Category Archives: Culture

Bad boy Amazon and George Packer’s latest salvo

February 15, 2014 By in Critics, Culture, Publishing Tags: , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

Until five or so years ago, every time I read yet another article about the perilous state of literary fiction I’d see complaints about how publishers ignore it in favor of airport thrillers and stupid self-help and romance and Michael Crichton and on and on. On or about December 2009 everything about the book business and human nature changed. Today, I read about how publishers are priestly custodians of high culture and the Amazon barbarians are knocking at the gate. Although George Packer doesn’t quite say as much in “Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?“, it fits the genre.

Packer is concerned that Amazon has too much power and that it is indifferent to quality. By contrast, the small publisher Melville House “puts out quality fiction and nonfiction,” while “Bezos announced that the price of best-sellers and new titles would be nine-ninety-nine, regardless of length or quality” and “Several editors, agents, and authors told me that the money for serious fiction and nonfiction has eroded dramatically in recent years; advances on mid-list titles—books that are expected to sell modestly but whose quality gives them a strong chance of enduring—have declined by a quarter.”

Maybe all of this is true, but here’s another possibility: thanks to Amazon, people writing the most abstruse literary fiction possible don’t have to beg giant multinational megacorps for a print run of 3,000 copies. Amazon doesn’t care if you’re going to sell one million or one hundred copies; you still get a spot, and now midlist authors aren’t going to be forcibly ejected from the publishing industry by publishing houses.

Read Martha McPhee’s novel Dear Money. It verges on annoying at first but shifts to being delightful. The protagonist, Emma Chapman, is a “midlist” novelist sinking towards being a no-list novelist, and pay attention to her descriptions about “the details of how our lives really were” and how “not one of my novels had sold more than five thousand copies” and that “the awards by this point had been received long ago.” She makes money from teaching, not fiction, and her money barely adds up to rent and private schools and the rest of the New York bullshit. Under the system Packer describes, Emma is a relative success.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASince Dear Money is a novel everything works out in the end, but in real life for many writers things don’t work out. Still, I would note that self-publishing as the norm has one major flaw: the absence of professional content editors, who are often key to writers’s growth can often turn a mess with potential into a great book (here’s one example of a promising self-published book that could’ve been saved; there are no doubt others).

Still, Amazon must save more books than it destroys. If you read any amount of literary criticism, journalism, or scholarly articles, you’ve read innumerable sentences like these: “[Malcolm] Cowley persuaded Viking to accept ‘On the Road’ after many publishers had turned it down. He worked to get Kerouac, who was broke, financial support.” How many Kerouacs and Nabokovs didn’t make it to publication, and are unknown to history because no Cowley persuaded a publisher to act in its own best interests? How many will now, thanks to Amazon?

Having spent half a decade banging around on various publishers’ and agents’ doors I’m not convinced that publishers are doing a great job of gatekeeping. I’d also note that it may be possible for many people to sell far fewer copies of a work and still be “successful;” a publisher apparently needs to sell at least 10,000 copies of a standard hardcover release, at $15 – $30 per hardcover and $9.99 – $14.99 for each ebook, to stay afloat. If I sell 10,000 copies of Asking Anna for $10 to $4 I’ll be doing peachy.

Amazon has done an incredible job setting up a fantastic amount of infrastructure, physical and electronic, and Packer doesn’t even mention that.

Amazon also offers referral fees to anyone with a website; most of the books linked to in this blog have my own referral tag attached. Not only does Amazon give a fee if someone buys the linked item directly, but Amazon gives out the fee for any other item that person buys the same day. So if a person buys a camera lens for $400 after clicking a link in my blog, I get a couple bucks.

It’s not a lot and I doubt anyone quits their day job to get rich on referral links, but it’s more than zero. I like to say that I’ve made tens of dollars through those fees; by now I’ve made a little more, though not so much that it’ll pay for both beer and books.

