“The rise of [Rush Limbaugh, Glenn] Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.” — David Brooks
Author: Alesh Houdek
Teacher performance pay
From an impressive new study: “We find that the teacher performance pay program was highly effective in improving student learning. At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in comparison schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations (SD) in math and language tests respectively…”
Down and out in Paris
I think I’m going to maybe show mainly pictures that have some explanation here, and maybe show the more plain visual ones in a slide show later. But here’s some prettiness just to sort of get us in the mood.
Let’s start at Notre Dame. Here’s a model depicting the building of the cathedral in something like the 12th century. Without getting into a whole discussion, it’s worth pausing over the fact that, for hundreds of years, the majority of the residents of Europe lived in abject poverty while ostentatious churches were built until they doted the landscape (there are three within spitting distance of ND, e.g.).
Tourists taking photos! Almost as silly looking as tourists taking photos of tourists taking photos, eh?
Here’s a random obligatory shot of teh glory/majesty. Impressive!
So, this was going to be Exhibit B in the case of the charmingly peculiar vanity of the French: a guy who stopped in the street to spontaneously clean his shoes. Dude was going at it, too — I saw him, started to walk away, then changed my mind and framed and took the picture, all while he was working. Exhibit A, more shocking but alas less photographically interesting, was a public perfume dispenser in the men’s bathroom at a highway-side gas station. I shit you not, and yes I do have the photo to prove it.
Paris is for lovers, and it really is. There are people making out in public everywhere, which I thought was nice.
Expensive-ass superhero and fantasy figurines.
In Paris there are no regular shops. There are restaurants (brasseries, cafés, bistros, etc.), flower shops, and clothing stores. Occasionally, there will be a wine shop of a fishmonger, but there is little evidence that anyone cooks much at home or buys anything not directly concerned with delighting the senses. But: here are some hens ready for the rotisserie.
Mostly I’d go with skipping “the sights” and favor wandering around (which goes for any city you’re visiting really). So here’s random prettiness #2. The tree on the balcony is painted on the side of that smokestack, note.
In one of the threads on MetaFilter’s Paris tag, someone said “you’re going to live well!” And it’s True. Here’s some side-street cafe cheese, served with bread and wine and followed with espresso. As much as the overall quality of food in London is on average noticeably worse then in the US, the food in Paris is noticeably better pretty much everywhere. Ham and cheese crepes are considered street food here.
Even the graffiti here is elegant and romantic.
The Eiffel Tower, natch. A stairs trip just to the first platform was plenty. A nice climb up a few dozen metal flights of stairs is just what the doctor ordered for the mildly acrophobic among us.
J. random view from the first platform. You could spend all day shooting and assembling a monster 360-degree panorama but ok, it’s breathtaking, we get it, geez.
At the foot of the tower there are ambiguously ethnic women walking around asking “Do you speak English?”, part of some scam that despite the extremely widely-disseminated warnings appears to be remarkably effective. One of them had a midwestern women digging around in her purse, and brazenly turned towards me as I walked by to ask me. That’s efficiency, right? Anyway, here’s home base of the Women who ask if you speak English.
Trust me, I’m going easy on you with the pictures of tourists acting goofy.
You feed these little birds bits of your ham/cheese crepe, and the competition is fierce, so eventually some of them start to try to catch the bits in mid-air, and you can get them to eat from your fingers, which is me doing exactly that here. My dad working the camera.
I would not mind living here! Willing to learn French!
I only saw one public ping-pong table in Paris, but what a cool idea. Eastside Garden take note.
The Musée d’Orsay is a highly recommended alternative to the multi-day requirements of the Louvre. They let you photograph, so lots of the paintings have obnoxious people going around with camera phones tediously snapping photos of every other piece instead of looking, and getting yelled at because flash is technically not permitted, and these people you people do not know how to work their your cameras. This is the Van Gogh room, which was of course the worst-case example. By the way: a roomfull of Van Goghs, plus all your major impressionists, etc! (For Picasso and later, you need to check out the Centre Pompidou, which I only got to do briefly, don’t get me started.)
If you can’t beat ‘em… a particularly lovely Toulouse-Lautrec.
And the Musée d’Orsay building is half the fun. It’s a baffling structure of late-19th century origin who’s size is difficult to determine at first (looks manageable on first impression, huge on second impression, but it actually is pretty manageable), and is full of interesting big and small spaces.
