The waxwing slain
Vladimir Nabokov may have had a dirty little secret: the plot for Lolita was apparently taken from a 1916 story by the same name. The Nabokov family is denying it of course, while some experts are making the case that Nabokov could have appropriated the elements subconsciously. It all seems a bit silly to me. Half of high literature is intertextual reference; nobody seems to mind that a character called Hamlet was around before Shakespeare wrote his play. And if Nabokov did read and forget the story (which seems unlikely, given some of the other mental feats he accomplished), who cares? His Lolita transcends her plot.

Ron Rosenbaum has the most interesting take: with the greedy enthusiasm of a sophomore lit major, he recasts the whole criticism of Pale Fire in light of this new revelation. Shade and Kinboat are Nabokov and von Lichberg, the pseudonymous author of what's now being called the Ur-Lolita. It's a fun thesis...

On the dole
Did my taxes in record time last night, in part thanks to technology, but mostly just because I had almost no income this year. In fact, in my last full year as a grad student, I made so little that for the first time ever I qualified for the EITC. Let me tell you, as someone who knows: it feels good to be on the receiving end of a government program.

Before someone mistakes my glee for sarcasm or willful free-riding, I should say that my enthusiasm is for the program, not for the tiny check that will pay for about 12 minutes of my political strategy class on Monday. EITC is probably the second most successful poverty reduction program in American history (after Social Security). It's the only thing that allows our tax code to even approach fairness, since as a percentage of income so much more of the tax burden is shouldered by the working poor these days. Not only does it redress the built in inequities of FICA and sales tax, but it does so inconspicuously, in a way that doesn't offend one's pride and dignity. That is, unless one blogs about it.

These things called changes
I'm a couple days late on this, but the wonderful A Frolic of My Own has moved to a new location. Todd is using this adorable bit of open-source software to manage it, and if I weren't already set up and comfortable, I'd be thinking of switching myself.

On a semi-related note, the use of a cute Technorati piggyback is starting to proliferate, and as I'm designing a new blog at the moment, I have to figure out whether I want to use it. For aesthetic reasons I don't really want multiple lists of referrers floating around, so I'm trying to choose between this new functionality and Trackback. Technorati probably catches more links, but it doesn't have Trackback's warning functionality or an easy way to display the links onsite. I guess I'm leaning toward using Technorati anyway, as a longtime user and a big fan of general interconnectedness, but I'm interested to hear what people think.

Oh: one other drawback for Technorati is that when you don't have any links, it actually says Ouch! I'd install the thing here (where, if you'll notice, I don't have Trackback set up) but I'm not sure my ego could take it...

Miserable failure
Just a couple quick notes on the Bush press conference/Kerry campaign ad shoot... I don't know what they were thinking putting him out there for questions like that. The speech was good enough (although his delivery left something to be desired), but the questions were tough and our president isn't too quick on his feet. His highlights (lowlights?) were:

• repeatedly refusing to apologize for 9/11 or explain why he didn't need to;
• not being able to point to a single mistake he's made since he entered office;
• twice dodging the direct question about why he won't appear alone before the 9/11 commission (I can't believe they didn't prep him for this question, which was obviously going to be asked);
• and referring to himself as "the ultimate decision maker for the country".

I hope the conventional wisdom that a 2nd term election is a referendum on the incumbent holds, because Bush is doing a hell of a job beating himself.

The Dean model
I went to a fascinating and inspiring lecture last night (actually it was part of my political strategy class with David Wilhelm) by Rick Klau, one of the heavy lifters in the Dean campaign and probably one of the most credible voices in the country now on technology and political campaigning. He talked a little bit about his relationship with the Dean campaign, why and how he got involved, and where that involvement took him. More importantly, he outlined his vision of how technology worked for Dean, and how those innovations could and should be brought to other campaigns. He's written up the talk here, definitely worth a close read.

His central idea (and it will be familiar to those who followed the Dean campaign) was that today's technology doesn't lend itself to the kinds of command and control, hierarchical campaign structures that campaigns have traditionally employed. Instead, the internet is a medium that promotes conversation and has the potential to get people involved in ways they've never been able to before. There was the idea of first a weblog and then a weblog with a healthy and unrestricted comments section that could engage people and elicit real responses from the campaign. There was MeetUp.com, which allowed people to get together where they might not have known about each other before. But there was innovation in the organization of authority too: people could set up their own fundraisers, publicize their own campaign events, and get recognition from the campaign for their work.

