overpoliticized

for serious, y'all

2010-02-08T22:15:00.002-05:00

i have moved, and apparently i'm no longer blogging very much. sad, but these things happen. please come visit my new and infinitely more professional site.

nothing says loving like cured pork.

2009-02-02T13:32:00.003-05:00

la quercia prosciutto, profiled in the new york times magazine. how awesome is that?

the piece reports that, while herb and kathy were developing their prosciutto process, "The couple would move their Volvo wagon out of the garage to weigh and salt legs, then age them in their guest bedroom."

i know that this is true: during the terrible horrible no good very bad summer of 2003, when i visited la and her family, i slept soundly in that very guest bedroom, the pork legs swaying slightly above my head.

shorter norm coleman

2009-01-21T19:05:00.001-05:00

it would be nice if i got more votes, but if democracy fails i'm willing to keep this seat any old way i can.

news flash

2009-01-16T14:38:00.003-05:00

1. in case you had forgotten (i sort of had), david rees is still a genius. 'specially look at the ones a few pages back, during the election season. ooh, and here's a review of the latest gywo collection (NB, rees linked to this review 'cause it's a happy one).

2. in other radical comic strip news, i recently devoured the new dykes to watch out for anthology. please to do so yourself also, thank you.

3. how irritating is it that i am now submitting grant applications to support me for *next year*? how doubly, triply, infinitely irritating (and, well, kind of creepy) is it that i (more or less intentionally) *missed* a bunch of deadlines that would have had me planning for september 2009 through june 2010 during fall 2008?

4. i used to have a plan to put up some sort of a "2008, she done me wrong" country-and-western lament about the year that was. but then i realized that 2008 was character-building. my character used to be a cardboard shack miserably slumping in the rain, and is now a rough-hewn log cabin on the hardscrabble frontier. next year: eco-friendly mansion! or maybe a well-appointed apartment in a city with curbside compost pickup.

5. the other day there was a near-100-degree difference between the low temperature in grand forks and the high temperature here in san francisco. i win!

on rick warren at the inaugural

2008-12-19T13:00:00.003-05:00

it's just...crass. i don't know if the choice of rick "homosexuality == incest" warren came from the president-elect himself or from an advisor looking to build bridges. but: bridges to what, exactly?

warren deserves at least some kind of credit for acknowledging christians' responsibilities to work against AIDS, poverty, and markets gone wild. but warren was late to the table on these issues, and appears to have digested neither his scripture nor his facts when he finally showed up. in the same interview in which he compared gay marriage to incest, polygamy and divorce (divorce is "a bigger problem," "hands down," golly thanks for noticing), he offered the following history-mangler: "Along about the beginning of the 20th century there were some protestant theologians who started using the term 'social gospel.' What they meant by that was you don’t really need to care about Jesus’ personal salvation any more...in many ways it was just Marxism in Christian clothing."

the point warren was making in this passage is that progressive christians -- the people who exist in his smear-version of the 'social gospel' -- need to attend to personal salvation as well as social transformation. (otherwise we're just Marxists! oh zing!) but a little further down, he breezily notes that his version of "personal salvation" is not something as simple and personally transformative as realizing and following the divinity of jesus christ. no, personal salvation is about "personal morality and pornography and protecting the family and personal moral issues." which formulation puts me, and many others, in the interesting position of being fake christians -- unsaved! -- unless and until we condemn all the usual reproductive-tract-involving fundamentalist hobgoblins.

warren deserves no special credit for dithering on about the "'I' in 'pride'" or for his belated acknowledgment that poverty is indeed bad -- especially when he acknowledges also that his willingness to talk about economic injustice is a theological hostage to the necessity of gay-bashing. warren vocally supported prop 8, blowing wide open his repeated claims that hating gays should be shoved down a couple of notches on the evangelical agenda.

and this is the person chosen to give the invocation at an event ostensibly signaling a new turn in american politics. the fact that he sold a gazillion self-help books and is the pastor of a really huge flock doesn't change the fact that his false gospel hurts people who have done him and his flock no harm. the obama team's willingness to choose someone popular over someone whose words and actions reflect a Christ-centered progressive theology implies a level of cynicism -- not to mention a level of disrespect for queer people -- that i wouldn't previously have suspected.

i worry about what this choice implies about our president-elect. is obama's own understanding of the gospels so unimportant to him that he is willing to misrepresent it in order to "build bridges"? or does he, too, fear and condemn queer people, people whose path to heaven is not through a profession of faith in some nigglingly specific Jesus, people who profess a social gospel? i feel obligated to hope for the former, but it is a weak and disappointing sort of hope.

oh, comandante

2008-12-10T21:04:00.003-05:00

there are only so many times you can write about the "strategic rear" before i begin to giggle.

friday food blogging

2008-12-05T19:10:00.002-05:00

(also known as friday adventures in procrastination.)

this was our first week as members of the farm fresh to you delivery service. it's a pretty non-traditional CSA, in that (1) it's pay-as-you-go as opposed to a big buy-in at the beginning; (2) it combines food from the capay organic farm with food from other organic producers in order to get a slightly 'less seasonal' (read: more oranges, less cabbage) mix; and (3) it comes straight to our door.

we are so, so spoiled. a big ol' box for $29 a week!

so far this week, we've eaten through all our mandarins, oranges and apples; made a stir fry based on the baby bok choy; done a great salad of napa cabbage, apples, shredded carrots, toasted pecans and vinaigrette-y stuff; and boiled up a large and wonderful potato-leek soup. still left from the box: a large bulb of fennel, some dino kale, and some lettuce, which are all, by hook or by crook, getting used tonight.

because tomorrow is pie-giving! this is an annual event hosted by fabulous friends who now live driveably close. our household is bringing a mince pie and a vegetable pot pie with a biscuit top, both brand new adventures for us. YAY OH YAY.

'state of impaired communion'

2008-12-03T15:56:00.002-05:00

that's how the bishop of fort worth, jack iker, recently described his association to women priests who are now, ostensibly, part of the same breakaway anglican province as iker himself. assuming that these women, dutiful members of the diocese of pittsburgh, actually do follow their bishop out of the episcopal church, they follow out of a desire to draw a line in the sand. i suppose i should pray for the motivation to pray for the charity to pray that women priests in this new province will be spared finding out how it feels to be an object of others' lines in the sand.

iker stated definitively that women priests would not be allowed to celebrate eucharist in his diocese -- nothing new for him or for fort worth, but interesting in light of the debate that led to the splinter province.

i hope that some of those who think of themselves as the "real" anglicans in our national (and ultimately global) denominational spat, will also to consider what it means to build a religious community whose theological touchstone is opposition to a particular bishop's sex life. how can this community know how to resolve its internal problems (of which women priests are only one), if its "principles" are just a long and contested list of actions and people that God, on someone's reading of something, opposes? it seems impoverished to me. but then again, common enemies are useful tools; maybe "ordaining Gene Robinson" will serve to smooth over the other irreconcilable differences for a while.

personally, i go back and forth over whether i feel as if losing these four dioceses, and some dozens of parishes throughout the country, makes me feel as if the episcopal church itself is in a 'state of impaired communion.' it's almost always a bad idea to say "good riddance," but i find it on the tip of my tongue recently. how can you convince people who have convinced themselves, already, that a church whose foundation is common prayer -- as explicitly opposed to doctrinal purity -- somehow "belongs to" the purity fetishists?

yet more "experimentation"

2008-11-21T14:41:00.002-05:00

today's xkcd is an excellent complement to yesterday's research-design ranting.

resrch dzine: ur doin it rong

2008-11-20T13:20:00.000-05:00

if only they had LOLPublicIntellectuals. peter salins, professor of political science at stony brook university, had a pro-SAT op-ed in the times yesterday that gave me a bad case of the ?!??!?!?!?!!!s.

salins's piece refers to an analysis of graduation rates at SUNY schools, before and after some of them decided to increase emphasis on SAT scores in admissions decisions. guess what! the schools that raised their emphasis on SAT scores, while presumably (?) leaving other aspects of the admissions process unchanged, had higher average graduation rates than the schools that left their SAT emphases alone. he closes by noting that it's "fashionable" to be negative about the SAT, but that people who wish to make judgments based on "good empirical evidence" should be a little nicer to our friends at ETS.

somebody call don green! salins has decided that the SUNY experience is "a controlled experiment of sorts" and that the evidence is "fairly conclusive[]." i think this is a convenience sample, and that the evidence is suggestive at best.

there are also a huge number of problems with uncritically endorsing the (racist, highly-responsive-to-expensive-prep-courses) SAT that i won't go into here. salins doesn't go into them either, which in the real world is certainly the worst of his problems -- but it's the research design claims that really get my goat today.

salins defines the research question this way: "do SATs predict graduation rates more accurately than high school grade-point averages?"

with the sort of keen accuracy that would surely have received a perfectly adequate score on a high school statistics test, he notes: "If we look merely at studies that statistically correlate SAT scores and high school grades with graduation rates, we find that, indeed, the two standards are roughly equivalent...However, since students with high SAT scores tend to have better high school grade-point averages, this data doesn’t tell us which of the indicators — independent of the other — is a better predictor of college success. Instead, we need to look at the two factors separately." true enough. so we ask:

colleagues! (what is it?) colleagues! (what is it?)

what is the usual way to "look at the two factors separately"?

well, given a big pool of convenience data referring to your chosen unit of observation (probably the college class), you'd gather a bunch of independent variables (pertinent demographics, popular programs of study, average SAT scores, average incoming GPA, so on, so forth, ad infinitem) and the relevant dependent variable, the average graduation rate. and then you do a big multiple regression. (with an instrumental variable, if there's one handy.) [also blah blah structural equation modeling blah blah blah.]

OR, if you had tons and tons of resources, you would secretly [SECRETLY!] change the weighting scheme for some incoming classes [CLASSES NOT SCHOOLS!] and not for others. you would make your secret change without altering anything else about the college, the admissions process or the admissions pool. and because are trying to compare the impact of incoming average GPA with the impact of incoming average SAT, you have at least three groups: two treatments (increase emphasis on SAT and increase emphasis on grades) and one control (change nothing).

that sort of design would be a "controlled experiment of sorts."

it is not a "controlled experiment of sorts" when nine of sixteen schools, using mechanisms that logic suggests could not have been random, change their SAT emphases and those schools then observe a better average six-year graduation rate than the seven schools that didn't. like i said, it's suggestive. but it's not a controlled experiment because it doesn't control. what else changed between 1997 and 2001 at these nine schools? increasing emphasis on SAT scores certainly doesn't test SAT scores against GPA. and, to use the methodological back door into the race/class issues that i said i wouldn't get into, it also doesn't tell us what sorts of applicants are discouraged from applying when they know the SAT is weighted more heavily.

here's an alternative hypothesis: any mechanism at all that decreases the number of poor (black, latino, whatev) kids in college is also going to decrease attrition.

grossed out but not surprised

2008-11-18T14:04:00.002-05:00

joe lieberman is keeping his homeland security and governmental affairs chairmanship. our favorite fake democrat, aside from endorsing the republican for president, also rolled over for the bush administration as chair of the senate committee responsible for investigating the executive branch. while i understand the importance of the senate numbers game, i can't believe they're actually letting him caucus with them. eew.

books in the breach

2008-11-16T16:50:00.008-05:00

for a whole panoply of reasons, i'm in san francisco instead of in el salvador. some of my readers will be surprised by this news. to tell the truth, i'm still a bit surprised by this news myself. but my present to myself on the occasion of my twenty-seventh birthday was the realization that Adults (people of twenty-seven, for example) don't have to withstand something awfully unpleasant just because (a) the Adults in question initially calculated that the something in question would be significantly less unpleasant and/or (b) the now clearly unpleasant thing is, technically speaking, survivable.

one side effect of my situation, which not incidentally involved being sick every day for a month and then taking a hatchet to my original dissertation design, is that i've been doing a lot of reading. i'm plowing through files of ancient newspaper articles and manuscripts; i'm reviewing my theoretical foils; i'm google-scholar-ing with abandon and marking up the bad Marxist anthropology that results. on particularly Off days, and at bedtime, i'm reading fiction, too. like lots of other people, i find that reading is a nice patch, or salve or something, for those painful holes in productivity and sense of purpose that emerge out of times like these.

although the truth is, i do not recommend cormac mccarthy's the road for anyone who's feeling blue. it is the scariest post-apocalypse i've ever read about, not just because mccarthy is good at describing violence but because whatever it was that effectively ended the world is never quite identified. i do recommend the book for practically everyone else. i suppose the other fiction i've been picking up isn't exactly cheerful, either, although we at least have the backward-looking relief of knowing that the events described in suite francaise and the brief wondrous life of oscar wao don't end it all.

suite francaise describes life in france during the early part of the german occupation; its author, irene nemirovsky (and i assume all my readers will forgive the lack of diacritics), died at auschwitz sixty-four years before the book finally made its way into print. the text of the novel is one thing -- it's a sad and personal look at how scarcity and panic make the worst of people, and was written during the very events it describes. it includes no reference to the plight of france's jews, which is either astounding or perfectly understandable alongside the notes and letters that accompany the novel itself: nemirovsky's acknowledgement of both nazi policy and her personal fate is stunning.

i described oscar wao to my bully-studying father as a book about a bully victim, which is more or less true. but it's also a book about dictatorship and repression and dungeons and dragons and immigrants. its freedom with footnotes put me in mind of consider the lobster. its freedom with language is more singular, more interesting, and more fun. other fun, or at least interesting, reads lately: look at me, by jennifer egan; wasted, by marya hornbacher; gilead (finally), by marilynne robinson.

oh, and my awesome friend erica made me drag out the nicomachean ethics for the first time in a while. excellent!

it's personfessional

2008-11-12T20:49:00.004-05:00

hi. this blog has been, to put things mildly, a bit short on new content lately. i'm as surprised as anyone by my total inability to write down my thoughts for public discussion. i've never been shy with my opinions, blogging is procrastination, and it's an election year. what gives?

i blame long-term goals. every day is another day closer to the academic job market, the heinous online job rumor compendia, the general expectation that as an Academic Blogger i will say things that are topical and incisive rather than wackily partisan, off-the-cuff, or mildly offensive. since i started thinking about actually finishing my dissertation someday, i've felt a little stifled. everyone knows my tendency to namecall is rad -- but could it get me not-hired?

what's worse than asshat-deprivation, though, is my scary intuition that the personal and the professional are going to slam together here in some unbecoming way, and i'll be worse off for it. which sucks: most of the (legitimate and thought-provoking!) feminist-inflected bitching i might do about my profession will include examples that seem uncomfortably, if not inappropriately, personal.

for example: what if i admit that i hate talking in workshops (in order to write about why that is)? am i allowed to discuss the health issues that are keeping me out of the field right now (and how it came to be that i wasn't encouraged to think of them before i went in)? maybe it's enough to decry the aggression norm and our collective, discipline-wide disdain for Balance in general terms, but i'm not sure. i read a lot of anonymous "women in academia" blogs, and mostly i think "golly, i'm sure glad that's not [insert department i know or identify with here]." but then i have non-anonymous conversations with actual women in academia and oh. wait. it *is* the departments i know and identify with.

all of which is just to say that for lots of reasons, i'd like to keep writing about everything under the sun, emphatically including the life that goes on when i am not dissertating, because being afraid of the job market is not a good reason to let job >> life.

hoov, where are you?

