A Paradox

I am not going to post anything this evening.

"It's Not My Trick, Michael..."

New Scientist presents the newest and best optical illusions. As Aristotle once said, "very cool stuff."

The 70s Are Back!

Remember Rick Perlstein? Smart guy, historian, subject of an anguished post on this very blog? Seems that he's currently writing a "political and culture history of the United States in the '70s." I guess Perlstein is slowly working his way through late 20th century America. What happens when he catches up with himself?

Anyway...as an appetizer for his upcoming book, he serves up an essay on the existing historical literature about the 70s. Conclusion: there's not a lot of there there. Perlstein thinks there is a gap in the literature just waiting to be filled by...wait for it...a new book by Rick Perlstein!

Really, though, if anyone is up to that task, it's Mr. Eric Perlstein. I might whine and criticize. But I'm going to buy the book, read it in a day, and thoroughly enjoy it. Even grad students can enjoy things, right? Or did we forfeit that when we received our first stipend check?

Getting Goosed

Have you ever heard the sound of a million geese in flight? It's a good deal more terrifying than you might think.

I was out running this morning when, in the distance, I heard a jumbo jet crashing into an all-drum concert held inside a steel foundry. At least that's what it sounded like. There was a tremendous roaring noise that went on and on and on, never stopping, only getting louder.

Geez, I think to myself, have they finally done the sensible thing and nuked Trenton? When I got to a break in the trees I looked for a mushroom cloud on the horizon. No suck luck--but what I saw was even more frightening. Geese. Nothing but geese. A galaxy of geese, stretched across the entire horizon.

Now, I have a deep love for geese. On my wall hangs a poster with the inexplicable message "Who Cares About the Geese? Everyone!" But a million of anything is frightening. A million dust mites would be frightening. And a million geese is downright spine-chilling.

I went back to my run, but I now carried within me an icy sliver of fear. All those geese...what if they chose to turn against us? What if they descended on our airports en masse, crashing planes and grounding flights? The lesson: beware of geese. You never know what they might be plotting.

Nerds!

To quote Mystery Science Theater 3000: "Even the AV club laughs at these guys."

For a useful antidote to Quidditch-related insanity, check out this reinterpretation of the Potter mythos. Warning: contains not safe for work language, unless you work at a swear factory.

Five Best Comic Strips Named "Ziggy"

Ziggy

Ziggy

Ziggy

Calvin & Hobbes

Ziggy

In a Hole, in the Ground...

...There lived a Hobbit who held an unfulfilling job as a paper salesman at Wernham Hogg.

My opinion? Great casting choice. Though I still think Gilbert Gottfried could have pulled it off.

Coach

A play based on the life of Vince Lombardi? Sure, why not. Too bad it isn't a musical. I would pay to hear musical numbers like "Let's Practice the Power Sweep Fifteen More Times" or "Goddamnit, Max, I'm Tired Of You Showing Up Drunk to Practice."

I Have the Best Name Ever for a History Textbook

The Dialectics of Comparative Discourse: A Phenomenological Synthesis of Meta-Tropes

Cliche Alert

Eric Cartman of South Park memorably described independent films as being about "gay cowboys eating pudding." Joe Queen explains how art-house movies are about so much more than that:

Sexually unfulfilled musicians are a fixture in arthouse films, particularly pianists. So are congenitally miserable Scandinavians and emotionally repressed Japanese. A proper arthouse film will often have an exotic animal, such as a dromedary or a yak, and it will sometimes feature a chatty dwarf who is wise beyond his years. Quite often the dwarf will be a bit cheeky. The Legend of the Cheeky Dwarf would actually make a very fine title for an arthouse film. It's surprising no one has yet tried it.

Assault and Battery

For the past few weeks, my car has been making a very peculiar sound whenever the engine starts. Imagine a fat guy getting gored to death by a yak with emphysema. Not too hard, right? And it get worse every day. Last week the little sucker took nearly half a minute to start. And now it sounded like the yak had contracted a nasty case of throat cancer.

My suspicion--confirmed through a scientific process known as "calling my dad"--was that the battery was dying. Or perhaps it was already dead, and now existed only in an advanced state of rigor mortis. Whatever the case, something under my car's hood was staggering toward a sickly, coughing end.

The solution was clear: I had to crack open another car and steal its battery. Turns out this is both impractical and illegal. And when something is illegal even in New Jersey, you know it must be really bad. Remember, this is a state that allows you to shoot people every other Tuesday.

The legal solution was clear: I had to take my car down to a service station for a double bypass battery transplant. Being incompetent at both car talk and social interaction, I was terrified by the prospect of having to talk to strangers about cars. Naturally, I turned to Wikipedia for help. I read the entry on "car." Then I skimmed the entry on "four-stroke engine." Then I jumped to "piston." And then to "Rip Hamilton," for reasons that will make sense if you are a fan of decaying pro basketball franchises.

I bring the car in. When the guy asks me what the problem is, I give him the yak-goring-man analogy, and he nods and says, "Oh yeah, the 'emphysemic yak.' That's shop talk for a busted battery." He brought out a defibrillator-looking thing to test the battery; after several jolts, as well as some mouth-to-mouth resucitation, failed to revive the battery, it was officially declared dead. It was survived by one radiator and two windshield wipers. In lieu of flowers, the family is asking you to make donations to your favorite televangelist.

Now the car runs as smoothly as butter, thanks in part to the butter I used to grease up the new battery. Hey, that's what Wikipedia said to do. They also said that sugar in the gas tank will make the car run more "sweetly." I'm off to see if it works...

Five Best Things About Fall in Princeton

Spectacular colors as the leaves turn neon pink and midnight blue

Great if you hate joy, happiness

Deathly pallor now seems somewhat normal

Heavy parka hides grotesquely out-of-shape body

Better than fall in Cambridge

Scary Sixteen

EW--that's Entertainment Daily, for those of you not up on your media acronyms--presents the 16 Creepiest TV Shows. Surprisingly, "Fraggle Rock" does not make the list.

