AV Educational Tools - Oh, the Cost

October 14, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

[Sen. Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?

I knew there had to be something wrong with this when McCain said it in the debate. I was pretty sure that the planetarium wasn’t buying the overhead projector I used to use for showing my transparencies.* I was right. The overhead projector the planetarium wants looks like a character out of Star Wars.


And by the way, the project was never funded. (Full story here.)

McCain’s complaint would be like mocking NASA for wanting $3 million dollar for a radio. “My friends, I can get one from Radio Shack for $8.95, and it picks up Rush Limbaugh perfectly.” No matter that NASA wants one that will beam signals back from Mars.

*We don’t have those any more, of course. Now, I have to schlepp my laptop to “smart room,” connect the VGA cable to the video port, reset the CRT/LCD display option, select the User Laptop function from the projector menu, and wait for the projector to warm up.

Ressentiment, Baby, Ressentiment

October 11, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sen. Biden: John McCain . . .thinks . . . the only answer is drill, drill, drill.
Gov. Palin: The chant is “drill, baby, drill.”

That missing “baby” was important enough for Palin to correct Biden.

But why? How is “drill, drill, drill,” importantly different from “drill, baby, drill”?

I guess this is really one for the Language Log, but here’s my take:

For one thing, the three drills imply that someone is ritualistically repeating an action without any realistic hope of reaching a goal. “That’s all you do – [fill in your own favorite verb repeated three times: talk, eat, complain, work, etc.]”*

Replacing the middle verb with baby switches the mood from ritualism to defiance. Like “Burn, baby, burn,” in the ghetto riots of the sixties, that middle baby makes the chant the cry of those who feel oppressed as they hit back. They realize that their action may be ultimately destructive, but they are not interested in rational goal-attainment. They want to drill or burn because it feels good now. . . .and because “They” don’t want you to.

It’s ressentiment, the nasty part of our populist stripe that goes back to the nineteenth century. It’s the resentment of the Know-nothings of the 1850s and of Nixon’s hardhats in the Vietnam era, beating up anti-war demonstrators. For much of the current campaign, the feeling had been silent. Was it because Joe Six-Pack had little to feel angry about? After all, his team has owned the White House for the last eight years and all but twelve of the last forty years. They’ve controlled Congress for most of the last 15 years. But resentment is about perception, not real power, and the feeling remained, frustrated and just barely below the surface.

Then Sarah Palin came along. She, much more than McCain, spoke to those frustrations. Paul Krugman, watching her acceptance speech and the response of the Republican convention, saw it clearly.

What the G.O.P. is selling . . . is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you.

(That is, it’s resentment against the kind of people who use the word ressentiment.)

I wonder if any of the Palinistas realize that their chant derives from the black rioters of the sixties, people for whom they probably feel no kinship at all.

I was also trying to think of other instances of this grammatical construction “[Verb], Baby, [Verb].” I couldn’t. Can you?

Then on 72nd Street this afternoon, I saw this.


The call to Shine, Baby, Shine and to get “freaky, funky, and crazy” isn’t exactly like the resentment of Burn and Drill. But it’s close enough.


*How can I get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. The joke ends there, but as every musician knows, even if you do practice, practice, practice, you still probably won’t be one of the few who make it.

The Distriubtion of Tea

(or Drawing the Line)

October 8, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In 1760, the Mason-Dixon line divided North from South. Since then, the line between Northernness and Southernness has shifted. In 1860, Maryland remained in the Union, and West Virginia seceded from Virginia to do likewise, curving the North-South dividing line and moving it lower.

Today, the line can be drawn in sweet tea. That’s heavily sugared iced tea, a Southern concoction going back to the 19th century. The people (person?) at Eight Over Five, a graphic design studio, mapped McDonald’s outlets in Virginia according to whether they served sweet tea. The map looks like this (gold dots serve sweet tea, black dots don’t):


Here’s another map showing the shift in the Democratic vote in 2006 compared with 2004. The redder the county, the more it shifted Republican, the bluer the county, the greater the shift towards the Democrats.

It’s not a perfect match, but it’s not bad. The closest resemblance I could find was the 2006 Democratic Senatorial primary race between Harris Miller (dark to light green in the map below) and Jim Webb (purple to pink). Webb, the sweet tea candidate, won and went on to win the general election that November.
As Brillat-Savarin almost said, “Tell me what you drink, and I will tell you how you vote.”

Shake . . . Or Not

October 8, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was on YouTube minutes after the debate ended, and liberal bloggers all over the Internet were linking to it. It appears that McCain refuses to shake hands with Obama. In the video, McCain taps Obama on the back, Obama turns and offers his hand, but McCain, rather than shaking hands, points to his wife, and Obama shakes hands with Cindy. Just at that moment Wolf Blitzer is saying, “It’s apparent that Senator McCain has some disdain . . . for Senator Obama.”



The clip is misleading. It’s taken out of context. The candidates had already shaken hands, and McCain was trying to get Obama to shake hands with Cindy as well, not instead of.

But the canard reminded me of another interracial failure to shake. This one was real, and it had consequences for winning and losing.

In the NIT basketball tournament in 1950 at Madison Square Garden, the University Kentucky Wildcats played the team from City College. Kentucky, under legendary coach Adolf Rupp, was the number three ranked team in the nation. It was also all white. In fact, Rupp had been quoted as saying that a black would never play on one of his teams.

The CCNY team was made up mostly of blacks and Jews. The coach, Nat Holman, was Jewish. As Marvin Kalb later characterized it, “It was not a basketball game. It was a cultural war.”

CCNY wasn’t given much of a chance to win. Kentucky had just taken the SEC championship, beating Tennessee 95 - 58. But after the warm-up, as the teams gathered at their benches, Coach Holman had an idea. He told his team that, you know, fellas, just for the sake of sportsmanship, why don’t you go over to the Kentucky bench and shake hands with their guys. Holman knew what was going to happen, but apparently his players didn’t. As Kalb tells it,

I watched as Floyd Lane put his hand out and this tall, blonde, gorgeous giant turned away from Floyd, which is exactly what Holman wanted...... to get Floyd very upset..... to get all of the other players upset. And Floyd hissed out at the guy, “You gonna be picking cotton in the morning, man!”

Nobody on the Kentucky team would shake hands with the black CCNY players.

Holman’s strategy worked. At halftime, CCNY led 45 - 20 and went on to win the game 89 - 50.

