Summing up the decade on New Year's Eve 2009

"The decade where people communicate as indirectly as possible but as often as possible while sharing as much information as possible and as useless of information as possible." — a friend on Facebook

"Throughout the decade, the real world pursued, hectored, harassed. Ignorance was punished. Hubris found its comeuppance. The optimists were routed, the pessimists validated. . . . This was a decade when things you didn't know about could really hurt you." — Joel Achenbach

"The aughts were ruined by not letting good crises go to waste." — Will Wilkinson

The worst movies from this decade that you saw because they were critically acclaimed

My mom points out that this is a much more useful idea for a list than the more common "worst movies of the decade." She explains:

I don't need a decade-end list of the very worst crap that you saw and I didn't see. I'd rather make a list of the worst movies that you, the movie reviewer, gulled me into seeing. What did you say was good that I wasted my time and money on?

She has her list at the link.

I haven't been watching many new movies this decade, but here are the ones I saw and was baffled by the amount of praise they received:

1. Lost in Translation
2. High Fidelity
3. I Heart Huckabees*
4. Waking Life
5. Away We Go* (blogged)
6. A Scanner Darkly
7. Fahrenheit 911*
8. Amelie*

* Movies with an asterisk received mixed reviews, but many critics gave them effusive praise.

I just saw Lost in Translation last night. That's probably the movie with the biggest gap between the critical reception (Metacritic's aggregation of reviews gives it an extraordinary 89 out of 100) and my enjoyment of it.

Now, on the positive side, here are some excellent movies from this decade that fully deserved their critical acclaim:

1. The Pianist
2. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
3. Capturing the Friedmans
4. Sideways
5. About Schmidt
6. Ghost World

Happy new year!

New Christmas

I just got back to Albany after a week-long vacation in Madison (part of why the blogging has been light in the past week). The family always spends Christmas together, but this time we had two new (to me) family members, my stepdad and stepsister. We had a lot of fun playing a game that can't be bought in a store, which we called "Word Storm." (I'll explain it in a later post so you can play it too.) We mixed some of our old Christmas traditions with some new traditions. We cooked dinner and breakfast together.

We watched a home video of our old family, shot with a rented camcorder in early 1987, when I was 5 years old. Though most of the video is unavoidably boring, I always watch it eagerly anticipating the occasional flashes of humor or insight. At one point, my mom asks me if I have a message for the grown-up John watching this in the future. My answer: "Travel all over the world." In another scene, she asks what I think of our family, and I respond, "I think we have a very nice family, and we have lots and lots of fun -- with the whole world being white." Huh? No, I wasn't raised by white supremacists; I was holding a white paper napkin up to the camera lens and joking about my state-of-the-art special effects.

I gave that answer with such gleeful enthusiasm that it's hard to imagine I was just saying what I thought I was supposed to say. Having Christmas in 2009 with a family I wouldn't have recognized even last year, I thought back to the young John -- how little he knew but also how important some of the things he knew were. I felt saddened to think: here we are, a very nice new family that could have been having lots of fun together for the past couple decades. I immediately corrected myself: no, that's impossible, things could only have happened exactly as they did. Whether they should have happened another way is irrelevant now. You can only go forward into the future. But you can still remember the things you knew when you were 5 years old.

Does evolutionary psychology make it hard to understand "culture"?

I've been reading Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters over my Christmas vacation. It's similar to Robert Wright's The Moral Animal in that it popularizes evolutionary psychology. But the authors (Alan S. Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa) update Wright's 1994 book by using more recent research to answer a slew of questions about society.

In a future post I'll excerpt some of the more useful insights from the book. For now, I have a complaint with the authors' discussion of "culture."

They start out the book saying that "everyone" realizes that environment, culture, etc. shape human behavior. "[T]here are no serious biological or genetic determinists in science" (pg. 2). The only controversy is whether biology, genes, evolution, etc. also shape human behavior. Of course, the authors, being evolutionary psychologists, are adamant that the answer is "yes." I agree.

But it's not so clear to me that the authors actually recognize that culture shapes human behavior. They say:

Gender socialization helps to accentuate, solidify, perpetuate, and strengthen the innate differences between men and women, but it does not cause or create such differences. In other words, men and women are not different because they are socialized differently; they are socialized differently because they are different. Gender socialization is not the cause of sex differences; it is their consequence. (32) (emphasis in original)

The first sentence in that paragraph sounds relatively nuanced, but the rest of the paragraph eliminates any nuance. Their position seems clear: gender norms are simply not a cause of any differences between men's and women's behavior. It's hard to imagine a more extreme position than that.

