La Topless – Passé?

August 2, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’ve been leaving breast-blogging to Sociological Images or other sociology blogs. A year ago, I came across an interview with French sociologist Jean-Claude Kaufmann, whose research interests include topless sunbathing. In 1995 he published Corps de Femmes, Regards d'Hommes, based on 300 interviews supplemented with observational research at the beach.

I was going to blog it with a title like “For this you can get a grant?” But I merely filed it away.

Now, a year later, a French magazine reports that younger women at the beach are leaving their tops on. The story went mostly ignored in France, The US and UK press were much more enthusiastic. They played it up as a trend towards prudishness among the young, as if to say, “See, they've finally come around to our way of doing things.”

Time magazine for example, says,

Younger women disinclined to baring themselves make up the majority of female sunbathers; those still willing to go topless are usually older French women.

Time has no data on this. If they sent some lucky staffer to Cannes for an informal count, they’re not saying. Time did check a recent a IFOP survey of 1000 French women (“Les femmes et la nudité”) which oddly enough did not ask women if they went topless at the beach. The Time article, in a desperate effort to show a cultural shift, does a really bad job of reporting the data. There were some small differences between younger and older. More of the 18-35 women said they felt uncomfortable seeing topless women at the beach than did the over-35s (31 % vs. 20%). But when asked their level of “pudeur personelle,” the youngest women (18-24) were indistinguishable from the over-35s.

(For a slightly larger view, click on the picture. Maybe NSFW – if your co-workers have really good vision.)

In either case – bared or covered – the French frame the decision over female anatomy as a matter of female autonomy. Last year, Kaufmann said of the decision to go topless, “le phénomène de la topless reste un choix qu'il exprime le désir d'être libres et de communiquer cette liberté.”* This year he sees not going topless as a rejection of fashion. “The practice has become common, and therefore less compelling as a fashion.”

It would be interesting to compare the situation of bare breasts in France and in the US. Here, topless beaches are few. Instead, the image of women baring their breasts is that of Girls Gone Wild or Mardi Gras – girls getting drunk and flashing a crowd of shouting boys (does anyone remember Rude Norton?).

How different from the French beach scene Kaufmann describes, the men

avec des yeux pas particulièrement expressifs, qui ne démontrent pas d’intérêt, mais qu’ils coulent rapidement sur le paysage féminin de la plage de manière attentive. . . .. Pour montrer ses seins, une femme doit se sentir à l’aise.**

There may also be French-US differences in the matter of quality vs. quantity. Kaufmann says that the unwritten rules of the beach permit that only “beaux seins” be exposed. Asked to define his terms, he says, “Selon les interviewés, de beaux seins sont ceux des jeunes filles: plutôt petit, dur, bien attaché au thorax.”

Plutôt petit. Rather small. In the US, surgeons do nearly three times as many breast augmentations as breast reductions. In France, the numbers are reversed. Maybe that’s why when the IFOP asked women who, among six celebs who had posed nude, represented the most gracious female nudity, Pamela Anderson got only 2% of the vote, behind Kate Moss (6%). Laetitia Casta was the big winner, especially among the 18-24s, followed by Emmanuele Béart. (If you are not familiar with these referenced sources, you're on your own.  We're not that kind of blog.)


* “The topless phenomenon remains a choice that expresses the desire to be free and to communicate this freedom.”

** “with eyes that are not particularly expressive and that show no interest, eyes that flow quickly over the feminine landscape of the beach in an attentive manner. . . . To show her breasts, a woman must feel at ease.”

Marrying Out (A Story Goes With It)

July 29, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Brad Wright posts this chart from a Pew report on marrying outside the faith.

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

There’s much to be said, but one thing struck me: for people who marry outside the faith, the most popular other faith is

• either the religion that’s similar (e.g., Orthodox and Catholic, Buddhist and unaffiliated) or
• the religion that has the most people – i.e., Protestant.

With one exception: Jews. Jews who marry outside the faith are much more likely to marry a Catholic.

I chalk this up to opportunity and proximity. Jews tend to live in places where there are also a high proportion of Catholics. In New York City, for example, where Jews are about 18% of the population, they are far more likely to meet a Catholic (50%) than a Protestant (10%).

That’s my explanation. Here’s the story.

My friend Robert, who takes his Judaism fairly seriously, sent his son Peter to Trinity, one of the top private schools in the city. (Despite its name, it’s nondenominational, with a strong ethical, though not religious, orientation. It also had the advantage of being only a few blocks from his house.)

One Saturday morning, Robert took Peter, then about seven, to shul. After the service, one of the older men from the congregation was talking with them, pinching the kid’s cheek, saying what a cute boy he was, asking what grade he was in. “First.” And where did he go to school. “Trinity,” said Peter.

“Oy gevalt.”

For the next couple of weeks, little Peter walked around saying, “Oy gevalt, oy gevalt” in a pretty fair imitation of the alte kocker.

I knew that Peter wasn’t the only Jewish kid at Trinity. And when Robert told me this story, I asked him what the Jewish proportion at Trinity was.

“Fifty percent,” he said. “Every kid has one Jewish parent.”

And most likely, the other parent was Catholic.

Fast forward twenty years or so. At the end of next month, Peter is getting married. To a nice Jewish girl.

Arlo and Nostalgia - But For What?

July 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The New York Times Magazine brief interview with Arlo Guthrie today opens with questions about “the fuss that is being made over the 40th anniversary” of Woodstock. But the picture of Arlo that accompanies the interview took me back not to 1969 (or even 1967, the year of Arlo’s recorded performance of Alice’s Restaurant at the Newport Folk Festival), but to another performance thirty years before Woodstock.



(Note: this post has no sociological content or import that I can see. If anybody finds some, please let me know.)9

I Wonder Who's Dissing Who Now?

July 25, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

If Gates had been white . . . . That’s the refrain you keep hearing from the left side of the street. There’s nothing else to suggest that racism was involved. Gates himself says as much:

If I had been white this incident never would have happened. . . .Whether he’s an individual racist? I don’t know—I don’t know him.

I’m not so sure. If Gates and the cab driver who helped force the door had been white, it’s much less likely the neighbor would have called the cops. But once the cop is there, and someone is challenging his authority, the scene may end in handcuffs, disorderly conduct charges, and artful police reports. Even for whites.

