2 Sound 2 Fury

I’ve got a satire in the Boston Globe’s great Ideas section tomorrow, in response to the news that publishers are looking at equipping ebooks with sounds for a more immersive experience (ahem). I imagine what sort of treatment our boy Biff Faulkner would come in for, in such a project, which would, inevitably, include Sean Penn…

New column…

… in New York magazine this week, here, on last week’s budget battle, on the alarming tendency to break down something as basic into a budget into moral terms, resulting, as you’d expect from a debate in which both parties believe their opponents are not just of a different mind, but are actually immoral, in an irritating, intellectually stunted Manichean gridlock. Whether partisans are maintaining this line because they believe it, or because it just makes for an easier argument, remains unseen. What is certain is that their cant is about as useless as it is boring. As Tom Waits sagely put it, come on down from the cross, folks, we could use the wood.

The Great Stephen Potter

I have a new piece up on Hilobrow, the great website for arcana obsessives co-edited by Josh Glenn, a friend and former editor and all-around frighteningly smart individual. It’s about Stephen Potter, the British humorist who published four books on how to one-up others without seeming like that’s what you’re doing. Potter actually coined the terms “gamesmanship” and “one-upmanship.” It’s terrific stuff. After being turned on to the stuff by a friend, I read everything he wrote in a week last year, and dashed off an essay which was promptly rejected by everyone. I was emailing with Josh not too long ago, mentioned I had this weird thing lying around, and he bit.

Here’s a sample, on his passage on using children to one-up your social betters, or, when needed, one-upping children.

If an opponent has managed to get inside your home and all other gambits have failed, Potter suggests training your child to walk in, look at the man, appear taken aback say something worriedly like, “Mummy, I don’t like that man.” The thinking is that children’s snap judgment is unerring, and that they can spot moral failings like dogs can spot ghosts. If you find yourself on the receiving end of such a maneuver, Potter recommends that revenge can be gotten at Christmas by buying the child a gift just a little bit too young for them (“Christmas Giftsmanship”). This is the only thing known to consistently offend children. “If the child is continuously burying itself in the corner with Lord Jim, give it a book about a wild wolf dog which saves a baby from an eagle,” Potter advises.

New stuff – Pickpockets, pizza and Palazzos

A few new things out for your edification/derision/etc. One is a longer piece on Slate about the decline of pickpocketing in America. While pickpocketing flourishes abroad, it’s tanking here.

Beyond being an object of fascination for people all over, the topic is also responsible for one of the most memorable lines I’ve ever heard. When I lived in Ireland, I worked as a waiter. The restaurant I terrorized with ineptitude in this capacity had some outdoor seating that was continually preyed upon by Roma thieves. They were about as brazen as you could be without resorting to violence, often using their children as stalls in elaborately staged pickpocketing attempts. One fabled scheme involved a woman coming up to you ad pressing her baby to your chest; you’d grab it to keep it from falling, and while your arms were engaged, someone would sweep past and pick your pocket. I never saw this, but a friend I met over there warned me very gravely about it. “There’s only one thing you can do: Swat the baby,” he said gesturing a swat. “You’ve got to swat that baby.”

The other two are for Hemispheres magazine. One on Domino’s bonkers, and hugely effective, self-flagellating ad campaign of 2010, and another on the efforts to build a series of huge, moveable dams around Venice to protect it from flooding. Fascinating.

Country music news

Attention all NYC country music fans: My band (which is to say, the band I’m in) The Steamboat Disasters has a show coming up at Spike Hill in Williamsburg on January 30th, and another on March 10 at Trash Bar, also in Williamsburg. Come by and introduce yourself. And stay tuned for new dates, which will be added in the next couple weeks as we ramp this operation up. For a taste, here’s a video from a recent gig at the legendary Hank’s Saloon in Brooklyn. Ignore the woodenness of first tune, it was a soundcheck…

New dispatch from the lying and folly beat

Hey folks, after a long break from freelancing, I’ve got a new story-ish, in the Boston Globe. It’s a Q&A with John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago. He set out to write a book about lying in geopolitics, thinking that it must happen all the time. What he discovered was that world leaders actually very rarely lie to one another. What they do, instead, is lie to their own people, freely, especially in democracies. His book is well worth a read. I don’t touch on it in the interview, but there’s a lot of smart stuff about why leaders lie, when, and what the possible consequences are.

The return of the indie bookstore… PLUS: Country music

I’ve got two parts (the intro essay and Cover to Cover”) of a package in New York magazine this week on the curious resurgence of independent bookstores in NYC. Just a few years ago, it looked like curtains for these places, but a new generation of entrepreneurs have jumped in and opened a number of new shops, every one of which I thought was fantastic. I actually visited every book store in NYC for this sucker, before the focus was shifted to strictly new stuff. I’m planning on writing an essay about the experience. I had a hell of a lot of fun, and gathered a lot of great, weird, and fascinating details. If I can’t get anyone to pay for it, it’ll likely wind up here, gratis.

Sorry, kids, life of the mercenary.

Let me also take this opportunity to promote the upcoming show by The Steamboat Disasters, my country band. Thursday, August 5, around 9pm, at Hank’s (glorious) Saloon, in Brooklyn. This shitty economy has made good, rowdy, somewhat boozy honky-tonk more relevant than it’s been in years. The Disasters are your source for the best of it.

Texas Textbooks: Probably not coming to a school near you

I’m late in posting this (and, yes, hopelessly derelict in maintaining this blog), but this is an interesting little piece I did for AOL News a couple months back on how the media’s assumption that the Texas curriculum changes will impact the rest of the country are nonsense. If were were still in the analog age, a state like Texas calling for changes would invariably affect other states, because it would be too expensive to make custom editions for states. Now, however, with digital publishing, you can make a special edition not just for a state, but for a school district — which one source did for a district in NC, which wanted the words “homo” and “bi” excised from their Latin textbooks — for little money. Just another example of herd-think gone wrong.

How our brains undermine democracy

I’ve got a new piece in the Boston Globe‘s Ideas section, on a bleak, but nonetheless extremely interesting phenomenon. Researchers have discovered that when someone believes something that is provably false, giving them the correct information might make them believe the falsehood even more. As anyone who has ever engaged in a debate with the type who sends a great deal of political chain emails, this comes as little surprise. But still, it’s rather amazing to see if measured, and replicated, in a political-scientific setting. And did I add it’s sort of a bummer?

Update: This one turned out to have some legs on it. The Times, Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, the Encyclopedia Britannica blog, Brendan Nyhan (whose research lies at the heart of the piece), The Monkey Cage (a great economics blog), MediaMatters, NPR, and others have weighed in.  Also, Matt Yglesias pointed out that this isn’t new because Americans have never been an informed citizenry when it comes to their government–and as I pointed out in the story, this is whoppingly true–however, you need to make a distinction between uninformed and misinformed. Uninformed people will listen, misinformed people probably won’t. This is why this research is so interesting. It works from the premise that the problem in America isn’t uninformed voters, but misinformed ones.

Why crime is up (in our heads)

Americans are uniquely obsessed with crime. That’s always been the way–we’re bloodier than most other Western nations–but the last decade has seen an odd development in our perception of crime. According to Gallup data, as crime fell continuously over the last decade (and a half), the percentage of Americans polled annually who believe crime is up year over year has soared. I have an essay in the Boston Globe’s Ideas section on why this may be happening. Weirdly, partisan politics may be one of the leading drivers. Check it out. (Also, I now now what “availability heuristic” means, and I intend to use it every time someone calls into question my education and intelligence. And perspicacity. Which is often.)