Similarly, they say:

[T]he sex differences in behavior, cognition, values, and preferences are largely innate; universal across cultures; and, in many cases, constant across species. If the sex differences were the result of social and cultural practices such as gender socialization, then they should by definition vary by culture and society. In fact, however, in every human society (and among many other species), males on average are more aggressive, violent, and competitive, and females on average are more social, caring, and nurturing. What is constant in every culture and society (sex differences in behavior) cannot be explained by what is variable across cultures and societies (cultural and social practices). A variable cannot explain a constant; only a constant can explain a constant. (32) (emphasis added)

But later in the same chapter, they have this heading:

There Is Only One Human Culture

Um, I thought they just said that anything that results from culture must, "by definition," "vary by culture and society." But no:

[A]ll the cultural differences are on the surface; deep down, at the most fundamental level, all human cultures are essentially the same .... [C]ulture is a universal trait of all human societies. Yes, culture is a cultural universal.

I'm open to hearing out someone's argument that all human culture is the same. And I'm open to the argument that culture is wildly varied; therefore, any traits that are universally present in humans cannot be the result of culture. But is it too much to ask that the same co-authors stick to a consistent position within a given book?

Aside from the internal inconsistency, I'm not convinced that sex differences are so universal that they can't be the result of social norms. One problem with this is: how could you ever conclude that a particular sex difference is universal? Even if you've surveyed every society in the world and found that, for instance, women refrain from serving in the military in all of them, you'd still only be speculating that this will continue to be the case for all time. Of course, women didn't used to serve in the military, but they do now. Many jobs used to be considered out of the question for women, but this is no longer the case. Who's to say that a sex difference that appears universal right now won't crumble in the future?

Thinking about the best songs of the first decade of the 2000s

Now that I've posted the 100 best songs of the decade, what can we conclude about the past 10 years of music?

Maybe not much — after all, the list is just my opinion. But here are the features that jump out at me, the things that made the decade what it was:

1. Women. Almost half of the lead vocals in the top 100 songs are sung by women. My favorite rock and pop music of the decades from the '50s through the '90s was much more predominantly male.

2. The decline of straightforward "rock" and the rise of a cluster of genres often loosely described as "indie," in which rock is just one influence of many. In the '90s, by contrast, ROCK — screamed vocals, bashed drums, and walls of distorted guitars — seemed to be de rigueur unless you unambiguously fell into a non-rock genre.

In the '90s, you mainly found female artists in one of two categories: (1) women playing straightforward rock music (often drawing praise for showing that they're capable of being like men), and (2) women playing music clearly not intended to rock. Examples of the first category would be Hole, the Breeders, Veruca Salt, and L7; examples of the second would be Sarah McLachlan, Lisa Loeb, and Jewel. Outstanding exceptions — that is, women in more innovative grey areas — were Tori Amos and Bjork (who are also in the 2000s list). In this decade, women in the spirit of Bjork and Tori Amos have multiplied: St. Vincent, My Brightest Diamond, the Dresden Dolls, Hanne Hukkelberg, Imogen Heap (Frou Frou), Rilo Kiley (Jenny Lewis), Feist, Psapp, Decoder Ring, Camera Obscura, Regina Spektor, and many others.

3. Guitars have been demoted from the dominant instrument to just one of many instruments. Bands routinely go beyond the standard rock ensemble of guitar/bass/drums and use the full panoply of instruments. A rock song with piano and strings doesn't stand out as unusual (e.g. #55). It's reminiscent of the Beatles' later work except that sophisticated electronics are part of the toolkit now. Of course, there was already an earlier decade where popular music was heavily electronic — the '80s — but synthesizers became so dominant then as to be overwhelming, which led to the alt-rock backlash of the '90s. Artists in the '00s have generally struck a more tasteful balance between electronics and traditional instruments — and the electronics themselves sound better anyway.

4. Male singers seem unconcerned with living up to traditional expectations of rock singing (loud, raspy, macho, aggressive). Examples are Rufus Wainwright, Beirut, and Grizzly Bear. It's influenced by a man who tragically can't be on this list: Jeff Buckley. It's more flowing, refined, and classically melodious. Some of these singers can and do "rock," but they freely choose not to.

5. So "rock" is less dominant, but what was the best rock of the 2000s like? If we take the listed songs by the Strokes, the White Stripes, Hot Hot Heat, and Franz Ferdinand, we can hear a decisive shift away from '90s rock. The new rock is simpler and more down-to-earth. These bands aren't like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, the Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, or Alice in Chains — who bared their souls and tried to overwhelm you with their emotion. The new bands just want to write fun rock songs with catchy melodies and a cool guitar lick or two; if they succeed at that, their job is done. The singing and guitar playing are usually less ambitious (Jack White being the exception that proves the general rule when it comes to guitar), and the songwriting tends to be more concise. The drumming often sounds like a human version of a disco beat. For these bands, a song with the earnest drama of Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" or a concept album with the grandeur of the Smashing Pumpkin's Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness would be unthinkable. (None of this is inherently better or worse than '90s rock — just different.)

