plethoric pundigrions — the blog of author-not-hockey-player Andrew Ladd

Why You're Entering The Immigration Debate Without The Proper Documents

2017-03-04T05:51:00.000-05:00

Or, "The Time Andrew Couldn't Quite Bring Himself To Write A Clickbait Headline"

Let me begin with the requisite disclaimers on a post like this: I don't like Trump, I'm a white guy so probably don't truly understand immigration anyway, and though I worked at a U.S. immigration law firm for two-plus years and therefore have a somewhat unique perspective on the topic, I am by no means an expert. Did I mention I don't like Trump? Okay.

The majority of immigration coverage I've read since Trump got elected has focused, understandably, on Trump's executive order restricting admission for citizens of certain countries, and his more recent order expanding the grounds on which people are targeted for deportation. The majority of that coverage has proceeded, also understandably, by reporting on individuals suffering as a result of those executive orders. But recently I've started to see a tricky flip in those stories, whereby reporters first find an immigrant suffering, and then relate that suffering back to one of Trump's executive orders. As a side note, Wikipedia tells me that this particular logical fallacy is called affirming the consequent, and as another side note, I would like to say that I think Trump's executive orders are bad policies. But that's not actually the point I want to make here.

Since we have a recent and horrific point of comparison in the news, let's talk about that off-duty cop in L.A. who fired his gun at a group of teenagers, in probably (hopefully) the most extreme "get off my lawn" incident in recorded history. Naturally, the protest in response was swift and vocal: fire that damn cop. It's a response that I think we're all pretty used to by now, in stories about police misconduct and brutality; the individual cop is definitely to blame, the "police department" or more vaguely "the system" is probably to blame, but very rarely does the specific head of the police department get apportioned any individual blame. And even when the latter does happen, it's not usually tied to that head of police's political views except maybe as an incidental "all racists are Republican/all Republicans are racist" assumption. (Talk about affirming the consequent!)

That's why I think it's (1) interesting, and (2) a problem that when an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid is conducted illegally, or a Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer detains someone without cause, or any other law enforcement officer under the aegis of homeland security does something shitty, we're very rarely treated to the same "fire the cop" argument. We certainly haven't been in any of the immigration stories I've seen since Trump was elected. Instead the implication is always that those officers were mindlessly carrying out the inherently politicised will of the current administration. For example:

The government's decision to remove the 31-year-old father, who has no criminal record and is married to an American citizen, is the latest indication that President Donald Trump's administration plans to deport practically any immigrant here illegally. [...]

"What the president is doing is going after everyone," said David Leopold, an Ohio immigration attorney.

Well, I'm sorry, but bull-honky. Trump didn't personally sit down the ICE officers involved in this case and say, "nope, that guy's out." Neither did anybody in his administration. It's also worth noting that ICE had already initiated removal proceedings against the guy, and an immigration judge had already ordered his deportation, back in 2006, because his mother had let his legal status lapse—and the only reason he was still in the country was because of Obama's executive order granting prosecutorial discretion. We can have a discussion, of course, about the shittiness of the Immigration and Nationality Act's provisions for what happens in a case where a minor's status lapses through no fault of his or her own, but technically the guy was removable under laws passed by congress a long time ago. The fact that ICE decided to enforce those laws now and in this case is undoubtedly a dick move, and I don't dispute that they probably felt empowered to do so by Trump's executive orders, but let's be clear that it was still some asshole ICE officer on a power trip who ultimately made the call, not Donald Trump. Making it about the current administration is like convening a jury to try an accessory after the fact while the murderer keeps going to work every morning.

Also, on the topic, Trump didn't personally call up the ICE agents hanging out in Denver courthouses waiting to sweep up immigrants as they leave their hearings, and say, hey guys, can you do this tremendous thing for me? He certainly didn't sit down and give any orders to the ICE officers who arrested people just to fill quotas in 2013, or the ICE officers who in 2015 struck an off-the-books deal to detain without cause or process suspected immigrants released by Fresno county's sheriff's office, or the ICE officers who lied to immigrants during raids in 2016 so that they could enter private property without a warrant. This isn't an Obama-bashing moment either, though to be clear his record on immigration was equivocal. Obama also didn't have anything to do, I don't think, with the CBP officer who told one of my clients, while I was a paralegal, that trying to enter the country with a green card approval rather than the green card itself—which is quite legal—was "like trying to claim lottery winnings without the ticket." Or the CBP officer who stopped my Canadian citizen friend at the land border during Bush II's administration and questioned her for an hour just because she was born in Iran.

These are all bad cops. They were bad cops before Trump and they will be bad cops after Trump. They also have plenty of colleagues at ICE and CBP who are good cops, and who frankly don't deserve to be tarred by the same brush that people are (rightly) using to discuss Trump's executive orders. The idea that ICE and CBP, which combined have twice as many officers as the NYPD—officers who are dispersed in wildly different communities all across the country—somehow all behave consistently and flip political affiliations automatically every time a new president is elected is, if you think about it, pretty ridiculous. And sure, executive orders can and do set the broad parameters of their activities, but day-to-day the president has pretty much zero oversight or control over what ICE and DHS do. Congress has pretty much zero oversight too—actually, it has too much oversight, in that something like 90+ subcommittees claim oversight, which is why congress has never actually passed annual authorising legislation for the Department of Homeland Security. And that's the real problem. One of the largest (and most powerful!) law enforcement agencies in the country basically sets its own rules and monitors its own performance, and that's by legislative design rather than executive fiat.

So go ahead and keep talking about how shitty Trump's immigration orders are. And go head and keep posting stories of all the shitty stuff ICE does (and largely gets away with) on a regular basis—it's nice that people are finally paying more attention. But let's all be very clear that these are two separate problems, and when it comes to immigration, at least, I think career immigration officers who treat immigrants like crap are the much bigger problem than a blowhard president trying to make good on his outrageous campaign promises.

Gopnik vs Gopnik

2017-02-18T13:23:00.001-05:00

I've been unusually prolific on my blog since Trump's election (I mean, three posts, but that's prolific compared to my previous months-long streak of nothing). If you don't want to take the time to scroll down and read them, they have all essentially expressed an uneasiness about how over-the-top the reaction to Trump has been on the political left, and about how so many people I have generally found to espouse level-headedness and empiricism in the face of almost anything now seem suddenly to be running through the streets screaming that the sky is falling.

So it was refreshing to read none other than Lord Chancellor of the Liberal Intelligentsia, Adam Gopnik, distill all my arguments into an elegant paragraph this week. (Have you been reading my blog, Adam?)

First, that Donald Trump is a blowhard but not a Benito: the scary things he says are mostly just smoke in the room. Second, that what his opponents most object to are not “Trumpian” policies but Republican ones, which, like it or not, now dominate the electorate. (Even if one questions the popular vote, there are the G.O.P.’s Senate, House, and gubernatorial majorities to explain away.) Then there is the claim that even the most controversial of his policies—though perhaps poorly articulated or sloppily executed—involve actions that are well within the norms and rules of American politics. Finally, there is the warning that continued liberal “hysteria” only further insults and emboldens the armies of Trump supporters, who, whether a strict majority or not, certainly number in the tens of millions. By seeming to call their views illegitimate, according to this argument, one only reinforces their well-earned feelings of rejection.

Psyche! Unfortunately Gopnik was only summarising all these arguments in order to explain why they're bad:

The trouble with these views, and what makes them cheery but false at best—or sinister or opportunistic at worst—is that they are deliberately blind to both the real nature of the man and the real nature of the threats he makes and the lies he tells. Many autocratic governments have built this road or won that war or engineered a realist foreign policy. They remain authoritarian and, therefore, fatally arbitrary. In a democracy, our procedures are our principles. Every tyrant does nice things for someone. You cannot be a friend to democracy while violating its norms—and when we say, “He violates democratic norms,” we undermine our own point, because “norm” is such a, well, normal word. In truth, what he violates by his statements are not mere norms but democratic principles so widely shared and so deeply important that “bedrock value” is closer to the mark than “democratic norm.”

Now, let's set aside for a moment the fact that this doesn't actually engage with any of the very reasonable arguments Gopnik claims to be debunking. Instead it just carries on asserting that Trump is a Benito rather than a blowhard, that he's too dangerous to be rational about, that to do anything except treat all Trump's actions as a step towards fascism is to risk losing forever our "bedrock principles"—which sort amounts to "but, like, he is just SO bad, okay?"

Let's set aside, too, the fact that in tying himself in knots to explain why Trump is so exceptionally evil, Gopnik ends up arguing, straight-faced, that Bush's lying about WMDs to justify the invasion of Iraq was just "normal fibs told by normal people." (Seriously! The real tragedy of the Trump presidency is that it's made Adam freakin' Gopnik say "Oh, the invasion of Iraq? Boys will be boys!")