Publishing’s golden age has always just ended. In 1994, Larissa MacFarquhar could write in the introduction to Robert Gottlieb’s Paris Review interview that in the 1950s—when Gottlieb got started—”publishers were frequently willing and able to lose money publishing books they liked, and tended to foster a sense that theirs were houses with missions more lofty than profit.” Then Gottlieb is quoted directly:

It is not a happy business now [. . .] and once it was. It was smaller. The stakes were lower. It was a less sophisticated world.

Today publishers are noble keepers of a sacred flame; before December 2009 they were rapacious capitalists. Today writers can also run a million experiments in what people want to read. Had I been an editor with 50 Shades of Grey passed my desk, I would’ve rejected it. Oops.

But the Internet is very good at getting to revealed preferences. Maybe Americans say they want to read high-quality books but many want to read about the stuff they’re not getting in real life: sex with attractive people; car chases; being important; being quasi-omniscient; and so on. Some people who provide those things are going to succeed.

More than anything else, the Internet demonstrates that a lot of people really like porn (in its visual forms and its written form). People want what they want and while I not surprisingly think that a lot of people would be better off reading more and more interesting stuff, on a fundamental level everyone lives their own lives how they see fit. A lot of people would also be better off if they ran more, watched reality TV less, ate more broccoli, and the other usual stuff. The world is full of ignored messages. In the end each individual suffers or doesn’t according to the way they live their own life.

I don’t love Amazon or any company, but Amazon and the Internet more generally has enabled me to do things that wouldn’t have been possible or pragmatic in 1995. Since Amazon is ascending, however, it’s the bad guy in many narratives. Big publishers are wobbling, so they’re the good guys. We have always been at war with East Asia and will always be at war with East Asia.

Packer is a good writer, skilled with details and particularities, but he can’t translate those skills into generalities. He fits stories into political / intellectual frameworks that don’t quite fit, as happened last his Silicon Valley article (I responded: “George Packer’s Silicon Valley myopia“). Packer’s high quality makes him worth responding to. But Packer presumably ignores his critics on the uncouth Interwebs, since he occupies the high ground of the old-school New Yorker. Too bad. There are things to be learned from the Internet, even about the past.

The power of conventional narratives and the great lie

February 13, 2014 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In Confessions of a Sociopath M. E. Thomas describes manipulating bureaucratic sexual harassment structures in a way that reminds me of Francine Prose’s Blue Angel. That novel is about a college freshman who sleeps with her creative writing instructor, thinking that he’ll get her book published, and then alleges sexual harassment when he doesn’t. The school’s bureaucracy largely rallies around Angela’s dubious claims. I wouldn’t argue that Angela, the female protagonist (or antagonist) is a sociopath, but the novel itself is good and the story about what happens when people of bad will have access to institutional structures designed around imagined goodwill.

I sent a note to Thomas about Blue Angel, and she replied that many “well-intentioned people having access to institutional structures designed around imagined ability to ascertain the real ‘truth’ of a situation and accordingly enact justice.”

She’s right, and that theme keeps showing up in various novels and nonfiction pieces. “What happened to Jamie Leigh Jones in Iraq?” is one; the whole story is worth reading and difficult to excerpt, but I will note this:

As it turned out, I found smoking guns, but not of the sort I was expecting. The next morning, I started looking through the filings posted online on PACER, the federal judiciary’s Web site. There I found expert witness reports filed by KBR, psychological evaluations of Jones conducted by workers’ comp companies, medical records, and much of what later came out at trial about her many previous rape claims and complicated mental health history. The trial record was so at odds with Jones’s public story that I was simply dumbfounded.

As best that reporter can say, Jones probably fabricated a rape story and in doing so tapped into a powerful narrative about sexuality and about the way evil corporations (and men) try to abuse and suppress women. Her case is at the very least much more complicated than that and at worst she made up her story. But powerful narratives have a way of overriding specific particulars that don’t support the narrative.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn does very well in playing out the way a media circus creates heroes and villains based on limited information. Like Blue Angel it’s also a lot of fun. Both also contain an element of terror: what happens if you’re the one the narrative turns against. There must be others.

