The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (30-21)

(Click here for the whole list.)

From now to the end of the list, we're clearly in "true greatness" territory.


30. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps

The kind of song that inspires graffiti.




29. The Arcade Fire - Rebellion (Lies)





28. The White Stripes - Seven Nation Army

Pure rock.




27. Esperanza Spalding - Precious




26. MGMT - Kids

Earlier this year, I was obsessed with this song, which I said "feels (to me, at least) like a living, breathing creature on the prowl."

The instrumental interlude (starting around 3:00) is outstanding. First, there's an adventurous and floridly Baroque keyboard solo. This is abruptly cut off and followed by a simple but exhilirating drum passage, backed by just one relentlessly repeated chord. There's no pretense that this might have been played on organic instruments; it sounds like it was played on the most rudimentary of synthesizers. Then the bottom drops out for a moment, and we're back to the catchy chorus.




25. Radiohead - Idioteque

With impassioned vocals and minimalist instrumentation consisting of a thumping drum beat and spare minor chord progression, this sounds like the Radiohead equivalent of Prince's "When Doves Cry."




24. Camera Obscura - Lloyd, I'm Ready to Be Heartbroken

When I listen to Camera Obscura, I imagine a band from the early '60s traveling through time to the '00s and trying to fit in.




23. The Flaming Lips - Do You Realize??

Poignant rock.




22. The Dodos - Red and Purple

I started listening to this song around the time I, along with many others, had to say an emotional goodbye to someone important to us. I can't disclose who it was, but there are so many parallels to this song's lyrics that it gives me chills. On the day we had to say goodbye, many people showed up wearing this person's favorite colors: red and purple.




21. Rihanna (featuring Jay-Z) - Umbrella

Possibly the youngest singer on the list -- she was 19 when she recorded this song.



Per Wikipedia, the song has been covered by a wide variety of artists. Here's Vanilla Sky's gender-bending version.

Mark Bittman and Ezra Klein on how to eat rationally on Thanksgiving (and other days)

Why do more parents want to have girls than boys?

Mickey Kaus seems incredulous that parents who use baby sex selection services usually prefer girls. He quotes this passage from an article in Elle:

Seventy-one percent of American families who use MicroSort—which is still in clinical trials—want a daughter. ... “The era of wanting a first-born male is gone, not to return,” founder Ronald Ericsson, MD, has said.

What’s behind the modern-day girl fetish? One explanation: Women envision a brighter future for their daughters than they do for their sons. Boys are practically the underdogs these days, having fallen behind girls on nearly every measure of academic achievement, from college attendance to high school graduation rates. ...

“The way society is now—I feel there’s a preference for girls,” says Linda Heithaus, a marine biologist from Hollywood, Florida, who has two sons and is contemplating doing IVF/PGD in the hope of getting a girl. “They can do everything a boy can do, plus you can dress them up. It’s almost like, to fit in, you need to have one.” Girls, in other words, are boys plus. They can play sports and have careers, and you can dress them in pink and take them to tea at the American Girl cafe. What’s not to like?

Others link the yearning to women’s belief that they’ll have a richer lifelong relationship with a daughter than a son. ...

Kaus responds: 

Maybe I'm out of it, but I was unaware that parents now want girls, not boys. ... Girls are boys plus? That's one way to look at it. I don't quite believe this trend (though some of my Westside yuppie friends confirm it).

Well, yes, this has been going on for a while. Ten years ago, the New York Times magazine reported, in a cover story called "Getting the Girl":

Americans, unlike much of the rest of the world, do not prefer boys. Of the first 111 Microsort attempts, 83 were for females and 28 were for males. True, the process began as a way to select for girls, and true, because it is better at selecting girls it is more likely to attract couples who want them. But there is something else going on as well, something Shettles and Ericsson learned a long time ago.

''More want girls,'' Shettles says. ''Definitely we heard more from women who had many boys and wanted a girl.''

