Weakly Standards

March 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

File this under “Things that people at the Weekly Standard are delighted about.” It’s from last Sunday’s Weekend Edition with Lynn Neary on (dare I say it?) NPR.

NEARY: And your son did in fact get into a school that he was happy about.

Mr. FERGUSON: Yes, absolutely. Our first meeting with his college counselor at high school involved him telling the counselor what kind of school he wanted, and my son being my son said, look, I want to go to a school where I can go to a football game, take off my shirt, paint my chest in the school colors and major in beer. And you should have seen the look on that college - this was the guy who was going to write him his recommendation. I was just delighted that my son was like that.

But as it turns out, that’s where he went. He hasn’t painted his chest yet, but pretty close I think. And he's definitely majoring in beer.

(Soundbite of laughter)

NEARY: Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard. His new book is Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College.

Assimilation and Rejection

March 11, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

On July 31, 1997, a six-man Emergency Services Unit (ESU) [of the NYPD] raided the apartment of two Middle Eastern terrorists who were in possession of bombs that they planned to detonate in the New York subway that morning.

So begins Seven Shots, An NYPD Raid on a Terrorist Cell and its Aftermath by my colleague Jennifer Hunt and recently published by U. of Chicago Press.

The police had been tipped off by a Pakistani immigrant, Mohammed Chindluri. Had he not said anything, it’s very likely that scores of New Yorkers, hundreds perhaps, would have been killed during the morning rush hour.

Why did Chindluri inform on the men who had been his roommates? It seems only natural. You know that someone is planning to bomb a subway station, you go to the police.

That was in 1997. But here is what I worry about now. I imagine a Mohammed Chindluri today. He has seen and heard the demonstrations in New York saying that his religion does not have a right to construct a house of worship on Park Place in lower Manhattan. He has heard that a New York congressman is holding hearings to show how Muslims are a terrorist threat to the US. Will this Mohammed Chindluri feel the same human impulse to save Americans whose lives are in danger? Or might he think, “They have drawn a line and put me on the other side; I owe them nothing”?

I wish I knew of some good research on what happens to people who find themselves vilified because they share some characteristic (ethnicity, religion) with a few people who are a real danger. My concern is not just academic. The people who are stirring up the fear and hatred against Muslims may be making themselves feel virtuous (patriots defending their country), but they may also be raising the actual risk of terrorism. But those unintended consequences will not be borne by the demonstrators. Most of the people riding the Muslims-are-terrorists bandwagon don’t take the subway. They live in places that are unlikely to be targets. No, the risks will be borne by those of us who live in cities and use public transportation. Thanks, guys.

Of course, Rep. King’s hearings could persuade American Muslims to be even more vigilant and to root out and inform on all possible terrorist recruits. But maybe not.

Suppose that Rep. King held hearings on other groups who rank far above Muslims on the FBI’s list of terrorist threats: militia/patriot groups, freemen/sovereign citizen, extreme anti-tax, and extreme anti-immigrant. How about Christian Identity?

Congress to Hold Hearings on Terrorist Threat Posed by Christian Identity

How would Christians react, especially those who knew people in the movement and perhaps even had some sympathy for some of their ideas? Would they assimilate to mainstream views, turning on (and turning in) their Christian Identity friends? Or might they reject the accusers? Might they even have a new respect for their movement acquaintances (“Maybe that stuff about the government being out to get us wasn't so nutty after all”)?

UPDATE: 9 a.m.: The Democracy in America blog at The Economist made a similar point yesterday about right-wing parties here and in the Netherlands. (I think the blogger is Will Wilkinson, but I can’t find a by-line on the page.) Calling Tea Partiers racists or comparing the Dutch PVV to Nazis (a comparison that Wilkinson (?) says is “not a wholly absurd rhetorical exercise”) serves only to rally the troops. Solidarity thrives on perceived injustice.

Musical Clusters

March 9, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston


I took the Jeopardy test two weekends ago. They were giving it during the New York Times Travel Expo at the Javits Center. This was one of the questions, and definitely not my category. I guessed Jay-Z. Go ahead, laugh.

