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January 31, 2008

Edwards' gift to the campaign

Yesterday, John Edwards ended his campaign as he began it, in New Orleans talking about poverty and injustice. It was a sad day for me personally, to see a candidate I volunteered for lose. It was still a useful few months for me, to believe and then to lose that belief. I saw something of the American political process while volunteering. It is an odd beat whose teeny base of retail politicking (rallies, speeches, etc.) supports the giant head of the media freak show. Positive feedback loops rule the media freak show: the media declares a candidate is viable because s/he has some support, and that declaration makes the candidate more viable. Money and fame and power beget more of the same. I don’t mean to be cynical: ideas do matter, in the sense that candidates with compelling themes and rhetoric do better than other candidates without these. But policy differences, the differences in the actions candidates would take when in office, matter relatively little.

Most of the media commentary following Edwards’ withdrawal focused on why he lost the race. Sometimes commentators divined what his departure would do Obama and Clinton’s poll numbers. Missing was a thoughtful reflection on how Edwards presence in the race affected the policy positions of the other two major Democratic candidates. Edwards pushed early for universal health care coverage, and Clinton followed his lead. Edwards’ environmental plan called for drastic government action to ease American dependence on foreign oil was incorporated into Obama and Clinton’s plans. Most important, Edwards discussion of poverty made the others start to address that issue as well. Edwards’ presence took two moderate candidates and made them pledge to support some progressive ideals. It remains to be seen whether they would stick to those pledges if elected, but at least we can hold them to their word. This influence on actual policy issues was Edwards’ real gift to the campaign.

January 24, 2008

Stock market crash proves US power?

One of the oddest things to have occurred after the dramatic market crash of the last few days is the spectacle of plenty of news commentators claiming it shows the importance of the US economy. The idea is that since the collapse of the US housing bubble and our stock market affected other economies, we therefore must matter to them.

Apart from seeming rather juvenile (a point which Jon Stewart scathingly satired), this argument displays an ignorance of history. Of course, it is clear that as the largest economy in the world we can influence other countries. But there are plenty examples of the converse: smaller countries collapse, affecting us. The collapse of the Asian Tigers in the late 90s affected many US stocks (albeit far from all of them). And once those economies collapsed many US and other foreign firms moved in to find bargain deal in the damaged economy. At no time did American commentators proudly proclaim that this showed that Asia was important to the US. The main discussion was about the nature of the globalized economy and the flaws in the Asian economies (whether real or perceived).

Much the same is happening now, just on a bigger scale. Systematic problems in the US economy have caused some foreign investors to pull out, triggering a fall in the stock market. Later, once the dust has cleared, I’m sure some savvy firms (both foreign and domestic) will move in looking for some bargains. For those particular firms, it may be an opportunity to make money. However, why in the world would anyone regard this collapse as a good thing for the average American citizen?

December 01, 2007

Journalists, Democracy, and Titles

Here’s a humble little suggestion for journalists: why not restrict use of the word “president” and “prime minister” to those who were elected in free and fair elections. The current standard policy for most newspapers is to use whatever title a leader wants to use, leading to absurdities like “President Kim Jong-il.” If you stop to think about it, North Korean’s leader is clearly not “the elected head of a republican state,” as Oxford’s New American Dictionary defines it. “Prime minister” also contains an implication of democratic principles: the head of an elected government; the principal minister of a sovereign or state.”

Such a restriction on titles would have to be done consistently, to avoid the appearance of propaganda (and would of course not apply to direct quotations from sources). Why not have a policy that every country with a Freedom House
score of “Not Free”. For example, here’s how you might write the names of leaders whose countries do not meet this criterion:

Algeria’s Leader Abdelaziz Bouteflika
Angola’s Leader José Eduardo dos Santos
Azerbaijan’s Leader Ilham Heydar oglu Aliyev
Belarus’s Leader Alexander Lukashenko
Bhutan’s King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck
Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah
Burma’s General Than Shwe
Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihamoni
Cameroon’s Leader Paul Biya
Chad’s General Idriss Déby
China’s Leader Hu Jintao
Congo (Brazzaville)’s General Denis Sassou Nguesso
Congo (Kinshasa)’s Leader Joseph Kabila Kabange
Cote de Ivoire’s Leader Laurent Koudou Gbagbo
Cuba’s General Fidel Castro
Egypt’s Leader Muhammad Hosni Said Mubarak
Equatorial Guinea’s General Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo
Eritrea’s General Isaias Afewerki
Guinea’s General Lansana Conté
Iran’s Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Iraq’s Leader Jalal Talabani
Kazakhstan’s Leader Nursultan Abishuly Nazarbayev
Laos’s General Choummaly Sayasone
Libya’s Leader Muammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi
Maldives’s Leader Maumoon Abdul Gayoom
North Korea’s General Kim Jong-il
Oman’s Sultan Sayyed Qaboos bin Sa’id Al ‘Bu Sa’id
Pakistan’s General Pervez Musharraf
Qatar’s Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani
Russia’s Leader Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin
Rwanda’s General Paul Kagame
Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud
Somalia’s Leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed
Sudan’s General Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir
Swaziland’s King Mswati III
Syria’s Leader Bashar al-Assad
Tajikistan’s Leader Emomalii Rahmon
Togo’s Faure Essozimna Gnassingbé
Tunisia’s General Zine El Abidine Ben Ali
Turkmenistan’s Leader Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhammedow
United Arab Emirates’s Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan
Uzbekistan’s Leader Islom Abdug‘aniyevich Karimov
Vietnam’s Leader Nguy?n T?n D?ng
Zimbabwe’s General Robert Gabriel Mugabe

November 03, 2007

Hurricane Noel and the Red Sox

The remnants of Hurricane Noel are blowing through Cambridge, shaking the last of the leaves from the trees. Right now the rain feels cold and hard, and I can’t wait until after the Hurricane comes through and the warm tropical air takes over.

I’m deeply sorry for not having written a blog post for so long. It’s not that I haven’t been writing; I’ve actually been editing several scientific manuscripts I’m quite excited about. The problem of course, is that most of my friends won’t ever read my scientific writing, so it’s like it sort of doesn’t exist outside academia. Also, science writing is by definition incremental and limited, so different from a well-crafted essay.