No, I have a more philosophical (ontological? epistemological?) objection to Gopnik's argument: it's impossible for him to lose. If Trump does turn out to be the world's next fascist dictator, Gopnik can say, see, I told you so, we should have been more hysterical; if Trump goes through an undistinguished four years and then is peacefully booted in favour of a more conventional candidate in the next election, he can say, see, good thing we were so hysterical! That may be a boon rhetorically for him—and indeed anyone making the same argument—but it's a failure of the sort of rational thought that many people making the argument (including Gopnik, usually) profess to like.

The problem is, "Trump will destroy America unless we assume everything he does is intended to destroy America" is an opinion, not a fact, and certainly not an empirically testable fact. It's an opinion you're welcome to hold, but as an opinion it's not a valid reason to reject, if you'll pardon the lingo, the null hypothesis—namely, that Trump is just another in a long line of American presidents. He's a particularly vile American president, and so far he hasn't done anything to make me think otherwise. But that doesn't mean he's going to destroy America.

I bring up the null hypothesis because it, too, is a "bedrock value" in Western thought. It's baked right into our justice system: innocent until proven guilty. Gopnik implies that Trump being mad about a department store dropping his daughter's clothing line is evidence of a dictator-in-waiting, which I suppose ex post facto, if that ends up being the case, will look prescient—but good luck getting a conviction that way. That's why we hold jurists (and scientists) to a higher standard of evidence: it's not enough to find evidence suggesting your belief might be right; you have to find evidence demonstrating that the opposite belief (in this case, that Trump is not a fascist) is definitely wrong.

And for all the articles about Nordstrom, about Russia, about Bannon, about executive orders, I have yet to see a single piece of evidence that demonstrates, without a doubt, that Trump is not just another president that half the country didn't vote for. Again, I don't think he's a good president—but I also don't think that makes him a fascist, or even particularly worse than much of the extreme right has openly been now for quite some time. Major conservative figures have been undermining the "lamestream media" for years, and undermining "activist judges" for years, and talking about voter fraud for years, without the press or the judiciary or democracy collapsing. That Trump continues to parrot these things on Twitter doesn't prove anything. Blowhard until proven Benito.

But hey, I'm just some blogger; what do I know, compared to an intellectual heavyweight like Gopnik? So I'll let 2014 Gopnik have the last word:

On the very day of 9/11, one of the wisest men I’ve known said that the choice it would present for us would be between experiencing the attack as an imagery and experiencing it as an injury. If you allowed it to become imagery, running on perpetual loop in your mind (the planes exploding, the people leaping), you would never be past it. If you experienced it as an injury—a horrific one, but of specific dimensions and significance, a criminal atrocity rather than an intimation of apocalypse—you had a chance to go on. [...] His model of conduct came from a character like Ed Harris’s flight director in “Apollo 13.” Let’s work the problem, people. Let’s not make things worse by guessing. What had happened to the American habit of pragmatic appraisal and a refusal to panic?

Well, nowhere to be found, and still missing. In the contest of imagery versus injury, imagery won in straight sets—the specifics of the injury have been lost in floods of hysteria. If there is one worst moral casualty of the past decade and a half, it surely lies there: Americans have gone from being the hardest of peoples to panic to among the most easily panicked people on the planet. [...]

Terrorists have become skilled at manipulating the Western imagination. There is an easy explanation for why this is so—it is because they are themselves in so many ways Western. [...] [E]xposed to the humiliations they think visited on their faith and distressed by the uncertainties of an open society, [they] turn toward fundamentalism—not for its own sake, but as a weapon against the shaming other, who bewilders and enrages them. They create what amount to GIFs of this other’s helplessness.

2014 Gopnik is writing specifically about terrorist spectacle, of course, but the argument works just as well for the endless newsfeed images of ICE raids, of lawyers in airports filing emergency habeas corpus petitions, of Bannon lurking in the background of the Oval Office, of Republican controlled legislatures enacting draconian restrictions on abortion. Those images are stirring, yes, but they also obscure the extent of the original injury: a lost election; a travel ban, for that matter, facilely blocked within days by the very institutions that Gopnik claims are being eroded as we speak.

So if you feel besieged by 2017 Gopnik and the constant "evidence" that Trump is marching us towards dictatorship, take solace in 2014 Gopnik's sage closing advice:

Reprisal born of optical reflex may work out this time [...] but if it does it would be a rare thing. Wars provoked by pictures tend to begin in clear outlines and bright colors. Imperfection being the inevitable state of human projects, the imagery at the end is always blurred and bloody. This is a truth worth keeping present in our minds, even as it escapes our vision.

It's easy to say Trump is a one-of-a-kind evil, who will snuff out American democracy for good. Making that a political strategy is not likely to go well.

Taking the Low Road

2017-01-31T04:08:00.000-05:00

I've found myself on what I can most charitably call the unpopular side of most arguments about politics, lately. I like to tell myself it's because I'm being relentlessly reasonable, which may well be the title of my autobiography one day, but I expect to a certain degree that's self-rationalisation. Either way, the end result of that is that I usually come out saying "Trump isn't trying to create an authoritarian state," and "Trump voters aren't so bad," and you can no doubt understand why this is often the unpopular side of the argument when one runs, as I do, in social groups that tend towards the left of the political spectrum. Hell, I've been piled on so much the last few months I've begun to feel kind of gaslit myself by my liberal friends.

But look, we can disagree for the rest of time over whether the Trump presidency or his supporters are as bad as the worse predictions, so this time I won't ask you to come there with me. The thing is, though, successive Republican congresses and presidents have brought us closer and closer, each time, to the sort of political climate where Trump can get elected, and that matters, because like it or not half the electorate still voted for the increasingly conservative right. (Of course, Hillary got more votes than Trump, but Republican candidates for the house got more votes than Democratic ones, so I'm inclined to call it a draw.)

I say this not to defend or justify any specific Trump or Republican policy, but to point out that conservative policies, by and large, can't change and still be conservative, whereas any voter can in theory be persuaded to vote for the other side with the right tactics. You're welcome, of course, to dig your heels in and say that anyone who voted for Trump is an irredeemable asshole who could never be persuaded to do something as reasonable as voting for a left-wing candidate — but for my money, there's still more chance of changing a human mind than rewriting a political doctrine, so the former is where I choose to put my effort. And, to be clear, I choose to expend that effort not by, say, donating money to swing races so that increasingly left-wing candidates can attempt with greater amounts of increasingly left-wing campaign material to sway increasingly right-wing voters onto the right side of 50%, but by approaching the problem as, like I said, a human one rather than a political one.

This is around the time when people tell me I'm being naive, or normalising, or using the moral high ground as an excuse not to take real action. So let me be clear: I am not now nor more than very rarely taking the high ground about anything. (Read the rest of my blog; my wheelhouse is mainly dick jokes.) So when I say something like "the Trump presidency isn't so bad," or "Trump voters aren't so bad," or "let's give them a chance," it is purely, self-servingly, entirely because I want a left-wing candidate to win the next election. And I don't believe that will happen as long as the most vocal left-wing voters are the ones who think all Trump voters are idiots or Nazis or both.

That's because there is a large body of reliable and replicable social science research into the most effective (and ineffective) ways to persuade people to agree with your point of view, and though I should have thought some of these were self-evident, here's a quick list of the most widely accepted dos and don'ts:

Things that don't persuade people	Things that do persuade people
Calling someone a Nazi/idiot/fascist	Getting someone to make small-bordering-on-insignificant, incremental concessions to you (because each time someone takes your side, no matter how piddling the issue, they are more likely to take your side again in the future, and on bigger issues too).
Punching someone (*perhaps because you believe them to be a Nazi, perhaps not)	Modifying someone's "choice architecture" to make them more likely to choose what you want (e.g. Not "Do you think the president should protect our borders from Muslim terrorists?" but "Do you think the president should violate the fourth amendment and the Immigration and Nationality Act?")
Telling someone that they are unequivocally wrong about everything they believe in.	Telling someone that they clearly have valid reasons for holding their beliefs, thereby making them more likely to accept your compromise when you offer it. (*N.B. This might require the exercise of empathy to understand why someone would hold an opposing belief.)
Framing everything as nothing short of a cultural war in which there can only be one winner.	Making some concessions. People are more likely to do you a favour when they feel indebted to you. (N.B. This obviously cuts both ways, given my first point about concessions. That's good. The more everyone in the country feels indebted to each other, the less likely they are to kill each other. Science!)

I also want to take a minute to be clear about my units of analysis here. I am not saying anybody needs to make concessions to Steve Bannon or empathise with Donald Trump (though I am saying you shouldn't punch anyone, Nazi or not). To the extent that this kind of conflation is reasonable, I see Bannon and Trump as equivalent with "right-wing doctrine," and therefore largely unchangeable. I'm also not saying that their opponents shouldn't consider all legal recourse to stop Bannon and Trump implementing their doctrine. But neither doctrine nor Bannon nor Trump is interchangeable with the people who voted that way, and those are the people whose can still be persuaded to vote for someone else. Those are also the people who won't be persuaded to vote for someone else if we repeatedly force them to publicly defend their views by calling them Nazis and idiots. When you get someone to state a belief out loud, they are less likely to give up on that belief in the future.

