A Saint With Sharp Elbows

In her race for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, is Elizabeth Warren running against Scott Brown and Obama?

by Jason Zengerle, New York

In January of last year, Elizabeth Warren went on The Daily Show and did what was then, and still is, that rarest of things: She gave a cogent, compelling, almost crystalline account of the financial collapse. It wasn’t the first time she had delivered this story, but her task seemed particularly urgent that night. A Republican named Scott Brown had just won Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat, depriving Democrats of a filibusterproof majority and prefiguring the bloodbath the party would take during the midterms. Barack Obama had been in the White House for a little more than twelve months, and already it appeared that he was losing control of the political narrative.

Warren tried to wrest it back. The problems started not with Obama, she said, but in the eighties, when the financial regulations that had been put in place after the Great Depression began to be repealed. This allowed “the big financial firms, the titans of Wall Street,” to “start selling ever more dangerous mortgages, ever more dangerous credit cards, ever more dangerous car loans,” which they then repackaged and sold again, producing, in addition to huge profits and bonuses, huge risk. After the market took a downturn, “all that risk that’s been built into the system starts to come home, somebody’s got to pay,” and “those same CEOs on Wall Street basically turn around to the American people and say, ‘Whoa, there’s a real problem here, and you better bail us out or we’re all gonna die.’ And so we did, that was TARP. And now we’re about to write the last chapter in this narrative.”

The story could have two endings, Warren said: one that favored “the CEOs on Wall Street” or one that turned out okay for the rest of us. “This is America’s middle class. We’ve hacked at it and chipped at it and pulled on it for 30 years now, and now there’s no more to do. Either we fix this problem going forward or the game really is over.” Jon Stewart, who had mostly kept quiet during Warren’s spiel, seemed momentarily shocked. “I know your husband is backstage,” he told her, “but I still want to make out with you.”

It was performances like that one that helped propel Warren, a Harvard law professor who was then chairing the congressional panel that oversaw TARP, higher into the political firmament. And as Obama’s star waned in the eyes of many liberals, hers rose in inverse proportion. That the story Warren was telling seemed increasingly destined to end more as she’d feared than as she’d hoped only served to boost her standing. Warren’s remarkable powers of explanation—and her willingness, even eagerness, to take on Wall Street—were precisely the qualities that the president seemed to lack and precisely what so many liberals were yearning for. “What Liz can do, maybe better than anyone walking the Earth, is talk about financial markets and the complexities of our economic system in a language that people understand and that resonates with them,” says Jared Bernstein, a former economic adviser to Joe Biden.

Warren was so good at this that, although she was relegated to the fringes of the bureaucracy—first running the relatively toothless TARP PANEL and then advising Obama on getting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau off the ground—she cut the public profile of a cabinet official. Stewart, Charlie Rose, and Bill Maher frequently invited her on their shows to talk about the economy; online petitions urging Obama to appoint her head of the CFPB garnered hundreds of thousands of signatures. Warren’s ubiquity became a sore spot for some Obama officials, who especially didn’t appreciate the fact that she was often as willing to criticize Democrats as Republicans. Her public grillings of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner when he appeared before her TARP panel—“A.I.G. has received about $70 billion in TARP money, about $100 billion in loans from the Fed. Do you know where the money went?”—were political theater at its finest.

The result is that now, in large swathes of blue America, Warren’s star actually eclipses Obama’s. Her announcement in September that she would run for the U.S. Senate—that she would seek to take back the seat Scott Brown won in 2010—has been greeted by Democrats with the sort of passion and energy not seen since that heady night in Grant Park three Novembers ago. A grainy YouTube video of Warren speaking in a supporter’s living room became such a viral sensation that the Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. deemed it “the declaration heard round the Internet world.” And while the presidential race is undoubtedly the most important election of 2012, Warren’s campaign is shaping up to be the most anticipated, as it affords liberals a chance to prove that the path that Obama pointedly did not take—the story he failed to tell for so long—can win at the ballot box.

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Photo: Pari Dukovic

Paramilitary Policing From Seattle to Occupy Wall Street

by Norm Stamper, The Nation

They came from all over, tens of thousands of demonstrators from around the world, protesting the economic and moral pitfalls of globalization. Our mission as members of the Seattle Police Department? To safeguard people and property—in that order. Things went well the first day. We were praised for our friendliness and restraint—though some politicians were apoplectic at our refusal to make mass arrests for the actions of a few.