6. Less interest in originality than synthesis of the past. I don't mean to criticize this music as "unoriginal." It is original, but in subtler ways. It's not usually original in the sense of "Congratulations to these people for creating a brand-new genre!" It's original as in "Hey, Of Montreal picks really good music to be influenced by, and they piece together the influences in fantastically unusual and refreshing ways."

7. Love is in; angst is out. Love is once again the default subject matter even in "indie"/"alternative" genres. Unlike in the '90s, you rarely hear an outpouring of angst unconnected to romance.

8. A quality you might call "positivity" or "optimism." The songs have lines like "Maybe I'll never die / I'll just keep growing younger with you" (#8) and "Say what you want to satisfy yourself" (#36). They have titles like "Good Day" and "Light and Day/Reach for the Sun." Songs that stand out as negative — Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," Beck's "Lost Cause" — are by artists who had their breakthroughs in the angst-ridden mid-'90s. While Radiohead has perfected the rock of eerie atmospheres and tormented souls, people like Regina Spektor and Arcade Fire have been no less brilliant at playing music with more major keys, less cynicism, more vivacity, less darkness, more sunshine.

"This is a sacred place."

So said Dave Douglas, the jazz trumpet player, in the middle of his in-between-song banter last night.

It was the first time I had heard any such statement made about a music venue. Normally, it would seem like a ridiculous and perhaps sacrilegious thing to say. But I doubt anyone in the audience was surprised to hear this asserted about the Village Vanguard.

You can hear a complete concert here — the same group and venue, from earlier last week.

Douglas described two of his songs as being about "November 2008 and the wonderful change that occurred in this country." Both of those songs — "The Presidents" and "Campaign Trail" — are on his latest album, A Single Sky. (The music on that album isn't actually representative of last night's show since it's performed by a big band.)

It was a great show, and the pianist, Uri Caine, was particularly magnificent. His solos were so adventurous they were practically little songs unto themselves. You wouldn't have guessed that his piano-playing was a major departure from the group's past: he played only keyboard (Fender Rhodes) in the group for almost 10 years and just recently switched to piano.

Uri Caine's albums based on Beethoven and Mozart would make great Christmas presents for anyone who likes classical and/or jazz music (not for me — I already have them). They're much better than I would have expected a jazzified version of Beethoven or Mozart to be.

Houston elects an openly gay mayor

"I know what this win means to many of us who never thought we could achieve high office."

Reuters oddly claims that Houston is the first "major" American city to elect an openly gay mayor. That seems like an unnecessary swipe at Portland, Oregon (which has a population the same size as Las Vegas) and Providence, Rhode Island (the capital of and most prominent city in its state).

If you want to describe this as something unprecedented, you could point out that Houston is the most populous American city to elect an openly gay mayor. But that's not saying much since the United States has only 3 cities with larger populations. The biggest news is that this happened in such a conservative city.

By the way, at least 3 cities outside the US have elected openly gay mayors: Paris, Hamburg, and Berlin. 

Near the end of the Houston race, anti-gay activists sent out mailers attacking Annise Parker (now the mayor-elect) for her "homosexual behavior." (What's with the anti-gay contingent's obsession with the word "homosexual"? They seem to use it as much as possible. Never "gay" -- always "homosexual.") The New York Times reports that Parker's opponent "denied having anything to do with the attacks, but two members of his finance committee gave $40,000 to help finance one of the mailings."

Anyway, this election is a relatively small step -- not nearly as important as actually changing the laws -- but still a step in the right direction. Some day, people won't even think to remark on this.

The top 10 songs of the first decade of the 2000s

After almost 200 songs, we've finally made it to the top 10 of the past 10 years.

(Click here for the whole list.)


10. Gnarls Barkley — "Crazy"




9. Sufjan Stevens — "Chicago"

Summer Anne, ranking this the 10th best song of the decade, says:

[I]f I ever made a church, my kind of church, we would worship outside, and this song would be our "Amazing Grace."

8. of Montreal — "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games"

Let's have bizarre celebrations!

