So as is obvious...

...this blog is on an indefinite hiatus since I'm now blogging regularly for work. But feel free to stay in touch by other means,.

A New Idea: Journalistic Leverage

Another day, another disaster.

Today the New York Times, quixotic but perhaps misinformed, attempts to make like the government and hold someone accountable for the disaster brewing at Freddie.

For sure, whoever vetted the Times’ spreadsheets did a great job. Numbers abound! But it seems as if their sources, much like a hot football player on senior prom night, have been trying to exploit the Times’ naivete.

There are a few doozies in this story. First off, all those unnamed sources?

Financial mavens chide banks for excessive leverage, so let’s practice a little position trimming of our own, here. There should be some sort of margin requirement for ratio of unnamed to named sources. Maybe there is. This story definitely doesn’t meet it. I counted. There are four named sources, not counting publicly released statements by the Fed and a few press relations peons who probably haven’t slept since last quarter.

There’s one mysterious screaming Democrat, hordes of attacking shareholders (attacking with what? Pens? Swords? Plowshares?) and 5 sources who said thanks but no thanks.

Not to mention the two dozen “officials” who, fearing reprisal (or, perhaps, are still piqued that they lost to CEO Syron in last month’s Irish Golf Classic) get top billing but not by name.

So that puts the ratio of anonymous to “mous” sources at: 17:4, not counting the spokesmen, the abstentions and the horde (because how does one count a horde?)

In other words, this entire story is massively leveraged, exposing the Times to a perhaps unprecedented but entirely predictable loss…of credibility.

Ignoring whether Syron’s ex-mistresses, former schoolmates and general haters-on have been using the Times as a convenient mouthpiece, there’s the fact that some of these quotes appear to have fallen upon the ears of babes.

One unknown but high-ranking Freddie Mac official tells the Times “It basically worked exactly as everyone expected — when things got bad, the government came to the rescue. But we didn’t expect it would come at the cost of a new regulator who now has the power to burrow into our business forever.”

They didn’t expect that?? Even though historically bailouts come at the cost of a regulator?

At the end, Syron adds with Napoleonic charm that his main concern is for #1: He wants to “save [his] reputation.” All right then. I shudder to think what his priorities were before this last-ditch, stop-gap, into-the-breach, insert-awful-metaphor-here moment, the type that really separates the boys from the traders.

Reading this story is like playing “Where’s Waldo” only instead of Waldo, we’re searching for the idiot. Was it the official? The writer? Syron? At the end of it all, I’m just not sure.

And also, to be blunt, this whole mess could have been avoided. If banks hadn’t been lulled by easy money and higher collateral value, but instead sat out the subprime siren song, or at least hedged a bit better against losses in home value. If a few people back in 2004 had read a few memos. But honestly. Whoever reads memos?

(Also: I’m not the only one who thought this story smelled off. Arrow over to Calculated Risk, where blogger Tanta politely refers to the article as a “Hit Job.”)

The Genie in the Bond Market

Economists and insurers like mathematical models. Nothing gets their glee going like predictability. People, on the other hand, are to math what ice dancing is to show ponies. (Don't look for a relationship, because there isn't one.)

In college, I - along with other aspiring financiers, arbitrageurs and general good for nothings - learned about moral hazard. To wit: the idea that a person who has bought insurance will behave more riskily than he otherwise would because he has insurance. It's a common problem in insurance circles.

Oddly enough, it's also a common problem in life. Once you buy into the system and stand to make a profit if you cheat the system, why not cheat? (Maybe you have ethical qualms about cheating. That's why you don't work in finance.)

Back in the late 1990s, a group of itinerant Harvard professors and a few Nobel laureates came up with the "Efficient Market Hypothesis." EMH was just about the worst thing to come out of Chicago since the winter weather report. The economists could hardly have been more excited than if they'd gotten elephants to tap dance, which in fact might have been less risky than what they proceeded to do. Several prominent economists left academia (and there's a reason that UChicago squirrels these folks away far, far from the real world) and started managing billions and billions of dollars using EMH.

The greatest drawback to EMH was that it was didn't work in the real world. The economists found this out to their chagrin when they started a hedge fund, made spectacular returns, leveraged themselves into the year 2050, and lost their shirts (as well as the shirts of everyone else involved.)

At the time, the Fed organized a bailout worth about $3 billion, which while staggering doesn't even approximate the current U.S. debt. But this was during the Clinton adminstration, salad years for the national account. The only real problem was the risk of moral hazard. After all, if the Fed started bailing out hedge funds, where would the trail end? And what, oh what, about moral hazard, the tragic effluvium of human nature injected into this otherwise perfect soup?

Why does this matter now that Long Term Capital Management (the failed hedge fund) has come and gone? Here's a fun fact. After engaging in some of the riskiest behavior in the (admittedly short!) memory of modern finance, one would expect the partners from LTCM to go into quiet retirement, perhaps give up a golf membership or two to show solidarity with the people they let down.

Ha! Promptly on the heels of liquidating one near national disaster, the partners at Long Term went onto to start another hedge fund, identical to the first. All the same people signed up as partners, they even kept their fancy Greenwich offices. Now, JWM Partners manages nearly $3 billion in assets, roughly the amount of the bailout less than a decade ago. Sure, somewhere, someone went crying into a world of pain. But it certainly wasn't the traders at Long Term, even though their failure was (odd as this may sound) their own fault.

But why pick at these bones? I say this on the eve of another momentous bailout, the Treasury bailout of Fannie and Freddie, those twins of leveraged tragedy. The fears are the same: letting Fannie and Freddie bite the dust will send the entire housing sector and indeed the entire American economy and then the world economy and then the known universe into a blazing nova.

