Archive for the 'Navel Gazing' Category

So my choice is “or death”?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on August 21, 2008
in Extemporanea, Food and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I used to work in a bakery, so I really enjoy this blog.

The worst part is, I think this is still better than my cake writing.

The most important lessons from my high school job?

  1. Never trust the customer to write down what he wants on the cake. A Penn professor whose son was graduating from MIT wanted a cake that read “Congrats on your Collage Graduation.” I can only hope he taught math.
  2. Never assume you know how to spell someone’s name. Don’t even suggest. The mother of a two-year-old once gave me the evil eye for asking if her daughter’s name was spelled Anita. No, it was Eneedah. Duh.
  3. The larger the difference between cake size and child’s age, the crazier the parent is. A 13-year-old with a 7″ cake? Probably a lovely person. A one-year-old with a full sheet cake? HIDE.
  4. People are weird. Someone once sent me to put extra sprinkles on a cake because otherwise it might not be appealing to children.
  5. No one listens to instructions. If you tell them to refrigerate the cake lest buttercream icing melt all over the kitchen counter, you’d better do it twice. Or three times. And even then, you can reliably expect a furious phone call from at least half the customers.
  6. Never, ever argue with a bride. I still have scars.

ETA: For what it’s worth, I’m still holding out for one of these.

While we devotin’ full time to floatin’

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on August 13, 2008
in Media, Navel Gazing and Technology
. 0 Comments

I’m still buzzing from Andrew Sullivan citing my Transhumanist post in the Daily Dish. Of course, my favourite bit of the Simon Barnes piece I’d originally sparked off was his finale:

It is required behaviour at such a point for the journalist to give all the answers to the world’s problems in a couple of pithy phrases and then go to the pub.

So by extension, the blogger is luckier - it is required behaviour for the blogger to collate a few sources, briefly sketch out the complexity of all the world’s problems, and then, leaving one’s readers to go to puzzle out their own solutions, to go to the pub.

So just for Andrew Sullivan, the King of Bloggers, here’s my thank you present - my vision of the future of Olympic advertising:

And of course such camaraderie towards Sullivan would never be an attempt unsubtly to curry favour. It’s just that us conservative classical liberal Christian homosexual-agenda-promoting cautiously-Obamacon Oxonian Brits in America had better stick together.

But can the robot love?

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 21, 2008
in Arts, Navel Gazing and Philosophy
. 0 Comments

I just got back from (finally) seeing Wall-E. So much ink, virtual and otherwise, has been spilt over the film that I’m not sure I have anything fascinating or original to share. My favorite moment of the film — besides the ought-to-be immortal phrase “I don’t want to survive, I want to live” — was very simple.

Wall-E bumps into the floating chair of one of the Axiom’s inhabitants, turning off the ever-present screen that keeps her virtually connected to all her friends. (Irony levels rising…) Suddenly, she sees the starfield beyond the ship’s windows, the panoply of multimedia advertisements, the wonder both of nature and of what man has wrought. She looks down: “Hey, I didn’t know we had a pool!”

That feeling it just familiar enough to make me wistful. Every so often, I pause and look around. Suddenly, instead of seeing “just” a tree, I remember the complicated dance of photosynthesis and respiration, the compact mystery of the atoms, the sheer alien wonder of a thing that turns sunlight into leafy shade. And then I blink, and check my email.

The joy of Wall-E isn’t in the story or the animation, but in the discovery. Like the best science fiction, the robots and spaceships are only there to make us remember the wonder of home.

If you’re not a YPU nerd, look away now

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on July 21, 2008
in Ladies, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 15 Comments

So I’m a bit late to join the “women in academia or the YPU” party (some of us have real summer jobs, you know) but as a wannabe academic-cum-YPU hack I just couldn’t restrain myself. Dara’s right to argue that we should look at “success as the field defines it”, which is why I’m surprised that no one of my fellow “Union-theory” obsessives has mentioned the political elephant on the room : that according to the obscure nature of Yale Political Union, “Union” posts are actually fairly low-status, as opposed to “Party” office. With the strength of the Parties comes an assumption that “real leadership”, charismatic and intellectual, comes through Party Chairmanship - this is seen as glamorous leadership compared to the administrative responsibilities of the elected Executive Board. So on positions occupied, the YPU no longer seems such a women-friendly place after all, when you notice that for the forthcoming semester, only 1 out of 7 Party Chairmen will be a woman (Jane Hu, of the Progs, the smallest party). 

