stevenberlinjohnson.com

Full Disclosures

Next Thursday, November 4, I'll be giving a speech at CalTech in Pasadena as part of their Voices Of Vision series. (It starts at eight, and is free and open to the public -- directions here.) The title for the speech is Everything Bad Is Good For You: Why Today's Pop Culture Is Making Our Kids Smarter. I don't normally plug speeches in this space, but I thought I'd make an exception for this one, because this talk will be the first time I've spoken publicly about my new book. And I didn't want to talk about it to a bunch of strangers at CalTech without mentioning it here first.

So, yes, there's a new book coming out next spring, called Everything Bad Is Good For You. (The subtitle is still up in the air.) Riverhead is publishing it in the US; Penguin in the UK. I'm in the middle of revisions now, with probably another couple months of edits and fine tuning ahead of me. But it's in pretty good shape, I think.

Unlike my first three books, which were all to varying degrees intellectual travelogues with me as a kind of tour guide ("let me travel with you through the world of emergence, or neuroscience, and show you the interesting landmarks"), Everything Bad is a pure work of persuasion, an old-fashioned polemic. It's shorter than the others, and barely has any chapters, and I'm not really introducing the reader to outside experts as the last two have. It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: that popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

I call this long-term trend the Sleeper Curve, after that famous Woody Allen joke from his mock sci-fi film where a team of scientists from 2029 are astounded that 20th-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge. (In conversation, I sometimes describe this book as the Atkins diet for pop culture.) Over the course of the book, I look at everything from Grand Theft Auto to "24," from Finding Nemo to "Dallas," from "Hill Street Blues" to "The Sopranos," from "Oprah" to "The Apprentice." There's some material about the internet, too, though less than you might suspect. (And I'm pretty sure the word "blog" never appears -- imagine that!) The critical method I've concocted for making the argument is one of my favorite things about the book -- it draws a little on narratology, a little on brain science, a little economics and media criticism, a dash of social network theory. But it tries to yoke all those disciplines together in a consistent and unified way. Or at least I think it does.

So there you go. Obviously I've got much more to say about it, and a few questions to ask. But in the meantime, if you are in the LA area, come out and hear this talk and let me know how the argument sounds in person.

Just The Facts

Others have said basically the same thing already, but allow me the briefest of posts just to concur: Bush's long-delayed response to the Al Qaqaa explosivies story ("a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief") has to be one of the most comical counter-attacks I've ever seen.

Yes, we do not know the facts yet -- that's exactly the scandal here! Enough explosives to blow up most of downtown Baghdad disappear 18 months ago, and the administration has no idea what happened to them. And the few facts we do know -- the explosives were there before the invasion, and now they're gone -- were studiously withheld from the American people until the press started reporting them. Bush defending himself by saying we don't know the facts is not a defense, it's an admission of guilt.

In Which I Boldly Predict An Election Result That No One Will Ever Hold Me Accountable For

The election's just a week away, and I so figure what's the point of having a blog if you don't make the obligatory electoral college prediction. If you miss the mark, no one will remember, and if you somehow call it, who knows -- maybe you can parlay that success into a guest host gig on Wonkette...

My gut right now is that Kerry will win fairly decisively -- not in the popular vote, but in the ultimate electoral college tally. It won't be Reagan/Mondale, but neither will it be 2000 redux. My best is guess is Kerry wins 299 to 239: he picks up the big three (Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania) and grabs Wisconsin along the way. Bush gets pretty much everything else that's seriously in play right now: Iowa, Arkansas, New Mexico, Colorado. It's enough of a margin that there's not a major recount battle, even if a handful of those states show less than a percentage point of difference. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if Bush won the popular vote, though I suspect Kerry will squeak out with that as well. So let's say the final tally is 299/239 and 49%/48.5% both in Kerry's favor. Check back in a week to see how I did.

Why am I so optimistic? At this point, in terms of the college, the race is clearly somewhere within the margin of error. (As is the popular vote.) So it's all about the last week of movement. It seems to me that there are six forces helping Kerry, and one helping Bush. The only thing helping Bush is the "war president" premise: people are ultimately not going to pull the lever against the guy who is leading us in the battle against evil. Even if he seems a little out of his depth.

I'm sure this is a factor, but how much of a factor is it? I think it has to be weighed against these forces helping Kerry:

1. Undecided historically break 2-to-1 against incumbents.
2. Almost all the non-party-line endorsements (Ventura, the Florida papers) are going Kerry.
3. The get-out-the-vote and new registration operations seem to be clearly helping Kerry.
4. The unpolled cell-phone-only voters are apparently strongly pro-Kerry.
5. The news from Iraq has been awful this week.
6. Clinton.

