Rereading James Baldwin

May 1, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

My son’s high school English teacher assigned James Baldwin’s Another Country. I had read this novel long ago but could remember absolutely nothing about it. Of course, that didn’t stop me from saying authoritatively that as a novelist Baldwin was second-tier at best and that his greater contribution to literature was an an essayist.

The teacher should have assigned Nobody Knows My Name, I told my son, who didn’t seem to be much interested in my literary opinions. Still, for my own satisfaction, I went back to that book, and in the first essay I found this bit of sociology: Baldwin has returned from several years living in Europe, mostly in Paris; in comparing the US and Europe, he discovers

a rather serious paradox: though American society is more mobile than Europe’s it is easier to cut across social and occupational lines there than it is here. This has something to do, I think, with the problem of status in American life. Where everyone has status it is also perfectly possible that no one has. It seems inevitable, in any case, that a man may become uneasy as to just what his status is.

But Europeans have lived with the idea of status for a long time. A man can be as proud of being a good waiter as being a good actor, and, in neither case, feel threatened.

Baldwin wrote that in about 1960. I think deTocqueville said something similar 125 years earlier. Plus ça change.
Baldwin is particularly concerned for the way that the fluidity and uncertainty of American society affects the novelist.

The charge has often been made against American writers that they do not describe society, and have no interest in it. They only describe individuals in opposition to it, or isolated from it. . . . But what is Anna Karenina describing if not the tragic fate of the isolated individual, at odds with her time and place?

The real difference is that Tolstoy was describing an old and dense society in which everything seemed . . . to be fixed forever. And the book is a masterpiece because Tolstoy was able to fathom, and to make us see, the hidden laws which really governed this society and made Anna’s doom inevitable.

What Baldwin says about writers might just as easily apply to sociologists, both as researchers and especially as teachers of undergraduates. In fact, where Baldwin uses the word writer, meaning novelist, we might equally substitute sociologist.

American writers do not have a fixed society to describe. The only society they know is one in which nothing is fixed and in which the individual must fight for his identity. . .
The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.

Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. It is up to the American writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are.

Baldwin is best known as a black writer and for his writings on race, which are worth rereading. He was also a homosexual. He was born in 1924 and came of age in America of the 1940s and 50s, when being black and gay were even heavier burdens than they are today. Being an outsider, doubly so, does not guarantee that you’ll be a great novelist, but it does make you aware of the “laws and assumptions” that others take for granted and often do not notice

AKD - The Sociology Honors Society

April 28, 2007
posted by Jay Livingston

As ceremonies go, it’s not a big deal. Every year, some of our best students choose to join Alpha Kappa Delta, the sociology honor society, and we have an official induction. We announce the student’s name, and he or she comes up and receives a rolled-up sheet of paper tied with a red ribbon (the real certificate comes in the mail). This year, twenty students elected to join, the most we’ve ever had at Montclair.

Unfortunately, our photographer was not very skillful, nor did he “work the room” properly and get photos of all the students. (He claims that he was busy reading names, handing out pseudo-certificates, and being chair of the department, but that’s a pretty lame excuse.)








The speaker for the evening was Bill DeFazio of St. John’s University. Bill’s an ethnographer. Ethnographers do what the research methods textbooks call participant observation. That means they hang around. Bill has hung around with longshoremen, with juvenile delinquents in Brooklyn (white, criminal, violent), and with theoretical biologists. They biologist project was the hardest, he says, much harder than hanging around with the delinquents.

Most recently, he spent years at the St. John's Bread and Life soup kitchen in Bed-Stuy, and the result is his latest book Ordinary Poverty: A Little Food and Cold Storage. That subtitle— those are the words of a young homeless man describing the life he now lives.
I wish I could convey the sense of compassion and commitment of hope and despair that Bill conveys when he talks about the poor people in all their variety who came to the soup kitchen and about Sister Bernadette, who ran it. There’s nothing romantic about poverty, theirs or anybody else’s.

Forty-year-old male of the middle class, with twenty years of experience as a warehouse manager, hasn't worked in a year. “You should see the people that I have to compete with. I'm waiting for a job interview in a moving company. A beautiful operation. They liked me but they said they didn't want to train me. It's not because I'm obese, at least not this time. It’s a computerized operation, and I would have to be trained on the computer. But, I’m sitting waiting for the interview. The other guy waiting to be interviewed is an MBA, also my age, knows how to use the computer but was laid off from Wall Street and a $80,000 a year job. He's competing with me. I told him I just applied for a warehouse job at Bush Terminal. He asks me for the information and if I mind that he’ll apply for the job, too. I have all on-the-job experience but only a two-year college degree. How can I compete for warehouse jobs with MBAs?”

Poverty, Bill kept reminding us, is ordinary. In the United States of America, the richest country in the world (as Bill also kept reminding us), there are at least 37.5 million people living in poverty. That’s the official count, the real number is much higher. What is so surprising and disappointing is how badly our government and society treat them.

Acceptable Risks — a rant

April 25, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

1. Apparently it’s not easy to think like a social scientist. Most people prefer to think in terms of individuals and absolute certainties. But social science doesn’t deal in certainties, at least not about individuals. We think in terms of probabilities or risks. For example, we don’t know precisely which smokers will get lung cancer and which will not; we know only that lung cancer rates will be higher among smokers than among non-smokers. That is, smoking raises the risk.

If you smoke, you are saying in effect that lung cancer is an “acceptable risk.”

Many of the stories in the press after the Virginia Tech shootings were about what the school might have done after the first killings to prevent the ones that occurred later. Many others were about “the mind of the killer.” Behind these stories lay the assumption, the wish really, that somehow it was possible to have predicted what Cho would do, and therefore the killings could have been prevented. The trouble is that such prediction is impossible. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people walking around with minds very similar to Cho’s, but who will never kill anyone.

But we could have reduced the probability that such a person could kill on such a large scale. If automatic handguns hadn’t been so easy to get, we would have greatly reduced the risk. Not eliminated it—a determined killer would find a way— but reduced it.

By allowing such easy access to weapons, we are saying that the Virginia Tech killings were an “acceptable risk.”

We cannot predict campus or workplace will be hit; we cannot predict which crazed person will be the shooter. But we can no longer dismiss such a shooting as a one-of-a-kind event — not after Columbine and the many other school shootings, not after the many cases of an employee “going postal.” (Only a few days after Virginia Tech, a NASA worker, upset over a performance evaluation, killed a supervisor and then himself.)

