Martin Vegas, Living Stones

Italian photographer with a gorgeous web site.

Zero Tolerance for Killing Pedestrians

One of New York mayor Bill de Blasio's first initiatives was a law that makes it a criminal offense, punishable by up to 30 days in jail, for drivers to kill or injure pedestrians who have the right of way. This "failure to yield" law is under attack now by the union representing New York's bus drivers:

The union, Transport Workers Union Local 100, says the arrest on Friday of the driver, Francisco DeJesus, a veteran with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, was uncalled-for; it has supported a proposed amendment in the City Council to exclude bus drivers from the law. The union created a hashtag — #LetsBePerfect — for its 10,000 bus operators, protesting that the mayor’s policy, Vision Zero, unreasonably demanded perfection.

Mr. DeJesus was charged with failure to yield after his bus struck the girl as she was crossing the street with a walk signal in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on her way to school. She was pinned under the front of the bus, and her leg was severely injured.

Here's a great legal and moral question: is it unreasonable to impose serious penalties for people whose mistakes lead to the deaths and injuries of others? When is it reasonable to demand perfection?

More broadly, what level of accidental death is acceptable? Is our right to get around conveniently and quickly worth the 30,000 American lives lost to vehicle accidents every year?

Obviously it is rarely possible to reduce any accident rate to zero. On the other hand, treating accidents as just something that happens is an invitation to more of them. The airline industry has reduced accidents to a fantastically low level by treating every single accident as something that ought not to have happened. Hospitals are now trying to use the same techniques to reduce their accident rates.

Yet one thing airlines and hospitals have discovered is that blaming people for mistakes is rarely effective; what is effective is changing whole systems to make mistakes less likely. I suspect that the only way to really curtail vehicle-pedestrian accidents is the physical separation of vehicles and pedestrians, and in New York that would be hard to achieve.

Let Us Now Praise Dodd-Frank

The regulations enacted under the Dodd-Frank banking bill are starting to seriously impact the way Wall Street banks do business. Salaries of bankers are in decline, as you can see from the chart. According to former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner,

We have substantially reduced the amount of risk they can take. We’ve cut the profitability of banking roughly in half.

Of course what Geithner means is "short term profitability," since in the long run reducing the likelihood of periodic crises will help bottom lines.

I think this is fabulous news, although one has to wonder if maybe the risk-taking part of Wall Street is just moving elsewhere, into hedge funds for example, and whether this might in the long run be just as risky. But so far I am not hearing any rumblings of that sort, and so for now the news all looks good.

Unryū-in

Unryū-in in Kyoto is not actually a temple, but a sub temple of a sub-temple of Sennyū-ji . It was founded in 1372, and he oldest standing building dates to 1646. This "window of enlightenment" is perhaps the temple's most famous feature.

Predicting the Future at Gegharot, Armenia, 1300 BCE

Over the past few years excavations at the hilltop fortress of Gegharot in Armenia have uncovered three similar shrines that the excavators think were used for divination rituals. Animal bones, flour (ground with grindstones in the shrines), and colored stones were cast in various ways to predict the future. The site dates to the late Bronze Age, c 1300 BCE.

Because of the prominent placement of the shrines, the excavators think the rulers of Gegharot participated in the rituals, and indeed that they were a key part of rulership.

Overview of Gegharot, from the website of Project ArAGATS.

Enough with the Cool Cultural Signalling

Some of my best friends etc.:

As I’ve said for a long time, a lot of progressive educated white types have essentially replaced having a politics with having certain cultural attachments and affectations. Really aggressively praising the Wire becomes a stand-in for “I am not racist.” Complaining that Selma was robbed becomes a stand-in for having done the necessary work to understand the history of race in America. Telling anyone who’ll listen that you think all of the creativity and risk are in hip hop now becomes a stand-in for advancing a meaningful political platform that could actually improve the lives of actually-existing black people. White people are so weird about Beyonce because Beyonce has become an all-purpose floating signifier, a vessel on to which bourgie white folks project all of their desires for how other people should see them. These vague associations with arts and media are intended to send a message that, if voiced explicitly, we all know by now to ridicule: some of my best friends are black. . . .

I’m not suggesting that there’s no political meaning to be had in these various artistic affiliations. What I am suggesting is that these attachments cannot possibly substitute for a healthy, functioning racial politics. They are designed to be a way to hide out from exactly the kind of risk and personal investment that are a prerequisite of meaningful political advancement.