Hat tip: I myself was not at the Garden that night – I’m old, but not that old. This story was first told to me by my friend Dave Fleischner, a grandnephew of Nat Holman.

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

October 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a thread over at Scatterplot, Jenn Lena said à propos of Sarah Palin in the televised debate, “I really loathe this ‘folksy’ thing. I wish someone would help me to understand what it means–specifically, why it is viewed as a desirable affect/quality by some voters.”

So I did my hair up Tina Fey style, put on my Kazuo Kawasaki glasses, and responded:

Doncha think that just havin’ a plain ol’ mom with good ol’-fashioned commonsense in office is the best way to run the government? We’re in this big economic mess right now, but if we can just get rid of the people who’ve been in Washington for so long, except for mavericks like John McCain, and get some more new people in there, well, gosh, I betcha those mavericks will fix up this economy in no time. ‘Cuz those mavericks, they’re not interested in politics or winnin’ elections the way politicans are, they’re just interested in what’s good for our country. Jeez, I don’t know why you guys can’t see that.

That was Friday. The next night, SNL led with a send-up of the debate. Fey/Palin’s opening lines are so similar to my comment that I suspect Scatterplot may have a lurking reader among the SNL writing staff.

Fey’s part begins at about two minutes into the clip.



Here's the transcript:

FEY AS PALIN: Well first of all, let me say how nice it is to meet Joe Biden. And may I say, up close your hair plugs don’t look nearly as bad as everyone says. You know, John McCain and I, we’re a couple of mavericks. And gosh darnit, we’re gonna take that maverick energy right to Washington and we’re gonna use it to fix this financial crisis and everything else that’s plaguin’ this great country of ours.

LATIFAH AS IFILL: How will you solve the financial crisis by being a maverick?

FEY AS PALIN: You know, we’re gonna take every aspect of the crisis and look at it and then we’re gonna ask ourselves, “what would a maverick do in this situation?” And then, you know, we’ll do that.” (SHEwinks.)

Incidentally, the show did very well in the ratings.

Who's Famous?

October 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

These two women embracing – you don’t recognize either of them, right?


Yet they are two of the this country’s greatest sopranos of the twentieth century (or the second half of that century), stars of the Met – Roberta Peters and Teresa Stratas.

They are both now retired – Stratas (the one wearing the cap) is 70, Peters 78 – but even in their prime they could have walked down the street together and nobody would have noticed them.

I was thinking about fame as I snapped photos of them.* Actors in film and television, a handful of rock performers, and a few athletes – those are the only people famous enough to be generally noticed. Some of them need bodyguards. But people who are “famous” in other fields go out in public wearing a cloak of anonymity.

That’s certainly true of people not in the performing arts (writers, sociologists), but it holds even for performers outside of those few favored fields. Someone might be the greatest stage actor in the world, but unless she’s starred in movies or TV, not too many people will recognize her.** Great musicians – classical, jazz, folk – have their fans, but the paparazzi will never bother them. (The photogs in the picture abover were all people who had been invited to the reception.)

Randy Newman tells this story. When he goes to restaurants, he likes to sit with his back to the room. One evening he went out to eat with his wife and three kids, and his fifteen-year-old daughter, first to the table, took the seat he would have taken. His wife quietly said to the girl, “You know, that’s the seat your father likes to sit in.” Newman’s daughter looked at him, paused, and said, “You’re not that famous.”

The hard truth is that the kid was probably right.

* I took this snapshot at a reception following a New York Opera Society tribute to Stratas. My presence had nothing to do with any involvement in opera (I have none). It was just one of those accidents of New York geography.

** Once in the local grocery store, I turned, and there was Broadway star Bernadette Peters (no relation to Roberta) standing two feet from me. Nobody else seemed to notice her, and it wasn’t just New Yorkers trying to be blasé. They didn’t recognize her.

Women Demanding Answers

Oct. 1, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

A month ago, I commented that US journalists seem reluctant to press politicians for answers. They ask a question, the politician gives an evasive response, and on to the next question. Or they will allow the politician to speak in generalities rather than insist on specifics.

During the Obama-McCain debate, poor Jim Lehrer couldn’t get either candidate to say how he’d scale back his proposals given the straitened economic circumstances he was sure to inherit. Lehrer was too polite to say point blank, “Here’s the question. Are you going to answer it or not?”

For some reason, it seems to be mostly women who are willing to speak bluntly and demand answers. It took a stand-up comic on a chat show for women (Joy Behar on The View) to tell McCain to his face that some of his ads were lies. And it was Campbell Brown, questioning a McCain adviser, who demanded specific examples of Sarah Palin's commander-in-chief decisions.

Here’s Katie Couric trying to get Palin to say whether human activities are the cause of global warming.



Here’s a transcript in case the video doesn’t play:

Couric: What’s your position on global warming? Do you believe it’s man-made or not?
Palin: Well, we’re the only Arctic state, of course, Alaska. So we feel the impacts more than any other state, up there with the changes in climates. And certainly, it is apparent. We have erosion issues. And we have melting sea ice, of course. So, what I’ve done up there is form a sub-cabinet to focus solely on climate change. Understanding that it is real. And …
Couric: Is it man-made, though in your view?
Palin: You know there are - there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, these impacts. I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate. Because the world’s weather patterns are cyclical. And over history we have seen change there. But kind of doesn’t matter at this point, as we debate what caused it. The point is: it’s real; we need to do something about it.

At another point, Couric asks her which newspapers and magazines she reads. Palin is deliberately vague, but Couric asks twice for specifics.



Transcript:

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.
Couric: What, specifically?
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, “Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?” Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

Palin’s supporters have been claiming that the press is out to get her. If they are, asking her questions and letting her speak for herself may be the best strategy.

Who's Calling Who a Nazi?

September 29, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Brendan Nyhan excoriates Tony Blankley for a Washington Times article accusing the mainstream press of being propagandists for Obama. Blankley writes:

This is no longer journalism — it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)

This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples,

(Volkischer Beobachter was the official Nazi newspaper. Goebbels was the Nazi Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda .)

We can be outraged, but we can’t really be surprised. It’s Godwin’s law:

As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a
comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

It applies to other media, not just Usenet. Maybe it was Blankley, or maybe it was Rush ("feminazi") Limbaugh, or maybe it was my memory of William F. Buckley, Jr. on Firing Line, but I have the impression that people on the right are quicker on the draw here – more likely than liberals to whip out their Nazi weaponry. So I did a quick Google search pairing Nazi and Hitler with a few politicians. I figured that attacks on liberals would be more likely to invoke the big baddies.


