Archive for February, 2008
You are a winner!
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Gmail has proved a delight in every respect. Less spam. More order. Speedy search. All the features I want and only the features I want. Elegant, efficient, incredibly useful.
A couple of junk emails get through. For some reason, these are usually for a lottery. You would think this would be easy to program against. I mean, just excise every email with the word "lottery" in it.
It is remotely possible, I guess, that Gmail is letting a few through to remind me of the old days with Microsoft Outlook when I fought spam like a London fire marshall during the blitz.
If that’s what happening, enough said. Complaint withdrawn. Pray continue. I am happy to be reminded of my deliverance. I will receive Lottery emails with Passover piety.
On the other hand, let me go on the record and say it’s ok if Gmail wants to suppress all future emails with Lottery anywhere in the heading or the body.
And here’s why. I assume that if I ever win a lottery, they will let me know in the usual way. I will look out my front window, and there, standing on the lawn, will be a man in a suit with a microphone, a beautiful woman in a evening gown, and a check the size of Newfoundland.
McCain and Obama for president
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Naunihal Singh noted in a Twitter today that Barack Obama uses a University of Chicago behavioral economist, Austin Goolsbee, and I thought, wow, that runs against the Democratic grain. This got me thinking that McCain enrages the Radio Right by refusing Republic orthodoxy.
In this way, these guys have more in common with one another than they do with their respective parties. In fact, I wonder if we could argue, at the limit, that there is a two party system but it’s no longer Democrat and Republican. It’s now heterodoxy versus orthodoxy. This would join McCain and Obama, distinguishing their new "party" from the one that contains the likes of Romney and Clinton.
If the world is a churning mass of possibility, surely the last person we want in the White House is someone who votes, who thinks, party line. Surely, the world is too complicated for that…and that politician. This has to be one of the signatures of the good politician. Isn’t there a prima facie case here?
References
Will, George. 2007. The Democrat Economists. The Washington Post. October 3, 2007. here.
The Martin Paradox, revisited
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A couple of weeks ago, I commented on the Martin Paradox, the one that says that the Canadians who are creatively forthcoming as individuals can be rendered unforthcoming in groups.
And today, for no good reason, it occurred to me that Canadians have a national passion and genius for improv. (Consider Second City and all those improv exports who now grace the American stage.) And improv is nothing if not group-based creativity.
We are obliged, then, to say that Canadians are creatively unforthcoming in groups chiefly when these have somehow been given bureaucratic or pragmatic marching orders. Released from these orders, Canadians are returned to their native creativity, as it were.
It’s a puzzle. What is it about the bureaucratic and the pragmatic that makes Canadians large and lumbering with tiny little eyes and an inclination to bang heads. I would call for a Royal Commission on this topic but that would only turn out badly.
References
McCracken, Grant. 2008. Canada, The Martin Paradox and The Opposable Mind. This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics. January 10, 2008. here.
The keen eyed ethnographer is always on the look out for the telling artifact and Jason Haas favored us with a beauty yesterday. (We wrapped up the MIT ethnography course and Jason was reporting research and recommendations for PBS.)
Jason played a YouTube clip that shows Mr. Rogers gently lecturing a committee of the US senate. At the 3:30 mark of this clip, Mr. Rogers says,
…an expression of care, this is what I give, an expression of care everyday to each child, to help him realize he is unique, I end the program by saying, you’ve made this day a special day by just you being you, there’s no person in the world like you, and I like you just the way you are.
There is something vertiginously strange about listening as Mr. Roberts, in his sing song voice, as he lectures the members of the US Senate…as if they were restive, not-very-bright, five year olds. (And, hey.)
"You’ve made this day a special day by just you being you"? This is the song of individualism. And you thought that that was Walt Whitman’s job? Nah. Well, it was Walt Whitman’s job but then it fell to his perfect opposite: a gentle, caring man in a cardigan, no friend to wilderness, a creature domesticated and domesticating, a surrogate parent to the nation’s young.
Today was filled with interesting, mind testing contrasts. In the afternoon, John Deighton was kind enough to show me an astonishing experiment in retail. In downtown Boston, there is a sneaker store that is concealed beyond what looks like a cigarette and candy hole in the wall. The window has dry goods that are dust covered and sun bleached. I am sure there are Bostonians who walk by it everyday without ever guessing that it is in fact a front. You enter a cramped little store, there is a guy surrounded by lotto tickets and cigarettes. You might well enter this shop and leave it again without ever guessing what is behind it’s Coke machine. You must approach the Coke machine and if you get close enough, it disappears every so suddenly, (one imagines a puff of magician’s smoke here, but I don’t think there was one), and you are admitted to the inner sneaker sanctum. Unbelievable.
John and I then went looking for a place to lunch and wondering into the cafe of the Mary Baker Eddy complex. This just as remarkable in its way. Airy, light, well designed, palm trees, sandwiches, agreeable people, and of course with John as always a lively conversation. And at one point I found myself thinking, "maybe this is what heaven is like."
And John and I were left to wonder whether kind of thinking and theory allows you to encompass all of this, a secret sneaker store and Christian Science, the latter already an interesting and unlikely combination, a bet against the odds. A sneaker shrine and a religious experiment, not so far from one another. Shouting distance actually. But cultural speaking, different continents and its up to bloggers, anthropologists, ethnographers, and business school (should they accept this mission) to do the cartography that makes them relative. And once we’ve done that, we might have a go at thinking how to think about Mr. Rogers and the US Senate in the same thought.
Acknowledgment
With thanks to Jay Gordon for his remarkable experiment. Long and much may he prosper.
The Mr. Rogers video is here.