Speaking of hurricanes, it felt like one hit the city, with all the excitement over the Red Sox. I kind of found the excitement fun and sweet, and ended up arguing with some leftist intellectuals at Harvard who seem to feel that if a lot of people like something it must be suspect. I can’t say I’m a huge baseball fan, but I like how it unifies people. I watched part of the games from in front of Cardullo’s, a store in Harvard Square that leaves a TV on in their window. The sidewalk become a cool mix of homeless folks, local Bostonians, cops, and Harvard profs, all hanging out and watching the game. It is, in truth, one of the more socioeconomically integrated spaces in Cambridge, a town that is often anything but integrated.

August 24, 2007

Ode to Palo Alto

I returned from visiting my wife at Stanford, and as I stepped off the plane it was raining in East Boston. This made me indescribably happy. After several weeks in the unchanging, beautiful Palo Alto summer- always sunny and 80F- I was frankly bored. Granted, seeing the oleander in bloom, smelling the hibiscus (my only memory from my natal state, Hawaii), hearing the hummingbirds buzzing around my head, I was happy. And I got a lot of thinking done, as I walked down long streets designed for cars. But perhaps because I didn’t have any job to stress me out, the days slipped by one by one, pleasantly. Even the fruit in the farmer’s market was ridiculously ripe, bursting with flavor. It was paradise. It was monotonous. In a way, isn’t this the dream of suburbia, a life smooth and cool?

I found myself missing weather. On our weekend trips up to San Francisco, I loved the cold fog rolling into Sunset, positively sublime, if I can use that discredited word from the 19th century Romantics. I even loved the crazy bums in the streets, the craziest in the United States. At least their were little moments, like when a homeless man came in this restaurant and screamed for no reason, that no one controlled or could have predicted.

This line of thinking is, course, clearly bobo (bohemian bourgeois), for I’ve never lived in a truly bad neighborhood. Maybe one can only fear the suburb when one can afford to live there, and indeed know all the responsibilities of raising a family might push you that way. People want predictability, until they get it.

I chatted with a friend of a friend while sitting in a fantastic coffeeshop, Ritual. She makes her living designing spaces in Second Life. I always wonder whether these online virtual spaces will be more like Palo Alto- predictable and pleasant- or full of the electronic equivalent of the homeless man screaming. Online, people can choose between designing a paradise, or something just a bit more quirky and gritty and unstable. Who knows which will in the end predominate?

June 10, 2007

Reflections on the Marshall Plan and John Edwards

Sixty years ago this June, General George Marshall stepped into Harvard Yard and delivered what may be the most famous commencement speech of all time, proposing what came to be called the Marshall Plan. On the anniversary of Marshall’s speech, I’ve been reflecting on what has changed since 1947. The developing countries are in the midst of a massive urbanization that makes the redevelopment of Europe after WWII look puny, and yet American leadership on the international stage is nowhere to be found, making John Edwards comments at the end of the last debate so important.

Marshall’s plan involved massive transfers of funds from America to the rebuilding countries in Western Europe, totaling some $170 billion in today’s dollars. Yet as Marshall made clear, it was a bargain, for by investing in Europe’s redevelopment America was insuring its own security. As he put it, it was only “logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.” Marshall’s key insight was that aid, properly conceived, is not charity but an essential part of national security.

After WWII, the clear link between Europe and the U.S. was direct military conflict. Marshall essentially argued that if America did not aid Europe it would have to deal eventually with another world war started in that region. Today the link is not a direct threat of interstate violence, but the growing web of transboundary issues. The increasingly globalized nature of the world economy and environment make what happens over there, in the developing world, central to what happens here in America.

And there is a lot happening over there. This year, for the first time in the history of Homo sapiens, a majority of our species live in cities. This process of urbanization will continue, driven by the greater number of deaths than births among urban dwellers, as well as rural-to-urban migration. By 2030 the United Nations Population Division estimates there will be 1.75 billion new urban residents, the equivalent of building a city the size of Vancouver every single week. More new dwellings will be built in the next 25 years than currently exist in all of Europe. If you were to push all this new urban area together, a good guess is that it will cover an area the size of California.

I spend most of my professional time thinking about one potent link between urbanization in the developing world and America’s well-being, the environment. The billions of new urban dwellers will increasingly demand more and more oil to drive their cars, as they begin to approach American standards of living. How much oil they end up using depends on the form of the coming urbanization, and whether safe and efficient mass transit is available. That in turn will affect whether over the long-term, the number of potential consumers of oil will grow faster than oil supply, resulting in much higher prices at the pump.

Additionally, there is now broad consensus in the scientific literature of the serious potential effects of global warming. Some of these effects, such as the flooding of low-lying areas and climate-change induced famines, may create large movements of refugees. One recent study by the British NGO Christian Aid predicts 250 million refugees will flee global warming’s effects, a figure several times larger than the number of displaced people during all of WWII. Just how bad global warming will be depends, in no small part, on how the poorer countries of the world grow and urbanize.

Yet American leadership during this crucial period in history is mostly absent, or at least distracted by other issues. We have engaged in a war of choice in Iraq that in one year costs us almost as much as the entire Marshall Plan. At the same time, we remain stingy with our foreign aid, giving only 17 cents in aid for every $100 our economy produces. How far we have come since Marshall’s vision of enlightened investment in a better world! If America continues to shirk its responsibilities, we will be abdicating a leadership role in the globalized world of the 21st century, to our own detriment.

And that’s why I found John Edwards comments at the end of his last debate so heartening. When asked what he highest priority would be when he got into office, he said it would be to “re-establish America's moral authority in the world”, saying that in comparison other issues “become less important and subservient.” It was a subtle answer, and perhaps one not well suited to the quick sound bite. However, it reflects exactly the kind of positive reengagement with the world that American needs.

June 04, 2007

Al Gore's Reason and the freak show

I managed, quite by accident, to read two books recently that covered the same theme in different ways. Both discussed the sphere of public debate in the United States, and its relative decline in recent decades as media sources have become more celebrity-driven. One leaves you feeling righteous, but with no practical outlet for that emotion. The other is eminently practical and useful for a politician, but leaves me feeling a little queasy.