Ericsson, too. ''We see more requests for girls,'' he says. At some Ericsson clinics, the ratio is as high as 2 to 1, despite Ericsson's own statistics showing a higher success rate for boys. It is, he says, a gap that has been growing since he first introduced his method 25 years ago.

In a lopsided, counterintuitive way, he insists, this is a streak of feminism, although it hardly appears that way at first, what with all the talk of ponytails, dresses and bows. ...

Also in keeping with [Ericsson's] experience, most [women on a sex selection website] yearn to parent girls. They speak of Barbies and ballet and butterfly barrettes. They also describe the desire to rear strong young women. Some want to recreate their relationships with their own mothers; a few want to do better by their daughters than their mothers did by them. They want their sons to have sisters, so that they learn to respect women. They want their husbands to have little girls. But many of them want a daughter simply because they always thought they would have one. They feel that their little girl is out there, somewhere. Every so often, while their boys are playing, they catch a mind's eye glimpse of her, and wonder where she is.

Back to Kaus -- he adds:

It seems to me men still have a lot of advantages, the lack of a mommy track being only the most obvious. But if true ... it would be an extraordinary example of relative changes in earning power affecting fairly basic and millenia-old socio-cultural preferences with startling rapidity--another victory for Vulgar Marxism ...

I can't quite disagree with Kaus's literal words when he says that men have "a lot of advantages"; after all, you probably could list "a lot" of them if you decided to. But I don't accept the implication that men have most of the advantages. As I've blogged before, men have plenty of disadvantages too. I'd be interested to know which advantages Kaus had in mind that he would have expected to tilt the scales in favor of parents wanting sons.

The only specific example he gives -- that girls are on a "mommy track" -- cuts both ways. You could see that as a downside. But when we're talking about the modern-day United States, where there's no question that it's socially acceptable for women to do any job they want, the option to forgo professional advancement and focus on being a parent seems like an advantage. All other things being equal, it's better to have more rather than fewer choices about how to live your life. Of course, it is possible for the father to do most of the parenting -- but there are still powerful social norms against it. There are no equivalent barriers to women being stay-at-home moms or having high-powered jobs. 

Of course, the parents' preferences aren't just objective calculations about the costs and benefits of being born a girl or a boy. As the Elle and NYT articles point out, a mother might want to have a daughter because she imagines they'd have a stronger relationship or because this conforms to her dream of how her life will end up. But if the parents are thinking about costs and benefits, they might want to have a girl -- who's less likely to be laid off in a recession, go to prison, or fight in a war, and more likely to grow up to earn a bachelor's degree, make more money (at least if she lives in a big city), and live longer.

Was he "homeless" or a "drifter"?

My mom talks about this and more as she deftly dissects the language the Daily Mail uses to report that an exterminator killed a germophobe in a subway car, which stayed enclosed with other passengers inside until the police showed up.

Scientific happiness studies are missing the point.

"The fundamental error of the science - and the reason why so many of its recommendations sound trivial or just confused - is the assumption that happiness is the same as positive emotion. Researchers are continuously drawn back to this idea since it makes happiness measurable."

So says Mark Vernon (who also writes the excellent "Philosophy and Life Blog"), channeling Robert Schoch's book The Secrets of Happiness: Three Thousand Years of Searching for the Good Life.

The whole article is well worth reading and worth keeping in mind the next time someone tries to tell you that researchers have discovered that people who do such-and-such are "happier" than people who do so-and-so.

An always unconvincing sentence

"I'm not thinking about my reelection."

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (40-31)

(Click here for the whole list.)

40. Decoder Ring - Fractions




39. The Dresden Dolls - Good Day




38. Andrew Bird - A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left




37. Tori Amos - A Sorta Fairytale




36. OutKast - Ms. Jackson

Yes, there is a rap song on the list, though you might not have expected it from the blogger who wrote this post!




35. My Brightest Diamond - Inside a Boy





34. Mika - Grace Kelly

And here's a solo unplugged live performance.




33. John Mayer - Daughters

I couldn't stand this song when I first heard it (playing in a convenience store). It was just too earnestly tear-jerking, with eye-rollingly gendered lyrics. Later on, for some reason, I suddenly found it perfectly effective.




