Hertzberg on Bloomberg

Hendrik Hertzeberg's column on Bloomberg's third term is exceptionally good. Hertzberg is a master of the form --

In broad outline, New Yorkers know all this. We know that we’re bought and paid for. We know that there is something unseemly, even humiliating, about submitting ourselves to be ruled by the richest man in town. We know that the muscling aside of term limits, whatever the law’s merits, was a travesty. We know that the Mayor’s campaign this time has been puzzlingly, pettily negative. Yet we will, most of us, troop to the polls on Tuesday and pull the lever for Mayor Mike. The truth is that Michael Bloomberg has been a very good mayor. The record is mixed, of course, but the mixture is largely positive....

The Mayor has ruled us well, but he has infantilized us. We are a little too much like the passive Romans of Crassus’ day, when the institutions of the old republic were giving way to a despotic (and competent) imperium. “People got used to the idea of them,” Edith Hamilton wrote of Crassus and his fellow-triumvirs, Pompey and Caesar, “and when four years later their powerful organization was completed and they began to act openly, honored and honorable patriots could find excellent reasons for acquiescing in their running the city. Indeed, it seemed exceedingly probable that if they did not do so there would be nobody to run it.” If Bloomberg had been satisfied with two terms, he would be leaving office a beloved legend, a municipal god. He’ll get his third, but we’ll give it to him sullenly, knowing that while it probably won’t measure up to his first two—times are hard, huge budget gaps are at hand—it’ll probably be good enough. The Pax Bloombergiana will endure a while longer. But then what? Will we have forgotten how to govern ourselves?

The Greek Tragedy point is well taken. A lot of New York politics has those undertones -- there's hubris and justice; the king and the polis; the chorus and the audience. But it's the New Yorkers themselves who in this election are facing the tragic dilemma: they want a new Major, but Bloomberg's the best man for the job.

Slave/Master Paradox

This from Robert Kagan, Introduction to Ancient Greek History:

I remember my old colleague who taught history of American slavery and so on, John Blassingame, said to me at one point, he said when the emancipation came, the slaves were freed and so were the masters...

He explains: as long as there were slaves in the antebellum South, there would also be riots and homicides, and no master could ever live entirely without fear of revolt. So owning slaves was like living in a tinder box. It was the sort of contingent life -- though you have something now, at any moment it could be taken away -- that characterizes slavery in the first place.

According to Kagan, this paradox helps us to understand the city-state of Sparta --that for Sparta, colonialism had the ironic effect of creating more fear, not less. As they conquered and enslaved the Mycenaeans to the West, they spread their military thin and at the same time multiplied their points of vulnerability. They internalized their enemy. So acute was their fear of Mycenaean revolt, Kagan says, that had to transform their society into a control apparatus, until it finally became the Rousseauian totalitariat we know Sparta as today. I'm sure there's a lot more here, but the point is this: their security apparatus, designed to enslave the Mycenaeans, was so total that they ended up enslaving themselves.

So the parable goes. I'll venture to say that I think something similar happens whenever we buy things or otherwise take control of material objects: a transaction of control happens, where we gain a lot of control, but forfeit some of it too. A petty example is my cellphone, which allows me to make calls when and where I want, but at the same time "tells me" when to charge it and "makes me" put in my pocket every morning and of course takes up a bit of space on my nightstand. This isn't existential stuff (it's the not Mycenaeans descending from the hills!), but it's a modern analogue. When we buy things, we're still in some way accepting the unfreedom of their proper stewardship. And these myriad forfeits of control, I think, ultimately speak to the persistent difficulties of life despite material abundance (speak to the fact that that perhaps it's not "despite" but "because of" abundance that some people drown).