The trouble is that these two men managed to turn a misunderstanding into a contest of egos, or as Steve Teles puts it, a matter of “honor.” Honor, respect, dissing, messing with. “You don’t know who you’re messing with,” Gates allegedly yelled at the cop. And Sgt. Crowley showed Gates that he didn’t know who he was messing with – a cop. Each felt that the other was not according him Respect. Rodney Dangerfield as tragedy.

I’m asking a different question – not what if Gates had been white, but what if Gates and Crowley had been women? I think the tendency to turn misunderstandings or disagreements into character contests is largely a guy thing.* And I like to think that women would have behaved far more sensibly.

That’s why I was so impressed with Obama’s impromptu appearance at the daily press briefing. It wasn’t just that he broke protocol – instead of letting the press secretary handle it, he came to the press room himself and addressed the reporters directly (“you guys,” as he calls them). And it wasn’t just that he said he’d made a mistake (though that is a refreshing contrast to his predecessor). It’s that he had phoned Sgt. Crowley and tried to resolve the problem.

Here, and this wasn’t the first time, Obama frames things as “This is a problem; let’s find a solution,” when others (like Gates and Crowley) frame it as “Let’s have a contest – fight, debate, law suit, etc. – to determine who’s right (i.e., who’s morally superior.)”

No doubt, the boys in the blogs and elsewhere will continue to frame this as a zero-sum game. This morning’s New York Post declares, “Obama’s Cop Backdown.” What I see as problem-solving, the Post sees as a fight, a contest, a challenge, with Obama backing down.


* Yes, I’m well aware that the best-known statement on respect, clearly spelling out the concept and its importance, is by a woman. And yes, elsewhere in the culture, Ann Coulter is, as far as I know, a woman. But few generalizations about gender differences apply to all cases.

Tumult in Harvard Square

July 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Tumultuous” was the part of the Henry Louis Gates story that seemed most unusual. White cop arrests a black man who has committed no crime except to challenge the cop’s authority – nothing much new here. But I don’t usually think of tumultuous as a word that comes quickly to the tongues of cops on the street, even around Harvard Square. But there it was in the report: Gates had been “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior.”

I’d forgotten that a police department is a bureaucracy, part of the larger bureaucratic structure of the law. The cop on the street may be just an ordinary male responding to a challenge to his authority. But the cop in the precinct writing up the report is a bureaucrat. And part of bureaucratic work is making cases conform to the regulations as written.*

Here’s one relevant passage from the ruling case in Massachusetts law on disorderly conduct:

to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm, or recklessly creating a risk thereof, he: (a) engages in fighting or threatening, or in violent or tumultuous behavior;

OK, that accounts for tumultuous. But why did Officer Crowley ask Gates to come out of his own house?

Explaining for the first time why he lured Gates out of his home, Crowley said he sought to protect himself and Gates from a potential intruder as he responded to a call for breaking and entering. (Boston Herald)

The explanation comes a day or two after the fact, or rather, after the facts, including the fact that Gates is a man in his late fifties who walks with a cane, and the fact that he showed the cop his ID.

This post-facto pretext went down well in the conservative press. The Wall Street Journal used it as what it called a “teaching moment”:

one lesson is that it’s usually better to cooperate during encounters with law enforcement so that matters don’t escalate needlessly. And if a cop asks you to step out on the porch, or away from your car, it’s probably because he’s concerned for his own safety.

Maybe the cop is thinking about his own safety. But maybe he’s also thinking about the law on disorderly conduct, which requires that the behavior be public.

`Public' means affecting or likely to affect persons in a place to which the public or a substantial group has access.'. . .

Inside your own house is not “public.” So if you want my name and badge number, step outside here where there are other people, and then . . . . you’re under arrest for disorderly conduct.


*According to one analysis, it was not the arresting officer who wrote up the report. Instead it was left to two officers who were perhaps more versed in the language of the law.

(Note: Much of what I’ve said here, it turns out, was already said by Mark Kleiman on his blog. Mark’s post is more detailed, somewhat more technical, and just generally better.)

No Protest on Protestants

July 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The conservative reaction to the Sotomayor nomination amply illustrated invisibility cloak worn by privilege. When some characteristic is the default setting (like white male for Supreme Court justices), it goes unnoticed, and we never think to ask what its effect might be. Only when someone doesn’t conform to the default do we worry about the influence their experiences might have. (See my earlier post here.)

Andrew Gelman posting at fivethirtyeight.com finds another example. The New York Times asked “legal experts” what questions they might like to ask at the hearings. Blogger Ann Althouse summoned up her legal expertise to ask.

If a diverse array of justices is desirable, should we not be concerned that if you are confirmed, six out of the nine justices will be Roman Catholics, or is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Catholicism on the court at the moment when we have our first Hispanic nominee?

Gelman reminds us – and provides a graph, of course, to show – that for nearly all of its history, the Court had an overwhelming majority of Protestants. Yet in all that time, no legal experts seem to have been concerned or even to have noticed.

I can't imagine that, when, say, Charles Evans Hughes was being nominated for his Supreme Court seat, that somebody asked him: “Is it somehow wrong to start paying attention to the extreme overrepresentation of Protestantism on the court at the moment when we have our umpteenth white nominee?”

Faculty Without Students

July 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I’m looking at low enrollments in some courses for the fall. The administration here pays attention to these numbers, and I may even have to cancel some sections.

So I took notice when I saw a recent paper called “Faculty Without Students: Resource Allocation in Higher Education” by William R. Johnson and Sarah Tuner.

The math department at Princeton, they report, has 58 faculty plus 8 visitors. It has 66 undergraduate math majors (a number that is nearly double what it was in 2007).

A student-faculty ratio of 1.0 or less is unusual.* But if you want to find low ratios like that, don’t go to sociology. Or any of the social sciences.

Here are two graphs from Johnson and Turner’s paper.

Click on the images if you want to actually see the graphs.

Student-faculty ratios are higher in the social sciences. They also show greater variation.

Political science is the interesting case here. Generally, the mean ratio increases with the popularity of a major. But in that case, psychology and English should have greater means and ranges than political science.

