Tag Archives: Books

Lev Grossman vs the haters

September 15, 2009 By in Books, SF/Fantasy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

I’m on the record praising Lev Grossman’s essay “Good Books Don’t Have to be Hard.” Predictably, that piece generated a fair amount of blowback (and a concomitant amount of misinterpretation, like the fallacious argument that Grossman is arguing that good books can’t be hard); see a sample of it here, complete with a comment from yours truly.

Now, however, we can see how Lev Grossman Responds to Criticism of His Wall Street Journal Piece, as spoken by the man himself. Read it when you get a chance. It’s not terrible, but I think he could do better, and I hope he does “write more (if anybody cares) when I’m back in civilization.”

One thing I’d strongly disagree with comes when Grossman discusses Twilight’s sales: “All those millions of people might be idiots or have bad taste. But I think it’s kinda intellectually lazy to say that.” I don’t, and they do have bad taste. I’ve read a book and a half of the series, and they’re so cliche-ridden that they make Harry Potter look like Shakespeare, and the writing has originality and verve that make Dan Brown impressive by comparison.

To be fair, he goes on to say, “Meyer is doing something very very well, or at least giving people something they really really want, and I don’t think we have a good critical vocabulary yet for talking about what that something is.” She might be doing something well, yes, but writing isn’t it. That’s why a lot of people who are literary and/or like good writing don’t think much of her.

Last Night at the Lobster — Stewart O’Nan

September 13, 2009 By in Books, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster reminds one that small can be engrossing and that real stories often underlie the vast news that floods our lives. One of the two epigraphs for Last Night at the Lobster says “Darden Restaurants, Inc., raised its outlook and expects full year 2005 diluted net earnings per share growth in the range of 22% to 27%….” Normally we’d skip by that headline on page C7 of the Wall Street Journal.

But underneath the earnings reports, sometimes far underneath it, are the people doing the earning. In this case it’s Manny DeLeon, who’s managing (Manny? Manage? Get it?) a Lobster joint closely modeled on a Red Lobster as it closes permanently. He’s self-aware enough to know that his activities aren’t likely to shake the counsels of the great, but he’s also trying to do what he can to do well for its own sake—in this respect, he’s like a writer with a limited audience who nonetheless takes pride in the craft itself. Furthermore, Manny seems human, aware, as when he’s pondering a perhaps finished affair with Jacquie one of the waitresses. The specifics fall away, and “All he can recall are still images—her black hair wet and heavy from the shower, her stockings laid over a chair, the glass of water on the floor by her bed holding the light from the window—yet instead of weakening with time, they’ve grown more powerful, liable to paralyze him if he dotes on them too long.”

Those images aren’t susceptible to the moves of the stock market or socioeconomic positioning: once they’re Manny’s, they’re his forever. If that were somehow the “lesson” of Last Night at the Lobster, it wouldn’t be much of a book. It’s more of a slice of life, or a whisper about an event that one can’t entirely make sense of: one has to run the Lobster on the last day of its life, but how does one draw any larger ideas from that? And if one can’t, does it matter? The classical economics answer would be “no,” but the answer for Manny is yes.

If it weren’t, his non-relationship relationship with Jacquie would be equally empty: they have nothing to commit themselves to one another outside of wanting something to commit to. If I were more fond of grandiose pronouncements, I might say that Last Night at the Lobster is about finding a place to anchor in a transitory, bottomless society, where the tides now rearrange the world faster than people can keep up. Hence the failing Lobster in the failing mall in the failing town where people nonetheless do what they can, even if it’s not enough. For it to be enough, you have to be a master of abstraction, creativity, computer science, unusual skills, and more: yet most people aren’t up to that. They’re still people, even as they shake downwards to the Lobster, where they can still succeed on different definitions than what social cues shout success is.