Continue reading The Dean model...

Help wanted
I'm going to be starting a new group weblog, and I'm still looking for contributors. It will be a topical blog, focused on public speech and how it's shaped and limited by market forces, the press, and democratic institutions (so we'll be writing about media bias, campaign finance, truth in advertising, speech law, etc). So far the crew is pleasantly multidisciplinary, but we're still a little weak when it comes to journalists, lawyers, and business-types.

If you're interested in these issues and might want to contribute, please email me ASAP. The blog will probably launch in a week or so.

An unlikely alliance
Tim Oliphant explains how unprecedented a Kerry/McCain ticket would be and outlines some of the difficulties:

Clearly, even the prospect of McCain under serious consideration for some kind of "national unity" ticket would be an earthquake event; this is something that has not happened in the 200 years of party elections in this country. For it to progress as an idea, discreet big shots would have to labor behind the scenes to construct an alliance; this is not simply a question of whether Kerry should consider asking McCain to serve or whether McCain should consider serving. In a way, that's the easy part, almost superficial.

The hard part would be defining the nature of such an unprecedented alliance. There would have to be a discussion about federal judges and about every major foreign and domestic challenge facing the country. It would be silly for them to bargain over policy details as if they were crafting legislation; however, it would be essential for them to agree on a basic approach and program, or the alliance would have no meaning.

I do think a lot of the talk about a Kerry/McCain ticket seriously underestimates the historical significance and political complexity of such a move. But I'll go even further: I think the kind of coalition Oliphant is talking about is actually impossible. John McCain just doesn't have the political strength to bring any Republicans into the fold on this. Sure, he's trustworthy and shoots from the hip, but those are the same qualities that make him a maverick, an outsider in the Republican party. If he can't bring anyone with him, he just ends up looking like a traitor, which damages his credibility and belies any talk of "national unity".

Black swan
Nassim Nicholas Taleb looks at the nature of risk and the unexpected and comes to some smart conclusions about the 9/11 commission's task. I'm very sympathetic to his view; I've never felt the attacks were foreseeable, and while there are some strange circumstances surrounding the attack and its immediate aftermath that still need to be explained, I've never expected this to end with a strong indictment of, for instance, the Bush administration.

But the commission is going in a different direction; as EJ Dionne points out, their questions today made it clear that they think this tragedy was preventable. Part of that assessment may hinge on information the public doesn't have yet; part of it may be explained by Mr Taleb's black swan. But the Bush administration's handling of the situation - their unwillingness to declassify documents or give the commission access to key players - has created new avenues for suspicion. They've been combative from the start, treating every step of the process as a political fight. That has made it seem like they have something to hide. And yet what can they be hiding? I'm not ready to believe they could reasonably have stopped the attacks, or that anybody else would have done a better job up to that point...

By the way, I should point out that there is another commission getting underway, one that won't present its findings until after November. For that commission and the war it's investigating, there won't be any hiding behind unforseeable, outlying risks. In that case, the administration took postive action (to the point of invading another country) based on incorrect intelligence, and for that someone must be held accountable.

Technological advance
Zach Exley (of MoveOn fame) is Kerry's new online director. I can't speak to the legality of the move, which Republicans are criticizing because it implies a connection between MoveOn and the Kerry folks (a connection which seemed pretty obvious before...), and I expect the Supreme Court will rule on the whole 527 issue before too long. But this is a great move from the standpoint of online organizing. So far, the Kerry campaign seems to be viewing the internet as a fundraising medium, but Exley has experience with the kind of grass roots organizing and online mobilization that brought out the base for the primaries. This will make the difference in November.

Collateral damage
Far be it from me to say US forces didn't actually need to fire missiles into a mosque today to defeat armed resisters in Falluja. From a tactical standpoint, urban warfare is about the messiest kind. The problem is that this is where we lose the "hearts and minds" of the larger Iraqi population. Destroying a mosque, no matter who's inside, is going to have psychic repercussions throughout the country, just like shutting down the Al Hawza newspaper did. If there's anywhere American blood is going to further the cause of Iraqi democracy, isn't it in defense of the institutions Iraqis hold dear?