2008-07-11T14:59:00.003-04:00

that's what the comment on my last post said.

the answer is that i'm right here in california, friends, but not for long.

since that last post, many Things have happened. i got super-awesome grant funding for my field work! i presented some work back at yale! i moved in with jarrod! i had my wisdom teeth out! i went to my fifth college reunion! i wrote hella statistics for the liberian truth and reconciliation commission! summer came (to the extent that summer comes to san francisco)! we celebrated a whole year of Official Coupledom! i wrote conference papers! i read (did read, have read, am reading, will read) books about el salvador! i made el salvador plans!

and so on.

on sunday i fly to santa fe, and then to grand forks, where anne is getting married. MARRIED! and then home to cali for a few weeks, and then back to the east coast for a few weeks (yay symposium! boo apsa!), and then back home to cali for one last week of whirlwind prep, and then i'm off to el salvador.

this is why i don't blog: there is so much to do, so immediately, that all my thoughts about things outside of staying sane in my daily life and doing work have been radically compressed.

however, a brief rundown:

bad: dissident "traditionalist" anglicans; john mccain's speaking skills; john mccain; the phrase "flip-flop"; the FARC; cheney-orchestrated global warming denialism at the EPA; barry zito; facebook diet ads.

distressing: new york times magazine articles on young gay marrieds and rush limbaugh; virtually all news from afghanistan and pakistan; seymour hersh on iran; every single thing the bush administration has ever done with or about or to inmates at guantanamo bay; the aforementioned facebook diet ads.

good: at&t park (the place, not the branding); barack obama, personally and politically; the symbolic potential of a black president; fourth of july on the beach.

interesting: new APSR article on a twin study of voting behavior; biblical data visualization.

charles tilly

2008-04-30T13:01:00.002-04:00

i'm breaking another near-monthlong radio silence with sad news: charles tilly has died.

political science largely remembers tilly for the maxim "states make war, [and] war makes states" -- one of these big theoretical contentions that comes up short, incomplete, overbroad, but which nevertheless puts many people on new paths.

my own connection was to a different part of tilly's work. imagine my ill-informed surprise when, having decided we really needed to theorize "repertoires of violence," i was informed that tilly had been writing about repertoires of contention since the '70's. not the same, but not entirely different, either. at least, i thought at the time, i've reinvented an interesting wheel.

every remembrance of tilly, from the crooked timber link above to lee bollinger's statement from columbia, talks about the boundlessness of both his energy and his intellectual interests. many scholars in many disciplines are going to miss him.

true story

2008-04-02T15:14:00.002-04:00

so, i was walking down MLK just now, coming home from the coffee shop where i spend my morning work time, when an older gentleman carrying a tiny guitar stopped me.

"excuse me," he said.

i assumed i was going to be asked the time, and started fishing around in my pocket for my "watch" (cell phone).

"aren't you robert de niro's little sister?" he asked.

well, no. (indeed, on a quick google search, de niro appears to be an only child.)

my actual answer: "not today."

only i can save the world

2008-03-27T12:56:00.005-04:00

a bit ago, timothy burke wrote about gatekeeping and territorialism in academia, beginning his discussion with a recent tempest-in-teapot over tim weiner's recent history of the CIA, legacy of ashes. i'm only halfway-or-so through the book, and i haven't read the critique by stephen weissman that burke points to. luckily for me, the substance of that debate is sort of incidental to burke's argument.

burke writes: "You can always tell when a serious scholarly pissing match is about to kick off in a journal or a listserv or a conference panel: it’s exactly when you see this mismatch between the intensity of the adjectives used by one scholar to describe his opponent and the alleged errors being described.

...When you see this kind of adjectival intensity associated with such a relatively picayune point, one of two things is going on. One possibility is that there is a major analytic disagreement about the overall substance of a book, and both parties to that disagreement represent substantial schools of thought or factions with a long-running history of antagonism...

Or the critic whose tone is mismatched to substance is a gatekeeper: someone accustomed to personal ownership of a given subject, to disciplinary ownership of a subject, or who is trying to keep non-academics off of turf perceived to be a scholarly monopoly."

oh boy! this is the closest i've come to a useful description of some of the politics occurring within a the corner of human rights research where academics and advocates come together. it doesn't quite describe the ferocity of this phenomenon in human rights, though, for a couple of reasons i'll get to in a second. first, an example.

a few weeks ago i was completely mystified (also overwhelmingly disgusted in a sort of train-wreck way) at the ferocity, the withering condescension, the downright rudeness and the assumption of bad intent, that poisoned what should have been a collegial debate about the magnitude of human rights violations in a situation where the magnitude of violations is unknown and, unless knowing is guessing, almost certainly unknowable. the case concerned people of unmistakably good intentions acting like complete assholes, essentially claiming that other human rights advocates sought to minimize a catastrophe and were therefore not, in fact, on the side of human rights at all.

[separate question: what, precisely, do we gain by maximizing a catastrophe? and at what cost?]

it's difficult to describe this particular exchange without going into details -- but it's also the case that exchanges like this are a dime a dozen in human rights, and the details are unimportant. as in burke's description, the descriptive-substantive disjuncture is a common feature of this sort of exchange. what is particularly troubling, however, is that most of these exchanges take place between people who have very similar goals and concerns but who seem convinced, for a number of reasons, that 'only i can save the world.'

'human rights people' -- almost always overworked (often by choice), very often underpaid, extraordinarily ambitious, self-consciously do-gooder-y, doing an incredibly difficult and incredibly important job that is unlikely to yield concrete or contemporaneous results, competing for scarce resources with many, many other people who are trying to do the same job with the same amorphous measures of 'success' in a context where actual Success is usually unachievable without, say, time travel and/or miracle-working abilities.

combine resource scarcity and true urgency, and the ultimate result is that no one has the perspective, or the incentive, to police the boundaries between gatekeeping and 'major analytic disagreement.' of necessity, one sells one's work as sort of an 'if and only if' solution: we are special, and have a unique new approach to saving the world, and it is better than all the other approaches to saving the world for the following n reasons. corollary: if you don't follow this approach, you are not really concerned with saving the world.

all this is basically a description of intra-advocacy fighting, the sort of thing that is bound to happen when lots of people who really care compete for scarce resources with which to express their caring. however, advocates are increasingly academics, and vice versa, so that the line(s) between getting the story right (whether that means calculating the right magnitudes over time or faithfully reproducing the meaning and intent of an individual victim or perpetrator, or understanding the structural conditions that led to the violations, or what have you) and fighting the good fight are increasingly murky. [in a context of urgency, what does it even mean to 'get the story right'? but that's a blog entry, or maybe a dissertation, for another day.]

what burke is describing is an undue intensity of conflict over getting the story right, sometimes due to real theoretical differences but just as often due to ego-driven territorial disputes. what we are often experiencing in human rights, i think, is an undue but understandable conflation of getting the story right and doing what we believe to be effective right this minute. gatekeeping, which is likely enough to happen even when people are not out there dying, begins to seem like the only response when you've convinced yourself of the total rightness and necessity of your approach. and then the gatekeeping itself jumps the shark: it's not that an intellectual adversary is guilty of a "shocking" or "gross" distortion of historical fact, as in the _legacy of ashes_ dispute -- it's that the adversary is personally "irresponsible" or "in the wrong business" or nefariously inclined toward a "blithe ignorance of...realities." an intellectual adversary is now a moral adversary as well, no matter what side that person started on.

to which i say: humility, people. i know it's hard when you've got tenure or a really huge grant, but come on.

under some weathers

2008-02-24T14:36:00.003-05:00

friends, i have a cold that will not go away. in addition, as you may have understood from last spring's ecstatic grocery-blogging, i live in the bay area, where it is currently all rainy and cold-inducing. or at least cold-encouraging. ooh, and also i totally get to count myself as a real academic now: i received my first article rejection today.

nevertheless: yesterday jarrod and i went to the ferry building farmers' market, where i sniffled and hacked my way through several stalls filled with early carrots, beets (meh), and lovely taters. in the evening we concocted a mostly-local feast of butternut squash soup with creme fraiche and pine nuts, wild rice (that's from minnesota, but it was local when we got it there) with meyer lemon juice and dried cherries, and roasted root veggies with meyer lemon zest and fresh thyme. yes! and nine wonderful people at the dinner table.

i always feel a little bit torn about the ferry building market. it's huge and expansive and the foods are beautiful to touch and feel and taste; everybody's from not more than a couple hours' drive away; it's a gift to be getting to know the seasons of food in this area. but more than the berkeley or oakland farmers' markets -- at least on the basis of no more than five visits to each -- the ferry building is a bit of a yuppie paradise. these foods are local and they may be organic, but they're not exactly cheap. just like every city i've gotten to know, san francisco's local food scene -- which should be benefiting everyone -- seems to be attracting (where attracting is maybe a proxy for serving?) mostly a white-and/or-upper-middle-class chunk of 'everyone.'

there are notable exceptions: EBT/food stamps are legal tender at berkeley's and oakland's farmers' markets, which may be similarly true but isn't advertised at the ferry building; the berkeley bowl and the reading terminal market in philly manage to sell quality stuff that's cheap, (relatively) accessible, and somehow...inclusive? i can't come up with a better term than "inclusive," but i'm talking about the idea that farmers' markets and their ilk aren't scary gourmet places.

anyway. the food we got there was great, and dinner was great, and friends are extra great, and then we went to see jarrod's new show, gone -- but not before running smack into the chinese new year parade, which was in full swing despite the downpour. this was my second time seeing gone, which is a collage piece that rewards repeat viewing. i liked it a lot the first time: all the components (sophocles, allan ginsburg, proust, anonymous blog excerpts, pliny the elder, country rock anthems...) are more or less tiny, complete pieces in themselves. but making all the connections required more streams of thought than i could fit into that initial viewing. i liked it a lot the first time; the second time i felt like i was actually getting it. also, the lighting is gorgeous.

in entirely unrelated news, i do occasionally work, and i more-than-occasionally think about work, and for my edification and yours i've added paul staniland, an MIT grad student working on armed group structures, to the blogroll.

'the intersection of mathematics and murder'

2008-02-19T21:03:00.003-05:00

a couple of profiles of patrick ball, my colleague/mentor/boss/thing at HRDAG, in the news recently...

this christian science monitor piece comes with a picture of patrick's glowery evil twin attached, and has a nice summary of patrick's trek from the peace brigades to the ICTY. more importantly, there are several good paragraphs on micro vs. macro, observation vs. reality, ruling-out vs. ruling-in:

...In layman's terms, the data suggested ethnic cleansing. In fact, the migration patterns matched killing patterns "so unbelievably perfectly" that he concluded that the two situations might be explained by the same external influence.

But this is where statistics, a science of elimination, cedes to lawyers, human rights practitioners, and historians. Observing a "consistent hypothesis" isn't the same as naming a cause. "When we're looking at data, it's what we're able to observe. That's not the same as what is true."

In the end, Ball can't say what did happen; he can only estimate what probably didn't. But even this reveals something bigger about the nature of truth: At a micro level, it seems to change, from town to town or person to person.

...

That's [referencing findings from Peru] why Ball finds all the painstaking work he puts into the macro picture of things worth it. In country after country, he has watched people "try to ... make their suffering have meaning in some bigger story," Ball says. He tries to ground that exercise in what he believes divides painful history from potentially destructive mythologies of violence: "Some kind of empirical truth."

But even so devoted a numbers guy knows graphs don't tell the whole story. "Statistics define the limits of what's plausible and what's not plausible," he says. "Statistics do not tell us how it felt to be there."

it's possible that the nytmag idea lab bit from this week is more compelling journalism: there's a FIGHT! indeed a CLASH! a BITTER RIVALRY! meh. as these things so often are, i think it's overplayed. that's not to say that violence data in colombia aren't contentious, just that there's so much more that we do. indeed, the weirdly disconnected snake-counting anecdote in the second paragraph is more relevant to what we do at HRDAG on a daily basis.

anyway, neato! publicity!

aerosolized pig brain

2008-02-04T20:23:00.000-05:00

shockingly, it may not be good for you.

the joys of industrial meat, eh?

more on the inspiration thing

2008-02-03T21:38:00.001-05:00

neato:

age & cohort effects & me

2008-01-31T14:07:00.001-05:00

in the world that i daily interact with -- you know, the one occupied by people 20-30 years old, with lefty politics, from san francisco, or who went to swarthmore -- barack obama is winning the california primary race in a landslide. everybody, but everybody, seems to be supporting him. nori's house has cute handmade signs in the front window (spied from the N the other day); most of my personal edwards contingent has turned obama despite health care worries. there's all this talk about inspiration and change, all these comparisons to bobby kennedy.

then last week i went to a dinner party in massachusetts where i was the youngest person by about a quarter century, and it was a den of clinton triumphalism. when i said that obama could win the CA primary, they were shocked. as it turned out, they had a right to be. (damn those older and wiser people, with their 'knowing how things really are'!) what looks like an obama landslide from my perspective is a decisive clinton victory in the polls.

i couldn't find any poll results by age for california, but i've heard tell that the exit polling was dramatically skewed by age in iowa (where obama won).

jarrod said a smart thing the other night when we were talking about primary votes (this is a bad paraphrase despite the quotation marks): "if you look at obama's positions, they're like, 'education is our future, our top priority, we're going to make it right.' if you look at clinton, she says, 'education is so important that we have to spend eleven billion dollars like this.'" i don't really know how that difference makes jarrod feel, but it makes me exceptionally jumpy. like about six other americans, i like policy wonks. i am at home with someone who does her homework.

all that said, though, with edwards out i'm going to go with the candidate who hasn't royally fucked up on foreign policy (i forgive you, i would vote for you in november, but you royally fucked up. admit it.) and who has the potential to get young people (remember? the most liberal part of the electorate? yeah, those guys.) engaged with politics again. i swear it's not just peer pressure.

and back and away again

2008-01-18T11:58:00.000-05:00

returned to oakland yesterday at noon-ish, just in time to start frantically working on a revision that's due today. maybe i'll finish?

i'm here in my real life through the weekend, then off to new haven 'til next friday. no rest for the wicked, or something like that.

friends: i'm toying with the idea of putting up a bulletin board, so that we can keep talking about the primaries (and contingency and inspiration and affective memories, all of which have come up very interestingly in the iowa primaries comment thread) well after the original posts have slipped off the front page and into the archive. anyone?

away

2008-01-14T11:40:00.000-05:00

since last thursday i've been holed up with HRDAG colleagues in bolinas, CA -- an hour up highway one from the city, right next to the beach, lovely lovely. i work, i sleep, i listen to the waves, that's about it.

i will spare you the edgy, emotionally-exhausted bit about how i'm not really equipped to spend a full week living and working (mostly working) with the same people right now, and this wasn't my choice, and there are too many tasks, and blah blah blah blah blah.

instead: progress! results! as it turns out, my understanding of (and my ability to write) python has actually improved in the last few months, despite almost no focused practice. consequently, the data-processing problems i was beating my head against in june are almost entirely dealt with now. we've also had the opportunity to implement some new tools that are going to make me happy down the road (although, whoa, intimidating barrage of information).

so, yay. there's not much room in my head for anything else until thursday afternoon, though.

last piece of news: i registered to vote in california! i still mostly intend to vote health care in this primary, but there's beginning to be some wiggle room in there. i dunno. strategery suggestions, anyone?

coupla things

2008-01-09T11:38:00.001-05:00

one, added new stuff in the blogroll, including chris blattman's blog, the "specialists in violence" news aggregator, and EMILY! who is a great writer even when she's barking like a seal.

and two: i can't help but read clinton's victory in new hampshire as somewhat of a vindication of my theory that people in the midwest hate her more than your average american. (not just iowans, north -- in fact, iowans perhaps less than some midwesterners.)

recommended: why not competence?