That guess, as I later discovered, was off. But I didn’t realize how far off. Now I know.

(Click on the image for a larger, legible view.)

You are looking at a section of a map of clustering created by Emden Gansner, Yifan Hu, Stephen Kobourov, and Chris Volinsky of AT&T Labs. It’s based on data from last.fm, a website that allows you to create, in effect, your own radio station, one that plays only the music you like. The clustering and connecting lines are based on the data set of listener preferences (the equivalent of Amazon’s “people who liked X also liked Y”). Jay-Z clusters near Kanye and OutKast, with links to several other rappers as well. No surprises there. But Eminem is something of a loner, down near the Jazzland border, divorced not just from Kim but from everyone except D12.

The entire map looks like this.


That gray archiplelago in the southeast corner is Classical (mostly composers rather than performers). The island in the Northeast is international, mostly Reggae. Neither has a link to the mainland.

Last July, I posted graphic of music performers arrayed on the London Underground map (here). That one was fun but idiosyncratic. This one is based on data. Some of the results are curious – Eminem’s isolation, or Solange apparently a more nodal figure than Beyoncé.

The full map is here. It’s a pdf, and you can search for a musician the way you would search for text in a document. You can also expand the map without losing resolution. But be warned, you can spend a lot more time there than you might have intended.

Scandal for School

March 8, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Two headlines about candidate Jim Doyle:

• Doyle Calls for City to “Get Tough on Illegal Immigration”
• Doyle Admits to Extra-Marital Affair with One Time Aide

Which story are you going to read first? And which one are you likely to remember?

If you do want to read them, they are here. But you should know first that Jim Doyle is a fictional candidate, created by Beth Miller for an experimental study. The control group read five news stories on Jim’s policy positions. For the experimentals, Miller ditched a homeland security story and switched in a story about the affair (the story omitted any mention of positions that might have been involved).


John Sides summarized the results over at The Monkey Cage.

Unsurprisingly, subjects who read about the affair were more likely to remember the story -- 47% did so, compared to 32% of those who read the fourth policy-related story.

Perhaps more surprisingly, subjects who read about the affair were, at the end of the experiment, better able to recall what issues the candidate talked about and what positions the candidate took on these issues.

I wasn’t surprised. And I don’t think that what really matters is the scandal. Instead, what’s important about the scandal story is that it humanizes Jim Doyle. It makes him a real person rather than a purveyor of policies. And for some reason, we assimilate ideas more easily when they come from people. (I wish Miller had included a third condition – with Story #4 as something humanizing but not scandalous.)

I wasn’t surprised because in teaching, it has long seemed to me that students were better able to understand a book or article once I could convince them that it was written by a real human being, a person. As I blogged two years ago, my students seem to think that all readings assigned in college are written by some anonymous consortium created for the sole purpose of making their lives difficult. In the students’ minds, the author of all these readings is They.

Here’s how I put it in that post (apologies for recycling my garbage here, but I do like this anecdote).

I was teaching criminology, using the textbook I myself had written. It was listed on the syllabus that way, and the book had my name on the cover. Several weeks into the semester, a student had a question about some point I was making in class or some data I was presenting. I don’t remember the topic or the issue. All I remember is that the student said, “But didn’t they say . . .” and she went on to offer some bit of information.

“They?” I asked, “What they?”

“In the book. Didn’t they say that . . . .” she started to repeat her question.

“They is me,” I said. “I wrote that book.”

She seemed genuinely stunned, and I sensed that many in the class shared her confusion. The book was a school textbook; therefore it must have been written by the same “They” that churned out all textbooks. Yet here was someone they knew, a very ordinary person they saw two or three days a week, claiming to have written the book, and the evidence on the cover seemed to support his claim.

Once students see that these readings are not handed down like sacred texts from a distant oracle, they can more easily engage themselves with the ideas. If I were teaching theory, I would try to knock the big guys off their pedestals – Weber, Marx, Durkheim, and the others. If it takes scandal to do it, fine. But I would use any stories that make them fallible human beings