As I mentioned at the beginning, I know this approach is unpopular. People are afraid that taking this kind of "soft" approach, instead of militancy, will only give the right more opportunity to press their advantage and drive us towards a new fascist dictatorship. I don't disagree that, in the context of government, that's true. But in the context of voters — and I'm going to keep drawing this distinction — it's not true. Look at same-sex marriage: it went from 27% approval in Gallup polling in 1996 to 53% in 2011. And yes, there were militant aspects to that movement, of course there were. But it also did a lot of the things above: it made incremental steps (civil unions in some states, repeal of DOMA, Obergefell); it changed the choice architecture (not "should gays be allowed to marry" but "should people who love each other be treated equally regardless of gender"); it expressed an understanding of the opposing side's beliefs ("we know you're afraid that this will destroy the institution of marriage, but that's not what we're trying to do"); and, crucially, it largely didn't frame the issue as about defeating a group of bigots.

So let me say it again: this isn't about taking the high ground. It's not even, jokes aside, about being relentlessly reasonable, except insofar as I think — and so do most of the most militant lefties I know, about most things, in most other circumstances — that the most reasonable and rational course of action is usually the most effective one. And let me say this again, too: you'll never make right-wing ideology left-wing. By definition it's impossible. But it is possible to make right-wing ideology less popular, and if everyone could focus a little more on changing minds and a little less on winning the culture wars, we might be able to do just that. If you want to persuade me otherwise, just remember: I'm not a Nazi.

On Trump, Normalising, and Bike Paths

2017-01-25T05:46:00.002-05:00

I had a somewhat delayed post-election epiphany about a bike path the other night that I feel like sharing, but before I do, full disclosure: I, perhaps like you, am pretty tired of hearing about Donald Trump. I thought I had Trump fatigue by the end of the campaign, but Jesus, back then seems breezy compared to the endless, over-wrought handwringing dragging down Facebook these days. What happened to the drunk pictures and stupid memes, guys?

Okay, I'm being glib. I get it. Donald Trump, on the evidence, has a number of character traits and apparent ideological positions and an overall air of dumbassedness that are unprecedented in modern presidential history (if you discount Nixon for the character traits and Reagan for the ideological positions and W. Bush for the dumbassedness, but yes, all three in one president is a first). Certainly, it's unsettling imagining the potential consequences of some of the things he might do. And no, I don't agree with the deft synecdoche most liberal pundits deploy by which Trump supporters = Trump = the return of the Nazi party, which strikes me as intellectually lazy and unnecessarily alarmist a lot of the time, but on his own merits I also don't expect Trump to shower himself in distinction as a commander-in-chief. That's why I didn't vote for him.

Still, I get tired of the doom and gloom. I remember the early years of Bush II, remember how fucking terrified I was, as a nineteen-year-old, by all the forecasts and prophecies about the first steps towards an authoritarian state, and the start of World War Three, and terrorist retaliation against the U.S. I was so terrified, in fact, that I did what a certain segment of the Democratic Party–voting U.S. population often threatens, and actually moved to Canada. After a few years, though, it became clear that none of those awful things were coming to pass, and to top it all off the same country then elected Obama, widely regarded as one of the most thoughtful, liberal, modernising presidents in recent times. Everything, it seemed, had turned out okay. And that's why I'm pretty sanguine about the actual prospects of a Trump presidency. I've heard these cries of wolf before.

This is the point where you accuse me of normalising. And yes, I'll cop to that, inasmuch as I am pointing out that a lot of the things Trump has done since taking office do reflect the norms of the presidency in the last fifteen years. His plans to restrict refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries? Actually less restrictive than what Bush II enacted in 2002. (It was called NSEERS, and was in effect until 2011. Look it up.) The Keystone Pipeline? I mean, come on guys. Obama didn't nix that until like literally three months ago, and if you recall even that took some cajoling. The ban on funding for global organisations that offer abortions? Bush II did that too. So did Bush I. So did Reagan. I'm not saying these are good things, or calling them norms in the prescriptive sense. But they are norms in the descriptive sense and that's worth acknowledging, because they're bigger than Trump and making it about him is counterproductive long-term.

All of this to say, sorry for adding to the weight of post-election armchair punditry, and sorry for normalising or whatever, but this epiphany, right?

So I'm walking home from the train station, along a poorly lit pavement near my building that is wide but perhaps not quite wide enough to be divided, as it is, into a half-and-half pedestrian walkway slash bike path. It's kind of a terrifying sidewalk, to be honest, and one I might avoid if it weren't the quickest route home. If you're crossing to it from the other side of the street, you have to navigate three lanes of traffic and then step immediately onto this bike path before you can get to your pedestrian sanctuary, and not a lot of effort has been put into making that fact obvious. There are no signs, there are only tiny little bike symbols painted onto the bike path at very long intervals, and the bike path itself just looks like part of a normal pavement. Yeah, it's got slightly different asphalt laid down, and there's a narrow concrete strip dividing bike path from footpath, but in the dark it all just looks like kind of a wonky pavement and let's be honest, if you're a London pedestrian you don't tend to notice that after a while because they're ALL wonky pavements.

But so I'm walking home, having successfully navigated these various dangers myself, and up ahead I see a lost old woman stop, on the pedestrian side of the pavement but right next to the divider. She looks to her left (away from the bike path), and realises that she is going the wrong way, and finally starts to turn around to the right — in a way, I have to emphasise, that is totally reasonable if you believe you're just standing in the middle of a normal pavement, and reckless only if you're aware that what you're doing is going to make you step directly into a commuter bike lane at rush hour.

Luckily, the cyclist careering towards her has also seen this coming and slams on the brakes and skids to a stop about two inches from her. He looks exasperated — but in a way, I again have to emphasise, that is totally reasonable if you've just shit your pants grinding your bike to a halt because you thought you were about to kill an old lady who wasn't watching where she was going. He doesn't say anything to her, but you can see it in his face, and she clearly can too, because she yells at him that she wasn't expecting him to be there, and at that point he finally yells back that, well, it is a cycle path, so she should probably pay more attention. And then they both just stand there smouldering at each other for a few seconds before he starts to ride off again. (It was a very British argument.)

And this was when I had my epiphany. Because both of those people had ample reason to be fucking furious at the other, right? The privileged young white man and the old black lady alike. No wonder they stood smouldering at each other for a while. He almost fucking killed her! She almost fucking caused an accident! How fucking stupid could he/she be?! They probably both went home and told their friends and family about the fucking moron who almost fucking sent both of them to hospital!

But let's face it: neither of them was really at fault. The problem was that goddamn bike path. And that suddenly struck me as a neat metaphor for the thing that has bothered me no end about the election's aftermath, about the campaign, and about politics in general in the United States ever since 9/11. Everyone is so busy painting the other side as imbeciles who are going to kill us all, that nobody is actually doing much about the real problems. You can keep signing and un-signing that executive order banning abortion funding as long as you like, but even restoring the funding doesn't really address the underlying cultural forces that mean women around the world get pregnant against their will way more than is acceptable. (i.e. at all.) You can also do and undo the Keystone Pipeline as much as you like, but at the end of the day, as long as the U.S. still needs this much oil, it has to come from somewhere and that means someone is going to get the shaft.

This is over-simplifying, okay. Of course it is. It's a fucking metaphor, that's the point. But it's still, I think, an instructive one. Do you know how many unrelated, disparate, piddling, unimportant decisions went into making that bike path the way it is? One bureaucrat had a bike path quota to meet and several other bureaucrats had lighting and road improvement budgets to slash, and all of them -- and indeed it sometimes seems the whole of my borough council -- were caught unprepared in general by the enormous push for gentrification in my neighbourhood over the last decade. And gentrification, of course, is a problem in itself, and one I'm a part of, but even that boils down to a lot of individual people making roughly the same, very reasonable calculation: I have a job in London, and I want to be able to get to and from that job to a house that I own and still have enough time left over after commuting to see my wife and/or husband and/or kid and/or friends. (For that matter, the fact that London is the place where so many people have to find work takes us onto another long history of once-reasonable decisions creating unintended consequences.) To claim that somehow all of that can be boiled down to "it's your fault for being on my side of the bike path" is, I hope we can all agree, also grossly over-simplifying.