I picked up Al Gore’s Assault on Reason at the Harvard Coop. I’ll confess to not having bought it, but instead spent a pleasant hour sitting in a chair in a bookstore, reading most of the text. Gore argues that reasoned discourse in American democracy has all but disappeared, replaced by entertainment of the basest kind. This has led, moreover, to a loss of faith in reason itself, in democratic decisions made by an informed electorate. I believe in the righteousness of Gore’s call, and its something I’ve felt myself for a long time. But I don’t believe that a hortatory call to return to reason will do much good, just as it generally has not done the environmental movement much good.

I actually listened to Mark Halperin and John Harris’s book The Way to Win during a long drive down to Millbrook, NY. The central point of the book is that the modern media freak show exists, and politicians better learn how to tame it, or at least live with it. They outline two basic paths a politicians can take: the Clinton path (play to the center) or the Rove path (play to the base). I loved the book in a Machiavellian way (although the pro-Hillary bias was strong enough that I sometimes wondered if Halpern was also moonlighting for her campaign), but what scared me was the implication that what matters in the public debate is the sincerity and vehemence of a politician’s ideas, rather than a reasoned examination of politician’s ideas.

I want to believe in another route, some path for our society that lies between these two books. It would have to be more than an elegy for our (slightly more) reasoned past. It would have to be more than a moral call to return to the values of the Enlightenment. It must somehow be consistent with the brave new media world we live in. Sadly, I don’t know what the other route is. Even Mr.Gore’s admirable book just barely beings to point the way toward a Modernism for the 21st century.

May 28, 2007

Bright Eyes at the Wang Theatre

Last Thursday, Bright Eyes played at the old Metropolitan Theatre, the insanely ornate and baroque opera hall in Boston. It was thoroughly surreal, starting with the beautiful set by Gillian Welch. What followed after couldn’t have been more of a contrast. The Bright Eyes band entered wearing white suits, white cowboy hats, and white boots, while various psychedelic visuals played on a screen behind them. The bad was followed by several cellist, a flutist, and two drummers. They then briskly played through some extremely loud, complex, and angry arrangements of their songs, each more bizarre than the next. It was a failure musically, in that most of the songs sounded horrible, but it was perhaps the most interesting failure I’ve ever seen on stage. Conor Oberst has adopted a new narrative onstage, trying to look like some cinema version of the Doors playing The End to rioting crowds.

In a way, it’s a shame Conor felt the need to play the bacchanalian rock-star. He could probably sound a whole lot better if he was comfortable with a different narrative. He’s a damn good songwriter and poet, and should just be comfortable (like Gillian) in that role. I guess, however, people tend to adopt the narrative we expect from them. Rock has a way of making its stars implode in colorful supernovas, for the audience’s amusement.

April 23, 2007

Spring comes to Boston

This weekend was the first real spring weekend. It was sunny, and actually was warm enough to wear a t-shirt. Inexplicably, every woman in Boston simultaneously decides to wear a skirt. Everyone swarms onto the Esplanade, sunning by the banks of the Charles River, or playing frisbee on the Boston Common. The sight of this mass of humanity is shocking to Bostonians used to empty winter streets. One thinks to oneself: where were all these people? Ah yes, hiding from the chill inside their apartments…

The flowers continue their riotous procession. The ornamental magnolias along the south-facing side of Commonwealth Avenue are in full display, while their north-facing brethren are still dormant. The forsythia everywhere are a gorgeous yellow, the cherries still a delicate pink. Even the ornamental pears seem to be thinking about flowering. Me, I repotted all my houseplants, and am impatiently waiting for them to grow.

April 15, 2007

Springtime and the Iraq war

It’s finally spring here in Cambridge, in a chilly New England kind of way. There’s a nor’easter blowing through now, bringing a cold, hard rain, making the future marathoners miserable in anticipation of tomorrow. The real sign of the coming season was the delicate pink blossoms of the ornamental magnolia on my street. They are a grateful reminder that I’ve survived another winter, and a chance to muse on all that has passed since the last time these flowers bloomed.

 

Through the whole last year, the Iraq War continued. The build up to the war and its aftermath have now gone on longer than the entire process of falling in love, getting engaged, getting married, and celebrating my second wedding anniversary. Food for thought, that is. The war doesn’t seem likely to end until after January 2009, when a new president is sworn in.

 

I’ve been reading recently Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and it seems to have special relevance now. All historical analogies are inexact and dangerous, but I think the American body politic could learn something from the ancient Athenians. If the theatrical speeches of Thucydides are to be believed, at least Athenian politicians would talk openly of the paradox between their internal democracy, at the time one of the most open in the world, and their empire. One quote in particular stood out, describing how the wars in defense of their empire subverted democratic discourse:

 

“To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.”

These meditations have left me in a melancholy mood. The magnolia tree, it now appears, will have to bloom twice more before our troops are withdrawn from Iraq. And then, if history is any guide, there will be another war somewhere else rather soon.

 

I hold out hope though that someday a set of institutions will make outright was between nations as unthinkable as an attack between Maryland and Virginia within the United States, or indeed as an attack between France and Germany within the European Union. This dream was the subject of a sparsely attend seminar this week at the Sheraton Commander hotel, entitled “Democracy and the Future.” George Soros gave a rambling keynote address, which was nicely summarized in Amartya Sen’s response. If democracy is participation in power, in the discussion within a society of what should be and shall be, then while Athens was democratic internally it ended significant democracy for many of the citizens of other states. The same is of course true, although Dr. Sen was too polite to mention it, for the United States today: unless we strive for something greater, history will also remember us for our grand democratic experiment at home and our profound failure of imagination abroad.

March 28, 2007

Basketball and Springtime

The first daffodils are blooming in Cambridge, and the snow banks have finally melted. The students have headed off to warmer climes, to drink off any extra brain cells they might have acquired during the year, and the town is blessedly quiet. And me, I’ve been spending far too long in the wood-paneled depths of the neighborhood pub, watching college basketball.

This is a fairly natural thing for a native North Carolinian to do, of course. Basketball is something close to a religion down there, almost eclipsing the insanity of Red Sox nation. To give you an idea, before my wedding, several older men approached me with a quandary: there was a chance that if UNC advanced in the NCAA tournament that they would play a game during my wedding reception. Of course, they loudly protested, they would be at the reception, but might it be possible to have the game playing in a back room so they could check score periodically? In the end, crisis was averted, for Carolina lost earlier in the tourney.

