Have some fun.
[ed. Repost: April 22, 2011]
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Friday, February 21, 2014
Why is Academic Writing so Academic?
Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work—practically and spiritually—is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing—the kind you read for fun—seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.
Professors didn’t sit down and decide to make academic writing this way, any more than journalists sat down and decided to invent listicles. Academic writing is the way it is because it’s part of a system. Professors live inside that system and have made peace with it. But every now and then, someone from outside the system swoops in to blame professors for the writing style that they’ve inherited. This week, it was Nicholas Kristof, who set off a rancorous debate about academic writing with a column, in the Times, called “Professors, We Need You!” The academic world, Kristof argued, is in thrall to a “culture of exclusivity” that “glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience”; as a result, there are “fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.”
The response from the professoriate was swift, severe, accurate, and thoughtful. (...)
As a one-time academic, I spent most of the week rooting for the profs. But I have a lot of sympathy for Kristof, too. I think his heart’s in the right place. (His column ended on a wistful note: “I write this in sorrow, for I considered an academic career.”) My own theory is that he got the situation backward. The problem with academia isn’t that professors are, as Kristof wrote, “marginalizing themselves.” It’s that the system that produces and consumes academic knowledge is changing, and, in the process, making academic work more marginal.
by Joshua Rothman, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Martine Franck/Magnum
The Highs and Lows of High and Low
By the same token, there’s Directing and there’s Great Directing. The present age is extremely enamored of Great Directing, which tends to involve camera movements so ostentatious that even viewers without much technical knowledge can register their difficulty. Throw a complicated six-minute tracking shot into an episode of True Detective, and watch Twitter light up the instant it airs. That sort of tour de force can be genuinely impressive—Orson Welles didn’t exactly botch the opening shot of Touch Of Evil—but it makes it hard for people to notice work that’s equally sophisticated, but less showy.
High And Low rarely gets mentioned when cinephiles talk about the medium’s most masterful formal achievements. Even among Akira Kurosawa’s films, Seven Samurai, Throne Of Blood, and Ran are more likely to be cited for purely visual mastery, if only because they’re all more superficially dynamic. But few movies have ever been as subtly, methodically composed as High And Low, in which every shot reflects, to some degree, the dichotomy presented by its title. The film’s narrative is neatly bifurcated between high and low, both literally (meaning geographically) and figuratively. Kurosawa’s camera follows suit, employing wholly different modes in its first and second halves. It’s almost hard to believe that certain sequences were directed by the same man, much less that they belong to the same picture.
Most of High And Low’s first half is confined to a single room in the hilltop mansion of shoe-company exec Kingo Gondo—a room, Chief Detective Tokura points out, that can easily be seen with a telescope from the slums below. There are often as many as 10 characters occupying this room at once: Gondo; his wife and son; the chauffeur whose son was actually kidnapped; Gondo’s secretary; Detective Tokura; and three or four of his men. The director’s job is to ensure this crowded set doesn’t devolve into random chaos, and to block the action cleanly and neatly. Kurosawa goes much further, continually reframing his actors with small, decisive camera movements that don’t call attention to themselves, yet always clarify visually what’s most important at any given moment. At the same time, he isn’t afraid to just cut to a new angle when that’s the most effective choice—no shot is extended for its own sake, or intended merely to impress. Many of these tiny shifts in perspective are only perceptible to viewers who pay close attention, though their impact can readily be felt, even when they don’t register consciously.
