Vegans to the Moon

November 26, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

One of those strange coincidences. For some reason, Monday morning I was sitting in my office thinking about Jackie Gleason in the Honeymooners, his Ralph Kramden character stomping about the kitchen in anger and frustration. “One of these days, Alice, one of these days . . . . POW. Right in the kisser.” Or he would threaten to hit her so hard, she would go “to the moon.” These were regular laugh-getters.

Here's a collection of these threats; the first “pow” comes at 6:55 into the clip. [T"his clip is no longer available. But if you are not familiar with this trope, search for “Honeymooners to the moon.”



We knew he didn’t mean it. So did Alice, who would respond – unfazed, arms akimbo, scornful – “Sure, Ralph.” (It was the fifties. “Yeah, right” didn’t yet exist.)

Even so, you couldn’t use that “joke” today, I thought. ’Taint funny, McGee.

The coincidence is that the next day, bellelettre at Scatterplot posted a link to a blogpost by a law professor, Michael Dorf Neil Buchanan*, who asks, “How quickly can norms change?” Here’s his first example of norms that have changed:

I recently watched a rerun of the 60's sitcom "The Dick Van Dyke Show." The story revolved around a woman who was drawn to a man because he was a mean drunk, bringing out her "maternal" side. The final line of the episode had one character saying to another: "You know what we should do? Go home and hit our wives." Raucous laughter, upbeat theme music, roll credits. It goes without saying that this is shocking to us today.

Dorf’s Buchanan's other examples, besides domestic violence, are smoking, the environment, and alcohol use / drunk driving. But what’s interesting is that in Dorf Buchananf’s version, these attitudes change seemingly by themselves. People just change their minds. Here’s his take on smoking:

The driving force in this social change seems to have been more a matter of deciding who had the right to force other people to do what they wanted. This may have been caused by concerns about suffering, but from my perspective it seemed to be more about attitudes toward public cleanliness. Smoking came to be seen as ugly, not dangerous (which people had known even before the surgeon general's report in the 60's).

Dorf Buchanan presents change as a strangely passive phenomenon. There’s no human action/agency involved. Smoking “came to be seen as.” You can’t do “to the moon” jokes anymore “because of a rapid and widespread public acceptance of a new norm.”

Dorf Buchanan, who is now a vegan, wants attitudes on veganism to change, and he frames the issue as a matter of the awareness of harm. Attitudes on smoking, domestic violence, and the rest changed because of a similar awareness of harm.

But how do people become aware? I guess law professors don’t know about “moral entrepreneurs.” Anti-smoking groups, MADD, NOW, etc. If veganism becomes more accepted, it will have more to do with the actions of PETA and other groups than with the outcome of Talmudic debates about the certainty of suffering.

*SocProf at Global Sociology pointed out that I incorrectly attributed the post to Dorf when in fact it was written by Buchanan posting on Dorf's blog.

Mirror, Mirror

November 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m skipping the “Self and Socialization” unit this semester. The real reason is that time thieves have been at work, and the term is about two weeks too short this year. But beyond that, I’ve lost my faith. I realize how wrong I’ve been about some basic ideas. Taking the role of other, seeing ourselves as other see us, the looking-glass self – what a crock. In fact, people don’t see themselves as others see them, and I’m not just talking about people who are clearly delusional.

A few months ago, I was interviewed for a TV show – a show you’ve never heard of for a network you’ve never heard of, unless you’ve heard of Ebru TV. Weeks later, they sent me a DVD of the show. It was painful to watch myself. Not because I said things that were wrong (though there was some of that too), but because the person in that real video looked and sounded so different from the person in the imaginary video of myself that I carry around in my head.

A looking-glass self? Maybe, but that looking-glass is flat and flattering. That’s why it’s so distressing to look in those triptych mirrors in the fitting rooms. Or to watch yourself on TV. Who was this stiff-looking guy with the ungraceful walk and a much higher forehead than I remember, this guy who looked like my brother (what’s Jack doing in this video?) and not at all like Gregory Peck?

I didn’t sound like Gregory Peck either. I knew that already, but even so, I certainly didn’t hear myself as others hear me. It wasn’t just my voice, which sounds so much more resonant from inside my head than from outside. It was all those verbal tics – “y’know” and “I mean.” I had no idea how often and how unwittingly I utter them.

Maybe the proper question is not how socialization works. The interesting questions are about the discrepancy between the image we have of ourselves and the image others have of us. Why do we so seldom become aware of the discrepancy? And given this discrepancy, how do we manage to sustain social life?

Taylorism – Ann Taylorism

November 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I had thought that Taylorism was a quaint bit of early twentieth century history. You remember Frederick Taylor, the father of “scientific management,” the guy who reduced each job to its smallest component motions, timing out exactly the one best way a worker could do each step.

Taylor wrote The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. As early as the 1950s, those principles were already the subject of some disdain. In the 1954 musical The Pajama Game, the principle comic role is Hinesy, the “time study man,” who sings “Think of the Time I Save.”

Taylorism might have been appropriate for work in factories, even pajama factories. From working with a machine, it’s only a small step to working like a machine. But in the service sector, workers deal with actual human beings (customers), so it makes little sense to try to impose the dehumanizing style of Taylorism.

Or so I thought. Earlier this season, the Wall Street Journal reported on another Taylor – Ann – which had installed the Ann Taylor Labor Allocation System, ATLAS.

Ann Taylor spent a year studying labor efficiencies. It established standards for how long it should take for employees to complete certain tasks: three seconds to greet a shopper; two minutes to help someone trying on clothing; 32 seconds to fold a sweater; and most importantly, five minutes to clinch a sale.

The computerized system clocks sales per hour for each employee so that managers can cut back on the hours of less “productive” employees. “Each Wednesday, the new system generates the following week’s schedules, broken into 15-minute increments for maximum efficiency.” Some employees wound up with only a three-hour shift, a ten-hour week.

