Ezra Klein

It is perhaps not surprising that a book about the economics of irrationality is somewhat irrationally presented. But it's still puzzling. Take the blurbs on the back cover. The first comes from Robert Solow. That's all for the good. Getting a Nobel laureate on your book jacket does wonders for credibility. The second, however, comes from Dennis Snower, an economist at the University of Kiel, in Germany. The third comes from Diane Coyle, author of The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters, which is currently #621,324 in the Amazon rankings. And the last comes from George Perry, an economist at the Brookings Institution.

You could imagine a page of blurbs meant to establish the credibility of the authors. Or you could imagine blurbs meant to supercharge sales ("this book was like opening a window at the top of a tall mountain that's already broken through the glass ceiling. It's nothing but net." -- Thomas Friedman). But this particular collection seems designed to do neither.

Similarly puzzling is the writing: It's rough. That's to be expected. Shiller and Akerlof are economists of of immense repute. Their core competency is not crafting elegant prose. But Freakonomics -- which paired an economist with a writer -- demonstrated the existence of a pretty significant market for accessibly written texts on economics. This book, however, will deter all but the most committed reader. The question, again, is why Akerlof and Shiller didn't pair their comparative advantage in economics with someone else's comparative advantage in writing good books. Seems like it would have been an economist-like thing to do. Specialization is well understood in the discipline! But aside from the wildly successful pairing of Steven Leavitt and Stephen Dubner -- you've not seen the model replicated.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

This feels like the sort of question I should be asking Tyler Cowen, but let's throw it open here. What fiction is most appropriate, and illuminating, in this moment? I'm looking for the culture of Wall Street, of riches, of wealth. The world and specifics of finance. Great Gatsby has to be on there, if only for literary context. American Psycho and Bonfire of the Vanities, too. Some have argued that Martin Amis's Money, deserves a spot, but I hold that it explores a culture of West Coast excess that's actually quite far removed. What else?

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (31)

David asks:

I've been wondering this for a while. Have you read David Broder's book on the Clinton Healthcare plan and is it any good? My (well-founded) prejudice would be to dismiss it as Broderish nonsense, probably containing an analysis to focused on people and their character and not enough about institutions etc. But I figured you would be well-placed to judge its merit if you have read the book.

The System

That said, analytically, it falls down. It's not good on policy or theory. It doesn't make judgments, or leave you with a sharp grasp of the ideas at the core of the process. Read Brad DeLong's review of the book, and reflection of his own experiences in health reform, for more on that.

If you're looking for an analytical take on the Clinton wars, start with Jacob Hacker's book The Road to Nowhere, which is indispensable, and Theda Skocpol's book Boomerang: Health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government. And if you want to learn more about the lessons of 1994 but don't want to read a whole book on it, read this article.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

From George Cooper's The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market Fallacy (Vintage):

Technically, because asset prices generally cannot become negative, when a price gets close to zero the size of the next possible price decline becomes a little smaller than the size of the next possible price rise. By making this adjustment the normal probability distributions, which are discussed in the rest of this book, become log normal probability distributions. For all practical purposes you can, if you have not already done so, forget this piece of information.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A review copy of Creative Capitalism just landed on my desk, and it includes some thoughts from Larry Summers. First, he is skeptical of the basic idea of the book which is that big corporations "should integrate doing good into their way of doing business." Summers writes:
Inherent in the mutliple objectives for creative capitalists is a loss of accountability with respect to performance.

The sense that the mission is virtuous is always a great club for beating down skeptics. When institutions have special responsibilities, it is necessary that they be supported in competition to the detriment of market efficiency.

It is hard in this world to do well. It is hard to do good. When I hear a claim that an institution is going to do both, I reach for my wallet. You should too.

I largely agree with that, and would recommend Aaron Chatterji and Siona Listokin's essay bashing corporate social responsibility to folks interested in more on the subject. Meanwhile, this, also from Summers, gave me more pause:

As for [Milton] Friedman -- I'm not so sure he looks bad. What is most screwed up today? GSEs, Citibank, regional banks. What is most regulated? Same list. What is least screwed up? Hedge funds and the like. What is least regulated? If regulation means the jihad against short selling that the Securities and Exchange Commission is engaged in, then god help us all.

Meanwhile, are hedge funds really doing that well? George Soros said last month that "[the] hedge funds will be decimated. I would guess that the amount of money they manage will shrink between 50 and 75 per cent." And this Reuters article certainly doesn't make it sound like they're in good shape. Nor does this Wall Street Journal article. It makes it sound like many of them are going to disappear. This article suggests they're doing better relative to investment banks, but none of the commentary is exactly sanguine, and it hasn't quite been explained to me how their relative regulatory freedom has aided their position. That's not to say it's not a factor, just that I haven't heard it explained. Meanwhile, heavily regulated local banks are doing very well, thank you, so if we're just going to play around with correlations...

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

The Holiday buying guides continue because, frankly, the economy remains woefully understimulated. You all are not doing enough. So today, cookbooks!

• How to Cook Everything (Completely Revised 10th Anniversary Edition) by Mark Bittman: The only cookbook I'd actually term essential. With it sitting heavily in your kitchen, there'll never be an ingredient you don't have some information on, or a technique you can't look up, or a basic recipe you can't see explained. And Bittman, happily, knows his audience: The writing is clear, the instructions simple, and the food good. I'm actually of the opinion that no kitchen should be without it.

• Land of Plenty: A Treasury of Authentic Sichuan Cooking by Fuschia Dunlop: My favorite type of food to cook is Sichuan food, and this is my bible. Everything I've made from here has been fantastic. Worth buying for the Kung Pao, Ma Po tofu, and Sichuan green bean recipes alone. Also for all the other recipes. Particularly good food for winter.

• Molto Italiano by Mario Batali: Extremely solid Italian cookbook. Simple recipes, and the most beautiful food photography I've just about ever seen. Batali is considered one of the few celebrity chefs with serious kitchen cred, and this book shows why.

• 100 Ways to Be Pasta by Wanda Tornabene, Giovanna Tornabene, and Carolynn Carreno: This book came into The American Prospect as a random review copy three years ago, and I've been using it ever since. Great pasta recipes, and great advice on the basics of cooking pasta. Turned out you need a lot more salt than I thought.

• Think Like a Chef by Tom Collichio: I wasn't expecting much when a friend gave me this cookbook. It's slim, and Collichio spends a lot of time on TV. But it's actually great. What it's not, however, is a cookbook. It's more of a primer on recipe construction. There's a lot of writing, and even a bit of theory. Collichio will start with one ingredient -- say, roasted tomatoes, or wild mushrooms -- and then build dozens of different dishes around them, ranging from tarts to entrees to desserts. The idea is to get you thinking about how to create your own recipes around whatever sounds good that week. And it works, or at least it did for me.

Image used under a CC license from Patrick Q.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (39)

Dissent Magazine has a fascinating interview with Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, the authors of the new book Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back. The book's argument is well-expressed in this passage on Warren Buffett, who famously asked what his income would have been had he been born in Bangladesh:

For all his gifts, he’s telling us that his billions are largely an accident of when and where he was born—that if he were the same person he is today (with the same amount of effort and intelligence) but was born in a poor country or transported back to early America, he would not have the wealth he has today or even a tiny fraction of it. So why then should we think of the wealth he “owns” as entirely, or even largely, his and, therefore, as being immune from other kinds of claims such as social need?

It's not clear how far you want to take this reasoning, but it's a good intervention on the question of whether success is perspiration or inspiration. Alperovitz and Daly are arguing that it's beyond simple luck and effort: It's also the product of our communal inheritance of knowledge, labor, infrastructure, and so forth. When you're asking after a just economic system, then, you have to recognize that that debt must be paid too. They neatly illustrate this by reference to the phenomena of "simultaneous invention."

Popular culture and much of our education promotes a “heroic” view of progress that obscures how most technologies really develop. The heroic view sees progress simply as a sequence of great achievements by extraordinary individuals. It is the view that Albert Einstein rejected when he famously said “many times a day I realize how much my inner and outer life is built upon the labors of my fellow men, both living and dead.” The reality is much closer to Einstein’s view of building on others’ labor over a long duration. From transportation, to medicine, to computers, technological progress is much less about isolated “eureka” moments than about recombining existing knowledge in new ways. An individual may hit upon something new that adds to existing knowledge and makes it more effective, but really the key is how the existing knowledge predisposes the individual to look for certain things within a narrow range of possibilities—a condition that makes discovery almost an automatic process over time.

This is plainly illustrated in the very common phenomenon of “simultaneous invention,” where two or more people working independently invent or discover the same thing at roughly the same time. So, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection at the same time. Or take the telephone. The very day Alexander Graham Bell’s lawyer filed for his patent on the telephone in 1876, so did Elisha Gray, and it’s possible that the only reason another inventor, Antonio Meucci, didn’t beat them both is that he didn’t have enough money to file for the patent several years earlier. None of these individuals “invented” the telephone in any strict individualistic sense. Bell’s “heroic” contribution was simply that he won the race to obtain legal title to an invention that was about to happen anyway.

The argument that an individual inventor deserves an incredible payday for his unique achievements is somewhat trickier to countenance if his work was not so unique after all. The consideration given to speed should probably be less than the consideration given to unique innovation. On the other hand, speed is worth incentivizing too, and a good economist would argue that the beckoning payday is incentivizing all the inventors, and you can't remove it for one without discouraging them all. But even so, there's probably a midway point between taking incentives seriously and taking the moral case for egalitarianism seriously, and we're not there.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (36)

David Leonhardt has a nice review of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers that focuses in on a point with relevance far beyond where you should read the book:

These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, in that it gives individual characteristics — talent, hard work, Horatio Alger-like pluck — the starring role. The second version doesn’t necessarily deny these characteristics, but it does sublimate them. The protagonist is not a singularly talented person who took advantage of opportunities. He is instead a talented person who took advantage of singular opportunities.[...]

Many people, I think, have an instinctual understanding of this idea (even if Gladwell, in the interest of setting his thesis against conventional wisdom, doesn’t say so). That’s why parents spend so much time worrying about what school their child attends. They don’t really believe the child is so infused with greatness that he or she can overcome a bad school, or even an average one. And yet when they look back years later on their child’s success — or their own — they tend toward explanations that focus on the individual.

The tricky thing about this argument is that it points in two different directions. It's good for societies to overstate the existence of individual opportunity and life-cycle autonomy. The more that people feel able to achieve, the more that they will attempt. A high perception of mobility is good for personal initiative, and personal initiative is good for both individuals and the economy.

It's also good for political systems to build policy atop realistic understandings of economic mobility. If outcomes are only weakly variable because opportunity is not broadly shared, than you probably want to use national policy to redress that fact. But policy is, at least in part, a function of attitudes. A society that's wrongly certain of its natural mobility will create policy that's insufficient in spreading opportunity. Optimally, you'd want individuals to overestimate mobility and policy to realistically estimate it, but it doesn't necessarily work out that way. For instance, the graph below tracks intergenerational income mobility:

If the political system were to more fully face up to the implications of that data -- that economic mobility is an upper-class asset -- it would push towards some pretty serious changes in policy. Similarly, do people realize that America has less economic mobility than virtually any other advanced nation?

Arguably, it's simultaneously one of Americas strengths and its weaknesses that this data would likely surprise most Americans. Indeed, our countrymen are much likelier to believe that people are rewarded for their effort and much less likely to believe that family riches are important for getting ahead than residents of other countries. That's good from an entrepreneurial standpoint, but it creates a society that believes strongly in economic mobility and doesn't have it. A society, in other words, at odds with its own deeply held values.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

Periods of great policy upheaval are rarities in American history. The American system of governance is by nature conservative. It is a collection of traps and catches designed to hamper majorities, to slow the process of change, to favor the status quo. Most of the time, inertia is the most powerful force in government. Those who succeed change have to succeed at dozens of potential veto points. Those who seek to prevent change usually have to succeed at only one.

But this gets the causality backwards. Assuming that policy outcomes are a simple reflection of public opinion is a nasty error. We have a government set up to protect against public opinion. And it works. The Founding Fathers weren't idiots, and the political structure they designed has functioned largely as they expected. Political opinion favors things like universal health care and paid vacation. But our system doesn't favor the passage of major legislation. As such, the outcomes are often conservative, insofar as change chokes to death in the US Senate. On the other hand, the system is no friendlier to right-wing reformism. Medicare and Social Security endure. There are very few examples of social programs being repealed. Privatization was a catastrophic failure.

The practical effect of all this, however, is that liberals and conservative reformers alike spend much too much time thinking about how to move public opinion and not nearly enough thinking about how to move legislation through the political process. It's unlikely that reformers will try anything in sharp contrast to voter preferences, and beyond that scenario, it's rare that preferences are strong enough to be initially decisive. But what you tend to see happen is that failed or failing legislation becomes extremely unpopular. The media writes a lot of stories trying to justify why the bill can't get through the Senate which tends to mean playing up the unpopular aspects of the legislation. They rarely offer up procedural explanations like it's being blocked by the minority party even though, and in fact because, it would be popular if it passed. But that's generally true. And then, when bills fail, voters tend to punish the failure even if they weren't necessarily of one mind on the original bill. Of course they weren't for that failed, catastrophe of a reform!

Posted by Ezra Klein at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Okay, one more quick Khalidi comment. Over at the Motherblog, Tim Fernholz analyzes the controversy and concludes, "no one knows who Khalidi is outside of the media and high information voters, and an even smaller universe of people cares. The attacks by McCain are reprehensible...but ultimately this is not an election about small stuff. This is a big stuff election." If you want a one-line summary of why John McCain's Distract-O-Tron 3000 strategy has failed to connect, you can't do much better than that.

Meanwhile, Khalidi is, as everyone keeps telling you, a well-respected and incisive scholar of the Middle East in general, and the Palestinian struggle for nationhood in particular. Take this Amazon.com review of his seminal book The Iron Cage, which investigates why Palestinian civil society is so curiously immature:

Khalidi poses the question of why Palestinian political development is so weak, certainly not up to the standards of contemporary high-income republics.[...]

In the subsequent period from the early 1960s on, Khalidi gives the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) credit for three essential achievements in political organization: (1) winning most Palestinians' recognition of the PLO as their first-ever central point for political cooperation, (2) winning Arab countries' recognition of a Palestinian national cause, and (3) finally winning global recognition that the Palestinian nation existed.