A Value Prop for the Music Industry

Comment: "Oy Tenenbaum! RIAA wins $675,000, or $22,500 per song" by Ben Shefner at Ars Technica; "The New Economics of Music: File-Sharing and Double Moral Hazard" by Umair Haque at Bubble Generation; "New Danger Mouse CD Released As A Blank CD-R Due To Legal Fight With EMI" by Tech Dirt

I'll start with a paradox: while the costs of distributing information are dropping, asymptotically, to zero, the value embedded within the information (its "meaning") persists.¹

This paradox of low costs and high value plays a large and unstated role in our debates about music piracy. Sure, data distribution costs have dropped so low that might as well round down to zero -- and economic theory predicts that prices will drop to marginal cost -- but has the "value" of music dropped that low (to zero), and if not, why shouldn't we be paying for it? While it might cost us almost nothing today to store and transmit the data stuff of (say) the Don Giovanni opera, the value that the opera inflicts on our soul has not changed much, if at all, for nearly two hundred years.²

So pricing is difficult. It's definitely true that distribution costs affects the value of music -- but it's not clear in which direction, up or down. As the digital shelf space reaches towards infinity, the supply of music available to us increases. This of course lowers, marginally, the value of any one song relative to all the others. Yet at the same time, as the self space expands, so does the chances that you'll find music that you really like. And so does the chances that the market will compete upward and outward, improving quality. Thus with increased supply, the value of each song declines, but the value of the set of available songs itself rises. And, further down the line, I'd argue, the more access to music we have, the more we can produce it, for information is both an output and an input: more music means more creativity, creative resynthesis, mushups, GirlTalk and DangerMouse. Value rises.

My point is that it's not altogether clear that the easy distribution of music lowers its value to us, and for that reason, I see no clear economic or "market morality" case for why we should all be getting our music for free, even if we can. To the contrary, I'd say there are a lot of good reasons why we should be paying for music. We need to create "incentives" for music production, sure; But more than that, I'd like to live in a society that values art -- the creation of art -- at least as much as it does trading derivatives or other forms of bean counting.

Most everyone seems to understand this intuitively. Americans are very used to exchanging money for value, and to suspend that enterprise when it comes to music feels odd, and immoral.

But if we accept this premise, then we've got to look at piracy as something other than just a breach of the law -- we've got to think of it as an economic transaction, as exchanging costs -- costs of our time, of risk to our computers, of ristk to our consciences -- for value. Apparently, a large amount of people are more willing to bear those costs and the prices assigned by the recording industy. And this is my point: Piracy is an essential statement about the value of the music.

To understand this, think about the music industry according to Haque's contract theory: listeners (the principles) contract out the the function of finding good artists and producing good music (the product) to the recording industry (the agents) for the purpose of performing a function that they cannot perform. In exchange for this service, the industry charges a premium on top of the retail price of the music

The crux of the piracy issue, I believe, is that the recording industry has failed in its function as an agent between listener and music. People don't want to pay for services unrendered.

As the music market has gotten more competitive -- with new bands getting new access to fans -- the recording industry has failed to compete. I has buckled down with a business model based on fixing prices and pumping out generically commercial music. By doing this, the industry has prevented the sort of rich, dynamic feedback on price and quality that's necessary to compete in lively markets.

Piracy has to be understood as a response to an industy that has neglected its core business function of creating value for its consumers. The industy has been too busy pumping out hot dog music -- "thick, pink, synthetic, inert" -- and suing its consumers (!) to bother with finding and creating art.

These are my opinions. Apparently, the RIAA is totally unaware that Joel Tenebaum's actions might be directly related to their own actions. And furthermore, they seems totally unaware that in an age of unlimited shelf space, of social media and of instantaneous search, their monopoly on the function of agent between musician and listener may soon break down -- that we'll see music distribution models that cut the recording industry out of the loop entirely. And that a growing group of good musicians already have.

So yes, we should pay artists for the music they create. But not more than we actually value it. And the money should go to those who are creating the value, not subtracting from it.

--

[1] The famous Stewart Brand about information "wanting to be free" actually has two parts. "On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other." back

[2]It really is a mystery why music affects us the way it does, why certain tones arrayed in certain ways, elicit so much joy. I'll note tangentially that I heard Steve Pinker describe our affinity for as a product of our language capacities; he said that so long as we can talk and think in word syllables, we cannot help but be "supernormally stimulated" by music...this suggest that the "value" of music is more a biological fact than an economic one. back

"I felt curiously aloof from my own self. No temptations maddened me. The plump, glossy little Eskimo girls with their fish smell, hideous raven hair and guinea pig faces, evoked less desire in me than Dr. Johnson had. Nymphets do not occur in polar regions" - Lolita (where else?)

