Roth Brothers

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 02:57:00 +0000

Amplifying Kevin Drum's remarks, Ezra Klein points out:

You hear a lot about "countercyclical policy" amidst deep recessions. You don't hear much about it amidst periods of joyously fast growth. Instead, our thumb is always on the same side of the scale: We have counter-recessionary policy and pro-expansionary policy.
The problem, as Kevin puts it, is both human and political. "How do you ensure that [countercyclical policy] happens not just during downturns, when everyone is eager for it, but also during upturns?" he asks.... "After all, no one wants to spoil a party when everyone is having a good time."
The answer to this, in part, was supposed to be that the Federal Reserve chairman is insulated from congressional meddling and popular opprobrium. He can do what must be done. But that didn't work out in the latter years of Greenspan's tenure and he was, in part, considered a hero for permitting such an awesome economy.

This is all true. It's worth noting, though, that during the 1980s, when Greenspan was doing exactly what Drum calls for, his strongest critics were on the left. I remember William Greider arguing that wages at the bottom of the income distribution only start to rise when the economy's really booming and we're close to full employment. By cutting off the highs, as Greenspan did by raising interest rates when things got too hot, he eliminated the part of the cycle when the poor get theirs.

So why have the sides switched, to the point where it's now progressives like Drum and Klein who are calling for counter-expansionary monetary policy? Perhaps it's the economic history of the Bush years, in which economic growth was decoupled from rising income not just for the poor but for the middle class too: liberals just don't root for robust growth in the way they used to.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:04:00 +0000

Weird NYT front-pager on a decision confronting President Obama: "whether the government must provide health insurance benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees."

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama said he would “fight hard” for the rights of gay couples. As a senator, he sponsored legislation that would have provided health benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees.
Now, Mr. Obama is in a tough spot. If he supports the personnel office on denying benefits to the San Francisco court employees, he risks agitating liberal groups that helped him win election. If he supports the judges and challenges the marriage act, he risks alienating Republicans with whom he is seeking to work on economic, health care and numerous other matters.

Is it just me, or is this in fact not a particularly tough spot at all? The situation is apparently as follows: Obama supports same-sex-partner benefits. His base supports same-sex-partner benefits. And a clear majority of the American people (73 percent, according to a Newsweek poll from three months ago) support same-sex-partner benefits. (The Times story doesn't mention this last point for some reason.) The only people who don't support it are members of the minority party. And Obama is supposed to capitulate to them because he needs their support on health care? How is that going to work? Are the Republicans going to explicitly agree to vote for health care reform as long as the gays don't get benefits? Or is Obama going to fold in the hope that folding will in some intangible way make the Republians more tractable on big economic issues? What's the percentage in capitulating, for Obama?

Behind this Times piece, I suspect, is the present media consensus that Obama's change-the-tone rhetoric somehow means that any kind of confrontation will be disastrous for him. So far, there is little evidence to support this.

Inevitable 'Watchmen' review post

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 19:16:00 +0000

When Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons began work on Watchmen, the twelve-issue DC Comics maxiseries (yup, that’s what we called them in 1986) that would come to bear the literary aspirations of superhero comics fandom on its shoulders, they chose to restrict themselves by declaring certain established techniques off-limits. Watchmen contains no thought balloons, the cloud-shaped bubbles used for expository interjections or angsty soliloquies. It has no narrator to say “Meanwhile....” Perhaps most tellingly, Watchmen—cited in a hundred newspaper articles with the headline “Pow! Zap! Comics aren’t just for kids anymore!”—contains none of the onomatopoeic sound effects that Roy Lichtenstein and the Batman TV show made a symbol of the medium. When characters in Watchmen throw punches or fire guns, the bangs and crashes are entirely implied by the images. The only sound that’s explicit in Watchmen is the characters’ speech, of which there’s a lot. For all its sudden eruptions of violence and magic, Watchmen consists largely of people talking to each other.

Starting in the early 1960s, superhero artists had begun to explode the rigid borders of the comic-strip panel into vivid, kinetic layouts. With Watchmen, Moore and Gibbons moved ostentatiously to the opposite extreme: every page of the series is a variation on a rigid nine-panel grid. (If Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four is a Beethoven symphony, Watchmen is the Goldberg Variations.) This metronomic regularity is part of Watchmen’s intricate fitting of form to content: the scenes of high adventure and everyday life are accompanied by a constant reminder, as if from the omniscient perspective of some objective overseer, of time’s steady passage.