For all this commentary, the narrative tension in Last Night at the Lobster is slack and the sense of anything major being at stake is absent; Manny’s soul is muted and confused more than tortured, and in this sense the book might be a defining work of realism, since it seems that few go through life with Nietzschian-esque metaphysical worries. Last Night at the Lobster also reminds me of some of the European novels that I called sheer and taunt; this book is equally short, and if it’s more explanatory than In our Strange Gardens or The Reader, there nonetheless isn’t a tremendous amount of emotional energy invested in its characters, who are nearer to short story sketches than to round, novelistic heroes or anti-heroes. But the moments and images tide the novel, as when “The guy with the bow tie nods as he passes, one boss to another, as if Manny’s done all this for him.” There’s so much in the line that I stopped and pondered it, asking too: how often have I been the guy in the bow tie? Manny? The crew that set up?

I don’t see too many novels like Last Night at the Lobster. As Mark Sarvas and Alain de Botton have pointed out, books about work are fairly uncommon. I hadn’t noticed till they observed it, but I find innumerable books on my shelves about love, affairs, geography, family, and destiny, but few about what people do to support those other endeavors. Perhaps that’s because writers are deracinated from the larger work world, as de Botton has suggested, or perhaps that’s because work can seem too mundane or not worthy of literary fiction’s point of view and linguistic pyrotechnics or genre fiction’s suspenseful plots. In The Grapes of Mild Outrage, Mark Athitakis writes that “… though O’Nan has admirable respect for his characters, the overall tone is one of defeat—the Red Lobster in which the novel is set is about to close forever, the snow outside is miserable, and nobody cares to thinks much about the restaurant itself.” I’m not sure if the tone is so much one of defeat as of recognition. And isn’t self-recognition part of what the novel is supposed to lead us to, and what life is supposed to be about?

On a final, structural note, I was ready to pass on Last Night at the Lobster till positive recommendations rescued it—most notably Terry Teachout. Book publicists occasionally ask me how they can get me to read their books or what kind of books I pick up, and the short answer to both is often that if they get Teachout, Sarvas, Nigel Beale, Tyler Cowen, Kate Sutherland, John Scalzi or a handful of others I’m no doubt forgetting to write favorably a book, the probability of me reading it skyrockets—as does the probability of me getting something from the book, even when I don’t necessarily like it without reservations; this happened with two books Sarvas liked, including The Gift and Nobility of Spirit, both of which were not self-critical enough and overly indulgent despite having powerful messages to avoid the cynicism that’s par for the contemporary course. In terms of books, I often look for social proof: the idea that, if others whose opinions I trust recommend a book, I’m more likely to read it. I still at least begin everything I’m sent, and I’m only too happy to find a book delightful—like the recent Carlos Ruiz Zafon novel, The Angel’s Game, which I need to post about shortly—but it doesn’t hurt to let in some air from elsewhere too.

Bookshelves, offices, and Neil Gaiman

September 7, 2009 By in Books, Links, Personal Tags: , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

Photos of Neil Gaiman’s impressive bookshelves have been making rounds of the literary blagosphere, and let me be the latest to link to them and say “wow.”

Gaiman Shelves

(There are more pictures in the original post.)

My own are humbler; I posted some pictures of the shelves in my old apartment here, and you can see one of them here:

seliger_shelves

Not nearly as impressive as Gaiman’s, to be sure. But then I haven’t been reading as long and have purged much of my library twice: once when I left for college and discarded much of the pulp fantasy (like DragonLance and The Wheel of Time) that I used to like, and again when I graduated from college and figured that many of the books, both ones I’d read in general and in class, I was unlikely to read again. So far that’s proven right regarding, for example, Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. Someday, when I’m less mobile than I am now, I wouldn’t mind a setup like Gaiman’s. And by “wouldn’t mind,” I probably mean something closer to “would love to have.”

