hotels in the area. You will not be surprised to hear . . . as indeed, I was not . . . that they had no rooms at 1:30 am, what with all the delayed flights.

So there I was sitting in a taxi at the mouth of the Van Wyck Expressway with no housing. I ordered the cab to take me back to the airport, paying $10 for the privilege of a private midnight tour of the Greater JFK Landscaping Program.

As he made his weary way back to the airport, I called the credit card company to find out what had happened. Why would they have declined the charge?

They hadn't, they said. Indeed, they had authorised a charge of $172.00, this being what $152 works out to after taxes, licensing, and applicable fees.

Perhaps that had been Expedia. Had the hotel attempted to authorise further charges and been declined?

They forwarded me to authorisations. Nope, no one had attempted to authorize any sort of charge, except the ones they'd approved.

Another call to the clerk, who kept on with her story. She'd tried to authorize the card, twice.

I pointed out, first, that the moral thing to do would be to find me another hotel room; and second, that I am a naturally vindictive person who was going to have a very long talk with customer service tomorrow about the hotel's booking practices. This was greeted with about as much interest as if she'd accidentally tuned into the gardening report. I tried to charge it, twice, she repeated . . .

(You debt-ridden hag. Maybe if you paid your bills, you wouldn't be huddled on the floor of an airport terminal at 2 am, trying to keep warm by wrapping your yoga tights around your exposed skin.)

I called Choice Hotels main reservation line. They chose to listen silently to my plight, offer to find me a room at the three hotels I had already discovered were booked solid, and let me go without regret.

At 2 am, I got Expedia involved. The Expedia phone rep, who seemed to be located somewhere in the Indian subcontinent, and therefore not close enough to do what I wanted him to, which was storm in like the gnome in the television commercials and save me, called the hotel. He returned to report that she had tried to charge the card, twice, to no avail.

I was, by this point, pretty much the only person left in the terminal. The guy sweeping the floors asked me why I didn't go home. I have no home, I replied sadly. However, the cavernous and deserted space did give my shouting into my now-dying cell phone a sort of echoing grandeur that helped put me in the correct righteous mood.

But they are lying, I said. The rep did that customer service rep thing where they don't say anything commital, but nonetheless convey the impression that you are a lunatic.

I checked with the card company, I said, twice. No one attempted a further authorization on the card after the first, successful one.

He remained noncommittal. He isn't there to judge. If my credit card bounces like Ricochet Rabbit, well, we all have hard times occasionally. The main thing now was to get me off the phone.

Of course, there was nothing the telephone guy could do anyway; it's not like they give their outsourcing center the power to shut hotels out of the network. But in the cold light of day, I do hope someone is taking a long, hard, look at the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens.

Eventually, the Expedia clerk seemed to realize that this was not some customer complaining that the Ficus in her hotel room doesn't smell fresh, and that being as I was stuck in the terminal with nowhere to go, I had literally all night to prosecute my complaint. Once he grokked that finding me another hotel room was the best way to get off the phone, he sprang into action. He did not, alas, offer to pay for the extra charges thus incurred, but at least he tried to make sure I had, y'know, a blanket and some good ol' central heating.

Ah, central heating. You young people don't know how lucky you are . . .

The Expedia guy rapidly discovered what I already knew, which is that the reason the clerk had given away my room is that in the immediate vicinity of JFK, hotel rooms were in extraordinarily short supply. Something about like copies of the National Review on Soviet newsstands, actually. But circa 2:55, a room at the Hampton Inn was found for only $150 more than the original room I'd booked had cost.

Their credit card machine was down, said the guy from Expedia, and anyway Expedia can't do same day bookings, so I'd have to go straight there and give them my card. His voice implied that I seemed nice enough, and he sure hoped I got away before the machine was repaired and they found out I was a deadbeat. I was saddened at the lost opportunity to prove that I can, so, front three c-notes when the occasion requires, but overjoyed at the thought of bed. I jumped into a cab, checked in with lightning speed, and managed to get a solid 3.5 hours of sleep before I had to get back up to make my flight. Unfortunately, there was no real time for frivolities like showers, but thankfully I'm pretty sure the octagenarian in the seat next to me had long ago lost her sense of smell.

The Hampton Inn, JFK, by the way, was lovely: nothing much to look at, but big soft beds and some very helpful clerks who tried to aid me in getting the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens to pay my freight. Sadly, this was to no avail, but they put me up anyway, and this morning, when I overslept slightly and missed the airport shuttle, found me a delightfully insane woman who drove her minivan up onto the sidewalk in an attempt to get me to JFK on time.

