The rafters of the Metropolitan Opera House recently rang with the raucous sound of booing. The occasion was the premiere of Mary Zimmerman’s production of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” a 19th-century opera that Ms. Zimmerman, a noted avant-garde theater director, set in present-day New York and turned into a postmodern extravaganza complete with cellphones and leather jackets. Such high-concept stagings are old hat in straight theater, but the Met’s opening-night crowds run to the staid, and much of the audience reacted loudly and angrily when Ms. Zimmerman and her production team took their curtain call. What happened to Ms. Zimmerman, while not unprecedented, is highly unusual. To be sure, booing at the opera house is far from uncommon elsewhere in the world, especially in Italy, but American audiences are reluctant to express their displeasure vocally. I’ve heard a certain amount of booing at the Met, but I can’t recall ever hearing a single boo at a Broadway show, a classical concert, a dance performance or a nightclub gig.

more from the WSJ here.

Lucie Dillon, Marquise de la Tour du Pin, was an ordinary woman who happened to live an extraordinary life. She was born in 1770 in a hôtel particulier on the rue du Bac, one of the exclusive precincts of Parisian fashionable life, and by the time she died, in 1853, in the quiet town of Pisa, she had seen France go through three revolutions, and witnessed the alternation of two republics, three kings and two emperors. She had watched Marie Antoinette dance at Versailles in a blue dress dotted with sapphires and diamonds; she had exchanged gossip with Talleyrand, amiable platitudes with Napoleon, and childhood memories (a branch of her family was Anglo-Irish) with the Duke of Wellington. She had been a guest at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball before the Battle of Waterloo, and had hosted endless receptions for visiting royals unsteady on their thrones. She had also witnessed the fury of the mob and the destructions of war; she had crossed the ocean on an American ship to escape the guillotine, and run a farm in Albany, New York, making butter and trading with the Iroquois. She had lived among exiles in England, Holland and Switzerland; lost, or sold to survive, most of her possessions only to replace them with a whole new load of court dresses, feathers, jewels and riding clothes, as fortunes went up and down and up again with the passing of regimes.

more from the TLS here.

Sherwin B. Nuland in The New Republic:

As far back as has been recorded of the history of human societies, men have equated life with movement. If our ancestors of antiquity could feel stirrings inside their bodies, it must mean that large, living structures were at the very least shifting their positions, and perhaps even migrating from place to place within the mysterious recesses of the internal cavities that encompassed them, whether the abdomen or the chest. Like other peoples of their time, for example, the Egyptians believed that the inner organs were so many distinctive and individual creatures, with whims and moods of their own that determined their peregrinations from neck to pelvis.

Of all the named structures within the abdomen and the chest, those associated with reproduction retained the mysteries of their willful behavior long after others had been solved to the satisfaction of physicians and philosophers. When, in his Timaeus, Hippocrates's contemporary Plato called the uterus “an animal within an animal,” he meant it to be taken literally. He was echoing a common belief of his time and earlier when he stated that under proper conditions the womb — or hystera, as it was called in Greek — “becomes seriously angry and moves all over the body.” Chief among those proper conditions was any frustration of its desire to bear children.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Norman Cousins, the storied journalist, author and editor, found no pain reliever better than clips of the Marx Brothers. For years, Cousins suffered from inflammatory arthritis, and he swore that 10 minutes of uproarious laughing at the hilarious team bought him two hours of pain-free sleep. In his book Anatomy of an Illness as Perceived by the Patient (W. W. Norton, 1979), Cousins described his self-prescribed laughing cure, which seemed to ameliorate his inflammation as well as his pain. He eventually was able to return to work, landing a job as an adjunct professor at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he investigated the effects of emotions on biological states and health. The community of patients inspired by such miracle treatments believes not only that humor is psychologically beneficial but that it actually cures disease. In reality, only a smattering of scientific evidence exists to support the latter idea—but laughter and humor do seem to have significant effects on the psyche, even influencing our perception of pain. What is more, psychological well-being has an impact on overall wellness, including our risk of disease.

Laughter relaxes us and improves our mood, and hearing jokes may ease anxiety. Amusement’s ability to counteract physical agony is well documented, and as Cousins’s experience suggests, humor’s analgesic effect lasts after the smile has faded. Cheerfulness, a trait that makes people respond more readily to laugh lines, is linked to emotional resilience—the ability to keep a level head in difficult circumstances—and to close relationships, studies show. Science also indicates that a sense of humor is sexy; women are attracted to men who have one. Thus, in various ways, life satisfaction may increase with the ability to laugh.