(Bleg: If anyone knows how to get Blogger to show a jpeg at a viewable size, please tell me.)

* In a post a couple of years ago, I told of my disillusionment at finding out that some “professors” never taught courses at all.

Everett Hughes at the Pump

July 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I don’t know how to do this. I’m from New Jersey.” The fortyish woman had gotten out of her SUV and was standing there by the gas pump looking befuddled. *

It was a small, two-pump Mobil station just off Rte. 84 in Connecticut, and my wife and I had stopped for gas on our way to Boston for my niece’s wedding.** The Jersey woman was also on her way to Boston, taking her teenage daughter to see Rent. She was a law-abiding woman, and in New Jersey, it’s illegal to pump your own gas. The Garden State does not trust its citizens to perform this delicate operation that is better left to professionals. Gas station attendants must take eight hours of training, and no doubt some of that time is devoted to nozzle technique. (On the other hand, if you want a clean windshield, do it yourself, buddy. The squeegee’s over there.)

My wife showed our fellow traveler how to unscrew the gas cap, dip her credit card, lift the nozzle, and so on. I thought about Everett Hughes.

In his course on work and professions, Hughes reflected on who was allowed to do what in an occupation. The rationale was always about the training and expertise necessary for the protection of the public. But when you looked at changes in the distribution of these tasks, you began to see an effort retain control and limit access.

To become a pharmacist required a two-year course of study. But in World War II, when the military needed druggists – and fast – the army started turning out 90-day wonders. For a long time, only MDs were allowed to give injections. Only when doctors had more complicated tasks that filled their time did the AMA change its mind and agree that on second thought maybe handling a hypodermic syringe was something a nurse might be capable of. There must be many more examples in medicine and in other professions.

Someday, even drivers in New Jersey and Oregon may be allowed to pump their own gas.

* No, the woman was not Mischa Barton. I just grabbed this pic from Google Images.

**A wonderful wedding, by the way. Pictures available on request.

Sotomayor and "Master Status"

July 15, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the Sotomayor confirmation hearings, Republicans have swarmed on Ricci v. DeStefano, the New Haven firefighters case. To hear them tell it, Sotomayor flung the law aside in upholding the lower court decision. She, the majority of the Second Circuit Court, the Federal judge who wrote the original opinion, and the four dissenting Supreme Court justices all based their opinions entirely on a preference for blacks and Hispanics and an animus towards whites. They didn’t consider the law.

By contrast, the five males (four of them white) on the Supreme Court who sided with the white male plaintiffs based their decision wholly and impartially on the law. Their race had nothing to do with it.

The Republican strategy depends on the tendency for privilege to remain invisible. I’ve commented on this before, here and more recently in a post called “White Is Not a Race” White is the default setting, the one we take for granted. Because it’s usually invisible, we can’t see how it could affect the way we think.

For the Republicans, Sotomayor’s race and gender are what Everett Hughes called “master status” – the dominating fact about her. So they assume that these characteristics control everything she does, including her legal opinions. Unfortunately for their argument, they can find nothing in those opinions that confirms this idea, except perhaps her brief statement in Ricci. Instead, they must ignore the large volume of opinions she has written (more than those of recent Court nominees) and focus on speeches in nonlegal venues.

In any case, the hearings have only ritualistic value and are without real consequence. The Senate will confirm Sotomayor, and the Court will have its first Latina, wise or otherwise.

NY ♥ France

Le 14 juillet 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The anti-French campaign by the Cheney-Bush administration and friends never had much success in New York. Elsewhere in America, people were dumping Bordeaux and serving “freedom fries,” but not here. A Stuff New Yorkers Like blog would have to have France near the top of the list.

So Sunday’s French street fair was packed.

(Click on a picture for a larger version.)

Food, of course, was much in evidence.

(Maybe you make crème brulée, but you probably don’t brown the top using an acetylene torch.)

There were macarons, but they were not from Ladurée, the only macarons source for true Parisians. As the snarky Stuff Parisians Like put it in their first post:

Parisians lack imagination. Baby Shower? Macarons Ladurée. Birthday party ? Macarons Ladurée. Thank you note? Macarons Ladurée. Dinner party? Macarons Ladurée. Weekend in Normandy? Macarons Ladurée.
Le macaron has become a key social lubricant in Paris. While most Parisians have given up on ancestral guilty pleasures (sex, drugs, alcohol), very few will say no to the modern form of socially acceptable vice: Le Macaron Ladurée.

There was even boules game.


From the improvised sign, I’d guess that this was a last minute addition. And because they call it pétanque rather than boules, I’d also guess that the people involved are from the South. It took me back to Laurence Wylie’s classic ethnography Village in the Vaucluse, which taught me the difference between pointer and tirer.

Last but not least, the Deux Chevaux.


Certain cars stand as icons for their country; they embody important cultural themes. The Rolls Royce, the Ferrari, the Mercedes, the Volvo. But it’s hard to know what to say about the 2 CV.

Data? We Don't Need No Stinking Data.

July 13, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

There it was again, the phrase that makes me cringe. This time it was in a letter to the New York Times Magazine in response to a column by Rob Walker on a marketing strategy the Hyatt Hotel chain was using to increase customer loyalty. The hotel would give “random acts of generosity” (like picking up your bar tab) in hopes of generating gratitude.

Walker also cited some supporting research from a management journal. That was his mistake. The letter writer knew better.

Well, we finally know why the American economy is in trouble. The Journal of Marketing accepted an academic paper exploring whether gratitude kindles a feeling of obligation. Could anything be more patently obvious without any research? John Milton knew this 400 years ago: “The debt immense of endless gratitude.”
-- Bob House, Phoenix [emphasis added]

Mr. House did not use the customary phrase, “we don’t need research to tell us,” though he did say flatly that such research is not only unnecessary but harmful to the economy. Who needs data when you have Paradise Lost?

Week one in my course I tell students that even when an idea is obvious, we still need to get evidence to confirm it. I don’t mention gratitude, though I do cite other obvious facts, like the fact that far more people die in fires each year than by drowning, a fact well supported by logic and common sense, though unfortunately not by the evidence.