Pardon. But. Remember how, at the bottom of it all, these things are always someone's fault? And the heads at Fan and Fred will go blue in the face talking about how they they didn't take on unnecessary risk, and how it wasn't their fault that short-term money failed, and that they had no one to unload their long securitions upon. They might even tell you that they weren't trading subprime securities, and maybe they weren't.

But somebody was. Where is that somebody now? Greenwich? New York? Where will that somebody be in ten years, when the US capital account has gone the way of a deflated Whoopie cushion?

Moral hazard, indeed.

Pounds of Flesh

Paul Krugman, over at conscience of a liberal, drew attention to this very funny airport sign the other day.

Airports are, of course, the last bastion of spontaneous humor – perhaps because there’s something so hideous about squeezing into a cramped metal compartment with your fellow man, cheek by jowl, noses inhaling the same recycled air for several hours while you contemplate how a terrorist win could hardly be more awful than the indignity of removing first your hat, then your shoes, then your pants in airport security until you wondered if you’d walked unwitting into an audition for a Vegas show. Nor for that matter could it be so much more terrible than the temperature of the plane itself, which has all the tropical warmth of winter in the Kremlin, which exacerbates the growling in your stomach as you behold the usurious prices the blonde, be-hatted, matching airline attendants demand for peanuts, water, and even trips to the toilet.

Yes, a flight resembles nothing so much as a prison where you’re not even granted the solace of a phone call. Which is why the suggestion at the Princeton airport is either genius marketing or the slow fade of our last vestiges of national self-respect, depending on how you look at it.

Imagine, if you will, that airlines did charge by the pound. Not 20 cents, not at these gas prices – let’s say $1.75. After all, a pound is a pound in the impersonal eyes of thrust and lift. In this world of peak load pricing, Eva Longoria would pay a mere $157.50 to jet across country. On the other hand, her hulking husband would pay the prince’s ransom of $437.50. Between them, the Longoria-Parkers would net an airline $297.50 a piece. Not bad.

In this new world, people who like to fill up, work out or even wear extensive fleece will have to pony up. And if they think to complain at the unfairness of it all, the wise man’s response would be “is this economy fair? Is joblessness fair? Is terrorism fair?”

And if anyone fears climbing aboard that communal scale, perhaps even dreads facing the number they would be forced, by law, to confront – remember this much: sans keys, sans belt, sans shoes, clothes and basic dignity – well, you’ll have very little left to lose. Your weight might even reflect that.

More Gripes About Other People's Writing

As everyone knows, I had a problem with “Eat, Pray, Love.” I tell people I didn’t like Gilbert’s voice, but what really goaded me was her premise. To wit: that somehow, travel can be extrapolated into memoir.

The best bit of travel writing I ever read was this, culled off a B-grade MySpace page one depressing evening: “No matter how far we travel, we stay in the same place, unless we are willing to change.”

There is a part of me that refuses to accept that people who explore the world are doing anything other than exploring the far reaches of themselves. And perhaps travel is an impetus to change, but it’s probably even more the other way around. Feel free to take a walk on the wild side of your personality, but why should that be the wild side of the world? And then, what sublime foolishness to think that somehow, the little corner of your brain you’ve carved out and mapped is the world!

But most of all, it’s the well-wishers who peeve me. The “you must do x before you die”-ers, the Bucket List-ers, you know the type I mean. The ones who wear you down with the insidious suggestion that if you’ve never stood before the bleached face of the Taj Mahal in the waning light of the moon you’ve never known love or beauty, the ones who assume that if you’ve never rafted the roaring Mekong you’ve never known breathlessness or adventure.

Maybe I’m bitter, and a little jealous. The truth is that I started traveling to escape the world I knew, which I later realized was myself, which I later realized would never happen.

Here’s another excellent bit of advice I once got about travel, from my seventh grade English teacher: “you don’t have to leave your home to do it.” I believe this. For that assignment I read “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which may be one of the best adventure novels of all time.

This, the inward travel, is both difficult to know and probably impossible to master. I know I’m not far along that path. I also know that I could never teach or preach the way to the trailhead to anyone else. And perhaps it’s true that other authors – the infamous and insufferable Elizabeth Gilbert, for one – acknowledge that they don’t know the whole truth either. But doesn’t the very act of writing a book suggest you should be listened to, that you feel you hold some perspective other people don’t? (For that matter, doesn’t a blog? Yes, ok, you may have me there…)

The point is, in adapting the world for our own enlightenment, don’t we leach it of its complexity? Isn’t that process abrasive and wrong? The great yogis of Hindu tradition achieved enlightenment without moving. They sat in the snowmelt, or under spindly trees, or in the middle of a cattle fair – wherever, really – and in the moment between closing and opening their eyes their brains managed to span the cosmos.

That would make for one hell of a travel memoir. The rest of us, I think, should stick to plain old travel writing.

First Generation Blues

I have a problem with people who write about India. I realized it today while reading AA Gill’s “A Short Walk in the Hindu Crush” which is perhaps the best travel essay I’ve ever read about India, and a great travel essay to begin with.

I have a problem perhaps because I feel as if India sleeps in my bones, a latent tiger, or at least a chemical reaction I can neither predict nor control. It irks me because all my life people here have said to me “You’re Indian” and what do they know about that? “Foreign-ness” is a mantle that doesn’t sit easy on anyone, and when I meet other first generation children I’m drawn to them for this reason. Whether they’re from Cuba or China or Guatemala, it doesn’t matter. We have that same energy, that same sense of waste-not inherited from parents who had nothing to waste. We’ve been called something, whatever it is, but not American. We’ve been called it for so long that we’ve begun to believe it’s true. The most interesting thing I realized while in India was that I was, in fact, American.