I don’t know how Google’s algorithm works. I suspect the recent references carry more weight, hence the landslide victory for the current candidates, McCain and Obama. Even so, attacks on Obama were more likley to mention Nazis and Hitler than were attacks on McCain.

The big surprise was Bush. Only a relative handful of Internet writers paired him with the Third Reich. As recently as May, Bush himself was comparing Obama to those who had appeased the Nazis, so even though Bush was the one linking Obama to Nazis, articles about this incident would have turned up in a “Bush and Nazi” search.

In general, though, the data support my idea. Obama v. McCain, Gore or Kerry v. Bush. And former VP Al Gore, who hasn’t been in office or run for anything for eight years, still gets more Nazi/Hitler references than does current VP Dick Cheney.

Senator Obama and John

September 27, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Maybe to Senator Obama it’s not a lot of money.
I don't know where John is getting his figures.
A lot of people might be interested in Senator Obama's definition of “rich.”
John, it’s been your president . . .who presided over this increase in spending.
Senator Obama still doesn’t quite understand.
And so John likes – John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007.

And so it went in last night’s Presidential debate.

“If my 76 year old mom is any indication,” wrote a commenter on a conservative blog, “Obama lost Florida tonight. She was very put off by Obama calling McCain ‘John’ over and over, while McCain never deviated from referring to ‘Senator Obama’.”

Obama’s choice of names for his opponent had to have been deliberate. As that last example shows, he called McCain “John” when he referred to him in the third person and when he addressed him directly. Had the Obama campaign run focus groups, done research? Were they afraid that calling him “Senator McCain” would be too deferential to the “experience” that McCain is making so much of? They must have known about the Floridians and thought it was worth the risk.

But where is the cutoff point? I’m old enough that I’m still surprised when people I don’t know at all, people much younger than I am, start right off addressing me by my first name. The telemarketer offering me new services, credit card reps I call about a problem with by bill, tech support in Bangalore. Machines too. I log in to some website where I’ve registered, a bank perhaps, and “Hi Jay, pops up cheerily on the screen.

Younger people apparently take this first-naming for granted and don’t give Obama’s use of “John” a second thought. Perhaps they are even put off by McCain’s formality, as though he were lecturing Obama on manners. (One focus group found McCain to be “condescending,” while Obama was more “caring.”). But where, between the twentysomethings and the septuagenarians in Florida and elsewhere does the preference shift from first name to Senator?

Filling in the Blanks

September 26, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociology is about the social situation, about context, and how it shapes what people do, what they feel, what they see. The micro version is words. Show people cards with incomplete words

• S _ O R T
• R _ C E
• P O L I _ E
• S _ Y

Sport, Race, Police, Shy. That’s easy. Except if it’s an Asian woman showing the cards, people are more likely to see Short, Rice, Polite, Shy (why not Soy?).*

Which word you see depends on the cues in the immediate situation. It also dpends on your background, your expectations, your interests. Here’s a magazine whose graphics department thought they could afford to hide a few letters.


Those of us who do a lot of sewing would see instantly that the magazine is Butterick. But try showing it to your students. Or colleagues. They might fill in the blanks using a schema from some other (what’s the mot juste here?) background interest.

Me, I’ve just gotten the pattern for my Halloween costume. I figure I'll finish the basting next week, but the facing is going to require a lot of backstitching, and I just don't know how I'll manage.

* Gilbert, Daniel T. and Hixon, J. Gregory, “The trouble of thinking: Activation and application of stereotypic beliefs.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 60 (491, 509-517).

Hat tip to Doug at Photshop Disasters.

Randy Newman - Ambivalence and Irony

September 25, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Randy Newman has perfect pitch. Maybe not for musical tones (or maybe he does, I have no idea) but cultural and political ones. He sings most of his songs in character, and the characters are a variety of unreliable narrators who embody different strands of American culture.

“Political Science,” written at least 35 years ago, still sounds like the voice of American foreign policy based on American exceptionalism – a belief in our inherent goodness and innocence, a disregard for the decent opinions of other countries, and a readiness to use violence on those who disagree.

No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them.

It’s a more closely reasoned version of John McCain’s “Bomb, bomb Iran.”

Most of Newman’s characters are not people like us or like him. But he makes us have some sympathy with them despite their distasteful ideas, even the anti-Semitic, anti-elitist, racist voice of “Rednecks.”* Instead of “Ebony and Ivory,” it’s Ambivalence and Irony.

The ambivalence haunts even the love songs, like “Marie,” which seems merely beautiful until you listen to the lyrics and realize that this guy is a cad.

And I'm weak and I'm lazy
And I've hurt you so
And I don't listen to a word you say
When you're in trouble I just turn away

And yet, his feeling is real.

In “The World Isn’t Fair,” the narrator drops his child off at an exclusive school and imagines a conversation with Marx

All the young mommies were there,
Karl, you never have seen such a glorious sight
as these beautiful women arrayed for the night
just like countesses, empresses, movie stars and queens
And they'd come there with men much like me –
Froggish men, unpleasant to see

It’s like Harold Brodkey’s line, “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.”


I just saw Newman in concert at Carnegie Hall, so I could go on. But I realize this might not be what younger, blogger-rockers are looking for. (“My demographic,” Newman told the audience, “is white males, fifty-two to fifty-five.”) You can see Newman doing most of the songs he did at Carnegie Hall by going to YouTube and searching for the concert he did in Stuttgart two years ago. But to hear his more recent political song, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” catch him at the MacWorld expo.

--------------------
* “Rednecks” is another song from the 70s that could have been written last week (except maybe for the refrain line about “keepin’ the niggers down.” Even rednecks don’t speak that explicitly today).

Just Coincidence, Right

September 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Clinton surplus inherited by Bush:
$300 billion

Bush deficit:
$400 billion

Amount Henry Paulson says he needs to bail out the US economy:
$700 billion

Bear With Us

September 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In my post a few weeks back about stuff kids bring to college, I had a photo of a teddy bear lying atop a pile of belongings that included pink bed linens. Obviously, it belonged to a girl. (There was a purse in the picture, but even without it. . . .)

A couple of days later, Lisa at Sociological Images had a post reminding us that pink was once the color for boys. She linked to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian.

