Via Andrew Sullivan, I see that John Kerry is dissing my marriage of 17 years: "Marriage is an institution between men and women for the purpose of having children and procreating."
I once wrote in a Reason editorial that "Conservative intellectuals, meanwhile, incessantly declare that 'the' purpose of family life is to raise children. Follow this rhetoric and pretty soon the childless are not merely second-class citizens, but fake families and quite possibly less than fully human." I should have included liberal hacks as well.
Could Steve and I get back the thousands of dollars that being married cost us in extra income taxes last year?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 14, 2003 • Comments
Happy Birthday to my wonderful husband (seen here on our vacation in Hawaii), who is getting up at the crack of dawn on his birthday to take me to followup Lasik surgery. No blogging today.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 13, 2003 • Comments
On our vacation, Steve read me the new book Artificial Love: A Story of Machines and Architecture, by the architect Paul Shepheard. Shepheard is a beautiful, compelling writer with fascinating but elusively ideas on the relationship between the natural and artificial. He doesn't exactly make his points in the conventional fashion. (But neither does he use the awful jargon that permeates much of architectural theory these days.) I love his books, but I can't say I entirely understand them. So, after Steve finished reading Artificial Love aloud, I immediately read it again to myself, the better to absorb it.
Doing so led me to an insight that had nothing to do with architecture: Little kids don't make you read them the same story night after night just because it's comforting--adults' favorite explanation. They're trying to get it, to absorb the plot and meaning the way I tried to absorb Paul Shepheard's ideas.
Lo and behold, there is some academic research to back up my vacation insight. In today's NYT, Emily Yoffe writes about why kids want to see the same video a million times. She leads with a 7-year-old who loves Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and says he's seen it 1,000 times. "It's really, really, really, really, really, really complicated," he says. "I can't tell you all the details, but I understand the whole thing"--thanks to all that repetition.
Yoffe quotes communications researcher Marie-Louise Mares, who wondered by surveys of parents showed that kids were less likely to watch videos more than once as they grew older. Wondering why, she interviewed 300 kids:
She found the need for repetition came partly from the children's accurate realization that they just didn't get it. She said one 3-year-old could anticipate scenes in "Mary Poppins" but had little idea of the story being told, let alone the themes being expressed. "She was an expert on 'Mary Poppins,' but also clueless about 'Mary Poppins,' " Dr. Mares said. When Dr. Mares showed children ages 4 and 5 a brief video made by another researcher about not judging people based on appearance, she found that it wasn't until the fourth viewing that they even had an understanding of the sequence of events and the message.
Absorbing truly new material doesn't get all that much easier as we get older. But we don't have the same patience with repetition, which may be one reason little kids are seemingly able to learn so much so quickly. Or maybe the repetition is just too boring. Eventually, I'll probably take another crack at Artificial Love, at least to cull some passages for the benefit of blog readers. It's a really fun book.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 13, 2003 • Comments
Technology Review has an interesting interview with Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO, on the "interplay between technology and design." You wouldn't think blogs would come up in this context, but they do:
TR: Are there historical parallels to this phenomenon?
BROWN: Sure--it's the whole horseless carriage scenario. Early cars looked like carriages, early TVs looked like radios. Every time somebody brings you something tha's new, it looks like the old thing. It's only the second or third generation before it finally starts to look like the new thing.
TR: Design must involve study of human behavior.
BROWN: Yes, one of the interesting human factors questions about new technology is, how long does it take for social groups to adjust to new technologies? How long, in other words, does the etiquette of new technologies take to evolve? We're seeing, both with e-mail and with mobile, two massively influential and powerful technologies that we've yet to develop the etiquette around--the social graces that eradicate most of the technology's objectionable faux pas.
TR: What's an example of that?
BROWN: Well, think about e-mail. There's something about e-mail that demands a reply, demands a response. But when you're getting thousands of these things, it becomes an impossibility to respond to everything. So we've got to shift the etiquette, and maybe make e-mail more like publishing: that is, you send something out and you might get one percent response. I think that the paradigm of e-mail as letters, as objects, is inappropriate. I'm waiting for a shift to the timeline, rather than the object, as the organizing principle.
If you think about a blog for instance, tha's a timeline. And it's a really good way of organizing huge amounts of information, because we're quite good at sequencing. We're quite good at remembering when things happen. That has meaning for us. But imagine creating an individual document around every one of those individual blog entries and just having them there on your desktop or in a folder. It would be completely meaningless to you. And that's how we treat e-mail now. But imagine keeping e-mail a bit more like a blog. Then suddenly, you've got instant messaging qualities and e-mail qualities happening at the same time.