And to some people this will seem naïve, but my question is, how can you sit around a table with friends you’ve known for years, and listen to them talk about the post-9/11 world and the general justifiability of racial profiling, and not feel like the Other? How can you ignore the elephant in the room, the elephant in the form of you? How can everyone else ignore it, is the question. And then, they write about India as if they know what it means.

Well, I have news for you Tigger, you can’t have it both ways.

Obama Earns A Living, Too

Ryan Lizza has a long article about Barack Obama in The New Yorker. You can read the full 15 pages if you like, but his opening interview with longtime Illinois Alderman Toni Preckwinkle seems to be the scoop. Preckwinkle, who’s known Obama for years, seems shocked by the guy’s meteoric political rise, and she goes so far as to suggest Obama has lost his personal integrity.

I know. Some friend.

But Lizza’s article exposes a fundamental Orwellianism that we need to get straight. Despite the fact that he is running for President, there still seem to be people out there who are shocked – shocked! – that Obama behaves like a politician.

People, the man is a politician. As a very wise columnist once wrote, “they’re not like the rest of us.”

Of course, Obama is not entirely clean himself. (And no, I’m not referring to that misfit moment in his autobiography when he admitted he’d done cocaine.) If anyone is responsible for this “Obama is not a politician” belief, it’s Obama himself. In that galvanizing speech, the one that launched the Obama cult of personality, he said, “If there's a child on the south side of Chicago who can't read, that matters to me, even if it's not my child. If there's a senior citizen somewhere who can't pay for their prescription and having to choose between medicine and the rent, that makes my life poorer, even if it's not my grandparent. If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties. It is that fundamental belief -- it is that fundamental belief -- I am my brother's keeper, I am my sisters' keeper -- that makes this country work.”

It’s still one of the greatest speeches in modern history. It ranks up there with MLK’s “I Have A Dream,” and the similarities are not to be discounted.

Why is it so heartbreaking to accept that those words came out of the mouth of a politician? The difference between Obama and every other politician we have isn’t that Obama claims to be a different breed (normally, they all do) but that many of us believed him (normally, we never do).

But maybe that exposes a deeper cultural insecurity, a “Politician-Human” complex along the lines of the “Virgin-Whore” complex that stymied feminism. The Politician-Human complex might have evolved when we trusted the promises of politicians only to be painfully misled.

But it runs deeper than that. It hearkens back to the Founding Fathers. Nothing put George Washington’s wig in a knot like politicians, whom he described in his famous farewell letter as “cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men…enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”

Which is a shame, since Washington, in addition to being our first President, was also our first politician.

Merriam-Webster defines a politician as: “a person experienced in the art or science of government; especially: one actively engaged in conducting the business of a government.”

Meanwhile, the most popular definition on Urban Dictionary has a different take: “A person who practices politics. "Politics" is derived from the words "poly" meaning "many", and "tics" meaning "blood-sucking parasites."” Incidentally, this is also the politest definition on the page.

Our nation’s bizarre love-hate relationship with its elected polity is more than I can unpack in a blog post, even one as irresponsibly long as this one. Suffice it to say that being a politician has, over the course of history, taken on many associated meanings, whether justified or not. We consider politicians selfish and utilitarian, or dishonest and insensitive. We consider “politician” to be a mindset, a personality and a social class.

But at the end of the day, it’s also a job. Obama’s job.

The (Underestimated?) Genius of Gamers

In the course of work I came across this quote about science education in America:

"Even those classrooms that do engage in inquiry typically provide in "simple inquiry tasks" rather than inquiry activities where the outcome is in genuine doubt, a hallmark of authentic inquiry (Chinn and Malhotra, 2002).

It comes from a study of – of all things – role playing games, by Kurt Squire and Mingfong Jan.

Reading the quote brought me to a strange realization. In order to graduate high school, I had to do a lot of things. But what about the things I didn't have to do? For example, not once did I engage in a scientific inquiry where the outcome was in genuine doubt.

I engaged in plenty where my competence was in genuine doubt, which led to a whole host of dubious outcomes. But even in in the depths of the darkest Methyl Blue haze, I knew what was supposed to happen.

But of course I didn’t design experiments, you’re all thinking. Hell, if I did things like that I would be Einstein! Newton! Confucius! (Maybe not Confucius…) That guy who won the Nobel Prize recently because he did something with something and now other scientists can do something else with something!

The thing is, the way those experiments worked, the entire experimental process was redundant.

When I was a kid, the opposite was true. I started life knowing nothing. If I came up with a plan involving my little sister and a sled made from a box, and the plan didn't work, then I had to come up with a new plan involving a trash can lid and a box, and if that didn’t work, then I had to find a new hill altogether, and so on.

If this is also how scientists learn, that explains why so many of the world’s greatest inventions have been mistakes. Invention isn’t what happens when you go to the drawing board, it’s what happens when you go back to the drawing board.

But wait, you’re thinking. Most schools don’t have the facilities to support higher-order scientific inquiry.

This might not the case. One of my most interesting high school experiments involved dropping an egg from a great height. In order to determine how impact acted upon the fragile egg, my partner and I had to make some diagrams, come up with an impulse estimate, and then design a little “egg-carrier.” The egg, ensconced in carrier, was ceremoniously dropped two stories.

Our egg survived. Others were not so lucky.

But what if all those people who weren’t so lucky had to go back and re-design their egg carriers? What if we all had to do that when one of our experiments didn’t work?

The reason role playing games reflect this process so well is because they offer no guides or guarantees. Playing one is like stepping into a new world. It’s like the day you were born. You don’t know the rules. You can only experiment, and through experimentation, survive.