Sometimes speakers use “we don’t need statistics” after they’ve cited the statistics. More often, when someone says, “We don’t need statistics to tell us. . . .” it’s a pretty good bet that there are no data to support the statement, or worse, that the evidence supports an opposite conclusion. Here are a couple of samples from my files:

Does watching porn or listening rap make kids more promiscuous? Why waste time figuring out how to get data on the question? Just take it from Irving Kristol (William’s dad) from some years back writing in the Wall Street Journal:

is it not reasonable to think that there may also be such a connection between our popular culture and the plagues of sexual promiscuity among teenagers, teenage illegitimacy, and, yes, the increasing number of rapes committed by teenagers? Here again, we don’t really need social science to confirm what common sense and common observations tell us to be the case.
Can anyone really believe that soft porn in our Hollywood movies, hard porn in our cable movies, and violent porn in our “rap” music is without effect?

By “here again,” he apparently means that there are several other areas where we are better off not trying to get evidence.

Is the death penalty more of a deterrent than long prison terms? No point in doing all those regressions. Just take it from Charles Rice, a law professor at Notre Dame, writing in The New American

The best evidence that the death penalty has a uniquely deterrent impact . . . is not based on statistics but is rather based on common sense and experience. Death is an awesome and awful penalty, qualitatively different from a prison term . . . Common sense can sufficiently verify that the prospect of punishment by death does exert a restraining effect on some criminals who would otherwise commit a capital crime.

For what it’s worth, I did a quick Internet search. Here are the results.

• “We don’t need studies” - Google - 791; Bing - 605
• “We don’t need statistics” Google - 329, Bing - 262

Of course, we don’t really need statistics to tell us that these phrases are a refuge for those who have no evidence.

Are Drugs Still Trumps?

July 8, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

For decades, drug policy in the US was based on a kind of hysteria, with lawmakers trying to outdo one another in dreaming up harsher and harsher punishments. Slowly but surely, drug laws are becoming more rational. But there are still people who think they can win an argument by shouting “drugs!” in a crowded-prison debate. They toss “drugs” out like a high trump card to sweep everything else off the table.

A few days ago, the Times ran an article by reporter Erik Ekholm on the children of parents who are incarcerated. Ekholm cited research, by sociologists such as the redoubtable Sara Wakefield, showing that having a parent sent away to prison does not generally contribute greatly to a kid’s well-being.

In the spirit of fair and balanced journalism, Ekholm was required to give space to the lock-’em-up folks, so he gives us “Heather MacDonald, a legal expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group.”

“A large portion of fathers were imprisoned on violence or drug-trafficking charges,” she said. “What would be the effects on other children in the neighborhood if those men are out there?”

Note Ms. MacDonald’s equation of violence and “drug-trafficking,” as though the person selling crack or heroin to willing customers were indistinguishable from an armed robber. I guess Ms. MacDonald has been watching reruns of Al Pacino’s Scarface rather than reading Sudhir Vankatesh (or the Montclair SocioBlog).

Nor, apparently, has she been talking with conservative economists down the hall at the Manhattan Institute, for she also seems to think that locking up drug sellers reduces the total number of drug sellers in the neighborhood. This fantasy is not only contradicted by empirical research (and by common knowledge); it also runs counter to what would be predicted by principles free-market economics. Market forces bring new dealers to replace the ones the police have just swept off the street.

(Hat tip: Todd Krohn at The Power Elite and SocProf at Global Sociology.)

If You Don't Know, Guess - But Sound as Though You're Certain

July 6, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does anybody really know why Palin resigned? Maybe Palin herself knows – and I emphasize the maybe. But that didn't stop the media from printing pure speculation almost as if it were solid fact. Here are some headlines typical of the first stories:

Palin prepping for a run for president?
(msnbc)
Palin hints at White House bid by quitting as governor of Alaska
(The Times - London)
News fuels rumors of a 2012 run
(Boston Globe)

Not much later, we got headlines like this:

Alaska's governor Sarah Palin to resign, dooming her presidential pipe dream.

(New York Daily News)
Sarah Palin’s Lame Duck Resignation Logic Eliminates a 2012 Run for President
(US News and World Report)

You might as well be reading blogs.

Civility or Mindless Compliance?

July 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Suppose you were about to walk into a campus building, and you saw this sign.


Would you take the door indicated? If you were headed for one door when you saw the sign, would you change your course, even if it meant adding a full three steps to your journey?

If so, according to the people at The Situationist, you are guilty of “gender conformity” and “mindless compliance.”

Here’s the full video. (Note: it’s silent. Don’t bother, as I did, trying to figure out what’s wrong with your computer’s sound.)

The Situationist lists “related” posts on the Zimbardo prison, the Milgram obedience experiments, and the Asch conformity experiments.

Why didn’t they link to something about civility?

Suppose you’re walking into a building, and a stranger says, “Excuse me, would you mind walking through this other door?” would you stop and demand that he explain the rationale for his request? Or would you say, “Sure,” and go on your way?

The experimenter, Sarah Lisenbe, frames this as a gender issue. But would the results have been different if the sign had indicated different doors for first-year students and sophomores and above? Or students and faculty?

The video ends with a sigh (a signed sigh). But it left me with a question: what about the people who saw the sign but deliberately ignored it? What kind of person would disregard such a simple request?

Yes, I know there’s a counter-argument – that mindless conformity to signs based on gender only serves to reinforce gender inequality. It’s like obeying the Jim Crow signs for colored and white drinking fountains. (Is it relevant that this video was apparently taken at Mississippi State?)
So I guess the question is this: do you see the sign as an intrinsic part of a system of sex segregation and male domination; or do you see it as another request, like a traffic arrow, that’s so minor you don’t even bother to wonder about its rationale?

Mainstream vs. Bloggers

July 1, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Socioblog is pleased that the New York Times picked up on yesterday’s blog post and ran with its own horror story about private health insurance (in this case, Aetna). The Times also quotes from Wendell Potter, the former Cigna exec who testified before Congress a week ago about private health care insurance.

