Author Archive for Dara Lind

Object Lesson

Published
by
Dara Lind
on October 6, 2008
in Arts and Extemporanea
. 1 Comment

Often I ask myself: what’s the “tipping point,” new-content-wise, that distinguishes a comment on another blog from a post on this one?

Today I figured out the answer.

Comment: wondering what Alicia Keys is doing in the new James Bond theme.

Post: realizing that — of course! — she’s there because she’s supposed to be Amy Winehouse.

The video makes so much more sense now. The lingering shots of eyelids and wrists. The excessive mic-seducing pouts. The retro-raunchy that keeps its edges so jagged that it turns out retro-pushy — but in a loose, tame way, like a girl lip-synching in front of her mirror.

Seriously, did the James Bond Theme Song Brain Trust rethink anything after jettisoning her? Or did they just try to find two musicians who, if morphed together, might approximate Amy Winehouse — and then, upon deciding that Jack White and Alicia Keys fit the bill reasonably, skip the crucial step of morphing them? (And don’t tell me that’s scientifically impossible. This is the Bond franchise, people.)

I mean, I like the song (almost despite myself), and I guess I appreciate their attempts to think ahead to the (likely near) day when we won’t have her around anymore. But if imitation can’t compare to the real thing, sometimes innovation can’t either.

UPDATE: Okay, so it problematizes my distinction just a little bit to point out that Poulos didn’t see this as worth posting on when he wrote his comment — before I wrote mine — on the original post…

But what would Sartre have thought of social networking?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on September 20, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 3 Comments

Are you looking for something to add to your Google Reader that isn’t quite as taxing as “Diaries of the Greats: Commemorative Blog Edition” (Pepys; Orwell) but has a bit more intellectual meat to it than, say, that cluster of Mad-Men-character Tumblrs that was hot for about a minute and a half this summer?

I give you “Being and Nothingness: le weblog personnel de Jean-Paul Sartre.”

Mocking the misanthropy of genius hasn’t been this much fun since Strindberg and Helium.

The Pepys/Orwell phenomenon highlights something else, actually: even as the infinite capacity of the Internet has broken all rules regarding a certain kind of time-boundedness — eliminating the tendency of old information to get “buried” under new information, for example (much to the chagrin of Google News and United Airlines) — the rise of blogs has encouraged packaging information in a serialized manner for consumption. Pepys and Orwell aren’t just being reintroduced for the 21st century, but de-archived (in a manner of speaking). Sidestepping the question of whether or not we’d be able to handle reading their diaries at one go these days, it seems like a really solid marketing strategy for targeting people who are mature/stagnant enough in their Web use that they tend toward “checking” rather than “exploring”.

It may be a surveillance society, but it’s our surveillance society.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on September 17, 2008
in Navel Gazing, Politics and Yale
. 0 Comments

Rule: I take criticism poorly. I find it irritating. But I don’t find it disturbing.

Exception: The commenter who responded to my YDN column about the lack of explanation surrounding increased campus police presence by asking, “What are you trying to hide?”

Oh, right, I forgot. Only the most shamefully degenerate college student would ever engage in illegal activity. Like underage drinking. Or file-sharing. Or jaywalking.

Of course, that’s not only a straw man but an inaccurate one. The real assumption is that it’s foolish to think that the police would ever care about the illegal things students do, because their sole purpose is to protect us from the bad guys. Sure, this comes from a place of blind faith in the institution — “Of course the University has nothing but our best interests at heart!” — but also from entitlement: “We pay their salaries with our tuition, they have no choice but to be on our side!”

There’s also the fact that the closer you get to having decision-making power yourself, the sillier it seems to scrutinize the intentions of power (Obama on FISA, anyone?). But as dangerous as it is to rationalize that “When I’m in charge it will all be okay,” it’s more troubling to assume that there’s some sort of mutual understanding between “decision-making people,” that they have the same interests at heart — and, furthermore, that those interests are necessarily in the best interests of society. That it goes without saying that the police are here to protect students from the strangers roaming their courtyards, and to imply otherwise is not just ridiculous but rude. What are they supposed to be around to protect, anyway? The law?

