The Daily Blague

Guest-posting at Felix Salmon, Justin Fox complains about Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson’s slapdash ways (she “gets basic facts wrong, seemingly misunderstands the businesses she covers, offers assertions that she fails to back up with evidence…”), but then he pronounces her indispensable.

How does she accomplish this? I think it’s partly that the same bullheadedness and simplistic approach that drives readers like me and Felix crazy actually enables Morgenson to zero in on targets that those more interested in nuance totally miss. It’s also that Morgenson suffuses her work with a sort of high moral dudgeon—and disgust for the evil ways of Wall Street—that more “sophisticated” journalists won’t allow themselves. The results speak for themselves: Sometimes battering rams work better than X-Acto knives. And I say that as someone who vastly prefers X-Acto knives (stylistically speaking).

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Matins

¶ In the middle of Seymour Hersh’s “exciting” article about “cyber warfare,” in the cartoon issue of The New Yorker, there’s a lovely tidbit about someone we’d never heard of, an office that we’d never heard of, and a fecklessness that has become all too familiar since January 2009.

Lauds

¶ What a surprise. Annie Liebovitz, who has never had much time for the fine-arts racket, is finding that her work fails to bring high prices at sale or auction — a matter of no small concern, now that she notoriously needs the money. How could that be? Something inherently lacking about the work? Or something else… John Gapper at FT Magazine.

Prime

¶ With Inside Job still very much on our mind — what struck us the hardest was the overt but legal corruption (called “consultancy”) of academic economists — we fastened on a comment to Barbaria Kiviat’s entry at Felix Salmon today, an entry that follows up nicely the one that we linked to yesterday. The gist of the entry is that we’ve all become so indoctrinated by the terms of economic analysis that we can’t see beyond fruitless policy debates even though we know that economists don’t know which way is up.

Tierce

¶ Brandon Keim’s report on a recent neurological study of focus isn’t his most lucid work, but there may be a bombshell for multitaskers planted not so deep within it. The study involved epileptic patients whos brains had already been invasively wired for pre-surgical study; Moran Cerf and his team made the most of a free ride. The patients were asked to focus on images of famous people (movie stars and sports figures). (Wired Science)

Sext

¶ The good people at The Awl have created a new Web site just for Mary H K Choi, called the hairpin. Mary is upset by the current craze for men dressing well; it’s throwing off her guydar.

Nones

¶ We don’t pay much heed to polls, but the results of a new Times/CBS poll are nonetheless distressing, precisely because ideas and information, nor to mentioin democratic confidence, appear in such short supply. The more we consider the results, the more impatient we become for the Democratic Party to be supplanted.

Vespers

¶ The most intriguing part of Poets & Writers‘s interview with Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally-Jackson Books, is her take on Chinese booksellers — which is also a take on herself. (Ms McNally was recently a member of a delegation of American booksellers that paid an official visit to — or was in any case officially received in — China.)

Compline

¶ Joshua Brown reports that there are no televisions at his investment management firm, Fusion Analytics. That’s the rule there, and the Reformed Broker can’t believe he managed without it. Which is great for him. When will everyone else in money management realize that television is an obscenely powerful herder?

Have A Look

¶ Obituaries for literary magazines. (HTMLGiant)

¶ Plan to fill in the East River — from years ago. (Strange Maps)

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Steps that we’d like to see being taken: the concoction of fruit juice, caffeine, and malt liquor known as Four Loko has been targeted — unfairly, says its manufacturer — by officials concerned about a recent rash of student hospitalizations.

Chris Hunter, a co-founder and managing partner of Phusion Projects, the five-year-old Chicago company that owns Four Loko, said Tuesday that the drink, introduced in August 2008, was being unfairly singled out. The company takes steps to prevent its products from getting into the hands of minors, he said.

“Alcohol misuse and abuse and under-age drinking are issues the industry faces and all of us would like to address,” Mr. Hunter said. “The singling out or banning of one product or category is not going to solve that. Consumer education is what’s going to do it.”

The best part? “[P]arents who were shocked because the can was in their refrigerator and they didn’t realize it was an alcoholic beverage.”

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Three new pages at Civil Pleasures:

¶ This week’s Book Review review, “The Ideological Divide.”

¶ Gotham Diary: “Gravity.”