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: “If you like the colour note on the little one's garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”

Goldacre uses this bit of history to debunk the claim recently made by evolutionary psychologists that girls’ preference for pink was an outcome of evolution.

But what about the teddy bear? Isn’t there something feminine, a maternal instinct perhaps, that leads girls to keep these soft, childhood objects? It is only girls, right?

Wait, now I remember seeing NYC sanitation trucks with a teddy bear mounted on the grill like a bowsprit mermaid. And Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited who takes his bear Aloysius with him to Oxford.

Now there’s a DVD* about a Teddy bear snapshot exhibition by Canadian Ydessa Hendeles – thousands of photos from the early twentieth century of people posing with their bears. And it’s not just girls.

*The DVD is of a documentary film by Agnès Varda, who interviews the visitors to the exhibit.

Hat tip to Magda

Happy Blogday to Me

September 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

This blog is two years old today so I’m allowing myself one day of what Chris Uggen calls “self-indulgery.” In nearly every other post, I’ve tried to follow the rules for this blog that I started out with:

• Posts would be something our undergraduates could read and would want to read.
• Posts would have some sociological content, however tangential.

In other ways, the blog has turned out differently from what I first expected.

• I set it up as a department blog, hence the name, but it quickly became a solo effort.
• I thought that the readership would be mostly our undergraduates, but few, if any, of them read it.
• I originally thought of posts as something like op-ed pieces – 700-800 words weaving together two or three related strands of thought. Now, I try to keep posts shorter, with more graphics, and with only one idea per post.

I never imagined that I’d wind up writing 300+ posts – three a week for two years. At first, I thought I might manage one or maybe two posts a week for at the most two months. That’s why I thought it would have to be a group blog. There were times times when I felt I had absolutely nothing left to say. But then something would spark my interest, and ideas for posts would pop out of every corner. I have a file of unused ideas, most of them past their sell-by date.

The rewards of blogging, at least for me, are two: First, as a friend put it, blogging is instant gratification. The turnaround time between writing and publication is zero. You get an idea or take an interesting photo or find some data. You write it up, you click, and it’s out there. Second, blogging has allowed me to make some contact, however minimal, with other bloggers, and they are a smart, funny, lively, and friendly bunch.

My main disappointment is that the readership is small, and the comments sparse (I was encouraged by Andrewska’s kind words on his blog). I feel like a comedian in a radio studio telling a joke and having no idea if anyone out there laughed or even if anyone was listening. If I do shut down the blog – and I have often thought I might – that will probably be the reason why.

I have now gone back and read through the posts, and I was surprised to find that I liked most of them. The list below is not necessarily the ten best. They’re just ten that for different idiosyncratic reasons I’m fond of.

The Pursuit of Bada Bing, April 13, 2007
I, You, We, May 14, 2008
The Institutionalization of Hysteria, September 29, 2007
Contributions and Attributions, April 18, 2007
Mendacity, October 27, 2006
Cheating the Executioner, November 5, 2006,
A Fine and Public Place, November 8, 2007
Sweat Equity and Magical Thinking, December 3, 2007
Moral Nostalgia and the Myth of the Authoritarian Past, February 27, 2007
Closed for vacation? May 15, 2007,

That’s My Narrative, and I’m Sticking To It

September 18, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The narrative about A-Rod and the Yankees hasn't changed from the start of the season (NY Daily News)

I wasn’t all that surprised to see the word narrative turn up in the sports pages of the Daily News. You see and hear the word everywhere these days, even in cooking.

For Ms. Dunlop [author of The Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook], Hunanese food ''embodies a narrative of place.'' (NY Times)

Every time I hear narrative, I ask myself whether it could be replaced by the simpler term story. Almost always, the answer is yes.

It’s hard to pick one narrative. The Palin narrative is she is in a war with the mainstream media. (Jim Pinkerton of The American Conservative on Fox)

I watched [McCain] begin that long narrative about his prison camp . . . (Wall Street Journal editor Dorothy Rabinowitz on Fox)

I'm used to all the faddish terms that come from sports and business. (The bottom line is that we need a new game plan.) Issues, replacing the more prosaic problems, crossed over from psychotherapy, but now everyone uses it, even people not usually given to psychobabble. An e-mail at work informed me that the maintenance department had taken care of the “issue” that had shut down the elevator for two hours. And before the start of football season two years ago, I heard a retired linebacker say on ESPN, “Well, the Jets have right tackle issues this season.”

But how many of these crossover words come to us from semiotics and lit crit? Now, even the right wingers who decry and denounce English professors for their impenetrable language and leftish views freely throw narrative into their commentary.

Articles from US and World Publications and TV and Radio Transcripts containing the word narrative.

My own sense that narrative had fully entered the mainstream came about four years ago. The teenager formerly in residence was in ninth grade, and that season he was watching “The Apprentice.” One evening, he said that two of his friends watched it and discussed the show the next day in school. “But their narrative is often different from Mark Burnett’s narrative.”

I had a sort of "Watch your language, young man" reaction. When I was his age, I would have thought that “The Apprentice” was Donald Trump’s show, not what’s-his-name. I wouldn’t have known the name of the producer of this or any TV show. Nor would I have known that the producer, far more than anyone on screen, was the true force shaping the program. I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what the producer did. And if I had known, I wouldn’t have thought of it as “creating a narrative.”

Politics - The Hollywood Version

September 16, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s like a really bad Disney movie, “The Hockey Mom.” “Oh, I’m just a hockey mom from Alaska,” and she’s president. She’s facing down Vladimir Putin and using the folksy stuff she learned at the hockey rink. It’s absurd.

Matt Damon knows the movies. He has picked up on a theme that has run through American films for decades: the triumph of innocence over intrigue. Damon is thinking of Disney comedies, but the idea is so deeply embedded in American culture that it underlies darker entertainments as well.

Typically, the ordinary American – honest, incapable of guile – lands in some nefarious web of intrigue and deceit woven by powerful but evil people. These are often foreigners, but they can also be domestic gangsters or malefactors of great wealth, the kind of people who drink expensive wine or collect modern art. In a word, elitists.

The official authorities, especially if they wear uniforms, are no help. They are either incompetent or in cahoots with the bad guys. In fact, they are usually a hindrance, threatening or even imprisoning the hero. Yet our hero, through good old American straightforwardness and resourcefulness, outwits the baddies, disrupts the their plot, rescues whoever was in danger, and restores the world to order. If there’s a pretty, single girl, he winds up with her too. Innocence beats intrigue every time.*

It’s not just Disney, and it’s not just Spiderman, Batman, and other films derived from children’s comic books. It’s Capra, Hitchcock (“The Man Who Knew Too Much,” “North By Northwest”), and dozens of lesser directors. Maybe it’s even Matt Damon movies (I confess, I have not seen or read “The Bourne Ultimatum,” but I wouldn’t be surprised if it contained some of these elements.)