Philosophers, as any good IB knows, recognize two forms of knowledge. Knowledge gained through being told (don’t touch the electrical outlet) and knowledge gained through experience (really, don’t touch it).

Is knowledge gained through experimentation different? Does it fall under experiential knowledge, or is it something else altogether? A fusion of those two forms? I’m sure the pros (Plato? Mill? Aristotle? That guy who said something about something?) have tacked this one. I’m just bringing it up.

And here’s my other question: remember all those computer and science nerds people made fun of in high school for their gaming ways? What if all that time, all those kids were learning how to think? What if some people have a gift for original inquiry, and those people are drawn to gaming, with its complex world of unintelligible rules?

I, for one, have never played an alternate reality or role playing game. But maybe I should start.

I don't like Jhumpa Lahiri. Actually, it's her writing I don't like. Everything else is (probably!) fine.

Now that I've gotten that monkey off my back.

I've read every one of her books. I've given nearly $100 to her publishers' children's college funds.

But that charity appeal no longer moves me, because the truth is I don't think she's very good. If the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Pulitzer Committee don't know good writing, what the hell do I know?

Good question. Here's what I do know: reading Interpreter of Maladies reminded me of seeing the "Mona Lisa." I nearly broke my neck staring up at the Sistine ceiling of Renaissance fame, and at no point was I disappointed. But some things are almost too famous for their own good. If I'd come to Interpreter tabula rasa, I might have felt I'd found a diamond in the rough. As it was, I felt I'd unearthed copper ore - during the Gold Rush.

The Namesake, plot of which boasted more whimsical turns than a country lane, ran long, but at least the destination was interesting.

But in her new collection, four "No Longer a Short Story, not Quite a Novel" types, what was once fresh has started to go stale. Her characters, much like married couples who have been friends for years, have started to resemble each other more than is entirely permissible.

Lahiri describes the same family over and over in (too) spacious prose. They're all Bengali, the mothers wear saris, the fathers seem a bit befuddled, the children speak English and marry WASP's, despite their parents' chagrin.

This may seem like a lot. But it actually gets quite predictable. I'm not saying Lahiri must speak for an entire diaspora, but she could do a better job capturing diversity even within the slice of Indian-Americana that she's cut for herself. And because the characters are flat, the stories themselves don't have much lift or heart.

With some writers, the whole story is much more than the sum of its words. Whereas with Lahiri's writing, the whole has somehow become less.

Mugabe in the Lurch

"The end of hyperinflation is always and everywhere a fiscal phenomenon."

This statement is true - or so I learned in econ class. So the government can end a hyperinflation, but what begins one?

I remembered this lesson when I read about the recent election woes in Zimbabwe, a nation previously infamous for its record-breaking inflations.

Many hyperinflations start when hard currency grows faster than real output - which means that a dollar today is much, much more than a dollar tomorrow. Needless to say, people start to expect that their money will be worthless in the future, which means it is (by a vicious feedback cycle) worth less today.

The fact that there is excess liquidity in the economy (think the opposite of the liquidity crunch recently experienced in the United States) means that money markets fall out of equilibrium, and an unstable market is nobody's friend.

But MORE simply put, hyperinflations start when a military leader (Mugabe?) prints cash to pay soldiers. He prints too much cash, prices start to go up, suddenly everything's awhirl. And yes, chaos breaks out of confinement that easily.

Now, of course, Mugabe's up a real creek. He's wrecked the economy (and let's not mince words: the recent troubles have as much to do with him as anyone) and his friends want to call in their debts. He's unpopular at home and abroad.

But short of matriculating at the George W. Bush Center for Men Who Can't Lead Good, what options does he have? And what option does Zimbabwe have? Regardless of whom they elect, they face a terrible and uphill battle. The climb down from an inflationary spiral is often more torturous than the ascent, and involves recessions so deep they feel endless. (See Argentina in 2001. Ending hyperinflation there resulted in a poverty rate over 50%.)

The problem with political upheaval is always one and the same. A constantly changing and ineffective civil service in turn leads to poor administration and enforcement. Production declines when regular citizens live in fear and the absence of opportunity, and eventually, the government in power attempts to pay its cronies through seignorage. Hence: hyperinflation.

This timeline does not absolutely apply: there must be exceptions. But the link can't be denied. A government facing a fiscal deficit can only finance itself through one of two options: seignorage or borrowing.

Governments that cannot borrow (poor credit, instability) resort to seignorage. Governments with an excellent credit rating (the United States) choose to borrow.

In fact we might have more in common with Zimbabwe than we realize. The United States, too, fights an uphill battle in Iraq, and our government faces mounting unpopularity at home and abroad. And we've mortgaged ourselves to the hilt. Meanwhile, Mugabe has leveraged himself past the point of no return in order to pay for his war.

I wonder how it'll all end up?

The Things We Do Not Know

I shouldn't be posting this.

Today I learned that a friend of a friend of mine was court martialled and released from the Army for the alleged torture of Iraqis.

I'm not close with this person, it would be safe to say that we met once, very briefly, and exchanged maybe five words the entire time. I can't say much more than that.

The legal documents are accessible online, but out of a (passing) respect for the privacy of the situation, I won't link to them. There were so many US soldiers found guilty in those trials that it doesn't give much away to admit to this acquaintance.

Let me be brief. It's shocking - and uncomfortable - to be in the presence of someone even dimly associated with this. The pictures of prisoner abuse horrified America, but what was worse was that we most likely didn't see the worst.

Looking through the trial documents of multiple soldiers online, however, what emerges is a more fragmented and difficult picture: a portrait of the moral no-man's-land of war. There are several facts that, by virtue of their historical persistence, we can accept for the truth.

