Helen DeWitt's Blog, page 43

no taxation w/o representation

Unbelievably depressed by UK election results. I really thought the Liberal Democrats could pull it off this time - get a number of seats that was something like representative of their percentage of the vote. Instead it's the same old same old: Tories 306 (36%), Labour 258 (29%), Lib Dems 57 (23%(!)). John Lanchester pointed out that the Tories, on 36.2 % of the vote, get only about 308 seats, minority of 34*, while Labour got 35.2% of the vote in 2005, 355 seats and a majority of 66. Bu...

There are revealingly few references to Baudelaire in th...

There are revealingly few references to Baudelaire in the Journal, the most telling of which seems at first sight prosaic, indeed calm:

M. Baudelaire came in as I was starting to work anew on a little figure of a woman in Oriental costume lying on a sofa, undertaken for Thomas of the rue du Bac. He told me of the difficulties that Daumier experiences in finishing. He ran on to Proudhon, whom he admires and whom he calls the idol of the people. His views seem to be of the most...

AAA

Imagine a school with three teachers. But this isn't a public school. It's a private school testing out an innovative new funding system: The kids write the tests, fill them out and then pay the teachers to grade them. If they don't like the grade they get, they don't have to go back to that teacher.

Sound good?

That's not how we run schools, of course. But it is how we run Wall Street. The three major ratings agencies -- Standard & Poor's, Moody's and Fitch -- are paid by banks to grade (...

in remembrance of crayolas past

Results of xkcd colour survey are out

By a strange coincidence, the same night I first made the color survey public, the webcomic Doghouse Diaries put up this comic (which I altered slightly to fit in this blog, click for original):

It was funny, but I realized I could test whether it was accurate (as far as chromosomal sex goes, anyway, which we asked about because it's tied to colorblindness). After the survey closed, I generated a version of the Doghouse Diaries comic with actual data...

Britain deserves the best

Esche stated the case clearly it in an earlier meeting: 'Reputation has no financial value in this university.' That isn't necessarily true even on its own terms: who is to say how the long-term credibility of Middlesex will be affected by the abolition of its most prestigious department? But as a statement of the short-termism encouraged by New Labour's reorganisation of higher education funding, it makes perfect sense.

More on the threatened closure of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex,...

and they all go marching...

Every summer, I get calls from people who are puzzled to find a heap of dead Argentine ants in their freezer. The ants are attracted to something, presumably an odor, in the rubber lining of freezer doors. No ant finds the freezer and goes back to recruit the others; once an ant goes in the freezer, it is doomed. But since the ants lay trail wherever they go, the ants that are attracted to the freezer all lay a trail on their way to it, and this is reinforced by more curious but equally...

The real explosion in customized derivatives came in the ...

The real explosion in customized derivatives came in the aughts, and in particular, after 2005. Why after 2005? There are a couple of theories, but the most convincing is that the bankruptcy reform bill gave derivatives favorable treatment during bankruptcy proceedings. That made them a better investment than other types of financial products, and so demand exploded.

Ezra Klein on derivatives & health of economy

i am not a number

Bruce Falconer on a German torture colony in Chile, ht MR.

get thee behind me tolkien

Magical thinking isn't fantasy in the literary sense. It is a fantasy, in the psychoanalytic sense: a dream of a world where actions don't have consequences, where loss is an impossibility, where wishing makes it so, where one doesn't have to make choices, because all possible good things arrive at once, unbidden, with none of those nasty trade-offs that are so characteristic of real life. There is no either/or in a fantasy, it's all both/and.

Lev Grossman on Leonard Woolf & B J Dutton, The...

At the Casual Optimist, Q&A with Ferrán Lopez, book d...

At the Casual Optimist, Q&A with Ferrán Lopez, book designer for Random House Mondadori