At least Damon has the good sense to know that the world of movies is not the real world, and that being the plucky hockey mom might not necessarily qualify someone to be one septuagenarian heartbeat away from the presidency. But the PR strategists that work for our politicians try to present the real world as though it were a movie, and the public often seems to accept that presentation.

The networks should be running “Wag the Dog” on a continuous loop.

*My favorite counter-example is “The Third Man.” The protagonist (played by Joseph Cotten) thinks he’s in an American film, but he’s not. He’s in a European film. His friend, the man whose innocence he tries to prove, turns out in fact to be a baddie, just like the British officer has said. And even though Cotten realizes that the British officer was right and winds up killing his friend, the intrigue, conspiracy, and evil in Vienna will continue. And he doesn’t get the girl.

Alas Poor York

September 15, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last week, I speculated that McCain’s boost in the polls following the Republican Convention might have been something different from the usual post-convention bounce. If people were reluctant to vote for Obama because of race, the convention, especially the speech by Sarah Palin, might have provided a legitimate cover for preferences that were based on racism. Instead of being against Obama, they could be for McCain and Palin.

It was speculation, and I hoped it was wrong. But the All Things Considered discussion with a panel of voters in York, PA provided some evidence that was depressingly consistent with this idea.

Some people repeated the criticisms of Obama that the Republicans offered at the convention. Like experience. Here’s Don Getty, a retired cop, white

“I don't think there is a problem with a black man,” says Don Getty, a retired police officer, who is white. “I personally don't think Obama is the right one. He doesn't have the experience. . . . He was a community organizer. Nobody's ever told me what a community organizer is.”

This conveniently ignores Obama’s years as a legislator in the Illinois Senate and the US Senate, but at least it’s a rationale.

More disturbing is Leah Moreland, an older, white woman:

“I look at Obama, and I have a question in my mind,” she says. “Years ago, was he taken into the Muslim faith? And my concern is the only way you are no longer a Muslim is if you are dead, killed. So in my mind, he's still alive. . . . There is something about him I don't trust,” she says. “I don't care how good a speaker he is, I just can't trust him.”

It’s possible that the “something” about Obama she can’t trust has nothing to do with race, but her clinging to misinformation about his religion makes me think otherwise.

Both these people are testimony to the invisibility of racism. Leah Morland says, “I really was totally unaware of prejudice . . . there was no prejudice in my home.”

Officer Getty says,

“I can't recall any privilege that I got because I was white,” Getty says. “I mean, I went to city schools. But I don't know of anything that I got because I was white that the black kids couldn't have gotten the same thing.”

NPR followed this statement immediately with that of Maggie Orr, a black woman whose family was the first black family in a suburb in 1963.

We weren't wanted there, of course, and the whites did everything they could to intimidate us to get us to move. But my parents were staunch-hearted people. We weren't going to budge. So, of course, we stayed there. We endured it all: the break-ins, the house being messed up, the whole nine yards, being called niggers.

The white police officer doesn’t see that his ability to move into a neighborhood – probably one with better schools and city services – constitutes white privilege. It’s just something he takes for granted. I also wondered how easy it would have been for a black man to have gotten on the York police force when Officer Getty was starting his career.

This invisibility plays into the Republican strategy, for if there is no racism in the US, then efforts to ensure African Americans access to housing or jobs are catering to a “special interest” (Blacks). Obama has tried very hard to avoid the perception of the Democrats as representing the interests of blacks. Meanwhile, the Republicans decry the politics of special interests and insist that we come together, rise above party, and put “country first” by voting Republican.

Culture and Social Construction

September 12, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

When it comes to gynecological exams, all I know is what I read in the papers – mostly, Joan Emerson’s classic 1970 article, “Behavior in Private Places, Sustaining Definitions of Reality in the Gynecological Examination.” The problem for the participants in the exam (patient, doctor, nurse, staff) is to maintain the definition that this is not a sexual situation but a medical one. Given the nudity, the touching and talk of sexual areas, it takes some work to create and sustain that definition.

Some routine practices simultaneously acknowledge the medical definition and qualify it by making special provision for the pelvic area. For instance, rituals of respect express dignity for the patient. The patient’s body is draped so as to expose only that part which is to receive the technical attention of the doctor. The presence of a nurse acting as “chaperone” cancels any residual suggestiveness of male and female alone in a room.

Maybe here. But in France, that’s not how it happens. Meg, a Kansas girl who wound up in Paris (was a tornado involved?) and blogging as La Blaguer à Paris*, writes about it with only sight exaggeration.

Here’s what to expect when you go for ze Exam:
Doc - Mme Blagueur? [offers ungloved warm hand] Please follow me.
You - Bonjour! [sits in chair at office desk] I am here for my annual poke.
Doc - Congratulations. Now take your clothes off [indicates table and returns to typing]. You - What here? Yes? Erm... [stands, removes everything south of waist, drapes clothes hastily over office chair while hiding bits behind computer monitor].
Doc - The top, too. You - Even the bra?!!
Doc - Your bra cannot save you, American.
You - I see . . .
Doc - Let’s begin. Do you mind if I smoke?

The error of cultural expectations goes both ways. Meg tells of a French woman going for an exam in Chicago. The nurse handed her what might have been a folded paper towel but which any American patient would immediately recognize as a “gown.”

The young American doctor, when he returned after a suitable interval, found a very hot French woman sitting buck naked on the table, a paper gown in her hand.

What really struck me in Meg’s story was the bottom line. When the exam is over,

there will be a quick exchange of insurance cards or, if you’re paying in cash, 28€.

That’s about $40. If you pay in cash. Otherwise it’s just the insurance card. And if you do pay cash, you then dip your card into a little machine at the doctor’s office, and the system immediately reimburses your bank account the government’s share (i.e., most) of the payment.** We Americans should be thankful that we have HMOs and insurance companies and that our medical system hasn’t been contaminated by European ideas like socialized medicine with its elaborate and inefficient bureaucracy.

--------------
*It’s a trans-language pun. In French, to blaguer is to kid around, not to blog (though I often wonder with this blog, who do I think I’m kidding?)