"The moral obligation to write well"

September 2, 2009 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , 1 Comment

From A Commonplace Blog:

No other writer I can name has accepted with such utter self-abnegating devotion to what I can only call, in a blatant allusion to John Erskine’s famous 1915 essay, the moral obligation to write well. This is, I believe, the sum and substance of what it means to respect the institution of literature. The writer shoulders a double burden.

If you think you know the writer, post your guess in the comments section.

No peeking!

“The moral obligation to write well”

September 2, 2009 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , 2 Comments

From A Commonplace Blog:

No other writer I can name has accepted with such utter self-abnegating devotion to what I can only call, in a blatant allusion to John Erskine’s famous 1915 essay, the moral obligation to write well. This is, I believe, the sum and substance of what it means to respect the institution of literature. The writer shoulders a double burden.

If you think you know the writer, post your guess in the comments section.

No peeking!

Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard

August 29, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

In my essay on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, I cited his Wall Street Journal article Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard:

It’s not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it’s something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place—the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us “The Age of Innocence,” “Ulysses,” “A Passage to India,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sound and the Fury.” Not to mention most of “In Search of Lost Time” and all of Kafka’s novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between “The Professor’s House,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Arrowsmith” and “An American Tragedy.” (It went to “Arrowsmith.” Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century’s worth of masterpieces before it was half over.

Read the whole thing. I’m drawing special attention to it because there are few essays I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, that I agree with more, ranging from Grossman’s analysis of the current situation to its historical roots to his call for future action.

If you haven’t clicked the link, you shouldn’t be reading this. Once you have clicked it, however, consider the next step: B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto.

EDIT: See also Jeff’s excellent comment.

Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard

August 29, 2009 By in Books, Culture, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

In my essay on Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, I cited his Wall Street Journal article Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard:

It’s not easy to put your finger on what exactly is so disgraceful about our attachment to storyline. Sure, it’s something to do with high and low and genres and the canon and such. But what exactly? Part of the problem is that to find the reason you have to dig down a ways, down into the murky history of the novel. There was once a reason for turning away from plot, but that rationale has outlived its usefulness. If there’s a key to what the 21st-century novel is going to look like, this is it: the ongoing exoneration and rehabilitation of plot.

Where did this conspiracy come from in the first place—the plot against plot? I blame the Modernists. Who were, I grant you, the single greatest crop of writers the novel has ever seen. In the 1920s alone they gave us “The Age of Innocence,” “Ulysses,” “A Passage to India,” “Mrs. Dalloway,” “To the Lighthouse,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sound and the Fury.” Not to mention most of “In Search of Lost Time” and all of Kafka’s novels. Pity the poor Pulitzer judge for 1926, who had to choose between “The Professor’s House,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Arrowsmith” and “An American Tragedy.” (It went to “Arrowsmith.” Sinclair Lewis prissily declined the prize.) The 20th century had a full century’s worth of masterpieces before it was half over.

Read the whole thing. I’m drawing special attention to it because there are few essays I’ve read recently, or maybe ever, that I agree with more, ranging from Grossman’s analysis of the current situation to its historical roots to his call for future action.

The next step is B.R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto.

EDIT: See also Jeff’s excellent comment.

Philip Greenspun's Why I'm Not a Writer and Hacker News

August 23, 2009 By in Academia, Culture, Essays Tags: , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

I submitted a Hacker News (HN) link to Philip Greenspun’s essay Why I’m Not a Writer, which begins:

I’m not a writer. Sometimes I write, but I don’t define myself as a career writer. And that isn’t because I couldn’t tolerate the garret lifestyle of an obscure writer. It is because I couldn’t tolerate the garret lifestyle of a successful writer.

He’s right. The garret lifestyle is one reason (there are many others too) why so many writers are now affiliated with universities, as detailed in Mark McGurl’s excellent book The Program Era. In fact, university affiliation has become so pervasive that Neal Stephenson told this hilarious story on the subject in a Slashdot interview:

[… A] while back, I went to a writers’ conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we’d exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me “And where do you teach?” just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another “And which distro do you use?”