¶ Friday Movie: Inside Job.

A word about Inside Job: I did not see the point in reviewing this powerful documentary as a film. I saw it with a film student, a cousin of Kathleen’s, who came away shrugging: Charles Ferguson has captured a horrible mess, but what can we do about it? I thought I’d write about that instead. What we can do right away is to learn how to think about what kind of failure(s) made the derivatives disaster possible.

But there was one thing about the film qua film that bothered me: all those pretty aerial shots of Manhattan! The stately homes of England are no more kempt than the placid bed of towers that we see from every angle. At one point, the East River is captured in sheet-of-glass mode, between tides. New York neverlooks lovelier than when you can’t see any people!

What was all that about? Was Mr Ferguson suggesting that Manhattan is a garden, sedulously tended by angels in the employ of plutocratic bankers who don’t care how broken the rest of the country is?

Who experiences New York City from the aerial point of view? Not New Yorkers themselves; you can’t get from A to B, even in a Town Car, without a little streetside friction.

Long before the end of Inside Job, the bird’s-eye views were making me wince. New York may well be the capital of the “financial industry” (an oxymoron on steroids), but there is a great deal more to this town than that. If Charles Ferguson wants his viewers to share his animus for Gotham, then he ought to make his request explicit. As it is, Inside Job indulges in urban abuse.

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Matins

¶ Having concluded that, when it comes to their own economic self-interest, Tea Party Americans are as deluded as the madwoman of Sunset Boulevard, Chris Lehmann is appalled to find a liberatarian professor at George Mason (where else) who argues that income inequality is “good.” (The Awl)

Lauds

¶ When a trouble-making director brings a Handel opera to China, you can be sure that he won’t leave well-enough alone. That’s why there are censors. Andrew Jacobs reports in the Times.

Prime

¶ In a recent study, small businessmen in the Dominican Republic were divided into two groups. The first received accounting instruction. The second group was given a collection of rules of thumb (“write everything down,” and the like). The second group’s performance improved, while the first’s remained flat. This oughtn’t to be a surprise. We don’t want the best advice available; we want the best advice that we can actually use, given our lives as they are. As Barbara Kiviat concludes, it wouldn’t be hard to provide Americans with straightforward guidelines of roughly universal utility. (Felix Salmon)

Tierce

¶ We’re appalled to find that anyone doubts the dangers of BPA, especially where children are concenred. At the very least, doubts about its safety ought to preclude its use as a container for foodstuffs. David Melzer and Tamara Galloway file a somewhat querulous opinion piece. (New Scientist)

Sext

¶ The blogging world came to standstill yesterday, when it was revealed that Alex Balk, one of the founders of The Awl, never gives interviews. (It was not mentioned whether or not he has ever been asked.) The reason, it turns out, is national security.

Nones

¶ In what amounts to a chapbook primer, Robert Reich explains the character difference between Republicans and Democrats — and why a sense of hopefulness is essential to the latters’ advance.

Vespers

¶ At Brainiac, Josh Rothman gives Helen Vendler’s annotation of 150 Emily Dickinson poems top marks, adding that “ the graduate seminars I took with Vendler were among the best intellectual experiences of my life” — something that we’ve heard before. Vendler is truly one of the great teachers, and Dickinson is, at least on some days, our best poet.

Compline

¶ We’re beginning to hope that Nicholas Carr’s book about the anxiety of connectivity will encourage people to use the Internet with greater self-awareness — and less hand-waving about how its cascades of information are dulling our thought processes. Emily St John Mandel has made a first small step. (The Millions)

Have A Look

¶ Very, very salty advice to President Obama and to Democrats. All it needs is a bit of backup rhythm. Gaga! (3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Ezra Klein shares a Britannica page: why it takes two cents to make one. (Washington Post; via The Morning News)

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Historians of American foreign policy in the Cold War and after will scratch their heads bald trying to understand this country’s special gift for backing blustery bozos in precarious sovereignties, but trying to figure out the appeal of Hamid Karsai may break the skin on a few scalps. The Afghan wiseguy’s latest stunt is to accuse the Times of defaming him — by reporting what he concedes to be the truth (about Iranian moneybags).