The consequences were predictable. Labor costs went down, employee dissatisfaction went up. Some workers quit, but that was before the current economic debacle. Strange, but for some reason the workers didn’t like their every minute being measured for efficiency. As John Gibbons, a sort of twenty-first century Taylor, says. “There’s been a natural resistance to thinking about human beings as pieces in a puzzle rather than individuals,” but he adds that when it comes to “clear methods of measurement [i.e. Taylorism], it’s a natural transition to apply it to human resources as well.” Natural somehow isn’t the word I would have chosen for this transition.

It’s not that Ann Taylor wasn’t thinking about employee reactions. That’s why they gave the system that cute name ATLAS. It “was important because it gave a personality to the system, so [employees] hate the system and not us.”

Ann isn’t alone. This week, the Journal reported on similar applications of Taylorism in retail – operating the cash register, folding clothes, making sales.

(Click on the chart to see a larger version.)

So the next time you’re shopping at Ann Taylor, the Gap, Wal-Mart, or any other retail chain store, remember, as Hinesy in The Pajama Game says, seconds are ticking, girls, seconds are ticking.

Hondling with the Bureaucracy

November 17, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Department of Motor Vehicles – the epitome of bureaucracy. I suspect I’m not the only sociology teacher who uses it as an example in the unit on bureaucracy. In an intro text, a picture of an office carries this caption: “Bureaucracies, such as this Department of Motor Vehicles, are organized according to hierarchical and rule-driven forms of social organization.” Hierarchy of authority and universalism, just as Weber says.

A few weeks ago, I found a ticket on my windshield: improper display of registration sticker. The glue holding my sticker to the windshield had proven not up to the task, and one side of the sticker had curled away from the windshield.

I didn’t know that the Parking Violations Bureau was so offended by impropriety. Nor did I think that the iron cage of a rule-driven bureaucracy would stretch the rules for me. But I was pissed. So I took some pictures, typed a very brief objection, and checked the box marked “Not Guilty.”

I was pretty sure that their response would be to quote the relevant passage in the law and tell me to pay the $65. Or maybe, just maybe, they’d uphold my plea. I figured that in the rules, these were the only two possibilities – guilty or not guilty.

Instead, the PVB has a deal for me.

(Click on the image to see a larger version.)

So the bureaucracy wants to hondle. They’re saying in effect, “The fine is sixty-five dollars . . . . but for you, forty-three.” And I thought plea bargaining was just for criminal court.

I wonder if Weber is turning over in his iron cage. I’m also wondering what happens if I make a counter-proposal. I offer them $20, and we finally settle at $30 or so. Oh, I know what the paragraph below the offer says – take it or risk an all-or-nothing decision. But what the hell – if they’re willing to knock off a third of the price just because I sent in a couple of photos, maybe they’ll come down a little further.

Food As Medicine

November 13, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Food as medicine. That was the dismissive phrase David G. used. David has been in the food biz in one way or another for decades, and he has little use for the idea of health-conscious eating. He has nothing against health. He just doesn’t make it his primary criterion in deciding what to eat. It’s like people who go to the race track and base their bets on the jockey’s silks. Yes, the silks are pretty, and some are more attractive than others, and it’s a good thing to wear nice clothes. But that’s not what horse racing is all about.

Food, like sex, is one of those items that gets slathered with layers of cultural meaning. A British friend, decades ago, pointed out to me that in the US, advertisements for food, especially children’s foods, were often all about the energy that food gives you so that you can go out and achieve.

If there really is a culture war, food may be one of the important battlegrounds, except that in the food-culture war, there are several different flags. What’s in a meal? Love, togetherness, Cartesian logic, propriety, health, efficiency? Are we having a healthy meal or a happy meal?

Lisa at Sociological Images showed how different themes got packaged into different TV dinners. It was a great post. Lisa called attention to the fonts, the names, the colors – things you see but don’t consciously notice. Health, it seemed, was a feminine concern.

So I was a bit surprised to see this ad on the commuter train this morning. And I remembered David G.

Why I Am Not in Business

November 10, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Dave was looking for shoelaces when I ran into him on the street yesterday. He can certainly afford them. After a successful career as a bond trader, Dave formed his own small investment company, and even in these hard times in the financial industry, with jobs, companies, and banks disappearing, he hasn’t had to lay anybody off.

He’d been walking for fifteen blocks and still hadn’t found shoelaces for his sneakers. Now he was on his way to Tip Top Shoes on West 72nd St., which would surely have them. I would have been annoyed; I might even have been curious as to why shoelaces had become so hard to find. That’s why I’m in academics and not business.

“I figure in this economic climate, people will be buying shoelaces,” Dave said. “They won’t be buying new shoes. It’ll be shoelaces. And Shoe-GOO, remember that?” I nodded, and he went on, “I should be looking for shoelace companies to invest in.”

It sounded like he was kidding. Maybe not. But that thought wouldn’t even have crossed my mind.

A Sign of Change

November 7, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s not that I don’t get sentimental and emotional and teary sometimes about political events (like recent ones). I do. It’s just that I don’t care for emotionality as a political tool. I especially dislike the use of little kids in politics – by candidates or supporters. I cringe when I see kids marching carrying signs their parents have persuaded or forced them to carry – even when I agree with what the signs say.

But this is different.


It’s by Ezra Klein at The American Prospect, and you must absolutely go here and see the full photo-story.

It’s spontaneous and not exploitative. And it’s something you would never have seen at a McCain or Palin celebration.

Take a Tip from Me

November 7, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

There’s a new blogger on the block - Brooke Harrington at Economic Sociology. Most recently, she wonders why tip jars don’t get stolen more often. The tip jar is an easy target, often unwatched. Brooke sees the survival of tip jars as evidence of trust.

Yes, but there are also laws against stealing, even when you can probably get away with it.