What’s interesting about my current basketball fever is that I’m usually quite immune. Indeed, I only watch the NCAA tournament fully when I’m away from Chapel Hill. I like the feeling that everyone down there is watching the game just as I am, and felt bummed out at the Tarheel’s loss at exactly the same moment I did. And I love talking with my family after the game, and hearing about the progress of the dogwoods and the azaleas and magnolias.

There are, among my friends, some intellectuals who find the love of sports too clannish for comfort. I think there is some truth to this criticism, but I think it is also in human nature to have some petty rivalries. I dream of a world without war, and I’m idealistic to believe with wise governance that might be possible. And if in that world men still get drunk and have fist-fights in bars over their sports teams, that’s okay with me. La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.

March 18, 2007

Dominique de Villepin at Harvard

On Friday, I got the chance to see the Prime Minister of France, Dominique de Villepin, give a speech in the Forum at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Outside, the snow was coming down in white swirls, making the streets slushy in Cambridge and slowing the traffic down to walking speed. Nevertheless, he entered into the building on time, wearing the standard politician uniform of a black business suit with tie. After a somewhat fulsome introduction by a Harvard professor, he took the podium and gave a decent speech.

 

I was there, primarily, because I remember with fondness M. de Villepin’s speech at United Nations, opposing the US-led invasion of Iraq. He revisited the Iraq issue during his Harvard speech, making the general point that no country, even the United States, is powerful enough to be a global hegemon by itself. Therefore, international institutions must be strengthened.

 

I agree with this thesis, and it was generally well received at the Kennedy School, which is always internationalist in its character due to its diverse make-up. However, the specific programs he proposed seemed rather uninspiring: expansion of the UN Security Council to include Germany, Japan, and a representative of Africa; an international conference to solve the Iraq problem; another international conference to solve the Palestinian problem; and increased foreign development aid. No real news was made during the speech.

 

Most interesting was what lines drew applause. The fiscally-conservative elements in the crowd gave him applause for his promise to continue slowly modernizing and opening France’s economy. The libertarian elements (in the original sense of that term) clapped loudly when he said no country should torture its prisoners. Disturbingly, there was almost no overlap between these two groups, leading me to wonder what ever happened to the traditional conservative position of support for free trade and respect for the rule of law

 

To his credit, M. de Villepin was brave enough to take 30 minutes of unscripted questions from the audience. This is more than can be said for several American politicians, including our current President. In fact, M. de Villepin was noticeably more relaxed during this question period than during his speech. He displayed the great rhetorical skill of subtly changing a question to one he wanted to answer, and then responding to the latter. At times this meant he skipped the substance of a question, as when he dodged a question about poverty among North African immigrants by discussing unemployment in France among the general population. Still, I’m willing to forgive this rhetorical evasion, for one in such a political position as he must avoid making news accidentally.

March 04, 2007

USS Kennedy and Senator Kennedy

I spent last Friday, to my total surprise, sitting on an aircraft carrier in Boston Harbor. I arrived at 8am at a nondescript parking deck in the waterfront. All I knew was that I was the guest of my wife, who was to be sworn in as a U.S. citizen. We were forced to wait in an endless, but well ordered, line that snaked through multiple “staging areas,” finally passing through what may have been the most efficient security checkpoint I have ever seen. We then walked up a steep metal mesh gangplank, dangling over the waters and being buffeted by the winds. The women’s high heels all got stuck in the mesh. Once inside the relatively warm hanger bay of the USS John Kennedy, our long wait for the ceremony began.

 

More than 2 hours later, Edward Kennedy arrived and gave an admittedly excellent and moving speech. The symbolism, of the Senator who has worked so much for immigration reform speaking on a soon-to-be decommissioned ship named after his dead brother, was powerful. The rest of the ceremony was good, if a bit too cheesy for my tastes- the video montage accompanying the song “Proud to be an American” was over the top. Nevertheless, it was a happy and joyous day for all involved. I was certainly happy my wife could finally participate as a citizen in U.S. politics.

 

What stands out most about Friday was how well ordered the whole event was, in a way that civilian life never is. There was, however, one apparent oversight: bathrooms. Given that there were 600 civilians on the carrier, forgetting to think about how they will find the bathroom in the bowels of the ship seems a rather big oversight. To their credit, the Navy admirably and quickly came up with a solution: given each person a military escort to the bathroom.

 

Somehow this small oversight reminded me of an excellent book I am reading now, Dean Acheson’s Present at the Creation. What is fascinating about the work is the feeling of actually being inside history, of seeing the messy process by which decisions are made. Stupid oversight and mistakes got made during Acheson’s tenure in the government, of far more import that some missing bathrooms on a boat. More importantly, the book makes you realize that history is not some process drive by impersonal forces like fate or destiny. Nor is it the story of single men leading movements. Rather, it is the complex outcome of a set of men and their personalities. To read Acheson is to realize that things could very well have turned out differently, if a different set of men had been there. And when history’s inevitable surprises happen, competence and a sharp comprehension of reality, trumps ideology everytime.

January 29, 2007

Getting better estimates of UFPJ's march

There’s been much grumbling among the anti-war protestors who attended the January 27th march that the press got the numbers wrong. The Associated Press report stated “tens of thousands,” apparently because an unnamed police source suggested he thought (without having done any sort of systematic estimate) there were less than 100,000 people. United for Peace and Justice didn’t help things by claiming to have 500,000, which (having been there) was simply not credible.

As I scientist, this deeply frustrates me. This is an easy problem to solve. UFPJ needs to negotiate for a digital camera to be placed at a high location with a view of the rally site (the Washington Monument would have been perfect in this case). The camera would take a photo every 30 minutes or so, and the picture would be uploaded to the Internet. From there, someone (and I’d be happy to help) would download the picture, geometrically rectify it (this accounts for the slant of the picture, the fact that it’s not straight up and down), and then make an estimate of the crowd size (one typically counts the density of the crowd in two or three specific 100 m2 sections of the photo, then multiplies by the area of the crowd). The estimate, as well as the picture (archival and geometrically rectified) it’s based on, could then be placed on a website, in near real time. Journalists would be likely to report the estimate, as long as it was clear that the group doing the estimate was not directly affiliated with the march, and as long as they could double-check the calculation with the photos. The whole thing could probably be done for a couple thousand dollars worth of fees, rental equipment, etc., and would provide credible estimates to the press.

