The Subconscious Mind

In a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee.
The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.
That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
Findings like this one, as improbable as they seem, have poured forth in psychological research over the last few years. New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support” — all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.
Psychologists say that “priming” people in this way is not some form of hypnotism, or even subliminal seduction; rather, it’s a demonstration of how everyday sights, smells and sounds can selectively activate goals or motives that people already have.
More fundamentally, the new studies reveal a subconscious brain that is far more active, purposeful and independent than previously known. Goals, whether to eat, mate or devour an iced latte, are like neural software programs that can only be run one at a time, and the unconscious is perfectly capable of running the program it chooses.
The give and take between these unconscious choices and our rational, conscious aims can help explain some of the more mystifying realities of behavior, like how we can be generous one moment and petty the next, or act rudely at a dinner party when convinced we are emanating charm.
“When it comes to our behavior from moment to moment, the big question is, ‘What to do next?’ ” said John A. Bargh, a professor of psychology at Yale and a co-author, with Lawrence Williams, of the coffee study, which was presented at a recent psychology conference. “Well, we’re finding that we have these unconscious behavioral guidance systems that are continually furnishing suggestions through the day about what to do next, and the brain is considering and often acting on those, all before conscious awareness.”

Just a Question of Sex

Why Have Sex? (YSEX?) Questionnaire
[Developed by Dr. Cindy Meston and Dr. David M. Buss]*

Note. This questionnaire is entirely voluntary. You are free not to participate or to skip any question you do not want to answer for any reason. All responses are totally confidential and anonymous. We would greatly appreciate your honest responses. Thank you!

People have sex (i.e., sexual intercourse) for many different reasons. Below is a list of some of these reasons. Please indicate how frequently each of the following reasons led you to have sex in the past. For example, if about half of the time you engaged in sexual intercourse you did so because you were bored, then you would write “3” beside question 3. If you have not had sex in the past, use the following scale to indicate what the likelihood that each of the following reasons would lead you to have sex.


1. I was “in the heat of the moment.”
2. It just happened.
3. I was bored.
4. It just seemed like “the thing to do.”
5. Someone dared me.
6. I desired emotional closeness (i.e., intimacy).
7. I wanted to feel closer to God.
8. I wanted to gain acceptance from friends.
9. It’s exciting, adventurous.
10. I wanted to make up after a fight.
11. I wanted to get rid of aggression.
12. I was under the influence of drugs.
13. I wanted to try to get a better mate than my current mate.
14. I wanted to express my love for the person.
15. I wanted to experience the physical pleasure.
16. I wanted to show my affection to the person.
17. I felt like I owed it to the person.
18. I was attracted to the person.
19. I was sexually aroused and wanted the release.
20. My friends were having sex and I wanted to fit in.
21. It feels good.
22. My partner kept insisting.
23. The person was famous and I wanted to be able to say I had sex with him/her.
24. I was physically forced to.
25. I was verbally coerced into it.
26. I wanted the person to love me.
27. I wanted to have a child.
28. I wanted to make someone else jealous.
29. I wanted to have more sex than my friends.
30. I was married and you’re supposed to.
31. I was tired of being a virgin.
32. I was “horny.”
33. I wanted to feel loved.
34. I was feeling lonely.
35. Everyone else was having sex.
36. I wanted the attention.
37. It was easier to “go all the way” than to stop.
38. I wanted to ensure the relationship was “committed.”
39. I was competing with someone else to “get the person.”
40. I wanted to “gain control” of the person.
41. I was curious about what the person was like in bed.
42. I was curious about sex.
43. I wanted to feel attractive.
44. I wanted to please my partner.
45. I wanted to display submission.
46. I wanted to release anxiety/stress
47. I didn’t know how to say “no.”
48. I felt like it was my duty.
49. I wanted to end the relationship.
50. My friends pressured me into it.
51. I wanted the adventure/excitement.
52. I wanted the experience.
53. I felt obligated to.
54. It’s fun.
55. I wanted to get even with someone (i.e., revenge).
56. I wanted to be popular.
57. It would get me gifts.
58. I wanted to act out a fantasy.
59. I hadn’t had sex for a while.
60. The person was “available.”
61. I didn’t want to “lose” the person.
62. I thought it would help “trap” a new partner.
63. I wanted to capture someone else’s mate.
64. I felt sorry for the person.
65. I wanted to feel powerful.
66. I wanted to “possess” the person.
67. I wanted to release tension.
68. I wanted to feel good about myself.
69. I was slumming.
70. I felt rebellious.
71. I wanted to intensify my relationship.
72. It seemed like the natural next step in my relationship.
73. I wanted to be nice.
74. I wanted to feel connected to the person.
75. I wanted to feel young.
76. I wanted to manipulate him/her into doing something for me.
77. I wanted him/her to stop bugging me about sex.
78. I wanted to hurt/humiliate the person.
79. I wanted the person to feel good about himself/herself.
80. I didn’t want to disappoint the person.
81. I was trying to “get over” an earlier person/relationship.
82. I wanted to reaffirm my sexual orientation.
83. I wanted to try out new sexual techniques or positions.
84. I felt guilty.
85. My hormones were out of control.
86. It was the only way my partner would spend time with me.
87. It became a habit.
88. I wanted to keep my partner happy.
89. I had no self-control.
90. I wanted to communicate at a "deeper" level.
91. I was afraid my partner would have an affair if I didn't have sex with him/her.
92. I was curious about my sexual abilities.
93. I wanted a "spiritual" experience.
94. It was just part of the relationship "routine."
95. I wanted to lose my inhibitions.
96. I got "carried away."
97. I needed another "notch on my belt."
98. The person demanded that I have sex with him/her.
99. The opportunity presented itself.
100. I wanted to see what it would be like to have sex while stoned (e.g., on marijuana or some other drug).
101. It's considered “taboo” by society.
102. I wanted to increase the number of sex partners I had experienced.
103. The person was too “hot” (sexy) to resist.
104. I thought it would relax me.
105. I thought it would make me feel healthy.
106. I wanted to experiment with new experiences.
107. I wanted to see what it would be like to have sex with another person.
108. I thought it would help me to fall asleep.
109. I could brag to other people about my sexual experience.
110. It would allow me to “get sex out of my system” so that I could focus on other things.
111. I wanted to decrease my partner’s desire to have sex with someone else.
112. It would damage my reputation if I said “no.”
113. The other person was too physically attractive to resist.
114. I wanted to celebrate something.
115. I was seduced.
116. I wanted to make the person feel better about herself/himself.
117. I wanted to increase the emotional bond by having sex.
118. I wanted to see whether sex with a different partner would feel different or better.
119. I was mad at my partner, so I had sex with someone else.
120. I wanted to fulfill a previous promise to my partner.
121. It was expected of me.
122. I wanted to keep my partner from straying.
123. I wanted the pure pleasure.
124. I wanted to dominate the other person.
125. I wanted to make a conquest.
126. I’m addicted to sex.
127. It was a favor to someone.
128. I wanted to be used or degraded.
129. Someone offered me money to do it.
130. I was drunk.
131. It seemed like good exercise.
132. I was pressured into doing it.
133. The person offered to give me drugs for doing it.
134. I was frustrated and needed relief.
135. It was a romantic setting.
136. I felt insecure.
137. My regular partner is boring, so I had sex with someone else.
138. I was on the “rebound” from another relationship.
139. I wanted to boost my self-esteem
140. I wanted to get my partner to stay with me.
141. Because of a bet.
142. It was a special occasion.
143. It was the next step in the relationship.
144. I wanted to get a special favor from someone.
145. I wanted to get back at my partner for having cheated on me.
146. I wanted to enhance my reputation.
147. I wanted to keep warm.
148. I wanted to punish myself.
149. I wanted to break up a rival’s relationship by having sex with his/her partner.
150. I wanted to stop my partners’ nagging.
151. I wanted to achieve an orgasm.
152. I wanted to brag to friends about my conquests.
153. I wanted to improve my sexual skills.
154. I wanted to get a job.
155. I wanted to get a raise.
156. I wanted to get a promotion.
157. I wanted to satisfy a compulsion.
158. I wanted to make money.
159. I wanted to keep my partner satisfied.
160. I wanted to change the topic of conversation.
161. I wanted to get out of doing something.
162. I wanted to test my compatibility with a new partner.
163. I wanted to get a partner to express love.
164. I wanted to put passion back into my relationship.
165. I wanted to prevent a breakup.
166. I wanted to become one with another person.
167. I wanted to get a favor from someone.
168. I wanted to breakup my relationship.
169. I wanted to give someone else a sexually transmitted disease (e.g., herpes, AIDS).
170. I wanted to breakup another’s relationship.
171. I wanted to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.
172. I wanted to make myself feel better about myself.
173. I wanted to get rid of a headache.
174. I was afraid to say "no" due to the possibility of physical harm.
175. I wanted to keep my partner from straying.
176. I wanted to burn calories.
177. I wanted to even the score with a cheating partner.
178. I wanted to hurt an enemy.
179. I wanted to feel older.
180. It is my genetic imperative.
181. It was an initiation rite to a club or organization.
182. I wanted to become more focused on work - sexual thoughts are distracting.
183. I wanted to say "I’ve missed you."
184. I wanted to celebrate a birthday or anniversary or special occasion.
185. I wanted to say "I’m sorry."
186. I wanted to return a favor.
187. I wanted to say "Thank You."
188. I wanted to welcome someone home.
189. I wanted to say "goodbye."
190. I wanted to defy my parents.
191. I wanted to relieve menstrual cramps.
192. I wanted to relieve “blue balls.”
193. I wanted to get the most out of life.
194. I wanted to feel feminine.
195. I wanted to feel masculine.
196. I am a sex addict.
197. I wanted to see what all the fuss is about.
198. I thought it would boost my social status.
199. The person had a lot of money.
200. The person’s physical appearance turned me on.
201. The person was a good dancer.
202. Someone had told me that this person was good in bed.
203. The person had beautiful eyes.
204. The person made me feel sexy.
205. An erotic movie had turned me on.
206. The person had taken me out to an expensive dinner.
207. The person was a good kisser.
208. The person had bought me jewelry.
209. The person had a great sense of humor.
210. The person seemed self-confident.
211. The person really desired me.
212. The person was really desired by others.
213. I wanted to gain access to that person’s friend.
214. I felt jealous.
215. The person flattered me.
216. I wanted to see if I could get the other person into bed.
217. The person had a desirable body.
218. I had not had sex in a long time.
219. The person smelled nice.
220. The person had an attractive face.
221. I saw the person naked and could not resist.
222. I was turned on by the sexual conversation.
223. The person was intelligent.
224. The person caressed me.
225. The person wore revealing clothes.
226. The person had too much to drink and I was able to take advantage of him/her.
227. I knew the person was usually “out of my league.”
228. The person was mysterious.
229. I realized I was in love.
230. I wanted to forget about my problems.
231. I wanted to reproduce.
232. I/she was ovulating.
233. I wanted my partner to notice me.
234. I wanted to help my partner forget about his/her problems.
235. I wanted to lift my partner's spirits.
236. I wanted to submit to my partner.
237. I wanted to make my partner feel powerful.