Economists are puzzled by seemingly irrational behavior, especially when it doesn’t violate the law – like standing in line to vote when it’s almost certain that your vote won’t affect the outcome of the election. Even worse is irrationality that’s explicitly economic. When a person or organization fails to maximize its gain, say charging less than what the market would bear, economists refer to it as “leaving money on the table.”

That’s also a pretty accurate description of tipping, which is another puzzle to economists. But here’s a puzzle for lawyers or ethicists: If you sit down at a restaurant table that still hasn’t been cleared and you pocket the tip someone left, that’s stealing. But what about this: you take half the money, and when you finish your meal, you add it to the tip you leave. The server comes out no worse, but the previous diner looks like a piker, and you look like a very generous tipper.

My father claimed that this hypothetical was a question on an exam when he was a law student.

Two Years Ago - Illinois, DC, Hawaii

November 4, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The news kept reminding me that this campaign had been going on for two years. True, and things can change a lot in two years. Here's a map, apparently legit, from SurveyUSA.

Exactly two years ago, SurveyUSA completed interviews with 600 voters in every state (30,000 total interviews), asking them how they would vote in a 2008 Presidential Election between John McCain and Barack Obama.

Hat tip to Wesleying, where I first saw this.

Is Realignment Real?

November 4, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

What will the Democratic victory today mean for political alignment?*

At our one-week-to-go colloquium on the election last Tuesday, political scientist Dan Cassino talked about realignment. Some Presidential elections seem to turn the political map inside out. When Dan flashed from the election map of 1928 to the map of 1932, it looked almost like a magic trick. Watch closely – with a click of a mouse, the country goes from nearly all red to nearly all blue.



He repeated the effect with 1964 and 1968.


Did these elections crystallize a long-term realignment in US politics? The 1932 election was the first of five straight Presidential victories for the Democrats. The Republicans, starting in 1968 won five out of six.

But is realignment real? Certainly the realignment Karl Rove predicted – a permanent Republican majority – didn’t happen, despite the efforts of the Bush administration to turn every government department and agency into a wholly owned subsidiary of the RNC.

Now, in reading around in Brendan Nyhan’s blog , I discover that realignment itself may be a myth, existing more in the eye of the beholder than in political reality.

David Mayhew’s Electoral Realignments: A Critique of an American Genre . . . argues convincingly that so-called realignments are a product of statistical naivete and the human penchant for hyperactive pattern detection rather than a real phenomenon of American politics.

Those periods of Democratic and Republican dominance might just be the result of random variation.

In the sequence of presidential elections from 1856 through 1980, the distribution of victory “runs” by party . . . did not differ significantly from the runs of heads and tails that would be expected from coin flips. Also, in the absence of repeat major-party candidates (such as Reagan in 1984 or Bryan in 1900), a presidential election four years ago holds virtually zero predictive value for this year's election—either in predicting this year’s victorious party or this year’s party shares of the vote

Why do I find this idea so hard to accept? In sports, I’ve always scoffed at the idea “momentum.” The sports announcer saying that “after that interception in the third quarter, the Jets had the momentum” is like a roulette player talking about red gaining the momentum from black.

But voting is not a random event. Voters aren’t flipping coins. They are making choices based on their perceptions of the candidates and the current situation. People may change their ideas when circumstances change. And newer generations of voters may see the world and politics differently from older voters.

So realignment may be real, just not as sudden as the maps make it appear. Our two-party system and winner-take-all allocation of each state’s electoral vote magnify differences. Two states may differ by a fraction of a percentage point, but one will be all blue and the other all red. Maps that allowed for shades of purple would show a much more gradual shift.

*I’m writing this well before the votes have been tallied, in fact before most votes have been cast.

The Bars of a Cell

November 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight has some information on a question I’ve been wondering about for some time:

• What are pollsters doing about sampling cell phone users
• Does it make a difference whether they are sampled?

The answers:

• It depends on the pollster
• Yes

The polls in the Cingular-y orange color include cellphones in their samples; the polls in gray do not. The cellphone polls have Obama ahead by an average of 9.4 points; the landline-only polls, 5.1 points.

I did a radio hit the other afternoon with Mark DeCamillo of California's vaunted Field Poll, which does include cellphones in their samples. He suggested to me that it was much easier to get the cooperation of cellphone users on the weekend than during the week. How come? Because most cellphone plans include free weekend minutes. Conversely, one might expect that young people are particularly difficult to reach on their landlines over the weekend, since they tend to be away from home more (especially on a weekend when some nontrivial number of them are out volunteering for Obama). So, while I haven't tried to verify this, it wouldn't surprise me if the "cellphone gap" expands over the weekend, and contracts during the week.
There's More...

Subprime Wine

November 2, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If Wall Street gives you a recession, take the subprime cabernet you wouldn’t dare sell under your usual label, call it Recession Red, and price it so that retailers can sell it for four dollars.

They also have a Recession White (chardonnay) and of course, in honor of Miles Raymond, a Merlot.

Racism Without Racists (LAPD version)

October 31, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Can you have racially discriminatory outcomes without racist motives or intent?

Los Angeles police are much more likely to stop blacks and Latinos than they are to stop whites. And when they stop someone, they are more likely to frisk or search minorities than whites. Here’s a graph from the ACLU report that collected the data. The principle author is Ian Ayres. (The full report and data set are here.)



William Bratton, chief of the LAPD says flatly, “This department does not engage in racial profiling, has not. We have significant safeguards built in to protect against that.”

I believe him. But then how do you explain the data?

One commenter at the Freakonomics blog, where Ayres aired his findings, suggests that the crucial variable is not the racism of the police but the demeanor of the suspect. Maybe minorities, especially young males, act in a way that sets off the warning bells. That’s also what the police union president seems to mean when he says that the ACLU study is “an exercise that might work on a spreadsheet at Yale, but doesn’t work on the streets of Los Angeles.”