Within the YPU, the charismatic leadership to which the many aspiring politicos are taught to aspire is explicitly described as masculine.  I’ve never forgotten the very semester I arrived, hearing a dear and intelligent friend state that “leadership has two main areas - administrative management, and inspiration of other people to follow a vision. Obviously, a woman can do the first, but not the second.” This past semester, the very same friend told me “when given the option, a Fall Chairman should always be a man, because he has to inspire new recruits to join his party, and obviously a man in charge will always be more inspirational than a woman”. (N.B. It’s not who you think it is, and I’m not going to tell you).

Of course, if you’re still reading this you’re enough of YPUer to know that the cult of Chairmanship is more powerful in the POR than in any other party. But I’ve heard similar sentiment in other parties (the IP, Tories and POL) - and from members of AdComm explaining that the masculine / feminine dichotomy is  necessary to the very fabric of the YPU. 

The argument goes like this: the YPU is defined by conflict between Parties - at its best, this is competition for intellectual supremacy which makes us all fiercer thinkers. The members of EBoard have to co-ordinate these components and weave together the different parts to make a harmony. Men are naturally more aggressive and confrontational, women more harmonious…Male Party Chairman, Female EBoard = great.  Whether or not we actually buy into gendered conventions of “warrior” or “peacemaker”, as long as others around us in the YPU do, they will be part of the parlance that defines our YPU careers - even if there’s still a status inequality given that leading one’s close comrades is widely considered more significant than leading the Union.

So where does this relate to larger claims about affirmative action and academia? Well, certainly the analogy of warrior and peacemaker holds true for academia. A Yalie who graduated a few years ago and is now a PhD student in philosophy told me recently that “Academia at the highest levels is a blood sport, it really is. It’s all about whose argument you savaged last and whether anyone else has been able to tear a strip off your latest publication. When I meet academics socially, who don’t know my work, and tell them that I want to go into the field, they tell me ‘but you seem like a sweet girl, you’re probably too nice for this’.” In the other side of the field, a Yale academic who served her time on ExComm told me “they’re always trying to get women onto the pastoral and disciplinary committees, because we’re apparently more student friendly”. Anecdotal evidence, but in both cases stemming from years of experience at the hard end.

So for both our microcosm of the YPU and the only larger world that really matters, academia, affirmative action doesn’t stand a chance of succeeding unless it adapts to the subtle discourses that define and redefine success. And as both fields success is chiefly measured by the approbation of the community as a whole, the discourse has to change before anything approaching collective action, conscious or subconscious, can help anyone. Let’s face it, if communities frequently went in for affirmative action in combating their own stereotypes, affirmative action of the tangible kind we usually refer to would never have been proposed in the first place.

And because this is a late night (British time) rant to friends, rather than a structured blog post for public consumption, on that inelegant note I’m going to bed.

In Defense of a Fluke

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 18, 2008
in General Scholarship and Navel Gazing
. 5 Comments

Impressively, in the last few days I’ve been chided both for failing to recognize the divine jazz-like looseness of blogging and for failing to recognize the requisite statistical rigor of blogging. The former accusation is harmless enough; the latter is the same argument used since time immemorial to wave aside cultural criticism on the whole — indeed, any knowledge that isn’t quantitatively generated — and that’s a problem.

It’s impossible to gather enough data to meet statistical standards while understanding the context that generated each point in that data. That’s the purpose of statistics in social science: to create discrete phenomena out of messy reality in an attempt to generalize where generalization is helpful. But generalization will never get you more than a few good options for what circumstances generated that data, a few strong correlations (which, the statisticians so ceaselessly remind us, is not causation). If you want to talk about not just the what but the why, you need to venture into conjecture anyway.