Because I thought I owed the clerk the courtesy of checking with the credit card company again, I did so when I finally got to a computer today. I got the same answer, which is that my card had been charged, and no further authorizations attempted. Because I'm a little bit crazy, and also because i already have the technology in order to do phone interviews, I recorded that call. And then I talked again to the people at the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens.

Yes, the man there said, it our records show we tried to authorize your card and failed.

I just spoke to my credit card company and they say that isn't true, I said.

I don't see anything here, he said, with the beginnings of dismissal in his voice.

I recorded the telephone call with the credit card company, I said, as sweetly as I could muster (which, I'm afraid I must confess, wasn't very.) Would you like to listen to it?

I want to get to the bottom of this, he said. Let me check my records and call you back.

Which he just did. And what do you suppose their records show? They show that the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens, charged my card last night sometime between 8 and 9 pm. And then . . . no, it's okay, stop holding your breath . . . did not attempt any further authorizations.

I can't imagine what could have happened, said the manager.

I am so un-cynical about things like this that a friend recently looked at me after a particularly Polly-annaish statement to the effect that people usually make political arguments in good faith, and said, "And what else have you learned about us during your stay on our planet?" Nonetheless, even I, who cannot do math and believes that everyone is a good person, deep down inside, could figure out what had happened: someone had offered her more money for the room. The rain delays at JFK meant that hotels near the airports were packed solid; I chose the Comfort Inn in the first place because it was the classiest of the remaining three hotels available on Expedia. (No, seriously: one of the other places was, last time I looked, known to rent rooms by the hour).

I want to find out what happened, said the manager; I will call you back tomorrow.

I can't wait to hear the explanation for the clerk's vociferous insistence that she had--twice!--attempted to charge my card. The thing demands a rather high degree of artistry. Has she recently gone off her meds, leading to a recurrence of her visual hallucinations? Is she a compulsive liar? Have they confused me with the other Megan McArdle who booked a hotel room at 8 pm yesterday through Expedia? Did God, acting through the credit card machine at the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens, cause it to malfunction so as to force me into a wandering exile?

Obviously, whatever the explanation, it will not make me any less filthy or exhausted, or give me, in retrospect, a more productive day out of my few here. There are only two things I can do: rant to you, and file a new learning away in the indelible memory box: when you have a choice between any "Choice" hotel, particularly a Comfort Inn, and especially the Comfort Inn, Jamaica, Queens, choose the fleabag that rents rooms by the hour. At least the people who mug you there won't try to convince you that it's your fault.

Caveat emptor

I see that the apartments from my old apartment building, 55 West 95th Street is finally on the market. These are the lovely folks who evicted me on a month's notice from the apartment where I'd rented for more than three years. My hatred for them is both broad and deep after the various disputes over payment, whether overstaying my lease for a week while my mother found substitute housing required eviction, and a general lack of interest in the actual people involved in the transaction.

Still, I have to say, I'm pretty curious to see what the apartments are like . . . and more to the point, what kind of a lunatic would buy them. The pipes burst three times during the last year I lived there, ruining a number of my clothes and, from what I understand, flooding all of the apartments above me even worse. By the end of my time there, there was no hot water to speak of for most of the day, and the heating was more in the nature of a fond hope than a working system.

I briefly considered buying the apartment I lived in, except that the management company inexplicably demanded, for my cave-like first floor apartment, about what it would cost to buy a one bedroom twice the size in a tony Central Park West building. Then my mother pointed out that the landlord seemed not to have done any work in the building for about thirty years. I had been under the assumption that they were going to gut renovate the thing: put in new boilers and pipes (every time the super talked about the condition of the pipes, he would start shaking his head in sadness), really repair the roof, get the electric up to modern code, and so forth. But it's only been four months since I moved out, which seems barely enough to have finished cosmetic updates on the apartments. Or am I missing something? Can you actually fix deep infrastructure like pipes and so forth in a 60 unit building where ten owners/rent-controlled holdouts are still living, refinish the apartments, and get them on the market by September, which is apparently when these things went on sale? Or did I dodge a bullet?

Update I should note that most people get apartments inspected when they buy them. If the pipes are indeed as awful as I remember them being, & the boiler as spotty, wouldn't that show up on inspection? Who's buying these things?

Why do they hate us?

