• Arrested Development - Season One {To think that Teen Wolf Too was just a glimpse of Jason Bateman's potential.}

The following might have been lifted from any current edition of any political or academic journal or op-ed piece, which models itself as an obituary on a recently imploded idealism:

This perspective on contemporary events is optimistic in the sense that it foresees continuing human progress; deterministic in the sense that it perceives events as fixed by processes over which persons and policies can have but little influence; moralistitic in the sense that it perceives history and U.S. policy as having moral ends; cosmopolitan in the sense that it attempts to view the world not from the perspective of American interests or intentions but from the perspective of the modernizing nation and the "end" of history. It identifies modernization with both revolution and morality, and U.S. policy with all three.

I was excited by this famous figure, and I believe what it was about him that stirred me up was the instant impression he gave--no matter about the old heap he rode in or the peculiarity of his retinue--of navigation by the great stars, of the highest considerations, of being fit to speak the most important human words and universal terms. When you are as reduced to a different kind of navigation from this high starry kind as I was and are only sculling on the shallow bay, crawling from one clam-rake to the next, it's stirring to have a glimpse of deep-water greatness. And, even more than an established, an exiled greatness, because the exile was a sign to me of persistence at the highest things.

And yet the psychohistorical memory hardly accounts for the fact that Kristol fils was not even a glint in Kristol pere's eye during the latter's "Alcove 1" phase, to which he was initially drawn, by the way, by that other Irving of the New York intellectuals, last name of Howe: a proud lifelong leftist, an early warner against McCarthyism, and one of the founding editors of the great Dissent magazine, the yin to Commentary's yang.

George F. Will's February 26th review of Jeffrey Hart's Making of the Conservative Mind and Bruce Bartlett's Impostor is more jeremiad than intellectual history. It bemoans the movement's loss of virtue at the hands of ideology's perennial Lothario, political power. In its nostalgia and its fear of change, the piece is as conservative as can be. It gives us a past we never had and no plan for the future. [Read more...]

There is no way that a city like New York should neglect to stand up for free speech, democracy and secular cosmopolitan values. So I am pleased to inform you that the rally for Solidarity With Denmark is indeed on for this week.

Noam Chomsky may profess to have zero interest in being seen as a leftist guru, or the go-to anarcho-syndicalist on all things condemnatory of the United States. Easy for him to say. Since the mid-80’s, he’s passively attracted a worldwide following whose size and ken explodes any definition of the word “cult.” (In fact, it may be said that he’s reached a sort hinge-moment in his career: fellow linguists now target his theory of generative grammar with more passion than yawningly familiarized conservatives do his politics. Where’s the outrage? Have you checked the Cognitive Science department?) Noam’s co-thinkers, however, haven’t had it so peachy. Some of them have had to work for their audiences, whether through carefully timed samizdat-styled publications that go on to become bestsellers – while still winning awards called things like “Project Censored” – or through much-bruited academic kerfuffles with “mainstream” antagonists.

Matthew Stewart's altogether excellent double- barreled biography, "The Courtier and the Heretic," has a great deal of back story and an equal amount of epilogue, but there's no confusing his climactic main event, which occurred over a few days in 1676, in The Hague. Its participants were rival philosophers of a budding modernity, who, as presented here, probably had more in common than either would have cared to admit.

Had he lived closer to our own time, Benedict de Spinoza would have been labeled a "free-thinking" or "Hellenized" Jew. His family had fled Portugal to evade the Inquisition, and landed in the cosmopolitan and mercantile milieu of Amsterdam, which no doubt facilitated the wry genius' formulation of what might be called the materialist conception of purpose.

On the surface, Prague looks all shiny and new, perfectly in tune with the ways of the modern world. I even thought we’d cleared the last hurdle when supermarkets started carrying cheddar cheese about a year and a half ago. Then my friend’s common cold turns out to be the mumps, and poof! I’m churning butter in a frock on the prairie waiting for the county doctor and hoping the injuns don’t show up. Or at least that’s the setting I felt like I should be in. Because in a First-World country in the 21st century, why are people still getting a disease that Americans have been routinely vaccinated for since 1967? Next thing you know, your upstairs neighbor’s gonna come down with Scarlet Fever, the café waitress’ll be hit with Polio, and the Bubonic Plague will be sweeping through Old Town.

At first glance, nothing seems terribly wrong with health and health care in this country – but take one step into any public hospital (and although private hospitals do exist, 91% of beds are in public ones) and you’ll think thrice about getting sick within these borders. A friend of mine, back in 2001, was admitted to Motol Hospital with an upper respiratory infection (or so we speculated, as he was never told what his actual illness was), and held there for two weeks without once being informed about his condition. He was medicated through a drip from a glass IV. His fellow wardmates, who looked very near death, were sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom. And it’s not just the archaic equipment and patients’ behavior that are out of whack. My friend the mumps victim has a sister who was sent to the hospital because of a routine bout of tonsilitis. It left her bedridden for three weeks, doctor’s orders, and when it was all over she was only one tonsil poorer. Two months later, she contracted the same illness in the remaining tonsil.

So I try to get sick as rarely as possible in this city. Which is why it came as such a shock to read yesterday that there are thousands of people who come to the Czech Republic every year to be nipped and tucked by the noteworthy doctors here. Apparently, “plastic surgery tourism” is thriving in Prague. The majority of these tourists are Brits, lured by cheap flights and the lower cost of procedures in the Czech Republic (a liposuction costs around $2500).

I’m a good Jewish New Yorker, and I know how to bargain hunt. But a red-tag nose job? No thank you. Especially with this shocking marketing material from Beautiful Beings, a British company that provides pre-packaged vanity-vaca’s in Prague:

“Everyone has something about themselves that they don't like, whether it's their profile, their body shape or their chest size. Some people just grudgingly accept what they have, while others strive to be the best person that they can be. If you are one of these people, who will not accept looking like second best, you might be the perfect candidate for plastic surgery.”

Let it be known that you heard it here first: caveat emptor.

Sex, Highs, and Videotape
by Michael Weiss
[Buy Havoc (Unrated Version) on DVD]

I can't quite bring myself to look this up verbatim, but in some interview in some entertainment magazine a while back a reporter asked Anne Hathaway if she wasn't worried about being typecast as a princess, having done two Disney Junior Diana fantasies and one wised-up musical fairy tale for Miramax. Her reply was something like, "Look, I've got the rest of my life as an actress in Hollywood to play the vengeful battered housewife or the hooker with the heart of gold. I'm fine with being a princess for now."