Then came day two. Early in the morning, large contingents of demonstrators began to converge at a key downtown intersection. They sat down and refused to budge. Their numbers grew. A labor march would soon add additional thousands to the mix.

“We have to clear the intersection,” said the field commander. “We have to clear the intersection,” the operations commander agreed, from his bunker in the Public Safety Building. Standing alone on the edge of the crowd, I, the chief of police, said to myself, “We have to clear the intersection.”

Why?

Because of all the what-ifs. What if a fire breaks out in the Sheraton across the street? What if a woman goes into labor on the seventeenth floor of the hotel? What if a heart patient goes into cardiac arrest in the high-rise on the corner? What if there’s a stabbing, a shooting, a serious-injury traffic accident? How would an aid car, fire engine or police cruiser get through that sea of people? The cop in me supported the decision to clear the intersection. But the chief in me should have vetoed it. And he certainly should have forbidden the indiscriminate use of tear gas to accomplish it, no matter how many warnings we barked through the bullhorn.

My support for a militaristic solution caused all hell to break loose. Rocks, bottles and newspaper racks went flying. Windows were smashed, stores were looted, fires lighted; and more gas filled the streets, with some cops clearly overreacting, escalating and prolonging the conflict. The “Battle in Seattle,” as the WTO protests and their aftermath came to be known, was a huge setback—for the protesters, my cops, the community.

More than a decade later, the police response to the Occupy movement, most disturbingly visible in Oakland—where scenes resembled a war zone and where a marine remains in serious condition from a police projectile—brings into sharp relief the acute and chronic problems of American law enforcement. Seattle might have served as a cautionary tale, but instead, US police forces have become increasingly militarized, and it’s showing in cities everywhere: the NYPD “white shirt” coating innocent people with pepper spray, the arrests of two student journalists at Occupy Atlanta, the declaration of public property as off-limits and the arrests of protesters for “trespassing.”

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Photo: REUTERS/Kim White

 

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From ‘Made in China’ to ‘Bought in China’

by J. Gabriel Boylan, Boston Globe

We read the phrase all the time, even if we’ve long since relegated it to the part of our brains that processes parental warning stickers or emergency-landing procedures: MADE IN CHINA.

China, for most of us in the West, is where things are manufactured, and here on the other side of the Pacific is where those things get bought. That organization of the world is a way to make sense of the big changes we see: America’s deindustrialization, the rise of our tech and service sectors, and China’s growing appetite for energy and resources. It is also a comfortable place to be: If you’re the world’s top consumer, then everyone else is worried about providing the things you want.

But what if the arrow were to turn, and China, brimming with a population of over 1.3 billion, started buying with a vengeance? What if China became the place that manufacturers looked for their cues?

That question is quickly turning from a what-if to a how-soon. Hundreds of millions of Chinese want the sorts of things we want — from televisions and washing machines to bottled water and organic food — and more and more of them are turning those wants into purchases. China’s annual consumer spending is now around $4 trillion; though still only half the US figure, it is already a bigger consumer economy than Japan and close to that of the European Union. China is now the world’s largest consumer in a number of categories, including beer, cigarettes, and — remarkably — cars. Some Western automakers have begun skipping US and European markets and debuting models in China first.

Karl Gerth, an East Asian studies professor at Oxford, has traveled to China many times in the past 25 years, building a body of research on China’s consumer history and habits. He has amassed data and interviewed colleagues and strangers alike about what they buy, what they’d like to buy, and how it’s all changed over the years. His latest book, “As China Goes, So Goes the World,” now out in paperback from Hill & Wang, documents China’s massive shift in lifestyle and spending.

Gerth draws a picture of a consumer culture that in some ways remains vastly different from the West’s. The state still plays a huge role in directing the manufacturing economy and prodding certain kinds of consumption. A long-held culture of saving means the Chinese are a long way from our comfort with credit and household debt. But some of the trends are familiar: Chains are spreading through the country; advertising is increasingly shaping consumer tastes across China’s diverse regions; golf and skiing, formerly the provinces only of the super-wealthy, have begun to attract middle-class fans. And as a token of prestige, the classic Chinese liquor Moatai is swiftly giving way to a taste for cognac.

Gerth spoke to Ideas from his home in Oxford, England.

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MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

Claudio Bravo. El sirviente, 1988.