To be clear, I'm still not saying we should restrict immigration or cut funding on the basis of abortion services or reinstate the Keystone Pipeline. What I am saying is that all of these issues are at the nexus of several much larger, much more complicated problems, most of which result from people with conflicting needs and beliefs making exquisitely rational decisions on the basis of those needs and beliefs over a long period of time, and in the process creating social forces that are much larger and more serious than the sum of their parts. And as easy and as satisfying as it might be to look at it all and say "fucking Trump, what a Nazi, just like anyone else who doesn't also say he's a Nazi," that not only won't address those larger issues (even assuming that calling anyone a Nazi is ever a good way to solve a problem), but it will actively make those issues harder to solve — because an issue like immigration across somewhat arbitrarily drawn national borders is not something you can definitively fix or unfix with a single executive order or act of congress or whatever. It requires long term cooperation and concerted effort of the sort that just doesn't happen in the current political climate.

So let's cool it with the new world order talk, okay? Don't forget that the right spent much of Obama's administration calling him an undercover fascist, and if you're on the left (and I assume you are if you're reading this) you probably switched off as soon as you heard someone suggest that. So what makes you think anyone on the right will take you seriously now that you're doing exactly the same thing to their guy? The validity or not of the accusation is irrelevant; it's basic psychology that nobody will want to cooperate with you or even listen to you if your starting point is likening them to the most notorious and murderous political movement in modern history. That doesn't mean you have to roll over and pretend everything Trump is proposing is okay. It doesn't mean you can't fight, vigorously, to fix what you see as the world's biggest problems.

But as long as we're all screaming at each other about who's on the wrong side of the bike path, we're never going to make anything better.

In Loving Memory

2016-10-11T18:16:00.000-04:00

A dear old friend of mine died today.

Beyond the obvious depressingness of that, I've also been depressed, since I found out, at how hard it's been coming up with a fitting way to commemorate him. It seems like all my ideas somehow revolve around posting something he wrote or did, or a photograph of him, or some other quote or image that captures what he meant to me. But never mind the difficulty in doing that for an eighty-five-year-old man who did all his best writing in private correspondence and avoided pictures and was so unique and encyclopaedic and indescribably good that some random internet epitaph could never do him justice anyway — he would have hated that sort of millennial social media dross. He liked depth. He saw the value in propriety, and tradition. Even in his most off-the-cuff emails, he wrote poetry in perfect meter if he thought the situation called for it. What would a stupid fucking GIF be to someone like that?

That's not to say he was a stubborn old fuddy-duddy. Sure, his emails had a lot of the same features as the ones you get from your grandparents — changing fonts, weird line breaks, that sort of thing — but he wasn't anti-change or anti-technology. He probably would have giggled at a lot of the GIFs I giggle at, too, come to that. He had a roomful of computers, and a digital camera he carried with him everywhere, and when his daughter got her PhD he exchanged half a dozen messages with me agonizing over the various different configurations of Windows and Mac computers he might buy her to mark the the occasion. (He even Googled reviews of them all, long before reviews likes that were easy to find on the internet, and certainly long before it ever occurred to me to do the same.)

But he also thought it was important to take time and care to express yourself clearly, to express yourself right, and I can't help feeling that so much of what I do to express myself these days wouldn't really meet his standards. I post pithy jokes on Facebook, and tweets that rely on so many levels of obscure pop-culture and twitterverse self-reference that even I look back sometimes and think, what the fuck was I going for there?

I use vulgarity too much as a shortcut for a certain kind of humorous tone.

I rush past words that I'm only 90% sure are correct instead of taking the time to look them up, even though the dictionary he bought me fifteen years ago is still sitting here on my desk, ready and willing. (Or I use lazy coinages like "depressingness" because, you know, dude, you understand what I'm going for, even though there's doubtless an existing word I could use that would do the trick much better.)

I use emoji. Emoji! Yeah, okay, show me all the research you like about how they actually increase intimacy between users and capture a lot of sophisticated meaning depending on their context. Send me a link to Buzzfeed's "Ten Best Famous Novels Retold In Emoji" if you think it will help. I get it. But don't tell me a smiling pile of poo is superior to a guy who takes the time to write you extemporaneous rhyming couplets just because he thinks you'll get a kick out of it.

Even when my cat died (and I loved that cat), my first reaction was to post a picture on Facebook accompanied by a reference to a TV show that was in turn referencing the cat's name, and a glib afterthought that we'd miss him. I only wrote the thoughtful blog post about it weeks later, and then only elsewhere and because I needed it for a publication credit. This is what the internet has reduced me to: shorthand and self-promotion.

Well not for you, Michael. You only get the blog post, and you only get it here, on my own blog, whose traffic, now that you're gone, has probably halved or disappeared altogether. I've tried to pay attention to language, like you always said I should, even though you won't be sending me an email in the morning to point out all my sloppy mistakes — but I've not tried too hard, either, because you always said I wrote best when I didn't. I've tried to express what you meant to me, not just in obnoxious, oblique ways but in clear, genuine, heartfelt ones too. And I know how much joy you took in describing yourself as my honorary godlessfather, so I won't make the twee suggestion that I hope you're appreciating all that with a smile, wherever you are. But I do hope that by some standard, somewhere, I've done good by you.

And now all that's been said, good grief,
Thank you, sir, and rest in peace.

In Which The Author Wonders How These People Find The Time To Actually Give A Shit About This Stuff

2016-07-13T18:10:00.003-04:00

Top ten sentiments ACTUALLY expressed by REAL PEOPLE at my building's shared ownership residents' meeting this evening.

IMPORTANT CONTEXT FOR NON-BRITISH READERS: In Britain, as in most places, and especially in London, there is a shortage of affordable housing. This shortage affects both the very poor, who can't even pay private market rent, and the middle-class, who can afford rent but have little hope of buying property. To solve both problems, the government legislated a class of housing called "shared ownership," whereby middle-class people can buy a portion of a home and pay heavily subsidised rent on the other portion. The catch is that these shared ownership homes are usually only given planning permission if they are built into new developments that also include social housing for the very poor. The result is "mixed-tenure" buildings like mine where the middle-class share with both the very poor and often, in cases where the building also offers private rent and private ownership apartments, the moderately rich—the idea being that the richer residents effectively subsidise the poorer ones, while the melting pot of so many people from different backgrounds living in close proximity fosters mutual understanding and greater social cohesion.

That idea, at least if tonight's meeting was anything to go by, is rather seriously over-optimistic. END CONTEXT.

And so, without further ado:

10. "I paid a lot of money for my parking space, and you're just giving them away to disabled people for free?"

9. "Who's responsible for the roof of the new 24-hour gym opening next door? Because my window looks out over it and I've noticed a lot of debris collecting up there already."

8. "I'm a public school teacher and I'm all in favour of inclusion and I don't want to sound like an elitist twat and I voted 'In' and all that, but if I'd known there were going to be so many social housing units in the building I would never have bought here. We're all new homeowners and I think I speak for the whole room when I say that frankly it's been a disappointing experience."

7. "I think the 24-hour gym will make the building safer, because it will be manned all the... Sorry, "manned" is a terrible word to use, isn't it? It will be staffed by people all the time."

6. "I know we've established that the people on the lower floors can't let their kids ride bikes around the common outdoor area... But my kid can, right? He's only little." (*NB ADDITIONAL CONTEXT: the social housing is on floors one to six, the shared ownership housing on floors seven and eight.)

5. "Somebody keeps leaving cotton buds in the stairwell."

4. "Is it safe to leave my bike in the bike storage locker? Do the social housing units have access to that?"

3. "I mean, that is just horrendous. I'm genuinely offended. How can anyone not recycle?"

2. "Can we get some kid-friendly signs in the bin storage room? Because a lot of the social housing families get their kids to take out the rubbish and they leave it in the wrong place."

1. [Collective gasp of delight at rumour that a coffee shop will be opening downstairs.]

I didn't make up a word of this folks. Not. A. Word.

It's Fine, We're Already Making More Whine Than Europe

2016-06-26T04:18:00.001-04:00

Dear sore losers,

1. You do not value diversity and condemn marginalization and exclusion above all else, because ever since the result you have been acting like people who think differently from you (i.e. Leave voters) are ruining the country. That is by definition marginalization.

2. The younger generation was not defrauded, or screwed over by their parents and grandparents. Younger people were half as likely to vote in the last general election, despite the unambiguous promise of an EU referendum if the Conservatives were elected. We screwed over ourselves a year ago when we let that happen.

3. It doesn't matter if a petition for a new referendum gets 1 million signatures or 2 million or even 18 million (i.e. more than the number of Leave voters). That is not how elections work. You ask the country once and then accept the outcome. In this case, the outcome was that more people wanted to leave. I cannot stress that enough. This was a democratic decision by the eligible voting population. Just because you don't agree doesn't mean you get a do-over. This is why older people think millennials have a sense of entitlement.

4. All Leave voters are not bigots, idiots, trolls, etc. Most of them just aren't happy with the status quo and are using the enfranchisement granted them by our democratic system of government to try and change the status quo. The complete failure of remain voters to understand that (a) not everyone has a cosmopolitan life in London, (b) not everyone wants a cosmopolitan life in London and (c) the above doesn't make someone an ogre, is part of the reason the leave campaign had so much traction.