I was taken aback. “I don’t teach anywhere,” I said.

Her turn to be taken aback. “Then what do you do?”

“I’m…a writer,” I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.

“Yes, but what do you do?”

I couldn’t think of how to answer the question—I’d already answered it!

“You can’t make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?” she tried.

“From…being a writer,” I stammered.

At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn’t snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.

And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.

In the HN thread, another poster named Quantumhobbit linked to Orson Scott Card dealing with the same subject. As Quantumhobbit says, “Basically his advice is make sure you have another source of income, such as a rich uncle, before you decide to become a full-time writer. There is no guaranty that you will make enough to support yourself, even in genre writing.”

But the most interesting response comes from Gwern, who said, “I note that [Greenspun’s essay is] from 1996, when the bubble was getting hot; are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?” In reply, I said:

I think that the date of Greenspun’s essay is indicative of how little has changed, rather than how much. Most writers didn’t make very much money then, and they still don’t, which many people don’t seem to realize; one writer friend who also teaches university classes recently wrote to me and said that a colleague had asked, in all seriousness, if he was rich now that he’d written a book. Writers often work like astronauts to achieve relatively modest financial success, which people like the poster in the original HN thread might want to know before getting started in earnest at trying to write for the book market. Take a look at these posts from a guy who works in the sales department of a major publishing house regarding current advances for most types of fiction.

“are you suggesting that the web has not panned out for writers and that they are equally screwed online as off?”

Depends on what you mean by “panned out” and “screwed”; I can’t really tell from the nature of the question. If you mean, “Do I think writers can make enough from the Internet to support themselves?” the answer is yes; if you mean, “Will many of them do so, especially relative to the number who would like to?” the answer is “no.” In fact, I even wrote a blog post at Grant Writing Confidential on the subject of how unlikely it is for people to make money from blogging.

(Note: the above is slightly edited from the original.)

Gwern replied:

But to expand on what I meant: I remember that back in the dot-com bubble, the bubble Greenspan wrote that essay in, there was a lot of enthusiasm and hype about how the future would be so much better for authors and artists than the old world of offline publishing – the Web would empower creators, cut out the middlemen, and channel tons of money to them, via the magic of 0-cost publishing, micropayments, and other things like search engines or aggregators. Greenspan’s essay seems to buy into that zeitgeist, albeit relatively modestly.

Of course, that vision has largely come failed to come true (spectacularly so in the case of micropayments and agents). I wondered if the point of your linking this old essay was to emphasize the contrast and make clear that writing is still a marginal business regardless of where it’s being distributed or what neat technical gadgets are involved.

That wasn’t my point, but if I’d been smarter it would’ve been. Half the 1996 equation Gwern describes has come true: the web has vastly empowered writers’ ability to reach readers (and consultants’ ability to reach clients). But it definitely hasn’t channeled vast amounts of money to most writers, and many kinds of writers—like professional journalists—are being laid off en-masse.

In the world of the web, as in the 1849 California gold rush, the people who make real money aren’t the people panning for gold, but the people selling equipment to and building infrastructure for the people panning for gold. So too with online writing: Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, which drives this blog, probably makes or will make far more than anyone writing on it.

All of this could probably be appended to advice for a very very beginning writer. I think that knowledge for its own sake is valuable, even, or maybe especially, for artists.

$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline will Change Our Lives for the Better — Christopher Steiner

August 21, 2009 By in Books, Essays, Reviews Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments

One major problem of $20 Per Gallon isn’t just the book itself, but its ancestors. Christopher Steiner argues that a) oil prices will rise like an Atlas rocket and b) that such a rise will result in people flocking to dense, urban cities, the return of manufacturing to the United States, and a host of cultural changes. But neither proposition is as certain as he implies, and Steiner comes from a long line of environmental doom-sayers. Books like Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb—a best-seller in the 1970s—make Malthusian arguments that have proven wrong over the last 40 years. They predicted catastrophe, not iPods and the Internet.