Lost in the Library

To enter the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library is to enter a world of sadness, confusion, and pain. Statistics show that 73% of people who walk through the front doors never walk out. And the 27% who make it out are never the same. They will carry the scars for the rest of their life.

The above paragraph may not be true, but it makes a good hook, and my middle school English teacher taught me that the hook was the only thing that mattered. Now that you, the reader, are properly hooked, I will continue. You are hooked, right? Because otherwise my entire middle school education was a sham.

The Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library to Harvey S. Firestone is nationally renowned for its squareness and grayness. "Architecture Today" named it the third most angular building in America, trailing only the Lincoln Memorial and the Transamerica Pyramid. Out front, there are rows and rows of bike racks, where grad students park their bikes and dream of the day when they can afford...well, maybe not a car, but a better bike. One with handlebar tassels.

Firestone has three floors above ground, three floors below ground, and one secret floor where the mole people live. Be warned: your cellphone will not get reception below ground. New York City could be wiped out by atomic meteors and you would be none the wiser.

The stacks are not well-lit, although the front desk does provide flint and tallow candles for a small fee. Rumors that a skeleton was found in the B floor stacks are complete nonsense. It was a mummified body--the flesh was still attached to the skeleton, and only a few bones were visible. Rumors that the A floor stacks are prowled by a Bengal tiger are, unfortunately, true. For a small fee, the front desk will notify your parents if you are torn to shreds by a savage feline.

You can find nearly every book in Firestone Library, including your third-grade composition book, the one that contained your magnum opus "Why I want to be a dinosaur when I grow up." In the rare book collection, you can find copy of the Bible autographed by God.

Don't forget to grab a lollipop on your way out! They come in three flavors: cranberry-raspberry, raspberry-cranberry, and cran-raspberry. Rasp-cranberry pops are sometimes available. On the way out, the guards will inspect your bag to make sure you are not smuggling any books. They will also require you to empty your lungs in order to insure you are not smuggling any precious library air.

Firestone Library! The library, the myth, the legend. Be sure to visit many times...assuming you find your way out the first time.

Conspiracy Theory

Turns out we came thisclose to President John W. McCormack. For those not in the know--that is to say, normal people--McCormack was Speaker of the House in 1963.

Question Worth Asking at 10:32 in the Evening

My mouthwash bills itself as "night mint flavor." How is that different from regular mint? What gives it that special "night" zing? The mind boggles.

Love and Hate: Malcolm Gladwell

I have never read a Malcolm Gladwell book. That makes me one of maybe six people. Everyone you know has read “Blink” or “The Tipping Point” or “Outliers,” and they think you should read it too. “You gotta read this!” they say, handing you a well-thumbed copy of “What the Dog Saw” in the manner of a Soviet dissident passing on samizdat. Malcolm Gladwell will change your life. He will Make You See Things in a New Way. He will Revolutionize Your Thinking.

This wild popularity has made Malcolm Gladwell a very, very rich man, wealthy enough to have me killed if he wanted. So I have to tread lightly here.

You might ask, Will, how can you judge Malcolm Gladwell? You admit that you haven’t read his books. What gives you the right to condemn him in front of your daily audience of three people?

I need to be more precise. I have never finished a Gladwell book. I started “Blink” and found it so god-awful that I put it down and curled up in a corner to cry. I did the same thing with “Outliers,” albeit in a different corner.

If Gladwell were a Batman supervillain, he would be called The Extrapolator. His M.O. is to take a seemingly random incident and inflate it to galactic proportions. Ever notice that many great Canadian hockey players are born in the first few calendar months? No, of course you haven’t. But Malcolm Gladwell has. Not only did he notice it, he devoted an entire chapter to it in “Outliers,” explaining it as the consequence of Canadiian youth hockey league rules. Or something.

But that's hardly enough extrapolation to satisfy Gladwell. In the Gladwell-verse, a mysterious realm locked beneath his goofy afro, everything is connected to something bigger. The story about the Canadian hockey league is no mere anecdote. It reveals the earth-shaking secret that…wait for it…success is often determined by outside factors!

You OK? I assume you fainted after reading that. It’s understandable. Malcolm Gladwell tends to make people swoon.

You might say, Geez, Will, this sounds a lot more like a hate-hate relationship than a love-hate one. Why don’t we all go grab our torches and pitchforks and meet at Malcolm Gladwell’s front door?

Because, as cognitive scientist and Robert Plant lookalike Steven Pinker has noted, Gladwell is deadly in book form but delightful when it comes to essays. Prevented by the word count from soaring to ridiculous heights of extrapolation, Gladwell drops his irritating tics—the cutesy catchphrases, the sloppy reasoning, the self-empowerment preaching—and gets down to writing.

And he does that quite well. If you don’t believe me, sample his story on espionage. Or try his intriguing comparison of teachers and quarterbacks. Or, staying on the football front, his comparison of football and dogfighting. Or his examination of the full court press in basketball. The fun never stops in a Malcolm Gladwell essay! Well, maybe in the one about dogfighting.

Still, I’ll give the last word to the critics. Sing us home, Craig Brown and Isaac Chotiner!

Squirreled Away

The squirrels here are not what they seem. You might think you know squirrels--chittering little furballs that can never decide whether to cross the street. Maybe that's true where you live. Up here, though, the squirrels have mutated from harmless rodents into something more sinister.

First, they have no fear. Normal squirrels flee in terror when a person walks by. These squirrels sit and stare, practically daring you to come closer. "Want a piece of me, buddy?" they seem to say, no doubt in a squeaky Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks voice. Just walk on by. It's not worth the trouble.

Second, they will eat anything. I guess they learned this from watching college students. I once saw a squirrel gnawing on a buffalo wing. If that doesn't put the fear of God in your heart, I don't know what will.

Third, they have a disconcerting habit of popping out of trash cans. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, at any given time 73% of the campus trash cans are occupied by squirrels. Go to toss out an empty Cheetos bag and there are better-than-even odds that a squirrel will jump out and claw your face off. OK, that last part is poetic license.

Am I getting through to you? If not, let me make it explicit: the squirrels of New Jersey must be destroyed. They are probably plotting our destruction as I write. We must strike first. Time is running out...