Ah yes, the streets.  The standard cop argument is that number-crunchers don’t know what’s really going down on the street. Cops know. Cops have that sixth sense, born out of years of street experience. It tells them whether someone is “clean” or “dirty.” Maybe they can’t put it into words, maybe they can’t lay it out so that lawyers in expensive three-piece suits and judges in black robes will recognize it as probable cause. But the cops know. They know who to stop, and they know who to search.

At least, that is the conventional wisdom . . . in the precinct and to a great extent in the media. (Do we ever see a movie where a cop’s strong but intuitive suspicions are wrong?) If cops are stopping and searching more minorities, it must be because minorities are more likely to be carrying illegal drugs and weapons. And the cops can tell.

Or can they? The data also show that the police searched a lot more innocent minorities than innocent whites. Cops searching blacks were about 40% less likely to find weapons than when searching whites.


This discrepancy certainly suggests that cops, wittingly or not, are discriminating against minorities. Ayres himself seems to favor that explanation.

The department should require that all existing and new officers take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) . . It produces a measure of unconscious bias . . . . For example, the black/white IAT produces a measure of whether an individual has unconscious negative associations with photographs of African-Americans relative to photographs of whites.

But I have different explanation. Mine is also race-based, but it doesn’t assume that police are racists or that they are, consciously or unconsciously, biased against blacks and Latinos. It’s just that the cops’ street sense, their ability to read people, doesn’t work so well across racial lines. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. We know that eyewitnesses are far more reliable in identifying people of their own race than people of another race. And just as we have trouble reading faces across race lines, we may also have trouble reading behavior.

If I’m right, then same-race searches should have a higher “hit rate.” And they do, regardless of the race of the suspect.

the racial disparities in the likelihood of arrest were substantially lower when at least one of the stopping officers was the same race as the suspect.

I picture a scene where a pair of cops, one black, one white, stop a young black suspect. They question him briefly. The white cop wants to throw the kid up against the car and search him, but the black cop restrains him. If I’m writing the dialogue, I don’t have the black cop warn about racism (“Watch it, Harry. We don’t want any Rodney Kings here,”). I have him say calmly but assuredly, “Take it easy, Harry. This kid’s clean.”

Autumn In New York

October 29, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

No sociological content. Just a couple of pictures I took in Central Park two weeks ago.

Conservatory Water

Kerbs Boat House and Reflections of Fifth Avenue

Hold That Headline and Get Me Rewrite

October 25, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a headline and first two paragraphs from a Reuter’s story today.

Obama lead on McCain
slips to 9 points

Sat Oct 25, 2008 1:05am EDT

By Andrew Quinn

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama's lead over Republican rival John McCain fell slightly to 9 points, according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll released Saturday, the second consecutive day the race has narrowed.

Obama leads McCain by 51 percent to 42 percent in the rolling three-day tracking poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 points. Obama led by 10 points Friday and 12 points on Thursday.

Does the press really know so little about statistics? Or is it just that they work on the assumption that change is more newsworthy than stability.

Here, thanks to Pollster, are several polls all taken in the same two or three days this week. You could pick any two and claim an ominious slip or optimistic gain for either candidate.

The trouble is, your story won’t get noticed as much if it has a headline like this.

Latest Polls Show Usual
Variation Due to Sampling Error

To Spite Its Face

October 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Virginia GOP sent out a mailer with the application for an absentee ballot. As you’d expect, the messages were all about the threat of terror, the only issue that might help McCain. To make it especially persuasive, they finished with this scary photo.


I guess we’d better look evil in the eye because apparently we’ve already cut off its nose. As the saying goes, you can pick your friends, and you can pick your terrorists, but you can’t pick your terrorist’s nose, at least not if you've Photoshopped it away.

TalkingPointsMemo has all five pages of the mailer. Hat tip also to Photoshop Disasters.

McCain - GI Specialist?

October 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Frankly, I’m puzzled. Here’s a guy at a McCain rally in North Carolina holding up a homemade sign that says, “McCain – The Best Cure for Your Colon.”


I must be hopelessly out of touch, but I’m clueless.

Any ideas?

I found the picture at the website of the Fayetteville Observer a few days ago. The same issue reported that at an Obama rally, several cars had their tires slashed, presumably by people Sarah Palin would refer to as “real Americans.”

Grades and Booze and Graphs -- Gee Whiz

October 21, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Drinking lowers your GPA. So do smoking, spending time on the computer, and probably other forms of moral dissolution. That’s the conclusion of a survey of 10,000 students in Minnesota.

Inside Higher Ed reported it, as did the Minnesota press with titles like “Bad Habits = Bad Grades.” Chris Uggen reprints graphs of some of the “more dramatic results” (that’s the report’s phrase, not Chris’s). Here’s a graph of the effects of the demon rum.


Pretty impressive . . . if you don’t look too closely. But note: the range of the y-axis is from 3.0 to 3.5.

I’ve blogged before about “gee whiz” graphs , and I guess I’ll keep doing so as long as people keep using them. Here are the same numbers, but the graph below scales them on the traditional GPA scale of 0 to 4.0.


The difference is real – the teetotalers have a B+ average, heaviest drinkers a B. But is it dramatic?

I also would like finer distinctions in the independent variable, but maybe that’s because my glass of wine with dinner each night, six or seven a week, puts me in the top category with the big boozers. I suspect that the big differences are not between the one-drink-a-day students and the teetotalers but between the really heavy drinkers – the ones who have six drinks or more in a sitting, not in a week– and everyone else.

If I Were a Rich Man

October 20, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m probably too late here – the timer on Joe the Plumber’s fifteen minutes of fame may have already run out. Still, he was right to be worried about taxes. It turns out that he owes $1182 in back taxes.

But that’s not the concern John McCain used to turn his name into shorthand for the overtaxed worker. No, what Joe and John were worried about was that 3% increase once his income hits $250,000. To reach that level, Joe’s income would have to triple or maybe quadruple. Still, it’s never too soon to start complaining about taxes on the wealthy, and Joe wants to make sure that when he does reach the quarter-million mark, those tax rates won’t have increased.

