Monday, March 27, 2006

A Beautiful Fairy Tale

OR - A Random Off-Topic Theory


I'm pretty sure that cheese grows underground, like potatoes, fertilized by olive oil.


Right now I'm particularly obsessed with the variety of ways we have to savor food. Underground cheese was a theory I developed in a very quotidian e-mail exchange with a co-worker about our favorite foods. She suggested that this theory sounded like a beautiful fairy tale. Doesn't it?

Sunday, March 26, 2006

They throw up their hands, then wring them.

Four or five years ago the New York Press was one of the better weekly reads in the city. The old writing corps - the ones who almost all had a bit of an edge with little pretension, and whose pieces I mostly wanted to read beyond the first graf no matter what their political persuasion or subject matter- they've been gone for a while. And Steve Weinstein provided me with yet another reason not to pick up the The New York Press on a regular basis. Factchecking isn't an important part of the Press' editorial process:

http://www.nypress.com/19/11/pagetwo/conterfeit1.cfm

It's SW commenting on the Nick Sylvester brouhaha at the Village Voice (a weekly that, with a couple of exceptions, I'm sorry, has mostly bored me beyond tears forever despite its storied history). When Weinstein says that editors can't be held responsible when their reporters fake the news, I've got to ask, what is the point?

I had to laugh especially loud when he bemoaned the Press' inability to hire fact-checkers - because they can't afford them. Ummmm - ain't getting the facts right kind of a basic principal of the practice? If your readers can't trust you to make a reasonable effort at accuracy beyond trusting your reporters, why should they read your paper at all when they can visit the fiction section of B&N? Since Jayson Blair, lots of publications have come up with ways of tracking their reporter's work, for example, with random deep fact checking missions. The Press is a WEEKLY even. It's not like they've got a phalanx of ambitious cub reporters in the city room clamoring for A1 and shoving supposed scoops in Weinstein's face at 2 am every morning, or whatever time of day those types clamor in the metro editor's face. And Weinstein is a BOSS, right? That means oversight rests with him, and he takes responsibility - or should - when something goes wrong.

This reminds me of the Times' internal report on the Blair fiasco. You read more, it seems, about how embarassing it was for the paper than what a betrayal to its readers it was that all those editors allowed Blair to continue writing. I don't think it's idealistic or unrealistic to expect level A pros to step back and just say they're responsible, and figure out how to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Lewis Lapham wrote an an essay in the July 1981 issue of Harpers called Gilding the News, about the Janet Cooke incident at the Washington Post. Cooke won a Pulitzer for a story about herion-addicted kids. After the prize, we learned that the lead character in the peice, Jimmy, was a composite of several characters, and that Cooke lied on her resume. Gilding The News still holds up today and it's still a better piece about what's wrong with journalism than any other commentary I've read since Blair, Glass, or Sylvester. I'll dig around to see if it is online.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

It's an interesting book, but I'm a slow reader

Three quarters through the book and I'm still not sure what Foer is up to. I'm not sure how one makes a case for globalization by demonstrating how global capitalism has kind of fucked, or at least not really fixed, football.

The top Italian clubs throw the umpires. The Ukranians import Nigerian players, who are then treated poorly and whose playing style is unappreciated and stifled. The Serbs worship a war criminal who runs their key club, and he's eventually assassinated. The Brazilian football barons of yesterday co-opt Pele until he is bankrupt, who remakes himself only to make new financial mistakes with the barons of today. If this is how great globalization is for football, I'm becoming convinced that Foer must be making the case against. Or else he's making the case that it's just such a great sport that no amount of whack corruption can ever hinder its popularity.

Monday, March 13, 2006

More Sheltered

But not from Europeans, conspiracy theory, police intervention, or death threats... A story in tomorrow's Guardian about a Pittsburgh area school board that dropped the International Baccalaureate (IB) for being too foreign:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1730530,00.html

(I'm using Safari and last time I checked I can't link any other way. I'm too lazy to see if that has changed).

It's just one more thing Republicans seem to be disagreeing about lately. From the article:

"The irony for Upper St Clair is that the Republican district board members who have banned the IB are going against the views of the president. Despite his disdain for the UN, the Kyoto protocol, the International Criminal Court and many other international institutions, Bush specifically called, in this year's state of the union address in January, for expansion of the IB programme.

Despite the cost of the Iraq war and America's ballooning deficit, which is robbing social, health and educational programmes of funding, he announced an extra $380m to boost IB initiatives and a homegrown alternative called Advanced Placement."