2008-01-08T15:47:00.000-05:00

timothy burke, very intelligent on why competence doesn't sell the way it should. this is a great post that, to my mind, skirts religiosity in some interesting ways. he cites a feeling among some americans that basically amounts to "things suck. they suck un-understandably in a way they didn't used to suck" -- and he's right about most of that. i think a huge part of the difference between Ye Olde Coastal Elites and flyover, median-income america is a growing sense among the second group that what is wrong is somehow out of their hands, even out of their historical ken.

however: i would note a distinction (even a potential point of inconsistency?) between burke's (right-on) characterization of the "resentment machine" and his statement that "Offering a tangible plan that promises this tax incentive, that fact-finding commission, this reinvestment project, this funding for retraining doesn’t reach people who perceive the present as a slum left behind by a low-rent version of Benjamin’s angel of history."

compare the angel of history to the actual fuel for the resentment machine. the resentments driving the machine are out of one's own, personal hands -- yes. but they are specific and directed, rather than manifestations of some eternal, unknowable progression of history. the causal chain that disdains competence generally seems to lead back (directly if not correctly) to some identifiable malevolent entity: immigrants stealing wealth; homosexuals seducing children; liberals taking God out of schools; "Islamofascist" terrah. this you might choose to see secularly, as a sort of cognitive-psych way of dealing with that "angel of history"/personal powerlessness problem...

...or you might view it as an outgrowth of (or something with an elective affinity for?) a culture of suspicion that has at least something to do with a biblical imperative that christians are to be "in the world but not of it" (john 17:14-15). that statement is easy to interpret as a belief that there are heathen enemies, both at the gates and in your midst, with whom you must unfortunately interact and against whom you must always be on your guard. [it's also easy to interpret, as in my tradition, as a call to reject materialism. but that's a different post.] it's not (just?) that some americans feel powerless in the face of the forces of history -- it's that many, many americans, even those who don't see themselves as particularly religious, are tuned for reception of messages telling them that the answers are (a) simple and(/or?) (b) mostly related to punishment.

how have republicans avoided being tarred with their own brush? burke says "the Republican leadership since Reagan has largely avoided selling itself as the party of superior competency in policy-making, but instead as the party that can address the deeper spiritual condition of the nation." yes, placing emphasis on the spiritual. again -- and this is something that left christians and other spiritual progressives have been trying to deal with lately -- actual competence isn't really a substitute for the sense that your public officials are regular folks who happen to be in on God's plan (or some vague and powerful secular analog).

burke arrives at *part* of the necessary change: articulate an emotionally and spiritually compelling case for competence, for governing well and transparently. i think there's a second half, which is that, in the most religiously observant country in the industrial world, the left might want to start thinking more seriously about God's plan.

so about that iowa caucus

2008-01-07T14:19:00.000-05:00

i was not surprised. or rather, i was not at all surprised about the republican result or about the winner on the democratic side, and in retrospect i should not have been surprised that edwards edged out clinton for second.

this is why it's kind of scary, in our alarmingly path-dependent primary system, to let midwesterners lead off. hillary clinton, possibly an entirely viable candidate in lots of other places, lost out here because people hate her without any clear sense of why. maybe more pertinently: mike "BMI report cards 'cause shame worked so well for me" huckabee is a former baptist preacher who supports a national sales tax. i mean, every republican candidate is scary in his, emphatically his, own way but huckabee is the one whose total disregard for book learnin' of every kind is most evident at this point.

God save us from the new republican populism.

on the other hand, although i think this would be a despicable reason to be happy about huckabee's win, he seems less electable nationally than many of the other republican contenders. all of them have their fatal flaws, from the guy who failed before (mccain) to the fake right-winger (romney; never gonna get the evangelicals) to the untrustworthy, multiply-married city guy (giuliani; see romney, only more so) to the self-professed hick whose main goal seems to be to destroy the economy (huckabee; never gonna get anyone *but* the evangelicals). is there anyone who could rally republicans in a unifying way, rather than tromping down the path toward schism?

(i sort of hope not. they could do with a good schism.)

on the democratic side, i've heard some serious craziness from obama supporters in recent days, including obama supporters i like and respect very much. the craziest-of-all award is a tie, split between "i don't trust john edwards because he's changed his public positioning now that he's no longer a senator from a conservative southern state" and "nothing can really change anyway, so it doesn't matter that obama's health care plan is broken." i've also heard a significant amount of "hillary"-bashing from people who should really know better. i keep daring people to do the thought experiment wherein they try to figure out whether they would dislike her just as much if she were a male; nobody enjoys taking me up on it. i suppose the bottom line is that i wish people were looking at policy rather than at the way particular candidates make them "feel" -- policy's a great reason not to support clinton, whereas the fact that you find her grating and overambitious absolutely is not.

but there's a bigger point. i was talking with north the other day, and we realized that we'd both be happier to vote for any of the three current democratic front-runners than either kerry or the gore that ran in 2000.

belated: resolutions!

2008-01-05T16:17:00.000-05:00

more local less industrial!
more corn less corn syrup!
more history less theory!
more religious progressives less "christian" conservatism!
more democratic presidents less republican everything!
more sleeping less agonizing!
more maximizing less satisficing!
more intrinsic less extrinsic!

i realize that the exciting more/less/exclamation point format doesn't really allow for the seriousness with which i've thought about a few of my hopes for the new year. the presidential election, sure, but also progress toward peace in iraq, some sort of resolution for kenya and pakistan, a less violent colombia, a halt to the slide in DRC...on and on and, unfortunately, on.

fake debates (vs. sincere questions)

2008-01-03T15:15:00.000-05:00

first a brief note (finally, if half-heartedly, fulfilling my recent mandate) about the useful persistence of fake debates. these are all over the place: global warming. intelligent design. universal health care. most pertinently for me lately: do we "believe in"/"agree with" multiple systems estimation?

i've been beating my head on these fake debates with some regularity in the course of my work, and i've decided that all the "debates" persist for a couple of reasons, neither of which is "it's still an open question." one: maintaining that the question is still open serves lots of people. it serves the people who are on the wrong side of the right answer for political reasons; it serves the people whose lot in life would change for the worse if the implications of the right answer were implemented. two: in most of these cases (although i'm thinking particularly of the MSE "debate" here), the right answer is complex or even technical, and the wrong answer is more intuitive.

i know we all love occam's razor, but i'm tired of being informed that if fully "getting it" requires several steps and/or expert knowledge, it can't possibly be right. no, it is absolutely *not* the case that the true number of [insert violation here] in [insert location here] falls somewhere between the upper bound and the lower bound of reported cases. no, it is absolutely *not* the case that press data will usually give you a pretty ok idea of the patterns of violence. and no, you are not allowed to "disagree" with the overwhelming weight of scientific evidence by pointing out some anecdote that you recently heard.

(of course, this is as much the technician's problem as the audience's: we should be allowed to require patience and diligence, but we should reciprocally require of ourselves a willingness to work as hard as is required to explain complexity that might seem obvious to us.)

ok, rant complete. now the real questions.

my colleague ryan, who just completed field work there, has been following the situation in kenya with much greater diligence than the US media. (i know: shocking.) also contemplating kenya news: chris blattman, a new assistant professor in our department. i'm intrigued by the media accounts of disorganized violence and organized resistance (in a few areas), since i've been musing recently about the organization of violence more generally, thinking about how armed groups control (or don't control) excessive or counterproductive violence by combatants. makes me wonder: how does the opportunistic violence of a place without either previously organized armed groups or enforceable laws ("mob violence"; rioting) compare to the opportunistic violence of an occupying army? i'm re-reading antony beevor on the soviet march through germany at the same time as i'm reading the news from kenya (and, last week, pakistan); it's not that kenya 2008 and germany 1945 are useful cases for academic comparison -- but if you're looking for sub-types of opportunistic violence i suppose you could do worse.

on a meta/personal note: the prospectus project feels back on track after a couple of long hard thinks and a reassuring phone conference. in retrospect, i'm impressed with my learning curve here: impostor phenomenon reigns -- fixing that is a long-term project for me -- but i'm impressed with the difference between my reaction to earlier bouts of painful criticism and my reaction to this one, namely, that i've become very practiced at deflecting the initial inference, which is always "i'm not cut out for this, everyone knows it, and i should never have attempted it." so, good news, i guess.

last but not least: the "personal note" above is tied for me to the "fake debates" bit above, at a pedagogical level. my education consisted of a lot of gentle and generous conversation which (i think) led to a lot of creative thinking and a relatively high tolerance for not getting it the first time, which is one step away from a high tolerance for complexity. go swarthmore! what i've discovered in graduate school (and to an even greater extent during this fellowship year) is that this is just not the dominant mode of teaching and learning, either in graduate social science programs or in other research organizations...and, sadly for both types of organizations, that their more combative style (which is not without its benefits, of course) de-incentivizes patience, complexity, and patience for complexity. which, let me tell you: NOT GOOD FOR THE STUDY OF VIOLENCE, FRIENDS.

commitment schmommitment

2007-12-28T17:37:00.000-05:00

i'm fresh out of words for my little 'fake debates' rant, because it turns out that if you write a really long prospectus draft, there will be lots of stuff in it to quarrel with. and after you figure that out, you will cry a lot, and then you will dry your eyes and snark on about pedagogy in the research academy and the lack of a christmas vacation, and then you will go back to work, not stopping at go or collecting $200, because otherwise the sky will fall and/or grad school will last forever.

commitment device

2007-12-20T11:55:00.001-05:00

some time in the next week, i'm going to write something interesting involving jonah goldberg, michael spagat, george w. bush, and the useful persistence of fake "scientific" debates.

but now i have to go explain to my committee that i'm not comfortable being "very explicit...about the variation to be explained," because i haven't estimated the descriptives yet and nobody's studied this before.

life is hard when your discipline wants a causal argument, hell or high water, whether the empirics are trustable or not. maybe i'll pretend to Just Know what the range of variation is and see if they catch me.

vignette

2007-12-19T13:03:00.000-05:00

ten points to gryffindor for explaining in comments what exactly is wrong with this exchange (and ps, the person i'm having the conversation with is awesome and smart and not at all fat-phobic).

ME: blah blah blah feminism mike huckabee fat-hater lunatic blah fat politics blah. blah blah fat fat politics politics BMI report card sorrow mike huckabee hatred blah. republican primaries snicker blah. [and so on.]

HE: you can correct me if i'm wrong, but it doesn't look to me like you're fat.

ME: well, not at the moment, no.

fat is a feminist issue, part n

2007-12-07T17:32:00.000-05:00

dan savage has missed a number of boats this week, including the non-fat-phobic boat, the actually-understanding-weight-changes boat, and the boat he's perennially waiting harborside for, gender.

in principle, yeah, hilarious joke there. let's take advice to gay men regarding other gay men, change the pronouns, and see how the audience likes it when we pretend it's advice to straight men about straight women! ha ha!

in practice, as well as in several different and equally important principles, wow, that was dumb as shit. it was, of course, dumb as shit to begin with, even before we applied the pronoun hilarity. how do we 'solve' our partner's weight gain? is there some rule to follow? real answers: we shouldn't and can't, and duh, of course there isn't.

however. if for the sake of argument we choke down the assumption that one partner's fat-phobia is the other partner's problem (or, to put it more kindly, that one partner is only attracted to a narrow range of body types that hir partner no longer falls into), is there any reason -- given american culture and whatnot -- to assume that talking about one's partner's fat should be a gender-neutral thing to do?

yeah, i didn't think so either. being a fat american blows because people are mean to you when you're fat, but as i've blogged before, those meannesses fall harder on those of us with two x chromosomes (and no y's).

a long, snarky whine about the inconsistent advice we give to homosexual males as versus heterosexual males misses the point, which is that the advice concerns partners of different sexes. and unless they've had no media exposure since infancy, said partners are likely to have quite different orientations (ha!) toward fat and toward their own fatness.

(although it's an interesting question, even when it's not about fat: what is the ethical and sanity-saving thing to do if you're no longer sexually attracted to someone you love?)

would not, could not, in a plant

2007-12-06T05:10:00.000-05:00

hey guess what! big huge industrial meat producers are spending large chunks of change on exciting factory-style decontamination measures!

but guess what else: “If you gave me a million, zillion dollars and said give me a plant that doesn’t have E. coli, I couldn’t do it,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “It’s not about the will. It’s about the ability.”

note the word plant in that quotation. what tyson or cargill is doing to combat e.coli is really not the issue here, because there's nothing they can do, no amount of money they can spend, that will change the fact that the industrial meat model involves taking a huge animal that is full of shit and poison, skinning it, gutting it, and hacking it apart, all on an assembly line that moves...well, really fast.

result: an environment that is so filthy that the meat has to be "bathed in streams of acid" and then vacuumed for microbes. which, eew. eew!

i am feeling very comfortable with my refusal to eat "non-happy" meat today.