** Commenters on Meg's blog put the cost closer to 80-100€, with about half that reimbursed.

Bounce or Bradley?

September 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The first poll released after the Republican convention (USA Today/Gallup) showed McCain going from even or even 5-6 points down to a 54-44 lead. Subsequent polls have the race still even, and the USA Today/Gallup poll may be a statistical anomaly. Even if it’s accurate, Democrats are hoping it reflects a post-convention bounce which will, like most such bounces, diminish with time.

But there’s another explanation that should be more unsettling for Democrats: the disappearance of the Bradley effect – the inaccuracy of polls when voters claim to be undecided rather than say they will vote for the white candidate over the black candidate.

For example, in the New York City mayoralty race of 1989, an African American, David Dinkins had defeated Ed Koch in the Democratic primary and was running against Rudy Giuliani. Polls taken shortly before the election showed Dinkins ahead by 15 percentage points or more. He won by two.

Adam Berinsky, guest blogging at The Monkey Cage, puts it this way:

In that election, the preferred candidate of older Jewish Democrats (or, as I like to call them, Mom and Dad), Ed Koch, lost a contentious Democratic primary to David Dinkins, who is black. Considering that many older Jewish Democrats had never in their life voted for a Republican candidate, a vote for Giuliani in the general election could be seen as nothing but a vote against Dinkins. Indeed among Jews over 50, 30 percent claimed that they didn’t know who they were going to vote for a week before the election, even though 93 percent said they would definitely cast a vote . . . . These are the precise circumstances where we would expect to see the polls perform poorly – and they did.

I prefer the Dinkins example to that of Tom Bradley (California, 1982) or Douglas Wilder (Virginia, 1989) because it had a sequel that adds to our understanding of the Bradley effect.

In 1993 Dinkins again ran against Giuliani, this time as an incumbent. In that election, unlike 1989, the pre-election polls were very accurate. One explanation for the discrepancy in the performance of the polls between 1989 and 1993 is that in 1989, Democratic voters could not openly oppose Dinkins without appearing to be racist. By 1993, however, they could oppose Dinkins because in the intervening 4 years he had established a poor record of performance.

In other words, racism was looking for a rationale. Once it had that rationale, it no longer needed to stay in the “undecided” closet.

Could something similar have been happening in the current Presidential campaign? Let’s assume that there are some voters who are reluctant to vote for Obama because of his race. Maybe they don’t even admit that to themselves, and they certainly don’t admit it to pollsters. Instead, they think and say, “I’m not sure. I don’t really know enough about the guy.” Then they see McCain and Palin at the convention, they see the clips on the news. They like what they see, or at least they see nothing to dislike. Now they have the “information” to justify their decision, and when the pollsters call, they can honestly say they’re for McCain.

Palin and Torture, Party and Gender

September 9, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America ... he’s worried that someone won't read them their rights?”

Sarah Palin was standing up for torture, and the Republicans cheered.

It was then I finally realized: these people actually like torture. Oh, of course you can’t come right out and say that torture is a good thing. But that was the idea the convention conveyed. You don’t tell a story over and over again unless it’s a story you really like, and the story the Republicans told and retold was the story of John McCain’s torture.

Previously, my explanation for the acceptance of torture had emphasized two elements – tribalism and bureaucratic rationality.

Tribalism is all about who. Morality is not some abstract universal that applies to all people. Tribal morality divides the world into Us and Them. What’s moral is what’s good for Us. This morality does not extend to Them. If We torture Them, it’s all right. If They torture Us, it’s an atrocity.

Bureaucratic rationality is about why. Torture is wrong if it’s done for sadistic pleasure or for personal vindictiveness, just to see your enemies suffer. That’s the picture we liked to paint of Saddam as torturer. But if you use torture as a rational means to a goal (“saving American lives”), and if the torturers are impersonal, if they derive no personal pleasure from torturing, then torture is O.K. President Bush used to refer to the torturers as “our professionals” (impersonal, efficient, unemotional) and extended the rational-legal angle by getting White House lawyers to write justifications using the impersonal language of law.

But the Republicans in Minnesota seemed to view torture not just as a regrettable but necessary tactic. Torture became a romanticized test of toughness, the ultimate chapter in the Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche version of masculinity. Only wimps have qualms about torture or worry about the niceties of human rights or the law. Real men can dish it out, and they can take it. Accordingly, in all the repeated invocations of Sen. McCain’s ordeal in the Hanoi Hilton, there was never any condemnation of the North Vietnamese as torturers, only the extolling of McCain for his toughness, patriotism, and other manly virtues. It was as though torture were not so much a violation of basic human rights and international law but a ritual that served to separate the men from the boys, painful but ultimately ennobling. And like the harsh fraternity initiation, those who have undergone it look back on it with something resembling nostalgia. See, you crybabies, the Republicans were saying, torture’s not so bad if you’re man enough to take it.

Surely others have commented on the Republicans’ long-standing effort to define the difference between the parties in terms of gender stereotypes: Republicans – tough, strong, and masculine, Democrats – soft, weak, and feminine. For the GOP, a woman on the ticket had the potential to confuse that imagery. Ms. Palin had to convince the party faithful – and those who shared their traditional expectations about gender – had to convince them that she would not weaken the party brand with feminine softness. So she played up her toughness. Don’t be misled by the lipstick, she said. She was the pit bull who would not hesitate to use torture.

The Last Shall Be First . . .

September 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In her comment on the previous post, our new colleague Faye noted that “Brits avoid using last names as first names.” But this style has become increasingly popular in the US. Last year the top 250 names included

• Mason (37)
  
• Hunter (57)
• Carter (80)
• Tyler (91)
• Cooper (95)
• Tanner (149)
• Sawyer (240)

Twenty years ago, only Tyler made the top 250. It’s also popular in the UK, ranking 27th last year for baby boys.

In the US, it was probably the wealthy who started the last-name ball rolling. Humorist Calvin Trillin says that when he was at Yale in the 1950s, the upper-class WASPs who had attended schools like Andover and Choate tended to have names like Hatcher Thatcher Baxter III. Or Thatcher Baxter Hatcher, Jr. Or . . . but you get the idea.

Over the decades, following the general social class trend in names described by Levitt and Dubner (the Freakonomics guys), Carter, Hunter, and the rest have trickled down through the system.

But why here and not in the UK?