Stupid Criminal Tricks

I don't know if there is a right way to rob a bank. This probably isn't it.

His Airness

On the off chance that you were recently hit in the head with a rock, causing you to forget that Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player in the history of basketball or of baskets in general, then this wonderful Davis Halberstam vignette will put you right.

And if you are a visual learner, or are just too busy to read, then this YouTube clip will do nicely.

Why am I blogging about a years-old basketball game? Hey, it's my blog, and I'll write about the mating habits of the Vietnamese horny toad if I want.

Board Stiff

For the life of me, I can't figure out why the board game "Thinking Man's Golf" didn't catch on like a rhinovirus. Wait...perhaps because the title combines golf and thinking, two of the most boring concepts known to man.

Sadly, it might still be the best of the "12 most horrendous board game fails of all time." Seriously, what were the designers of "Don't Catch a Cold" thinking?

See You In the Funny Papers

Scott Adams explains how to think like a cartoonist. Come for the anecdote about the french fry, stay for the life-changing advice.

Love and Hate: Rick Perlstein

When I grow up, I want to be Rick Perlstein. Commercial success, major awards, critical acclamation…the man has it all. “Before the Storm,” his history of the Barry Goldwater campaign, remains the definitive take on the subject. Topping “Before the Storm” would be like dethroning Wayne Gretzky as history’s greatest hockey player. It can’t be done. Perlstein’s second book, “Nixonland,” is—the cover blurb from Newsweek swears—the “best book ever written about the 1960s.”

What makes him so successful? Panache. He writes in a snappy style reminiscent of journalist-historians like J. Anthony Lukas and William Manchester. He has a golden ear for anecdotes. His narrative grabs you in the back of your brain and drags you helplessly from chapter to chapter. And his chapter titles are hands-down the best in the business. Consider the craftsmanship that went into something like “In Which Playboy Bunnies, and Barbarella, and Tanya Inspire Theoretical Considerations upon the Nature of Democracy.”

But my love for Perlstein goes beyond style. The man works in my wheelhouse—heck, he practically lives there. Among all the books that inspired me to study conservative history, “Before the Storm” ranks second, behind only the immortal “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.” Perlstein helped create the modern history of conservatism, for goodness sakes. Without him, I’d be flipping burgers at the Burger King off I-95. My dorm room, my stipend, and my carrel all ought to be stamped “Courtesy of Rick Perlstein.”

Having covered the “love” part of this love-hate relationship, I’ll move on to the fun stuff. I could link to George Will’s review of “Nixonland” and be done with it. But that would be shirking my duty as a blogger. Read the Will review first, then come back here.

Finished? Good. I agree with every word. “Nixonland” is “compulsively readable.” Perlstein does have “a gift for penetrating judgments.” And, at the same time, he does tend “to catch the ’60s disease of rhetorical excess” and to “[pile] up jejune incongruities.” He is a tremendously gifted writer, granted, but gifts can be misused, and Perlstein often abuses his beyond all human decency. It is fair to describe Lyndon Johnson as “psychopathic”? Hardly.

My deeper criticism has nothing to do with language and everything to do with content. Perlstein never met an ideology he liked. As Will points out, Perlstein sees ulterior motives behind everything, motives that are invariably crass and usually racist. Liberalism is a smokescreen used by the elite to justify their elite-ness. Conservatism is a paranoid fear-fueled backlash. And don’t get him started on neoconservatism.

I’ll never give up on Perlstein. That doesn’t mean I have to cut him slack. Rick Perlstein, you are officially on notice with this blog.

History-Related Words I Never Want to Hear Again

Trope

Performative

Diachronic

Presentism

Creole

Dialectic

Normative

Structuralist

Synecdoche

Yes, these are real words, used by real historians without a sense of either irony or shame. I'm no less guilty than the next guy.

I Get a Kick Out of You

Political Wire asks: is this the best attack ad ever? I'm inclined to say yes.

Talkin' Softball

Homer: Clemens, did I make the team?
Clemens: You sure did.
Homer: I did! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! In your face, Strawberry!
Clemens: Wait a minute, are you Ken Griffey Jr.?
Homer: No.
Clemens: Sorry, didn't mean to get your hopes up.

And other wonderful sports-related quotes from The Simpsons.

Five Favorite iPhone Apps

SmugBastard: Sends an e-mail to all your contacts alerting them whenever you purchase a new iPhone app

Detonator: Causes your iPhone to explode like a fragmentary grenade (Note: good for one use only)

Tarantino Watch: Keeps you informed at all times as to the whereabouts of acclaimed film director Quentin Tarantino

Baconator: Gives you iPhone a pleasing bacon scent

iChat: Allows you to carry on conversations with a friend simply by speaking into your iPhone and holding it up to your ear to hear their response

Handwriting on the Wall

Turns out practicing penmanship is good for the brain. Looks like I owe my Catholic school teachers an apology. Forgive me, Sister Agnoricus. I never realized your cursive lessons would be so enriching.

Mini-Review: God, Church, and Flag

What made Joe run? How exactly did Joseph McCarthy, a bumptious judge from Wisconsin, become the most loved, hated, and feared man in Washington? For years, the short answer was “Catholicism.” Pundits claimed that McCarthy, an Irish Catholic, was buoyed by support from co-religionists, who—the pundits further claimed—were without exception die-hard red hunters. As usual, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Donald Crosby’s “God, Church, and Flag: Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and the Catholic Church, 1950-1957” explodes the myth that Catholics marched in lockstep behind Tail Gunner Joe.

McCarthy was hardly the model Catholic. Though he attended mass each Sunday, he was ignorant of even the most basic church teachings. His knowledge of Catholic social policy brings to mind Al Smith’s lament: “What the hell is an encyclical?” And while he certainly appreciated whatever support he got from Catholics, rarely—if ever—did he pitch his anti-communist appeal on a religious level. His speeches were often spiced with fiery condemnations of “atheistic communism,” but that was hardly unusual among red-baiters.