So I'm guessing that we'll start to see that sort of timeline become more and more important. Because I think it's the way that we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data.
(Via Core77.)
He sounds like David Gelernter, who's long pushed the idea of organizing information sequentially, as we experience our lives. But that's not how "we as human beings tend to organize massive amounts of data." When was the last library you saw that shelved its books by publication date? Chronology works only if it's a proxy for something more meaningful.
Besides, my email does organize itself sequentially, and that makes it a mess. The amount of mail is a lot bigger than the number of blog entries, even at InstaPundit. The only way to keep the mail straight is to file it in folders by subject and use various tags to single out important items. And even that doesn't quite work. The problem of information overload is information overload. Nobody's yet found the solution, other than having a really good memory.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 12, 2003 • Comments
I'm just trying to scare Democratic bloggers with that Willie Brown post below. The real Democratic alternative to Gray Davis is obvious, and actually qualified: former state Controller Kathleen Connell, who fits the Kleiman Criteria perfectly. She's run successfully for statewide office, has independent money, has a particular appeal to women without alienating men, and won plaudits for her strong campaign for L.A. mayor, despite a very late start that made winning impossible. Most important, she has a record of fighting with Davis, who clearly hates her already, on the budget. (Here's an example.)
From Jill Stewart's latest column (via Kausfiles, who didn't pick up the Connell angle)
A slightly kinder take comes from Democrat Kathleen Connell, who stepped down as State Controller in January after spending months blasting her fellow Democrats for their unchecked overspending, which Connell says clearly caused California's budget debacle.
Connell was a fiscal toughie who, had Davis listened to her, never would have permitted California to spiral into the reckless "get out alive" budgets Davis and the Democrats keep creating.
"You are going to see eight or so major players behind Gray during this recall, giving directly, or through vendors, or subsidiaries, and they are Haim Saban, Stephen Bing, [grocery magnate] Ron Berkle, [SunAmerica billionaire] Eli Broad and others," says Connell.
"The Democrats would lose their political control," Connell says. "Their greatest fear is if he's thrown out it destroys Democratic solidarity and it would create an opportunity for a Republican to be elected governor."
Some people think Connell's a bitch. But a) Professor Postrel, a former UCLA colleague, disagrees, and I tend to trust him on the issue of strong women b) a truth-telling bitch may be exactly what the state needs right now c) compared to Gray Davis, who by all reports is a really nasty person, the typical bitch looks like a sweetheart. Connell's bio is here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 12, 2003 • Comments
Via Mickey Kaus, who has comments of his own, I see Mark Kleiman is looking for (just one) Democrat to jump from the anti-recall side into the California governor's race. His choice is Leon Panetta, the man who (in my opinion) saved the country from the dangerous chaos of the early Clinton White House. But is he really the Democrat who best meets the Kleiman Criteria?
The ideal candidate would:
1. Have enormous name recognition.
2. Have enthusiastic supporters who will come out in what is likely to be a light-turnout special election. (Doesn't matter much how many people hate him as long as a lot of people love him.)
3. Be able to raise money.
4. Not be associated in the voters' minds with the current mess.
5. Not have anything to fear from Davis in case Davis manages to squeak through.
I may be wrong about this, especially on #5, but I think Willie Brown fits the bill. (That parenthetical in #2 is crucial.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 12, 2003 • Comments
Amazon has corrected--and, hence, lowered--the price on my forthcoming book, The Substance of Style. So pre-order your copy today. (Not that I'm excited or anything.) For more on the book, click here. For tour information, click here.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 11, 2003 • Comments
Responding the post below, reader Kevin Parker suggests that John Kerry may not have been signalling "hang loose." Kevin writes, "Isn't that also the sign for 'telephone?'"
By this interpretation, Kerry wasn't saying, "I'm a groovy guy," but "Don't bother me, I'm on the phone."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 11, 2003 • Comments
Here's a provocative piece on the downside of the post-Raines NYT: the return of prejudice against youth, the Internet, and popular culture. I have no independent knowledge of anything it's talking about, but it's interesting.
There's youth and there's youth. I've known journalistic prodigies who seemed much more experienced than their years. (One of them, briefly my colleague at Inc., became managing editor of the WaPost at 39.) In my own life, I was terribly immature and undeveloped as a 22-year-old WSJ reporter and completely qualified to become editor of Reason at 29 (despite the trustee who objected to the appointment of "that girl). And, as all Web readers know, there are Internet sites and Internet sites. It's a diverse medium.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 11, 2003 • Comments
But the reporters are leaving. The number of reporters embedded with troops in Iraq has dropped to 23 from a high of around 700.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 11, 2003 • Comments