More here.

Over at TPM Cafe, a book club discussion on Jessica Valenti's The Purity Myth with Jessica Valenti, Amanda Marcotte, Lila Shapiro, Leora Tanenbaum, J. Goodrich, Hanne Blank, Emily Blazeon. Jessica Valenti:

The Purity Myth is a book that I've been thinking about for a long time; the sexual double standard has irked me since I was a teenager and the framing of sexually active women as “dirty” has fascinated me for just as long. But it was really the work I do on Feministing that led me to write this book. I started to notice a trend emerging in the stories we were covering – whether it was pop culture or policy, there seemed to be an obsessive focus on young women's sexuality. Not exactly news, I know. But this focus went beyond your run-of-the-mill objectification. Hundreds of moral panic articles about “girls gone wild” and spring break madness were popping up around the same time books about “modesty” and the dangers of “hooking up” were all the rage.

On the policy end of things, the FDA was holding up emergency contraception and conservatives were driving themselves into a frenzy over the HPV vaccine – all because of fears that young women would become promiscuous. And that's how The Purity Myth was born. I wanted to look at how the conservative movement uses the fear of young women's sexuality to promote a regressive agenda for women, and how cultural messages about chastity and virginity influence the way young women are perceived (by themselves and society).

Sukhdev Sandhu in New Statesman:

Les quatre cents coups was anything but creaky. It wasn’t a story, so much as a series of episodes that contained the rhythms of life, especially the rhythms of adolescence – a time of inexplicable longings, aching boredom, whimsical raptures – rather than those of well-made plays. The film used real locations, sounds and lighting. It seemed as improvisatory as jazz music, and felt just as modern.

As such, it fully delivered on the claim that Truffaut had made in an article just a couple of years earlier: “The film of tomorrow appears to me as even more personal than an individual and autobiographical novel, like a confession, or a diary [. . .] The film of tomorrow will resemble the person who made it, and the number of spectators will be proportional to the number of friends the director has. The film of tomorrow will be an act of love.”

The idea that a film can be an expression of a director’s identity and personal vision became known as “auteur theory”, helped give space in Hollywood to directors such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and David Lynch, and has become sacred for independent cinema. It was also a key element of the Nouvelle Vague movement, of which Les quatre cents coups, while not the first expression (that honour goes perhaps to Claude Chabrol’s Le beau Serge of 1958), nor even the only example in 1959 (there was also Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour, and Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle appeared just months later in 1960), remains one of the high points.

Josh Tucker reports on the used of Twitter for opposition movements, over at the Monkey Cage:

I have written previously about the role that electoral fraud can play in helping people to overcome the collective action problems that normally prevent citizens from protesting against abusive regimes. The gist of my argument is that in the period of time following a potentially fraudulent election the costs of protest to individual citizens may significantly be lower than usual, and the potential benefit from protest – the opportunity to actually “throw the bums out” if the election result is reversed – is much higher than usual.

One of the key factors that I identified in terms of lowering the anticipated costs of protest was the expectation that others would be protesting as well, and thus the likelihood of punishment being borne by any one particular individual would be low (as opposed to, for example, refusing to pay a bribe to a fire inspector who could then shut down your business).

The events unfolding in Moldova, however, suggest that internet-based social networking tools that were not even present during the original colored revolutions, such as Facebook and especially Twitter, may also be able to play a very valuable role in allowing even loosely organized opposition networks to coordinate protest activity. To the extent that a constant stream of Twitter posts increases any individual’s confidence that there will be more protestors in the street at a particular place at a particular point in time, it should also serve to lower the perceived costs of participation to potential protestors.

This is a development that is worth watching, because once this genie is out of the bag, it may significantly change the dynamics of how public protests develop and play out in the future.

Kevin Carey in The Chronicle of Higher Ed:

Newspapers are dying. Are universities next? The parallels between them are closer than they appear. Both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information. Paradoxically, both are threatened by the way technology has made that easier than ever before.

