Birdhouse Hosting welcomes marilynberlinsnell.com, a portfolio site for journalist and editor Marilyn Berlin Snell.
I’m a San Francisco-based journalist and editor. Partial to Vladimir Nabokov, who said that “curiosity is insubordination in its purest form,” I’ve utilized my predilection for nosiness, most recently, on political and investigative stories related to the environment, profiles of unlikely environmentalists, and special projects tied to climate change and green living.
The Simpsons’ Matt Groening pens a weekly strip, Life in Hell, for alternative newspapers. Groening declares, “If I can make somebody laugh and really annoy the hell out of somebody else, I think I’ve done my job!”
patrick_cates has added a photo to the pool:
patrick_cates has added a photo to the pool:
Brian Gaut lives in an average nondescript apartment. The only thing out of the ordinary is the object sitting in the middle of the coffee table -- a metal box adorned with a huge red button... the Emergency Party Button (EPB for short). Slam that button in a moment of extremity and the whole room changes personality. The lights go down, the curtains close, black lights, fog machines and lasers fire up, the stereo starts cranking out "What Is Love" by Haddaway and -- just like that -- your nondescript apartment is transformed into a totally happenin' disco.
The world would be a better place if every room had an emergency party button. You can check out a video of the room in action on Gaut's website. There's also complete instructions in case you want to roll your own EPB.
(Thanks LifeHacker)
I’m getting to the point where I’ve been writing my talks out more, rather than having points in my slides that I elaborate over. This is partly a result of doing more “big picture” keynote/endnote type talks but also just because they seem to go better and I’m more at ease beforehand. I did the endnote talk for the Saskatchewan-Manitoba Library Conference last week (say that to the Customs guy at the border and watch his eyes glaze over really fast…) and I’ve put up both a PDF of the slides as well as the whole talk as I’ve written it. Some of it is still ad-libbed, I have notes like “tell Katrina story” and, my favorite, “wrap up” but I figured some people might like to read a talk start to finish. Thanks are due to all the wonderful librarians who I met and talked with. Next time I’m up that way I hope to be able to actually see some libraries and not just the inside of the conference center.
..which has now arrived.
NYTBR: Rachel Donadio time-travels to 1958 and the raging war of intelligentsia; Jennifer Senior considers Masha Gessen's examination of genetics in contemporary settings; and David Orr looks at Helen Vendler's examination of William Butler Yeats.
WaPo Book World: Jonathan Yardley considers the reflections of a wine merchant; Michael Dirda reads Albert Camus' notebooks from the 1950s; and Art Taylor has his say on Kate Mosse's new historical thriller.
LA Times: Mark Luce pulls for the main character of HARRY, REVISED in spite of himself; Deborah Vankin explores the murky marriage territory of Andrew Sean Greer's new novel; Richard Rayner is thoroughly entertained by AMERICAN EVE; and Donna Rifkind wishes she could feel the same about David Benioff's latest novelistic effort.
G&M: Simon Houpt catches up with memoir-writin' Barbara Walters; Jamie Kastner scrutinizes several examples of cautionary parenting books; and Margaret Cannon reviews crime fiction by Joy Fielding, Tom Rob Smith, Michael Gruber, Mary Daheim, Ann Cleeves, Randy Wayne White & M.C. Beaton.
Guardian Review: Jacqueline Rose traces the trajectory of Israel's literature; David Peace talks of Yorkshire and Tokyo to Nicholas Wroe; and David Thomson pays tribute to David Lean on the director's birth centenary.
Observer: Anushka Asthana is devastated by Stephanie Merritt's chronicle of bipolar disorder; Toby Lichtig is impressed with David Lodge's ability to make anything - even hearing impairment - funny; and Peter Guttridge sings the praises of Kate Summerscale and her non-fiction detective novel.
The Times: Tom Gatti meets publisher David Fickling, the man responsible for saving British comics; Hugo Barnacle likes Sebastian Barry's sweeping new novel well enough;and Lindsey Duguid recognizes the delusion menace that stalks Emily Perkins' newest tale.
The Scotsman: Catherine Deveney meets Rebecca Walker: memoirist, activist, famous writer's daughter; Aidan Smith meets William Sutcliffe, the man referred to as "Evelyn Waugh with iPods"; and Ron Butlin talks of his cultural life.
The Rest:
Reasons why publishing cracks me up, part the umpteenth: that a debut PI novel by an American author with UK representation gets splashed in the British papers because - boing! - he happens to be the half-brother of a famous actor. Oh, publishing, can you stop acting like the ugly stepchild of Hollywood even though so many people think that's exactly what you are?