7. Dresden Dolls — "Coin-Operated Boy"

This is an ingeniously constructed song. It starts out jaunty and full of innuendo for a few verses. The singer, Amanda Palmer, then takes the song deeper into her psyche by describing the songwriting process itself:

This bridge was written

To make you feel smitten-er

With my sad picture

Of girl getting bitter-er

The shift in the lyrics and music here (flowing arpeggios instead of percussive chords) seems to tell us we've left the physical world and entered her stream of consciousness. The bridge culminates with an obsessively repeated "I want it —," then "I want you —," then "I want a —," while the whole band mimics the repetitive, jerky movements of a wind-up toy (a lyrical and musical transition back to the verse). When Palmer finally finishes the sentence with the same words and melody that started the song ("... coin-operated boy"), her delivery has lost its previous childlike quality. She sounds weary from the one-sided relationship. At the end, the band winds down like a toy running out of batteries. Not only does Palmer's voice slow down along with everything else, but she sounds unexpectedly meek, as though it were dawning on her that she doesn't quite believe everything she's been singing.




6. St. Vincent — "Paris Is Burning"




5. The Postal Service — "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight"

I remember sitting in a cafe a few years ago, hearing this chorus for the first time — "You seem so out of context / In this gaudy apartment complex" — and thinking, "Hm, that's a pretty clever hook." Since then, I've probably listened to this song 100 times, and it still sounds startlingly new.




4. Franz Ferdinand — "Take Me Out"

The rock anthem of the decade.




3. Imogen Heap — "Hide and Seek"

Here's Imogen Heap's description of how this song came to be:

My favorite computer blew up on me. ... But I didn't want to leave the studio without having done anything that day. I saw the [DigiTech Vocalist Workstation] on a shelf and just plugged it into my little 4-track MiniDisc with my mic and my keyboard and pressed Record. The first thing that I sang was those first few lines, "Where are we? What the hell is going on?" I set the vocalist to a four-note polyphony, so even if I play 10 notes on the keyboard, it will only choose four of them. It's quite nicely surprising when it comes back with a strange combination. When it gets really high in the second chorus, that's a result of it choosing higher rather than low notes, so I ended up going even higher to compensate, above the chord. I recorded it in, like, four-and-a-half minutes, and it ended up on the album in exactly the structure of how it came out of me then. I love it because it doesn't feel like my song. It just came out of nowhere, and I'm not questioning that one at all.

The result sounds like a 21st-century version of a Renaissance madrigal.

Have you ever thought to yourself: if God is watching me and has to choose the single greatest 5 minutes of my life, what would they be? For Imogen Heap, the answer just might be those 5 minutes when she was creating this:




2. Arcade Fire — "No Cars Go"

The songwriting is almost embarrassingly simple, yet this is some of the most exciting music to come along in recent memory.

Between the click of the light and the start of the dream...

1. Regina Spektor — "Fidelity"

Spontaneous but refined, sincere but quirky, simple but complex. No song more beautifully encapsulates the spirit of this decade of music.




Regina alone, live:

Does America's military really "protect our freedom"?

Will Wilkinson, in a blog post I wish I had written about patriotism and war, admits that he doesn't know — and neither do you, or anyone else.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (20-11)

(Click here for the whole list.)


20. Spoon — "The Beast and Dragon, Adored"




19. Radiohead — "How to Disappear Completely"




18. Rilo Kiley – "Does He Love You?"

(Live.)




17. Beyoncé (feat. Jay-Z) — "Crazy in Love"

Credit is also due to the Chi-Lites; the brass-section hook is sampled from their 1971 song "Are You My Woman? (Tell Me So)."




16. Björk – "Hidden Place"

A great introversion song. The build-up from the final verse ("Can I hide there too?") to the final chorus is quietly overwhelming. She gets so much feeling out of singing the words slightly off from the beat.




15. Regina Spektor – "Us"




14. Goldfrapp – "A&E"

When I said one of the criteria I used in deciding whether to include a song on the list was ...

Does the music have some sort of dramatic arc or development? (A bridge or other deviation from "verse/chorus/verse/chorus" is especially helpful.)

... this is one of the songs I had in mind. Wow!




13. The Flaming Lips — "Do You Realize??"

A song that gets great emotion out of stating simple facts, like: We're floating in space…




12. Frou Frou – "Let Go"

(Unplugged version by Imogen Heap, the singer of Frou Frou.)




11. Death Cab for Cutie – "I Will Follow You into the Dark"

A conservative's message to conservatives: Support President Obama on Afghanistan.

Ramesh Ponnuru says:

Conservatives fear that the president looks weak abroad; they should not reinforce the impression. They worry that the war is losing support at home; they should not make it come true. The right course for conservatives--and the one most of us are going to take--is to applaud the president for doing the right thing, hope for the best, and urge course corrections when necessary.

"Aggravated homosexuality"

Uganda is considering legislation to make that a criminal offense.

The definition of the crime, according to that article, would be: being HIV positive and having gay sex.

The punishment: death.

If you merely have gay sex in Uganda, without being HIV positive, the punishment under the proposed law would be life imprisonment.