The signs of sickness appeared earlier in the newspaper business, which is now in rapid decline. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and there's a good chance that the San Francisco Chronicle won't last the year. Even the mighty New York Times is in danger — its debt has been downgraded to junk status and the owners have sold off their stake in the lavish Renzo Piano-designed headquarters that the paper built for itself just a few years ago.

All of this is happening despite the fact that the Internet has radically expanded the audience for news. Millions of people read The New York Times online, dwarfing its print circulation of slightly over one million. The problem is that the Times is not, and never has been, in the business of selling news. It's in the print advertising business. For decades, newspapers enjoyed a geographically defined monopoly over the lucrative ad market, the profits from which were used to support money-losing enterprises like investigative reporting and foreign bureaus. Now that money is gone, lost to cheaper online competitors like Craigslist. Proud institutions that served their communities for decades are vanishing, one by one.

In 1816 the summer never came. Across New England and the Maritimes, late snows and repeated frosts led to crop failures, livestock deaths, and severe food shortages. In Europe, which was struggling to recover from the extended cataclysm of the Napoleonic Wars, torrential rain and abysmal cold resulted in the collapse of the German wheat crop, leading to meager harvests across the continent. Authorities struggled to quell riots in England and France as mobs raided storehouses, and troops were dispatched to protect grain shipments. In Switzerland, the poor resorted to eating cats and lichen, and the streets of Zurich were swarmed with beggars. Historian John Post has called it the last great subsistence crisis of the Western world, but today 1816 is generally remembered—when it is remembered at all—as “the year without a summer.” At the time, the cause of the strange weather was a mystery, but today we know that the main culprit was a massive volcanic eruption that occurred the previous spring on the other side of the globe.

more from VQR here.

Swiss consumer prices fell 0.4pc in March (year-on-year). Swiss CPI will be minus 1pc at least by July, nearing the level where spending psychology changes. By the time you have a self-feeding spiral, it is too late. “This is something that we must prevent at all costs. The current situation is extraordinarily serious,” said Philipp Hildebrand, a governor of the Swiss National Bank. The SNB is not easily spooked. It is the world’s benchmark bank, the keeper of the monetary flame. Yet even the SNB’s hard men have thrown away the rule book, taking emergency action to force down the exchange rate of the Swiss franc. Here lies the danger. If other countries try to export deflation by this means, we will face a second phase of the global crisis. Taiwan is already devaluing. Korea, Singapore, and Sweden all seem tempted to follow. Japan is chomping at the bit. “We don’t fully realise in the West what a catastrophic collapse Japan has suffered,” says Albert Edwards, global strategist at Société Générale. “The West has dumped a large part of its economic downturn onto Japan by devaluing against the yen.”

more from The Telegraph here.

The first key to puzzling out Morrissey is to ignore Morrissey himself—that is, to separate out the artist not only from the man but from the “Moz,” the elaborately coy public construct that has helped turn the reclusive teenage whatsit into a British icon. That Morrissey—the playful, spiteful, celibate, fourth-gender Morrissey—is a lot of fun, and in three decades, he has scarcely given a dull interview. (“You haven’t got any evidence of that,” he once snapped at a journalist who dared call him human. “I’m actually 40 percent papier-mâché.”) Set aside the rejoinders and innuendo, entertaining as they are, and then go one step further and ignore his lyrics. Heresy, I know; Morrissey is the most yearbook-quotable lyricist in the history of the form. (“I dreamt about you last night/ Nearly fell out of bed twice/ You can pin and mount me/ Like a butterfly …”) Don’t allow yourself to be beguiled, however, or you will find yourself wandering down a flyblown alley filled with child murder, militant vegetarianism, gender-bending, and Tory-baiting. The man cherishes his obsessions, but it is possible to imagine him without them. It is not possible to imagine Morrissey minus one thing: the suffering once inflicted on him by obscurity.

more from Slate here.

Chainey
John Beecher

The field boss claimed his privilege. Her knife
quenched all his lust for black girls. She got life
in the Big Rock and swung a chain-gang pick
a quarter century before she broke.
To save her keep they kicked her out, paroled.
Root, hog, or die! Thereafter she despoiled
our garbage cans of what our pampered pets
repudiated. We capering white brats
dogged her around, mocking that tethered gait.
She shambled, rolling-eyed down every street
in Birmingham, mumbling of “Jedgment.” All
our minds were shackled by her chain and ball.