At the same time, Khalidi also identifies three failings: (1) not setting up internal democracy and efficient service bureaucracies, (2) not being categorical enough when they gave up armed resistance to the Israelis after the mid-1970s, and (3) neglecting Palestinians outside the West Bank and Gaza when Israel allowed the PLO leadership to return in the mid-1990s.

Presumably, this experience has not been a pleasant one for Khalidi. But it would be nice if some good emerged from it in the form of broader familiarity with his important works. So next time you hear Hannity explain how Rashid Khalidi urinates on a Haggadah during full moons, head over to Amazon and pick up a copy of The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood. Its an important book on its own terms, and its purchase is a worthy counter-statement to this type of anti-Arab fearmongering.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

In the opening scene, the New York Federal Reserve calls an emergency meeting of investment bank CEOs in the hopes of forcing one or more to bail out LTCM. The concern is that LTCM is so heavily leveraged that their collapse could bring down Wall Street. "This one obscure arbitrage fund had amassed an amazing $100 billion in assets virtually all of it borrow -- borrowed, that is, from the bankers around [the] table," writes Lowenstein. "As monstrous as this indebtedness was, it was by no means the worst of Long-Term's problems. The fund had entered into thousands of derivatives contracts, which had endlessly intertwined it with every bank on Wall Street...If Long-Term defaulted, all of the banks in the room would be eft holding one side of a contract for which the other side no longer existed. In other words, they would be exposed to tremendous, and untenable, risks. Undoubtedly, there would be a frenzy as every bank rushed to escape its now one-sided obligations and tried to sell its collateral from Long-Term."

Sound familiar? Oh, and the key players in the scene, the responsible lenders who would never get involved in the chicanery of this reckless hedge fund? Among others, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns. They saw this happen merely a decade ago. But then, it was only one reckless hedge fund. 10 years later, it's every bank in the room.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

The chattering classes are already inclined to treat the Republican Party as a gathering of gun-toting yahoos with too many damn kids; if the GOP made its working-class populism more explicit, adding economic as well as socio-cultural elements, and found standard-bearers who embody the background and aspirations of the Sam's Club demographic more completely than a son of privilege like George W. Bush, the results would lend themselves to even greater hysteria, condescension and demonization than the Republican Party's current incarnation.

I think the coverage of Sarah Palin to date - by colleagues I used to respect and publications I normally admire - at least partially vindicates this theory about the reception that would greet the kind of GOP I'd like to see.

Continue reading "SARAH PALIN AND THE GRAND NEW PARTY." »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Man, John McWhorter really doesn't know much about rap. But then, I guess that was never the point. Fairly few folks will buy his book to learn more about hip-hop. Rather, people who already don't like hip-hop, but for whom that distaste is more cranky mental gesture than articulated critique, will buy it so they can adopt McWhorter's argument. It's a sort of "How to Be a Cranky Hater" manual more than anything. But for folks who are into hip-hop, I can't recommend Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation highly enough. And if you're just looking to listen to some good hip hop, I've been really enjoying Modill's Midnight Green and Little Brother's The Listening.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Earlier today, I offered some recommended reading for the presidential candidates on domestic reform and promised I'd lean on some friends to cover other issue areas. So much as I'd like to believe that health care will be the priority in 2009, Iraq (and national security) will almost certainly dominate the president's first days. So I reached out to Spencer Ackerman, the best national security reporter/punk rock obsessive I know, for a couple recommendations in that area. He replied:

Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War by Anthony Shadid. The best accessible book about how the Iraqi people experience the war.

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner. About the CIA, and more broadly offers valuable lessons about imperialism.

Making the Corps by Tom Ricks. Written during the 1990s, it's the first book-length treatment of the growing cultural divisions between civilians and the military. Will be crucial for understanding how traumatizing both the Iraq war and *withdrawal* will be for the military -- and how to mitigate that trauma.

Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century by Marc Sageman; along with Architect of Global Jihad: The Life of Al Qaeda Strategist Abu Mus'ab Al-Suri by Brynjar Lia. In a nutshell, these books explain where al-Qaeda is coming from, how it's changing and why, and where it's going next.

Extra credit:
The Old Social Classes & The Revolutionary Movement In Iraq by Hanna Batatu. Many years ago I asked Juan Cole what I should read if I want to understand Iraq and its people without western preconceptions. This is it. It's MASSIVE -- well over 1000 pages -- and I won't pretend I've finished it, but it's a soup-to-nuts history of the cohesions, cleavages and shifts in Iraq's 80-year existence. Published in the 70s, I think.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The New York Times ran a feature last weekend asking prominent authors and writers to a recommend a couple books to the presidential candidates. The idea was good, but, sadly, the answers are almost uniformly bad. Though props for publishing Gore Vidal's reply, which read, in full, "I can only answer in the negative: I want them not to read The New York Times, while subscribing to The Financial Times."

Dan Drezner has a couple ideas of his own, though I'd probably only echo the first choice. For my list, I'm going to stick to my areas of relative expertise. And it goes without saying that these books are as good for individual progressives as they are for possible presidents.

• The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point. This should be skimmed as much as it should be read, but there's simply no better tick-tock history of a Congressional battle than Broder's history of the 1994 health reform effort. The book is marred by being so in the weeds of the legislative process that it doesn't effectively explain how the policy process and broader political conditions interacted with the campaign, but that's why we have the next book.

• The Road to Nowhere. Probably the single best book for understanding the original sin of the 1994 health reforms, which was the process that created the bill, left out the Congress, and involved mainly health wonks. Hacker emphasizes that you simply can't mistake policy for politics, and though he does less to explain the minute-by-minute changes in Congressional coalitions, he does a much better job hammering home that everything needs to be built around a strategy that twins public support with stakeholder and congressional buy-in. The book is about health care, yes, but it's applicable to any large scale legislative reform.

• Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Markets are powerful. Humans are fallible. This book will impress on you how the interactions between the two can not only lead to imperfect outcomes, but outcomes that systematically screw individuals. We saw this in the subprime loan crisis, and we're going to see it again. Part of your job is to equalize power between folks who have very little information and folks whose job it is to have a whole lot and use it to make a profit. This book will help steal your spine. Also, unlike the other books I've recommended so far, you won't be bored by it.

• Which Side Are You On?: Trying to Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back. If you're going to be successful, you're going to need a healthy Labor movement. If the middle class is going to be successful after you leave office, it's going to need a healthy Labor movement. If your gains are to be preserved after you leave office, they'll be preserved by healthy labor movement. Additionally, my sense is that lots of liberals, and lots of politicians, don't really know why they should be for organized labor save that it's a useful ally in elections and can help raise some money. This book details, beautifully and wrenchingly how crucial it is that this country retains a force dedicated to ensuring dignity and wresting power for the working class.

As I said, I stuck to my areas of expertise here. I'm going to e-mail a couple friends who walk in different worlds, however, and see what they say. Meanwhile, suggest your own in comments.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 9:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

In one of the more enjoyable writing experiences I've had of late, I've got the cover in this month's Columbia Journalism Review recounting my month with the Amazon Kindle and what it suggests about the future of reading:

I’m not sure exactly what I expected from my month with the Kindle. Maybe for some inquisitive older gentleman, possibly wearing wire glasses and a tweed blazer, to sidle up and say, “Excuse me, I hate to bother you while you’re reading, but do you really think that can replace the book?” Or possibly for a librarian to berate me. In any case, it didn’t happen. In fact, nobody noticed at all. Though reading the Kindle felt like a courageous betrayal of every word written since the moment papyrus gave way to paper, it turns out that looking at words on tiny screens in public places is far too common to attract attention. Indeed, the only person who demonstrated a heightened awareness of nearby reading habits was me. Suddenly everyone seemed to be staring at a laptop or scrolling through a BlackBerry or searching for songs on an iPod or texting on a flip phone. The Kindle is far less the start of a revolution than the codification of one. It’s a declaration of war long after most of the contested lands have been conquered.[...]

Let me be clear: though the Kindle has some advantages over traditional books, for the moment, I’d stick with the low-tech option. The problem is that the Kindle tries to compete too directly with paper. It attempts to electronically mimic the experience of reading a book. But the book is very, very good at providing the experience of reading a book. In this way, the Kindle occasionally comes off as if Ford, failing to make the conceptual leap to the car, had instead built a motorized horse. Sure, there would be some advantages: the robo-steed would never grow tired, and could be outfitted with more plush seating. But horses are pretty good at being horses. And books, like horses, have evolved to maximize their advantages.

The true promise of the Kindle, and its inevitable descendants, is in creating a product that goes where the book cannot. Printed text is fundamentally limited. Once on the page, nothing more can be done with it. With digital text, everything is a draft, to be edited, altered, broadened, remixed, and redirected. As better conveyors of electronic text are developed, the big question is how content itself will change to take advantage of the new opportunities.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from John Pastor.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. We can be, by turns, belligerent and aggressive to our potential competitors. We can force diplomatic flare-ups and risk violent confrontations. We can encourage mistrust and anger. We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.

Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.

As for relations between the powers themselves,the more invested these countries are in the global system, the more they feel its benefits flowing to them and their people, the less likely they are to jeopardize its security or seek violent competition with other countries. Indeed, looked at from this perspective, little could be better than the rise of other, powerful countries with their own highly educated populaces and increasingly symmetrical incentives. Looked at from the unipolarist's perspective, however, little could be worse -- and few prophecies could be more obviously self-fulfilling. The choice between the two visions is, of course, for us to make. Zakaria's book is argument in favor of the positive sum approach is deeply convincing, and an entry into what's probably the most important debate going today.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Burger King's plan to release a £85 burger made with Kobe beef and topped with fois gras is fascinating from a behavioral economics standpoint. As one analyst says, "The idea of a burger that no one buys is not as ludicrous as it seems. Burger King will use it to promote a gap in perception between it and McDonald’s. It could lead consumers to reassess the quality of the brand." In other words, no one will buy the burger, but the very fact that Burger King sells it will imply that they're a higher quality fast food company, and so their 99 cent burger is better than McDonald's 99 cent burger. Indeed, it's well known in behavioral economics that retailers will sometimes sometimes offer a useless, pricey product not because they think anyone will buy it, but because they think it will make their other offerings look better.

Which reminds me, I cover these and other topics in my review of Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, which went up the other day. The nut

Ariely's point goes far beyond our irrationality -- it is the predictability of our processing flaws that interests him. It isn't that we sometimes make the wrong decision, but that we make it repeatedly, and in the same way, as a response to certain conditions and mental processes. Early on in the book, Ariely tells us about Gregg Rapp, a restaurant consultant who helps establishments figure out their menu pricing. "One thing Rapp has learned," writes Ariely, "is that high-priced entrees on the menu boost revenues for the restaurant -- even if no one buys them. Why? Because even though people generally won't buy the most expensive dish on the menu, they will order the second most expensive dish. Thus, by creating an expensive dish, a restaurateur can lure customers into ordering the second most expensive dish (which can be cleverly engineered to deliver a high profit margin)."

The implication here is that our irrationality is not only predictable, it's actually being predicted. Restaurants know that we anchor our frugality by deciding the priciest item on the menu is too expensive. Electronic stores know that we're likely to go for the marked-down television whose price places it in the middle of the pack. Magazines know we'll go for whichever subscription rate looks like the best deal as compared to the other subscription rates on the page. The problem, then, is not our predictable irrationality, but the world's asymmetric rationality. They know how we're going to screw up, and how to take advantage of it. The only defense is being similarly aware of our flaws and failings, and trying to take into account not only how they affect our judgment, but how they're being used against us.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)

Related: Sack of Rome blogging from the snows of New Hampshire.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Yglesias cites careerism as the sole motive for liberals’ support for the Iraq War. Democrats in Congress, he writes, supported the invasion because “it was useful from a careerist perspective,” in light of President Bush’s high approval ratings at the time. As for liberal commentators, they got in line behind Bush for the simple reason that “the writer’s life is more interesting and more important if the challenge of al-Qaeda is world-historical in scale.” He thus ignores the raft of Democratic politicians, liberal journalists, and Clinton-administration national security officials who, throughout the nineties and well into the administration of George W. Bush, believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction programs and unhesitatingly supported military action against him in 2003.

The second family, according to Matt, were the "humanitarian militarists." This group believes, like Tom Friedman, that "what the Arab world desperately needs is a model that works -- a progressive Arab regime that by its sheer existence would create pressure and inspiration for gradual democratization and modernization around the region." Matt lays out the arguments of these two schools until page 72, when we get the third group, "political opportunists who wanted to project 'strength.'"

Now recall what Kirchick said: "Yglesias cites careerism as the sole motive for liberals’ support for the Iraq War." Now Matt's my friend and his beliefs are close to mine, so one might expect that I'd defend its contents. And maybe, when the occasion arises, I will. But in this post, I want to make something clear: This isn't an argument Kirchick and I are having on the content of the book. I'm describing the content of the book. He's lying about it. There's just no earthly way to reconcile his account of Matt calling "careerism the sole motive" with Matt's book, which mentions careerism as the third of the three leading motives, and puts genuine national security concerns first. Hell, you can't even reconcile it with Matt, who supported the war on national security grounds. So if you want to take a really generous view of Kirchick's comments, you can say he hasn't read the book, and is assuming its contents. More likely, he's lying about its contents in order to create a straw man who's easier to knock down. But this is why it's not worth taking Jamie seriously. You just can't trust the kid.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (38)

The New York Times ran a story recently about Gregg Rapp, a restaurant consultant, who gets paid to work out the pricing for menus. He knows, for instance, how lamb sold this year as opposed to last year; whether lamb did better paired with risotto or with squash; and whether orders decrease when the price of the main dish was hiked from $39 to $41.

One thing Rapp has learned is that high-priced entrees on the menu boost revenue for the restaurant -- even if no one buys them. Why? Because though people generally won't buy the most expensive dish on the menu, they will order the second most expensive dish. Thus, by creating an expensive dish, a restaurateur can lure customers into ordering the second most expensive dish (which can be cleverly engineered to deliver a higher profit margin).

