Poetry and Scotch

Eating and Tradition in America

Via Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

So violent a change in a culture’s eating habits is surely the sign of a national eating disorder. Certainly it would never have happened in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating. But then, such a culture would not feel the need for its most august legislative body to ever deliberate the nation’s “dietary goals”—or, for that matter, to wage political battle every few years over the precise design of an official government graphic called the “food pyramid.” A country with a stable culture of food would not shell out millions for the quackery (or common sense) of a new diet book every January. It would not be susceptible to the pendulum swings of food scares or fads, to the apotheosis every few years of one newly discovered nutrient and the demonization of another. It would not be apt to confuse protein bars and food supplements with meals or breakfast cereals with medicines. It probably would not eat a fifth of its meals in cars or feed fully a third of its children at a fast-food outlet every day. And it surely would not be nearly so fat.

I was reading this book on the airplane yesterday on my way back from three weeks in Kiev. After I landed, the first person to talk to me in the USA was a 300lb+ woman at the baggage carousel pitching me about a new line of nutritional supplements she’s created with a “doctor” that cures everything from joint pain to cancer. 

Apropos. 

The American Legal System

Via The Atlantic:

Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998 to outlaw technologies that bypass copyright protections. This sounds like a great idea, but in practice it has terrible, and widely acknowledged, negative consequences that affect consumers and new innovation. The DMCA leaves it up to the Librarian of Congress (LOC) to issue exemptions from the law, exceptions that were recognized to be necessary given the broad language of the statute that swept a number of ordinary acts and technologies as potential DMCA circumvention violations.

Every three years groups like the American Foundation for the Blind have to lobby Congress to protect an exception for the blind allowing for books to be read aloud. Can you imagine a more ridiculous regulation than one that requires a lobby group for the blind to come to Capitol Hill every three years to explain that the blind still can’t read books on their own and therefore need this exception?

Apparently it’s now illegal to unlock your smartphone.

PENALTY: In some situations, first time offenders may be fined up to $500,000, imprisoned for five years, or both. For repeat offenders, the maximum penalty increases to a fine of $1,000,000, imprisonment for up to ten years, or both.*

The punishment should fit the crime.

Humanism - Richard Sennett

I’m working through “The Best Essays of 2012” since it was an Amazon Daily Deal a few days ago. Richard Sennett has an interesting one on time, technology, and sociology. 

Today, in the labor market, Chaucerian jobs rather than careers define work. The young, middle-level university graduate can expect to change employers at least twelve times in the course of a working life, and to change his or her “skills base” at least three times; the skills he or she must draw on at forty are not the skills learned in school. Job change no longer flows within the Chaucerian trajectory of a career; without a fixed corporate structure, job change follows a more erratic path.

My studies of workers—both manual and white-collar—have led me to the conclusion that they are profoundly unhappy simply to narrate these erratic shifts as their own life stories. The flux of time is weakening their powers as narrators; they can see their working lives only in bits and pieces. Without a clear sense of how to structure work in time, people become confused, if not depressed, about what they should do. The flexible work place itself seems illegible; the chameleon character of organizations, for instance, makes it hard for people to calculate what will happen if they change jobs.

Does anyone know if there’s a name for the apparent paradox where everything around you seems to be getting worse without seeming to affect you personally? Because I buy all of this “dislocation” stuff about modernity, but trying to imagine “situating” myself back in a more linear narrative seems equally (if not more) problematic. 

I wonder if I’ll feel differently in two decades.

Gopnik on How We Listen to Music

Adam Gopnik has a great piece on music and the brain in The New Yorker, which is, unfortunately, behind a paywall. The brilliance of the article is its structure- it starts by diving into what technologists and scientists are doing to understand and improve the quality of what we hear before questioning the whole premise by tackling the sociology of music. 

In this view, the BACCH filter, with its narrow listening spot and its Rube Goldberg-style machinery to take that sweet spot with you, is an elaborate ode to a dying practice; it is a way of mechanizing the cultural prestige of attention, of enforcing the kind of listening that we think we ought to give music and mostly don’t. There doesn’t, in truth, seem to be much dissatisfaction with what people have now; those tiny, tinny earbuds playing music from detail-deminished MP3s are satisfying because, as Sterne says, in all but a handful of abberant cases nobody sits down to listen to music.

For the record, I love my tiny, tinny earbuds. 

Tactics and War Crimes in Vietnam

Really interesting piece in Guernica about how indiscriminate the slaughter of civilians by US troops in Vietnam really was, and why the environment fostered such behavior.

Search and destroy was “more a gestalt than a tactic…” Day after day, patrol after patrol, U.S. troops wandered around the countryside spoiling for a fight—trying to goad a lightly armed enemy to abandon all sense and stand toe-to-toe in open battle with the best-armed military in the world.

…That is, the American boys on patrol were just a lure—“dangling the bait,” as the veteran and future senator James Webb put it in his Vietnam War novel Fields of Fire. When attacked, they were supposed to back away and call in heavy firepower to destroy their Vietnamese foes.

It sounded easy enough and looked good on paper, but in the field search and destroy proved to be a wholly defective tactic. Vietnamese forces refused to do battle as Americans wished them to, declining to take the lure and fight at the time and place of the U.S. military’s choosing. Tipped off by preparatory artillery, roaring helicopters, and repetitively predictable patrolling patterns, the revolutionary forces generally refrained from large, set-piece combat engagements where the odds would be greatly against them.