Joe didn’t think much about Catholicism. Strange as it may seem, many Catholics didn’t think much about Joe, either. Opinion polls found that large percentages of Catholics held no opinion whatsoever about McCarthy. Among those who did, the majority supported the senator—but so did a majority of Protestants, and by nearly identical margins. When McCarthy went into a spiraling nosedive after the Army hearings, his support among Catholics and Protestants dropped side-by-side.

Your average John Q. Catholic didn’t care much for McCarthy one way or the other. The real fight took place within the Catholic elite, the clergymen, politicians, and journalists who fancied themselves the voice of Catholic America. Some, like Francis Spellman—the New York cardinal whose unofficial slogan was “kill a commie for Christ”—embraced McCarthy. Conservative Catholic periodicals such as The Wanderer, the Los Angeles Tidings, and the Brooklyn Tablet did the same. They stuck with McCarthy even after his fall, transfiguring him into a Christ-like martyr persecuted for speaking the truth.

Every good word from the conservative Catholic elite was balanced by a harsh one from the liberals. Commonweal denounced McCarthy from the very start. America, published by the Jesuits, was so critical of the senator that the Jesuit superiors ordered the editor to stop writing about McCarthyism. McCarthy’s support among the conservative New York City clergy was balanced by opposition from the liberal clergymen of Chicago, led by the activist cardinal Bernard Sheil.

Yet it was mostly sound and fury; the Tablet’s rabid McCarthyism never translated into concrete Catholic votes. Why, then, did the myth of Catholic McCarthyism persist? Mostly because it meshed with existing stereotypes. Protestants believed Catholics to be ignorant and anti-democratic. McCarthy gave them a living symbol of everything they feared. No matter how much the evidence refuted it—in his 1952 re-election campaign, for instance, McCarthy did quite poorly among Wisconsin Catholics—the elite clung tightly to their preconceptions.

The final irony: the “sensible” elites were more to blame for McCarthyism than were ordinary Catholics. The Catholics thought little of McCarthy. The elite obsessed over him, and their loathing of McCarthy—mixed with a certain degree of admiration—made the senator an inescapable presence in the media. They broadcast his every move; they printed his every allegation. And when McCarthy grew famous from the attention, they shifted the blame to Catholics and washed their hands of guilt.

The Five Best Things About Being a Grad Student

You get a free lunch ever day, as long as you are willing to stick with a strict "cookies and coffee" diet

Chicks dig neckbeards

Though the work might be hard, you can always console yourself by looking toward the future, when the work will be even harder

People expect you to be unhygienic, which really saves time in the morning

At least you're not a grad stu...ah, crap

Call It

Joe Posnanski--the rarest of things, a sportswriter with original thoughts--lists the 32 best-ever sports calls. To quote Gus Johnson, "AWWWOOORRROOOGGGGHHHHH!"

Mini-Review: Suburban Warriors

Today, California is one of the truest-blue states in the union. A Republican presidential candidate is about as likely to carry California as a guy named William T. Sherman is likely to win an election in Georgia. Yet in the dim and distant past, California—at least parts of it—was conservative. Do you think it was sheer coincidence that both Nixon and Reagan called the Golden State home? Lisa McGirr’s short but comprehensive “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right” returns California to the center of the right-wing universe.

As California was to the rest of the nation, so was Orange County to California. Once a sleepy backwater dotted with citrus farms and the occasional oil well, the OC underwent explosive growth—no pun intended—during World War II. Weapons manufacturers, eager to take advantage of the cheap land and convenient location, snapped up thousands of acres on which to build their factories. The resultant influx of workers hyper-charged Orange County, transforming it into a suburban megalopolis.

Many of these new migrants hailed from the south or Midwest; they came to Orange County carrying suitcases in their hands and conservatism in their heads. Once there, they meshed well with the old-timers, the oilmen and ranchers suspicious of anything resembling “big government.” The migrants also blessed Orange County with a touch of that old-time religion. Churches, especially evangelical ones, multiplied during the 1940s and 1950s.

What did these people believe? According to McGirr, they embraced the very same—sometimes contradictory—policies that underlie modern conservatism. Government was the problem, not the solution. The word “tax” should always be followed by “cut.” The decline of public morals was more than a nuisance; it threatened the very fabric of the nation. Communism was not an economic ideology—it was an anti-Christian theology and very possibly the anti-Christ itself.

These Orange County conservatives adopted as their slogan the principle “Organize, organize, organize.” At first they worked within pre-existing institutions, radical right groups like the paranoid John Birch Society. Eventually, however, they shed this extremist skin and began to take over more mainstream organizations. The California Republican Assembly changed rapidly from a moderate stronghold to a bastion of the far right. Political institutions were supplemented by religious ones; the first conservative mega-churches arose, not in the Deep South, but on the beaches of Orange County.

At first, they suffered defeat. Many of the Orange County conservatives wore out their shoes campaigning for Barry Goldwater in 1964. When he lost in landslide, some of the OC activists withdrew from politics, but most kept right on working. Two years after the Goldwater debacle, the conservatives helped put Ronald Reagan in the California governor’s mansion. And two years after that they played a part in the astonishing comeback of Richard Nixon. The ultimate triumph came in 1980, with the election of Ronald Reagan as president.

The contours of this story have been explored before—the rise, defeat, and redemption of American conservatism. But McGirr tells it in a microscopic level. She interviews the men and women who went door to door for Goldwater and organized coffee klatches for Reagan. “Suburban Warriors” transforms the conservative movement from a vast, faceless philosophy into many-headed hydra, a people-powered movement that has endured, despite its setbacks, up to the present day.

Love and Hate

Love and hate. They go together like razor blades and Halloween candy. Is a love-hate relationship even possible? The very idea seems silly. Doesn’t love dissolve any lesser emotion? And doesn’t hate do the exact same thing? In theory, then, love and hate should go their separate ways, and never should the twain meet.

Of course the above paragraph is nonsense. We all have love-hate relationships. We all have things we adore that nonetheless frustrate us time and again. You love The Monkees but feel guilty for listening to “I’m A Believer” ten times straight. You think Kobe Bryant is an all-time great, but wish he would stop doing that absurd fist-pump. You despise “Dancing With the Stars” and never miss an episode.