"After the 1850s, thanks in part to Franklin's influence, American became the land of ingenuity" - Maria Kalman, in her excellent And In Pursuit of Happiness

"The proper use of entertainment and education has become the most fundamental social enterprise" - Tyler Cowen in Create Your Own Economy

Chomsky's New Socialism

Just to make this clear, I didn't mean for my last post to turn into an encomium for "Chomsky's American sensibilities." In fact, I find a lot of his foreign policy writing to be distasteful, and for exactly the opposite reasons I was praising him for below. I find that his is a basically simplistic worldview: Everything that the U.S. does is necessarily expansionistic; nothing that those who are "oppressed" by our policies themselves do has a baring on their status as the categorically oppressed. And his written tone, in contrast to the 1971 debate, is usually embittered, caustic, meandering and belittling to those who disagree. So if you were to confront my previous post and say his foreign policy work undermined his authority as a "pragmatist" in the sense described below, I'd say "well, maybe that's the what you've got to do as a dissenter. Maybe pragmatism is an untenable position to take as an advocate." And I'd also say, "Yeah, unfortunately, you're probably right."

That said, I did want to point to this gem from the debate, which I didn't have a chance to bring up in the last post. This, at least, he got exactly right:

As to the idea, which was perhaps lurking in your question anyway-it's an idea that's often expressed-that there is some technical imperative, some property of advanced technological society that requires centralised power and decision-making-and a lot of people say that, from Robert McNamara on down-as far as I can see it's perfect nonsense, I've never seen any argument in favour of it.

It seems to me that modern technology, like the technology of data-processing, or communication and so on, has precisely the opposite implications. It implies that relevant information and relevant understanding can be brought to everyone quickly. It doesn't have to be concentrated in the hands of a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decision-making. So technology, I think, can be liberating, it has the property of being possibly liberating; it's converted, like everything else, like the system of justice, into an instrument of oppression because of the fact that power is badly distributed.

The question posed to him was whether socialism demanded centralized power, and, if it did, how this could be reconciled with his belief in the priority of individual freedom. His choice of answers, really, was remarkably prescient. Information technology, in fact, has distributed a great deal of power from the hands of "a small group of managers who control all knowledge, all information and all decision-making" -- and that Chomsky could predict this, while framing it as an affront to traditional notions of socialism, is goddamn impressive for a debate in 1971. And it's even more impressive because guys like Kevin Kelly are today publishing articles in Wired Magazine saying the very same thing:

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Chomsky's Pragmatism

Review: Chomsky-Foucault Debate "Human Nature: Justice versus Power"

The Chomsky-Foucault debate "Human Nature: Justice versus Power" (original) is a supremely interesting exchange, definitely worthwhile on its merits. But what's particularly interesting to me is hearing Chomsky discuss questions that are conceptually prior to those I normally hear him lecture one -- rather than linguistics or politics per se, you get serious reflection on the enterprise of being a scholar and activist...how thinking occurs and why we ought to do it, according to a young Chomsky at the height of the Vietnam War.

What's striking in this debate is something that's rarely commented on: how pragmatic Noam Chomsky is. The question of why and how to think naturally lend itself to dogmatism. But here you see Chomsky extremely articulate about the limitations of his own mind, yet also steady about his need to move it forward. It's a remarkable posture. When I call it "pragmatic" I don't mean in the everyday sense (ie, someone whose ideas are "viable") but rather in the philosophical sense. The habits of mind that commit oneself to a certain method of truth, and yet aware of the intrinsic limitations of this method.

(Reading the debate, one's even reminded a little of Obama, who once said: "Part of it is psychological...I'm still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think the other candidates just aren't. There's a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It's part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It's not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.")

For example, look at Chomsky's argument for the existence of human nature (it's so elegant that it's worth quoting in full):

Now, the person who has acquired this intricate and highly articulated and organised collection of abilities-the collection of abilities that we call knowing a language-has been exposed to a certain experience; he has been presented in the course of his lifetime with a certain amount of data, of direct experience with a language.