The soundtrack to Zack Snyder’s Watchmen movie, which I saw last night, is crammed from start to finish with pop songs, melodramatic synthesizer fanfares, and digital effects. Every punch is accompanied by a whoosh of air and a percussive crack. When characters in Snyder’s movie fight, they alternate between Matrix-style “bullet time” and the sped-up style of kung-fu movies. Whereas Snyder has gone to great and sometimes absurd lengths to transliterate the story from comics to film—taking dialogue verbatim from Moore, recreating Gibbons’s images down to the smallest details—he steadfastly refuses to restrict his options as they did. Sweeping strings? Graphic dismemberment? Superspeed gymastics on the part of characters without superpowers—characters whose whole narrative purpose centers on the fact that they’re ordinary human beings? Sure, man, it looks cool!

I enjoyed every minute of the movie, although everything I got from it was derived from having read the comic a dozen times more than a decade ago. The casting is mostly very good: I genuinely believed I was watching Rorshach and Nite Owl and the Comedian. (The glaring exception is Ozymandias, who should be a Tom Cruise type, great-looking and super-likeable, rather than a skinny, sinister Euro.) And Snyder’s self-indulgence is fun to watch, in a way. Moore’s goal was to present a superhero story as seriously as possible, and he sometimes ran into that limit and kept going. Cranking up the volume, as Snyder does, highlights the lurid pulp elements, the ultraviolence and fetish costumes, that Watchmen insists are guilty pleasures.

But beyond formal rigidity, something central is missing. Watchmen isn’t great literature, but at least it’s about something. It’s a critique of the ideas of power and morality that are fundamental to the superhero genre; it’s about what it means to wish for godlike abilities, or to imagine that you’re fighting for justice, or to appoint yourself the protector of others. If you read superhero comics you’re probably invested in these ideas, at least unconsciously, which is why Watchmen was a meaningful experience for me at the age of thirteen: it makes you think. It’s hard to imagine Snyder’s movie making anyone think.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 19:18:00 +0000

Surowiecki:

First of all, we don’t want policymakers to assume the worst about the future when shaping economic policy. Nor do we want them to assume the best. Actually, we don’t want them to assume anything. Instead, we want them to come up with the most accurate forecast of the future they can, and to adopt the economic policies that make the most sense given that forecast.

Unfortunately, it's more complicated than that. Surowiecki's proposal would have us ignore unlikely-but-still-possible events -- "black swans," as we're now learning to call them -- because they don't fit into our "most accurate forecast of the future."

Rather, we want politicians to forecast the entire range of reasonable possibilities, estimate the probability of each of those forecasts coming to pass, and then adopt the economic policies that best optimize outcomes across that range of possibilities, taking into account the estimated probabilities and constantly adjusting the forecasts, the probability estimates, and the policies themselves in the light of new events and information. Plus also we'd like a pony.

Update: One might imagine that Surowiecki would be too busy to post a response in the comments section of this post. One would be wrong. In case it's not clear: the difference here is semantic and hinges on the definition of "forecast," which I had taken to mean "single predicted outcome" where J.S. was using it to to mean "predicted range of possible outcomes."

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 20:53:00 +0000

Matt Linderman writes:

Imagine you’re the drummer in a band. If you ask the bandleader for permission to do something different, it starts a whole conversation that may result in an argument or your idea being shot down.  But what if you just do what you think is best? What if you switch to the ride cymbal during the chorus or use brushes instead of sticks? If it sounds good, it sounds good. Everyone can agree on that.

The one thing I think we can safely conclude from this is that Matt Linderman has never been in a band.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 20:54:00 +0000

Best news of the holiday season: David Denby has written a book entitled Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation -- setting up what will no doubt be a knock-down, drag-out contest to write the best negative review. Adam Sternbergh takes an early lead.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:56:00 +0000

Link rodeo:

Adam Gopnik remembers Saul Steinberg.
The real progenitors of modern Republicanism are not Goldwater and Reagan but McCarthy and Nixon.
Terry Gross interviews the great Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff, of Philadelphia International Records [web, iTunes].

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:17:00 +0000

Why professional journalism sucks: Dan "Fake Steve" Lyons quits blogging in Newsweek censorship fracas.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 18:20:00 +0000

Gay marriage: The database engineering perspective.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 02:04:00 +0000

John Darnielle: "It's pretentious, but hard-won pretentiousness is its own kind of realness once you've learned the secret handshake."

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 17:28:00 +0000

Wait ... Jeff Tweedy is friends with Barack Obama?