Oline Cogdill splits her decision on new thrillers by Ace Atkins and Bill Floyd.
Dick Adler echoes the CHILD 44 hosannas in the Chicago Tribune.
The Seattle Times' Adam Woog reviews new mystery offerings from Donna Leon, John Straley, Peter Leonard, Greg Mandel, C.J. Box and Robert Goddard.
In the Sun-Times, Dana Kaye chats with Augusten Burroughs and Ed Champion travels down paranormal alleys with a LONELY WEREWOLF GIRL.
At the Telegraph, Susanna Yager reviews recent crime fiction by Ariana Franklin and Declan Hughes while Jake Kerridge has his say on international mysteries by Mehmet Murat Somer, AC Baantjer, Qiu Xiaolong and Henning Mankell.
The Madison Times profiles local mystery bookstore Booked for Murder, now in the hands of new ownership.
Kate's Mystery Bookstore just won the Raven, celebrates its 25th anniversary and is written up by the Cambridge Chronicle.
The Thunder Bay Chronicle Journal talks with local journalist-turned-crime novelist April Lindgren about her debut novel HEADLINE: MURDER.
Chris Simms gets the interview treatment about his DI Spicer novels at Manchester Confidential.
And finally, this is a work of genius. (via)
“The library structure was originally a hot dog stand operated by Harry Lewis. Lewis’s grandfather, W.R. Surles, owned the land and structure, which he provided for use as a library in the late 1930s.” [read more in the picture comments over at Flickr.]
By Kathy G.
I’ve been remiss in replying to this post by Megan McArdle, but today I’ve finally gotten around to it. This will be a really long post, so don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
McArdle basically argues two things: that 1) the minimum wage has a disemployment effect, and 2) that monopsony is not a persuasive model for the labor market (or at least for the low-wage retail sector). First I’ll deal with the evidence on the minimum wage. McArdle mentions the famous 1994 Alan Krueger and David Card study which looked at the impact of a 1992 increase in the minimum wage on employment in fast food establishments in New Jersey. Krueger and Card found that in that case, contrary to what standard theory predicts, the increase in the minimum wage did not decrease employment.
Very reasonable criticisms of that study have been made. McArdle summarizes:
The original study was a phone study; when another study asked for actual payroll records, they found the same result the standard model would predict: fast food employment dropped in New Jersey. Additionally, as Kevin Murphy has pointed out, the survey started long after employers knew that a minimum wage hike was coming—he compares it to assessing a midnight curfew by comparing the number of teenagers on the street at 11:59 to the number on the street at 12:30.
There are a number of other reliable scholarly studies on the minimum wage that report similar results—such as this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one, for example. There are also quite a few very good studies that show the opposite—that an increase in the minimum wage does indeed bring about a decrease in employment. A fair characterization of the literature is that the minimum wage’s impact on employment is ambiguous. But the fact that the findings are mixed is fairly compelling evidence that there must be something wrong with the standard perfect competition model of employment. And that’s because the textbook perfect competition model predicts that an increase in the minimum wage will always and everywhere lead to a decrease in employment, no ifs, ands, or buts about it.
Another thing that must be pointed out: given the anti-regulation ideological bias of the economics profession as a whole, it’s not hard to imagine that studies that do find that the minimum wage has a disemployment effect are considerably more likely to be published. I’m not accusing anyone of scholarly fraud here. But the fact is, there are lots of different datasets you can use, lots of models to go with, lots of variables to include or leave out, and lots of ways to slice and dice the data. It’s not unheard of for researchers to opportunistically try different models and methodologies until they hit upon one that gives them the results they want.
Here is what economist Edward Glaeser had to say in a recent paper about researcher incentives and empirical methods:
Economists are quick to assume opportunistic behavior in almost every walk of life other than our own. Our empirical methods are based on assumptions of human behavior that would not pass muster in any of our models. The solution to this problem is not to expect a mass renunciation of data mining, selective data cleaning or opportunistic methodology selection, but rather to follow Leamer’s lead in designing and using techniques that anticipate the behavior of optimizing researchers.
David Card, a highly regarded economist at Berkeley (among other honors, he won the John Bates Clark Prize, a prestigious award given every two years to the most outstanding economist under 40), has produced many of the best studies taking issue with the old conventional wisdom about the minimum wage. But he stopped studying this subject, to a large degree because the reception his research got was so hostile in some quarters of the economics profession. He said:
I’ve subsequently stayed away from the minimum wage literature for a number of reasons. First, it cost me a lot of friends. People that I had known for many years, for instance, some of the ones I met at my first job at the University of Chicago, became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole.