Mukasey Extends Jurisdiction over Court of Public Opinion

Published
by
Dara Lind
on August 13, 2008
in Politics
. 0 Comments

The Attorney General, of all people, endorses shame culture over, um, law:

As last month’s report from the inspector general acknowledged, the hiring abuses by former Justice Department officials represented a violation of federal Civil Service law, but not of criminal law, he said. “That does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences,” Mr. Mukasey said. “Far from it. The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity.” (Emphasis mine, of course.)

I’ve been trying to figure out the circumstances under which I would actually believe that the shame provided by “negative publicity” was so strong that it made legal prosecution irrelevant. I can’t come up with any, but I’m willing to leave the possibility open. But this was clearly not that.

For one thing, how “substantial” was this negative publicity anyway? Mukasey implies that it was enough to drum those “most directly implicated” (presumably Gonzales, Goodling, Sampson) out of the Department — though of course they resigned in the midst of other scandals, unrelated to the pervasive sins of hiring practices that have been uncovered in the last year or so. The report itself on such practices received a comparable amount of publicity to, say, John Edwards’ admission of his affair. (And if I were more of a partisan hack I’d point out that this time last decade, the shame of a dalliance exposed wasn’t considered nearly enough to satisfy the demands of justice.)

But the fundamental question if you’re going to equate negative publicity and criminal prosecution is what shame negative publicity can produce, and whether it can be sufficiently punishing to the wrongdoer as an individual. Just having one’s name incanted spitefully or mockingly a few times in the mouths of the Keith Olbermanns in this world is certainly “negative publicity” (to some, at least), but it’s not shame. Shame works because it forces private wrongdoing out into the open, claiming it as public property and revoking the shamebearer’s right to go about his business behind closed doors. Furthermore, it does so in such a way that it transforms public perception; reassimilation is impossible. You, a personality, become identified with your scandal.

This doesn’t seem to have happened here in the least. Goodling and Sampson, in particular, were private citizens with private lives before they were supporting players in a scandal — but instead of the scandal transforming their role in the public eye, they have returned to being private persons again. No cameras parked outside their houses; they were scrutinized only in past tense, in a report that cast them in jobs they’d already left.

True, Goodling doesn’t seem to have been rehired since her resignation — then again, it seems that she had already reached her Peter Principle point. Sampson, on the other hand, had already been rehired by a private firm before the report came out, his resume not so stained as to be illegible. And while rumors persist that Gonzales hasn’t been so lucky in hiring, he’s still making money via public speaking engagements — as good a sign as any that the damage done to his public figure wasn’t as significant as Mukasey makes out. After all, everybody knows that the scandal-tarred don’t go on speaking tours; they go on the vaudeville circuit instead.

He who laughs in the newspaper of record, laughs best.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on August 11, 2008
in Extemporanea, Media and Social Theory
. 0 Comments

I feel a bit of an obligation to call attention to David Brooks’ column from last Friday, not because it’s particularly novel but precisely because it isn’t — at least, not to anyone who read my exchange with Reihan on cultural capital, here and here. In fact, Brooks cited it accordingly (if vaguely), in a passage that reads extremely awkwardly in unlinked print:

[With the release of the iPhone,] media displaced culture. As commenters on The American Scene blog have pointed out, the means of transmission replaced the content of culture as the center of historical excitement and as the marker of social status. Now the global thought-leader is defined less by what culture he enjoys than by the smartphone, social bookmarking site, social network and e-mail provider he uses to store and transmit it. (In this era, MySpace is the new leisure suit and an AOL e-mail address is a scarlet letter of techno-shame.)