My kind of woman. Imagine Tina Fey going into internal exile amid an Oceania of next generation Olsenites.

Now imagine me writhing like an electric fan to see Mrs. Shakespeare's namesake give a stunningly all-grown-up performance in a Stephen Gaghan-scripted disaster called Havoc. (Not as in what you cry before letting slip the dogs of war, although you may be tempted by the prospect of remote change.) It's about ghetto fabulous white teens from the Palisades who are already rich but are going to die trying to -- what, exactly is never firmly established. Keep their rep with the sucka MCs in charge of their annuities at Merrill Lynch? Drop Benjamins on the latest Gucci skin grafts?

The film is more or less Traffic on a learner's permit. Although, Hathaway has successfully zipped right into that hooker/housewife carpool lane as Allison, a smart but self-destructive (aren't they all?) poseur gangsta with domestic demons and wits and a lack of selfconsciousness ill-befitting someone with her sharp stare and perpetually elevated eyebrow. She decides that the elite West Coast club scene -- which includes scamming on dirty old men bearing blow -- has grown terribly old and blase ("We. Are. Totally. Fucking. Bored.") whereas all things vibrantly new and exciting reside in... East L.A.!

In a wrong plot and highway turn about as plausible as a drug czar's daughter becoming a tenement crackwhore, she and her girlfriends front to a Latino dealer (Freddy Rodriguez, six feet in over his head) with evidently more patience than client pages. Allison and Bijou Phillips (probably blissfully unaware that she was in fact filming a minor motion picture) want to be initiated into his gang, and the hazing ritual is about what you'd expect it to be. Their spot of Lifetime "Movie of the Week" trouble culminates in an unconvincing shouting session from Allison's father (Michael Biehn, finally showing his age), and serene intercession by her mother (a fugual Laura San Giacomo) as a bromide-spouting and Percoset-popping Martha Stewart.

Perhaps now would be the time to mention that Allison intermittently deconstructs her and her friends' culturally inverted nihilism on videotape, this being shot by an amateur AV Squad documentarian who calls the mamba-fanged minx out on her seedy and needy mutability as honors student one minute and boricua blanquita the next. (Poor guy: he's forced to do this while Hathaway's sprawled topless on a couch offering herself to him in what may indeed be ironic and taunting tones, but still... James Spader at full-tilt creepy was never so slow on the make. Like Syriana, Gaghan's most recent endeavor, this is what happens when a Soderbergh mentorship goes awry.)

I only mention any of this because Hathaway, apart from looking the way she does -- Amelie's Audrey Tatou without the playpen pout or the New Wave preciousness -- has got charisma and sex appeal like you would not believe. I'm also convinced she's a genuinely magnanimous human being off-camera, since she never once appeared bored or frustrated by the fact that this straight-to-DVD trifle was going to be the thing that finally plugged up her career pigeon hole.

And this felicitous consequence of Havoc redeems the trip to Blockbuster or Amazon. The tween queen is dead. Long live the vamp, the tramp and the femme fatale.

Who's Your Huckleberry?
by Michael Weiss
[Buy Tombstone on DVD]

In one of the old black-and-white Westerns, which could always play it safe by running a variation on the Showdown at the O.K. Corral, a traveling thespian struggles to recall the closing staves of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and does so in the worst possible setting of the fin de siecle American frontier: a testosterone-rich saloon filled with grizzled illiterates, where any display of male weakness -- especially the swishy iambic kind -- can prove fatal. Never fear. In rushes Doc Holliday, drunk and victorious from a recent gun battle, to color in the pale cast of the even paler-faced player's thought. Whenever someone attempts to teach Tocqueville's correspondence course by trotting out that false dichotomy between "red" and "blue" states, I always remember this scene of Appalachian (and Jeffersonian) erudition, amid the blood and the mud and the beer.

Very cosmopolitan, indeed. Saddled between Clint Eastwood's gorgeous genre gallop into the sunset, Unforgiven, and HBO's Mametesque noir series Deadwood -- where "fuck," in all its many declensions, is a preposition -- is George P. Cosmatos' Tombstone, a modern manifest destiny shoot-'em-up that skillfully melds the kitsch of its spaghetti forebears with better writing and none of the postmodern cartoonishness of tribute you'd expect from a Tarantino or a Rodriguez. There's too much real dust and sun in the eye to allow for any winking here.

The story is about interventionism. Retired Dodge City marshal Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell in his best performance to date) and his brothers (Sam Elliott, Bill Paxton) repair to the thriving mining town of Tombstone, Arizona to win their treasure in gambling and venture capital. What they find is that this necessarily comes at the expense of innocent people's blood, as Tombstone is little more than a dusky Bedlam with pretenses of civilization as collapsible as the scenery when the Kodak runs out. Meet the first incarnation of "organized crime" in America: the cowboys, recognizable by their sociopathic anarcho-syndicalist ways and by the red sashes they wear around their waists. Earp is reluctant at first to unpack his grey, old widowmaker until filial pressures and a nagging conscience, bolstered by a love for a cultivated and impetuous Jewish actress played by Dana Delany, make this all but inevitable -- and splendidly climactic, right out of a cordite-stained Old Testament.

Cosmatos has not been heard from much since 1993, and this is lowdown dirty shame because I doubt that any other director apart from maybe James Cameron could add to Michael Biehn's repertoire of three facial expressions. With the rather strident exception of Johnny Ringo's final line, delivered in pitch-perfect Malibu surfer dude ("All right lunger, let's do it"), Biehn's screentime is used to great purpose, as is that of Powers Booth, who apparently liked the clothes so much, he re-donned them for Deadwood.

But the real showstopper is the aforementioned "lunger," Val Kilmer's startlingly charismatic and witty Doc Holliday. You'll watch this film once and committ all of his dialogue to memory. Most of his famous turns of phrase occur as ripostes, as if from a liquid-tongued but recalcitrant child, to the hectoring of others who are either perpetually worried about his well-being, or looking to ensure that it grows even more hazardous. On being asked to stop drinking and card playing: "I have not yet begun to defile myself." On being asked (by a badly sunburnt Tom Hayden-Church) to play a more crowd-pleasing melody at the piano:

"'Oh, Susannah,' 'Camptown Races.' Stephen stinking Foster."

"Ah, yes. Well, this happens to be a nocturne."

"A which?"

"You know, Fredric fucking Chopin."

