yes yes alright yes i know i know i haven’t touched this thing in months.  But who has time for blogs anyway? I speak through my deeds.

on the other hand here and here is a very good interview with the very wonderful juliet ulman

They’ve made a Mike Tyson movie, apparently.

The central event in Tyson’s life, of course, is his encounter with the philosopher Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, who was at the time 77 years old:

“At yet another party [Ayer] had befriended [Fernando Sanchez, a fashionable designer]. Ayer was now standing near the entrance to the great white living-room of Sanchez’s West 57th Street apartment, chatting to a group of young models and designers, when a woman rushed in saying that a friend was being assaulted in a bedroom. Ayer went to investigate and found Mike Tyson forcing himself on a young south London model called Naomi Campbell, then just beginning her career. Ayer warned Tyson to desist. Tyson: “Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world.” Ayer stood his ground. “And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field; I suggest that we talk about this like rational men.” Ayer and Tyson began to talk. Naomi Campbell slipped out.”

The ideal Tyson biopic would introduce this story about thirty minutes into its run time, and after it the camera would, as if embarrassed, slowly withdraw from Tyson; and for the rest of the film it would follow Ayer instead, from a respectful distance.

Help! Internet!

All my bananas have gone brown and mushy, and it’s raining outside.  I have some pears but I want bananas instead.  How do I transmute stale bananas and/or pears into fresh bananas? 

Secondly, iTunes keeps crashing when I try to add new music.

I have an alembic of aqua regia, a small pouch of antimony, some cinnabar, a live toad and a Hand of Glory, if any of that helps. No mandrake root, no bat wing.

Any suggestions appreciated.

This is Sarah not-so-secretly posting on the blog to let you know that we’re giving away books in celebration of the news that Thunderer has been shortlisted for the 2009 Locus award for first novel. Go to the homepage to enter!

Tilt-shift; best actually-existing photographic gimmick, or best possible photographic gimmick?

Bathtub IV from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.

Elliot Abrams explains how the Iranians won’t really mind if we launch airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities:

We are not talking about the Americans killing civilians, bombing cities, destroying mosques, hospitals, schools. No, no, no – we’re talking about nuclear facilities which most Iranians know very little about, have not seen, will not see, some quite well hidden.

So they wake up in the morning and find out that the United States if attacking those facilities and, presumably with some good messaging about why we’re doing it and why we are not against the people of Iran.

It’s not clear to me that the reaction let’s go to war with the Americans, but rather, perhaps, how did we get into this mess? Why did those guys, the very unpopular ayatollahs in a country 70 percent of whose population is under the age of 30, why did those old guys get us into this mess.

Suppose Iran decided to bomb an American military base, on American soil.  How good would Iranian messaging have to be, do you presume, for American popular reaction to be, “Well, who cares, they only killed a bunch of soldiers.  Maybe these guys have a point.”  I presume that that messaging would have to be really quite good.

Lee “Spezzatura” Siegel laments the intellectual vulgarity of our discourse, as revealed by the fact that when other people are trying to understand the causes of the current financial crisis and he starts namedropping random philosophers he gets funny looks:

Arguments about small versus big government used to entail reflections on the nature of man and society, the question of balancing the highest good against the greatest number of people who might benefit from that good, the meaning of power and of authority. Not anymore.

Now just about every political debate comes down to one phrase: economic policy. Occasionally, things grow more specialized, and just as intellectual disputes over class conflict once spilled over into philosophical differences over “dialectical” change, the issues of taxes and spending branch out into the exciting topic of “earmarks.” Sometimes things get fancy: You might hear the term “moral hazard.” But just when the intellectual wheels start to turn—Aristotle’s Ethics! William James’ pragmatism! Sartre’s existentialism!—you realize that you’ve eavesdropped on a conversation between an insurance broker and a management consultant about the proper way to structure a transaction.

Someone whose intellectual wheels were actually turning, not just grinding, might entertain the notion that even insurance brokers and management consultants sometimes know interesting things about things.

When Archimedes said, “Give me a lever that is long enough, and I will move the world,” he was talking about how you can think your way into a new actuality.

No, he wasn’t.  He was talking about levers.

It all started with massive downsizing at AT&T. In the mid-1990s, Karen Ho was studying anthropology as a graduate student at Princeton, searching for the focus of her dissertation. Ho, now an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Minnesota, remembers thinking that 40,000 workers losing their jobs was horrible news. But the stock market applauded it, sending AT&T shares up. 

She spent the next few years working on her ethnography, or study of Wall Street culture, by being a self-described pain in the you-know-what: interviewing hundreds of people, shadowing investment bankers at work and hanging out with them at bars and industry conferences. She’s turned that research into her forthcoming book “Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street,” out this summer.

Q How are investment bankers different from the rest of us?

A Investment bankers are structured toward the next bonus. They’re compensated on how many deals they can push through, not on the quality of the deals or long-term strategy. Investment bankers have tons of job insecurity; they are a total revolving door. But what’s interesting is that because of their fairly elite biographies and kind of privileged networks they move in, as well as their lavish compensation, the way they experience downsizing is very different from that of the average worker. 

One of the things I argue in the book is that they cultivate a culture of liquidity, of continual restructuring and downsizing that they understand from their particular cultural point of view and privileged location as a productive challenge, as a building of character, precisely because their cushion is so thick. They can say, “Hey look, I have a really risky job, but that’s why I just got paid $1 million last year.” They’ll actually recommend this kind of churning for other workers who have a very different experience. This actually affects corporate America, how other industries are operating.

Q What are some other themes in the book?

A One of the main ideas is to figure out how short-term shareholder value became the undisputed mission of most corporations from the 1980s onward. Throughout the mid-20th century, Business Roundtable leaders would say: “Our mission is to negotiate the long-term interests of multiple stakeholders — consumers, employees, distributors, as well as the shareholder.” After 1980, it’s: “We don’t have to negotiate all these other interests; we just have to be concerned about the shareholder.” The corporate takeover movement Wall Street led in the 1980s helped to culturally make that shift so CEOs now imbibe that Wall Street mantra.

Even though Wall Street investment banks represent themselves as champions of shareholder value, their very recommendations and advice and actions actually undermine shareholder value through these continuous booms and busts.

This sounds excellent.  This woman sounds excellent. I want to buy her book.

The poetry of economics: imagine a car lot. . .

This explanation of the various possible approaches to toxic assets is very good, very clear, and should be circulated more widely:

Imagine a car lot that has 100 cars on it. However, some of these cars have problems. Half of them will have engine troubles that total the cars - the engines blow up and the cars are then worthless - and this will happen just after purchase. The other half are perfectly fine. Unfortunately, there is no way to tell prior to purchase which type of car you will get no matter how hard you try. Thus, half of the assets on the car dealer’s “balance sheet” - the cars on its lot - are toxic, and lack of transparency makes it impossible to tell which ones are bad prior to purchase.

It’s pitched at the level of a reasonably bright child, which is exactly what I’ve been looking for.

Belatedly — I’ve been busy — noting that the ballot for the Hugo Awards was announced a couple of days ago, and I am on the shortlist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

That’s fantastically flattering.  Thanks so much to everyone who voted for me.

Traditionally one says at this point that it’s humbling to be nominated.  I’ve never understood what the mechanism’s supposed to be, there.  It’s not humbling!  Writing is chock-full of actual humbling moments, believe you me, oh my god is it ever.  This is fucking awesome.