Indeed, search and destroy gave Vietnamese revolutionary forces an overwhelming tactical advantage. They could take the “bait” whenever and wherever it suited them, which meant that, no matter how aggressive the patrols were, the Americans almost invariably found themselves on the defensive. According to the Pentagon Papers, the Viet Cong surprised U.S. forces—dictating the time, the place, and often the duration of combat engagements—more than 78 percent of the time. Another report showed that the revolutionary forces began 73 percent of all firefights. Unable to effectively engage the enemy, U.S. soldiers sometimes took to attacking what ever they could, which often meant that civilians ended up paying the heaviest price.

I’m not sure that I would have made it through this whole article, but I recently finished reading “Matterhorn” on the plane back and forth from Kiev. It’s a novel about the futility of search and destroy tactics in Vietnam, and the effect the hunt for stats at the officer level had for troops on the ground. I’d definitely recommend it. 

Big Boi vs. Andre 3000

I love that The Atlantic occasionally takes hip-hop seriously. If only I could find a music blog that consistently critiqued music like this:

The film critic Manny Farber’s essay “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” comes to mind, as André and Big Boi seem to epitomize these two styles of art. White Elephant Art is big, made up of grandiose gestures, meant to be taken by others as a masterwork…  that, no matter how well done, become “a yawning production of overripe technique shrieking with preciosity, fame, ambition,” and collapse under their own weight—just like André’s The Love Below.

Meanwhile, Big Boi has approached his work like a termite, giving no indications that he has anything in mind “other than eating away the immediate boundaries of his art, and turning these boundaries into conditions of the next achievement… Love the art, and the craft of the art, and don’t strive to do anything other than entertain.

In recent years, termite artists have garnered greater attention and acclaim. Genre has stopped being a bad word, as we’ve recognized that not only is there nothing wrong with entertainment, but that these works of art can tell us important things about ourselves, our culture, and our world without being self-conscious about doing so.

Grantland on Dead Girlfriends and Sports

“In the real world, if a man says to his team that his 6-year-old son is desperately ill back at home, the response of the team would be: “Then what the hell are you doing here? Go home!” Only in the alternate reality of football is the response: “Oh. In that case, we’re going to try extra hard and go out and beat Georgia Tech.” In that epic Courier-Sampras match, when Sampras breaks down in tears, Courier says to him: “You all right, Peter? We can do this tomorrow, you know.” Here we have part of the reason why Sampras was a better tennis player than Courier: Sampras is the kind of person who could block out the real world (the impending death of his coach) in the service of winning another tennis match. Courier couldn’t. He saw someone suffering and wanted to set tennis aside. But if Courier wasn’t the better player, for his decency he is certainly the better human being, isn’t he? And isn’t that the lesson of this whole sorry mess? We have a set of expectations about what makes an athlete great or what motivates a team that run contrary to the rules we want the rest of us to live by.”

Via Grantland

Katie Baker on Russia

Grantland heads to Russia:

It was a little bit past three in the morning in Ufa, Russia, and I was sitting on the bed of my dorm-style hotel room and telling a friend over Gchat how everything was. I had landed about an hour before and located my suitcase and cab driver without incident, an unexpected delight. The flights had gone fine. The Ukrainian one I took from Moscow to Ufa, taking off and landing in snowstorms that would have felled entire fleets at JFK, gave out really good dessert. I had watched nearly the entire first season ofDownton Abbey on the plane. The bar at the Frankfurt airport sold the most incredible pretzels. In the cab to the hotel, a Russian remix of Ke$ha’s “Die Young” was on the radio…

“I just opened my window because it’s a thousand degrees in my hotel room,” I told my friend, “and it smells like burning. I love Russia.”

Swap out some minor details, and that’s pretty much how I feel about Ukraine. I’ll also confirm the quality of pretzels at the Frankfurt airport.

Also, I’m quoting the only part of the article that I read. I just assumed that once she starts talking about hockey I’ll be bored. 

http://www.kyivpost.com/content/business/temporary-tax-break-grows-wildly-popular-311140.html

Yaroslav Lomakin, a founder of Moscow-based consulting firm Honest & Bright, says the logic behind the increased limit is not yet clear, but it looks like an attempt to improve the business climate.

“All instruments can be used in a number of ways,” Lomakin said. “A knife can cut a sausage as well as stab a neighbor.”

I don’t what I love more. The name of the consulting firm, or the aphorism. 

Home Depot Prostitutes

The local color totally sells an inane story:

“Donald Adams goes to Home Depot about three times a week.

He says prostitution is morally wrong.

“If a man goes out and pays for it and everything, and if he doesn’t use proper protection, then he could wind up with stuff that he wouldn’t want to take back home to mama,” said Adams.

Still, Adams admits the women had a pretty good marketing plan.

“It was smart because of the marketing purposes, but legally, no, they shouldn’t have been doing it,” said Adams.

Adams is just thankful no card was left on his truck, because if his wife found it, she wouldn’t have been too happy.

Prostitution is a misdemeanor and the women are already out of jail.”

All’s well that ends well.