1) Some of the US soldiers who were punished were innocent.
2) Some of the guilty soldiers went free.
3) Some of the torture incidents were exaggerated in later reports.
4) Some of the torture incidents were underexaggerated, brushed under the rug, or never reported at all.

But the question that remains, long after perusing the online archive, is this: was this part of the general hideousness of war, which permits abuse in a world where the consequences of someone's actions depend on national or ethnic origin rather than on absolute morality? Was it a systematic element of US operations in Iraq, an element implicitly encouraged by Pentagon higher-ups as a method of demoralizing a difficult enemy? Was it a demonstration of the ugliness of the race and class barriers that lurk within all people? Was it Heart of Darkness?

These are all things that, years later, we do not definitively know. They are things that some people would say do not matter. Except that war has an aftermath. Iraqi memories are going to be longer than ours, perhaps because their innocents suffered in this war even more than ours did (after all, the war took place on their soil. Saddam, for all the rumors, did not launch an official attack on the United States).

What this all boils down to is that years from now, some Americans will be scratching their heads, wondering "Why do they hate us?" A lot of the media like to mock these Americans. Who is "they" ask the mockers. Do those poor shmucks even know?

But we know who "they" are. Do we know who "we" are? Do we know, any of us, what exactly has or hasn't been done in our name? Is it easy to be moral when you don't have to fight for your life? Or is it harder?

A nation should be aware that its conduct in wartime is a part of its spirit. In a few short years, we squandered a (perhaps mistaken) reputation built on years of staunch advocacy of certain "universal rights." Wars, by their nature, erode those rights.

What I am saying, of course, is that the toll on all concerned is almost too vast to comprehend. The United States has paid for Iraq in the lives of US soldiers (those who died, those who lost their reputations, those who were rightly or wrongly accused, those who served and were injured), the lives of Iraqi civilians, the lives of Iraqi soldiers, its international reputation for human rights and the massive opportunity cost (education, scientific research, Social Security) of the billions and billions of dollars we've spent on it.

We've paid a lot. That kid I met once, briefly, has paid a lot. And by extension, so have most of us. What did any of us get out of it? That's another thing we might never exactly know.

Chastity Makes the News

The New York Times is clearly one of those well-intentioned newsrooms where senior editors encourage their hordes of minion writers to get "the scoop" on minority communities.

I really wish they wouldn't. The result is pieces like "In Europe, Debate over Islam and Chastity."

It's true that nothing whets the American news appetite like a) Muslims and b) virgins, two demographic groups the average American finds incredibly weird. The Times batted a hit with the mainstream, since this piece of fluff is now the most email-ed article on NYTimes.com.

And with care and the proper attention, this story might have been great. Instead, it's a mess. First off, the author cites no stats on grounds that there are none. In journalism classes we're taught that it's really a sellout for a writer to resort to the vague "a small but growing number" when trying to justify a trend. This writer not only resorts to it, she offers a lame, one-line excuse as to why she did so. She says that hymen reconstruction surgery is so deeply personal there are no stats available. I find this hard to believe. We're talking about a cosmetic procedure, performed by licensed doctors, in hospitals. I'm sure she could have dug up some numbers.

Second, the article frames the question in light of Muslim "culture." I'm not sure that Elaine Sciolino is an expert on Muslim culture, assuming she even wants to be. Witness the fact that most of the people in her article, the ones having the "debate" over Islam and chastity, are not Muslim.

In fact, she waits until the end of the piece to cite the viewpoint of a lone Muslim dissident, who actually (haha!) turns out to be vice president of a large Muslim Cultural Center. So he's not just some man she grabbed on his way home from the mosque. He says "The man was the biggest donkey of all" but we have to wait until the end of page 2 before we hear someone in the Muslim community call this "small but growing trend" for the absurdity it is?

This story could have been one of several things. It could have been "Among Muslim immigrants to France/England/etc, surgery narrows gap between permissive Western values and religious tradition" or it could have been "In England, hot debate over woman whose marriage was annulled because she was not a virgin." But these better stories would have required more research and better knowledge of the communities into which Sciolino was delving. She could have discussed honestly the difficulties of many European governments in dealing with new immigrants, particularly Muslims. She could have talked about differences between Muslim immigrant communities. She could have researched attitudes towards virginity as expressed by prominent Muslim clerics and scholars in the West. (And to be honest, a real delve might have unearthed the fact that traditional Muslims are really very similar to all those chastity ball dads and "Silver Ring Thing"-ers we've seen before.)

Instead, Sciolino and her faithful "native" sidekick traverse Europe, find a few African women who have had the surgery (and never mind, here, the vast difference between religious and cultural practices of African, Arab, Turkish and American Muslims, never mind the variety to be found in the vast diaspora of the world's third-largest religion) and file this sucker before the Wednesday deadline.

It comes off as what it is: a cliche-ridden, cobbled-together, inadequately-sourced and (worst of all!) misleading piece of tripe.

The real difference between McCain and Obama

Much has been made of the differences between McCain and Obama, differences in rhetorical style, personal history, professional qualifications. But the real difference between them only becomes obvious in their AIPAC speeches.

Both politicians tried last week to forge a personal connection with one of Washington's strongest lobbies. Each brought up what he believed to be the strongest moment in America's relationship with the Jewish world.

McCain said, "When President Truman recognized the new State of Israel sixty years ago, he acted on the highest ideals and best instincts of our country." He also referred to the Holocaust, saying "And today, when we join in saying "never again," that is not a wish, a request, or a plea to the enemies of Israel." He played on the most critical and obvious fear of Jews in America: that the Holocaust will be repeated, and that the ugliness of the past doesn't go away.

