Political Arrivistes

Daniel Larison:

Despite his fairly humble origins, Obama speaks the language of the elite and the highly educated (or at least the thoroughly schooled), which he uses as a marker of the status that he has acquired; despite their more privileged backgrounds, McCain and Clinton are more comfortable speaking in a lower register, or at least have accustomed themselves to speaking this way, because they have nothing to prove and no need to reinforce their right to belong to the elite. It may be relevant that some of the Democratic candidates over the years who have been derided as elitist, “out of touch” or lacking in some patriotic enthusiasm are the children or grandchildren of immigrants–Kerry, Dukakis and now Obama–so that the very signs of assimilation to the norms of the political class are taken as evidence of a lack of connection to other Americans, when, of course, the retention of visibly ethnic or foreign habits would be considered equally disqualifying in an election.

Le chagrin et la pitié

Der Spiegel reports on an exhibition of photographs of Vichy-era Paris that have caused an uproar. The 270 full-color photographs were taken by Andre Zucca, a photographer who worked for the Nazi magazine Signal, although the photographs were apparently not intended for publication. They show an occupied Paris that seems mostly unaffected by war and regime change: families at market, fishing in the Seine -- ordinary street scenes, neither glittering propaganda or subversive underbelly.

The Paris Historical Library, who'd displayed the photos, received criticism that the photos essentially whitewashed the occupation, especially the persecution of Jews in the Vichy regime (only two photos show Parisians wearing the yellow star). The exhibit didn't identify Zucca's employer, and didn't try to appeal to this larger context. After a push to close the exhibit, the exhibit was modified to include new captions and a statement in the catalogue, noting that Zucca "chose not to show anything, or very little, of the reality of the occupation and of its dramatic aspects."

The difference between the French and American myths of World War II is vast. No American exhibit of life during World War II would pause to add captions noting that Japanese-Americans were being rounded up and sent to internment camps. Our myth is the myth of national heroism and national innocence (or at least ignorance). The French myth is different -- the myth of the heroic resistance. But the Zucca photos aren't staged or manipulated. They're not really propaganda. Instead, they really do show a different "reality of the occupation." Its crime is that it is inconsistent with the national myth of heroic resistance.

My favorite film ever made about World War II is Marcel Ophuls's The Sorrow and the Pity. If you only know it by the jokes at its expense in Annie Hall, you've done yourselves a disservice. It makes the point again and again -- the numbers of the resistance were smaller and the numbers of the collaborators larger than anyone would have you believe, and that the huge numbers of people who were simply indifferent dwarfed them both.

What I hope is that the Zucca photographs' captions teach a different lesson than either Zucca or his employers wished to teach or the critics would like to say, that they're not dismissed, but noted accordingly. In the middle of atrocities, we blinded ourselves to them, and went on with our lives.

Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky:

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

I will add: the transformation of our cognitive attention isn't about television vs. Wikipedia. If you look at the most successful television shows of the past five or ten years, as opposed to the ten or twenty or thirty years before that, we've shifted from a kind of cool or loose or detatched participation -- "water cooler shows" like Seinfeld or Friends or The Real World or whatever -- to shows with very intense participation, online and off, ranging from Lost to American Idol to The Sopranos. In other words, the most successful television shows are sparking and harnessing -- or at least benefitting from -- the surplus value created by their communities.

Abstraction Levels

The most emailed story at the New York Times is about researchers at Ohio State who claim that learning to manipulate abstract mathematical equations is better for students than story problems. Put this way, I actually agree with this. But here's the problem with the article and with the research.

1. Story problems aren't actually "concrete," and they're certainly not "real-world" examples. They're verbal, which is a quite different thing. The famous train problems, like most story problems, test your ability to translate a verbal description into a mathematical model (in this case, two linear equations). The recent push to add concrete explorations to mathematics has more to do with using physical experiments, measurements, in more of a laboratory style approach.

2. I love ripping on educational research as much as anyone, but to write that random, controlled experiments are "something relatively rare in education research" *or as Matthew Yglesias writes, "it's a bit bizarre how little effort we put into developing serious research-based pedagogical methods") just isn't true. I know hundreds of studies in mathematics education, some of it experimental, lots based on testing and controls. The trouble is that the body of research has yielded very few consistent results, in part because the research design is often designed to prove a point or justify a particular curricular change rather than to actually figure out what works. And, "what works" is pretty murky itself.

3. This experiment is flawed, and I'll tell you why.

The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.