Alex Massie ponders the question. Myself, I don't care what they say or do--"they" are a bunch of troglodyte enemies of freedom whose outsized envy of a success motivates them, not to try to surpass our achievement, but only to tear down ours. I will never denounce, much less renounce, the proud franchise I was born to. Nor will I permit others to do so in my presence. And no matter what Alex may argue, I will never, ever bring myself to believe that a rank political opportunist like Hillary Clinton could possibly get us out of the mess we are in.

I'm shocked . . . shocked!

Various people are expressing various kinds of shock at what Matt calls "the latest weird conservative sex scandal". Here's what surprised me the most: I hadn't realized, until I read part of the autopsy report, that if I die in any sort of weird or violent way, the lasting official record is going to involve some guy in a white coat describing most of my body parts as "unremarkable".

Epigram of the month

I was preparing to name "Gogol Bordello is hell's Bar Mitzvah band" the epigram of the week. But that was before Scott Adams knocked it out of the running with this gem:

At the risk of oversimplifying, our current energy policy in The United States involves shooting bearded people.

Defending Vegetarian honor

Matt Zeitlin writes:

I read Christopher Hitchens’ heartbreaking piece about a 23 year old soldier who was inspired to enlist by reading Hitchens and was killed in action in Iraq. The soldier, Mark Daily, was a UCLA graduate, registered Democrat, an agnostic, had early doubts about the war and even was once a vegetarian.

We're* not pacifists, you know. Indeed, some of us are quite feisty. I could have joined the military with a clean conscience in 2002--except for the part where I'm a 4F asthmatic with lousy eyesight who was medically unfit for the State Department. But that had nothing to do with my tofu-loving ways.

* Technically, I'm not a vegetarian: I eat humanely raised and killed meat. However, given the difficulty of locating such meat, and the expense of buying it, this is generally a distinction without a difference. Moreover, I was a vegetarian at the time of the Iraq War's inception.

A magazine for the ages

Thanks muchly to Stuart Buck for the pointer to this gem.

From Dr. Boli's alphabet of occupations:

J for the Journalist, chasing a story,
Following up every hint, lead, and clue:
Not for the fame—no, and not for the glory,
But only because it’s the right thing to do.
No, she won’t quit working until the sun rises:
She’s making our planet a much better place.
Of course, if she happens to win a few prizes,
She’ll modestly smile and accept with good grace.

The genius behind it deserves some kind of award, but I fear greatly for his sanity.

Super homo economicus

Understanding economics, says Scott Adams, is like having a mild superpower. I'm pretty fond of economics. But I'm not sure I wouldn't rather be able to fly or shoot flames out of my hands.

The American Century

From "Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads":

American housewives took to the mechanical refrigerator as fast as their finances would allow. By 1937 more than two million American households had new refrigerators, and by the mid-1950's over 80 percent of the population did. (In contrast, only 8 perfect of English households had refrigerators by 1956.)

I'm trying, and failing, to imagine my life if I had to shop for food every day, or keep charge of a tiny, moldy, inconsistent icebox. I doubt it would include much writing, for starters. Little things like this constantly remind me just how rich we are compared to even the very recent past.

Go Yankees! Ish!

The press release from Yankees.com reads "Yankees clinch wild-card spot." I suppose that's one way to look at it.

Verizon accepts NARAL's text messages after all

So Verizon has rescinded its refusal to give NARAL one of those short-form text message numbers for broadcasts. This case didn't strike me as a cause for indignation so much as a cause for total bewilderment. What on earth was Verizon thinking? How could this possibly offend their pro-life subscribers, who can not receive NARAL's text messages by the simple expedient of not signing up for them? Do even those pro-life subscribers want a cell phone service that deigns to decide to whose text messages they may or may not subscribe?

Given that the other big networks had already signed up NARAL, this sort of thing seems very likely to drive away any subscribers who want the service, while gleaning absolutely no support from pro-life subscribers who presumably will never try to subscribe to NARAL's text messages, and thus will never learn to their immense satisfaction that their cell-phone provider does not permit such smut to be transmitted over its networks.

Personally, I don't particularly care for NARAL, and I'm certainly not planning to waste my text messages on them. But when my Verizon contract is up, I'll be looking for a provider that doesn't think it can make those sorts of decisions for me. And I'm pretty sure that my mother, who has never gotten a text message in her life, but who focuses her charity on Planned Parenthood, will be even more avid to make the switch.