My name is Will Schultz, and I confess to my share of love-hate relationships. I’m going to tell you about a few of them. Why? To unburden myself. To make you feel better about the subjects of your love and hate. To tell a good story. And to explain why Bill Simmons is the only sportswriter I read, in spite of my suspicion that he is pure evil.

This will be a multi-part series, with installments appearing when you least expect it. Coming soon: the historian whose irresistible books drive me up my carrel wall.

Speaking of Taft

I wonder if this software could be employed to make him appear 1) slimmer and 2) slightly less dead. I doubt it.

My Dream...

A Twitter feed, written from the point of view of former president William Howard Taft, titled justtalkinbouttaft. Together, we can make it happen.

Rejected Opening Lines for Bobby Darin's Classic "Splish Splash"

Splish splesh, I was hittin' "refresh"

Splish splosh, I was havin' a nosh

Splish splush, I was listenin' to Rush

Splish splish, I was guttin' a fish

Splish sployce, I was readin' James Joyce

Sexy Sex

Harvard historian Jill Lepore takes a break from Revolutionary War history to address the subject of sex ed. What horrors await in this article? How about " a tiny, naked, bald homunculus who walks around with an erection"?

Mini-Review: The Social Network

Go see "The Social Network." What? You want more? Fine. "The Social Network," if you were unaware, is a movie about the founding of Facebook. Cue the jokes about "YouTube: The Movie" and "Google II: Electric Boogaloo."

The "hero" of our story is Mark Zuckerberg, a curly-haired Harvard undergrad obsessed with success. I add quotation marks to "hero" because Zuckerberg--played by the curly-haired Jesse Eisenberg--is the most unpleasant character to slink into multiplexes since Lotso Huggin' Bear. Arrogant and socially clueless, he sees nothing wrong with writing a computer program to rank Harvard girls by hotness.

That unsavory little creation catches the eye of the Winklevoss twins, a pair of strapping Abercrombie-models-to-be with a couple million bucks to burn. The Winklevosses want to build the online equivalent of a gated community: a social network site open only to users with the golden harvard.edu address. Zuckerberg is so enchanted by this idea that he promptly steals it.

What follows would be deathly boring in any film not scripted by West Wing muse Aaron Sorkin. Zuckerberg, funded by a cash infusion from his friend Eduardo, sits down and writes several thousand lines of code. Voila! Facebook! Thankfully, Sorkin's overcaffeinated style saves the jargon-y dialogue from the mortal sin of dullness. You almost forget that no one in the entire history of mankind has ever spoken like a Sorkin character.

The actors do a fine job bringing the hyperactive screenplay to life. Eisenberg captures the flat affect and clipped speech characteristic of computer creeps everywhere. Any college student will immediately recognize Zuckerberg as the weird kid who sits in the front row and pesters the professor with irrelevant questions about number theory. Justin Timberlake brings a boatload of panache to the character of Sean Parker, a shady online mogul who sees himself as Zuckerberg's Svengali.

Does this movie have a downside? Of course! No review would be complete without a laundry list of weaknesses. And here they are: no likable characters, a forgettable score, and an unexplained shift in the main character's personality from passive lump to scheming mastermind.

Forget those quibbles, though. "The Social Network" demands to be seen. Like that guy on campus you try to avoid, it will keep popping up in your "friend" queue until you give in. Do yourself a favor and accept the request.

A Taste of New Jersey

Apologies for the light blogging--I spent the weekend with relatives in New Jersey and did my best to escape any and all responsibilities. Now I'm back and badder than ever. Or at the very least, less good than ever.

My weekend was an extended exercise in gluttony on a scale not seen since the Roman Empire. I ate my weight in junk food several times over. But it was more than simple greed--it was a learning experience. It gave me the chance to sample some delicacies--or "delicacies"--unique to the Garden State.

First up, Taylor ham. It might sound like a country singer. Don't be fooled, though; Taylor ham is actually a sausage-like substance capable of clogging arteries at five yards. Imagine ham, only thicker, meatier, and with a stronger flavor. I ate it with maple-flavored sausages, which were meant to evoke the flavor of a pancake-and-pork-link breakfast scramble but tasted more like someone spilled Mrs. Butterworth in a sausage factory.

Second, doughnuts from Delran's L&M Bakery. I am never going back to Dunkin' or Krispy Kreme. I refuse. I am a convert to the church of L&M. All other doughnut shops are guilty of foul heresy. We also got doughnuts from Wegman's, the Yankee Food Lion. Not at all bad. They aced the cruller, always the true test of bakery prowess. A bad cruller tastes like styrofoam, only less edible.

Last, soft pretzels. The Northeast is famous for its pretzels. People come from miles around to buy paper bags loaded with slimy-salty Philly soft pretzels. As for these ones...eh...could have been worse. They delivered salted carbohydrate goodness. Really, what more do you want from a pretzel? A lecture in the political economy of nineteenth-century America?

Stay tuned for my mini-review of "The Social Network." To put it in mini-mini-mini review terms: good movie. Watch.

Worse than Marmaduke

If there really is an all-powerful and all-loving God, than He has some 'splaining to do.

Mini-Review of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom Based on the First Eleven Pages

Freedom is great as an abstract concept. As a novel, it sucks.

I Don't Buy It

The worst insult a grad student can throw at a book is "I don't buy it." It's the ultimate diss. You reject the author's argument; at the same time, you make it clear you don't care much about the book either way. Even "I hate it" is gentler than "I don't buy it." Just a bit of friendly advice for those of you who have to deal with grad students.

Spider Man

Damn spiders. Why they gotta build their webs right across the jogging trails? Every time I run, I tear down spider webs the way a wrecking ball demolishes houses. Makes me feel a little guilty, in fact. God knows how many innocent spiders now have to live on the streets, homeless, after investing so much time and effort spinning their web.

But let's bring the subject back to me, shall we? I'm tired of finishing my morning run wearing a mask made from spider webs. To solve this problem, I plan to create a "spider plow," a large and heavy stick that can be worn on the head. The plow will smash through webs before they hit your face. Genius, right?