Holliday is the Byronic hero of the Old West, with one crucial difference: his terminus was more bathetic than it was glorious. The actual Holliday, a licensed dentist from Virginia, first became an outlaw because he would rather have died quickly from a bullet wound than slowly from the tuberculosis eating away at his lung tissue. Yet through all the low-burn attempts at suicide, his aim was just too sure to ever miss, and he wound up expiring, emaciated and blanched, of his Fury-like consumption after all. The "comment" on this is one of the last scenes where Kilmer stares at his bare feet in a sanitarium, pondering the whimpering irony of his blase end. "This is funny," he says. Yes, I suppose it is, but how nice that the comic relief in such a refried trope was given the dimensions of a smiling Falstaff who could apprehend such things, and who wasn't afraid to open his mouth when that got the job done better than a six-shooter. The Duke had nothing on "Doc." [Buy the DVD...]

YBRET: Lunar Park Reviewed
by Michael Weiss
(Originally published in Stop Smiling magazine)
[link]

The writer who inserts himself unveiled into his own fiction is a writer asking for trouble; the reader is there to give it to him. Early indicators of imminent confrontation include eye-rolling and wincing. Then the cheek, in anticipation of future embarrassments, goes as vermilion as the critical ink about to be spilled. The sharks of the High Concept begin circling immediately. It's hard enough to distract someone from conflating the characters on the page with the person who put them there, even though a successful distraction is one definition of artistry. But why on earth would anyone court bathos and masochism in a novel by having the name in the copyright stick around until its more regularly scheduled reappearance in the acknowledgements? Maybe because the payoff of this gimmick hasn't always been so slight. An enduring example is Christopher Isherwood's celebrated aperture in the 'Berlin stories' of the '30s. Though the shutter malfunctioned in later years, Herr Isyvoo still managed to charm some of the fustier opponents of the racy new formalism who had been clamoring to turn back the clock ever since Ulysses. It would be presumptuous, then, to abandon hope once the more imaginative dramatis personae has been discarded. Consider two more recent toyings in this subgenre. [Read more...]

What's Your Blog Worth? Converting Your Livejournal Into Cold, Hard Cash
by Nic Duquette [link]

If you're reading this essay, you probably have an Internet connection, and if you have an Internet connection, you probably have a weblog. We will therefore dispose with the formality of defining what a blog is for technological neophytes and proceed directly to the question that has been on your mind since the very first day when you wrote that the music accompanying your frowny emoticon and paragraph about your significant other was Tom Waits -- can you make money doing this? Maybe even enough to quit your job? [Read more...]

Servicing Stalin
by Michael Weiss
(Originally published in Stop Smiling magazine)
[link]

Someone at this stage should do for Joseph Stalin what Don DeLillo, in his novel White Noise, did for Adolph Hitler: Give him his own academic department. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, assorted articles and monographs have disgorged the goods on the former Soviet Union and its miserable ruler of three decades. Most recently, Simon Sebag Montiefore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar examined what can only be called the methodical caprice of the modern -- and fully modernized -- authoritarian. Here, at last, was Stalin's Satyricon: decades of after-hours Politburo meetings, with food fights, adolescent pranks, and creepy man-on-man waltzes, where the head of Polish security presses his lips to the ear of a foreign minister and whispers sweet somethings about “infiltrations” -- and not the kind you'd expect under the circumstances. [Read more...]

Fascism With the Face It Deserves
by Michael Weiss [link]

Tune in to Hitchens v. Galloway, Wednesday, September 14, at 7 PM, broadcast live from Baruch College in Manhattan. But first read up on the awful truth about Boy George:

-- George Galloway & Iraq's Oil For Food Program: Facts, Falsehoods, and Misconceptions

-- Galloway In His Own Words

If Children Don't Understand Evolution, Maybe It's Because We Don't Teach Them Science
by Nic Duquette [link]

Neither side of the evolution debate is able to address the issue usefully in the classroom. When President Bush suggested that "intelligent design" be introduced in schools so students could understand the vital cultural debate we are having, he was denounced as a political opportunist and scientific philistine. But the president is correct on this issue: schoolchildren should be introduced to the principles of so-called intelligent design theory and encouraged to hammer out the scientific and theological issues at stake. A spirited, ugly debate on intelligent design from coast to coast is the best way to make sure Darwin's insights are introduced to students well. All participants in the evolution debate seem to believe that the school system is training children to be evolutionists, and that the introduction of intelligent design will undermine unquestioning belief in natural selection. That's absurd. The opposite is true. [more...]

The Prague Fall: Communism's Death Hasn't Stopped the Self-Inflicted Kind
by Orli Sharaby [link]

Even in the warmest of months, life can seem cold and dreary. So it was, presumably, for some anonymous fellow on a bright and sunny Tuesday morning a few weeks ago. As I made my way unsuspectingly to the tram at 8:10 that day, incidentally, without yet having had any coffee, I suddenly came face to face with self-inflicted death, splattered unsympathetically across the tram tracks directly underneath the Nusle Bridge. A shocking sight, to be sure, and one which made me rather unfashionably late to work, not to mention the fact that it's haunted me ever since. The crude outline of the victim has long since faded from the pavement, but it remains forever etched in my memory, from time to time bringing to the surface ruminations on suicide and what would cause a person to end his own life. I mean, it's a harsh world out there. Leaving aside the uncertainty of living in a major city in the age of "sacred terror," millions of horsepower zoom past us everyday as we cross the street; diseases threaten to gobble our t-cells; earthquakes rend holes in the very ground beneath our feet...Isn't it enough to leave death to chance?

Apparently not for the hundreds of thousands of people who kill themselves every year, citing -- presumably in suicide notes -- marital problems, depression, mental or physical disease, or fear of police (yes, really) as reasons for their "take no prisoners" attitude toward their own lives. In the Czech Republic in 2003, the last year for which records are available, approximately 1700 people committed suicide, thankfully not all from the bridge above my house. When one researches global trends in suicide, which I discovered is a much less repulsive task than one might imagine, certain interesting facts emerge. One is that women are anywhere from 2 to 6 times less likely to die at their own hands then men are (except in China, where women are more inclined), but that they're at least two times more likely than men to try.

The statistics on suicide also point to the high numbers in European countries versus Latin American and Middle Eastern nations. This would seem to lend truth to the popular opinion that a religious commitment all but inoculates a person from committing the act. Church and other religious leaders claim that integration in that kind of social network provides worshipers the necessary support system and sense of belonging to choose life. More likely, fear of burning eternally in hell is the predominant deterrent for conscientious churchgoers. Whatever the case, the claim that atheists and agnostics are more likely to kill themselves out of desperation falls apart when one takes into consideration Poland, a country that boasts a population wherein 97% of citizens are strictly Catholic. Poland has a comparable suicide rate to that of the Czech Republic, a country, as we all know, that is one of the most atheistic in the world.