More guns, less boring kissy stuff

Anthony Gottlieb, the perspicacious man who first hired me to work at The Economist, has made the New York Times for his violent hobby:

It’s not an obvious leap from “The Sopranos” to the Sci-Fi channel, but a friend who was bereft after that HBO series ended was steered to the new incarnation of “Battlestar Galactica,” a cult series about a fleet of starships seeking to escape the robot race of Cylons and find refuge on a fabled, lost colony known as Earth.

Science fiction is one thing: “Battlestar Galactica” has intellectual cachet.

“The humans are pagan polytheists and the robots are monotheists, whose divine jihad is against the humans (even though the former know that the latter created them),” Anthony Gottlieb, the author of “The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance,” explained off the top of his Blackberry from an airport baggage claim. “There’s a curious mix of high-tech and superstition and scriptural fundamentalism (which interestingly suggests that religion is ineradicable, as today’s theorists of secularism are increasingly saying).”

Mr. Gottlieb likes the philosophical puzzles (“Some of the robots think they are human, and some of the humans fear they may be robots”) as well as the way the show switches sympathies back and forth from democracy to dictatorship. He really had only one objection. “There’s lots of romance, though this bores me,” he typed. “Less kissing, more killing is a frequent internal refrain of mine.”

Quirky Canada has own government, laws

Speaking of separatists, why is it that Canada has a robust, and rising, separatist movement, while America doesn't? It's not just Quebec. Newfoundland, which has always been suspicious of fraud in the referendum that propelled it into the union, now has a separatist party (although to be sure, it's clearly not a very successful one.) Alberta's Separatist candidates don't get much of the provincial vote, but they seem to be gaining sympathy and support. And I've now met several people from British Columbia who say that if Alberta broke off, they'd like to join them.

Perhaps my vision is just skewed by the fact that I've actually met multiple English-speaking Canadian separatists, but the Canadian union seems to be much more fragile than the American one, and not just because we know what to do with hotheads who try to leave the union. Why would this be?

My working theory is that it is the wild population asymmetry in Canada; given the parliamentary structure, the Liberal Party just needs to run up the vote total in Toronto, and not do too badly in Quebec, and it gets to run things. (A nasty corruption scandal propelled the re-formed Conservatives into a minority government last election, but it looks like they'll be out of power again soon.) That is just what it has been doing for the last decade or so, and as a result, the people in the other 3.4 million square miles are getting a mite restless. Can my readers offer a better explanation?

Wow

Half of all French children under five have never brushed their teeth.

I don't believe it

A friend emails:

Students at many of the country's most prestigious colleges and universities are graduating with less knowledge of American history, government, and economics than they had as incoming freshmen, with Harvard University seniors scoring a "D+" average on a 60-question multiple-choice exam about civic literacy.

According to a report released yesterday by the Intercollegiate
Studies Institute, the average college senior at the 50 colleges and
universities polled did not earn a passing grade.

The quiz is here. I scored 100%. Take the quiz yourself; if incoming Harvard students are really scoring in the sub-70% range, I'd be shocked. Although it is heavy on economics, so I might be biased.

Life imitates art. (Well, muzak, anyway)

Remember that Rupert Holmes song about the guy who's tired of his relationship, so he answers a personals ad

If you like Pina Coladas, and getting caught in the rain. If you're not into yoga, if you have half-a-brain. If you like making love at midnight, in the dunes of the cape. I'm the lady you've looked for, write to me, and escape.

Only to find out, when the woman shows up, that it's his current squeeze?

In the song, they run off together. In real life, apparently it doesn't work out so well.

Sana Klaric, 27, and husband Adnan, 32, from Zenica, poured out their hearts to each other over their marriage troubles, and both felt they had found their real soul mate.

The couple met on an online chat forum while he was at work and she in an internet cafe, and started chatting under the names Sweetie and Prince of Joy.

They eventually decided to meet up - but there was no happy ending when they realised what had happened.

Now they are both filing for divorce - with each accusing the other of being unfaithful.

(h/t Radley Balko, who points out that Ananova is not always a reliable source.)

Public service announcement

I'm a judge in the America's Future Foundation college blogging contest, which will award $10,000 to the best student blog. Nominations open today, and close on December 31st. I heartily encourage any readers with conservative or libertarian college blogs to submit theirs.

The American Scene: Plastic People of the Universe

Matt Feeney at The American Scene is rather harsh on plastic surgery :

There’s an article in the Daily Mail in which 44-year-old actress Demi Moore openly admits having undergone a half million dollars in plastic surgery. She laments, "It's been a challenging few years, being the age I am. Almost to the point where I felt like, well, they don't know what to do with me. I am not 20. Not 30.