In his news conference, Mr. Karzai also attacked The Times for publishing the report about Iranian payments, even as he confirmed receiving such payments. He urged the Afghan news media to “defame The New York Times as they defame us.”

You have to love the echo of the Lord’s Prayer.

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Matins

¶ We may a practice of reading the Times’s conservative columnists, David Brooks and Ross Douthat, very, very carefully, because while they often have good things to say they are just as often merely plausible, as Mr Douthat is today, comparing TARP and the voters’ reaction against it to Truman’s deployment of the atomic bomb against Japan and the immediate taboo on using such devices again.

 If the Republicans gain control of Congress in the coming election, the blessed event (not) will be far more attributable to the White House’s poor-to-nonexistent leadership skills on the economic front (not to mention the retention of Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke) than to some heallthy principle of political isostasy.

Lauds

¶ We think that Ben Brantley is a bit of a doltish chump for holding Jan Maxwell’s age against her performance — obviously splendid by his own account — in the Second Stage revival of Arthur Kopit’s Wings. (NYT)

Prime

¶ James Kwak’s brisk comparison of nutritionism and financialization shows how dangerous it can be to get meta about vital mattesr. (The Baseline Scenario)

Tierce

¶ In homage to Maurice Allais, who died earlier this month, Jonah Lehrer writes about the long-term impact of his 1953 paper on the irrationality of loss, what came to be known as the Allais Paradox, when Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky got hold of it. (Wired Science)

Sext

¶ At The Awl, Eryn Loeb talkes about “My Former Best Friend’s Wedding,” which she didn’t attend, although she gave herself a headache looking at all the photos online. Leaving home isn’t what it used to be; arguably, Facebook has made it impossible. You grow up and apart but not away.

Nones

¶ From Edmund Burke’s The Sublime and the Beautiful to the Pledge to America: Cory Robin traces the vein of hot-air-appreciation that animates conservatives whenever war is under discussion — so long as the actual warfare is far enough away to seem “sublime.” (Chron Higher Ed; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Vespers

¶ From a Rumpus Poetry Club discussion of Timothy Donnelly’s acclaimed collection, The Cloud Corporation. We applaud the bit about re-reading, and are faintly surprised by the notion that a poet would not have memorized his own verse.

Compline

¶ James Somers muses on the contrast between now and then — now a confident and capable alumnus of the University of Michigan who is nonetheless too settled to indulge the impulse to chat up everyone he encountered at a recent football game on campus; then, a freshman during the first two weeks of college, who like all of his classmates did exactly that. The image of annealing is particularly just. (jsomers.net)

Have A Look

¶ Leah Fusco’s Owling. (The Best Part)

¶ Fuck Yeah Meanswear. (via Ivy Style)

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One of our most favorite Web sites, The Awl, is making money. According to the Times, no less. Isn’t that nice? “The owners don’t have to get rich … they just have to eat.”

Because there is no office — staff members work out of their homes — there is no office manager, no toner cartridge to replace, no lease to be negotiated, no pencils to steal. The company exists in a string of e-mails, instant messages and phone calls.

“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

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Matins

¶ A story that’s really too good to be true: rather than pay “confiscatory taxes,” Boeing plowed its earnings into R&D, becoming the aircraft leader that has been for fifty years. Moral of the story? (Justin Fox at Felix Salmon)

Lauds

¶ In what amount to super-duper liner notes, Ian Bostridge writes about the three Eighteenth-Century tenors from whose repertoires he has fashioned a recital program, recorded for EMI. (Guardian; via Arts Journal )

Prime

¶ In three paragraphs, George Soros nails it. We are more flabbergasted by President Obama’s economic-adviser choices every day. (NYRB)

Tierce

¶ What sort of myths would human beings develop if confronted with the binary star NN Serpentis, where a dim red dwarf would make its presence known to someone standing on one of its two planets every few hours, when it eclipsed the adjacent and brilliant white dwarf? Phil Plait asks just that at Bad Astronomy — after setting forth all the how-weird-is-thatness lying 1500 light years away.

