Ron's View

When the September issue of Harper’s arrived at the house the week before last, I immediately read Mark Slouka’s article Dehumanized: When Math and Science Rule the School. I was going to write about it at the time, but the website still had the August up. September is online now (though you may need an account to read the full article). If you can get access to the article, I recommend it. Slouka makes a good case for the dangers of de-emphasizing the arts and humanities in favor of math, science, and preparation to participate in the market economy. I think he mis-represents the nature of mathematics at times. Whether he does so out of ignorance or in service to his argument I have no way to tell. But any errors in this direction shouldn’t distract from his larger warning about an imbalance in US education, with which I largely agree.

It is difficult, indeed unwise, for a university administrator to resist the temptation to build strength in disciplines that have the potential to bring in external research funding (at a major research university anyway). But at least when one makes such decisions, one should be aware of the issues Slouka raises. After the jump, I’ll quote some passages from the article to give an idea of his argument.

I am reminded of my son Joel’s initial first grade homework assignments years ago. On the first evening, he was to establish a location in the house where he would put his completed homework, so that he would be able to remember on a consistent basis to bring it to school each day. There was a similar assignment the next night, maybe involving setting up a regular work location. I had the sinking feeling that the underlying goal was to train him for the workforce rather than educate him. A year later, at our parent-teacher conference to review his work, I was struck even more forcefully by the realization that that teacher’s concern was his success at developing proper work habits, as opposed to his giving free rein to his curiosity.

This is an old tension in education, workforce development and socialization versus creativity and imagination. Many have written far more eloquently about it than I can, Slouka in particular. So I won’t say more. Except to note that science and math are not on one side of this. They are very much a haven for creativity and imagination. The problem that arises is how to respond when business and legislative leaders argue that math and science, as the areas most likely to lead to new business opportunities and most in demand by highly desirable businesses, should be given extra funding so that a university can train more students to prepare for careers in these fields. This is a good problem. Yet, it can open the door to mis-understanding about what a research university’s mission is, what the larger benefits of math and science education to all citizens can be, and how important arts and humanities are as well for an educated citizen.

Let me leave it at that. Here are representative excerpts from Slouka’s article:
Read more…

Clark Hoyt’s Public Editor column in Sunday’s NYT surprised me. He chose to address the apparent furor over Cintra Wilson’s Critical Shopper column two weeks ago on the opening of J.C. Penney in Manhattan’s Herald Square, right by Macy’s famed flagship store, ultimately judging her as crossing the line from edgy to objectionable. I read the article online the evening before it was printed, and I didn’t feel that way. I enjoyed it. Am I becoming dangerously inured to snark?

See for yourself. Read Wilson’s column, then Hoyt’s critique. Here is how Wilson opens:

J.C. Penney has broken free of its suburban parking area to invade Herald Square, and the most frequent question on New York’s collective lips seems to be: Why?

Why would this perennially square department store bother to reanimate itself in Manhattan — in the sleekest, scariest fashion city in America — during a hair-raising economic downturn, without taking the opportunity to vigorously rebrand itself? Why would this dowdy Middle American entity waddle into Midtown in its big old shorts and flip-flops without even bothering to update its ancient Helvetica Light logo, which for anyone who grew up with the company is encrusted with decades of boring, even traumatically parental, associations?

J. C. Penney has always trafficked in knockoffs that aren’t quite up to Canal Street’s illegal standards. It was never “get the look for less” so much as “get something vaguely shaped like the designer thing you want, but cut much more conservatively, made in all-petroleum materials, and with a too-similar wannabe logo that announces your inferiority to evil classmates as surely as if you were cursed to be followed around by a tuba section.”

I love it. But Hoyt writes:

Or, as one reader, Daniel Harris-McCoy of Boston, put it: How do writers “navigate the fine lines between observation, satire and snark,” and when should editors step in to restrain them?

Although Trip Gabriel, the Styles editor, said the lines can be blurry, it seems to me that they were crossed and left far behind in this case. Wilson’s editors should have saved her, themselves and the paper from the reaction they got from readers, who concluded that the humor was at their expense, not for their benefit.

[NYT executive editor Bill] Keller said, “The key, I guess, is to imagine that you are writing for an audience with a broad range of views and experiences, and to write with respect for them.” Dismissing a point of view “with a contemptuous sneer is not only bad manners, it’s bad journalism.”