Legislators have been proposing stricter handgun laws for nearly a half century now. But congressional majorities have either voted these down or diluted to then insignificance. If they had been passed, we cannot say that there would be no mass shootings. But we can say that there would have been far fewer of them.

2. A week after the Virginia Tech shootings, the New York Times ran an article on infant mortality in Mississippi. In order not to raise taxes, the governor, Haley Barbour, cut state spending on Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). “Locations and hours for enrollment changed, and documentation requirements became more stringent. As a result, the number of non-elderly people, mainly children, covered by the Medicaid and CHIP programs declined by 54,000 in the 2005 and 2006 fiscal years.”

The infant mortality rate in Mississippi rose from 14 per 1,000 births to 17 per 1,000. It’s possible that Gov. Barbour didn’t know what effect his policy would have, but he knows now. If he continues this policy, he is saying in effect that those additional 481 dead infants are an “acceptable risk.”

Gov. Barbour is strongly “pro-life.” But don’t bet on him restoring the cuts to Medicaid and CHIP.

The Times also cites a private church-run program in one county where the population is poor, rural, and largely black. Yet the infant mortality rate is only 5 per 1,000, and it has remained that low for the past 15 years. If similar programs were instituted state-wide, it would save the lives of 1,600 infants per year.

If a parent starves an infant and deprives it of medical care, and the child dies, that’s a crime, probably some level of manslaughter. If a governor and legislature deprive thousands of children of food and medical care, and several hundred of them die, that’s just good tax policy.

The New York Walk

April 22, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The weather was perfect Saturday for the informal and unofficial semi-annual Sociology Department New York Walk. And walk we did. We started at Port Authority.



The new murals in the subway station there deserve a better picture than the little thumbnails here.



When you get out on the street in New York, you miss a lot if you look only at eye level. A lot of the interesting things to be seen are up above — the ornamention at the top floors of the buildings, the gargoyles, the windows.

Of course, at street level too you can run into interesting things. Here are two of our walkers, Priscilla and Miriam, with a guy they seemed to recognize and who was kind enough to pose for a picture.
(Full disclosure: Samuel L. was not really there. Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum on Forty-second St. has this likeness outside.)

The great economist and game theorist Thomas Schelling once gave a roomful of law students in New York the following problem: You have to meet a stranger in New York City today, and you have no way of getting in touch with him. The trouble is that you don’t know the time or the place. All you know is that he wants to meet with you, and you want to meet with him. Where and when do you go? Students weren’t allowed to consult with one another, yet most of them wrote the same answer:

The information booth under the clock and Grand Central Station at noon. (As you can see, we were a bit late, and whoever the stranger was, apparently he didn’t wait around for us.) Schelling was interested generally in how one person’s decisions affect those of other people and how those decisions in turn affect yet others. The where-to-meet problem is about the coordination of behavior, and the lesson Schelling offered is that some places are more important than others as “focal point[s] for each person’s expectation of what the other expects him to expect to be expected to do.”

What he should have added was that even if the other guy doesn't show up, you can have a great time just wandering around in this grand piece of architecture.


We took the subway down to the Lower East Side and had lunch at a hole-in-the-wall Thai place. Here are George, Joanne, and Tanya standing just outside.

We've been doing the New York Walk for decades now, and for us old timers, it's about change — the Disneyfication of Forty-second Street, the rehabilitation of Grand Central, the gentrification of just about everywhere. Those changes are invisible to city-walkers who are seeing these places for the first time. But sometimes you can see the neighborhood in transition. In the 1970s, when we first started doing this walk, The Lower East Side looked and felt much like it must have fifty or sixty years earlier — the stores with cheap clothes displayed outside. The stores were still owned by Jews, though the many of the customers and sales people were Hispanic. You can still see some of that. But now much of the sidewalk space seems to be take up by cafes like this one.

You can't read the street sign, but this is at the corner of Orchard and Stanton. Orchard Street, a name once synonymous with tenements and pushcarts. And now you can get a burger here blackened with Cajun mayonnaise or with chipotle pepper and avocado. Oy.

That’s why I particularly liked this fabric store that has probably been around for most of a century. It's squeezed into a narrow space on Stanton Street and doesn’t look like much. Inside, the store goes back forever, with bolts of fabric in every color and texture you can imagine randomly lining the wall. I mean it looked random to me. But I’m sure that if I'd asked this man in charge for some particular item, he could have taken me directly to it in two seconds.
But stores like this one are glimpses of a fast-fading history, and they are quickly giving way to boutiques (two of our walkers, Tanya and Joanne, were particularly taken with a black cotton top that was only $275), cafes, pricier restaurants, cell-phone stores, and real estate offices.

And now, as I think about Thomas Schelling, I realize that my decisions are part of the reason for the change. I'd never buy fabric; I don’t sew my own clothes, and neither does anyone else I know. Sewing machines are all computerized now, and a good one costs thousands of dollars. When I look at the labels in the clothes I buy, they all say made in places on the other side of the globe.

Has Anybody Here Seen a Kelly

April 20, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Social context influences how we judge and respond to a piece of art (or anything else for that matter). That was the message of the previous post in this blog. It was based on a Washington Post article, “Pearls Before Breakfast,” about virtuoso Joshua Bell busking in the DC metro. Everybody who was in on the stunt thought that people would recognize Bell or that at the very least, some people would recognize the quality of the performance. In fact, almost nobody stopped to listen, and many commuters, when interviewed later, didn’t even recall that there was a violinist in the station that morning.

But one person wasn’t surprised and did realize the importance of context—Mark Leithauser, curator at the National Gallery of Art.

Let’s say I took one of our more abstract masterpieces, say an Ellsworth Kelly, and removed it from its frame, marched it down the 52 steps that people walk up to get to the National Gallery, past the giant columns, and brought it into a restaurant. It’s a $5 million painting. And it's one of those restaurants where there are pieces of original art for sale, by some industrious kids from the Corcoran School, and I hang that Kelly on the wall with a price tag of $150. No one is going to notice it. An art curator might look up and say: “Hey, that looks a little like an Ellsworth Kelly. Please pass the salt.”