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Is This Really the Tablet Everyone's Talking About?

by Jon Phillips, Wired

When all those people who pre-ordered the Kindle Fire receive their tablets in the mail this week, they will rip open their new toy’s bespoke cardboard packaging — it looks nothing like a typical Amazon shipping box — and be greeted by a playful home screen that comes personalized with their very own name.

These lucky few will bask in early adopter bliss. They will issue themselves hearty high-fives for having the foresight to purchase the year’s hottest gadget, sight unseen. And then they will marvel at a device that really does bring something fresh and clever to the tablet space — namely, an insanely low price.

But everything I describe above accounts for just the first five minutes of Kindle Fire use. The Fire isn’t a dud, but its real-world performance and utility match neither the benchmarks of public expectation, nor the standards set by the world’s best tablets.

The Fire’s 7-inch, 1024×600 screen is too small for many key tablet activities. The Fire’s processor, a 1GHz dual-core chip, appears all but insufficient for fluid, silky-smooth web browsing, an area where I found performance to be preternaturally slow. And unlike most of its tablet competitors, the Fire lacks a camera, 3G data connectivity, and a slot for removable storage.

As an assembly of physical components, the Fire lives at the bottom of the tablet food chain — and this limits what the Fire can actually do as a piece of mobile hardware. But all those consumers who pre-ordered the Fire knew this going in, right?

Hardware, Schmardware — Let’s Sell Some Content
(...)
I’ve been testing a Kindle Fire loaner unit for the last five days, and I’m impressed by how it elegantly repackages and streamlines every phase of the familiar Amazon purchasing experience. Indeed, the Fire is a fiendishly effective shopping portal in the guise of a 7-inch slate. It’s also a winning video playback device that uses Netflix, Hulu Plus, and Amazon’s own digital storefront to deliver hundreds of thousands of movies and TV shows, many of them free.

And, yes, the Fire is pretty good bargain for anyone who’s only comfortable with cautious toe-dipping in our presently murky (and expensive) tablet waters. At $200, the Fire crosses an impulse-buy threshold — albeit a steep one — that Apple’s $500 entry-level iPad 2 can’t even approach.

All these enticing features are topped off by a free one-month subscription to Amazon Prime, the company’s premium membership service. Prime provides free two-day shipping on all physical deliveries, free access to some 13,000 streaming videos, and free access to Amazon’s Kindle Owners Lending Library. This library lets you borrow e-books from a selection of more than 5,000 titles, including 100-plus current and former New York Times bestsellers — one e-book at a time, and one borrow per month, but with no pesky due dates.

In total, Prime alone would seem to justify a Kindle Fire purchase — if not for the fact that the service is open to all Amazon customers for just $79 a year. This means one month of free Amazon Prime access is just a $6.58 value-add for anyone who buys the Kindle Fire.

All of which leads us back to what the Fire can actually do as a day-in, day-out mobile workhorse. Is it tablet that people will grab again and again for web browsing, book and magazine reading, casual gaming, and more?

No. It’s not that kind of tablet.

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Photos by Jon Snyder/Wired

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Energy Independence - The Big Lie

by Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform (via Zerohedge)

It is too bad that our 255 million cars can’t run on hot air. American presidents have propagated the Big Lie of energy independence for the last three decades. The Democrats have lied about green energy solutions and the Republicans have lied about domestic sources saving the day. These deceitful politicians put the country at risk as they misinform and mislead the non-thinking American public. They have been declaring our energy independence for 30 years, but we import three times as much oil today as we did in the early 1980’s. The CPI has gone up 350% since 1978, but the price of a barrel of oil has risen 800% over the same time frame. Today, I hear the same mindless fabrications from politicians and pundits about our ability to become energy independent. Any critical thinking analysis of the hard facts reveals that the United States will grow increasingly dependent upon other countries to supply our energy needs from a dwindling and harder to access supply of oil and natural gas. The fantasy world of plug in cars, corn driven vehicles and solar energy running our manufacturing plants is a castle in the sky flight of imagination. The linear thinking academic crowd believes a technological miracle will save us, when it is evident technology fails without infinite quantities of cheap oil.