Joe isn’t alone in his optimism. Over forty percent of men in Joe’s age range think that it’s likely they’ll become “rich.”

The 2003 Gallup poll found that optimism declined with age. And definitions of rich varied with income. Only those with incomes of $50,000 or more thought that to be rich you needed an income of at least $200,000. For middle-income people ($30-50K), $100,000 was rich.

McCain also took Obama to task for suggesting that it might be better to “spread the wealth around.” The right wing is screaming “socialist.” But more recent Gallup polls show that Americans aren’t all that opposed to redistribution.

Click on the graphs to see them large enough that you can read the titles.

If you believe the poll, you also shouldn’t be too worried that Obama’s tax proposal will cost him a lot of votes.

Dig These New Threads

October 15, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

I passed by a fancy men’s store on Columbus Avenue the other day, and to my admittedly non-fashion-trained eye, the new suits looked very much like the ones I’ve been seeing each week on Mad Men.

Mad Men, for those still unfamiliar with this Emmy winner, is set in a New York advertising agency in the early 1960s. Culturally, that’s the tail end of the 1950s.* What the show teaches us about this period is this: Everyone smoked – a lot. Everyone drank – a lot. And an ad agency was a place people went in those odd moments when they were not actively committing adultery.

Here’s the show’s central figure Don Draper. And on the right, a 2008 Hugo available at Bloomingdale’s.

To me, the suits look very similar – two buttons, narrow lapels, unpleated trousers. And although this Boss man leaves his collar open, if you look at the other suits where I found this , you’ll see a few neckties that look a lot like the one Draper is wearing, though perhaps a shade wider.

The similarity isn’t surprising. Clothing makers have to keep changing the styles to get us to feel embarrassed to wear the same suit we’ve been wearing for the last few years and buy a new one. But there are only so many variations on a man’s suit, so old styles have to get recycled.

Language, too, has its fashions, dude, even though nobody makes money from the currency of words and phrases. But language is nearly infinite, so there’s no need to recycle. Then why is Ta-Nehisi Coates writing this:

I don’t ever want to hear anyone complaining about black people and their conspiracy theories. The cat on the corner – or even the Reverend – yelling about the government inventing AIDS is off his rocker. . .

Or this:

There is nothing troubling about one lone racist nut in a crowd. What’s troubling is the crowd. Dig how they just look on and smile uncomfortably.

Cat? Dig?

Coates is black, hip, and thirty-three years old (the age of Don Draper in 1960, when Mad Men begins). Maybe fifties hipster lingo, like those suits, is going to come back in style. Meanwhile, I’ll be listening to my LP of “Kind of Blue,” man, ’cause I like really dig Miles. That Madison Avenue scene is just too square..


* The “decade” we call “The Sixties” doesn’t begin until late 1963, with LBJ, Vietnam, and the Beatles.

AV Educational Tools - Oh, the Cost

October 14, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

[Sen. Obama] voted for nearly a billion dollars in pork barrel earmark projects, including, by the way, $3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?

I knew there had to be something wrong with this when McCain said it in the debate. I was pretty sure that the planetarium wasn’t buying the overhead projector I used to use for showing my transparencies.* I was right. The overhead projector the planetarium wants looks like a character out of Star Wars.


And by the way, the project was never funded. (Full story here.)

McCain’s complaint would be like mocking NASA for wanting $3 million dollar for a radio. “My friends, I can get one from Radio Shack for $8.95, and it picks up Rush Limbaugh perfectly.” No matter that NASA wants one that will beam signals back from Mars.

*We don’t have those any more, of course. Now, I have to schlepp my laptop to “smart room,” connect the VGA cable to the video port, reset the CRT/LCD display option, select the User Laptop function from the projector menu, and wait for the projector to warm up.

Ressentiment, Baby, Ressentiment

October 11, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sen. Biden: John McCain . . .thinks . . . the only answer is drill, drill, drill.
Gov. Palin: The chant is “drill, baby, drill.”

That missing “baby” was important enough for Palin to correct Biden.

But why? How is “drill, drill, drill,” importantly different from “drill, baby, drill”?

I guess this is really one for the Language Log, but here’s my take:

For one thing, the three drills imply that someone is ritualistically repeating an action without any realistic hope of reaching a goal. “That’s all you do – [fill in your own favorite verb repeated three times: talk, eat, complain, work, etc.]”*

Replacing the middle verb with baby switches the mood from ritualism to defiance. Like “Burn, baby, burn,” in the ghetto riots of the sixties, that middle baby makes the chant the cry of those who feel oppressed as they hit back. They realize that their action may be ultimately destructive, but they are not interested in rational goal-attainment. They want to drill or burn because it feels good now. . . .and because “They” don’t want you to.

It’s ressentiment, the nasty part of our populist stripe that goes back to the nineteenth century. It’s the resentment of the Know-nothings of the 1850s and of Nixon’s hardhats in the Vietnam era, beating up anti-war demonstrators. For much of the current campaign, the feeling had been silent. Was it because Joe Six-Pack had little to feel angry about? After all, his team has owned the White House for the last eight years and all but twelve of the last forty years. They’ve controlled Congress for most of the last 15 years. But resentment is about perception, not real power, and the feeling remained, frustrated and just barely below the surface.

Then Sarah Palin came along. She, much more than McCain, spoke to those frustrations. Paul Krugman, watching her acceptance speech and the response of the Republican convention, saw it clearly.

What the G.O.P. is selling . . . is the pure politics of resentment; you’re supposed to vote Republican to stick it to an elite that thinks it’s better than you.

(That is, it’s resentment against the kind of people who use the word ressentiment.)

I wonder if any of the Palinistas realize that their chant derives from the black rioters of the sixties, people for whom they probably feel no kinship at all.

I was also trying to think of other instances of this grammatical construction “[Verb], Baby, [Verb].” I couldn’t. Can you?

Then on 72nd Street this afternoon, I saw this.