My guess is that British ears, especially upper-class British ears, still hear the working-class overtones in these names. These names, after all, derive from common trades. The upper class, who did not do such common work, so they did not have surnames like Farmer, Miller, or Baker (Baxter, by the way, is a variant – a “bakester”). Thatchers worked, thatching roofs. They did not own land. Hunters hunted, Carters carted, and Tylers tiled.

The upper class were quite merry in olde England and had no need to emigrate. It was the Baxters and Hatchers, not the Forsyths, who came to America to seek their fortunes. Enough of these tradesman descendants were successful in the New World, and the class system was open enough, that their names lost their working class connotations. But they did retain the aura of England, the “AS” in WASP. These were “classy” names, as contrasted with the foreign names of later immigrants.

As Bob Garfield of NPR’s “On the Media” noted in his short-lived stand-up comedy career, only WASPs can get away with this last-name ploy. He envies media people like

Stone Phillips, Anderson Cooper, Shepard Smith . . . . Jews can't do that. Jews can’t use last names as first names. “This is Teitelbaum Moskowitz, and here are tonight’s headlines.”

What's in a Name? It Depends on Where.

September 4, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

What to name the baby? Good old American Republican names like Track, Trig, Willow, Piper. Certainly not elitist British names like Nigel or Phillipa.

In fact, nowadays there’s a good deal of similarity in the popular names here and in the UK. Among girls, six names are in the top twenty for both countries (Emily, Isabella, Grace, Chloe, Hannah, Olivia).

There are also differences. Lucy and Charlotte, #8 and #12 respectively in the UK don’t even make the top 100 here. Some names popular here, like Ashley and Alyssa (#13 and #14) are all but unknown across the pond.

On the other hand, the Madison explosion is making its way east. She went from 203rd to 3rd in a mere ten years here (1990-2000), and is now 39th in the UK. Many people think that the movie Splash” put the name out there, and it caught on.

Thanks to Sarah Palin, something similar may happen with Willow, Piper, and Bristol. Here, but not there, at least not for Bristol. I have no idea how the Palins came up with Bristol, but I’d bet a lot of money that they’re not familiar with Cockney rhyming slang.


Popular Girls Names (UK, 2006. US 2007)

UK . . . . . . . . . . . .. .US
1. Olivia . . . . . . . . . Emily
2. Grace . . . . . . . . . Isabella
3. Jessica . . . . . . . . Emma
4. Ruby . . . . . . . . . Ava
5. Emily . . . . . . . . . Madison
6. Sophie . . . . . . . . Sophia
7. Chloe . . . . . . . . . Olivia
8. Lucy . . . . . . . . . . Abigail
9. Lily . . . . . . . . . . .Hannah
10. Ellie . . . . . . . . . Elizabeth
11. Ella . . . . . . . . . . Addison
12. Charlotte . . . . . . Samantha
13. Katie . . . . . . . . Ashley
14. Mia . . . . . . . . . .Alyssa
15. Hannah . . . . . . . Mia
16. Amelia . . . . . . . .Chloe
17. Megan . . . . . . . .Natalie
18. Amy. . . . . . . . .Sarah
19. Isabella . . . . . . .Alexis
20. Millie . . . . . . . .Grace

King and Queen

September 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

John McCain cancelled a scheduled interview with Larry King “as punishment for what his aides said was an unfair interview of a McCain campaign spokesman by the network host Campbell Brown on Monday night.” (Story in the New York Times ).

The claim of unfairness says a lot about the culture of politics and journalism.
ed. Here’s a clip from the interview.



What was unfair? Brown tried to get the McCain flak, Tucker Bounds, to answer the questions she asked.

First, she asks a question about Sarah Palin’s readiness to be commander-in-chief. Bounds’s answer is all about McCain. So Campbell Brown says (at 0:47), “I asked you about her.”

Then there’s this (at 2:11 in the clip), described by the Times

“Can you tell me one decision that she made as commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard, just one?” Ms. Brown asked.

Mr. Bounds responded, “Any decision she has made as the commander of the National Guard that’s deployed overseas is more of a decision Barack Obama’s been making as he’s been running for president for the last two years.”

Ms. Brown pressed again, saying: “So tell me. Tell me. Give me an example of one of those decisions.”

Apparently, what’s unfair is to insist that a politician answer the question and if he doesn’t to point out that he has not answered it. At least in US journalism. If you listen to the BBC news, you’ll hear interviewers asking pointed questions, and when politicians – even cabinet secretaries – are evasive, the journalist will say, “But you haven’t answered my question,” and then repeat it.

In the US, such a demand is “unfair” to a candidate. If the interviewee is an office holder rather than an office seeker, the demand is “disrespectful.”

In a post about the film “The Queen” many months back, I speculated about the advantages of monarchy, of separating the role of ceremonial head of state from the role of political leader, rather than combining them as we do. A follow-up post quoted a British journalist on the cultural differences this has for political journalism. These posts focused on the Presidency. But the cloak of respect for the institution may flow farther down the line, so that we prefer all politicians, candidates for higher office, and their spokespersons to be treated with deference.

Or maybe, it’s just that we have a norm that face-to-face conversations – even interviews with politicians – should be “nice” rather than confrontational.

Or maybe not. At the same time that McCain was ducking Larry King, Obama was agreeing to go on Bill O’Reilly’s show. It will be interesting to see whether O’Reilly treats the Democratic candidate with greater civility than he shows to most guests he disagrees with. Maybe, Obama will be able to finish an answer to a question before O’Reilly interrupts him.

Deadly Sins (a Sunday Sermon)

August 30, 2008  
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can you have too much sex? Yes, apparently. In the news this weekend, David Duchovny claims to be suffering from “sex addiction” and has just entered rehab. (Maybe it’s my age, but I think I might do an Amy Winehouse on this one and say no, no, no.) The Duchovny case history will no doubt be labeled “the x-rated files.” Or maybe it’s Californication as reality TV.

Lust, as we all know, is a deadly sin.  Desire is all right, but lust is “too much of a good thing.” It distorts the proper proportions. But what about the other deadly sins? In case you forgot them, here are all seven:

1. Lust
2. Anger
3. Gluttony
4. Pride
5. Envy
6. Sloth
7. Greed
   
   
   Hieronymous Bosch - The Seven Deadly Sins and the Last Four Things
   Click on the image for a larger view

Does the same rule of moderation and proportion apply? Yes, but. In the words of the Sesame Street song, “one of these things is not like the others.”