I plan to start manufacturing spider plows next week. For a mere $50, you can get in on the ground floor of this invention. Think about it...it'd be like investing in Apple right before the iPod. Or investing in McDonald's right before the Happy Meal.

Mini-Review: The Anticommunist Manifestos

For a faith born out of books—the books of Marx, to be precise—communism was never very keen on literature. Fiction, or at least fiction not devoted to the glories of the Five Year Plan, was bourgeois. So were biographies and memoirs. Political texts were subversive. In short, everything not bearing the name Marx, Lenin, or Stalin, or praising one of those three, was verboten. Small wonder, then, that books proved such a powerful counterargument to communism. In “The Anticommunist Manifestos,” John Fleming treats on four books that battled the Bolshies.

Two of the titles, “Witness” and “Darkness at Noon,” might be familiar to history-minded readers. The other two—“Out of the Night” and “I Chose Freedom”—are more obscure than the post-Wham career of Andrew Ridgely. Yet in their day, all four were widely read, widely discussed, and widely condemned by communists and fellow travelers in America and across the world.

People often assume anti-communism was an American phenomenon. The archetypal anticommunist, Joseph McCarthy, was as jingoistic as jingoes come, and the whole idea of anti-communism seems to float in a red, white, and blue haze. In reality, it was as much a global phenomenon as the ideology it fought against. “Darkness at Noon,” the chilling story of a Soviet political commissar sacrificed on the bloody altar of communism, was written by Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler and first published in France; it dealt a near-fatal blow to the fortunes of the French Communist Party.

“Out of the Night” by Richard Krebs (published under the pseudonym Jan Valtin) and “I Chose Freedom” by Victor Kravchenko were both exposes written by Soviet defectors. Both were published in America thanks to the work of dedicated anti-communists like Isaac Don Levine and Eugene Lyons (himself an ex-communist). “I Chose Freedom” made perhaps the bigger splash. When the French communist paper Les Lettres Francaises accused Kravchenko of fabricating tales about gulags, political executions, and mass starvation, he sued them for libel—and won, after a chaotic trial brilliantly retold by Fleming.

Whittaker Chambers’s “Witness” marked the end of an era for American anti-communism. Not that Americans no longer opposed communism. But the Communist Party, which had once been so vibrant, was by that time a moldering corpse. The Alger Hiss case and
“Witness” simply interred the body. From then on, the serious battles against communism would be fought on foreign fronts. “Witness” served as a rallying cry for this coming battle. Chambers, a communist-turned conservative and an atheist-turned Quaker, warned Americans that beating the Soviets would require more than topping them in the annual production of dishwashers. Victory in this battle would require faith, faith in God and in democracy. The perpetually gloomy Chambers feared that neither would take root.

In his book—actually more a series of essays, joined under the spacious anti-communist umbrella—Fleming retells these stories with elegance, intelligence, and a slight smidgen of humor. You feel drawn back to the 1940s, the age of the Popular Front, the age when it sometimes seemed that the only thing standing between America and communism was a few hundred bound pages.

Procra

I was going to write a witty introduction for this article, but then I decided to do it tomorrow.

Out in the Cold

Tomorrow they turn the heat on in our dorm. At long last...no more waking up with that slab-of-beef-in-a-freezer feeling. No more thawing out my socks over a bare light bulb. No more kindling a fire with pages ripped from Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities."

This being New Jersey, of course, the weather will probably take a turn for the scorching sometime in the next few days. We'll go from freezing to broiling in no time at all. I guess the heat could have its advantages. For instance, I'll be able to cook cheese steak hot pockets without a microwave...

The Wheel of Time

I remember my first time reading Robert Jordan. The book was "The Wheel of Time," a chunky, compact novel whose eye-catching cover featured a man on horseback wearing what looked like samurai armor. I read it in one sitting. Then I read the next. And the next. And so on and on, until I had read enough pages of Robert Jordan to fill two good-sized Bibles and small Koran besides.

Did I like the stuff? I think I did. Though I recognized the derivative elements--might as well calls Trollocs orcs and be done with it--I liked the sweep and complexity of Jordan's world. Most of all, I liked putting myself in the story, imagining what my character would have done in this or that situation. Inevitably, I used my super powers to smash the bad guys, often in very bloody ways. My altar-ego never wound up with a girl, but that was OK. Girls were gross.

My flirtation--no, my affair--with Robert Jordan ended in the seventh book. This, as dedicated Jordainaires may recall, was when characters started traveling through the dimensional portals that inexplicably popped up everywhere. It was getting a little too weird. Plus, it was impossible to keep track of the dozens of characters without a guide. I realized this when I tried to explain the plot of the fourth book to my parents. It took me fifteen minutes alone to introduce the characters.

Now, years later, this article brought me back to those days. Though the author is right to describe the later books as "a study in inertia," it's good to relive my career slaughtering Draghkars and battling Gray Men.

Mini-Review: The Politics of Rage

Artie Bremer wanted to kill Richard Nixon, only to find himself stymied by the layers of security surrounding the president. What’s a psychopath to do? Bremer was forced to set his sights lower; he picked as his target Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Upset by this turn of events, Bremer complained that shooting a governor would hardly win him the notoriety he craved. George Wallace was not just any governor. In “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics,” Dan Carter explores how a gawky country boy became America’s most polarizing politician.

Wallace was born to campaign. Blessed with a nose for power, he made the right allies early in his career, chief among them the colorful populist James “Big Jim” Folsom. Yet their relationship eventually buckled beneath the weight of the race question. As a circuit judge, Wallace was known for his courtesy toward black lawyers and clients, but things changed when he entered the arena. After losing a gubernatorial contest to a race-baiting opponent, Wallace famously swore “I will never be outniggered again.” He was true to his word. Four years later he swept into the governor’s mansion, defeating his former mentor Folsom in a campaign flavored by the sour tang of racism.

Race meant everything to Wallace. Unlike some southern politicians, who seemed to be putting on their racism in an attempt to smuggle economic populism through the back door, Wallace could talk of nothing but “Negro inferiority.” His attitude—a combination of condescending paternalism and ugly bigotry—seems a throwback to the old days of the pre-Civil War south. But, in a classic case of being the right person at the right time, Wallace’s rhetoric found a sympathetic hearing in the 1960s, as middle-class Americans began to fear their society was breaking apart under their feet.