100,000 servers
Here's a fascinating post from skrenta about what's going on over at Google with their new GMail service (which, by the way, is under attack from privacy groups today). For some reason I find the idea that you could hold the entire surface web in RAM at the same time a little disturbing... maybe I need to write more?

UPDATE: Jason Kottke has some interesting thoughts on what Google's advantages are, and what their long term strategy might look like.

Bait & switch
Taegan Goddard brings up an issue I've been wondering about in re the US Senate race in Illinois: what happens if a candidate drops out between now and the election? The word around the campfire is Jack Ryan's divorce papers hold some revelations that (assuming they come out) will torpedo his campaign. While Obama is taking the high road so far, Republicans are clearly worried this stuff will become public sometime before November, and as Rick Hasen points out, we may see some interesting constitutional battles over how a replacement candidate should be selected.

Real world responsibilities
Sorry about the lack of posts. This quarter promises to be the busiest since I started blogging, what with having to find a job, tie up all the loose ends before I graduate, and prepare (organizationally? psychologically?) for my wedding at the end of June.

Meanwhile, just to spice things up, I've taken a job as the TA for Jim Leitzel's class on the regulation of vice. I'm not exactly an expert on this topic (!) but the class promises to be fun, and Jim seems like a great guy to work with (now, if I can only get him to add me to his blogroll...).

Contractual obligations
The voices of The Simpsons are demanding more money, to the tune of $360,000 per episode. Most of the articles I'm seeing on this aren't too sympathetic to their demands, some even predicting the demise of the show as a result. But one thing none of the articles mention is whether or not the actors get paid when an episode gets syndicated. If they don't, it's hard to blame them for wanting more, especially after they were paid only $30,000 per episode for the first nine seasons.

$50 million
This is fantastic news. My sense all along has been that the Democrats were completely overmatched in terms of finding $2000 donors, but apparently Bush's policies have inflamed opinion on the left so much that finding people who want to give is a cinch. Obviously this will directly help Kerry's ability to advertise, but it's also important as a cushion in case the courts find MoveOn and other similar supporting actors to be in violation of McCain-Feingold.

Language and power
The Trib has an interesting piece on English and its cloudy future as a lingua franca. This comment might be the most illuminating for us monolingual Americans:

"Monolingualism ... is peculiar," [Graddol] told the Atlantic. "Taking a long-term historical view, I'm inclined to think that the European project (from the Renaissance onwards) that created the idea of the modern nation state, each with a single national language and that marginalized or suppressed linguistic diversity within national borders, will turn out to be a blip in history."

Just another way the internet and globalization are eroding the nation-state, I guess. But perhaps it's harder to see from inside America, with its strong borders and ineluctable cultural exports.

Finale of seem
All this suggestion that yesterday's murder and mutilation of four American contractors was another Mogadishu is a little overblown. For one thing, I think Americans are much more aware and accepting of the fact that we're at war right now; we've been desensitized to this kind of violence through months of casualty reports trickling in. I don't think this means Americans are unconcerned or that the incident won't affect public opinion toward the war, but it certainly isn't going to bring the White House to adjust its military policy anytime soon, and it's hard to imagine a backlash beyond what we aleady have.

Another big difference with this incident is the way the media has handled it. Domestic US media has kept a pretty tight lid on the images, just like it's avoided covering the return of soldiers' coffins or maimed "medical evacuees". This failure may not even be corrected by foreign press in Iraq, who as we saw earlier this week are controlled by the provisional authority. But in any case, the flow of information this time means the images are a lot less in you face.

And then there's the whiff that these guys weren't really civilians, as the news reports have been so careful to point out. Calling them contractors somehow avoids the question of who they're contracted out to - almost certainly the military. It reminds me of the situation with the "civilians" who were taken hostage after their plane was downed over Colombia... calling them civilians was pretty misleading. Jeanne D'Arc has more on this.

Market forces and opinion diversity
Vance over at Begging to Differ takes Jesse Jackson's Sunday morning talk show on a Clear Channel station in Oregon as a sign that things are working as they should - the invisible hand is leading the media to diversify. I'm not sure I'm convinced that this settles the question of media bias in talk radio, but my main gripe here has to do with the assumption that having market forces guide content in the press is a good thing.

