Today, Try to Be a Little Less Positive, Will You?

Our Nancy Cook talks to Barbara Ehrenreich about how thinking positive has ruined us all:

So, what’s wrong with being happy at work? 
Ehrenreich: Well, it’s wonderful to be happy. Optimism sometimes is justified, but what has happened in the American business culture has been some kind of staggering retreat from reality. I always assumed that corporate culture was rational because of my background in science and in journalism, but what I began to understand in the 1980s, 1990s, and throughout this decade was that the business culture had become unmoored. The idea of being the CEO went from being someone who had mastered the business to being someone who was a charismatic figure. Some business writers started to talk about the corporation more like a cult.

I remember reading one of these crazy books on attraction—about how you can get what you want by wishing it. One of blurbs on the back was written by a guy who worked for the company that held my retirement funds. That scared me. It’s clear that the build-up to the financial meltdown involved real denial and people acting on the idea that it’s bad to have negative people around.

How has this emphasis on positive thinking changed workers’ daily lives?
It means artificial smiling and artificial cheer. It’s a strain on people emotionally; the effort of managing the appearance of one’s emotions is work. It means not asking the hard questions you think about asking. When people have been criticized for being negative at work, very often what that means is that they asked too many questions. I always thought asking questions was a good thing.

meaghano:

Rick Moody is twittering a short story on Electric Literature’s twitter. It is kind of awesome.

We are reminded of the days when the Website Word would publish stories in which each word was on a separate html page. In both cases, we think this is interesting, and intensely annoying.

wearethedigitalkids:

hostelcolonial:

punkyj:

El Ateneo. Bueno Aires, Argentina.

This is a world famous theater built in 1919 which housed many operas and tango dance performances and has now been converted into a bookstore. Gorgeous.

When they film that Borges story, they will film it here.

The Palin problem, then, might be that she cynically incites a crowd that she has no real intention of pleasing. If she were ever to get herself to the nation’s capital, the teabaggers would be just as much on the outside as they are now, and would simply have been the instruments that helped get her elected. In my own not-all-that-humble opinion, duping the hicks is a degree or two worse than condescending to them. It’s also much more dangerous, because it meanwhile involves giving a sort of respectability to ideas that were discredited when William Jennings Bryan was last on the stump. The Weekly Standard (itself not exactly a prairie-based publication) might want to think twice before flirting with popular delusions and resentments that are as impossible to satisfy as the demand for a silver standard or a ban on the teaching of Darwin, and are for that very reason hard to tamp down. Many of Palin’s admirers seem to expect that, on receipt of the Republican Party nomination, she would immediately embark on a crusade against Wall Street and the banks. This notion is stupid to much the same degree that it is irresponsible.

Hitchens, on Mrs. Palin.

Given their emphasis on cold, hard numbers, it’s noteworthy that Levitt and Dubner ignore what are, by now, whole libraries’ worth of data on global warming. Indeed, just about everything they have to say on the topic is, factually speaking, wrong. Among the many matters they misrepresent are: the significance of carbon emissions as a climate-forcing agent, the mechanics of climate modelling, the temperature record of the past decade, and the climate history of the past several hundred thousand years.

From Elizabeth Kolbert’s masterful New Yorker takedown of the SuperFreakonomics proposal to combat climate change by building a big hose.

This is Why You Were Bored as a Teenager

From NurtureShock:

In his new book, Dr. Joe Allen has concluded that our urge to protect teenagers from real life – because we don’t think they’re ready yet – has tragically backfired. By insulating them from adult-like work, adult social relationships, and adult consequences, we have only delayed their development. We have made it harder for them to grow up. Maybe even made it impossible to grow up on time.

Basically, we long ago decided that teens ought to be in school, not in the labor force. Education was their future. But the structure of schools is endlessly repetitive. “From a Martian’s perspective, high schools look virtually the same as sixth grade,” said Allen. “There’s no recognition, in the structure of school, that these are very different people with different capabilities.” Strapped to desks for 13+ years, school becomes both incredibly montonous, artificial, and cookie-cutter.