I know the chart below requires some time to grasp, but I’m sure the average American can take five minutes away from watching Jersey Shore, Dancing with the Stars, or the latest update of the Kardashian saga to understand why the propaganda about energy independence is nothing but falsehoods. You have U.S. energy demand by sector on the right and the energy source by fuel on the left. Total U.S. energy use is nearly 100 quadrillion Btu. In physical energy terms, 1 quad represents 172 million barrels of oil (8 to 9 days of U.S. oil use), 50 million tons of coal (enough to generate about 2% of annual U.S. electricity use), or 1 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (about 4% of annual U.S. natural gas use).

Please note that 37% of our energy source is petroleum, which supplies 95% of the energy for our transportation sector. That means your car and the millions of 18 wheelers that deliver your food to your grocery stores and electronic gadgets to your Best Buy. You can’t fill up your SUV with coal, natural gas, nuclear energy or sunshine. Without the 7 billion barrels of oil we use every year, our just in time mall centric suburban sprawl society would come to a grinding halt. There is no substitute for cheap plentiful oil anywhere in sight. The government sponsored ethanol boondoggle has already driven food prices higher, while requiring more energy to produce than it generates. Only a government “solution” could raise food prices, reduce gas mileage, and bankrupt hundreds of companies in an effort to reduce our dependence on oil. Natural gas as a transportation fuel supplies 2% of our needs. The cost to retro-fit 160,000 service stations across the country to supply natural gas as a fuel for the non-existent natural gas automobiles would be a fool’s errand and take at least a decade to implement. (...)

The United States is a country built upon the four C’s: Crude, Cars, Credit, and Consumption. They are intertwined and can’t exist without crude as the crucial ingredient. As the amount of crude available declines and the price rises, the other three C’s will breakdown. Our warped consumer driven economy collapses without the input of cheap plentiful oil. Those at the top levels of government realize this fact. It is not a coincidence that the War on Terror is the current cover story to keep our troops in the Middle East. It is not a coincidence the uncooperative rulers (Hussein, Gaddafi) of the countries with the 5^th and 9^th largest oil reserves on the planet have been dispatched. It is not a coincidence the saber rattling grows louder regarding the Iranian regime, as they sit atop 155 billion barrels of oil, the 4^th largest reserves in the world. It should also be noted the troops leaving Iraq immediately began occupying Kuwait, owner of the 6^th largest oil reserves on the planet. Oil under the South China Sea and in the arctic is being hotly pursued by the major world players. China and Russia are supporting Iran in their showdown with Israel and the U.S. As the world depletes the remaining oil, conflict and war are inevitable. The term Energy Independence will carry a different meaning than the one spouted by mindless politicians as the oil runs low.

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Intrade

[ed. I had never heard of Intrade until today.  This is not an advertisment and I'm not using it to gamble, but am curious about its predictive abilities over a wide range of topics.  This might be more useful than polling since people are putting actual money where their mouths are.  For example: The U.S. economy will go into recession in 2012.]

What is a prediction market?

Intrade is a prediction market. What is a prediction market? It's a market that allows you to make predictions on the outcome of hundreds of real-world events. Stock exchanges find the price of stocks, and futures markets find the price of commodities. Prediction markets find the probability of something happening - a predefined, uncertain future event.

Will the financial markets be up today? Will a certain candidate win the next election? Who will win the Academy Awards? If you have an opinion on what will happen then you can make a prediction on Intrade. Predict correctly and you can win real money profits.

Who am I buying from? Who am I selling to?

Intrade is an exchange - like the New York or London stock exchanges for example. When you buy shares you are buying them from another member of Intrade. And when you sell shares, another member of the exchange is buying them from you. You do not buy shares from Intrade, and Intrade does not buy shares from you. You are always trading shares with other members of the exchange - other people who are making predictions, just like you.

It is important to remember that Intrade is a market. This means you may not always be able to get what you want. If you are looking to buy some shares, but nobody is selling, then you can't buy the shares that you want.

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B-52's

The 99 Second Presentation

[ed. Not a topic you see often - conference planning and participation. Two excellent essays:  How to Get the Most Out of Conferences and The Problems with Training.]

by Scott Berkun

Everyone I know that has attended more than one conference or training event has left early at least once. They felt bored, wanted to avoid the traffic, or desired to go see the sights if the conference was out of town. I’ve done this on many occasions. If I know that the sessions are simply live versions of the papers in the proceedings, or other things I can obtain later, what exactly is my motivation to stay? I think people leaving early, or cutting out of sessions is an indicator of a problem. It means that something unique and hard to miss isn’t happening. (btw: Those are often the people to catch on their way out, and politely ask what could have been different that would have made them want to stay).