5. Leaving the EU is not an irreparable disaster for the country. If you could stop complaining about having lost and start talking about how to ensure an out Britain will continue to reflect the cosmopolitan values you care about so much, a lot of things won't have to change at all.

Sincerely,

A FELLOW REMAIN VOTER who is TIRED OF YOUR DAMN BELLYACHING ALREADY

Your Brexit Questions Answered

2016-06-24T04:42:00.001-04:00

After Britain's vote to leave the EU, some members of the public are understandably worried about the consequences for their day-to-day lives. This guide covers some of the most frequently asked questions.

1. Can I still eat hummus? Yes.

2. Can Scotland qualify for Euro 2020 now? Absolutely not.

3. Oh shit. Is my cleaner an EU citizen? Probably.

4. Is this how Nazi Germany started? No. They had better sausages, for one thing.

5. Can I still get shitfaced and trash my Ibiza/Mallorca/Cyprus/Alicante hotel room? Yes, but it will cost more and you might need to pay for travel insurance if you still want your stomach pumped afterwards.

6. Is Donald Trump king of England now? No.

7. When are they going to let David Dimbleby go to bed? Hopefully soon.

8. What if other countries now hold their own referenda? At least we'll have a lot of good pun opportunities.

9. Can I sweepingly write off the 17 million people who voted leave as stupid bigots who won't even try to be inclusive or sympathetic? Sure, if you like irony!

10. Are you totally sure about the hummus thing? Yes.

Meanwhile, In The Ivies

2016-04-10T12:22:00.001-04:00

Today I would like to take my quarterly break from Total Blog Silence to talk about this story from The Harvard Crimson: Berries Sour Debate Over UC Funding

On Sunday, Freshman Class Committee Treasurer Scott Xiao ’19 introduced legislation to appropriate $850 to Harvard University Dining Services for a “Berry Brain Break” on Tuesday, as part of this week’s Freshman Health Project. The legislation proposed funding an assortment of strawberries, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries to feed about 400 students.

“Our constituents say they want to see berries at our enhanced brain break,” Xiao said.

I'm sorry, a "Brain Break"? Way to bury the lede. The headline for this whole story should really be "Harvard students find way to make even snacking sound fucking lame."

But apparently not all on the Undergraduate Council were convinced that spending two thirds of one credit hour of undergraduate tuition on some berries was such a good idea.

Oak Yard representative Olu Oisaghie ’19 called such an allotment “irresponsible.”

Leverett House representative Jullian A. Duran ’18 said “there are definitely other foods that are healthy that don’t cost $850.”

“This didn’t feel like the best appropriation of money,” Oak Yard representative Nicholas D. Boucher ’19 said at the meeting, explaining his opposition to the berry bill when the Freshman Class Committee debated it.

To be honest, I feel like the real headline here should be: "Harvard doesn't already serve berries to students." Like, really? What kind of place can charge $63,000 per year per student and then turn around with a straight face and say "ooooooh, berries? IDK, seems kind of pricey." At $15,000 per student in room and board each year, they should have berries pouring from faucets all over campus on demand.

Some representatives pointed to survey results that indicated that berries were popular among freshmen and argued that the committee still had close to $2,000 in its budget remaining for the rest of the school year.

Others, however, were not sold on the alleged popularity of berries.

“I hear people talking about how a lot of their constituents are so excited to have berries at brain break. I’m not sure we have the same constituents,” Oisaghie said.

DON'T YOU SEE HOW YOUR FAILURE TO SERVE BERRIES IS DIVIDING THE LEADERS OF TOMORROW? NO WONDER PARTISANSHIP IS SO RIFE IN ~~INDIAN~~ ~~CHINESE~~ AMERICAN POLITICS!

Speaking of making even snacking sound lame, how about we wrap up this debate with pretty much the nerdiest Harvard kid quote we can find?

Winthrop House representative Vimal S. Konduri ’17, a Crimson news editor, said that “technically, there are berries at every brain break, because botanically, bananas are berries.”

*slow clap*

Anyway, spoiler alert, the student council ultimately voted in favour of the berry spending bill, only to have the School of Public Health step in and offer to pick up the tab anyway. And in the event:

Hundreds of freshmen crowded Annenberg Hall to enjoy an assortment of strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries during Tuesday’s Brain Break, but some...

...were left with just sour grapes.

“There were a bunch of people who took two bowls so that they could get as many berries as they could,” Catherine Y. Zhang ’19 said. “I’m pretty sure there were some people who brought tupperware.” [...] Though the event was scheduled to last from 9:15 p.m. to 11:15 p.m., all the berries had been consumed by 9:40. [...]

“I wish there was a more sustainable solution for students to get berries as opposed to one day for one hour,” Deepika S. Kurup ’19 said.

I mean, seriously, how expensive can it possibly be to buy a couple of punnets of strawberries every now and then? You'd think these kids had never seen a piece of fruit before.

Finally, the interview scoop that every journalist reporting on a story like this dreams of getting:

Katie C. BERRY ’19 was one of many students who arrived after all of the berries had disappeared, and said she was “devastated.”

“I was looking forward to having some berries, but there was nothing for me," Berry said.

I take it back. This is really what I'd call...

...berrying the lede.

Things Andrew Can't Believe Today, In No Particular Order

2015-12-07T19:26:00.000-05:00

1. America is a real place.

2. Brooklyn Beckham is old enough to leave school.

3. No, really. America is a real place?

4. The lengths people will go to get a ticket for a free event.

5. Seriously, though. You're kidding, right?

6. There was an episode of House about SARS.

7. I got nominated for a Pushcart Prize!

8. Just the general pervasiveness of a sense of entitlement in the world.

9. How important a single bridge can be.

10. ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME?

Rat Race

2015-11-13T03:58:00.004-05:00

I would like to begin by acknowledging the obvious irony in me, a white man, saying the following:

WHITE MEN ARE THE FUCKING WORST.

Of course, you know, I'm a liberal guy with a sociology degree. I've always known in the abstract that white men are awful. But having taken a commuter train from central London home yesterday with my six-week-old baby (context: I had a baby six weeks ago), I now understand far more viscerally just what colossal cuntbags white men can be.

I would like to pause to acknowledge the obvious truth that sweeping generalisations about any group of people based on their gender and/or race are by necessity not accurate for every person belonging to that group. Though I think white men can handle it.

More than any other kind of person with whom I came into contact last night, white men were far more likely to (a) fail to acknowledge the existence of another person trying to wrestle a large pram through commuter pedestrian traffic on a narrow pavement; (b) (on a related point) cut me off, especially with their own LARGE FUCKING SUITCASES; (c) just stand in the fucking way because they were too engrossed in their own newspaper/smartphone/wet dream to pay any attention to the world outside their own soma. Once I finally got on my train, parking my pram in the doorwell because there was nowhere else to put it, some dude in a suit proceeded to stand next to me and block the other half of the door for the rest of the journey reading his goddamn broadsheet, even when the train stopped at the next station and people needed to, you know, get off. That's right: the person standing reading a newspaper didn't move a fucking inch, so that the person standing with a pram had to awkwardly squeeze around said pram to make even half a channel through which other passengers could get off, and through which many of them had no choice but to jostle the sleeping baby while squeezing out the door.

I would like to pause once more, by the way, to acknowledge the perhaps less obvious but no less important truth that, in the business district in central London, the sample is heavily biased towards incredibly egocentric assholes who wear suits and read broadsheets on busy trains, and also that this population self-selects heavily for white men — and so the fact that I observed a lot of white men acting like douchebags last night doesn't in itself prove as much about white men in general as it does about rich pricks in central London. Then again, the two black dudes in the doorwell on the same train immediately offered to move, and the white woman who had to jostle my sleeping baby on her way out apologised to ME, even though I was more (inextricably) in her way than anyone.

(And if I could just digress from this digression, I would also like to once more acknowledge my own inherent privilege as a white man and wonder what might have been different about all of the above interactions had I been, say, an Indian woman. Other than the fact that my book would be a few spots to the left on the general fiction shelf and I would have won the fucking Pulitzer already, perhaps white asshole would have moved; perhaps polite black dudes wouldn't have; perhaps apologetic white woman would have silently glared at me. Identity politics, amirite?)

When I did get to my station, by the way, in marginally more suburban London, two white dudes did offer to help me get the pram off the train and over the particular large gap beside the platform — so maybe it really is more about rich pricks than white men. But then again, show me that Venn diagram and I'll show you a guy with a pram and a chip on his shoulder.

Get Your BAPs Out

2015-09-09T04:10:00.001-04:00

If you're one of those people who likes to keep on top of the latest poetry controversies (and who isn't!), you might be having conflicted feelings right now about Yi-Fen Chou, aka Michael Derrick Hudson, aka some white dude who occasionally submits poems using an Asian nom de plume in order to increase his chances of getting published, and who was (un?)lucky enough to have one of those pseudonymous poems picked for Best American Poetry this year (by a Native American, just to really throw a racial politics spanner in the works), thereby catapulting him into the realm of internet infamy.