Still, just because someone was incorrect about a past prediction doesn’t mean that a current prediction will be wrong; there’s probably a name for this kind of bias beyond “boy-who-cried-wolf-syndrome.” But the argument that $20 Per Gallon might be wrong goes deeper, as shown in Tad Friend’s “Plugged In: Is the electric car the future?” from this week’s New Yorker. Friend’s answer is “maybe,” which isn’t much of a surprise given the technological, infrastructure, and economic challenges surrounding electric vehicles. But if oil prices spike high enough, the switch might be painful and rapid—which could drive oil prices back down as demand drops. We saw something similar happen in the summer of 2008, when oil usage plummeted in response to higher prices. And judging by the amount of investment going into electric and hybrid vehicles, it’s not impossible imagine that climbing oil prices will lead people beyond those who want to show their environmental conscientiousness to buy them, resulting in exurban sprawl and a lifestyle not so different for most people, rather than the wholesale urban changes Steiner predicts.

Predictions about the end of the world or drastic changes to it have been so popular that Simon Pearson even wrote A Brief History of the End of the World: Apocalyptic Beliefs from Revelation to UFO Cults, which covers the history of people who predict the end of the world, or at least civilization (so far, their track record isn’t so hot, but many post-apocalyptic novels are fun to read). Steiner is more upbeat, seeing higher gas prices improving the world, and that part is refreshing and makes his work different from someone like Ehrlich’s.

Still, oil prices might not climb all that high in the immediate future. Although Steiner says “We have hit what’s popularly known as peak oil, meaning that global production of crude is at a zenith that will never again be realized,” Friend says, “It troubles [Elon] Musk [founder of Tesla Motors] that while few people know that the world’s oil supply could plateau by 2020 and run out as early as 2050, nearly everyone knows that electric cars suck.” Given the two sources, I would tend to trust the New Yorker’s famously fastidious fact-checkers over Steiner. Still, the Wall Street Journal reports today that Oil Prices Hit 2009 High. Based on this flurry of recent news, is Steiner more right or wrong? It depends on what happens to the market. People who think they know what will happen and bet accordingly will win or lose big. Some will presumably end up demonstrably wrong, like Ehrlich. Steiner cites an airline consultant who says “oil […] is bound to reach [eight dollars per gallon] within three or four years.” I wonder if someone will remember to call him on it then.

So the obviousness that Steiner argues just isn’t there. I’ve come to that conclusion in part because the book doesn’t break new ground or bring enough existing information together to make a compelling and new argument. If you’re familiar with the work of economist Edward Glaeser or writer Richard Florida, both of whom have often been cited in The Atlantic, you know where Steiner’s coming from. Florida even writes for the magazine, while Glaeser contributes to the New York Times’ Economix blog. Too much of $20 Per Gallon is going to be redundant or superfluous for anyone familiar with Glaeser and Florida’s work. To be worthwhile, a book needs to have such depth and such a strong animating idea that it must have hundreds of pages to flesh out its major ideas. Lately I’ve criticized a number of nonfiction books for that failing that test, including Rapt, America’s War on Sex, and The Secret Currency of Love.

In $20 Per Gallon, there’s also a troublesome undercurrent of snobbery that runs through, and a sense that Steiner looks down on the proles who like kitsch and SUVs for reasons other than economics, but those views are cloaked in economic arguments. In an aesthetic sense I’m more or less with Steiner, but he makes poorly supported arguments like this one:

According to some of American automakers’ own market researchers, the type of people who tend to buy SUVs are insecure and vain. They’re people who frequently are nervous about their marriages and uncomfortable about having become parents. They have little confidence in their skills as drivers.