We can investigate the data that's available to this person; having done so, in principle, we're faced with a reasonably clear and well-delineated scientific problem, namely that of accounting for the gap between the really quite small quantity of data, small and rather degenerate in quality, that's presented to the child, and the very highly articulated, highly systematic, profoundly organised resulting knowledge that he somehow derives from these data.

Furthermore we notice that varying individuals with very varied experience in a particular language nevertheless arrive at systems which are very much congruent to one another. The systems that two speakers of English arrive at on the basis of their very different experiences are congruent in the sense that, over an overwhelming range, what one of them says, the other can understand.

Furthermore, even more remarkable, we notice that in a wide range of languages, in fact all that have been studied seriously, there are remarkable limitations on the kind of systems that emerge from the very different kinds of experiences to which people are exposed.

There is only one possible explanation, which I have to give in a rather schematic fashion, for this remarkable phenomenon, namely the assumption that the individual himself contributes a good deal, an overwhelming part in fact, of the general schematic structure and perhaps even of the specific content of the knowledge that he ultimately derives from this very scattered and limited experience...

I would claim then that this instinctive knowledge, if you like, this schematism that makes it possible to derive complex and intricate knowledge on the basis of very partial data, is one fundamental constituent of human nature. In this case I think a fundamental constituent because of the role that language plays, not merely in communication, but also in expression of thought and interaction between persons; and I assume that in other domains of human intelligence, in other domains of human cognition and behaviour, something of the same sort must be true. Well, this collection, this mass of schematisms, innate organising principles, which guides our social and intellectual and individual behaviour, that's what I mean to refer to by the concept of human nature.

He's purporting to have discovered a "fundamental constituent of human nature." But his method for doing so was strictly empirical. And the discovery is itself highly contained. We have a human nature, but for what use is it? Where does it steer us? If human nature exists then, conceivably, so too does the Good Society. But Chomsky's statements about human nature was too conservative for an answer about what that would look like: just because human nature is there, doesn't mean we can claim any privileged access to it, and it especially doesn't mean that we can assert by fiat moral judgments on its basis (or ask people to sacrifice on its behalf).

Foucault is a great foil for Chomsky on this point. For him, the uncertainty inherent in the value "justice" renders the whole process of social change invalid. If we cannot establish justice for certain, than we cannot dignify our attempts to make change as anything but power plays. These are his premises: Justice itself is not objectively existent. Rather, like other social notions, it is a construct. And constructs are formulated by those who control institutions of power and by those who are victims of them. All of our mental life (including concepts like "justice" "science" "insanity") fit within the "grille" of cultural rules at play. This set of rules is contingent and changeable.

And contrary to what you think, you can't prevent me from believing that these notions of human nature, of justice, of the realisation of the essence of human beings, are all notions and concepts which have been formed within our civilisation, within our type of knowledge and our form of philosophy, and that as a result form part of our class system; and one can't, however regrettable it may be, put forward these notions to describe or justify a fight which should-and shall in principle--overthrow the very fundaments of our society. This is an extrapolation for which I can't find the historical justification. That's the point.

I'm actually pretty sympathetic to Foucault's point about the ways that individuals fit within the totality of the social rules that govern them. But it's not clear how seriously we can take this -- life, after all, would hardly be worth living if we had to ditch all the things that were contingent/constructed. Too much of the stuff of living would be rendered unusable: our identities are products of chance, so those are constructs, and so are our conceptions of "love" and "suffering," our families we've been born into, not to mention any conception of a good society towards which we could struggle. The great irony of the postmodernist's project is that as they've attempted to reject socially constructed "systems of knowledge," they've managed to create there own system -- and one just as untenable as any its replacing. But in some ways worse. Foucault's thought denies the very act of thinking.

Where does Chomsky stand on this? Well, he affirms that justice may not exist, but we still must progress according to the believe that it does. If social change cannot ever have a demonstrative, absolute moral basis (and I think it cannot), then we can either deny the act of progress all together, or retain that notion and attempt to guide ourselves by our moral intuitions alone. Social changes would then revolve on the empirical process of finding the conditions that tend to make people thrive, and that reduce their oppression, a process that concedes from the beginning that the idealism is bracketed by epistemological uncertainty.