"There aren't that many good roles for women over 40. A lot of them don't have much substance, other than being someone's mother or wife."

One of the reasons there may be especially few roles for Demi Moore is that, no, she doesn’t look 20, and she doesn’t look 30. She looks like a 44-year-old woman who’s had a half a million dollars worth of plastic surgery. Directors, I would guess, are rarely casting for that.

I don't think there's anything wrong with plastic surgery. Lots of it works quite well, and I'd happily get my favorite flaws corrected if a) I could get realistic results and b) I had more money. The problem is, women in Hollywood start getting surgery quite early, and they don't know when to quit. There's also apparently a tradeoff between young and old surgery, because your skin and muscles will only take so much. If you have breast implants when you're 22, the breast lift at 40 isn't going to take so well. Likewise, if you have a facelift at 32 to stretch out your youth roles, you shouldn't have another one at 40--but then you get to forty, and can't bear to look at yourself, and the next thing you know, you're Joan Rivers and can blink your lips.

Huh?

This seems crazy. How do you recruit a constitutional law professor to be your dean without being aware that he's very liberal? And it seems like a twink move to fire him because he'll be "a target for conservatives". Either his legal scholarship and administrative skill will make him a good dean, or not. There's obviously much more to the story, likely involving either powerful donors, or powerful politicians, or both. At any rate, this doesn't seem likely to do good things for a fledgling law school trying to recruit high-caliber faculty. In the long run, that will matter a great deal more than a few donors.

Speak of the devil . . .

Martin Feldstein is stepping down as the head of the NBER. Hopefully, this means some of his work will slip out from behind their pay wall . . .

Music Sunday

I'm just getting around to reading this piece on the music business from last week's New York Times magazine. In it, Columbia's resident guru, Rick Rubin, describes his vision for the future:

Rubin has a bigger idea. To combat the devastating impact of file sharing, he, like others in the music business (Doug Morris and Jimmy Iovine at Universal, for instance), says that the future of the industry is a subscription model, much like paid cable on a television set. "You would subscribe to music," Rubin explained, as he settled on the velvet couch in his library. "You'd pay, say, $19.95 a month, and the music will come anywhere you'd like. In this new world, there will be a virtual library that will be accessible from your car, from your cellphone, from your computer, from your television. Anywhere. The iPod will be obsolete, but there would be a Walkman-like device you could plug into speakers at home. You'll say, 'Today I want to listen to ... Simon and Garfunkel,' and there they are. The service can have demos, bootlegs, concerts, whatever context the artist wants to put out. And once that model is put into place, the industry will grow 10 times the size it is now."

I should be excited about this, right? All the world's music, all the time. But somehow, I'm not. I like owning music; I like the feeling that this set of songs is mine. I even like the limits that this imposes. Sure, sometimes I want to listen to a song I don't have--but between iTunes and eMusic, that song is rarely more than a couple of mouse clicks away. Meanwhile, when I sit down at my computer, the limited selection prevents me from spending hours thinking about what the absolutely correct song for my current mood might be. Due to a series of unfortunate events that twice destroyed my accumulated stash, my music collection is not currently anywhere near big enough. But I have a feeling that somewhere between 5-10,000 songs, it will be.

Meanwhile, on a completely unrelated note, I need to go all fogey for a minute. Last night, I went to see Georgie James, the first band I've seen in a long time that I felt sure was going to be big before they even released an album. Which is one way of telling you that when their album comes out on the 25th, you should acquire it. But I digress. Anyway, I've seen them twice now, and they always play very short gigs, because they've got just about enough songs for an album.

At the risk of sounding like Andy Rooney, as I reach deep back into the mists of time to recall the new bands I listened to in college, I feel like most people didn't cut an album, or even play out that much, until they had enough material for more than one short set. To be sure, one or two of those songs was always a cover--generally a semi-ironic one--to the extent that funny variations on "X's cover of Y" became a running joke among my friends. (i.e. Grim Reaper's cover of "A tisket, a tasket"). But it seems like now as soon as a band ekes out enough material to keep a crowd occupied for fifteen minutes, they start circulating. What changed? The proliferation of indie labels, the low cost of cutting a CD, or something else? Or am I just romanticizing how much better things were back in my day?

It's all in the numbers

As it happens, I am blogging from a local coffee shop with bloggers Matthew Yglesias and Brian Beutler. Yes, this is the glamorous blogging lifestyle you've read so much about.

At any rate, Matt and I were explaining the secrets of creating an ordered (numbered) list and an unordered (bulleted) list in html. At which point, Brian asked: why is a bulleted list "unordered"?

Matt and I responded, with stunning obviousness, that an ordered list has numbers. But then Brian showed us a preview of the post he was writing and sensibly asked "Is there any doubt about what order you should click on the links?"

Now I am trying to formulate a philosophy of numbered lists that distinguishes them from bulleted lists. Reader thoughts are welcome.

Map it!

Back when I was Countries Editor at Economist.com, one of my little jobs was fielding the complaints over maps. The most frequent ire was drawn by the body of water which Korea calls the East Sea, and Japan calls the Sea of Japan, and no one else besides mariners cares about; no matter what we printed, there were surprising numbers of angry people who had taken time out of their busy day to demand that we alter a map. One of my old colleagues has expanded upon the phenomenon for a column.

Live fast, die young, leave a good looking corpse

I cried when my extraodinarily evanescent college band broke up. Though a cynic would point out that I might have been crying because the break-up was coincidental with the rending of relations between myself and my college boyfriend, I maintain that the even greater tragedy was the world's loss of Bottle Green's groovy, Irish-punk-rock-pop fusion.

However, it seems as if personally, I may have lucked out:

ROCK stars are famous for excess, and some pay the price. A new study suggests that they are up to three times more likely to die young than the rest of the population, mainly because of drug and alcohol abuse. Researchers led by Mark Bellis at Liverpool John Moores University looked at survival rates for over 1,000 European and American musicians who had their first chart success between 1956 and 1999. From 1956 to 2005, 100 of them died. Some 40% of the Europeans and 28% of the Americans died from overdoses, accidents or chronic disease related to drugs and drink. Cancer and heart disease, conditions associated with unhealthy lifestyles, together claimed over a third of the Americans. The study is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Since I just know we would have hit the big time had we not been torn apart by the fickle hand of fate, I suppose I have to thank said boyfriend for saving us both from a life of glamour, hard living, and premature death.

Thank you, John, wherever you are. I think.

Arise, ye prisoners of barbeque and holiday traffic

At 5:36 on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day, it's hard to keep one's mind focused on substantive posts, and you wouldn't read them if I did. To judge by today's comments, it's all y'all can do to engage in a little desultory chitchat about music and giant grasshoppers. So here are a few fun¹ links for your Labor Day delectation:

From The Atlantic's mighty archive, Jack London on scabs, in which our intrepid author battles with deadweight loss and competition:

It is for this reason that a laborer is so fiercely hostile to another laborer who offers to work for less pay or longer hours. To hold his place (which is to live), he must offset this offer by another equally liberal, which is equivalent to giving away somewhat from the food and shelter he enjoys. To sell his day's work for two dollars instead of two dollars and a half means that he, his wife, and his children will not have so good a roof over their heads, such warm clothes on their backs, such substantial food in their stomachs. Meat will be bought less frequently, and it will be tougher and less nutritious; stout new shoes will go less often on the children's feet; and disease and death will be more imminent in a cheaper house and neighborhood.

Thus, the generous laborer, giving more of a day's work for less return (measured in terms of food and shelter), threatens the life of his less generous brother laborer, and, at the best, if he does not destroy that life, he diminishes it. Whereupon the less generous laborer looks upon him as an enemy, and, as men are inclined to do in a tooth-and-nail society, he tries to kill the man who is trying to kill him.

When a striker kills with a brick the man who has taken his place, he has no sense of wrong-doing. In the deepest holds of his being, though he does not reason the impulse, he has an ethical sanction. He feels dimly that he has justification, just as the home-defending Boer felt, though more sharply, with each bullet he fired at the invading English. Behind every brick thrown by a striker is the selfish "will to live" of himself and the slightly altruistic will to live of his family. The family-group came into the world before the state-group, and society being still on the primitive basis of tooth and nail, the will to live of the state is not so compelling to the striker as the will to live of his family and himself.

In addition to the use of bricks, clubs, and bullets, the selfish laborer finds it necessary to express his feelings in speech. Just as the peaceful country-dweller calls the sea-rover a "pirate," and the stout burgher calls the man who breaks into his strong-box a "robber," so the selfish laborer applies the opprobrious epithet "scab" to the laborer who takes from him food and shelter by being more generous in the disposal of his labor-power. The sentimental connotation of scab is as terrific as that of " traitor" or "Judas," and a sentimental definition would be as deep and varied as the human heart. It is far easier to arrive at what may be called a technical definition, worded in commercial terms, as, for instance, that a scab is one who gives more value for the same price than another.