Moreover, neighbors Czech Republic and Poland share their status as high-suicide-rate nations with the entire region of Eastern Europe, including Lithuania, which lays claim to the highest global rate of suicide. So maybe it's not about religion, and it's not about girls and boys; maybe suicide is just another social phenomenon to be put neatly in the "it's because of Communism" box. And true enough, Prague's Suicide Bridge, giving fatalism an inconvenient potential energy just above my apartment, was built from 1968-1973 by Communist authorities not only to alleviate traffic congestion but also as a grandiose display of military and cultural authority. But as the thousands who jump, hang, shoot, suffocate, and overdose to their deaths in the former Eastern Bloc can attest, Big Brother left his legacy in the region in far less showy, but just as pervasive, ways.

Peer Review: The Aristocrats, In Theory and Practice
by Michael Weiss [link]

Within the vernacular of modern show biz there exists a system of taxonomy that sounds as if it were dreamt up by a Variety editor with an annoying speech impediment: "director's director," "actor's actor," "comedian's comedian." Whatever the species under consideration, the genus is instantly recognizable as much by its implied shortcomings as by its signaled attributes. The limelight has probably been elusive for the comedian's comedian despite a white-hot talent which only the pros can appreciate and, to coin another commonplace of the industrial lingo, "hope to work with someday." Not for him is the blockbuster weekend or household celebrity. The best he can hope for is his name whispered in hushed tones, in moist magazine profiles of his box office betters; a moment of amplified applause during an embarassing cameo in some award show montage; or, now that the success of independent film is largely brokered on the success of the semi-anonymous underdog, a documentary all about his little old self...

The Aristocrats is not about a comedian's comedian, but it is about something slightly more elect and revealing: a comedian's comedy. As with any mercantile guild or philosophers circle, the closed circuit of the entertainer is worth investigating on social merits alone. Who are these people and what do they do when they're not working? Even if the answer is, Still working, what's different when the cameras aren't on? This is why old Friar's Club and Dean Martin roasts are now available on DVD and why books like Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live top the bestsellers lists. It's not the ham schtick, bad haircuts, or parade of bold-faced (and mostly dead) names that fascinate us; it's the access to a rare-glimpsed culture of comity or commiseration, how those bold-faced names intimately know one another, or pretend to do, anyway. It's the cant-free chaos of shoptalk, the personnel abuse -- whether ironic and well-meaning, or sincere and irate -- that makes these spectacles no different than those of a vaguely functional family that drinks together. From scripted intentionality to failure-friendly improvisation. All certificates of inauthenticity have been voided as a little something extra for the fans. Actually, failure-friendly doesn't quite cut it: failure, and a temporary immunity to it, is the whole point. David Letterman's monologue would have been consigned to the dust-bin of Nick-at-Nite reruns a long time ago were this not true.

And this is pretty much the conceit behind a legendary inside joke of vaudeville that's been passed down through the ages and told mostly offstage as a form of self-entertainment. It's built upon the thinnest and most shiftable armatures of form, a Zen-like rock garden of humor. Ready? Here goes: A family visits a talent agent. The father tells the agent they've got this amazing, must-see act. "What is it you do?," asks the agent. Now insert the vilest, most elaborate thought-images of carnality, incest, bestiality and scatology you can dream up on the spot and sustain indefinitely. (Grandmas and newborn infants aren't just fair game, they're de rigueur.) Finish with one justifiably horrified agent who has a single follow-up question, the name of the act, and you've got the whole shebang of The Aristocrats, which is also the punchline. The same hoary set-up is told and retold and with alternating levels of gusto and flourish by everyone who's still alive and ever made you laugh. Or never made you laugh, but will do so here. George Carlin, Gilbert Gottfried, Bob Saget, Drew Carey and Cartman from South Park all spray their own brand of liquid filth to enormously hilarious effect. (That Gottfried, the Patron Saint of the Onstage Reincarnation, and Saget, who charitably donates his Frankenstein rendering of the joke to the "kids from Full House," are two of the funniest in this capacity is another testament to the you-only-thought-you-knew world of professional stand-up.)

You might say that such a documentary, which is the badly molested brainchild of Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, depends on a one-trick pony, but given what ponies are rhetorically put through for two hours, you'd only court banality with that description. Instead, what's been produced here is a very smart and engrossing work of history, deconstruction and reconstruction of a near-Iliadic text by academics you wouldn't mind reading even when they do get a touch pedantic. I suppose it was inevitable that the gender and race distinctions of "blue" comedy would get its exegesis, but even this is handled skillfully by Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg and Phyllis Diller, charmingly buttoned-up about the obscene, all the while wearing a muu-muu. "I fainted the first time I heard it" -- which leads you to wonder what poor Phyllis must have made of Sarah Silverman's exquisitely tasteless interpretation of the bit, ending in the slow-dawn realization of her own rape.

A few years back Jerry Seinfeld made a documentary called Comedian. The problem with that compulsive peak behind the curtain was that it attempted to take a wildly inordinate success story -- about the richest and most high-profile master of observation, ever -- and boil it back down to its humble, on-the-road essences. The duds remained duds because of a complete lack of self-consciousness about them, not to mention a too-literal presentation of the agonies of invention by a mediocre supporting cast. Whereas with The Aristocrats no one hogs the mic, if only because of the deliberately thankless material everyone has to work with. That's the fun. Small and formulaic imperceptibly building to outsize and unpredictable climax is also one definition of artistry. Indeed, it says more about the true nature of comedy that a shit-soaked, uncle-fucking mongoloid girl of seven somehow represents the more attractive side of an industry filled with bank-breaking personality disorders like Jerry, and self-obsessed primadonnas like Orny Adams.

Freaky Deaky: A Rogue Economist Has Fun, and So Do We... Up to a Point
by Max Gross
Buy it from Amazon
[link]

Probably the best thing that can be said about Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is that it makes for excellent cocktail party nibbles.

Who wouldn't like to regale one's friends with some of the weird avenues Levitt and Dubner explore? The book tells why public school teachers might encourage their students to cheat on a standardized test; why a real estate broker would gladly sell a house for less than its market worth; why sumo wrestlers are willing to fix matches; why a swimming pool is more dangerous than a handgun. And so on.