Insured but Unprotected, and Driven Bankrupt by Health Crises - Series - NYTimes.com via kwout

How do the mainstream media decide what is news and what isn’t? The Times did not see fit to cover Potter’s testimony when it was news. But why was it not fit to print? Potter was a former insider telling several inconvenient truths about insurance companies. He was making accusations in point-blank terms. Yet when I searched Lexis-Nexis, I found only two newspapers that gave ink to the story – the Washington Post and the Philadelphia Inquirer. A few others (e.g., WSJ, Hartford Courant) had the story on line. The AP put Potter at the end of a short item (621 words) about insurers using a “flawed database.” No TV networks covered it.

But several blogs had the story.

The disparity reminded me of the old days and I.F. Stone’s Newsletter.* After he was blacklisted, and most Washington insiders avoided him, Stone made a virtue of necessity. While most reporters avoided the boring stuff of actual legislation and got their stories from government insiders, Stone made a careful reading of transcripts of Congressional hearings. When it came to foreign affairs, especially the Vietnam war, he didn’t much bother with the press briefings from the White House or Pentagon, but he did look closely at non-US sources like Agence France Presse. It was like finding out inconvenient truths by going through the garbage people threw out. It was out there and public, though most reporters ignored it, and it often didn't smell very good.

I know that a lot of dubious material floats around the blogosphere, but the medium has allowed a thousand I.F. Stones to blossom. (Well, maybe not a thousand, but there are dozens of good ones.)

* Update, July 2: I am, it turns out, far from alone noticing the resemblance. According to a recent article in the L.A. Times by Stone’s biographer D.D. Guttenplan, “many contemporary observers” have dubbed Stone “the first blogger.”

There may be at least one difference between Stone and contemporary bloggers. Stone was meticulous about copy. His daughter says that he once told her, “Typos are worse than fascism.”

Anecdotal Evidence on Health Care

June 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Opponents of government involvement in health care seem to have two strategies. One is name-calling – “socialism” and “European-style” are two of their favorites. The other is to repeat anecdotes to illustrate the horrors that people in Europe and Canada have suffered – delayed treatment, denial of treatment, and so on. There’s a third strategy – spending huge amounts of money in lobbying legislators directly – but that’s less visible.

The Obama Administration has asked Americans for their own stories about their experiences with the insurance industry. Stories have poured in by the thousands. You can read them here, read them and weep.

Some people report on their experiences with socialized European-style health care, and the US does not come off on the plus side (here, for example). Others compare experiences with private insurance against public plans in this country Again, the private system comes off as inferior.
I’ve blogged before (here and here) about the utter hollowness of the claims that socialized health care will mean that “bureaucrats” rather than doctors will be making decisions. In fact, the bureaucrats are already doing that. And a few of them have contributed their stories to the Obama website. Here’s one from Barbara in Barbara, Deer Island, FL

I worked for United Health Care in small group customer service. If a company was more than 5 days late in their monthly payments, United would "terminate" their coverage. When they were terminated the group administrator from the "termed" company would call me to reinstate their coverage. I would take their phone number, go to my supervisor's office and get a computer disk showing all small groups "loss ratios." If the company I was working with was in the high risk ratio, I was not to reinstate their coverage. This meant people in the hospital or scheduled for surgery would never nave coverage with any company because of pre-existing conditions if their coverage was less than 90 days. Sometimes a new group misses payments in the first few months before they get on a payment schedule. This is how United Would "weed out" the high claims group. Their actions were not illegal, but were IMMORAL!

That term “loss ratio” refers to the ratio of premiums that the insurance company pays out. When your insurance company pays a claim to your doctor or hospital, that’s a loss.

Barbara’s story was amplified recently in Congress. Wendell Potter, a former executive at Cigna, testified before the Commerce Committee.

"They look carefully to see if a sick policyholder may have omitted a minor illness, a pre-existing condition, when applying for coverage, and then they use that as justification to cancel the policy, even if the enrollee has never missed a premium payment."
(Potter’s full testimony, thanks to Ezra Klein, is here.)

Selling (Out) Public Transport

June 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Even in my early morning stupor, I couldn’t help noticing the new turnstiles at Penn Station. Where once spotless chrome gleamed, proclaiming the subway’s purity, now speaks the crass voice of commerce: There’s a sale at H&M waiting for you upstairs when you leave the station. You can get something for as little as five bucks. Cheap.



It’s not so different from the ads on the walls, I thought. Besides, it might help to keep the fare from going up too much. At least the MTA isn’t selling naming rights to the subway the way the Port Authority nearly sold the George Washington Bridge to Geico (see my old blog entry here.)

That was then. Yesterday, the MTA announced that the Atlantic Ave. Station in Brooklyn will henceforth also be known as the Barclay’s Bank station. The station is a major hub, with transfers available from at least four different subway lines. For a large British bank, the $200,000 a year is pocket change. Talk about cheap.

Oh well, at least they didn’t sell the name for my station.

Taylorized Eating

June 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The 1954 musical The Pajama Game makes fun of “scientific management” and efficiency experts. The comic foil in the show is Hinesy, the time-study man. (See my post of last December on Taylorism.)

In the song “Think of the Time I Save,” Hinesy tells the female workers in the pajama factory of how his personal life is devoted to saving time. He even eats so as to maximize efficiency. The song includes this verse:

At breakfast time, I grab a bowl.
And in the bowl I drop an egg,
And add some juice.
A poor excuse for what I crave.
And then I add some oatmeal too,
And it comes out tasting just like glue,
But think of the time I save.

Parody, right? Could never happen, right? Maybe not, but as Mike at Pragmatic Realists Idealists reports, one fast food chain, BBQ Chicken, is coming close.

Twenty-five Is Not a Random Number

June 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Political scientists Bernd Beber and Alexandra Scacco have a simple test for electoral fraud in the Iranian election. Here are the results from Qom

• Ahmadinejad . . . . .422,457
• Karroubi . . . . . . . . . . 2,314
• Mousavi. . . . . . . . . .148,467
• Rezaee. . . . . . . . . . . . 16,297

Which digits are the important ones? The left-most ones, of course – Ahmadinejad’s roughly 420,000 to Mousavi’s 148,000.

But Beber and Scacco were interested in the right-most digits, the ones that we might throw out and round to zero. Here’s why:

When people try to make up numbers that appear to be random, they show certain preferences. Try it yourself. Think of any random number from 0 to 100. I’ll wait. Got your number? O.K. Chances are it’s an odd number that does not end in 5. More than likely, it does end in 7.*

In an honest vote count, about 10% of the final digits should be fives, and 10% should be sevens. If five is underrepresented, and if seven is overrepresented, someone is trying to make up numbers and have them seem random.

