When John Kerry was slipping in the polls a month out from election day, liberals fretted that there wasn’t enough time to get back on track.
Now, with Obama ahead by at least twice as much as Kerry was down, it’s a political eternity in which something can go wrong.
“Great kid! don’t get cocky.”
Until I got my kindle, I never read letters to the editor. I still don’t really, but with the kindle it’s faster to page through them then navigate around them. So, sometimes a letter catches my eye, like this one. The lead prosecutor in William Ayers’s 70’s era trial, William C. Ibershof was expressing S&O (shock and outrage) at attempts to link Ayers to Obama. While he “desperately” wanted an indictment, he had moved on and was glad to see Ayers leading a productive life. But the last sentence was weird:
I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of “prosecutorial misconduct.” It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an F.B.I. assistant director.
Watergate ghosts of AG Mitchell and Deep Throat . . .
While my kindle experience has generally been a love-fest, there are some areas where it falls short and I feel the pain:
- the digital version of books don’t always preserve section breaks within chapters. This is especially true in novels, the kindle format sometimes loses the extra paragraph break or first word capitalization that indicates a shift in scene
- some weird capitalization/italicizations appear or linger in the digital versions of some books. I think this is mostly classics, but the last three public domain things I’ve read (two Austens and a Dickens, which, to be honest I haven’t and may never complete) have random-seeming words appear in caps. it’s very jarring
- taking notes can be funky. When you highlight passages of periodicals, you lose those highlights when you store them at Amazon and take them off of your kindle (yes, I’ve spent enough money to fill my kindle memory and my sd card). It’s not really fair to complain that Amazon should store the state of my book, but it is a difference between the book and the kindle
- Random access::difficulty moving through sections. this is the biggest problem. It’s nearly impossible to quickly navigate between sections or highlights of a book.
- real note-taking. While the commenting function of the kindle (with its keyboard) is useful, it’s still less rich, and yes less satisyfing, than having an open book next to an open notebook where you scribble madly. I was wrong earlier, this may be the biggest drawback.
That all said, I still love the thing. And I have to say, I am so over the smell of the books and the sound of the riffling pages thing. I still love my big-ass Riverside Shakespeare and still think there’s a certain majesty to my illustrated Dickens, first edition Orwell, and bound series (like POwell’s “Dance to the Music of Time”, which seems larger as four bound volumes, rather than 12 single ones published under different marketing sensibilities), but I’m not bumming too heavy. AND, during a miserable plane ride where I had kids on all four sides of me, it was wonderful to switch from a work-related book, to Thomas Friedman, to the paper, to a piece of pulp trash like The Camel Club and find the right reading rhythm.
And think of all the trees I’m saving . . . *hugs self-righteous self.
For some reason, I’m madly grabbing reviewer’s quotes and clipping, blogging, copying them. I guess it’s part of my obsession about craft. The most recent one comes from the NYT review of ‘A Man for All Seasons which starts with the old play’s inherent weaknesses, but praises Langella as the consummate stage performer. I love this paragraph where the reviewer is simply revelling in Langella’s power as an actor and the mastery of his craft:
Lord knows Mr. Langella doesn’t shirk his duties as the center of attention. It’s fun to watch him avert his eyes in contained distaste from the spectacle of his fellow mortals’ shortcomings or clutch the back of a chair to steady himself when receiving life-shattering information, the only betrayal that his equanimity has been shaken. On the few occasions when he raises his voice, you don’t doubt that Heaven can hear him. Such regal deportment evokes the days when grand stars like the Barrymores presided over plays.
From the NYT article covering French writer Jean-Michel Gustave Le Clezio award of the Nobel Prize, his answer to what message he would convey in his address:
My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.
Interesting, and interesting to argue, sidenote: Horace Engdahl, the head of the Swedish Academy (which awards the prize) was critical of American literature today, calling it “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” No American has won the Nobel literature prize since Toni Morrison did in 1993.
The NY Times had a deviously clever piece about candidate physiques and their impact on Presidential elections today. Leading with the explanation that they were exploring the claim that Americans might not relate to Obama’s “slender physique”, they did a height and weight analysis of the major candidates, going back to 1896. It would seem that taller or heavier tends to win, though we probably need a baseball stats nut to model the combinations.
The chart is too big to display, but here’s a sample:
It’s a fun little exercise, but the ‘tale of the tape’ seems a little silly for the NYT to devote this kind of space, even virtual, to it. I think the thing of real interest, is the silhouettes they chose to represent the candidates. In addition to some nice design work (Truman’s glasses, William Jennings Bryan’s watch fob, Carter’s smile), they did a nice job of capturing of the general vibe of the candidates. Many have argued that Democrats lose not so much because people disagree with them but because they are hard to relate to, egghead, or as the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank put it, ‘inauthentic’. So check out the profiles.
Ike versus beloved egghead Adlai Stevenson: (whose campaigns my mother worked for weekend after weekend):
Nixon versus Humphrey and McGovern:
Dukakis and Mondale are the very mark of unimposing, unleaderly, un-anything:
War hero John Kerry doesn’t stand up to the admittedly faux-Reagan swagger of W:
Not all of them are perfectly accurate. TR’s pose comes off a bit foppish (though he DID lose that election):
Yet another deft bit of info-work by the NYT.