Freakonomics is essentially an expansion of a fawning article that Dubner wrote for The New York Times Magazine a few years back about Levitt, a young economist at the University of Chicago, who specializes in economies that have little to do with money. (The article is quoted -- embarrassingly -- throughout the book.) The research is all Levitt's, and the book is a pop-rewrite of Levitt's academic papers.

Since it has come out, Freakonomics has been collecting nothing but lavish praise from a lot of highbrow reviewers. "If Indiana Jones were an economist, he'd be Steven Levitt," wrote Steven Landsburg, in the Wall Street Journal. The New Yorker's science writer, Malcolm Gladwell, lent the book a blurb for its cover: "Prepare to be dazzled." There were many others.

But I would advise against preparing oneself to be dazzled; on the contrary, I would say that one should prepare to be slightly disappointed. It would be ridiculous to say that there is nothing worthwhile in this book, but I found the book to be scattershot and unconvincing, in which serious topics (such as abortion, crime and drugs) were looked at in a somewhat sophomoric way.

In what should have been the most engaging chapter, "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?" Levitt and Dubner look at the economy of the crack-cocaine world:

A few years back one of Levitt's colleagues befriended a Chicago crack gang and, in the process, managed to obtain one of the gang's ledgers. (Yes, apparently crack gangs keep accounts.)

It turns out that crack gangs are run very similarly to Fortune 500 companies; the gang had an enforcer, a treasurer, a CEO (who was a college educated business major) and dozens of junior-level dealers, who earned pitiful wages working a highly dangerous job (less than minimum wage; many dealers had to supplement their incomes working at places like McDonald's).

The economy of crack dealing is, of course, fascinating, and the chapter smells of what could have been first-rate journalism, but Levitt and Dubner choose to ask the wrong questions; the chapter asks why, if crack dealing is so profitable, most dealers live in the slums? (With their mothers, no less.) It is as if Levitt and Dubner watched movies like "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas", and took them for literal truth.

It's no surprise to anyone who has ever walked through a slum (or even picked up a newspaper) that most crack dealers lead Hobbseian, squalid lives. It almost goes without saying that crime would obey a certain pecking order -- that the Pablo Escobars and John Gottis of crime do very well, and the foot soldiers would not do nearly as well.

Most of us would respond, "Duh."

This chapter only serves to emphasize the overall slightness of the book as a whole.

More troubling is the chapter entitled, "Where Have All the Criminals Gone?" which explains why the legalization of abortion might have led to reduced crime rates.

This chapter begins by asking why crime went down during the 1990s when all experts were predicting it would go up. Some attribute the dip to the booming economy; others say it has to do with stricter gun laws; a few said that it was because more police were put on the force.

But Levitt posits that the dip came almost exactly 16 years after Roe v. Wade took effect -- exactly the same years that most thugs enter their criminal prime. Maybe there was less crime because fewer criminals were being born...

For both liberals and conservatives, the implications of this argument are horrific; for conservatives -- who have always prided themselves on believing in law-and-order -- Levitt's argument would validate abortion. For liberals the argument smacks of a soft form of eugenics; that poor people -- and all the minorities that live in poverty -- are criminals, and that they are being weeded out.

The book has facts to back itself up; in the states where abortion was legal prior to Roe, crime rates went down sooner. And in 1966, after Ceausescu made abortion illegal in Romania, the reverse happened: crime started to go up about 16 years later. (These facts seem a little wispy when making such a startling claim. I would have liked to have seen much more evidence.)

Levitt and Dubner have remained proudly noncommittal, politically speaking, about this chapter -- which, no matter what side of the political aisle you come from, is a major cop-out. At a time when a new Supreme Court Justice might well decide the fate of abortion (as well as the legislation that has been chipping away at a woman's right to an abortion) it seems too important an argument to treat as neutrally as Levitt and Dubner.

But, then, that seems to be the general gestalt of the book. Freakonomics might flirt with serious topics, and maybe that's the only way to write a best seller these days, but it will ultimately be relegated into a quaint anecdote.

A Revalued Yuan Means a Cheaper Dollar. Will China Buy General Motors? by Nic Duquette [link]

The very idea that one of the iconic corporations of American manufacturing could be bought up by Asians may strike most Americans as impossible. However, it is not only feasible, but the recent revaluation of the Chinese currency suggests that this may be exactly what China is planning. Like the auto worker in the Johnny Cash song, China's government and manufacturers may be assembling all they need one piece at a time. [more]

In the Gloaming: Before Sunset on DVD
Buy it from Amazon [link]

Of the many virtues of seeing Julie Delpy do anything for roughly ninety minutes, her strutting Nina Simone impersonation in the very last frame of Before Sunset was easily the sexiest thing committed to celluloid in the last year. "Baby... You are gonna miss. That. Plane." I know. Planes, trains, automobiles, Vienna, Paris. Who wouldn't write a bestselling novel, thinly disguised as an all-points enchantress bulletin, and tour the Continent with it just to find her again? There's absolutely no reason why a sequel to a self-contained story of circadian rhythms should have turned out better than the original. But then, your thirties are supposed to be more interesting than your twenties. And it makes sense that not having seen each other for a decade (oh, come on, if they had met six months later, would there be a sequel?) has almost estranged them back into first encounter mode. So we get another day, another peripatetic chatfest with some tingly, but also prickly, catching up to do. Are they both presently with other people? Yes. Does one of them now have a child? Uh-huh. Does any of this matter remotely? Maybe. Kudos to Linklater for resorting again to the flickering neon question mark of a denouement, which for these two characters obviously works. Though plenty of that older-and-wiser badinage can drift back into post-college Eurorail banality ("How can you possibly think that the world is not going straight to hell?" belongs to a different French Celine, in a different decade), this generally occupies the realm of how real, flawed human beings talk to and seduce each other. I can't believe I'd live to say this, but a director's instinct to let his actors write their own dialogue has finally paid off. Hawke and Delpy have a frightening natural chemistry (I even hear one of them is single these days) and you get the sense -- and ain't it always the reaffirmingest kind -- that they derived as much pleasure making the film as we do watching it. Until 2014 in the land of the midnight sun. And make it fucking work this time. --MW

Evil Will Always Win Because Good Is Dumb: Episode III
by Michael Weiss
[link]

So it's ironic that Lucas's long-awaited return to the franchise that invented the modern consensus fable was met, in 1998, with almost unanimous hostility. Let's see, the first installment: a disposable children's cartoon best remembered for a talking upright fish for whom the seemingly inevitable line, "No woman no cry," was just an anti-defamation lawsuit away. Round two: a saccharine love story sprinkled liberally over a bland admixture of human cloning and "separatist" rebellion. Let simmer until plot thickens.