Hmm. Hoyt had already noted earlier that “Keller said his mother was a Penney’s shopper for much of her life, and she would have found the review ‘snotty.’ He told me that he wished it had not been published.” Harsh.

Speaking of harsh, remember that Keller believes (and Hoyt agrees) that torture, when performed by the CIA, should be called “harsh interrogation.” In contrast, when done by Iran on protesters, it gets to be called torture. (See Glenn Greenwald last month on this point.)

French consulate regions

It’s hardly news that bureaucratic functionaries love to toy with people. Who can blame them? One has to have some fun in one’s life. As a result, I’ve been anxious for months about Joel’s need to get a student visa for his time in France this fall. It’s required for any stay of over 90 days, and Joel will be studying in Grenoble from early September through December 19. The rules are that you need to show up in person at the consulate to which your home region is assigned, do so at least two weeks ahead of departure, and bring a long list of documents.

My first worry was, is Joel eligible to submit the application at the Boston consulate? If they insisted that Seattle is his home address, he would have to go down to San Francisco. (There seems to be no way around showing up in person at one of the ten consulates around the country. See the map here, also copied above. Notice that Louisiana gets its own consulate, which I suppose makes historical sense. So does Florida. I can’t imagine why.)

My second worry was that Joel would get around to it too late, especially if he showed up for his appointment in Boston and was told they can’t do it, he has to go to SF. My third worry was that he’d have failed to comply with some paperwork requirement, as interpreted by the fonctionnaire. And my fourth worry was simply that they’d screw him, just for the heck of it, like a cat toying with a mouse.

So anyway, Joel flies out of Boston a week from Sunday, nine days from now, to London and then Paris. That means to meet the two-week-prior requirement, he should have been to the consulate by last Friday at the latest. It didn’t work out that way. When he got around to making an appointment, the best he could do was three days ago, Tuesday morning of this week. In Boston. He had other things on his mind, like finishing up his summer half-term classes a week ago. This would be the week to deal with visa and apartment. Gail flew to Boston Monday, arriving that night, and got up way early (Seattle time) Tuesday morning so she could accompany him to the consulate. One of the paperwork requirements was a document attesting that your parents could provide for you financially, so what better way was there to do that than to have a parent present?

I wasn’t there, so I’m not the one to tell the consulate story. The main point is that the consulate official, noting that Joel had not met the two-week requirement, said that the best she could do is get the visa sent to us at the end of next week. Next Friday. It could be sent FedEx. Indeed, that’s the only option, and one of the items you need to bring is a prepaid FedEx mailer, which fortunately Joel arranged to get on Monday afternoon. That night I gave him our account number so it could be charged to us. Now, the thing is, it would be sent Friday to Seattle and Joel would be flying Sunday to France. That doesn’t quite work. Unless we pay extra for FedEx Saturday delivery, which we agreed to do. And even that doesn’t work very well. It means Joel can’t fly from Seattle back to Boston that Saturday morning, and flying out Sunday morning wouldn’t allow him to catch the 6:00PM flight from Boston to London. Well, there’s always overnight, and that’s what I booked him on, once we had all the information. The plan, then, was: visa sent Friday, visa arrives Saturday, Joel takes off Saturday night, arrives in Boston Sunday morning, kills 10 hours, takes off for London Sunday night.

I could say more, but again I wasn’t there. Like, there was the mother and daughter who cut in front of Joel and two other parties, all having 10AM appointments at the consulate. There is no first-come, first served apparently. Some fonctionnaire, ready to take the next case, asked for a 10AM appointment, and this mother jumped. But the galling thing is that they got their visa immediately, because there wasn’t enough time to send it, whereas Joel couldn’t even have his shipped a day sooner to simplify life.

Okay, so here’s the punch line. The visa came. An hour ago. The doorbell rang, I saw a FedEx truck out the window, I ran like hell to the front door so I wouldn’t miss him. I took the envelope from him, opened it up, and there was Joel’s passport, with visa glued to a page.

Let’s review. The consulate got his application Tuesday. They processed it Wednesday. They shipped it Thursday. It arrived Friday. No big deal. But we were told they wouldn’t ship it until next Friday. Our mild effort to ask if it could be sent sooner was met with the observation that we were late in getting there. Tough luck. We would have to pay the FedEx Saturday delivery fee, and if something went wrong, Joel wouldn’t be making his flights. Plus, because of the anticipated Saturday delivery, I had to book Joel on an overnight flight to Boston through JFK.