The call to Shine, Baby, Shine and to get “freaky, funky, and crazy” isn’t exactly like the resentment of Burn and Drill. But it’s close enough.


*How can I get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice. The joke ends there, but as every musician knows, even if you do practice, practice, practice, you still probably won’t be one of the few who make it.

The Distriubtion of Tea

(or Drawing the Line)

October 8, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In 1760, the Mason-Dixon line divided North from South. Since then, the line between Northernness and Southernness has shifted. In 1860, Maryland remained in the Union, and West Virginia seceded from Virginia to do likewise, curving the North-South dividing line and moving it lower.

Today, the line can be drawn in sweet tea. That’s heavily sugared iced tea, a Southern concoction going back to the 19th century. The people (person?) at Eight Over Five, a graphic design studio, mapped McDonald’s outlets in Virginia according to whether they served sweet tea. The map looks like this (gold dots serve sweet tea, black dots don’t):


Here’s another map showing the shift in the Democratic vote in 2006 compared with 2004. The redder the county, the more it shifted Republican, the bluer the county, the greater the shift towards the Democrats.

It’s not a perfect match, but it’s not bad. The closest resemblance I could find was the 2006 Democratic Senatorial primary race between Harris Miller (dark to light green in the map below) and Jim Webb (purple to pink). Webb, the sweet tea candidate, won and went on to win the general election that November.
As Brillat-Savarin almost said, “Tell me what you drink, and I will tell you how you vote.”

Shake . . . Or Not

October 8, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

It was on YouTube minutes after the debate ended, and liberal bloggers all over the Internet were linking to it. It appears that McCain refuses to shake hands with Obama. In the video, McCain taps Obama on the back, Obama turns and offers his hand, but McCain, rather than shaking hands, points to his wife, and Obama shakes hands with Cindy. Just at that moment Wolf Blitzer is saying, “It’s apparent that Senator McCain has some disdain . . . for Senator Obama.”



The clip is misleading. It’s taken out of context. The candidates had already shaken hands, and McCain was trying to get Obama to shake hands with Cindy as well, not instead of.

But the canard reminded me of another interracial failure to shake. This one was real, and it had consequences for winning and losing.

In the NIT basketball tournament in 1950 at Madison Square Garden, the University Kentucky Wildcats played the team from City College. Kentucky, under legendary coach Adolf Rupp, was the number three ranked team in the nation. It was also all white. In fact, Rupp had been quoted as saying that a black would never play on one of his teams.

The CCNY team was made up mostly of blacks and Jews. The coach, Nat Holman, was Jewish. As Marvin Kalb later characterized it, “It was not a basketball game. It was a cultural war.”

CCNY wasn’t given much of a chance to win. Kentucky had just taken the SEC championship, beating Tennessee 95 - 58. But after the warm-up, as the teams gathered at their benches, Coach Holman had an idea. He told his team that, you know, fellas, just for the sake of sportsmanship, why don’t you go over to the Kentucky bench and shake hands with their guys. Holman knew what was going to happen, but apparently his players didn’t. As Kalb tells it,

I watched as Floyd Lane put his hand out and this tall, blonde, gorgeous giant turned away from Floyd, which is exactly what Holman wanted...... to get Floyd very upset..... to get all of the other players upset. And Floyd hissed out at the guy, “You gonna be picking cotton in the morning, man!”

Nobody on the Kentucky team would shake hands with the black CCNY players.

Holman’s strategy worked. At halftime, CCNY led 45 - 20 and went on to win the game 89 - 50.

Hat tip: I myself was not at the Garden that night – I’m old, but not that old. This story was first told to me by my friend Dave Fleischner, a grandnephew of Nat Holman.

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

October 6, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In a thread over at Scatterplot, Jenn Lena said à propos of Sarah Palin in the televised debate, “I really loathe this ‘folksy’ thing. I wish someone would help me to understand what it means–specifically, why it is viewed as a desirable affect/quality by some voters.”

So I did my hair up Tina Fey style, put on my Kazuo Kawasaki glasses, and responded:

Doncha think that just havin’ a plain ol’ mom with good ol’-fashioned commonsense in office is the best way to run the government? We’re in this big economic mess right now, but if we can just get rid of the people who’ve been in Washington for so long, except for mavericks like John McCain, and get some more new people in there, well, gosh, I betcha those mavericks will fix up this economy in no time. ‘Cuz those mavericks, they’re not interested in politics or winnin’ elections the way politicans are, they’re just interested in what’s good for our country. Jeez, I don’t know why you guys can’t see that.

That was Friday. The next night, SNL led with a send-up of the debate. Fey/Palin’s opening lines are so similar to my comment that I suspect Scatterplot may have a lurking reader among the SNL writing staff.

Fey’s part begins at about two minutes into the clip.



Here's the transcript:

FEY AS PALIN: Well first of all, let me say how nice it is to meet Joe Biden. And may I say, up close your hair plugs don’t look nearly as bad as everyone says. You know, John McCain and I, we’re a couple of mavericks. And gosh darnit, we’re gonna take that maverick energy right to Washington and we’re gonna use it to fix this financial crisis and everything else that’s plaguin’ this great country of ours.

LATIFAH AS IFILL: How will you solve the financial crisis by being a maverick?

FEY AS PALIN: You know, we’re gonna take every aspect of the crisis and look at it and then we’re gonna ask ourselves, “what would a maverick do in this situation?” And then, you know, we’ll do that.” (SHEwinks.)

Incidentally, the show did very well in the ratings.

Who's Famous?

October 3, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

These two women embracing – you don’t recognize either of them, right?


Yet they are two of the this country’s greatest sopranos of the twentieth century (or the second half of that century), stars of the Met – Roberta Peters and Teresa Stratas.

They are both now retired – Stratas (the one wearing the cap) is 70, Peters 78 – but even in their prime they could have walked down the street together and nobody would have noticed them.