This, in general, is one of Ariely's really worthwhile insights. Humans don't have an internal compass that detects value. We don't know how much an item is "worth." So we rely on other methods of making the decision. Context, for instance. We "know" hardcover books are worth around $24.95, so less than that is probably a good value. Or we compare to nearby products, and look for the one in the middle, or the upper range of the middle. All well and good, except that retailers are well aware that we do this, and figure out their pricing accordingly. Oops.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

Tyler Cowen asks "Which 20th century classic of American conservative political thought has held up best?" This isn't to ask which is your favorite, or which most influenced you, but which has held up the best. "Road to Serfdom is a contender," he writes, "even though its main empirical point (socialism leads to loss of political freedom) would seem to be refuted." If you have ideas on this score, head over to his place and share them. But for now, I'd ask the same about 20th century classics in liberal political thought. Unlike Tyler, I'm not going to disallow economics-texts, largely because I think Galbraith should be part of the discussion. Rawls would seem an obvious contender, as would Susan Moller Okin. But range widely.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (49)

There are no end of competing hypotheses that propose to explain why we invaded Iraq. But beneath the question of why this war versus another, or versus none at all, is the issue of why the country, and the media, and the politicians, evinced so much confidence in our capabilities. Insofar as the war was a subject for dispute, the questions tended to be about justification: Was the war the right thing to do, the humane thing to do, the ethical thing to do, the lawful thing to do? Rarely did we question whether it was within our capabilities to carry out.

In part, that's because you're not really allowed to question the military. Troops always deserve our support, and support, in this context, means admiration, and even overestimation. It would have been political suicide for a prominent politician to stand up and say that our military was unfit for this task: It wasn't culturally astute enough, experienced enough with occupation or counter-insurgency, populated by enough Arab speakers. It would have been even more unthinkable to question the virtues of the soldiers themselves, admitting, as we all know, that they are a fighting force composed largely of young, aggressive kids who've never been out of this country and, through no fault of their own, are utterly unprepared for a task of this delicacy. Add in our fetishization of military hardware, and the apparent ease with which we toppled the Taliban, and you had a deeply skewed conversation which seemed singularly unable to address what should've been the threshold question: Can we do this?

Continue reading "STILL BROKEN." »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

it's a shame that Milbank didn't take his conceit more seriously. The American Association of Anthropologists says of their varied and broad discipline, "always, the common goal links these vastly different projects: to advance knowledge of who we are, how we came to be that way -- and where we may go in the future." That would be a wonderful guiding spirit for a book on Washington. But Homo Politicus is not an anthropologist's take on Washington. It is a cynic's single-minded search for that which will arch his eyebrow.

Milbank gives us the perverts and the liars, the fools and the frauds. But speaking as a Washingtonian, his book is most notable for those who are absent...Milbank, by offering this parade of horrors to Washingtonians and civilians alike, helps assure the former that their misbehavior is perfectly normal and helps reinforce the latter's decision to ignore politics altogether. Indeed, you have to give Milbank this: like a real anthropologist, he appears content to study his subject rather than seeking to better it. There is no attention to the structural factors that aid corruption or the underlying trends that feed polarization. There is no talk of reform or renewal, no vignettes describing those who are trying to better the process and need the support of Milbank's readers.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

I'm one of the many who has no problem with large, chain bookstores. I remember when all my city had was a tiny Crown bookstore, no larger than your average Starbucks. The first Barnes and Nobles was a revelation for me, and the six after that -- which don't even include the Borders that arose shortly thereafter -- were all welcome additions. But, like Matt, I recognize their advantages have largely been overwhelmed by the online booksellers.

At this point, the brick-and-mortar book model seems to be leveraging the enjoyable atmosphere created by rows of books in order to subsidize the sale of expensive coffee drinks, wireless internet, and DVDs. At the end of the day, physical stores have fewer books, higher prices, and offer less useful information than virtual outlets. They're better for browsing, but without reviews and "other books you might like," worse for choosing. As Matt puts it, "[if] you don't need the book immediately, the practical advantages to shopping online are just enormous." And even that may end shortly, as the Kindle and similar devices make eBooks more viable. There is, after all, no real reason that text has to be printed on paper and carried around. Soon, you'll just download your book, and that'll be far quicker than driving out to the store.

All of which I take to be a shame. I love bookstores, and spend a significant fraction of my time in them. When I go to Politics and Prose, I purchase books I don't need, partially out of a desire to simply donate to the store's continued operation. I keep trying to figure out a reason I believe bookstores will survive into the future, but it seems pretty clear that books will eventually be as mercilessly digitized as music, and most bookstores will close, just as most CD stores were shuttered long ago. Tell me why I'm wrong.

(Flickr image used under a Creative Commons license from user EclecticLibrarian.)

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (35)

No, this is all wrong. Bookshelves are not for displaying books you've read -- those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson. I am the type of person who is very interested in a history of the Reformation, but am not, as it happens, the type of person with the time to read 900 pages on the subject. More importantly, I am the type of person who amasses many books, on all sorts of subjects. I'm pretty sure that's what a bookshelf is there to prove. The reading of those books is entirely incidental. The question becomes how we'll project all of this when Kindles takes off and all our books are digital.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (67)

Over at Crooked Timber, Rich Pulchasky comments:

[Jonah Goldberg] expects his book to be considered because it has right-wing propaganda pushing it, and because his handlers appear to have chosen to tell him to go for publicity through Coulteresque overstatement.

And whenever someone writes yet another one of these “Isn’t Goldberg stupid? Watch me not consider his book!” pieces, he’s proved a little more correct. There is no such thing as bad publicity. The total number of words written about Goldberg’s book probably adds up to the sum of all other words written about political books on blogs for the last year.

It would be good, of course, if we writers could figure out a better way to publicize better books. It's hard, though, But take Alex Stille's The Sack of Rome, a book about Berlusconi's rise to power that's really about the unsettling intersection of money, media power, corporate heft, and political success. It's a brilliant book, thought-provoking and insightful, and it's about much broader, more potent trends than whether liberals or conservatives are bad. Take this bit towards the end, when Stille considers how commercial values have come to overwhelm civic values in modern political life:

Continue reading "HOW TO PROMOTE A BOOK." »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

I've got a review of Larry Sabato's A More Perfect Constitution over at Barnes and Nobles' website. An excerpt:

The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg has noted that an alien observer would think us a society based upon ancestor worship, and that's not far from the truth. Thomas Jefferson and his cohort are our democracy's gods, and the Constitution is their gospel.

It is into this strange situation that Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, strides. His new book, A More Perfect Constitution, is a welcome blast of the profane within this unwarranted hush: it dares us to consider the Constitution a mere document, the product of messy compromises, occasional shortsightedness, and, most important, its times (the Constitution was, lest we forget, composed over 200 years ago). It reminds us that the Founding Fathers considered it decidedly limited in relevance, and that Jefferson himself held that "every Constitution...naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right." And it drives home, in great detail and with admirable clarity, a variety of ways in which the Constitution hinders the smooth function of the modern state.

In its basic thrust, Sabato's is a broadly agreeable thesis. The lifetime appointment of Supreme Court judges is lunacy, encouraging presidents to nominate the young over the wise and rendering vacancies random and disruptive. The Electoral College is virulently undemocratic, second in offensiveness only to the absurd apportionment of the United State Senate, where 41 Senators representing 11.2 percent of the population can use the filibuster to effectively block any and all legislation. And let's be honest: the Second Amendments is, if not poorly written, in need of an editor's pen.

Moreover, Sabato reminds us that constitutions are not, by nature, sacred documents, approachable only by a priestly class and amendable only by God Almighty. Between the 50 states comprising the Union there have been more than 92 constitutional conventions, with the original 13 states alone overseeing the creation of 40 new constitutions. If they can do it, why can't we?

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (18)

Because I think you should probably read Jonah in his own words, and not just in mine, I recommend checking out his long interview with Alex Koppelman at Salon. One of the interesting tensions in the interview is one of them more depressing tensions in the book. Jonah begins, in part, by worrying that "we see fascism as a thing of the right," and he wants to rescue the right from that label. Fair enough. That's the book's weak claim, and it's true: The contemporary right is not fascist. But in order to make a book of it, he goes to a strong claim, which is that fascism is not a thing of the right, it's a thing of the left. And so we get exchanges like this one:

Continue reading "JONAH IN HIS OWN WORDS." »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (79)

One of the nice side effects of very bad books is that they occasionally give rise to very good reviews. And so it is with Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism, which has sparked some genuinely interesting ruminations on the nature of historical fascism and the relevancy of its contemporary advocates. John Holbo's post, "Heil Myself!", is actually one of the finest pieces of writing I've ever read in the blogosphere. As Holbo notes, Jonah fears Hillary Clinton's invocation of "the village," but says not a word for the "primordial, vaguely mystical, hierarchical social order" which animates Burkean conservatism (a strain of conservatism I've often heard Goldberg defend). Holbo goes on to muse:

There are two reasons why ad hitlerem arguments tend to be rude and crude. (Everyone knows Godwin’s Law is law. Here’s why, more or less.) First, the Holocaust. It’s pretty obvious how always dragging that in is not necessarily clarifying of every little dispute. Second, a little less obviously, ad hitlerem arguments are invariably arguments by moral analogy. Person A espouses value B. But the Nazis approved B. Not that person A is necessarily a Nazi but there must be something morally perilous about B, if espousing it is consistent with turning all Nazi. The trouble is: with few exceptions, the Nazis had all our values – at least nominally. They approved of life, liberty, justice, happiness, property, motherhood, society, culture, art, science, church, duty, devotion, loyalty, courage, fidelity, prudence, boldness, vision, veneration for tradition, respect for reason. They didn’t reject all that; they perverted it; preached but didn’t practice, or practiced horribly. Which goes to show there is pretty much no value immune from being paid mere lip-service; nominally maintained but substantively subverted.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (32)

I hadn't realized just how central Berlusconi was to Italy's economic life. He owns most of the private television networks, own major publishing houses, owns some of the main newspapers and magazines, owns finance institutions, owns insurance companies, owns polling outfits, owns theatres, etc, etc, etc. And he turned this huge corporate beast into a dedicated campaign machine. It's fascinating, and chilling, to watch. Highly recommended.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 8:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Congratulations to fellow Slug Shannon Brownlee, who's book Overtreated got named "Economics Book of the Year" by The New York Times' David Leonhardt. Overtreated runs through a topic many of you will be familiar with: The excessive quantity of medical services we're prescribed, the weak evidence that more is better in health care, and the need to cut volume and generate stronger data on comparative effectiveness. It's got lots of scary stories and arresting statistics. It is, in sum, totally convincing, and a surprisingly good read.

But it's tough. I had lunch with Brownlee a week or two ago, and she wanted to know what the likelihood was that the next round of health reform would do anything to cut care volume. That, in her estimation, is what's needed: In health care, supply is creating its own demand, and so reducing supply -- fewer specialists, CT scanners, etc -- is the first step towards a better, leaner, cheaper system. But reducing volume is political anathema. Pick your favorite slur levied against reform -- "waiting lines," rationing," socialized medicine" -- and what it is, at base, is a reference to a dystopic future in which volume is somewhat more controlled than it is now, and 92-year-olds don't get greenlighted for heart transplants (true story, at least according to a friend at a party the other night, which is the only type of information I really trust). Even HMOs* -- so hated by the public, but basically effective at controlling costs without harming health -- are basically volume-cutting organizations.

My overarching theory of reform tends to be that you sell a system that offers health security, full coverage, and a better affordability. Along the way, you integrate it, so more insurance is offered through structures vulnerable to regulation (like federal health markets). And then, with most health care flowing from one place, you can begin experimenting with soft ways to cut volume, like smart cost sharing. But anyone looking for rationing or real cost control in the first round of reform will be sorely disappointed.

*Remember not to confuse HMOs with managed care. They're different, but have, sadly, been conflated in the conversation.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (32)

I can't tell you how relieved I am that Jonah Goldberg's forthcoming Liberal Fascism looks, if anything, to be even worse than we all imagined. I was totally stealing myself for the possibility that I'd have to apologize for the mockery, but lines like "the quintessential liberal fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade-school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore," suggest that it will be, instead, "a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care."

Meanwhile, for more fun deployment of the "a very serious, thoughtful argument" catchphrase, keep your eyes peeled for Alex Rossmiller's forthcoming book on America's broken, politicized intelligence system. He works it into a totally earnest paragraph praising Juan Cole (who has a bit of a history with Jonah), making it an Easter Egg for progressive bloggers on a variety of levels. All other progressive authors should endeavor to do the same. One day, I want historians to write about the propagation of the phrase, which has proven so helpful in helping them date progressive literature from the early-21st century.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 6:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

In the past, Marshall McLuhan has sagely advised book buyers to "turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book."

Like everything else, this got sucked into the Magical Internet Machine and popped out on the other end as a brilliant blog, which exhorts authors to send in a description of their book's 69th page, and whether they think it's a fair representation of their book. So far, the test seems to be working pretty well. In order to further improve the data set (everything I do, I do for science), I gave it a shot on David Cay Johnston's new book, Free Lunch: How The Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense (and Stick You With The Bill). Page 69 focused on the exemption of professional sports teams from anti-monopoly laws, explaining that this is why London has 13 soccer teams, while New York only has two basketball teams, and Los Angeles has no football teams ("so long as the city remains teamless, the owners of football franchises use the threat of moving to extract money through public financing of new stadiums, rent rebates and other official favors.") This happens to be a personal obsession of mine, and so Johnston's book just went from being a book I want to read, to one I will read.

You win again, McLuhan.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

• Matt Bai reminds us of Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, the greatest campaign narrative ever published. I agree. What It Takes is actually the book that launched my political path. The portrayal of Gary Hart impressed me, so I grew interested in the man, searched him at the right time to hear about his abortive 2004 campaign, and volunteered for it. That effort fell apart rather quickly, but it's why Joe Trippi brought me to the Dean campaign, which is where I really got into blogging, and on and on. In conclusion, I owe everything to Cramer.

ª The second best best campaign book, or so I'd argue, is Trail Fever by Michael Lewis.