Beber and Scacco looked at the 116 results (four candidates x 29 provinces) and . . .

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran's provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average – a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another – are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

In a second test, Beber and Scacco also looked at the last two digits.

Psychologists have also found that humans have trouble generating non-adjacent digits (such as 64 or 17, as opposed to 23) as frequently as one would expect in a sequence of random numbers.

Sure enough, the totals had fewer non-adjacent pairs than would be expected, especially in the province totals for Ahmadinejad. The two tests provide a fairly persuasive case for what most people think anyway – that the vote totals reported by the Iranian government were fabricated.

Beber and Scacco report their research in the Washington Post here.

*Street magician David Blaine uses this same tendency in one of his mind reading tricks. A lot of people pick 37.

Hat tip to Joshua Tucker at The Monkey Cage, which has links to the electoral data.

States' Rights, and Wrongs

June 19, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Supreme Court decision in Osborne yesterday allows a state to prevent a convicted person from re-examining evidence using modern DNA testing, even though such testing might prove innocence.

That’s bad enough – especially for people who have been wrongfully convicted and who might be exonerated. But my guess is that the conservative majority has bigger things in mind – rolling back incorporation.

Incorporation is the theory that the Warren Court used to prevent states from violating individual rights. The language of the Bill of Rights clearly protects people against actions by the federal government. “Congress shall make no law . . . ” But it says nothing specifically about what state governments may do. The Fourteenth Amendment, like the other two Civil War amendments imposes limitations on the states. No slavery, no denial of the vote. The Fourteenth requires states to follow “due process” in criminal cases.

The trouble was that what state courts considered due process varied widely. In Mississippi, beating defendants till they confessed and then using that confession to convict them was not a violation of due process.

Beginning in the 1960s, the Court handed down some landmark decisions saying basically that certain due process rights which already existed at the federal level (a free lawyer, the exclusion of illegally seized evidence, etc.) were incorporated on the states via the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The conservatives seem to want to restrict these protections and return the definition of due process to the states. As Chief Justice Roberts wrote in his opinion.

This approach would take the development of rules and procedures in this area out of the hands of legislatures and state courts shaping policy in a focused manner and turn it over to federal courts applying the broad parameters of the Due Process Clause. There is no reason to constitutionalize the issue in this way.

“No reason to constitutionalize.” There is a reason, actually – making sure that a state is not locking up (or executing) an innocent person. But that’s a small price to pay for taking one small step in rolling back the constitutionalizing protections of the Court’s more liberal period. Of course, when it comes to state practices the conservatives don’t like (restricting guns, allowing abortions and assisted suicide, counting Democratic votes), I doubt that we’ll hear much from them about the evils of constitutionalizing and incorporation.

None of the legal blogs have mentioned incorporation (at least not the two I looked at). So what I’m saying is either so wrong or so obvious that it isn’t worth noting.

Folkways and Laws

June 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Stateways cannot change folkways. Or can they?

Henry at Crooked Timber, who has apparently spent some time in the pubs of Ireland, says he never expected the Irish to obey the new anti-smoking law. But they did. Henry’s explanation is not that he underestimated the power of the law but that he overestimated the strength of the norms:

prevailing norms (that Irish people can smoke in pubs to their hearts’ content, and that others will just have to put up with it) were much more fragile than they appeared to be

In France too, and Italy, many people were sure that smokers would ignore new restrictions on indoor smoking, but the bans in those countries have been surprisingly effective.

The crucial point is not that social scientists misread the norms but that the smokers on the ground did. It’s a case of “pluralistic ignorance,” a phrase coined by Floyd Allport in the early 20th century to describe this misreading. Most people have doubts about the norm (in this case, the norm that smoking is O.K.), but each thinks that others support it, so each person publicly states support for the norm and keeps his doubts to himself, which only leads everyone to further misread just how weak the norm really is.

Attribution theory has a related explanation. When we see someone behave in a certain way, we are quick to attribute a whole set of motives and characteristics to the person. If someone is smoking, it must be because he wants to. He is a smoker. On top of that, if we see nonsmokers in a pub where there is smoking, and they are not objecting, we conclude that they have no objections. In both cases, we are using our observations of behavior to make simplistic assumptions about what’s in the minds of the people we observe.

If we thought about it for a couple of seconds, we’d realize that most people who smoke feel at least ambivalent about smoking. They’d like to quit and have probably tried to more than once. A ban on smoking indoors gives them one more external push to do what they want to do anyway.

Something similar happened when New York City passed a “pooper scooper” law thirty years ago. By the late 1970s in New York City, dog droppings in the public areas of the city – the parks, streets, and sidewalks – had reached a level that many people found disgusting. It was a shitty version of the tragedy of the commons. Each individual acted out of self-interest (walking away was more pleasant than scooping up the poop) with a result that made the city less pleasant for all.

Many people thought the new law would have no effect. They were applying a rational, economic analysis. True, there was a fine for not cleaning up. But the city had much heavier fines for running red lights, and still many New York drivers continued to treat stop lights more as a suggestion than as a command. Besides, it was very unlikely that a cop would be around at the precise moment a dog owner walked away leaving the incriminating evidence. The law was all but unenforceable. How could anyone seriously expect New Yorkers, of all people, to cooperate?


But much to the surprise of most people, including New Yorkers themselves, the law worked. Dog owners did clean up, even though they could easily have gotten away with violating the new law. But why? Here’s my guess: Even before the new law, dog owners had probably thought that cleaning up after their dogs was the right thing to do, but since everyone else was leaving the stuff on the sidewalk, nobody wanted to be the only schmuck in New York to be picking up dog shit. In the same way that the no-smoking laws worked because smokers wanted to quit, the dog law in New York worked because dog owners really did agree that they should be cleaning up after their dogs. But prior to the law, none of them would speak or act on that idea.

So it looks as though stateways can indeed change folkways, at least when the folks want to change.