I was thinking about fame as I snapped photos of them.* Actors in film and television, a handful of rock performers, and a few athletes – those are the only people famous enough to be generally noticed. Some of them need bodyguards. But people who are “famous” in other fields go out in public wearing a cloak of anonymity.

That’s certainly true of people not in the performing arts (writers, sociologists), but it holds even for performers outside of those few favored fields. Someone might be the greatest stage actor in the world, but unless she’s starred in movies or TV, not too many people will recognize her.** Great musicians – classical, jazz, folk – have their fans, but the paparazzi will never bother them. (The photogs in the picture abover were all people who had been invited to the reception.)

Randy Newman tells this story. When he goes to restaurants, he likes to sit with his back to the room. One evening he went out to eat with his wife and three kids, and his fifteen-year-old daughter, first to the table, took the seat he would have taken. His wife quietly said to the girl, “You know, that’s the seat your father likes to sit in.” Newman’s daughter looked at him, paused, and said, “You’re not that famous.”

The hard truth is that the kid was probably right.

* I took this snapshot at a reception following a New York Opera Society tribute to Stratas. My presence had nothing to do with any involvement in opera (I have none). It was just one of those accidents of New York geography.

** Once in the local grocery store, I turned, and there was Broadway star Bernadette Peters (no relation to Roberta) standing two feet from me. Nobody else seemed to notice her, and it wasn’t just New Yorkers trying to be blasé. They didn’t recognize her.

Women Demanding Answers

Oct. 1, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

A month ago, I commented that US journalists seem reluctant to press politicians for answers. They ask a question, the politician gives an evasive response, and on to the next question. Or they will allow the politician to speak in generalities rather than insist on specifics.

During the Obama-McCain debate, poor Jim Lehrer couldn’t get either candidate to say how he’d scale back his proposals given the straitened economic circumstances he was sure to inherit. Lehrer was too polite to say point blank, “Here’s the question. Are you going to answer it or not?”

For some reason, it seems to be mostly women who are willing to speak bluntly and demand answers. It took a stand-up comic on a chat show for women (Joy Behar on The View) to tell McCain to his face that some of his ads were lies. And it was Campbell Brown, questioning a McCain adviser, who demanded specific examples of Sarah Palin's commander-in-chief decisions.

Here’s Katie Couric trying to get Palin to say whether human activities are the cause of global warming.



Here’s a transcript in case the video doesn’t play:

Couric: What’s your position on global warming? Do you believe it’s man-made or not?
Palin: Well, we’re the only Arctic state, of course, Alaska. So we feel the impacts more than any other state, up there with the changes in climates. And certainly, it is apparent. We have erosion issues. And we have melting sea ice, of course. So, what I’ve done up there is form a sub-cabinet to focus solely on climate change. Understanding that it is real. And …
Couric: Is it man-made, though in your view?
Palin: You know there are - there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, these impacts. I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate. Because the world’s weather patterns are cyclical. And over history we have seen change there. But kind of doesn’t matter at this point, as we debate what caused it. The point is: it’s real; we need to do something about it.

At another point, Couric asks her which newspapers and magazines she reads. Palin is deliberately vague, but Couric asks twice for specifics.



Transcript:

Couric: And when it comes to establishing your world view, I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?
Palin: I’ve read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media.
Couric: What, specifically?
Palin: Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Palin: I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too. Alaska isn’t a foreign country, where it’s kind of suggested, “Wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?” Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.

Palin’s supporters have been claiming that the press is out to get her. If they are, asking her questions and letting her speak for herself may be the best strategy.

Who's Calling Who a Nazi?

September 29, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Brendan Nyhan excoriates Tony Blankley for a Washington Times article accusing the mainstream press of being propagandists for Obama. Blankley writes:

This is no longer journalism — it is simply propaganda. (The American left-wing version of the Volkischer Beobachter cannot be far behind.)

This is the kind of editing one would expect from Goebbels' disciples,

(Volkischer Beobachter was the official Nazi newspaper. Goebbels was the Nazi Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda .)

We can be outraged, but we can’t really be surprised. It’s Godwin’s law:

As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a
comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

It applies to other media, not just Usenet. Maybe it was Blankley, or maybe it was Rush ("feminazi") Limbaugh, or maybe it was my memory of William F. Buckley, Jr. on Firing Line, but I have the impression that people on the right are quicker on the draw here – more likely than liberals to whip out their Nazi weaponry. So I did a quick Google search pairing Nazi and Hitler with a few politicians. I figured that attacks on liberals would be more likely to invoke the big baddies.


I don’t know how Google’s algorithm works. I suspect the recent references carry more weight, hence the landslide victory for the current candidates, McCain and Obama. Even so, attacks on Obama were more likley to mention Nazis and Hitler than were attacks on McCain.

The big surprise was Bush. Only a relative handful of Internet writers paired him with the Third Reich. As recently as May, Bush himself was comparing Obama to those who had appeased the Nazis, so even though Bush was the one linking Obama to Nazis, articles about this incident would have turned up in a “Bush and Nazi” search.

In general, though, the data support my idea. Obama v. McCain, Gore or Kerry v. Bush. And former VP Al Gore, who hasn’t been in office or run for anything for eight years, still gets more Nazi/Hitler references than does current VP Dick Cheney.

Senator Obama and John

September 27, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Maybe to Senator Obama it’s not a lot of money.
I don't know where John is getting his figures.
A lot of people might be interested in Senator Obama's definition of “rich.”
John, it’s been your president . . .who presided over this increase in spending.
Senator Obama still doesn’t quite understand.
And so John likes – John, you like to pretend like the war started in 2007.

And so it went in last night’s Presidential debate.

“If my 76 year old mom is any indication,” wrote a commenter on a conservative blog, “Obama lost Florida tonight. She was very put off by Obama calling McCain ‘John’ over and over, while McCain never deviated from referring to ‘Senator Obama’.”