The laborer who gives more time, or strength, or skill, for the same wage, than another, or equal time, or strength, or skill, for a less wage, is a scab. This generousness on his part is hurtful to his fellow laborers, for it compels them to an equal generousness which is not to their liking, and which gives them less of food and shelter. But a word may be said for the scab. Just as his act makes his rivals compulsorily generous, so do they, by fortune of birth and training, make compulsory his act of generousness. He does not scab because he wants to scab. No whim of the spirit, no burgeoning of the heart, leads him to give more of his labor-power than they for a certain sum.

It is because he cannot get work on the same terms as they that he is a scab. There is less work than there are men to do work. This is patent, else the scab would not loom so large on the labor-market horizon. Because they are stronger than he, or more skilled, or more fortunate, or more energetic, it is impossible for him to take their places at the same wage. To take their places he must give more value, must work longer hours, or receive a smaller wage. He does so, and he cannot help it, for his will to live is driving him on as well as they are being driven on by theirs, and to live he must win food and shelter, which he can do only by receiving permission to work from some man who owns a bit of land or piece of machinery. And to receive permission from this man, he must make the transaction profitable for him.

Viewed in this light, the scab who gives more labor-power for a certain price than his fellows is not so generous after all. He is no more generous with his energy than the chattel slave and the convict laborer, who, by the way, are the almost perfect scabs. They give their labor-power for about the minimum possible price. But, within limits, they may loaf and malinger, and, as scabs, are exceeded by the machine, which never loafs and malingers, and which is the ideally perfect scab.

It is not nice to be a scab. Not only is it not in good social taste and comradeship, but, from the standpoint of food and shelter, it is bad business policy. Nobody desires to scab, to give most for least. The ambition of every individual is quite the opposite,—to give least for most; and as a result, living in a tooth-and-nail society, battle royal is waged by the ambitious individuals. But in its most salient aspect, that of the struggle over the division of a joint-product, it is no longer a battle between individuals, but between groups of individuals. Capital and labor apply themselves to raw material, make something useful out of it, add to its value, and then proceed to quarrel over the division of the added value. Neither cares to give most for least. Each is intent on giving less than the other and on receiving more.

Why don't we celebrate Labor Day on May 1st like everyone else, particularly since May 1st commemorates the Haymarket Riot, an American labor milestone? Slate's Explainer, er, explains.

What's an animal lover to do for that special barbeque? Might I suggest Certified Humane Meat?

Various versions of the Internationale, to be sung during that somnolent post-gorging period.

Demotivating your workforce, from Despair.com

¹ For some values of the word "fun"

Music Friday

So my downloads have reset, and I managed to get 100 downloaded with six minutes to go until midnight. I thought I'd update you on what I managed to download between 5 o'clock yesterday, when I realized that I had, in the excitement of moving and switching computers, forgotten to download any music this month; and midnight, when the downloads reset. I should note that there was a three+ hour break for dinner.

The Affair Yes Yes to You
Amon Tobin Chaos Theory
Arnold Schoenberg Verklarte Nacht/Chamber Symphony No 2
Beirut Lon Gisland
The Decemberists Castaways and Cutouts
godspeed you! black emperor Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven
Infected Mushroom Classical Mushroom
Moondog Moondog
The National Boxer
The New Pornographers Twin Cinema
Okkervil River The Stage Names
Quentin Crisp An Evening with Quentin Crisp
Steve Reich/The Smith Quartet Different Trains
Tokyo Police Club Smith
Georgie James The Grizzly Jive
Death Cab for Cutie Dream Scream

As you can see, I was in an Indie kind of mood, which is not to disparage any of the other genres that were suggested; I will explore some of them with this month's downloads. But when you're in a hurry, it's best to stick with one or two genres; it's easier to distinguish what you like. And so far, I like all of it, except that I'm kind of ambivalent about The Affair. For that matter, I should like all of it, since several of those selections were repeats of things I lost to a hard drive failure and my poor backup technique.

As you can also see, anyone who was hoping for Yglesias-quality music blogging will have to slide back over to his blog. Thanks for everyone who made suggestions, and keep them coming; I have a hundred downloads every month.

Incidentally, I should mention that if you don't have an eMusic subscription, you should totally get one; mine costs $25 a month, or 25 cents per fully transferrable MP3. However, I do want to complain about the fact that after you get to 100 downloads a month, there's no further discount; the 200 song package costs exactly twice as much, give or take a penny, as the 100 song package.