Here’s an example: Kurosawa begins this shot with a panoramic view of the entire company, placing Detective Tokura (Tatsuya Nakadai, wearing the dark suit) at the frame’s center, evenly flanked by the room’s other occupants. Everybody is clearly visible, but by far the least prominent person in the shot is the chauffeur, most of whose body is obstructed, significantly, by Gondo (Toshirô Mifune, seated at left). At this point in the film, the kidnapper hasn’t yet made his demands, so nobody knows that the chauffeur’s son’s life may depend on Gondo’s willingness to pay an enormous ransom. Nonetheless, Kurosawa is already foreshadowing that moral conflict visually, and at the end of the previous shot, Mifune and the two actors playing the technicians (to his right) actually get into place to create this composition, even though the camera is on the opposite side of the room.
by Mike D'Angelo, Dissolve | Read more:
Image: High and Low
Buddhist Economics
It says that truly rational decisions can only be made when we understand what creates irrationality. When people understand what constitutes desire, they realize that all the wealth in the world cannot satisfy it. When people understand the universality of fear, they become more compassionate to all beings. Thus, this spiritual approach to Economics doesn't rely on theories and models but on the essential forces of acumen, empathy, and restraint.
The Buddhist point of view ascribes to work a trinal function: to give man a chance to utilize and develop his aptitude; to enable him to overcome his self-aggrandizement by engaging with other people in common tasks; and to bring forward the goods and services needed for a better existence.
From the perspective of a Buddhist, Economics and other streams of knowledge cannot be separated. Economics is a single component of a combined effort to fix the problems of humanity and Buddhist Economics works with it to reach a common goal of societal, individual, and environmental sufficiency.
by Wikipedia | Read more:
Image: via:
Milestone
Good morning, Duck Soup readers. I'd like to share a small milestone with you. Today we surpassed 250,000 page views after nearly three years of being in existence. A quarter-of-a-million page views! I know, probably about what the Huffington Post or The Atlantic gets in 10 minutes, but still, a very gratifyng and humbling metric for this little corner of the internet.
Clive Thompson, in his recent book Smarter Than You Think talks about the 'audience effect' and why blogging can be so satisfying. He makes the observation that:
"the cognitive shift in going from an audience of zero (talking to yourself) to an audience of 10 (a few friends or random strangers checking out your online post) is so big that it’s actually huger than going from 10 people to a million."I'd agree with that completely. The first time this blog got a visit I was stunned. Then there were a few more, and a few more, and all of a sudden Duck Soup had an audience! But delight quickly turned to horror as the realization sank in that, if people were going to return, there had to be something worth returning for. That responsibility is really the engine that's kept this thing going... that and just the pure pleasure of sharing (really interesting things!). Fortunately, the horror stage didn't last long, and I now consider Duck Soup a companion, an outlet, a small creative diversion that I hope adds something to someone's life, but beyond that don't have any pretentions about its relevance to anyone but myself. Still. This milestone makes me smile a little.
More recently, Roger Angell compared blogging to "a bit like making a paper airplane and then watching it take wing below your window." I'd agree with that, too. Who cares where it goes? It's just the fun of making it and sending it sailing that counts.
Thank you all.
markk
Image via:
Image via:
The Shadow Lobbying Complex
It was 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and I found myself hanging around the House-side entrance to the Capitol building, hoping to interview lawmakers during the protracted government shutdown in October. The members had been called by the Republican leadership to open just one slice of the government without authorizing funds for the Affordable Care Act, a partial solution that had rallied Democrats in opposition. As dusk settled in, I lingered to interview the representatives as they walked in and out of what everyone considered at this point to be a scene of political theater.
While I waited, a small crowd gathered, composed of men and women in business attire, creating something of a receiving line where they could exchange pleasantries with members of Congress as the latter made their way from their offices across Independence Avenue to cast a perfunctory vote. The city, with hundreds of thousands of federal workers sent home from the job, was far from dead. On Capitol Hill, the real financial engine of Washington, the selling of access and policy hummed along at full speed, and I was in the midst of it. (...)
On paper, the lobbying industry is quickly disappearing. In January, records indicated that for a third straight year, overall spending on lobbying decreased. Lobbyists themselves continue to deregister. In 2013, the number of registered lobbyists dipped to 12,281, the lowest number on file since 2002.