It’s here. We can relax. That’s the important thing. But what was the point of all the toying with us? Oh, I guess I already answered that at the beginning. Just because. One has to have some fun.

Further good news is that Gail and Joel have succeeded, as of 2 hours ago, in emptying Joel’s apartment, turning in the key, getting rid of the rental car, and checking out of the hotel room. Three days of hard work. Now they just have to wait for tonight’s flight, already scheduled over an hour late, with an arrival time in Seattle after 1:00 AM local time. It’s going to be a long day.

Digby, guest-blogging at Glenn Greenwald’s site today, has a post on police overuse of tasers. It addresses some concerns I have had of late, especially in light of last week’s widely reported incident in which
Mobile, Alabama, police officers, responding to a complaint about a man who had locked himself in a store bathroom for more than an hour, used a tire iron to crack open the door, sprayed pepper spray through the crack to subdue him, and tasered him when they got inside. He was arrested for disorderly conduct, but a magistrate refused to issue a warrant. It turns out that the man was deaf, mentally disabled, and understandably scared to death.

Digby addresses this incident and more. Here are excerpts:

In our apparent acceptance of torture as a legal method of interrogation, the bar of civilized official behavior has been lowered to the point where we are accepting torture in everyday life as if it’s nothing. Indeed, we are using it as a form of entertainment.

I’m speaking of the ever more common use of the Taser, an electrical device used by police and other authorities to drop its victims to the ground and coerce instant compliance. The videos of various incidents make the rounds on the internet and you can see by the comments at the YouTube site that a large number of Americans find tasering to be a sort of slapstick comedy, the equivalent of someone slipping on a banana peel, with a touch of that authoritarian cruelty that always seems to amuse a certain kind of person. “Don’t tase me bro” is a national catch phrase.

Tasers aren’t benign however. They kill people. … . As awful as the possibility of death is, tasers would be a blight on any free people even if they weren’t so often deadly. Tasers were sold to the public as a tool for law enforcement to be used in lieu of deadly force. Presumably, this means situations in which officers would have previously had to use their firearms. It’s hard to argue with that, and I can’t think of a single civil libertarian who would say that this would be a truly civilized advance in policing. Nobody wants to see more death and if police have a weapon they can employ instead of a gun, in self defense or to stop someone from hurting others, I think we all can agree that’s a good thing.

But that’s not what’s happening. Tasers are routinely used by police to torture innocent people who have not broken any law and whose only crime is being disrespectful toward their authority or failing to understand their “orders.” There is ample evidence that police often take no more than 30 seconds to talk to citizens before employing the taser, they use them while people are already handcuffed and thus present no danger, and are used often against the mentally ill and handicapped. It is becoming a barbaric tool of authoritarian, social control. …

Representatives of the government torture innocent citizens into unconsciousness, on camera, in United States courtrooms with tasers. They use them on prisoners and on motorists and on political protesters and bicycle riders, on mentally ill and handicapped people and on children. And it’s happening with nary a peep of protest.

America’s torture problem is much bigger than Gitmo or the CIA or the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The government is torturing people every day and killing some of them. Then videos of the torture wind up on Youtube where sadists laugh and jeer at the victims. It’s the sign of profound cultural illness.

When I read the story a couple of week’s back about the use of a gay slur by University of Hawaii football coach Greb McMackin at a press conference, I didn’t think too much about it. Business as usual. Coach makes remark he shouldn’t have, apologizes for it, says he didn’t mean it, of course he meant it, will be punished, won’t do it again. For some reason, the word he used is so sensitive that newspapers can’t even print it, which leaves us guessing (though it’s not hard to guess) just what he did say and doesn’t advance the cause of serious discussion of the issues.

But then I heard his remarks (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan), which you too can listen to, here, and I discovered how much worse his remarks were. The thing is, he didn’t just describe the Notre Dame chant before last year’s Hawaii Bowl game between Notre Dame and Hawaii as a faggot [yes, that's the word] dance — eliciting laughter from some of the audience. A minute later, after talking about the game against ND, McMackin went on to ask the press to cover for him and not repeat his faggot dance comment, saying it in a sneering tone and eliciting still more laughter. Hearing the actual words makes it difficult to take his subsequent apology with any seriousness at all. (See an AP story here for coverage of his apology and the penalty the university is imposing on him.)

