Photos from the Stoney LaRue concert at Joe’s in Chicago last Thursday now have a home.

Pity the long lead. Quick on the heels of Michael Hirschorn’s Atlantic attack on “quirk” comes a similar effort by Melvin Jules Bukiet in this month’s American Scholar.

Hirschorn’s piece saw quirk everywhere: in books, movies, and preeminently in public radio’s This American Life. Bukiet’s article goes after something he rather clumsily calls “Brooklyn Books of Wonder”:

Take mawkish self-indulgence, add a heavy dollop of creamy nostalgia, season with magic realism, stir in a complacency of faith, and you’ve got wondrousness….BBoWs are escape novels, albeit garnished with intellectual flourishes. They’re kitsch, which Milan Kundera defined as “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

But though the éminence grise in Bukiet’s account is Paul Auster, not Ira Glass, it’s clear that he and Hirschorn are talking about the same thing. Several names (Jonathan Safran Foer, Dave Eggers, McSweeney’s) show up in both accounts. And their diagnoses—in Bukiet’s words, vanity mixed with “mock-naïve astonishment”—are pretty much the same.

I wrote before that Hirschorn went too soft on the softies. Bukiet’s not going to let them escape so easily:

Coddled and cosseted, they’re the first generation of novelists who grew up reading the young-adult pap that they’ve now regurgitated with a deconstructive gloss learned in college. Of course, such aspirations require equivalently high subject matter. Hence the BBoWs’s mock encounter with enormity. Still, they have no teeth. They’re sheep in wolves’ clothing who manage to write about bad things and make you feel good.

If Bukiet strikes deeper than Hirschorn, it’s probably because he working in fields not far from the better-known writers he’s aiming at. (more…)

In his column today at the NYT, Thomas Friedman writes:

We have to show [China] what Wal-Mart is showing its competitors—that green is not just right for the world, it is better, more profitable, more healthy, more innovative, more efficient, more successful.

Friedman wants to go green. He knows that the threat of global warming is real. He chastises the federal government in general, and the Bush administration in particular, for not doing enough to try to stop it.

But what Friedman, ever gleaming in his Panglossian naivete, doesn’t seem to understand is that his prescription for fighting the problem dumps us right back into the thinking that caused the problem in the first place. If the bottom line is the bottom line, if the ultimate arbiters of every political decision are economic values—profit, innovation, efficiency, success—then we leave ourselves helpless in the face of problems that can’t be—or aren’t*—adequately described in economic terms.

(more…)

(photo by Bob Daemmrich)

Random House has announced the publication of Norman Mailer’s new book of—wait for it—theology. (In an eerie echo of the Neale Donald Walsch franchise, the book is titled On God: An Uncommon Conversation). I suspect that ghostwriting for Jesus gave Mailer the sense that he was up to the task—in a publicity interview for that book he said that being a celebrity had given him “a slight understanding of what it’s like to be half a man and half something else, something larger.” But this new book, which promises a series of “Platonic dialogues” between Mailer and his literary executor, still seems a bit much.

A real theologian I know who’s seen an advance copy of the book says that Mailer’s something of a Gnostic. According to the publisher,

Mailer establishes his own system of belief, one that rejects both organized religion and atheism. He presents instead a view of our world as one created by an artistic God who often succeeds but can also fail in the face of determined opposition by contrary powers in the universe, with whom war is waged for the souls of humans.

In other words, a God who sounds a lot like Norman Mailer. Those pernicious contrary powers better find themselves a pew to pray on quick…

From “Hatred and Profits,” a new paper by Chief Freakonomist Steven Levitt and Roland G. Fryer, Jr.:

Rather than a terrorist organization, the 1920s Klan is best described as a social organization built through a wildly successful pyramid scheme fueled by an army of highly-incentivized sales agents selling hatred, religious intolerance, and fraternity in a time and place where there was tremendous demand.

The “rather than” that opens that sentence covers a whole range of troubling assumptions, but in case you’ve ever wondered how an economist thinks about hate crime, here’s your answer:

Conventional wisdom is quickly congealing around the idea that Alan Greenspan, presiding genius of the dot-conomy, is to blame for the subprime mortgage mess. The argument, articulated by Steve Forbes and others, goes like this: by lowering short-term interest rates to near-zero in the early years of this decade, Greenspan encouraged the spread of adjustable-rate mortgages (with low initial “teaser” rates that rise after three, five, or seven years) and ill-advised lending practices.

In his new book The Age of Turbulence, Greenspan offers this defense against these critics:

I believed then, as now, that the benefits of broadened home ownership are worth the risk. Protection of property rights, so critical to a market economy, requires a critical mass of owners to sustain political support.

It’s hard to care much about the Forbes/Greenspan fight, but Greenspan’s response is intriguing on its own.

What’s interesting is that Greenspan gives a political defense, not an economic one, for encouraging home ownership. (more…)