Oceane Tide Rising and Falling

June 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post on names, I said that the rapid rise and fall of Oceane in France paralleled the career of Madison in the US. But Madison is still hanging in there, still in the top 5, having descended only one or two places in the rankings. A better example might be Hannah (though Oceane doesn’t have Hannah’s history), or Ashley in the late 20th century.

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

Still, both these American names were less volatile than Oceane in France. In a single decade (1991-2000) the number of Oceanes increased by a factor of six. Six years later, it had fallen nearly by half.
(US graphs are from babynamewizard. More data on French names here.)

It's How You Finish

June 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Flaneuse at Graphic Sociology reprints a neat graph by Baptiste Coulmont showing trends in the endings of girls' names in France.

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

The final “e” has long been characteristic of French female names, though with some variation (the “ette” suffix is so 1930s). The most remarkable trend in recent decades is the rise of the final “a” to the point that it is now more common than the final “e.” The three top names in 2006 (the most recent year I could find data for), were Emma, Lea, and Clara. (I also noted that Oceane has now dropped out of the top ten. Apparently, in terms of fashion cycles, Oceane is to France what Madison is to the US.)

Final letters of boys’ names in the US have also seen a dramatic shift, as documented nearly two years ago by Laura Wattenberg at babynamewizard. The half century from 1906 to 1956 saw little change. D,E, S, N, and Y shared the closing spotlight, probably thanks to David, George, and James/Charles/Thomas, John and several Y names.

Final Letter of Boys' Names 1906

Final Letter of Boys' Names 1956

But by 2006, N had conquered the field and stood pretty much alone.

Final Letter of Boys' Names 2006

It won not by having a single blockbuster – only one of the top ten boys’ names, Ethan, had a final N – but with more of a long-tail effect. Of the names ranked 14th to 27th, nine of the fourteen ended in N. (The list is here).

Dialing, Dollars, and Doctors

June 10, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The only health care costs I was thinking about when I started calling orthopedists today were my own. That’s why my first question was to make sure that the doctor participated in my insurance plan. I was calling only orthopedists listed listed on my plan’s website. But the woman who finally answered the phone of my first choice told me No.

The personal is the political, and I started thinking of all those warnings from conservatives that if the government gets into health care, we won’t be able to choose our own doctors, and we’ll be subject to incompetent government bureaucracy. It took only one phone call to discover that under what I have now, I can’t choose my own doctor, and that, at least when it comes to keeping their website information current, the insurance company bureaucracy isn’t exactly a paragon of competence.

A public option might be just as good. And who knows – with Obama in office, maybe the music you have to listen to while you’re waiting will be better.

I expected to be put on hold, and I expected the music. But I wasn’t prepared for the ads over the music – a woman’s reassuring voice telling me about all the wonderful kinds of surgery now available. It wasn’t as blatant as those ads on the subway decades ago for Dr. Tush* and his hemorrhoid surgery. The on-hold message didn’t exactly say, “What would it take for me to put you today into this quick and sporty little arthroscopic hand surgery?” There was also the difference that while the straphanger-friendly proctologist was going for volume, the orthopedists were aiming at a smaller customer base but pushing their more expensive products. Still, it was clear that all these practitioners were paying close attention to the bottom line.

Then I remembered that just this morning, Ezra Klein blogging at WaPo had said something along similar lines – less personal, more political and economic.

Reforms to . . . the way doctors are paid would actually do much to change the drivers of health-care spending. . . . Most doctors are paid on a fee-for-service model. Every time they do something to you, they get money for it. That's a subtle incentive toward expensive overtreatment. Conversely, if we paid doctors exactly the same amount overall, but made that money a yearly salary rather than a reward for volume of treatment, doctors would lose an important incentive to provide more health-care services than we actually need.

Ezra also recommends Atul Gawande’s recent New Yorker article, which ought to be required reading for anybody who has anything to do with healthcare.

* Amazingly, I could not find anything about Dr. Tush on the Internet. I’m pretty sure he wound up in prison, but I don’t know whether for medical or financial malfeasance

Well You Needn't

June 7, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The primary school my son went to is moving, and there was a farewell tour of the old building. The walls were covered with the kids’ art and their class projects. I was looking at the classroom doors – guides to trends in names. Gone were Emily and Alexandra and of course Jason.
But this one stopped me in my tracks.


Thelonius!

“There’s Only One Aretha,” I remembered. It was the title of a chapter in Beyond Jennifer and Jason: An Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby, by far the best of the books my wife and I consulted back in the late 80s. (The title has since been updated: Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana: What to Name Your Baby Now.)

Don’t name your kid Aretha – that was the gist of the chapter – unless you want to doom her to a lifetime of predictable comments. There are some names that are unique. There’s only one of them, and it’s been taken.

Surely Thelonius must be such a name – even his son goes by T.S. Monk, Jr. But at least on the West Side, maybe it has broken out.

The Dog Corrupted My Homework

June 5, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Inside Higher Ed today reports on a company that sells corrupted files for students to submit in lieu of the paper they haven’t finished. “It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!”

A few readers at Ed (Inside Higher Ed and I are on a last name basis) offered ways to defeat such tactics.

I have several reactions..

• Formal rationality and substantive rationality: If you set up a bureaucratized, McDonaldized version of “education,” where forms are more important than substance, you should expect this cat-and-mouse game of students trying not to learn, and teachers trying to catch them.
  
  
• A day in the life. Corrupted-files.com promises students “several hours.” Maybe even a day or two. Will that time really make a difference in quality? Probably not. But students may have complicated lives, and my course is only one of its elements. And suppose that the extra day or two would make a difference in quality . . . .
  
  
• Do you want it Wednesday or do you want it good? It’s a standard line among sitcom writers. TV has to run on schedule, so the answer is usually Wednesday. Which is why TV is so often not good. But my course is not a sitcom (or is it?), and I would much rather have the work be good.
  
  
• WTF? RTF. I ask students to submit papers as Rich Text Format (.rtf) documents. I don’t know if this reduces the possibility for corruption. It does make the paper readable in other formats (like my beloved WordPerfect). And I once heard that a virus can be embedded in a Word document but not in a .rtf document.*

*And please no PowerPoint. As Lord Acton said of the effect of presentation software on thinking, “PowerPoint tends to corrupt. Absolute PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

Which Side (of the Newsstand) Are You On?