This election has been weird for me with the polls. The biggest riddle for me has been: why, in a race that the media describe as a dead heat, has John McCain been throwing hail Mary passes, acting in such a desperate fashion? The most frequent answer is that the media wants drama so that people follow the news more closely, which I can buy, but I’m still kind of baffled and annoyed about the highly democratic (all polls are worth reporting) approach to polling data.
Weird moment of NY Times coverage in today’s/yesterday’s online version (interesting: I just realized that the phrase “today’s paper” is really twisted on-line. Long time coming, that thought). On the front page is an article about the campaigns in battleground states with the graphic:
The image is one of the worst case scenarios for Democrats and pretty far removed from current thinking: no toss-up states, no recognition of polling showing some of the reds leaning blue. So, what’s the editorial thinking driving that? Is the Times trying to panic its liberal readers into reading that article? What role does polling data play in the news? I’m confused.
Very grim, 2004, version of the election in that graphic. In fact, if we assume that most readers and viewers are becoming quite familiar with shades of red and blue for barely, weakly, and strongly dem or repub and that they expect some neutral color to indicate toss-up, this graphic gives no indication that there are any battleground states.
Then there’s the Times’s ongoing electoral map graphic which appears in the right column of the Politics section:
It’s even more jarring when the two items appear together:
Poll reportage has been tricky for several elections: exit polls on the east coast have been thought to influence west coast voting, exit polls created the mis-announcement of the Florida winner in 2000, landslide vote predictions make people nervous about voter turnout. I’m having a hard time figuring out what role poll reportage is supposed to play in the election.
Kevin Kelly has an invigorating post about our the inevitable increase in our ignorance. When I saw the title “The Expansion of Ignorance”, I had a curmudgeonly joy at reading about how stupid we’re allowing ourselves to become. Yesterday, I listened to a series of Open Source interviews with Harold Bloom (while playing my Rogue alt on WoW, no less). He railed against the ’school of resentment’, lamented the celebration of crap books, condemned the loss of memorization, etc. Cocktail Party Physics had a post about how Sarah Palin represents a celebration of dumb and connecting it to bigger, scarier trends:
Despite the Palin-centric focus, this is not meant to be a political post; rather, her candidacy epitomizes one of our most fundamental failings as a nation. I’m talking about the triumph of mediocrity, of settling for “good enough,” in America. No wonder our country is in a shambles, teetering on the edge of economic ruin and losing our historical edge in technological innovation. No wonder we’re lagging so far behind other developed countries in educational testing scores, when we demand so little of even the highest offices of our land.
In a recent post here about how fivethirtyeight.com was uncovering basic 101 weaknesses in long-standing polls, I was surprised to find out how pissy I was about the media’s and larger public’s inability to figure out this problem for themselves.
So I was looking forward to a bilious post from Kevin Kelly, which, now that I think of it, is silly. He’s not the bilious type. What the post is about is how, despite all of the knowledge we’ve acquired, we’re not really getting close to knowing it all or being done with science. He points out that, if every answer raises to more questions, our pursuit of truth is creating more ignorance than knowledge. Chart:
As one who was depressed that Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov was turning things I once saw as art and as having mystery into simple riddles, this was a big pick me up. There’s something very Jean-Luc Picard’s love of discovery and surprise in all this.
“The plural of anecdote is not data”
- from a review of Friedman’s new book
Riding to and from Washington on the Acela yesterday, we were only able to find seats in the quiet car. At 5:45 in the morning, I reminded my colleagues to bring their DSes so we could play some head-to-head games (which, sadly, I hadn’t done on the DS before).
For those who haven’t been in a quiet car on Amtrak, it’s a trip. Manna from heaven for people who need to concentrate, want to sleep, or hate the loud cell phone conversations. The self-policing, however, can be over-zealous. Two co-passengers yesterday sat behind a woman who was sitting next to a man who apparently was a loud PC-typist. In reportedly pissy tones, she grilled the percussionist-emailist about how long he planned to type, with heavy sighs, and pointed intonation. It’s a tough crowd.
But three of us are punchy with morning coffee and adrenaline and lack of sleep (It was a 7 AM train, with boarding at 6:30) and need to play Mario Kart, a competitive racing game with all the cute characters from Nintendo. In addition to racing, you pick up power-ups which can give you speed boosts, but which can also be offensive things to lob at your opponents (turtles that you trip, octopus that sprays ink on your windshield so you can’t see, and the classic banana peel). So, while we’re playing, we’re desperately trying to be quiet — whispering trash talk, creating Nintendo-appropriate equivalents of flipping the bird, celebrating wins, taunting when you’ve done something clever — it was awesome.
Better yet, though, on the way back, we played Mario Party, a game where you roll dice and move around collecting points and things, but also where the squares allow you to play mini-games (like whack a mole, connect the dots, tangoes). One of the games required you to blow into the microphone in order to knock down a wall. Hard, fast breaths were advised. I was sitting at a table with three strangers, determined to win, and blowing into the mic as discreetly (and quickly and powerfully) as I could. It was crazy awesome funny. (The scotch from my flask helped, but it was fun under any circumstances.)
Nintendo are geniuses.