January 28, 2007

Postcards from an anti-war protest

I sit on the edge of the tidal basin. There is not a hint of ice on the water, and its surface is so smooth it mirrors the low-lying jets passing overhead. Other than their rumble all is quiet, save for the honks of geese and the occasional chatter of a nearby game of touch football. On moments when the wind blows right, I can smell the stables of the Park Service, a refreshing odor after the cleanness of the rest of the district. Across the water tourists swarm up the steps of the Jefferson Memorial, and many of them with anti-war placards are turned away, for of course one can’t protest without the proper authorization.


It is colder on the white marble of Jefferson’s memorial. Here, thin shards of ice swirl in the water. On rare moments a shorebird tries to stand on one of these icebergs, only to quickly topple off. On my walk here I was struck by how brutal the new WWII memorial looks, naked granite, filling part of the National Mall. If humanity has a 21st century as bloody as the one we just left, perhaps the Mall will be filled with war memorials, and they will have to cut down the cherry trees to make space. As Jefferson said, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”


I’m on the fringes now of the rally. The protestors haven’t yet filled up their designated area, even though it’s already 11pm. This doesn’t bode well for a massive turnout, but there are perhaps 50,000 people here, with more arriving every second. What fascinates me is the intricate ecology of these marches. The socialist and communist papers are hawked aggressively near the entrance- they are the bottom feeders of the march, the carrion eaters. Everywhere, college kids swarming, playing football, filling up the kid’s merry-go-round. Near the front is the stage, full of speakers and media types, who are mostly ignored by everybody. The exception is some of the preacher-types, like Jesse Jackson, that can still spur the crowd. Even Jesse’s speech was a little bizarre, coinciding as it did with a nearby tribal drumming rendition of “Give Peace a Chance,” complete with a sax being played in a decidedly Dixieland style. Bizarreness is the order of the day. There was a man pushing a grocery cart around selling cold pretzels. There were a group of folks with a sign that said “Arms are for hugging,” and they thus went around hugging people. Numerous cute babies walked around in activist costumes. A man wore a classic Minuteman colonial costume, except for 1980’s vintage running shoes.


I’m now happily sitting in Teaism in Penn Quarter, digesting my meal. The place has been taken over by activists, and has a hip bohemian vibe because of it. The march after the rally was exhausting, a slow-motion slog around the Capitol. It was pleasing to see us all stretched out, surrounding the building. Interestingly, the staffers in many of the Senate office buildings had put anti-war placards up in the windows, and a few staffers even greeted the crowd on behalf of their senator!


It’s nighttime now, and I’m looking out a plate glass window onto Connecticut Avenue. I marveled as I walked here how many contradictions float around the city. It is modern and clean, but there’s a homeless person over practically every street vent. One can sense the power that resides in the city when a black town car drives by, the man in the back wearing a tuxedo. And yet the city seems shockingly unsure of itself. To Americans, the land inside the Beltway has ceased to be a place where good happens, at least consistently (I still hold out hope), and instead is just a place of necessary secrets. You see this in some of the government servants who jog by on the Mall- they are proud of themselves for being in DC in a position of power, rather than for the good things they did with their power.

January 20, 2007

UFPJ's anti-war march on Washington

I will be in Washington on January 27, for United for Peace and Justice’s legal, permitted demonstration against the escalation of the war in Iraq. The time seems ripe now, and an effective protest may make a huge difference. The new Democratic Congress has to listen to the anti-war movement, at least to some extent, for we are part of their constituency. Moreover, the growing consensus opinion that the troop escalation is wrong (70% in a recent AP poll) adds political clout to the protest. I am also happy, frankly, that UFPJ has decided not to work with ANSWER, a more militant coalition. This will make the message of the march more focused and clear.

 

Who knows if the march will really be effective, or change any Congressman’s mind about how to vote? My opinion is that every person should have a set of bedrock moral beliefs that are not cast aside when they are inefficient. One should, or course, try to make one’s actions in support of these beliefs as politically effective as possible. A decent argument could be made that protest events are less effective as a political tool in the US than they once were. But history is mysterious, and sometimes one has to act without knowing the full consequences of one’s action. Vaclav Havel writes eloquently about this with regards to the Charter 77. At the time it was a mostly symbolic manifesto calling for more civil freedoms within the Czech communist system. In the end, the Charter ended up starting a chain of events that profoundly changed the Czech system, but no one knew in advance it would turn out that way. At some point a man has to commit to concrete actions that are consistent with his beliefs and improve the world a bit, and leave the writing of future history to the historians.

 

There is a poisonous, hip irony out there on the web that is deeply cynical about the UFPJ march. Wonkette gives probably the most egregious example, when she says “It won’t make a bit of difference, but you might get lucky with a hippie!” While I’m sure there will be a few members of the hippie species at the march, the vast majority of folks will be quite normal middle-class liberals. Wonkette’s comments reveal a deep smugness. The entire blogosphere seems to me a bit like the salons of aristocrats in Paris in the 19th century, supportive of the Enlightenment but fearful of the rabble.

 

There’s also a darker insinuation in Wonkette’s remarks, that this march is just protest for protest’s sake. Milan Kundera summarized this as kitsch:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.”

Bloggers hate this second tear, and well they should- the most important function of the blogosphere is as a BS detector. However, our hip, poisonous irony has also banished the first tear. I reject that. In a democracy, I want people to react emotionally (but legally) when their government invades a foreign country, displacing hundreds of thousands and killing an almost equal number. I want people to shed that first tear. And if that makes me un-ironic and subject to Wonkette’s well-crafted satire, then so be it.

December 11, 2006

Letter to NPR re: piece on Kofi Annan

This short piece is in response to NPR's conversation on Morning Edition on 12/11/2006, where some of the diplomatic fury at the UN over the Iraq war was blamed on Kofi Annan's strong-willed nature. You can find the piece at:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6607693 

Thank you for the excellent conversation (12/11/06) between James Traub and Steve Inskeep about Kofi Annan’s tenure at the United Nations. It provided a detailed look into the geopolitics of the UN that is sadly often lacking in the news media. However, your focus on the strong-willed personality of Mr. Annan may have given your listeners the mistaken impression that it was his pure stubbornness that caused his second term, in the run-up to the Iraq war, to be so difficult. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq was a clear violation of the UN Charter, and in that situation any Secretary-General, even one as polite as Ban Ki-Moon, will protest mightily.