The largest event we ran at Microsoft, Design day (500-600 people), saw the introduction of several different formats to break up the monotony of lectures and panels. Using an idea I’d seen elsewhere, we created a session called 99 second presentations. We had open submissions (which we selected from) for people to speak at the conference on any topic for, you guessed it, 99 seconds. This had three effects. First, it drew people in. They’d never heard of this, and since it sounded like a potential disaster, many people came to watch. Second, there are lots of smart knowledgeable people who don’t have the interest or time to make 45 minute presentations. But a 99 second presentation everyone has time for. So many voices at Microsoft that hadn’t been heard before were encouraged to surface.

And finally, for the audience, the 99 second time limit allowed for them to hear 20 or 30 different short talks in an hour. If one talk was boring, they didn’t have to wait long for it to end. On the other hand, if they heard something interesting, they knew the name or URL for the person that spoke, and were invited to follow up with them and actually have a conversation and learn in a more social way. I believe there are dozens of other interesting ideas that haven’t been done yet, or that I haven’t heard of. They will never happen until people try them out and learn how to organize them well.

(Side note: I was also told that some people with fears of public speaking signed up for this, since they wanted to work on overcoming that fear, but wanted an easier step.)

While the 99 second format was successful, we did make mistakes. This comes with the territory when you try new things. The timer we used didn’t work out so well (ok, it sucked), and the transitions between speakers wasn’t as smooth as I had planned. But the packed crowd and the high review marks made clear that the session worked anyway. If ever anyone tries to run this session again, they’ll be able to make it even better. The only way to progress is to try new things: so even if this had failed, it was worth it. I’d have learned something more about what might work at next year’s conference.

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Steel Pulse

Putting Like a Pro: The Role of Positive Contagion in Golf Performance and Perception

Charles Lee¹, Sally A. Linkenauger^2*, Jonathan Z. Bakdash³, Jennifer A. Joy-Gaba¹, Dennis R. Profitt¹

1 Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America, 2 Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, 3 Department of Psychology, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah, United States of America

Abstract

Many amateur athletes believe that using a professional athlete's equipment can improve their performance. Such equipment can be said to be affected with positive contagion, which refers to the belief of transference of beneficial properties between animate persons/objects to previously neutral objects. In this experiment, positive contagion was induced by telling participants in one group that a putter previously belonged to a professional golfer. The effect of positive contagion was examined for perception and performance in a golf putting task. Individuals who believed they were using the professional golfer's putter perceived the size of the golf hole to be larger than golfers without such a belief and also had better performance, sinking more putts. These results provide empirical support for anecdotes, which allege that using objects with positive contagion can improve performance, and further suggest perception can be modulated by positive contagion.

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h/t: Scientific American

New York City, Yellow Cabs by Thomas Richter
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Chris Whitley

Herbin, Auguste (1882-1960) - 1913 Landscape in Ceret (Musée d’Art Moderne de
Ville de Paris)
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Twelve Apathetic Men

Why no one wants to get convicted of jury duty.

by Greg Beato, Reason

Recently I spent the morning in a large room at San Francisco’s Hall of Justice along with several hundred others watching Ideals Made Real, the world’s least convincing infomercial. A 14-minute anesthetic that the state of California administers to anxious citizens to ease the pain of imminent empaneling, Ideals Made Real is filled with photogenic flags, close-ups of the Constitution, and candid disclosures from sedately enthusiastic jury duty survivors. “It’s often a deep and moving experience to be on a jury,” a robotic female narrator eventually concludes, and yet few in the audience seem sold on this premise. Young, old, rich, poor, as demographically diverse a cross-section of the public as the court system’s computers can randomly generate, the great overwhelming bulk of them share the last common bond uniting America: They want to escape jury duty. Desperately. When a judge enters the room and asks those who aren’t planning to plead hardship of one sort or another to stand up, only a couple dozen of us rise to our feet.

At a time when sentiments against government overreach animate the land, this ennui is, if not exactly puzzling, at least ironic. Trial by jury isn’t merely a Hollywood plot device. It’s a mechanism designed to prevent government oppression and to disperse the state’s power into the hands of the common man. It’s the ultimate embodiment of government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Just one problem: The people don’t seem all that interested in the job.  (...)