Random bookstore taxidermy action.
A random sampling of street musicians: Two guys playing Django Reinhardt jazz on Django Reinhardt guitars (with people dancing), a lone violin playing random arias on an abandoned side-street, a one-man band accordion/trombone/drums guy singing (amplified) mauldin old French songs, and a guy playing minimalist tones on clarinet to faint classical CD-based accompaniment for the closing of the museum, and these guys. This is BTW some random side-street staircase shortcut, but yeah, random prettiness #3, right?
#4; in general, it’s hard to point your camera here and not hit something amazing.
And we’re going to leave it there. Next up: Prague!
Film directors
There is something about film directors — they are at the top of their field, and they need to juggle artistic, technical, and personal challenges at every stage of their work. But maybe because of that and maybe just because of poor sampling, it seems that directors are always fascinating to listen to. We know about Woody Allen and Quentin Tarantino, but perhaps the taker of the cake is Werner Herzog. Even though it’s not an interview, check out this. (But fuck it, let’s have some interviews: how about by Errol Morris, Vice Magazine, Roger Ebert, and The Guardian for starters.)
Down and out in London
8 hours in London. Mission: (1) get from Heathrow into the city, (2) check out the Tate Modern, (3) get fish and chips and a pint, and (4) wander around and get semi-lost. For to your future reference, the best way to get from the airport into the city is the Heathrow Connect, not the Heathrow Express, which costs twice as much and takes 10 minutes (that’s $56 for a 15 minute trip—but who’s counting!).
So, they drive on the left side in London. THE LEFT SIDE. This does not sound like nearly the tourist-life-threatening clusterfuck that it in fact is. Consider that London is a medieval tangle of roads of varying narrowness, many of which are one-way and many of which are motor-vehicle-prohibited, and also that some of which have these friendly “LOOK RIGHT” indicators, and realize that after one or two of those pints, where these indicators are missing your road-crossing instincts are all bass-ackwards and your life is in peril.
So! the Tate Modern. I got told to not take pictures after this one (Next: Museums In Paris Allow Photography, Which is Super-Annoying), but the TM houses several completely primo and ass-kicking Francis Bacons (one of which had a cute girl planted on the floor in front of it making a pretty good sketch (the girl)(of the Bacon)) and a completely brain-popping room with 6 Gerhard Richter squeegee paintings. Also the requisite Picassos, Miros, etc., and the Jackson Pollock that pretty well marks his transition from Miro-esque abstraction to his mature drippiness.
A tres-artsy pedestrian bridge leads from the TM back across the Thames.
Success w/r/t the fish and chips. Also plus a Timothy Taylor Landlord, which would be my beer recommendation if you ever find yourself in a London pub.
Here’s the London pub in which I found myself. I was unable to judge the Disnification (or, perhaps, ‘Fridays-ification’?) level of this particular establishment, but ‘moderate’ is a fair guess. I’m still not sure what the proper ordering/paying/tipping procedure is for GB, but half-assing it worked for a half-day excursion.
Of course all of Europe is cycling-friendly, but did you know that in London they have Bicycle Ambulances?
If they keep building bridges maybe eventually the whole of the Thames will be paved over. Anywho. London: a nice place to visit, and not as expensive as you’d have thought, but still pretty darned expensive, yeah? (Next up: Paris.)
Travelin’
Here’s a zippy photo of the London Underground for all you sassy types. I’m traveling around Europe for a few weeks. Posting shall to be nonexistent until Friday, and intermittent afterwards. (The itinerary goes thiswise: Thursday was in London, then to Prague, tomorrow morning to Paris by car, Back on Wednesday/Thursday with some time in Germany (Oktoberfest!), then another week and change in Prague.) I’ll try to post photos as often as possible here
Dispute Finder
While discussing the alleged death of polite disagreement at Rex’s blog last week, I expressed the idea that a lot of the disagreement stems from a disagreement about simple facts. It’s almost impossible to support healthcare reform bill if you think it includes “death panels,” and there are folks who consume media in such a way that they genuinely believe this. But even those with every right to call themselves reasonable are at prone to this effect — we tend to be more likely to believe the facts that jibe with our view of the world. Those facts then push our opinion farther along toward certainty, and make those who disagree with us seem ever less reasonable.
It follows that clarifying the facts is a potential way to begin restoring some of the civility that’s been lost from public discourse. By this I mean not only correcting incorrectly held beliefs, but also by exposing reasonable disagreements about what are often presented as established facts.
