is what i do

Alex and Nazanin contemplating their newborn nephew Benno.

Alex & Adam’s story “The Giant Pool of Money” has just been named one of the top ten pieces of journalism in the past decade. The list was compiled by the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU; they started with eighty nominees, and a very distinguished panel of judges selected the top ten, including books by Barbara Ehrenreich, Jane Mayer, Lawrence Wright and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, and Pulitzer-winning newspaper journalism from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New Orleans Times-Picayune and the Washington Post. Alex & Adam’s story, which ran as a full-hour episode of This American Life in May, 2008, was the first really good explanation of what was still being called “the subprime mortgage crisis”; it became the most-downloaded episode in the history of the show.

Introducing the list, NYU Journalism Professor Mitchell Stephens said “Ten years ago New York University, using some of the same judges, selected ‘the Top 100 Works of Journalism of the Twentieth Century in the United States.‘ It is our belief that the best journalism of the first decade of the twenty-first century belongs in that company.”

Like I said, pretty good company. Congratulations, Alex and Adam!

Philip Pullman has written a new book, with an intriguing title, “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ”.. It’s not published yet, but here’s what he says about it: “The story I tell comes out of the tension within the dual nature of Jesus Christ, but what I do with it is my responsibility alone. Parts of it read like a novel, parts like history, and parts like a fairy tale; I wanted it to be like that because it is, among other things, a story about how stories become stories.” I can’t wait to read it, but some people would have me do just that; here’s how Mr. Pullman answered one of them—

I’ve heard no one make a better or more succinct case for freedom of speech and publishing.

I’ve pre-ordered it from Amazon. I’d encourage you to do the same; I expect neither of us will be disappointed.

Dan Savage is a wonder! He makes the most persuasive case I’ve seen/heard for gay adoption, coming at it from a number of different perspectives, including an evolutionary perspective. He does it calmly, clearly, and lovingly. If I had a child I was, for whatever reason, unable to raise, I can think of no more fortunate fate for that child than to be adopted by Dan and his partner. Watch, listen, learn.

We went caroling Friday evening at Frank and Mary’s, and had a great time. And the Buddhist Peace Fellowship weekly trip to our local state penitentiary is on Wednesday, and we’re going to do some caroling with the sangha there. To prepare for the caroling sessions, I put together a book of lyrics of some of my favorite carols. It’s set up to print nicely in the very few browsers that understand print media css, particularly the page-break directives. Opera and MS Internet Explorer 8 do that; Safari and Firefox do not. I’d be grateful for any additional info about what works and what doesn’t.

Before I put my own book together, I looked on the web for something that I could use, and found little. There are a lot of carol lyric collections out there, which gave me the starting text for my book, but none of them are formatted well for print, and most of them are (a) pretty unselective, so that there’s a lot of cruft in the collection, and (b) pretty ugly. I’ve tried to stick with the carols that many, and possibly most people know, and I’ve gone for maximum simplicity in the page layout: fairly large type, not much color, and no illustrations. These pages are designed for functionality. I hope they function well for you. Please feel free to pass the link along to anyone who might find it useful.

And a very Merry Christmas, from a confirmed and comfortable atheist.

Breaking news: “The Giant Pool of Money” has just won a Peabody Award! Congratulations to Adam, to Alex, to Ira and the team at This American Life, and to the people at NPR who tried something new and helped foal a winner!

First, the DuPont/Columbia Award; then, the George Polk Award; now, the Peabody. In broadcast journalism, those are the three biggies, and the Peabody is arguably the biggest of them all. Joan and I are bursting with joy for you, Alex and Adam. We knew that show was good work, spectacularly good work, when we first heard it, and it’s good to see that judgment confirmed. Keep it up.

Brewster Kahle, over at the Open Content Alliance, has an interesting post about the cost of digitizing books. His overall take: it’s very cheap, especially relative to the cost of maintaining brick & mortar libraries. And, I might add, incredibly worthwhile, especially when you factor in the negligible additional cost of reproducing a digitized book. As a way of preserving our cultural heritage in the face of certain change, and possibly pernicious attack, it’s money that we absolutely need to spend.

The next step is to figure out how to get those digitized books into the hands of readers, with some responsible way of preserving some reasonable level of copyright protection for authors (needless to say, perhaps, that I consider our current copyright laws unreasonable). Kindle doesn’t do it; Apple’s probably upcoming netbook/tablet/ginormous ipod touch might, but only for a few. Perhaps the OLPC consortium might look into repurposing their technology as eBook technology; that might help more people, and respond to greater need, and spread information more widely and democratically and at lower cost, than the rather silly and instantly outmoded device that they came up with (and that I first saw in Brewster’s offices; thanks, Brewster & Becky).