But did Hudson actually do anything wrong? And who is allowed to say so? And does agreeing/disagreeing with other white/Asian people on the topic make me racist/enlightened myself? These are the questions that observers have been endlessly, hand-wringingly asking about the affair for several days now—so to try and set everyone's mind at ease, I present here a handy Guide to Calibrating Your Moral Outrage:

SCENARIO: Asian Poet Is Published In Prestigious Publication

QUESTIONS TO ASK:

1. Was he actually Asian?
YES: Great! No moral outrage necessary
NO: WTF? Go to 2.

2. But at least he was non-white, right?
YES: Phew! Let's talk about hierarchies of oppression.
NO: WTF? Go to 3.

3. Did he actually pretend to be Asian beyond using an Asian name?
YES: Probably safe to commence moral outrage. (See supplementary guide 37A: How Racist Is My Impression of an Asian Person?)
NO: Hmm. Go to 4.

4. Was he submitting to a publication reserved exclusively for Asian authors, or one that privileges Asian authors over non-Asian ones?
YES: That's pretty messed up. Commence moral outrage.
NO, he was submitting to the literary journal at the University of fucking Nebraska: Go to 5.

5. Did he self-identify as Asian?
YES: Good point. Who said he was a ciswhite man anyway? Let him be whoever he wants to be.
NO: Go to 6.

6. Wait, was he even a man?
YES: Great! Let's talk about intersectionality.
NO: Fuck it, let's talk about intersectionality anyway.

7. Did the person selecting the poem look at the author's name ahead of time?
YES: Commence moral outrage. (I think?)
NO: Jeez, is it getting hot in here or is it just me?

8. Was the poem selected by another Asian?
YES: Was it? Or was it someone pretending to be an Asian? Go to 1.
NO: Go to 9.

9. Was his poem selected by another person of colour?
YES: Wait, can I say "person of colour"?
NO: Of course it wasn't, because the chances of a person of colour being in a position of power in the publishing industry are offensively small. Unless we're talking about Sherman Alexie or Roxane Gay or Ta-Nehisi Coates.

10. Wait, are we talking about Sherman Alexie or Roxane Gay or Ta-Nehisi Coates?
YES: To Twitter!
NO: Toni Morrison?

11. Did the person selecting the poem realise it was actually written by a white dude?
YES: Go to 10.
NO: Go to 12.

12. Did the person selecting the poem not initially realise it was actually written by a white dude but then found out and decided to publish it anyway?
YES: He was probably TOO FUCKING EXHAUSTED TO WORRY ABOUT IT ANY MORE.
NO: Great! The system works.

13. Has anyone thought about the fact that some poet felt so strongly about getting his work into print that he was willing to submit it with a pseudonym that he could never credibly or noncontroversially take ownership of?
YES: Poignant, huh?
NO: Oh, boo-hoo, the white man's burden.

14. Was the poem so irredeemably shitty that it would never have been published if the author didn't have an Asian name?
YES: Commence artistic outrage. (Unless... Did we decide whether he was actually Asian? Because this is a pretty dicey statement otherwise.)
NO: Great! The system works.

15. Isn't there some major humanitarian crisis happening in Europe right now?
YES: But fucking poetry, man.
NO: Great! The system works.

And Other Katy Perry Songs

2015-04-30T03:48:00.003-04:00

Here are some statistics about my night at the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award Benefit on Monday:

Drinks I had to calm down before the event: 3

Additional drinks I told myself I would have before announcement of award, in case I had to get up on stage and talk: 0

Seconds of deliberation between being offered free champagne on arrival and accepting: 2.21

Unintentionally insulting comments made to fellow nominee Ben Lerner: 1

Times Ethan Hawke manhandled me into position for a photograph: 2

(*Unrelated) times I said "Thank you" to Ethan Hawke: 2

Times I met Jenny Slate without realising it was Jenny Slate: 1

Times I thought "oh shit, that was Jenny SLATE": 1 (at least)

Embarrassed flinches at awkward phrasing while listening to actor Vincent Piazza read my work: 6

Moments during said reading when I thought "what do I know this guy from, he looks so familiar?": 16

Times I IMDB'ed him afterwards: 2

Things I've actually seen him in: 0

So why did he look so damn familiar?: beats me

Times I said "Thank you again" to Ethan Hawke: 1

Times I saw winner Molly Antopol and considered stopping her to tell her (genuinely) how much I enjoyed her book and that I thought she far and away deserved to win: 5

Times I actually talked to Molly Antopol: 0

Mini tacos I ate while continuing to drink at after party: SHUT UP I'LL TELL YOU WHEN I'VE HAD ENOUGH

Liquor stores I attempted to go to on way back to hotel: 3

Bottles of "Vineyard Creek" wine-based beverage I considered buying at Duane Reade: 0

Bottles of overpriced hotel wine I bought instead: 1

Glasses of wine anybody else actually wanted: 0

Times I would do it all again: ∞

Breaking: Earning Less Than Similarly Qualified Men Just A Bunch Of Whining Too

2015-04-04T17:33:00.002-04:00

Last October, researchers at the Open University of Israel published the results of a study investigating the factors influencing how women recall the pain of labour. According to their rather dry abstract:

We found that despite the exceptional physical and emotional experiences of childbirth, the memory of the pain involved in labor was biased toward the average of the peak pain and the end pain, whereas the duration of the delivery had a relatively negligible effect on the recollected intensity of pain.... [Our analysis] corroborated previous findings that the level of pain toward the end of an experience greatly influences the way the overall experience is remembered.

The study was picked up by science journalism clearinghouse EurekAlert, who glossed it quite reasonably thus:

Memories of pain during childbirth tied to intensity rather than length of labor

Childbirth is physically intense and, for many women, it is the most painful experience they will have. And yet, new research shows that the amount of time a woman spends in labor doesn't seem to impact how she remembers her labor pain afterwards.

EurekAlert also explains the theory underpinning the experiment:

The idea that we tend to remember an experience as a joint product of peak point and end point of the experience while ignoring all other parts is well known to researchers, dubbed the "peak-end bias," but it has primarily been tested in lab settings using relatively brief experiments. Thus, it remained unclear as to whether the peak-end bias would apply to real life events.

So, there you have it. A couple of psychologists found a clever way to test in a real-life situation a phenomenon that has frequently been observed in lab tests.

Say, how did the press pick this up, anyway?

Study says child birth pain not as painful as women claim

That's right, folks. The take-home for the (male?) junior staff writer whose (female?) editor handed him the science beat this week was: why bitches always gotsta be complainin', man?

Okay, junior staff writer. Let's see how else you can completely botch this.

The researchers then called the moms twice, two days after birth and again two months later... The results show the women rated the process less painful two days after their delivery than they did when the researchers asked them again two months later.

According to the researchers, they conclude that moms are likely to forget all the points during labor that aren't quite as painful and just focus on the moments that were the most painful.

PEOPLE. Not "moms." PEOPLE. If a dude gets kicked eight times and one of those times happens to be in the nuts, he'll probably remember the whole experience as pretty freakin' painful. You'd never tell him he was probably recalling it as worse than it was. Jesus. If you'll permit a moment of angry feminist ranting, this is pure patriarchal devaluing-the-experiences-of-women bullshit.

It's also, maybe, a case of an idiot being put in charge of science writing, because...

The reason for the study? To determine if an epidural is helpful for moms.

He Was A Featherweight

2015-03-13T04:51:00.000-04:00

From the Glasgow Herald: Edinburgh Zoo urged to cancel "party" nights after Peta claims bird punched at similar event at another zoo

The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) [has reassured] People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) there will be no "drunken atmosphere" at evenings at Edinburgh Zoo after claims similar night events at another zoo led to one visitor trying to pour beer over a tiger and another accidentally punching a bird.

I say if you're the sort of person who wants to pour beer over a tiger, you should go for it and reap what you sow. But punching a bird? That's a chickenshit move. The guy probably winged it afterwards, too.

A spokeswoman for the RZSS said the events attract people who may not normally visit a zoo who learn about endangered species and how to help.

Step one: DON'T PUNCH THE ANIMALS.

At similar recent events at the London Zoo, one person reportedly tried to pour beer on a tiger, another allegedly attempted to undress and enter the enclosure that held penguins and another fell and 'accidentally' punched a bird, among other incidents... [But] London Zoo was reported as saying earlier that its "Zoo Lates" evenings were safe and that only three people had been removed from events in two years.

I wonder which three people, right?

Edinburgh Zoo said that alcohol will be available at its Zoo Nights which are to be held over four nights in the summer but that entertainers and bars are situated away from the animals.

Funny, because usually zoos put their animals behind the bars SPLABANGO!

