June 5, 2008: Ten Years Ago on Grasping Reality
Biomedical Literary Criticism Ask the Internet "Age of Innocence" Blogging: "Edith Wharton's 1920 The Age of Innocence: My brother wonders if perhaps Edith Wharton meant us to understand that Count Olenski had tertiary syphilis a la Friedrich Neitzsche and Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill—hat he was not just your standard garden-variety European aristocrat libertine unfaithful cold penniless mentally-unbalanced domineering husband who married you for your money alone and from whom you fled back to New York—and that for Madame Ellen Olenska to return to him in Europe is to consign herself to marital rape, likely infection, and ultimate deep insanity herself. Is this a reading that Edith Wharton intended? A part of the book that literary critics lost with the discovery of penicillin? Or is it a reading that I am tempted to impose on the book simply because I have lived in the age of AIDS? And, in either case, does this reading deepen or trivialize the book?...
Delong Smackdown Watch: Why Cap-and-Trade Beats a Carbon Tax: Felix Salmon: "Brad DeLong reckons that the relative merits of carbon taxes and cap-and-trade 'roughly offset'.... 'Cap-and-trade runs the risk that the cap will be set at the wrong place and so the price will go damagingly above its social optimum value. Carbon taxes run the risk that the tax will be set too low and so the quantity emitted will go damagingly above its social optimum value.' These two considerations do not offset each other. The second risk is high and real; the first risk is low and politically much more unrealistic..."
The Meaning of Box 722: Rick Perlstein is a national treasure. Buy his Nixonland. Buy it now...
Answers to Easy Questions (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps New York Times Pitiful Embarrassment Department): Marty Lederman asks:" Today's New York Times story about the arraignment of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed concludes with this sentence: 'C.I.A. officials have said that Mr. Mohammed was one of three detainees who were subjected to the simulated-drowning technique known as waterboarding during interrogation, which is described by some as torture.' If the Attorney General insisted that the sun rises in the west, would the New York Times treat it as a contested question?" Answer: Yes. The New York Times death spiral continue...
