Thanks to everybody who answered my shoe survey. It plays a small role in my latest Bloomberg View column. Here's the column lead:
If you have been reading newspapers or websites, listening to the radio or watching TV over the past few weeks, you have probably heard the news: "You CAN judge a person by his shoes." Beginning in mid-June, word of a psychology article titled "Shoes as a source of first impressions" began circling the globe.
Describing an experiment by researchers from the University of Kansas and Wellesley College, many reports declared that shoes alone reveal just everything about the wearer's personality. "Overly aggressive people wear ankle boots," proclaimed a Los Angeles National Public Radio host.
What psychologist Omri Gillath and his team actually found was more modest. Without the cues of facial expressions and context, college students could guess basic demographic characteristics from looking at photos of other college students' footwear: gender, age and income. They could also detect the personality trait known as agreeableness, as well as something called attachment anxiety, which is connected to fear of rejection and was correlated with dull-colored shoes. That was all: not political affiliation, not how extroverted the wearers were, not whether they were overly aggressive.
The study made a solid contribution to research on first impressions, but it was hardly earthshaking. By getting so much attention, however, it demonstrated a sociological truth: People love to talk about shoes. Even those who dismissed the research as silly often felt compelled to call radio stations or comment on websites, providing details about their own choices. Why this fascination with footwear?
Like cars, shoes combine function and aesthetics, the promise of mobility and the pleasures of style. As apparel, they offer not only protection but transformation; as autonomous objects, they serve as "bursts of beauty that defy the mundane," writes Rachelle Bergstein in Women from the Ankle Down: The Story of Shoes and How They Define Us. Unlike cars, shoes are also inexpensive enough to permit people to build diverse wardrobes, changing footwear with season, circumstances and mood.
Whether Jimmy Choos, Pumas or Toms, shoes let us stand out as individuals while fitting into similarly shod social groups. The complex relationship between the social and the personal is why it's so hard to tell much about a shoe's owner from a photograph alone -- and why shoes are so interesting. Their meanings require, and sometimes reveal, broader cultural context. Bergstein tells the story of a Texas high school that in 1993 punished students for wearing Doc Martens, falsely assuming that the boots signaled white racism when in fact they merely reflected students' musical taste. A shoe, says Elizabeth Semmelhack, the senior curator at the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto, "is an accessory that can carry a lot of cultural meaning."
The Free Press has accepted my book, tentatively titled Glamour Decoded, and sent me the traditional "Author Questionnaire" to provide information for the publicity and marketing departments. (They're not blunt enough to say it, but essentially for the people who won't read any of the book.) Although the questionnaire came as a .docx file and has a section asking about online activities, the initial instructions recall an earlier era (emphasis added):
The purpose of this questionnaire is to provide our publicity, promotion, and advertising departments with accurate information about you and your work. If you would answer each question as thoroughly as possible, it will enable us to answer questions from the press and the public quickly and accurately, and to obtain the best possible attention to your book. We will keep this information on file to be used in the preparation of news releases to the media. Please type your responses if possible. If you would like any of this information to be kept confidential, indicate so by placing a check in left margin of the question and we will respect your wishes. If you need more space, feel free to attach additional pages, indicating which question or section they correspond to.
They even spaced twice between sentences, just as I was taught to do in middle-school typing class. All that's lacking is a reference to carriage returns.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 08, 2012 • Comments
Times are tough in the magazine business and every penny counts. So I was surprised to receive not one but two copies of the latest issue of Time--a redundancy that was beaten when Sports Illustrated arrived, with three identical copies. Unless word has come down that Time Inc. is going to single-handedly cover the USPS deficit, something has gone seriously wrong in the printing and fulfillment departments. Or maybe the Postrels are just lucky.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 08, 2012 • Comments
I am looking for someone to help me overhaul and update the non-blog portions of this site. If you're interested, please email me at vp-at-dynamist.com.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 03, 2012 • Comments
One of the great miracles of industrial technology is the transformation of one of the most difficult of household tasks, washing clothes, into one of the easiest. (I'm doing it right now.) Although he doesn't note it in the talk, hand-washing clothes is so onerous that it is one of the first chores people who don't have washing machines contract out to even poorer people. (Some of the commenters, none of whom scrub their jeans by hand, thus see washing machines as destroying jobs.)
But if you don't want to use electricity, there's a new alternative to the old washboard and bucket called The Laundry POD. (h/t Greg Rehmke via Facebook.)
Posted by Virginia Postrel on July 02, 2012 • Comments
Larry Solum's article is the best I've seen for putting the decision in a broader legal context.
DrRich on Covert Rationing called the "it's a tax" angle more than two years ago. Greg Mankiw suggested that taxes and mandates were economically identical back in 2007, when Obama opposed a mandate and Hillary supported one. He also links to a discussion of Bush's plan.
Megan McArdle, who recently returned to blogging and is now at the Daily Beast, has some sensible reactions--and links to some 2010 predictions about the effects of the bill. Be sure to read the predictions.