The source for this? Two writers who also have a strong enough point of view to make me doubt their own research: Brian Hicks and Chris Nelder, who wrote Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century. As I tell freshmen: you have to go back and find the primary research material if you’re going to cite extravagant or unusual claims. I want to believe Steiner’s argument about people who drive SUVs in part because I don’t, and his argument flatters my own prejudices, which is nice. But the analytic side of my mind doesn’t buy it. He also says that the vast McMansions that were in vogue until February 2009 “will be an entrapment, an entrapment to giant utility bills and the attachment to a dwelling unit that will, with time, become a kind of pariah.” His financial argument is probably sound: spending vast quantities of money on a signaling device like a distant house isn’t playing smart financial defense. I don’t want to live in one. But because of the hybrid and electric car argument above, Steiner might be wrong on the basic affordability of McMansions, even if he remains right in his unstated view that they’re gaudy, ugly, and likely to fall apart.

The basic problem with $20 Per Gallon is that if you’ve read this post and followed most of the links, you now know more about the issue that the book describes than the book itself tells you. Someone would probably be better off subscribing to The Atlantic and The New Yorker than they would reading $20 Per Gallon, since those magazines do a better job of dealing with issues surrounding oil prices and their consequences than Steiner does here. A lot of that work is online. Go find it there. Once you have a map to finding it, you don’t Steiner to do the work for you.

Early August links: Book stalking, teaching, Playboy's Guide to Lingering, and more

August 10, 2009 By in Books, Links Tags: , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

* Makers’ versus Managers’ Schedules:

Most powerful people are on the manager’s schedule. It’s the schedule of command. But there’s another way of using time that’s common among people who make things, like programmers and writers. They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

* Rands’ The Book Stalker: Where is it? Everyone has one could well describe me.

* From the department of unintended consequences: “The New Book Banning: Children’s books burn, courtesy of the federal government.” This is because the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA) stops the selling of used children’s good produced before 1985, when lead was banned, unless those products conform to the post-1985 standards. Although lead in children’s books hasn’t been shown to be harmful, the books don’t pass muster anyway.

I am generally not an organized political person who writes angry letters to Congresspersons and such, but this might be worth an exception.

(Hat tip to Megan McArdle.)

* A “teach naked” proponent challenges us to stop using computers while we teach:

Mr. Bowen is part of a group of college leaders who haven’t given up on that dream of shaking up college instruction. Even though he is taking computers out of classrooms, he’s not anti-technology. He just thinks they should be used differently—upending the traditional lecture model in the process.

Here’s the kicker, though: The biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods. The lecture model is pretty comfortable for both students and professors, after all, and so fundamental change may be even harder than it initially seems, whether or not laptops, iPods, or other cool gadgets are thrown into the mix.

This is what I generally shoot for; in classrooms without computers, I never use one, and even when they come with classrooms, I generally use them very little, and mostly as a whiteboard substitute.

* What goes into book jackets: sometimes the answer is “facile stereotypes” or “very little.”

* Edifying editing, from a journal reviewer. Contrast this with my recent post, “Careers—and careerism—in academia and criticism“. Notice this bit from “Edifying editing:”

Ellison finds that the profession has slowed down, doubling the “submission to print” time at major journals. What was unexpected for me was the finding that most of the
slowdown is the number of revisions, not the ‘within round cycle time.’ I hadn’t realized that the interminable wait for a response was common twenty-five years ago. What has changed, Ellison shows, is that we have about doubled the number of rounds. I had thought it was merely deficiencies in my own papers that caused me to revise three, four, even five times. But no, it is a profession-wide phenomenon.

Like most economists, I am personally obsessed with efficiency, and wasted resources offend me in an irrational way. The way economists operate journals is perhaps the most inefficient operation I encounter on a regular basis. It is a fabulous irony that a profession obsessed with efficiency operates its core business in such an inefficient manner. How long do you spend refereeing a paper? Many hours are devoted to reviewing papers. This would be socially efficient if the paper improved in a way commensurate with the time spent, but in fact revising papers using blind referees often makes papers worse. Referees offer specific advice that push papers away from the author’s intent. It is one thing for a referee to say “I do not find this paper compelling because of X” and another thing entirely to say that the referee would rather see a different paper on the same general topic and try to get the author to write it.