December 04, 2006

Dissent at the Fogg

I finally got around to seeing the new exhibit at the Fogg Art Museum, provocatively title DISSENT! The exhibit lives up to its title, presenting a bombastic take on protest art throughout the ages. Works range from ancient woodcuts showing the “Pope as a wolf enticing sheep” to a picture of George W. Bush with the caption “blame Yale.”

I was struck by how activist Harvard appears in the exhibit, full of stenciled red fists raised in solidarity. This seems so different from Harvard I know, which frankly seems quite deferential to power (although some of this may simply be because I’ve been too busy to participate in the politics of my new institution). Perhaps the increased antiwar activity at Harvard in the late 1960s was simple because there was a draft that affected most college students, in a way that doesn’t exist today. It’s surely something more than that though, for there were a host of other movements active on campus: feminism, black power, civil rights, worker rights, etc. It seems to me that students in the past identified psychologically with each other and with oppressed groups. Students today here seem to, on the average, identify with the successful or powerful, and spend a great deal of time thinking of how to take their place.

The exhibit also reminded me that the line between political satire and political kitsch is a fine one, and is context-dependent. For me, works like Auguste Bouquet’s “The Pear and its Pips,” which depicts the king of France as a rotting fruit, are the height of satire. In contrast, the “Inflammatory Essays” of Jenny Holzer seems to be more about striking a revolutionary pose than any real cause. It brings to mind Milan Kundera’s famous definition of kitsch: a tear being shed for the beauty of shedding tears. But I suspect the line between satire and kitsch must change for every generation. The causes that won wrote the history books, and as a result their propaganda comes to be seen as brilliant satire. The Boston Massacre is a great example: the revolutionary press in New England made something damn near a riot into a principled martyrdom. The causes that lose, like communism, are destined to have their propaganda seem vaguely kitschy, self-serving, absurd.

October 28, 2006

Fall in Cambridge

It is raining today in Harvard Yard, a cold autumnal rain that washes the maple leaves off the trees. They swirl in the rainwater, shimmering orange cascades that flow along the gutters. At intersections in the drainage grates clog with leaves, masses upon masses of crushed biomass, and the pavement is puddle with shallow stagnant pools, too deep to jump across.

And for some reason Homer’s old saying came back to me: “the generations of men are as leaves.” What a ridiculously pompous Harvard kind of recollection! And yet how true that line seems today! It has been a full year since I last suffered through a New England winter, and yet it seems much less. I wrote a few good papers, earned a few gray hairs on my head, had a few memorable moments with my wife, that’s all. I am still a tender young life, and can look down on the fall’s leaves from on high. Yet around me on my little branch are hundreds of new buds, pubescent and just unfolding, and I am sure to them I seem like a true stout leaf. If the generations of men are as leaves, is the fall a tragedy or a miracle? Or perhaps the question is not a proper one, not answerable- the fall just is, come what may.

October 09, 2006

a Democratic Congress and land-use policy

I try in my scientific work to remain non-partisan. Still, when I take off that hat and put on my environmentalist’s hat, I find myself overjoyed at the prospect of a Democratic takeover of the House and, perhaps, the Senate. In recent years the Republican party has come to be resolutely anti-environmental, with a few exceptions like the Chafee’s of Rhode Island. It wasn’t always thus- as recently as the Nixon administration Republicans took the lead on environmental protection.

Here then are the legislative initiatives that a newly Democratic Congress could adopt, which would substantially advance the cause of “wise growth” of U.S. cities.

1. The next big highway bill to come out of Congress should build on ISTEA I and II by going beyond authorizing states to use transportation funds for mass transit, to mandating that a certain minimum level of transportation funds must be used for mass transit. This would free cities to use funds as they see fit, rather than the current situation where there is a maximum limit on funds used for public transit.
2. Disbursement of transportation funds should be contingent on each major metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) involved having a detailed land-use plan of their own creation. Furthermore, the plan must be legally binding on jurisdictions within the planning zone. MSAs of course have the right to reject such binding compacts- they will just in the process give up the privilege of receiving federal transportation money.
3. Instead of fighting (and often losing) periodic battles over raising CAFE standards, environmentalists should just set CAFE standards to rise a small fixed percentage a year. This has the added advantage of giving manufacturers certainty, rather than the current situation of uncertainty about when fleet standards will rise.
4. The federal government should help incorporate a fun for short-term, low-interest loans to conservation groups that meet the highest standards of fiscal solvency. Such short-term “bridge” financing already exists in several states and organizations, and frees conservation NGOs to act fast when conservation opportunities present themselves.
5. Whenever possible, revenue-neutral changes to the tax code should shift taxes relating to automobiles from general funds to funds being paid just by automobile users. For example, a rise in gas taxes could be used to finance a significant part of highway construction, with an equivalent amount of money being given as a tax credit to those with no car or those with fuel-efficient cars.
6. The federal government should play a role in crafting model enabling language that, if adopted by states, would make cities have the power to enact more flexible, “new urbanist” zoning laws. Currently in several states this legal authority is lacking. Of course, local jurisdiction have the right to keep their current system of zoning.

October 03, 2006

Sorrow and the mundane

Last week was a busy week for me. I was doing lots of highly technical tasks related to my research. It was a bit boring, but stuff that I believe is intellectually important. And I was in the thrill of the hunt, in the bubble, lost in my little technical details.

So it was a shock when I emerged from my bubble to find that Congress had really done it: they had officially given the president the power to imprison whomever he wants, for as long as he deems proper, before trying them in a military tribunal that has only minimal consideration for the rights of the defendant. There seems to be some disagreement about what exactly this means for citizens, but it’s clear that for millions of legal immigrants into the United States, the right to petition for the writ of habeas corpus is gone.

In my own little prosperous corner of the country, Harvard Square, the thousands of foreign scholars all chuckle nervously in their beers. “It’s not like it’ll affect us,” they say, “just a handful of terrorists, and maybe a few unlikely Arab men wrongly picked up.” Maybe. Maybe we’ll look back on this a few decades the way we look back on the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during WWII- an aberration that didn’t infect the rest of the body politic. But often- not always but often- a precedent like this spreads. I worry that in a few decades we will come to define all those that question the government’s tactics in the war on terrorism as enemy combatants. Once the logical line of habeas corpus is gone, the boundary between those within the rule and those beyond the pale grows fuzzy indeed.