Also:

The Bill proposes a three-year prison sentence for anyone who is aware of evidence of homosexuality and fails to report it to the police within 24 hours. And it would impose a sentence of up to seven years for anyone who defends the rights of gays and lesbians.

Live-blogging President Obama's prime-time speech on Afghanistan

8:04 - Obama coins a portmanteau word: "toperatives."

8:09 - "Afghanistan is not lost, but for several years now, it has moved backwards." Obama's delivery here was uncannily evocative of George W. Bush's.

8:14 - I'm glad Obama says, of the war on terrorism, "This is not just America's war," and lists some of the terrorist attacks that have happened around the world since September 11, 2001. A welcome change from the glibly myopic refrain we heard during the Bush administration that "we" haven't been attacked again.

[UPDATE: Here's the prepared text of the speech. The key passage:]

We must keep the pressure on al Qaeda, and to do that, we must increase the stability and capacity of our partners in the region. Of course, this burden is not ours alone to bear. This is not just America's war. Since 9/11, al Qaeda's safe-havens have been the source of attacks against London and Amman and Bali. The people and governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan are endangered. And the stakes are even higher within a nuclear-armed Pakistan, because we know that al Qaeda and other extremists seek nuclear weapons, and we have every reason to believe that they would use them. These facts compel us to act along with our friends and allies.

8:27 - A long-term commitment to nation-building in Afghanistan can't be fulfilled "at a reasonable cost." "The nation I'm most interested in building is our own." It's refreshing to finally have a president who's willing to bluntly acknowledge, in the context of foreign policy, that our capabilities are finite and that trade-offs sometimes need to be made.

[Another update from the transcript:]

I am mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who – in discussing our national security – said, "Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs."

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance, and failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy. In the wake of an economic crisis, too many of our friends and neighbors are out of work and struggle to pay the bills, and too many Americans are worried about the future facing our children. Meanwhile, competition within the global economy has grown more fierce. So we simply cannot afford to ignore the price of these wars.

All told, by the time I took office the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan approached a trillion dollars. Going forward, I am committed to addressing these costs openly and honestly. Our new approach in Afghanistan is likely to cost us roughly 30 billion dollars for the military this year, and I will work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit.

But as we end the war in Iraq and transition to Afghan responsibility, we must rebuild our strength here at home. Our prosperity provides a foundation for our power. It pays for our military. It underwrites our diplomacy. It taps the potential of our people, and allows investment in new industry. And it will allow us to compete in this century as successfully as we did in the last. That is why our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended – because the nation that I am most interested in building is our own.

(By contrast, here's Bush's second inaugural address: "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom. ... America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom.")

8:35 - He ends with a mix of Obama-like inspiration and Bush-like resolve: "Our cause is just. ... Right makes might."

I'm not qualified to judge the actual military strategy Obama was announcing with this speech. (How many people watching could honestly say they are?) But the speech itself was as smoothly effective as we've come to expect from Obama.

UPDATE: Here's the complete video:

Some quick common sense on the leaked Climate Research Unit emails

1. Matthew Yglesias.

2. Will Wilkinson.

How to make economics confusing enough to get published

In an article called "Confessions of an Economist: Writing to Impress Rather than to Inform" (PDF), economics professor David R. Hakes tells this story about academia's perverse bias in favor of inscrutability (via):

A colleague presented a fairly complex paper on how firms might use warranties to extract rent from certain users of their products. No one in the audience seemed to follow the argument. Because I found the argument to be perfectly clear, I repeatedly defended the author and I was able to bring the audience to an understanding of the paper. The author was so pleased that I was able to understand his work and explain it to others that he asked me if I was willing to coauthor the paper with him. I said I would be delighted.

We managed to reduce the equations in the paper to six. At this stage the paper was perfectly clear and was written at a level so that it could reach a broad audience. When we submitted the paper to risk, uncertainty, and insurance journals, the referees responded that the results were self-evident. After some degree of frustration, my coauthor suggested that the problem with the paper might be that we had made the argument too easy to follow, and thus referees and editors were not sufficiently impressed. He said that he could make the paper more impressive by generalizing the model. While making the same point as the original paper, the new paper would be more mathematically elegant, and it would become absolutely impenetrable to most readers. The resulting paper had fifteen equations, two propositions and proofs, dozens of additional mathematical expressions, and a mathematical appendix containing nineteen equations and even more mathematical expressions. I personally could no longer understand the paper and I could not possibly present the paper alone.

The paper was published in the first journal to which we submitted. . . . While the audience for the original version of the paper was broad, the audience for the published version of the paper has been reduced to a very narrow set of specialists and mathematicians. Even for mathematicians, . . . the time and effort necessary to read the paper may exceed the benefits received from reading it. I am now part of the conspiracy to intentionally make simple ideas obscure and complex.