238. Other (please fill in your reasons in the space below).


*Meston, C., & Buss, D.M. (2007). Why humans have sex. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 36, 477-507.

Kasparov on Putin

OpinionJournal

"When Vladimir Putin took power in Russia in 2000, the burning question was: 'Who is Putin?' It has now changed to: 'What is the nature of Putin's Russia?' This regime has been remarkably consistent in its behavior, yet foreign leaders and the Western press still act surprised at Mr. Putin's total disregard for their opinions.
Again and again we hear cries of: 'Doesn't Putin know how bad this looks?' When another prominent Russian journalist is murdered, when a businessman not friendly to the Kremlin is jailed, when a foreign company is pushed out of its Russian investment, when pro-democracy marchers are beaten by police, when gas and oil supplies are used as weapons, or when Russian weapons and missile technology are sold to terrorist sponsor states like Iran and Syria, what needs to be asked is what sort of government would continue such behavior. This Kremlin regime operates within a value system entirely different from that of the Western nations struggling to understand what is happening behind the medieval red walls.
Mr. Putin's government is unique in history. This Kremlin is part oligarchy, with a small, tightly connected gang of wealthy rulers. It is partly a feudal system, broken down into semi-autonomous fiefdoms in which payments are collected from the serfs, who have no rights. Over this there is a democratic coat of paint, just thick enough to gain entry into the G-8 and keep the oligarchy's money safe in Western banks."

West End & Broadway

It's not often that you get to follow the daily musings of a leading theatre critic, especially the chief reviewer of The New York Times, whose verdicts on the London season have an inevitable influence on theatrical booking patterns in a Manhattan already in thrall to the UK. That's just one reason why the ongoing London Theatre Journal of The New York Times's Ben Brantley has become essential blogosphere reading for theatre buffs - not to mention industry professionals - over the past 10 days or so.
It's long been one of the perks of the job that the paper's number one drama critic gets a trip or two to London every season; that's the context, in fact, in which I first met such predecessors of Brantley as Frank Rich and the late, much-missed Vincent Canby. But with the arrival of the blog, Brantley is now able to report back virtually instantaneously, while still saving longer, more sustained theme pieces for the print edition of the paper. (Those, too, are of course available online.)The fact is, although Brantley has so far weighed in with one longer print essay driven by his response to the National Theatre's revival of The Hothouse, his ongoing ArtsBeat blog means that we already know some of his thoughts about Saint Joan and In Celebration (both of which he liked), and Gaslight at the Old Vic (which he didn't, much). We also hear about food poisoning precluding Brantley's visit to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat - a blessing in disguise, many might argue - and get an ace description of Elaine Paige in London's Drowsy Chaperone: "In a dark wig and tarantula eyelashes, [she] resembles a plush toy version of Joan Collins," Brantley writes.So far so fun you might argue, but why pay special heed? That's an easy one: because Britain more than ever is relied upon to fuel a New York theatre scene that, in the absence of thinking for itself, likes to import whatever has received the cultural imprimatur of the town's most influential critic.
It's near-miraculous that the Broadway season to come already promises new plays by American dramatists Aaron Sorkin (The Farnsworth Invention, starring Hank Azaria) and David Mamet (November, starring Nathan Lane), since the big guns in years gone by have been Tom Stoppard, Alan Bennett, and David Hare. It will come as no surprise, meanwhile, to point out that Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll itself surfaces on Broadway in the autumn, much of its London cast intact - this is the same play (and production) that was exalted by Brantley during his sweep through London, minus a blog, this time last year.

God, er...Dog

I believe that ALL MEN no matter how primitive or how sophisticated needs a 'central intellectual focus' sooner or later in his evolutionary process in order to understand the world around him. Long before Jesus, or Mohammad, there were philosophers like Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, the Greek philosophers who voiced their thoughts. They were not religious sages, they simply thought about the world around them and came up with their perceptions. All thinking men will also so evolve from the primitive no matter from which tree of evolution.However, another evolution created philosophers who lived in a 'tribal community'. Because of the need for tribal survival and dominance of one tribe over a region in a harsh and poor land like the Holy Lands, tribes had to survive by exclusivity. Hence tribal philosophies and codes of tribal life created 'exclusive religions'. As a matter of fact it is nothing but an exclusive philosophy. Even atheism is a form of philosophy of the non-belief in a god. And so were the philosophies of polytheism. God, gods, your god, my god, no god, it is all just part and parcel of a philosophy turned into an ideology.So all it is is that philosophies are utilized by the clerics into ideologies, and hence the exclusivity of religions. If we do not have one form of religion, we will have another form or call it philosophy if you like. But that is the nature of MAN!

Bad Times for the Press

The American press has the blues. Too many authorities have assured it that its days are numbered, too many good newspapers are in ruins. It has lost too much public respect. Courts that once treated it like a sleeping tiger now taunt it with insolent subpoenas and put in jail reporters who refuse to play ball with prosecutors. It is abused relentlessly on talk radio and in Internet blogs. It is easily bullied into acquiescing in the designs of a presidential propaganda machine determined to dominate the news.
Its advertising and circulation are being drained away by the Internet, and its owners seem stricken by a failure of the entrepreneurial imagination needed to prosper in the electronic age. Surveys showing that more and more young people get their news from television and computers breed a melancholy sense that the press is yesteryear's thing, a horse-drawn buggy on an eight-lane interstate.
Then there are the embarrassments: hoaxers like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass turn journalism into farce. The elite Washington press corps is bamboozled into helping a circle of neoconservative connivers create the Iraq war. What became of heroes? Journalists used to dine out on the deeds of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during Watergate; of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Malcolm Browne in Vietnam; of "Punch" Sulzberger and Kay Graham risking everything to publish the Pentagon Papers. Instead of heroes, today's table talk is about journalistic frauds and a Washington press too dim to stay out of a three-card-monte game.