• Over at The Monkey Cage, Lee Sigelman recommends a core reading list for understanding the media's influence on American politics. I've only read The Atlantic article it's based off of, but I'd add James Fallows' Breaking the News: How the Media Undermines Democracy.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From Brookings comes a new, must-read book:

Opportunity 08: Independent Ideas for America’s Next President

New Brookings Book Focuses on Critical Issues Facing the Nation

Opportunity 08: Independent Ideas for America’s Next President offers innovative solutions to the issues facing the 2008 Presidential candidates, presented in 5,000 word essays that provide a concise, yet thoughtful, overview of how to tackle pressing policy challenges. Part One of the book focuses on “Our World” and its topics include the challenge of dealing with Iran, the rise of China, climate change, oil dependence, Middle East peace and the future of Iraq. Part Two, “Our Society,” takes a look at key domestic issues such as housing policy, poverty, inequality, upward economic mobility and voting reform. Part Three, “Our Prosperity,” tackles vexing problems such as the budget deficit, health care access and quality, retirement security, and the challenge of strengthening information technology in the United States.

The editor of Opportunity 08: Independent Ideas for America’s Next President, Michael E. O’Hanlon, is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution. He is a frequent media commentator on national security and is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including Defense Strategy for the Post-Saddam Era; Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security; and A War Like No Other: The Truth about China’s Challenge to America.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

• So my early enthusiasm is waning. The IP protections seem like a dealbreaker. I can't read pdfs? I have to pay to aggregate blogs? Amazon is fairly clearly trying to follow the iPod model, where your technology gives you such an early lead, that you can lock up all your content and nobody's the wiser. But even the iPod only locks up iTunes content -- it doesn't try to keep me from playing music I already have, or that a friend gave me, or that I downloaded off the net. Kindle does.

• That said, if Amazon really has figured out the technology, someone else will match the product without the locks. Or Amazon will decide to open the Kindle in order to better corner the market. If e-book readers really are the future, just as iPods were, the important thing is that someone kicks off our brave new world. The Kindle may do that, even as its many locks and constraints open the market for a successor.

• If the Kindle does work, it will make much more of a difference for non-fiction readers than fiction lovers. I don't think the advantage is in size -- a book really isn't that big. It's in information delivery. I really want some technology that allows me to clip parts of books, make annotations I can e-ail to myself, and better organize the information I glean from reading. Simply looking over words is a tremendously inefficient way to absorb knowledge, and it's long past time someone came up with a product that helps correct for my brain's sieve-like nature and general failings.

• Isaac Butler makes a fair point here, offering the Hayekian case for print:

Why will it be unsatisfying? Because it's not a book. I don't mean to be conservative here, but the simple fact of the matter is that there's something about books that just works. It's not that explainable, so it's hard to try to phrase it as a counterargument, but here goes...the book is one of humankind's perfect inventions... like bread, or the wheel (or, I'd argue, cheese). You might be able to improve on its design but you can't fundamentally change the thing. It's perfect as is. It's survived as a human invention for a truly shocking amount of time. As sentimental as this sounds, I just don't think that many people really want to cuddle up with their electronic reader and delve into the latest from Henning Mankell.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

From Chris Hayes' review of Stud Terkel's new memoirs:

You just can't beat people: as a description of Terkel's guiding ethos, you just can't beat that. Through more than a dozen books of oral history on topics ranging from working life to war, race, and the great hereafter, Terkel has demonstrated an unshakeable faith in humanity in all its flaws and triumphs. It's this fascination with the human condition which gives his books their verve and pathos. With a sharp eye and a sympathetic (if no longer particularly sensitive) ear, Terkel has coaxed wisdom and insight from janitor and senator alike. And in an age of reality television, on which ordinary people are given a shred of celebrity for the price of their dignity, Terkel has always offered the opposite, a steadfast insistence on presenting his subjects with dignity, grace, and empathy. You come away from Terkel's books with more faith in humanity than you had before.

Chris isn't quite so positive on the memoir, but everyone in the country should own a copy of Terkel's masterpiece, Working.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I've been leafing through Susan Faludi's new book on the country's post-9/11 turn to a protective masculinity fantasy, but haven't gotten quite far enough to offer any systematic thoughts. There's a chapter on the presidential candidates and guns which is interesting, but makes too much out of what was really a very small part of the campaign. The chapter on the myths surrounding Jessica Lynch's "rescue," however, is great, if only because it reminds us what a cynical heap of lies we were fed. Faludi recounts the bizarre spectacle of the soldiers storming the hospital where Lynch was being treated, kicking in doors that the staff had given them keys too, ripping open Lynch's sand-filled, anti-bedsore mattress to take sand samples, and triumphantly carrying away the "rescued" Lynch, who was wearing a dress one of the Iraqi nurse's brought from home. All this two days after the hospital's employees had tried to bring Lynch to an American base, but had their ambulance shot at for the trouble.

Here, by the way, is Rebecca Traister's review of Faludi's book.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I attended a briefing this morning with Akiva Eldar, political columnist for Ha'aretz and coauthor of Lords of the Land, one of the first comprehensive histories of the Israeli settlers movement published in either Hebrew or English. I haven't read the book yet, but it certainly sounds interesting, and the topic is crucially important. I've long been confused, given the settlement's moral indefensibility and their obvious spoiler effect on peace deals, why the government allows for their construction. According to this review of the book, it may not be that simple:

Consider, for example, one incident at the movement's beginning, told in detail in the first section of the book: In the spring of 1968, less than a year after Israel acquired new territories in the lightning victory of the Six-Day War, a group of young men, led by Rabbi Moshe Levinger, approached the military administration of the occupied territory with a modest request. They asked to celebrate the Passover Seder in Hebron, the newly occupied city of our biblical forefathers and foremothers.

Armed with a military permit signed by commander of the Eastern front General Uzi Narkis, they arrived in the ancient town on the night of April 12, and rented rooms in the Park Hotel. It later turned out that they neglected to keep their promise to leave the city when the holiday was over. The government had already rejected plans, submitted by Minister Igal Alon, hero of the War of Independence, to create a Jewish neighborhood in Hebron. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was not happy with the whole Seder affair, but he failed to grasp the full meaning of this little bridgehead, and he did not put his foot down...His minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, another war hero, came up with a compromise: to move the group temporarily to the military administration's building, until a permanent solution could be found. The settlers took this to be a kind of official recognition. They were already busy creating an improvised school for their children (inside the Park Hotel), followed by a yeshiva.

When the issue was brought up in Cabinet again, rather than deciding on creating a Jewish settlement, the government first decided not to evacuate those already there. By and by, a settlement sprang up. A fact on the ground. The army mobilized to protect it. And since it was there already, by September of the same year, a government that never intended to settle any of the territories approved construction of a Jewish neighborhood in the city. This would become a pattern: Facts on the ground are created, army and bureaucracy follow, and finally the government grants retroactive approval.

Of course, even rogue elements require some sort of government support, less future settlements be left in the cold. And on this, it seems that there were always powerful enough groups within the Israeli government willing to exert pressure on behalf of the settler's. The book explains "how land grabs were disguised as military zone restrictions; how new settlements were disguised at first as "neighborhoods" of existing ones; how legal terms were twisted and devoid of meaning, creating double standards and lax enforcement; how government funds were diverted in clandestine, roundabout ways; how bureaucratic hierarchies grew strange humps to bypass regular procedures, and so forth." And once the settlement was constructed, the government couldn't, politically, leave it undefended. So at the end of the day, "a small group of zealots, a mere 2% of Israel's population, managed to exploit the nation's inability to decide the fate of the territories to an extraordinary extent. With various degrees of sympathy and antipathy from different governments, they were able to drag a whole country into a state it never really debated, let alone decided on." It's like the worst Mircotrend ever.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Read Kevin on Daniel Brook's The Trap. Kevin points out another thing that bugged me abut the book, namely, Brook's apparent belief that anyone in the corporate world trudged there, death march style, after being priced out of working for a rewarding non-profit.

I know lots of people in the for-profit world. They like their jobs pretty well -- just as well as Hill staffers and non-profiteers. And a lot of them like having money! Brook paints for-profit work as a loathed fallback to every young person's natural ambition to work for Amnesty International, but not only does that fail to track with my experience, it's sort of insulting to folks who have chosen a different career path than I have, and thus probably not the way to build political support for a program that will reduce their salaries.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 8:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (28)

I tend to find it very hard to finish books.  So rather than me using a bunch of nice adjectives for it, let me just say that I finished Jon Chait's book, The Big Con, on the rise of crackpot, rightwing, economics in two days.  On the beach.  It's a very, very good piece of work, and contains the clearest, most sustained demolition of supply-siderism I've encountered.  It's also got a lot of very clear, quick writing on economics in general, including this quote-worthy bit on taxes:

You can look at the federal tax code as a kind of layer cake.  At the bottom is the federal payroll tax, used to finance Social Security and Medicare.  This tax is a flat rate and covers wage income only to around $100,000 a year, with all income above that level exempt.  This is the most regressive tax imposed by Washington.  Above the payroll tax sits the income tax.  The income tax is more progressive, exempting low wage workers and making high earners pay a higher rate.  On top of that are taxes on capital gains and dividends.  These taxes are even more concentrated at the top, since they affect only those who receive lots of income from accumulated wealth.  The most progressive tax of all is the estate tax, which is paid by a tiny handful of fabulously wealthy heirs.

Compare that layer cake to President Bush's policies.  The tax at the bottom, the payroll tax, he has not touched at all.  The tax just above that, the income tax, he sliced by about a tenth.  The taxes just above that, the capital gains and dividends, he cut in half.  And the tax at the very top, the estate tax, he abolished altogether (though he has not mustered enough votes to abolish it permanently).  Bush's opposition to any given tax is exactly proportional to the degree that it affects the rich.

The book also has the world's most perfect description of Grover Norquist, about whom it says:

Norquist, like a Bond villain, has an irresistible penchant for spelling out his master plans in their full, nefarious detail.

It's almost impossible to accurately convey how true that is.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

I haven't read Matt Bai's The Argument, though it seems, from the reviews, that the book's flaw was being conceived in 2004, reported in 2005, obviated in 2006, and released in 2007.  That's not really Bai's fault.  Lakoff really did seem like a big deal, and if you immersed yourself in the Democratic Party's search for messaging gurus, it's understandable that you'd ache for a bit of substance.

But that immersion is the key.  The Democratic Party's reworking of its message was a prime Bai story over the last few years.  His critique of it, by contrast, has been that Democrats need ideas, not gurus.  Notably, that they need a social policy capable of withstanding the 21st century, the "information age," or whatever synonym we're using for The Now (zoom!) that week.  But whatever the worth of the gurus, Bai's critique is myopic -- it's a function of what he's reporting on, rather than what's going on in the Party.

As a reporter, I focus on policy ideas.  And damn it, I'm drowning.  Bai seems to think Democrats need a health care plan, but I could show him no fewer than 20 fully-realized plans and outline the basic areas of consensus -- and they're broad -- that outline the Party's essential orientation on the issue.  Same goes for pension planning, trade adjustment plans, or any and every other element of social policy you can think of.

These plans have a common thread -- a social policy for the 21st century, if you will: Globalization and its attendant economic forces have destabilized the working class and the corporate welfare state they relied on, so the government should step into the breach and guarantee what employers no longer can.  And though Bai may not have been paying attention, Democrats have even settled on certain policy gurus -- notably Jacob Hacker, Joseph Stiglitz, and Elizabeth Warren -- who're uniting previously opposed wings of the party, as in Hacker's involvement with both the traditionally left wing EPI and they're bete noire, Robert Rubin's centrist Hamilton Project.  Bai's book may be a good read, but if you only profile politicians and messaging types, you should have some self-awareness that you're unlikely to trip over much new policy thinking along the way, and an affirmative effort to search some out is required before you critique its absence.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

There is no country in Europe that interests me more than Spain. There is no ongoing issue in Spain that frustrates me more than ETA, one hopes the last homegrown terrorist organization in Western Europe.

Continue reading "ETA and the Roots of Terrorism" »

Posted by at 9:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Revenge is a dish best served cold or at least sarcastically as Richard Kluger hands the execrable Richard Brookhiser his head here. My favorite part? This:

It was an honor to be so subtly awakened from my self-deception by Mr. Brookhiser, who has honed his own skills by laboring for 30 years on the staff of National Review, a beacon of insightful commentary as well as fair and balanced judgment. Thanks, too, to your staff for selecting him. As we say out here in Berkeley, that iniquitous den of bluest liberalism, have a nice day.

Ouch!

Posted by at 8:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

By Kathy G.

Via James Wolcott comes the sad news that Grace Paley has passed away.

Paley, who was 84, was a great stalwart of the antiwar and women's movements, a New Yorker through and through, and a prodigiously gifted writer. If you've never read her, do yourself a favor and pick up her Collected Stories. You'll be dazzled by her warmth, wit, passion, empathy, and colloquial eloquence.

Posted by at 6:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

By Kathy G.

I agree with James Wolcott -- Terry Castle is a wonderful writer. She's a Stanford literature prof who wrote a brilliant book about one of my all-time favorite novels (it's got to be in my top five favorite novels, at least), as well as a fascinating study analyzing cultural representations of lesbians.

For a number of years now, she's been contributing the occasional article to the London Review of Books, and every one of them I've read, the literary reviews as well as the autobiographical essays, has been a gem. The latest one is a memorable piece about a trip to New Mexico with her elderly mom. But I think her all-time classic has got to be her gimlet-eyed and hilarious essay about her frenemy Susan Sontag.

I agree with Wolcott that her personal essays should be collected together and published as a memoir in book form. They're way too good to be consigned to the ephemeral format of a journal article.

Posted by at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Cornell economist Robert Frank's short and brilliant Falling Behind is the most illuminating and important book I've yet read on inequality. It's altered how I view the economy in almost all particulars, and I highly, highly recommend that you all pick it up. Over in The New York Times, Daniel Gross has a very clear and concise explanation of its arguments and implications. Well worth a read.

Gross also evaluates Frank's The Economic Naturalist, which compiles homework assignments from his students examining everyday occurrences through an economic lens. That was a somewhat less useful book, and seemed more an example of cute-o-nomics paired with a really smart business plan (his students, after all, wrote most of it). But since you all know how I love examples of collective action problems, here are two from that book:

“If women could decide collectively what kind of shoes to wear, all might agree to forgo high heels,” he writes. “But because any individual can gain advantage by wearing them, such an agreement might be hard to maintain.” And why do Frank’s humanities colleagues across Cornell’s idyllic quad, who are supposed to be good at writing, use so much jargon? It’s an arms race of erudition.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

And is surprisingly good at articulating why. Most columns by Serious People trying to prove that they know how to have fun fall flat, but Ignatius' exploration of his own affection for hefty English novels is actually a great read. He also hits on one of my real weaknesses as a traveler -- my tendency to use vacation as a time to start a good book, and then pass the time in the book rather than the place. When I was 8 or 9, I went with my brother to Israel while I was in a fantasy phase. He likes to say that, in fact, he went to Israel. I went to Pern.