The good news is Revenge of the Sith -- or Episode III, or Bush in Space, or whatever the fuck it's called -- does pay down some of the deficit amassed by Lucas's latter-day gambles. No, it's not better than the original Star Wars, but it is well-paced, well-acted -- especially given the moody, brooding circumstances of the western/samurai trope -- and far more attentive to the unities of dramatic storytelling; it actually draws you in this time. Like the last scene in the final episode of Seinfeld, a giddy nostalgia is generated by the distinct impression of having "been here before," except that in this case we know exactly where we're going: back to the future of 1977. Oh, and a Promethean fall from grace, a prophecy betrayed, and something about the struggle for the fate of the universe -- all that shuffles things along, too.

To bring us up to speed, then: Anakin Skywalker is now secretly married to Padme, much to the contravention of an austere (and vaguely homoerotic) honor code for Jedi journeymen. Yet domestic life in an Ikea-furnished apartment seems to have only heightened his abilities as a fighter pilot and lightsaber swashbuckler. As a result, Anakin is now the Page Six apprentice of the galaxy, best known for saving the lives of other heroes and plenipotentiaries, not least of which belongs to Obi-Wan Kenobi, his (ahem) "master." The film opens with dizzying space battle that is shot and edited by someone who's been begging us to hear him out on the glories of CGI and has finally provided the key evidence for his case. Skywalker and Kenobi are on a mission to rescue Chancellor Palpatine, believed to have been kidnapped by the nasty Count Dooku, played by Christopher Lee who looks like an advertisement for the undead he once was. But of course the droll, froggy-voiced chancellor -- imagine Gore Vidal, only funnier and with better politics -- moonlights as the "Dark Lord of the Sith," prime mover of cosmic misfortune and chief villain of all six films. He's orchestrated a phony civil war, with nary a Jabba the Moore having hipped to him, the better to facilitate the transformation of the republic into his very own totalitarian empire. This is a project in which Anakin will, unwittingly at first, serve as helpmeet.

Now the Sith is either a schismatic sect of the Jedi order founded on a kind of alchemical interpretation of The Force, or else it's Douglas Feith's old department at the Pentagon. I'm really not so sure since the macedoine of ancient and contemporary histories and contradictory philosophies makes for a befuddled morality play indeed. Leaving aside the idea of a chancellor winding up a genocidal baddie dressed in black (forget ham, that's just spam-fisted), at one point a Dark Side-lured Anakin remarks to Obi-Wan: "Either you're with me, or you're my enemy." To this comes the sententious reply that "only a Sith thinks in absolutes." Yet Obi-Wan will soon thereafter invoke the giveaway Manichean term "evil," against which Anakin submits a claim to relative "points of view"! "Fanatical obscurantism" is something that even the arcane Leo Strauss deplored. I've got to wonder what the hell the "noble Wookie lie" must sound like.

I'd also like to take a moment and give credit to the wrongfully defamed Hayden Christensen. He learned from Shattered Glass that overwrought post-adolescence needn't package itself as a cardboard cutout set to bleat every five minutes, and he's proven under more demanding conditions that this is a knowledge he intends to keep. Good for him. His pissiness has matured into a respectable angry young man's grumble (that bulge in the forehead is genetic -- have you no heart, A.O. Scott?) which leaves you half sorry for the chap as he suppurates and smolders on the volcanic shore where Darth Vader is satanically born.

Despite what you've read, the dialogue in this installment isn't nearly as face-coveringly embarrassing as it was in the other go-rounds. Some of Yoda's Yiddish left-dislocational syntax would trip up Noam Chomsky on a good day, but otherwise the signs are all there of Tom Stoppard's cautious, and no doubt gleefully self-contained, script-doctoring. (C-3PO and R2-D2 Are Dead might have made for an interesting failure in its own right.) When Natalie Portman says, "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo," I winced more out of memory of her having opened her mouth at all in Closer. And the other critically celebrated clunker, "She's lost the will to live," is delivered by a medical droid who couldn't order 300 cc's of Penzoil Plus without sounding ridiculous. So no harm there, either.

But would it have killed Lucas to give Samuel L. Jackson the adieu his being zapped out the window of a multi-storied government building requires? "You God damn right I sense a disturbance in the Force!"

It's the Stupidity, Economists: The Debate Over Social Security
by Nic Duquette [link] [Click New Dealer to read.]

The whole four-part series has been compiled and edited together. You can now view it here as The Tractatus Fiscalo-Deepshiticus.

Nouvelle Vague: Putting the High-Concept Into "Concept Album"
by Nic Duquette [link] [Click album cover to buy.]

Lately I've been listening to Internet streams of Santa Monica's iconic public radio station KCRW, which might as well drop the syndicated news programs for an "all covers and remixes, all the time" format. I don't think I've heard an original version yet, except for one song from Guero that sounded like it was a rimix of a different Beck song. But one day, rising from the seamless sea of trip-hop was a thoroughly unironic lounge jazz cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

If you're anything like me, you double-took that sentence the way I did the song itself. It's the leadoff track from the self-titled debut Nouvelle Vague, a French band that recorded an album of British post-punk in a Brazilian bossanova style with a half-dozen guest chanteuses. ("Nouvelle Vague" translates to "new wave" in English and bossa nova in Portuguese.)

Had I never heard the album, I would have stayed away from it. After all, these sort of experiments usually have the Cakey toxicity of those "ironic" punk covers of TV theme songs that circulate through freshman dorms, or at least the one-shot novelty of that Flaming Lips cover of the Kylie Minogue song. (You know, the version with the tympani.)

But this is one such idea that actually works more often than not. If anything, the arrangements generally strip the songs of hipster smugness and lay bare the emotional core in a way synthesizers and depressed British dudes often didn't. It doesn't always work. But what works is as surprising as what doesn't.

Songs that should be unkillable come off mediocre. Teenage Kicks doesn't even sound especially different. Guns of Brixton sounds stiff. (What kind of time signature do you put on a French band's bossanova cover of an English reggae tune?) Friday Night Saturday Morning and Sorry for Laughing give up on the bossa nova thing for the most part and are unexciting. Killing Joke's Psyche stands out on the only song on the album that is worth getting up and crossing the room to skip over.