SIMPSONS

AFTER 18 years on prime-time television, “The Simpsons Movie” brings to the big screen all the qualities that have made the Simpson family superstars. That should reassure pundits who have been fretting over the question Homer Simpson poses at the beginning of the film, after viewing an especially Aesopian episode of “The Itchy & Scratchy Show”, Bart Simpson's favourite ultraviolent cartoon-within-a-cartoon: “Who's going to pay for something they've been getting for free?”
The answer is another question: how many smart, satirical, uproariously witty comedies did Hollywood make this year? “The Simpsons Movie” fills a niche in the major studios' release schedules that has lately become a void.
Critics were shown the film just before it opened to keep the audience's enjoyment of the rococo plot twists from being spiked by internet killjoys, a policy deserving of support. Briefly, an ecological disaster befalls the town of Springfield, brought about by Homer's involvement with a new love and his weakness for doughnuts.
The dysfunctional cohesion of the Simpson family is put to the test. Bart starts wishing he had a father like Ned Flanders next door, who practises family values with a wise serenity that is horribly off-putting. Marge doubts her love for Homer. Lisa meets a musician named Colin whose green politics is matched by his lilting brogue. And baby Maggie breaks 18 years of silence by speaking her first word, which audiences will have to stay through the final credits to hear.
But it is Homer who really evolves, after an Inuit medicine woman teaches him his “throat-song” and sends him on a spirit journey to an epiphany about human interconnectedness based on enlightened self-interest. Strangely, we come to care deeply about all of them.

Friendship & Email & Aristotle

The first two types of friendship are relatively fragile. When the purpose for which the relationship is formed somehow changes, then these friendships tend to end. For instance, if the business partnership is dissolved, or if you take another job, or graduate from school, it is more than likely that no ties will be maintained with the former friend of utility. Likewise, once the love affair cools, or you take up a new hobby or give up fishing, the friends of pleasure will go their own ways.
However, friendships of the good tend to be lifelong, are often formed in childhood or adolescence, and will exist so long as the friends continue to remain virtuous in each other’s eyes. To have more than a handful of such friends of the good, Aristotle states, is indeed a fortunate thing. Rare indeed are such friendships, for people of this kind are rare. Or as my mother used to say, “Make new friends but keep the old, for one is silver and the other is gold.” Such friendships of the good require time and intimacy – to truly know people’s finest qualities you must have deep experiences with them, and close connections. “Many a friendship doth want of intercourse destroy,” Aristotle warns us.
And yet, for us living in the frenetic 21st Century, it can be difficult to maintain such ties. Friendships of utility and pleasure come and go quickly as we move from job to job and relationship to relationship. But for Aristotle this need not be a tragedy. Since the interchanges of both types are less intense or permanent, their endings are not necessarily detrimental to one’s self. But to lose a friend of the good – ah, there is tragedy indeed.
Email has added a new wrinkle to Aristotle’s threefold schemata. Thanks to it, and the wonders of the internet in general, it is now easier than ever to stay in touch with people from throughout one’s life. Old acquaintances, long forgotten, can be found relatively easily through Google searches and services such as classmates.com, where you can often track down old school chums you haven’t spoken to in many a moon, for a fee.

Quo Vadimus?

Reason Magazine - Quo Vadimus?

Al Gore had so wanted to nab the Capitol. He had planned all along on making Washington, DC a key link in the Live Earth concert chain, starting hours after Sydney, right after London, right before New York. Around the world, 2 billion viewers - including many of those mythical millions who, Billy Crystal or Whoopi Goldberg inform us, dutifully watch every year's Oscars - would watch carbon-conscious rock stars shatter their amps in view of the massive Capitol dome.
And then Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, a global warming skeptic, put the brakes on it. Organizers were shocked: not even an Oscar and a clutch of Huffington Post essays could override the power of a duly-elected pain-in-the-ass. The concert was scrapped until Friday, when the Smithsonian offered up the grounds of the Museum of the American Indian. The word went out online, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood booked their plane tickets, and on Saturday the Mall's newest taxpayer-funded field trip destination hosted a pathetically small crowd in front of, well, basically, nothing. Look ahead and you could see the stage. Crane your neck and you could spot some grass and footpaths and some perplexed tourists. Gore, looking far less imposing than the holographic Gore that beamed into in Tokyo, put his sunniest spin on the new location. "It wasn't the cavalry that came to our rescue," he said. "It was the American Indians."
Sure, fine, but everybody knows the truth: Gore really needed that Capitol in the background. He needed a display of power and there is no greater display of power than shaking your fist in front of a giant crowd as the vast legislative house of the world's superpower looms behind you. American troops are in Iraq because of a decision made inside that building. A wall along the U.S.-Mexico border that would immediately become the longest and largest in history has been funded, and may be built, because of a decision made inside of there. A rally in the view of that dome has the imprimatur of the American empire. That's what you want those 2 billion people to see.
Just don't count Cullen Murphy, the longtime Atlantic managing editor, among the billions. In Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America he envisions a happy day when Al Gore and Jim Inhofe won't be brawling over concert licenses. "I doubt I'm the only person," he writes, "who has trod, with lofty step, the sculpted gardens of the Capitol and been seized with a vision of how the city might appear as a ruin."
Murphy hardly writes about anything without treading through it. When he was a boy he toured Rome "walk[ing] alone in the early morning with a sketchbook." He's visited every important outpost of the Roman Empire and some of the key sites of Pax Americana, like Bagram Air Base. As an editor he published some of the glummest predictive journalism ever written, some of it (like James Fallows' The Fifty-first State?) depressingly prescient. His brief book has the feel of a life's work, much like Gore's post-politics output. Both men plunder the past to predict the future, Gore with his ancient glacier data and wind patterns, Murphy with the Rome collection at the Boston Aethenaeum.
And Murphy has the easier case to prove. Is America the new Roman Empire? Yes, obviously it is. America dominates the planet militarily, economically, culturally, as much or more than Rome ever did. Americas know their position and their superiority as surely as the Romans did. The Capitol, like every other ruin-to-be in Washington, was modeled in the Roman image, and half of it is named for the Roman Senate. Our confidence leads us to make the same kinds of military blunders as the Romans, and the only argument is whether Iraq is our Teutoburg Forest or our Adrianople - if we've learned our lesson and will stop pushing outside our boundaries, or if we've used up all of our get-out-of-jail cards and are primed for a fall.
Americans started comparing ourselves to the Romans long before we had an empire to worry about - shortly before we were Americans at all. Before the Revolution, as Murphy points out, Americans performed Joseph Addison's Cato: A Tragedy in Five Acts and walked to the wrap parties ready to trade life for liberty. When George Washington declined absolute power and when he walked away from the presidency after two terms, Americans reached back to a Roman hero to pay their tribute: Washington was Cincinattus. The statue of a toga-clad Washington handing back his sword to the masses now sits in the Smithsonian, although Murphy worries that the "reference is probably lost on most visitors: Washington looks like a man in a sauna reaching for a towel."Our cognizance of Rome and of her downfall is an insurance policy. A culture that tells and re-tells the Roman epic everywhere from the founding to HBO series to the second Star Wars trilogy has obviously paid its attention to history. Not enough, says Murphy: We don't realize that an empire that's going to last has to start acting with an eye on the future. So we need a "hundred-year workout plan" to correct our short-sightedness, and we need to stop privatizing government services. "Yes, it takes some imagination to see how corrosive privatized government will prove to be many decades down the road," Murphy argues. "Start thinking in centuries."
Does that sound like a stretch? Well, it is. The rest of Murphy's problems that threaten to turn the Capitol into a new Coliseum are problems of centralization, power, overconfidence; we can protect our culture with a border wall, we can remake Mesopotamia if we clap a little louder. Privatization leaps almost out of nowhere, out of Murphy's anger at political corruption and out of documents that reveal powerful Romans trading favors for cash. So he argues points like "as in Rome, privatization still includes turning over government departments to incompetent cronies, empowering private individuals at the expense of public intentions." His example? Michael Brown at FEMA.Mull that one over. If you're looking for an example of the ills of privatization, of shrinking government, does anyone disprove your point like Michael Brown? He was the man at the top of an organization of Laurel-and-Hardy-level screw-ups, which had been folded into the Department of Homeland Security, a font of even greater screw-ups. His pivotal moment, his own Teutoburg Forest, was the evacuation and clean-up of New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina. While Brown was blowing it, what organization was shoveling supplies to survivors with epic efficiency? That's right: Wal-Mart.
But that's merely more fuel for Murphy's nightmare. He sees three bleak possible future for Pax Americana. In one, the borders are locked off and the security state peeks into every bedroom. In another, America's megalopolises break off into city-states: Cosimo di Medici, meet Michael Bloomberg. In his grimmest scenario the breakdown of controlling authority and the sense of "in-this-togetherness" that government provides leads to "the rise of corporate feudalism on a global scale."
Sounds bleak, but is that a scenario where the American empire falls and snooty Chinese tourists snap photos standing aside the rubble of old Washington? No; it's a scenario where America has basically won. Commerce has won out. Culture has won out. If you believe that spreading American cultural norms around the world is more important than planting the flag or christening some new military camp, what's there to fear from a future where government controls less and less and business governs the affairs of man more than nationalism?
Again, that's Murphy's worst nightmare. His other predictions of doom are cut down by his optimism about America's ability to adapt, to absorb immigrants, to trade, to tolerate. "America's powerfully absorptive and transformative domestic culture" is "more than a match for any challenge and doesn't need to be ‘run' by bureaucrats or told what to do." This isn't a prediction that American hegemony will go on and on and on like some propaganda poem commissioned by Augustus. It won't, obviously. But it would be folly to try and preserve American power (or American culture) by locking down the demographics and the bureaucracy that we have today and refusing to experiment for fear of wrecking everything. Not only does that flout the very reason Pax America has been so successful, it indulges the habit that so irritates Inhofe about Al Gore: working from pessimism and drawing a straight black line from the present into the infinite, ominous future.