HOLY CRAP IT'S DECEMBER

2007-11-30T18:12:00.000-05:00

obviously, november was a little crazy. recap: first week of november in yale, then a buncha crazy prep and also a fair amount of bread baking, then on thanksgiving i flew to philly, and it was great. and then on monday i flew to amsterdam, and now it's friday night and i'm in a hotel in the hague and this headcold is totally out of control.

relevant points of fact from the last several weeks:

1. i am disappointed in barack obama. like nori said in an email today, "i WANT to be behind obama! what the shit is he doing?" i've never been impressed with the obama health care plan, but now i'm actively pissed. although, where the fuck is john edwards right now? i'm not so much a hillary fan, but like north i wanna vote on health care. maybe it's lucky that my primary vote doesn't matter...

2. econometrics != statistics != science. well, or maybe econometrics is a subset of statistics is a subset of science. i don't want to suggest they're discontinuous...unless people try crazy subset-hopping. dude, get your ordinary least squares out of my multiple systems!

3. fashiony people have hilarious ideas about gender. in particular, they have some seriously strange debates about the (potential) difference(s) between "ornamental" and "expressive." which are you allowed to be, and under what conditions, and are those things mutually exclusive, and if not, should they be?

gender in the workplace in the fashion section

2007-11-01T10:42:00.001-04:00

so, here's a serious piece of science writing -- reviewing studies at several major universities and interviewing clinicians who attempt to apply the findings. two paragraphs in the article, which not at all incidentally is about women in the workplace, cover psychological studies in which subjects were shown pictures of women in "sexy" versus "non-sexy" clothes, and told they were either executives or secretaries.

so of course the times publishes it in fashion and style.

there's history here: as a college student, i wrote a paper in which i focused on how hillary clinton was covered in major newspapers, and found that even when the topic was actually news -- clinton presents health care plan; clinton runs for senate -- the "paper of record" was likely to publish the story in the fashion section, with a lot of participial phrases beginning "wearing...". and of course, my own (literally sophomoric) attempt at media criticism was nth in a long line of similar work. but, as today's article so helpfully points out, none of the work on subtle biases against women in professional workplaces contains policy prescriptions that might prevent or redress the damage.

procrastinatory ps

2007-10-24T18:47:00.001-04:00

omg, california-grown pippin apples are so, so, so good this week. why am i leaving again on friday?

among the more realistic of my many worries

2007-10-24T15:05:00.000-04:00

here's the thing: i tend to get "[more than] just a little worried about my future." and, while i'm not sleeping with anyone inappropriate as a consequence, my anxiety level about that-which-follows-this-endless-prospectus is, not to put too fine a point on it, kind of wacky. luckily,i am often reminded (thanks everybody!) that i am talented, i will finish, there is a job out there for me. yay.

but for accuracy's sake i'm not, never ever, reassured of the fact that "work-life balance" will work out just fine, for me or any other female academic. while all the insecurity- and vocation-related troubles eventually fall by the wayside (that's what i tell myself), the cost of childcare -- and the willful deafness of (most) university administrations to the disparate gender impacts of same -- remain. here is a very smart post to that effect, up since last friday at confessions of a community college dean, which (er, whom) i should remember to read more often.

OCV mix tape, part deux

2007-10-23T11:39:00.000-04:00

and here i thought plagiarism was only popular among ivy undergrads! turns out that the onion's av club is not above a little forcible intellectual property redistribution, either. while i'll admit that my own list focused perhaps too intently on the "conflict" side of things, this "order + violence" collection (21 songs about the police) should at least have credited me. (and probably stathis.)

fool's errand

2007-10-17T11:25:00.000-04:00

i've been stuck in transport since about 4:00 am (pacific time) yesterday morning. most of that time has been spent in miami, first at the wyndham (gee, thanks, american airlines. you really do care!) and, this morning, in the terminal again: the 10.25 flight that replaced yesterday's afternoon flight after mechanical problems at SFO made me miss it has turned into a 12.30 flight. no one here knows why.

now, if i were going to bogotá for a span of weeks, this would not be a big deal. however, i'm getting on a plane to come home on friday morning at 7:00. let's break that down, in bogotá time: 6:00 am tuesday - 3:00 pm wednesday: transit; 3:00 pm wednesday - 4:00 am friday: on the ground in bogotá; 4:00 am friday - 8:00 pm friday: transit.

altogether, that's 49 hours of transit for 37 hours of colombia. i really don't want to be one of those people who is lucky enough to travel to amazing places but bitches about the experience of travel -- but that's who i am today. waaaaaahhh. on the other hand, i do love bogotá, and am tremendously excited about the work we're presenting there, and so on and so forth.

on yet another hand: i should have listened, and will in future listen, to the instinct telling me that short visits are a bad idea unless they're absolutely necessary. also, i still hate miami. why did i have to get stranded in a city with such high humidity?

BMI stupidity in pictures

2007-10-09T20:24:00.000-04:00

fascinating project that's getting a lot of blog play recently: the illustrated BMI categories. as usual, i'm amazed by the variety of sizes and shapes that correspond to relatively similar numbers. can we be done gathering evidence that weight is not a perfect proxy for health now?

travel/bluegrass/autumn...philosophy of science?

2007-10-09T13:08:00.000-04:00

some of you may be wondering, "where has amelia been? and why doesn't she ever think about politics any more?" (seriously, you have to check that link out.)

the answer is that i've been in the office, and then in new haven, and then listening to a boatload of bluegrass, and then in the office some more. lots of office! lots of bayesian model averaging! lots of clustering algorithms!

also at the office: we're theorizing my job, which is fun and scary. why, after all, should the human rights community invest in academics whose institutional incentives are (at the moment) all wrong for continuing their advocacy work alongside their (putatively academic) careers? there are no teaching hospitals in social science, that is, no place where basic science and clinical practice work together in a way that's good for both.

for example: at hrdag i've spent a good chunk of time lately thinking about how to make inferences on command responsibility from data on mass behavior -- but at best, academic political science seems only mildly concerned with differences between ordered behavior, behavior that occurs because of a lack of orders, and behavior that occurs despite orders. (at worst, political science is actively hostile to the idea of decision-making and responsibility in individual cases, in the sense that the discipline prefers theories in which violence happens in a structural or deterministic way.)

anyway. it's been intriguing to think about the institutions that could be built to encourage rigor in the human rights community and groundedness in the academy. for the record: i think my current job is the right start.

and new haven: new haven was stressful. it was great to see everybody, but i was a big weepy flake the whole time, due to some combination of lack of sleep, general intellectual overload, and the weather, which was disgusting. on the other hand, The Have presented a great opportunity to re-engage the great SUV vandalism debate. a new point: even if you target rich neighborhoods, everybody' premiums go up. doesn't that amount to regressive taxation?

i experienced my usual irrational joy on landing at SFO and, after an hrdag team meeting, took off to various fun artsy events for the weekend. chief among them: hardly strictly bluegrass, which entailed travel nightmares for everyone but resulted in two solid days of sunshine and lounging and excellent music and even excellent-er people.

and now it's fall?! the bay area's not renowned for its seasonality, but the combination of chilly nights and falling leaves is enough for me.

confidential to lewisburg, PA

2007-09-26T03:09:00.000-04:00

...who googled "how to stop worrying academic job market" and landed here: not to be a meanie or anything, but um, good luck with that. maybe we can discuss this some more after we're both done with our dissertations and adjuncting at lake wobegon state.

buy books for laurel's students

2007-09-24T19:00:00.000-04:00

i didn't read beowulf until college. but you can bet that, when i did read it, i wrote ALL OVER it. now, this is me we're talking about, and my marginal-note needs are maybe a little over the top. however, i can't imagine fully getting beowulf, as a twenty-first-century kid, without some serious marginal notes (history, etymology, definition, general underlining, you know?).

now get this: because of the crap system in which they find themselves, laurel's students are asked to read and understand beowulf from EXCERPTS in an anthology that they CANNOT WRITE IN and CANNOT TAKE HOME. this is only one of the many meannesses that kids in lots of urban schools are subjected to, of course, but it's one you can help solve.

laurel has set up a classroom blog that discusses her book-buying goals and will probably also be updated with other funding needs. from the blog (or, heck, directly), you can make a contribution -- first for copies of beowulf, then for other things that those of us who got the long end of the inequitable-education-funding stick probably take, or took, for granted.

she needs 35 copies. you could totally buy one of them. so do!

central high school theatre

2007-09-24T17:39:00.000-04:00

is the (well, a) backdrop for a historical op-ed in the times today (thanks for the tip, al!). sure, the story ends with the intrepid reporter leaving the herald over his "political" content. (way to blaze that trail, Herald!) but it's nice as always to think of my high school, with its grander-than-we-really-need WPA auditorium, as host to the likes of louis armstrong. especially the louis armstrong who was willing, finally, to denounce orval faubus and the racist south more generally.

the article mentions that armstrong stayed in the dakota (iirc, more famous in later times as the slightly fleabitten residential hotel from which folks had to be evacuated in helicopters during The Flood) and was the first african american to do so; makes you wonder where paul robeson and marian anderson, each of whom had performed at central in years past, might have stayed.

oh, and of course there's personal nostalgia associated with that stage as well -- and not just because, many years later, i sang where marian anderson sang. it's the autographs and messages carved into the wood loft and the catwalks, the way it felt to know that people had been singing rogers and hammerstein there since rogers and hammerstein were writing, the general feeling of grandness associated with having the oldest most capacious house in town.

just a little sorry for myself

2007-09-20T16:05:00.000-04:00

it's birthday eve! and in the next several days, i have a bunch of paper type things to write (one of them is a LECTURE, eeeek), which seems like a bit much but is the sort of thing i'm always setting myself up for, so who knows. maybe i subconsciously love it.

this morning i woke up and it was (a) cloudy, (b) cold, and (c) the day for driving emily to the airport so she can leave for a month.

it also happened to be the day for new contacts, new contacts which are stored in a big bag of toiletry type miscellany that i keep in a corner. i found the right-eye contacts. check. then i was rummaging around for the left-eye contacts, and i found out that the small bag for razors and tweezers -- the one that lives in the bottom of the big bag -- had been open, and there was at least one razor down there where i was rummaging.

anyway, i'm down one right index fingertip, which puts a serious crimp in my plans for writing paper type things. writing this entry, for example, took me like four and a half hours.

also it is still cloudy and still cold. on the upside, i know i have a wide variety of internet friends who will console me with comments (ahem), and a wide variety of local acquaintances who will be impressed with the gory mess i have made. go me!

more multipartism

2007-09-17T15:42:00.000-04:00

in no particular order:

1. potluck last night to celebrate/mourn emily's grad school hunting trip, which will be long (a month!) and presumably full of food that is not as good as that on offer in our bay area friend circle: sweet potato fries of two varieties, emily's own cream of zucchini & squash soup, lovely couscous and wild rice salads, zachary's pizza (although: isn't that cheating?), homemade ice cream, gooey orangey chocolatey cake with grand marnier whipped cream.

2. new baby! in particular, a macbook pro that is lightning fast and has a time-suck of a camera attached to it and actually belongs to benetech but oh well. and speaking of benetech: i have business cards! and benefits! below is a picture of me demonstrating both the existence of business cards and the timesuck camera. enjoy!

3. today's task, after a weekend of brusque-to-brutal email interactions: edit my APSA paper back into my prospectus, taking care to highlight the hypotheses with, like, sixteen-point bold font. i find it difficult to believe it when many of my sentences begin with things like "observationally, we expect..." -- but it turns out that some readers of the APSA paper failed to diagnose the presence of observational implications in all that theoretical gobbledygook. oh, and i'm adding two new sections to my prospectus: an "executive summary" (surprisingly useful!) and "what this prospectus is not about" (painfully necessary!).

i might even choose cases soon. you never know.

4. everyone's a little bit (ok, a lot) racist: white people in tuscaloosa, including most of the board of ed and the superintendent, seem unable to understand the implications of hearing "undisciplined" and "overcrowded" as good reasons to engage in some de facto resegregation. said one white parent who supported the plan, which moved mostly black and latino students back to their "neighborhood schools:" "I’m not one who looks to resegregate the schools." at least, not in so many words. meanwhile, hundreds of kids who had gone to the trouble of getting themselves bused to better (whiter) schools were kicked out, reassigned, and then readmitted after the school year had already begun.

a three-parter

2007-09-10T20:13:00.001-04:00

I. herb and kathy eckhouse, who have long been rockstars in my own personal constellation, have made their rockstar status a little more official and public by being named bon appétit magazine food artisans of the year. isn't it great when great people do great things to great acclaim?

II. about that convention thingy: i promised earlier that i would have some exciting things to say about APSA that didn't necessarily involve my personal discomfort with dressing up. and here they are.

first and most interesting (as far as i'm concerned): the order/conflict/violence corner of the discipline has begun to wonder about its categories in a way that is actually interesting to me. i think this probably starts with a suggestion of nick sambanis's (which, oh dear, i can't remember the appropriate citation for) that the 1,000-battle-death threshold we've been using might mask significant differences between the sorts of concatenated events we refer to as "war" or "civil war."

i am happy (mostly in a selfish way, natch) to report that many of my yale colleagues are very much at the leading edge of these discusions. in the panels and talks i attended before the dudes-in-suits thing really started to get me down, i heard (1) abbey and ryan discuss really interestingly the local phenomena we miss when we think about "state building;" and (2) some thoughtful approaches to "ethnic conflicts" as they relate to other types of ethnic (or ethnic-seeming) violence, and to other types of conflicts.

later, in a more informal conversation, i ran my mouth for a while about what we should call the situation in iraq right now. war? (yes.) civil war? (yes.) ethnic civil war? (probably.) violent occupation? (oh wait, that too, especially from the american perspective.) we ended with the following question: what are other wars in which a major power invaded, overthrew the local leader, started a civil war, and attempted to stay and ("help" the "people" to) govern? americans have often overthrown local leaders, and they have often run other countries' governments, and they have gotten uncomfortably involved in other people's civil wars, but our current quagmire seems like a Very Special Quagmire.

(speaking of which: "slow progress" my ass. has gen. petraeus's spine oozed away since his promotion? speaking of which, see also criticizing the generals in the sunday times of two weeks ago. very interesting piece on the institutionalized divisions between lower- and mid-grade officers and the top of the chain of command.)

now, typically i think of definitional conversations as a bit blathery and useless: just decide on something you can observe and observe it, already! except that my own (totally theoretical, sigh) APSA paper was about categories and definitions, as well. essentially, i've claimed that unless we look at the full spectrum of conflict-related violence (lethal, non-lethal, property, etc.), we're going to have both our definitions of "violence" and our observations of "violence" wrong. we're not going to be able to distinguish command responsibility; we're not going to be able to see the effects of political pressure (as opposed to military necessity) on armed groups' behaviors. strictly empirically, we're not going to be able to see most of the acts of violence!

what i mean to say, i suppose, is that unlike the ongoing fiasco that is "genocide studies," i think our definitional questions may be getting us somewhere analytically.

two other observations of note, best stated briefly. first, folks are getting the message about cross-national work, namely: don't go there. as i am happy to tell anyone who crosses my path, i'm not all that excited about a lot of sub-national data, either -- but at least (so it seems) the flood of ill-conceived, poorly operationalized cross-national studies is drying up. second, hallelujah. there seems to be some sort of emerging specialization in armed group structures, socialization, command and control, etc. this is A Good Thing.

so, fine: APSA was interesting as well as depressingly corporate. i even received props for my concept "variation in covariation." i am still pissed about the lack of wireless, though.