And yet life in Harvard Square goes on. We keep racking our brains about research, keep being scholars. During lunch, we leave the computers behind and sit in the gorgeous fall sun. Somehow it seems wrong that something so symbolically charged could be lost, and yet the flow of things move on. There’s a human desire, as Shakespeare well understand, for big events to resound throughout: Caesar’s death was foretold by freak omens and lightening. Instead, all is quiet once you turn off CNN.

August 02, 2006

The US and French coverage of Lebanon

For what must be the 10th day in a row, images of the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon flash on the television, while the anchor drones on in French. I’ve been struck by how different the tone is in coverage in France than in the US. In France, journalists were very quick to refer to the conflict as a war, whereas in the US there was an odd tendency to avoid the word, so accurately parodied by John Stewart. More importantly, the framing of the whole subject is rather different between the two countries. In the US, Hezbollah’s kidnapping of Israeli soldiers is seen as the cause of the Israeli bombing. There’s a general lack of discussion of the historical context in which the kidnappings occurred. In contrast, in France the Israeli bombing is commonly portrayed as a disproportionate response to the Hezbollah kidnapping, as a form of collective punishment. Overall, there’s more discussion of the long history of conflict between the two groups.

There’s also an important difference in how each country portrays the role of America in this mess. In France, and especially among the Arab community here, the US is seen as the ultimate cause of the conflict. The logic is that since the US is principal funder (and arms dealer) of Israel, the US is responsible for what Israel does. To my American ears, this argument seems a bit overstated- some commentators even insinuated that the US ordered Israeli to attack, an assertion for which I have seen no evidence. In the US, in contrast, the media glosses over the massive US support for Israel, and I dare say that the majority of Americans don’t even know the basic history of the region. As Gore Vidal once said, the USA might more appropriately be called the “United States of Amnesia.”

June 22, 2006

How many goals are scored in a football match?

Today, in the spirit of summer and the World Cup, I thought I'd write about something that has nothing to do with ecology and sustainable development, my usual topics. I've been catching the occassional football match, and got into a debate with a friend about whether or not World Cup games were lower scoring than they were in previous years. I'm sure someone else has looked at this, but I thought it'd be fun to check out the facts myself.

So, there's a big difference between the first several decades of the World Cup and the modern World Cup. The average number of total goals scored (by either team) has declined:

1930 4.0
1934 4.1
1938 4.7
1950 4.0
1954 5.4
1958 3.6
1962 2.8
1966 2.8
1970 3.0
1974 2.6
1978 2.7
1982 2.9
1986 2.5
1990 2.2
1994 2.7
1998 2.7
2002 2.6

 The same trend is evident if one looks at the average difference in scores between teams, which was higher before 1954 and lower afterward (anyone know why this is?):

1930 2.6
1934 1.5
1938 2.1
1950 2.3
1954 3.0
1958 1.5
1962 1.5
1966 1.5
1970 1.5
1974 1.7
1978 1.5
1982 1.4
1986 1.4
1990 1.2
1994 1.2
1998 1.3
2002 1.4

While the average number of total goals scored doesn't change much since 1958, there does seem to be a trend in the distribution over time. Interestingly, the number of null-null matches has decreased over time, as has the number of mathces with 5 or more total goals scored.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE GRAPH

A similar change in distribution occurs for the average difference in match scores. The number of tie games increases over time, as do the number of matches decided by one match. In contrast, the number of matches decided by 2 or more goals sharply declines over time.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE GRAPH

 

June 01, 2006

Robert Kennedy, the election, and statistics

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. gives a nice presentation of all the unusual events that happened on Election Day 2004. His discussion of all the efforts undertaken to suppress the Democratic turnout in Ohio (misallocation of voting machines, making voter registration difficult, disqualification of provisional ballots, etc.) is well-written, and certainly makes the case for unethical (and possibly illegal) behavior on the part of Kenneth Blackwell. However, I wanted to clarify one issue for people. Kennedy writes at length about the difference between the exit polls (which showed Kerry winning) and the vote tally (which Bush won), and he repeatedly says things like “The statistical odds against such a variance are just shy of one in 3 billion”.

This is the probability of what statisticians call the null hypothesis. In this case, it is that “any difference in the proportion of votes for a candidate in the exit poll and the proportion of votes for a candidate in the precinct tally is due solely to the random nature of sampling voters as they exited the polls.” This hypothesis is vanishingly small, as has been known for more than a year, so it can be safely rejected. But this probability says NOTHING about the truth/validity of either of the following two alternative hypotheses being true:

1. The exit polls are biased, and did not accurately measure what voters did in the ballot box.

AND/OR

2. The votes cast in the ballot box were manipulated to give Bush a victory.

These hypotheses are not mutually exclusive, and it’s possible that in a few precincts there was vote fraud, while the exit polls were systematically wrong in many states due to bias in the methodology. What does not seem plausible to me, given the decentralized nature of the American voting system, is the implication that only hypothesis 2 is correct- there’s just no way that vote fraud could be conducted in dozens of states, involving hundreds of people, and have it remain quiet. Pollsters may not have figured out the source of the bias, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In any event, showing people huge numbers like “one in 3 billion” only serves to rhetorically confuse people into thinking that’s the odds of vote fraud having occurred. If I’d reviewed this paper for a scientific journal I would’ve edited all such sentences out, as they aren’t germane to the main rhetorical thrust of the piece.

May 27, 2006

Heckling as free speech

There’s been much flack recently from the press about John McCain’s chilly reception at the New School in Manhattan. Howard Kurtz compiles this assault, and generally supports it. It’s a common critique, one that was trotted out in the press here in Boston when Dr. Rice gave an address at Boston College: incivilities by students and faculty toward the speaker are an attack on free speech. While I can see a grain of truth in this argument, I’ve come to believe it’s fundamentally wrong.