For example, to be quite concrete, a lot of my own activity really has to do with the Vietnam War, and some of my own energy goes into civil disobedience. Well, civil disobedience in the U.S. is an action undertaken in the face of considerable uncertainties about its effects. For example, it threatens the social order in ways which might, one might argue, bring about fascism; and that would be a very bad thing for America, for Vietnam, for Holland and for everyone else. You know, if a great Leviathan like the United States were really to become fascist, a lot of problems would result; so that is one danger in undertaking this concrete act.

On the other hand there is a great danger in not undertaking it, namely, if you don't undertake it, the society of Indo-China will be torn to shreds by American power. In the face of these uncertainties one has to choose a course of action.

Well, similarly in the intellectual domain, one is faced with the uncertainties that you correctly pose. Our concept of human nature is certainly limited; it's partially socially conditioned, constrained by our own character defects and the limitations of the intellectual culture in which we exist. Yet at the same time it is of critical importance that we know what impossible goals we're trying to achieve, if we hope to achieve some of the possible goals. And that means that we have to be bold enough to speculate and create social theories on the basis of partial knowledge, while remaining very open to the strong possibility, and in fact overwhelming probability, that at least in some respects we're very far off the mark.

I really admire this mixture of uncertainty and progress. I think it's the correct posture intellecutally and, also, that it's a particularly American one. (See Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club for a review of the American invention of philosophical pragmatism during the reconstruction of the Union after the Civil War). I imagine Chomsky would disagree with this -- but maybe not. After all, Chomsky is one of Foucault's exceptions, someone who's militated against the contingencies of his culture (he was born into a country that he's spent his career criticizing; he was born as a Jew, and has become one of Israel's greatest critic), yet owes much of his life to the freedoms and institutions of American society. So maybe it's this: American sensibilities. But with reservations.

A Few Comments About the New Site

Welcome to the new site. I'll say: notice the larger text, the simple, black-and-white color scheme, and the data streams on the sidebar. This is what's called Progress. To understand this, you'd probably have to have been following The Conviction since my sophomore year of High School -- we've been a long time since then. The site has changed a lot, and now, once again, it's time to tighten the slack and rethink the sort of stuff that this site tries to do. So if you'll indulge me, the following post is basically some thoughts on that question of making this space matter again, and some other stuff too.

In one sense certainty, it's an academic project. My aim with this site is to develop a system for the thoughtful management of information, a system to deal with the mass of data I encounter day-to-day. The rss streams on the sidebar are a part of this. The posts, once they come, are going to be part of this as well. My idea is to somehow post "abstracted/raw data" from the articles I'm reading and from the ideas I'm playing with. I want to focus on the act of writing (of producing) as an act of editing. Writing as parsing and winnowing. Writing as a quantum of information, but also as a vector (as DFW once wrote).

That's my goal -- and, frankly, I think that few projects are more important. Information abundance is characteristic of our time, of my own life, and one of the thing that we've learned for sure is that information alone does not mean truth or knowledge. In fact, it's vividly clear that the opposite can be true. Abundance can breed its own forms of unknowledge, its own forms of exclusion and control, its own new, special forms of helplessness. We can drawn out totally. And if we're not drawing, we're defecting: defering control of our information flow upwards, or cowering into dogmas, or otherwise resigning to being hopelessly ignorant, totally abject. These are the pathologies of information abundance. They are the pathologies that result from the condition of having too much and too many, of abundance unmatched by an ability to reckon with it. I think I can go further and say that so long as we continue to deal immaturely with information, then we'll continue to be fucked in the special ways of the recent past. Look at the financial crisis and the role information asymmetry played in creating moral hazard; or look at the Iraq War.

For those of us who want to make some decently accurate choices about what to believe, whom to trust, what to do, then the process begins with making serious choices about what information we consume and how we do it. I'm not there -- not even close. But I'm trying, and this blog is small part of that.

So that's the first point: information control. But I'll admit that there's more. If you stop reading here, it's fine, because the rest of this post, I'm afraid, might start to unravel. (This I suspect is going to be a characteristic overplaying of my intellectual hand. Usually I regret it.) This project, like a lot of blogs out there, is not just about providing content for the reader, but about providing content for the writer. I'm asking my readers to participate in my own self-help.