Obama, on the other hand, chose a very different historical moment to analyze: " In the great social movements in our country’s history, Jewish and African Americans have stood shoulder to shoulder. " Of the future, he said, "Their legacy is our inheritance. "

Both men toed the party line, saying that they would never discount military force as an option when dealing with Israel's enemies. Obama also said, "I also believe that the United States has a responsibility to support Israel’s efforts to renew peace talks with the Syrians." And he spoke to one of my (pet) concerns when he said "Israel can also advance the cause of peace by taking appropriate steps - consistent with its security - to ease the freedom of movement for Palestinians, improve economic conditions in the West Bank, and to refrain from building new settlements - as it agreed to with the Bush Administration at Annapolis."

But ultimately, the difference between the two men came down to this. McCain said, "The threats to Israel's security are large and growing, and America's commitment must grow as well." Obama said, "I deeply understood the Zionist idea - that there is always a homeland at the center of our story."

And if McCain did well to capitalize on fear, Obama may have done better to talk about home. The truth is, Jews in America are just that: Jews in America. My many Jewish friends can criticize and commend Israel in equal measure. They are the recipients of a dual legacy: that of the Holocaust, yes, but also that of the people who realized that "never again" meant standing up against bigotry in all its forms, across nations and cultures.

This legacy is something that McCain, the torture survivor, could also have cited. Because McCain knows, just as Obama does, that fear can inspire strength. What is telling is that McCain chose not to talk about that. Instead, he talked about the foundation of Israel, which was, in many ways, not America's strongest moment. After treating the Jews of the world abominably, the US joined Europe in creating a nation where none existed, without consulting the people there or considering the consequences. Instead of offering refuge to Jews fleeing the European death camps, America preferred to send them far, far away.

That, in McCain's opinion, was one of our moments of greatest national strength.

I Cry Over Milk That Has Yet to be Spilled

My first mistake was buying the planner.

It was bright pink, and obscenely cheery and compact, and it had space in it for 1.5 years. It seemed perfect. It wasn't until today that I realized I'd made a terrible error.

See, I was flipping through the pages to write in my graduation date - which by the way, is in three weeks. And suddenly I realized: after graduation, there are 12 more months for me to fill in this little planner (assuming I don't lose it, which the odds are against). There will come a time a year from now when I'll be able to flip through to the beginning, and I'll notice the little notes I made "DZ Cubs Game" and "Brings Props and Costumes for Castle" and "Hindi midterm 3" and "Dillo Day Shindig" and I'll have to accept that an era in my life actually ended, somewhere between pages 60 and page 63.

This may sound melodramatic, and it is, but it reminds me of this heroine I read about in sixth grade, who wrote letters to herself. Every year on her birthday she wrote herself a letter, and she opened the letter she'd written the year before. I tried this, but before the first year was up I'd forgotten where it was, and I found it by accident years later, and it was about halfway through (where I wrote "let's be honest, M-- is the only guy in our sixth grade class whom I'd even consider dating" that I was so horrified I burned it)

Anyway, that experiment failed, and thank God, because what an exercise in misery. I hate looking back because to me, nostalgia is more terrifying than heights. I realize, of course, that life is not in fact a vast funnel narrowing inexorably into Death, but I'd still rather not contemplate the infinite.

Because what frightened me earlier is not that one day I'll look back and realize what time has gone by, but that today, here and now, I have no idea what lies ahead. The thought of the entire universe that goes by in a year is so frightening. I've always been unnecessarily frightened by this, and for years after something ends I spend far too much time feeling belatedly bereft, just to avoid feeling presently confused.

This is a bad strategy. So now I'm of two minds: either destroy the damn planner and get a new one when my new life starts, or keep it as a test of my character. After all, there might come a day when the phrase "Hindi midterm 3" makes me want to cringe just as badly as my sixth grade flames do now. Or when I don't really care at all.

He with the loudest voice...

I often hear educated people in the United States excuse their anti-Muslim views by saying "if the majority of the world's Muslims don't support terrorism, why don't they step up to condemn it?" This argument is bigotry masquerading as reason. Plenty of Muslims condemn terrorism - today I picked up a copy of Al bayan, the newsletter for our university's Muslim Cultural Students Association. At the risk of being ridiculed by their peers, the editors write that they chose to distribute Al Bayan campuswide because they wanted "to give our voice a public position and the power to inform."

What about Asra Nomani, who went to the front of the mosque and for her trouble received threats against her life (in addition to a lucrative career as a writer).

What about Mukhtar Mai?

What about the Iraqi Muslims who hide their Jewish neighbors from state reprisal?

Is this not moral courage? In standing up to the doctrines that insist women belong in the back of the mosque, that Muslims should stay silent, that rape victims should kill themselves, and that Muslims should terrorize Jews, these people resist. In doing so they risk their lives. Men called Mukhtar in the middle of the night threatening to repeat the gang-rape that devastated her life. Others told Nomani they would slaughter her "halal-style."

Do these acts of moral courage count for nothing? In resisting the terrorism that controls their daily lives, aren't these people defying terrorism? Aren't they attempting to recreate a peaceful Islam in the modern world?

If all commentators who said "Muslims should speak up" got a midnight call threatening to slit their throats as thanks for expressing their beliefs, how many would still speak up?

By making those comments, we demean the bravery of Muslims all over the world, every day, who risk everything they have and more to make the world better for all of us.

Education: the Only Human Necessity

I had no words for this. In fact, I'd planned on leaving it as a testament to the consummate and obvious folly of the Bush administration, but in the interest of honesty I should add that the Fulbrights were reinstated.

But here's what I can't let go of: the Defense Ministry kook who justified Israel's first decision not to let the students leave Gaza said "Education is not a humanitarian necessity."

