Christoph Niemann turns in a great New Yorker cover.

One of my favorite Shouts & Murmurs in quite awhile, E-Mail Auto-Response. Excerpt of reasons for not hearing back:

— Thinking about the matter gives me a headache.
— Thinking about the matter takes longer than forty-five (45) seconds.
— Thinking about the matter is simple enough, and takes less than forty-five (45) seconds, but, when combined with all the other e-mails in my in-box, it creates a synergy of matterdom, exacerbating the headaches mentioned at the beginning of this list.

Nick Paumgarten has a short, funny piece on inattentional blindness in the 11/9 issue of The New Yorker.

The winners of caption contest #197, plus my losing entry:

Thought I had this one. Looking at some of the others that didn’t make the cut, I just don’t know what passes for funny with the editor who picks the finalists. New gatekeeper, please!

Always drop what you’re doing when a new Atul Gawande piece comes down the pike, this time for his take on the wide range of health care costs across the country, what factors influence that, and what a huge problem it is:

Spending on doctors, hospitals, drugs, and the like now consumes more than one of every six dollars we earn. The financial burden has damaged the global competitiveness of American businesses and bankrupted millions of families, even those with insurance. It’s also devouring our government. “The greatest threat to America’s fiscal health is not Social Security,” President Barack Obama said in a March speech at the White House. “It’s not the investments that we’ve made to rescue our economy during this crisis. By a wide margin, the biggest threat to our nation’s balance sheet is the skyrocketing cost of health care. It’s not even close.”

Proving that it’s about the artist, not the tools, Jorge Colombo “painted” the 6/1 cover of The New Yorker on his iPhone.

Unfortunately the recent profile of V. S. Ramachandran in The New Yorker is subscriber-only, but you can still find out what’s going in this picture here:

Related, don’t miss this Atul Gawande piece (I think I’ve linked this one up before).

The winners of caption contest #187, plus my losing entry:

This one stings because my entry is basically a shameless pander to what I knew they were looking for. Dreadfully conventional, and I still lost!

I’m a bit behind, but finally read Burkhard Bilger’s fascinating article on escaped exotic pets making a home in Florida (abstract only, unfortunately). It’s ostensibly about invasive species, but for me the real entertainment was in learning how awesome Burmese pythons are, and how committed they are to swallowing once they start:

One python in the Everglades was found with a great blue heron stuck in its throat. The bird’s bill had poked it way through the back of the snake’s head, and was widening the hole every time the snake tried to swallow it. When the python was on the verge of getting caught, it disgorged the bird and slithered off—presumably to hunt another day.

Then there’s the gruesome story of the 13-foot python that swallowed the 6-foot alligator. But what topped it off for me was the final page of the article where we learn that Nile monitors are running amok in Cape Coral:

Like pythons, they are spectacular animals that make terrible pets. Up to seven feet long, with stout legs, tapered jaws, and skin that seems to be encrusted with semiprecious stones, Nile monitors are notoriously aggressive and ill-tempered. When cornered, a monitor will stand on its hind legs and hiss, inflating its body and lashing its tail like a bullwhip. In the words of one biologist, “no one realizes the ability this animal has to tear off your cat’s head with one twist.”

Also, they are totally non-discriminating carnivores; if it’s made of meat, they’ll eat it. They are fearless, and, get this, they hunt in packs.

Note to self: no camping in Florida.

The winners of caption contest #183, plus my losing entry:

I liked this one because you could either read it like she put the car there as a design decision, or that their bed used to be against that wall.

Atul Gawande’s article in The New Yorker on solitary confinement is excellent:

“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” John McCain wrote of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam—more than two years of it spent in isolation in a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, unable to communicate with other P.O.W.s except by tap code, secreted notes, or by speaking into an enamel cup pressed against the wall. “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of having an arm broken again. A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam, many of whom were treated even worse than McCain, reported that they found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.

And what happened to them was physical. EEG studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse slowing of brain waves in prisoners after a week or more of solitary confinement. In 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were examined using EEG-like tests. The recordings revealed brain abnormalities months afterward; the most severe were found in prisoners who had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious or, yes, solitary confinement. Without sustained social interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that has incurred a traumatic injury.

Also, from The Book Bench, Charles Dickens’ take:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

James Surowiecki explains why nobody wants the bastards to get their bonuses, even if it would (theoretically) be better for the economy:

Myriad experiments in behavioral economics have found that people are willing to pay to punish members of a group whom they believe to be shirkers or free-riders. In other words, people are willing to make themselves worse off (they have to pay their own money) in order to ensure that others don’t get undeserved rewards. Economists call this “altruistic punishment” (because the punishers are putting the interests of the group ahead of their own interest), and argue that it played an important role in fostering cooperation. So even if people believed that getting the AIG bonuses back would be a net loss for the economy, chances are they’d still want to do it.