Philip Greenspun’s review of Divorce Corp. is also relevant:

What is important is a story and it is always the same story: “There is a victim and a victimizer. Then you need a third person, a rescuer, which is sometimes an attorney and sometimes a judge.”

We’ve got these stories in circulation and almost no one is publicly fighting back against them.

Why “tit-for-tat” might be so hard to implement in a romantic/dating context

February 12, 2014 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The other day a friend with love problems described them, and I offered a solution applicable to a wide range of similar issues: tit-for-tat, in which you respond to another person’s response. If the other person is cooling off, cool off in turn; if the other person is heating up, heat up in turn. This avoids wasted effort in pursing someone unavailable and also prevents the (frequently) unattractive behavior of being too available.*

There’s a large challenge in TFT, however: it’s really hard for most of us to implement, even among people who know, intellectually, that it’s a good idea. We often want the world to arrange itself according to our wishes. In most endeavors increased effort leads to increased reward. But there is a class of endeavors—getting a job, finding romance, succeeding in book proposals—where too much effort is a negative signal that shows desperation or low status.**

In that problem class, TFT is a pretty good way of checking a sense of hope against the reality of a situation. In the real world we can’t control what other people do but we can control our reactions. That’s not a new idea but it is a really important one, and one that a lot of people (especially when they’re romantically inexperienced) fail to really understand.

I suspect that the roots of misunderstanding romantic behavior starts in childhood. When you’re a child your parents love you unconditionally and tell you that you’re special (because you are, to them), and your teachers try to help you (for the most part) and encourage you even when you fuck up. If you show your parents or family or teachers that you’re really trying hard or care or whatever they usually reward you.

But eventually you hit puberty, get some hair on your beanbag or a righteous set of jugs, and you start splashing around with dating. Except in that domain a lot of people you may be interested in don’t care about you no matter what you do or how much you care. You care so much—why don’t they? If you’re overly demonstrative in this, however, at best you’ll be taken advantage of and at worse you’ll be ignored.

smoking-0730The real solution is to realize that you can’t force other people to be romantically (or otherwise) interested in you. In a romantic context, extended ambiguity sucks, and one effective way to end it may be to introduce a rival. Find some guy or girl and make sure the real target knows. If that doesn’t spur the love interest to action nothing will, because it says, “Hey, either take this spot or lose it.”

That’s not quite TFT, but it is one way to force decisions.

In books and movies, almost no one employs TFT, and things tend to work out anyway—but that’s because most books and movies are fantasies that give us what we wish were true, rather than what is true. Which may be why inexperienced people have so much trouble: their only guidelines are really poor.

Most of the stuff I imbibed from pop culture between birth and age 16 or so, for example, did absolutely nothing to prepare me for the real world and if anything it was harmful. Part of this was my own fault—I had a penchant for pulp fantasy novels in which not only the dragons were imaginary but so too were the female characters—but not all of it. Consequently, almost everyone has to discover the same lessons for themselves, over and over again, often without any useful guidance whatsoever. Parents are of little help because their own interests diverge in systematic ways from their children’s interests. Peers are often equally ignorant. Non-parent adults by and large don’t interact with highly inexperienced teens or early 20-somethings. So people are left with pop culture and its wish-fulfillment fantasies.

There are some people building a theory of reality—like Esther Perel or Roosh—but little of it has filtered into the culture at large so far. Maybe it never will.

* I’m not the first to notice these issues: “Sexual Attraction and Game Theory” popped up in my RSS feed about a week after the discussion.

** This post had its origins in a much more specific (and explicit!) email, but it’s been generalized and (somewhat) sanitized.