III. sad news about madeleine l'engle. i'd recently been thinking of her again, after many years, because of my philip pullman addiction. the question that inevitably arises when i read things that could be classified "fantasy" is: how am i enjoying this? back in the day, i made it through the whole of the _wrinkle_ series and _a ring of endless light_ (plus others i forget now), despite my complete inability to stay awake through hobbits, rings, narnia or, for the most part, ursula k. le guin.

it would be too self-congratulatory to say that it's the complexity of her metaphysics that impressed me; mostly, at eight or ten or twelve, what i liked was the idea that ordinary earth-based real-life-living girls could do such profoundly momentous things. meg, rather like lyra from _his dark materials_, is a non-magical yet world-historical figure. maybe, you begin to tell yourself, i too am only *seemingly* ordinary!

anyway, it was a big jolt to read the news yesterday and i am sad for the loss.

standards of evidence

2007-09-06T12:46:00.000-04:00

see yesterday's phd strip.

APSA commentary

2007-09-04T16:45:00.000-04:00

1. is there any reason at all, good or bad, that when political scientists get together to share and celebrate their intellectual endeavors, they mark the occasion by pretending to be businesspeople for four days? is this ("this" == "conservative suits and uncomfortable shoes") the only idea of "professionalism" we can come up with? is it just a function of the hugeness of the event?

2. stupid, stupid, stupid: hold a huge academic conference in a place where there is essentially no free wireless. words cannot explain how dumb and irritating a waste of time *that* was.

3. navy pier is now so clotted with opportunities to spend money that you can't actually see the lake. w.t.f!

4. institutional complaints aside, there were some pretty damn interesting ideas about war, armed groups, and social control bandied about this weekend, both in and out of panels. when i can put my methodological night-and-day-mares out of my mind, i am increasingly excited about my place in the academic universe right now. but -- more on that later.

our house is warm

2007-08-26T02:09:00.001-04:00

and there are pictures of the event that did it (plus newlyweds dinner party!) on my flickr page.

good day

2007-08-22T12:35:00.000-04:00

yes it is!

i'm finishing the rough draft of my APSA paper, then, many-ways-celebratorily, off to avenue q at the orpheum this evening.

the answer is yes

2007-08-21T14:14:00.000-04:00

browsing the fatblogs this morning, came across another rendition of "is fat a feminist issue?" because i'm supposed to be writing something else, and because emily and i talked about this at breakfast this morning

[happy dance for my new household!],

i thought i'd better blog it. in case any of you out there in tehinterwebs had doubts.

as usual i'm a little disappointed with the reasoning on both sides. is it possible that we are not all aware, at this late date, that fat is not *just* a feminist issue? that the weird fake cultural stuff attaching to fat affects men too? is it likewise possible that there exist people, at this late date, who still haven't cottoned to the idea that fat stigma falls more heavily (HA!) on women than on men?

mis- and underdiagnosis of men aside (yes, i know this is a problem), there remains the fact that more than nine tenths of people diagnosed with eating disorders are women. being abused for the crime of fat is qualitatively different than being asked to be pathologically fearful of fat as some sort of life project.

health care/class warfare/RAGE

2007-08-20T22:42:00.000-04:00

it's been hard, lately, to find something sufficiently callous, boneheaded, thrilling or chilling to blog. the democrats are wonking and stumbling their way through the endless primary race; the republican presidential candidates are comically inept; there is a seemingly endless amount of shit for lobbing at the fan in iraq.

and then one seemingly calm monday afternoon, i take a gander at the times and there's this news. perhaps i shouldn't be shocked that the bush administration would do something quite so transparently awful, but i am: they are trying to deny expansion of CHIPs to "middle income" families.

note: "middle income" is equal to more than 250% of the poverty line for a family of four, i.e., about $50,000 for a family of four. feel free to do the math yourself, but trust me: not many people who aren't already covered at work can afford to insure their kids privately at that income level.

where states want to expand subsidized health care for kids to those who are a little better off than absolutely destitute, this administration has invented a novel way to block their paths. moreover, bush et al. explicitly state that this is because they don't want CHIPs to substitute for private health insurance. because, and let's be perfectly clear here, it's more important that insurance companies continue to make large profits than that children in this country don't die of abscessed teeth or asthma attacks.

but wait! it gets better. in new jersey, which has for five years boasted one of the nation's highest CHIP thresholds (350% of the poverty line), there has been "no evidence" of a decline in private coverage. none. translation: it's not even about the profits! we just don't want the kids to be covered! excuse me, but: jesus fucking christ.

speaking of whom: your homework is to reflect for just a minute on the hardness of heart required for ostensible christians in positions of power to sign off on something like this, let alone come up with it. know what a common litmus test for employment in the bush administration is? yeah: you have to be "pro-life" (where pro-life is apparently interpreted with sickening narrowness).

more homework: read the edwards health care platform.

the lighter side of military bureaucracy

2007-08-18T22:30:00.000-04:00

hi again, fandom. i know it's been a while. there is no excuse. but THIS! this is too good to pass up.

this morning i was searching furiously (and ultimately uselessly) for the harvard ph.d. of a former army special forces officer and current naval postgraduate school professor named kalev sepp, whose dissertation research consisted of advising the salvadoran military during its long campaign against the FMLN (and, as far as the salvadoran government was concerned, anyone who sort of vaguely resembled an FMLN sympathizer, plus the occasional entire village).

sepp makes appearances in several of the journalistic accounts of iraq i've zoomed through recently; today it's george packer's the assassin's gate, which is more interesting to read but less relevant to my work (dangit!) than thomas ricks' fiasco. his experiences in both central america and iraq make him a prime interview target for me. how better to show that i deserve an interview than to read his dissertation?! no one reads anyone's dissertation! tragically, he hasn't released it to UMI, so i may have to actually gather relevant knowledge before i drive down to monterey and camp at the gates (if indeed there are gates there).

anyway, after my disheartening trip to the thesis emporium i googled sepp's name and -- lo and behold! -- the fourth or fifth hit was this stunning piece of work, by a woman fetchingly titled "pentagon diva," on the blog known as "I LUV A MAN IN A UNIFORM!" unfortunately for all of us who love us some military intellectual men, it appears the site hasn't been updated since may and was relatively sparsely populated even before then.

now back to our regularly scheduled APSA paper, the one that ate my brain...

MIA

2007-08-03T17:40:00.000-04:00

that's miami international airport, from which i'm currently blogging, and which i think i might hate even more than LAX.

about three more hours, now, until i get on a plane for minneapolis. it's been a long (read: sleep-deprived) day, a long (but great) several days, so i'm going to wait on a real update until i'm back in st. cloud.

in the meantime, you can look at touristy flickr pics from the salt cathedral, medellín, and our medellín-bogotá flight (thanks meg!).

procrasti-ma-nation

2007-07-27T11:35:00.001-04:00

in entirely non-colombia news: i am psyched for the simpsons movie. today the times has an open comment thread on which people are posting their favorite moments, and it is, OMG, so much fun to read (at least if you're me).

entiendo la mayoría, pero...

2007-07-27T10:44:00.000-04:00

this is what i say near the beginning of most of our interviews -- "i understand most (of what is said), but for me speaking is difficult. so today, i'll be taking notes." it seems to work out fine most of the time, but it's far from ideal for me. the interview subjects don't seem to care too much, meg protests that it's still better to have two of us in the interviews, and i'm practicing my listening comprehension like i've never practiced before. but still!

hard to believe, actually, that i'm on a plane a week from right now. (and that between now and then we're flying off to a whole new city for four days.) it's amazing how much work can get done in 19 days if we put our minds to it; also amazing how much is left to do when we return to the states. except: oops, i'll also have to write my APSA paper and finish the prospectus. and move. speaking of which: i have a house! new housemate megan (not to be confused with meghan) is a total rockstar who found a lovely place all by herself.

as for megHan, she and i are working working working, thinking thinking thinking, and simultaneously expending large amounts of energy trying to behave like diplomats: no, we are not here to judge your data. we don't even want your data! no, we are not here as hrdag propagandists. yes, we are actual doctoral students. from a university much like harvard! (here the heavens open and rays of light shine down on our letter of introduction.) beyond that, there's very little that i want to share with the blog about the research here. everyone we've talked to, governmental and non, has received us warmly (even if the vice president's office does make you wear those ugly name tags with the ID photo shot straight up the nose). everyone has been, to our ears and eyes, extremely forthcoming about their data collection strategies, both advantages and challenges. things are complex; everyone tries to believe not hopelessly so.

on the subject of complexity i will say -- and this is also clear to everyone on all sides of the debate -- that the bitterness (intransigence, even) of the political debate on these numbers (during an ongoing conflict, whatever the atmosphere in the cities may be) is of no help to anyone.

home front

2007-07-21T21:33:00.001-04:00

awww! the times has a picture of a farmer from osnabrock, standing in a field of canola. more importantly, the times has a story about efforts to grow hemp in the flickertail state. the economic arguments for it are great, there's essentially no real opposition in the state any more (despite the one uninformed nutbag conflating hemp with meth) -- and the folks standing in the way are the federal pot police. don't they have better things to be doing in the upper midwest?

más fotos!

2007-07-20T17:47:00.000-04:00

click the flickr link. important notes: (1) on july 15, i watched the sunrise outside an abandoned new mexico mining town and the sunset from the window of hrdag's bogota office. ¡que esplendido! (2) in between long bouts of interview writing, interview translation, interview practice and interview-giving, meg and i have had a certain amount of time to play with an extremely charming (if not so housebroken) six-week-old chocolate lab.

seriously?

2007-07-17T23:32:00.000-04:00

i admire gina kolata's work trying to crack open the fitisthin, thinisfit bullshit currently dogging american public health, but maybe she should publishing in the times, which seems hell-bent on destroying her good work with its illustrations. take a look at the women pictured alongside this article, and see whether you can detect any "range of body types" there. i couldn't...and if you can then i'm sorry for you.

bogotá, again

2007-07-17T11:44:00.000-04:00

i made it! as, after a 24-hour delay, did meg. at the moment our project consists almost entirely of long lists of NGO contacts and phone numbers, but that promises to change within the next couple of days: we have meetings, the sort of meetings which inevitably generate more meetings, which is exactly what we want but which, in the face of a mere 16 working days left, and those days split between two cities, seem a bit intimidating.

and then there's the language barrier. everything i do in colombia teaches me the difference between first-semester classroom spanish, at which i was pretty much ok, and actual conversation, which might be vocabulary-intensive or mumbled or whispered or colloquial or just very, very fast. i like to talk; not being able to talk sucks. willingness to embarrass oneself comes in very handy in these situations, but it's not a skill that comes naturally for me. (no, propensity and willingness are not the same.)

anyway -- off to conquer the supermarket.

complexityland (metaland? abstractionland?)

2007-07-12T20:00:00.000-04:00

it's disneyland for dorks! the santa fe institute, where i've been since monday morning, says it's "devoted to creating a new kind of scientific research community, one emphasizing multi-disciplinary collaboration in pursuit of understanding the common themes that arise in natural, artificial, and social systems," all of which is true.

in this sense, it's very (very very very) different from your standard research university, although rather less different from your standard liberal arts college: it's too small for departments and, in any case, frowns upon the idea that knowledge need be specialized, or that there should be topic-bound conventions for inquiry.

sounds great, right? and of course, it is great. it is completely, completely great with the gorgeous views and the leather chairs and the catered meals and the smart people and the hiking trails and the intense learning. on the other hand, there are a couple of related pathologies here that make me worry about a general trend in my own discipline, namely the great and greatly increasing power of The Quant (and its close cousin The Formal).

in particular, as was explained to me in an earlier conversation: you need to be able to put up with a lot of reinvention of the wheel from very smart people who are engaging new fields. relatedly, although this issue is farther below the radar in hallway conversation: because barriers to entry are higher for the mathier disciplines, there seems to be more entry in the opposite direction. more qualitative disciplines tend to write in more traditional human languages; therefore they may seem transparent to anyone who is literate, even though some of the language may be used in very nuanced or technical ways. math, on the other hand, includes both a crazy density of heretofore unknown symbols and (arguably) some concepts that can't be expressed in human language at all. what i can't figure out (yet) is exactly how this surface-understanding gradient figures into the worrisome presumption that arguments crafted numerically are intrinsically more sophisticated than those arrived at through other sorts of laborious evidence-sifting. why this seeming assumption that things we can't decipher must just be too smart for us?

related question: does interdisciplinarity necessarily privilege mathematical abstraction, or are there ways of formulating questions and projects that can get to truly collaborative answers? i ask because it often seems that only increasing flights of abstraction can 'cover' the questions of several disparate scholars -- put a chemist, a psychologist, a political scientist and a mathematician in the same room and the mathematician is pretty likely to win the conversation. my initial answer, though, is that you *can* frame the question so as to be truly collaborative, but that doing so effectively might actually require everyone to back away from the leading edge of her/his discipline.

new photos

2007-07-06T11:27:00.000-04:00

rainy fourth (and fifth) of july living room festivities, among other enjoyments, are up on my flickr page. if you are a consumer, please do note that "the booty's gone bad!" -- possibly my favorite public service advertisement ever, brought to us by the good people at mariposa, the co-op to which north & household (& many others) belong.

happy fourth of july!

2007-07-04T22:13:00.001-04:00

impeach bush.

yes, really. north has it right over there.

we're in the middle of a pretty low-key party right now in torrentially rainy philadelphia, and at this party we have printed ourselves a copy of the document about which the holiday is celebrated. my idea about the fourth is that, yes, yay, the united states are rad, and we should think about things that we might do in order to better uphold the principles laid out in the declaration of independence. like, for example, impeaching george bush and dick cheney.

things we aspire to:

"all...are created equal...endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness...governments...derive[] their just powers from the consent of the governed..."

some of the (more directly applicable) bad things that that other George did, according to Jefferson et al:

"He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries...He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation: ...For protecting [troops], by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states...For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury...For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses...For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering fundamentally the forms of our governments."

they conclude:

"A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

moving day!