And conjecture based on those same generalizations doesn’t draw from nearly as deep a knowledge base as knowledge based on more comprehensive understanding of particular situations. Maybe those situations are anomalous — though in this case, the fact that I was using personal experience to illuminate a broader statistical study whose results lined up with that experience indicates that “fluke” is putting it strongly — and they’re certainly statistically insignificant. But until we can invent statistics to explain connections we don’t yet know exist, we’ll never be able to use them to explain social forces and cultural trends, only to record them after the fact like starlight on an Earth-bound telescope. Cultural criticism is by its nature tentative and speculative and flexible, but to say you can only explain a phenomenon after you’ve zoomed out too far to really examine it is missing the point entirely.

Overstretched, or Kicked Upstairs?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 17, 2008
in General Scholarship, Ladies, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 18 Comments

David Broockman thinks Kay Steiger’s post on women in academia could be turned into an argument against affirmative action. Maybe that’s true, but only because I think she infers too much too readily. Here’s the gist:

Once women earn tenure and arrive at the institution they immediately begin getting pulled into various “service” commitments. This includes heading committees, become program coordinators, or take other leadership roles. While this is good for women that long to go into administration at a university, it often pulls female professors away from research…I think the urge is to make sure women are represented in leadership roles but when this pulls time away from their principal mission of research, it becomes a bad thing.

On the face of it, I can see why it’s easy to read this as a simple affirmative-action narrative. But I’m surprised that Broockman didn’t pick up on the fact that the affirmative-action motive is inferred, and start thinking if there might be something else going on. Especially because he’s in the Yale Political Union, where a similar phenomenon takes place, and there is very definitely something else going on.

You see, the YPU on the whole doesn’t have anything close to gender parity, at least among active members. And at any given debate, women are much less likely to speak than men are. But the Union’s executive board has represented something pretty close to a 50/50 split during the three years I’ve been around, and the top three positions have been held by more women than men during that time.

But here’s the result, as in Steiger’s example: while women end up running the show — managing, that is — men are able to devote themselves to success in the field as the field itself defines it (for Steiger, research; for the YPU, debating prowess), and therefore continue to be labeled “leaders”. This is only progressive in the same way that, say, thanking a housewife for the hard work she does is progressive: it’s nice to have the recognition, but it’d be nicer to acknowledge that maybe she’d rather be doing something other than housework.

But even to get the acknowledgment, women have to get noticed and taken seriously, which is tricky in an environment where they’re underrepresented. And often, the way to get noticed and groomed for leadership is to get things done, and get them done well. It’s hard to mount an impressive track record in intellectualism as a freshman, because intellectualism doesn’t lend itself to track records; it’s much easier to hang posters and organize events and do other things that mark one for “management.” Like female academics, they get siphoned out early and therefore miss the chance to get everything they can out of the environment they’re in.

So I really can’t see this as a reason to oppose affirmative action, but rather to ensure that the pools from which candidates are selected are of equal size, so that women don’t feel the need to “prove themselves” in male-dominated settings. Much more importantly, though, we need to recognize that in plenty of fields (academia, sure, but what about advertising? Programming?) many of the roles that get marked as “service”, “management” or “administration” aren’t positions of authority in the least; rather, the managers are those who keep things running so that other people can do what they came to the field to do in the first place, and get all the glory in the long haul.

I’m all for specialization, but let’s be honest about it. Appointing a junior academic to the position of program coordinator, regardless of gender, isn’t a promotion but a qualitative job shift. I think many of the problems that affirmative action hasn’t fixed or has exacerbated might be addressed if we stopped thinking purely in terms of organizational flowcharts but also in terms of social capital or personal fulfillment. And I certainly think that the trends Steiger notices might begin to reverse if tenure committees et al. had it brought to their attention that their actions were the ivory-tower equivalent of telling their daughters: “Oh, no, little girls can’t be doctors. Why don’t you pretend to be the Head Nurse instead?”