But so long as we're on literature, Ignatius gives the general encomium to fiction's virtues. He writes that, "a wise person (my mother, actually) once observed that it was essential to read novels, because otherwise people would not know how to behave. They would encounter problems of the heart that would be insoluble, save for the education they had received in watching the great characters of fiction struggle to make moral choices."

Is this true for any of you out in Blogland? Because I've had to make many a tough decision and just about never found my literary memories capable of offering much guidance. This, in fact, always seemed like a dodge to me, an attempt to argue for the usefulness of reading fiction, lest it be considered a mere trivial diversion. I found some validation for certain decisions I'd made in various Nick Hornby novels, I don't think that's what Ignatius is referring to here. But maybe other people really do call up The Power and the Glory when they're confused....

Posted by Ezra Klein at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (39)

Lots of people are telling me that I need to read Daniel Brook's book The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, and I probably do. But if Adam Doster's review is correct, it's main point seems a bit banal. So far as I can tell, Brooks argues that conservative economic policies have shredded the safety net, forcing more and more talented graduates to enter law school (or investment banking, or whatever) rather than follow their bliss by working for low pay at virtuous non-profits.

Well, yeah. Working for low pay at a job that confers lots of Good Person points has always been something of a luxury for the young, well-off, and independent. And you don't go into law or hedge fund management because you're seeking subsistence: You do it because you're seeking riches, and status. I am, to be sure, a big believer in the economic autonomy offered by such programs as universal health care. But I don't think the end result will be a vast reordering of the occupational landscape. It will just be more people with health care, and a bit less job lock. And creating economic security for the young and upwardly mobile (i.e, by creating free college) will cost other people more money -- money that I'm not sure should be spent subsidizing the educations of the upper middle class.

All that said, I haven't read the book, and should. It's fully possible Brooks deals with exactly these objections.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (35)

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is something like 65% of the greatest book ever written and 35% of something you wrote for a freshman philosophy class and are now embarrassed of.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 7:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

I haven't read Sasha Abramsky's American Furies: Crime, Punishment, and Vengeance in the Age of Mass Imprisonment, but it's next on my list. This country's culture of imprisonment is a critical, and usually under-noticed, contributor to crime, inequality, poverty, the breakdown of the nuclear family in urban areas, depressed earnings among black men, intergenerational transmission of economic status, etc, etc, etc. It's hard to find good reporting and analysis on these issues, as the imprisoned are, by definition, out of sight, and deeply unsympathetic, so their lives and outcomes take on less urgency. But Silja Talvi's review suggests Abramsky's book is more than up the challenge.

Good as Abramsky's book may be on the informational issues, the "what can be done" part of this is tough, as rehabilitative, humane prison reforms are considered politically suicidal. But though I agree with that conventional wisdom, Rhode Island has restored the vote to felons, and in a more amazing shift, Florida's Republican governor did the same thing, so maybe the politics of the issue are changing.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Now that's a well-done book. Sure the characters are disruptively unbelievable and the plot doesn't really start until page 300 and the ending makes no sense at all, but those are virtues; they help the book hit my sweet spot: Entertaining, but not grabbing.

I hate being grabbed by a book. It's troublesome. You lose sleep, sneak looks during the workday, don't want to get off the bus, and generally act out all the downsides of infatuation. Jonathan Rosen's Joy Comes in the Morning, for instance, is currently making a run at ruining my life. Wonderful book, to be sure, but a pain in the ass for that very reason. It's keeping me up at night, and, come the day, beckoning from my bag when I actually need to be writing.

With Special Topics in Calamity Physics, I could merrily read for 20 minutes before going to bed without any particular interest in knowing what happened next. It was The Entourage of books: Great dialogue, charming moments, fun characters, but no nettlesome investment in the characters or interest in the plot to muck up the experience. I need more like it.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

Via Greg Mankiw, here's the illustrated, Road to Serfdom graphic novel. I must say, I sometimes forget how wacky the implications, and particularly the orthodox interpretations, of these canonical conservative documents can be. Make sure to read past page 10, when things really go off the rails. And to page 16, when we find that Tom Friedman really is omnipresent.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 7:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Okay, it turns out you folks like my crackpot book club idea. So we're going to do it. First step, of course, is to pick the book. So I'm going to offer two suggestions of my own, and you can either back me up in comments, or propose other candidates. After I see what you folks are into, I'll winnow the list down and we'll have some sort of vote.

The Populist Persuasion by Michael Kazin. A history of populism, in all its American forms, focusing on its rhetoric, communication, and aims. Goes all the way from the agrarians to Perot. Kazin's a great writer and a smart thinker. In the 15 pages I read before an article deadline interrupted me, there was much underlining.

John Kenneth Galbraith by Richard Parker. Readers know the importance I place on Galbraith in the canon of liberal thought. This is a remarkable book, and I'd welcome the chance to read it again, and with more thought. The problem is, it's long. And while well-written, the ideas are complex and it can move somewhat slowly. I'm worried folks will drop out. Also, biographies tend to have periods which are simply expository -- what can we really say about his youth on a farm?

The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism by Kevin Boyle: Combines a few of my obsessions in fairly obvious ways. Plus: You hear so much about the unreasonable demands of GM's workers and the crazy benefit packages they negotiated. I'm rather interested in getting into the context of all that.

Okay, those are mine. Now you go.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (42)

Arnold Kling writes:

some of the most interesting economic observations concern relative abundance. Look at our standard of living compared to 100 years ago. Look at South Korea compared with North Korea. Robert Lucas famously said that "The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are simply staggering: Once one starts to think about them it is hard to think of anything else."

The standard economics textbook does not treat the issues of "relative abundance" very well. I think that there is a market opportunity for a book that can fix that.

I'm pretty sure such a book was written; it even sold a few million copies. Indeed, I've long thought Arnold Kling would benefit from reading it...

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

A friend and I were lamenting our inability to actually finish nonfiction books, and musing about starting a book club to help provide some discipline. I, however, am unimpressed with my ability to regularly attend events outside my living room, and downright pessimistic about my aptitude for cleaning up after events that occur in my living room. Yet my blog remains clean and regularly updated. And so an idea struck!

So here's the question, internet people: How do you feel about a book club? I'd start an extension on this blog (ezraklein.typepad.com/bookclub, or something), folks who want to join would sign up, and we'd go from there. I'd give a couple people keys to the Caddy, so they could post up impressions, and we'd have awesome discussions full of penetrating insights, illuminating ruminations, and consciousness expanding drug trips. Plus, we'd actually finish a book. But no use going through all that if you're not interested. So: Interested? Tell me in comments. And since this probably depends at least in part on the book we'd read, let's use Michael Kazin's The Populist Persuasion as a likely candidate for the first read.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (50)

This is weird:

Checking Out [John J. Miller]
Are public libraries supposed to repositories of the best that has been thought and said, or are they supposed to compete with bookstores for customers? In Fairfax County, Va., librarians are removing classics that haven't been checked out recently so they can make more room for bestsellers and titles that Oprah likes. I've got some pretty strong libertarian tendencies, but I've always had a soft spot for public libraries. If they merely become government-run versions of what the private sector delivers so efficiently nowadays—the ability to purchase just about any book ever printed, and often at a very good price if you're willing to buy from a secondhand seller—then maybe we don't really need them anymore.

Since when do bookstores allow you to check out books for no fee, finish them, and bring them back? That's the primary difference between libraries and bookstores -- they make reading cheap, if not free. As it happens, John and I work at magazines. Books magically flow into our offices, and those that don't can be freely ordered from the kind elves staffing publisher publicity departments. But for those whose employment (or lack thereof) eschews such perks, $25.95 (or a bit over $20 on Amazon, once shipping is included) for Special Topics in Calamity Physics is steep. Libraries make it less so. That's their function: Not to serve as a dusty repository of the classics, but to economically democratize the world of letters.

So far as the Fairfax branches go, I'm all for keeping the hits of yesteryear available, but they are, I''ll remind John, delivered fairly efficiently by the private sector, and for dirt-cheap if you're willing to go secondhand. The Education of Henry Adams, one of the removed classics, is available for $1.44 on Amazon -- $13.05 cheaper than the cheapest copy of Special Topics. So it would seem the libraries could do more good by making the pricier, contemporary novels widely available, rather than duplicating the inexpensive back catalogues of the private sector. Indeed, it seems oddly un-libertarian to demand that libraries paternalistically ignore market pressures and consumer preferences in order to stock the titles that educated elites have deemed "classics." Nothing against the classics, of course, but it would certainly seem that in the age of Amazon and online used retailers, libraries should ensure their stock hews as close to the preferences of their users as possible.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (71)

I'm all for more pamphlet publishing. There's a peculiar lack of middle ground in journalism, where you can either write a 4-5,000 word article on a subject or a 70,000-100,000 word book. Surely some topics would be best served by a word count between 5,001 and 69,999. To some degree, this is driven by the fact that books are artifacts, often written by authors to stand as testament to their brilliance and bought by readers to serve as evidence of their erudition. The book is not written to maximize readability, and the buyer often does not read it. So yeah, pamphlets. I'm also happy to see a middle ground emerging in trade publishing, where certain books are starting in paperback form with a lower word count and price point. There's really no reason authors should have to choose between magazine length and magisterial when deciding how best to address a topic.

Update: The first link, by the way, goes to an interview with Adam Bellow, Saul Bellow's son and a conservative editor and publisher. It's interesting stuff. His analogy for the rise of online political content seems fairly spot-on:

I think it can best be described cosmologically. First there is a big bang. Thousands and thousands of individual blogs are spewed out. Nobody reads them in particular. They are all just little points sort of flickering in the cosmic gloom. But over time, because the Internet is a kind of pure intellectual democracy, little aggregations form. People are drawn to one another by common interests. And at the same time, certain individuals emerge as large planetary bodies, very often surrounded by circles of other people who share their interests.

I don't know if the net's a "pure intellectual democracy," but the general point seems sound. In any case, it's a good interview, well worth a read.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

There's little I love more than a few good book recommendations. But I'm always saddened to see the year-end lists constrained to books of that year, a needless limit when I'm much more interested in books the author discovered that year and found dazzling. Happily, John Judis's heap o' recommendations over at TNR merrily eschews such narrowness to range widely over the past four decades of American letters. Like my editor Harold Meyerson, Judis is a graduate of the post-War left (if I don't misremember, he was also a Michael Harrington disciple) and encyclopedic on all things related to American politics.

Meanwhile, I remain vaguely aghast that no bright publisher has offered a book composed merely of notable intellectuals and individuals recommending the titles they believe everyone should read. Or, given the limits of print, Amazon or some other smart web retailer should create, pursue, and publicize just such a series, hyperlinking all the recommendations to the order pages.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Kevin Drum wonders if rumors really do travel faster than light, and implores folks to link here to help find out. Reminds me of one of my favorites parts from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

The history of the Galaxy has got a little muddled, for a number of reasons: partly because those who are trying to keep track of it have got a little muddled, but also because some very muddling things have been happening anyway. One of the problems has to do with the speed of light and the difficulties involved in trying to exceed it. You can't. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws. The Hingefreel people of Arkintoofle Minor did try to build spaceships that were powered by bad news but they didn't work particularly well and were so extremely unwelcome whenever they arrived anywhere that there wasn't really any point in being there.

Update: Or, from comments, comes this passage from Mort (by Terry Pratchett):

The only things known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy,
according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you
can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap
between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to
the heir *instantaneously*. Presumably, he said, there must be some
elementary particles -- kingons, or possibly queons -- that do this job,
but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an
anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to
send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to
modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the
bar closed.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

As part of my sorta-off-from-work-though-not-really-because-I-have-an-article-due vacation (all those hyphens are going to really fuck up that line break), I just finished a rare non-political read in Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself to Live. I'll vaguely disagree with Julian and say the book, which abandons its ostensible topic of Rock-and-Roll deaths in favor of hundreds of pages of quirky romantic ruminations, is really much better for the topic change. Indeed, until Julian's review made me aware this wasn't just some maudlin road trip, I was going to skip it. Glad I didn't: the journey actually proves itself quite fun (and occasionally trenchant), though if you'd asked me during the first hundred-or-so pages, I would have been considerably more enthusiastic (though not for any reason I can quite put my finger on).

The virtue of focusing on memories that are relatively mundane rather than rock trivia that's relatively specific is pretty well explained in Klosterman's brilliant essay on Saved By The Bell from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Comparing the comforting predictability of Saved By The Bell with MASH's intellectual contrarianism, he argues in the former's favor because "important things are inevitably cliche," and that's no reason to dismiss them. That strikes me as a correct observation, though one that's disincentivized at multiple junctures in the creative process.

The first, obviously, is the reviewers, who've little time for staid topics. But critics aren't the only ones with a fetish for the fresh. Editors have an instinctual aversion to the cliche, and love nothing more than to ask how your concept is different than the similar concepts preceding it, so you tend to get a lot of writers with books on fairly specific and rare experiences** interspersed with a few that've managed to dress up the ordinary in a costume the publishing house doesn't recognize. Which is how you get Chuck Klosterman pitching a book about dead rock stars and writing a book about his obsessive attempts to understand his four major relationships. A road trip to the death sites of rock stars strike publishing houses as original. "Girls I've Loved" doesn't. But it happens to make a much better book.

Continue reading "Klostermania" »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (44)

Eric Alterman notes that Peter Beinart's book is racking up some great reviews. Not necessarily great in that they really like Beinart's effort, but great in that they're fascinating, well-crafted, deeply provocative pieces of writing. He links to three in particular -- Kevin Mattson in the Boston Review, Frank Rich in The New York Review of Books, and Kevin Baker in Harper's -- but that's scarcely the tip of the ice berg. Just from memory, Michael Lind took the book on in Democracy, Andrew Bacevich hated on it in The Nation, Michael Tomasky throttled it in The American Prospect, George Packer explored it in The New Yorker, Fred Kaplan engaged it in The Washington Monthly, James Lindsay praised it in The Washington Post, Richard Samuelson went at it in The Claremont Review, etc. Yet, weirdly, few of the reviews were overwhelmingly positive: The book hasn't been so ubiquitous because folks just love it. Nor has it sold remarkably well. So what's with the affection of review pages?