No problem with sins one through six. We criticize ourselves or others for having too much sex, eating too much food, or lazily avoiding work. The same goes for the emotional sins. Some people need “anger management,” others need to curb their envy. We have a variety of negative words for those who are too proud – egotistical, narcissistic, conceited, etc.

With food, sex, self-esteem, relaxation, etc., we recognize that there are limits. But we give Greed a pass. Is it possible to have too much money? Apparently not. Those who amass more and more of it win the admiration of others, and as a society we do little to curb their passion. In fact, we encourage it, and not just with esteem; we grant it tangible rewards like tax breaks unavailable to those of lesser means. The tax code, especially in the Cheney-Bush administration, seems to have been written as an elaborate gloss on Gordon Gecko’s maxim “Greed is Good.”

The Seven Deadly Sins are sins because they distort the balance between the individual and the society. They all represent individual pleasures grown so large that they become detrimental to the society. But for some reason, when it comes to the unbridled pursuit of money, we don't see the sinfulness.  We don't even see any downside in the imbalance.

For example, elsewhere in the news, Joe Nocera in the New York Times details how billionaire Carl Icahn gained control of XO Communications only to use the company’s financial woes as a way to enrich himself.

As chairman, he could have tried to have helped the company rebuild — or sold the company to someone who was interested in doing so. But that doesn’t really appear to have ever been his motive.

It wasn’t easy, and Icahn met resistance, but through a combination of sneaky tricks and power, he got his way.

“Carl is very smart and acts very aggressively in his own self-interest,” said Robert Powell . . ., who has followed the XO shenanigans closely. “And if you get in the way of his self-interest, he will trample you.”

Icahn is already a billionaire and has been for some time. I have no idea why he needs more money. Nevertheless, he wants to screw a company in order to add still more to his bank accounts.
Yet nobody ever suggests that the Icahns of this world check themselves into rehab.

Big hat tip to Philip Slater, author of Wealth Addiction. The title says it all.

And You Think Textbooks Cost a Lot Today

August 29, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

• A manuscript hand-copied book back in 1000 cost roughly the same share of average annual income as $50,000 is today.
• Hence if you have a "normal" college--eight semesters, four courses a semester--and demand that people buy and read one book a course, you are talking the equivalent of $1.6M in book outlay.

That's from a post at Brad DeLong' blog, and he provides this information about college expenses to look at the rationale for the large lecture. His point is that back in those early university days, the large lecture made economic sense.

• Hence you assemble the hundred or so people who want to read Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy in a room, and have the professor read to them--hence lecture, lecturer, from the Latin lector, reader--while they frantically take notes because they are likely to never see a copy of that book again once they are out in the world administering justice in Wuerzburg or wherever...

But with books now so cheap (O.K., relatively affordable), why do we still have large lectures? The reasons must be non-economic -- i.e., social.

The full post and many of the comments (40 at last count) are worth reading.

These Eyes

August 27, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Eyes – windows to the Soul. Also to the Rock, Alternative, Country, Metal, Folk, and most other genres, though not all.

Wired Magazine reports on a great bit of content analysis of popular music. The researchers, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg, are visual artists, not sociologists, but they counted up references to body parts in the lyrics of popular songs. Then they broke the data down by genre and created this chart.

(Click on the image to see the larger version.)

Even in this small version, it's clear that Hip Hop is the most body-oriented genre, both in frequency and diversity, and Gospel the least – earthy versus ethereal.

Eyes and hand run one-two in all genres except for Blues, where head and arms outrank eyes, and Hip Hop, where ass takes the gold and head the silver.

Go here for the original, which allows you to click on the genre and see a more complete breakdown, like this chart of Gospel.
I can understand why knee gets mentioned relatively often in Gospel (prayerful posture), but I was surprised that ass was mentioned with the same frequency as neck and tongue. Obviously, I haven't been listening to enough Gospel.

There's a wealth of data. Take a look at the site and see what ideas and associations it triggers for you.


Warning: some of the pictures in some of the genres (no surprises here) may be NSFW.
HT Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.

College - The Material World

August 26, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was move-in day at college (the one my son is going to, not Montclair). The stuff of modern college life lay displayed on the sidewalk awaiting transshipment to the dorms.


Necessities have changed since I went to college way back in the previous century. It’s not just the computers and printers instead of typewriters, iPods instead of stereos, electric guitars far outnumbering acoustic. But televisions, once a luxury, are apparently nearing the level of a necessity (how else can you play your Wii or other games?) .

Cleaning supplies are much more in evidence. Even the boys were packing Dust Busters and Swiffers.

There were some things that surprised me but that the frosh took as commonplace.


Nearly every kid (or his or her roomate) came with a refrigerator (1). Microwaves (2) were nearly as common. And several kids brought cases of water. Yes water, as though this college that parents are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for were some third-world country where the stuff that comes out of the tap is dangerous to drink and you have to bring your own supply. (The Aquafina in the above picture, as you surely know, is merely Pepsi’s filtered version of that same tapwater.)

Of course, there's water, and there’s water.


And despite the cleaning-supplies thing, the cluster of stuff on the sidewalk sometimes announced the student's gender loud and clear.

That object circled in the upper right is a teddy bear, and the movie poster on the left is for Breakfast at Tiffany's (apologies for the bad angle of this photo). The pink sheet set is unmistakable. And it reminded me that just a few days before this, I had heard another girl, one about to head off to a different school, say that she had chosen bright pink sheets. Also a yellow rug, green towels, and maybe something orange. “I’m trying to have a theme – citrus.” When I asked about the pink, she immediately responded, “Grapefruit.” I guess she’d thought about this one before. I couldn’t imagine having this conversation with a college-bound boy.

Subgroups

August 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Yesterday, Jeremy Freese had a post at Scatterplot on interaction effects:

There are so many ways of dividing a sample into subgroups, and there are so many variables in a typical dataset that have low correlation with an outcome, that it is inevitable that there will be all kinds of little pockets for high correlation for some subgroup just by chance.

Today, the Onion News Network had this example, probably inspired more by Mark Penn than by Jeremy, but instructive nevertheless.



Hat tip to Ezra Klein at The American Prospect.

Head Start for Stats

August 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

If you want students to master quantitative methods, I guess you have to start while they're young.



As you have no doubt guessed, this has nothing to do with statistics. The products – backpacks, wristbands, etc. – are like medical alert bracelets for kids, to alert adults to the child’s food allergies or other medical conditions.