2007-07-01T13:33:00.000-04:00

yesterday we packed all my crap, smooshed it into a jarrod's car and carted it off to storage; this morning i swept and dusted and wiped and generally made my little attic cleaner than it ever was when i lived here; tonight i'm flying out. hoo boy. in case you wonder when i am coming to your city --

2-3 july: new haven
3-6 july: philadelphia
7-8 july: new york
9-15 july: santa fe institute
16 july-3 august: bogota
4-11 august: saint cloud

it's likely that i'll find plenty to blog about while i'm gone, but you never know. time has a way of flying when you're on the run.

again with "health" and appearance

2007-06-29T14:56:00.000-04:00

i spend a considerable amount of time in fatblogland, thinking about health and politics and the weirdly moralistic "science" and "health" arguments behind a lot of fat-hatred. this week's treasure from that neighborhood of the internets is fat fu, where i found, among other things, this excellent essay on the ridiculousness that is 'if you just tried'.

the following quotation is actually from the comment thread, but it's too spot on not to share: "The unadulterated insanity of the argument: I’m allowed to hate you unless you live your life to my exact specification - and if you do I still won’t believe you unless you look exactly how I want you to. I will call this 'concern for your health.' It’s megalomaniacal control freak psychology - like being in an instant dysfunctional relationship with an abusive boyfriend. And yet it passes uncommented by most people as if it were the work of a reasonable mind."

it reminds me a bit of the hateful little moral mix-ups in _the mill on the floss_, which i've been reading this week. here a central problem is that the female protagonist, though entirely blameless, is often trapped in circumstantial "evidence" of wrong-doing. (often wrong-doing of the sexual sort. THE WORST!) her brother (playing the part of the fat-moralist in this disturbingly direct analogy) implacably refuses to believe her, assumes the worst, and mercilessly punishes her for her non-sins. (to which punishment, despite a burning sense of injustice, she submits.) why? because a brother who truly loves and cares for his sister has a duty to "protect" her from both dishonor and the appearance thereof, even where that "love" and "protection" takes the form of contempt and hardness.

this has been a message from your friends respect and autonomy to remind you: by analogy and otherwise, fat is a feminist issue.

my cautionary tale

2007-06-28T16:26:00.000-04:00

first of all, i would like to acknowledge that i should be writing my prospectus right now, this minute, in fact always, every minute.

there have been a spate of good prospectus days lately: first i realized that, whatever the "it's totally all rational and strategic, trust us" school of thought has to say [econ, i'm looking at you], excessive violence is a little overdetermined in war zones. so i need to develop a theory of well-controlled violence. check it out: i've replaced a fake puzzle with a real one!

then i started to think about the institutional differences between old and new armed groups (hezbollah doesn't have cavalry or even "cavalry"; most of the US military is not organized in compartmentalized sleeper cells), which led me to thinking, more generally, about what sorts of institutional wiggle room are available to what sorts of elites. could the american military change its weird quasi-chivalric ideology if it wanted to?

and then there's pages and pages of notes about pushes, pulls, carrots, sticks, resource types, priorities. say your group is of type "stick," and your resources change. does the violence your people use also change? my guess: yes, because you shift your remaining resources to consequating rules that are more strategically important and consequences are pretty much it for your guys. whereas the ideal-typical carrot (where by "carrot" i mean "indoctrination") guys are all "i know comandante's off having lunch, but do we really need this guy's TV/daughter/scalp for the cause?"

or something like that.

the prospectus update is really just a prelude to the cautionary tale, however. the moral of the cautionary tale, which i'm going to hit you with up front because i can't think of any animal allegories, is that no matter how invested you are in your work-thinking, you should save some space and time for other stuff, because there will come a time in that investment when you shouldn't (unethical) or can't (incoherent [see above]) write about work-thinking on your shooting-the-shit blog.

if you are me, and the above scenario comes to pass, you will then be very sad, because your shooting-the-shit blog, which used to contain an insight once in a while, is now mostly full of long meditations that everyone on the left has already thought of or said better. very notably for me: the more i think about the iraq war academically, the less i can blog it. but also, the more i contemplate violence, the less i have to say about gender in academia, food politics, appearance politics or my (now frustratingly, comprehensively back-burner-ed) religious life. it is a fine way, if one is not careful, to cut oneself off from all the interesting insights that haven't been peer-reviewed (i.e., most of them).

so: work-thinking is like a zebra mussel or that really motor-clogging algae some of the northern minnesota lakes are getting, in that it's fine in its own habitat but liable to invasion, takeover, and eventual ecosystem death unless its travel is carefully controlled.

and, oops, i've arrived at an animal allegory for my moral. dangit.

twofer

2007-06-28T15:23:00.000-04:00

shorter roberts court: dude. if you can manage some de facto residential redlining we'll give you segregated schools for free!

and speaking of the expansion of executive power

2007-06-26T14:14:00.001-04:00

please read the washington post's series on dick cheney this week. the second installment is the, um, "best," where by best i mean most informative and by extension most viscerally upsetting, so far.

scotus hackery

2007-06-26T12:49:00.000-04:00

as is often the case, antonin scalia said it best: "This faux judicial restraint is judicial obfuscation."

such has often been true for conservative ("restrained") justices, including scalia himself, but the string of 5-4 overrules and political pandering that has characterized the roberts court so far is more dispiriting than usual. the partial birth abortion act; "bong hits 4 jesus"; now an absurdist rendering of our already rather toothless campaign finance law.

a meaningless message duct-taped to a sheet is not, according to the new majority, protected speech because it references drugs. (also jesus, but something tells me they'da been ok with that.) on the other hand, when it comes to huge corporations, unions and wealthy lobbies, roberts wrote: "Where the First Amendment is implicated, the tie goes to the speaker, not the censor."

now, i understand, to a point, the history of first amendment law in schools. fine. carol nackenoff dragged us through several weeks of this jurisprudence five years ago, just so that i could understand how "the tie goes to the speaker" is not necessarily applicable in a school setting. but this is really not about the differential standards for protected speech in school and non-school settings. this is about "bong hits" versus the big money campaigning. about how having lots and lots of money makes one's speech a little bit more, um, speechy. (thanks, stephen colbert.)

hacks! they are hacks. we have long suspected that they are hacks. and now they are hacks who have a bare majority, hacks whose hackery is exposed precisely by the bareness of that majority. i don't see any striving for consensus. i don't see anything but the ratification of unprincipled, narrowly political decision-making as the court's new modus operandi.

i guess this is a data point in favor of terry moe's argument about the expansion of executive power: there's no stable equilibrium; having exercised that constitutionally mandated apopintment power and gotten more staff and administrative resources for the appointment process and thereby more appointment power and thereby more resources for the appointment process...well, you get the picture. jeffrey toobin has it right in the current new yorker: "The days when justices surprised the Presidents who appointed them are over[.]" meaning: that "removed from the political process" rhetoric that has always been a key talking point for the least dangerous branch? done for.

can't sleep

2007-06-23T05:01:00.000-04:00

...must play on flickr. i turned pro, added a bunch of new sets, and uploaded all the fun photos since february.

"fashion is not a luxury" (?)

2007-06-21T17:09:00.000-04:00

embarrassing admission: i occasionally read the nyt style section, and i more than occasionally check in on cathy horyn's blogamajig. this week, a conversation with sarah jessica parker about her cheap-ass and relatively cute new clothing line is actually worth a little bit of comment.

bitten, as it is known, is sold in sizes 0 to 22; it is not marketing to teenagers or to soccer moms; she claims there's an interest in quality construction; it's cheap as hell (think $10 handbags, $20 coats). the populist marketing rhetoric is pretty intense -- note the cheese-a-riffic flash animation leading off her site. "fashion is not a luxury. it's a right."

the times style section has been pushing "rights" like this for a while now. prior to parker's line it was a puff piece about forever 21, which sells to a younger crowd at similar prices. but the question that never gets asked is...who's making these clothes? with what sort of materials? six-year-olds in hot rooms, with factory farmed and chemically treated fibers, i'd wager. this is populism in name only -- the move being made here is just to replace "fashion is for the rich" with the even more dangerous (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) "ethical consumption is for the rich."

you've got questions

2007-06-20T19:53:00.000-04:00

...i've got answers!

from comments to the last entry: (1) what in God's name is hrdag? (2) what will you do there? (3) what do you mean, three to five years?

(1) hrdag is the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, which provides and assists quantitative analyses of human rights abuses all over the world. "objective, undeniable evidence" geared toward accountability is the key goal. for example, patrick recently testified to his findings at the icty trial milan milutinovic. hrdag has also been involved in creating a sampling scheme at the guatemalan national police archive. another grad student who works with hrdag (jeff, from stanford computer science) has invented a software system to help us match cases across multiple human rights datasets.

(2) unclear. i will definitely continue to work on my own pet project, which is the recovery and analysis of data from the (1980-1992) civil war in el salvador. these data have been mangled by time and old formats, but there are three surprisingly complete, detailed sets, if i can just wrangle them correctly. there are several other projects i'm interested in (mainly in latin america and west africa), but i'll be earning my keep by helping out with various phases of analysis on projects from all over the globe -- everything from checking the accuracy of the data against paper records to writing final analyses.

(3) three to five years! this is my favorite question of all. (unfortunately,) i don't mean i'll be living in cali for three to five years -- rather, that within the next three to five years i'll start trying to make california my permanent home. my philadelphia household and i ("a feral hat," which is an anagram of our initials, because we are huge dorks) realized recently that it was going to take a relatively serious amount of planning and resolve for us to stay present in one another's lives -- and that, however great your intentions, it's hard to be present from a long ways off. then we thought for a while about what sort of place we would (and, jobwise, could) all live. the answer we arrived at is "california in three to five years," after we've mostly finished being slaves to postgraduate education and other preparatory projects.

[fig. 1: a feral hat]

home away from huh?

2007-06-17T00:16:00.000-04:00

i'm staying a while longer in california, people. i am thrilled. the situation, as yet officially unofficial, is that come fall i'll be working at hrdag in a shiny new capacity, i.e., i'll be actually working at hrdag as opposed to simply leeching skills, office supplies and python manuals. (there will still be some of that, of course.) plus the dissertation will go zooming right ahead, which is key.

also, did i mention that i am thrilled? i'm thrilled for people reasons, food reasons, Work-Life Balance (TM) reasons, health insurance reasons, professional reasons, you name it. (i will refrain from mentioning the confiscatory housing market or the strange audition process required to enter said market; i will refrain from mentioning BART's horrific underbay squealing or the untrustworthiness of the 51 bus. because i'm thrilled!)

it's been hard to come up with correct language for the bay area's relation to me. case in point: this afternoon i had a moment of ah, california, my home away from home which segued quickly into but which home? and from there on to do i have a home? somehow, it's impossible that "home away from home" is the aptest phrase for "the place i'll stay for about eighteen months, which is not the other place where i was for twenty-eight months, during which time i occupied three separate apartments, only one of which ever had my pictures on the walls." somehow, the brand new solidity of my plan to stick around here has made me feel my (past and future, fieldwork and writeup related) itinerancy incredibly keenly -- and, as it turns out, i am not someone who appreciates the sensation "unsettled."

partial solution: damn the torpedoes (and the expense)! send the books and the pictures and the bedclothes from the east! (also possibly some kitchen supplies. can i send sharp knives bulk rate?) in keeping with a feral hat's recent "in three to five years" consensus, the correct long-run view is ah, california, my home, full stop. after everyone has moved here, i won't have to be updated on breakfast-time drug policy reforms by telephone.

working vacay wrapup

2007-06-12T23:18:00.000-04:00

so, we went to south america! this was a first for me, as my sole previous international travel experience consisted of (1) a slice of jamaica that was just like america, only with even more decadent white people and (2) egypt. (#2 seems to have convinced me that every large non-american city should and will be exactly like cairo, which served me well in the charging across multiple lanes of traffic game, which is played in bogota with nothing like the abandon necessary in cairo but also nothing like the restraint present in any american city.)

the trip was "generative," i keep telling people. this means that it was not always fun but that it was always provocative -- of new ideas, ambitions and seeming necessities as well as of excitement and frustration. (don't worry, it was pretty fun too. also incredibly beautiful!)

we set up shop in the apartment that serves also as hrdag's bogota office, six people and seven computers and cords everywhere, and we hacked and hacked and hacked.

when we weren't hacking, we were busy eating new fruits (guanábana, lulo and feijoa were my favorites, although the sweet and crunchy "happy poop fruit" -- not its real name, i promise -- was also yummy) or eating at one of bogota's seemingly endless supply of fine restaurants, or talking with colleagues from a million and one organizations about data, politics, and the politics of data.

there's not enough anonymity in all the interwebs for me to do our many conversations justice, but i think i can safely say that colombia's war is a place in which the empirical, who-did-what-to-whom (and how many times and where) truth is clear to no one. maybe the broad outlines are coming into focus, but that's an exceptionally weak maybe, a maybe that in any case can only speak for a few times and places. there's no excuse for it -- i should know better! -- but in my naivete i was taken aback by the extent to which violence data and the interpretation thereof have become their own front in this conflict. (indeed, information and interpretation seem to be the one place in this conflict with conventional front lines: clearly identifiable, relatively impermeable and bitterly contested.)

"interesting" doesn't begin to do justice to our talks with colleagues outside of HRDAG. it doesn't really begin to do justice to our internal conversations, either. what was initially envisioned as a "let's get the colombia project really moving, hip hip hooray" sort of junket turned into an all-out frenzy (and i mean that in the best way), with data from at least four countries in various stages of disrepair and deduplication. my own work gave rise to a number of wackily intense sleep-deprived mood swings, as it became clear that (a) the data are nowhere near their finally ready state and (b) i can probably begin the matching process anyway. [this is Very Good News, as i'm counting on those descriptives for APSA in september.]

the matching process -- generally the object around which the last week was built -- also gave us plentiful opportunities to have bigger conversations about epistemologies, specifically the differing levels of epistemology involved in building the software, implementing the software, grokking the results that the software can offer, and trusting the grokked stuff. and then of course, the social scientists among us were on our high horses about what might be causally claimed on the basis of our trust in the grokked stuff.

in sum, the week was a single long opportunity to think [much more clearly than social scientists typically seem to] about the sensitivity of our analyses to the processes that generate our variables. qualitatively-oriented folks have been doing this for some time (occasionally self-defeatingly so), but dismantling the awesome and not-so-well-deserved rhetorical power of The Comprehensive Data Set has been a long time coming.

long story short, i'm all fired up and also kind of terrified -- i'll be back in bogota (plus maybe medellin?) next month, by which point i'll need to have mastered all the available information on conflict think tanks and NGO's and advanced my spanish well beyond its current state, which can be summarized as "i understand this, but damned if i can figure out any words to say in response." and i'm also trying to learn some more python? and finish my prospectus? and move? at the moment my ok-o-meter is swinging between RAWK! and OMGWTF!!1!, but i'm confident that i'll quit oscillating and settle somewhere in the middle.

in bogota!