I mentioned before that I found some of the criticisms by Murphy et al. of the 1994 Krueger and Card study to be quite legitimate. But they made other criticisms that have not been so reasonable. Here is Murphy et al. on what economic theory has to say about the minimum wage:
The implications of the theory are also simple and direct. The prediction that an artificial increase in the price of something causes less of it to be purchased is the most fundamental prediction of economics; it is called the law of demand.
More importantly, though, it’s a huge mistake to view the purchase of a unit of human labor as being exactly the same as the purchase of a widget. What economics has done is to take the models of the supply and demand of consumer goods and apply them to the supply and demand of labor. This, I believe, is fundamentally wrong-headed. Human labor and consumer goods are categorically different, and it’s a big mistake to treat them as if they were interchangeable. There are a slew of institutions, norms, and other features of labor markets that do not apply to product markets.
When I first read that paper by Murphy and company, I was struck by the passages in it about “the law of demand” and how you can’t “repeal” the law of demand. It was so literal! Now, I should mention that I’ve taken one of Kevin Murphy’s classes and I am familiar with his work. I have great respect for him. He is a first-rate economist, a brilliant econometrician, a gifted teacher, and, so far as my limited dealings with him go, a really nice guy to boot. But he is a University of Chicago economist in every sense of the word. I’ve heard him speak, and he is quite contemptuous of the idea that regulation can ever improve anything, or that the government can ever do a better job of anything than the free market.
I also believe, based on his writings, that Kevin Murphy, like all too many economists, takes the models literally. He is so enamored of them that he sees them, I think, not as tools for understanding, but as God’s revealed truth, handed down to Moses on stone tablets. He’s an economic fundamentalist, if you will.
Fortunately, though, the old-fashioned theories about labor markets that Murphy and others hold are gradually being displaced. A 2000 survey showed that less than half economists agreed that an increase in the minimum wage will always increase unemployment among young and unskilled workers; just ten years before, over 60% of economists believed that. And in 2006, over 650 economists, including Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz, Kenneth Arrow, Robert Solow, Lawrence Klein, and Clive Granger, signed a statement supporting an increase in the minimum wage. They wrote, “We believe that a modest increase in the minimum wage would improve the well-being of low-wage workers and would not have the adverse effects that critics have claimed.”
In the interview I cited earlier, David Card gives a good description of how the new theories about the labor market differ from the old models, and what his research on the minimum wage has to do with this:
What we were trying to do in our research was use the minimum wage as a lever to gain more understanding of how labor markets actually work and, in particular, to address a question that we thought was quite important: To what extent does the simplest model of supply and demand actually describe how employers operate in the labor market? That model says that if an employer wants to hire another worker, he or she can hire as many people as needed at the going wage. Also, workers move freely between firms and, as a result, individual employers have not discretion in the wages that they offer.
In contrast to that highly simplified theoretical model, there is a huge literature that has evolved in labor economics over the last 25 years, arguing that individuals have to spend time looking for job opportunities and employers have to spend time finding employees. In this alternative paradigm a range of wage offers co-exist in the market at any one time.That broader theory is, I think,pretty widely accepted in most branches of economics. . . . The theory explains a lot of things that don’t seem to make sense, at least to me, in a simple demand and supply model.
For example, what does it mean for a firm to have a vacancy? If a firm can readily go to the market and buy a worker, there’s no such thing as a vacancy, or at least not a persistent vacancy. During the early 1990s, when Alan and I were working on minimum wages, it was our perception that many low-wage employers had had vacancies for months on end. Actually many fast-food restaurants had policies that said, “Bring in a friend, get him to work for us for a week or two and we’ll pay you a $100 bonus.” These policies raised the question to us: Why not just increase the wage?
From the perspective of a search paradigm, these policies make sense, but they also mean that each employer has a tiny bit of monopoly power over his or her workforce. As a result, if you raise the minimum wage a little—not a huge amount, but a little—you won’t necessarily cause a big employment reduction. In some cases you could get an employment increase.
I believe that that model of the labor market is correct. There are frictions in the market and some imperfect information.