Alas, although he says in the article's conclusion that he'll try to "write to inform rather than to impress," he admits he'll still occasionally succumb to the professional norm of obfuscation:

If in the future a referee or an editor suggests that I "generalize the model" or "make the model dynamic" when I feel that the change is an unnecessary complication which will likely cloud the issue rather than illuminate it, I will probably do as they requested rather than fight for clarity.

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

(Click here for the whole list.)


30. Ra Ra Riot — "Ghost Under Rocks"

This song has a great propulsive energy. There's some debate on the internet about the correct lyrics of the chorus, but I hear:

Here you are, you are breathing

Life into ghost under rocks

Like notes found in pocket

Coats of your fathers

Lost and forgotten

29. Yeah Yeah Yeahs — "Maps"

The kind of song that inspires graffiti.

(Unplugged.)




28. The Dodos — "Red and Purple"

This song has a personal resonance to me. I started listening to this song around the time, I was one of many people who had to say an emotional goodbye to someone important to us, and I kept finding parallels between that situation and this song. On one day when we said goodbye, many people showed up wearing this person's favorite colors: red and purple.




27. Rihanna — "Umbrella"

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




26. Arcade Fire — "Rebellion (Lies)"




25. MGMT — "Kids"

This song feels to me like a living, breathing creature on the prowl.

The instrumental interlude (starting about 3 minutes in) is outstanding. First, there's an adventurous and floridly Baroque keyboard solo — which is abruptly cut off and followed by a simple but effective drum passage, backed by just one relentlessly repeated chord. Then the bottom drops out for a moment, and we're back to the catchy chorus.




24. The Strokes - Last Nite

The Strokes and Tom Petty have admitted that this is derivative of Petty's "American Girl."




23. Esperanza Spalding — "Fall In"




22. OutKast — "Ms. Jackson"




21. Rufus Wainwright - I Don't Know What It Is

This is a masterful fitting of melody to chord progressions. He must have taken exquisite care to make this sound so effortless.

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. Daniel Merriweather — "For Your Money"

Sean Lennon plays some nice guitar leads on this.




39. Faded Paper Figures — "North by North"

I love the male/female vocal harmonies in this song.




38. Polydream — "Hollywood"

(Full disclosure: I'm friends with them.)




37. Bat for Lashes — "Daniel"




36. Mika — "Grace Kelly"

And here's a solo unplugged live performance.




35. Grizzly Bear — "Two Weeks"




34. Sara Bareilles— "Love Song"

Here a few of the main questions I've asked myself in selecting the songs:

1) Is it capable of giving me chills? (Or: does it emotionally affect me?)

2) Is it capable of getting stuck in my head?

3) Do I enjoy listening to the singer's voice?

4) Does the music have some sort of dramatic arc or development? (A bridge or other deviation from "verse/chorus/verse/chorus" is especially helpful.)

5) Is there a sense of "inevitability" — that is, does each note seem to lead naturally to the next?

A song where I'd answer "Yes" to all those questions is probably a good contender for the list. A song where I'd answer "No" to most of those questions probably won't be on the list.

This song — which has a casually effervescent quality that reminds me of Paul McCartney — gets a "Yes" answer to all 5 questions.




33. 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 famously conflicted feelings about his own success: "The crowd applauded as he curtsied bashfully."




32. The New Pornographers — "The Laws Have Changed"

It's always fun to hear both A.C. Newman and Neko Case singing lead in the same song.




31. 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.

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.

My dad reports from a Rwandan genocide site, "including as few details as I can."

"The memorial rooms stink of death, still."

Clicking on the photograph of "a mother holding her child" goes to the full-size version. Sitting here in the comfort of our rooms, it's impossible to appreciate the full horror contained in that photo.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (50-41)

(Click here for the whole list.)


50. Decoder Ring — "Fractions"




49. Beirut — "Elephant Gun"




48. Tori Amos — "A Sorta Fairytale"

Here's a full band performance, but here's Tori Amos alone:




47. Ben Folds — "Zak and Sara"




46. John Mayer — "No Such Thing"




45. My Brightest Diamond — "Inside a Boy"




44. Hot Hot Heat — "No, Not Now"




43. Seal — "Waiting for You"




42. Zwan — "Lyric"

After the Smashing Pumpkins broke up, Billy Corgan brought a more positive and poppy approach to this sadly short-lived band.