Does anyone have data about paper efficiency and the humanities? Searching through Project MUSE, JSTOR, and Google Scholar yields nothing through the criteria I tried.

* I very much like the poem “Playboy’s Guide to Lingering” by Joseph J. Capista, although I can’t decide why; normally the Slate poems leave me high and dry, like the New Yorker’s.

* A review of Thy Neighbor’s Wife from Bill Wasik at The Second Pass; compare to my comments here. I’m not sure I buy this: “Of all the mass utopian notions of the twentieth century, the sexual revolution was both the most spectacularly successful and, in the end, the most thwarted” because it would seem that the “success” part has dominated the “failure” part.

* Hilarious if silly: Vampires Suck. Actually, they don’t. And that’s the problem:

Just as America’s young men are being given deeply erroneous ideas about sex by what they watch on the Web, so, too, are America’s young women receiving troubling misinformation about the male of the species from Twilight. These women are going to be shocked when the sensitive, emotionally available, poetry-writing boys of their dreams expect a bit more from a sleepover than dew-eyed gazes and chaste hugs. The young man, having been schooled in love online, will be expecting extreme bondage and a lesbian three-way.

* State governments are behaving with even less foresight than usual; according to a Salon post quoting the San Jose Mercury News, “In 1980, 17 percent of the state budget went to higher education. By 2007, that had fallen to 10 percent — the same as prisons and parole.” And 2007 predated the current crisis, showing that the trend away from higher education funding is accelerating.

* A variety of research shows that driving while distracted leads to more accidents, and I wouldn’t be surprised if thinking while distracted leads to an inability to consider deep thoughts and inhibits creativity. This is part of the reason I’m suspicious of Tyler Cowen’s argument in Create Your Own Economy that the ceaseless flow of bite-sized information bits is a net positive.

* Fascinating: Japan and Korea’s hidden protectionist measures prevented U.S. car companies from competing in their home markets, and the English-language press largely ignored the story. Compare this to the argument in David Halberstam’s The Reckoning. Maybe the widely held story regarding Detroit’s utter incompetence needs to be substantially revised.

* Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four from Slate’s Farhad Manjoo observes, “The worst thing about this story [of Amazon remotely deleting copies of Orwell’s 1984] isn’t Amazon’s conduct; it’s the company’s technical capabilities.” Indeed. But the main thing he forgets is that our future, like our toilets, is unlikely to be completely paperless: to the extent readers and publishers want to continue distributing books via print, they’ll still be able to. The situation probably isn’t as dire as Manjoo implies, but his warning is very much worth remembering: you don’t want the means of knowledge dissemination in a single company’s hands. It used to be that writers feared churches more than anything else; then it was governments; now it might be companies. Perhaps that’s a microcosm of the overall development of power in our world.

* Speaking of electronic books, Barnes & Noble has demonstrated its capacity to totally miss the boat with its recently announced eBook Reader. Problems: 1) It’s late to the game, with Sony and Amazon having preempted it by years; 2) No e-ink paper—who wants to read books on crappy computer and iPod screens? 3) Lousy device name. “Kindle” and “iPod” are evocative and unique; eBook Reader is not. If a Kindle-like device is coming, maybe Barnes & Noble could stage a dramatic comeback, but I’m not optimistic.

(Also see the WSJ’s article here.)

* Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The article argues it’s not evolution; compare this to Geoffrey Miller’s arguments.

* IKEA is not the social or environmental paragon its corporate image makes it out to be.

* Gas and the suburbs.

* The wisdom of Megan McArdle regarding bike commuting.

* Finally, for some foreign affairs: Is Burma attempting to build nuclear weapons?