Except that’s confusing, because when economists use the term today and apply it to labor markets, they generally don’t mean literally one employer. Rather, they mean that the supply of labor to an individual firm is not infinitely elastic—i.e., if an employer cuts wages by one cent, all the workers at that firm won’t immediately quit. The monopsony model holds that because employers set wages, and because of important frictions in labor markets (such workers’ heterogeneous preferences, incomplete information, firm-specific human capital, and mobility costs), employers have some degree of monopoly power over their employees. Which means that they can set wages below the levels that would occur in a labor market where there is perfect competition.
Theory predicts that if a minimum wage is set in a monopsony labor market, it can actually increase employment. It won’t necessarily do that, though—if you set it too high, employment will decrease. But that’s a huge contrast with the textbook perfect competition model, which predicts that a minimum wage increase will always, inevitably decrease employment.
Some economists believe that the monopsony model is, for the most part, a better fit for labor markets than the old perfect competition model is. After all, how realistic is it that, if your employer cuts wages by one cent, everyone at your workplace will immediately quit? Btw, I have asked variations of that question numerous times on previous blog posts, and Megan McArdle has not yet answered it. To be fair, all models are stylized and radically simplified representations of reality, and leave out many features that are very important in the real world. Still, some models are better than others at getting the basics right.
Getting back to the 1994 Krueger and Card paper— it’s not clear that a monopsonistic labor market explains their results. In fact, in their paper they consider, but then reject, such an explanation. There have also been other explanations for why increasing the minimum wage doesn’t always decrease employment, including matching models (which emphasize search costs), efficiency wage models (“where firms suffer from diseconomies of scale in monitoring workers and, therefore, must increase wages when expanding their workforce to maintain the required penalty for shirking”), and training enhancing models (“where a binding minimum wage induces workers to raise their productivity to the level of the minimum by acquiring education which otherwise would not have been taken”).
The other theories have their strengths, but I think a monopsony model is a better fit for most sectors of the labor market in the U.S. McArdle rejects this, at least in respect to the fast food and low-wage retail sectors. First of all, she points to “extremely low search costs on both sides” in the low-wage sector. True, the search costs tend to be low. But it’s also true that information is not complete. Employees don’t always know what other low-wage retailers are paying, and once they’ve found a job they generally don’t go out of their way to seek out info on the going rates at other workplaces.
Mobility costs are another factor. For a lot of people, particularly in less densely populated areas, it’s important that their workplace is not too far from home and doesn’t require a long commute.
I think heterogeneous preferences can be important here, but McArdle says:
This seems unlikely. It’s not like you’re taking a lower wage at Wendy’s because they have a great dental plan and they let you use the pool. The labor is unskilled, the wages are undifferentiated, and the benefits are nonexistent. Maybe there are some people out there who love Wendy’s food, or Gap clothes, so much that they never want to consume anything else, making the employee discount super valuable. But I cannot believe that this group is sufficiently large to be driving the market.
Similarly, I was a research assistant for a project that looked at the low-wage retail sector, and one thing we discovered was that scheduling policies were very important to workers. It’s common in the low-wage retail sector for employees not to know from one week to the next what their schedule will be—they are expected to be “available” at all hours. Needless to say, this can be extremely problematic for single mothers with child care issues, or for students seeking to balance school and work. But although unpredictability in scheduling was the norm, their were some bosses and some workplaces that enabled workers to make their schedules in advance. So if a worker who desires predictability finds a job that provides it, she’s going to be reluctant to switch jobs, even if the pay is higher.
McArdle also mentions that collusion and cartels are unlikely. I don’t disagree with her there; in fact, I have never once mentioned collusion or cartels as a cause of monopsony. Economists who are proponents of the monopsony model don’t make the collusion argument, either. For example, Alan Manning, who has written the standard work on monopsony in labor markets, mentions employer collusion only once in his book, and that’s in passing, and he dismisses it as an explanation, anyway. Which is not to say that employer collusion never happens; it sometimes does. But so far as I know, it is rare, especially in the low-wage retail sector.
Finally, McArdle says she doesn’t think that the monopsony model is a good fit for the low-wage retail sector, since there is so much turnover there: “empirical evidence,” she says, shows that “most people do not stay in only one industry, much less only one firm.” But monopsony doesn’t require that turnover rates be low. All it requires is that there is some—maybe only just a little—friction in the labor market, such that worker turnover is not 100% sensitive to the wage.
