In an eye opening article on Aborigines, Michael Finkel paints a colorful picture of the local landscape:
The pilot flew low over the bush, the trees thin and straight and widely spaced, like a bad hair transplant.
Maybe the Aussie government needs to invest in Tree Club for Men.
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In the New Yorker this July, Jon Lee Anderson wrote a fascinating article about Timbuktu, where Al Qaeda is working to become a legitimate political power. A scary story. But a beautifully written one. Take this paragraph when he introduces readers to the city in question:
Timbuktu is a small, unlovely city in shades of brown and gray, a warren of low, flat-roofed homes made of mud or concrete. Interspersed are beehive-shaped tents covered with hides and scrap–the hovels of the nomadic Bella, former slaves who remain in serf like conditions, working as goatherds and as servants for their former owners. Other than one paved street, the roads are dirt. At the outer edges, the city peters out amid sand dunes and piles of uncollected refuse. In Timbuktu, as in many parts of Africa, plastic rubbish is so prevalent as to seem part of a new ecology.
What I like about this paragraph is that it is so vividly descriptive without being too writerly, powerfully visual without being overwrought. Doesn’t make me want to visit Timbuktu. But almost makes me feel like I have.
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I thought I would share this wonderful poem with you:
For eleven years I have regretted it,
regretted that I did not do what
I wanted to do as I sat there those
four hours watching her die. I wanted
to crawl in among the machinery
and hold her in my arms, knowing
the elementary, leftover bit of her
mind would dimly recognize it was me
carrying her to where she was going.
– Jack Gilbert
Nothing more to say…
“Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.”
Amen to that!
I could go on quoting Abraham Lincoln all day long, for he was one of the finest writers of his or any time. Here’s one very special quote, where Lincoln uses the metaphor of a snake to make distinctions between slavery itself being bad, versus policies to limit slavery to the south, versus policies to prevent slavery from expanding into new US territories.
If I saw a venomous snake crawling in the road, any man would say I may seize the nearest stick and kill it. But if I found that snake in bed with my children that would be another question. I might hurt the children more than the snake, and it might bite them.
In other words, slavery is bad, but ending slavery in the South might harm unintended victims.
Much more, if I found it in bed with my neighbor’s children, and I had found myself by a solemn oath not to meddle with his children under any circumstances, it would become me to let that particular mode of getting rid of the gentleman alone.
In other words, once they signed on to the Constitution, Northerners became duty-bound to leave slavery alone in the south.
But if there was a bed newly made up, to which the children were to be taken, and it was proposed to take a batch of young snakes and put them there with them, I take it no man would say there was any question how I ought to decide.
And that is the reasoning by which Lincoln concluded that slavery should not be expanded into new territories, a position the south could not tolerate, because Southerners saw such a policy as the beginning of the end of slavery in their lands. What a brilliant way to frame the argument.
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For at least the last few decades, conservative legal scholarship in United States has paid a great deal of attention to the idea of original intent. According to this view, the best way to interpret the Constitution of the United States is to imagine what the writers of that document meant at the time they wrote it, and to make sure that modern interpretations do not stray any further than necessary from this meaning.
But Abraham Lincoln was way ahead of current legal scholars in thinking this way about the Constitution. And they might be surprised to find that what he decided the framers of the Constitution signified when they avoided using the words slave or slavery in the document:
The thing is hid away, in the Constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest they bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time.
After reviewing subsequent laws, early in the nation’s history, Lincoln concludes:
We see the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, toward slavery, was hostility in the PRINCIPLE, and toleration ONLY BY NECESSITY.
I am not a fan of limiting ourselves to constitutional interpretations that rely on original intent. In large part, I do not think the writers of the Constitution expected our country to be stagnant. But just as importantly, I do not think we can often determine intent confidently. Lincoln’s creative interpretation stands as an example of just how flexible the idea of original intent can be.
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In their book Animal Spirits, George Akerlof and Robert Shiller recount the intellectual battles waged between Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson, two of the 20th century’s most important economists. Friedman was a huge believer in the power of markets, and in consumers’abilities to make rational decisions. Samuelson also recognized the power of markets, but thought Friedman went too far. Akerlof and Shiller say that Samuelson described Friedman as:
Like the boy who knew how to spell banana but did not know when to stop.
And I will stop this post right here.
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Albert Rees was a University of Chicago trained economist who wrote some of the most influential works in the field of labor economics. Despite his Chicago training – Chicago being the epicenter of the idea that humans are guided largely by rational choice – he was well aware of something crucial missing from economic theory: the idea of fairness. Here’s a great paragraph from something he wrote near the end of his career:
In none of these roles [working for two presidential administrations, directing two corporations, being provost of Princeton University, and president of the Alfred Sloan foundation] did I find the theory that I taught so long to be the slightest help. The factors involved in setting wages and salaries in the real world seemed to be very different from those specified in the neoclassical theory. The one factor that seemed to be of overwhelming importance in all these situations was fairness.
Or as I usually put it: the strongest determinant of someone’s happiness with their salary is whether the person in the next office, or adjoining cubicle, is paid more than they are.
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Here’s the opening paragraph from a New York Times magazine article published in May of this year, about monk seals. What a great way to open the piece:
The Hawaiian monk seal has wiry whiskers and the deep, round eyes of an apologetic child. The animals will eat a variety of fish and selfish, or turn over rocks for eel and octopus, then haul out on the beach and lie there most of the day, digesting. On the south side of Kawai one afternoon, I saw one sneeze in its sleep: it’s complex body shuddered, then spilled again over the sand the way a raw, boneless chicken breast will settle on a cutting board. The seals can grow to 7 feet long and weigh 450 pounds. They are adorable, but also a little gross: the Zach Galifianakises of marine mammals.
Although I doubt one of the seals will have a role in Hangover 4.
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During a particularly miserable World War II battle, a military analyst estimated that it cost $25,000 in artillery shells for each enemy soldier killed. That caused one soldier to ask: “Why wouldn’t it be better to just offer the Germans $25,000 to surrender?”
If only the world were so rational!
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