Sext

¶ Abe Sauer waxes feisty on the subject of Juan Williams’s NPR termination. Not only ought the network dump anyone who appears regularly on Fox News, but it ought to dump its public funding as well. (The Awl)

Nones

¶ The advent of gold bullion ATMs has us wondering when someone will be smart enough to install GOLD BUBBLE gum vending machines. (Guardian; via The Morning News)

Vespers

¶ We thought that we’d heard everything, on the subject of Tao Lin, author of Richard Yates, but a comparison to Jack Kerouac was sort of beyond our wildest dreams. Or maybe way this side of them. “Whatevs.” (LRB Blog)

Compline

¶ In our ongoing uplift campaign, hoping to demonstrate that the world is not going to hell in a handbasket if only because it is already there, we report on the sad case of our Upper East Side neighbors, Karim and Tina Samii and Daphne Guinness, who have felt obliged to go to law over (or under) an overflowing bathtub at the former Stanhope, where, presumably, they both (so to speak) bought “floor throughs.”

Have A Look

¶ The melting pot that is New York: IRT, BMT, IND. (NYT)

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Fired by NPR for expressing a personal fear, in the wake of 9/11, of fellow passengers wearing “Muslim attire,” news analyst Juan Williams fulminated thusly. Right or wrong?

“Now that I no longer work for NPR let me give you my opinion. This is an outrageous violation of journalistic standards and ethics by management that has no use for a diversity of opinion, ideas or a diversity of staff (I was the only black male on the air). This is evidence of one-party rule and one-sided thinking at NPR that leads to enforced ideology, speech and writing. It leads to people, especially journalists, being sent to the gulag for raising the wrong questions and displaying independence of thought.”

Would having said “Arab” instead of “Muslim” have made a difference?

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Matins

¶ A report, backed by the NAACP, shows that a number of low-level Tea Party organizations are allied with racist groups. This doen’st come as much of a surprise, but as the semi-official register of the conservative groups’ associations (disputed, of course, by the Tea Partiers themselves as a “liberal smear”), it puts the reading public on notice. (Washington Post; via The Morning News)

Lauds

¶ Larry Fahey claims to “hate” film critic Roger Ebert, but we’re in accord with the substance of his argument, at least to the extent that serious moviegoers might contemplate buttressing their own opinions with Mr Ebert’s judgments. Movies are not commodities that can be comparison-shopped, and many “bad” movies are worth at least one viewing. (The Rumpus)

Prime

¶ At Naked Capitalism, a rousingly populist guest post from Jim Quinn. What we wouldn’t give to be able to convince him and his listeners that the most powerful enemy of economic equity in this country is the 1886  Supreme Court decision that conferred Fourteenth-Amendment protections (meant for former slaves) upon the American corproation.

Tierce

¶ The big story in today’s Times is about football helmets, and how they’ve been designed to prevent fractures, not concussions. This is an important look at the failure of self-regulatory organizations, NOCSAE in this case, which are funded by the businesses that they’re supposed to be supervising.

Sext

¶ David Shapiro shows up for a literary lions’ gala at the Chip seriously underdressed. No problem! A friend at his table “tells me not to worry about it because people will think i am super rich/powerful if i look like i don’t care about getting dressed for this.” We remember trying that sort of thing on when we were young, but we could never bring ourselves to believe it. (The Awl)

Nones

¶ Mark Lilla witness a manif in Lyon, which spurs reflections on the (American) Tea Party. (NYRBlog)

Vespers

¶ We’re knocked out with admiration for Lydia Kiesling, who is working her way through Kar, by Orhan Pamuk. That would be the novel that you may have read as Snow; Ms Kiesling is reading the novel in its original Turkish, one agglutianted clause at a time. Oh, to be young — or old beyond ambition! (The Millions)

Compline

¶ At the Guardian, Bettany Hughes writes a nice introduction to the topic of her new book: Socrates, and discusses the political insecurity behind his death sentence. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Have A Look

¶ Art Is Murder. (The Bygone Bureau)

¶ Maira Kalman’s studio. (Design Sponge)

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Times columnist Christine Haughney asked readers about their real-estate regrets. The solicitation was interpreted very widely. Among the choices that responders would reverse, the following stood out for us as a sign of changing times.

Simple: I would never go to law school. What a complete waste of time and money. I’d have been MUCH better off learning an actual skill/trade that is actually in demand. Welding. Solar panel installation. Diesel mechanic. Whatever. Andrew M.

We’d kind of like to know what Andrew is doing these days.