If McArdle believes that raising the minimum wage will always create unemployment, which is what the perfect competition theory predicts, then I’d love for her to explain the many studies (which I cite above) that show that it doesn’t. Yes, over the years there have been even more studies that show there is a disemployment effect, but that’s not necessarily inconsistent with monopsony. The problem that the economic fundamentalists have to deal with is that the perfect competition model makes a number of very strong, and highly implausible, assumptions. It assumes that employers don’t set wages, for one thing, and although in some settings that’s obviously not true, in most cases it is the norm.
More important, the perfect competition model assumes a frictionless job market, with complete information, no search costs, no mobility costs, no heterogeneous preferences, no firm-specific human capital. Indeed, they assume a job market so frictionless that if an individual employer cuts wages by even one cent, every employee at that firm will immediately quit. Which is a more realistic assumption, do you think—that we live in a world where there are certain frictions in the labor market that to some extent bind employees to their employer? Or that we live in a world so frictionless that if an employer cuts wages by a penny, all employees at that firm will immediately quit?
I’m still waiting for an answer for that one.
Just in time for Mother's Day: Real Memories is a fantastic new online framing service with a brilliant, foolproof, and easy-to-use interface. [JH]
Just in time for Mother's Day: Real Memories is a fantastic new online framing service with a brilliant, foolproof, and easy-to-use interface. [JH]
Hamilton's novels are unlike anyone else's, though at moments you catch glints of other writers: Charles Dickens, William Trevor, Henry Green, Patricia Highsmith. In their simultaneously purposeful and almost giddy malevolence, some of his characters recall the principals in Jacobean tragedy, which seems fitting since, in addition to his novels, Hamilton was also the author of two popular melodramas, Rope and Gaslight.What I want: the fullest possible list of other literary titles that became verbs!
The latter may be one of the few literary titles to have become a verb. "To gaslight" is now commonly used to mean the willful undermining of someone's sense of reality in order to drive that person mad, a malign scenario often enacted in Hamilton's fiction. Along with alcohol, loneliness, and romantic obsession, the abuse of power—the small but all-important degrees of dominance conferred by class, gender, status, and beauty—is Hamilton's great subject. For Hamilton's heroes, falling in love entails surrendering their autonomy to undeserving women who mistreat their abject suitors, partly because it is the only power these women will ever have, and partly because they enjoy it.
At the start of The Siege of Pleasure, the second novel in the Twenty Thousand Streets trilogy, Jenny Maples has just finished breaking Bob's heart and blowing the last of his savings. Now she looks back on the social and moral descent that began when—poor, alone, dependent on her so-called betters—she worked in the suburbs as a live-in servant, entombed with two ancient sisters and their gaga brother. How little she would have sold her soul for, or, for that matter, her body. A car ride seemed exciting. Tea in a tea shop! A movie! A drink! Especially a drink. Jenny blames her downfall on a single glass of port, which led to another glass of port. Here is how Patrick Hamilton describes alcohol's seductive and ultimately successful assault on her virtue:A permeating coma, a warm haze of noises and conversation, wrapped her comfortably around—together with something more. What that something more was she did not quite know. She sat there and let it flow through her. It was a glow, and a kind of premonition. It was certainly a spiritual, but much more emphatically a physical, premonition of good about to befall. It was like the effect on the body of good news, without the good news.Much of Patrick Hamilton's fiction was loosely based on personal experience, a biography that involved considerably more alcohol than good news.
From the rubber room to the recap district, Toad: But where the hell are the rest of ya’ll? Caz Dolowicz is still in Florida, he left a message saying they were out of sausage at Eli’s BBQ in Dunedin yesterday. BZA is on the campaign trail again, last seen looking for Elvis on the jukebox of a Martinsburg, West Virgina Waffle House at 3 am & not heard from since. I don’t know if this is true but I heard Angry M.F. Fisher turned up the Big Daddy Kane really loud in Gowanus last week. Centipede, who lives in that vast part of Bed-Stuy without even one yummy brunch spot (or brunch blogger!), remembers both the Carolina Adult C
enter & Tar Heel Auto Repair. Despite riding the front car of the GG train often as a kid, Swan is not a foamer, & if he gets off at Queens Plaza & starts walking north, ya’ll better believe he means business, & it ain’t buying your mom crappy brunch or a crappier condo. Ernie Koy Jr. must have siphoned some gas & drove over from the Bronx, because that’s him in the corner, digging through the milk crates now.
Zyczymy Smacznego is hittin’ what? All of ya’ll who walking dogs in the Boogie Down– especially Mott Haven– know that’s where chicken bones come from. This is fact. Shout out to Forest Houses in Morrisania too: huh, no brunch for Mami? Somebody blog that!