God Particle

At Fermilab, the Race Is on for the ‘God Particle’
By DENNIS OVERBYE
In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call “ambulance chasing.”
He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons.
But the only theory he and Dr. Lee could come up with was ugly. A few weeks later it turned out that the triplet effect wasn’t true.
“I’ve always been embarrassed that we managed to come up with a theory,” Dr. Weinberg, now at the University of Texas at Austin, said recently.
Dr. Weinberg said that 30 years later, he still has not gotten to Yosemite.
“And we never got trimuons either,” he added.
And therein lies a lesson — or not — for the world’s physicists.
Earlier this summer, the physics world was jolted by a rumor that a team of scientists from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Batavia, Ill., had found a bump in their data that might be a legendary particle that has haunted physicists for a generation. It is known colloquially as the Higgs boson and sometimes grandly as the “God particle.” According to the Standard Model that has ruled physics for 30 years, the Higgs endows elementary particles in the universe with mass.
The history of physics is full of bumps that could have been revolutionary but have disappeared like ghosts in the night, and this rumor of a possible Higgs sighting was not even the first this year. Most physicists who have heard this rumor think that this bump is likely to be another of those disappearing anomalies, like the trimuons that frustrated Dr. Weinberg. But then these same physicists point out that you never know.
The team, known as the D Zero collaboration and numbering some 600 physicists from 19 countries and 88 institutions, will not even say whether there is a bump in its data until the scientists have decided for sure that it is nature calling and not just a random statistical fluctuation.

Zelda's Birthday

It's the birthday of Zelda Fitzgerald (books by this author), born Zelda Sayre in Montgomery, Alabama (1900). She was the wife and muse of the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. She met F. Scott Fitzgerald at one of the military dances, and he stood out from the crowd in his fancy Brooks Brothers uniform and cream-colored boots. Zelda said, "He smelled like new goods." He told her that she looked like the heroine in the novel he was writing. They went on their first date on Zelda's birthday, July 24, 1918. She never forgot that day. Years later in a letter to Scott she wrote, "The night you gave me my birthday party ... you were a young Lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn't I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best."
Their marriage was difficult. Scott struggled with alcoholism and Zelda struggled with schizophrenia, but they were the quintessential literary couple of the Jazz Age. They were so famous that William Randolph Hearst hired a reporter whose only job was to cover their activities. They looked so much alike that people sometimes mistook them for brother and sister. Lillian Gish said, "They were both so beautiful, so blond, so clean and so clear." Dorothy Parker said, "[They] looked like they'd just stepped out of the sun."
After F. Scott Fitzgerald died in 1940, Zelda sent a letter to his family in White Bear, Minnesota. She wrote, "Now that [Scott] won't be coming east again with his pockets full of promises and his notebooks full of schemes and new refurbished hope, life doesn't offer as happy a vista. My only consolation is that he died mercifully, without suffering whereas he might have spent years confined to his room [hemmed] in by the tiredness of a heart that had always felt so deeply. ... Life has a way of closing its books as soon as one's category is fulfilled; and I suppose the time has come."

From Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac

Confucius Making a Comeback

Confucius Making a Comeback In Money-Driven Modern China - washingtonpost.com:

"Confucianism is enjoying a resurgence in this country, as more and more Chinese like Guan seek ways to adapt to a culture in which corruption has spread and materialism has become a driving value. For many Chinese, a system of ethical teachings that stresses the importance of avoiding conflict and respecting hierarchy makes perfect sense, even if it was first in vogue centuries ago.
State-supported commemorations of Confucius have become more common, and the number of people studying his works has increased. A new best-selling book and TV program based on the sage's teachings have made Confucianism easy for the masses to digest.
'With the fast economic growth, many people have become selfish and have no morality,' said Ren Xiaolin, founder of the Zhengzhou Young Pioneers school, which Guan's son attends. 'This has created a need for Confucianism. . . . The change is overwhelming and many Chinese can't get used to it. It's created a clash of values.'
Because Confucianism has only recently regained its popularity -- it was seen as an obstacle to modernization during the anti-intellectual Cultural Revolution of 1966-76 -- many Chinese today are hard-pressed to fully describe the philosophy. It has become a grab bag of ideas that people are tailoring to their own needs as they search for a new belief system."

Book Reviews

The newspaper owners are killing the book reviews. It’s a fad among the owners, sweeping the nation. The review sections seem in danger of going in a short time. Will the disappearance of the book review sections be like the moment when we realized the elm trees were going? One day, as I remember it, we got the news a lot of them were dying in towns across the country, and the next moment the cities were sawing them all down and carrying the dead bodies away. “Bring out your dead!!”The disappearance of criticism from the daily papers in the United States poses a problem that goes way beyond the problems that are most immediately apparent, such as few reviews means fewer ads for books and fewer sales of the sorts of books I publish at Harvard University Press or of the sort most publishers of serious fiction and non-fiction produce.Since Day One as an editor I have always thought about which book review editors can I or the publicists I work with reach personally to make an appeal for a book to be covered. I know a goodly number of newspaper people—maybe more than some editors—because I just feel I have to have personal ties. I want to know someone is going to be on the other end of the phone line when I call. So, it seems like a nightmare to think that those lines are being pulled out. If the papers shut down reviews, it’ll be like having the door slammed in my face and the door removed.
In those glorious days of yesteryear just a little more than a century ago, when the future seemed to belong to the West, Walter Pater urged sensitive souls to always burn with a keen, gem-like flame, but what do we do now when the disappearance of the book reviews from so many papers portends the extinguishing of the critical flame? I would urge you to realize that the disappearance of criticism from our papers is not the cause, but the symptom of vast changes in our cultural ecology. It signals changes so long in gestation that they may be irreversible; and they are symptoms as indicative of momentous change as the discovery of hole in the ozone layer, the disappearance of the plankton from the sea, of the bees from fields, and the permafrost from Alaska. Oh, fine, the bosses might say, a literary person so besotted with books and their paraphernalia that he’s crying out like Chicken Little that the sky is falling when all we’ve done is closed out a few unproductive accounts! Boo-hoo!! But I’m warning you: the problems are bigger than they seem and they’re not solveable by getting a few newspaper excecs to restore the book pages.Beware, I say, lest the whole edifice of modern democratic society collapse if a stake is driven through its heart. That’s what killing books and arts reviewing means. We must constantly be indulging ourselves in the freeplay of critical intelligence. Is the new De Lillo book good? What about Pynchon’s Against the Day? Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica? Is the new Arcade Fire really good? And what about the new Electrelane album, No Shouts, No Calls? We modern humans need to be able to read critics wrestling with their own feelings about such works of art. We don’t want them to be invoking authorities who have sent down the word that a particular work is worthy. And we don’t need authorities recognized as such by society telling us to tune out of works of art the way the self-styled “Dean of America” Stanley Fish does. You don’t need to give a work of art the taste-test, he’s written. All you need to know is whether it comes to you by a card-carrying writer; your reactions to the work are irrelevant.