This is partly a quirk of journalism: Very few outlets will simply allow a writer -- even a renowned one -- to publish an essay on a large subject of their choice. Magazine articles require ledes, color, and interviews, while op-eds constrain you to three paragraphs and a bio line. But that doesn't mean writers don't have long, non-reported ideas on big subjects that they'd prefer not to turn into books. So political publishing has come up with a sneaky compromise: Publications will let you spend pages and pages ostensibly reviewing a book, when what you're really doing is crafting an essay on the book's subject. That way, the piece ostensibly "reports" on an event -- the release of a new book. And since many writers want to expound on foreign policy and the left, Beinart's book, which addressed that precise topic, has proved perfect cover.

But do these essays help the books they ostensibly promote? I'm skeptical. In the book-writing business, there are three interested players: The writer, the agent, and the publisher. All three are worried about sales, but rather often, the writer will have a day job that actually pays the bills, and the purpose of the book will largely be prestige and attention. In that case, an unending series of reviews by Important People in Serious Magazines will do the trick. Though many of Beinart's reviews were relatively critical, the fact that so many minds were grappling with his book undoubtedly burnished his reputation. They were certainly good for Peter Beinart

Continue reading "The Best-Reviewed Book of All" »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

David Brooks argues that one indicator that conservatism is running out of steam is a distinct paucity of "big, impactful books" on the right. He reminisces about the good ol' days, the 80's and 90's, when George Gilder, Alan Bloom, Charles Murray, and others were writing books that fundamentally shifted how conservatives viewed the world. Such books aren't being released lately, he laments.

Well, truth be told, my knowledge of conservative publishing is rather sparse, so I've little more than a suspicion that he's right. But is the left any different? Over the past ten years, and certainly over the past five, it would be simple to point out titles that changed how the left views politics. Books like What's The Matter With Kansas, Don't Think of an Elephant, and even Crashing the Gate offered fairly fundamental insights into the depressing electoral realities facing Democrats. But eliminating the strategic, have there been any really important books for how the left views the world or its problems? If a young liberal came to you and asked for the few titles that would truly change her intellectual outlook, what would you recommend?

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (38)

Bob Woodward's new book paints the president as a resolute leader so in awe of his own conviction and resolution that he can't adapt to new realities, and thus has been unable to learn from the mistakes in Iraq. That's in stark contrast to Bob Woodward's last book, which painted Bush as a resolute leader whose in awe of his own conviction and resolution was perfectly suited to the new, post-9/11 reality. Matt asks:

Why were the earlier books so different? Did he somehow not notice this stuff before? It's a serious problem for the most prominent people in the journalism world to be merely lagging indicators, praising leaders when they're popular and then pointing out that, in fact, they suck only after a whole series of disasters discredit them.

Nah, he noticed all this stuff before. And he mentioned it all. His last book was perfectly explanatory. It's merely that then, Bob Woodward thought pigheadedness was a virtue, now it's a vice. The problem is that Woodward is not what folks might call an analyst. Here's Nora Ephron, who was married to his partner Bernstein, explaining Woodward's technique:

Bob has always had trouble seeing the forest for the trees. That’s why people love to talk to him; he almost never puts the pieces together in a way that hurts his sources. And that’s also why he has so much access: his sources can count on him to convey their version of events. When Bob says that when he was first told about Valerie Plame, he [just] didn’t think it was important.

Woodward knows what's going on, but not what to think of it. He's a safe vessel for hall-of-power confessionals precisely because he doesn't put the pieces together in any sort of innovative and damning way. But without that analytical approach, Woodward simply colors his reporting with whatever crayons everyone else is using. If Bush is atop the world, Woodward's interviews show why. If he ain't, the very same interviews will shed light on that, too. What's impressive about the two Woodward books isn't how different they are, but how similar. The reporting hasn't much changed, it's the conventional wisdom that's shifted and, thus, Woodward's adjectives.

And, so far as political experts being nothing but lagging indicators, it's really much, much worse than that. Try incorrect indicators.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 6:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

I have been caught, it appears, by the accursed book meme, courtesy of the accursed Julian Sanchez. Curses! Here we go:

1) One book that changed your life?

Yikes, no easy start, huh? It was probably, to be honest, Noam Chomsky's 9/11. That was the first political book I was ever given, and it came at a time -- just after the attacks -- when I was ready and willing to get politically activated. It made me a radical for awhile, to be sure, but in getting me involved, it set me on the path that has placed me here, writing this post.

2) One book that you have read more than once.

This one will end a bit embarrassingly, but I read Anne McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern trilogy incessantly when I was young. I'd finish it, flip the back cover closed, and start right back on page one. I must have read that book thirty times.

3) One book that you would want on a desert island?

How to get off a desert island (but seriously folks, I'll be here all week!). I've actually always thought this question is poorly framed. Obviously, I would want a book that imparted some number of technical or agricultural skills. If we're going to eliminate that category, however, I'd probably want something dense enough that I could keep discovering new facets. And am I getting off the island at some point? If not, maybe I want some sort of spiritual book or meditation manual, the better to mentally adjust and adapt to my dire situation. Or possibly porn.

4) One book that made you cry.

Not sure any book ever has. On the other hand, an episode of Ultraman once broke me down.

5) One book that made you laugh.

I'll join with Julian in giving this one to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Come to think of it, that's another book I've read over and over and over again.

6) One book you wish had been written.

Well, I have one I'm going to write, but I'm excited about someday doing that, so I'm glad it remains in my head. As for other books, if there were more I wish had been written, I guess I'd write them. If I can be fanciful with the answer though, I'd go with What I Think About Things, In Simple, Declarative Sentences and Dark Ink by Jesus.

7) One book you wish had never been written.

The Da Vinci Code. Just because when I see it listed on folk's Facebook profiles as their favorite book, I instantly lose respect for them. Which I don't like doing.

8) One book you are reading currently?

The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan. It's an unbelievably fascinating look into our food chain and eating habits.

9) One book you've been meaning to read?

The Rise of American Democracy, by Sean Wilentz. I really don't know my American history that well, and Wilentz is such a talented writer. But it's so big and ambitious that I'm scared to crack it open. If we're talking fiction, just insert any piece of famous literature. Crime and Punishment, Lolita, The Sun Also Rises, The Naked Lunch, Herzog...Odds are, I haven't read it, and feel great terrible about the oversight.

I'm going to tag Kevin, Mark, and Amanda. And because I'm devilish, I'm going to add, but not answer, the following question:

10) What book do you routinely recommend but haven't actually read?

Bwahahahah.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

Speaking of the Walter Ben Michaels book, LB has posted up some extended thoughts on his central diversity vs. inequality arguments, and I agree with just about every word. So earlier, when I wrote that I "really haven't achieved sufficient clarity in my own thoughts" to address the book at length, I should've just written that "LB hasn't yet seen fit to actually write up the reactions I was hoping to one day process, and I will link as soon as she does."

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In DC, I run with a community of writers, political thinkers, and sundry other intellectual types. The circle is large, sprawling, and relatively incestuous: We go to each other's parties, attend each other's events, go to each other's happy hours, etc and so on. What that means is that there are an awful lot of Evites floating around at any given time. This one to a barbecue, that one to a birthday, the third to a going away bash. And because a heavy portion of this crowd is comprised of professional prose stylists, there's ever-increasing pressure to make the invites funnier, the responses, wittier. It was rather fun at the beginning, but now the pressure is too intense, with each successive invitation demanding sharper wit and more innovative approaches. The meta comments ("Enthusiastic response!") have been tapped out, the dark humor analogies to foreign conflicts largely used up. I've taken to visiting wikipedia and pegging my invitations to some absurd anniversary or holiday falling on the date (my last party fell on international pi day -- 7/22). It's exhausting stuff.

I was reminded of the Evite arms race by the title of Dinesh D'Souza's latest, uh, "book": The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11. I'm becoming convinced rightwing book is caught in a similar loop, only this time towards ever more insane and inflammatory titles. Dinesh, after all, had to top Ponnuru's The Party of Death and Coulter's Treason, and will soon be contending with Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. I'm rather confident, particularly given Ponnuru's totally embarrassed reaction to his own book's title, that this is a purely mercenary decision on their part. Most of these folks fancy themselves serious thinkers but, in the end, publishing's a tough market, and a bloodthirsty title can stand between you and bargain rack oblivion.

But like with our Evite invitations, too much pressure for too long and all the good jokes, or slurs, get taken, and what's left sounds forced and self-parodic. To blame not merely the left, but the cultural left for 9/11? To wreck the word fascism by attaching it to "liberal"? It's a problem. Though one, if the Evite I just responded to is any indicator, that has no real solution.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

I can't say I've read much by Harold Pinter, but then I never claimed to be anything but the uncultured boor that I am. Nevertheless, this whole hubbub over whether his views or prose won him the Nobel strikes me as a bit silly. Starting from the obviously true observation that the majority of eminent writers skew left politically, the way to judge whether someone of Pinter's caliber got picked for his plays or his opinions is an easy thought experiment: if you were the Nobel committee and you were trying to pick a prose stylist whose ascension would be the clearest slap in Bush's face, would you pick Pinter?

Well, no.

Pinter may be a Bush critic, but he's not a particularly well-known one. You could've gotten a lot more mileage out of awarding Philip Roth his overdue award, particularly now that The Plot Against America has clarified his stance. Indeed, that would've have the added plus of motivating other writers who feel themselves overdue for a Nobel to write books implicitly comparing Bush to fascist anti-semites. Hell, you could even delve into the quasi-muck of popular fiction and go with John LeCarre, who did, after all, redefine spy novels, and whose Absolute Friends was a former intelligence officers denouncement of the Bush administration. But instead you'd go with Pinter? Sorry folks, but I think not.

Pinter might not like Bush, but he's neither particularly piercing nor unquestionably effective in his distaste. He's a leftie, sure, but only incidentally so, the movement will hum along just fine without him. So while you can certainly argue that his politics didn't hurt, it's a bit bizarre to hold that they, and not his plays or vision, were the driving reason behind his pick. It just doesn't make sense.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (16)

From Henry's review of Hacker and Pierson's new book Off Center:

So why hasn’t the Republican party been punished by voters for its radicalism? As I understand it, Hacker and Pierson’s explanation has three main components. First, information. Voters are often poorly informed about politics, and are vulnerable to “tailored disinformation,” which distorts public perceptions. Second, institutions. The Republican Party has been able to use its dominance of Senate, House and Presidency to set the agenda and to sideline opposition. Finally, networks. “New Power Brokers” like Tom DeLay have been able to assemble networks that bring together politicians, think-tankers, funders and lobbyists, creating a coherent agenda across separate institutions, rewarding and protecting loyalists while brutally punishing those who go off-message.

And as I understand it, the argument really begins and ends behind door number one. That the Republican Party has been able to leverage their institutional dominance to reshape the playing field and imprison Democrats in the dugout helps explain their effectiveness, sure, as does the DeLay-led synergy among moneymen, idea peddlers, and politicians, but the reason they can bring their ideological babies to term is the peculiar structure of the media and the openings it provides for disinformation. If voters don't know, they can't oppose. And the media's preference for screaming fests, their willingness to let distortions and half-truths fly unchallenged, their grateful acceptance of a cadre of professional flacks paid and trained to lie unpopular positions into broadly acceptable forms, and all the other quirks of the "objective" protocols have taught listeners to basically tune out the whole show, to watch it as a boxing match rather than an informational session. The results are unambiguous, this comes from a PIPA poll released shortly before the election:

Majorities of Bush supporters incorrectly assumed that Bush favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (84%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the International Criminal Court (66%), the treaty banning land mines (72%), and the Kyoto Treaty on global warming (51%). They were divided between those who knew that Bush favors building a new missile defense system now (44%) and those who incorrectly believe he wishes to do more research until its capabilities are proven (41%). However, majorities were correct that Bush favors increased defense spending (57%) and wants the US, not the UN, to take the stronger role in developing Iraq’s new government (70%).

Bush supporters also, themselves, favored some of the positions that they attributed to Bush. Majorities of Bush supporters favored including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (93%), and the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (68%), the International Criminal Court (75%), the treaty banning land mines (66%), and the Kyoto treaty on climate change (54%). Only 33% of Bush supporters wanted to build a new missile defense system now, while more wanted to do more research until its capabilities are proven (56%).

Same thing happened during the Clinton health care initiative. Studies showed that, over the course of the controversy, voters actually got stupider, which is to say that the fairly clear understanding they had of the Clinton plan at the start actually degraded over a year of wall-to-wall coverage. The media, the commercials, the politicians -- all these ended up misinforming the populace on what was being debated. It should thus be no surprise that, after ClintonCare died, surveys found voters wanted a health care proposal that was -- you guessed it -- almost exactly like Clinton's.

For now, our politicians live on disinformation. The Energy Bill was an atrocity, the Medicare Bill a giveaway, the tax cuts targeted at those with no need, the Iraq War sold on the dangers of weapons that didn't exist. The only failure, Social Security privatization, flopped because Bush eventually admitted what it was -- not a solvency plan, but a restructuring of a beloved program. Betcha he won't make that nistake again.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (53)

Lots of folks are talking about Ray Kurzweil's new book The Singularity is Near. His argument, basically, is that true artificial intelligence is a function of computing power, we currently haven't created it because we don't have the computer power, given current trends we will have it in about 20 years, then our artificially intelligent robots will begin working on speeding up the process ever-more, making human intelligence almost useless in a relatively short period of time. Kurzweil kindly goes in for the "this will help humans and make us all much happier" explanation rather than the "we're all gonna be robot-slaves" argument. To me, that one seems a coin toss. In any case, the singularity is when it happens, when our intelligence becomes increasingly non-biological and and the world becomes Totally Awesome.

Reactions vary. Kevin thinks he's right, but that he cheated on a graph. Matt thinks he's wrong, and points to our dashed hopes for nuclear power as proof. Tyler wonders why IE still crashes if we're so damn smart. And so on.