His first presidential campaign, a quixotic run against Lyndon Johnson in 1964, introduced him to voters outside the south—and they liked what they saw. Wallace captured a quarter of the votes in Wisconsin, another quarter in Indiana, and nearly half in Maryland. Running as the American Independence candidate in 1968, the governor won most of the Deep South but failed to achieve his goal of throwing the election into the House of Representatives. Would he have been nominated by the Democrats in 1972? An interesting question, but Bremer’s bullet paralyzed Wallace and made the question moot.

In the long, dark twilight of his career, Wallace changed his segregationist ways and begged for forgiveness. Carter does not speculate as to the sincerity of this conversion. Nor does he spend much time on it—Wallace the civil rights activist is banished to the book’s epilogue.

Though I enjoyed Carter’s book, I found plenty quibbling material. His description of “the southernization of America” in the 1960s seems more a case of “the nationalization of the south.” The South was not exporting its poisonous brand of racism; indeed, racial tolerance was rising, albeit slowly, painfully, and with a good deal of bloodshed. Which leads to my second complaint. Carter depicts Wallace voters and conservatives in general as being infected by the southern virus of racism. Yet there was a degree of social disintegration in the 1960s; there really was a rise in national crime rates. Backlash politics was fed by more than racism. Acknowledging that fact would have made this a much stronger book.

The Soul of the Game

Don't have time to watch the baseball playoffs? This handy guide has all you need in a nutshell.

The Bish

Yesterday, the mass at Princeton chapel was graced by a visit from a diocesan bishop. After mass, he stood at the front of the church, shaking hands with parishioners as they left. As I approached the bishop, I realized I had no idea how to address him. Can't call him "father"--he's been promoted beyond that title. Is "your excellency" right? What about "your grace"? "Your majesty"?

Unable to choose, I compromised. As I shook the bishop's hand, I gave him a vacant smile and grunted in a pleasant, polite way, the way you might greet a complete stranger at a wedding. The bishop looked a little of puzzled. But he probably gets stuff like that all the time. What can you expect when you wear a hat shaped like a fancy napkin?

Mini-Reviews: Books About History

History is the neurotic science. It constantly questions itself, asking whether it has a meaning, purpose, or method. Historians write long, scholarly books arguing that long, scholarly books are useless. History also suffers an inferiority complex; it longs to have the respect given to “hard” sciences like physics, mathematics, even economics. Sometimes it all becomes too much. You want to shout “Enough! Stop the bellyaching! Get back to the archives!”

Two books—one short and casual, the other long and densely-argued—offer historians a way out of their mental bind. The first, Marc Bloch’s “The Historian’s Craft,” is as notable for its own history as for its argument. Bloch was a prominent French historian who served in the Resistance during World War II. Captured, tortured, and executed by the Nazis, Bloch made “The Historian’s Craft” his last testament. At the outset, he apologizes for his unscholarly style—his books and notes were lost during the invasion.

Bloch dismisses the notion of “history as science.” Nothing could be more ridiculous, he scoffs. His definition of history is simple: “It is the appearance of the human element.” Having defined history, he then seeks to explain its method. The historian might be compared to a big game hunter. His quarry is “the human element.” Its tracks are the documents left behind by past generations: government records, bills of sale, diaries, the junk of human existence. The historian follows these tracks and, with a bit of imagination, tries to summon up the humans who left them behind.

There are dangers in this hunt. Bloch warns that “a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time.” Context is everything. The historian should also take care not to explain a thing by that which came immediately before it. History, according to Bloch, is less a chain than a web, every event connected to every other event. The firing on Fort Sumter might have triggered the Civil War, for instance, but it is absurd to think the war might have been averted if the guns of Charleston had stayed silent. Most of all, Bloch believes that the historian should be accepting of ignorance. There are some thing that can never be known.

Written in a spare and elegant style, “The Hstorian’s Craft” clocks in at 197 pages. Compare that to Hayden White’s “Metahistory.” Open it and random and you stumble across a sentence like “A history might have an explanatory component, like the ‘legend’ of a map, but this component had to be relegated to a place on the periphery of the narrative itself, in the same way that the legend of the map was.” And so on for 400+ pages.

You might expect me to hate “Metahistory.” But I don’t. It core idea is so radical that it earns my respect in spite of the wordy prose that surrounds it. To summarize, White erases the line between fiction and nonfiction. We do not come by our “historical consciousness” through the careful collection of evidence. Instead, our vision of history is a “moral and aesthetic” choice. There is no “right” way to see history. There are only different ways of describing it.

Specifically, there are four ways to see history, each corresponding to a type of fiction. You can regard history as a Romance, in which mankind struggles against—but finally overcomes—its challenges. Or you can see it as a Comedy. In the Comic mode of history, everything happens for the best, and everything has a happy ending. Then there is Tragedy—the notion that man is doomed by the very forces and institutions he creates in order to survive in this world. Lastly, the Satirical view of history holds that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Why bother with anything? No matter what we do, in the end it comes to nothing.

Each mode has an associated ideology: Anarchist, Conservative, Radical, Liberal. And each ideology has a trope: Metonym, Synecdoche, Metaphor, and Irony. And each trope has a…you get the idea. If it seems overdeveloped, that’s because it is. White is too eager to cram everything into his four-by-four box. Still, if you can overlook references to Satirical Comedies and Ironic Tragedies, you still have a fascinating study of four great European historians (Michelet, Ranke, Tocqueville, Burckhardt) and four great philosophers of history (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Croce).

I think White comes to the same conclusion as Bloch. Choose your style. Write your history. Let the philosophers worry about the meaning of it all.

Networking

Twitter is death to social activism. Or so says professional dilettante Malcolm Gladwell. He thinks the real key to social change isn't the connectivity provided by Web 2.0. Instead, you need a close-knit circle of friends. Having never inspired a revolution, not even a small and bloodless one, I do not feel qualified to comment.