Patricia Marx’s Memo from the C.E.O starts strong…

It is with deep regret that we inform you of certain cost-cutting measures that will be taken in the coming days so that we can remain competitive. But first some good news. We are happy to report that Bring Your Child to Work Day has been renamed Bring Your Child to Do Work Day. We hope you will contribute unstintingly to the Gummy Bears Overtime Fund.

Now for the harsh realities. We will no longer be serving complimentary cold cuts and soda on Cold Cuts and Soda Day. Stairs will go up, but not down. Please do not use the fire extinguisher unless there is no water in the toilets.

… and just keeps building.

The winners of caption contest #179, plus my losing entry:

Not that it would have mattered, but I don’t think I made the fact that the patient’s insurance company roughed up the doctor explicit enough.

John McPhee’s article on on fact checkers is fascinating. For one thing, I had no idea Japan launched paper incendiary balloons that were carried all the way to the US on the jet stream:

The Japanese called the balloons fusen bakudan. Thirty-three feet in diameter, they were made of paper and were equipped with incendiary devices or high explosives. In less than a year, nine thousand were launched from a beach on Honshu. They killed six people in Oregon, five of them children, and they started forest fires, and they landed from Alaska to Mexico and as far east as fifteen miles from the center of Detroit. Completing the original manuscrip of “The Curve of Binding Energy,” which was otherwise not about Hanford, I wrote half a dozen sentences on the balloon that shut down the reactor, and I turned the piece in. If Wheeler’s story was true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. I hoped it was true. The rest was up to Sara.

Interesting profile in The New Yorker on Jerry Baber, an Appalachian gunsmith who wants the military to adopt his robotic soldiers. The technology is made possible by his recoil-less automatic shotgun, which allows the robots to fire without having their aim disrupted:

Until recently, Baber’s reputation as a firearms craftsman was known only to a few dozen gun-trade insiders. Then, a few years ago, he started producing, from start to finish, his own weapon: a fully automatic shotgun called the AA-12. The AA-12 has the power of a twelve-gauge shotgun but none of its bruising recoil. Recoil is a problem with any shotgun; a typical single-shot twelve-gauge will, as Baber puts it, “just rattle your damn teeth when it goes off.” A gun’s kick occurs when gas from ignited gunpowder propels the shell out of a gun barrel, creating an equal and opposite force that pushes the gun’s firing bolt backward. That force eventually gets transferred to the shooters shoulder, and the pop of the recoil also sends the barrel upward. Trying to fire an automatic version of a twelve-gauge shotgun would be like holding a fire hose with one hand.

By contrast, you can fire an AA-12—which shoots five shotgun shells per second—with one hand and hold a mug of coffee in the other without spilling it. Made almost entirely of aircraft-grade stainless steel, the gun can fire thousands of rounds without cleaning. Baber spent a dozen years, and upward of a million and a half dollars of his own money, perfecting the gun. He believes that the AA-12 is the most deadly close-range weapon ever created.

Here’s a YouTube demo reel. I thought the one-hand claim might be an exaggeration, but I guess not.

Heavy (and welcome) dose of Far Side influence in a couple cartoons in the 2/23 issue of The New Yorker:

and…

I confess, I usually skip the fiction in The New Yorker, but how could I pass up a mere 1,500-word alien invasion?

Atul Gawande is always worth reading. Here he makes the case for building on what we have in reforming health care rather than a complete tear-down and rebuild, which would kill people:

Yes, American health care is an appallingly patched-together ship, with rotting timbers, water leaking in, mercenaries on board, and fifteen per cent of the passengers thrown over the rails just to keep it afloat. But hundreds of millions of people depend on it. The system provides more than thirty-five million hospital stays a year, sixty-four million surgical procedures, nine hundred million office visits, three and a half billion prescriptions. It represents a sixth of our economy. There is no dry-docking health care for a few months, or even for an afternoon, while we rebuild it. Grand plans admit no possibility of mistakes or failures, or the chance to learn from them. If we get things wrong, people will die. This doesn’t mean that ambitious reform is beyond us. But we have to start with what we have.

He then proceeded to teach me about the phone system by way of analogy:

The P.S.T.N. [Public Switched Telephone Network] is probably the shaggiest, most convoluted system around; it contains tens of millions of lines of software code. Given a chance for a do-over, no self-respecting engineer would create anything remotely like it. Yet this jerry-rigged system has provided us with 911 emergency service, voice mail, instant global connectivity, mobile-phone lines, and the transformation from analog to digital communication. It has also been fantastically reliable, designed to have as little as two hours of total downtime every forty years. As a system that can’t be turned off, the P.S.T.N. may be the ultimate in path-dependence. But that hasn’t prevented dramatic change. The structure may not have undergone revolution; the way it functions has. The P.S.T.N. has made the twenty-first century possible.