I never thought I’d write a post praising moderate Islam. I’ve pretty much concluded that the phrase is an oxymoron, like “tolerant fundamentalist”. But this video is almost enough to convince me otherwise:

For one thing, it’s a lovely song, with lyrics that seem, from the subtitles, to be graceful and true. Its message is universal; although the images are of Islamic terrorists, and its clearly aimed at an Islamic audience and clearly intended to move that audience to reject terror, it is a song that any of us can sing with feeling and with broader intent. I call myself an atheist; you repeat the term, and there is venom in your tone. Yeh hum naheen. You look at an old white man; you see an Imperialist American, and you scowl and spit. Yeh hum naheen. I look at a cluster of Hasids in Williamsburg; I think of their wives, bewigged and burdened with babies, and I see deluded oppressors. Yeh hum naheen. This is not us; I am not that: not that one you reduce me to, not that one you label me, not one at all, but many, and you as well. Yeh hum naheen.

I can see this song joining others I have sung in my life whose lyrics were not in my tongue, but whose meaning added richness to my life: Die Gedanken est frei, Kumbaya, Guantanamera, Viva la Quince Brigada, Hey, Zhankoye. I will listen again. And again. I hope to hear it sung by many who are not Muslims.

I am still suspicious of and disgusted by Islam as it is revealed in the Koran, just as I am suspicious of and disgusted by Judaism as it’s revealed in the Torah, and by Christianity as it’s revealed in the Gospels, in Revelations, and in the epistles of Paul. Those books are full of bile and vengeful rage; the God Who terrified their authors is a paranoid solipsistic SOB, powerless, irrelevant, and almost certainly illusory. Those who believe that God to be real and who try to live their lives according to His will are to be pitied.

But this is a great song, and it carries a message we would all do well to hear and to integrate into our view of things and our habits of mind. There’s a website and a foundation. There is a petition against terrorism, which millions of Pakistanis have signed – more Pakistanis have signed the petition than voted in the last Pakistani election. That is hopeful.

Incompletely developed thoughts, loosely connected:

• It’s not spending. It’s buying. The government is not spending our money when it builds roads and subsidizes the employment of teachers and health care workers; it’s buying us better roads, better schools, better hospitals.
• Economics is not an empirical science. It’s reasoned guessing. That’s why there’s no Standard Theory in economics, like there is in Biology and Physics.
• What’s happened in the past 30 years is new, radically new. The development of information technology, and the use of that technology to control machines, requires that we think differently about cost, price, and profit: no theories developed before about 1975 can deal with the dramatic drop in manufacturing and service delivery costs that have happened since then.
• Steady or gently rising prices, plus plummeting costs, have created enormous profits, inflating investor wealth and expectations way beyond what was reasonable before 1975.
• The general idea that we have been pretty much immune to inflation in recent times is an illusion. Falling costs (which involve stagnant or falling wages and fewer jobs) have very much the same effect as classical inflation.
• By the same token, deflation, when the disparity between price and cost has gotten so out of line, is not the horrendous event that classical economic theory imagines the word to describe.
• When costs drop, innovative effort requires less capital investment; the big losers in a deflationary economy are the capitalists. Fuck ‘em.
• The cost to government of stimulating innovation and increased production of commodities (including commodity services like education and health care) is not great in an economy in which costs are dropping dramatically and steadily. Government is in a better position to measure its return on stimulus investment in terms appropriate to the well-being of the society and is not (or should not be) concerned, as a private investor must be, about maximizing the monetary return on its investment.
• There are a lot of people used to working who have lost their jobs. Deflation doesn’t help them much; if there’s no money coming in, it doesn’t really matter much how low prices fall. Those people need jobs, which intelligent government stimulus will generate, and, until those jobs materialize, they need help getting by.
• I don’t need direct help, at least right now. I don’t need tax cuts or checks in the mail; deflation will take care of me in that regard. I want the government to buy me stuff that it’s unrealistic to expect private capitalism to buy me, and to create jobs in the process, so that civic order and individual pride and responsibility can be maintained.

How much sense is there in all this?

“My life is never dictated by superstitions. My faith is first and foremost. If you believe that God’s in control, there is no reason to believe in superstitions.”

Ishmael muses: