Tom Malone, in November 2008:

Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.

Decius, in February 2009:

The ship has already sailed on the question of whether or not it's reasonable for the government to collect evidence about everyone all the time so that it can be used against them in court if someone accuses them of a crime or civil tort. This is just another brick in the wall.

Now, Carrie Johnson and Ellen Nakashima:

In a letter, the Obama administration recommended that Congress move swiftly with legislation that would protect the government's ability to collect a variety of business and credit card records and to monitor terrorism suspects with roving wiretaps.

But Assistant Attorney General Ronald Weich also told Democrats that the administration is "willing to consider" additional privacy safeguards advocated by lawmakers, so long as the provisions do not "undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities."

Several civil liberties groups are exhorting Congress to use the expiration to begin debate on an array of domestic surveillance issues. One priority is national security letters: no judge signs off on these, and recipients are usually barred from talking about the letters.

Durbin and Feingold want to tighten standards for obtaining national security letters so that the government must show some "nexus to terrorism," heightening the current standard of showing "relevance" to a counterterrorism investigation. The senators also want a judge to be able to review the appropriateness of the gag order on the letters' recipients.

Their new bill, expected to be out this week, will also seek to repeal the legal immunity granted to telecommunications companies included in last year's domestic surveillance legislation. The bill would also ensure that new powers granted under last year's law would not be used as a pretext to target the communications of Americans in the United States without a warrant.

Tune in:

The Senate Committee on the Judiciary will hold a hearing entitled "Reauthorizing the USA PATRIOT Act: Ensuring Liberty and Security" on Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. in Room 226 of the Senate Dirksen Office Building.

Jello:

Not finding the exciting, entrepreneurial nexus of our dreams, we figured we'd start one of our own.

Thomas Powers, in May 2005:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

From the archive:

The phone is ringing! Answer it!

White House Seeks Renewal of Surveillance Laws, Perhaps With Tweaks

The Invisible Committee:

Thirty years of "crisis," mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. ... We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it.

They say the family is coming back, the couple is coming back. But the family that's coming back is not the same one that went away. Its return is nothing but a deepening of the prevailing separation that it serves to mask, becoming what it is through this masquerade. Everyone can testify to the doses of sadness condensed from year to year in family gatherings: the forced smiles, the awkwardness of seeing everyone pretending in vain, the feeling that a corpse is lying there on the table, and everyone acting as though it were nothing. From flirtation to divorce, from cohabitation to stepfamilies, everyone feels the inanity of the sad family nucleus, but most seem to believe that it would be sadder still to give it up. The family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon to a fuzzy dependency, where everything is familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where "becoming self-sufficient" is a euphemism for "finding a boss." They want to use the "familiarity" of the biological family as an excuse to undermine anything that burns passionately within us and, under the pretext that they raised us, make us renounce the possibility of growing up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. We need to guard against such corrosion.

The couple is like the final echelon in the great social debacle.

Paul Graham:

It's not so much that there's something special about founders as that there's something missing in the lives of employees.

Matthew Crawford:

One of the hottest things at the shopping mall right now is a store called Build-a-Bear, where children are said to make their own teddy bears. I went into one of these stores, and it turns out that what the kid actually does is select the features and clothes for the bear on a computer screen, then the bear is made for him. Some entity has leaped in ahead of us and taken care of things already, with a kind of solicitude. The effect is to preempt cultivation of embodied agency, the sort that is natural to us.

Curtis White:

When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

The Coming Insurrection

John T. Cacioppo:

Social isolation can be as harmful to your health as smoking or a sedentary lifestyle. A large part of this effect is driven by the subjective sense of social isolation we call loneliness. New research shows that human beings are simply far more intertwined and interdependent--physiologically as well as psychologically--than our cultural prejudices have allowed us to acknowledge. "If you want to go fast," says an African proverb, "go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

Elizabeth Kirkwood:

It would be a shame if Capoccio's findings, insightful as they are, made people feel overtly afraid of feeling lonely. There is much to be said for the dialogues we have with ourselves. Isn't that so?

A female introvert:

One of the greatest compliments I have ever given anyone I dated is that being with him was like being alone.

Michael Chabon:

Once something is fetishized, capitalism steps in and finds a way to sell it.

Noteworthy, in early 2006:

Social networking is the 21st century equivalent of collecting baseball cards.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection

Clive Thompson:

People weren't just getting fatter randomly.

Good behaviors -- like quitting smoking or staying slender or being happy -- pass from friend to friend almost as if they were contagious viruses.

And the same is true of bad behaviors -- clusters of friends appear to "infect" each other with obesity, unhappiness and smoking.

People may be able to pass along a social signal without themselves acting on it.

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her.

Christakis:

It turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks.

Christakis & Fowler:

Each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

Sandy Pentland:

You couldn't prove what they say, but I happen to believe it.

Subtle patterns in how we interact with other people reveal our attitudes toward them.

Nora Johnson:

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

Pico Iyer:

It seems that happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued.

Thompson:

Your place in the network affects your happiness, but your happiness doesn't affect your place in the network.

Is Happiness Catching?

Late last year, Niall Ferguson wrote:

This hunt for scapegoats is futile. To understand the downfall of Planet Finance, you need to take several steps back and locate this crisis in the long run of financial history. Only then will you see that we have all played a part.

The key point is to appreciate why the quants were so wrong.

This past weekend, Paul Krugman picks up the story:

The central cause of the profession's failure was the desire for an all-encompassing, intellectually elegant approach that also gave economists a chance to show off their mathematical prowess.

Unfortunately, his latest essay doesn't offer much new insight on the subject. There's plenty of material in the archive that covers this ground with more interest ... a sampler follows.

John Cochrane:

It is very comforting in times of stress to go back to the fairy tales we heard as children, but it doesn't make them less false.

Paul Graham:

I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

H. L. Mencken:

There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible and wrong.

Freeman Dyson:

By excluding messiness, they excluded the essence of life.

Decius:

The economist's suggestion, that ignorance is bliss, is a perfect example of why accounting is the opposite of art.

Anthony Lane:

The problem is not the ignorance. The problem is the bliss.

John Lanchester:

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Compare Decius, in January (below), with Krugman's parable of the Capitol Hill Baby-Sitting Co-op:

Cutting production means layoffs which will reduce consumption which will reduce orders which means that production will need to be cut which will require more layoffs which will reduce consumption which will reduce orders which means that production will need to be cut which will require more layoffs which will reduce consumption which will reduce orders which means that production will need to be cut which will require more layoffs ...

Patricia Princehouse's friend:

It takes half a second for a baby to throw up ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?

A Gold Star for David Grann:

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, in 2006, voted with a majority to uphold the death penalty in a Kansas case. In his opinion, Scalia declared that, in the modern judicial system, there has not been "a single case--not one--in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops."

Justice Scalia in 2009:

"This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent."

Did I mention the Gold Star for David Grann's article?

In 2003 Decius recommended an interesting web site:

Here you can see the last statements of people executed in Texas.

Sure enough, this site is still in operation, and today, Cameron Todd Willingham's Information Sheet and Last Statement are there, although the Statement is incomplete because the government omitted part of it "due to profanity."

Decius, in 2003:

We have a real problem in America with oversimplified responses to complex problems.

The ABA wants a moratorium on the death penalty.

Decius, in 2005:

IMHO If the state is going to kill you it ought to consider all of the evidence. The idea that it need not seems ignorant of the finality of death.

Finethen, in 2006:

If we must use it, we must make sure it is absolutely humane and does not get misapplied. Unfortunately, both inhumane uses and misapplication are still frequent.

Decius, in 2007:

Americans define themselves with their toughness. Having sympathy for criminals is weak. No one wants to be perceived as weak. The meme here is that caring about what happens to people is the opposite of thinking. The conservative movement paraphrases this as "liberals feel and conservatives think."

Trial By Fire

Hadley Leggett:

Starting this fall, you'll have a new reason to trust the information you find on Wikipedia: An optional feature called "WikiTrust" will color code every word of the encyclopedia based on the reliability of its author and the length of time it has persisted on the page.

Called WikiTrust, the program assigns a color code to newly edited text using an algorithm that calculates author reputation from the lifespan of their past contributions. It's based on a simple concept: The longer information persists on the page, the more accurate it's likely to be.

"They've hit on the fundamentally Darwinian nature of Wikipedia," said Wikipedia software developer and neuroscientist Virgil Griffith of the California Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the project.

It's pretty egregious that neither Wired nor the WikiTrust folks bothered to mention the Puppy Smoothies paper, which was published in 2006, a year before the earliest citations on the WikiTrust site. (Why didn't Virgil mention this?)

The reliability of information collected from at large Internet users by open collaborative wikis such as Wikipedia has been a subject of widespread debate. This paper provides a practical proposal for improving user confidence in wiki information by coloring the text of a wiki article based on the venerability of the text. This proposal relies on the philosophy that bad information is less likely to survive a collaborative editing process over large numbers of edits. Colorization would provide users with a clear visual cue as to the level of confidence that they can place in particular assertions made within a wiki article.

The omission is baffling, considering that the First Monday article was Slashdotted after its initial publication. (In fairness to the authors, it's perhaps worth noting that Puppy Smoothies is one of the primary citations in their first paper on the work that has become WikiTrust.)

Death to Puppy Smoothies!

Tania Murillo:

The problem with American hot dogs is that they're American. The best hot dogs come from Sonora. Everybody knows that.

John T. Edge:

In Tucson more than 100 vendors, known as hotdogueros, peddle Sonoran-style hot dogs -- candy cane-wrapped in bacon, griddled until dog and bacon fuse, garnished with a kitchen sink of taco truck condiments and stuffed into split-top rolls that owe a debt to both Mexican bolillo loaves and grocery store hot dog buns.