This is wrong. In fact, the second "real world" example teaches a fundamentally different kind of mathematical problem. It's modular arithmetic. The relationship is one of addition, but the sums "reset" at 3, so 1+1=2, but 2+2=4, i.e. 3+1, so 4=1, and likewise 2+3=5, or its modular equivalent, 2. The water example teaches a completely different mathematical relationship than the purely symbolic systems so, while the shapes and the game are essentially the same. So what obscures the underlying math is the explicit math. The second group is doing a kind of arithmetic, while the first group isn't. The fact that you can model the first set of relationships using this modular arithmetic is interesting, but since the game doesn't rely on that skill, of course it doesn't transfer. It could be argued that the experiment proves exactly the opposite of what's claimed. The group working with relationships between specific objects does better than the group working with arithmetic-based models.

Oh, yeah, and the experiment used college students, but they think the results apply equally well to elementary students. Wha? Sociologists don't work that way. Pharmaceutical researchers don't either. Neither do serious educational researchers.

Here's how I'd test this theory. First, work with the target population -- let's say, eighth graders who know a little bit of algebra. Train one group in pure systems of equations and the other only in train modeling problems (or some other specific kind of story problem). Then give them both the same test, including abstract systems, train story problems, and a range of other modeling problems that use the same mathematical principles. Repeat with a bunch of different groups, using different teachers, maybe different income tiers, slightly different background knowledge. And then see what you see.

I think it's plausible that training students to do one or a handful of specific examples of algebraic modeling doesn't really teach them how to do modeling in general very well. Maybe a great deal of comfort and familiarity with systems of equations could actually improve their ability to do so. But to my admittedly skeptical mind, this research just stinks.

Poetry, Whatsa Matter?

Hey! It's Saturday, so here are some poetry links.

Ron Silliman on poetry contests:

Consider the best known of these awards, the Yale Younger Poets, and the piece I linked to last Monday from the Houston Chronicle about Fady Joudah winning the current round. The article states, reasonably enough, that "previous winners include such iconic figures as John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, John Hollander and W.S. Merwin" without quite noticing that not one of these figures is under the age of 78 and that maybe more recent winners have not gone on to such iconic status. But it’s worth remembering that anyone who is 78 began at a time when the number of publishing poets in the United States was in the low hundreds, not the tens of thousands. Further, if these four poets didn’t come out of the same community, exactly, the world they arose from was small enough: as undergrads they attended Harvard, Radcliffe, Columbia and Princeton, in that order, and all were picked by W.H. Auden (who asked Ashbery to submit a manuscript, rather than picking one that had been sent in according to the rules).

Al Filreis on Flarf:

Easy enough to define, harder for some to appreciate, harder still perhaps for some of the flarfists to stay with it (in any particular sense) after the months or years of excitement about the mode has worn off. Then again, a number have managed to keep the excitement up.

Surely a flarfist himself or herself wrote the Wikipedia entry on "flarf poetry"; it's quite a good little essay on all this. "Its first practitioners practiced an aesthetic dedicated to the exploration of 'the inappropriate' in all of its guises. Their method was to mine the Internet with odd search terms then distill the results into often hilarious and sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts." Joyelle McSweeney expressed my own relief and delight: "This is utterly tonic in a poetry field crowded by would-be sincerists unwilling to own up to their poems."

My attitude towards Flarf would roughly approximate "hard to appreciate," at least insofar as it sounds more fun than it actually turns out to be.

Allen Ginsberg did a better job of being genuinely playful, funny, and revolting:

Ecological Disaster? No, Thanks, I'll Take Man-Made

Environmental Graffiti lists five American cities that may become "lost cities" in the indeterminate-but-not-too-distant future. In four out of five cases, the culprit is nature, especially not enough water (Atlanta, Las Vegas) or too much (Miami, New Orleans). But one city is bold enough to be "already in the process of becoming ruins" -- of course, it is the city of my birth, Detroit. (Via Kensingdelphia.)

Of course, Detroit's immanent destruction isn't celebrated in a Donovan song:

History's Anatomy

Timothy Burke at Cliopatria has sketched a near-comprehensive list of modes of historical explanation -- or as he calls it, different ways of saying "so what?" in history. Highlights:

4. The past is another country: our own times are made more particular by looking at just how different the past really was. Caroline Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast; Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre; Richard White, The Middle Ground.

5. The past helps us make N as big as possible: it is a source of data for making generalizations, formulating models, constructing claims about human universals. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel; David Christian, Maps of Time...

16. The past is memorial: we study (recite it, really) it to honor what people did or sacrificed on our behalf. Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation.

This is actually slightly different from explaining how historical argument works, and why we're persuaded by it -- although a few touch on that -- but does speak well to the problem of why we care about history in the first place.