But there's a lot of gems, too. Depeche Mode's "I Just Can't Get Enough" is positively giddy. The Cure's "A Forest" is very good, with jungle sound effects deployed well on top of the mix. "Making Plans For Nigel" is better than the original. "I Melt For You": who would have thought Modern English could ever sound cool again? Weirdest of all, "Too Drunk To Fuck" actually turns the Dead Kennedys into a maddening cocktease.

It's a pretty good album with excellent moments. If nothing else, hop over to iTunes and drop a buck for "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Just Can't Get Enough." Throw them onto an iPod shuffle and wait for these songs to come from nowhere on some subway ride.

Affirmative Conservatives II: David Horowitz and "Academic Freedom"
by Michael Weiss [link]

Before I matriculated at college, I was out at a bar with my sister's friends from medical school, one of whom had brought a date. I don't remember much about this woman except that she seemed very interested in the post-adolescent limbo I was in, having just graduated from high school and occupying the threshold of a supposedly "formative" experience in life. Which cask would I be maturing in? Brideshead Revisited or Animal House? Or someplace in between? One of the worries I brought up to her was that I didn't much see myself as a frat guy, yet I was going to a school where Saturday nights (not to mention Monday through Friday nights) were measured in kegs of cheap beer and gallons of more costly vomit. How was I going to avoid this scene? "Oh well, if you're against all that, that's good," she said. "It'll be four years of learning how to deal with people and conditions you'll be dealing with your whole life." Fucking twit, I thought as I smiled and mumbled false appreciation for this unglimpsed bright side. [more]

Affirmative Conservatives
by Nic Duquette [link]

Russel Jacoby's new article in the Nation ponders the growing pressure on universities to hire more conservative professors to balance the longstanding leftism of campuses. The argument is usually phrased in terms of "intellectual diversity." The piece is typical Nation rinse-and-recycle, with sentences that begin, "Conservatives claim that..." The ironic knife-twist promised in the title barely appears, and then not until the end of the third page. In the interim, Jacoby drools remarks like, "Angst besets the triumphant conservatives. Those who purge Darwin from America's schools must yell in order to drown out their own misgivings, the inchoate realization that they are barking at the moon." I thought this was sarcastic until I reread it a couple times. [more]

A Beautiful Mind: Rebecca Goldstein's Goedel
by Michael Weiss [link]

It surely says something about the slanted, flickering halos we place atop the figures of twentieth-century "genius" that Rebecca Goldstein's wonderful new study of the life and mind of Kurt Goedel doesn't get around to the math that made him famous until around page 150. This is no fault of Ms. Goldstein, who artfully and engagingly carpenters a stage of historical and philosophical preconditions that led to the eventual discovery of "incompleteness."

Goedel, Escher, Bach. Einstein, Goedel, Heisenberg. The umlaut hovers over that "o" like the twin theorems over the head of the agape initiate. What's an obscure Austrian name doing in troikas of such forbidding company, anyway? Goedel is the third tenor, the "other guy." There never was a Philip Glass opera called Goedel on the Beach. No taut, world-traveled Michael Frayn duologue ever clocked in as Vienna. A poster of the ferrety logician's hand imperceptibly tracing itself will not become a staple of the computer desktop background. And when tortured prodigies of number theory do gain some measure of popular recognition, they get Ben Affleck as their confidant in the suburbs, not the nimbus-domed author of the most famous equation in history.

The man in the street may have heard of Kurt Goedel, but that man is on wobblier footing than when terms like "relativity" or "uncertainty" or "fugue" are invoked. Like each of these schema-altering concepts, Goedel's theorems have been misunderstood and misappropriated by all the usual suspects in cerebral larceny: postmodernists, creationists, people who think "It all depends on what you mean by genocide" is a moral argument. "Incompleteness," then, also seems to be referring to Goedel's legacy, which is... what, exactly?

In 1930, at the age of twenty-four, a University of Vienna graduate student quietly, and to yawning initial reception, established the following: 1. There are provably unprovable but true propositions in any formal system that is consistent and contains arithmetic; 2. The consistency of such a system cannot be proven.

These discoveries may look bite-sized enough to fit comfortably inside a nutshell, but they shook modern epistemology, in all its kingdoms of infinite space, to the core and blew the living daylights out of regnant Continental notions about objective reality. Not bad for a pre-doc.

Goedel's proofs scuppered the positivism of the famed Vienna Circle, which was embodied most charismatically by Ludwig Wittgenstein, actually more of a tangential member. Founded on the Protagorean, or Sophist, idea that "man is the measure of all things," the Circle held that nothing beyond sensory experience was truly "meaningful." Touch, taste, smell, etc. -- that's all we should ever bother to work with as everything else is metaphysical bunkum. In Goedel's opinion, which was fundamentally Platonic, man was not the measure of all things. There was indeed a pure absolute reality, albeit one which could only be apprehended through the tenebrous lenses of probability and presupposition. Nothing wrong with them, however, since they formed the bases of a priori reasoning and hence all mathematics. (When Einstein later formed his peripatetic friendship with Goedel at the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton, the physicist confessed to sharing this belief in a "higher," semi-translucent realm. Einstein dubbed it the "out yonder.")

The positivists' favorite mathematician, the one they believed they could trust not to futz with their worldview, was the formalist David Hilbert. This was because his bete noire, like theirs, was intuition, that unreliable gatekeeper of the "out yonder." Hilbert's desire was to create what he called "consistent formal systems" which would drain mathematics of any descriptive relation to external phenomena: numbers, sets of objects, etc. Like the recent ads for Las Vegas, "What happens here, stays here," formalism decreed that mathematical systems should only consist of stipulated rules governing symbols that were internally "meaningful" (having semantic value within the system, but no mundane representation to upset the positivists.) Simple enough, except that no math is an island; even in formalism, to get from one system to the next requires a point of origin, a hub system from which all others can be then be accessed. Axioms and the rule of inference, which logically allows any pre-proven theorem to act as "given" in the proof of a new one, traditionally served as the bridges for convenient systems-hopping. But what happens when an axiom is divested of its real-world significance? Where one used to rely on a fingers-crossed "best guess" assumption, now the spadework had to be done using the "provability" of symbols worth nothing outside their own domains.

The hub was arithmetic. The first challenge was proving its consistency, i.e. showing that no logical contradictions could be found in the stuff everyone learns in grade school. A contradiction proves anything; it's the anarchist monkey wrench tossed into a well-oiled machine. The second challenge was proving arithmetic complete, that its logic was tautologous. Accomplish these two things, and formalist revolution could begin.