One reason for the art curator’s wisdom might be that in his field, the connection between artistic value and monetary value is so tenuous. And he knows it. Monetary value is based on what collectors are willing to pay. They’ll pay $5 million because that canvas is a genuine Kelly. The same canvas painted by a nobody would be bring only $150.

Of course, if someone decided to hang the nobody’s canvas in a major museum or an upscale gallery, its price would skyrocket. Location, location, location.

It’s not about the art, it’s about economics. And in this case, as in Father Guido Sarducci’s Five Minute University, all you need to know about economics is “supply ana demand.” Here’s a Kelly print.


It costs $8,000 signed. Unsigned, it might go for less than $1,000. It’s from a limited edition, the supply is limited to 45. If Kelly had printed and signed several hundred, it would still be the same piece of art and have the same artistic value. But it’s price would be less.

(Maybe you think you yourself could produce these works with a $1.89 roll of masking tape and three cans of paint. But that just shows what a Philistines you are.)

People who work in the art world probably take it for granted that judgments and evaluations will be influenced by extrinsics — rarity, authorship, a signature, and location— rather than the intrinsic qualities of the painting. It’s a lesson the rest of us, social scientists included, are continually learning.

Contributions and Attributions

April 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Social context is everything.

OK, maybe not everything, but it counts for much more than we usually realize. Listen to a comedian tell a joke. If it’s in the middle of a good set and the audience has been laughing, the chances are you’ll laugh. And if someone asked you why you laughed, you’d probably say it was because the joke was funny. Let the same comedian tell the same joke in exactly the same way in a dead room, and it won’t seem nearly as funny, maybe not funny at all. That’s why nearly all TV sitcoms include an audience laugh track. (In the old days, they didn’t bother with an audience but merely dubbed in “canned laughter.”)

Read a quotation about politics and rebellion. If you’re told that the author is Thomas Jefferson, you’ll be more likely to approve of the quote and see its essential wisdom. If you’re told that the quote is from Lenin, you might reject it. If asked why, as with the joke, you’d attribute your reaction to the content of the quote, not the context.

Listen to a Bach composition for unaccompanied violin. If you’ve paid $50 or more for your seat and the soloist is someone like the virtuoso Joshua Bell, you might give him a standing ovation and demand encores. But if you hear the same piece played by some guy in the subway station, his violin case on the ground open for contributions, you might toss in some coins to encourage him as you hurry off to work. You might think, “This guy’s not bad, but he’s no Joshua Bell” . . . even if it is Joshua Bell.

Which is who it was — at least that’s who it was if you were going through the L’Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington, DC one Friday morning last January around eight o’clock. And he was fiddling on a 1713 Stradivarius. (Just in case you didn’t know, that was the golden era for Strads, and Bell’s is worth more than $3 million.)

The experiment (or stunt) was hatched by the Washington Post, and reporter Gene Weingarten published an excellent article about it recently in the Post’s Sunday Magazine. It’s a bit long (7000 words) but worth reading. The two video clips that accompany the article require a very fast connection. But in them you can see and hear Bell playing the E major partita. This is no self-effacing performance. He’s playing the hell out of it. And nobody stops to listen.

Most commuters just walk by.


A few toss some money in Bell’s violin case.




Bell netted $32.17 in 43 minutes.

As usual, the experts underestimated the importance of context. Remember the Milgram obedience experiment? Before he ran the experiment, Milgram asked psychiatrists how many people would be obedient to the end. Their estimates were in the range of 0.1% to 1%. In fact, 65% of the subjects went on delivering more and more severe shocks right to the end. The psychiatrists were focusing too much on the individual (“What kind of person would do such a thing?) and ignoring the power of the situation.

Similarly, the editors at the Post focused on the central person. Joshua Bell playing in the metro station for free? Omigod!.

In preparing for this event, the editors at the Post magazine discussed how to deal with likely outcomes. The most widely held assumption was that there could well be a problem with crowd control: In a demographic as sophisticated as Washington, the thinking went, several people would surely recognize Bell. Nervous “what-if” scenarios abounded. As people gathered, what if others stopped just to see what the attraction was? Word would spread through the crowd. Cameras would flash. More people flock to the scene; rush-hour pedestrian traffic backs up; tempers flare; the National Guard is called; tear gas, rubber bullets, etc.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. This seems like a close cousin of the “fundamental attribution error,” in which we attribute all cause to the individual and ignore the power of situational cues. The Post editors were thinking that the commuters would be influenced greatly by Bell’s performance and hardly at all by the context. But just as the audience affects whether we think the joke is funny, we take our cues for how great a violin performance is from the surroundings.

The whole set-up —playing for contributions in a metro station — affected not just the commuters’ thoughts and actions; it also affected Bell, much to the journalist’s surprise.

“At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change.” This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

Weingarten is a journalist, not a social scientist. He is surprised because he attributes too much to the personal traits he assumes Bell possesses and too little to the social context.

The Pursuit of Bada-Bing?

April 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Why is the Mafia so popular?

“The Sopranos” ratings were off a bit for the season premiere, only about 6.7 million viewers. That’s still amazingly high for a show on a cable network that you have to pay extra for. In past seasons, it was getting 10-12 million viewers, way ahead of anything else on cable and much network TV as well. (“Entourage,” another HBO show, is considered a success with 3.8 million viewers.)

At the movies, “The Godfather” is one of the biggest box office films in history, and other Mafia films like “Godfather II” and “Goodfellas” have also done well. And it’s not just the general public who admire these gangsters. “The Sopranos” gets raves from the critics; gangster movies frequently turn up at the Oscars. Academics, too, are not immune to the seductions of Mafia media. Some universities offer entire courses on these films and TV shows.

Not everybody is cheering. There are always a few malcontents who don’t love the Mafia. Over at the Huffington Post, Philip Slater in this week’s column asks, “Why is it that so many of my countrymen seem endlessly fascinated with the activities of a bunch of dumb thugs?”

Slater, a former sociology professor, has an answer, one that’s not particularly flattering. “Americans love the mafia because it represents a totally authoritarian system in which mistrust, cynicism, slavish obedience, and rash, violent decisions prevail. That seems to be the kind of world most Americans are looking for today.”