Willy Jokes

2015-03-06T19:08:00.001-05:00

From The Scotsman: Hidden in the Clinton painting

[In] an interview which the American portrait painter Nelson Shanks gave to the Philadelphia Daily News... he admitted to slipping a secret image into the portrait he painted for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC of President Bill Clinton.

He said: “Clinton was hard."

I'll bet.

A Further Open Letter to Andrew Ladd

2015-02-25T17:28:00.002-05:00

Dear Andrew Ladd,

Hi there. Sorry it's been a while. I've been pretty busy, I guess; I moved to London; I published my book in the U.K. (to some great reviews, incidentally); and I got shortlisted for the New York Public Library's Young Lions fiction award. If you'll pardon the hubris, it's been a pretty great year.

But anyway. I gather, as always, from my Google Alerts, that you've been busy too. You've signed some pucks. You've scored a lot of goals. You've been called for a lot of fouls. And last week, I notice, you visited a school to promote the Winnipeg Jets' children's book, The Home Team, as part of "I Love To Read Month."

Now look here, Andrew Ladd. Getting kids excited about reading is great. I'm on board with that. Kids who get excited about reading today are my meal ticket tomorrow. But dude, COME ON. It's already hard enough for me to get noticed as an author above the constant flood of news about you and your already very successful hockey career. (And now I have this jackass to contend with as well.)

So why did you have to go and start attaching yourself to books and plugging them in libraries, too? You don't catch me slapping pucks around the ice for the cameras, do you? That's your thing, and I respect you for it. So is it really too much to ask that you extend me the same courtesy?

I guess I wouldn't be so cheesed off about this, Andrew Ladd, if you hadn't so studiously ignored my book all these months. After I tried tweeting you about it, and I wrote you all these open letters, and then tweets about ME started accidentally showing up in sports website feeds about YOU, I figured you would have to be just a little bit interested. We may not have met, may never meet, and sharing a name may not mean all that much to either of us. But it's SOMETHING, right? It's a reason to at least say, hey, millions of people who hang on my every word and step, check out this book by this other Andrew Ladd. Maybe it doesn't suck.

When still I didn't hear a peep, though, I resigned myself to the thought that, okay, maybe he just care about books all that much. And now I find out that all this time you've been holding out on me? That you've got no qualms about promoting other people's books in public forums, and yet you can't even throw me one fricking bone?

Anyway, Andrew Ladd. It's still "I Love To Read Month," after all, so maybe it's not too late. Maybe now, just once, just a little, you can tell your adult fans to check out my book. And if not, well, shucks. I guess I'll just have to dig out those ice skates and come down to the MTS Centre after all, and see how YOU like it.

Yours, despite everything, in homonymery.

Andrew Ladd

Clooney Would Actually Make This Film, Too

2015-02-13T03:34:00.001-05:00

From BBC News: Al Jazeera journalists Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed freed

Al Jazeera journalists Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohammed have left prison in Egypt following their release on bail.

They spent more than a year behind bars. On Thursday a court ordered their release pending a retrial this month.

They are accused of spreading false information and helping the banned Muslim Brotherhood.

In the film version of their story, Baher Mohamed will be played by George Clooney circa E.R.

The trial is due to resume later this month.

The Defense Calls Pepé Le Pew

2015-02-10T16:17:00.002-05:00

From the New York Times: Strauss-Kahn Expected to Defend Legality of Lust at Trial

LILLE, France — Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund who is accused of participating in a global sex ring, was expected to testify on Tuesday to present a novel defense: There is nothing criminal about lust.

I believe the full argument he's presenting to the French court is: "Ma cherie, zere is nussing criminal about lust, hein?" And if you think I'm just unfairly stereotyping the French, here's an actual quote from Strauss-Kahn's lawyer, Henri Leclerc:

“I dare you to distinguish between a prostitute and a naked socialite.”

They used to say the same thing about Mitzy Goldfarb from East 73rd.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a high-flying former finance minister once seen as a leading contender for the French presidency, stands accused with 13 other defendants of pimping...

Mr. Strauss-Kahn has thus far been a stoic and elusive figure in the courtroom, arriving at the courthouse in a car with dark tinted windows.

Pro-tip, Dominique: if you're trying to convince people you're NOT a pimp, maybe ditch the car with tinted windows.

He has acknowledged being present at sex parties. But his defense team has said he played no part in organizing them and has insisted he was not aware that some of the women at the parties were prostitutes because they were all naked by the time he arrived...

Gee, officer! I just figured those gals musta been real hot!

[In more recent testimony] he said he might have been naïve about why the young women were there.

Annoyingly, the Times has been continuously updating the same page all day as the story has developed, so you can no longer find most of the excerpts I quote here in the link I provide above. (N.B. It is annoying that they are updating the same page rather than posting new iterations of the story on different pages. It is not annoying that they are continuing to practice journalism as new details emerge.) However, to prove I am not making this shit up, you can helpfully read all past versions of the story here.

And now, Dom, take us home. What's the Frenchest excuse you can come up with for all this?

Mr. Strauss-Kahn characterized the sex parties as libertinage, or freewheeling sex and pleasure among multiple and consensual partners, an age-old and legal practice in France dating from the 16th century.

And...?

He said that the festive nature of libertinage would have been sullied had he known that the women were being paid for sex.

"Bwuh, mais non! It would be like aving foie gras after being told ze geese were force fed! Quoi?"

The trial continues.

In Which The Author Appreciates Why Amazon Might Sometimes Be Not So Bad, or, Why British People Can't Go Anywhere

2014-12-11T18:17:00.002-05:00

Two months ago I wrapped up Conversations With Greatness, which for the last two years has been pretty much the only regular content on this blog. The plan was to start putting the time I'd been spending on CWG into actually writing on the blog more frequently, but this hasn't happened because my timing was terrible; in November I drove up to Edinburgh for my second festival of the year here, Edinburgh's Christmas, and since then I have pretty much not had time to do anything except Edinburgh's Christmas. (Also, eat sausages. Because I also haven't had time to buy food most days, except from the German market stalls on site.)

Another thing I haven't had time to do since Edinburgh's Christmas started is go to the bookstore, to do a favour for a friend back in London who wants to give a signed copy of my book to someone for a Christmas gift. (Side note: this is probably the best idea for a Christmas gift you will come across this year. It's certainly the best one I've ever heard in my life.) Since he's still in London and I'm in Edinburgh, it seemed like the easiest thing to do would be for me to buy one here to sign and send, and get reimbursed later. So today, two weeks after promising to do so, off I went to the Waterstones on Princes Street.

I picked this Waterstones specifically, because my book was listed as in stock on their website, so I figured I wouldn't have to awkwardly ask someone if they had my own book. (As an added element of shame, Alexander McCall Smith was just leaving when I got there, having spent the evening signing copies of his book that OTHER PEOPLE were buying.) But when I went searching for my book it was neither in the Scottish Fiction section where it has previously been shelved in this store (because I've checked, because I have a sad authorly existence), nor was it in the general fiction section. So there went my ingenious plan...

ME: This is embarrassing, but... I need to buy a copy of my own book, and I can't find it.

KINDLY SCOTTISH BOOKSTORE CLERK: Oh dear! What's your name?

ME [wondering what sort of tone adequately expresses "I don't expect you to know my name"]: Andrew Ladd.

KSBC: Okay... [taps at keyboard; frowns] What Ends, is it?

ME: That's the one.

KSBC: Is it... Scottish Fiction?

ME: Yes, but I checked there already and couldn't find it.

KSBC: Well, you should probably look upstairs in general fiction then. I expect it's been mis-shelved.

ME [knowing full well that it is not in general fiction, because I have already checked there too, but not wanting KSBC to feel unhelpful]: Oh, okay. Thank you.

I then went upstairs and pretended to check in general fiction again, considered asking another clerk but suddenly realised I didn't want to be the guy in the bookstore telling every employee I was an author, and finally returned downstairs to check the Scottish fiction section again, causing KSBC to cast a concerned glance in my direction from the till. After another few seconds exaggeratedly looking at the shelves for his benefit, I walked back over to him.

KSBC: Still no luck?

ME: No. Sorry.

KSBC [motioning to the clerk beside him]: Well, if you wait a second and ask my colleague, he'll probably be able to help. He's in charge of the Scottish Fiction section.

...a few moments pass...

GUY IN CHARGE OF SCOTTISH FICTION SECTION: So what was it you were looking for?

ME [now more self-conscious than ever about being the guy mentioning he's an author to every bookstore employee he sees]: It's, uh... What Ends. The book is called What Ends.

GICOSFS: Is there a question mark after that?

ME: No.

GICOSFS: Hmm. It says it's in stock. I know I've seen it. Weird.

ME [now regretting not telling him I'm the author in case KSBC has already mentioned it]: [nervous chuckle]

GICOSFS: Oh, hang on. It says it's in stock because it just came in this morning. I'll have to go get it from the back.

