Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

essays

Personal essays from Krisis on everything from parenting to immigrant life to driving, and much more.

Consumption: Freakonomics

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Freakonomics is an entertaining reminder that correlation does not indicate causation, proof that not all economists are interested in the economy, and a valuable deflator of a few harmful common sense truisms. It is obsessed with subtly pointing out that the word “data” is plural. It’s commentary on apples that are really oranges is purely metaphorical.

It is easy to compare this book with the similar bestseller Blink, by dust-jacket endorser Malcolm Gladwell. Indeed, the subtitle, “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything,” seems to jive with Gladwell’s way of carefully evaluating the world through communications-theory tinged lenses.

The subtitle is somewhat of a misnomer. Levitt is considered “rogue” because he delights in applying microeconomics to thorny subjects that are not adequately explained by statistical analysis. He has no overarching theory of anything – just an endless series of slightly counterintuitive but highly logical facts about everything.

Levitt and Dubner’s “hidden side of everything” epiphanies are highly entertaining, and educational. You will certainly be the hit of the watercooler for weeks after reading this book. However, the epiphanies are not especially portable. Knowing that a swimming pool is more dangerous to children than a handgun does nothing for comparing the dangers of a trampoline against a hunting knife collection. All the authors have to say about that is that you’ll need lots of data.

Maybe the lack of long-term impact to your way of thinking wouldn’t seem like such a shortcoming if this book was anything more than a compilation of six over-long magazine articles – the main text barely tops 200 pages. Furthermore, though the book has an extensive works cited, it features no footnotes – meaning you have to turn to the back of the book every time you read something interesting to see if it came from another source.

If any of Levitt’s assertions are valuable beyond passing amusement, clearly that assertion is the link between available, legalized abortion and lower crime rates. This bombshell is dropped in the book’s introduction, and later discussed for almost a full chapter. Though the authors repeatedly disclaim that the data are not meant to support a pro-choice position, it is hard to come away with any other conclusion. Focusing on this aspect of the book might seem like an unfair attempt to politicize a exercise in economics applied to socio-politics, but you could say the same thing about books by Marx or Durkheim. Clearly, Levitt is on to something important, and the fact that he carefully disguises it behind a cleverly non-sequitur title and cover image rather than making it the focus of his first book is insulting, and maybe tragic.

The authors are clearly trying to build a sort of narrative (from drug dealers to abortion vs crime-rate, to parenting, to children’s names), but they clearly run out of steam in the sixth and final chapter, which drones on with lists of names for poor kids, middle class kids, black kids, and white kids. For every list, the findings get less revolutionary, until Levitt is pointing out facts that would barely rate as footnotes, if he had any.

Freakonomics is a quick, lightweight read chunked into six chapters that should each probably be read in only one or two sittings in order to gain their full impact. With a hefty $26 purchase price for it’s brief length it is a book that should be borrowed from the local library, unless one of it’s common-sense-deflators is extremely valuable to one of your social or political causes, or if its cover would look especially appealing on your bookshelf.

Nothing Left to Win; Nothing Else to Lose

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(There is a high probability that you are reading this post because you searched for the lyrics in its title. They slightly misquoted from the song “With or Without You” by U2, released in 1987 on their album The Joshua Tree. (The actual lyric is “nothing left to lose”).

Purchasing that album, which also includes “Where the Streets Have No Name” and “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” was one of the major reasons i wrote this post.

I’d love it if you would stick around to check out my writing and my original music. I’ve embedded an MP3 of the original “With or Without You” elsewhere on this site – you might bump into it if you do enough browsing. You can read the full lyrics here.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled post.)

There are some songs I’ve only ever heard on the radio. Those magical hits, disembodied from albums, never seemed meant to be played at my command. I might not hear one for years, but one day be bestowed with it in a restaurant, or in someone else’s car. All a matter of chance.

These songs are different for everyone. Certainly some are more universal than others. They are each quicksilver, resolving in your aural canal as quickly as they will trickle away. You may not even remember them from one listen to the next, maybe not even if you see their names.

When people come to my house sometimes the marvel at how many of these songs – otherwise lost to them – exist in my record collection. Can they listen to this one, or borrow that one? It’s a wonderful role of fantasy fulfillment, being able to render the songs more real for my friends by offering them in the context of albums, cases, and liner notes.

I can’t possibly own each possible slippery tune, mine or anyone else’s. Not without buying all of the “Best of DooWop” and “The Big Eighties” collections there are to be had. Yet, sometimes you are in Tower Records, and there is an inexplicable $7.99 sale, and your fingers are dancing across the tops of plastic cases, and suddenly you see it – one song easily worth a penny under eight dollars just so you can capture it, like lightning in a jar.

Will you listen to it once a day? Will it hold up? Or, will you content in knowing that the next time you catch a snippet of it you can return to your home and release those notes into the air to light up the room, if just for three brief minutes?

Blink of an Eye

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I’ve tacitly decided to read a book for every week in this year, but the relationship isn’t going to be strictly one-to-one. That is to say, i plan to read books in fits and starts – two here, a handful there – with weeks off in between.