Two hours of downtime every 40 years!

Hertzberg on Blagojevich. Wow. I don’t even know what to excerpt. Blagojevich’s musing about what a fair price for Obama’s senate seat would be? His reaction when told Obama wouldn’t be coughing up? The contrast with NY? Oh what the heck, when in doubt, go with the profanity:

Blagojevich—who had remarked of the Senate seat, “I’ve got this thing and it’s fucking golden, and, uh, uh, I’m just not giving it up for fuckin’ nothing”—was not happy when told that no offers were forthcoming from anyone around “this motherfucker,” as he referred to the President-elect: “Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.”

Two of my New Yorker heroes, Malcolm Gladwell and Hendrik Hertzberg both recently wrote about fixing public schools, and came to two different conclusions.

Gladwell, in his article Most Likely to Succeed:

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.

Hertzberg, on the other hand, writes in his blog post, Size Matters:

Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.

This is not hard to understand. Every teacher and every student knows that the smaller the class, the better the learning environment. Each kid gets more attention. Discipline and control are far easier to achieve. Disruptive kids have less scope for mischief. Teachers are happier and more likely to stay in the profession.

Hertzberg also notes that his way has the important advantage of being objectively measurable. True, and I do hate to throw money at stuff that isn’t measurable, but in my 16 years of school and however many teachers and professors that is, I only had four great teachers (four!), and it was obvious who they were. The subject and the class size were insignificant factors, they made the material great. Bad teachers, on the other hand, could work one-on-one with the most interesting material on the planet and still suck the life right out of the learning experience.

(To be fair, I probably had as many truly sucky teachers as great ones. The rest were in between, scattered along the curve.)

In short, in my experience a good teacher can overcome a large class size but there’s no redeeming a bad teacher. Teacher quality is everything, and good teachers are rare. If a genie popped out of the lamp and said to me, “you can either bump all teachers up a notch in skill, so sucky to poor, poor to average, average to good, good to great or you can keep the current teacher bell curve but halve all the class sizes, but you can’t have both,” it’s such an easy choice it feels pointless to even frame the hypothetical. Give me better teachers any day of the week, and on Sundays too.

(Besides, you know genies: you say you want to halve class sizes and suddenly half the students in the world are dead or worse, inevitably including your own, and then Rod Serling comes out and says something pithy.)

The winners of caption contest #166, plus my losing entry:

The winners of caption contest #141, plus my losing entry:

The winners of caption contest #86, plus my losing entry (so close!):

Jenny Allen: “I Have to Go Now.” Very funny (perhaps in part because it hits so close to home).

I appreciate this guy's motivation, from a New Yorker comment on Theatre Of War, a play about the Scottish regiment deployed to Iraq:

At least one veteran declared himself a conscientious objector to the general approval of the play. "I didn't join the Army because I didn't want to work the deli counter at a convenience store," Jason Everman, a heavily tattooed, bearded veteran of the Army Rangers and the Special Forces, who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, said, referring to the play's depiction of soldiers as having been motivated to enlist by the lack of alternatives. "I joined the Army because I had a specific agenda: to develop the warrior aspect of my persona."

As a teen-ager living in Washington state, Everman explained, he had been inspired by the "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini." "He was the quintessential Renaissance man: an accomplished warrior, an artist, a philosopher," he said. Everman had already taken care of the artistic aspect of his persona, a friend who was with him said, at which Everman admitted that he had been a guitarist. (No kidding: post-encounter intelligence reveals that in the early nineties he played with Nirvana and Soundgarden.) Having left the military in 2006, he is now studying philosophy at Columbia University. "It's the Platonic ideal of the tripartite soul," he said. "Wisdom, courage, and temperance. Those are Plato's words, not mine."

Here's the Cellini autobiography.