32. Dntel - (This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan 

This song was created by the same lineup as The Postal Service.

Another blog, The Factual Opinion, ranked this the best song of the decade, saying:

The 2001 people imagined decades ago must have sounded like this--the electronic squall, the nearly overwhelming surge of drums, the drifting grasp on reality. ... 8 years on, “(This Is) The Dream of Evan and Chan” sounds like a future that we still haven't caught up with.

The Factual Opinion quotes the line, "He then played every song from 1993," and says, "I always imagine that he’s talking about hearing *every* song from 1993, from 'Whoomp (There It Is)' to 'Mr. Jones.'" Although that's what the line would seem to literally mean, I always imagine that he's talking about Kurt Cobain in the last full year of his life, and "every song from 1993" means every one of his songs from 1993 -- in other words, In Utero, Nirvana's last studio album. That's why (I imagine) Ben Gibbard wittily accentuates the next line, which I hear as a reference to Cobain's famous diffidence toward his own success: "The crowd applauded as he curtsied bashfully."




31. Polydream - Hollywood

Click here to play the mp3. (Authorized by the band.)

(Full disclosure: I'm friends with these guys.)

Why isn't there "philosophy of journalism"? Or how about journalism of philosophy?

There should be courses in "philosophy of journalism," says Professor Carlin Romano. He teaches such a course at Yale. (The article is via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Prof. Romano frames the issue this way: 

If you examine philosophy-department offerings around America, you'll find staple courses in "Philosophy of Law," "Philosophy of Art," "Philosophy of Science," "Philosophy of Religion," and a fair number of other areas that make up our world.

It makes sense. Philosophy, as the intellectual enterprise that in its noblest form inspects all areas of life and questions each practice's fundamental concepts and presumptions, should regularly look at all human activities broad and persistent enough not to be aberrations or idiosyncrasies. ...

Why, then, don't you find "Philosophy of Journalism" among those staple courses?

Listing those topics creates a sense that you could have a philosophical field to correspond to every profession, but things don't work out so neatly. "Philosophy of art" is trying to penetrate the very nature of what artists create by asking, "What is art?" I don't think "philosophy of journalism" would be about trying to define journalism or explain what journalists do, since that wouldn't be a very challenging philosophical task.

Based on Prof. Romano's description of his lesson plans, he seems to be using journalism as a platform to discuss ethics, epistemology, and political philosophy. Journalism isn't a sui generis subject of philosophical inquiry; it's a bundle of human interactions that can be analyzed philosophically within traditional branches of philosophy that have existed for centuries. (In this respect, "philosophy of religion" is closer to "philosophy of journalism" than to "philosophy of art." Trying to define "religion" may be a worthwhile exercise, but it's unlikely to be the main point of a philosophy of religion class.)

I'm actually so convinced by his argument that this kind of class is worth teaching that I don't find the article too interesting. Instead of an article about whether there should be a philosophy of journalism, I'd rather see some discussion of whether there should be journalism about philosophy.

The New York Times, for instance, regularly reports on some of the more socially important academic breakthroughs, even including some that happen to be of interest to philosophers. But I can't remember seeing the Times directly report on a philosopher's ideas -- except in an obituary. You regularly read news articles about how the latest brain experiment has revealed so-and-so. Well, that's how the news likes to present it, but the truth is rarely so clear-cut or sensational. A headline-grabbing story based on brain scans is probably going to be highly conjectural, in part because brain imaging doesn't yet have much explanatory power.

Could any philosophical insight about the brain and/or the mind be significant enough to be reported in the New York Times? I'm sure reporters would say philosophical thoughts are too abstract to count as "news" at all. But philosophers of mind should stay sufficiently up to date with the latest neurological discoveries so that their philosophizing actually is timely.

I wish we lived in a world where philosophical ideas routinely made the news. I'm not sure if the journalists or the philosophers are more to blame. Probably the philosophers.