Well, not exactly. I suspect that what Americans find attractive in the Mafia (at least in these media portrayals) is its moral clarity. Here is a system that rewards its virtues —loyalty, respect, honor — and punishes transgressions surely and swiftly. If your real world is full of uncertainty and moral ambiguity, if virtue is not always rewarded and wickedness not always punished, you might take comfort at the end of the day in the unclouded vision of the media’s mafias.

Movies and TV are like dreams — stories we tell ourselves in the dark — and their relation to real life is as complicated as the relation between dreams and waking life. Sometimes these stories reflect the reality we live, sometimes they reflect an ideal we are striving for. But sometimes they provide a taste of the social and psychological nutrients that we don’t get enough of in everyday life. Slater himself wrote a book forty years ago about America’s unfulfilled need for community —The Pursuit of Loneliness, a fine book, still in print and still selling. Does the success of a show like “Friends” tell us that Americans now have community and spend a lot of time hanging out together in groups, lovingly involved in one another’s lives? Or does it tell us the opposite — that the American culture Slater saw in Pursuit is still with us, that we are mostly bowling alone, and that our lack of community is what brings us back week after week to be vicarious members of NBC’s happy, friendly bowling team?

If “Friends” is a response to the felt need for community, Mafia movies may be a response to the desire for order and control. Our fascination with Mafia authoritarianism in the media may reflect the frustrations of freedom and democracy. As Donald Rumsfeld put it, “democracy is messy.” For some segment of the population, the neatness of a truly authoritarian government would be a tempting reality. But at some level, we also recognize that it’s a package deal, and that along with the clarity, honor, and other virtues, come the perils that Slater points out — the mistrust, rigidity, and lack of freedom.

Slater is obviously and justifiably disappointed with his fellow Americans these days. He sees a link between ratings for “The Sopranos” and the vote for George Bush. “Americans were so willing to elect and re-elect the most secretive, despotic, and anti-democratic administration in the history of our nation.”

Even if that’s what Bush voters had in mind (and most of them probably didn’t), Bush will still have been in office for only eight years, and in the last two of those years his power will be greatly checked. Undoubtedly, he will have been able to do considerable long-term damage to foreign policy and perhaps to the economy and the environment. But as for government, in the long run Bush may have done for the Republican party what Goldwater did for it in 1964, and he may have done for secretive manipulation what Nixon did for it in 1974. You can see reversal, the swing towards the democratic (and the Democratic) in the election of 2006.

Authoritarianism has always had some allure to some Americans, especially in times of crisis. In the Depression, people like Huey Long and Father Coughlin played to this sentiment with some success. But in the end they failed, and most people today have never heard of them. To some extent, it’s because of the eventual good sense of the American people, who can distinguish between entertainment and reality. They may like to watch NASCAR, but that doesn’t mean that they want to go out on the highway and smash up their cars. But more likely, our success in avoiding a Godfather government stems from the enduring institutions of our society and government.

Where There's Smoke

April 10, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s a campaign afoot to have movies rated R if they have smoking in them. I’ve seen signs on cabs, on bus stops. If a studio wants its movie rated PG-13, it’ll have to hide the cigarettes.

“What a dumb idea,” says my son the teenager.

I remember that a year or so ago I took him and a friend of his to see “Good Night and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s film about Edward R. Murrow, CBS, and their clash with Sen. McCarthy. The boys were fifteen and thirteen (my wife took the friend’s sister, age eight, to see the unfortunate remake of “The Pink Panther” on another screen at the Cineplex).

“Good Night and Good Luck” did a great job of capturing the feeling of the early 1950s— the clothes, the hair, the political climate, the mores. Shooting the film in black&white helped too; the film was about television, and that’s what television in the fifties looked like. And everyone smoked.

The movie was rated PG (“for mild thematic elements and brief language”).

My sample of movies is hardly representative (my annual N rarely hits two digits). But now there’s a report documenting smoking in films in the last five years (hat tip to Eszter). The sample was just about every movie produced in the US, 1999 through 2006 (earlier studies had sampled only the most advertized or popular films). The researchers counted every tobacco “incident” (actual smoking, brand displays, or signs). They then multiplied the number of incidents by the box office sales to get a measure of overall “impressions.” These numbers were up in the billions. After all, if a movie that sold 5 million tickets had only 2 “incidents,” that’s 10 million “impressions” for that one film.

Here’s the trend for the last eight years.

I have no idea what caused the crash of 2003 (a 33% overall drop, 40% in PG films), but since then, the PG numbers have held steady. Still, the anti-smoking forces are worried since there’s evidence that smoking in films does push kids towards smoking in real life.

The article has much interesting information, with breakdowns not just by MPAA rating but also by studio. Disney, for example, especially in their PG-13 and R-rated movies, has been among the smokiest.

But it’s this chart that I find especially interesting.
The authors use it to argue for the effectiveness of slapping an R-rating on smoky movies. Since R films lose at the box office to movies with less forbidding ratings, studios will thank even their toughest characters for not smoking. Hollywood being what it is, studios would gladly sacrifice a little verisimilitude for a lot of ticket sales.

But something else in this chart should encourage the anti-smokers: apparently, non-smoking sells. In every rating category, movies without smoking have the larger box office gross. And the differences are nothing to sneeze (or cough) at— nonsmoking gives a boost of 50% boost in the R films, 25% in the G through PG-13 categories. Could differences this large — averages over all films released — be mere random variation? And if there is a real relationship, what’s the cause? More importantly, does Hollywood know about this? When studio executives are worried about the sales of some film they’re about to release, do they tell the director go back to the editing room and cut the cigarettes?

(Thanks to Max for catching my errors in the earlier version of this post.)

Real Simple Stuff

April 7, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston
Real Simple was #2 on Adweek’s “Hot List” of magazines, just behind O, The Oprah Magazine. Nobody beats Oprah. Seven of the top ten on the Hot List were women’s magazines. Adweek’s editor said, “Young women, older women, women obsessed with living more spiritual, less- cluttered lives — you name it, there is a magazine for almost any advertiser looking to reach women.”

I looked at the latest issue Real Simple. Advertising revenues are up, and the magazine sits on the newsstand shelf fat and prosperous with all those ad pages. It has articles on things like “Six Products for Organizing Your Laundry Room” and “Ten Organizing Problem-Solvers: Restore order in your home with these inventive products.” Suddenly, Real Simple seemed a bit more complicated. It’s an irony others must have pointed out, but since I can’t Google up anything along those lines, I’ll state the obvious:

Companies are rushing to advertise in Real Simple for the same reason they advertise anywhere — because they think the ads will get people to buy their stuff. So either the advertisers don’t know what they’re doing (unlikely) or Real Simple readers are caught in an apparent contradiction. In order to really simplify their cluttered lives they’re buying more stuff.