A similar recent effort in Fairfax , VA failed. Maybe the Virginia contingent didn't call their opponents Marxists enough times as did the Upper St. Clair anti-IB camp.

To be fair, the guy who received death threats was in the anti-IB camp.

And I just noticed...BBC uses the term "The American President" - at least in its radio programs. The Guardian does not. Hmm. I guess they haven't got the the AP style guide, eh? Anyway, I wonder what the rational is at the BBC v the Guardian. I have to say, I like the British press more and more the American press less and less. The brits still have a healthy adversarial tone to their reporting and their commentary that is more and more rare here.

Sheltered

That's me.

The week before last I was near Sarasota on a visit to family. I'll skip much of the whining I've done to friends and just relate two things.

I took a few runs through the subdivision and - creepy - simply sensed that if i didn't say hello to everyone i came across, I stood a good chance of being reported by the Neighborhood Watch. And because I wanted to run more than I didn't want to greet strangers, I said hello to all of them. Running in Central Park, I love being around all those thousands of other people but what I love just as much is that I'm not obligated to be fake nice to a single one of 'em. Also, while my nabe does not have Neighborhood Watch signs and I'm sure there's no group here, I've come home at 4 a.m. to plenty of civilians also coming in. I feel much safer back here. Perhaps for southerners its not about fake nice, but for me, it was.


Did i mention the giant confederate flag flying at one of the houses at the end of one of the cul de sacs in the next subdivision over? I just don't understand. It didn't comfort me that there was an equally giant American flag flying above it. I just don't know what to make of it, and I didn't have to guts to keep running right up to the middle-aged man sitting out on the well-manicured lawn and ask about it all. I turned right around before i got to end of the cul de sac, and kept running.

Typical liberal reaction.


Less seriously, and not Florida specific, but it was one of the first things that I heard off the plane and it still makes me laugh:

Overheard at the airport:

Grandmother (yanking her little grandson out of the path of the oncoming car at the terminals' curb): Do you WANT to get hit by a car? Is that what you want?

Grandson: ...yeeeeees?


Many a time in the city I've wanted to ask the grandmother's question to my fellow nyc pedestrians.

Monday, March 06, 2006

Football, and All Kinds of Enterprise

I have made some headway into How Soccer Explains the World, by Franklin Foer, my first leisure reading since I took the term off school. It was sitting at the top of my very tall pile of books To Read since sometime last Fall.

Foer undermines his own premise, I think, when he says that dislocation and economic conditions can only do so much to explain the more virulent forms of soccer hooliganism (and I do hope he is going to get past the hooliganism parts). So, he discards the arguments a lot of the key critics of globalization (in its institutionalized form; I’ll make a distinction about this later) have made (so we expect he's going to end up as an apoligist for globalization and I'm pretty sure that's what he's after). But in the very next graf, he says the football hooligans in Yugoslavia took more cues from African American gangster rap than their material condition, ignoring that gangster rap very much developed, if not exclusively certainly in large part, as a response to dislocation and economic deprivation. He also seriously misuses what Hannah Arendt meant when she described the banality of evil, but I promise to go off on that later.

The book reads like sophisticated historical Cliff Notes for ignorant Americans who don’t want to feel as if we’re being ignorant – it’s an easy read without being a dumb read. I’m learning stuff and he’s a very good writer to boot.

Finally, the book is mistitled. The book is much more about how geopolitics explains the popularity of soccer and how vociferous many of its clubs’ fans are. It should be called How International Politics Explain Soccer. At least so far. I am only one third in.

So institutional globalization vs. De facto globalization. De facto globalization is my own little conception – it’s just that aspect of the human condition in which societies are mixing, trading, and colliding. Certain trends and ideas ebb, others recede. It is inevitable for political geography and economic geography to heave and groan as we shift ourselves around forever and ever. People both prosper and founder under it, but there is nothing inherent in de facto globalization that undermines the human enterprise.

Institutional globalization, on the other hand, is problematic, because with NAFTA and FTAA and their global equivalents there’s a pretty insidious assumption that markets and the right to create and reap profit trump democratic institutions and their rules. And that’s important. Markets and democracy need at the very least to be balanced, and if I had my way, the democratic enterprise would always be given the edge over economic enterprise. The problem with institutional globalization is that the profit motive is given institutionalized favor over self-determination. That’s bad.