Interestingly, there is a tool intended to do exactly that: the Dispute Finder. It works like this: you install it as a Firefox extension, and it then alerts you when a fact you are seeing on the internet is in dispute, and cites a few disagreeing sources. It gets to know what sources you respect, and so if you’re a Republican, say, it’s more likely to point you to a story about how death panels are a hoax in the Wall Street Journal then in Harper’s magazine. (Demo here.) Try this at home!: do any of the statements below make you nod in agreement? Click through for contradictory evidence.
- Genetically modified foods are dangerous
- Recycling is good for the environment
- 76% of Americans want a public health care option
- The 2009 Iran Presidential Election was rigged
The point here isn’t that any of those claims are wrong — the point is that they are not nearly as clear cut as we might suppose, and that having our beliefs challenged makes us more likely to listen to those we disagree with, ergo more civil discourse. Two problems.
1) This is all well and good on the internet, but can we attach it to Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck’s asses? And also better yet, what about my uncle who parrots Limbaugh, Beck, et al. at the Sunday cookout? Well, it turns out they’re working on that! Explains Dispute Finder developer Rob Ennals on a recent On the Media:
The bullshit detector is a thing that we’re planning to do next. It’s trying to apply the same kind of ideas we’re applying to the Web to information you hear in real life. So let’s say you’re in a conversation with somebody and they tell you something which is disputed. The device is going to buzz in your pocket and let you know that you just heard something disputed and perhaps you should question it. … [A]nother thing we’re planning [is] to apply this to closed caption TV text; that if some pundit on TV says something disputed, a thing will flash up at the bottom of your screen saying, this is a disputed claim. This source you trust disagreed with some of this.
Nice, right? Sign me up. And sign up my uncle. Better yet, sign up YOU and YOUR uncle, which brings us to
2) This is great, but how do I get the people who disagree with me to sign up for this? To wit, aren’t the very people who are disagreeably disagreeing the least likely to pay any attention to this type of technology? And at first I think this will be true. But I think it’ll have a snowball effect. As this type of technology spreads and improves, the desire for intellectual honesty will begin to drive its adoption. That is, even the most extreme conspiracy theorists want to claim to be open to opposing arguments, right? So unless this whole project manages to get painted as part of the liberal conspiracy (not inconceivable!), some portion of even the wackos at the fringes of the political parties will get on board, which will begin to soften — maybe — the craziness that’s therein harbored.
Just one of those coincidences
Attention recovering stalkers: mild voyeouristic content alert. Where were you when you heard that Jim Carroll died? I was sitting in front of my computer last night, when I came across the news reading the Awl in my RSS reader. The reason that this struck me as odd is that at 5:47 pm on Sunday (that would be the day before yesterday), I posted a video of Carroll’s song People Who Died on my tumblr (you can confirm this by refreshing the page today at 5:47, when the date stamp should change from “one day ago” to “two days ago”). I assumed that I’d heard about the death sometime Sunday afternoon, and that’d sparked the post. So, I checked my firefox history — you can see me posting the video at the top, and no mention of Carroll in the preceding few hours. Ah, maybe I heard about it on twitter? Nope.
SO, I’m provisionally going with Coincidence, but watch the tumblr for predictions of future deaths.
Ye olde Kanye West controversy
Ye olde Kanye West controversy: If you’re one of the billions of people who didn’t even consider watching the VMA’s, but heard about something to do with Kanye West, well Gawker has your back, natch, with the video and the debate about whether the whole thing was staged. (I say YES!!) Update: Choire says, essentially, ‘it’s all good.’ Update #2: I am not even joking with you, Obama is on the record on this situation.
Supreme Court and Hillary The Movie
Public financing of elections sounds like a good idea. But so does free speech. And it appears that honest philosophical examination finds these two ideals incompatible. Witness Hillary: The Movie, banned from cable television during the 2008 elections because of its campaign-promotional aspect. Well, off to the Supreme Court it went, which Supreme Court sent the case back for re-arguing. Given that the SC as it currently stands decidedly on the pro-free speech anti-campaign-reform side, this is taken as an indication that they’re planning on doing way more then conceding that the film should have been allowed to run. They very likely are looking at drastic scaling back of the limitations we place on political contributions, etc. If you need the “pro-free speech” argument spelled out again, George Will help you out.