What we signal when we speak: Verbal tee-ups, honesty, and tact

January 31, 2014 By in Culture, ideas, Links Tags: , , , , , , , 1 Comment

In “Why Verbal Tee-Ups Like ‘To Be Honest’ Often Signal Insincerity: James W. Pennebaker, of the University of Texas, Austin, says these phrases are a form of dishonesty,” Elizabeth Bernstein ends with a quote: “You are more likely to seem like someone who is perfectly honest when you are no longer commenting on it.”

That’s probably true in some situations, but verbal tee-ups are (often) a decorous way of saying, “I’m going to say something you don’t want to hear” or “I’m potentially going to violate social convention by saying this.” They’re demonstrating social deftness by pre-empting feelings of the receiver saying or thinking, “This person is a jerk.”

In many cases qualifiers should be eliminated, but they exist for a reason and, as someone sometimes accused of being an asshole when I’m being honest (or trying to be), I’m aware of why verbal tee-ups are often deployed the way they’re deployed. Bernstein says, “for the listener, these phrases are confusing. They make it fairly impossible to understand, or even accurately hear, what the speaker is trying to say.” She’s right—the phrases are sometimes confusing. But sometimes they make it easier to hear what the speaker is saying. Bernstein does write:

Her advice is either to abort your speaking mission and think about whether what you wanted to say is something you should say, or to say what you want to say without using the phrase. “Eliminating it will automatically force you to find other more productive ways to be diplomatic,” Ms. Jovin says.

In general thinking about what you say, to the extent you can do so on the fly, is a good idea, but it’s also hard to do—which is probably why we get encouraged to do so so often. Qualifiers are a way of keeping your identity small while still speaking substantively. We could call the judicious use of verbal tee-ups “tact.”

Looks matter and always will because they convey valuable information, and a note about the media

January 23, 2014 By in Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

In “The Revolution Will Not Be Screen-Printed on a Thong” Maureen O’Connor laments that people judge each other based on looks (“Why can’t we just not obsess about bodies?”), and then kind of answers her own question:

I ask that in earnest — it’s possible that we actually can’t stop, that this compulsive corporeal scrutiny is some sort of biological imperative, or species-wide neurosis left over from millennia of treating women as chattel.

We judge each based on looks because, as Geoffrey Miller describes in Spent and others have described elsewhere, looks convey a lot of useful information about age, fertility, and health. Beyond that, women are competitive with each other in this domain because they know (correctly) that men judge them based on looks (among other things).

In addition, as Tim Harford discusses in The Logic of Life, speed dating and other research shows that women reject about 90% of those in any given speed-dating event, and men reject about 80% of women. Both men and women usually report that they want similar things—men want youth and beauty; women want height and humor. But researchers devised clever experiments in which dating pools of either men or women have changed systematically—for example, by having entirely very tall men or very short men. Yet the rate at which men and women accept or decline dates remains the same.

That implies “compulsive corporeal scrutiny” is based partially on the knowledge that any particular person will be judged based on the other people around.

I don’t bring this up merely to correct a point in an article; it’s also to observe that a lot of the stuff one reads online is based on limited knowledge. As I get older I increasingly get the impression that a lot of journalists would be better served, at least intellectually speaking, to spend more time reading books and less time… doing other things?

One thing I like about journalists or journalist-blogger hybrids like Megan McArdle and Matt Yglesias is their wide, deep reading, and their willingness to connect wide, deep reading with the subjects they write about. One might disagree with them for ideological or other reasons, but they do at least know what they’re talking about and usually try to learn when they don’t. Too much of the media—whether in The Seattle Times or The Wall Street Journal or New York Magazine—is just making noise.*

Given the choice between most media and books, choose books. The challenge, of course, is finding them.

EDIT: Maybe Ezra Klein’s new mystery venture will solve some of the complaints above; he mentions “the deficiencies in how we present information” and promises “context.” I hope so, and certainly I’m not the first person to notice the many problems with the way much of the media works.

* Granted, I may be contributing to this in my own small way by contributing a link and possibly hits to a noise-making article that should be better than it is.

If this is what his admirers think, what do his detractors think?

December 28, 2013 By in Academia, Books, Culture, Reading Tags: , , , , , Leave a comment

“Like Austen’s plots, [Henry] James’s lack adventure and suspense. His novels progress at a very slow pace: his characters waver and postpone action interminably, and their conversations revolve awkwardly around unclear goals without ever seeming to reach them.”

That’s from Thomas Pavel’s The Lives of the Novel: A History, which is unlikely to be of interest to non-specialists but is much more interesting than most of its peers in the genre. There are a surprisingly small number of direct quotes and a surprisingly number of plot summaries but I’m going to read to the end. One paragraph also gave me an idea for a novel, which relatively few books do.

I would probably be less even less charitable than Pavel to Henry James, but a lot of old and well-read people say my view of him is likely to change in the future. Nonetheless I am struck by how few non-academics read him.

Politics and pernicious expectations

December 7, 2013 By in Culture, ideas Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Last month there was a long and mostly stupid discussion about “The Cheapest Generation,” and in the long and mostly stupid discussion someone mentioned delaying having children and that “everyone i know considers the world far too precarious to start a family.” I replied and said that, “By virtually every metric, the world is a much safer, healthier place than it used to be, as Steven Pinker observes in The Better Angels of our Nature. Someone else replied, “Safer? Yes. Healthier? Yes. Stable? No. Between income/job volatility and lack of proper social safety nets (at least in the US), its a dangerous gamble to start a family unless you’re in the right situation.”

I don’t know what “the right situation” is, but I think that person underestimates just how hard most people have worked throughout history and how low their material expectations were—and, by contrast, how high they are now. If you expect two cars, a large house with a room for each child and a spare room too, in a sweet coastal city location like L.A., San Francisco, or Seattle, then yeah, things are tough (though much of that is because of land-use policy, not because of “intrinsic” how prices). If you have lower expectations, however, it’s possible to move to Texas, buy a $140,000 house that maybe isn’t in the world’s best location but is okay, and has room for kids but maybe not tons of extra space, then things aren’t all that expensive. The “right” situation is much cheaper.

Most of the commentariat, however, is looking at NYC / L.A. / Seattle / etc., and wants the “best” schools, and wants a BMW, and interesting vacations to foreign countries, and, and, and… all those things add up. If you radically scale back expectations, a lot of things become more possible. If you realize what people use to expect, your expectations might change too. My grandparents barely escaped the Holocaust and, according to family lore, never really made it to the American middle class. Tales of living in Minneapolis without heat in the winter were and are common.

Along similar lines, Megan McArdle tells this story:

My grandfather worked as a grocery boy until he was 26, in the depths of the Great Depression. For six years, he supported a wife on that salary — and no, it’s not because You Used To Be Able To Support A Family On A Grocery Boy’s Wages Until These Republicans Ruined Everything. He and my grandmother moved into a room in his parents’ home, cut a hole through the wall for their stovepipe and set up housekeeping. They got married on Thanksgiving, because that was the only day he could get off. My grandmother spent six years carefully piecing his tiny salary into envelopes — so much for food, for rent, for gasoline for the car he needed to get eight miles into town. And they stayed married for 67 years, until my grandfather’s death in 2004.

“We didn’t have a dramatic increase in unwed childbearing back in the Great Depression,” sociologist Brad Wilcox told me. “That’s in part because we had a very different understanding of family life and sex and marriage back then. That tells us that it’s not just economic. It’s also about culture and law.”

By modern standards that sounds really crappy, but McArdle’s grandparents managed to have kids and be more-or-less okay in material conditions that would strike most contemporary Americans as being at a level of shocking privation. Yet the commenters above mention “income/job volatility” without noting that, in many circumstances, we have very high incomes—we just choose to spend them instead of save them (Note that I’m guilty of this too and am not throwing stones from my own glass house). In an environment of low or zero growth, or highly uneven growth, that may be a tremendous problem, and the problem has individual and political components—and responses.

To return to McArdle, this time in “How to Put the Brakes on Consumers’ Debt:”

[. . .] this is a conflict between what Walter Russell Mead calls the blue social model and the red-state world where Ramsey lives and finds most of his listeners. We can quibble about this or that [. . . ] But what it boils down to is that Olen thinks that rising economic insecurity calls for a massive expansion of the blue social model, while Ramsey thinks it calls for getting more entrepreneurial and adjusting your lifestyle to meet reduced income expectations. How well you think this works is probably closely connected to where you live.

(Emphasis added)

The whole piece is worth reading, but I think the debate between the two gurus McArdle cites is actually about a large-scale public response to current conditions versus how a particular individual or family should respond. Olen is arguing politics; Ramsey is arguing personal. I also think we’re going to see this change: “But for blue-state professionals, that’s something close to suggesting that they should abandon their kids in the street (or have them take out $150,000 in student loans, which is not much better). The social norm is that you send your kid to the best college he or she can get into, by any means necessary,” because for one thing I’m not convinced any school is worth $150,000 in student loans. Maybe one could make that argument for the very, very elite schools, but not many others.

The problem with arguing for a political response is that most individuals can’t do much on their own to change policies. But they can decide to say, “No, I can’t afford that house or vacation or dinner or whatever.” I also suspect that very few individuals have any coherent idea about how public policies work, as Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter shows. My own pet peeve is urban land use controls, since those raise prices by preventing new development, but very few people connect high prices with supply limits. That’s basic econ, but almost no one acknowledges it. If we collectively can’t even understand that, I’m not optimistic about Olen-style political solutions. Those mostly seem to boil down to taking a lot of money and dumping it into systems and institutions that aren’t necessarily working all that well.

Education is one of those systems, and I suspect that a basic idea is taking hold: a lot of higher education has become increasingly exploitive over time, with student loans fueling the binge. There is very little incentive for most institutions to say, “We’re going to forget about a diversity department staff and counseling staff and subsidizing dorms, and we’re just going to provide professors, classrooms, and labs, and you buy the rest, unsubsidized, if you want to.” We’re going to see some non-elite schools go for radical cost reductions, and we’ll see if people go for them. If the price is good enough they might.

In the meantime, lots of people are moving to places like Texas, where land controls are low. On average they’re leaving places like New York and California. For people with medium or low incomes and high material expectations, that totally makes sense. Historically speaking, I think it’s easy to forget high low material expectations were: until recently, houses were shockingly smaller than they are today. In 1975 the median new home was 1,535 square feet, and now it’s 2,169 square feet—even as family size and children-per-woman has been declining.

To return to the original point in the first paragraph of this post, job volatility might not matter so much for someone who decides to live in a 1,535 square foot house instead of a 2,169 square foot house, and that basic dynamic can be extrapolated across a range of purchases. Most of us, however, ask ourselves, “Why not take the Vicuna?” Then we complain when the world doesn’t conform to our material expectations.

If you don’t have a purpose, pick one for yourself

September 16, 2013 By in Books, Culture, Fiction, Writing Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

The New Yorker‘s “Briefly Noted” book review section (behind a paywall, but check here if you’re curious) has a review Very Recent History that displays all the telltale signs of pointlessly plotless modern novels: adrift protagonists; problems with few or no important stakes; expecting the world to be automatically interesting, instead of you being interesting to the world; consumption for its own sake rather than for the sake of pleasure. Even the language of the review is stupid, saying that Very Recent History “serves to underscore the sense of trauma that is daily life in a late-capitalist moment.”