If you hold individuals' preferences constant over time, then having a press that responds to demand would lead to a press that responds to those preferences. If the preferences are diverse, then coverage will be diverse. The problem is that the media has the ability to change or reinforce people's views; preferences may not be constant over time, and may reflect past coverage. In this kind of situation, market forces could well lead to less diversity, in both opinion and coverage, depending on the beginning state of things.

This is a pretty simplistic argument I'm making, and there's a lot more to be done along these lines... so maybe now is as good a time as any to announce that I'm going to be starting a group blog on public speech, markets, and democracy in the next couple weeks. The idea is to talk about issues like media bias, truth in advertising, intellectual property, and what part the availability (or over-availability) of information plays in the mechanics of democracy. If you're interested in contributing, there's still room; email me for details.

A recurrence of plague
Ray Davis has a thoughtful analysis of blogs in light of some research on 18th century magazines. Basically, he uses the familiar sounding historical circumstances of 18th century magazine publishing to make some assertions about where blogs might be headed. I agree most of what he says - although I'm a little skeptical of his hope that "the low-cost grazing inherent in the weblog form could exert some tiny influence against social splintering and towards recognition of the commons."

My own sense is that the peer-review-through-linking process is leading people to be more and more insular in their reading. The blogosphere can be tremendously disorienting in the sense that it's hard to get a sense of where it extends from wherever you happen to be standing. The latest thing for me (and Davis hints at this in his piece too) has been the discovery of so many poetry blogs, a phenomenon that somehow escaped me despite the fact that I've been blogging for more than a year and am arguably a poet myself... [via bertramonline]

The perfect storm
This is absolutely the piece to read on political strategy in the late stages of the Dean campaign. As Dean's pollster, Paul Maslin was one of the principals, and he illuminates both the candidate's foibles and the campaign's political miscalculations. What it doesn't really talk about is the transformative nature of the grassroots organization and internet campaign, but then again that hasn't been a big theme of the Kerry operation so far.

In midstream
Apparently there's a little more to the story of why Bob Edwards is getting the boot at NPR, and it's not going over well with listeners. Strategies to save him include signing a petition and withholding donations from your local station. The latter feels like an awfully oblique attack, with a lot of potential victims at the local level; although apparently some of the pressure to get rid of Edwards came from local stations in the first place.

Isn't it odd, though, the way we treat anchors? We keep them around decades on end, unwilling to give anybody else a chance... is it really all just a matter of listener comfort? And what does this say about the news, if ratings are so tightly tethered to a single personality?

Share the load
This is encouraging: Kerry may pick a running mate before the convention after all. I've been a little concerned, watching Kerry exchange blows with Cheney in the past couple weeks; having an "attack dog" would let him focus his attention on bigger targets. Plus, the free press will help. [via Political Wire]

Where to go for dinner
If you and your friends are having difficulty agreeing on where to go for dinner, maybe you can use the method championed by one of my professors last quarter. The basic gist is that each member of the group narrows the pool of restaurants by some factor until only one is left. This might seem like a pretty obvious mechanical structure, but supposedly it sets the probabilities that any individual's favorite restaurant will be picked equal.

Of course, it's an a priori assumption that diners face a veil of ignorance with respect to others' preferences, which probably means you can't go out to eat with your friends! And it's not going to get you past Arrow, if you're concerned about such things. [via Gapers' Block]

The landscapes and cultures of half the planet
Mario Vargas Llosa writes convincingly about Madrid and what the attacks there mean for Spain's political future. He's full of indignant talk about the clash of civilizations, and yet somehow it feels more considered coming from such as him. One of my favorite novels of the past few years has been his The Storyteller, which treats some serious cultural discord of its own.

The enemies of freedom
Paul Bremer has gone and shut down a Shiite newspaper in Iraq:

The letter ordering the paper closed, signed by L. Paul Bremer III, the top administrator in Iraq, cited what the American authorities called several examples of false reports in Al Hawza, including a February dispatch that said the cause of an explosion that killed more than 50 Iraqi police recruits was not a car bomb, as occupation officials had said, but an American missile.

This seems like a pretty bad idea, even from the standpoint of promoting stability. Even if these rumors were malicious anti-American propaganda, won't shutting the operation down just fuel more rumors about American intentions? I'm sympathetic to the need to stabilize the country and achieve some consensus for democracy before the intermim government comes in, but compromising on speech makes us look a lot more like occupiers than liberators...