Edward Rothstein in the NY Times: "...as Bobby Fischer's death on Thursday might remind us, even abstract gifts can exact a terrible price."

Many of the commentaries assert or presume that there must have been a connection between Fischer's genius and his eccentricities (or paranoid schizophrenia, take your pick). Why should the combination be more than coincidence? Substantial research suggests that high-functioning people in all domains experience less mental illness than average. So was there ever any logic to Dryden's

Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide

beyond a visceral (envious?) insistence on balance or payback? Surely some of it is no more than an upscale, cognitive version of the tabloids' barely suppressed satisfaction that Michael Jackson or Britney Spears is, y'know, really weird and unhappy.

Tags: somethin happenin here
Current Mood: curious
Current Music: Raising Sand, Plant & Krauss

In this NY Times story, Lord Alton cites (without details) a twin brother and sister separated at birth who married -- a classic what-if in debates about adoption information. “They met later," he says, "and felt an inevitable attraction, and the judge had to deal with the consequences” when they sought an annulment.

Shall we parse the assumptions behind that "inevitable"..?

I didn't think so.


 

Tags: somethin happenin here

I've been catching up on Atlantic contributing editor James Fallows' weblog, and noticed the recurrence in recent posts of variations on the phrase "maybe it's just me, but..."

Now, usually when someone does that in public writing -- especially about contentious and polarized topics -- it's a little stroke of faux-humble snark. It signifies "Of course you, my readers, and all right-thinking people, agree with what I'm about to say."

But it seems to me that more often than not, Fallows means it, which is uncommon and admirable. He's a superlative reporter and hard-working writer. When you've invested that much in forming a conviction, and you're putting it out there in the hope of swaying others, it's natural to position it as the only conviction supportable by sweet reason. It's hard, it's unnatural,  to keep in mind that there may be a long road of persuasion ahead, that the rest of the world -- if it happens to be paying attention at all -- will take a while to Get It.

Maybe Fallows' "it's just me" is not an affectation or a tic, but a small intellectual (even spiritual) exercise to remind himself of that... sort of a vaccine against Pundits' Syndrome. Make it a habit, make an effort to mean it, and it could offer some modest protection against the temptations of crusade and fanaticism. Jacob Bronowski talked about that, standing in the ash fields of Auschwitz.

In 1650, Oliver Cromwell was trying to persuade the Scots Presbyterians to abandon their support of Charles II, and famously wrote to their governing synod: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken." The line has a double edge, of course, because Cromwell was himself a man of such bulldozer conviction. But hey: we take our moments of clarity when we can get them, even when the motes in others' eyes are so much more obvious than the beams in our own.

Tags: somethin happenin here
Current Mood: contemplative

I try not to clutter this space with the nine-day wonders, but the Boston bomb scare story  has "culture war" and "project your phobia" written all over it.

One netizen I respect commented: "I tend to think this kinda stuff isn't funny in this day and age."
 
GMAFB -- look at the photos. What do you see? This is is not a duffel bag artfully left open with wires, a bundle of highway flares, and a bit of clock face showing. This is not (as other stories called it) a "package." Even the WaPo's choice of the words "small electronic circuit boards" and "[a] magnetic object, which looked like circuit boards with protruding wires" is loaded. What this is, what you see, what was  located and positioned for passersby to see, is a display panel.

To anyone in this culture over the age of 14 months, it says Here I am, look at me

much louder than Mystery hardware in inappropriate location...

let alone Doh dee doh, nothin to see here foax, move along while I get ready to explode

Is it super-extra-suspicious because it's attached to a girder under a highway? I've spent many happy hours in New Jersey traffic jams approaching the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. I've seen thousands of non-official signs and other forms of display attached to girders under I-95 and US 1. My heartbeat stayed steady.



Does the display panel show red numbers counting balefully down to apocalypse? (Cut the blue wire, Bond... the blue wire!)

Does it show the Arabic characters for

 
No, it shows a stylized, chunky-pixel block figure flipping the bird. I've never watched the Aqua Teen show... but I like to think I'd know if this were the globally recognized Logo of Doom, spray-painted by Hezbollah teens, thousand-stitched into kamikaze belts by Aum Shinrikyo fanatics, branded into the privy door at the Unabomber's country place.

I can readily understand a Boston train passenger calling to report a quick glimpse. I have no quarrel at all with the decision to send a patrolman, even a bomb team, to check it out. But from the first moment someone got a close look at it, the response should have been ratcheting down, not up.

Now Boston's press and politicians and prosecutors -- and a good chunk of the punditocracy, not all on the usual GWoT Team -- are all committed to righteous indignation, and will have a hard time backing down.

Prediction #1: Legal charges and damage claims will, nonetheless, be quietly dropped. Too much fun for defense counsel otherwise.

Prediction #2: Right now, enterprising reporters are poring through 911 logs for all the other cities involved (and for Boston previously) to find out how many times authorities could have given themselves a wedgie about these signs... and didn't.

Tags: somethin happenin here
Current Mood: chipper