I admit that I don’t know any of these Real Simple readers, but the image I get is of an addict, a product junkie. The essence of addiction is the idea that the solution to your problem is more of what caused the problem in the first place. The heroin addict thinks he can solve his withdrawal symptoms with another shot of smack. The compulsive gambler thinks he can climb out of the abyss of debt that his gambling has put him in if only he can just make a few winning bets.

If I wanted to lead a more spiritual, less cluttered life I would be getting rid of the stuff in my house (and in my house that clutter includes a lot of magazines and other printed material). I would be cancelling magazine subscriptions, giving stuff away, throwing stuff out. If we have too much, it seems the solution should be less not more. Of course, there are few social rewards for having less, and our whole society and economy are geared towards encouraging the desire for more products. In fact, it seems that what Real Simple is offering is not simplicity but order.

The problem is not that you have too much stuff; the problem is that your stuff is not well organized. The ideal Real Simple reader (ideal from the point of view of the advertisers and probably the publisher, Time Warner) is the woman who tries to achieve a more spiritual and less cluttered life by buying the products featured in the ads and the articles in this magazine and using them to impose order on the chaos. Once the clutter gets organized, she’ll have room for more, more, more.

It makes sense, at least within the context of American culture. Appropriately enough, number four on the Adweek Hot List is a magazine called More.

American Idol - The Wisdom of Crowds?

April 3, 2007
Posted by Jay LivingstonI’ve posted here before about “prediction markets” and “the wisdom of crowds.” The Superbowl, the Oscars. Now it's American Idol time.

Many people wouldn’t have thought Sanjaya Malaker would still be on American Idol this late in the game. Now the odds on him have dropped to 18:1 (bet $100 and win $1800), more or less depending on which bookmaker. Melinda Doolitle is even money or better to win the whole thing (bet $100 and win $80).

Melinda Doolittle 4:5
Jordan Sparks 5:2
Blake Lewis 4:1
Lakisha Jones 5:1
Sanjaya Malakar 18:1
Chris Richardson 25:1
Gina Glocksen 30:1
Phil Stacey 35:1
Haley Scarnato 50:1

One of the things Sanjaya has going for him is Howard Stern. Yes, Mr. Stern isn’t just about strippers and sex toys. He takes a strong interest in culture and aesthetics, and recently he’s given a big boost to a grassroots movement that emerged from the website Vote for the Worst That site is encouraging fans to do just what the name says and vote for Sanjaya.

American Idol is resolutely democratic— the performers with the most votes stay. So if you can get the majority of Americans to vote for someone, he wins even if he’s the worst candidate. It might work for Howard Stern. It certainly worked for Karl Rove.

It works because American Idol is just that — American— and it exemplifies some of the curiosities and contradictions in American culture. To begin with, it turns something qualitative (the entertainment value of a performer) into something quantitative (a number of votes). Other contests do something similar, Olympic figure skating for example. But with American Idol, as Howard Stern is trying to show, that quantitative measure may have little to do with quality.

More interesting— and this is what seems peculiarly American about it— it is both democratic and egalitarian. The decision as to who is best is made not by experts but by anyone who sends in a vote. The assumption behind it is that we are all just as good as the so-called experts at making these decisions.

Americans don’t like people who come across as thinking they are better or smarter, and we especially don’t like those who claim to have more refined tastes. For a long time now, Republicans have won a lot of votes by attacking Democrats as the party of chardonnay-sipping, brie-eating, PBS-watching snobs. To be sure, on AI there is one critic who makes no bones about the superiority of his taste. But he’s the man we love to hate, Simon Cowell. And of course, he’s not an American.

There may also be something especially American in how we respond to these prizes. If we reject expert advice on matters of taste, if my judgment is just as good as anyone else’s, why don’t I just make my own decision? Can’t I decide for myself who’s the best and then buy his or her album?

But obviously Americans’ personal preferences are greatly affected by the outcome of these contests, whether the decision is made by a panel of experts (as in book awards), a larger vote of people in the business (the Academy Awards), or the general public (American Idol).

Surely in contests like these there cannot be very much difference between the winner and the entry that finished second. Or third or fourth for that matter. Yet the winner, no matter how narrow the margin, reaps large rewards at the box office or in album sales, while the runners-up are all but forgotten. Once the winner is decided, we all get in line.

There seems to be a contradiction between the American ideal of freedom and individualism on the one hand and the uniformity of our choices on the other. But that’s nothing new. As observers of American culture going back to deTocqueville have noted, Americans insist on their right to individual freedom, but they use that freedom to choose pretty much what everyone else is choosing. And they insist that others do likewise.

Intercultural knowledge (Comprenez?)

April 1, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Foreign students in the US are often dismayed at how ignorant American students are about other countries. Not just ignorant but incurious. So I was interested in this poster that’s all over Paris metro walls these days.



How many Americans could decipher a visual pun in foreign language? Certainly not enough to make it worthwhile to advertisers. (Of course, if they could offer round-trip to London for $90, they wouldn't have to worry about ads.)

The problem of ethnocentric ignorance goes beyond pop culture trivia, and it’s certainly not confined to the young. Soon after taking office, the Bush administration decided that it could change the politics of the Middle East, and in 2003 it launched that policy with the invasion of Iraq. But the ignorance of the region’s culture and religion is stunning. Last October reporter Jeff Stein revealed that many high-level government people working on counter-terrorism didn’t have a clue as to the differences between Sunni and Shiite, didn’t even know which branch of Islam was followed by Al Qaeda or Iran.


If you didn’t get the poster reference, you can find the answer here.

Rewarding Good Behavior

March 31, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Many people think of welfare as helping the unfortunate. In this view, the government should ensure that everyone, even the poorest members of society, can feed and shelter their children. Yet for as long as I can remember, conservatives have hammered on welfare as “rewarding bad behavior” — if you give women these princely sums (a couple of hundred dollars a month) when they have babies, of course they’ll go and have more babies whether they’re married or not.