I want to talk about all of the books here because, in my eternal OCD need to track everything in my life, the thing i’ve always wanted to do the most (after tracking every song i listen to) is track all the books i’ve read in and how long it took me to read them. I finished Harry Potter four and five in about a solid 24 hours of reading, and i just finished Tori’s dense Piece by Piece in well under seven.

The problem with talking about these literary conquests is that i’m not really a book reviewer. I am too voracious of a reader, and i suspect that applying my vicious music-critic standards to books would yield extremely few positive write-ups. Plus, i don’t like immediately reacting to a book; i’m more-often-than-not wrong.

If anything, i want to wait until each book has really sunk itself into me, and then talk about the things it made me think. Harry 4/5 brought me back around to loving the intrugue of a fantasy novel. Tori changed the way i look at songwriting and my personal image, my entrenchment in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking has so far made me think every encounter i’ve hard with a person or a piece of art in the last two days. I was turned on to author Malcom Gladwell through Tom, who posted a link to Gladwell’s entrancing essay on Ketchup.

Blink is a book about the ability to (and science of) discern(ing) things in the most split of seconds. In its third chapter, it discusses the idea of implicit associations, and how scientists at Harvard are trying to measure them. Malcolm posed the question: Do i associate men or woman more with professional careers. After a brief Implicit Association test, he postulated that i probably leaned towards men. As a feminist i was a little offended, but then i remembered he was talking to the general reader, and not me. As i’m not exactly the general reader, i decided to take to the web to try some of these tests for myself.

At Project Implicit i immediately went for a gender-identity test that measured my associations of men and women with science and art. I predicted that i would come up even, or even preferring girls in relation to science; i was, after all, raised a feminist.

I was right! My Gender/Science rating was “little or no association between science and Female relative to Male.” Upbringing aside, it’s not exactly a surprising result, seeing as my best friend is a female chemist and i’m a liberal arts kind of guy.

Next, i chose a test whose result i was honestly quite interested in: the White/Black test. Though i’ve claimed to be completely racially indiscriminate my entire life, i haven’t had a close African American friend since fifth grade, and do not show much affinity for black musical artists. I predicted that i would show slight racial bias on this test. However, i once again discovered that i have little or no preference, this time regarding “African Americans relative to White Americans.”

With two neutral results under my belt, i started to become suspicious of my ability to break even on the tests (i also scored neutral on Kerry v Bush, but that’s like asking me this week how much i like the Eagles). Finally, i settled on two tests that i would surely weigh heavily on: fat vs thin and sexuality.

Rather than confirming my ability to game the test results, these two tests proved to me that the Harvard scientists have a great methodology that may suffer slightly from poor execution. The images on the sexuality test were a lame man-on-man wedding cake topper, its straight counterpart, restroom style semiotic genders standing in male/female and male/male pairs, plus the words straight, gay, homosexual, and heterosexual.

Can you spot the possible flaws? Primary in my mind is that the test lacks anything having to do with lesbians, though it professes that its “gay” designation encompasses both men and women. A second issue is that both of the visual cues were ambiguous at best; why not feature a picture of a straight couple kissing, or a gay couple holding hands? Their graphics and words for homosexuality had no connection to what i instinctively recognize about it (like the word “queer” or a rainbow flag), which left me hopelessly confused the entire time; I scored a moderately positive implicitly “straight,” but i suspect that it was due to my utter confusion.

The fat/thin test drove this major problem home with a specific example: one of the five thin-faced people looked fat to me. I consciously thought she was fat, and i instinctively drilled the “fat” key every time she appeared. Sometimes i’d catch myself just before making the mistake, but i consistently erred on her face. At the end of the test, i was told that i had no preference between thin and fat. I’ll let you, the longtime reader, decide if that statement is true.

Based on this scientific foray, some of the following statements may be true:


a) I am facile enough at computer tests that some natural biases are obscured,

b) The test has a sampling error that could be overcome by discarding words and images the user cannot identify correctly, or allowing the user to self-identify words or images that they recognize as being associated with the given categories,

c) The test measures implicit (unconscious) cultural associations, which should not necessarily be expected to match implicit personal associations, which may not be the same,

d) The test is perfectly functional, though its results are occasionally surprising,

e) After all this time being an equal opportunity feminist, it turns out that i don’t despise G.W., i really don’t prefer being thin, and i much prefer one of the grooms in a commitment ceremony to wear a wedding dress.

To the tests’ collective credit, i wasn’t able to overwhelm the tacit “societal” bias on any of them – neutral is as far as i go. Back in Blink, Malcolm subsequently informs me that over 80% of people make pro-white associations, even after repeated testing.

Maybe it’s not broken; maybe they just should screen out the communications majors after the opening survey. More thoughts on Blink et al in upcoming posts.

Wee Wee Wee!

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I have this special way, which I’m sure is the special way of most people, of absorbing trivial information from credible sources, but then forgetting the source of the information by the time I want to use it, thus making it anecdotal at best.