41. Lady Gaga — "Speechless"

Goethe for bloggers

I recently bought Goethe's Maxims and Reflections at the fantastic NYC bookstore Three Lives. I started reading it yesterday morning over breakfast and underlined numerous passages. I was initially concerned that the book -- a posthumously compiled set of aphorisms from the early 19th century -- might seem dry or antiquated, but it's quite the opposite. It has less wit and pithiness than the standard quotations book, but it makes up for this by having more actual insight.

Here are three thoughts I want to keep in mind while blogging:

[N]o one should be silent or give in; we must talk and be up and doing, not in order to vanquish, but so as to keep on the alert; whether with the majority or the minority is a matter of indifference. [#159]

It is much easier to recognize error than to find truth. [#166]

Surely the world is quite full enough of riddles for us not to need to turn the simplest phenomena into riddles too? [#81]

Finally, here's a point that I hope we Americans can appreciate:

No nation attains the power of judgement until it can sit in judgement on itself. [#113]

(To those who might sit in judgment of that spelling: the book was published in the UK.)

As a side note, other people also deserve credit for this wonderful little book: (1) Elisabeth Stopp, who completed the translation shortly before she died and saw it as the crowning achievement of her life, (2) Max Hecker, who compiled the maxims (Goethe jotted them down on scrap paper over the course of decades and used about half of them in other works), and (3) various sources, many of them unknown -- the book euphemistically points out that Goethe would "borrow" other people's aphorisms without including quotation marks or attribution.

Another lull

I usually like to have a new post up on Monday, but I probably won't be blogging till later in the week since I have another set of job interviews. They're callbacks from the interviews from a few weeks ago, so I'm optimistic that something will come through and I can stop posting these notices...

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (60-51)

(Click here for the whole list.)

60. Beck — "Lost Cause"




59. Spoon — "Everything Hits at Once"




58. Feist — "Mushaboom"




57. Radiohead — "Nude"




56. of Montreal — "Disconnect the Dots"




55. Rufus Wainwright — "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk"




54. Norah Jones — "Don't Know Why"




53. Green Day — "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"




52. Alicia Keys — "You Don't Know My Name"

The "Just My Imagination" of the '00s.




51. Adele — "Cold Shoulder"

(Acoustic version.)

Why does America have so many more premature births than Europe?

"Premature births are the chief reason the U.S. ranks 30th in the world in infant mortality, with a rate more than twice as high as infant mortality rates in Sweden, Japan, Finland, Norway and the Czech Republic."

The AP lists possible reasons suggested by "experts":

-Fertility treatments and other forms of assisted reproduction probably play a role because they often lead to twins, triplets or other multiple births. Those children tend to be delivered early.

-The U.S. health care system doesn't guarantees [sic] prenatal care to pregnant women, particularly the uninsured, said Dr. Alan R. Fleischman, medical director for the March of Dimes.

-Maternal obesity and smoking have been linked to premature births and may also be a factor.

-Health officials are also concerned that doctors increasingly are inducing labor or performing C-sections before the 37th week. However, Fleischman said most infant deaths do not occur in babies just shy of 37 weeks gestation, but rather in those much younger....

While "smoking" makes sense as one of the factors causing premature births in the US, it doesn't make sense as an explanation of why America has more premature births than Europe. Europeans smoke much more than Americans, and I'd assume there's a direct correlation between a country's overall smoking rate and the prevalence of pregnant women smoking. There must be factors aside from smoking that are so harmful to babies that they go even further than canceling out America's advantage in having relatively few smokers.

Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten says "hooray" to his colleagues' getting into a fistfight.

"Hooray that there is still enough passion left somewhere in a newsroom in America for violence to break out between colorful characters in disagreement over the quality of a story."

(Here's the backstory.)

Via Metafilter, where one commenter asks:

What the ---- is with this glorification of workplace violence?

This makes me long for the days before advertisers had a finely honed understanding of how to manipulate the public.

"I have made a chemical analysis of Sozodont for the Teeth, and find nothing injurious or objectionable in its composition."

(Here's the original source.)

It's an 1898 ad highlighted on Living in a Golden Age, a blog by "Jason (the commenter)," who's also a frequent commenter here. I recommend bookmarking the blog if you enjoy such pre-modern cultural items.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (70-61)

(Click here for the whole list.)


70. Ambulance LTD — "Anecdote"

From this overlooked NYC band's only album.




69. The Futureheads — "Robot"




68. Sonic Youth — "Incinerate"




67. The Darkness — "I Believe in a Thing Called Love"




66. Dirty Projectors — "Stillness Is the Move"




65. Daniel Powter — "Bad Day"




64. Okkervil River — "Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe"




63. Hot Chip — "Ready for the Floor"

I can't stop watching this:




62. Regina Spektor — "Samson"




61. Justin Timberlake — "Cry Me a River"

Dreams From My Father, by Tripp Johnston

The memoir about his gradual discovery of his lost father, Levi Johnston, circa 2056.