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Matins

¶ Although the word “honor” is not music in our ears, we read Kwame Anthony Appiah’s reflections on national and familial honor with the greatest interest — not least because of Mr Appiah’s almost fantastic parentage. We’re not persuaded, however, to abandon our preference for decency over honor. (Telegraph; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lauds

¶ If you’re like us, you’ve already got Alex Ross’s Listen to This on your list, if you don’t already have the book itself. Readers less familiar with the inside of Carnegie Hall (where, too, classical music isn’t the only kind on offer, not by a long shot) may be inspired by Jessica Freeman-Slade’s fresh-faced review, at The Millions.

Prime

¶ In a chummy little piece at The Reformed Broker, “Blogging on the Shoulders of Giants,” Joshua Brown pulls a coy tent over fellow admirers of the hedge fund superstars — all the while warming up some crocodile tears about the hit that a few of them are taking on Bank of America, and how much it hurts no matter what they say.

Tierce

¶ The idea that opposition makes people intransigent, advanced by Leon Festinger half a century ago, has only now been tested, and not only demonstrated but proved in a way that supports our intuitive (as yet untested) view that calm and security are essential for civilized life. In conversational terms, this means that doubt and uncertainty must be handled with great tact. Ed Yong reports, at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

Sext

¶ Something wrong with the world of late: Choire Sicha hasn’t been writing very much. (Or we have been missing it.) We’re reminded of this regrettable deficit by his warm appreciation of that excellent motion picture, Jackass 3D, which we’re going to run out and see on his recommenda — oh. (The Awl)

Nones

¶ What’s surprising about Christopher Hitchens’s essay on Hezbollah in Lebanon is his suprirse that paternalism orders society effectively. He makes it sound like a dark art, instead of the hardy cultural survival that it is. (Slate)

Vespers

¶ Raynard Seifert reviews Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood — or does he? (HTMLGiant)

Compline

¶ We were also  interested to read ” No More Arcs,” Rochelle Gurstein’s lament for the days when the nations of the West, especially the democracies, tried to live up to the glories of Antiquity. It’s not a sentiment that we share.

Have A Look

¶ Alida Valli. (Who knew the bed was green?) (Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist)

¶ Living in: Rear Window. (Design Sponge)

¶ Economy Candy. (The Awl)

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New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn deplores gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino’s incendiary homophobic rhetoric. (via Joe.My.God)

When there is focused political rhetoric against the LGBT community, anti-LGBT hate crimes go up. It is a fact, documented by decades of data at AVP [the Anti-Violence Project] and the FBI and in the police department. So why would it be any different this time?”

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Matins

¶ The man who gave us those beautiful fractals, Benoît Mandelbrot, died late last week, more or less estranged from the financial world that his researches transformed. In his opinion, quantitative analysts misused his work to convey a false sense of security about dangerous risks. Justin Fox, sitting in for Felix Salmon, suggests why Wall Street didn’t heed Mandelbrot’s warnings. (Also: Brain Pickings)

Lauds

¶ We agree with David Cho about the finale of Man Men‘s fourth season. (We also think that it befitted a drama that is more about the world of work than any show ever.) Of course, we would have been happy with anything that put an end to the tyranny showtimes. (The Awl)

Prime

¶ At Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith rounds up objections to the proposed QE2, or second “quantitative easing.” This is a somewhat arcane issue, but it’s also quite important, and we hope that the entry, with its snips from commenters as eminent as Joseph Stiglitz, will shed light.

Tierce

¶ Why Harrison Ford is awarding $10,000 prizes annually to writers who can make complex biodiversity issues intelligeible to the general public. (Wired Science)

Sext

¶ We’ve discovered a new blog (better to say that a new blog discovered us): My Dog Ate My Blog. We’re very heartened by the overlap in our interests, and the fresh writing is brisk and engaging. In a recent entry, Sarah McCarthy writes about the thorny decision in the eminent-domain case, Kelo v City of New London.