But experts say that lobbying isn’t dying; instead, it’s simply going underground. The problem, says American University professor James Thurber, who has studied congressional lobbying for more than thirty years, is that “most of what is going on in Washington is not covered” by the lobbyist-registration system. Thurber, who is currently advising the American Bar Association’s lobbying-reform task force, adds that his research suggests the true number of working lobbyists is closer to 100,000.
A loophole-ridden law, poor enforcement, the development of increasingly sophisticated strategies that enlist third-party validators and create faux-grassroots campaigns, along with an Obama administration executive order that gave many in the profession a disincentive to register—all of these forces have combined to produce a near-total collapse of the system that was designed to keep tabs on federal lobbying.
While the official figure puts the annual spending on lobbying at $3.2 billion in 2013, Thurber estimates that the industry brings in more than $9 billion a year. Other experts have made similar estimates, but no one is sure how large the industry has become. Lee Drutman, a lobbying expert at the Sunlight Foundation, says that at least twice as much is spent on lobbying as is officially reported. (...)
Rather than using the L-word to describe what they do, many lobbyists prefer the more banal rubric of “government relations” or “government affairs.” Reflecting this trend, the American League of Lobbyists—a professional association for the industry—changed its name in November to the Association of Government Relations Professionals. And while lobbyists must report their payments from clients, those ducking the system quietly bring in the biggest paydays.
by Lee Fang, The Nation | Read more:
While I waited, a small crowd gathered, composed of men and women in business attire, creating something of a receiving line where they could exchange pleasantries with members of Congress as the latter made their way from their offices across Independence Avenue to cast a perfunctory vote. The city, with hundreds of thousands of federal workers sent home from the job, was far from dead. On Capitol Hill, the real financial engine of Washington, the selling of access and policy hummed along at full speed, and I was in the midst of it. (...)On paper, the lobbying industry is quickly disappearing. In January, records indicated that for a third straight year, overall spending on lobbying decreased. Lobbyists themselves continue to deregister. In 2013, the number of registered lobbyists dipped to 12,281, the lowest number on file since 2002.
But experts say that lobbying isn’t dying; instead, it’s simply going underground. The problem, says American University professor James Thurber, who has studied congressional lobbying for more than thirty years, is that “most of what is going on in Washington is not covered” by the lobbyist-registration system. Thurber, who is currently advising the American Bar Association’s lobbying-reform task force, adds that his research suggests the true number of working lobbyists is closer to 100,000.
A loophole-ridden law, poor enforcement, the development of increasingly sophisticated strategies that enlist third-party validators and create faux-grassroots campaigns, along with an Obama administration executive order that gave many in the profession a disincentive to register—all of these forces have combined to produce a near-total collapse of the system that was designed to keep tabs on federal lobbying.
While the official figure puts the annual spending on lobbying at $3.2 billion in 2013, Thurber estimates that the industry brings in more than $9 billion a year. Other experts have made similar estimates, but no one is sure how large the industry has become. Lee Drutman, a lobbying expert at the Sunlight Foundation, says that at least twice as much is spent on lobbying as is officially reported. (...)
Rather than using the L-word to describe what they do, many lobbyists prefer the more banal rubric of “government relations” or “government affairs.” Reflecting this trend, the American League of Lobbyists—a professional association for the industry—changed its name in November to the Association of Government Relations Professionals. And while lobbyists must report their payments from clients, those ducking the system quietly bring in the biggest paydays.
by Lee Fang, The Nation | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Thursday, February 20, 2014
The Dark Power of Fraternities
Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck. Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and—in the fullness of time—pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.
It takes a certain kind of personal-injury lawyer to look at the facts of this glittering night and wrest from them a plausible plaintiff and defendant, unless it were possible for Travis Hughes to be sued by his own anus. But the fraternity lawsuit is a lucrative mini-segment of the personal-injury business, and if ever there was a deck that ought to have had a railing, it was the one that served as a nighttime think tank and party-idea testing ground for the brain trust of the Theta Omicron Chapter of Alpha Tau Omega and its honored guests—including these two knuckleheads, who didn’t even belong to the fraternity. Moreover, the building codes of Huntington, West Virginia, are unambiguous on the necessity of railings on elevated decks. Whether Helmburg stumbled in reaction to an exploding party guest or to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ is immaterial; there should have been a railing to catch him.