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:40:00 +0000

This made me really sad for Jack Kirby.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 16:24:00 +0000

Harold Meyerson: "Second, Waxman is a legislative genius."

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:41:00 +0000

Chuck Klosterman: "The GNR members Rose misses more are Izzy Stradlin (who effortlessly wrote or co-wrote many of the band's most memorable tunes) and Duff McKagan, the underappreciated bassist who made Appetite For Destruction so devastating. Because McKagan worked in numerous Seattle-based bands before joining Guns N' Roses, he became the de facto arranger for many of those pre-Appetite tracks, and his philosophy was always to take the path of least resistance. He pushed the songs in whatever direction felt most organic. But Rose is the complete opposite. He takes the path of most resistance."

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:38:00 +0000

Ezra Klein: "You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress."

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:08:00 +0000

In the spirit of Nathan Zuckerman's perennial Hebrew-school essay topic "Sandy Koufax: Great Pitcher, Greater Jew," comes the Forward's roundup of the top 50 Jews. Of Matthew Weiner's Mad Men, which features two peripheral Jewish characters in its large cast, the editors write: "Mad Men won six Emmy awards this year, including one for best drama, but its greater accomplishment was in shaping perceptions of who Jews are and where we came from."

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:04:00 +0000

These past few days I've been crying at odd intervals, prompted sometimes by pieces of music -- James Carter's version of "Summer Babe" coming up on shuffle, Sam Cooke's version of "A Change Is Gonna Come" coming up in my head -- and sometimes by the sight of children in strollers, although when the children are black I try to hide my emotion because I bet the black parents of Fort Greene are already sick of white people's faces creasing up at the sight of them going about their lives.

Judith Warner has a good piece up about all this crying and what it means.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:28:00 +0000

I love Fort Greene.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:00:00 +0000

For the past two decades, a core set of "cultural conservative" opinions has served as a theoretical dividing line between "red" (Republican/conservative) and "blue" (Democratic/liberal) America. These incude attitudes toward sex roles, the centrality of Christianity in culture, and a social traditionalism focused on patriotism and the family. If you were to translate that divide into baby names it might place a name like Peter—classic, Christian, masculine—on one side, staring down an androgynous pagan newcomer like Dakota on the other. In fact, that does describe the political baby name divide quite accurately. But it describes it backwards.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:47:00 +0000

Spore wrapup: Seed article on the conflict among the game's developers: the "cute team" versus the "science team." On the Spore messageboard, disappointed fans react with a thread called "We Found Who to Tar and Feather!" Biologist P. Z. Myers bemoans the dumbed-down science.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:24:00 +0000

OMG, I'd forgotten like 65 percent of these, and the rest are permanently burned into my brain.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 02:16:00 +0000

Andrew Sullivan:

If you place a map of the states that favoured the proslavery south over a map of the states that are now showing a trend for John McCain, you will get an almost perfect match. The only differences: Virginia has switched sides, and West Virginia has too. (It is now for McCain.) Florida, once part of the Confederacy, is also now prone to vote Democrat because of a massive influx from the north. The rest is essentially unchanged since the 1860s. Even in America, the past controls the present. [Emphasis mine]

It would be foolish to deny that slavery and the Civil War exert their influence over present-day politics. But it's also foolish to suggest that the electoral map is "essentially unchanged since the 1860s."

In fact, the south wasn't a unified conservative bloc even in the 1860s. (In 1869, Georgia, Kentucky, and Louisiana voted for Horatio Seymour while the rest of the south backed Union war hero Ulysses Grant.) In the '30s and '40s, FDR swept the south twice, along with the rest of the country. In 1952 and 1956 the former Confederacy (and nowhere else) threw its electoral votes to that good ol' boy Adlai Stevenson. In 1960 and 1964 the region's votes split down the middle; in 1976 every southern state but Virginia backed native son Jimmy Carter. In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton won many southern states. (Fascinating historical maps here.)

In the last two elections, of course, the south has been homogeneously conservative. But that's an anomaly, and the idea of the former Confederacy as a unified and consistently reactionary voting bloc is an unwarranted capitulation to the fantasies of Karl Rove.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 23:51:00 +0000

Awesome website for Maura's new book.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:12:00 +0000

Mark Danner's "Obama and Sweet Potato Pie": Probably the best non-newsy belles-lettristic thing I've read about the campaign, maybe the closest we're going to get to a full-scale Joan Didion Obama/McCain piece.

noreply@blogger.com (Gabe) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 21:04:00 +0000

[37] David Lipsky's great sad biographical piece about DFW, the most thorough so far, is now online.