The gist is this: if I want to grow then I've got to be willing to fail. That's my main point. If I want to write and think better, then I've got to write and think more; if I want to succeed, then I've got to go through the very unsexy process of attempting, of confronting my assumptions and bringing them to bear and then ripping them down; of writing again and again until one piece -- finally -- succeeds, after a hundred -- ultimately -- have failed.

It's paradoxical, sure, but I'd argue that there's dignity to failure. To fail is to try, and to try -- in an age that has surrogated "physical fear" (fear for one's actual life) for "social fear" (fear for one's social life) -- is to be fearless. Failure is a willingness to fuck up and embarrass oneself for the purposes of making art or doing good. And that's meaningful. In an age that has redefined fear, failure is one of the closest things we've got for proof-positive evidence of personal bravery.

Maybe there's more. Maybe it's not just that we fear for our "social lives" but also that we fear the sort of truth that failure gives us. When people say that "you learn from your mistakes" they don't say anything about exactly how you learn. It's truth that hits hard. Anyone who's ever failed -- I mean, really failed -- knows what it means to get truth like a blow to the face. It's truth that burns in your eyes; to fail is to sit on your bed in midday and look at your placid hands and to look at the shadows on the wall and to feel that moment of violence come down on you; it's to forget yourself, your ambivalent, postmodern self. And at the same time it's to remember yourself, to remember that at least you have a self, that you've lived through darkness, that you'll be here tomorrow. Maybe people are afraid of failure because they're afraid of truth, or at least that very special, very place-putting kind of truth-as-blow-to-the-head that failure gives us. A life without failure means a life where this sort of special bravery and special truth -- I think the term is "wisdom" -- would be very far off indeed.

So these are roughly my intention. To try, to write a lot, and to fail a lot, and thus to grow. I take Becket's Westward, Ho! as my guide here: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That's what I want this site to be about.

I'll say, in closing, that the process I've attempted to describe is not just a personal-self-help thing. The whole failure-based model, unillusioned as it is about the messiness of progress or the priority of empirical experience over theory, yet still committed as it is to beating forward, to progress despite the fear, to engaging in the project of being better no matter how ultimately unperfectable man is -- this is the model of an American cautiousness, of an ad hoc hopefulness, and it probably has a lot to do with what "the liberal conviction" can means to us in this day and age, in the first place. So, once again, I'll say, "welcome to the site."

N.B. I haven't figured out how I want to archive my old posts. So until then, I'll just throw up a few indicative pieces, from an earlier age...

Cameron's Culture (Dec. 2006)

Two Years Old Today (Feb. 2007)

I feel silly now, that in my trepidation, I overlooked the fact that no one ever said free speech was supposed to be clean and grammatical. It should be boisterous, unruly and unapologetic, and the Internet is just that. In one fitful stroke it empowers both brilliance and bigotry, pitting one post's flaws against another's, dogma against dogma, prejudice against prejudice, hoping that truth rises to the top of the labyrinthine pile of incoherency and inaccuracy. Sure, the Internet is not authoritative, but, in all of its blemishes, obscenities, inanity, and openness, it is the ultimate free marketplace of ideas. Blogs don't claim to be correct, only curious.

"Censorship at John Jay's Open Mic Night" (March 2007)

From what I gathered, the intent of the students' reading – an excerpt from the award-winning play "The Vagina Monologues," a play I saw just one week ago – was to celebrate femininity, what for so long has been seen as frail and inferior, or lascivious and sinful. The students uttered the word not as an admission but as a declaration: no longer should a word so natural and important be shrouded in a mist of ignorance and irrationality.

It is the height of irony that by censoring this word, and by punishing those who said it, the administration has compounded the mist of ignorance and irrationality that the word set out to dispel in the first place.

Start the Dialogue (March 2007)

The real issue is that as a school, John Jay has the educational imperative for diversity. Importantly, adamantly, is this: just because someone feels uncomfortable by the sexual politics of the Monologue, it does not mean that he is entitled to censor it. Because that would mean the end of education. How would I know what I believe, if I were not exposed to that which I did not believe? How would I know the bounds of my own civility, if I were never made to feel uncomfortable.