Whoa. It kind of makes you wonder: what else doesn't qualify as a humanitarian necessity? Israel's strategy of "isolating" Gaza reminds me eerily of the US internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It was a shame for our nation, one that we seem to skip over in history class perhaps because there's just no way to excuse it. If education doesn't qualify as a humanitarian necessity, what does?

The largely innocent people of Gaza are suffering for the crimes of their extremists. This may satisfy some Israelis' desire for revenge, but how does it help anyone else? The Palestinians cannot leave to attend university, to visit dying relatives in the West Bank, or to assume any of the apparatus of a free existence.

Before people say that it's extreme to compare Gaza to an internment camp, remember that part of Israel's strategy is to strictly control the flow of supplies into Gaza. Who knows what that supply is, if the people in charge of enforcing the blockade think education is not a humanitarian necessity?

A comparable strategy would be if the United States fenced off Texas and allowed no one in or out in order to solve the problem of illegal immigrants moving from Texas to other states. (Wait...)

Israel's line seems to be "until they behave, they get nothing." But who's 'they?' If there wasn't a 'they' before there will certainly be one now.

Do the innocent people of Gaza deserve to suffer for the crime of being Palestinian? Because it seems like that's what's happening.

Who's Your Uncle?

Another spring, another political scandal. I don't know enough about Ehud Olmert to pass judgment on his leadership in Israel, although I admire anyone who makes a reasonable go of the job.

I do find the NY Times story on Olmert's possible regisnation to be very interesting. Halfway down the page, author Isabel Kershner refers to one of the participants in a legal deposition as "avuncular" and "unassuming." In so saying, Kershner runs, colors flying, across the hard line between fact and opinion. In the breakdown of literary boundaries that has accompanied the information age, journalists might feel the need to 'paint a picture' for readers at least as compelling as that offered by novelists or memoirists. Nonetheless, it was not the best choice of words.

Speaking of journalism, Fareed Zakaria once more asserted the self that made me so fond of him in this fantastic piece about terrorism, where he debunked the meme that has taken hold in the popular press that terrorism shows no sign of fading. (In fact, I said this just yesterday.)

Zakaria titled his piece "The Only Thing We Have to Fear" a phrase so entrenched in our cultural consciousness that it's now a cliche. The sentence reminded me of another adage, dusted off and presented to me in my first year of journalism school. We must "speak truth to power" suggested the earnest journalistic manifesto I signed my freshman year. At the time I thought that phrase belonged to journalists, although in fact it started with the Quakers.

Zakaria, more than most journalists I've read, makes a living off "speaking truth to power." He picks a wide-ranging power as his audience. Sometimes it's corporate America, sometimes the Bush administration, more often it's the universe of editors and advertisers who direct American publishing.

"Speak Truth to Power" sums up the presidential race. The thing is this: I'm reading Obama's "Dreams from my Father" right now, and I've started to realize. This man might not be presidential material. Not because he'd be a bad commander-in-chief, but because Obama has his roots on the South Side. He used to pick do-nothing teens off the streets past Ninety-Fifth (yikes, say I, being from the Windy City). He knew where it was at.

Obama is a man in his element when he's "speaking truth to power." He's not so hot at being the power himself. He might do okay, but in terms of best allocation, he'd be better off as a rogue U.N. inspector, a Mohamed ElBaradei character, a thorn in the feathers of doves and hawks alike. To a degree, the same can be said of John McCain. McCain is on the wagon at last, but I wish he were off. Sometimes it seems he's lost himself in the make-believe land of Bushisms, paying no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Hillary, well, now there was a candidate. Forget about speaking truth to power. Hill was at her best with her arm across the windpipe of the opposition. Her forte was a fuerte unmatched in the present field. But due to the way the political winds have huffed and puffed, it seems this outcome (where Hillary becomes President and Obama and McCain take turns heckling her from the floor) is the only one we shall not have. Too bad, really.

The Immigration Conundrum

A court in Iowa recently sent 270 illegal Guatemalan immigrants to federal prison. The judge who pronounced the sentences said to the group, "I don't doubt for a moment that you are good, hard-working people...unfortunately, you committed a violation of federal law."

Unfortunately, the decision in Iowa could shape the emerging debate over illegal immigration, and set a precedent that might ultimately undermine rather than help the American economy.

We live in difficult times. Debate over the U.S.-Mexico fence has bogged down in disputes over Native American land claims. Terrorism shows little sign of abating. The job market is projected to weaken across all sectors.

And there are problems on a local level. Despite their contribution to local economies, illegal immigrants don't pay taxes. And the public services they use - education, hospitals - are funded through tax revenues. With the Bush stimulus plan in full swing, and the government running a deficit due (in part) to a big defense budget, there's just no money to be given in the form of federal tax relief to underfunded school districts. Districts that lean on federal funding (typically ones that underperform, a relationship which may or may not imply causality) have to do something. But so do states where education funding comes from local revenues (Iowa falls into this category, with 42.5% of expenditure coming from local sources.)

Gone are the days when INS - now ICE - might turn the other cheek.

But what is the solution? Economic analysis shows immigrants - even illegal ones - are a net benefit to the national economy. (A consensus among numerous studies I looked at) Nonetheless, the taxpayers of California (for example) can hardly afford the emergency room operations given out by law to all comers, regardless of immigration status. (The other option, which is to let illegal immigrants and their children suffer on the street, is even more unpalatable, as well as inconsistent with our national values)

Meanwhile, what happens to industries where much of the labor force comprises illegal immigrants? 20% of illegal immigrants work in construction, but a disproportion number also work in agriculture and fast food preparation. Right now, there is no action pending against Agriprocessors, the company that employed all 270 of the illegal immigrants. Regardless of the justice of this situation, to lock up the immigrants and let the company go free is to get the leaf of the problem without even touching the root.