Why the iPhone is the single catalyst for so seismic a shift is left unexplained, which is a shame. Brooks’ only major innovation over Reihan and me (other than the advice-column conceit, which is admittedly hilarious) is mapping our vague generalities onto a particular historical timeline — an innovation which would be much more welcome if the points on said timeline were justified rather than apparently arbitrary.

But Brooks’ additions are secondary; it’s the fact that his column exists at all that best proves its point (though I hope this was unintentional). It’s medium, not content, that determines who leads culture — which could be why the fact that these points were originally made by people other than Brooks is far less relevant than the fact that Brooks made them in a far more influential medium. But since the NYT isn’t as hip as a blog, Brooks’ audience doesn’t qualify as members of his “early rejecter” elite. This turns the entire column into a subtle tribute to the fringe bloggers who cultivate ideas for the media mainstream to farm, toiling in our elite obscurity, doomed to being “influential” — which as we know is a euphemism for “small potatoes”.

But how much would it cost to cover the Irish in gold leaf?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on August 7, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 0 Comments

My apologies for the continued lightness of posting — I’ve been wrapping up a couple of projects this week, and tomorrow will be spent on the road. Should get back up to speed over the weekend; watch this space for thoughts about Sesame Street gender theory and/or Midwestern diners and/or “Mad Men” and/or surveillance-based law enforcement and/or my take on pomObama (which I don’t think is a trope we’ve heard the last of yet).

In the meantime, you should go check out War or Car?, one of the best efforts to make statistics real I’ve seen in a very long time. And by “make statistics real” I mean “DINOSAURS.” Pay it a call.

Anthro Quick Hits: Telos and McFate

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 31, 2008
in General Scholarship
. 2 Comments

How to make friends with an anthropologist:

DO NOT: design Pentagon-funded anthro-warrior schemes that make the anthropological establishment leery, then decide that the perfect anthropologist to present the public face of these schemes is the daughter-in-law (and former support staffer!) of a former gun-lobby double agent. (h/t Open Anthropology)

DO: Talk about Transhumanism more often. As ckelty of Savage Minds explains:

Most of the critiques of transhumanism center around its more speculative aspects, like the notion of the singularity, the emergence of artificial intelligence etc. But I think there is increasingly an opening here for thinking about what we do and what we do not have control over as humanity evolves. Most transhumanist rhetoric seems to imply that there is no control—-it’s just the next stage of evolution—-but when push comes to shove, whatever “evolution” means to them, it isn’t simply your basic genetic-species evolution, but involves culture and technology as well.

…

I think that transhumanists will increasingly come to dominate discussions about the controlability of technology and its effects on people and their potential. But more than that, I think anthropologists are already interested in transhumanism, we just don’t call it that because we’ve given up (or just studiously avoid) trying to define the human.

Of course, the closest thing to a Transhumanism expert I know once argued with me for an hour during slow traffic outside Montreal about the worth of my discipline. (The opening line was something like “So, anthropology. Totally useless. Discuss.”) So I’m not too optimistic on the prospects for dialogue here.

Yeah, I know Montgomery McFate got her doctorate from the department that’s giving me my B.A. next June. And I know that my feelings on the Human Terrain System are more complicated than I allow for here. But the spy thing is still pretty hilarious.

This Charming Man

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 30, 2008
in Across The Pond and Arts
. 1 Comment

I am to Maureen Dowd columns as kids with drunkard nursemaids are to whiskey: my grandmother used to clip her columns and mail them to me during the Starr Report years. (I turned 10 years old in 1998, so the politics and sex were every bit as exotic as the snark.) So while I’m sure that my blood ought to be boiling at the faux-intimacy of her column today (and its totally vapid Homer references), I’m instead gushing over the insight she’s given me into New Toryism, as revealed by Barack Obama’s party favors:

The British opposition leader David Cameron gave Obama a copy of Winston Churchill’s “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” and a box of CDs by British bands, including the Smiths, Radiohead and the Gorillaz.