Steve McOrmond has added a photo to the pool:
Well, I was the recipient of Christian faith-healing today. A Singaporean friend is, like many people in Singapore, a devout Christian of some born-again type (all those people are some variety of Pentacostals, right?) Her church is, at the moment, held in the Holiday Inn down by Great World City, in a ballroom, with the Sunday school groups one floor down, but they are planning to build a church in a sort of industrial park out in Jurong. As someone whose family is Episcopalian, I find the aesthetics of this all wrong, and the church experience itself way too exuberant. It's like they're all fired up about being redeemed by Christ! That never happens to Episcopalians!
Today they had a young guy preaching, an American of Filipino descent, who is a renowned healer. Cures lepers and everything. So, my friend made me promise a while ago I would come and bring the girls so we could all get healed. This was obviously meant in a loving spirit, and it's not like it's going to hurt or anything, so I said yes. I was regretting that as I dragged myself out of bed this morning, but it was OK once I got up.
They had a concert first, with a quite decent band playing "Our God is an Awesome God"-type songs in a "rock" way--which pretty much amounted to cleaned-up late 90s grunge. Again, I find this rather jarring. Then Zoë went down to Sunday school (where she has been before, because she's a Christian. She decided this when she was four and I figure I'm not going to stop her. I basically gave her a precis of the major world religions and she thought Christianity sounded great from the first time she heard about it. No general waffling about God, either, she explained "I believe Jesus is the son of God." I was like, well, Christian it is then.) and Violet stayed up with me because she was shy. She sat on my lap very quietly the whole time, occasionally interjecting "what is he talking about" and "that guy is crazy!"
He explained that he can perform miracles because it says right in the bible that there will be signs and wonders, and that if you believe you'll be able to heal the sick (and raise the dead, actually, but he can't do that). Which it does! And he told us about lots of people he had healed in the Philippines, one of whom is an MTV VJ whom he converted from Catholicism. The best story was about this one guy who, in addition to having some ailment was upset about being shorter than his fiancee. You might think this is too trivial for God to worry about, but it isn't! All the hairs on your head, etc. So he made the guy taller. He also goes into nightclubs in the Philippines to do this. And fights against witchcraft! Of course, lots of people do practice witchcraft in the Philippines, bomohs, and people who will cast curses for you. It's sort of funny to think of him having real witches to struggle with (for some value of real witches). He also casts out demons, which sometimes causes people to vomit. We went up at the end to get healed, and Violet got upset that Zoë was downstairs and would miss it, so my friend's daughter went and got her. Everybody was crowding around (and indeed there seemed to be some outbreaks of healing-related kiasu cropping up as people jostled for position), but I got nicely shoved to the front on account of carrying a kid around so long.
In the actual healing part he laid hands on each of us in turn and prayed for our various ailments to be healed. He said that Zoë was an unusually sensitive child and prayed for her to be freed from the spirit of fear in addition to her general weakness and stuff. He gets full marks for that, I have to say, and it was out of the blue without talking to any of us. Everybody in the crowd pressed around to touch us too and pray for us. In the laying on of hands stuff I did feel a sort of thrill, like I've felt before in a martial arts class when the instructor did various things to get his hands charged up with chi and let you feel a before and after. Afterwards I was just tired.
If we're all 100% better tomorrow I guess I'm honor-bound to turn Christian. It was a very loving thing for my friend to do and an interesting experience, even though earnest Christians make me feel uncomfortable. The thing is, the actual content of Christian beliefs is really exciting, and in a way it makes more sense to be all hyped about Jesus than it does to read from the Book of Common Prayer in a tasteful, restrained way. Nonetheless I find it weird in a way that I think I don't find devout Muslim people weird. Maybe it's something about the US political and cultural context. I feel like there's something very American about this particular kind of positive, you-can-become-a-new-person-and overcome-all-life-obstacles!-message.
Almighty Dolor:
As Americans, we like the greenback, but as investors, we’re a little more willing to go where the money is
This week Consumed looks at spending money — on other forms of money.
Currency prestige has a long history in the context of nation-states, but the idea that individuals might find some forms of money more desirable than others is less familiar. Perhaps rising awareness of the falling dollar is changing that.
There is a way to, in effect, spend your dollars on other forms of money, and apparently the number of people doing so is increasing. …
Read the column in the May 11, 2008, issue of The New York Times Magazine, or here.
Consumed archive is here, and FAQ is here. Consumed Facebook page is here.