"If you consume dairy, you should eat veal."

A chillingly utilitarian rebuff to vegetarians.

The argument is that if you eat or drink dairy products, you're supporting the existence of male calves, since "dairy cows must give birth to provide milk." These calves "are unsuitable for beef production and too costly to keep on the farm." Something must be done with those animals, and the best result -- even just from the calves' perspective -- would be to humanely raise them for meat.

But even if I accept that practical argument as far as it goes, the only thing it would seem that I "should" do is: hope that veal is produced -- and eaten by someone (of course), but not necessarily me. That's different from saying that I "should" be one of the people eating the veal. It doesn't seem like I'd have that kind of moral obligation unless I somehow knew that the amount of veal being consumed were insufficient to use up all the male calves already being born.

By the way, this is a noteworthy passage from the linked article:

The renaissance of humanely raised veal is driven in part by small farmers who embrace old-fashioned animal husbandry and see veal as an extra revenue stream. But it also has been spurred by the success of animal rights campaigns and the resulting collapse in demand for veal. In 1944, Americans ate 8.6 pounds of veal per person annually, according to Agriculture Department figures. In 2004, the latest year for which data are available, consumption had fallen to less than half a pound. It hasn't topped one pound per person since 1988.

This illustrates Mark Bittman's principle: "Let's get the numbers of animals we're killing for eating down, and then we'll worry about being nice to the ones that are left." (Quoted here, from the video here.)

How being black and in his 60s caused Glenn Loury to underestimate Obama

Which victims do we care about?

"[I]n the hierarchy of victimhood, young beats old, female beats male, domestic beats foreign, fur beats scales, defenseless beats well-armed, pregnant beats nonpregnant, and kittens beat everything."

So says this Slate article on why the press gets hoodwinked by fake victims. Of course, the point also applies to real victims.

Do you think an earlier -- perhaps censored -- draft of the article had one more item in that list: "white beats black"?

As for the part about "female beats male," I'd be interested to know if Nicholas Kristof honestly disagrees with that observation.

The 100 best songs of the first decade of the 2000s (80-71)

(Click here for the whole list.)


80. Imogen Heap — "Headlock"

I had one semester in law school where I had no morning classes on most weekdays, so I had time to have breakfast at home, and I'd always play this, the first song on her great album Speak for Yourself, to get the day started.




79. The Killers — "Read My Mind"




78. Lenka — "Bring Me Down"




77. Amy Winehouse — "You Know I'm No Good"




76. Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros — "Home"




75. Nerina Pallot — "Everything's Illuminated!"




74. Rilo Kiley — "The Good That Won’t Come Out"

Starts unassumingly, ends gloriously.




73. Arcade Fire — "Wake Up"

David Bowie joins the band in this performance. A great melisma: the joyously drawn-out "adjuuuuuuust" (starting at 3:08 in the video).




72. Yeah Yeah Yeahs — "Zero"




71. Youth Group — "Someone Else's Dream"

"The Internet is supplementing and intensifying real life."

Some common-sense optimism on how the internet is changing our lives by Tyler Cowen, who insightfully compares the rise of online social media to getting married after a long-distance relationship.

(Via Arts & Letters Daily.)

Oblivious anti-consumerism

My dad spotted these:

Left rear bumper: "Consumption Will Not Fill the Void."

Right rear bumper: "Black Star Pub Brewery"

And that's not the only thing that makes the left bumper sticker ironic. What's that thing attached to the bumper sticker? Oh yes, a car. You would think that such a vocal critic of consumerism would think twice about having one -- or at least about decorating it with unnecessary plastic.

I'm reminded of the New York Times article that reported, with a straight face, on the family (a married couple with kids) that was purporting to give away its possessions. (Coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, both the family and the car with the bumper stickers were in Austin.) I blogged the story and said:

They're also going to give away their current cars ... and get new cars ... and drive all the way from their current home in Texas to Vermont (where they've never been) to start a new life. I'm not sure how driving across the country -- which is to say, using up the world's resources and unnecessarily contributing to carbon emissions, just to give a partial list of the evils of driving -- is part of simplifying your life and returning to nature. Americans are so obsessed with our car culture that using a car doesn't even register as something that goes against the ideals of simplicity, counterculture, anti-consumerism. Thus, the Times write-up never mentions their car situation, and I doubt that the writers had a second thought about this. Or if they did, it was quickly dismissed: "Come on, you have to have a car!"

I don't mean to attack people who feel that they need a car. Maybe they do. But if so, they should think twice about whether to hold themselves out to the world as paragons of monastic counterculturism.