Nones

¶ Parag Khanna never mentions Jane Jacobs in a post at Foreign Policy that might as well entitled “Cities and the Wealth of Nations,” — it’s called “Beyond City Limits” insteaad — but what’s somewhat more troubling is the non-appearance of military considerations. With the exception of Venice (which established a large hinterland on both sides of the Adriatic, city states have rarely mastered the defense problem, and never for very long. Toward the end, the focus shifts somewhat, via a discussion of the gee-whiz Korean urban project at Songdo: cities are indeed our laboratories for the future. (via BLDBLOG)

Vespers

¶ At HTMLGiant, Roxanne Gay announces something new: a Literary Magazine Club. Every month will feature a different “little magazine,” starting with one that we’ve never heard of, New York Tyrant. (That would be the Editor, surely.) We’ve ordered a copy!

Compline

¶ Also sitting in for Felix Salmon, Barbara Kiviat picks up a hot topic that was raised in the Times over the weekend: the renewed willingness of economists to take cultural considerations into account when talking about poverty. Such talk makes her uncomfortable, as indeed it does us. If there’s a connection, it’s mediated by other factors, ranging from education to public transport, all of which can be more or less subsidized without affecting individual income.

Have A Look

¶ Paris en noir et blanc. (via Mnémoglyphes)

¶ Nailing Cockerham. (The Age of Uncertainty)

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Felix Rohatyn, a statesman of finance if ever there was one, looks back with no small discontent on the evolution of finance during his fifty years of notability. He is still haunted by the RJR Nabisco deal.

Still, almost 25 years later, he is grappling with how to fix a system built upon selling to the highest bidder.

“The trouble with this is that it is very difficult to quantify,” he said of valuing the impact on all the other constituents. “I am very troubled by my difficulty in trying to determine which was the better of the two deals.”

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Matins

¶ Justin E H Smith argues passionately for the centrality of foreign-language study in the humanities curriculum. In our view, language makes the difference between true education and hot air.

Lauds

¶ HTMLGiant‘s Kyle Minor is in town, where he spent a chunk of time at the IFC, watching Olivier Assayas’s Carlos. At 5 hours 19 minutes runtime, the Roadshow Edition of this film calls for serious intestinal fortitude, which is why we’re grateful for Kyle’s report, which also serves to remind us how much political orientations have changed since we were his age.

Prime

¶ Maybe the practice of economics will be truly scientific some day, but two pieces in the Times over the weekend show where the difficulty of attaining true predictability lies: in economists’ very imperfect understanding of human nature — namely their own, as reflected in philosophical bias. First, in a piece on income inequality, Robert Frank reminds us how far economists have wandered from Adam Smith‘s fundamental concern for moral sentiments. Then, the tile of David Segal’s “The X-Factor of Economics: People” tells you where he’s going.

Tierce

¶ Chris Mooney picked up Sam Harris’s new book, and found that it repeated an objection to Mr Mooney’s “accommodationism” to which the blogger had responded before at The Intersection. We take Mr  Mooney’s part in this important discussion, which pits intellectual principles against respect for different views.

Sext

¶ At 1904, our friend George Snyder wonders, improbably we should have thought, if he is turning into his old man. He probably thought that it was improbable as well. If you live long enough, though, life does begin to look like the Princesse de Guermantes reception — minus the footmen and the goodies and mirrors and the feathers.

Nones

¶ Michael Pettis, an associate of the Carnegie Asia Program in Beijing, advances a modest proposal: instead of buying Treasuries, China ought to fund the rehabiliation of United States infrastructure. (via Humble Student of the Markets)

Vespers

¶ Alexander Chee proffers the syllabus for his graphic fiction course at Amherst — and explains why he did not offer the two-semester expansion that he’d have had no trouble filling.

Compline

¶ At The Awl, Mike Barthel’s engagine reflections on “Bully Crisis 2010,” wherein he asks, “What do we do with the assholes?”

Have A Look

¶ Planet Berlin. (Strange Maps)

¶ Lisa Breslow’s Urban Silences; Tom Wizon’s Homespun Peregrinations. (ArtCat)

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In an Op-Ed piece in the Times, about the costs of our unthinking everyday numerologies, Daniel Gilbert plays a quiet little joke on the unsuspecting reader.

In 1962, a physicist named M. F. M. Osborne noticed that stock prices tended to cluster around numbers ending in zero and five. Why? Well, on the one hand, most people have five fingers, and on the other hand, most people have five more.

As with the well-known vase-profile illusion, we’re surprised when a very common figure of speech is put to literal use.

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