Goedel stopped the revolution in its tracks. Through metamathematical legerdemain, he was able to use the very syntax (the rules) of a uniquely designed, number-based formal system to both compute and comment upon the meaning (semantic value) contained therein. The numbers he used symbolized starting-point logical propositions that, although not actually paradoxical, were weird and entendre-loaded enough to be saying something about themselves. E.g., "This very statement is not provable in this system." When this self-cannibalizing logic worked itself out, Goedel had produced contradictions of Russian doll-complexity, one integument of meaning masking another.

Goldstein elegantly compares Goedel's winning style of being able to have his cake and pop out of it too to the dramatic conceit of the "play within a play." Specifically, the kind where the characters of the one become "actors" within the other and then use that medium say relevant things about their character selves. She cites Leoncavallo's opera I Pagliacci as she might have done the season of Seinfeld where George and Jerry work on a television series a lot like the one Jason Alexander and the real Jerry Seinfeld had been appearing in. And while I suppose Hamlet technically doesn't qualify because the "players" in Shakespeare's tragedy were all out-sourced allegorizers, Tom Stoppard's paradox-loving comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead most certainly does. The syntactic-semantic barbershop pole around which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern coil their celebrated "question game?" Very Goedelian. Indeed, the filiations between mathematics and literature were never more finely exampled, especially at the self-referential and meta levels. Goedel's theorems are said to consist of a logical "double speak." Letting aside the coincidence of another "Goldstein" who factors significantly in 1984, is Orwell's novel of thwarted political revolution itself not brokered upon a clever plot involution? Winston Smith is handed a book encoded within a book: a fabricated essay theorizing the motives of a factitious society, stuck between the pages of that society's updated "formal system" of grammar. Elsewhere we hear of the "Alice-in-Wonderland" model Goedel braided around Einstein's field equations for relativity; or the "rigorous rule-bound logic" he admired in Kafka's writing.

Actually, Kafka affords an easy segue into the kind of psychic distress that would come to define Goedel's life following his annus mirabilis. Goldstein uses a good chunk of her book exploring the logician's chronic bouts of paranoia and delusion. His fear of being poisoned by refrigerator fumes and food ultimately led to his demise: the medical record indicated "malnutrition and inanition" as the causes of death. A no less acute, if slightly more justified, sensitivity lay in Goedel's hearing his unorthodox ideas -- which only grew more unorthodox and less remunerative as he got older -- ridiculed in public. This led to reclusiveness and the mournful, too-familiar symptoms of a heavyweight intellectual losing his shit. Some of these read like plagiarism of Bellow's Herzog: the tranches of go-where notes; the unpublished papers and unposted letters; the mounting agoraphobia and anthrophobia.

We know from Douglas Hofstatder that an overactive imagination can produce "swirly, twisty, vortex-like" patterns of rational and creativity marvels. But we also know from the historian Richard Hofstatder that there's a much darker side to this synaptic industry. In his classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," this second Hofstatder made an observation by no means exclusive to styles American or political: "The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms; he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds" [Italics added].

The cartel ran out for Kurt Goedel at a rather unripe age.

So we get Noam Chomsky once running into the "greatest logician since Aristotle" and asking him what he was working on. The MIT linguist "received an answer that probably nobody since the seventeenth-century's Leibnitz had given: 'I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori.'" Yeah, any day now.

A less melancholy anecdote involves Goedel's precarious navigation of the a posteriori laws of naturalization. Having obsessed over his US citizenship exam, he uncovered a "logical contradiction" in one of the clauses of the Constitution, a loophole he believed could eventually be exploited for the purpose of transforming democracy into dictatorship. The incompleteness of "It can't happen here" would have to wait, however, if the ÈmigrÈ wished to remain here. Einstein and the economist Oskar Morgenstern agreed to calmly distract their friend from bringing up this alarming matter before the New Jersey justice, who, having presided over Einstein's own case, turned out to be a lot more sympathetic than Goedel was distracted:

"'Up to now you have held German citizenship.'
Immediately, Goedel corrected the judicial error: 'Austrian citizenship.'
Duly corrected, the judge continued.
'In any case, it was under an evil dictatorship. Fortunately, this is not possible in America.'"

The look on the Bavarian sage's face at this moment should have been photographed and sold as the pop art complement to the shots of him on the bicycle or sticking out his tongue.

Ernest Gabor Straus once wrote that "Goedel had an interesting axiom by which he looked at the world; namely, that nothing that happens in it is due to accident or stupidity. If you really take that axiom seriously all the strange theories that Goedel believed in become absolutely necessary." And Goedel's silly-to-sinister regard for the status quo becomes explainable, if not quite excusable. Try to avoid wincing through the chapter in which he travels back to Nazified Vienna preoccupied only with his "rights" as a certified academic. Possessing a Wodehouse-like obliviousness to current events -- even after being roughed up by a gang of brownshirts for his ostensible resemblance to a reviled race -- Goedel had to take an enormously detoured return trip to the lush and secure quandrangles of Princeton. What news of home did he bring with him for his info-starved fellow exiles? "The coffee was wretched."

In that same letter, Straus indicates that the normally indulgent and avuncular Einstein was given -- just once -- to write his daily walking partner off as "completely crazy." "Well, what worse could he have done?" inquired Straus. "He voted for Eisenhower."

From Plato's disciple to Plato's Republican.

I began by alluding to the fetish our culture seems to have for slowly morphing eccentric geniuses into genius eccentrics. If there is a "strange axiom," or telos, which guides these fantastic anomalies of the species, "legend" occurs somewhere between awe and condescension, between the whispered campus rumor and the Time magazine cover story. It's a real credit to Goldstein that her book does not contain a passage of greater endeavor than the one in which, drawing on all her skills of characterization as a novelist, she hazards this cant-free, and un-Hollywood portrait of the logician as a young man:

"When the random permutations of genetic blending produce an offspring whose intelligence far outstrips that of his parents that child faces a special sort of predicament: he both recognizes his utter dependence, being after all only a child; and he also clearly perceives the sever limits of his own parents' understanding. Most people come to the latter recognition only during adolescence, when the normal reaction is an explosive mixture of hubris, contempt, and outrage (how can they be so dumb?). But the reaction of a young child is more likely to be blind terror (how can they be trusted to take care of me?) It would be comforting, in the presence of such a shattering conclusion, especially when it's reinforced by a serious illness a few years later, to derive the following additional conclusion: There are always logical explanation and I am exactly the sort of person who can discover such explanations. The grownups around me may be a sorry lot, but luckily I don't need to depend on them. I can figure out everything for myself. The world is thoroughly logical and so is my mind -- a perfect fit."