Nice little piece in The NY Times on the importance of relaxation to performance. They site the Michael Phelps example, of course, but I'd point to the Usain Bolt/Asafa Powell example as the more glaring one. As Anthony Lane put it in his opening paragraph to his excellent piece on the Olympics:

The morning of Friday, August 15th, was one of unaccustomed freshness in Beijing, and it brought forth two objects, both wreathed in legend but hitherto hard to spot. The first was a boiling ball of gases some ninety-three million miles away, known as the sun. The second was the sprinter Usain Bolt, whose homeland lies more than eight thousand miles away, in Jamaica, but who was now a hundred and thirty metres from where I sat. I was close to the finish line of the hundred-metre track, and he was at the start, awaiting his first heat of the Games, and going through his pre-race routine: glancing to the heavens and beating a brief tattoo, with his index fingers, on an invisible drum. He shimmied on the spot, revving his muscles, as all athletes like to do--the most febrile being Rafael Nadal, the young minotaur of the tennis circuit, who hops up and down, before every match, like a small boy in need of a pee. Bolt's nerves were less twitchy than that. Indeed, from this first heat up to the final, the following night, he seemed to be participating less in an Olympic sport than in a gargantuan party, which happened to have a sporting theme. My deepest fear was that he would break the world record and then test positive for rum and Coke.

Lane's first article is even better. Read 'em both (although it's a bit after-the-fact now).

The New Yorker is running a piece on Parkour titled No Obstacles. I only skimmed the first page, as I'll read it full when my print edition arrives, but this paragraph leapt out at me:

The video of Belle that traceurs seem to find most compelling, judging from how often they mention it, is one in which he crashes into a cement wall. I have found it on YouTube, using "David Belle fall" as the search term. Belle is attempting to leap over a double-wide ramp that leads to an underground parking garage. The ramp is enclosed by cinder-block walls, about three feet high. Belle arrives at a run from the left. He lowers his hands but they appear to miss the first wall entirely; he seems to be looking at where he means to land. Incredibly, while aloft, he turns, so that his shoulder, not his head, strikes the opposite wall. Ten feet beneath him, at the bottom of the ramp, a cameraman is lying on his back in order to shoot from below. Belle manages not to land on him. His first gesture is to see if the cameraman is all right. Then he begins walking briskly up the ramp. Toward the top, he turns and can be seen to be grinning.

I hadn't seen that video, so did a quick search and found it easily. Then I went back and watched this popular video of Belle. It's much harder to watch without cringing now, as you really appreciate how death-defying the building-to-building leaps are. A similar slip—a slip I now know he has in him—at those heights... Shudder.

Anyway, happier thoughts: I really like this commerical and this one.

From the most recent Coudal Partners newsletter:

Somebody once said that if you want to know if a particular cartoon came from The New Yorker magazine, all you have to do is replace the caption with the phrase "F*** Y**." If the comic still works, then it's a fair bet it came from The New Yorker.

From The New Yorker, Deal Sweeteners:

What's stopping the U.S. from doing the same [distilling better ethanol from sugarcane rather than corn]? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it's not cost-effective to use it for ethanol. And the tariffs and quotas for imported sugar mean that no one can afford to import foreign sugar and turn it into ethanol, the way that oil refiners import crude from the Middle East to make gasoline. Americans now import eighty per cent less sugar than they did thirty years ago. So the prospects for a domestic-sugar ethanol industry are dim at best.

Interesting. And, like so many interesting things involving politics and special interests, depressing.

After a few weeks of receiving the paper version of The New Yorker (rather than the limited online content) I can see why a buddy of mine found my not subscribing inexcusable. Fantastic. Each issue always has at least one must-read article in it, and often more than that. Off the newsstand you'd pay over $200 for a year's supply, but you get get it for less than $1/issue delivered. The highlights of the July 3rd issue were an interesting World Cup piece, a fascinating article on hemispherectomies (brain surgery, exactly what you'd guess it is from the word):

I asked him Mike's question, about all that space left by the missing lobes. In the past, [Dr. Ben Carson] said, doctors worried about this and tried to anchor the remaining brain by stitching it to the dura. They would put all kinds of things in the cranial cavity—one surgeon used sterile Ping-Pong balls. But, as Carson did more hemispherectomies, he realized that the brain's own drip of cerebrospinal fluid could adequately fill the cavity. Sometims the remaining brain moves during the weeks following the surgery, but usually by less than an inch. "It doesn't seem to be a problem," he said. Much of Carson's method is intuitive. "You develop a feel for the brain," he said. "Normal brain feels like a very soft boiled egg. A bad brain feels like a mushy apple."

... and a profile of David Addington (Cheney's chief-of-staff):

David Addington is a satisfactory lawyer, [Bruce] Fein said, but a less than satisfactory student of American history, which for a public servant of his influence, matters more. "If you read the Federalist Papers, you can see how rich in history they are," he said. "The Founders really understood the history of what people did with power, going back to Greek and Roman and Biblical times. Our political heritage is to be skeptical of executive power, because, in particular, there was skepticism of King George III. But Cheney and Addington are not students of history. If they were, they'd know that the Founding Fathers would be shocked by what they've done."