Super Hamburger America

This, for the purpose of this celebration, is the 4th of July. It is the birthday of your National Independence, and of your political freedom. This, to you, is what the Passover was to the emancipated people of God. It carries your minds back to the day, and to the act of your great deliverance; and to the signs, and to the wonders, associated with that act, and that day. This celebration also marks the beginning of another year of your national life; and reminds you that the Republic of America is now 76 years old. I am glad, fellow-citizens, that your nation is so young. Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands. According to this fact, you are, even now, only in the beginning of your national career, still lingering in the period of childhood. I repeat, I am glad this is so. There is hope in the thought, and hope is much needed, under the dark clouds which lower above the horizon. The eye of the reformer is met with angry flashes, portending disastrous times; but his heart may well beat lighter at the thought that America is young, and that she is still in the impressible stage of her existence. May he not hope that high lessons of wisdom, of justice and of truth, will yet give direction to her destiny? Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow. There is consolation in the thought that America is young. Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages. They may sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty, and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away, on their angry waves, the accumulated wealth of years of toil and hardship. They, however, gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on as serenely as ever. But, while the river may not be turned aside, it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory. As with rivers so with nations.

—Frederick Douglass, 5 July 1852

21 hours ago; Comments |

“The biotechnology company Genzyme spent five hundred million dollars developing the drug Myozyme, which is intended for a condition, Pompe disease, that afflicts fewer than ten thousand people worldwide. That’s the quintessential modern drug: a high-tech, targeted remedy that took a very long and costly path to market. Myozyme is priced at three hundred thousand dollars a year. Genzyme isn’t a mining company: its real assets are intellectual property—information, not stuff. But, in this case, information does not want to be free. It wants to be really, really expensive.”

— Malcolm Gladwell, “Priced to Sell”

3 days ago; Comments |

Q: How worrisome is 'Cyber-warfare?'

A: “Almost as scary as raptors in Central Park or a giant asteroid heading toward the White House. The latter two are not, however, being presented as ‘national security risks’ yet.”

3 days ago; Comments |

“By neglecting — and in some cases even opposing — essential modernization programs, arms-control proponents are actually undermining the prospect for further reductions of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. As our nuclear weapons stockpile ages and concern about its reliability increases, we will have to compensate by retaining more nuclear weapons than would otherwise be the case. This reality will necessarily influence future arms-control negotiations, beginning with the upcoming Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty follow-on.”

— Jon Kyl and Richard Perle, “Our Decaying Nuclear Deterrent”

3 days ago; Comments |

“We estimate that, when the president cannot seek reelection or the economy is not in a recession, the probability of war initiation in a year is about 30 percent. By contrast, the probability significantly increases to over 60 percent when both the economy is doing poorly and the president is up for reelection. These results appear to be robust to the choice of other indicators of economic performance, such as GDP growth and changes in the unemployment rate. We also find that historical evidence back to 1897 is also consistent with the theory.”

— Gregory Hess and Athanasios Orphanides, “War Politics: An Economic, Rational-Voter Framework”.

4 days ago; Comments |

“As I see it, it probably really is good for the soul to be a tourist, even if it’s only once in a while. Not good for the soul in a refreshing or enlivening way, though, but rather in a grim, steely-eyed, let’s-look-honestly-at-the-facts-and-find-some-way-to-deal-with-them way. […] To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all noneconomic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.”

— David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster”

1 month ago; Comments |

In 1957, sociologist Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe tracked and plotted the daily trajectories of one Parisian girl over one year on a map of the city. This is the result. Vertices of the thick triangle correspond to home, piano lessons and school.

I saw this map some time ago, strained from the aether by StumbleUpon or someone’s blog. It wasn’t until this semester abroad that it was more than a curiosity.

When I return home, I will tell friends and family all about Istanbul, confident that I know this place. I will mark a box on Facebook and watch the city turn red: “Istanbul - Has Lived Here.” I will close my Lonely Planet guide for good and leave it on a shelf for others to see that I am a Bon Vivant Man of the World.

But how little that guide contains—surely no more than an archipelago of polygons! How little I have seen—perhaps a few points and lines strewn across the map! It is a difficult truth for the traveler, who craves the one authentic thing: next to my city are innumerable others that I will never know. By seeing one, I exclude another. No one can know this place. There is no Aleph here.

I have tried to map my own vectors, estimate their width, and push the frontier of my triangle. Merely knowing my corridors exist has changed the way I interact with the city for the better. But though I can test the walls and chart new lines on my map, there is another difficult truth: like the city, I will never really know my triangle.

1 month ago; Comments |

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

—Wilfred Owen, 1917

1 month ago; Comments |

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Warren Zevon - “Desperados Under the Eaves”

An observation: the amount of time I spend listening to Warren Zevon correlates inversely with my general welfare. This is a pity, because his songs are beautiful.

3 months ago; Comments |

So much more alive

“Sometimes he spoke aloud, but it was not satisfying; it seemed rather to hold back the natural development of the ideas. They flowed out through his mouth, and he was never sure whether they had been resolved in the right words. Words were so much more alive and more difficult to handle, now; so much so that Kit did not seem to understand them when he used them. They slipped into his head like the wind blowing into a room, and extinguished the frail flame of an idea forming there in the dark. Less and less he used them in his thinking. The process became more mobile; he followed the course of thoughts because he was tied on behind. […] It was an existence of exile from the world. He never saw a human face or figure, nor even an animal; there were no familiar objects along the way, there was no ground below, nor sky above, yet the space was full of things. Sometimes he saw them, knowing at the same time that really they could only be heard. Sometimes they were absolutely still, like the printed page and he was conscious of their terrible invisible motion underneath, and of its portent to him because he was alone. Sometimes he could touch them with his fingers and at the same time they poured in through his mouth. It was all utterly familiar and wholly horrible—existence unmodifiable, not to be questioned, that must be borne.”

—“The Sheltering Sky”, Paul Bowles

This passage describes the hallucinations of one character as he dies of cholera alone in the Maghreb. It is also not a bad account of the way I feel every day I spend abroad.

To live in a place and speak its language with imprecision is to attach a margin of error to every idea one wishes to express. Before I came to Turkey, I gave short shrift to the idea that humans construct much of the world around them. But in my life here, what once were facts (or seemed to be!) are now confidence intervals, objects whose truth varies with the probability that I have comprehended them. Likewise, when words flow out from my mouth in the stilted Turkish of a toddler, I am never sure that they are resolved.

Consider how much of the world is built on language. The simple act of expressing thoughts to others is most obvious, but there is so much more. In English, my mind sifts through a constant backround chatter: the conversations of people around me, the words I read from street signs and advertisements. In Turkish, it’s as if I’ve pressed the mute button—or at least turned the volume so far down that I must strain to truly hear and work hard to comprehend.

In many ways, it is “an existence of exile from the world,” life in a place “full of things” but devoid of “familiar objects.” This is a hard, bleak place to inhabit, “utterly familiar and wholly horrible,” but I tell myself every day that it is better than snapping a few photos of the Hagia Sophia and flying home.

3 months ago; Comments |