The evidence doesn’t support this idea, but the moralistic and punitive mentality remains unchanged. The most striking feature of the “welfare reform” of the 1990s was this punitive approach: if you don’t get a job, we’ll punish you by taking away your welfare grants.

Now, a new program in New York City keeps the same conservative view, but instead of punishing bad behavior, it seeks to reward good behavior.

The city will select an experimental group of 2500 poor families and give them cash for good behavior in

• education (children’s attendance and performance, parents’ involvement)
• health (regular check-ups at doctors and dentists)
• work (job training, looking for work, working)

The total payments, if a family does everything right could add up to $5000 for a year.

The official announcement was full of optimism, and the press coverage has been favorable. I like the idea that it’s based on reward rather than punishment. At a time when the very richest are getting astronomically richer, it just doesn’t seem right to have government taking money away from the very poorest. I also like the built-in experimental design — a study will also follow a control group of 2500 similar families who are not offered the incentive. (As Mike Kellerman at Harvard’s Social Science Statistics blog notes, “The image of 2,500 families randomly selected to not receive benefits probably doesn't do much to help the cause . . .”

But I have a couple of reservations. First, I worry that the rewards won’t work because they are too small and too long range. Suppose we offer a reward of $50 or even $100 for good school attendance. If the family can’t get the cash till the end of the term, will that far-off promise be enough to offset whatever pressures there are in the present that have been pulling the kids away from school? These rewards are based on the assumption that the poor have the luxury of a longer-term perspective. That perspective is much more available in the comfort of a middle-class income than in the world of poverty with its frequent financial crises.

Even middle-class people may not act “rationally” to maximize their rewards. In my classes, I offer bonus points for papers turned in on time. On most assignments, about half the students don't take advantage of the offer. Other things in life get in the way of doing the paper on time.

Suppose that the study does prove a success, and that the experimental group does better in those three areas. Is the program an answer to the problem of poverty?

Programs like this one assume that poverty is matter of individual characteristics; they ignore the role of the broader economy. Welfare rolls were reduced in the 1990s, and Clinton’s welfare reform may have played a part. But so did a booming economy, which was certainly not caused by welfare reform. In those full-employment years, employers were paying living wages to people whose personal characteristics might have caused employers and economists a few years earlier to write them off as “unemployable.” In a weak economy, all a program like this might be expected to do is to convert the welfare poor into the working poor.

Whatchoo Lookin' At?

March 26, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

A few months ago in this blog, I speculated about what people in supermarkets spend their time doing. Ask people, and most would say “shopping.” But I wondered what the results could be if we could somehow track what they were actually looking at. My guess was that they spend much more time looking at other shoppers than at the stuff on the shelves.

We may not yet have unobtrusive ways of following the gaze of people as they walk around, but eyetracking technology can tell us what people actually look at when they look at a computer screen. The technology can overlay the screen image with a color map showing which places on the screen got the most attention. Here, for example, is a newspaper. Red areas were the most looked at, green the least. Purple X’s are mouse clicks.


One researcher, Tara Pierce Coyne, found that as with most things in life, there are differences between the sexes. Here’s a photo of baseball Hall-of-Famer George Brett. (The image was not a stand-alone as it is here, but part of a larger page with biographical information. ) Both women and men looked at Brett’s face, but men were also interested in an area not usually thought of as having much to do with on-base percentage.


Of course, if you asked guys what they looked at, they would probably not mention this area. They wouldn’t be deliberately lying. It’s just that we’re not always aware of everything we are doing.

Nor should Brett be flattered. Men’s attention (but not women’s) drifted to similar areas even when viewers were told to look at the Website of the American Kennel Club.


I bet you looked.

Just Your Average Family

March 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

This sceptred isle . . .this happy breed of men, this little world . . .
Against the envy of less happier lands . . .
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, Manhattan.

Even for those of us in the social science biz, anecdotal evidence is more striking than systematic evidence. As Stalin said, “The death of a million Russian soldiers, that is a statistic. The death of a single Russian soldier, that is a tragedy.” And when it comes to making an impression on someone’s mind, statistics lose out almost every time. Almost. Sometimes you come across one of those numbers that speaks so loudly it stops you in your tracks.

Sure, I know about income inequality and how it’s been increasing, mostly because those at the very, very top of the income ladder are raking in larger and larger amounts. I also know that middle-class and upper-middle-class families are returning to the cities. I know that in my town, New York City, the “good” schools, public and private, are flooded with applications — far more than when we went through this ordeal with my son back in the 90s.

Parents with more kids and more money. There was even a story in the Times a couple of months ago about the Mercedes GLs and other pricey SUVs crowding the streets near expensive preschools at drop-off and pick-up time. It had gotten so bad that the director of one school sent a letter to parents telling them to have the drivers wait somewhere else. (“Drivers” was the word used. The parents themselves were certainly not driving, but they also don’t care for the word “chauffeur.”) The Times story was angled mostly at the foibles and status games of the rich, as in the following: “In the letter, [the director] played perhaps the only bargaining chip she has, stating that failure to observe this rule could hinder their children's chances of getting into the kindergarten of their choice.”

But today, the Times told the story with a single number, and here it is: the median income for white families in Manhattan with children under age 5 was $284,208. The median, not the mean. In other words, the middling Manhattan white family has an income higher than 99% of all US families.

Nevertheless, I’d bet that most of those Manhattan families feel that they don’t have quite enough money. I don’t have data on them, just a strong hunch based on what we know about people and money.

Organizing the Fun out of Play

March 21, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Parents, with the best of intentions, organize sports teams and leagues for kids, and then are dismayed that the kids are stressed by the pressure of winning. “Have fun,” parents tell the kids. “Enjoy playing the game. That’s more important than winning.”

But structures speak more loudly than words, and if you structure kids’ play as a formal competition, with teams and leagues and won-lost records, the message is clear: it’s about winning. It’s as though parents had organized a military marching band for their musically inclined children and then wondered why kids weren’t jamming on the blues.

That was the gist of my previous post. But there’s something else contradictory about organized sports for kids. The whole idea — at least the officially stated idea — is to provide more opportunity for kids to play. But the result can turn out to be less opportunity, less play.