Obama’s choice of names for his opponent had to have been deliberate. As that last example shows, he called McCain “John” when he referred to him in the third person and when he addressed him directly. Had the Obama campaign run focus groups, done research? Were they afraid that calling him “Senator McCain” would be too deferential to the “experience” that McCain is making so much of? They must have known about the Floridians and thought it was worth the risk.

But where is the cutoff point? I’m old enough that I’m still surprised when people I don’t know at all, people much younger than I am, start right off addressing me by my first name. The telemarketer offering me new services, credit card reps I call about a problem with by bill, tech support in Bangalore. Machines too. I log in to some website where I’ve registered, a bank perhaps, and “Hi Jay, pops up cheerily on the screen.

Younger people apparently take this first-naming for granted and don’t give Obama’s use of “John” a second thought. Perhaps they are even put off by McCain’s formality, as though he were lecturing Obama on manners. (One focus group found McCain to be “condescending,” while Obama was more “caring.”). But where, between the twentysomethings and the septuagenarians in Florida and elsewhere does the preference shift from first name to Senator?

Filling in the Blanks

September 26, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Sociology is about the social situation, about context, and how it shapes what people do, what they feel, what they see. The micro version is words. Show people cards with incomplete words

• S _ O R T
• R _ C E
• P O L I _ E
• S _ Y

Sport, Race, Police, Shy. That’s easy. Except if it’s an Asian woman showing the cards, people are more likely to see Short, Rice, Polite, Shy (why not Soy?).*

Which word you see depends on the cues in the immediate situation. It also dpends on your background, your expectations, your interests. Here’s a magazine whose graphics department thought they could afford to hide a few letters.


Those of us who do a lot of sewing would see instantly that the magazine is Butterick. But try showing it to your students. Or colleagues. They might fill in the blanks using a schema from some other (what’s the mot juste here?) background interest.

Me, I’ve just gotten the pattern for my Halloween costume. I figure I'll finish the basting next week, but the facing is going to require a lot of backstitching, and I just don't know how I'll manage.

* Gilbert, Daniel T. and Hixon, J. Gregory, “The trouble of thinking: Activation and application of stereotypic beliefs.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol 60 (491, 509-517).

Hat tip to Doug at Photshop Disasters.

Randy Newman - Ambivalence and Irony

September 25, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Randy Newman has perfect pitch. Maybe not for musical tones (or maybe he does, I have no idea) but cultural and political ones. He sings most of his songs in character, and the characters are a variety of unreliable narrators who embody different strands of American culture.

“Political Science,” written at least 35 years ago, still sounds like the voice of American foreign policy based on American exceptionalism – a belief in our inherent goodness and innocence, a disregard for the decent opinions of other countries, and a readiness to use violence on those who disagree.

No one likes us-I don't know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let's drop the big one and see what happens

We give them money-but are they grateful?
No, they're spiteful and they're hateful
They don't respect us-so let's surprise them
We'll drop the big one and pulverize them.

It’s a more closely reasoned version of John McCain’s “Bomb, bomb Iran.”

Most of Newman’s characters are not people like us or like him. But he makes us have some sympathy with them despite their distasteful ideas, even the anti-Semitic, anti-elitist, racist voice of “Rednecks.”* Instead of “Ebony and Ivory,” it’s Ambivalence and Irony.

The ambivalence haunts even the love songs, like “Marie,” which seems merely beautiful until you listen to the lyrics and realize that this guy is a cad.

And I'm weak and I'm lazy
And I've hurt you so
And I don't listen to a word you say
When you're in trouble I just turn away

And yet, his feeling is real.

In “The World Isn’t Fair,” the narrator drops his child off at an exclusive school and imagines a conversation with Marx

All the young mommies were there,
Karl, you never have seen such a glorious sight
as these beautiful women arrayed for the night
just like countesses, empresses, movie stars and queens
And they'd come there with men much like me –
Froggish men, unpleasant to see

It’s like Harold Brodkey’s line, “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.”


I just saw Newman in concert at Carnegie Hall, so I could go on. But I realize this might not be what younger, blogger-rockers are looking for. (“My demographic,” Newman told the audience, “is white males, fifty-two to fifty-five.”) You can see Newman doing most of the songs he did at Carnegie Hall by going to YouTube and searching for the concert he did in Stuttgart two years ago. But to hear his more recent political song, “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country,” catch him at the MacWorld expo.

--------------------
* “Rednecks” is another song from the 70s that could have been written last week (except maybe for the refrain line about “keepin’ the niggers down.” Even rednecks don’t speak that explicitly today).

Just Coincidence, Right

September 24, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Clinton surplus inherited by Bush:
$300 billion

Bush deficit:
$400 billion

Amount Henry Paulson says he needs to bail out the US economy:
$700 billion

Bear With Us

September 23, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

In my post a few weeks back about stuff kids bring to college, I had a photo of a teddy bear lying atop a pile of belongings that included pink bed linens. Obviously, it belonged to a girl. (There was a purse in the picture, but even without it. . . .)

A couple of days later, Lisa at Sociological Images had a post reminding us that pink was once the color for boys. She linked to an article by Ben Goldacre in the Guardian.

The Sunday Sentinel in 1914 told American mothers: “If you like the colour note on the little one's garments, use pink for the boy and blue for the girl, if you are a follower of convention.”

Goldacre uses this bit of history to debunk the claim recently made by evolutionary psychologists that girls’ preference for pink was an outcome of evolution.

But what about the teddy bear? Isn’t there something feminine, a maternal instinct perhaps, that leads girls to keep these soft, childhood objects? It is only girls, right?

Wait, now I remember seeing NYC sanitation trucks with a teddy bear mounted on the grill like a bowsprit mermaid. And Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited who takes his bear Aloysius with him to Oxford.

Now there’s a DVD* about a Teddy bear snapshot exhibition by Canadian Ydessa Hendeles – thousands of photos from the early twentieth century of people posing with their bears. And it’s not just girls.

*The DVD is of a documentary film by Agnès Varda, who interviews the visitors to the exhibit.

Hat tip to Magda