What? How do we know this is “a late capitalist moment?” Assuming capitalism as such dates to the 18th Century and, say, Adam Smith, and is the dominant organization of successful societies in 200 years, this is a “mid capitalist moment.” And there is little or no “sense of trauma” in “daily life” for most urban dwellers: If you want fucking trauma, try getting gassed in Syria, or AIDS in much of Africa, or live as one of hundreds of millions of people without electricity or running water in India. Get some fucking perspective people. Being laid off from a white-collar job is not the same as being shot by the regime’s uniformed thugs.

The other funny thing, as a friend mentioned in an e-mail, is that “no novelist who manages to write an entire book and get it mentioned in the major media is anything like those adrift protagonists; that’s someone with purpose.”

There’s a whole genre of these novels about people who behave stupidly in transparent ways. My favorite example is Adam Wilson’s Flatscreen, because it helped crystallize the problem for me, though there are many others examples. It’s also not a badly written book. These kinds of novels can actually be fabulously well-written, and have all sorts of brilliant micro observations. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children fits this designation. All those wonderful sentences about a bunch of boring fools leading unimportantly literary lives in New York. I wanted one of them to get a job as a foreign correspondent in Afghanistan instead of debating about whether they should Follow Their Muse or sell out.

The Emperor’s Children is an example of the apparently growing number of people who have no direction or purpose in life and choose not to have one. Call it the Girls problem, which is not having real problems while simultaneously not trying anything and not knowing about anything.

About the TV show Girls: it has probably engendered more essays about it than viewers, but my fiancée and I watched the first couple episodes and the beginnings of a couple episodes after that, but it was too dumb to keep going: the characters were privileged morons. I wanted to climb in the TV and say, “Hey! There are real problems out there! People are starving in various places! Science is finding and doing all kinds of awesome stuff. Programs need to be written. There are sick people in hospitals and children who need education. Why don’t you all get real fucking jobs?”

I would love to see one of the girls on Girls get a job as an ER nurse or doctor. They’d learn a little about what’s fucking important. Or they could be working on democracy in Guinea. None of the characters in Girls appear to be learning how to paint, draw, write education grants, keep tropical fish, hack, solder, cook, sew… the list goes on. None seem to appreciate that SpaceX is sending rockets into space and is probably our best collective shot at visiting Mars in the next 40 years. Wow!

Whole industries are being shaken and rebuilt all around us (publishing, for example, by the colossus in Seattle).

Their collective response to this, however, is to continue to gaze lovingly at the lint gathered in their own navels, and to wonder why people aren’t beating a path to their door to offer them fame and fortune. Hell, they can’t even make the bad sex they’re sometimes having into a politically or intellectually interesting act, as someone like Catherine Millet or Toni Bentley can. They have no sense of the past. They have no sense beyond the most rudimentary knowledge of other cultures. They’re not trying to be an amazing novelist like Anne Patchett.

Just because I’ve been stupid doesn’t mean you should too: responses to the school and jobs post

September 9, 2013 By in Academia, Culture, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

In response to “Employment, attitude, and educational entitlement,” a couple friends noted my own experience in higher education and asked if I was being a hypocrite by telling people to do as I say not as I do. But I would phrase it differently by saying that going to grad school was a stupid thing to do, and an important component of intellectual honesty is admitting when we do something stupid.

When I make a mistake, I admit it and encourage others not to make the same one. What do you do?*

In addition, although it’s true that I’ve been in various pouches of academia, I’ve also been working continuously as a grant writer (If not for that, I doubt I would’ve majored in English in the first place: I like to read and write but am aware of the job situation). When I began English grad school, I thought I’d be able to conventionally publish a novel by the time I was done. This has turned out not to be true. For me, that’s annoying but not a crisis. For many of my peers, however, it is a crisis.

English grad school is also somewhat less pernicious than some professional grad schools. In English, they pay you (a small amount, to be sure), instead of you paying them, which means it’s relatively easy to walk away—much easier than law, business, or medicine. It’s becoming apparent to those of us who pay attention to higher education that higher education institutions have an increasingly predatory relationship with those they are educating. Or nominally educating.