If you’re one of those rare souls who has actually shown up for jury duty, however, then you know that the first real stage of the trial process—voir dire—has nothing to do with fair cross-sections, impartiality, or any other noble ideals regularly uttered to the beat of a banging gavel. Instead, it’s all about giving prosecutors and defense attorneys a chance to winnow the jury pool in ways that favor their side, as determined by jury consulting firms who’ve focus-grouped surrogate jurors in mock trials and know which way prospective panelists are likely to lean based on such factors as their education level, their personality traits, and the number of hours they spend each week watching Law and Order reruns.

Is an accused murderer’s life at stake? Is a lot of money on the line? The greater consequence a trial is presumed to have, the more effort goes into filtering juries in this manner. And if we’re okay with ending up without a random selection, why is it so important to start out with one?

Make jury service voluntary rather than compulsory and mostly what we’d lose is a costly, time-consuming ideal—the fair cross-section of the community—which we currently honor by immediately trying to undermine it with the costly, time-consuming process of voir dire.

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image: ifilmdb

Grown-ups Must Act Like Grown-ups

by Jane Levy, Grantland

Five nights ago, a prosecutor pal — a new mom — who spends her days tracking terrorists and her nights trying not to think about them, sent me a link to the indictment of Jerry Sandusky on 40 counts of child molestation.

"Don't read it before you go to bed," my pal said.

In her former professional life, she prosecuted child sexual abuse cases and had helped me understand the abuse Mickey Mantle suffered at the hands of an older half sister, neighborhood bully-boys, and a high school teacher. She knew I had deeply researched the psychological image inflicted upon victims of abuse and thought I might want to write about the flesh-and-blood boys so clinically identified in the grand jury indictment as Victims 1-8.

I took her advice about my bedtime reading. I listened instead to the attorney for a woman who had accepted a settlement from the National Restaurant Association plead for her to be released from a confidentiality agreement so she could publicly address the allegations of sexual harassment she had made against Herman Cain. I listened to the leading Republican candidate for president refer to his accuser as "that woman," and heard an echo of former president Bill Clinton's defiant testimony: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

I read Penn State University president Graham Spanier's statement of unconditional support for two school officials who would be forced to resign the next day after being charged with perjury and failure to report what they knew to state child protective services.

I watched a crowd gathered outside coach Joe Paterno's house in State College, Pa. chant, "Paterno! Paterno!"

I Googled the name and learned that it is believed to be a short form of the better known "Paternoster," a surname for a maker of rosaries as well as a given name for baby boys meaning, "Of the father."

I thought about the cruel irony of the nickname Paterno wore as proudly as his Nittany Lions sweater.

The next morning I booted up the computer and opened a new document file with the intention to write about the common denominator in the colliding headlines and the institutional reflex to bury heads in the quicksand of silence.

Then I read the 23-page indictment, which should be required reading — though perhaps not at bedtime — on every college campus in America with or without a revenue-producing football team. Prosecutors call it a speaking indictment because of the awful, irrefutable specificity recorded in the statement of facts that puts the lie to the polite evasions and elisions of defense attorneys and family newspapers.  (...)

As I read, something quite unexpected occurred, an "aha" moment in the quiet of my kitchen, with the dog asleep on the floor and coffee cooling in a cup. I leaned against the cooktop. I realized I was writing the wrong story.

Forty-one years ago, while an exchange student living at a convent school in Belgium, I was sexually assaulted by a teacher, a married woman with an 8-month-old son. This is not a newly recovered memory. This is a story I have told repeatedly, though not publicly, for years. I needed to tell it to convince myself it was true.

I choose to tell it here, not because I wish to detract in any way from the severity of the alleged abuse that took place at Penn State but because it illustrates the power of the mind, as psychologist Richard Gartner, author of the definitive book on the subject, Betrayed As Boys, told me, "to put experience in a kind of box so that it doesn't disturb the rest of you." Because, while I am a reluctant citizen of the confessional states of America, my experience, which pales in comparison to the trauma described by the grand jury, illustrates the banal ubiquity of sexual abuse and its insidious aftermath.

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Photo: AP

The Entreprenurial Generation

by William Deresiewicz, NY Times

Ever since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?

Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.

According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Call it Generation Sell.

The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

AND that, I think, is the real meaning of the Millennial affect — which is, like the entrepreneurial ideal, essentially everyone’s now. Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

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Illustration: Josh Cochran and Mike Perry

Ben Grasso
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