ESPN senior writer Jeff MacGregor had an excellent piece last week on the incident. An excerpt:

Let’s be clear before we go on that this word, “f*****,” is a slur, is a crude blunt instrument of language used to hurt, and is, in and of itself, undeniably hateful. Whether or not it’s the gender equivalent of “n*****” I can’t say. There’s no consensus on the matter. It certainly seems so. Especially insofar as its power and its ugliness and its use as a kind of rhetorical jiujitsu within the very community it is most often used to denigrate. But as Chris Rock asks, is it OK for a white person to use the word “n*****?” Not really. Is it OK, therefore, for a straight person to use the word “f******?” Not really.

Now take a breath.

Think of it this way:

If Mr. McMackin had used the word “n*****” instead of the word “f*****”, he’d have been fired before he stepped away from the podium.

So, yes, I feel bad for Greg McMackin, undone in public by his own clueless ignorance and insensitivity.

But the bone-deep homophobia of the football locker room is well known to anyone who’s ever walked into one, from Pop Warner to the pros, so none of this should come as a surprise.

Now I don’t doubt for a moment that Mr. McMackin is a very nice man who meant no hurt to anyone. But Mr. McMackin is also the perfect product of his lifetime environment, a genial boob in the moral and cultural vacuum of football who can’t imagine a world in which the word “f*****” used as an adjective would ever trouble anyone.

And see also an earlier piece by MacGregor’s ESPN colleague LC Granderson on the significance of the reaction by the media in the room to McMackin’s remarks.

I haven’t posted a Ted Rall cartoon in over three weeks, so maybe I can get away with posting one again. His latest is above.

Um, do I need to explain anything? You see, there’s Skip Gates. And Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge Police Department. You know them. And there’s this famous movie, Dirty Harry, with Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan. In the movie, well, see for yourself in the clip below. The key lines start at 1’35″, but the entire clip is useful for context.

Fans of Edinburgh will enjoy Geoffrey Pullum’s post two days ago at Language Log. Pullum is a British linguist who spent many years at UC Santa Cruz, but returned to the UK two years ago to become a professor at the University of Edinburgh. He is also one of the founders of Language Log, along with Mark Liberman at the University of Pennsylvania.

In the recent post, Pullum returns to one of his recurring topics, which he has come to call nerdview, and which occurs when a document is written “in technical terms from the perspective of the technician or engineer rather than from a standpoint that would seem useful to the customer or reader.” (This quote is taken from an earlier Pullum post on nerdview.) I will leave it to Pullum to tell the story of his latest example of nerdview, the sentence, “This refuse has been checked for illegal presentation,” courtesy of the city of Edinburgh. The light he sheds on life in Edinburgh makes the post worth reading independent of the linguistic issues. Here’s a sample, without the context Pullum has provided regarding the challenges of setting out garbage for pickup in the New Town area:

You see, Edinburgh is basically on a seacoast. We have seagulls.

These large, wily, and sharp-beaked birds don’t spend all their time on the arduous traditional pursuit of catching live fish. Several days a week they head inland for an easier life, and flock to the New Town (they know exactly which streets to head for on which days). They come with the breaking dawn, looking for bags that were illicitly put out at midnight. In the spring and summer there is enough light to spot them as early as 4 a.m.; plenty of time to have breakfast before the streets start getting crowded with people walking to work.

Great gangs of gulls rip open the sacks, pull out packaging and envelopes and other dry trash and toss it all over the place, and dig around for discarded food, which they drag out and eat on the sidewalks (which are called “pavements” here; I hope you are appreciating the vocabulary lessons I have built into this piece). By 7 a.m., the street in front of many houses looks like a municipal dump. …

These birds are big, omnivorous, and fearless: you cannot frighten them away more than about ten feet. They come straight back the moment you move on. And they have no sense of civic pride whatsoever. Edinburgh is heart-stoppingly beautiful, but the gulls do not appreciate that. On some pickup days I have had to come home and use a shovel and broom to clear up outside our home.

I posted last week about Improv Everywhere‘s latest mission, the Surprise Wedding Reception, embedding their video report on it as well as a video of their JFK welcome back mission. If you haven’t seen the videos, take a look now. Yesterday they posted their report on the their sixth annual MP3 experiment, which took place on Roosevelt Island in New York City last month. The video is above, but the report has far more background information plus additional photos.