Count me critical. Inventions don't tend to follow the tracks we think they will. If they did, we'd have long ago had our flying cars, phaser guns, and teleportation devices. So the graph that Kevin references showing the increasing speed of technological innovation strikes me as a point against. We're getting better at making things, but we don't tend to improve them in the way futurists expect. Very rarely folks get a few things right and so the reputation of futurists everywhere is saved, but given what we've seen in the past, Kurzweil's analysis strikes me as too easy an extrapolation to accurately describe where we're going to end up. In my read, the one thing we aren't is linear.

Continue reading "All Hail Our New Robot Overlords" »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (30) | TrackBacks (1)

Chris Mooney is everywhere. The Daily Show, Fresh Air, the papers, the internet...and everywhere he goes, his hosts say the same thing:

Buy his book.

And guess what I'm going to say?

Buy his book.

Bunches of other bloggers have reviewed it, so I'm not going to spend too much time recapping the basics, but in short, The Republican War on Science is about the right's multipronged effort to devalue, contradict, and drown out scientific evidence that discredits their agenda. And since their agenda has become wholly business-oriented and/or religiously motivated, Republicans have had too start waging war against empiricism a lot.

Continue reading "The Republican War on Science" »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (23) | TrackBacks (1)

Enormous thanks to the kind reader who snagged me The World's Banker from my Amazon Wish List. Not only will I be more informed on global trade, but I now know the feature works, too! And so do all of you! In any case, I really do appreciate it when folks take the time to buy me things. I try not to ask for donations on this site, largely because the world has far better causes for your money than random tips in my jar, and since I occasionally ask you to donate to those better ends, I don't feel I should be constantly playing Santa with the bell. But the Wish List is, to me, a bit different.

All the books in there will make this site better, either by leaving me educated on a subject was embarrassingly ignorant on or adding more context and information to something I already know a bit about (that's why, incidentally, I put so little fiction on the list). It also allows you to be targeted, so if you like my health care work, you could get me One Nation, Uninsured, and if you wanted me to write more about Labor, you could pick me up The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, and if you wanted to steer me towards something else entirely, you could always e-mail me with a "suggestion" of a book I'd be smart to add on. I figure, then, that the whole thing is very logical. If you like what I say on certain topics (or think that you would), you can put up some cash to improve my commentary on those topics. Seems like a good way of doing things.

So, in conclusion, thanks to my secret santa, and buy me books because I've rationalized them differently than donations.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (65)

Posted by Nick Beaudrot

To maintain the Law of Conservation of Blog Post Length, I'll answer Ezra's book query in short order.

I just picked up The Gospel According to RFK to feed my Bobby "first New Democrat" Kennedy hero-worship. It's a collection of speech excerpts from Kennedy's 1968 Presidential campaign -- all quality stuff, but with enough length to remind you that even RFK doesn't drip eloquence from every single sentence that comes out of his mouth. There are plenty of good speeches, on health care, poverty, civic responsibility, and foreign policy, and while one out of every three chapters will draw out enough empathy to have you on the verge of tears, the rest of the book is "just" a bucnh of good campaign speeches.

It'd be tough to revive Bobby's political coalition, and his policies are a bit obsolete now, but if more Democrats learned to talk like Bobby, they'd lose way fewer elections.

Posted by at 10:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I had finals this week, so there's not been much interesting prose on my nightstand. I read a bit of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and am finishing up Nixon vs. Kennedy. But it's been more of a periodicals week, and the New York Review of Books has been leading the charge there. What'choo got?

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: As mentioned below, I'm really enjoying it.  Yes, I know his examples sometimes don't hold water and his sociological brush is broad enough to use Australia as canvas, but it's still fun, he still has fascinating thougts and ideas, and he still brings a better, more incisive eye towards a certain subset of people than most anyone else writing about them.  Other books of this sort suffer from an unrestrained contempt towards their subjects or a desire to lionize.  Brooks, I think, likes living this life, but is nevertheless a bit ashamed at its inconsistencies and oddities, and the tone that that his conflicted indulgence results in is delightful.  Since I'm a Bobo in good standing, I'm loving the book.

Chris Matthews Kennedy and Nixon:  Yeah, that Chris Matthews.  Before he ran an inconsistent television show, he apparently wrote books.  More surprising yet, they're pretty good.  This one focuses on the troubled relationship between the two presidents when they were rising political stars.  They had an affinity for each other because they were both, basically, bloodthirsty.  Kennedy won Congress using an array of dirty tricks and bribes that make DeLay look like a choirboy.  As for Nixon, his red-baiting was legendary and actually provided the template for McCarthy's later perfection of the form (the Wisconsin Senator actually cribbed whole speeches from Nixon).  He was a nasty, lying campaigner and an absolute workaholic.  The two of them, in the end, were the same sort of folks.  It's just that Kennedy's looks, charm and money allowed him to get away with his tactics, even be admired for them while Nixon went down in disgrace.  In some ways, that's a much more profound judgment on Americans and how we treat criminals from different classes than it is a verdict on either man.

Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity: A sociologist's study of what sort of conversion rate Christianity needed to explode as it did (the answer?  About 40%.) and what sort of conditions allowed it to maintain the growth.  I'm not too far into it, so that's all I know for now.

What's on your nightstand?

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (26) | TrackBacks (1)

Slight change to this.  Saturday I'm just going to do books, both fiction and non.  Sunday I'll do music.  Rules remain the same: I'll put down what I'm reading/listening to, comment on it, and you'll do the same.

Victor S. Navasky's A Matter of Opinion: Navasky, the longtime publisher of The Nation, has written his memoirs on the magazine industry.  I thought the book would be a bit broader than it is -- this is really about the nuts and bolts of running a journal of opinion -- but it's still an interesting read.  Navasky's engaging, his early run-ins with folks who later became great are entertaining, and for an aspiring magazine writer like myself, the technical stuff is fairly interesting.  But don't go here looking for a political memoir; it's not one.  It has reminded me to read Charlie Peters Tilting at Windmills, though.

Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down and The Polysyllabic Spree:  I think I've blown through the guy's whole ouvre in the last two weeks.  High Fidelity, About a Boy, and A Long Way Down all got swallowed up (I'd previously ready How to be Good).  A Long Way Down is fun stuff, certainly.  You don't spend three hours at Borders polishing off anything that's a pain-in-the-ass.  But About a Boy and High Fidelity had a feeling that they needed to be written, that Hornby had something he desperately needed to say about life.  Not so here.  This one looks more like he thought of a clever plot device (four strangers go to a popular suicide spot on New Year's Eve, awkwardly meet, and decide to come down and stay in touch) and wrote a book to spin it out.  Enjoyable stuff, certainly, but nothing profound, nothing raw, nothing that really touches on your own life or gives you insight into another's.

As for the Spree, it's a collection of Hornby's essays from The Believer, all of which focus on how successful he's been that month at getting through the books on his reading list.  The general answer?  Not very.  As I have more sympathy for that condition than just about any other I know of, it's a book well worth having.  Proceeds from it also go to benefit 826, McSweeney's multicity nonprofit that teaches reading, writing, and everything else to kids who need the help.  As 826LA put on a bang-up reading last night (featuring my friend Josh Bearman and his shockingly good piece on The Metaphysics of Pac-Man) that included two free glasses of sangria, I feel all the better about the purchase.

As you can see, it's not been the most productive week I've ever had.  Blame school and the Supreme Court.  On the bright side, I found a book I desperately do want to read.  So if anyone out there would like to pluck The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism out of my wish list, I'd be much obliged.

Your turn.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Not to march in on Fortuna's territory or anything, but this bit from Nick Hornby's Polysyllabic Spree is too good not to excerpt. He's talking about Zoe Heller's Desperate Characters and, by extension, all "literary" fiction:

It's brilliantly written, I can see that much, and it made me think, too. But mostly I thought about why I don't know anyone like the people Fox writes about. Why are all my friends so dim and unreflective? Where did I go wrong?
Toward the end of the book, Otto and Sophie, the central couple, go to stay in their holiday home. Sophie opens the door to her house and is immediately reminded of a friend, an artist who used to visit them there; she thinks about him for a page or so. The reason she's thinking about him is that she's staring at something he loved, a vinegar bottle shaped like a bunch of grapes. The reason she's staring at the bottle is because it's in pieces. And the reason it's in pieces is because someone has broken in and trashed the place, a fact we only discover when Sophie has snapped out of her reverie. At this point I realized with some regret that not only could I never write a literary novel, but I couldn't even be a character in a literary nobel. I can only imagine myself, or any other character I created, saying, "Shit! Some bastard has trashed the house!" No rumination about artist friends -- just a lot of cursing and some empty threats of violence.

That's generally how I feel, he just said it a lot better. Maybe when I'm older I'll like Ian McEwan, but for now, 40 pages of Atonement was all I could take. Meanwhile, I've read about 600 pages of Hornby in the last five days. I feel like a guy who walked out of the opera to shotgun beer in front of football. And, since I'm usually an elitist political nerd, I like getting a chance to be that guy.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (28)

I told you I was going to stick with this. Yesterday was fiction, today is fact, tomorrow is music. The rules are I put down what I'm reading with my comments and you put down what you're reading with your comments. Or, if you're illiterate, you can just talk about what other people are reading. Off we go:

Nick Hornby's The Polysyllabic Spree: Couldn't pass this one up. It's a collection of essays Hornby wrote for The Believer on "one man's struggle with the monthly tide of books he's bought and book he's been meaning to read." Welcome to my life.

Earl Malt's Rehnquist Justice: Collection of academic essays on the Rehnquist Court, one for each Justice. Trying to bone up on what each member means to the country's judicial direction, and thus what it means when one or another retires.

Tony Horwitz's Confederates in the Attic: A narrative book exploring Civil War culture. Hardcore reenactors, confederate flag crimes, the Daughters of the Confederacy, and so forth. I could never live in it, but it's worth trying to understand.

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America: Term paper, so I had to choose from the poli-sci canon. Figured I should use de Tocqueville so I can ostentatiously inject it into articles later on, making folks think I'm erudite without actually reading through the classics.

Your turn.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Oren, despite hating the first half, loved the latter part of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity.  I haven't read it, but I did pick up Hornby's About a Boy for the plane ride yesterday and loved it.  When 300 pages fly by in about 2.5 hours, you know you've been grabbed.  I've long left easy fiction simply because the habit was too costly (Hornby cost me $5 per hour of enjoyment), but with Amazon used, that's no longer so much of a consideration.  And I do need to get out of this masochistic reading phase, where it either needs to be nonfiction or the sort of fiction that supposed to build character and open horizons.  Enjoyment...not...bad.

Speaking of serious fiction though, I'm just about through Michael Shaara's novel of Gettysburg, Killer Angels.  Reading it, you understand why the South is able venerate this war, why they worship those who fought it.  It was a bad cause, but it managed to attract some impressive men.  True, the North won, but they won ugly.  And while the South lost, they did it beautifully.  The North seems to have been a puddle of incompetence and idiocy, bureaucracy and bad decisions.  The South?  Larger than life men, separate from the Cause but duty-bound to battle it out.  Underdogs who fought till the last inning without proper equipment and only lost by a few runs.  Generals whose traits allow them to be venerated by non-racists because they, judged by the time, weren't very racist.  if the North had had Lee and the South Meade and Hooker, not only would the war have been over quicker, but there wouldn't be the sort of timeless martyrs and heroes able to make the Cause such a mainstream, attractive obsession centuries down after defeat.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (38)

CJR's got a good interview with John Harris, author of the Clinton assessment The Survivor. I'm on page 340 of the book and it's a fun read; not much new if you've studied the era before, but about as good an introduction as you're likely to find. Harris's insights, though, are more interesting for what they say about him than the Administration he's discussing.

Harris was the Washington Post's lead reporter on Clinton during the President's second term, and the book reflects that. It's more thoughtful and considered, sure, but Harris's focus is the same now as then: process, personalities, and politics all come before policy. No one reading the book could count themselves uninformed on how the administration's internal debates played out, but the flip side is that no one reading could call themselves experts on the policies that drove those debates.

Health care gets ten pages, and the plan itself only a few paragraphs. Welfare reform gets similar treatment. And even on these policy-heavy subjects, the serviceable descriptions of the policies are clearly subservient to the lovingly crafted retellings of the political process that forged them.

Clinton's many scandals also enter the analysis, and as you'd expect, they fill some pages. Lots of pages. And Harris, interestingly, is honest about both his irritation and fascination with them. It's not what he wanted to be covering, but he certainly took to the task with gusto. I, unlike some, don't blame him for that. I'll never forgive Clinton for Monica, a move that was both self-evidently unethical and completely relevant to his presidency. Did it affect his fitness for office? No, he was as mentally capable as ever. But it still destroyed his ability to do his job.

Continue reading "The Survivor" »

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (16) | TrackBacks (1)

Over at TPM Cafe, Josh has had some cool threads with readers suggesting favorite books in a genre.  I'm going to copy him.  This week, finals end.  When they end, I'm going on a week of vacation (but, if all goes well, you folks will have some sweet guest bloggers keeping you entertained) that, if I have my way, will be about as unpolitical as possible.  With that in mind, what're your favorite nonpolitical nonfiction books?  I'm talking quirky history books (though not epic, governments-and-wars history), sociology studies, biographies (nonpolitical ones, though), and so forth. 

To get things started, I've always loved Jeffrey Schwartz's The Mind and The Brain, but best recent read has to go to  Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures With Extremists. Your turn.

Incidentally, on the off chance this conversation gave you a burning desire to set me up for the Summer, my Amazon wish list is right this way.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (51)

Matt Yglesias handed me the baton on the latest meme, books you should have read but haven't. And since the tag came from Matt, where better to start than with the guy he did his thesis on?

John Rawls' A Theory of Justice: I've cracked this one open a number of times. I've battled my way through part one. But, in the end, I never reach -- hell, I never even catch sight of -- the finish line. Bonus: I'm particularly ashamed whenever Jonah Goldberg goes on his "liberals need to read their philosophers" tangent. Bonus Bonus: Since I often go on a liberals have read their philosophers rejoinder and display Rawls prominently within the post, I have a secret suspicion that Jonah's no more finished his than I've finished mine. Bonus Bonus Bonus: I can joke that I'm speaking about Rawls' veil of ignorance from behind my own veil of ignorance. Awesome.

The Bible: I've read a lot of this one. Most of the Gospels, most of the Tanakh (I refuse to call it the Old Testament), but I always fail somewhere around Paul's letters. This is particularly galling as my non-political intellectual interest is religious history, so I should probably have the source document straight. Nevertheless, the Bible's tough to get through. The Gospels aren't bad (though they are redundant), but have you tried trudging through Leviticus? Staying awake through the endless genealogies? Tough stuff. (As an aside, the Koran is really much easier and more pleasant to read. So far as Holy Books go, Islam definitely had the best wordsmiths.)

Literature: This is a canon, but I'm woefully ignorant of it. Hemingway? Think I read a short story once. Faulkner? Nothing at all. Dostoevsky? Crime and Punishment is taunting me from the bookshelf. I've never read Macbeth, can't allude to King Lear, never finished anything by Joyce, and have somehow avoided cracking open John Updike. Now, I've got a few loves among the greats -- mainly Saul Bellow and John Steinbeck -- but on the whole, I'm terribly out of the loop. One day I'd love to do a Great Books project, but so long as I've got a blog to feed and current events to contextualize, I can't see where I'll get the time.

George Orwell's Collected Essays and Letters: Nick Confessore had his rules for writing hung up in the office. Paul Glastris would refer to him during editorial meetings. The Economist bases their style guide on Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language". Christopher Hitchens just wrote a book on him. Hendrick Hertzburg venerates him. He's the patron saint of journalism. And so, awhile back, I ordered his collected works, sat down to go through it, and got distracted two essays in. Orwell is a great writer, his reportage vibrant and organic without resorting to the rhetorical fireworks needed by today's wordsmiths. But I don't find him particularly transformative. His rules for writing are fine, but basic, and he broke them often (indeed, he warned against using the passive voice while writing in the passive voice). In the end, he's good, but I can't figure out what makes him so pressing.

Karl Marx's Anything: I like old Karl. Indeed, I just read a biography of him simply because I find the guy interesting. His critique of capitalism is pretty solid, even if his prediction of what would come next failed on (approximately) a million levels. But I can't make it through the guy's writing. Not the Communist Manifesto, not Capital, not The Collected Works...I like reading through his ideas, but only if they're rewritten by someone else.

So there's your five. They may not be the books I most wish I'd read, but they are the ones I most often find myself pretending I've read. Thank God for book reviews, lit crit, and summaries, I guess. I pass the bat to Greg from the Talent Show, Neil Sinhababu, and the off-hiatus Lindsay Beyerstein. Further, in a shameless show of favoritism, I'm adding a fourth and tagging Kate.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (32)

According to Praktike, or at least Alaa Al'-Aswany, the author he's quoting, the paucity of Arab literature isn't a problem requiring the drastic interventions of creativity or liberty, but merely a bit of Hernando De Soto. With no mature publishing industry, there's no way to effectively market or accurately profit from writing books. But slap some legal frameworks and protocols on the distribution system and it's a whole new ball game.

Interesting thought. But couldn't this fall prey to the Hernando De Soto problem? De Soto is an enormously popular and influential economist whose big idea was that capitalism failed in developing countries because there's no legal framework for converting informal holdings into formal assets. Add that, he argued, and the poor could participate in the free market too.

The problem was that banks and buyers didn't much want the title to 25 square feet of slum land, so the poor were no more able to net favorable loans or sell their property than before De Soto's intervention. Similarly, it may be that potential Arab writers don't want to flex their rhetorical muscles in full sight of paranoid regimes that employ a lot of non-metaphorical muscle. Formalize the publishing process and you'll only increase the ease with which governments can identify authors for reprisal. My understanding is that totalitarian societies operate under a "keep your head down" ethic, so it'd make sense that very few writers are keen to shine a bright light on the publishing industry and then publish the sort of controversial, or even interesting, works that are likely to sell.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I'll never understand folks who alphabetize their books. It's not that I don't appreciate the idea of imposing some order on the ever-encroaching floor-monster that is my library, but the method seems so very off. I acquire books at an enormously alarming rate. You think I'm joking, I'm not -- the government has retained a team of highly trained specialists to monitor, study, and reach conclusions based solely on my rate of literary acquisition. One of them had a nervous breakdown, the other two got divorces. It's really quite scary.

Because of my Amazon addiction and my dorm room's lack of bookshelves, my storage system is a bit off. My dorm overflows with tomes. I've taken over all the bookshelves in the main room, filled a closet, littered the floor, stacked my dresser, and generally replaced my roommates with paperbacks. The trunk of my car -- a hatchback, no less -- is layered three deep with books, a bit of unfinished business left over from when I moved out of Santa Cruz last June. My room at home also sports towering stacks of books, in addition to a few unpacked boxes where the lesser-known and seldomly viewed titles live.

The point is that I get a lot of new books. And I'm quite excited, when I have a non-dorm living space next year, to lovingly place each and every one onto the rows of bookshelves that'll turn my flat -- can I call it that if I'm not British? What if I was just watching Coupling? -- into some sort of urban, literate, labyrinth garden. And yes, I hope to have some sort of classification system. Maybe broad categories or something. But alphabetical? It'd never work. Assuming that every shelf save the last will be full of books, I'd never be able to buy anything that didn't begin with Z. Otherwise, I'd have to shift the last book in each shelf down to the next, all the way through to the end of my collection. To be clear, what happens if I buy an M? The M shelf is already full, so I have to move a book out of that shelf. But the next shelf is full too, so I have to place the just-moved book at the front (alphabetical order, after all), and then move that shelf's ending book down a level, and so on. It just wouldn't work, it can't.

Can it?

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (35)

Kevin Drum dismisses Kunstler's book The Long Emergency on the grounds that he tries to explain most everything through entropy. Well sure, the blatant misappropriation of physics concepts is one reason to dismiss the guy's post-apocalyptic predictions, but why stop at just one? How about the fact that Kunstler really isn't an oil expert? He was a staff writer for The Rolling Stone, published a string of (self-described) bad novels, and then wrote a few books on the crushing soullessness of suburban architecture. Hearing him confidently predict the end of civilization definitely has a crazy-guy-on-Venice feel to it.

But no, you say, Rolling Stone published excerpts from the book, and if RS thinks they have merit, they probably do. Or at least they would, if Kunstler hadn't worked for RS, thus pulling that appearance into question. But maybe pseudo-physics and lack of credentials aren't enough for you. Maybe you still need one last piece of evidence that it's not quite time to head for the hills. Well, here's how Kunstler ended his piece in Rolling Stone:

These are daunting and even dreadful prospects. The Long Emergency is going to be a tremendous trauma for the human race. We will not believe that this is happening to us, that 200 years of modernity can be brought to its knees by a world-wide power shortage. The survivors will have to cultivate a religion of hope -- that is, a deep and comprehensive belief that humanity is worth carrying on. If there is any positive side to stark changes coming our way, it may be in the benefits of close communal relations, of having to really work intimately (and physically) with our neighbors, to be part of an enterprise that really matters and to be fully engaged in meaningful social enactments instead of being merely entertained to avoid boredom. Years from now, when we hear singing at all, we will hear ourselves, and we will sing with our whole hearts.

It's like a Hallmark card to a luddite. There's plenty to worry about with oil, from economic turmoil to war over resources. But anyone confidently predicting the dispersion of the human species into a set of agrarian communities that survive only through hope and the uplifting power of song, well -- you can probably find yourself some better sources...

Posted by Ezra Klein at 5:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (21) | TrackBacks (2)

As I mentioned a few days ago, I spent Saturday night watching Malcolm Gladwell read from his new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The reading was at The Hammer, a terrific museum just blocks from my house. He packed it. Their 250 person auditorium became standing room only and, when that ran out, overflow seating was set up near speakers outside.

Gladwell's an effective, entertaining speaker. He's a short, slight guy with a rapidly-receding hairline and an enormous afro. He's clearly comfortable on the stage, and he needed no notes nor, in fact, any books. Rather than read from Blink, he told stories from it.

And that was the problem. See, Blink does not seem to be about rapid cognition at all. A better name foor the book would be Overload: How Too Much Information Clouds Our Conclusions, or Bias: How the Wrong Information Perverts our Conclusions. I guess those titles didn't focus group as well, but Gladwell didn't change the content along with the name. As it was, every story he told had to do with the elimination or addition of information. Classical musicians are better off auditioning behind a screen, Diallo's shooters should have slowed down and amassed more information, doctors are best able to diagnose chest pain when limited to the results of four tests, etc. And that's all well and good, but if any of you could think of a more basic, common-sense thesis to pack a bestseller with, I'd be pretty impressed. So while Gladwell was enjoyable, my gut, or blink, reaction to his book was right, and I won't be buying it. That's okay, from the looks of the auditorium, Gladwell hardly needs me to add on to his sales.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Tonight I'm heading out to hear Malcolm Gladwell (yes, he of the hair) read from his new book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The book tries to prove that your instant, gut reactions are actually more intelligent than your considered analyses. The problem, however, is that my instant, gut reaction is that the thesis is clever bullshit, which means that actually reading the book would be a wholehearted repudiation of its argument. We'll see if he can prove himself wrong and convince me to ignore my quicker instincts tonight.

--Ezra

Posted by Ezra Klein at 4:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Rick Perlstein e-mailed this morning to say that he too trudged through a Hewitt book for the good of his readers. Not only do I sympathize, but I'm a great believer that authorial sacrifices like reading Hugh Hewitt mandate long-lasting rewards. So go give his review the half-life it deserves, I'm sure it'll aid his recovery greatly.

For those wondering, I'm about 110 pages into the book, and it's now changed from lying a lot to talking about history a lot. In the last 30, it's morphed again and is making bizarre assertions about blog power. My favorite thus far:

The blogs will move much more quickly, and with much greater authority, than the MSM. They will make or break the nominee.
[P]erhaps future presidents ought to put three or four names out for collecting blog vetting before a final choice is made. The White House Counsel's Office and the Department of Justice are staffed by fine lawyers with great capacity for research and analysis.
But their number and energy are finite.

He's talking here about giving blogs first vet on Supreme Court nominees. Brilliant.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

It was 16 years ago to this day that the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie. And, thanks to a kind reader who used my wish list, I actually found the offending tome, Satanic Verses, in my mailbox this morning. I can't think of a better way to celebrate the anniversary of Khomeini's outrage.

By the way, to those of you who've been generous enough to use my wish list, thanks much. I put that up as a lark (Typepad offers it as an option) hoping I might get a book or two over the life of the site. Instead, I've gotten four in the first few weeks. I really, really appreciate them, and I hope they'll leave my commentary more informed, and thus informative, for you. See? It's all for your benefit, really.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 2:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (1)

Like everyone else in blogland, I set aside a few minutes each day to sacrifice a goat to Google. But despite the enormous bloodletting conducted in their names, I often find them reasonably useless when I'm looking for very targeted information sets. Maybe I'm just not good at searching, but googling has served me better when trying to confirm information or find related data than when I've got an objective in mind. Sucks, I know, but what else is there?

Well floor me with a feather, I discovered the wonder that is The Almanac. I had no idea so much blazingly useful information could be found in a single, physical, source. Expect more actual "facts" and"research" undergirding my usual from-the-hip-bullshit from here on out.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

In an otherwise impressive synthesis/review of the current glut of books promising a European Revolution, Tony Judt hobbles his piece with a near-fatal opening:

Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap—and refills are free. Being largely without flavor it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact.

Consider the following lazy writer trick: Rather than reporting to find the perfect example that sums up your piece, or simply eschewing a gift-wrapped synecdoche, you spend a paragraph inventing an analogy that'll do the trick. Desperate to fit it into the contours of your point, your stretch, shape and delete till the comparison no longer has meaning. So you ignore the glut of machines capable of creating Italian espressos. You ignore that coffee refills are generally not free. You assume that there's an appreciable caffeine difference between a cup of coffee and a shot of espresso, which is demonstrably untrue. You assume you can't get double, triple or even quadruple shots of espresso, also untrue. You put too much into an analogy that's too cute (and too useless), and you do it at the start of your piece. And in doing, you irritate your reader enough that it takes 1,000 or so more words of effective, informed and illuminating prose to wash the taste of the coffee metaphor from his mouth. And, to be fair, you write those 1,000 words, and a couple 1,000 more, and you do it well enough that your reader recommends your piece to his readers. But your opening analogy is still so egregious that he needs to spend a few hundred words mocking it and explaining how he can still recommend the piece. Now ask yourself -- wouldn't it have been easier to just start with a quote?

Posted by Ezra Klein at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Via Kriston, I see Doubleday is taking fire for their decision to publish an al-Qa'eda Reader. The book would consist of translations of tracts penned by the organization's leaders with all profits going to charity. Of course, the usual outcry is emerging, and it's only a matter of time till O'Reilly pops a blood vessel over it, but I'll be first in line to buy a copy. Years ago, Mein Kampf became the top seller in Germany, with the government giving a copy to every newlywed couple and readers lining up in bookstores to purchase what was quickly becoming a must-have for all "proper" Germans. The book was nothing but the ramblings and theories of Hitler, distilled onto the page but retaining all their hatred, paranoia, bigotry and enormity. Had other countries taken a careful look at the tome, maybe stopping Hitler would've seemed less a diplomatic breach and more an overriding priority. But we didn't, and so we understood neither the German agenda nor the depths to which Hitler and his people were willing to go to actualize it.

Similarly, bin-Laden's tracts are read all across the Middle East, distributed in every town and cafe. Those of his deputies and Lieutenants find similar life across the region. They have long been a primary point of contact between al-Qaeda and the populaces they claim to represent, and they've thus helped shape local opinion towards Islamic Jihadis and bin-Laden himself. If Americans are too damn afraid to confront what they might say, then, just as in Germany, we won't understand them until it's too late. But if we head in the other direction and take a close look, we may learn a hell of a lot about where al-Qaeda finds their support and where they try and shore up weaknesses. And that, of course, will make us stronger.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 1:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (151)

In the land of the cool, Random House discovered a genius author working in their mailroom and, after getting a five-figure, two-book deal, he's still toiling among the envelopes. Oh, and his book might become a movie. It doesn't get much sweeter than that.

Via The Elegant Variation.

Posted by Ezra Klein at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (1)