Everyone’s stated ideal is for open, vigorous two-way dialogue on the campuses of academia. I happen to believe that this can happen even for politicians. I once saw Representative David Price bravely defend his stance on the Iraq War in front of an audience at UNC, who got to ask questions of him for an hour and a half. All too often, however, an open debate is the last thing on a politician’s mind. The goal is a clean, crisp photo-op, with an impressive backdrop that allows the politician to borrow from the prestige of the university. Questions are rarely allowed, and if they are they are prescreened to be safe and polite to the speaker. There should certainly be no boos or catcalls or signs that might distract from the preordained message of the event. It’s important to recognize that this photo-op bears no resemblance to an open, two-way dialogue. Its purpose is in fact the exact opposite.

There’s something a bit thin-skinned about the American dislike of heckling. It’s in sharp contrast with the British system that allows for more open hostility during public discussion. Tony Blair faces more heckling in one of his weekly sessions in front of Parliament than Bush has faced in his entire presidency. I sometimes fanaticize about watching Bush wither in front of weekly pointed questions from Congress…

Something deeper is going on that causes these incivilities than mere impoliteness. They are a calculated way to puncture the media bubble that increasingly surrounds every single event of every politician. If a student body deeply resents being used as a backdrop for a photo-op, then why in the world shouldn’t they make that know by moderate incivilities? After all, McCain will still have plenty of chances to exercise his free speech rights- what’s wrong with the students squeezing in a bit of their message while they fleetingly have a chance. As a media strategy, this detournement works: we can be quite sure that Mr. Kurtz wouldn’t have discussed how the students felt about McCain’s speech if they hadn’t acted out. In a way, by being so deferential to authority the media has created the need for incivility, to puncture the media bubble.

There’s also a historical irony here, for many of those who critiqued the actions of the New School were, I suspect, supporters of moderate incivilities toward those who perpetuated the Vietnam War. I would bet, although I’m not certain, that Mr. Kurtz is in this category. I’m sure incivility to the establishment is more threatening when you’re part of it. Interestingly, Mr. Kurtz didn’t raise free speech issues when people heckled the leaders of China, or those who opposed Israeli policy in the occupied territories. The clear message to the universities is: be a useful backdrop, and stop asserting  your opinions so much.

May 15, 2006

Saving constitutionalism from Bush

News broke this week of the National Security Agency’s seizure of essentially every Americans’ calling history that they could get their hands on. I feel shocked and saddened, but not particularly surprised, given the track records of the principles involved. Interestingly, the press coverage has focused on the scope of the program (some have defended that they aren’t listening to the content of the conversations) or its effectiveness (statistically, a database of all Americans’ phone call seems likely to generate so many false positives as to be useless for law enforcement). To me, this focus seems to miss the point. The Administration has clearly intentionally violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the FISA law. It has clearly intentionally violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the 4th Amendment. What is dangerous about the Bush Administration then is not this or that action and whether it is effective, but their direct assault on the principle of constitutionalism. I mean this in the broad sense, where constitutionalism is simply the limitation of government by a set of publicly-defined, transparent laws. The reason every English-speaking schoolchild studies the Magna Carta is that it was one of the first documents of constitutionalism; the actual specifics of the rules in the Magna Carta are quite unimportant to modern men.

Whatever your political party, you have to admit that constitutionalism is central to what made the United States the great democracy that it is: we are a country of laws, not of men. What does it mean then, that some of our men of letters argue that it doesn’t matter that the president knowingly and willingly violated the law, because it was effective? When any columnist or reporter makes this argument, they are becoming, in the terminology of Milan Kundera, “the ally of their own gravediggers.” If there is no constitutionalism, if there are no rules within which democracy functions, then there are no political writers, only polemicists. Honest political writing is an effort to influence public opinion so as to democratically shape policy. If there no laws for the powerful, then writers become little more than Mark Anthony to a Caesar: skilled orators, perhaps, but not free men.

April 27, 2006

Oil: What can't go on forever, won't

There has been much buzz in the media this past week about the relatively sharp spike in oil prices. I’ve been frustrated by how the majority of coverage has focused on the (very real) possibility of oil company manipulation, as if we’re searching for a convenient villain in the process. The Bush Administration’s policy response to the price spike has been storyline #2, even though truthfully there’s little a president can do to affect oil prices over the short-term. Sadly, there’s been little coverage of how U.S. oil prices compare to the other G7 counties (they are much lower), except for a brief fact check I saw on CNN International (and even that focused on other countries’ high taxes, without explaining the good policy reasons for them). Even worse, there’s been no coverage of the likely long-term trend in oil prices over the next decade or two. Global supply will remain relatively constant, or at best slightly increase; this is not because of technological limitations like a lack of refinery capacity, but simply because there’s a finite supply of the stuff and what’s left is harder to extract. Global demand, on the other hand, will continue to grow rapidly, as nations like China and India industrialize.

The clear implication is that oil prices will continue to rise over the long-term. In this context, the current U.S. government policy of seeking to maintain steady, low prices seems quixotic. It would be far more honest if the U.S. committed itself to expecting steady 5% annual increases in oil prices. The U.S. economy could absorb that sort of gradual annual increase in prices, as we all slowly adapted, whereas a rapid huge price spike could be very damaging.

Yet the press mentions none of these weighty issues. This seems to be a general problem: the media focus on particulars, not on the underlying trend. Global warming is another great example. There is much discussion of whether this or that hurricane was caused by global warming, an attribution that’s almost scientifically impossible to make. In contrast, the long-term, gradual trends (e.g., glacial melt and sea level rise) that keeps us scientists literally up at night, get little press (Andy Revkin being a notable exception).

Maybe this is just human psychology. We focus on what is nearby in space and time, and forget what is distant. It may also be the failure of environmental scientists like myself to find a good, compelling narrative. It’s just challenging with such a grand process: we’re recreating Noah’s flood by burning fossilized sunlight! Perhaps the best summary was what was once said by Herbert Stein, a conservative economist who served under Nixon and Ford: “What can’t go on forever, won’t.”

April 24, 2006

Exile on Beacon Street

There’s an odd thing about being around Harvard, particularly places like the Kennedy School of Government: All sorts of rather well known and experienced people are constantly hanging around. There are half a dozen lecturers around campus who are just passing time, now that their jobs in the Clinton Administration have ended. They teach occasionally, but seem to spend more time writing pithy books. A parade of seminar speakers like James Carville comes through, earning their speaking fee. In a sense, even our university president, Larry Summers, is a Clinton-era exile now just biding his time.

This palpable sense of exile expresses itself differently in different people. For some, it’s just a temporary state, which will end with a new De