Not that this has kept me from toying with the idea . . .

David Brooks is funny

Ezra Klein suddenly notices after this column:

I think it was Abraham Joshua Heschel — after he broke off with Reinhold Niebuhr and formed Jefferson Airplane — who observed that though the ancients counseled, “Know Thyself,” in 87 percent of actual cases, profound self-knowledge is not transforming. It’s just disappointing.

And this is never more true than when the beach self takes over. There is a boardwalk game near where we vacation where you roll balls into holes to try to get your mechanical horse across a track faster than your 11 opponents. You pay a dollar a game and if you win you get a stuffed horse worth 75 cents. My beach self has played that game for 15 years, and I have never once gotten up without secretly wishing I was playing again.

In my heart, I’d be happy to play that game 11 hours a day at the cost of several thousand dollars, and the only thing preventing me is that the Slovakian girl behind the counter might conclude that American men are pathetic.

I question the economics, there; I'd guess the horse is worth more like 2 cents. But it is certainly true that a life without funnel cakes and salt water taffy is not worth living.

Actually, I too had just noticed Brooks being exceptionally funny, in this review of Drew Westen's book:

Westen urges Democratic candidates to go for the gut, and includes a number of speeches that he wishes Democratic candidates had given. He wishes, for example, Al Gore had hit George Bush harder for being a drunk. He wishes Gore had interrupted a presidential debate and barked at Bush, “If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn’t a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father’s own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings.”

At another point, he imagines Gore exploding: “Why don’t you tell us how many times you got behind the wheel of a car with a few drinks under your belt, endangering your neighbors’ kids? Where I come from, we call that a drunk.” If Democrats would go for people’s primitive passions in this way, Westen argues, they’d win elections.

This thesis raises some interesting questions. First, why did someone with so little faith in rational inquiry go into academia, and what does he do to those who disagree with him at Emory faculty meetings, especially recovering alcoholics?

Of course, perhaps this is not fair: who couldn't write a funny review of a book by a man who thinks that the way to make an emotional connection with people is to make fun of recovering drunks? But it was rather wittier and more acerbic than I generally think of Brooks as being.

Update A reader argues that Westen's response makes this piece sound considerably less funny. I haven't read the book, but I have heard the good professor interviewed on NPR, and after listening to him for an hour, I have to say that he, and his thesis, came off as exactly the painfully parochial, self-unaware, thoroughly risible parody that David Brooks presents him as.

Oh, what a tangled web

I am totally terrified of spiders, along with almost anything else that has more than four legs. (Grasshoppers are okay). Past boyfriends will attest that you don't really know fear until you hear the electrifying strangled screams that emit from my mouth at the sight of, say, a largish cockroach. Naturally, therefore, I was unable to resist clicking on a New York Times headline that read "Got Arachnophobia? Here’s Your Worst Nightmare"

Actually, however, the story turned out to be pretty cool:

Most spiders are solitary creatures. So the discovery of a vast web crawling with millions of spiders that is spreading across several acres of a North Texas park is causing a stir among scientists, and park visitors.

Sheets of web have encased several mature oak trees and are thick enough in places to block out the sun along a nature trail at Lake Tawakoni State Park, near this town about 50 miles east of Dallas.

. . .

Allen Dean, a spider expert at Texas A&M University, has seen a lot of webs, but even he described this one as “rather spooky, kind of like Halloween.”

Mr. Dean and several other scientists said they had never seen a web of this size outside of the tropics, where the relatively few species of “social” spiders that build communal webs are most active.

Airport follies

Maria of Crooked Timber asks a question:

Here are the things most people would happily pay for at an international transit airport: – a shower – clean underwear (for those of us who habitually forget to pack it) – daylight – an exercise facility to help with the jetlag and minimise DVT – nutritious but not too heavy food – a nap, lying flat, somewhere quiet.

And here’s what is generally available: – Gucci – Chanel – l’Occitane – Bodyshop – Lacoste – Nike – a few plastic seats – McDonalds, dougnuts, and the local variety of fried, sugary dross to add a sugar hangover to your jetlag.

. . .

So why the complete mismatch of trapped and exhausted consumers to luxury goods? Surely the airports have woken up to the fact that travelling is mass market. Or are travellers such a captive market that airports can completely ignore what they actually want…?

My answer: in an airport, foot traffic is very high, and space is at a premium. So you should expect to see things that go at a very high volume (McDonalds) or things that are very expensive per-inch-of-display-space, such as Gucci. Showers and napping capsules do not meet either criteria.