Emporer Bush

The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn’t have the power to do it. “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war,” he said at a recent press conference. “I think they ought to be funding the troops.” He added magnanimously: “I’m certainly interested in their opinion.”
The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress’s side.
Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”
The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”
Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”
When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.
The Constitution does make the president “commander in chief,” a title President Bush often invokes. But it does not have the sweeping meaning he suggests. The framers took it from the British military, which used it to denote the highest-ranking official in a theater of battle. Alexander Hamilton emphasized in Federalist No. 69 that the president would be “nothing more” than “first general and admiral,” responsible for “command and direction” of military forces.
The founders would have been astonished by President Bush’s assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly. Madison described Congress’s control over spending as “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”
The framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters. The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years. Hamilton explained that the limitation prevented Congress from vesting “in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.”
As opinion turns more decisively against the war, the administration is becoming ever more dismissive of Congress’s role. Last week, Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman brusquely turned away Senator Hillary Clinton’s questions about how the Pentagon intended to plan for withdrawal from Iraq. "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq,” he wrote. Mr. Edelman’s response showed contempt not merely for Congress, but for the system of government the founders carefully created.
The Constitution cannot enforce itself. It is, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin famously observed, an “invitation to struggle” among the branches, but the founders wisely bequeathed to Congress some powerful tools for engaging in the struggle. It is no surprise that the current debate over a deeply unpopular war is arising in the context of a Congressional spending bill. That is precisely what the founders intended.
Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.

It's the birthday of the painter Edward Hopper, born in Nyack, New York (1882). By the time he was 12, he was already six feet tall. He was skinny, gangly, made fun of by his classmates, painfully shy, and spent much of his time alone drawing.
After he finished art school, he took a trip to Paris and spent almost all of his time there alone, reading or painting. In Paris, he realized that he had fallen in love with light. He said the light in Paris was unlike anything he'd ever seen before. He tried to recreate it in his paintings.
He came back to New York and got a job as an illustrator at an ad agency. He hated the job. In his spare time, he drove around and painted train stations and gas stations and corner saloons. He'd sold only one painting by the time he was 40, but his first major exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933 made him famous—paintings with titles such as "Houses by the Railroad," "Room in Brooklyn," "Roofs of Washington Square," "Cold Storage Plant," "Lonely House," and "Girl on Bridge."
He'd also been an illustrator for business magazines, and he became one of the first American painters to paint office scenes. Several of his paintings show office managers surrounded by gorgeous, buxom secretaries, or people working late at the office, sitting at desks high above the city.
He lived and worked in the same walkup apartment in Washington Square from 1913 until 1967. He ate almost every meal of his adult life in a diner. He never rode in a taxi. He loved the theater, but he always sat in the cheap seats. He never had any children with his wife, and he never included a single child in any of his paintings. The closest he came was a painting called "New York Pavements," showing a nun pushing a baby carriage. His painting "Four Lane Road" is his only painting that shows people actually communicating: a woman is yelling at a man.
Edward Hopper said, "Maybe I am slightly inhuman ... All I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house."

CEO Libraries

Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete. Ken Lopez, a bookseller in Hadley, Mass., says it is impossible to put together a serious library on almost any subject for less than several hundred thousand dollars.
Perhaps that is why — more than their sex lives or bank accounts — chief executives keep their libraries private. Few Nike colleagues, for example, ever saw the personal library of the founder, Phil Knight, a room behind his formal office. To enter, one had to remove one’s shoes and bow: the ceilings were low, the space intimate, the degree of reverence demanded for these volumes on Asian history, art and poetry greater than any the self-effacing Mr. Knight, who is no longer chief executive, demanded for himself.
The Knight collection remains in the Nike headquarters. “Of course the library still exists,” Mr. Knight said in an interview. “I’m always learning.”
Until recently when Steven P. Jobs of Apple sold his collection, he reportedly had an “inexhaustible interest” in the books of William Blake — the mad visionary 18th-century mystic poet and artist. Perhaps future historians will track down Mr. Jobs’s Blake library to trace the inspiration for Pixar and the grail-like appeal of the iPhone.
If there is a C.E.O. canon, its rule is this: “Don’t follow your mentors, follow your mentors’ mentors,” suggests David Leach, chief executive of the American Medical Association’s accreditation division. Mr. Leach has stocked his cabin in the woods of North Carolina with the collected works of Aristotle.
Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries. “I try to vary my reading diet and ensure that I read more fiction than nonfiction,” Mr. Moritz said. “I rarely read business books, except for Andy Grove’s ‘Swimming Across,’ which has nothing to do with business but describes the emotional foundation of a remarkable man. I re-read from time to time T. E. Lawrence’s ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom,’ an exquisite lyric of derring-do, the navigation of strange places and the imaginative ruses of a peculiar character. It has to be the best book ever written about leading people from atop a camel.” Students of power should take note that C.E.O.’s are starting to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore’s tomes but books from the 15th century about the weather, Egyptian droughts, even replicas of Sumerian tablets recording extraordinary changes in climate, according to John Windle, the owner of John Windle Antiquarian Booksellers in San Francisco

Balthazar

Rembrandt

Hanging Ten

The George Freeth memorial in Redondo Beach is a salt-bitten bust of a lifeguard in an old-fashioned swimming vest, gazing with the stoicism we expect from early surf heroes into the deep mystery of a concrete parking garage. His back is to the Redondo Pier. Locals jog or skate past this memorial without noticing the plaque, which reads, "First Surfer in the United States," and then relates the story of how Freeth was paid by Los Angeles real estate and streetcar magnate Henry Huntington in 1907 to lure people to Redondo Beach to watch a new kind of athlete trim the waves. "George Freeth was advertised as 'The Man Who Can Walk on Water,' " according to the plaque. "Thousands of people came here … to watch this astounding feat. George would mount his big 8-foot-long, solid wood, 200-pound surfboard far out in the surf. He would wait for a suitable wave, catch it, and to the amazement of all, ride onto the beach while standing upright."The memorial is outdated: Freeth was only the first celebrity surfer in America. The first men on record to surf North America are now considered to be three Hawaiian princes who noticed that waves at the mouth of the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz were up to snuff. Jonah Kalaniana'ole and David and Edward Kawananakoa shaped boards from local redwoods and hauled them out to the beach one day in 1885. "The young Hawaiian princes were in the water," a local paper wrote, "enjoying it hugely and giving interesting exhibitions of surfboard swimming as practiced in their native islands." But Freeth, a haole with one Hawaiian grandparent, helped rescue stand-up surfing from the Christianized sickness of 19th century Hawaiian culture, and he brought it to Redondo Beach. He had won fame on the islands as a talented young swimmer but was ambitious to see the world. After he taught an avid Jack London to surf in front of a hotel at Waikiki — and after London wrote up the exotic art of "surf-bathing" for a magazine in 1907, describing Freeth in syrupy prose as a "handsome brown Mercury" — the young man asked for a letter of introduction. London obliged, and by July 1907, Freeth was bound for North America.Redondo Beach in 1907 was declining as an industrial harbor, and most of California's coastline consisted of wind-swept dunes. But wealthy men like Huntington wanted to develop. The Hotel Redondo had gone up in 1890, and a new arm of Huntington's light-rail line, the Pacific Electric, already stopped at Redondo Beach."When I studied the place, and saw its attractions, the beautiful topography it possessed, those terraces rising in harmonious degrees from the sea, I determined," Huntington wrote, with a real estate man's instinct for anticlimax, "that it presented such features as should make it the great resort of this region." Huntington had competition. In 1904, a cigarette mogul named Abbott Kinney had announced plans to build the "Venice of America," a gimmicky village with a network of canals and bridges and a flock of gondoliers who would pole tourists around in front of kitschy mock-European storefronts. It would come with a saltwater public pool under an arched glass ceiling and a Coney Island-style pier loaded with rides.Huntington countered this vision of Oz in 1905 with a three-story pavilion in Redondo Beach, decked out with Moorish arches and flag-topped golden domes. But he noticed that people were wary of the ocean. Most L.A. residents in those days preferred to ride out to the San Fernando Valley on weekends and shoot jackrabbits from the streetcars. Not that the coast was unpopular; people just had no concept of swimming in the waves. What we think of as "beach culture" was still alien to Americans. But Huntington had been to Waikiki. He knew that a man who could "walk on water" in the shore break, who looked half-exotic and bronzed in his swimming costume, who had lifesaving skills to match his surfing talent — why, a man like that could lure people to an otherwise empty stretch of sand. Within days of his arrival in California, Freeth went surfing off Venice Beach. A local paper ran an article on July 22 — "Surf Riders Have Drawn Attention." This may have startled Huntington, and by the end of the year, Freeth was on the Pacific Electric payroll, surfing twice a day near a section of Redondo known as Moonstone Beach, where semiprecious stones lay in a natural mound along the waterline. So Jack London's handsome "brown Mercury" walked up and down a heavy plank in sloppy Redondo whitewash while tourists in Edwardian suits browsed a mound of colorful surf cobble for "excellent specimens" to offer to their sweethearts. Clanking streetcars and an improbable Moorish pavilion gave the once-industrial coastline a carny atmosphere that must have seemed as ridiculous in 1907 as it does a century on, wherever old boardwalks or pleasure piers compete with the roar of the sea. But surfing — professional or paid surfing — had arrived in America, and George Freeth would be more than just a sideshow freak.