There’s also a “follow-the-money” element to the higher education problem. School can go on pretty much forever when you are paying them. Not surprisingly, if you offer someone money, they will usually be inclined to accept it. Want to get into any but the very top PhD programs? Say you’ll pay your way and you can at least start. Finding someone who wants to give you money is harder than finding someone who wants yours.

Universities have realized this.

Finally, I’ll note that, in the absence of a better job, I will do whatever jobs I can get, and, in my life, some relatively low-status jobs have been better than relatively high status jobs; working as a lifeguard, for example, is more fun than being a lawyer, and it was a great job from a writing perspective: about 10% of my conscious mind would keep an eye on the pool while the other 90% came up with ideas. I wish I’d been smarter and started lifeguarding in high school.**

It’s true that lifeguards don’t get to fuck with other people’s lives in the way some lawyers do, so it may be a worse occupation for the power hungry, but it also doesn’t require tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to be a lifeguard.

* “When the Facts Change, I Change My Mind. What Do You Do, Sir?”

** Then again most people probably wish they’d made smarter choices.

Why would you want to own a car if you could avoid it?

August 13, 2013 By in Cities, Culture Tags: , , , , , , , 5 Comments

My Dad sent “Who’s Buying ‘Youth’ Cars? Seniors Aging Boomers Are Prime Buyers for Small Vehicles That Auto Makers Target at Hipsters,” because he bought a Mini Cooper a few years ago, which is probably targeted at “young” people. But I replied with a larger point:

Why would you want a car if you could avoid having one?

Young people don’t care about cars. They care about smartphones. See here for more:

Why are younger Americans driving less?

Brad Plumer considers several good hypotheses, including the recession, gas prices, student debt, tougher legal requirements, and a stronger desire to live in places such as Brooklyn. I would add one other factor to his list: because they are working less. A more speculative additional hypothesis would be “because it is easier to have sex without driving to get it.”

Ugh

Ugh

A nice car is still a status symbol but a much less important status symbol than it used to be. Cars are expensive, dirty, and cause a lot of traffic. Old people like you (wrongly) associate cars with freedom and the open road, because when you grew up the roads were relatively empty.

Young people today associate cars with traffic and their parents and death. Cars are like jails. In ye olde days getting laid meant cruising to drive-ins or malls or whatever. Today getting laid means texting, Facebook, and OKCupid. Former students have talked about Tinder (sp?), which is Grindr for straight people. Going back to the status symbol point, is it more useful for a guy looking to get laid to work his ass off for a BMW or to learn guitar and get a YouTube channel? For someone with no financial constraints the obvious answer is “both,” but for someone choosing between them I suspect guitar + YouTube would win.

An iPhone is much cheaper than a car. Even an iPhone, iPad, and laptop together are much cheaper than a car. See also Philip Greenspun on this.

DUI laws are also now heavily enforced and draconian (A BAC of .1 is much more reasonable than .08) and everyone knows someone who’s had ten thousand dollars or more in court costs and hassles related to DUI. Even so, a cop can ruin your night and next day for pretty much any reason if he suspects you’ve had anything to drink. Gas is much more expensive in real terms than it was even in the late 90s / early 2000s.

No one with half a brain would want to drive more than they absolutely must, so I am skeptical that any “youth-oriented pitches” will succeed because really who cares? Driving sucks. Part of selling is having something to sell that people want. And, as you yourself pointed out, you spent much of your working life in high school and college trying to keep a car in working order. AAA estimates that the average car costs $10,000 TCO, or about one quarter of median income. Even knocking $2000 off for a cheaper car, I suspect a lot of people could allocate $2000 to transit / bikes / Zipcar / etc. and come out way ahead.

Almost anyone who can avoid commuting by car is better off ditching their wheels. Even you, Dad, would be much more financially secure by selling your car, renting your parking spaces, and getting a Zipcar subscription.

[Note: My Dad doesn’t have to drive to his office.]