2007-06-05T01:04:00.000-04:00

meg and i (and a whole other big chunk of the hrdag team) are in colombia for a week -- this may or may not mean light posting. i haven't seen the city in daylight yet, so can't gloat about that, but in my first hour here i had two fruits i'd never seen before.

oh hai wrk-rltd humorz!!11!

2007-05-31T16:14:00.000-04:00

lolcode.com

memorial day II: identity politics

2007-05-28T19:41:00.000-04:00

christian americans or american christians?

i found this piece via crooked timber, where the startling fact of the matter is that the christian case against patriotism (or at least, against nationalism, distinction per michael hechter) is taken to be, like, wow! new and exciting! christians not bloodthirsty xenophobes? who'da thunk it?!

...which itself is a sad testament to the brand of "christianity" that's recently been ascendant here in the U.S.

it's memorial day

2007-05-28T13:45:00.000-04:00

i hate the
(way congress rolled over for)
(people who got us into)
(fact that we can't seem to leave the)
(hubris and malevolence that made this)
(numbers killed in our)
(way my patriotism is questioned unless i support)
(fog of)
(determined ignorance of the costs of)
(kids without parents because of)
(parents wihtout kids because of)
(class politics of every american)
(fact of)
war.

ps: read counterinsurgency expert andrew bacevich on his son's death in iraq.

a berkeley bowl in every neighborhood?

2007-05-26T20:05:00.000-04:00

i was thrilled to read that progress plaza is getting a real live grocery store.

(interesting to note that the grocery story was -- inexplicably, i'd say -- filed under U.S. rather than Health. maybe lead health reporter jane brody has embargoed the dangerous suggestion that there are social obstacles to her upper-income-quintile lifestyle prescriptions?)

i was less thrilled to hear that the new store will be a Fresh Grocer. it's not that i bear fresh grocer any particular antipathy -- i just wonder whether this is the right solution for north philly. fresh grocer in university city is a yuppie haven where penn kids spend oodles of cash on fancy shit. sort of a more-commercialized whole foods.

if price is the problem, the solution is unclear. it's sure as shit not safeway or, as we know from painful experience, cousin's. meg and i were talking about this over breakfast this morning and she wondered: why not berkeley bowl? it's not that the bowl doesn't make money (i think); it's not that the bowl sells high; it's not that it can sell low because everything's local. is it that the folks who come for the fancy-ass cheeses and whatnot are subsidizing the folks who come for the canned goods and apples and sweet potatoes? is it the bulk section?

and if it's those things, as opposed to berkeley specifics, then why don't we see more markets like this? related food policy question: why aren't CSA's more aggressively marketed to low-income communities? or are they, and it just doesn't work? is it transportation? is it that CSA's can't take food stamps? is it...what is it? (yes, i know there are time and energy and cultural capital issues about actually preparing CSA food, and fresh food in general. how serious are they?)

in the meantime: godspeed, fresh grocer. anything's better than popeye's and dollar store mac and cheese every night.

priorities

2007-05-25T13:06:00.001-04:00

last para of today's times article on the long-overdue minimum wage increase (!!!):

"The White House had opposed many of the domestic spending provisions, which totaled $22 billion. Republicans managed to remove some of them shortly before the bill reached the floor, including $660 million to stockpile medicine for a flu pandemic and $400 million for energy assistance for low-income families."

i totally love it when we take comparatively small amounts of money away from real problems so that we can (a) keep pretending we're fiscally conservative and (b) stuff it down other, more swiftly flowing cash drains.

just for instance, total congressional appropriations for the iraq war as of november: $300 billion. the same CFR article places the possible total cost (that's direct costs, not economic fallout, btw) at something closer to a trillion dollars over the long run.

50,000 + anarcho-zombie insurgents

2007-05-22T16:09:00.000-04:00

sometime last night i had my fifty thousandth hit! i had been hoping to make it to 50,000 before july (my five-year bloggiversary), so i'm a couple of months early. thanks for putting up with me for so long, all you people.

i've had a couple of interesting conversations recently about how reading testimonies and working with data on political violence has ruined my composure when it comes to media portrayals of violence. for example, yesterday i was chatting with dan, and said: "i really can't handle media violence that could conceivably be real. zombies and ghosts, fine; counterinsurgency, no way. random gun violence, even less ok."

partially in honor of my declaration, and partially because i knew meg would never come with me, dan and i went to the 9:30 showing of 28 weeks later, the sequel to 28 days later, the gory but very smart fast-zombie flick from 2002.

unfortunately for me, 28 weeks later features a whole chunk of real-world-y violence, more than i suppose i expected from the times review. in fact, on seeing the movie i think that the usual schtick about how zombie movies are "biting social commentary" (ha. ha. ha.) was used without much reflection on what this movie -- a startlingly different film from its predecessor -- actually has to teach us. that one was about the possibilities for mutually beneficial solidarity, even when the rest of the world turns hobbesian on you. this one...well, this one is about how the general was right when he said they should shoot that innocent civilian.

"green zone" aside, the iraq (vietnam, el salvador, whatever) parallels provided here are hardly of the leftist variety. i'll try and save some of the suspense (and, dear God, it is almost painfully suspenseful, this movie), but i think it important to point out the fact that 28 weeks later is essentially calling for a curtis lemay solution to its undead insurgency: the only military preventative for infection (zombies are known as "infecteds") is overwhelming firepower. the consequences of humanitarianism, according to the domino theory of ravening zombies presented here, include massive (necessary) civilian massacres by ostensibly peacekeeping forces and rapidly spreading global catastrophe.

bonus, however: the times review contains one of the best ratings tags i've ever seen:

“28 Weeks Later” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Rabid zombies feast on living flesh, which causes their potential victims to utter an occasional obscenity.

sex versus aging with atul gawande

2007-05-19T03:51:00.000-04:00

embarrassing admission: i am a medical-tales junkie. i am even more of a medical-tales junkie when medical tales have to do with health care policy. (like many of my political-cultural-intellectual preoccupations, this one can be traced to a ken sharpe class, in this case practical wisdom.)

so i've been enjoying the month of guest columns by the current new yorker medical writer, atul gawande, in the times. he's not meant to do short form, i don't think -- many of these columns seem too pat, or merely commonsensical, or insufficiently dense. but most have been well worth the reading, and today's is no exception. after going through some terrifying statistics on birth control failure rates, he arrives at a policy prescription: we (that's the state-and-society we) should be more explicit about sex and birth control. he continues more ominously:

An effective national campaign would provide the details — on television, on billboards — and actively use what evidence shows works best to cut our massive rate of unwanted pregnancies. But politics precludes this. There’s not going to be such a campaign anytime soon.

but then, rather breezily:

Nonetheless, there’s no reason you have to join the one in three — or as a male, contribute to it. You just have to understand: the effort is strictly Do-It-Yourself.

i guess that, strictly and literally speaking, that's true. but the oddly individualistic DIY exhortation takes the edge off the epidemiological fact of the matter, namely: information is not free. for fuck's sake, we need those billboards.

gawande's most recent long piece runs in a similar sort of way but doesn't sidestep the difficulties with individualistic, DIY solutions -- here, investigating the decline of geriatrics, gawande gets to the state-and-society piece of the puzzle (not enough geriatric specialists for the aging population), shows how some well-heeled individuals cope (fancy-ass retirement communities, extremely good preventative care), and assesses the costs (hella high). DIY, or analogs thereto, begin to seem like less and less of an option.

this despite the fact that the much-missed geriatricians perform essentially the same role as the longed-for sex billboards: they provide preventative information. to be sure, it's personally-tailored, but it's really the same sort of (statistical) information. birth control fails 8% of the time; there are three important risk factors for falls in older adults. so why would we read the information-to-effort ratio as so much lower when we're talking about sex?

(or is this a path dependency problem -- gawande knows that there have been and could be geriatricians; he's never seen an american sex ed campaign; somebody call paul pierson -- ?)

the things we do with our privileges

2007-05-17T15:55:00.000-04:00

like, for example, spending thousands of wholly unnecessary dollarsto perfect your isolation. is it just me, or is this article really, really sad? (maybe not on its own; maybe only in relation to the news from the rest of the world?)

anyway, ugh.

class reading, habits of mind

2007-05-17T00:55:00.000-04:00

as usual, i am catching up on timothy burke's blog after an extended lapse. (sadly, my current modal procrastination is something more on the intellectual level of a lolcat, although i've been enoying the nerdlier explications of lolcat etymology right along with the cute kitties.)

about a week ago, burke posted a little treatise on reading: several of his students' reflective essays seem to blame college for sucking the joy out of reading. perhaps intentionally (?), it makes an interesting companion to his previous "how to read in college" piece, since the one explores the (potential) joylessness of college reading and the other gives tips on successful joylessness (success as joylessness?).

there are lots of great points to grab on to, but i suppose the most important for me is the incomplete connection between pedagogical purpose and non-joylessness ("pleasure," not "joy"). the idea -- simple to grasp and very hard to implement -- is that reading for class needs to be both more and less than fun:

When I think about how I want to make the act and experience of reading in my classes create delight, pleasure, discovery, I have to also think about how I want that reading to require my guidance and how I can guarantee that this reading is knowledge-producing as well as pleasurable. In short, to justify the value of taking a course here with me, an experience which doesn’t come cheap. I can’t just say, "Let us talk about how this book pleases us."

that is exactly right for the humanities, i'd say, but does it apply in my field?

a bit later in the essay burke goes on to say that

I think for me, it’s about playfulness in how we read in courses, about being able to switch channels from weighty historicism to aestheticism to personal reflection to information extraction without relentlessly or ideologically demanding any of those as exclusive practices of reading.

and

It’s about leaving room for different kinds of minds to get different kinds of value from reading a kind of text, and mixing up the types and modes of writing that we use to explore a subject.

this sort of reflection sounds fantastic when applied to novels, or the cultural significance(s) of novels, or (say) the construction of narratives about events in a community.

i'm a little less certain how i'd go about reconciling "delight, pleasure, discovery" in the interpretive act of reading with the need to document and predict exactly what the "events in a community" were. which is another way to say: when we're teaching empirical social science, how do we usefully "switch channels from weighty historicism to aestheticism to personal reflection to information extraction"? put it another way -- and here think about what it means to take pleasure in math: to what extent does social science have room for "different kinds of minds"? everyone in my classroom needs to understand how hypothesis testing, case selection and model identification work. at a fundamental level, it wouldn't be political science without those things.

i had the "channel-switching" experience fairly often as an undergrad -- my own stories with gender and appearance politics got filtered through conversations, theoretical reading, and the news until they arrived at the comparative politics literature on electoral systems. (and hey! that's the essay that got me into grad school!) we read aristotle with ken and foundered for a while until we figured out how it fit into poole and rosenthal with rick. (also, how it fit into Our Whole Lives, but that's another entry.) in latin american politics we were asked for "interesting points" from the reading (an aesthetic question: what in this text is evocative for you?) during each class session. some of the interesting points were merely interesting; some became cornerstone examples or disproofs. certainly listening to clumsy debates about moral and historical (not statistical) significance illuminated ways that the theories at hand might be mutually exclusive.

i did some joyless reading, and some joyless learning, in college, but that sure wasn't it. on the other hand, i didn't learn much about hypothesis testing. we never read KKV. and a few of my strongly held conclusions were, on later reflection, better indicators of my own preferences about how the world should be than of how the world actually was.

the sorts of meandering high-risk intellectual paths that i took when i studied poli sci at swarthmore appear less and less often since i started at yale. it's not that it doesn't happen at all: international relations began with two weeks of philosophy of science, comparative politics professors have been known to demand novel- and memoir-reading. but these folks are (relatively) few and far between, and even they seem to frown quizzically when the comment is "that point in X really reminds me of this detail from Y" or "how does X connect to Y?" even at the undergrad level, it seems that the dominant approach to reading is critical and data-based. everybody knows about hypothesis testing and case selection and model identification (oh my!), and that is what everyone is expected to talk about.

and so, back to the difference(s) between humanities and social sciences. it seems easier (and maybe more theoretically justifiable) to introduce "delight, pleasure, discovery" in the humanities, where standards of evidence and interpretation are different, and where a narrow subset of the theoretically possible stances and habits of mind is less important to success in the discipline. but perhaps the tradeoff would seem less steep if we were more invested in teaching as an end in itself?

oops, plus hitchens

2007-05-13T23:05:00.000-04:00

i am so sick of this dude.

the conundrums (conundra?) that kinsley points to in the review i've linked seem so pale and laughable. these are things that bothered me when i was ten. but, as usual (lately), it seems hitchens is either unwilling or unable to engage his ostensible adversaries with any sort of respectful knowledge. it's...distasteful. and oddly like fundamentalism.

bringing the O back in (+ update)

2007-05-13T22:25:00.000-04:00

ryan wrote to me, suggesting that i may have been too focused on the "conflict and violence" part of "order, conflict and violence" as i constructed my initial plea below. this is a common complaint from those among us who are interested in the less-disquieting aspects of relationships between states, potential states, and folks on the ground.

so. before launching into a somewhat epic description of songs i'm'n'a include in my little mix (and their theoretical significance), a brief pause to ask: please, send us some songs about state formation. or the maintenance of order, or what have you.

suggestions so far: "up the wolves" (mountain goats) references the mythology behind the founding of rome; "wait a minute mr. postman" (marvelettes) clearly speaks to an important aspect of american state formation and development. and then there's this, which i shall quote from the email in its entirety: "FOR ORDER PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE INCLUDE WE BUILT THIS CITY ON ROCK AND ROLL BY JEFFERSON STARSHIP."

which, yes, of course. how could we not?

without further ado, friends, the OCV mixtape (as it currently stands; i'm still thinking about how to sequence the songs):

"Goodnight Saigon," Billy Joel (Abbey): recruitment, socialization/traumatization, reintegration issues
"Knuckles," The Hold Steady (Amelia): state weakness and paramilitary organizations in the american midwest, "kevlar vests against the crystal flakes"
"Fuck tha Police," NWA/Rage Against the Machine (Laurel): grievance.
"Shankill Butchers"/"Culling of the Fold," The Decemberists (Amelia): The Troubles; targeted versus indiscriminate violence against civilians.
"Diamonds from Sierra Leone," Kanye West (Amelia): greed.
"Pull up the People," M.I.A. (Laurel): grievance.
"War," Outcast (Anonymous): proxy wars, violence against civilians.
"Born in the USA," Bruce Springsteen (Anonymous): dynamics of recruitment (esp. class)
"Fortunate Son," CCR (Amelia): dynamics of recruitment (esp. class)
"Sunday Bloody Sunday," U2 (Abbey): 'cause, duh.
"Bombs over Baghdad," Outkast (Ryan): duh again.
"Spanish Bombs," The Clash (Ryan): Spanish civil war, "i think."
"Hit 'Em Up," 2Pac (Ryan): "this is the song all about the various ways he wants to kill biggie and extends the vendetta to bad boy records 'as a staff, record label, and a motherfucking crew. if you're down with bad boy fuck you too' -- alliance, endogeneity of cleavages to conflict, brutalization.
"The Hook," Stephen Malkmus (Ryan): Pirates!

in other news, it's been a crazy few weeks here at House of Data, Lots of Data, Data That You Need or Else You Will Be Wrong. first, we went to boston to present our paper at a conference. as is typical with conferences, it was a mix-and-match experience. without being overspecific, i think it's fair to say that social science ph.d. training inculcates habits of mind that are (a) useful and (b) limiting. we are -- as meg and i pointed out -- pretty obsessed with identification, with causal modeling, and that's for good reason.

on the other hand, it does seem as if many semesters of "how to criticize a causal theory" may have blunted our ability to reason on our feet about other sorts of inferential problems. meg and i were speaking about measurement and how it might affect inference, and it seemed that there was general, passive agreement. but no one knew how to have a conversation about it. very odd. on the whole, however, it was a great time. lots of very smart people with very interesting ideas, in different stages of development. i may be speaking too soon, but i think that my particular interest in armed group structures might be group-ifying.

then i saw friends! lots of friends! and had numerous important conversations. compared to the pre-conference era, i am up a lot of Life Insight and one dissertation committee member. i am also, and this was the genesis of the previous post, increasingly unsure about precisely what my long-term plans are. there's no question about finishing; there's just the nagging issue of precisely in what manner.

however. we can forget all-or-most of that for the moment. things in berkeley are beautiful as usual. i got a minor and somehow affirming sunburn this morning, eating thai brunch on the library lawn with emily, meg and a parade of people-watching gold.

painful (in)decision(s)

2007-05-06T13:58:00.000-04:00

but at least it's nice outside.