Radiohead, I concede, is a fairly safe choice in general and for Obama in particular: it’s the sort of act that a man whose passions are for jazz and the Stones would find to be intriguing and worthwhile, though he might admire it more than he liked it in the end. (I’m assuming Cameron chose In Rainbows rather than, say, Hail to the Thief.) But the other two are legitimately inspired choices. I find Gorillaz to be consistently underrated and just plain fun — furthermore, by turning up the bass a bit more than Radiohead does, the songs are probably a bit more likely to hit Obama’s sweet spot.

And the Smiths? That’s just a matter of consciousness-raising, man. Though I’m concerned that Mr. Cameron may be trying unfairly to influence the veepstakes.

Admittedly, Reggie Love is the man responsible both for keeping Obama’s iPod hip and for presenting gifts to foreign dignitaries, so Cameron might have someone equivalent on his side. Still, though, someone out there in Toryland has very good taste — yet another thing major parties here would do well to emulate.

The Real Reason Why I’m Glad Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 1 Comment

In the vein of Withywindle’s dream (which I think of less as “alternate history” than “blogger fanfic”), here’s my fantasy as to what happens next:

  • Ta-Nehisi immediately (within 2 weeks) gets into a multi-day mano-a-mano with Ross Douthat. The topic is preferably something sprawling and cultural that isn’t covered much in Grand New Party.
  • When the exchange fails to subside within a day but instead gets more heated, Ross’s comment-purging interns find themselves working overtime on the more overtly racist comments, but opt to leave those that just say “soft-headed affirmative-action beneficiary” in place.
  • Among many posts on the Left using the argument to reopen the question of whether conservatives have souls, someone at Firedoglake writes a post that all-but calls Douthat a racist. In response, Reihan quickly composes and records a song called “Some of my Best Friends Are Ross Douthat.”
  • Impressed, Ta-Nehisi posts the video on his blog. His readers are mollified (or just hypnotized by Reihan’s exceptionally round head; it’s not clear which).
  • The blogosphere finally moves on from the flareup, but Ross and Ta-Nehisi continue to be spirited and influential philosophical adversaries. Ross pulls fewer punches. Everyone links to Marc Ambinder less. The world is a better place.

Why I’m Glad That Ta-Nehisi Coates Sold Out

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 29, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

I’m not exactly surprised that Ta-Nehisi Coates is joining the Atlantic blogroll (I know, no one else is, either) but I’m absolutely tickled pink about it.

I say all the time that there aren’t any bloggers on the Left who seem to care about culture, but Ta-Nehisi is absolutely the exception: he posts for the sake of narrative rather than the sake of fact-checking, and he weaves cultural logics and socioeconomics together so well that he makes it look easy. I’d call him “Gramsci to Yglesias’ Marx,”  but aside from the inaccuracy of the political comparison there’s the little matter of hegemony.

You see, unfortunately, I suspect that the reason he’s gained traction among liberals for writing about culture is that “he has a culture to write about” — which is to say that the culture of urban black America is subaltern and therefore readily noticeable, whereas that of white America and/or the American mainstream and/or coastal elites is not, i.e. hegemonic. It’s not that the blogosphere lacks cultural self-consciousness — to the contrary, bloggers relish in self-caricature regarding their personas virtual (see also: Cheetos Experiment) and actual (see also: Stuff White People Like). But that’s a far cry from using personal narrative, or talking about codes of behavior and social norms — that is to say, writing about culture the way Ta-Nehisi writes about culture. The implication is that growing up African-American in Baltimore is a unique experience, a perspective worth reading, in a way growing up somewhere else isn’t: that the dominant culture is in fact predominant, even universal.

Just last week, Ta-Nehisi’s response to David Brooks warned against calling a middle-class “economic” phenomenon “cultural” when it hits a lower class. Fascination with West Baltimore as “a culture to write about” among white, coastal policy bloggers is the flip side of the same coin. I hope that this isn’t actually why the blogosphere likes Ta-Nehisi; maybe his reception when he makes the move to the Atlantic will definitively prove me wrong.