Here is the first paragraph of Improv Everywhere’s overview of their series of MP3 experiments:

The Mp3 Experiment has become an annual event for Improv Everywhere; Agent Tyler Walker and I put an mp3 online (usually around 45 minutes long) and agents download and transfer it to their iPods. Everyone then synchronizes their watches to an atomic clock on the website, and then heads out to the same public location. At the predetermined time, everyone presses play. Hilarity ensues as participants carry out ridiculous instructions delivered to their headphones via narrator Steve (aka The Omnipotent Voice From Above) and folks passing by try to figure out why a mass of people are all silently jumping around.

As for last month’s experiment, they explain that

This year’s location was Roosevelt Island. It’s a really beautiful place, situated in between Manhattan and Queens on the East River. There are about 12,000 residents on the island. To participate in this year’s experiment, agents were given these instructions. Everyone synchronized their watch to the clock on the instruction page, downloaded the mp3, wore a red, blue, yellow, or green shirt, and then traveled to the island. At exactly 4:00 PM, everyone would press play from wherever they happened to be on the island.

With this as background, watch the video above (or go to the link at youtube, and then be sure to click on HD), and if you enjoy it, read the report for more details.

As it turns out, NYT technology writer David Pogue participated in the experiment. His blog report is worth a look. And finally, Pogue mentions one of Improv Everywhere’s older missions, which I hadn’t seen yet, Food Court Musical. It’s worth a look too. Just click below.

I haven’t had occasion to mention this before, but I’m a big fan of Vows, the weekly featured wedding announcement in the NYT Sunday Styles section. You’re guaranteed a great story every week. And there’s a style to the pieces that I find difficult to describe but that Claire Messud parodied so perfectly in her novel The Emperor’s Children. That alone makes the novel worth reading.

Today we meet Elizabeth Wood and Gabriel Nussbaum. What got my attention wasn’t their story as much as the identity of Gabriel’s grandfather. As part of their story, we learn that Elizabeth and Gabriel made a trip to LA to visit Gabriel’s 97-year-old grandmother Ruth, whose husband Max is described as the rabbi in Hollywood who converted Elizabeth Taylor to Judaism. But that’s the least of his achievements. For more about his extraordinary life, see excerpts I’ve included after the jump from his biographical sketch at the American Jewish Archives website.

I couldn’t help but wonder, once I learned who Gabriel’s grandfather was, whether Elizabeth is Jewish. Could Gabriel marry a gentile? Well, yes. Three sentences later, we learn that

They were wed on June 6, as a nippy fog rolled in and 200 guests, including Ruth Nussbaum, gathered under a cherry tree in the garden of his parents’ Amagansett home. The ceremony was led by Dr. Arlis Wood, Ms. Wood’s father and a Church of Christ minister, and Cantor Debra Stein sang blessings.

The bride, wearing a pale mocha silk gown with peacock blue straps and a temporary “Elizabeth-Gabriel” tattoo on her arm, giggled and shouted, “I do.”

After a buffet of pulled-pork sliders and fried macaroni and cheese balls, friends and family paid tribute to the couple with a song and dance revue.

Pulled-pork sliders? I’m guessing that when Rabbi Nussbaum headed over to Cantor’s Deli after Temple Israel’s Shabbos services, he didn’t have pulled pork sliders. Chopped liver, maybe. Tongue, maybe. But pulled pork sliders?

I wonder what Ruth ate.

Read more…

The video above (hat tip: Andrew Sullivan) is the latest production from Improv Everywhere. I knew about their annual no pants subway rides in New York City, but I hadn’t realized that they have many different types of missions. After watching the video above, I went to their website (linked above) and discovered how much more they do. Some great stuff. I’ve added their feed to my news aggregator, so from now on I’ll be able to see their reports and learn about each new mission as it gets posted.

Plus, when you go to the website, you see photos and read more about each of the missions. For example, the wedding webpage describes how they were lucky to get the tents for the reception because another group was finished using them and they were able to pay extra to extend the rental time.

Below is the video from their Welcome Back mission last November. In this mission, a group of people went out to JFK, where they would find a driver with a name sign waiting for an arriving passenger. They’d tell the driver that they know that person and will wait with him. Then, since they now knew the passenger’s name from the driver’s sign, they would quickly prepare more signs greeting the arrivee. The video shows some of the surprised passengers as they are warmly greeted by a group of total strangers.

Have a look. And go to the Improv Everywhere website to see many more videos, along with photos and mission reports.