OCV mix tape

2007-04-26T19:20:00.000-04:00

first things first: i saw the decemberists last night, and even from the balcony it was great. since my crap speakers and i aren't good at picking up orchestration by ear, i always love seeing it. it makes me do ridiculous things like yell out "pedal steel! wow!" it also occurred to me, walking back from BART at a later-than-reasonable hour, that i hadn't been to an, ahem, show-show -- as opposed to a show in a bar or a vfw or a what-have-you -- for quite some time. this was a show-show! with big pre-orchestrated light cues and a fancy backdrop and an ornate proscenium venue, oh my.

top to bottom, it was pretty much fantastic. i'd venture a guess that colin meloy was either heavily produced on the album or suffering from some vocal problems last night, because the high notes were consistently flat and a bit shaky. i shocked myself by being much less bothered by that than i had intended. among other highlights, shankill butchers was awesomely creepy, with the band standing in a small knot bathed by only red light, and audience participation on sixteen military wives (the la, di da, di da, di...etc...somg) was a blast. there was also a gigantic papier-mache whale for the mariner's revenge. favorite thing, more generally: this is a group that knows how to work a vamp -- under (always funny) quasi-monologue; as bridge between songs, whatever. those of us who fell out of showtuneland and into pop (or rock or whatever the decemberists are) fandom can really appreciate that facility.

but the point of this entry was not to review a concert, because i am a better gusher than a reviewer, and not even a sufficiently knowledgeable gusher. (speaking of which: mmm, gushers.) anyway, the point! was to note that listening to "shankill butchers" last night got me thinking about how it (and its sort-of-companion "culling of the fold") referred to a real paramilitary group (also "real" in the sense that the story showcases how thin was the line between The Troubles and straight-up criminality or sadism). and of course contemplating shankill butchers that way got me thinking about other order-conflict-and/or-violence-referencing songs, especially those that refer to a particular dynamic we might be interested in, or to a particular case. "diamonds from sierra leone" comes to mind, but after that i'm sort of stumped, except for a big ol' heap of british and american folk music. i guess there's always "buffalo soldier," but i'm not sure that we really capture the full dynamic of coerced recruitment with "buffalo soldier, dreadlock rasta...woy yoy yoy yoy..."

help?

oh no he didn't

2007-04-23T19:58:00.000-04:00

...just compare himself to lincoln.

oh, wait. yes he did. my mistake. asshat.

in other news, i have an inordinately long discussion on the friars of the renewal, intentional communities, asceticism, and the dangers of pride coming right up.

sadly, it really is all about disrespect

2007-04-20T00:34:00.000-04:00

haven't posted about this yet, because i had a really pause-giving conversation with my awesome pro-life housemate about the dangers of consequentialism. plus, thinking about it makes me weary. however, let it be known (i'm sure you're all shocked) that i find the supreme court's d&x decision not only un-constitutional but deeply insulting. read bitch phd for some terrifying factoids.

several more

2007-04-19T18:14:00.000-04:00

1. danblim wrote in comments to the last entry, which wondered why shootings at virginia tech seem so jarring to americans: "My sense is we get captivated by the unexpected deaths. We expect people to die in a war zone. We expect people to die in the inner cities. We don't expect it in a classroom."

this is an interesting take. the question i would ask is whether it's relevant to the question. at one level, of course it is: true that we expect people to die in wars and inner cities, rather than in german class. at another level, it begs some questions about priors. if expectation is going to be key, we should ask whence the expectations. why do we expect baghdad to be a war zone? how have we reconciled ourselves to that? similarly: why do we expect gun violence in west philadelphia? (after all, there are -- or were -- german classes in both of those places too.) in irritatingly circular fashion we arrive back at the usual beef: somehow certain lives just seem more important than others.

2. as anne points out, thursday april 17, 1997, was not actually evacuation day. thursday, i ditched school (!) and helped nancy devine clear out her house. given that it's now the 19th (the *actual* day we left our house), i'll just say it again: it is very funny to realize that ten years have passed. anne used the phrase "colored by something that feels like nostalgia" to describe those remembrances, and i wholeheartedly agree.

3. about this women in (possibly computer, but pretty much any) science thing. i should point out that i mostly posted it because i felt that the article i had linked to took an incredibly naive view: as if the reason women didn't enter computer science in larger numbers was their aversion to pocket protectors, rather than a magnified version of all the structural factors that keep women out of top-flight academia more generally. because: at least at the upper levels of the bell curve, the problem with getting women into computer science isn't that they don't take the intro classes; it's that they (1) don't find mentors and colleagues who look like them (yes, it matters) and (2) are wearied by the combative atmosphere that pervades a lot of science-y environments and (3) are tasked with too much domestic/femininity-maintenance labor to maintain the sort of singular focus required at the very top.

however, andrew points out that a couple of these things are pretty inseparable from that stupid phrase, "the nerd factor." hmmm. there's also the question of whether i meant "computer science" or "science" or "academia" and, honestly, i haven't figured that one out yet. put it this way: i think that there's a certain inattention to the constructive part of "constructive criticism" that seems to get worse the "harder" the science. on the other hand, i don't have enough evidence to really support that.

4. summer funding reconstituted! from an email sent by my director of grad studies to the relevant dean: "I approve for Amelia to receive funding this summer. She is working hard on her research and training and it is entirely appropriate that she is eligible for funding." have i mentioned before that, aside from being a completely fantastic scholar, our DGS is a completely fantastic person? no? well, my bad.

several

2007-04-17T15:19:00.000-04:00

1. interesting how tragedies relatively close to home hold our attention. (i'll do us all a favor and not link to this week's death toll from similarly sized attacks in iraq. or indeed the homicide total for this month in philadelphia.) is there a way to mourn sincerely and still remember that our ability to mourn for 32 is a sign of some pretty hefty privilege? also, can we wait just a few days before we turn it into a debate about gun control?

2. today is ten years since i was evacuated from my house in grand forks, which is somehow very funny to recall.

3. women in computer science: did you know that we're staying away because we don't like the "nerd factor"? funny, i would have thought it was the aggresivity norm, the lack of mentors and the hugely punitive working hours (which don't match well with our continuing second shift problem).

4. my summer funding evaporated. note to yale: maybe it would be a good idea to tell your graduate students up front that, if they take a semester of non-cumulative registration, they are ineligible for the funding they've been guaranteed for the summer following that semester. just a thought.

they printed it in the style section

2007-04-15T21:30:00.000-04:00

i think i know what twisty faster would say about the times' decision to place this article chronicling a serial rape charge in the style section. there'd be something about how the rapes take a backseat to the fashion-insider fame of the accused (rendering this a style story rather than a news story) because that is how much the patriarchy hates and disregards women. i can also envision a bit about how the fashion industry (as an outgrowth of the patriarchy) is pretty much entirely about the domination of women in any case, and so the editorial choice is actually rather appropriate.

i'm not sure which of those possibilities is more horrifying, because my wee brain has been all but fried by the following paragraphs, in which this hideous person's hideous lawyer makes with the "dirty sluts" defense:

The dark-eyed, 33-year-old fashion designer has been released on $1.3 million bail after having been charged last month by the district attorney’s office in Los Angeles County with 32 counts of rape, sexual battery, lewd acts on a child and other ugly crimes, against a dozen women — all models — aged 14 to 23.

“It’s the pattern of a sexual predator,” said Jane Robison, the spokeswoman for the district attorney. “It’s a serious, serious case.”

Ronald Richards, Mr. Jon’s defense lawyer, said this is a case of thwarted expectations: the young women had sought to trade sex for a career in fashion. “You can’t fault a man if women throw themselves at him,” he said.

[snip]

She arrived by taxi at his Beverly Hills apartment around 11 p.m., according to the police report. She went upstairs, entered Mr. Jon’s bedroom and changed into yoga pants and a T-shirt. She sat on the bed. He kissed her. She said she was menstruating and asked him to stop, putting up her arms.

“Is this the only reason you brought me here?” she asked, according to the report.

“Not the only thing,” he responded.

Then, the report says, he forced her to have oral sex. He proceeded to have intercourse with her, but she first asked that he “at least use a condom.” He declined.

Afterward she went to clean up. Mr. Jon sat and meditated.

The following day, after going out to eat with two of Mr. Jon’s assistants, the model went to a rape center in Santa Monica, Calif., which sent her to the police station in Beverly Hills, where the sexual encounter occurred. Mr. Jon was arrested the next day, and an indictment soon followed.

“Why would she change into pajamas?” asked Mr. Richards, Mr. Jon’s lawyer. “Why didn’t she leave when she sees there’s no bed for her? Why didn’t she punch him in the face?” He noted that there were no signs of physical trauma. “My client is 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds. He’s a thin Gandhi-type guy. He can’t overpower anybody. Any girl would kick his butt. It’s not even a close call. That’s what’s so silly about this.”

p.s.: looking to be even more incensed? check out the not-entirely-implicit assertion that the accused was just "promiscuous" and "couldn't control himself."

grocery list at rest

2007-04-14T20:13:00.000-04:00

we took a break today from a marathon of yes-virginia-your-bias-really-is-that-bad (to be presented at this thing in a couple of weeks) in order to make a bowl run. what's on the table -- too much for me to enjoy listing it -- weighs 47.76 pounds and cost $44.01.

in other news, there are pictures of the p&m kitkits, wendy and elsie, on the flickr page. (don't be afraid. wendy's eyes don't actually glow like that.)

one sentence on rock music

2007-04-11T13:36:00.000-04:00

i am not a particular fan of iggy pop, or more generally of music reviews in the times, but i am a huge fan of the following sentence: "How he re-enacts fear, rage, sex, abject boredom, universal love and lethal cynicism, while dancing with originality, remembering lyrics and maintaining the delicate middle-state between having pants on and not having pants on, is why he is he, and you are merely you."

marathon holy week roundup

2007-04-09T19:39:00.000-04:00

happy (belated) easter! it's been grant applications and workshop talks and church, oh my! on palm sunday, i swallowed some major liturgical worries and headed off to church at the university lutheran chapel, where the processions are not solemn and the altar is in the middle.

[public speaking]

we spent most of the week commuting back and forth between berkeley and palo alto, putting finishing touches on a presentation for thursday and wending our way through some exciting python code. i learned how to translate the "dude, where's my natural experiment?" slide eventually got cut from our talk, but i still managed to give a brief and slightly coherent digression on instrumental variables in the Q&A.

[last supper]

instead of the usual anglicized quasi-seder, my maundy thursday meal took place in an asian fusion restaurant where the talk was appropriate estimators for standard error in multiple systems estimation, good san francisco restaurants, and (!!!) SUV vandalism. after a couple of weeks of bandying it about at social gatherings, my conclusion is that the vandalism conundrum captivates just about anyone who's offended by climate change. i arrived back at the house to a terrifyingly large amount of chocolate -- leavened with LCD rubber duckies, a kazoo and a harmonica -- recently arrived from minnesota.

[actually not a digression]

wow, we sure are throwing a lot of money at plan colombia. good thing it works so well for everyone.

[wisdom of Mom]

(good) friday i slept off a cold, talked to laurel about chchchanges, and then called my mum to thank her for the box of calories. in the course of the conversation i was lamenting my recent 'laziness,' which i put down to lack of motivation to do something i'm not (yet) good at. shocking revelation: it's tough to stay on task when your tasks seem designed to remind you how far you have to go. "just imagine how my LD kids feel," she said. right then! perspective restored.

[up the hills]

saturday afternoon meg and i walked about eight miles, from our little house in the flat part of berkeley, up through the fog bank and into the botanic gardens at tilden park, where among other absolutely gorgeous sights we came upon this:

[sound the liar]

back to the chapel, this time with meg, for a marathon holy saturday vigil, a vigil unlike every other vigil i've ever attended. i don't, in the end, think that this is the parish for me. plenty of smells, but maybe insufficient bells. certainly there is not a choir. certainly there was an extremely unfortunate feminist verse sung to the tune of "be thou my vision." HOWEVER. i love the intensity with which these folks connect scripture with their political actions. one of the old testament readings was an interactive, with some congregation member designated to sound each instrument as it was mentioned: trumpets, flutes, tamborines, and so on. pastor jeff was playing the "lyre" and it sounded like "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!" we just about fell out of our seats with joy.

[alleluia!]

and on the eighth day, it finally got sunny again, and berkeley was beautiful and teeming, and thai brunch was spilling over onto the library lawn, and there were scones and bunny ears and chocolate eggs at emily's -- all very appropriate to the occasion.

herb carneal

2007-04-02T03:27:00.000-04:00

...died today (actually yesterday, though only by 28 minutes here on the left coast), mere hours before the season opener against the O's. his was a voice of my childhood -- or at least, his voice mediated by whatever snap-crackle-pop version of WCCO we were getting in whichever of our minivans we were driving at the time.

in other, happier twins news, they are playing six games in cali during the first week of june. i am going to the oakland coliseum with my homer hankie. whee.

more cheery news

2007-03-29T16:55:00.000-04:00

looks like income inequality has risen to its highest point since 1928. thanks, unified republican government from 2000 to 2006! we knew we could count on you to set us up for another great depression!