John Thorne in The Liberal:

Moroccans often say their country, on the cusp of the Arab world, is different. They argue that Islamic extremism is an alien Middle Eastern disease. They are wrong. On 16 May 2003, a date that rings in Morocco as September 11th does in the West, fourteen young Casablancans proved them so.

It was a Friday night. The fourteen boys left their homes in a poor suburb and headed downtown, where they quickly dispersed. Some proceeded to fine restaurants, some to a fancy hotel, some to a Jewish community centre, one to the Belgian consulate and one to a Jewish cemetery. There they blew themselves up. The twelve dead bombers – two were arrested in the nick of time – murdered 33 civilians and injured over a hundred.

Religious intolerance is relatively rare in today’s Morocco, but draws on a long tradition. For centuries, Muslim pirates operated out of ports to Libya, claiming divine right to attack Western ships and enslave the crews. Their grip on the high seas was broken only by American military campaigns in the early 19th-century, and as late as 1883, the French explorer Charles de Foucauld was obliged to visit Morocco disguised as a Russian Jew, accompanied by an aging Algerian rabbi seeking the philosopher’s stone. Morocco remained off-limits to Christians until the French took it over in 1911. Jews were marginally tolerated, but often forced to live in closed ghettos and pay special tribute in accordance with Islamic law; most later emigrated to Israel.

More here.

From City Journal:

We New Yorkers imagine our city’s history begins in earnest with the Gilded Age and the Great Migration that brought many of our forebears sailing under the Statue of Liberty’s torch to supercharge a nascent metropolis with a jolt of new energy. But this summer, when a handful of square-bearded, antique-garbed Pennsylvania German Baptists jacked a yellow clapboard house up over a Harlem church and wheeled it around the corner to a new site in St. Nicholas Park, we recalled that more than a century earlier Gotham took center stage as the nation’s first capital. For the house belonged to Alexander Hamilton—not only one of the greatest Founding Fathers but the one who stamped the infant republic forever with the unique spirit of New York City.

The other Founders were Americans of a century’s standing, who fought the Revolution to defend liberties their families had claimed for generations. Washington and Jefferson, landed grandees, descended from seventeenth-century Virginians; Harvard-educated John Adams’s forebears settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1638. Such men were rooted Americans, living on land inherited from their fathers. Hamilton, by contrast, was a penniless immigrant from the West Indies; like so many New Yorkers, he had come here from elsewhere, seeking his fortune.

And he wasn’t just penniless. “My birth,” as he delicately put it, “is the subject of the most humiliating criticism”—for he was, in John Adams’s acidulous taunt, “the bastard brat of a Scotch pedlar.”

More here.

Barry Eichengreen and Kevin H. O’Rourke in Vox (via Delong):

This and most other commentary contrasting the two episodes compares America then and now. This, however, is a misleading picture. The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Even if it originated, in some sense, in the US, it was transmitted internationally by trade flows, capital flows and commodity prices. That said, different countries were affected differently. The US is not representative of their experiences.

Our Great Recession is every bit as global, earlier hopes for decoupling in Asia and Europe notwithstanding. Increasingly there is awareness that events have taken an even uglier turn outside the US, with even larger falls in manufacturing production, exports and equity prices.

In fact, when we look globally, as in Figure 1, the decline in industrial production in the last nine months has been at least as severe as in the nine months following the 1929 peak. (All graphs in this column track behaviour after the peaks in world industrial production, which occurred in June 1929 and April 2008.) Here, then, is a first illustration of how the global picture provides a very different and, indeed, more disturbing perspective than the US case considered by Krugman, which as noted earlier shows a smaller decline in manufacturing production now than then.

Figure 1. World Industrial Output, Now vs Then

SHAG RUGS ARE back in the stores. The rooms in decorating magazines are starting to look just a little bit cluttered. Solar panels are hot. Men are wearing beards. There are orange cars on the road, something not seen since the days of the flaming Ford Pinto. For all we know, avocado-colored appliances are about to mount a comeback. It’s true that the 1970s have been revived at regular intervals in fashion, music, and entertainment ever since they ended. But this time, the echo is different. It’s not just superficial scavenging but rather a deeper reconnection. Those ’70s aesthetics didn’t come from nowhere: they were born from a particular kind of change and uncertainty. And in the end, they embodied an imaginative way out of the malaise of the time. In the flush times of the early 1960s, as in the early 2000s, surfaces tended to be smooth, cool, and technological, reflecting a confidence that wars could be limited, economies could be fine-tuned, and that the best and the brightest had matters firmly in hand. In the 1970s, the world turned hairy, and our floor coverings, our clothes, and even our bodies soon followed.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Salon:

Allen Barra says a case can be made that 83-year-old Yogi Berra was the greatest catcher in baseball history. And no ex-ballplayer is more famous today, not even Willie Mays. But a few years ago, fresh off a book about Bear Bryant, Barra noticed that there hadn't been a definitive bio of Yogi. He set out to fix that, and the result is the new “Yogi Berra: Eternal Yankee.” Yogi's best known to younger generations as a lovable lunkhead, the idiot savant who talks to a duck on an insurance commercial, who said, “It ain't over till it's over” and “You can observe a lot by watching.” Then there are the malapropisms that make a weird kind of sense when you think about them: When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Half this game is 90 percent mental. I didn't really say everything I said.

But, as Barra points out, Yogi's been a success at almost everything he ever tried. Pitchers who were brilliant when he was behind the plate never did anything much when he wasn't. Whitey Ford, one of the greatest left-handers ever, often says he never shook off one of Berra's signs, and Don Larsen has said the same thing about his World Series perfect game.

More here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

Look around you. On the train platform, at the bus stop, in the car pool lane: these days someone there is probably faking it, maintaining a job routine without having a job to go to. The Wall Street type in suspenders, with his bulging briefcase; the woman in pearls, thumbing her BlackBerry; the builder in his work boots and tool belt — they could all be headed for the same coffee shop, or bar, for the day. “I have a new client, a laid-off lawyer, who’s commuting in every day — to his Starbucks,” said Robert C. Chope, a professor of counseling at San Francisco State University and president of the employment division of the American Counseling Association. “He gets dressed up, meets with colleagues, networks; he calls it his Western White House. I have encouraged him to keep his routine.”

The fine art of keeping up appearances may seem shallow and deceitful, the very embodiment of denial. But many psychologists beg to differ. To the extent that it sustains good habits and reflects personal pride, they say, this kind of play-acting can be an extremely effective social strategy, especially in uncertain times. “If showing pride in these kinds of situations was always maladaptive, then why would people do it so often?” said David DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “But people do, of course, and we are finding that pride is centrally important not just for surviving physical danger but for thriving in difficult social circumstances, in ways that are not at all obvious.”

For most of its existence, the field of psychology ignored pride as a fundamental social emotion. It was thought to be too marginal, too individually variable, compared with basic visceral expressions of fear, disgust, sadness or joy. Moreover, it can mean different things in different cultures.

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Jeffrey Sachs in The Huffington Post:

Two weeks ago, I posted an article showing how the Geithner-Summers banking plan could potentially and unnecessarily transfer hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from taxpayers to banks. The same basic arithmetic was later described by Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Times (April 1) and by Peyton Young in the Financial Times (April 1). In fact, the situation is even potentially more disastrous than we wrote. Insiders can easily game the system created by Geithner and Summers to cost up to a trillion dollars or more to the taxpayers.

Here's how. Consider a toxic asset held by Citibank with a face value of $1 million, but with zero probability of any payout and therefore with a zero market value. An outside bidder would not pay anything for such an asset. All of the previous articles consider the case of true outside bidders.

Suppose, however, that Citibank itself sets up a Citibank Public-Private Investment Fund (CPPIF) under the Geithner-Summers plan. The CPPIF will bid the full face value of $1 million for the worthless asset, because it can borrow $850K from the FDIC, and get $75K from the Treasury, to make the purchase! Citibank will only have to put in $75K of the total.

Citibank thereby receives $1 million for the worthless asset, while the CPPIF ends up with an utterly worthless asset against $850K in debt to the FDIC. The CPPIF therefore quietly declares bankruptcy, while Citibank walks away with a cool $1 million. Citibank's net profit on the transaction is $925K (remember that the bank invested $75K in the CPPIF) and the taxpayers lose $925K. Since the total of toxic assets in the banking system exceeds $1 trillion, and perhaps reaches $2-3 trillion, the amount of potential rip-off in the Geithner-Summers plan is unconscionably large.

More here.