We have many awful bits of evolutionary inheritance, but our need  for in-group signalling is one of the most annoying.

Haruki Murakami's Writing Advice

Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami has started a peculiar advice column, and New York Magazine has some highlights. My personal favorite:

Murakami-san, hello. Being that I’m a graduate student, I need to write a lot: reports, presentation speeches, emails to professors, etc. I’m not that great in writing, but if I don’t, I won’t be able to graduate. I struggle with it every day. How will this get easier? If you have any composition 101 techniques, can you let me know?

—Sakurai, female, 23 years old, graduate student

Writing is similar to trying to seduce a woman. A lot has to do with practice, but mostly it’s innate. Anyway, good luck.

God's Constitution and Christian Idolatry

Looking into the controversy surrounding the new AP history guidelines, Rod Dreher stumbled on a movement called the Black Robe Regiment:

The Black Robe Regiment is a resource and networking entity where church leaders and laypeople can network and educate themselves as to our biblical responsibility to stand up for our Lord and Savior and to protect the freedoms and liberties granted to a moral people in the divinely inspired US Constitution. The Regiment had its historical beginnings during the Revolutionary War when Pastors from across the colonies arose and lead their congregations into the battle for freedom. . . .

These folks who now inhabited this New Jerusalem (this New Eden that Christopher Columbus saw), were living out what they saw as a life and a country that was fashioned entirely by their Creator. The Constitution (Part 1–the Declaration of Independence, and part 2), was and is a covenant between the people of America and their Heavenly Father. It was written for a Christian people….who are fully able to internally govern themselves. Thus, the meaning of a Republic that was inspired by God’s Word and spells out the mission of God’s children and Christ’s ambassadors on Earth.

Ah, the New Eden of the American suburbs.

Dreher got dragged into this after tweeting about lynching and encountering "Christians" who deny that such things ever happened in America. Dreher is an Orthodox Christian and he worries about such beliefs on theological grounds as well as historical; to Catholics and Orthodox (as Pope Benedict said on several occasions) putting the nation on par with God is idolatry. But for many Southern Baptists in particular it seems that worshiping America is an essential part of their faith.

How such people and I could ever agree on the content of an American history course escapes me.

Basilica of St. Peter, Tuscania

The town of Tuscania was a gift from Pope Hadrian to Charlemagne, and it used to be thought that this basilica was built not long afterward. That would have made it a pioneering work in the Romanesque style. But recent scholarship has pushed the construction later and later, first to the 11th century (which is the date you still see on most web sites), and now even later. These days they say only the crypt and part of the nave date to the 11th century, the most interesting parts are dated to the thirteenth. Which makes the style downright reactionary, but I still like it. This was the local cathedral until the sixteenth century, when it lost that status.

The town is a very ancient one, and the church was built on top of the Etruscan acropolis. The towers to the left of the church in this photo are the remains of the bishop's palace; must have been a rough neighborhood for the bishop to want such a fortress.

The most famous element of the church is the upper facade.

In the center is a spectacular wheel window, surrounded by the symbols of the four evangelists.

To the left is St. Peter holding up the church, with numerous other symbols of Christian goodness.

To the right is a wonderfully weird window generally held to represent evil; that may be King Midas beneath the window.

Interior, and a shot of the Cosmati pavement. The church has been damaged by numerous earthquakes, most recently in 1971, when most of the apse collapsed. It seems that other than the floor little interior decoration has survived.

More details. Juliana Lees has an amazing set of photos.

Christianity and Individualism

The extreme individualism of the modern west is something unusual in human history, in degree if not in kind. Compared to other societies we focus much more on people as independent agents and much less on communities or families. Consider that in many societies it is considered perfectly natural to punish a family or even a whole community for a crime committed by one of its members. The rules of a modern bureaucracy, which make it illegal for successful people to promote members of their families, would have struck most pre-modern government officials as unworkable and perhaps insane.

Where did this obsession with the individual agent come from?

One school of thought traces individualism to capitalism, urbanization, and the industrial economy. Marx of course was a leader of this school, and Marxists were always fulminating against bourgeois individualism. I suspect this is the line taken in most Western Civ classes.