Atta-Me (We All Need this Machine)

Feeling blue? Unloved? As if nobody appreciates you? Maybe no one can see your inner wonderfulness. Or maybe you deserve to be forsaken. Maybe you are unloved because you're such a jerk, simply unlovable. Maybe you're a victim of the old maxim: "If you can't say anything nice . . . "
So when walking along 14th Street NW, you might be surprised to hear a chime followed by a reassuring voice:
"You help create a brighter future."
The avuncular voice calls out from a bright red-and-white-striped box perched on a platform of bricks, with a speaker at eye level and a grid of ventilation holes in the side. A small sign explains, "The Compliment Machine." The striking colors, stark lines and sharp corners lend the appearance of some strange installation of the municipality, perhaps from the Bureau of Self-Esteem or the Ministry of Happiness.
Ding! "People are drawn to your positive energy."
Is it true? It must be. The Compliment Machine looks as though it knows what it's talking about. Maybe it's a kinder, gentler cousin of Big Brother?
Ding! "You don't hate the player or the game."
Actually, the city has nothing to do with this. The Compliment Machine was conceived by Tom Greaves, 46, a visual artist who lives on Capitol Hill. It's part of SitesProject D.C., an exhibit by the Washington Project for the Arts\Corcoran, which features a collection of public art along 14th Street NW between P and V streets.
"It's a response to how on kids' soccer teams . . . win or lose, everyone gets a trophy," Greaves explains. Not soccer, specifically, but the saccharine culture in which everyone is special and unique, nobody can be criticized and everyone gets an award.
Some people can't stand that culture, others heartily embrace it, but if you're looking for a normative judgment from the creator of the Compliment Machine, you are looking in the wrong place. The machine is his entire comment.
The mellow, jeans-clad Greaves will only say that perhaps the nature of the comment is in the, well, ear of the beholder. As with an unearned trophy, Greaves says, "People can believe it or not."
Will they believe it? If everyone gets the trophy, if everyone receives the compliment, does it really mean anything?
On the other hand:
Ding! "You are always there when needed."
The machine calls to Tom Minter, 50, a resident of Q Street, who walks past the corner regularly. "It really makes you feel good," says Minter, a playwright. "If I'm having a really bad moment while I'm walking down this street, and it penetrates the fog, it's a good thing."
Ding! "Your eyes are beautiful."
The machine calls to a heavily muscled man in a snug black T-shirt, who pauses for just a moment to frown at the machine before heading on his way.
The Compliment Machine knows as much about its subjects as a fortune cookie knows about its eater. There's no science to it. Greaves simply read a hundred compliments in his most neutral voice -- like the recordings telling people to watch for the end of the moving sidewalk in an airport -- and put them on an iPod Nano. The Nano is inside the machine, plugged into a speaker and powered by a car battery (Greaves removes the iPod at night so it doesn't get stolen). The compliments play at random, and every night Greaves changes the compliments a bit, adding some and removing others. The machine operates from about 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. each day through July 27.
Between compliments is a gap of silence lasting several seconds to several minutes, to heighten the anticipation. Greaves picked up the idea at the Pompidou Center in Paris, where he observed a dummy with a bell hanging by its head; every few minutes, the dummy would lurch forward and bash his head against the bell.
Initially, Greaves thought of making some of the compliments subversive, but had a change of heart. "Why not make it completely positive? Everyone deserves to have a compliment paid to them."
And so the Compliment Machine has kind words for even the blackest of hearts. "Maybe if the compliment doesn't apply to them, they'll want to change that," says Greaves. Like a horoscope, there is the potential that the compliment becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the machine says "You leave things better than you find them," then maybe, just maybe, the recipient will be inspired to improve one little thing.
But it's hard to catch a break in this world. When Greaves went to install the machine earlier this month, he was across the street from a crew of construction workers.
"You are a wonderf--" BUZZZZUZZZZ! A circular saw loudly interrupted the machine -- unintentional commentary, perhaps?
How difficult it is in this modern age to hear those rare words of praise over all the chaos of our lives.
"You have--" PRAP PRAP PRAP PRAP!
Or perhaps it's just the reality of public art on a bustling street in a gentrifying neighborhood in a busy city. In response to the noise, Greaves ratcheted up the volume of the machine so that, after a long day or week or month or year, a person pausing at the corner could hear:
Ding! "You're a star in the face of the sky."

CHOMSKY

For years it was pretended that the threat was from the Russians, the routine pretext for violence and subversion all over the world. In the case of the Middle East, we do not have to consider this pretext, since it was officially abandoned. When the Berlin Wall fell, the first Bush administration released a new National Security Strategy, explaining that everything would go as before but within a new rhetorical framework. The massive military system is still necessary, but now because of the “technological sophistication of third world powers”—which at least comes closer to the truth—the primary threat, worldwide, has been indigenous nationalism. The official document explained further that the United States would maintain its intervention forces aimed at the Middle East, where “the threat to our interests” that required intervention “could not be laid at the Kremlin’s door,” contrary to decades of fabrication.2 As is normal, all of this passed without comment.
The most serious current problem in the minds of the population, by far, is Iraq. And the easy winner in the competition for the country that is the most feared is Iran, not because Iran really poses a severe threat, but because of a drumbeat of government-media propaganda. That is a familiar pattern. The most recent example is Iraq. The invasion of Iraq was virtually announced in September 2002. As we now know, the U.S.-British invasion was already underway in secret. In that month, Washington initiated a huge propaganda campaign, with lurid warnings by Condoleezza Rice and others that the next message from Saddam Hussein would be a mushroom cloud in New York City. Within a few weeks, the government-media propaganda barrage had driven Americans completely off the international spectrum. Saddam may have been despised almost everywhere, but it was only in the United States that a majority of the population were terrified of what he might do to them, tomorrow. Not surprisingly, support for the war correlated very closely with such fears. That has been achieved before, in amazing ways during the Reagan years, and there is a long and illuminating earlier history. But I will keep to the current monster being crafted by the doctrinal system, after a few words about Iraq.

Bush's Cognitive Therapy

One hopes the leader of the free world hasn't really, truly lost touch with objective reality. But one does have to wonder.
Last week, George W. Bush invited nine conservative pundits to the White House for what amounted to a pep talk, with the president providing the pep. Somehow I was left off the list -- must have been an oversight. But some columnists who attended have been writing about the meeting or describing it to colleagues, and their accounts are downright scary.

National Review's Kate O'Beirne, who joined the presidential chat in the Roosevelt Room, told me that the most striking thing was the president's incongruously sunny demeanor. Bush's approval ratings are well below freezing, the nation is sooooo finished with his foolish and tragic war, many of his remaining allies in Congress have given notice that come September they plan to leave the Decider alone in his private Alamo -- and the president remains optimistic and upbeat.
Bush was "not at all weary or anguished" and in fact was "very energized," wrote Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report. He was "as confident and upbeat as ever," observed Rich Lowry of National Review. "Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored," according to David Brooks of the New York Times.
Excuse me? I guess he must be in an even better mood since the feckless Iraqi government announced its decision to take the whole month of August off while U.S. troops continue fighting and dying in Baghdad's 130-degree summer heat.
It's almost as if Bush were trying to apply the principles of cognitive therapy, the system psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck developed in the 1960s. Beck found that getting patients to banish negative thoughts and develop patterns of positive thinking was helpful in pulling them out of depression. However, Beck was trying to get the patients to see themselves and the world realistically, whereas Bush has left realism far behind.
"He says the most useful argument to make in support of his policy is to show what failure would mean," Barone wrote of the president and Iraq. "It would mean an ascendant radicalism, among both Shia and Sunni Muslims, and it would embolden sponsors of terrorism such as Iran. Al-Qaeda would be emboldened and would be able to recruit forces."
Excuse me again? This is what Bush believes would happen? Hasn't he noticed that these catastrophes have already befallen us? And that they are the direct consequence of his decision to invade and occupy Iraq?
At a news conference last week, someone tried to point this out. Bush replied with such a bizarre version of history that I hope he was being cynical and doesn't really believe what he said: "Actually, I was hoping to solve the Iraqi issue diplomatically. That's why I went to the United Nations and worked with the United Nations Security Council, which unanimously passed a resolution that said disclose, disarm or face serious consequences. That was the message, the clear message to Saddam Hussein. He chose the course. . . . It was his decision to make."
Let's see, we have learned that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. That means Bush is claiming that Saddam Hussein "chose" the invasion -- and, ultimately, his own death -- by not showing us what he didn't have.
"Bush gives the impression that he is more steadfast on the war than many in his own administration and that, if need be, he'll be the last hawk standing," wrote Lowry. The president says the results of his recent troop escalation will be evaluated by Gen. David Petraeus, wrote Barone, and not by "the polls."
Translation: Everybody's out of step but me.
One of the more unnerving reports out of the president's seminar with the pundits came from Brooks, who quoted Bush as saying: "It's more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn't exist."
It's bad enough that Osama bin Laden is still out there plotting bloody acts of terrorism, convinced that God wants him to slay the infidels. Now we know that the president of the United States believes God has chosen him to bring freedom to the world, that he refuses to acknowledge setbacks in his crusade and that he flat-out doesn't care what "the polls" -- meaning the American people -- might think. I'm having trouble seeing the bright side. I think I need cognitive therapy.