Do any of these on their own constitute a sea change in the race? Of course not. But added up, I think they're worth a point or two of help for Kerry, and a point or two quickly transforms this from a dead heat to a decisive win, given the expectations right now.

Oh, wait, I forgot #7. With this post, yours truly officially endorses Kerry. If there were ever a tipping point...

Triumph Triumphs Again

It's everywhere right now, but I must add my linkage to the incredible Triumph The Insult Comic Dog visit to Spin Alley after the third debate. This is as funny as anything the Daily Show has come up with, and that's setting the bar pretty high.

Points to Paul Begala not only for having a good sense of humor, but also for being the only spinner game enough to look Triumph in the eye while talking to him.

Fair Weather Fandom

You know, everybody always talks about all the suffering and heartache that comes from being a Red Sox fan, but ever since I converted two days ago, it really hasn't seemed all that difficult.

True Confessions

For reasons that are too boring to explain here, I am a lifelong Yankees fan. But sitting last night watching the Yankees/Red Sox game, I began to detect an unfamiliar sentiment swelling inside me.

First, I've long argued (after the Yanks won their first three Series in the 90s) that the only honorable thing to root for as a Yankee fan was as many interesting playoff games as possible. So if the Yanks won the first three games, you had to root for the opposing team to make it close.

Second, I do think it would be a more interesting Series if the Sox had a chance to reverse the curse.

Third, my wife has planted in my head the idea that if the Sox win, Kerry will get a subtle, but perhaps crucial, boost in the closing days of the election: the baseball version of an October surprise.

Ergo, I think I'm a Red Sox fan.

The Blind Eyes Of The Beholder

Here's what I'm going to miss most about these debates: first, reading through The Corner at National Review Online before going to bed and enjoying the expert analysis there. Here's a sample of last night's wisdom:

HE DID IT.... [Jonah Goldberg]
Bush won it. I missed the first few minutes (and I couldn't blog from where I watched it). But I don't think you can score it any other way. If Bush had given this performance the first night he might have put this election away.
Posted at 11:03 PM

HARD WORK [Stanley Kurtz]
Kathryn, I know what you mean. I do think Bush won, as I said. I also think his personal presence and command of the material was very strong, which I emphasized...
Posted at 10:53 PM

EMPATHY [Rod Dreher]
I think Bush really connected with people tonight, and reminded them why they liked him in the first place. He seemed like a normal, decent man; Kerry seemed like a stiff... Posted at 10:50 PM

WHO WOULDA THUNK?: [Rod Dreher]
I'm so relieved. Bush owned this night. Who would have thought, though, that by the time we ended this year's debate cycle, Kerry would have won the foreign policy debate, and Bush the domestic policy one?
Posted at 10:49 PM

BUSH WAS BEAUTIFUL [Mark Levin]
I hope somebody was watching. Kerry seemed at times to be talking without purpose, searching for issues or themes...
Posted at 10:48 PM

And then waking up in the morning and reading things like this:

According to a CBS News poll of uncommitted voters:
Kerry [was] the winner by 39-25 percent over Mr. Bush, with 36 percent calling it a tie. Sixty percent said Kerry has clear positions on the issues. Before the third debate, only 29 percent of the same voters said Kerry had clear positions.

I particularly like that movement on clear positions on the issues.

Kerry also emerged a strong winner in the Gallup/CNN post-debate flash poll:
According to the Gallup organization as reported by CNN, Kerry won the debate with 52% while only 39% felt that George Bush had the better night.

For comparison, the first debate's flash results left Kerry the winner 53% to 37% and the second debate was closer with Kerry leading 47% to 45%.

Note how close tonight's results are to the results from the first debate, which is now viewed as a Kerry blow-out. Very interesting.

Choices

It seems to me in all the controversy over Kerry's Mary Cheney shoutout last night, something important is being overlooked: the original question was a really interesting one -- exactly the kind of question you never hear asked at a debate. I would have loved to hear either candidate genuinely attempt an answer. (To his credit, Kerry gave it a try for a few sentences, while Bush took a pass.)

In the commentary afterwards, I heard a few talking heads describe Schieffer's question as one between "choice and biology." In other words, are people gay because of something in their genes, or because of a conscious decision they've made? But the opposition is a false one, and I think it's important to stress that in rejecting the "choice" scenario, you are not necessarily embracing pure genetic determinism. Between DNA and individual choice, a whole host of intermediary forces play themselves out: gene expression, brain development, cultural environments, parents, peers, school, and so on. All of those forces contribute to the person you are without you having any real choice about the matter.