In the suburb where I grew up, there was a nice field where kids often played pick-up baseball. Maybe kids would arrange beforehand to meet there. But often, you’d just go up to the field, and if there was a game, you’d get in. But then the grown-ups who ran Little League, probably in some arrangement with the town government, converted this space into an official Little League field. They sodded the outfield and smoothed down the infield, and when it was done, it was beautiful. A perfectly shaped dirt infield without a pebble, surrounded by neatly trimmed grass, the whole thing surrounded by a chain-link fence.

The only trouble was that the field now became forbidden territory for everything except Little League games. The wise adults who ran the show didn’t want this beautiful field that they had created worn down by kids who just wanted to play there. So now, the field provided less play time than it had before it was taken over by Little League. The goal of having this wonderful official field for the organized games won out over the original goal of providing more opportunity for kids to play.

I saw something similar last September. I happened to be in a park where a girls’ soccer match was just getting started. The girls looked to be about six or seven years old, incredibly cute, one team in shiny pink shirts, the other in blue. It was a scene you could easily imagine parents taking pictures of. But as it turned out, it wasn’t much of a match. The blue team had a couple of really good players, and the game was never close. The pink team would put the ball in play, but after a few seconds the blue team would get it, and one of the good players would take the ball downfield and kick a goal. After a few such scores, the girls in pink were becoming demoralized, and even the girls in blue didn’t seem very excited or happy. The coach of the blue team even benched one of the good players to try to even things up. It didn’t help. Mercifully, six-year-olds don’t play long matches, and the whole dismal thing was over in twenty minutes or so.

What was wrong with this picture? For the purpose of making it easier for girls to play soccer, parents had organized a league with teams and uniforms and scheduled matches. But today, it wasn’t working very well. How might they have had a good match? In other circumstances, the solution would be so obvious that even six-year-olds could think of it: have one or two of the good Blue players switch sides with some of the weaker Pink players. But I doubt that this thought occurred to any of the parents. Even if some of the soccer moms or dads had thought of it, what could they have done? The uniforms, the necessity of keeping won-lost records, and everything else based on the idea of permanent teams in an organized league make that solution all but impossible.

Instead, the coach made her best player stop playing, and for all I know the adults ended the match early rather than let the score get even more lopsided. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but I wonder if anyone thought, “Hey, the whole idea of this league was to get the girls to play soccer? How can our solution be to have one of them, or all of them, play less or not at all?”

The way we organize something carries its own logic, and that logic that often overwhelms our best personal intentions.

Are We Having Fun Yet?

March 19, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

John Tesh was on the Fox news show this morning talking about kids’ sports and the emphasis on winning. Kids themselves, in surveys about why they play sports, put winning far down the list, and the main reason kids drop out of sports is that they weren’t having fun. (I cannot find the original study by the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University, only references to it online.) Tesh blamed the winning-is-everything approach on parents.

Sure, it’s easy to find anecdotal evidence of overly competitive parents overly involved in their kids’ sports. But the pressure on winning comes as much from the organization of the game as from the people involved. As soon as you set up a formal structure — leagues with teams, uniforms, schedules, rules, won-lost records and other statistics — your focus is no longer on the fun of playing. Instead, the point of the game is to work towards some future measurable goal, a championship. And there lies the contradiction: fun isn’t in the future, it’s in the present. And it can’t be easily measured. Championships are about winning, not about fun.

Pick-up games are much less organized, and they are much more fun. They have no prizes, no championships. They have no permanent teams, no uniforms, no scheduling, no record keeping. The kid’s first objective is to play; winning is secondary. For example, in baseball, what do you do if you have only 13 players instead of the officially requisite eighteen (nine to a side)? In pick-up games, kids think up all kinds of solutions; they think outside the box of official baseball rules. You improvise positions and rules (no right field hitting, batting team supplies the catcher, etc.). As kids leave or arrive, teams change, so it’s not clear which team is winning. Often the game doesn’t really end, it fades out, so you can’t really say what the final score was or who won. And yet, despite the fuzziness over the winner or the score, you’ve managed to play baseball for hours.

What about a league game? If fewer than nine kids from one team show up, it’s a forfeit, and nobody plays. The message here is clear: determining the winner is more important than having a good game. Or any game at all. But that’s because of the organized structure, not the people involved. Put these same people in a pick-up game, and they’d have no such problem.

Yet grown-ups continue to organize kids’ games and to force children’s play within the rigid structures of teams and leagues, coaches and practices, record-keeping and trophies. Of course, the parents (most of them) tell the kids that the important thing is to have fun. But despite what the parents say, everything they do points in the other direction, towards winning.

I’m reminded of a line from the British movie “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.” The protagonist, a young schoolgirl, has just done badly in some school competition (not sports), and a grown-up tries to console her: “Winning isn’t the important thing.”

“Then why is that what they give the prizes for?” asks the girl.

Why indeed? It’s not hypocrisy—I’m sure most grown-ups mean what they say about fun and winning —it’s just ignorance about social structures and how they shape our ideas about what’s important.

“300” and Counting

March 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

I sometimes ask students if Violence is an American value. Their first thought is usually: No, of course not; violence is bad. But then I point out the amount of violence in our popular culture (TV, music, movies) and in our real lives (US rates of violent crime, even after the extraordinary decline in the last 15 years, are still much higher than those of other industrialized nations).

My point in all this is to question the idea — often found in sociology textbooks — that values are primarily guides to action. That definition implies that we can discover a culture’s values by looking at what people do. Looking at Americans do, we see that they produce and consume a lot of violence. So either Americans value violence, or there’s something wrong with this sociological idea about values.

The answer I usually give is that the guides-to-action definition is at best incomplete. Despite our actions, Americans and American culture do not value violence itself. Violence is not an ultimate good —like success or freedom —that we use to justify some action. It’s just that we don’t mind using violence to get some of the results that we do value. We don’t think violence is inherently good. We just don’t think it’s all that bad.

Brian Gellman, who blogs at Intel Dump, may get me to change my thinking. Intel Dump is a blog run by former military officers, and it has provided excellent military analysis of the current war. But this post, inspired by the recent hit movie “300,” shaded over from purely military matters into the cultural arena.

Critics of 300 fail to understand what many critics of the current administration’s handling of the “Global War on Terror” fail to understand. American culture. . . .Americans today overwhelming see military power as a solution to any number of problems.