The Volokh Conspiracy has so much stuff that yesterday their server seemed to be having problems.
Please help me with an experiment. First estimate how many pairs of shoes you own. Then go count them. Post the two numbers in the comments below.
Here's a WSJ column I wrote on a related subject, although it doesn't mention shoes. Excerpt:
Take clothes. In 2008, Americans owned an average of 92 items of clothing, not counting underwear, bras and pajamas, according to Cotton Inc.'s Lifestyle Monitor survey, which includes consumers, age 13 to 70. The typical wardrobe contained, among other garments, 16 T-shirts, 12 casual shirts, seven dress shirts, seven pairs of jeans, five pairs of casual slacks, four pairs of dress pants, and two suits—a clothing cornucopia.
Then the economy crashed. Consumers drew down their inventories instead of replacing clothes that wore out or no longer fit. In the 2009 survey, the average wardrobe had shrunk—to a still-abundant 88 items. We may not be shopping like we used to, but we aren't exactly going threadbare. Bad news for customer-hungry retailers, and perhaps for economic recovery, is good news for our standard of living.
By contrast, consider a middle-class worker's wardrobe during the Great Depression. Instead of roughly 90 items, it contained fewer than 15. For the typical white-collar clerk in the San Francisco Bay Area, those garments included three suits, eight shirts (of all types), and one extra pair of pants. A unionized streetcar operator would own a uniform, a suit, six shirts, an extra pair of pants, and a set of overalls. Their wives and children had similarly spare wardrobes. Based on how rarely items were replaced, a 1933 study concluded that this "clothing must have been worn until it was fairly shabby." Cutting a wardrobe like that by four items—from six shirts to two, for instance—would cause real pain. And these were middle-class wage earners with fairly secure jobs.
So how many pairs of shoes do you think you own? How many do you actually own?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 21, 2012 • Comments
I used to be in the comic book business, and recall this story you may like, The great EC comic book company (surviving as Mad) did a terrific version of the 1st Martian Chronicles. As theft. Bradbury penned a letter complimenting the rendition and mentioned that they had inadvertently forgot his royalty, (invoice enclosed). They promptly paid and worked with Ray on the entire series, now classics of the genre.
Steve sent the image here, which is one of the subsequent issues.
Gregory Benford has a good remembrance of Bradbury here. Excerpt:
It's telling that we read Bradbury for his short stories. They are stylish glimpses at possibilities, meant for contemplation. The most important thing about writers is how they exist in our memories. Having read Bradbury is like having seen a striking glimpse out of a car window and then being whisked away.
Often reprinted in high school texts, he became a poet of the expanding world view of the 20th century. He coupled the American love of machines to the love of frontiers. Elton John's hit "Rocket Man" is an homage to Bradbury's Mars.
Roger L. Simon recalls sharing a book-signing table with him here: "I sold more books that day, several hundred in my memory, than I ever have at any signing before or since (or am ever likely to)."
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 08, 2012 • Comments
After hitting the LA Times paywall one too many times, I decided I should invest in a subscription. I was signing up for Sunday delivery, which comes with digital access but costs $1.99 a week compared to $3.99 a week for digital-only access. (You can see the advertising model at work in those prices.) But as I filled out the form, I noticed the following below the required phone number:
By giving your phone number here, you agree the Los Angeles Times may call you about marketing, sales or promotional events, and may use an automatic dialer, text message or prerecorded voice to do so.
You can't subscribe without giving them your phone number and permission to harass you with unwanted telemarketing calls. So that's why the LAT lost this potential subscriber.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 08, 2012 • Comments
Ray Bradbury has died at 91. His most famous book, Fahrenheit 451, is about book-burning in a world where entertainment on wall-size screens ("parlor walls") has replaced reading. Published in 1953, it's a dystopia woven from a fear of television.
Its redemptive ending establishes another theme: the power of memory. The books aren't gone. Their texts have been preserved in the memories of people who read them and will keep them alive until it's safe to write them down again. One man has Plato's "Republic," another "Gulliver's Travels," another the book of Ecclesiastes. Books aren't physical objects. They're words that resonate and linger in the mind.
When I was in high school, I chose a passage from "Fahrenheit 451" to memorize and recite as a literary interpretation exercise in a speech class. Nearly four decades later, only fragments remain. The most important is this one:
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there.
Although I enjoy both science fiction and beautiful prose, I never read much of Bradbury's work, at least not once I was old enough to understand or appreciate it. (Sometime in elementary school I tried The Martian Chronicles without realizing it was a series of short stories and not a novel.) But he exercised an enormous influence on my life through that one passage in "Fahrenheit 451."
Larry Solum's article
In response to 
, is about book-burning in a world where entertainment on wall-size screens ("parlor walls") has replaced reading. Published in 1953, it's a dystopia woven from a fear of television.
without realizing it was a series of short stories and not a novel.) But he exercised an enormous influence on my life through that one passage in "Fahrenheit 451."