GICOSFS proceeded to disappear for what was probably five minutes but felt like fifteen. At one point I saw him leave the back room he had gone into and disappear into an elevator. I didn't even know this bookstore had an elevator. It was taking him so long I was really starting to regret not telling him I was the author, because if he thought I was just a normal customer this was probably no big deal, but if KSBC had mentioned it then GICOSFS was probably thinking, Jesus, who is this jackass who's sending me on a wild goose chase ten minutes before closing time to find him a copy of his own goddamn book, and won't even own up to it?

At last he reappeared clutching a copy of my book, and took me back to the till to pay. By this point I was kind of hoping that when I handed over my card he would notice my name and we could have a good laugh about it, so that I wouldn't leave with him still thinking I was jackass (or, worse, with me wondering if he thought I was a jackass)—but in the end he barely even looked at it. Then he gave me two extra stamps on my loyalty card, which he said was for "being so patient," and I was on my way.

Anyway, if you're reading, Guy In Charge Of Scottish Fiction Section at the Waterstones West End in Edinburgh: sorry if you thought I was a jackass. And thank you for being so helpful.

Burying the Hachette

2014-11-13T18:19:00.001-05:00

From NYTimes.com: Amazon and Hachette Resolve Dispute

Amazon and Hachette announced Thursday that they had resolved their differences and signed a new multiyear contract, bringing an official end to a publishing dispute that blossomed into a major cultural and business brawl.

In an excruciating PR exercise that both companies realised was increasingly necessary, given how much money they were both losing and how petty it was starting to seem to even the most passionate observers on both sides, they expressed their satisfaction with the terms of their new agreement in breathtakingly vague, whitewashed pleasantries.

“This is great news for writers,” Michael Pietsch, Hachette’s chief executive, said in a statement. An Amazon executive, David Naggar, said Amazon was “pleased with this new agreement." [...] Neither Amazon nor Hachette would comment beyond their statements.

But the authors whose hackles were raised during the months-long negotiations are less sanguine.

“I’m relieved that Amazon and Hachette reached an agreement,” Mr. Preston [founder of Authors United, an organisation formed in response to the negotiations] said. But, he added: “If anyone thinks this is over, they are deluding themselves. Amazon covets market share the way Napoleon coveted territory.”

Mr Preston added. "I dunno, does that analogy seem forced? I feel like it seems forced. Time to kill some darlings!"

Authors United and the Authors Guild are in the midst of writing a lengthy letter to the Justice Department.

Of COURSE they are. I'd love to be a fly on the wall in that meeting.

AUTHOR 1: "Frankly, we are shocked and appalled that the government would stand by while an organisation like Amazon, whose business model alone seems sometimes to verge on antitrust, dismantles the publishing industry."

AUTHOR 2: Dismantles? Demolishes? Decimates.

AUTHOR 1: Decimates is a little melodramatic, don't you think?

AUTHOR 2: You can talk. You covet melodrama like Napoleon coveted territory.

AUTHOR 1: That analogy seems forced.

AUTHOR 2: YOU seem forced.

AUTHOR 1: I mean, why not go with Genghis Khan? Hitler? Napoleon feels awfully bland, really.

AUTHOR 3: I wrote a prologue to this preamble if someone wants to take a look!

N.B. I will still gladly accept a publishing deal with Hachette. Call me, Pietsch!

Correction of the Week

2014-10-28T19:04:00.002-04:00

Seen on this HuffPo article about a man at Dallas airport who started trying to beat up another guy while yelling homophobic slurs:

Update: An earlier version of this story noted that Wonkette.com had reported actor Paul Rudd was part of the group that took down the homophobic bully. However, it apparently was not Rudd.

I have no idea whether the man being beaten up was actually gay, by the way. He also appears to first provoke the (drunk?) man by taking pictures of him with his phone. But the "reporting" here leaves a little to be desired, so it's hard to say. Probably because the newsgathering went like this:

HUFFPO CONTRIBUTOR: Okay, time to get to the bottom of what really happened he—OH MY GOD IS THAT PAUL RUDD? [*files report*]

Please bear with me as I (hopefully) ease back into blogging more regularly.

Epizztemology

2014-10-25T11:38:00.002-04:00

Got the following through my letterbox last night:

They bill themselves as a "noodle and pizza house" so I guess the "noodle" part is as in, "you will have to use your noodle to figure out just what the heck we're talking about."

It's Hard to Keitel the Difference

2014-10-24T05:01:00.001-04:00

Has anyone else noticed the striking resemblance between Academy Award–nominated actor Harvey Keitel, and the exiled first President of Lithuania Antanas Smetona?

Also, the Lithuanian Vikipedija entry on Smetona is suspiciously short compared to the English Wikipedia one.

Also also, the name of Smetona's prime minister was basically Lord Volemort.

Finished With Greatness

2014-10-21T04:07:00.000-04:00

Several people have remarked to me over the past year that the overarching storyline in Conversations With Greatness since January or so—Karl Marx fading into obscurity—had a swan song–ish quality to it. And, indeed, those same people (and other regular readers) can't have failed to notice that the comic strip went quietly into the night two weeks ago. It was almost exactly ten years since the very first instalment appeared.

Back then, I was starting my second year of a sociology degree at McGill—my fourth year of university overall—and my friends found Conversations With Greatness cool in the overwhelmingly enthusiastic, you're-going-to-change-the-world way that only college students can really find things cool. (What happened to us, guys?) It was probably thanks to their encouragement that I kept it up, or in any event that I kept it up beyond, say, the first twenty or thirty strips, when it inevitably began to require more effort beyond the obvious jokes.

Then, a week or two shy of the two-year anniversary of the strip, I moved to London and took a job at an investment bank. This probably would have been a natural time to wind things down, between my first 9-to-5 and my new improv group and my capoeira classes. Certainly my new friends at the bank, while really lovely people, were not reading my web comic about the father of socialism. But the old Montreal crowd had a remarkably robust online presence back then, and I continued to blush at their enthusiasm, so I kept it chugging away.

Within a few more months I'd been accepted to grad school, so just a month or two shy of the three-year anniversary of the strip, I moved back to Boston and was plunged back into academe. Here I discovered that, shit, people in the program were Googling me, and when they found the comic some of them were wildly enthusiastic about it too, in the overwhelmingly dry and quietly admiring way that only grad students can really find things cool. (What happened to us, guys?) That was when I really revamped the CWG website, buying a URL for it, and coming up with a more professional way to present the strips, and opening the CafePress store for merchandise—which, seven years later, has still sold precisely nothing outside my immediate family.

By now I'd pretty much scraped down to the last of the sociology jokes (probably for the better), and on enrolling in my writing program I considered adding a famous dead author to the cast—Sartre or something—to keep things fresh, and also to give myself the same opportunity to vent homework frustrations that Marx et al. had given me back at McGill. In the end, though, I decided against it, because I wanted to keep the spirit of the strip intact; to keep indulging my nerdy social sciences side rather than letting the strip get taken over by whatever was forefront in my day-to-day life.

What's funny, though, looking back at the strips from grad school, is how much my day-to-day life took over anyway. This was the year of Obama's historic first campaign, so for two months I ran nothing but election jokes (featuring Canada as a recurring character). When there was a blizzard on my birthday, there was a blizzard in the strip. When my neighbour kept stealing my newspaper, someone stole Marx's newspaper. I even copied a pick-up line I used on the future Mrs Pundigrion, more or less verbatim. (I'm not going to link to that one.)

On the other hand, keeping up the strip also gave me a good reason to keep indulging my nerdy social science side, just as I'd hoped; when a new magazine piece or right-wing politician or book discussed Marx or Engels (or one of the other cast members), I read it. Proximately this was to find new material for the strip, but ultimately it was a way to stay connected to those happy years during my undergrad degree. (Not that I wasn't still happy, you understand. But nostalgia and all that.)

Anyway, it was only after I moved to New York, in the strip's eighth and ninth years, that I started to think seriously about winding things down. Partly I didn't want to drag it out long after it should have ended, à la the Simpsons. Partly ten years seemed like a nice round number. But mostly, to be honest, with another 9-to-5 and my book getting published, I really wanted to devote most of my spare time to writing.

On the other hand, I also didn't want to just end it; I wanted a satisfying denouement. (Blame the novelist in me.) That's how I landed on the fading-from-existence idea, because with 50 strips per year I could fade out Marx by 2% a week, and though at first that would be completely undetectable, by going back and looking at it later you'd be able to see the early signs of trouble—just like a good book.

And now, here we are, all finished. I'm not going to say that my life feels hugely different now, because, you know... Come on. It's a web comic that like thirty people read. (Except on the rare occasions when my dad forwards a particular one around his colleagues, usually because it's making fun of Steven Pinker. Then, maybe fifty people.) But looking back at the five hundred weeks of silly jokes—"The greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century acting like idiots," as one friend put it—I'm proud of the accomplishment. I still giggle at some of the older punchlines I'd forgotten writing. And somewhere, hopefully, a fresh-faced social science nerd is giggling too.