Domesticity Regained

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 14, 2008
in Food and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

I spent most of the last week sick in bed, which means that in addition to accumulating empty packs of cigarettes (Will) and water glasses (mostly me) on the porch, we have been surviving on takeout and ramen.

The first order of business, once Cipro returned me to some semblance of normalcy, was real food. (Well, maybe second, after catching up with work.) Luckily, there has been substantial discussion on this topic, and well-fueled with theory we traveled Whole Foods-ward.[1]

Tonight, we made — by which I mean I made and was observed while making — John’s fantastic Pasta with Corn, Pancetta, Butter, and Sage. Due to a shocking lack of pancetta, it was actually with bacon, and I only used half the butter called for,[2] but it was delicious. I might reduce the amount of butter even more and leave out the pasta altogether (the corn and bacon all hid at the bottom of the pot) to have it as a side dish.

Oh, and also, if anything important has happened in the world in the last few days and you didn’t e-mail me about it, I probably don’t know it happened. Hillary — still in the race, right?

[1] Advantages to Whole Foods being the only supermarket within walking distance: quality of produce and meat, selection of delicious gourmet food. Disadvantages to same: temptation to blow entire grocery budget on cheese.

[2] This is still an entire stick of butter, which I think is quite sufficient. On the other hand, the reason my Thea Helen’s baklava is so much better than mine is that she uses twice as much butter. The parallel is left as an exercise for the reader.

Bow-ties Unvisited

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on July 9, 2008
in Extemporanea and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

I meant to write something yesterday, but a nasty infection has me feeling a little under the weather and I collapsed promptly upon getting home. Instead, two good articles, and brief links to miscellaneous silly things that have pleased me in the last 24 hours:

  1. Two great articles in the newest issue of The American Conservative: John Schwenkler on culinary culture and Rod Dreher’s interview with Michael Pollan.
  2. A silly webcomic.
  3. Some of the creepiest men alive, and the reason for my love/hate relationship with summer clothes. (Pretty! But…)
  4. The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest.

I have also been thinking more about bow-ties and drag, but the Tylenol is calling.

Monday Morning Melancholy

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on June 30, 2008
in Extemporanea and Navel Gazing
. 2 Comments

From the Department of Sad but True, another example of the depressing truth about my employment prospects.

On the other hand, that’s a truly excellent blog, and this one always cheers me up.

Egg : Chicken :: Apathy : State

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on June 16, 2008
in Navel Gazing, Politics and Social Theory
. 2 Comments

Conservatives should be familiar with the argument that state intervention destroys communal bonds. Back in March, I wrote:

So what happens when the state starts taking care of the poor, the elderly, and the sick? Well, we don’t do it ourselves. It suddenly becomes possible to walk past a hungry person, because we can tell ourselves that the government will take care of the problem. Taxes let us fulfill our societal obligations by writing a check, which is easier and far less personal than any kind of meaningful interaction.

Peter Schweizer makes much the same case: conservatives care more, because if you buy into the idea that the state should be doing something, it’s simple to ignore your part in it.

But what if that isn’t it? More interesting than his argument is the data he cites:

Those surveyed were asked: ‘Is it your obligation to care for a seriously injured/ill spouse or parent, or should you give care only if you really want to?’ Of those describing themselves as ‘conservative’, 71 per cent said it was. Only 46 per cent of those on the Left agreed.

To the question: ‘Do you get happiness by putting someone else’s happiness ahead of your own?’, 55 per cent of those who said they were ‘very conservative’ said Yes, compared with 20 per cent of those who were ‘very liberal’.

What if it’s not the political structures around us that influence character, but character that influences our political ideals? If that’s true, then the problem isn’t that the state is robbing us of the human connection we ought to feel; rather, the problem is that some people just don’t feel it.

Sure, it would be better if the poor were helped by charity in their neighborhoods, but let’s assume for a moment that they won’t be. In such a circumstance, it is better to have government welfare programs: state intrusion is preferable to starvation.

Maybe the Right’s conviction that private charity will help people, and the Left’s insistence on using the state, can be traced back very simply to the idea that everyone else is like me.

And if that’s so, what do we do?