Caramoor (May 2007)

The guests told Walter that they felt as if they had traveled to another country when they visited his home. Perhaps what they really felt, is that they had traveled with Pizarro himself to Cajamarca, and that they had witnessed a massacre. Only in Caramoor, it was not the Incas who were slaughtered; it was time and distance and culture and everything that could die did die. So nothing that survived in the halls of the mansion could ever die anymore, for pretty things like paintings and old swords and reliefs could live for a very long time, without context or soul. One man's suffering and another's genius were owned by Walter Rosen and hung up among the ruins in the rooms and corridors, like a fantastic museum of cauterized splendor.

Farewell Speech to Campus Congress (June 2007)

I am saying this, quite simply, because representation is not always easy. When we act there are going to be costs. But I believe, and I believe this from my heart, that if there are costs when we take action, then the costs for inaction are far greater. To ask a question our school district asked itself this year: What harm can come of words? Perhaps words can cause harm. Perhaps that is true. But ask yourself: What is the harm of no words at all? How can we understand who we are, the bounds of our own civility and our own ignorance, if we cannot hear aloud what others think? Of all the values a society, or a school system like this, can have, the willingness for open discussion is our most important. If we cannot meet and talk freely about our own stupidity and our own potential, then we might as well be going to class to learn fairytales each day.

Graduation Speech: The Man Without a Hamlet (June 2007)

The roads that he travels – that we on the stage have traveled to get here – are different, of course (in the textbook, on the turf, at Cameron's Deli) but all roads towards anything are, in a sense, very much the same. They wind far onto the horizon, so that the Man Without a Hamlet can only see what is directly in front of his eyes.

A Very Short Love Letter to America (Oct. 2007)

This small collection of pictures spans a time period from the beginning of the summer -- to me known as the Summer of Love -- to the end of my travels in the West. Though this period is rather short, I will remember it as endlessly long. How long is the moment that a ball tossed in the air stops and sits before it travels down again? There is a moment that the ball does not move. This is the moment of transition, of reflection; the ball is at once traveling up and traveling down; this is the moment that glances at infinity, that is outside of time, has no beginning, no end and is infinitely short. Therefore the moment is forever. For me, that is the feeling of this period in my life.

Herzog Review (Feb. 2008)

Thus, we begin with a vision of what it means to be human: freed from type. Freed from the predictable. Too diverse for ideology, too beautiful to be any one thing.

Watching Ayacucho (April 2008)

Max! he scolded, get to the point. But what is the point? The point is knowledge and love and human suffering. That is the point. The trains that Kerouac jumped existed because of collective man and radical hopes and the slouching and trembling brotherhood I call progress. What a fool to revolt against the very society that permits your existence. Kerouacs glowing on the margins – we cannot have that, in this struggle to survive. The real kind: people are dying.

Crossing Borders (May 2008)

Eventually they just looked at each other. She asked him what he was thinking. He said he was thinking about flowers and clouds and then he leaned in towards her lips. She turned her head. She looked at the wall for a moment. Max tried again, leaning against her body. He tried again to kiss her lips, and then she turned once more, this time, moving close to his ear. She was all seriousness now. She said, too loudly for a whisper: Not all Colombian girls are what you think.

He smiled and kissed her on the cheek and got up from the bed. It was late. Yes, he said, and not all American boys are what you think.

Persistence of Difference in Marilyn Diptych (Feb. 2009)

The message is clear: accepting the reality of time opens up both a host of possibilities and a host of problems, accounting at once for Marilyn Monroe’s fame and her death. Accepting the right panel, that of change, is accepting the trappings of freedom. The very existence of the right side questions the power of the left: the persistence of time despite our attempts to evade it. Warhol forces us to grapple with the two universes, side-by-side.

Review of Unequal Democracy (May 2009)

His book, a collection of previously published papers, traces the socially mediated processes that transform economic disparities into political inequality. He creates a model for understanding democracy that (given recent political and economic events) is utterly relevant, even urgent so.