Critics of current US policies in the world who believe things will change when the current administration leaves office are fooling themselves . . . The reality is that until American culture changes, US policies will not change significantly.

So maybe we don’t mind violence as a means to an end; maybe it's the means we most prefer, at least in international matters. This preference goes along with another idea that forms the basis for at least three hundred American movies from “HighNoon” to “Top Gun” and “300,” an idea I’ve mentioned before — that all problems (moral, psychological, personal) will be resolved through a final, decisive contest between two adversaries. It works in the movies.

Unfortunately, in real life, where we cannot fade to black and roll the credits, the results are rarely so simple.

Spring Break

March 12, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

The blog is going to Florida for Spring Break. It will return, tanned and rested and maybe with a few strings of beads. Don't look for it on the next installment of “Blogs Gone Wild,” though. It's just not that kind of blog, jello shots or no.

Dissonance, Hypocrisy, Irony

March 11, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

Cognitive dissonance — the phrase echoes from the past when I took courses in social psychology. It’s the idea that people find it uncomfortable to hold two conflicting “cognitions” and usually adjust one of them to make it fit.

The classic experiment asked people to do a very boring task — turning square pegs on a board for no apparent reason and with no apparent effect. Some people were paid a pittance, others were paid well. When they were asked to rate how interesting the task really was, the poorly paid volunteers rated it as more interesting than did the well-paid ones. Their cognition that the task was boring conflicted with the cognition that they’d done it for very little money. So they changed their view of the task and rated it as not so boring. Well-paid volunteers needed no such rethinking to justify their actions; they did it for the money.

Cognitive dissonance is really the close cousin of Hypocrisy — changing your perceptions to make them square with your larger ideas. Cognitive Dissonance went to grad school; Hypocrisy chose religion and politics. Here’s what I mean.

1. One of These Adulterers is Not Like the Other

The Rev. James Dobson, a moral crusader, hates Bill Clinton and his politics. (He also came out strongly against Spongebob — Bob was  part of the homosexual agenda — but that's another matter.) Dobson far prefers the conservatism of a Newt Gingrich. When Congressman Newt was rallying the troops to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, the good reverend was cheerleading from the pulpit. Now Newt has disclosed that at that very moment back in 1998, he himself was having an extramarital affair.

Rev. Dobson was appalled by Clinton’s behavior: “we can’t overlook his shameful sexual behavior in the Oval Office... Indeed, it is my belief that no man has ever done more to debase the presidency or to undermine our Constitution — and particularly the moral and biblical principles upon which it is based —  than has William Jefferson Clinton.”

How did Rev. Dobson react to Newt Gingrich’s infidelity? He invited Gingrich to be on his radio show and praised him as a national leader.

Jerry Falwell thought Clinton’s affair was not just immoral but bad for the morality of the country. “My view as a theologian is that the leadership of a nation reflects the moral condition of the nation itself, and Bill Clinton is a reflection of the moral climate of the nation.” As for Gingrich’s philandering, Falwell has forgiven him and invited him to be commencement speaker at Falwell’s Liberty University (or is it Libertine University?)

Apparently it’s Clinton’s lying, as opposed to Gingrich’s merely keeping his mouth shut, that makes Clinton’s sexual misdeed so malignant, while Gingrich’s adultery is benign

2. See No Evil
And then there’s the Washington sex scandal. The “Beltway Madam,” Susan Palfrey, ran a business which she styled, “high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behavior.” The prosecutors say she was running a prostitution service. Her defense? The women who worked for her had to sign a contract saying that they wouldn’t engage in illegal behavior.

This fig leaf wasn’t good enough for the prosecutors, who insist that she knew what the women were doing and encouraged them to do it.

But how about torture? Here’s President Bush talking about the administration’s program of “rendition” — sending prisoners to foreign countries to be tortured:

“We seek assurances that nobody will be tortured when we render a person back to their home country.” The Bush administration knows that those countries use torture, but it gets them to sign a statement, just like Madam Palfrey’s contract, saying that they won’t do anything illegal. These assurances, unlike Ms. Palfrey’s signed contracts, are sufficient for the Justice Department. I’m not sure what the difference is, but I’m sure cognitive dissonance is at work.

3. Patriots, Prostitutes, Privacy
Here's the final irony: This week Ms. Palfrey threatened to sell her phone records of 10,000 numbers dating back to 1993, a client list that probably included several powerful Washington people. No names, of course — Ms. Palfrey respects her clients' privacy — just numbers and preferred scenarios. That same week, the Justice Department announced that the FBI had been abusing the Patriot Act to illegally get phone records and other information on thousands of Americans.

Annals of Crime - GTA

March 10, 2007

Posted by Jay Livingston

I know from my own days in the crim biz that people with criminal records have trouble getting jobs, a difficulty which only contributes to the cycle of problems. (Blogger and U. of Minnesota sociology chair Chris Uggen is very good on the problems faced by convicts.) I’m not talking about criminals like Scooter Libby or Jack Abramoff—they’ll do very well, pardon or no — but street criminals. Case in point:

My friend David G tells me this story. David G is in the retail food business, and as he was sorting the chèvre and mozzarella this morning, our conversation turned to the topic of the disorganization and craziness he sometimes encounters in the business.

“We just had a guy who came to a job interview in a stolen car.”

“How’d you know it was a stolen,” I ask.

“Well, the guy comes in, fills out the forms, has the interview, and leaves. And right there on the first page, it says, “Have you ever been convicted of a felony?” and he puts down that yes, he was convicted of possession of stolen property. So I figure, OK, maybe here’s a guy trying to get his life back together.

“Then one of the workers comes in and says, ‘You know that guy that was just here— he left his car out in the parking lot.’ So I have the application with the address and phone number. So we call him. ‘Hey, you left your car here.’ He says, ‘No, it wasn’t me, I didn’t drive.’

“So we go back and run the surveillance tape, and sure enough, it shows him driving up in that car. We get the license number, call the police and run the plates, and it turns out the car is stolen.

“We have the tape of him driving up in the car, and we have his name and address.”

“Not exactly CSI,” I say, “but look at it this way: the guy is trying to get an honest job, your place probably isn’t that easy to get to, maybe he was running late, so instead of taking the bus, he took a car. It just wasn’t his. That’s pretty enterprising.”

“Enterprising,” says David G, “but not very smart.”

I guess the guy’s not going to get the job.