Think about it this way: did I choose to become an English speaker, or is speaking English part of my biology? Obviously, the answer is neither. I'm capable of speaking English for biological reaons, because my brain is specialized for the acquisition of spoken language, but the details of English are transmitted purely through culture. Certainly, it wasn't my choice at fifteen months to start speaking English, nor was it my parents'. (Even if they had never said a word to me, I would have picked it up from other sources.) If there is a conscious choice involved in me becoming an English speaker, it probably belongs to the ancestors of mine who decided to settle in English-speaking parts of the world. My connection to English is an essential part of who I am; it's arguably the most fundamental lens I have in making sense of the world. But to explain how it came about, you have to tell a much more complicated story than choice versus biology. I suspect when we finally disentangle the mystery of why some people are attracted to the same sex, the story will be at least as complicated, if not more so.

PS. Three posts in one day! What's going on around here? I had lunch with Jarvis yesterday; something must have rubbed off on me.

Google For President

Two quick Google items: first I have a short piece in Slate about the strange reluctance of the campaigns to use Google Adwords as part of their advertising strategy. Second: Google Desktop Search is out! (Sadly, not on OS X.) I will not say another word about the implications of this, because John Battelle has said everything I would have said, plus about fifteen other things that wouldn't have occurred to me.

Derrida Is Dead. Long Live Derrida!

When I first saw in the Times Sunday morning that Jacques Derrida had died, my first thought was that all the icons of High Theory that had so dominated my college days were now gone: Derrida, Foucault, Said, Deleuze, DeMan. Only Baudrillard is still around, along with the many American carriers of French theory. But as I read through the Times obit, I found myself -- for the first time in a long while -- mentally rushing to defend Derrida against what was generally a hostile assessment of his work, emphasizing almost exclusively its impenetrability, without even trying to explain it on its own terms. (Ed Rothstein did much better the next day.)

I spent about six year of my life -- through college and the beginning of grad school -- wrestling on and off with deconstruction, and studied closely during those last couple of years with Gayatri Spivak, arguably Derrida's most influential disciple. During that time, I never fully identified myself with the Derridean camp -- I was much more interested in Foucault's social histories -- but there was a clear sense, back in those days, that deconstruction was something that you had to account for in your thinking. Ultimately, I came out of that period with the feeling that deconstruction was ultimately an accurate, legitimate, and surprisingly understandable critique of the way language produces meaning. (Or it least it could have been understandable, if its proponents weren't so insistent on having their writing enact the contradictory, self-erasing property they were trying to document -- which is a bit like a evolutionary biologist choosing to write a paper using strands of DNA.) But I also came to feel that the lessons of deconstruction were fundamentally small ones; extremely important to deal with if you were, say, a philosopher of language --but not all that important if you were trying to analyze a novel, or a political movement. At the most granular level, language does contain a host of built-in contradictions and elipses that you can tease out if you have the time and the training. But most of what's important in life doesn't happen at the granular level, and those micro-effects generally just disappear when you shift focus to the macro scale.

There's a somewhat hackneyed tradition of imagining Derrida's work as being the philosophical equivalent of quantum physics -- uncertainty is everywhere! -- but to me, the comparison is most useful in a negative sense. Quantum physics is, I suppose, real enough, but you can safely ignore it when trying to describe most of things that are important to us -- political campaigns, the effects of media on consciousness, terrorism, etc -- because those things live in a Newtonian world that is much more certain in its underlying physics. The same, I think, is true for deconstruction; as Derrida's ideas spread through the humanities, and began influencing legal theorists, political scientists, activists and artists, that sense of deconstruction's micro focus was lost, and a very small problem came to be mistaken for a global one.

No doubt Derrida was responsible for some of that spread, but he can't take all the blame. The few times I met him in person, he seemed quite modest and remarkably intelligible -- mostly, I suspect, because he was speaking in English and couldn't lay on all the triple-entendres that he used in French. He once showed up as a surprise guest at a graduate seminar Spivak was teaching on his work -- he arrived before Spivak did, and so there was a hilarious period for about ten minutes where all these over-caffeinated grad students had to resist the urge to ask the quiet, white-haired man in the corner if he was, in fact, Derrida. In a way, his appearance was a strange corrective to the general thrust of his theories. You spend six years cementing the idea that the Author is irrelevant, and that you're free to erect new interpretations without his permission. It's all fun and games, until one day you start riffing around the seminar table and you realize that the Author is sitting right next to you, taking notes.