And so it was that Louis Helmburg III joined forces with Timothy P. Rosinsky, Esq., a slip-and-fall lawyer from Huntington who had experience also with dog-bite, DUI, car-repossession, and drug cases. The events of that night, laid out in Helmburg’s complaint, suggested a relatively straightforward lawsuit. But the suit would turn out to have its own repeated failures to launch and unintended collateral damage, and it would include an ever-widening and desperate search for potential defendants willing to foot the modest bill for Helmburg’s documented injuries. Sending a lawyer without special expertise in wrangling with fraternities to sue one of them is like sending a Boy Scout to sort out the unpleasantness in Afghanistan. Who knows? The kid could get lucky. But it never hurts—preparedness and all that—to send him off with a body bag.
College fraternities—by which term of art I refer to the formerly all-white, now nominally integrated men’s “general” or “social” fraternities, and not the several other types of fraternities on American campuses (religious, ethnic, academic)—are as old, almost, as the republic. In a sense, they are older: they emanated in part from the Freemasons, of which George Washington himself was a member. When arguments are made in their favor, they are arguments in defense of a foundational experience for millions of American young men, and of a system that helped build American higher education as we know it. Fraternities also provide their members with matchless leadership training. While the system has produced its share of poets, aesthetes, and Henry James scholars, it is far more famous for its success in the powerhouse fraternity fields of business, law, and politics. An astonishing number of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, congressmen and male senators, and American presidents have belonged to fraternities. Many more thousands of American men count their fraternal experience—and the friendships made within it—as among the most valuable in their lives. The organizations raise millions of dollars for worthy causes, contribute millions of hours in community service, and seek to steer young men toward lives of service and honorable action. They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.
by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Phil Toledano
Google Plus You Equals $$$$
It is one of the great Internet mysteries of the last few years: Why does Google Plus still exist? The search engine company’s social network launched in mid-2011 and most people who signed up to “check it out” stopped using it several hours later in mid-2011. Since then, the only people I’ve seen actively promoting their Google Plus (or shall we say Google+!) accounts are the couple of people I know who work for Google Inc. So why hasn’t Google Inc. shitcanned this clearly failed rival to Facebook already?
Because while you may have stopped using Google Plus, Google Plus hasn’t stopped using you. In fact, you’ve been a great product for Google Plus!
Five-hundred-some million people have Google Plus accounts, mostly because using Gmail or YouTube or whatever other web-based software requires you to set up a Google Plus account. You, reader, probably have a Google Plus account and don’t even know it, aside from the occasional “Check out what you’ve missed on Google+” emails the infernal company spams you with from time to time. And since you’re logged into it pretty much all the time, this helps Google track everything you do on the Internet to make you a clearer target for advertisers. The New York Times writes:
Because while you may have stopped using Google Plus, Google Plus hasn’t stopped using you. In fact, you’ve been a great product for Google Plus!Five-hundred-some million people have Google Plus accounts, mostly because using Gmail or YouTube or whatever other web-based software requires you to set up a Google Plus account. You, reader, probably have a Google Plus account and don’t even know it, aside from the occasional “Check out what you’ve missed on Google+” emails the infernal company spams you with from time to time. And since you’re logged into it pretty much all the time, this helps Google track everything you do on the Internet to make you a clearer target for advertisers. The New York Times writes:
But Google isn’t worried. Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future — a lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information that advertisers covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about people’s social activity than Facebook does.
The reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once return to the social network itself.
Before Google released Plus, the company might not have known that you were the same person when you searched, watched videos and used maps. With a single Plus account, the company can build a database of your affinities.The true star of the piece is a certain Bradley Horowitz, the vice president of product management for Google Plus. As the piece goes into detail describing how Google Plus is just a more comprehensive method for the company to hoover up as much of your information as possible, there’s Bradley Horowitz, ready with the glib bizspeak quote to suggest that no, this product is actually about helping you. “Google Plus gives you the opportunity to be yourself, and gives Google that common understanding of who you are.”
by Jim Newell, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: US Govt.
Why Actors Act Out
The recent erratic behavior of Shia LaBeouf, the 27-year-old actor best known as the star of the “Transformers” movies, has sent the press into a feeding frenzy. Though the wisdom of some of his actions may seem questionable, as an actor and artist I’m inclined to take an empathetic view of his conduct.
Let’s review the facts. First, in December, Mr. LaBeouf was accused of plagiarism after critics noted similarities between “Howard Cantour.com,” a short film he created, and a story by the graphic novelist Daniel Clowes. Though Mr. LaBeouf apologized on Twitter, conceding that he had “neglected to follow proper accreditation,” it turned out that the apology itself appropriated someone else’s writing. Was that clever or pathological?
Then, earlier this month, with these actions focusing the tabloid gaze on him, he wore a paper bag over his head that read “I am not famous anymore” at the red-carpet premiere of his latest movie, “Nymphomaniac.” And last week he staged an art show called “#IAmSorry” that involved having him sit opposite visitors to a Los Angeles gallery while he wore a similar bag over his head and stared at them through cutout eye holes.
This behavior could be a sign of many things, from a nervous breakdown to mere youthful recklessness. For Mr. LaBeouf’s sake I hope it is nothing serious. Indeed I hope — and, yes, I know that this idea has pretentious or just plain ridiculous overtones — that his actions are intended as a piece of performance art, one in which a young man in a very public profession tries to reclaim his public persona.
Actors have been lashing out against their profession and its grip on their public images since at least Marlon Brando. Brando’s performances revolutionized American acting precisely because he didn’t seem to be “performing,” in the sense that he wasn’t putting something on as much as he was being. Off-screen he defied the studio system’s control over his image, allowing his weight to fluctuate, choosing roles that were considered beneath him and turning down the Oscar for best actor in 1973. These were acts of rebellion against an industry that practically forces an actor to identify with his persona while at the same time repeatedly wresting it from him.
by James Franco, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeff Vespa/WireImage.com
Let’s review the facts. First, in December, Mr. LaBeouf was accused of plagiarism after critics noted similarities between “Howard Cantour.com,” a short film he created, and a story by the graphic novelist Daniel Clowes. Though Mr. LaBeouf apologized on Twitter, conceding that he had “neglected to follow proper accreditation,” it turned out that the apology itself appropriated someone else’s writing. Was that clever or pathological?Then, earlier this month, with these actions focusing the tabloid gaze on him, he wore a paper bag over his head that read “I am not famous anymore” at the red-carpet premiere of his latest movie, “Nymphomaniac.” And last week he staged an art show called “#IAmSorry” that involved having him sit opposite visitors to a Los Angeles gallery while he wore a similar bag over his head and stared at them through cutout eye holes.
This behavior could be a sign of many things, from a nervous breakdown to mere youthful recklessness. For Mr. LaBeouf’s sake I hope it is nothing serious. Indeed I hope — and, yes, I know that this idea has pretentious or just plain ridiculous overtones — that his actions are intended as a piece of performance art, one in which a young man in a very public profession tries to reclaim his public persona.
Actors have been lashing out against their profession and its grip on their public images since at least Marlon Brando. Brando’s performances revolutionized American acting precisely because he didn’t seem to be “performing,” in the sense that he wasn’t putting something on as much as he was being. Off-screen he defied the studio system’s control over his image, allowing his weight to fluctuate, choosing roles that were considered beneath him and turning down the Oscar for best actor in 1973. These were acts of rebellion against an industry that practically forces an actor to identify with his persona while at the same time repeatedly wresting it from him.
by James Franco, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jeff Vespa/WireImage.com
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
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