I’m sure that I’ve read about the slow evolutionary recession of our pinky toe. The pinky finger is useful, to be sure, and not just for guitar playing or holding tea cups. But, the pink toe? It’s just a decorative flourish for the outside of the foot; it is a mere foot flourish. None of the staying power of the big toe, or the gripping ability of the middle three that allowed you to fetch things out of the bottom of the pool. No. And, if we were in the wild, running about with bare feet, somehow nature would favor those with increasingly smaller pinky toes until it became just a tiny side-of-foot nub, and eventually disappeared, leaving us with four useful toes in its wake.

Except, you know how you never appreciate the effect of something until you don’t have it? Like, mom annoyingly doing your laundry or an old jalopy that had really comfy seats? Well, my left pinky toe is in revolt today, folks, and I am feeling the impact.

This weekend I abused the toe, though not intentionally: I clipped the nail entirely too short and subsequently collided the poor useless thing with my bathroom door, as I am wont to do with one toe or another at least once a month. It’s not broken, as my co-worker with the broken pinky toe assures me I would barely have been able to put on my shoe in that event, but it hurts enough that it’s turning out to be nearly non-functional as my day proceeds.

The thing is, it’s not just the pain of walking around. I mean, yes, it is just the pain of walking around, but the pain itself isn’t what I’m finding to be so debilitating – it has had some unexpected side-effects. Walking down the broken sidewalk to the trolley my left foot couldn’t seem to find solid footing – it was like when you first step onto a beach wearing flip-flops, and you’re carrying something heavy, and the sand seems to melt away from your every step. Like that, but with sidewalk, because I could not get my whole foot to come down solidly to create balance without the cooperation of my pinky toe (which, in effect, is the spokes-toe for the entire side of my foot).

Tertiary effects included cramping in left-toe-number-four, which was using its grippiness to overcompensate for its out-of-commission pinky friend, and overextension of the capabilities of right-knee, as right foot and its respective pinky were doing quite a bit of work to keep me upright.

Walking back and forth to the printer a few times has finally beat the pain into pins-and-needles submission, but I still feel as though I’m hobbling because I cannot quite figure out how balance works anymore.

So, anyhow, part of me is like, “just cut the damn thing off, evolution was gonna get there eventually anyhow.” But, the other part says, “Oh my god, our descendants will be doomed, dOOOOOmed I say! How will they walk, or effectively battle the giant irradiated killer cockroaches, without effective pinky toes slash side of foot spokes-toes?”

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

Tales of My Disaffected Youth

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I forget, sometimes, thin slices of my life, those parts that didn’t leave the most permanent marks on me. Not passing fads, or habits I grew out of, but actual commitments that simply didn’t make it into the finale resume of my personality. I was a camp counselor for four years. I was in AP Computer Programming but decided it wasn’t worth getting up early for.

In one of those lives, I was a South Street kid, wearing an array faux-leather pants, walking into stores, always looking, never buying, down at Penn’s Landing keeping watch while my friends made out in the bushes. The old graveyard where I watched them open beers on tombstones, the corner of 4th where we loitered while pretending to catch the bus, the defunct fountain that served as our later-evening headquarters – places that I still pass, but am no longer connected to. Not the way i once was.

I unexpectedly found myself on South Thursday night, cool summer air and plenty of teenagers freed from school nights perfectly setting the mood. Out of habit, I met the glances of each person I passed, only to be met with blankness. I always half-expect to see people I know there – Monica, Marissa, Susanne, Guitar Dave, Amanda who wouldn’t date me because her last two boyfriends turned out to be gay and she was afraid to continue the trend, the dumb-but-hot blonde girl that looked uncannily like Taylor Hanson – that whole crew that I could find on seemingly every street corner every Thursday or Friday or Saturday night that I dragged myself out.

There was a society, an etiquette, to our association, loose though it was. There were places that we, smartly hip South Philly denizens, could be found and other places that the more enduring, slightly gutter-punk South Street crowd would inhabit, and some places where the two intersected. I don’t know that we ever did anything, though I remember something about climbing up a statue near the Moshulu, and something else about Monica kicking a Philly Weekly box and an ensuing footchase that may have involved several disgruntled police officers. But, we never did do anything, and I think all I have to show for the sum of the experiences is a tacit allegiance to the coffee-shop across from Starbucks that would let us sit all night after we bought one round of drinks.

Being a South Street kid doesn’t last; it’s a Peter Pan world of evolving maturity and dissolving naiveté. The people I passed last night were back there, in that bliss of not knowing or caring if their nightly adventures would have any net effect on the rest of their lives. I met eyes and was looked at as a stranger rather than a member.

All those people either float away, or change into something else. Walking that street for three years was a beautiful metamorphosis, from my first time as shy in glittered pants trying to learn their names to the ends of it, surely strutting with a crowd of my new college friends, watching the familiar faces slowly float away to better things, or transform into failures, junkies.

I cannot hang out on South Street anymore. I need a mission, a get-in-get-out objective. Otherwise, I think I might just walk, aimless, misty-eyed, always looking, never buying a thing.