I would add a few, especially if we're considering history writ large and not only what current academic historians practice. For example, we read and write history (especially biography) to find models of ethical behavior. (Hi, Robin.) Examples: Plutarch's Parallel Lives, many others.

On a slightly different tack, we read history to psychologize or better understand someone who is interesting for other reasons. Again, a big chunk of biography, especially of artists, celebrities, or political figures.

And we turn to history to win other arguments, whether factual or interpretive. If I think word X in poem Y by author Z means ___, then I might look at either Z's biography or some contemporary history to justify that claim.

Lastly, we use history to understand language, what words mean and have meant, where they come from and how they circulate.

I'm sure there are many more, but these are the first that come to mind.

The Raw and the Cooked

Ken Silverstein's "The Revolution Will Not Be Pasteurized" is a long, readable, and balanced story about raw milk. It also includes several startlingly vivid moments, such as this:

Schmidt is a man of Teutonic certainty, but as he walked into the field soon after he’d sold the land, he was filled with doubt. The morning sun had turned the sky red, and mist hung around the legs of the cattle. While he twitched a stick at his bull, Xamos, to turn him away from the cows, Schmidt wondered whether it was even possible to run a farm in the manner he wanted. If he started selling his milk at industrial prices it would erode his meticulous style of farming. He would lose the direct connection to his customers. He’d have to push his cows to produce more milk. He’d be compelled to adopt the newest feed-management strategies and modernize his equipment. Schmidt didn’t see Xamos coming, just felt the explosion as the bull struck him. Even as he hit the ground, the animal was on him, bellowing. It stabbed with one horn and then the other, tearing up the earth and ripping off Schmidt’s clothes. One horn sank into Schmidt’s belly, another ripped into his chest and shoulder, grazing a lung. Only when his wife charged into the field, flanked by the couple’s snarling dogs, did Xamos retreat. Another man might have taken this attack as a sure sign, a demonstration of the folly of seeking harmony with nature. As Schmidt lay there bleeding into the earth, however, he felt only humility. “Nature is dangerous, yes,” he would tell me later. “But I can’t control it, and I can’t escape from it. I can only learn the best way to live with it.”

Or this:

Around the time that Chicago passed the first pasteurization law in the United States, in 1908, many of the dairies supplying cities had themselves become urban. They were crowded, grassless, and filthy. Unscrupulous proprietors added chalk and plaster of paris to extend the milk. Consumptive workers coughed into their pails, spreading tuberculosis; children contracted diseases like scarlet fever from milk. Pasteurization was an easy solution. But pasteurization also gave farmers license to be unsanitary. They knew that if fecal bacteria got in the milk, the heating process would eventually take care of it. Customers didn’t notice, or pay less, when they drank the corpses of a few thousand pathogens. As a result, farmers who emphasized animal health and cleanliness were at a disadvantage to those who simply pushed for greater production.

After a century of pasteurization, modern dairies, to put it bluntly, are covered in shit. Most have a viscous lagoon full of it. Cows lie in it. Wastewater is recycled to flush out their stalls. Farmers do dip cows’ teats in iodine, but standards mandate only that the number of germs swimming around their bulk tanks be below 100,000 per milliliter.

Invention of the Quotidian

Natalie Zemon Davis's review-essay on Michel de Certeau is unsurprisingly peripatetic, given de Certeau's interest in "extravagant wanderers." But it leans very heavily on the theological and spiritual aspects of de Certeau's writings, saying very little about his social or broader philosophical concerns. Here's one paragraph that gives you a glimpse:

Certeau examined commonplace activities over which control could in principle be maintained by the institutional organization of space and language and suggested how in fact control was ignored or bypassed. People walk their own way through the grid of city streets, zigzagging, slowing down, preferring streets with certain names, making turns and detours, their own "walking rhetoric." People read in ways that escape the social hierarchy and "imposed system" of written texts: they read in all kinds of places from libraries to toilets. They read with their own rhythms and interruptions, thinking or daydreaming; they read making gestures and sounds, stretching, "a wild orchestration of the body," and end up with their own ideas about the book. "These procedures and ruses...compose the network of an antidiscipline."

Davis also devotes a surprising amount of space to Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict. It's almost as though she were working on a really cracking article about de Certeau, Ratzinger, and Foucault (those "exact contemporaries") -- their intellectual development, responses to the 1960s, theological dimensions, and cultural reception -- and it morphed into a review of de Certeau.

My Sweet God

There are times when I would rather wrestle a rabid alligator to the ground than get my seven-month old son to sleep. Yet the first, I do only for bar bets and toughman competitions, while the second, I do five nights a week.