On a spring day last year, three months after the death of my younger son, Max, I opened my front door and saw a butterfly resting on the steps—an Eastern tiger swallowtail, I later determined, a species native to the Northeast but not one I remembered seeing before in the middle of Brooklyn. The date stuck in my mind because, as it happens, it was also my birthday. The butterfly, with its otherworldly beauty and silence, is, of course, a common metaphor for the soul. Its emergence from entombment as a chrysalis may have inspired ideas about human resurrection. In the newsletter of the Compassionate Friends, a support group for bereaved parents, the sudden appearance of butterflies (and birds, cloud formations, and particular songs on the radio) is sometimes cited as evidence of communication from beyond the grave. So let me be clear about where I stand: not only do I not believe it, but I can’t understand why anyone would take comfort from it. I would hate to think of Max, with his fierce intelligence and tenacity, reduced to sending mute signals by way of insects.

I was put in mind of this by reading a new book by Dinesh D’Souza, provocatively titled ‘Life After Death: The Evidence,’ and I can’t help wondering what D’Souza, a well-known conservative political commentator starting a second career as a Christian apologist, would make of my experience. To be consistent, he would have to say nothing at all: it is what scientists call anecdotal evidence, useless by definition, and D’Souza’s book attempts to build a case on unshakable scientific grounds for the survival of consciousness beyond death.

Jerry Adler, who is exactly the person you want to review the D’Souza book.

Since long before Plutarch, the story of a life has been our most durable and most enduringly popular literary form—it was Johnson’s favorite reading. In our time alone it has multiplied into a dizzying number of forms—authorized, unauthorized, oral biography and autobiography, the group biography, the biographical novel, not to mention the online biography. What is Facebook, or most blogs, but a slew of autobiographies constantly in progress? But the most extraordinary thing about modern biography is how much, at its best, it still resembles the Boswellian model. In writing the life of Johnson—and following his subject’s dictates on how to do it—Boswell did not only give us a great biography. He gave us the formula: painstaking research, strong narrative, and in-depth, unflinching portraiture. Were either man to come back to life, he would have no trouble recognizing what he helped create.

What might shock both men, however, are the ends to which their techniques have been directed. Boswell was blushingly frank in his journals, and Johnson was blunt in his judgments, but both men were circumspect, a word not often associated with biographies today, when the history of biography can be said to parallel, where it does not overlap, the history of the erosion of private life. There’s no denying the proliferation of what Joyce Carol Oates defined as “pathography”—works in which a biographer fastens on to every loathsome detail of a subject’s life, with the result that the subject is not cut down to size but simply cut down. (But is that so new? A century ago Oscar Wilde observed, “Every great man has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.”)

This, from Malcolm Jones, is a great read

andrewromano:

“Nina and Simone, Piazza di Spagna, Rome,” William Klein (1962).

In 1956, a 28–year old William Klein arrived in Rome to assist Federico Fellini on his film Nights of Cabiria (1957). When the start of filming was delayed, Klein spent his time strolling about the city with Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, and other avant-garde Italian writers and artists serving as his guides.

The resulting book, Rome, is out in a new edition next month from Aperture.

The artist credited with almost singlehandedly launching the underground-comics scene in ’60s San Francisco, the cartoonist who gave us the X-rated adventures of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, a professed atheist, a man who fantasizes about getting piggyback rides from big-legged women (and then draws and publishes these fantasies), and, last but surely most horrifying to the people whose nightmares R. Crumb haunts, an American who emigrates to France and likes it—this is the man a publisher has entrusted with the task of illustrating the first book of the Bible.

Unlikely as it might seem, this was trust well repaid. Without a trace of irony, and certainly no mockery, Crumb delivers a literal—one might even say traditional—rendition of the events in the Judeo-Christian account of Creation and its aftermath. Frame by frame, comic-book fashion, The Book of Genesis shows a white-bearded, patriarchal God creating the heavens and the earth and all that walk upon it. We see Adam and Eve exiled from the Garden of Eden. We observe the first murder, as Cain kills his brother, and then Noah and the Flood, the travails of Abraham—every verse of every chapter carefully rendered, right through to the story of Joseph and the Israelite migration to Egypt.

—Malcolm Jones makes us want to read the Bible all over again.