The Week

I am a great admirer of the type of dispassionate diary of the week's events favored by The Spectator and Harpers.

So here goes.

Last Sunday I lit up our condominium with a nasty fire that started with our grill on the back (or should I say former) balcony. Being ousted from home is very dis-orienting -- it's always the little things like, did I bring the toothpaste?

My leg is healing. Perhaps two more weeks. The Dow closes above 14,000. God has forgiven David Vitter. That has got to be a relief. The Democrats can't get the military out of Iraq. The Open is being contested at Carnoustie. Allegations of doping now haunt golf and more distree the Tour de France. the Astros are in last place.

CHINA

SHANGHAI — China's economy grew at an extraordinary rate of 11.9% in the second quarter, the fastest clip in more than 12 years and a pace that puts the nation on track to overtake Germany this year as the world's third-largest economy.For the last 35 years, the United States, Japan and Germany have ranked 1-2-3 in gross domestic product, but as growth in those mature economies has slowed, China's has accelerated, powered by foreign investments and trade amid a global shift in production activity to the Far East.Just 12 years ago, China's economy ranked No. 8, behind Brazil's, and was less than one-third the size of Germany's.But figures released in a report by China's government Thursday show increasing challenges ahead for Beijing: surging inflation, breakneck investments in factories and a dramatic jump in exports that is stoking tensions between China and its major trading partners, particularly the United States.

Tolkien

It was on this day in 1954, the first part of the Lord of the Rings trilogy came out, The Fellowship of the Ring. It was the sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, which came out in 1937. Tolkien had written The Hobbit for his own amusement and didn't expect it to sell well. It's the story of a small, human-like creature with hairy feet named Bilbo, who goes on an adventure through Middle Earth and comes back with a magical ring.
J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote, "I am in fact a hobbit in all but size. I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands. I smoke a pipe, like good, plain food, detest French cooking ... I am fond of mushrooms, have a very simple sense of humor ... go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much."
The Hobbit sold pretty well, partly because C.S. Lewis gave it a big review when it came out. And so Tolkien's publisher asked for a sequel. Tolkien decided the new book would be about Bilbo's nephew Frodo, but for a long time he had no idea what sort of adventure. Finally, he decided it would be about the magical ring, though the ring had not been such an important part of The Hobbit.
Tolkien spent the next 17 years working on The Lord of the Rings. He was a professor at Oxford. He had to write in his spare time, usually at night, sitting by the stove in the study in his house.
He was well into his first draft by the time World War II broke out in 1939. He hadn't set out to write an allegory, but once the war began, he started to draw parallels between the war and the events in his novel: the land of evil in The Lord of the Rings, Mordor, was set east of Middle Earth, just as the enemies of England were to the east.
The book became more and more complicated as he went along. It was taking much longer to finish than he'd planned. He went through long stretches where he didn't write anything. He thought about giving up the whole thing. He wanted to make sure all the details were right, the geography, the language, the mythology of Middle Earth. He made elaborate charts to keep track of the events of the story. His son Christopher also drew a detailed map of Middle Earth.
Finally, in the fall of 1949, he finished writing The Lord of the Rings. He typed the final copy himself sitting on a bed in his attic, typewriter on his lap, tapping it out with two fingers. It turned out to be more than a half million words long, and the publisher agreed to bring it out in three volumes. The first came out on this day in 1954. The publisher printed just 3,500 copies, but it turned out to be incredibly popular. It went into a second printing in just six weeks. Today more than 30 million copies have been sold around the world.

Curtains for Curtain Calls

It happened last night at In Celebration and last week at Saint Joan. Here were the two latest examples of the British theatre's unique capacity for selling itself short when it comes to the curtain call, that closing theatrical gesture uniting audience and actor alike in a moment of release. What difference does it make, I can hear sceptics grumbling, how long the curtain call lasts? Surely the luvvies deserve a quick clap or two and then off to the pub. But such an attitude misunderstands how essential the bows are as a shared act of closure. Don't believe me? Ask anyone who saw the Neil LaBute play The Shape of Things some years back during the Almeida's King's Cross season: that staging deliberately denied its cast any curtain call at all, resulting in a distinctly queasy feeling as the audience made its way home.
More recent curtain calls have merely tended towards the frustrating. It's surely unfair to the labours of a cast, not least on press night, for them to come out for a third call amidst darkness, as was the case last night at In Celebration until someone somewhere was generous enough to illuminate the stage. At the opening night of Marianne Elliott's blistering production of Saint Joan, a rapt audience was clearly ready to prolong applause that seemed curtailed - the British tendency towards self-denial, perhaps, extending itself to such theatrical niceties.This isn't a problem elsewhere. Broadway has never been shy about bowing as long as is necessary to get the audience on its feet, though the Continent can be just as showy. Last month, I looked on astonished in Prague as a Czech-language staging of Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll got a good half dozen or more bows following a matinee performance whose leading man, I regret to say, wasn't a patch on London's own Rufus Sewell. Some years ago, I saw a production of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus in Paris which starred Roman Polanski as Mozart; the bows that evening threatened to exceed the length of the play itself, as was to be expected, I suppose, from a rare live theatrical outing from a cinematic master.

Mr. Gill & the Language

The British critic A A. Gill loves the English language but detests the English people.
In this curmudgeonly but very droll volume, he has lavish praise for the glories of English — “the most successful language that hurdled teeth” with “more ways of saying more things than any other language,” a language “as new as the most recent refugee,” a “brilliant, invisible river that flows all round us, full of things that we’ve left unsaid,” something “deeper than you will ever manage to plumb and faster than you will ever patter.”
The English people, however, annoy Mr. Gill no end: this “ugly race,” in his words, afflicted by an “earthbound pedantic spirituality” and “puce-faced, finger-jabbing, spittle-flecked politics,” a people “impervious to fondness, sympathy or attraction” and susceptible to “a Pooterish yearning for a Fascist order.”
A Scotsman who has spent much of his life living as an exile in what he sees as a hostile land, Mr. Gill says the opinions in this volume are “what I know to be true,” though the reader often suspects that he is writing tongue firmly in cheek. In fact, the central thesis of his book — that anger is the defining characteristic of the English people — feels more like a contrarian conceit than an earnestly held belief. Mr. Gill never says what the English might be so angry about, never comes up with any good examples of their fury, never explains why the country’s “default setting is anger: lapel-poking, Chinese-burning, ram-raiding, street-shouting, sniping, spitting, shoving, vengeful, inventive rage.”
Instead, he describes all the more familiar English traits — from a stiff upper lip to stoical humility, from good manners to a good sense of humor — as ingenious strategies for diffusing or deflecting anger. “Not giving in to your nature is very English,” he writes, “clinging on, white-knuckled, bottling the urges, refusing to slide into spittle-flecked release of snarling national fury.”