Pick Vick?

Is it right to root for Michael Vick? Bill Simmons thinks so. Only one thing I would add--for the past two years it looked like the Atlanta Falcons did themselves a favor by cutting ties with their former quarterback. Everyone said Matt Ryan was a big upgrade from Vick. Now, though, "Matty Ice" has taken a step backwards, while Vick is--for the moment--hot property. So who gets the last laugh? Vick or Atlanta?

Artsy-Fartsy

Snobbish but interesting piece on "smart art," AKA "Urban Intellectual Fodder," AKA "the movies, music, and literature that appeal to New Yorker readers."

October: A Pre-Retrospective

Ah, October! Month of Halloween, and…uh…other things, most of them Halloween-related. Month of pumpkins, candy corn, and, if you live in Detroit, arson on a scale not seen since the Dresden firebombing. We

October has a special place in my heart. My long-term project—very long-term, set for completion in the year 2159—is to create a qualitative ranking of the twelve months. For the curious, May and December are at the top, January and August at the bottom. October ranks very high on this list. Allow me to explain my method.
When I judge a month, the first thing I account for is holidays. Months with good holidays get more points. For instance, December gets more credit for Christmas than September does for Talk Like a Pirate Day. Holidays with either food or presents get extra-super bonus points, allowing November to rise in the rankings despite its weak profile.

October can boast one of the “Big Three” holidays. Granted, in my mind Halloween trails far behind Christmas and Thanksgiving. Trick-or-treating lost its appeal the year I dressed as a Star Trek redshirt. I was chased by a dog, fell into a creek, and was nearly run over five or six times. And though I concede the deliciousness of Halloween candy, can you really choose Smarties and Snickers over turkey and Christmas cookies? No. You cannot. Still…it’s a holiday where people give you free candy. That counts for a lot in my rankings.

Weather plays a big factor. Temperature extremes are a big no-no. Thus, July is dragged down the list by its sweaty, buggy nights and sauna-humid days. February has too many days that make you feel like a human popsicle. October offers a nice compromise. It might get a little nippy, but remember that this cold weather comes after the oppressive mugginess of August and the neither-hot-nor-cold wishy-washiness of September. To me, October means clear blue skies, a crisp breeze, and leaves swirling underfoot. Plus points for that.

Don’t forget sports! August really takes it in the shorts, sports-wise. All it has is Major League Baseball. Does anyone even watch baseball anymore? Aside from a couple Cubs fans, of course, hoping that this might be the year the Cubs flame out in the National League Championship Series rather than the Divisional Series. Compare this with October. The month is stuffed with sports. You have college football, the NFL, and—the one baseball event people watch—the World Series. The NBA might start in October, but I feel too lazy to check that online. So take my word for it.

Also note that October has better music than any other month except December: “Monster Mash” and the soundtrack from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” Those beat “Alice’s Restaurant” in my book. Speaking of which, where is my book? I talk about “in my book” so often, but I’ve never even read it. Perhaps I can find it on Amazon.
In conclusion, all in all, to sum it up: October is a top-four month. For the moment. Who knows? If I walk outside tomorrow and get hit in the eye with a leaf, it might drop a few notches. We won’t know the final answer until 2159. Stay tuned!

Mini-Review: Up From Communism

No one is loved—or hated—like a convert. The receiving side hails him as a hero; the losing side hisses him as a traitor. The higher the stakes, the greater the praise and damnation, a truth born out in John P. Diggins’s “Up From Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History.” Diggins follows four intellectuals on their path from the Communist Party to the National Review masthead, and a very twisting path it is.

Many historians have noted the ironic fact that the brightest lights of American anti-communism began their political lives reading the Daily Worker and singing the Internationale. Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Frank Meyer, and Whittaker Chambers were all among “Stalin’s gift to anti-communism,” as such defectors were popularly known.

Four other gifts—particularly rich ones—are the subject of this book. Max Eastman was a ladykiller who, in his spare time, published highbrow titles like Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution. John Dos Passos authored the U.S.A. trilogy, which dripped bitter radicalism in lines like “all right we are two nations.” Will Herberg was nicknamed “the Rabbi” for his encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist texts and his mastery of debate. And James Burnham was prominent enough in the Communist Party to receive a rebuke from Trotsky himself.

What drove these men from Joe Stalin to Joe McCarthy? Stalin takes much of the blame. All four men were repulsed by his brutality; the stunning venality of the Nazi-Soviet Pact was another heavy weight in the anti-communist scale. But their conversion was more than a gut reaction. For each man, the road to the right passed through his own soul. And each found shelter in a different room within the newly built conservative household.

The journey might have been easiest for Burnham. A student of realpolitik, he had embraced hard-headed realism in books like The Machiavellians. To Burnham, power was the only thing that mattered in world affairs; not surprising, then, that he became an ardent Cold Warrior and advocate for “liberating” Eastern Europe. Max Eastman was drawn by economics. Disillusioned by communism, he became a spokesman—his enemies would say shill—for free enterprise.

Dos Passos and Herberg took more convoluted paths to the right, each traveling down many byways before reaching their destination. Dos Passos had always harbored a faint blue streak of conservatism. It was an older kind of conservatism, the kind that regarded modernity as a wasteland smelling of gasoline. The man who once declared “organization is death” found a kindred spirit not in Stalin but in Washington, Madison, and Jefferson; Dos Passos became an avid historian of the Founding Fathers. As to Herberg, he concluded that religion was all that mattered. “The Rabbi” converted to Judaism and enlisted his debating skills in God’s cause.

Diggins seems a little bemused by all this. He wonders how four men, so evidently brilliant, could wind up in thrall to a “pompous young man” named Bill Buckley. Diggins also argues that the four men suffered a sort of mental arteriosclerosis in their later years, their conservatism becoming hard and dogmatic—as if communism was a flexible faith. Still, he tells their stories well, explaining Marxian dialectics and the Niebuhrian irony with equal ease. Consider this book a gateway drug to harder varieties of conservative intellectual history.

O, Chocinco!

This story gives new meaning to the phrase "sexy cereal." Not that the phrase had a meaning in the first place.