June 2, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Inflation or deflation – which is the greater cause for concern? Maybe your answer depends on your relation to the means of producing the New York Times – are you a writer or a reader?

On Friday, Paul Krugman wrote:

Suddenly it seems as if everyone is talking about inflation. . . .But does the big inflation scare make any sense? Basically, no . . .. Deflation, not inflation, is the clear and present danger.

When I went to buy the paper Monday to see Krugman’s next column, the newsstand price had risen by 33% – from $1.50 to $2.00. (The increase, equal to the price of New York’s other two dailies, means that the Times price is 300% that of the Daily News or Post.)

Murder in the Cathedral

May 31, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Operation Rescue issued the following statement regarding the assassination of Dr. George Tiller as he served as an usher at his Kansas church.

We are shocked at this morning's disturbing news that Mr. [sic]Tiller was gunned down. Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning. We pray for Mr. Tiller's family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.

I like “shocked” with its inadvertent Casablanca allusion. For years they have been calling Dr. Tiller a murderer, a mass murderer. They wanted him “brought to justice” even though he had committed no crime. And now they are shocked, shocked, to find that one of their followers got the message.

In 1170, King Henry II, frustrated by Archbishop Thomas Becket’s refusal to cede any church jurisdiction to the crown, called out to his underling knights, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest.”* Four knights rode to Canterbury and killed Becket.

The next day, King Henry issued a proclamation. (My memory is hazy here. I think the lines below may be from T.S. Eliot’s version.)

At this disturbing news we are shocked, shocked,
That the Archbishop has been killed by swords.
We wanted on his head to bring down justice
But through peaceful means. We’re not to blame – trust us.

*That is the most famous version of the quote. More recent scholarship has Henry taunting the knights: “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!”

White Is Not a Race

May 31, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and others on the far right are calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Before she was nominated, when Obama said that “empathy” was a quality he would look for in a Supreme Court justice, Republicans picked up the word and waved it like the red flag of danger. Even David Brooks, who enters stage right to play the role of the calm and thoughtful, but always reliable, conservative, suddenly remembered that “emotions are an inherent part of decision-making.” In his column yesterday, Brooks asks of Sotomayor,

Can she process multiple streams of emotion? Reason is weak and emotions are strong, but emotions can be balanced off each other. . . . Is she aware of the murky, flawed and semiprimitive nature of her own decision-making, and has she accounted for her own uncertainty? If we were logical creatures in a logical world, judges could create sweeping abstractions and then rigorously apply them. But because we’re emotional creatures in an idiosyncratic world, it’s prudent to have judges who are cautious, incrementalist and minimalist.

The role of emotion and the “semiprimitive” nature of decision-making – Brooks says that these affect all humans. It was a mere oversight that he never mentioned these factors in his writings about other justices or nominees. But faced with the nomination of Sotomayor, Brooks seems to be seeing he as Penelope Cruz as the hot-blooded Latina in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

These Republican reactions and arguments rest on the basic assumption that white male is the default setting. White is not a race, male is not a gender. Only blacks, Hispanics, and others have race. Only women and gays have gender. Because white males do not have race or gender, race and gender cannot affect their decisions or perceptions. But for a Latina, awash in race and gender, these qualities will distort her views. Therefore, she must prove that she can overcome race and gender – in other words, that she can think like a white male.

Situation Comedy

May 28, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“If there’s one second of spare time, and if you look away from him and lose eye contact, he immediately whips it out and starts looking at it,” she said.

“She” is Evvajean Mintz, speaking about her husband, Richard, a partner in a Boston law firm. His annoying bit of dinner-table behavior is the subject of an article in the food section of the yesterday’s New York Times. The “it” she is referring to, as you have no doubt guessed, is his Blackberry.*

Cellphones and Blackberries are the new normative battleground. The rules are far from clear. Adults think it’s rude to text at the dinner table; obviously many kids think otherwise. In fact, I wonder if there are any situations at all that these kids would redline for texting.

Most people think that you shouldn’t make cellphone calls in a theater – most, but not all, for the management has to remind people of the rule. But what about on public transportation? Some buses ban them; others don’t. Some commuter trains have cellphone cars the way they used to have smoking cars. How about sporting events? My sister-in-law complained about cell-phone users at the Yankee game.

Sometimes our reactions are personal and rational. We can’t enjoy the play or movie if we have to listen to competing cellphone conversations. We know that the kid who is busy with his Blackberry in class is not giving us his full attention. But more often our reactions are social. We are acting not as individuals but as members of society. We resent the texter or talker not out of self-interest but on behalf of the social situation. As Goffman says, we have a stake in the situation that we find ourselves in, and even though we may have absolutely no personal connection to others in that situation, we think that they too should show their commitment to it. The cellphone/Blackberry user is saying to all those present that despite her physical presence, she herself is not part of the situation. Her allegiance is to others elsewhere.

The Times reporter talked with danah boyd (or as the Times style sheet insists, Danah Boyd), who says that teenagers are

just doing what they’ve always done: hanging out with their friends.
The cellphone makes it possible to bring your social circle to the dinner table. “You don’t really have to disconnect,” she said.

That’s putting a smiley emoticon face on it. The teens are not bringing their social circle to the table. Instead, what the others at the table see is a teenager who has disconnected from interaction with them in favor of some distant, private, and invisible friend.

I don’t mind if the woman on the bus is reading the newspaper or listening to her iPod or talking to the person next to her. I don’t mind if the guy at the Yankee game is yelling out his assessment of the players’ abilities. But if they’re talking on their cellphones, that’s just not right.

----------------
*Seinfeld viewers may be reminded of a bit of dialogue from “The Stand-in” episode (1994). Elaine is explaining to Jerry what happened on a first date: “He took it out.” (Watch it here .)

That was then. But if it were now, and if the guy, just prior to a possible first kiss, had taken out his Blackberry and started thumbing it, Elaine might have similarly decided that she wanted nothing more to do with him.


Update: Randy at Potato Chipping has a nice post noting that the Times seems to be on a moral-panic campaign to turn texting into a social problem. The texting-at-table article is a sort of follow up to a more “serious” article that appeared in the health section a day or two earlier.