Culture

Bryan Appleyard

I am indebted to Gum, “the global content division of Saatchi & Saatchi”, for giving me a good laugh. Gum is the creator of CultGeist (at www.cultgeist.com/4C), which is, apparently, “an ever-evolving global network of 3,000 emerging creatives”. It explores the four Cs: culture, content, communication and commerce. But the greatest of the four is culture. “Before being able to understand the ways in the [sic] 4C’s [sic] converge, it is imperative to understand the zeitgeist of the C we know best – CULTURE. We live it, we breathe [sic] and we create it.”
Of all the different ways of saying “Give us your money”, this is surely one of the funniest. And, because of its inane juggling of the word “culture”, it is also one of the most resonant. The Gum guys clearly love this word, and they clearly have some dim intuition that it means something; but, equally clearly, they have no idea what that might be. I think, with the aid of Roger Scruton’s brilliant new book, Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged, I can help.
Back in the innocent 1990s, a colleague and I accidentally suggested – we were only speculating wildly – to this newspaper that it should start an arts-based magazine called The Culture. The idea was partly influenced by the small-circulation but huge-impact magazine Modern Review, whose driving force was the idea that pop or low culture should be treated with as much reverence and respect as high culture. And the outcome was Culture (the “The” has now gone), the publication you are holding now.
I’m not claiming originality for our approach. In the 1960s, in The Times, Bernard Levin used to switch effortlessly between high and low culture; and, subsequently, the unique selling proposition of Clive James when he was television critic of The Observer was the erudition and style he brought to his reviews of series such as Dallas. In both cases, the intention was not simply to mock, but to define low cultural phenomena as exactly as one might Don Giovanni or Hamlet.
But what was different in the 1990s was the appearance of a generation to whom the idea of blending high and low came as naturally as breathing. They had absorbed the idea from media studies or any of the humanities courses that had been invaded by the French. Structuralism and then deconstruction were ideas that had emerged from the French universities. They could be applied to almost any discipline and, although they were impenetrably complex in detail, they delivered a simple message to the students: that all human artefacts could be deciphered through the same critical procedures. As a result, there was as much to be learnt about the world from a can of beans as there was from Wordsworth’s Prelude. To deny it was to assert old “imperial hierarchies of meaning” that had, the students were told, been utterly discredited.
This went way beyond anything intended by Levin or James. They applied high-art standards to what had previously been seen as low art. James liked Randy Newman because of their common understanding of song through Verdi. That elevated Newman to the high-art pantheon, and that was the whole point. James was simply saying that high art did not necessarily dwell exclusively in the old categories. Who could disagree? But the structuralists abandoned the terms “high” and “low” completely, and in doing so, they in effect tossed out the term “art”. That left a gaping hole. What word could be used to describe all this stuff? A big tent was needed to encompass this mountain of beans, poems, clothes, operas, pop songs, graffiti and game shows. The tent, the word that plugged the gap, was “culture”.
The Culture section was an inspired invention. It was copied by other newspapers, such as The Independent on Sunday and the International Herald Tribune, and there is The Culture Show on BBC2. The word, I now realise, works because it means something not just to rather poorly educated students, but also to the more traditionally educated.
“Culture”, after all, used to mean opera, theatre and all the other high arts. This new culture tent was very big indeed. But it was also riven with contradiction.
Enter Scruton, a philosopher with a genius for clarifying issues that vested interests often don’t want clarified. As the illiterate babble from Saatchi & Saatchi demonstrates, the big-tent version of culture is in serious danger of becoming meaningless. In Culture Counts, Scruton takes us back to basics. “Culture”, as used by anthropologists, he explains, means “those customs and artefacts which are shared, and the sharing of which brings social cohesion”. More broadly, ethnologists would say culture includes “all intellectual, emotional and behavioural features that are transmitted through learning and social interaction, rather than through genetic endowment”. Such uses of the word are close to the structuralist definition – not surprisingly, since the discipline was, in part, created by Claude L鶩-Strauss, an anthropologist.
But Scruton is discussing the word in its other sense, “the literary, artistic and philosophical inheritance that has been taught in departments of humanities both in Europe and America, and which has recently been subject to contemptuous dismissal (especially in America) as the product of ‘dead white European males’”. He tells me: “Mine is a nor-mative use of the word. I’m using it to identify those things that are about knowledge in the realm of the human heart.”
The sense of the word is thus value-laden, and it is this that provokes the “contemptuous dismissal” from people who think we can simply shrug off our past and its values. But that dismissal – and our prolonged crises over multi-culturalism, inspired by the rise of Islamism – threatens us with the loss of our culture. The western world could become a civilisation devoid of culture: exactly what, in 1922, Oswald Spengler forecast in his book The Decline of the West. For Spengler, we were about to find ourselves in the depraved, cultureless condition of the late Roman empire. And for Scruton?
“There can be such a civilisation without culture,” Scruton says. “We have an enormous accumulation of technical know-how and scientific knowledge, but we are very thin on practical knowledge – what to do and how to feel. The loss of a culture means the loss of that knowledge, and that’s what I think we are advancing towards. There is a highly sophisticated grasp of all kinds of technical know-how and the science that estab-lishes it, but little sense of how the human being finds fulfilment in those things, or where to look for it.”
A world without culture would be one fixated on “immediate excitement and pleasure”. Sound familiar?
“There are two important factors that are causing this to happen to us. The first is mass communications, which flood all the channels in which culture might grow with a stream of endless noise, so that it becomes difficult to separate out things that are worth attending to from things that are not. That, combined with the democratisation of everything, means the type of criticism that is vital for separating out the valuable from the trivial becomes very difficult to maintain. That’s the principal thing we have lost through the egalitarian reforms in education and through current political correctness.”
Scruton regards the high culture of the west as more genuinely multicultural than that of politically correct politicians or of all other cultures. No other culture, he point out, so eagerly absorbs or pays homage to alien cultures. “When”, he writes, “has any eastern culture paid to western culture the kind of tribute that Benjamin Britten paid, in Curlew River, to the culture of Japan, or Rudyard Kipling, in Kim, to the culture of India?” Furthermore, high culture is, by definition, a universal undertaking: it is about the condition of being human. It can thus be a far better form of international understanding than the culture of the anthropologists or the masses. “We can understand the Chinese through the Confucian odes in a way that we can’t understand foot-binding. The great thing about high culture is that it’s open to interpretation from outside itself. By its very nature, it is an attempt to communicate with mankind as such.”
However, another philosopher, AC Grayling, points out that the belief that high culture is being degraded by low is present in every civilisation in every age. “There is always that pressure downwards. We all get tired, and we all need to flop down in front of a rerun of Frasier – we don’t necessarily want a high-intellectual conversation.” Grayling is sceptical of the view that high culture is in decline. “Look at London. It’s buzzing with high culture; it’s very healthy.” But Grayling does not attempt to rebut the core of Scruton’s argument, which is, primarily, about the need to protect the traditio of judgment and evaluation.
Hari Kunzru, however, does. Kunzru is the award-winning novelist – his new book, My Revolutions, is out next month – who rejected the John Llewellyn Rhys prize because it was sponsored by The Mail on Sunday, a paper that, he believed, was hostile towards black and Asian British people. For him, the very phrase “high culture” carries unacceptable political overtones. “My sense of high culture is that it’s whatever culture happens to be enjoyed by the elite. It’s a term with a hidden political content that opens the way for culture to further political ends, so the elite can say, ‘We are the possessors of this and we feel it is good for you; and we have the right to educate you and mould your taste.’ Taste is often a very politicised thing.”
What, then, is the source of his own judgment? “It’s what I care about and wish to make a case for. I wouldn’t necessarily claim that, because I like it, it is in some way ‘high’. My own taste is fairly mixed, and would include certain things that are considered high culture and others that are not.” Isn’t this in danger of becoming an entirely self-centred method of judgment? “If we are talking about what might be good music or bad music, then I am very happy to allow value judgment and expertise. I will listen more to somebody who cares deeply about and has made a study of the subject than to somebody who hasn’t. The reason I bristle at the notion of high culture is that it seems to bring with it something that is purely political.”
As ever with Scruton’s thought, people think they disagree with him more than they, in fact, do – for what is the “value judgment and expertise” in music to which Kunzru is happy to defer if it is not a tradition of transmissible knowledge of the effect of sounds on the human heart? Perhaps the anxiety Scruton provokes is all to do with postcolonial queasiness about any celebration of the legacy of the west. But, ultimately, such celebration is only a way of saying: this is who we are and this is where we live. To destroy “high” culture – meaning the art that has survived the test of time – is to render us incapable of knowing ourselves.
The word “culture” was in need of Scruton’s brisk and exact housekeeping, and the responses, pro and anti, he will inspire. In spite of Saatchi & Saatchi’s best efforts, culture still works for me, and for this magazine, as a tent that is slightly bigger than art and somewhat smaller than anthropology, and at the centre of which is, as Scruton says, nothing more nor less than the human heart.