But other scholars think that can't be the whole story. For one thing Japan has managed to achieve a high degree of modernity in most ways without embracing the extreme notions of individual agency prominent in the west. For another, many people see the rise of individualism happening much earlier than Marx allowed. In art and literature, especially, some people see individualism rampant in the Renaissance; Shakespeare's characters are often held up as models of modern thought and action.

If individualism was on the rise before capitalism, what was driving it? A growing school of historians points to Christianity. The basic idea is that medieval Christianity put its emphasis on the Christian's personal relationship with God, and on achieving a personal path to salvation, and that this inwardness pointed the way to individualism. Some theologians thought a Christian should be a stranger in this world, a pilgrim, whose mission was to sever worldly ties rather than to deepen them. This Chrstian alienation can be seen as the precursor of the alienation of the modern city dweller. Samuel Moyn has a little review essay on some of these historians in the Boston Review, which I recommend for the curious. Here he summarizes the ideas of French historian Marcel Gauchet:

For Gauchet, the secret lies in monotheism’s unique approach to God’s transcendence, which made the divine so otherworldly that man became more autonomous in consequence. Christianity in particular severed the monotheistic promise from terrestrial fulfillment in the Promised Land and inscribed it “in the soul’s inner recesses,” a step that, as Gauchet puts it, “[intensified] divine exteriority in relation to creation.” The same revolution that alienated individuals in relation to the world inadvertently prepared their independence from the divine and deprived politics of any sacred meaning. Siedentop observes that, as a matter of the history of language, the “individual” emerged more or less simultaneously with the “state.” Gauchet insists this is no accident, since the early modern kings who founded the absolutist state completed the long-term transition whereby secular political authority no longer incarnates the divine—that only Jesus could do—but represents the will of individuals. The social contract was thus born as authority in politics ultimately needed to come from the ground up, rather than heaven down. 

These questions are, of course, very difficult to answer in any definitive way. My own view is that industrialization is the essential background to individualism at our level, especially our economy of "jobs" that people get by themselves, rather than families or households that produce something together. But I suspect that this would not, in itself, be enough, and I wonder if Christian loneliness before God did play some sort of role.

A New Bipartisan Agenda: Justice Reform

Great news from Washington:

Usually bitter adversaries, Koch Industries and the Center for American Progress have found at least one thing they can agree on: The nation’s criminal justice system is broken.

Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the conservative Koch brothers, and the center, a Washington-based liberal issues group, are coming together to back a new organization called the Coalition for Public Safety. The coalition plans a multimillion-dollar campaign on behalf of emerging proposals to reduce prison populations, overhaul sentencing, reduce recidivism and take on similar initiatives. Other groups from both the left and right — the American Civil Liberties Union, Americans for Tax Reform, the Tea Party-oriented FreedomWorks — are also part of the coalition, reflecting its unusually bipartisan approach. . . .

With the huge costs to the public of an expanding 2.2 million-person prison population drawing interest from the right and the conviction that the system is unfair and incarcerating too many drug and nonviolent offenders driving those on the left, the new coalition is the most recent example of ideological opposites joining together.

This is of course made possible by the falling crime rate, which has reduced the anxiety around the issue and now allows us to think more rationally about the whole business. I have been hoping for a while that this movement would gather national momentum, and now that finally seems to be happening.

Libya: the Aftermath of Regime Change

Here's a great summary of how bad things have gotten in Libya:

There is no overstating the chaos of post-Qaddafi Libya. Two competing governments claim legitimacy. Armed militias roam the streets. The electricity is frequently out of service, and most business is at a standstill; revenues from oil, the country's greatest asset, have dwindled by more than ninety per cent. Some three thousand people have been killed by fighting in the past year, and nearly a third of the country's population has fled across the border to Tunisia. What has followed the downfall of a tyrant-a downfall encouraged by NATO air strikes-is the tyranny of a dangerous and pervasive instability.

And that was written before the local Islamic State branch started beheading Coptic Christians.

I opposed the US and European air offensive that toppled Qaddafi, because I thought it would lead to a dragging civil war like the one in Syria, and I thought a quick massacre by Qaddafi's forces was less awful than that. But then when the dictator was driven from power so quickly, I thought maybe I had been wrong. But now it seems that Libya is having its lengthy civil war, just without Qaddafi to lead one of the factions, and my thoughts have circled back to something I said in March, 2011:

I still don't see how this can have a decent outcome.