The fence will not keep people out. After all, Iowa's immigrants came from Guatemala.

To be more utilitarian: what is the optimal allocation of illegal immigrants in our economy such that it will function most efficiently? The politician's answer: 0. The economist's answer: not 0. The ethical American's answer: ?

Some action might have been necessary in Iowa. But the action the court took was wrong on almost every level. And the entire United States will have to make immigration decisions in the aftermath of that precedent.

Off to See the Wizard

There was much hullaballoo when George Bush popped up in Saudi last week, palm out, hoping for a free pass to the end of his presidency. In other words, for a promise to pump more oil. The Saudis, conventional in their capriciousness, turned him down.

But let's not forget the ridiculousness of this situation. The United States is first in the world for oil consumption, with about 25.2% of world demand originating between sea and shining sea. We're headed, according to all predictions, for a serious crisis, considering as this pit is hardly bottomless. Meanwhile, our President is playing the mendicant in a country famous for its oppressive and unpredictable politics, and incidentally, one whose extreme Wahhabi sect has known connections to many of the world's deadliest terrorists (the rest, of course, were once the toast of Reagan's Rose Garden). Sometimes, there is no difference between sleeping with the enemy and being the enemy. Or, in the case of the Saudi royal family, failing to control the enemy and being the enemy.

Nonetheless, assuming that all the reports are true, and we are facing the so-called "end of oil," and that future predictions by IEA and EIA continue to be gloomy (and how exactly is it that in the case of a commodity with a fixed supply we have up until now only modeled based on demand?) In the words of the Godfather, "'What can I do?' What is that nonsense?"

Hence all the hand-wringing. If production peaks before demand, we are in for a serious catastrophe, the proportions of which will dwarf the economic credit crunch and the physical water shortage.

Let me be blunt: my grandparents live in a prosperous suburb of Mumbai, where for the past several months now they get two hours of water a day. Note I did not say clean water, note I did not say drinkable. I said, Two hours of water a day.

Meanwhile, I use more water in two hours than they use in two weeks. To return to the Godfather, an epic that for some reason seems so applicable to the oil crunch, "That is not justice." In another ten years, assuming demand has outstripped production, it will be my grandparents who get two gallons of gas a week, whereas I'll still be eating food that has a negative energy output ratio.

A utilitarian might wash his hands of the whole affair on the grounds that it's working out for the best. Assuming Americans are the most efficient people on earth (a faulty assumption to begin with, for reasons of energy usage and, on a financial level, market failures) then who cares about global access? I, for one, have trouble accepting that one life is worth more than another, but I admit that's how the world works.

Nonetheless, people talk about energy efficiency as if it's a jaunt, or a philanthropy, but Al Gore (not the Godfather) may be right that there is a moral dimension to this whole situation. It is not just a matter of dollars and cents and futures traded on commodities exchanges the world over.

When one person uses a lot of oil, someone else has to go without. That someone else has a face and a name and a life. What does he deserve? It is interesting that Americans, not God, will be deciding the answer to this very difficult question.

Double Standard

You can now watch the trailers for "You Don't Mess with the Zohan." It looks bad. It looks very, very bad. But it also makes me realize that we still operate in the existence of a double standard.

I'm not talking about gender. If Tina Fey is any example, female comedians can make bad movies with the same lack of talent as any late-night stand-up on Comedy Central. (And Baby Mama was bad. It was catastrophically bad. The premise was banal, the jokes were predictable. Hiring a surrogate mother for a 30-something woman whose career consumed her life? How Lifetime. Tina Fey should do something very weird - like build a space station out of pretzel sticks and the hair of llamas. She could make a great movie about that.)

At any rate, I'm not talking about that double standard. I'm talking about Zohan. An Israeli "anti-terrorist" agent. We can laugh comfortably about a man whose mission and training is to eliminate suspected terrorists Bond-style.

Who is Zohan's Palestinian counterpart? Wait, you'll say, there are no Israeli terrorists. There are certain people within Israel who believe that there should be one state, and that state should be Israel, and the Palestinian Arabs who have lived in the region for years should suck it up and become Jordanian citizens (because, you know, it's merely a hop, skip and a jump to Jordan on election day and therefore, at least, a Palestinian vote will count for something even if this system is not, strictly speaking, the most democratic). There are people who believe this. Some of these people train other young people to create settlements beyond Israel's political boundaries for the express purpose of building Israel, while perhaps deliberately antagonizing the Palestinians. But it's a stretch - naturally - to call these people terrorists. After all, they haven't bombed anybody.

And anyway, even if they had, even if the Israeli government of 1948 had followed an ethnic cleansing policy that left 800,000 Arabs as homeless refugees (or dead!), even if the United Nations had issued a report condemning paramilitary settlers responsible for multiple Palestinian deaths in the West Bank and Gaza, even if Palestinians were routinely treated up to the present day with such brutality by Israeli checkpoint soldiers that even President George W Bush felt compelled to weigh in: even if these absurd hypotheticals were true,

Who would make a movie called "Don't Mess with the Abu Bakr?" Who would laugh at it the way they laughed at "Borat"?

Let me be clear - I have no reason to side with Islamic militants. As a first generation American whose parents and grandparents grew up in majority-Hindu India, members of my family and friends have lost their property and sometimes their lives to religious extremism. But for me, my family, or the Indian government to suggest that the Hindus and Muslims did not each play an equal part in antagonizing the other would not just be naive - it would be criminal.

But the violence in the Middle East ebbs and flows, while Hollywood endures.