From 2004:

Who wants to eat at a chain where the food has almost no character?

Jennifer Senior:

On a spring afternoon in 2004, I had coffee with Tina Fey to discuss screenwriting, news gathering and the mythological role of hot dogs in girl-world byzantium.

Holly J. Wagner :

Think of it as a variation on the giant doughnuts and colossal hot dogs of Googie architecture.

Waste not, want not:

At night the clerks sometimes give Ballard the hot dogs and doughnuts that otherwise would be thrown out. In exchange, he looks out for female employees who work the late shift.

A jumbo batch from Tim:

Burgers! Hot Dogs! Biking! Oh my!

Calvin Trillin is a food writing god. and by food god I don't mean snooty food, I mean BBQ, hotdogs, beefs on weck, pizza, subs, pie and fried chicken.

Wright's serves three meals a day, and the menu goes well beyond burgers. There are regular and foot-long hot dogs, pork barbecue on a bun, sandwich baskets with potato chips and a pickle, whole submarines, hearty chili with beans, and even some recently added low-fat wraps. In addition to milk shakes and soda pop, the beverage list includes that drink known to connoisseurs of Dixie mixology as the champagne of the South - pre-sweetened ice tea, served in cups that range up to one-quart size.

Fans of Rutt's know the magnificent hot dogs served here as rippers because their skin tears and crinkles when they are deep fried. The oil bath turns the pork-and-beef links rugged, dark, and chewy on the outside, while the interior remains soft and juicy. Weenie wimps can ask for an "in and outer," which gets plucked from the fat more quickly and remains thoroughly pink and plump; while those who crave maximum succulence can get one well-done, which ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

In Praise of the All-American Mexican Hot Dog

Paul Theroux:

Travel is mostly about dreams--dreaming of landscapes or cities, imagining yourself in them, murmuring the bewitching place names, and then finding a way to make the dream come true. The dream can also be one that involves hardship, slogging through a forest, paddling down a river, confronting suspicious people, living in a hostile place, testing your adaptability, hoping for some sort of revelation.

Ten days into my road trip I began wondering if I were perhaps pushing it a little too hard. But wasn't the whole point to keep going down the proud highway? The thrill is in the moving, gaining ground, watching the landscape change, stopping on impulse.

I count the drive through West Virginia as distinctly memorable--there was hardly a town or village on the way I would not have been content to live in; not a hill I did not wish to climb, or a hollow that did not invite me to laze under a tree. At one point, bowling along the open road, the Supertramp song "Take the Long Way Home" came on the radio. Listening to music while driving through a lovely landscape is one of life's great mood enhancers. And hearing the line, "But there are times that you feel you're part of the scenery," I was in Heaven.

Jenny Diski:

Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness.

The great delight was in deferring sleep, hovering on the edge, pulling myself back to the same point in the story and trying to move it along, but always dropping off, hanging by the story-thread, the fingertips losing their grip but managing to haul back to the tale on the waking side of the world. The trick was to sustain my stay in the no man's land for as long as possible, knowing all the while that I would inevitably, sooner or later, lose my grip on consciousness.

Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me – retrospectively or in anticipation, of course. That one has the capacity to be not here while being nowhere else. To be in the grip of unconsciousness, and consciously to lose consciousness to that grip.

Louis Menand:

The characters in "On the Road" spend as short a time on the road as they can. They're not interested in exploring rural or small-town America. Speed is essential. The men rarely even have time to chase after the women they run into, because they're always in a hurry to get to a city ...

The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country ---- "ramblin' round," in the Guthrie song ---- following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank's photographs in "The Americans," taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar affluence and consumerism.

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Driving is the cultural anomaly of our moment.

Taking the Great American Roadtrip

Susan Orlean:

The roads in the medina of Fez are so narrow that bumping into another person or a pushcart is no accident; it is simply the way you move forward, your progress more like a pinball than a pedestrian, bouncing from one fixed object to the next, brushing by a man chiseling names into grave markers only to slam into a drum maker stretching goat skin on a drying rack, then to carom off a southbound porter hauling luggage in a wire cart.

It was that stoic expression, of course. But even more, it was seeing, in that moment, the astonishing commingling of past and present--the timeless little animal, the medieval city and the pile of electronics--that made me believe that it was possible for time to simultaneously move forward and stand still. In Fez, at least, that seems to be true.

Stefan Klein:

The brain creates its own time, and it is this inner time, not clock time, that guides our actions. In the space of an hour, we can accomplish a great deal -- or very little.

Orlean:

As far as I could tell, the donkey was alone; there was no one in front of him or beside him, no one behind. I wondered if he was lost, or had broken away from his handler, so I asked the porter, who looked at me with surprise. The donkey wasn't lost, the man said. He was probably done with work and on his way home.

Later:

"Tell me, what is the price you want to pay?" Mohammed asked.

Ginia Bellafante:

There used to be a time if you didn't have money to buy something, you just didn't buy it.

Morocco's Extraordinary Donkeys