Harald Sohlberg

Harald Oskar Sohlberg (1869 – 1935) was a Norwegian painter generally described as "neo romantic." The painting above, Winter Night in Rondane, is his most famous, and in Norway it is one of the most famous and most reproduced of all Norwegian paintings.

There is even a Sohlberg Platform from which you can behold the view that inspired the painting.

Sohlberg painted this view at least three times; the famous one is the second. This, the third one, is the one that started me researching Sohlberg. Winter Night in the Mountains, 1921. Sohlberg was part of a little golden age of Norwegian culture, along with Edvard Munch, playwright Henrik Ibsen, and composer Edvard Grieg. But while those other three are well known in Europe and North America, Sohlberg is obscure outside his home country. The Norwegian government tried to rectify this a few years ago by organizing a traveling exhibit that paired Sohlberg and Munch under the theme "Landscapes of the Mind." Carol Strickland saw the exhibit and wrote that while both painters loved the Norwegian landscape and both were influenced by the Symbolists, they

Could not be more different. . . . Sohlberg's vision of nature's vastness makes you want to book the next fjord cruise, while Munch's seething shores might convince you to swear off beaches.

Three views of the town of Røros. Top, Main Street, 1903; middle, After the Snowstorm, 1904; bottom, The View from Røros, 1902.

Self Portrait, 1896. Sohlberg was one of those artists who had to overcome objections by his parents to the career he wanted from an early age. His father, a fur merchant, thought art was ridiculously impractical and apprenticed his son to a cabinet maker. Fortunately for everyone a family friend who recognized Sohlberg's talent stepped in and persuaded the father to send his son to the Royal Institute of Art at 16.

Fisherman's Cottage, 1906. This is in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Night Glow.

Autumn Landscape, 1910. This is the sort of work that leads critics to remark on Sohlberg's "mystic intensity."

And a final painting that wikipedia chose to post without title or date.

David Carr's Syllabus for Press Play

Longtime journalist David Carr died recently, and as part of the celebration of his career somebody posted the syllabus to a course on digital journalism he taught recently.  I found it laudably passionate about both his subject and the teaching of it. From the introduction:

This course, Press Play, aspires to be a place where you make things. Good things. Smart things. Cool things. And then share those things with other people. The idea of Press Play is that after we make something we are happy with, we push a button and unleash it on the world. Much of it will be text, but if you want to make magic with a camera, your phone, or with a digital recorder, knock yourself out. But it will all be displayed and edited on Medium because there will be a strong emphasis on working with others in this course, and Medium is collaborative.

While writing, shooting, and editing are often solitary activities, great work emerges in the spaces between people. We will be working in groups with peer and teacher edits. There will be a number of smaller assignments, but the goal is that you will leave here with a single piece of work that reflects your capabilities as a maker of media. But remember, evaluations will be based not just on your efforts, but on your ability to bring excellence out of the people around you. . . . To begin with, we will look at the current media ecosystem: how content is conceived, made, made better, distributed, and paid for. We will discuss finding a story, research and reporting, content management systems, voice, multimedia packaging, along with distribution and marketing of work. If that sounds ambitious, keep in mind that in addition to picking this professor and grad assistant, we picked you. We already know you are smart, and we just want you to demonstrate that on the (web) page. . . .

Together, we will make a collection of stories on Medium around a specific organizing principle — it could be a genre, topic, reading time, or event — which we’ll decide on in collaboration as well. And once we get stories up and running, we will work on ways of getting them out there into the bloodstream of the web.

In order to have a chance of making great work, you have to consume remarkable work. Fair warning: There will be a lot of weekly reading assignments. I’m not sliming you with a bunch of textbooks, so please know I am dead serious about these readings. Skip or skim at your peril.

I will be bringing in a number of guest speakers. They will be talented, accomplished people giving their own time. Please respond with your fullest attention.

So, to summarize: We will make things — in class, in groups, by our lonely selves — we will work to make those things better, and, if we are lucky, we will figure out how to beckon the lightning of excellence along the way.

Apotheon

This seems to be a simple little plaform game, but with art work modeled on Greek vases. What an awesome idea.

Windows, Tossa del Mar, Spain

By Laura Fernandez.

Dangerous Parenting

Last night we finally had a real snow, so this morning I stayed home to shovel and risk life and limb with my children. On government property, no less. It was 15 degrees and the powdery snow was stinging our faces, so we didn't stay long, but at least we got out on the hill. And the hot chocolate always tastes better after you've been sledding.